Uncanny Magazine Issue One

by Uncanny Magazine

  “Why do you”—I paused, swallowed, searched for breath—“get to decide?”

  “It was not our decision. We are only the wings of the message. Fly in peace.” They bowed their heads, and slid like shadows from my room.

  Peace. Much easier to wish someone when you are walking free wearing wings than when you are lying in bed, feeling your bones burn from the inside out.

  Peace.

  There are other places, where souls must be carried between one life and the next. They are brought on bees, on butterflies gold and black. Sung to their rest by flights of angels. But always, always wings. Not because a soul itself has wings, or is meant to fly, I think. But because death is like flight trapped beneath a skin not made for such things, and wings are its escape.

  A cardinal flew past my window. I turned my head away from the blaze of red and spent my strength on weeping.

  Birds and ashes. That was what Lara’s house was full of. She wasn’t even quite sure how it was that none of the birds had lit themselves on fire, as she was still shedding errant flames when she walked, or turned her head, or breathed. They seemed a side effect of her existence, now.

  The crack in her egg had grown, lacelike, across the glowing, golden surface, and the air smelled of cinnamon and amber. These were the scents of resurrection, though she had not flown, not burned, and still, was too cold.

  She was dying. She knew that now, knew it in her bones, the burning core of them cooling with every heartbeat.

  She tried to shatter the egg herself, to speed the process and end the strangeness, but instead of cracking when she hurled it against the fireplace, it just rolled back into the embers. She stared, blankly.

  Then shook her head. “This is ridiculous.”

  Outside. In the air. It wouldn’t be like flying, not even close, but maybe outside the air would be light enough that she could breathe. She grabbed a jacket, huddled into it for warmth.

  As Lara crossed the threshold, the egg shattered, releasing her soul to the wind.

  Outside, the birds rose in a cacophony. Chirping and skittering and cawing, wings akimbo and everywhere. I longed for peace, for quiet, but they were impossible to ignore.

  And the air reeked, cinnamon and burnt amber, and somehow, the starkness of bone.

  I burnt too, beneath my skin, my pending death raging through me, but I hauled myself from bed and to the window. The effort careened my heart back and forth behind the cage of my breastbone, unsteady shaking. When I saw her, it flapped like a broken–winged bird.

  She lay on the ground, crumpled, flame licking over her skin, but not burning, not consuming. The cinnamon scent of the air was so strong it burned my eyes. On her skin, not birds, but feathers were inked in ash.

  A phoenix.

  I ran.

  Burning, dying, I ran. Exhausted and more than half dead when I got to her, I didn’t try to pick her up. I let go, and let myself fall into her flame.

  Once I touched her, we burned together.

  And then we flew.

  Flight. Burning. And oh, the glorious heat of it. Forever. Always.

  Eternity is dark, like deep blue velvet, and full of stars. Its air is cool inside my feathers and smells bitter–green, like myrrh. It does not seem strange to me that I am feathered, that I am winged, that the air burns as I pass through it, leaving a contrail of smoke in my wake. Death is only a migration, after all.

  The burden of Lara’s soul, Lara who once was the phoenix, is not hard for me to carry. I fly until the light behind my eyes is ultraviolet, is silver, is smoke, and then I let her go. She flies without me then, and her flight is beautiful. At the apex of her path, there is a spark, and then a flare. One last flame, to mark her final passage. I could feel her soul as I carried her, and I know that there is joy in her burning.

  Once I no longer see her, I too catch fire and I burn, until there is nothing left of me.

  I resurrect standing in the embers of a bone fire, cinnamon and burnt amber on the air, brushing ashes from my skin. And though I have returned when I meant to go forever, I am content here in the warmth of the flame.

  I am not as I was. I am wings. I am smoke.

  One sharp, burning pain, and a feather appears, inked in ash on my skin.

  Next to me, glowing softly, is an egg.

  It holds the weight of my soul. Without it, I am light enough to fly forever.

  © 2014 Kat Howard

  Kat Howard is the World Fantasy Award-nominated author of over 25 pieces of short fiction. Her work has been performed on NPR as part of Selected Shorts, and has appeared in magazines including Nightmare, Clarkesworld, and the Journal of Unlikely Cartography, and a variety of anthologies. Her novella, The End of the Sentence, written with Maria Dahvana Headley, is available from Subterranean Press. You can find her on twitter as @KatWithSword and she blogs at strangeink.blogspot.com.

  The Boy Who Grew Up

  by Christopher Barzak

  It was in the park I met him, one summer day when my Dad and I were fighting (again) and I left (again), slamming the door behind me after realizing I wouldn’t be winning (again), and took the tube to Kensington Gardens, where sometimes you can meet interesting people if the timing and other magical aspects of the world are right. When I was angry, which is what I’d been most of the time since my mum left a couple of years ago, I’d always go to the gardens. Back when I was little, she used to tell me that fairies lived there, that the flowers in the beds were actually their disguises. I never believed her, really—and after she left I thought of that as just another example of her tendency to lie—but by the time the sun went down that day, I’d see hundreds of them. Fairies, that is. And him too. Peter.

  He wasn’t what I expected, though I hadn’t really gone to the gardens expecting to see him in the first place. And anyway, what can you truly expect from someone you thought was a character out of a story adults read to children?

  That’s what my mum used to do. She’d read to me from this one book about Peter. Not the famous one with Wendy and Neverland, but the one where Peter was first introduced, The Little White Bird. That was back when she still wanted to be part of our family. That was back before she met Marcus the Carcass Splitter, owner of the absurdly posh butcher shop called Chop Chop over in Camden Town. That was back before she left my dad and me behind for bloody fat–marbled sides of beef.

  In the stories my mum used to read, Peter always seemed like a perpetual ten–year–old, but the Peter who stood in front of me that day, admiring his own statue (which looked like the little kid version of him) seemed more round my age. Fifteen or sixteen. Reddish–brown hair sticking up like he’d just pulled his head off a pillow. Wearing this costume of a leaf–covered vest and soft leather pants. And boots, too, up to the tops of his calves.

  I didn’t realize who he was right away. I thought he was just another nutter, or someone really into cosplay, or maybe just this huge fan of Peter Pan who’d gotten a bit carried away. But none of that put me off him. He was exactly the sort of person I’d hoped I’d come across. Someone lost, someone looking for something that might Change Things.

  I’d been there for about twenty minutes before he showed up, but no one really interesting had come by. Just mums and dads with kids, tourists clicking the camera buttons on their phones. So I’d kept my hands in my pockets and kept walking, hoping someone right would eventually meet my eyes. The world seemed to conspire against me that day, though, and I began to worry I’d end up back at our flat feeling the same way I had when I left.

  Then suddenly he was just there, standing next to the Peter statue like he’d been beamed down to earth from his alien world past the first star on the left and straight on until morning. And for the first full minute after he materialized, all he did was stand there and stare at that statue of himself like he was looking up at Christ on the cross or something.

  “You like him?” I finally said, grinning as I interrupted him pondering the statue like someone absorbed in on
e of their own selfies. I lifted my chin in the direction of the statue and chuckled a little, trying to put him at ease, but he only turned to me with this squint in his eye and said, “It’s been so long since I’ve been that little.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from snorting. Clearly the kid was messing with me. But when his face didn’t budge, I squinted back and said, “You lose your way from the hospital or something?”

  “This was the spot,” he said, utterly serious, and pointed at the stump–like pedestal the bronze Peter statue stood on, which had these stone fairies etched into its base, fanning their wings as they looked up at him like some kind of god. “This was the spot where I landed after I flew out my window and the bird Solomon told me I was more human than I thought, and that humans can’t fly. And because he said that, I fell and landed. Right here.”

  “Are you for real?” I asked, and he just blinked and nodded like, of course. I nodded back, just once, thinking, Right, this is going to be interesting. Even if the kid was a complete liar or just out of his mind in general, or maybe doing performance art of some kind, I liked that he believed in what he was trying to sell me.

  “I had a boat too,” he said, “right over there,” and he pointed toward a group of trees that lined the river. “I used to stash it there when I came across the Serpentine from the island where Solomon’s bird friends built me the boat from mud and twigs.”

  “Come on,” I said, “Let’s have a look then.”

  “At the boat?” he said, raising his eyebrows.

  I nodded and smiled, encouraging him to keep the game going. Of course he’d back down after I pushed for proof, I figured, because there really wasn’t any. “Yeah,” I said. “The boat. Let’s go for a sail in it, why don’t we?”

  “It’s probably fallen apart by now,” he said, shaking his head in resignation. And I thought, Here it comes. “But if it’s anywhere,” he said as he turned again toward the copse of trees by the river, “it would be there.” He looked over his shoulder at me then and said, “You do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shrugging. “Why wouldn’t I?” And hearing that, he seemed to brighten a bit, to stand up straighter, and then he grinned like a fool.

  “Let’s go then!” he said, suddenly sounding like a little kid calling out the start of a surprise race, and then he turned to sprint in the direction of the tree line. “Beat you there!”

  Nutter, I thought, shaking my head as I watched him go. Utter nutter. But I ran off a second later, laughing a little because I’d gone this far with him already, running to look for a non–existent boat made out of twigs and mud. I figured it was better than being at home pretending like my dad and I weren’t ready to commit acts of immense violence upon each other.

  When I caught up to him down by the banks of the Serpentine, he was standing half–bent over, looking at something. And when I came to a stop beside him, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

  A nest. A big nest. A human–sized nest, really, had been pulled up on the bank of the river. It was covered with moss and some fallen branches and a few vines that had grown around it over time, camouflaging it from ordinary passersby. Peter looked up with a glint in his eye. “I told you,” he said. “I told you it’d be here if it was anywhere. Get in.”

  “Are you mad?” I said. “That boat’s not big enough for both of us. We’ll go down like the bloody Titanic.”

  He laughed like he thought I’d told a joke, slapped one of his thighs like he was doing a pantomime play of Peter Pan, and suddenly I started to wonder if maybe one of those was actually going on in the park that day and he’d somehow escaped from the venue, gone off the rails, threw the script over his shoulder, and this group of children were just then sitting in a semi–circle somewhere asking their mums when Peter was going to come back and finish the story.

  “You’re funny,” he said. “I like that. Not everyone can tell a proper joke.” Then he cleared away the branches and vines and pushed the boat out into the water, wading next to it. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Come on already.”

  I waited for him to get in the boat, which bobbed on top of the water even after it held his weight inside it. There was barely room in there for me, but he held his hand out anyway, curled his fingers inward a couple of times. I thought about those fingers for a second, the way they might feel on my skin, and shivered.

  “It isn’t going to work with both of us in there,” I said. I put my hands in my pockets and looked back toward the Peter statue, ready to run. The light was starting to turn this greyish–purple color, as if whole hours had burned away in the last five minutes, and the grounds looked incredibly empty where just seconds before hordes of people had been milling.

  Then I heard a clang, clang, clang sound coming from all sides of the park, and Peter whispered in the most alarmed way, “It’s Lock–out Time. We must hurry.”

  “Are you saying we’ve been locked in?”

  “No,” said Peter. “I’m saying humans have been locked out. Hurry. The fairies will be coming soon, and you’re not a baby. They like human babies, but not grown–ups.”

  “I have a mobile with me,” I said, and fished my phone out. But when I started tapping on the keypad, I got nothing. No numbers. No bars. No anything. ”What the?” I said, tapping and tapping.

  “There’s no time for whatever that is,” said Peter. “Hurry. Get in.”

  So I stashed my phone in my pocket and waded out into the water—because what else could I do, really—and climbed into that nest of a boat to squeeze in beside him.

  It was a pretty messed up idea, but my life was pretty messed up right then. I didn’t want to go home to my dad and have to apologize for the argument we’d had earlier, during which I’d called him the biggest wanker in the world, and then proceeded to tell him how I wished he and my mum had never had me. Sitting in a nest–like boat seemed somehow more preferable.

  Peter didn’t say much as we floated down the Serpentine. He just slipped a small garden spade from between two branches in the nest and held it up in the air, where it gleamed under the moonlight. I blinked a few times, then gasped as I realized the moon was already out and shining down on the spade and on the rippling water. “My old paddle,” said Peter, waving it around like a sword.

  “It’s a garden spade,” I pointed out.

  “I know that,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I just didn’t know it back then, when I was only seven days old.”

  “You paddled down the Serpentine in this nest with a garden implement when you were seven days old?” I said, blinking over and over. I couldn’t manage to keep the scorn out of my voice, or the roll out of my eyes.

  Peter nodded. “I also used it to bury the children.”

  My throat constricted, hearing that, and the sudden urge to throw myself overboard came on me. “You buried children?”

  “The ones who got lost,” Peter replied like this was quite normal.

  “Lost?” I said, thinking maybe I should have just gone back home and apologized after all.

  “Yes,” said Peter. “They’d either get lost on their way to their mothers after hatching, or on their way back when they decided they wanted to be birds again instead of humans.”

  “Okay, this has gone on long enough,” I said, and tried to wriggle away from him, to put some space between our bodies. But the nest–boat was too small. Our shoulders were pressed together, his right knee knocked against my left, and he rested one elbow on my chest as he held the spade up over my head like it was bloody Excalibur. If he hadn’t been acting like such a little kid, which was a huge turn–off, I might have slid my hand under his tunic to see if he were up for it.

  “No,” he said. “We haven’t gone far enough to reach the island yet.” Then he turned to the side and dipped the spade into the dark water and began to paddle.

  I didn’t know what to do other than sit there and grill myself for being so flipping stupid. What had I been thinking? My dad would be wonde
ring where I was. He might have even called my mum to ask if I’d shown up there, which would never happen, but if he was worried enough, he’d phone her. When I got home—if Peter didn’t turn out to be a bloody serial killer and I did get to go home—my dad would annihilate me for running off again, which is something I’d been doing for the past year, whenever we had a row. I hated this idea I had right then, as I drifted in the nest–boat, this idea that the last thing I might ever hear my dad say was, “Colin, I’m sorry, but shouting at me and running off to who knows where isn’t going to bring your mum home. She has a new home now, much as you don’t like it.”

  She’d left when I was thirteen, right after she gave my dad her parting words. Jonathan Crowe, she had told him, you are all mouth and no trousers. Then she picked up the bags she’d packed before my dad got home from cabbying and walked out the door. Didn’t look back, not even to catch my eye. She’d already been seeing Marcus the Carcass Splitter behind our backs for several months already. Had kept it a secret. She went to stay with Marcus then, and after the divorce, she got remarried within a few weeks, like we’d never meant anything.

  I wanted to hate her. A lot. I did hate her, actually. But I couldn’t keep hating her so hard forever, my dad kept saying. So I tried to forgive her instead. And sometimes I’d get to this place where I’d want to be around her again, because I missed her voice as she talked back to the wankers who populated her favorite talk shows on the telly, and I missed the sound of her whistling as she made us tea. And then, when she’d call or email to see how I was doing, I’d be decent enough to her, which was a mistake because then she got the idea that it was time to have me over for dinner with her and Marcus. I tried that a few times, but it never worked out. As soon as I’d knock on their door and she answered, saying, “Colin, my love!” and Marcus would come to stand behind her, all smarmy and grinning over her shoulder, I’d start hating her all over again.

  It was because of what she’d said before she left—not to my dad, but to me, even though she didn’t mean for me to hear—it was because of what she said that I couldn’t forgive her.