Fearless Genre Warriors

by Steve Lockley

  See, that doesn’t sound like her at all. The trembling in my hand crawls all the way up to everywhere in my body. Probably even to my heart.

  My eyes sting. Oh, how my eyes sting. I pull the knife out of my pocket, the pointed end towards her. It. A wind blows and the shadows of those disgusting shreds dance over the gleaming blade. I choke on my tears, as I try to stop my shaky hand with another shaky hand.

  The monster widens its eyes slightly. It stands half way up, and shuffles to me on its knees. Just like she used to do when she was too interested in something I had, to properly stand. ‘Oh, is it for me?’

  ‘What?’ I blink too hard, tiny tears flying off my lashes.

  ‘I always thought I could do with a knife, you see,’ it says. ‘My hands are good enough when it comes to... cutting.’ It giggles. It giggles. ‘But then something smaller than my hands, and something beautiful as that, would be great.’

  Monster! I want to scream. It can cut with its hands! Cut into flesh and bone, ripping through skins and sinews. What am I doing here? How did I ever, ever assume I could get her back out of the monster’s hold?

  On its knees it reaches out. The fingers slowly tracing the line of the blunt side of the knife, all the way up to my fingers, to my hands holding the knife. The fingers feel so smooth and firm, it’s hard to believe there is no real flesh beneath the skin. All the way up to my elbow, giving my lower arm a reassuring caress. Squeezing my upper arm.

  I need to scream. I need to do something. The blade is so close to its heart, if only it has one.

  And the next moment, her lips are all over me.

  I just couldn’t resist. This thing looked so soft, I just couldn’t help it. I also kind of thought maybe that’d let it know how close it’d come to the real danger. But well.

  It doesn’t take long to realise where this hunger for its softness comes from, my own temporary softness driving me. This thing lets me feel my way through it for a while, and almost falls apart. But then it snaps awake, and screams.

  I don’t know what made it do that. But it stumbles away from me, making funny noises.

  I—or this thing I’m wearing right now—might have enjoyed a few more seconds of its softness. But it’s gone, though I can still hear it slipping and falling every few seconds on its way away.

  All right, then. Back to work.

  Its eyes! There was something not-human about the way its eyes rolled behind her eyelids! But its tongue was hers—where does she end, and where does the monster begin? I stumble on a tree root, fall face down. I wipe my nose and it’s bleeding. My leg is bruised badly, too. I hurt. It hurts so much. I so wish everything would stop hurting me so.

  To my surprise, it returns. This time it has a small package with it. I wonder if it brought something more efficient for damaging me than that stupid, small knife but when it unwraps the package before it actually enters my building, I can see that they’re only daily necessaries, like garments and a cup, and a flint stone. I raise my brows, a hand on my hip, and ask, ‘Are you going to move in or something?’

  The human thing looks up from its package. ‘I’ll be careful with the fire. I’ll leave the flint stone here.’ It places the object on a rock, which used to punctuate the temple’s garden. ‘And I brought more knives and scissors.’ It lifts a smaller bundle to let me see it better. ‘So I can help.’

  ‘What help?’

  ‘Your... work?’ It gestures vaguely around. ‘Look, I even had them whetted.’

  Humans. I never understand them. I heave a sigh and get back to work.

  The thing comes closer and looks down at my work. ‘What are you making?’ it inquires.

  I point up at the opening that used to be a small window for letting the light in. ‘I want a shade up there. I don’t like too much light, you see.’ I shuffle away and pick up a few humans’ worth of left-over skin from under the raised floor, carefully laid out in gradation, and hairs and other parts set aside for some fancy effect. The human thing immediately turns away, and I hear it throw up. I offer no help or consolation and begin shredding some back skin. Darker ones for the horizontal bars, lighter ones for vertical. And the very rare child hair in place for the paper screen, perhaps?

  My fingers fumble over a particularly hard-built thing’s skin. I hear the live human breathe hard, trying to steady its breaths, maybe, before coming to kneel beside me. I don’t mind the smell of the acid, but I don’t like things wet. ‘Go away,’ I tell it.

  ‘Let me help,’ it says through its sandy teeth. ‘I can help.’

  After some time, to my surprise, its shaky hands get a bit less shaky, and it starts sliding the knife over the skin smoothly. This little human thing has steady, sure hands that know where they should be going always one moment before they move, while the thing I’m wearing right now is always hesitant and clumsy. But I can see that this thing beside me now doesn’t have an artist’s eyes. ‘Clip it a little here,’ I tell it, or ‘Roll this there inside out so that the colour looks more delicate... ’ And I realise it’s actually working out.

  Together we work for hours. At dusk it rubs its eyes and goes outside, lights its lantern. On the ground of my dark palace it looks brighter than it should be. I wince. The human thing places the lantern back on the rock outside and comes back.

  ‘Go away,’ I say, and remember this is the second time I say it.

  But the human thing comes to hold my fingers. I frown, knowing my expression is likely to be hidden in the shadow. Is this thing thinking that I’m still the human it once knew? Is anything behind its actions?

  Maybe. Probably.

  But my canopied cot looks so beautiful in the light from its lantern, and I just cannot resist the human things softness pressing against me.

  Her cot looked bizarrely beautiful, the woven canopy swaying in the faint light when our movement shakes it. No. Its cot. Shit.

  I open my eyes and realise I haven’t been dreaming everything. The morning grey comes through the small window we just screened yesterday. She is nowhere to be seen, the monster. But I hear scissors somewhere, chopping rhythmically at something. The sun is just about to rise, and I shiver in the morning chill. I walk around a few columns and find her at the end of the building, a room that probably used to be the kitchen.

  It is chopping human nails.

  I somehow make it to the remains of the sink and retch there, though not sure if it matters where.

  ‘Go away,’ I hear it say for the third time from behind me.

  And I refuse for the third time. ‘What are they for?’

  It keeps on chopping. It even seems to like my scissors. ‘I don’t know. I might scatter them around my palace when there’s enough of them, in place of white garden pebbles.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Don’t you need something to eat?’

  That makes me realise how hungry I am, even though everything around me is making any thought of food unwelcome at the moment. ‘I... what about you?’

  ‘I can last for some time.’

  Monster.

  I walk to the back door of the kitchen, expecting and wanting to find a well outside. But when I touch the curtain hanging from the door frame, it dissolves to nothing, turning to dust.

  I cannot help but cry out—I see some bits of hair peeping out here and there.

  ‘Oh,’ it says. ‘I didn’t realise it was that old.’

  Monster!

  I manage to leap over the dust that had been a curtain a moment ago and run to the well. Thankfully there’s water. As I obsessively splash water onto my face, I vaguely wonder how long its works last. How many blankets it has replaced, how many people’s worth of skin it has used over time.

  I have to eat, I still have some of the drug with the food, that I somehow obtained from them last night. In the bucket I see a distorted reflection of my own face. And think of all
the lies I told them last night. Fathers and mothers, uncles and aunties, I said, while the pain-numbing drug they gave me for the hurt nose and leg was still working. I’ve been wrong, I should’ve listened to you. Let me make up for my mistake, please.

  Please.

  I splash some more water and stand again. Make fire, cook some simple gruel and eat in the garden. Wait for the drug’s effect to kick in. When I get back to its side, the monster is doing something with her clumsy fingers. ‘Is there anything I can...?’ I ask.

  It looks up, and her lips perk up ever so slightly, just like when she was mildly amused. Something contracts in my throat. ‘Well,’ she says. It says. ‘I’d appreciate that but you don’t think you can just do this with bare fingers...?’ She holds up her work-in-progress a little; she is either making a ball, or just winding the shreds randomly, the way it looks like. Or maybe it’s just her fingers.

  I extend my hand towards her. I am ashamed to see how shaky my hand is. The drug is working too slowly right now, it seems. She smiles and places the ball of shreds in my hand.

  It feels strange, my fingers curling around someone else’s skin. Skin should be something over the flesh; this doesn’t feel alive, doesn’t feel right.

  She tells me she’s been doing this strange finger working that she learned from someone in the town. ‘You’ve been to a town?’ I almost drop the thing.

  ‘Why, of course. Many live there, many... die there.’ She smiles, measuring me.

  I look away for a moment to wince secretly. ‘Didn’t they try to... examine you, or expel you?’

  ‘And why would they do that?’

  Why? Because in my village, when someone, something—anything—new arrives, people would probe every surface of you, ask every question in the world as they pretend they welcome you. They’d know everything about you by the next morning, and by the time you realise they’re doing all of it out of curiosity and a want to control, rather than kindness, it’d be way too late.

  And I believe that is what everyone does to something that’s different.

  Now she tells me how to do this finger working, and I do as she tells me, and the ball starts to look like something. When she spreads the thing in the end it looks like a double-petal flower. I wince, because to my dismay, it is beautiful.

  She smiles and places the flower in her hair.

  Maybe if it truly was her, she might have placed it in my hair instead.

  The way its hands shook as it worked on the shreds bare-handed. Why did it want to do it if it was so frightened, sickened, or whatever, of the work?

  I hear it breathing, its heart going ‘thump-thump’ so loudly. Those human noises. They annoy me so much when I’m getting hungrier; because they just make me wish they’d stop so that the human body will be ready for my feast.

  Nearly time. What will this human thing do when I no longer look the way I do just now?

  ‘I’m hungry,’ she says one day.

  I raise my pan with the gruel in it, which has been becoming thinner and thinner these days.

  ‘No. You know what I mean. What that means. I cannot go on like... this. I’ve been wearing this thing for unusually long, more so considering these stupid fingers. I need to eat, and change. Your illusion is over—if that is what you came here for.’

  For a moment I don’t know what to say. Maybe I expected some grander effect than this, like she revealing its true horrible self and attacking me. The imagination doesn’t even stir a faint fear in me; I have really become used to this monster, all this craziness, and I kind of feel proud.

  I scrape my pan and swallow the final mouthful. ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’ve been waiting for you to say that, actually.’

  ‘What?’

  I slide towards the monster, and touch the large blanket we’ve been working on. Now it stirs a strange pride in me; the monster is responsible for the aesthetics, but I was the one who did most of the actual work. Horrible and familiar, grotesque yet fascinating. I touch her hand, its hand, under the blanket, and when she doesn’t withdraw, entangle my fingers with her clumsy fingers. ‘Please. Let me be the next.’

  She says nothing, quietly measuring me.

  ‘Please.’ I squeeze her fingers in mine. ‘Eat me, blend me with her. When you use her skin, use mine too, entwine me into her. Bind me to her.’

  She doesn’t pull her hand away, but doesn’t squeeze back, either. ‘So you came, spent all this time with me, to ask me for that?’

  ‘I thought if you’re hungry enough and if you like me well enough, you might cooperate.’

  I cannot read her face, and with a pang I remember, she used to be so easy to read. But this is all left of her, for me, for now.

  ‘I asked them—begged them—to give me the drug that would make things easier for me with you, like not registering things too grotesque, shutting out emotions too strong. They were going to give it to us, anyway, if she didn’t die in that accident. Because my fellow villagers didn’t want the two of us to love each other.’ Fathers and mothers, uncles and aunties. Those people who cared nothing about me. ‘I promised them that I’d kill the monster if they’d let me use that drug. I lied, of course. I’m not going to kill you, because I’m going to let you kill me. I lied to them, and I cannot go back to them now.’

  She says nothing.

  ‘Please.’

  For a long, palpable moment, we face each other, her—its—expression impeccable, me on the verge of tears. And then, she breaks the silence.

  With a laugh.

  ‘Like you enough?’ It shakes her head. ‘Did you think I’d feel something, anything for you, human? Don’t forget, what I look like has nothing to do with what I am.’

  ‘Please! Look, you’ll have these deft fingers. You can make your palace whatever you like. If I go back to them without slaying a monster, they’ll drug me into nothing, anyway!’

  ‘Then try slaying me, and fail and die.’

  ‘No... ’ I swallow hard. ‘I cannot do that. You look too much like her, and I, I do like you, not the skin, but the inside. I thought, hoped, you might be feeling the same.’

  It shakes her head again. ‘But it was all just for this, right? Your true goal of being with her in the end.’

  And that strikes home, of course. ‘I—’

  ‘They’ll kill you? Then why don’t you simply walk away?’

  Tears run down my soft cheeks. ‘You can have these good fingers—’

  ‘That,’ she stands, ‘is just a side effect. I’ll make do with whatever I have.’

  I look down on the blanket. Maybe I’m ruining it with my tears. But I cannot move.

  For how long we stayed that way, I cannot tell. The sun’s colour has started to change, when she finally says, ‘If you walk straight towards the sun just now, you’ll find an easy path that cuts through the mountain.’

  I look up at her. She’s not looking at me.

  ‘Over the mountain is where the town I mentioned is. There, you’ll have to stop being wobbly, you have to know what you are, what you can do. If you can manage that, it might be a better place for you than your own village, from what you just said.’

  I try to say something, but only end up swallowing.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. If you go back to your own village now you really might get killed, and then I might end up eating you after all. But I find it so annoying just now if you should have your way after all.’

  I look at her, the monster, whatever is in front of me. Not knowing what she is thinking—and how frustrating it is...

  She turns sharply at me, glares at me. ‘Go now. The way the sun is just now is the direction you should go. If you wait too long and the sun changes its position you may not find the right path before dark.’

  She glares. It glares. Now it looks so different from her, with her eyes, her mouth, her everything, t
hat I wonder how I ever mistook this monster for her. Because my lover never glared at me. She never made this face.

  I turn. Leap off the raised floor of its palace. Fight my urge to look back just for one last look. And win.

  And I run. Chasing the sun, never catching up.

  Time to change. And forget all about softness.

  Nothing is the same.

  I am a monster and I belong to nothing.

  Nothing is the same. When I turn up in the town, no one speaks to me. Most of them never even look at me. But when I go to a particular woman and tell her I need shelter, she holds my muddy hand and takes me to an appropriate place. They only ask me necessary questions.

  They give me only what I need, and no more than that. And I realise this is the first time in years that I feel comfortable among people. I remember the monster’s glare and try to stop being wobbly. I don’t know if I succeed, but I tell them I can help with crafts and all. And they let me help them.

  And then I wonder if I understand that glary monster a little. If I miss it just a little.

  I am a monster and I belong to nothing. Not even time. But I never again find fingers better than that one’s. Some are good enough. But never better.

  And when I hear about the death of the town’s best craftsperson, I know what that means.

  You promised me good fingers. You stupid thing. Look how old you’ve gone. Your fingers now have the delicacy laden with years, yes, but the strength and swiftness are all lost.

  You stupid thing. How hard it will be for me to go through that old skin alone. I took so much care to keep the softness in that thing that I used to wear. How can your crippled skin go along with it?

  Well. I’ll find some use in time. I always do. And at least I’m in no hurry.

  A Change of Heart

  A Babylon Steel story

  Gaie Sebold

  From: Wicked Women

  I leant on the ship’s rail and stared at grey rain hitting grey water, feeling somewhat sorry for myself. I was running. It was something I did a lot back then. Not, this time, from anyone who wanted to kill me; just the end of an affair. We’d both served as bodyguards to a local merchant, and had a lot of fun – rather more than fun, at least on my part. But he’d cooled off. Instead of hanging about with the risk of seeing that face I still loved around the next corner, I decided to get moving.