Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “I have been waiting for someone. I assumed it was you.”

  “How long?”

  “Two hours,” she said, “three. I don’t know.”

  “Are you hungry?” he asked her.

  “I am,” said Swan.

  Fionn led her back to the house. Swan paused to examine the shoes lined up in the hallway, the umbrellas toppled over beside the coat-rack, the photographs on the wall—Fionn and Mara’s wedding, Fionn and Mara in black and white, reduced to only the light and the darknesses of themselves—and the big gilt mirror, in which Swan’s face floated small and pale as a ghostly fish. Fionn left her studying her own reflection and went into the kitchen to make breakfast. He did not open the oven, not wanting Swan to know about his dead wife, not wanting to share Mara with her, but it was the first thing Swan did when she wandered in from the hall; she sat cross-legged on the linoleum and tugged at the oven door. Mara blinked at Swan.

  “Who are you?” Swan asked.

  “I might ask you the same question,” Mara said. “This is my house.”

  Swan hooked one arm around her grass-stained knees. “You’re dead.”

  “I am.”

  “My sister might be dead,” she offered, a conciliatory gesture.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mara.

  Fionn made tea and bacon sandwiches, and he and Swan ate on the floor while Mara nibbled delicately at a piece of burnt onion. Swan ate two sandwiches, and then finished Fionn’s, and hunted through his refrigerator for lunch meats and cold leftover potatoes. “Where did you live, if not with January?” Fionn asked her, when she had exhausted his food supply and sat arranging frozen raspberries into indecipherable, bleeding designs on the linoleum.

  “Irrelevant, Fionn,” said Swan, and she sounded calm and self-assured as any adult.

  “Do you have any other brothers or sisters?”

  Swan stood without answering, wiped raspberry juice onto her yellow dress, and left the kitchen. Mara shooed Fionn away with both hands, and after a moment he followed the little girl into the living room. Swan held up a picture of Fionn as a child. It was a bad photograph, but one he loved, because it was the only picture he had left of his mother: she stood behind him, pale and indistinct, her long hair blown across her face; and Fionn sat in a patch of dusky grass, playing with finger paints. Three black fingerprint dots crossed his cheek. His mouth was a dark and painty smudge.

  “Fionn,” Swan said, her voice low, urgent. “There is somewhere we have to go.”

  Violins had woken Swan that morning, shrilling against the chime of a grandfather clock. She knew her sister was missing. Scented air blew across the tops of green bottles, blue bottles, clear bottles scattered across the room, and the breathy notes sang in harmony, and they sang Swan, Swan, Swan.

  She crawled out of her bed when the strings woke her. Swan lived, and had lived for the past three years, in an old brewery: a place still summery with the smell of hops, where nameless machines rusted and broken glass caught every angle of light on the floor and in the windows. She walked barefoot across the factory.

  The first owners of the brewery lived there still. They were old, a few hundred years old, so long dead that they had forgotten even how to be ghosts, and only remembered their roots in the roots clinging to the earth. Once, Swan expected, they had carried shapes and voices; these remnants drifted away piece by piece, and now they were nothing but air and misplaced colors in light. They cared for her like loving parents. They had little to say, but listened sympathetically to her stories, and made her tea full of tin buttons and dust. They had met January only once.

  Swan climbed up into an empty window-frame and looked out over the canal and boardwalk. January was nowhere to be seen, not in the waterfront businesses, the tall apartments, the crumbling lacework of bridge. Swan was used to disappearances. Her family was a family of strangers. But not January, not in this dreadful manner, an absence like a body carved in two. Something terrible had happened.

  January had been young once, too. She had lived with Swan in a city apartment. They had slept side-by-side in a king-sized bed, and their walls were decorated with strings of seashells, sugary sea glass, dried flowers. January baked mussels for their supper in smoky sacrificial fires. Her younger face was different from the one she wore later, as an adult: swirled with black designs, her lips plum-red, vicious red, golden hoops swinging in her ears. Her older face was more sedate, more cosmopolitan, but Swan remembered the days when January climbed trees for the choicest apples and screamed to the wind. January had been Swan’s protector, and neither men nor monsters ever troubled them. But when Swan turned eight January packed away her lacy dresses, her willow spears, her golden earrings, put on a face more suitable for the outside world, and walked away. Swan had not cried. Without January to be the strong one, Swan was no longer the weak one, which meant she had grown strong, which meant she would never be afraid again. She left her own home and wandered up and down the city until she found the abandoned brewery.

  Now, sensing her worry, the brewery owners surrounded Swan with their sweet breath. One made her a cup of tea. One brought a moldy biscuit. Swan swallowed a piece of broken glass, an apple seed, a dead moth. “January is missing,” she said. “What do you think I should do? Do you think I should look for her?”

  Automatically, the shapeless shapes of the brewery owners shook their gusty heads. No, no, no, they breathed.

  January had visited Swan in the brewery once, almost a year before. She appeared in the factory front, wearing a belted yellow raincoat and fingerless lace gloves, bearing gifts like a conquering hero. She gave Swan expensive dresses, suede boots, sun hats with hanging veils of silk, wheels of cheese and salted meats, strings of glossy beads, elderflower cordial in frosted bottles, a silver tea service, pearl-drop earrings, a new yellow jacket. Swan accepted these gifts wordlessly. Rain dripped from January’s coat, though outside the sun shone. Her hair clung damply around her neck. Troubled, the brewery owners stood at Swan’s back, swirling themselves into a mistrustful light show. January had not noticed. Her adult face, clear of black paint, was swept with blush, her eyes dark and fluttering lashes long as spider legs. She spoke in a strange new dialect. January stayed for one night; in the morning she kissed Swan’s cheek, and left.

  Swan ignored the advice of the brewery owners. They begged her to stay, to lie in the sunny factory and doze and dream and let them blow music from the many warped bright bottles. Instead, she dressed and she tied up her long hair. She pressed her mouth to the glassy ground. January’s scent hung there, faintly. Swan left the brewery owners to their own dreams.

  Every step Fionn took away from Mara was a tangible one, a chain around his feet. He sat in a silver taxi and watched mile after mile of distance separate them. This world, the world into which he shot like a reluctant bullet, seemed to be the ghostly one, barely readable outside the car window; while his house and his dead wife were solid, a known territory. If Mara had taken up residence in his skull instead of his oven none of this would matter. There would be no room for imaginary January then, only the two of them, husband and wife, husband and ghost, the most intimate marriage.

  They left the taxi at a hill lined with tall Georgian houses. Up on a black cliff, a castle made of golden rock balanced like a bird perching over the city. A tourist attraction, an historical remnant. Fionn wondered about the castle’s ovens. Where were they? Did someone keep them working? Did other ghosts live in them, royal ghosts, passing their time with songs and counting games, waiting until the castle crumbled around them? If the world’s ovens were populated with ghosts, how did anyone ever get any cooking done? A mystery, Fionn thought, one not even Mara would answer.

  He and Swan counted houses until they came to seventy-six, a number that pleased them both, and they stopped simultaneously, and nodded at one another. Fionn opened the door. Inside the house smelled of cooking rice, limes, and another sweet, unnameable fruit. Along the seashell-grey walls, someone had hung
old black-and-white photographs, minimalist things: a table full of light, a hat stand with one black hat, an empty bridge; stenographer’s shorthand for a life history. Swan smashed one frame against the wall and picked the photo out from the shards of glass. On the back was written Où es-tu? The picture showed a path of white stones, leading from nowhere to nowhere. Fionn and Swan made their way slowly down the length of the corridor, smashing every glass frame, examining every smooth, age-worn photograph. Each one had a note for them to read. Put together, they made up a strange news story, one without statistics or irrefutable evidence, and too arcane to be useful. Fionn and Swan collected the photographs in their pockets and stepped into the first room they found.

  It was a bedroom, January’s. Dusty teacups arranged like standing stones waited on the floor to trip them up. The bedclothes on the iron-barred bed were rumpled; Swan found a single piece of orange peel beneath the pillow, a clue that left them with more questions than answers. On the ceiling above them, black mold blossomed in the shape of a woman’s frowning, indistinct face, a reproachful guardian angel. Fionn stared across the room at the bathroom door. He knew it was the bathroom door; and he knew that he should not cross the room to see it, knew that if he tried the floor would buck and tilt like a rough ocean, the armchair would snap ferocious teeth at him and the wardrobe would yawn to swallow him whole. He moved towards it. “Don’t,” Swan whispered.

  In the bathroom, mirrors glinted everywhere. They were sulky creatures and refused to show Fionn his own pale face. Colored water had fallen on the floor, and he side-stepped it carefully. January’s bathtub was a wide one, knobbed jets and painted tiles, surrounded by vials of bath salts, perfumed soap, tiny bottles of essential oils. In the bathtub lay January. Her hair was tangled and matted. Blood had dried into a dull glint. January wore veined, blue-tinted skin, and her eyes were open, cloudy like lake-water in a glass.

  “You knew, didn’t you,” Fionn said.

  He crept closer. January’s chest lay open like a tree, and inside it was a white staircase crowded with ivy, leading down, and warm air, the sounds of birds calling somewhere in the distance. Swan, hovering beside Fionn, rested her face on his arm.

  “What are the rules,” he asked, “in a situation like this? Are we here to sew her up? To bury her and forget her?”

  “No,” said Swan.

  If January was dead, they were all dead, Fionn and Swan as well as Mara coiling in her oven, January neat and ajar. It seemed an impossible situation. Fionn gazed, pensive, at his lack of a reflection. In the end, he offered his hand to Swan, and she took it, the half-moon on her palm smiling into his skin; together, they stepped into the bathtub. He lifted Swan onto the first white step, and then swung himself down onto the open path in January’s chest. Fionn and his sister started down the stairs.

  Somewhere, bread was baking. Mara smelled it and rose, uncoiling the way a snake rises, charmed, from its basket. She had not been a baker. She did not know pound cakes from fairy cakes; but these days the smell of bread welcomed her. She extended her pointed toes delicately. Each step was another oven, a shoe for her feet, until she found the bread in a stranger’s kitchen, and wrapped herself around it like a nesting doll. Behind her, darkness stretched out, never-ending; in front of her, Fionn wandered through the world; they were choices, ones she could not deny, only delay; and ovens seemed to speak her language. This one was vast, sweet-scented. A chef’s home. A bakery. Mara nibbled experimentally at a piece of char on the oven floor.

  A small wind blew a puff of flour in Mara’s eyes, with the scent of seaweed and roses. January had tossed her yellow hair. “Greetings,” she said. Mara could not place the accent, but it did not matter. It was unmistakably January, impossibly January. Who else would it be?

  “Does this mean you’re dead?” Mara asked. “My husband is off looking for you. He is a wonderful man, a lovely man. If he dies in your pursuit I will be furious with you.”

  January shook her head. “I don’t know what I am.”

  “I’m dead.”

  “I know you are,” January said, and laughed her beautiful laugh. “But for people like me, like my sister, like your husband, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as that. There are not only two states of being, alive and dead. There are others.”

  Mara ground burnt bread between her teeth. “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know what it means.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Mara thought of Fionn, the way she always thought of Fionn. If he died, who would hunt for him? Who would cross the country in search of his body, whether alive, or dead, or some mysterious third option? She asked, “What part of you is here, if you don’t know where you are?”

  “The smallest part,” said January.

  I will hunt for him, Mara thought; and it was a realization, and a choice.

  January drew herself closer, as though seeking heat in the heat of the oven. “Don’t you want to know what happened to me?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe in ghost stories?”

  “No,” Mara said, judiciously. “Do you believe that they can help you?”

  The baking bread glowed like a fire signal.

  About the Author

  Becca De La Rosa lives in Dublin, Ireland, where she is studying Ancient Greek at university. Her stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, The Best of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Sybil’s Garage, and the recent anthology Phantom, edited by Sean Wallace and Paul Tremblay, among other places.

  Messenger

  J.M. Sidorova

  Life is a stick with a death on each end, balanced on a finger of the Universe, I understand that much. My kind is born small and numerous, wet and weak. Most of us do not survive to the onset of maturation. Of those who do, yet fewer complete it. Sometimes a human will step on a whole brood of my kind and never notice, other times one of us, a mature one, will level a human home because it is in the way, and will not notice either. This is fairness, and it is made out of time.

  I am a mature and strong one, I’ve lived for a while. There were times I was big and wild, and sat in the high desert, watching water turn into salt, moon into sun; watching a root break a rock in its blindness, make a whole tree fall into abyss still clutching to the rock it had broken. Other times I wanted confinement, structure. I became a stone in a big road. The road conveyed armies back and forth. When armies no longer walked on me, they took me out of the road and fit me into a pillar to support a temple of peace. I listened to a lot of talking. I saw many humans, I learned how women were different from men. I smelled charred meat, I saw childbirth. When I left, the temple collapsed.

  Shortly after that, He took me in for the first time. I felt reduced to infinite smallness, then turned inside out, to expand on the Other Side of Things. It was not without pain. The Other Side was luminous and streaming fast in all directions at once. On the Other Side I did not move, I stretched; my tail end became an umbilicus attached to the point through which I entered. I knew that if this umbilicus broke I would not be able to reenter my world. I would contract until I was a dot, dense and blown by the luminous wind. I knew I would die once I was a dot.

  Yet I kept stretching, He forced me to, and that is how I knew He was mightier than me, than anyone of my kind. Once He had drawn me taut, He docked my head end into a place that was like a shining mouth of a jellyfish. Since I was inside out, all my thoughts and feelings, all my innermost corners and surfaces were exposed, raw and shriveling in the streaming wind, and the hand of His mind caressed and soothed, reading them. My shame and humiliation inverted inside out and became a surrender to infinite pleasure—the kind I had never experienced before.

  When I was exhausted and trembling with gratitude, he inoculated me with His purpose. His purpose stayed in my mind when He released me to my world.

  His purpose speaks in me. It says, find Me a vessel. I know the what but not the why—that is my role. He is my Master and
I am His messenger, His Ag-ghel.

  I choose randomly. There is a little valley fed by a stream—a wet crease between two hills; tongues of greenery lick pale yellow slopes, getting drier, thornier as they extend. A grove, a field, a vineyard. A village. Huts, the color of earth and rocks, seem to sit atop each others’ shoulders, climbing uphill.

  I choose her because she is one of the two children who do not flee in fear when I show myself to them in my first ever human shape. The other child is a boy and smaller than she. He clutches her hand. I understand that my human shape is not reproduced very well. I wanted it to be a child, like them. It appears I got many things wrong. “Maria, is it the undead?” the boy mumbles. When I speak they do not understand me. Baffled, I shed the shape, become invisible. Still, Maria looks at me, and her eyes are blue-green.

  From this moment on I watch over her. I am a stone on the path she takes every day with her flock of sheep. I am a thornbush she crouches behind when she does not want her little brother to see what she is doing. At nights I lie on the roof of the hut she lives in with her family and listen to the twitter of their speech. This is when the memory of His stroking hand invades me again and again, and His purpose wisps in my head like handfuls of red feathers. I long for His touch and yet feel ashamed of it.

  One day Maria is up in the pasture and a streak of blood runs down to her knee. She sits down, pulls her knees up and folds back her skirt. She follows the trail of blood up her leg. When she finds the source, she squeezes her legs shut and pulls the skirt over. She sits for a while, her arms tight around her calves, then gets up and runs down to the village. She runs differently now than the way she used to, as if she holds a secret between her legs. A purpose. My time is drawing near.

  I need to take a better human form. I follow Maria’s family to the market to watch and learn. But the things that catch my attention are often superfluous: an imbalanced scale of a fig vendor absorbs me more than the vendor. I see the weights he uses, that they are good and stamped with the King’s seal, but I also see the wrongness of balance, and it draws me in. With an effort I pull away: I am here to learn to look like a vendor, not like his scale.