by Cat Rambo
Anger flares in me again. I feel it move, incandescent, through my veins. I feel lighter, harder. As though I am made of fire and metal and air.
Screw this. If June won't give me what I want, I will take it.
June goes on during the third act. She shoots flaming arrows at an LED-lit circle while standing on top of a galloping horse. When I was little, I thought she was one of the most amazing things I had ever seen.
Now that we are both older, I see the imperfections in the act, where a shot almost goes short and a few paces later where the horse shies and June hops forward just a little to maintain her balance.
I slip out of the main tent and go to hers.
Pausing in the entrance, I consider. June is an alchemist, after all. Circuses sometimes have a sneak thief or two, but everyone knows that an alchemist is capable of all sorts of subtle but lethal tricks to guard their things.
I proceed with caution. I have a thin wooden wand with me, and I use it to tap around the backpack, looking for cords or other triggers. I find nothing.
I kneel beside the bed and pull the pack out. I had expected it to feel heavier.
The package itself is brick-sized but not heavy enough to be made of stone.
I pull the suede away from the rectangular object. Up close I can see where the leather is burned in irregular patterns that look like fingerprints. I close my eyes and tried to match my fingers to the marks. They're almost perfect in their alignment.
Inside the suede is a box, hollowed out of some white milky stone. I open the lid and see a circlet and necklace. The metal is as intricately wrought as though it came from an older time, but it is set with thumbnails of roughly polished ruby. I stare into their depths, red as rage, mesmerizing.
"Your mother didn't want you to have that until you learned to master your anger," June says. She stands unexpectedly close, in the doorway of the tent.
My hands fall, almost dropping the box. "Why aren't you finishing your act?" I stammer.
She blinks. "I finished a good fifteen minutes ago. You've been staring at those stones without moving your eyes."
I don't care what my mother thought about my anger. Everyone gets angry. I'm a normal person. I may be having trouble finding my place in the circus, but that doesn't mean I don't have a place.
"What was my mother?" I asked.
"You mean what did she do for the circus?" June says. "She was a flame eater."
"And my father?"
June shakes her head. "Your mother decided she wanted a child. She didn't much care about who fathered the baby, because she figured she'd be well away before she even started to show. He was someone that came through the circus, back in the northern parts, way back when. Exactly when you were conceived, I don't know. Your mother was very good at keeping things to herself."
"So what are these things?" I hold the box up.
"Artifacts of your family. They increase a flame eater's powers."
"Powers?" I try to put all the scorn and disbelief that I can into the words.
She shrugs.
"Who are you to say whether or not I deserve my mother's legacy?"
"I was one of her best friends."
I feel a pang of guilt at that, because her face seems genuinely pained when speaking of my mother.
Still the squeeze of anger around my lungs makes me bluster. "Well, you're not my friend." My fists clench, forcing more words out. "I hate you!"
"I don't care how you feel, one way or another. I like you," she says, eyes patient but flickering with humor, laughing not at me, but at both of us, faced off like this.
"Why didn't anyone ever tell me about my mother?"
June sits down on the cot, folds her hands in her lap, and looks at me as though trying to convince me that every ounce of her attention is being devoted to this conversation. The rain has picked up; it patters urgently on the canvas. "You have to understand, your mother did more than eat flames. She was an elementalist."
"An elementalist?" People said that there were mutants who were aligned with the forces of the earth, but you never ran into anyone who had actually met one, let alone had one for a parent.
"The flames couldn't harm her because she was one with them." June's face is still serious. She says, "Would you like me to make you a calming tea?"
"Screw that!" I say. "What are you telling me? That my mother is some kind of mutant? That she's left me some sort of magical jewelry?"
"Not magic. Old tech." June reaches over to take the tiara from my fingers. I let her, resisting the urge to slap her hand away. She traces with her finger around the lumps of ruby, to the underlying silver circuitry. "Very old."
I reach to take it back from her, and she resists for a second, before relinquishing it to me. She looks at me as I settle it on my head. I am prepared for something amazing to take place when I do so, but the moment is actually anticlimactic. I feel nothing, no rush of power.
"Your mother wasn't around to teach you. So we didn't want you to know what you were capable of, until you were of an age where you could listen and learn from us. An elementalist calling on their powers without knowing how to temper them can kill everyone around them."
I want to want to scoff at all that she is saying. But I can feel the anger inside me, reaching up to the machinery contained in the metal lying against my scalp and setting it into an oscillating blaze perceptible only inside my skull. I can feel my powers, feel the fields of energy and heat all around me, through several tents away.
And I can feel the people all around me. There is Roto, flirting with two townies, and Carrie with her dancers and Lorelei wondering and worrying how much longer she can keep the circus afloat.
I could set fire to them all.
Even as I think that, I can feel the fire racing out of me, ready to land wherever I want to send it. Ready to turn the humans and under-people around me into burning candles in the night.
My fingers twitch. This might have been what my mother feared, that I'd take this thing and do something terrible with it. And I could. I could take what I wanted from this place, take Roto and whatever supplies I wanted, and leave them all behind, burning.
I look at June.
Her face is placid as she returns my stare.
Trusting me to do the right thing.
I don't feel as though she is trusting me for my mother's sake, that her memories of an old friend are what makes her stand there without moving, even as the air inside the tent grows thick and oppressive and hot. No, she is trusting me for my own sake. For the sake of the person who she has watched grow up.
And that trust helps me grapple the flames back inside myself.
It's not that I don't still feel the anger. It may linger inside me till my dying day. But I am in control of it. Can use it, can let it fuel my actions. And my powers. I take the tiara off and slide it back into the box with the necklace.
"Do you want me to hold onto that for you?" June offers.
"That's okay," I say.
At least I have a better sense of my place here now. If my mother was a flame eater, there's nothing to say I can't follow in her footsteps as I explore my new power. As for the necklace and tiara, they can wait until the time that they are needed. For something tells me that my mother thought they would be.
At least I don't have to practice juggling anymore.
© 2014 by Cat Rambo
* * *
Cat Rambo often lives, writes, and teaches in the pacific Northwest. Her 150+ fiction publications include stories in Asimov's, Clarkesworld Magazine, and Tor.com. Her short story,"Five Ways to Fall in Love on Planet Porcelain," from her story collection Near + Far (Hydra House Books), was a 2012 Nebula nominee. Her editorship of Fantasy Magazine earned her a World Fantasy Award nomination in 2012 and she edited Lightspeed's Women Destroying Fantasy issue in 2014. For more about her, as well as links to her fiction, see www.kittywumpus.net or www.patreon.com/catrambo.
Forever
Rachel Pollack
It happened one day that the Blessed Lady of Dark Forever went for a walk in her garden of black leaves, past the Seven Broken Doorways, and down to the ferries, where the refugees arrive in endless outpourings. She was watching her servants—"facilitators" they called themselves these days—play a game of Snatch The Bone when she heard whispers behind her, then laughter, then more whispers. When she looked around she saw no one but the endless rolling landscape of the dead. She tried to tell herself it was just the usual back and forth between the oldtimers and newcomers, but the sound stayed with her, itchy under her long gray dress. Finally she had to admit it. Her sisters were meeting somewhere. Without her.
Forever called Gatekeeper Number 7, a young man with blond hair, creased striped pants, sharp teeth, and satin buckled shoes. "I'm going away for awhile," she told him. "Take care of things." He smiled, pushed the tip of his finger against an upper tooth until a single drop of lavender blood appeared, then flicked it on the ground, outwardly a sign of obedience, but really—She said "No re-decorating. No parades. And no puppets to frighten the children. I won't be gone very long." The servant bowed his head.
She found her sisters in an abandoned library of burnt books. She flung open the door, but instead of embarrassment, her sisters clapped their hands. "You came!" Ocean said, and Sky added, "Now we can start."
"Start?" Forever said, and wondered if they'd sent some invitation the staff had managed to forget. That crowd of dead beetles the other day—they had seemed determined to reach her. She should pay attention to such things.
Ocean said, "The game. The contest."
Of course. What else but another competition? It was Sky's doing, it always was. Ocean, as innocent as foam, just thought it was fun, and a memory of their childhood, but Sky always had to win. It was what drew her back from the edges. Forever told herself she should leave. Go back to work. But if she didn't play when would she ever see her sisters? "What is it this time?" she said.
It was simple. They would choose a skin woman and try to predict what would happen to her over the course of a single year. The loser, the one who strayed furthest from the truth, would have to spend a day among the humans, disguised as one of them. How easy, Forever thought. Fortune-telling was her domain after all, for what prediction was more certain than death? "Who chooses?" she said.
Sky waved a hand. "You can choose. You were always the most trustworthy."
Forever cast her mind across the world, spotted a young woman whose body was two-thirds eaten by cancer. A wave of her hand summoned a picture of the woman in front of them. "A year from now," she said, "this girl will be settled down below, and her family will be already bored from weekly visits to her grave to pull weeds and scatter poppies."
Ocean smiled. "I don't think so," she said. "I say, a year from now, she will put down fresh roots."
Sky added "And reach up to the Sun." Forever laughed. Sky said, "Oh, and skin people will come to her with seeds and offerings, asking for help to escape, well, you." The Mother of Silence laughed louder. They sat down to watch.
The Kindly Ones (as people sometimes called cancer, hoping to placate it) ate more and more of the girl, gnawing their way from the inside out. The doctors offered more medicine, more cutting, more invisible fire, but she refused. She began a journal, a record of everything she loved. A friend read it and told her to let others know the wonders they ignored as they rushed through life. She wrote a blog, Chronicle of the World's Beauty, that every day was read by more and more people.
One day her parents carried her out to a grassy bank at a place where three rivers meet. A group of sick children had gathered there to meet her. "Please don't leave us," they said. "We need to know you're here."
"That's not up to me," she said. "I wrote about that last Tuesday, don't you remember?"
The children stretched themselves on the dirt, as much as their diseased bodies could manage. "Please," they begged the Heavens, the Earth, and all the worlds between, "let us keep her. We need her more than Death." A flash of light made them close their eyes, and when they looked again the sick girl had vanished. In her place stood a lilac tree, tall and fragrant. If the children looked closely they could spot excerpts from the Chronicle of the World's Beauty on every leaf.
Word spread, and within a year the sick had begun to come from across the world to touch the leaves to their sores and broken places. They left flowers and seeds as offerings, and more and more came every day.
"You cheated," Forever whispered, too angry to shout.
"And how did we do that?" Sky asked. "We didn't change her. It's not our fault her whining and moaning hit the right frequency." Sky smiled sweetly and shrugged.
Forever didn't answer. She blamed herself. If she hadn't been so certain she might have been careful. She sighed. She'd lost the game, but it was only one day. She would walk into some mud woman body, let the Sun flicker across the sky, then return to her work, while her sisters gloated. They'd get over it, and so would she.
She chose a young woman in a small city, healthy enough so her possessor wouldn't have to suffer any pain, smart because Forever didn't want to be bored, friends but no husband, parents, or children to make annoying demands or notice the difference under the mask. "Karen," the woman's name was, and just before Forever was about to walk into her, she thought how silly it was to worry so much for just one day.
But what if she got lost, or something distracted her? She summoned Gatekeeper Number 3, whose creased pants and slicked black hair and ruby cufflinks made her want to call him Rudolph. She told him what she was about to do and instructed him to make sure her skin body got some kind of reminder.
She entered Karen in a booth in a restaurant, where the woman was having lunch with her boss, a publicist for area artists. It was a little like floating and then being sucked down by a heavy weight. For a moment she thrashed about inside, and must have made the body jerk, because a glass of ice tea spilled all over a plate of French fries, and a notebook, and a proposal in a yellow folder. It was 3:12 in the afternoon.
Karen's boss took her hand. "Hey, are you all right?" he said, as a blank-faced Mexican man came over with a cloth.
Forever wanted to leap at the boss, cut through his neck with these Karen teeth that had just ground up bits of dead cow. Instead she seemed to back away, go somewhere deeper inside. The Karen voice said "Sorry. I don't—I don't know what happened there." She looked down at the blur of tea and ink. "Oh God, I'm sorry," she said.
Her boss, who was named Phillip, waved his hand. "Don't worry about it."
Karen stared at her own hand, wiggled the fingers, looked at the lines, imagined she could see the web of blood under the skin. Embarrassed, she put her hand in her lap and focused on Phillip.
As they left the restaurant a little boy with shiny black hair held out his hand towards her. A piece of soft wood lay on it, a crude carving of a boat. "Would you like this?" he said politely. Karen stared at him. "I made it in art class. The teacher said we had to give it to someone."
Karen smiled. "Why don't you give it to your mother? I'm sure she would really like it."
The boy shook his head. "It's supposed to be a stranger."
"Oh, well okay. I mean, thank you. It's very nice." The boat felt warm and almost sharp, as if he'd carved it out of nettles. As the boy ran off, Karen dropped the toy in her purse.
Phillip said "Well, that's really weird."
"We should get back to work," Karen said.
That night Karen squinted at her face in the bathroom mirror. She just couldn't shake the sense that something was wrong. It was like—like she was looking at someone else, or someone else was looking at her. She should go to the doctor. Call for an appointment first thing in the morning. But she woke up late, with just enough time to put her makeup on and grab a coffee on the way to the office. There she stared at endless streams of emails until she could think of nothing else.
At twelve minutes after three she picked up the carving of t
he boat the boy had given her, turned it over in her hand, rubbed it with her thumb. Something about it—then Phil called to discuss an account and she dropped the boat back in her purse.
Over the next few weeks she found herself too busy to think of much besides the next appointment. Except, every day, at 3:12, a queasiness came over her, like a cyclic fever, so strong that she began to make sure she was always somewhere she could sit down and not say anything for a minute or so. After a month of this, including two check-ups by her doctor, she decided to go see a therapist.
Dr. Connell suggested the strange sensations might stem from a forgotten childhood trauma that had taken place on some long ago afternoon, at 3:12. Maybe her mother did something one day when Karen came home from school, something innocent that the child misinterpreted as fearful. But why would it come up now, Karen asked. Who knows, Dr. Connell said. Some perfectly innocuous incident might have pushed the old trauma just a little closer to the surface.
For the next month Karen did her best to bring her secret trouble to the surface. But nothing came to her. One of Phil's clients, an astrologer pianist (or was it pianist astrologer?) told her of a medium who could go into a trance and "journey" inside you. Karen dismissed the idea at first, but finally called for an appointment. Andrew Crow-Talker, as the young man called himself, had an office in his white two story home. He led her to a pleasant room with large windows overlooking woods and asked her to lie down on a massage table, fully clothed, he assured her.
"Relax" he told her. "You don't have to do anything, I do it all." He half closed his eyes and murmured something to himself as he moved his hands back and forth about four inches from her body. At 3:12 he touched her chest above her breasts and the top of her head. For a moment nothing happened, then he cried out "Sisters!" and a moment later passed out.
