Uncanny Magazine Issue 41

by Lynne M. Thomas

  Let’s step outside of fantasy ancient Greece for a second and consider—where are you on your path? Have you even acknowledged the harm you’ve done? The harm done in your name, or the power you wield? It’s a question worth asking as our societies are mired in global and local systems where too few have taken these steps.

  All right, back to fantasy ancient Greece, because that’s what we’re here for: powerful women with swords and guilty consciences. And what’s a woman to do when those are her primary assets to offer the world? Well, she begins a lifetime pilgrimage of good deeds. Deeds she is particularly equipped for—seducing and fighting warlords, kings, emperors, and gods to free the vulnerable in their thrall.

  Here, we come to Ares, God of War, who wants Xena back as his greatest warmonger and worshipper. He’s willing to give her untold power if she comes to his side, and the more she refuses, the more desperate he becomes. There’s a particular seduction to his offer (and I don’t mean physical, though occasionally, yes, a physical seduction, and Ares isn’t a bad-looking dude, I can see why someone would be tempted). It’s the seduction of a return to the status quo. The changes Xena wants to make in her life are not passive ones—they require effort and pain and a willingness to accept failure not as a stopping point but another chance to do better. A willingness to accept critique. It would be easier, even rewarded, if she took the offers to return to the top of the warlords. Instead, she tries to negate that privilege—usually. (She’s not perfect, and the cracks in her perfection are or lead to some of the most stirring episodes, like “The Debt I&II,” “Destiny,” “Adventures in the Sin Trade I&II” and “The Ides of March,” just to name a few of my favorites.)

  We also grapple with one of my favorite questions in media and life—what’s a woman’s role in relation to committing violence? How and when are women, femmes, and those perceived (however incorrectly) as women allowed to perpetuate violence? With the exception of Ares, most of Xena’s powerful and recurring enemies (and allies) are women. One in particular is part of why Xena’s redemption arc is so compelling: Callisto. First, we must acknowledge a victim is not a means to their aggressor’s rise to goodness. Thankfully, Xena is never quite let off the hook.

  When we first meet Callisto in season one, we’re like, yes, new woman warrior on the scene! We love a good rival! As the story unfolds, however, we get something else instead: Callisto was a child in one of the villages that Xena the Warlord destroyed. Now Callisto is playing on the rarity of women warlords to ruin Xena’s burgeoning reputation as a good guy by sacking towns with Xena’s signature battle-cry.

  It’s a classic case of your past coming to bite you in the ass, and it’s one of the reasons that we have to acknowledge the hard truth of redemption—no one has to forgive you. And someone not forgiving you for ruining their life or even breaking their favorite toy doesn’t make them the bad guy. It means you have to reckon with accepting that the harm you caused isn’t about you. You cannot demand that someone let you “make it up to them” any more than you can demand their forgiveness so that you can assuage your guilt and feel like a good person again.

  What we get throughout the series with Xena and Callisto’s relationship (that’s right, you don’t get to confront your past misdeeds one good time, thanks very much, my hands are clean now) is an examination of cyclical violence and trauma, not unlike that which we see played out in the global stage of imperialism and slavery, and the subsequent hatred and resentment. This is not to say the narrative is perfect; despite their history, Callisto is clearly intended to be the villain and Xena the hero (Callisto is literally demonized in later episodes, and the viewer is reminded that Xena, the aggressor, is still the center of this narrative, which is perhaps the primary critique to offer of any redemption narrative). Thinking about the story now, 25 years later, I wish the relationship between the two were troubled even more. In some ways, though, Xena was ahead of its time. In her reactionary pain and quest for vengeance against Xena, Callisto creates even more victims who will grow to hate them both for the role they played in ruining yet another generation. Callisto also reminds the viewer that there are mental costs on the victims of violence, too—and how, exactly, do you provide recompense for causing that sort of pain?

  Callisto is just one victim of Xena the Warlord that we meet, and Xena is not always so successful at managing the balance of violence, even with Gabrielle’s faith and guidance. Like I said earlier, Xena has a particular skillset, and when all you have is a hammer… In the middle seasons, we really struggle with Xena as this tendency strains all of her relationships, especially her partnership with the pacifist Gabrielle. In “The Debt,” someone from Xena’s past—someone who helped Xena, who took care of her—calls in a debt: she wants Xena to kill someone for her. Gabrielle begs Xena not to, and across the two-part episode, we are reminded that even those who love you the most will turn on you if you renege on your promises to change. In a series of betrayals, Xena and Gabrielle have to work through a journey of forgiveness on a small scale (see “The Bitter Suite”) that becomes another touchstone not just for their friendship (cough-soulmateship-cough), but for the arc of Xena’s destiny. So many people in her past—Ares, Callisto, even Julius Caesar (see “Destiny”)—tried to dictate the end of her story, that she was, is, and will die a murderer, and that she would be a fool for not taking the power that came with it. And, yes, sometimes, she believes them. The consequences of these setbacks are even more dire—the souls of thousands of people hang in the balance and in the last episodes, Xena must choose how much she’s willing to give up to make right the past.

  One of the hardest parts about making up for past mistakes—even past complacency can be a mistake—is that those mistakes happened for a reason. There was some sort of inertia there that kept us from making the decision with the less harmful outcome. Maybe the inertia we had to overcome was ignorance—now you need to make the effort to learn, but gah, sometimes history books are dull, or it takes more than buying one book or attending one diversity and inclusion lecture to understand the scope of a systemic problem or the perspective of a victim.

  Or maybe the inertia is that you’re actively benefiting from a privilege that you need—it sustains your health, your life, your financial security, your peace of mind—and to question that, let alone to dismantle that system in the hopes of building a more equitable one that not only ceases future damage but repairs past damages… well, that’s a pretty big obstacle to get over. You’d be putting yourself at risk, maybe even in physical danger. Times like this, you have to ask the hard question: what would Xena do?

  To become a part of the solution, and thus earn any redemption to be had, you must do the labour yourself, without asking someone else to do it for you. You might even have to die for it! Xena did—several times. Xena didn’t ask Callisto to tell her all of the ways she could change. Xena looked at her actions, the results, and then put the equation together herself. She wanted to do the hard, self-critical math. Do you?

  And therein lies the power of Xena’s story. Not in the late-millennia special effects or the musical episodes (…yes), but in the willingness to follow a flawed character through an arc of growth and temptation, triumph and setback. When you’ve contributed to harm actively or passively, you’re responsible for your own redemption. Keep that ledger book honestly in your heart. No one will know if you fudge the numbers but you. You have to live with it and die by it.

  1 There are likely the simple generational factors (how old the Xena franchise is) and accessibility factors (Xena is no longer freely available on primary streaming platforms; at the writing of this essay, however, it is available on Tubi in the United States).

  © 2021 C.L. Clark

  Cherae Clark is the author of The Unbroken, the first book in the Magic of the Lost trilogy. She graduated from Indiana University’s creative writing MFA and was a 2012 Lambda Literary Fellow. She’s been a personal trainer, an English teacher, and an editor, and is some combi
nation thereof as she travels the world. When she’s not writing or working, she’s learning languages, doing P90something, or reading about war and [post-]colonial history. Her work has also appeared in FIYAH, PodCastle, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

  Sonnet for the Aglæcwif

  by Minal Hajratwala

  Classic mum-in-law she was, Ma Grendl:

  mood scorpio, wirehaired, snagged in the trap

  of always having been a loving much-

  beloved mum, no more—suddenly stuck

  on the wrong side of the story: Beast.

  Creeping through Hero’s brackish fits & tweets,

  she’s damp of neck, bent of knee, tarsals

  swollen thick as trees. The They all cheered

  when bold boy knight raised golden mead

  in the mouldering hall: Death to the green-

  clawed she-fiend, brine wolf, long of tooth

  ragged hag, may she fall! Defeat—

  she who by her own kind, in her own time,

  was called mama, milady, ma’am. Goddamn.

  (Editors’ Note: “Sonnet for the Aglæcwif” is read by Joy Piedmont on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, 41A.)

  © 2021 Minal Hajratwala

  Minal Hajratwala is the founder of the Unicorn Authors Club, a magical sanctuary where authors of color (and allies who really mean it!) finish our gorgeous, urgently needed books. Her books include the award-winning nonfiction epic Leaving India: My Family’s Journey From Five Villages to Five Continents; a poetry collection, Bountiful Instructions for Enlightenment; a travel guidebook, Moon Fiji; and a groundbreaking anthology, Out! Stories from the New Queer India.

  Hitobashira

  by Betsy Aoki

  Every year the water flows up to the banks and beyond,

  reaching slick algae fingers to the sky:

  betrayal of an old one-eyed widow, her son never looked after

  nor given a samurai’s sword. And now you have her tears

  greening your lands, not salty, but fetid and harsh

  stink rising in the bright wet spring winds

  through the windows of the keep. The woman inside the pillar

  is the bones inside the promise. The woman inside the pillar

  has grown roots deep into this new earthquake. It shakes

  the woman whose face was pressed against the stone.

  The woman whose round body has rotted to earth

  in a smile no one can see.

  Her bones glow inside that cylinder that can’t hold her.

  Her bones call for the whole thing to crash down.

  © 2021 Betsy Aoki

  Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. Her work has appeared / is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Uncanny Magazine, Asimov’s Magazine of Science Fiction, and anthologized in Climbing Lightly Through Forests (Ursula K. Le Guin tribute poetry anthology). Her first poetry collection, Breakpoint, is a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist and received the Patricia Bibby First Book Award. Breakpoint is forthcoming from Tebot Bach in 2022.

  You can find her tweeting at @baoki or contact her via her website at betsyaoki.com.

  After The Tower Falls, Death Gives Advice

  by Ali Trotta

  You tuck the past into your bones,

  a kindling of ruin and rain,

  a hollow that rings

  in the ocean of your heart,

  fear skipping

  up your spine, punctuated

  by the ghost

  of every broken promise—

  you say,

  some things break,

  and how could brokenness

  be beautiful?

  But here is the lesson

  of stained glass,

  and trialed hearts,

  and bridges

  built between souls:

  there’s a wild song

  still singing in your blood,

  listen,

  listen to the howl of it,

  the keening truth

  made of unlocked hearts,

  the way the wreckage

  unfurls into a promise,

  light hitting slant

  through what caged you

  in the dark—

  a spark of something

  burning bright

  of its own accord,

  unhurried

  by night-ache,

  untroubled

  by grief-hollow

  and hopes

  that snapped like bones—

  that was then

  and this is now,

  so why can’t it be

  beautiful?

  Burn the candles, one by one,

  until they are clear-flamed,

  until the wax runs

  a new river, one that worships

  the earth and sky

  in equal measure, a balance

  between new and old, held aloft

  by what might be—

  imagine it for three heartbeats,

  ask yourself,

  what if?

  Then reach for mortar and pestle,

  lay despair gently on the altar,

  this burden of weathered heart-songs,

  this scorched history

  of once-rung bells

  and a stumbling dark,

  a gift of graceless execution,

  soul-arson

  and all its smoke trappings,

  set down that ruinous tithe—

  grind all of it to dust,

  scatter it in handfuls to the stars,

  and let the wreckage return

  to the universe:

  you’re worth more than just surviving,

  you don’t have to sleep

  in the remains

  of what shattered you

  from yourself—

  your imperfect,

  wrecked and reckless

  heart

  is still divine.

  © 2021 Ali Trotta

  Ali Trotta is a poet, editor, dreamer, word-nerd, and unapologetic coffee addict. Her poetry has appeared in Uncanny, Fireside, Strange Horizons, Mermaids Monthly, and Cicada magazines, as well as in The Best of Uncanny from Subterranean Press. She has a poem forthcoming in F&SF magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in Curtains, a flash fiction anthology. A geek to the core, she’s previously written TV show reviews for Blastoff Comics, as well as a few personal essays. Ali’s always scribbling on napkins, looking for magic in the world, and bursting into song. When she isn’t word-wrangling, she’s being a kitchen witch, hugging an animal, or pretending to be a mermaid. Follow her on Twitter as @alwayscoffee, read her blog at alwayscoffee.wordpress.com, or subscribe to her TinyLetter. Four of her poems, including three for Uncanny, were Rhysling Award nominees.

  Radioactivity

  by Octavia Cade

  Data is not an element that has ever been bloodless.

  Ranunculus aquatilis and radium.

  One has petals that are pale in vases and reflect moonlight

  the other walks in empty spaces, and footprints glow behind it.

  Marie Curie was poisoned by her blood.

  She kept radium in her pocket

  it bit her with bright teeth,

  with bright thin needle teeth

  and experimental years.

  (I wonder if her hair fell out.

  I’ve never thought to check.

  I don’t suppose it matters.

  She did it to herself:

  decay and dignity were isotopic together.

  Ignorance, or implicit permission?)

  Marie’s shoes have flowers in them:

  water buttercups, from one of the last days she spent with Pierre,

  gathering flowers in the country.

  Then he died in the street

  the buttercups still fresh in their vase.

  To keep them, Marie pressed the petals between books

  but there they were hidden in covers, out of sight

  and not n
early painful enough.

  She pressed them in shoes instead,

  her whole weight come down upon them, lightly

  translucent.

  This is loss, she thinks: the feel of cellulose,

  imbued with the slow, warm itch of laboratory,

  the particles she transfers from element to flesh to funeral flowers.

  (Her cookbook is kept in a lined box now.

  It’s too radioactive to live outside of lead, so they say—

  but when the covers open up, buttercups sprout from the round

  radioactive prints of fingertips. The petals catch in the book’s spine

  and fill the box with the scent of watery stems.)

  The shoes she wrapped up and stuffed in the back of wardrobe,

  because flowers following behind made her feel too much a sacrament.

  There’s nothing sacred about grief. It’s revolting. A mess in the streets,

  blood in the gutter, bones shifting uneasily and broken under skin.

  He was run over, the husband who brought her buttercups,

  run down in the street, and all she has of him are shoes stained with radium