by Kelly Link
The rehab facility had originated at city’s edge, adjacent to a cemetery with old religious and older racial divisions, then, as the city burgeoned, found itself ever closer to center. The cemetery was gone, doves too, but bordering stands of trees and dense growth remained.
Further in towards the heart of the complex sat the original building about which all else had accrued, three storeys of rust-colored brick facade and clear plastic windows that on late evenings caught up the sun’s light to transform it into swirling, ungraspable, ghostlike figures. Other times, passing by, I’d look up to see those within, on the second floor, peering out, and feel a pull at something deep inside myself, an uneasiness for which I had neither word nor explanation.
It was Abraham who took me there late one night. The colony, as he put it, is sleeping, nessun dorma. Entering, we passed up narrow stairs and along a corridor with indirect lighting set low in the walls, then to a single door among dozens. There was a scarred window in the door and in the window, still as a portrait in its frame, a face.
“This is Julie,” Abraham said.
The woman’s face turned slightly as though to locate the sound of his voice. Her eyes behind the glass were cloudy and unfocused. They didn’t move, didn’t see. After a moment she shuffled back away from the door, obviously in pain, perhaps remembering what had happened other times when voices came and the door opened.
“Surely you must have known,” Abraham said. “You had to suspect.”
That scientific advances do not happen without experimentation, and that experimentation walks hand in hand with failure?
So much gone deeply wrong with this woman, so many failures in the world that put her there.
9.
Most of the rest you know, or a version of it. You live in a world formed by the rest. You also believe you had some say in the making of that world, I suspect, and I suppose you did, but it was a small say, three or four words lost to a crowded page. There’s a long line of wizards behind the curtain vying for their turn at the wheel. When Fran and I floated to the top one more time before sinking out of sight for good, whatever grand intentions might have been packed away in our luggage, truthfully we were doing little more than the wizards’s work. Can we ever appraise the time in which we act? Probably not. How do we decide? With a wary smile and fingers crossed.
It was Abraham who called out to me, and to others like me with whom he had worked over the years. Abraham, who once carried me across the room as though I could walk, to qualify me for rehab. Abraham who never hesitates to remind us that we stagger from place to place, day to day, beneath the moral weight of acts we didn’t commit but for which we are responsible. That in allowing ourselves collectively to think certain thoughts we risk damaging, even destroying, the lives of millions, yet surely, if any of this means anything at all, we must be free to think those thoughts, to think all thoughts.
Never forget it’s because of such men as Abraham and Merritt Li that you have the life you do, with its fundamental rights and fail-safes.
Try always to remember the responsibility that comes with those freedoms.
The easy part of government? Ideals. Rational benevolence.
The hardest? Avoiding the terrible gravity of bureaucracy, the pull away from service towards self-survival.
Max Weber had it right over a century ago.
Not much time left for me now. What came to the fore in that Alaska safe house has run its course. I can feel systems shutting down one by one, like lights going off sequentially from room to room, hallway to hallway. The overloaded wire burning down. I’m intrigued by how familiar it feels, how welcome, a visit from an old friend.
Fran is here waiting with me.
Opposite my bed there’s a window that for a long while I took to be a link screen as in it I watched people come and go, out in the world, I thought. Couples strolling, crowds flowing off platforms and onto trains, scenes of towns like Claeton, like those in Oregon. Children playing. But that couldn’t be right, could it?
I am 8. I have no idea as yet how much heartache is in the world, how much pain, how it goes on building, day by day. I have a new toy, a two-tier garage made of tin, with ramps and tiny pumps and service pits, and I’m running my truck from one to another, making engine sounds, brake sounds, happy driver sounds. On a TV against the wall at room’s end, videos of war machines flanked by infantry unspool as a government official inset upper left reads from a prompter saying that high-level talks are underway and that we expect—
And that can’t be right either. I’m imagining this, surely, not the garage, the garage was real, but the crash of that newscast into my revery . . . Am I dreaming? It’s harder and harder to tell memory from dream, imaginings from hallucination. Harder and harder, too, to summon much concern which is which, to believe it matters.
All in a moment I am that child with his garage, I am pulling myself along with impossible arms after the toxins take over, I am struggling to stand and stay upright in rehab once brought home from the battlefield and yet again after the surgery, I am driving deserted highways at 10:36 on Union Day.
Fran leans close, her hand on mine. I see but cannot feel it. As she will not hear the last thing I tell her. That we go on and on and, all the time, terrible engines whirl and crash about us, in the great empty spaces that surround our lives.
About these Authors
Holly Day has taught writing classes at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, since 2000. Her poetry has recently appeared in Tampa Review, SLAB, and Gargoyle, and her books include Walking Twin Cities, Music Theory for Dummies, and Ugly Girl.
Dawn Kimberling lives with her wife Nicole Kimberling in Bellingham Washington, where she often discovers things to photograph. She is the art director for Blind Eye Books.
Nicole Kimberling lives in Bellingham, Washington, with her wife, Dawn Kimberling. She is a professional cook and amateur life coach. Her first novel, Turnskin, won the Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror. She is also the author of the Bellingham Mystery Series.
Juan Martinez lives in Chicago where he is an assistant professor at Northwestern University. His work has been collected in Best Worst American and has appeared in Glimmer Train, McSweeney’s, Huizache, Ecotone, Mississippi Review, NPR’s Selected Shorts, and elsewhere and is forthcoming in the anthology Who Will Speak for America? Visit and say hi at fulmerford.com.
Maria Romasco Moore’s stories have appeared in Unstuck, Interfictions, and Lightspeed’s Women Destroy Science Fiction. Her flash fiction collection, Ghostographs, is forthcoming from Rose Metal Press. She is an alumni of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and holds an MFA in Fiction from Southern Illinois University.
Apple Music is a streaming music service run by one of the biggest corporations in the world. The design is clunky and while there is supposed to be some kind of social aspect of it, Apple seems to have no idea how to actually make that work. Which is fine because to me it and all the other streaming services are real and true life miracles. Having seen various great ideas ground down into nothing I am not sure that I will get to keep enjoying this service as long as I’d like to (i.e. up until my final breath). Record labels, by whatever name they go by, have never been known as being friendly to musicians, listeners, anyone — except their bottom line so I would not be surprised if they decide to stop licensing music to the streaming services to mess things up for the millions of happy listeners. Ugh. But in the meantime: woah. What a moment. I have a family subscription which lets 6 people use Apple Music for $15 a month. It is amazing. OK, it is clunky and sometimes I forget to download songs to my phone so I don’t have them when I am offline. Ha. What a “complaint.” I spent my formative years without access to most of the music I wanted to hear — oh, the joy of the crappy passed down walkman from my older brother! The long hours waiting for any song I liked to be played on the radio. N
ow I say to my phone, Hey Siri, play Amy Winehouse’s “Valerie” or Ian Gillan’s Stevie Wonder cover “Living for the City” or Kate Nash or the Winterpills or a n y t h i n g. Bartok? Yes. Arab pop workout playlist? Yes. Hard to get B-sides? Yes. Demos? Yes. Woah. There are odd gaps, some of which I still have on CD or even a few on tape(!). One flat out failure is the Sisters of Mercy version of “Jolene” but I have it myself so it’s ok. I like Apple stuff because I don’t want to be a technician, I want stuff that generally does what it’s supposed to do. All the other stuff can fall apart, though (heads up: hyperbole) as long as the lovely lovely cornucopia of the millions and millions of songs aren’t taken away from my old and grabby hands. [Here’s an Apple generated playlist if this link will work: https://itunes.apple.com/us/playlist/favorites-mix/pl.pm-20e9f373919da0801a0e29e29e8382b3]
Catherine Rockwood is an early-modernist and lapsed (alas) martial artist. She lives near Boston with her family. Poems in concis, the Fem, The Rise Up Review, Liminality, and elsewhere. Reviews and essays in Strange Horizons, Rain Taxi, and Tin House.
Best known for the Lew Griffin series and Drive, Jim Sallis has published 17 novels, multiple collections of stories and essays, four collections of poetry, a landmark biography of Chester Himes, and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Saint Glinglin. He’s received a lifetime achievement award from Bouchercon, the Hammett award for literary excellence in crime writing, and the Grand Prix de Littérature policière.
John Schoffstall has published short fiction in Asimov’s, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Strange Horizons, and other venues, and was a Grand Prize winner of the Writers of the Future award. He is a physician, and once practiced Emergency Medicine. Now he follows Candide’s advice and tends his own garden. He lives in the Philadelphia area. His first novel, Half-Witch, will be published by Big Mouth House in July 2018.
Howard Waldrop, born in Mississippi and now living in Austin, Texas, is an American iconoclast. His highly original books include Them Bones and A Dozen Tough Jobs, and the collections Howard Who?, All About Strange Monsters of the Recent Past, Night of the Cooters, Other Worlds, Better Lives, Things Will Never Be the Same, and Horse of a Different Color. He won the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards for his novelette “The Ugly Chickens.”
Izzy Wasserstein teaches writing and literature at a midwestern university, and writes poetry and fiction. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from Pseudopod, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, and elsewhere. She shares a home with her spouse and their animal companions. She’s a graduate of Clarion West and likes to slowly run long distances.
Michael Werner’s work has been recognized with a Troubadour International Poetry Prize and an American Academy of Poets honorary prize. He has taught history, Latin American studies, and human rights at Moravian College, Iowa State University, and Laney College, among others. He was editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society, and Culture, which Choice named one of the academic books of the year. He presently lives in Jerusalem.
Leslie Wilber is a former newspaper reporter and current bicycle mechanic. She tinkers with words and bikes in Denver.
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We occasionally solicit work but most of what we publish is work that comes in over the transom and we are very happy that we have generally published a couple of new writers in each issue. We continue to seek out work by women and writers of color.
We recommend you read Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet before submitting. You can procure a copy from us or from assorted book shops.
We accept fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and black and white art. The fiction we publish most of tends toward but is not limited to the speculative. This does not mean only quietly desperate stories. We will consider items that fall out with regular categories. We do not publish gore, sword and sorcery, or pornography. We can discuss these terms if you like. There are places for them all, this is not one of them.
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Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet
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A Bonus Story from Howard Waldrop’s Horse of a Different Color
copyright © 2013 by Howard Waldrop. All rights reserved.
Ninieslando
The captain had a puzzled look on his face. He clamped a hand to the right earphone and frowned in concentration.
“Lots of extraneous chatter on the lines again. I’m pretty sure some Fritz’s have been replaced by Austrians in this sector. It seems to be in some language I don’t speak. Hungarian, perhaps.”
Tommy peered out into the blackness around the listening post. And of course could see nothing. The l.p. was inside the replica of a bloated dead horse that had lain between the lines for months. A week ago the plaster replica had arrived via the reserve trench from the camouflage shops far behind the lines. That meant a working party had had to get out in the night and not only replace the real thing with the plaster one, but bury the original, which had swelled and burst months before.
They had come back nasty, smelly, and in foul moods, and had been sent back to the baths miles behind the lines, to have the luxury of a hot bath and a clean uniform. Lucky bastards, thought Tommy at the time.
Tommy’s sentry duty that night, instead of the usual peering into the blackness over the parapet into the emptiness of No Man’s Land, had been to accompany the officer to the listening post inside the plaster dead horse, thirty feet in front of their trench line. That the l.p. was tapped into the German field telephone system (as they were into the British) meant that some poor sapper had had to crawl the quarter-mile through No Man’s Land in the dark, find a wire, and tap into it. (Sometimes after doing so, they’d find they’d tied into a dead or abandoned wire.) Then he’d had to carefully crawl back to his own line, burying the wire as he retreated, and making no noise, lest he get a flare fired off for his trouble.
This was usually done when wiring parties were out on both sides, making noises of their own, so routine that they didn’t draw illumination or small-arms fire.
There had evidently been lots of unidentified talk on the lines lately, to hear the rumours. The officers were pretty close-lipped (you didn’t admit voices were there in a language you didn’t understand and could make no report on). Officers from the General Staff had been to the l.p. in the last few nights and came back with nothing useful. A few hours in the mud and the dark had probably done them a world of good, a break from their regular routines in the chateau that was HQ miles back of the line.
What little information that reached the ranks was, as the captain said, “Probably Hungarian, or some other Balkan sub-tongue.” HQ was on the case, and was sending in some language experts soon. Or so they said.
Tommy looked through the slit just below the neck of the fake horse. Again, not
hing. He cradled his rifle next to his chest. This March had been almost as cold as any January he remembered. At least the thaw had not come yet, turning everything to cold wet clinging mud.
There was the noise of slow dragging behind them, and Tommy brought his rifle up.
“Password” said the captain to the darkness behind the horse replica.
“Ah—St. Agnes Eve . . . ,” came a hiss.
“Bitter chill it was,” said the captain. “Pass.”
A lieutenant and a corporal came into the open side of the horse. “Your relief, sir,” said the lieutenant.
“1 don’t envy you your watch,” said the captain. “Unless you were raised in Buda-Pesh.”
“The unrecognizable chatter again?” asked the junior officer.
“The same.”
“Well, I hope someone from HQ has a go at it soon,” said the lieutenant.
“Hopefully.”
“Well, I’ll give it a go,” said the lieutenant. “Have a good night’s sleep, sir.”
“’Very well. Better luck with it than I’ve had.” He turned to Tommy. “Let’s go, Private.”
“Sir!” said Tommy.
They crawled the thirty feet or so back to the front trench on an oblique angle, making the distance much longer, and they were under the outermost concertina wire before they were challenged by the sentries.
Tommy went immediately to his funk hole dug into the wall of the sandbagged parapet. There was a nodding man on look-out; others slept in exhausted attitudes as if they were, like the l.p. horse, made of plaster.
He wrapped his frozen blanket around himself and was in a troubled sleep within seconds.
“Up for morning stand-to!” yelled the sergeant, kicking the bottom of his left boot.
