Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  Do Not Go Quietly

  An Anthology of Victory in Defiance

  Edited by

  Jason Sizemore & Lesley Conner

  Copyright © 2019

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  “To Write” © 2019 by Annie Neugebauer; “Kindle” © 2019 by Brooke Bolander; “What the Mountain Wants” © 2019 by Maurice Broaddus and Nayad Monroe; “Nobody Lives in the Swamp” © 2019 by Dee Warrick; “The Skeleton Archer Speaks” © 2019 by Jeremy Paden; “Oil Under Her Tongue” © 2019 by Rachael K. Jones; “Glossolalia” © 2019 by John Horner Jacobs; “Choose Your Truth” © 2019 by Jo Miles; “If the Fairy Godmother Comes” © 2019 by Mary Soon Lee; “What We Have Chosen to Love” © 2019 by Cassandra Khaw; “Salted Bone and Silent Sea” © 2019 by Shanna Germain; “Scurry” © 2019 by Rich Larson; “Permian Basin Blues” by © 2000 (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, issue 7, Small Beer Press) by Lucy A. Snyder; “Rage Against the Venting Machine” © 2019 by Russell Nichols; “Everything Is Closed Today” © 2019 by Sarah Pinsker; “Hey, Alexa” © 2019 by Meg Elison; “The Dolls” © 2019 Christina Sng; “Thirteen Year Long Song” © 2019 by Sheree Renée Thomas; “The Society for the Reclamation of Words and Meaning” © 2019 by Fran Wilde; “South of the Waffle House” © 2019 by Marie Vibbert; “#greenlivesmatter” © 2016 (Star*Line, issue 39.2) by Joshua Gage; “Sympathizer” © 2019 by Karin Lowachee; “Face” © 2019 by Veronica Brush; “April Teeth” © 2019 by Eugenia Triantafyllou; “Witch’s Star” © 2019 by Alethea Kontis; “The Judith Plague” by Merc Rustad; “Kill the Darlings (Silicone Sister Remix)” © 2019 by E. Catherine Tobler; “Plot Twist” © 2019 by Bianca Lynne Spriggs

  Line art accompanying stories © 2019 by Justin Stewart

  Cover art and four interior full page drawing © 2019 by Marcela Bolívar

  Available as a trade paperback, hardcover, and eBook from Apex Book Company.

  ISBN (HC) 978-1-937009-78-6; ISBN (TPB) 978-1-937009-77-9

  Apex Publications, PO Box 24323, Lexington, KY 40524

  Visit us online at ApexBookCompany.com.

  For my Girl Scouts: If I teach anything, let it be to not be quiet when you see something wrong in the world. Stand up, be loud, make yourself heard—for yourself, for your Girl Scout sisters, for your community, for the world. You can make a difference!

  —Lesley Conner

  * * *

  For my family. They’ve seen me through some tough times during the production of this book. Love y’all.

  —Jason Sizemore

  Contents

  To Write

  Kindle

  What the Mountain Wants

  Nobody Lives in the Swamp

  The Skeleton Archer Speaks

  Oil Under Her Tongue

  Glossolalia

  Choose Your Truth

  If the Fairy Godmother Comes

  What We have Chosen to Love

  Salted Bone and Silent Sea

  Scurry

  Permian Basin Blues

  Rage Against the Venting Machine

  Everything Is Closed Today

  Hey, Alexa

  The Dolls

  Thirteen Year Long Song

  The Society for the Reclamation of Words and Meaning

  South of the Waffle House

  #greenlivesmatter

  Sympathizer

  Face

  April Teeth

  Witch’s Star

  The Judith Plague

  Kill the Darlings (Silicone Sister Remix)

  Plot Twist

  Author Bios

  “The thing worse than rebellion is the thing that causes rebellion.”

  Frederick Douglass, in a letter written to the Reconstruction Congress and published in The Atlantic in December, 1866

  To Write

  by Annie Neugebauer

  Tonight I dreamed

  my mouth was zippered shut,

  like some macabre doctor

  had taken the school teacher’s gesture

  quite literally

  and replaced each lip with one half a zipper.

  * * *

  Like any fresh surgery,

  the flesh ached and burned,

  far too tender for me to even think

  of touching it with the gentlest fingertips,

  much less grasping the metal pull

  and opening the angry little teeth.

  * * *

  I wandered down a street I knew well

  surrounded by strangers who my dream told me

  I knew well as well

  and every one of them

  sealed at the mouth:

  a zipper,

  a line like melted wax,

  sutures stitched across like a rag doll,

  a single, large button pulled up over the top lip,

  staples,

  the particularly vicious stretch of super glue,

  and, most terrifying of all, a perfect, smooth melding of bottom to top lip

  no line or seal remaining where mouth used to be,

  only a vague bump out of the teeth beneath the flesh,

  caged.

  * * *

  I was desperate to tell them something.

  Wild with the need.

  I don’t know what it was.

  I don’t know if I even knew, then, in the dream.

  I know only that I raced from person to person

  forcing myself into their paths

  and trying

  again and again—oh, sleeping eternity—

  to speak.

  * * *

  Silence.

  * * *

  The words piled up against the inside of my zipper,

  stacked up on my tongue,

  brushed the roof of my mouth

  and gullet

  and down my clenched throat,

  choking,

  tears stinging my fresh wounds,

  and still,

  still …

  * * *

  Never has there been a dream

  with such a perfect lack of sound.

  * * *

  When I awoke,

  reader,

  I did not speak.

  * * *

  I picked up the notebook

  I keep by my bed

  and I began to write,

  the scratching of my pen

  against this page

  pulling and clicking

  like the long, metallic freeing

  of a zipper.

  Kindle

  by Brooke Bolander

  It’s the last evening of the year, as bitterly cold as coins in a factory owner’s pocket, and the snow makes blue hummocks of familiar landmarks up and down the avenues of the great capital city all the way to the palace gates. Crowds scurry through the drifts, hats tugged down, and collars turned up. They have no more need for matches than the little girl watching them wistfully from the alleyway might have for a china dolly.

  The royal family had been the first to have their home wired for electricity. It had been right there in the newspapers the child’s grandmother used to wrap her feet, the wonders of the modern age come to make life better for every man, woman, and child in the kingdom. Grandmother, sharp as the first crust of ice on an October puddle, had snorted and spat over her shoulder in the direction of the palace, shaking her head. Her opinions of the Tsar and his rule were well-known in that section of the quarters and try as the girl’s father might to make the old beldame hush up her talk, he never did manage the trick.

&n
bsp; “Making life better for who, now?” she rasped, breath billowing in the cold. “Mark my words, the only ones who will be benefitting from that are thems that don’t need it. The rest of us will have an even harder time of it from here on out, see if we don’t.”

  She had vanished sometime around midsummer, when the days stretched on till well past midnight and the skirmishes blazed hottest. The girl’s father had said the squawking old banty must’ve gotten what was coming to her and toasted her memory in five different saloons while the girl stood outside, looking pathetic for coins. It had been an easier sell than the matches, at least.

  The palace glows on the horizon. There are four princesses who live inside, rarely seen but said to be vivacious and fair-haired and full of fun. All they do all day is learn sums and stuff themselves full of sweetmeats, huddled by fires that never go out. Grandmother always said this was a bloody disgrace, but right now, with the girl’s shoes gone and her toes numb, every yellow-lit shop window full of fat geese and Father waiting at home with a strap in one hand and a bottle in the other, it doesn’t sound like all that wicked an existence at all. It sounds like something she’d like to reach out and take for herself like plucking a pork pie from a windowsill.

  She reaches out for a passerby’s trouser leg and earns a kick for her troubles that scatters her matches in the snow. Frantically, whimpering under her breath, she scrambles to scoop them back up, praying to Grandmother and the Good Lady Luck, both, they won’t be ruined by the wetting. If she’s managed to waste an entire basket of goods in one night, there’s no telling what Father might do. Little girls, he’s often fond of telling her, go for a high price in some places, even ones as dark and black-eyed as her.

  Her grimy hand trembles as she strikes one against the basket handle, barely daring to breathe. The sputter and hiss as the sulphur tip catches and blazes like a Christmas star beneath her cupped palm is the sweetest thing she’s ever heard, prettier than church bells or meat’s sizzle. The little flame gutters in the gust from her relieved sigh, but stubbornly refuses to go out, a tiny spot of warmth and light in this numb black and blue bruise of a night. She holds it, transfixed, until it burns all the way down and blisters her fingertips. She tosses it away into the darkness, where it lands unseen with a last faint hiss of steam. The panicked thing hammering away behind her rags and ribs stills itself.

  The night seems much emptier now that she’s been reminded of light, and ever so much colder now that she’s been reminded of heat. Light streams down from high windows overhead, so butter-thick and butter-yellow, you could baste a bird in it, but it’s no more hers than anything else behind those thick slabs of glass. Gazing up at the frosted panes, something flickers inside her, angry and wanting at the same time. She snatches up another match and strikes it, inhaling the smoke and heat. It’s not fair that she should be out here in rags, afraid to go home with snowflakes gathering in her braid, when so many others have so much. It’s not right that she has to beg to be seen when Grandmother always said her mothers and her mothers' mothers were warrior queens, riding where they liked and taking what they wanted. Hot tears gather in her eyes, blurring the flame to an indistinct smear.

  The smear becomes a spangled vision. Like peering through a muslin curtain, she can just about see them: women with round faces and dark braids like hers, dressed in riding leathers, seated about a rug, laden with steaming food. Stews thick with meat, cheeses yellow as a flower-seller’s daffodils, plump roasted chickens and piles of potatoes, mashed and salted—the saliva gathers in the girl’s mouth until she has to swallow, ashamed, knowing none of it is real but wishing it were so badly, she smells every item in the feast. There’s a fire, too, a rosy thing burning low and hot in its pit, the kind that bakes your shins so deliciously, you don’t dare move them from the hearth until the heat is almost unbearable. Occasionally one of the women will give it a poke, sending up sparks and smoke that escapes through a hole in the roof.

  The women’s features are indistinct, but somehow the match girl knows that her mother is there in the circle, and Grandmother, as well. She reaches for the veil, wanting to see better, wanting to join them, oh please don’t go, wait for me, wait—

  Another match falls from her fingers and dies in the snow. The vision goes out like a snuffed candle. The street is empty, save for a few homebound stragglers, and the only things she can smell are her own sodden clothes and the faint, ghostly char of burned matches. The parts of her that aren’t yet numb ache with the cold. She thinks of that merry fire, the searing bite of it, the coals glowing like cherries on a cake in a baker’s window.

  She should be heading home. The snow is falling in great gusts, now, muffling the world like eiderdown. If Father is there and sober, he’ll beat her for wasting matches. If he’s down at the saloon, the beating will wait until morning, but the house will be cold, not even the meager night-fire they keep banked with newspapers and twisted hay, sputtering behind the hearth. In either case, she sees little point in starting out just yet. At least here, she can have these little dreams, fleeting as they are. There’s a recklessness in her where fear usually sets. It’s a small, smoldering thing, enough to make her pull another match from the basket. This one takes a couple of strikes to get going before bursting to life.

  Such flames in her vision! Not merely a cook fire in a pit, this time, or a crackling blaze behind a hearth, but a roaring whirlwind of consuming orange and red, licking at the beams of a sagging hovel. It melts all the snow around it in a great, wet circle up and down the alleyway like spring thaw come early. Water trickles and burbles beneath the crackle-crumple-crash. Smoke and cinders erupt from the windows, the chimney, the roof. They taste the shingles of the shack next door, considering their next meal.

  Someone inside is screaming. The match girl recognizes his voice. She’s heard it raised in anger or dropped in slurred good humor many times before in her life. This is the first time she’s ever heard it screeching in fear, scalded down to naked pain and panic. Perhaps he is pinned beneath a beam, or unable to find the door in the smoke. Perhaps the way is blocked.

  The match girl smiles. She’s smiling still when the match at last goes out, leaving her alone once again in the dark and cold.

  Were it summer, or spring, she might feel guilt for such an imagining. The priests, safe and dry now in their warm churches and their great, wool vestments, would tell her to honor her father as she would honor the great God in His Heaven, the eternal Father of them all. But God, she thinks deep down in her blasphemous little heart, feels very far away, and if He is anything like Father-on-Earth, that’s probably for the best. All she has are her matches, and aren’t those named after Lucifer himself?

  If she’s going to Hell for these thoughts, she muses, at least she’ll be warm. She takes a whole handful this time and strikes them all at once like a torch—

  —in the hand of her beloved grandmother, standing before her as real and sturdy as a policeman or a lamppost. She tries to cry out, but all that emerges is a croak.

  Her face is indistinct in the flickering light of the torch, her wiry, old frame cloaked in a woolen greatcoat, dyed a startling red. A cap is pulled down low over her gray braids.

  “Girl,” says the grandmother in a voice so familiar, it makes the match girl’s heart ache, “you’re on the right track, but you’re not quite there yet.” She stamps her boots in the snow. The girl cannot remember her grandmother ever wearing boots like these, but there was much about her life Grandmother had never revealed. “And I’m afraid until you find the right track, there will be no rest for you, mightily unfair as it seems. Try to remember what I’m about to tell you, little one. Carry it with you to the next cycle and go from there.”

  She leans down, so close the match girl can see herself reflected in the old woman’s black eyes, the little bundle of matches blazing away in her hand. Grandmother smells of rosemary, vodka, gunpowder, and cheroot smoke, just as she had in life. Pamphlets stick out of the coat pockets
, the kind you found littering the ground after marches, wadded in-between the bars of the palace gates.

  “Dying in the snow’s not enough,” Grandmother rasps. “Taking down that drunken lout of a father of yourn, still not enough. You got the blood of warrior queens in you, child. Think bigger. Seize back what belongs to you from them who took it long ago. And for pity’s sake, if you’re gonna be a martyr in anybody’s story, at least make sure it’s your own. Let others tell it, and they’ll take your name and they’ll take your fire and then they’ll take everything else.”

  The match girl tries to focus, but Grandmother’s face seems to recede into the darkness before her. She tries to move her limbs, to crawl after her, but they feel frozen solid, too heavy to even twitch.

  But her ears still work, and they catch the last words Grandmother speaks before the matches burn out and darkness falls a final time.

  They find her frozen in a doorway the next morning, a bundle of spent matches clutched in one blue hand. What a pity, the constables say. Poor little beast. At least she died smiling. D’you think she saw Heaven, there at the last, and the good reward that awaits all who suffer quietly in the snow?