Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 92

by Matthew Kressel

  I burrow into the grass, until I can cover myself and watch the sky pass above through a thin lattice of green. I was kept below ground for so long, it is a comfort to be sheltered from the limitless sky. Clouds thicken across the ivory vault and the smell of rain saturates the cooling air, but the clouds do not spill their water. The sky bruises the way I do when I fall, until the sun is dragged beneath the horizon by scrabbling, dark-clouded hands.

  Night comes and sleep, too, and when I wake there is a brown rabbit curled near my damp cheek. It watches me with wide black eyes, but does not flee, its side rising with unpanicked breaths. I am only a creature in the grass much as it is; its nose moves and it breathes me in, the smells of sweat and wet and half-warm sleep. Its ears are wet with dew and above the green canopy that covers us, morning stretches its bright fingers. I do not move until the rabbit goes, tunneling without hurry into the grass as if it knows where it is headed, without fearing me as a threat.

  I bundle grass into my pack, exchanging it for a meal of dried meat and berries as I set off across the plain. Wet ground means no fire, which means no fresh meat, but there were times before I had no food at all, and the berries are sweet. The bunkers meant reliable food, a place to sleep already shaped by your body from countless nights before, a path known to all because it was all that existed. And when all has gone?

  I walk on.

  The green plain is not eternal, not like the sky above, for in the near distance there rises something I have not seen in eighty-four days: a shed. This shed is a division, a sharp point between the plain and all that sprawls beyond—and here, beyond, I can see it is not hills or mountains, but ragged trees at long last, clawing at the boundless and darkening sky.

  The shed is so worn that its shadowed silhouette slants toward the setting sun. The prior shed led to a bunker and I have no cause to expect this space will be any different. Will this bunker hold bodies? Will this bunker hold food?

  When the figure emerges from the shadows, I stare in fear that I have conjured this person yet again. A man, not tall but looking accustomed to work, to walking. Strong, solid.

  Cipta told me: the stupid ones will try to take you by force because they know of no other way to hurt you. They believe your cunt is the center of your world, because their cock is the center of theirs. The smart ones are the ones you have to watch, because they know the myriad ways you can be hurt, the ways that extend from your center, the way pieces of your mind can be taken, abused, erased. These are the ones you have to watch for, Cipta said.

  Is he stupid or is he smart? His hands are laden with wet clothing and he wrings water from each piece before draping them over the shed doors. He has a stranglehold on a shirt when he looks up, when he sees me. His chin comes up, shirt forgotten in his hands, as I stare in return. His eyes narrow and his lips part and his face brightens from the flood of lights in the sky.

  Lights in the sky.

  There is a startling uprush of air and birds scatter upward from the grasses, shrieking as the lights descend upon the shed. Toward the man. I lurch into motion, desperate to reach him, but my boots slip against the damp grass, and I cannot run fast enough. The lights are the way I imagine sunlight on wide seas: bright and clear and flooding the plain. When I break through their boundary, I expect to be burned, to dissolve, to fly into the air in a thousand pieces and forget everything I have known, but I am only blinded by the brilliance. I push toward the shed even as I cannot see it, and when I can see it, the lights have gone, the man has gone, and I am once again alone.

  My throat is raw as if screamed that way and his laundry hangs cold in the rising dark.

  Why was he taken?

  Why not me?

  Will they bring him back?

  Will they come for me?

  Who? I still don’t know who I mean.

  Of all the questions that consume me, none is so painful or insistent as the desperate longing that rises beneath the surface of my skin; the longing to go and no longer wander these plains, these mountains, this looming swamp. If the lights would dissolve me, if they would take me apart and erase me as they have every other person here, I would have done.

  I linger at the shed: ten days, fifteen, twenty-eight. I bleed, I sleep, I do not touch his clothing. It dries and stiffens where he left it after countless rains that keep me inside the bunker’s shelter. And this bunker beneath the shed is like any other; lines of beds that hold the impression of bodies long gone; dusty, empty cells, and rooms that once held food. He had begun a smaller pantry: nuts, water, dried meat, and labeled packets of seeds. And now he is gone.

  I wait for the lights to return and they do not. I walk out in dusk and back in dusk, approaching the shed as I did that day and they still do not return. I think to make a life here, to settle and stay, but the sky beckons the way the land does. I cannot stay, because when people stay, they are killed. They evaporate in light and wind.

  The lights do not return and when the weather clears, the ground at last dry from a lack of rain, I leave the bunker behind, because I cannot stay even if I cannot be taken by the lights. I walk to the towering trees that line the horizon as far as I can see and my yearning to go—into the sky, into the lights—stretches taut inside me.

  Even beneath the frame of trees there is no escaping the sky. It observes me through every gap of bare branches, pressing me toward ground still wet with rain. The ground runs with small rivers that collide and form pools, pools to reflect the sky and brighten the gloom of the world under the canopy. I break the pools with my boots, shattering sky so it cannot see me, running through slick mud heedless of destination. I am only going because I cannot be taken.

  Why have they not taken me?

  Why was I ever brought?

  Was I brought?

  I can remember no place beyond this one. Cipta spoke of other lives, of men and women she loved, of paved streets and vehicles that moved through the world on metal tracks, but I have seen no such thing here. The ground is spoiled only by root and rain, and the only thing built are bunkers, bunkers to hold bodies that have all vanished. All but for me.

  I run until the ground refuses me. The ground becomes a swamp that pulls me in to my knees, and it’s mud that latches onto me, tries to hold me where I am. I walk on, through the black mud that undulates like the green plain, sucking my knees, my thighs, my hips. It insists I stay; I insist I go. I claw myself out, nails bending in the sodden earth.

  Was I made for only this journey?

  This endless goddamn journey with an endless goddamn sky covering me.

  There is little warning before the creature rears out of the mud. It is scaled and fanged, and it’s hard to tell hunger from outrage when it bellows. Its mud-splattered face surely reflects my own and I think if there are such creatures in this world, why are they not gone? Why have they not been taken as every person was taken?

  It is this anger and the broken end of my spear that kill the beast, and as with the beast, my own hunger and outrage are impossible to separate. My spear drips with blood and gore when I lift it from the muddy, broken wreck of the beast’s head. With a wrenched sob, I push myself from the dead, losing a boot to the suck of the mud as I find a solid bank to pull myself onto.

  The rain is colder through the branches, spitting bits of bark into my hair, onto my cheeks. My hands are turning blue with cold and there will be no fire. There will only ever be the rain, I think, and then I sleep, having crawled to a tree and wedged myself into a wet and broken length of wood that should seemingly topple over in the night. It does not and I dream Cipta’s hands warm and rough on my cheeks, though when I wake, I am alone and the rain still falls.

  At the edge of the swamp and in the cold twilight rain, I wash the mud from my body. I strip off my clothes and wring the mud out, draping each piece on branches to allow the hard rain to beat them clean. They will never be clean, but I close my eyes and spread my hands and stand beneath the wild skies so that I might be.

  Th
e lights do not come, but the rain does in pounding sheets that never warm. Maybe it will always be this, rain drumming on skin until it has silenced the longing inside me to go wherever those lights go. But then the rain also goes, the clouds drifting apart in clumps of gray and white as if they never gathered to rain on anyone at all.

  The world is silent in the aftermath. I make slow circles in the mossy ground, my toes clean for the first time in days. The swamp lingers at my back, watching me, but I do not mind it so much as I mind the sky. The clouds part to expose the lazy stare of the night sky. Stars prick through the gloaming, faint but growing stronger as the sun gives up its hold. And there, still above me, is the string of stars reaching toward the distant horizon.

  Where am I going? Away.

  Why am I going? Because to stay in any one place, where the ground might hold the impression of my body, is a kind of death all its own.

  I walk naked through the growing night, until I can not see the world before me, until I roll a stone over to take advantage of its dry ground and build a meager fire. Metal and flint and for once there is no wind to tempt my sparks away. The grass of the plains burns fragrant in the night, feeding the flames that stroke the swamp’s wood. I spread my clothes close to the fire so that they may finish drying, and stretch myself flat too, watching the sky as it watches me. My skin pricks under its unblinking scrutiny. I do not blink, I do not blink, and then I sleep.

  I dream of the lights, spreading far across water, bursting wide open to obliterate the stars.

  I mark each day in the book with a stick burned in the fire. It has been sixty-two days since they took the man at the shed; it has been seven times that since I last saw Cipta. I write her name on the page so I will not forget, so she will not be carried from my memory.

  The longing to go does not ease.

  And so I go.

  Wherever my feet can take me: across ground that grows more rocky and calls to mind the mountains—the mountains where I first saw him—but the land does not rise, it rushes outward, ever flat toward that distant horizon. I think I can see the world complete, but then the land dips and days are spent crossing a crevasse that must then be ascended, and more world stretches beyond that. And beyond that.

  In the end, it is the air that betrays the coming sea; it presses damp against my cheeks and tastes like salt, and the ground beneath my feet becomes slippery with moss, with small grasses that spread into tide pools cupped by larger spoons of rock. This water holds salt the way the air does, and I have never seen so much of it, running from tide pools, narrowing into rivers, swelling into ponds, to flow against a shoreline where it breaks into a wide-reaching sea. Is this Cipta’s sea? Could there be another? I can see across its entire width, evening waters reflecting the sky above. The string of stars dangles above this sunless sea, as if the string has reached its own end, and for the first time, I am not compelled to break the reflection of sky or its regard of me.

  Spreading around the sea, other figures stand in shadowy relief upon wet and mossy stones as I do; they are women and they are men and they, like me, gaze in wonder at the water that spreads with such abundance between us. My legs buckle and my knees crack against the stones and I cannot breathe.

  They, as I used to, lift their eyes to the sky, as if searching for the lights, for the way out, for the answers why.

  And these people—

  They do not disappear.

  They do not disappear.

  About the Author

  E. Catherine Tobler lives and writes in Colorado. Among others, her fiction has appeared in SciFiction, Fantasy Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. She is an active member of SFWA and senior editor at Shimmer Magazine.

  Night of the Cooters

  Howard Waldrop

  Sheriff Lindley was asleep on the toilet in the Pachuco County courthouse when someone started pounding on the door.

  “Bert!” the voice yelled as the sheriff jerked awake.

  “Gol Dang!” said the lawman. The Waco newspaper slid off his lap onto the floor.

  He pulled his pants up with one hand and the toilet chain on the water box overhead with the other. He opened the door. Chief Deputy Sweets stood before him, a complaint slip in his hand.

  “Dang it, Sweets!” said the sheriff. “I told you never to bother me in there. It’s the hottest Thursday in the history of Texas! You woke me up out of a hell of a dream!”

  The deputy waited, wiping sweat from his forehead. There were two big circles, like half-moons, under the arms of his blue chambray shirt.

  “I was fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, and I was a Aztec or a Mixtec or somethin’,” said the sheriff. “Anyways, I was buck naked, and I was standin’ on one of them ball courts with the little bitty stone rings twenty foot up one wall, and they was presentin’ me to Moctezuma. I was real proud, and the sun was shinin’, but it was real still and cool down there in the Valley of the Mexico. I look up at the grandstand, and there’s Moctezuma and all his high muckety-mucks with feathers and stuff hangin’ off ’em, and more gold than a circus wagon. And there was these other guys, conquistadors and stuff, with beards and rusty helmets, and I-talian priests with crosses you coulda barred a livery-stable door with. One of Moctezuma’s men was explainin’ how we was fixin’ to play ball for the gods and things.

  “I knew in my dream I was captain of my team. I had a name that sounded like a bird fart in Aztec talk, and they mentioned it and the name of the captain of the other team, too. Well, everything was goin’ all right, and I was prouder and prouder, until the guy doing the talkin’ let slip that whichever team won was gonna be paraded around Tenochtitlan and given women and food and stuff like that; and then tomorrow A.M. they was gonna be cut up and simmered real slow and served up with chilis and onions and tomatoes.

  “Well, you never seed such a fight as broke out then! They was a-yellin’, and a priest was swingin’ a cross, and spears and axes were flyin’ around like it was an Irish funeral.

  “Next thing I know, you’re a-bangin’ on the door and wakin’ me up and bringin’ me back to Pachuco County! What the hell do you want?”

  “Mr. De Spain wants you to come over to his place right away.”

  “He does, huh?”

  “That’s right. Sheriff. He says he’s got some miscreants he wants you to arrest.”

  “Everybody else around here has desperadoes. De Spain has miscreants. I’ll be so danged glad when the town council gets around to movin’ the city limits fifty foot the other side of his place, I won’t know what to do! Every time anybody farts too loud, he calls me.”

  Lindley and Sweets walked back to the office at the other end of the courthouse. Four deputies sat around with their feet propped up on desks. They rocked forward respectfully and watched as the sheriff went to the hat pegs.

  On one of the dowels was a sweat-stained hat with turned-down points at front and back. The side brims were twisted in curves. The hat angled up to end in a crown that looked like the business end of a Phillips screwdriver. Under the hat was a holster with a Navy Colt .41 that looked like someone had used it to drive railroad spikes all the way to the Continental Divide. Leaning under them was a ten-gauge pump shotgun with the barrel sawed off just in front of the foregrip.

  On the other peg was an immaculate new round-top Stetson of brown felt with a snakeskin band half as wide as a fingernail running around it.

  The deputies stared.

  Lindley picked up the Stetson.

  The deputies rocked back in their chairs and resumed yakking.

  “Hey, Sweets!” said the sheriff at the door. “Change that damn calendar on your desk. It ain’t Wednesday, August seventeenth; it’s Thursday, August eighteenth.”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  “And you boys try not to play checkers so loud you wake the judge up, okay?”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  Lindley went down the courthouse steps onto the rock wa
lk. He passed the two courthouse cannons he and the deputies fired off three times a year—March second, July fourth, and Robert E. Lee’s birthday. Each cannon had a pyramid of ornamental cannonballs in front of it.

  Waves of heat came off the cannons, the ammunition, the telegraph wires overhead, and, in the distance, the rails of the twice-a-day spur line from Waxahachie.

  The town was still as a rusty shovel. The forty-five-star United States flag hung like an old, dried dishrag from its stanchion. From looking at the town you couldn’t tell the nation was about to go to war with Spain over Cuba, that China was full of unrest, and that five thousand miles away a crazy German count was making airships.

  Lindley had seen enough changes in his sixty-eight years. He had been born in the bottom of an Ohio keelboat in 1830; was in Bloody Kansas when John Brown came through; fought for the Confederacy, first as a corporal, then a sergeant major, from Chickamauga to the Wilderness; and had seen more skirmishes with hostile tribes than most people would ever read about in a dozen Wide-Awake Library novels.

  It was as hot as under an upside-down washpot on a tin shed roof. The sheriff’s wagon horse seemed asleep as it trotted, head down, puffs hanging in the still air like brown shrubs made of dust around its hooves.

  There were ten, maybe a dozen people in sight in the whole town. Those few on the street moved like molasses, only as far as they had to, from shade to shade. Anybody with sense was asleep at home with wet towels hung over the windows, or sitting as still as possible with a funeral-parlor fan in their hands.

  The sheriff licked his big droopy mustache and hoped nobody nodded to him. He was already too hot and tired to tip his hat. He leaned back in the wagon seat and straightened his bad leg (a Yankee souvenir) against the boot board. His gray suit was like a boiling shroud. He was too hot to reach up and flick the dust off his new hat.

  He had become sheriff in the special election three years ago to fill out Sanderson’s term when the governor had appointed the former sheriff attorney general. Nothing much had happened in the county since then.