The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  A night comes when the moon is as full and fat and yellow as a disc of dry bone in the sky. Everything is spilled ink and ivory. The airship squats near what’s left of the original rocket, waiting for Linnea as she steps out her front door. Not a sigh of wind disturbs the becalmed world. It’s as still and breathless a night as she’s seen in an unreckoned amount of time—a listening audience, a girl waiting for a bedtime story.

  Or a conductor waiting for someone to fish out a ticket. She’s got no skin but her own to draw on; humans traded their stripes for words long ago.

  “We weren’t very good at this,” Linnea says to the darkness.

  After going so long without speaking or hearing another voice, the sound of her own voice lands like a teacup kissing concrete.

  “The man who built this house used to hit his wife. He died a long time ago, before the aunties moved in, but I still know that somehow. I know a lot of stuff now. I know all the things I learned and all the things I didn’t.” Linnea lets her gaze wander over the familiar front porch landmarks—the abandoned wasp nest in the shadowy upper left corner, the pillars sandblasted down to bare, dried wood. She thinks she sees movement out of the corner of one eye. A dark bipedal shape beneath the airship’s bulk, an absence of moonlight clinging to memories of alarm clocks and apple pie. Another joins it, then another.

  “I know why me and all those other kids were living around the gas station,” she continues. “I know where all the grown-ups went. I know why they went there, and why they never came back. I know why they stopped talking on the radio, and it’s all…so…dumb. Nobody would listen to one another, not even to the people they loved. Maybe they weren’t scared enough. Maybe they were scared of the wrong things. They didn’t have Auntie Ben and Auntie Martha and Auntie Doris to teach them about stuff and they wouldn’t have listened anyways, but…”

  There are so many stories buzzing inside Linnea’s head it’s hard to hold on to the frayed length of her own thoughts. She gropes and pushes aside other people’s memories until she finds the end of it again. The little cluster of flickering shadows around the airship’s hull is thicker now. The patchwork bag shudders and stirs with a faint hiss.

  “We weren’t very good at this,” she repeats. “And we took everybody else with us. But we weren’t all bad. We had potato crisps, and ice cream, and we built farmhouses and wrote songs and told stories. Maybe next time will be okay. Maybe we’ll turn into something better at changing once we fly.”

  There is a noise—a rising wind, a thousand whispers, a sliding of fabric and a slither of inflating canvas. The horizon in the direction of the abandoned town seems to ripple.

  Linnea steps off the porch into the moonlight. She strides across the yard, vaults the fence, and doesn’t stop until the shadow of the rising airship reaches out to swallow her own.

  • • • •

  Pretend you are the land—the empty sea-lapped cities with their blank skull eyes, the blasted green glass wastes, the skeletal forests. The desert, as red and uncaring as ever. Do you feel the shadow cutting a nightjar’s swoop across your foothills? Do you see the airship that throws it, nosing noiselessly across the face of the moon?

  Ghosts rise to meet the vessel, sinuous as smoke and blue as pilot flames. They cluster thickest over the cities, but even in the empty parts of the world there are always a few hurrying to catch up. The airship moves with the graceful, unbothered patience of a whale hunting for krill. It is a black mouth with a belly big enough for all of humanity, filtering souls from a night that seems endless. No need to rush, it whispers, but even in extinction humans are terrible at altering their old habits.

  (Remember whales? Remember nightjars? Remember life in the sea and the sky?)

  It takes forever. It takes no time at all. It crosses all the whens and wheres, all the should-have-beens and never-wills. Whoever or whatever stands at the wheel has a steady, tireless hand. The gathering goes on for exactly as long as it needs to, until there’s nobody else left to claim. The moon sets and the stars rise; so, too, does the airship. It sets a course for a constellation shaped like a long, lean predator, distant flickering suns dotting its purple flanks like stripes.

  Drifting gently upward

  (Remember balloons? Remember letting go of your first in the parking lot of some forgotten bank, tearfully saying goodbye as it climbed and climbed and the sun turned it to a bird?)

  distance shrinks its size, taking memories of telephones and coffee tables and radio broadcasts along with it. First kisses, last breaths, friendships and fallout and fires blossoming on the horizon—they dwindle and dim, going back to the darkness all thoughts and stories come from. A final pulse of ancient light from a dead star—red-blue-green—and there’s nothing left to see and no one left to remember they ever saw it.

  Pretend you are the land. Goodbye, you say, slamming a screen door in the wind. Goodbye. Better luck next time.

  * * *

  Brooke Bolander’s fiction has won the Nebula & Locus Awards and been shortlisted for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy Awards. Her work has been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Tor.com, and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently resides in New York City.

  How to Swallow the Moon

  By Isabel Yap

  “I want to know the fires your hands bring—”

  “Having Been Cast, Eve Implores” by Barbara Jane Reyes

  Tonight, as in every night, she smiles when the door opens. Her arms loop over your neck; she leans in and rests her head against your cheek. She looks down at the basket between you. “Is this for me?”

  She already knows the answer, but: “Yes, my jewel.”

  It’s four golden mangoes this time, and a bunch of lakatan bananas, stubby and sweet. She lifts a mango to a patch of moonlight, turning it pale silver. “From who?”

  “Aba Ignayon.”

  “Which one is he?”

  “The one with a very square chin. His head is like a box.”

  She laughs; her laughter soothes the knot tightening in your chest. As her sixteenth birthday nears, the number of suitors grows by the day. They come from farther lands, ever distant shores. The gifts they bring grow more numerous, more elaborate. They are given audience for an afternoon, discussing with her parents. Sometimes they are blindfolded and taken to a dark room, where they kneel, waiting in agony, til at last they are permitted a glimpse. You sit with Anyag on the other side of the wall, watching her hold her laughter while she carefully pushes her smallest finger through a hole cut into the wood. There is usually a sharp intake of breath on the other side. Then you both wait, quavering, until at last a door clicks shut, and you fall over each other, erupting in giggles.

  Part of your pain comes from not knowing what will happen when she marries. Will she stay here and become a lady of the village? Or will she leave with him, for some faraway place where you can no longer be part of her life? These thoughts haunt you more than you care to admit. To distract yourself, you inspect her weaving progress for the week, the colorful tapestry only begun: the impression of a woman, bare-shouldered.

  “A sirena?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She takes a banana and peels it. “I dreamt of one,” she says. “She sang the song of Buyi-Lahin, so sweetly. While the men rowed close in their boats…”

  “Dreaming of men now?”

  She shrugs, talks while chewing. “And why not? They’re only people. You know the only man I’ve ever seen is my father, so I have to imagine. Anyway they’re no different than women, besides what is between their legs.” She snickers. To her, men’s bodies are funny. She has never had reason to fear them, of course, which is a relief. But that could all change, one day not too far from now. You decide her curiosity is a good thing. It might make the wedding night easier. She continues: “It was strange; in my dream, Buyi-Lahin was no man, but a woman without hair, who rode a steed of dark copper…”

  While she recounts her
dream, you gather the materials for bathing: clean clothes, a smooth stone to polish her feet and elbows, coconut milk for her hair, salt crystals, and a midnight cloth to shield her from view, even if no one dares come by the river, lest they be put to death for straying eyes. You would hold the knife yourself, slit their throat, pluck their eyeballs, partly because it is your duty: she is your handiwork as much as her family’s. And partly because you love her, despite all your efforts not to.

  She doesn’t make it easy, but you’re good at difficult things.

  “Shall we bathe, then?”

  She nods and drapes a veil over her head. You follow her down the steps of her tower, into the quiet night outside.

  • • • •

  When your mother was a girl, there were still two moons. Like Bathala’s eyes, she would say, working a long blade over her fire. You always imagine Mother the same way: sweat shining on her brow, curls plastered against her neck and cheeks, sparks dancing at her elbows. At her throat glints the amulet you now wear. On her sturdy neck, it was more like a choker, the bright pendant reflecting forge fire. What a delight it was, to look up and see them both there, an assurance that everything was safe; that we had not been forgotten by the gods.

  And? What happened?

  And one night, when the two moons were glowing bright and beautiful, it came for them: the Moon-Eater, rising out of the ocean, groaning as it ascended over the land. The trees shook and snapped in the force from its beating wings. It had rows and rows of silver teeth, each one as big as the boulders lining the caves of Aman Puli. Its ribbon-like tail was serrated at the edge—here, mother holds up the knife she is sharpening, ridges flashing in incandescent light—and it lifted in a tremulous zigzag, out of the water. When it flickered, a shower of saltwater fell on our rice paddies, our homes. For days after everything smelled of salted fish. Our skin, our hair. Our hands.

  You shudder at the idea of a mouth so large it could swallow ten of you in one go.

  It rose, and rose. It was every color. We stood transfixed—unable to move, unable to stop it. It sank its jaws into one of our moons, which disappeared down its throat. We saw the shape of our moon roll down the length of the monster’s endless body, shining through those giant scales, while the monster laughed—its laugh like a roar—for it had taken something precious from the children of the earth, and it was delicious: our moon, our suffering. Its great orange eyes trained on the next moon…

  “Our moon,” you breathe, and look outside the window, even if it is daytime.

  Yes, the moon that remains with us. For just as soon as it had eaten the other moon, the beast could already feel it melting away, like the six it had swallowed in your ancestors’ times… Its hunger was insatiable, and our moons were never meant to last outside the sky. It sank its teeth into our last, final moon, and our hearts lurched in our chests, for we would soon be cast into darkness every sundown…

  And then, three things happened at once. The village priestesses, your great-aunts among them, took up a chant. Their voices, straining through panic, rose like cutting knives, and the pitch made the bakunawa blanch, the great moon bobbing out of its jaws. The village warriors began to pitch their spears at the beast. Driven by the chanting, some spears found their mark and pierced the bakunawa’s side. But what little effect it had! The bakunawa merely roared at us, a sound that still rings inside me today (here, her eyes water, though whether it is from the rising smoke or the memory of that cursed night, you know not. She blinks the tears away because her hands are grimy, and continues). What made it stop was not the spears or the magic, but the high, clear voice of Hugan-an, who emerged from her house, to everyone’s shock.

  Hugan-an, our precious jewel. Hugan-an of fabled beauty. It was the first time any of us had seen her—those not of her family. For she was a binukot, protected from birth, shielded from view, in order to be as pure and unstained a gift for one suitor most worthy…

  She sang a song we did not recognize, with words that she was making up, words that were not handed from our ancestors: leave the moon be, leave my people be, and I will be your bride, Moon-Eater, if it pleases thee. She walked on the sand towards the shoreline, and the priestesses stopped banging on the gongs and kulintang, and held their breath. Her father ran from his house and screamed for her to return. But she was so sure, she was unyielding.

  The moon emerged from the serpent’s mouth, fixed itself in the sky, shining brightly, while he dove, and took Hugan-an in his jaws…

  Like the moons, she sparkled as she disappeared down its throat. The beast fled back into the sea. We had finally learned the secret of keeping our moons alive, after he had already taken six. And he may never take another, so long as she is his bride…

  But how her father sobbed! Despite everything the village gave him, nothing could ever make up for that sacrifice, and he died of heartbreak not long after.

  She stops working the blade, and sets the polished steel down. “I pray it does not happen in your lifetime,” Mother says. She is speaking about the return of the Moon-Eater, and the loss of a binukot. Having completed her work of the afternoon, she reaches out to you. Neither of you know that in just a few months, she will be dead from a blood illness. Your living relatives will barter you for coin, and you will become a servant at the house of one such jewel. You nod and press your head against her chest, breathing in her smell: smoke, comfort, a sorrow that has never left.

  • • • •

  You help Anyag shed her clothes by the river: undoing the pearled clasps of her top, first, then the hooks of her skirt, the soft woven undergarments. You set them aside on the grass, while she removes her earrings, the clips in her hair, the necklace with two thin braids of gold. Jewelry from her family—she is not allowed to wear gifts from her suitors, not yet. Her mother keeps such offerings in trays, stacked in a dining hall cupboard. Pearls the size of lanzones, green gems that mimic the eternal depths of the ocean, ivory cut into intricate starscapes. And letters, love poems, the most delightful or daring of which you read to her in the evenings. It’s a curious game: you choose the words you think will make her fall in love with the suitors you like best (how can you not judge, even knowing it isn’t your place?). You read them to her as sweetly as you can, but lightly, too. Your guilt and shame coalesce with envy, but you never let it leak through your voice.

  “I liked that one,” she says sometimes. Sometimes, she says nothing.

  Sometimes, she smiles at you in wonder, and something skitters under your skin, a fey creature with too many legs.

  What if you were to write her a letter of your own, just to tell her how you feel? No one would know. But you cannot bring yourself to do it. What use would it be, even if she turned to you after and said, I liked that one?

  You can’t fall in love with your jewel. You have always known it, but never dreamed it would be a problem. Every time you think you’ve managed to escape your feelings, they flood back. A smile, a look, a sharp word: needles to the heart, as sharp and biting as if you’d been actually stung. You would tell her to stop doing that to you, but she doesn’t mean it, isn’t even aware of it. You know her as no one else does, and this makes you ashamed; this knowledge should not make you love her.

  Anyag wades into the river. “Gah!” she says. “It’s cold.”

  “You always say that.” You unfurl the cloth and step into the river, up to your ankles, and wait.

  After a moment, she says, “Sing for me?”

  “Anyag…”

  “I’m bored.”

  “Only if it’s a duet, then.” You’re toying with your own feelings, pushing the boundaries of what you can bear. You recklessly start the song about three stupid monkeys splashing in the river, and the turtle that outsmarts them all. Anyag joins in, playing the high-pitched parts of the baby monkey and the grumbling murmurs of the turtle. After the last verse, you laugh, expecting her to join in. There’s a pause that makes your heart skip—then she finally does.

  �
��That song never gets old, does it? We’ve been singing it for years.” She pokes you through the cloth. “I’m done.”

  You wrap the cloth around her. “Some things never change.”

  “Yes. Some things stay the same for a long, long time.” She sighs. There it is: from the moment she said I’m bored, you were expecting this. What a longing she must have, to see more of the world, instead of being locked away. No sun, no other humans, no freedom to wander her own village, except at night, with you keeping watch. Her cage a tower, and you its guard—or is it dragon, fending off any who come to lure her out?

  It’s your duty, but sometimes you wonder how much damage you’re actually inflicting. You understand why she’d want more than this, so you say: “Things will change, soon enough. Your presentation is only a few weeks away. I am certain your future husband will show you more of the world.”

  “True,” she says. There are countless things unsaid in that true. You string them together in your mind: excitement, eagerness, resignation. A thread of wistfulness—no, that’s only your own hope manifesting. Without warning, she asks: “Will my marriage make you happy?”

  “Your happiness is my happiness.”

  “That’s not an answer, Amira.” She sounds a bit scolding, and you laugh and tell her it’s true, ignoring how your heart aches. Why does it feel as if both of you are speaking in code tonight?

  She dresses herself while you wash her garments. For reasons you cannot fathom there’s a nervous taint to the air between you as there has never been before. Then a thought strikes you: she knows. She knows how you feel, your desires like poison, and she does not know what to do with this knowledge. How to break your heart carefully. How to tell you that what you want is wrong: not only because you are both women, and you are a servant, but most importantly because she does not feel the same. It doesn’t matter, you think desperately, while you twist the cloth to let out water. It changes nothing! Just ignore me. You wish she would understand that you know your own foolishness and want nothing more. Your heart pounds loud enough to drive moon-eaters away.