by Annie Bellet
“We were.” Aisa extended her hand to him with an imperative flourish. Dance with me.
Balege bowed, a dancer’s benediction that said, Forever.
They moved together in unison, fingers clasped, his body wrapped in a lithe frame around hers. There was no awkward shifting or repositioning of limbs. There had never been between them.
“The finale,” he murmured. “On my count. One-two, one-two-three-four.”
The music started silently in two heads in complete synchrony.
She twirled in his arms and skipped away, springing like a gazelle back again. He steadied and braced her, always there, the inverted complement of her movements. They danced, and she reveled in the strength of his arms around her, the metered cadence of his legs, the matched beat of two bodies moving in seamless fluidity. It was as it used to be. And for now, nothing else mattered. How he’d found her, how he could be so himself still and not one of the mindless monsters the plague-bearers became. How he’d…died.
He bore her overhead in a spinning lift, effortlessly committing her to the air, only one hand supporting the full weight of her body. By an accident of threadbare hose and skirt, his fingers gripped skin where they should have glided over layers of once immaculate costume. The unnatural chill of his dead fingers cut to the bone. When he set her down, light as a fallen leaf, Aisa stumbled.
Balege was there, one hand on her hip, the other at her elbow, taking the weight of her misstep into the turn of his body. Shielding her. Catching her. None but the most discerning eye in the audience would have seen anything amiss, and even that discerning eye would have noted only a stray half beat, the smallest of errors.
How many times had Balege’s strong arms held her, lifted her, carried her? Balege was frame and scaffold, launching her into the air and catching her as she spun back to earth, his virtuoso utterly focused on making her scintillate.
Without a word, they continued their duet, and Snowbird’s Lament spooled out to its final steps: the lovers united, torn apart, reunited. The grand finale, as it should be danced, an explosion of turns and fleet footwork, culminating in a dead run to the end of the stage and a magnificent hurtle into Balege’s arms, just before she could plummet off it. It was a feat of athleticism and absolute trust. If he ever miscounted the beat, had a slight misalignment of timing or balance, she would fall, badly, from the high stage and onto the unforgiving floor below. Battered and bruised certainly, broken bones possibly, a career ending fall. But Balege had always caught her.
Aisa didn’t hesitate now, flinging herself into the air, her body arched, giving herself over with complete abandon.
It was like flying—the moment stretching to infinity, suspended in the limbo space between earth and weightless freedom. No fear, no hunger, no pain, nothing but this perfect moment.
Dying now, like this, it wouldn’t be so bad. If Balege didn’t catch her, she might fall poorly enough to snap her own neck. That wouldn’t be so bad. Quick and fast.
Where had that thought come from?
The world’s weight found her. Aisa fell.
And Balege caught her.
The silent music ended. Aisa curtsied. Balege bowed. The illusory audience applauded. The phantom curtain came down.
Facing each other, their arms dropped away, no longer speaking the language of bodies and movement, relegated to the far less elegant communication of words and speech.
“You always catch me,” Aisa said.
“Yes,” Balege replied, softly almost a whisper.
“I had a thought, this time. What would happen if you didn’t?”
He straightened and stepped back, his eerie, undead eyes shifting sidelong. “You always forget. No matter how often we dance and I remind you, you forget.”
Aisa frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“One time, I didn’t catch you.”
Sudden outrage and disbelief, disproportionately livid and irrational. “Don’t be ridiculous. You always catch me.”
“Our first night on this stage. Remember again, Aisa.”
She wanted to stomp her foot. “This is our first night.” Lightning flash images skittered and popped behind her eyes. “Isn’t it—?” Her words faltered, taking her indignation with it. Hunger. So much hunger.
“You came here, why?” Balege asked, his voice gentle, coaxing.
She shivered, suddenly chilled. “After the theaters closed down, I–I sold myself into slavery. Better to be a fed slave in the upper city than starving and free in the slums.” Bruises and humiliation. “But the man I sold myself to, he wanted me to do such unspeakable things.” The instrument of her art desecrated. Blood on the walls. “I ran away. Found this place, this stage.”
“And I found you here, dancing.”
Aisa lifted her head. “How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was the light of your candle, or the shifting shadows through the cracked walls. I was drawn to you as those who have succumbed to the death plague are drawn to ravage and devour the still-living. But when I saw you dancing Snowbird’s Lament, it was like an awakening. Mesmerized, I watched and remembered you and me, and us. You were afraid of me at first. But in the end, we did as we always do.”
“We danced,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“At the end, right before Makira’s final vault off the stage, you called to me, ‘Don’t catch me! Let me go!’”
Hunger. Ceaseless, ravenous hunger.
“I still tried to catch you,” Balege said.
Juxtaposed images of pale flesh transposed with gray, splattered bursts of crimson across faded posters in the sunlight. “But I didn’t let you,” Aisa murmured. “I twisted away at the last moment.”
“Yes.”
“I fell.” Aisa lifted her hands to her face, noted the dead flatness of her skin, the black, broken nails. She listened to the still-quiet in her chest where her heart should beat, inhaled the scent of rotting flesh, her own. Her once fine dress, not just ragged and grimy, but grave-worn with filth and gore.
“We hunt and feed together,” he said. “You don’t remember who I am, who you are except when we’re dancing. But I do. Somehow, I do. I remind you.”
Aisa smoothed the soiled creases of her skirt, tucked a wisp of matted hair back into its unraveling chignon. All dancers knew their springtime was short. A dancer’s fate was to break or fade away, a short season of glory, if they were lucky. And Aisa had been lucky, very lucky. Until all the luck went away, for everyone. But this was a new kind of luck.
It would do.
“Remind me again, Balege,” she said and lifted her arm, fingers outstretched. Dance with me.
He bowed. “From the top. One-two, one-two-three-four.”
• • • •
The tarnished moon spilled through the cracked and rent ceiling of the dilapidated theater, the only audience to the two dancers as they leaped and twirled together in matchless harmony. Dead flesh moved together with graceful elegance, lithe and nimble and strong, his and hers. An eternal performance.
And when it ends, he catches her.
* * *
Eugie Foster called home a mildly haunted, fey-infested house in metro Atlanta that she shared with her husband, Matthew and her pet skunks. It was there she penned her flights of fancy. Holder of a master’s degree in psychology that she used only for amusement, she became an editor for the Georgia General Assembly, a job she thought also took her into flights of fancy.
Her publication credits number over 100 and include stories in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Apex Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Cricket, Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Baen’s Universe. Her short fiction is collected in four volumes with more on the way.
Eugie received the 2009 Nebula Award for her novelette, “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast,” requiring the SFWA to change how they engraved the trophy due to the length of the title. She was proud o
f both those facts. Her fiction has been a finalist/nominee for the Nebula (a second time), Hugo, Sturgeon, Black Quill, Bram Stoker, Pushcart, and BSFA awards, and been translated into eight languages.
Eugie died due to side effects of her cancer treatment on September 27th, 2014. “When It Ends, He Catches Her” was published the day before her death.
Toad Words
By T. Kingfisher
Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.
It used to be a problem.
There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up with parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold and gems fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.
So I got frogs. It happens.
“You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”
I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.
Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.
Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.
I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening. I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.
Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.
Toads are masters of it.
I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.
When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.
I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.
I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.
But I can make more.
I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.
Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.
It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.
I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)
The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.
My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit sapphires and rubies. I am grateful.
I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.
* * *
Ursula Vernon is the author of the Dragonbreath and Hamster Princess series for kids. T. Kingfisher is the name she uses when she’s writing stories for adults. As Kingfisher, she has written several novel-length fairy-tale retellings, including Bryony & Roses and The Seventh Bride. She has won the Hugo, Nebula, Sequoyah and Mythopoeic Awards for her work. Under both names, she lives in North Carolina with her husband, her garden, and an increasingly ancient beagle.
Makeisha In Time
By Rachael K. Jones
Makeisha has always been able to bend the fourth dimension, though no one believes her. She has been a soldier, a sheriff, a pilot, a prophet, a poet, a ninja, a nun, a conductor (of trains and symphonies), a cordwainer, a comedian, a carpetbagger, a troubadour, a queen, and a receptionist. She has shot arrows, guns, and cannons. She speaks an extinct Ethiopian dialect with a perfect accent. She knows a recipe for mead that is measured in aurochs horns, and with a katana, she is deadly.
Her jumps happen intermittently. She will be yanked from the present without warning, and live a whole lifetime in the past. When she dies, she returns right back to where she left, restored to a younger age. It usually happens when she is deep in conversation with her boss, or arguing with her mother-in-law, or during a book club meeting just when it is her turn to speak. One moment, Makeisha is firmly grounded in the timeline of her birth, and the next, she is elsewhere. Elsewhen.
Makeisha has seen the sun rise over prehistoric shores, where the ocean writhed with soft, slimy things that bore the promise of dung beetles, Archeopteryx, and Edgar Allan Poe. She has seen the sun set upon long-forgotten empires. When Makeisha skims a map of the continents, she sees a fractured Pangaea. She never knows where she will jump next, or how long she will stay, but she is never afraid. Makeisha has been doing this all her life.
Makeisha learned long ago to lie about the jumping. When she was nine, she attempted to prove it to her mother by singing in Egyptian, but her mother just laughed and sent her to do the dishes. She received worse when she contradicted her history teachers. It was intolerable, sitting in school in the body of a child but with the memories of innumerable lifetimes, while incomplete truths and half-truths and outright lies were written on the board. The adults called a conference about her attention-seeking behavior, and she learned to keep her mouth shut.
The hardest part is coming back. Once, when she was twelve, she was slouched in the pew at church when she felt the past tug. Makeisha found herself floundering in the roiling ocean of the Mediterranean, only to be saved by Moorish pirates who hauled her aboard in the nick of time. At first the bewildered men and women treasured their catch as a mascot and good-luck charm. Later, after nearly ten years of fine seacraft and fearless warfare, they made her captain of the ship. Makeisha took to piracy like sheet music. She could climb ropes and hold her grog with the best sailors, and even after losing an eye in a gunpowder explosion, she never once wept and wished herself home.
The day came when, at the pasha’s command, she set sail to intercept Spanish invaders in Ottoman waters. It was a hot night when they sighted the lanterns of the enemy shuddering on the waves. Makeisha’s crew pulled their ship astern the enemy’s vessel in the dark and fog after midnight. She gave the order – Charge! – her deep voice booming through the mists, echoed by the shouts of her pirates as they swung on ropes over the sliver of ocean between the ships. And suddenly an explosion, and a pinching sensation in her midriff, and she was twelve again in the church pew, staring at her soft palms through two perfect eyes. That was when she finally wept, so loud and hard the reverend stopped his sermon to scold her. Her fath
er grounded her for a week after that.
People often get angry with Makeisha when she returns. She can’t control her befuddlement, the way the room spins like she is drunk, and how for days and weeks afterward she cannot settle back into who she was, because the truth is, she isn’t the same. Each time she returns from the past, she carries another lifetime nestled within her like the shell of a matryoshka doll.
Once, after the fall of the Roman Empire, she joined a peasant uprising in Bavaria, and charging quickly from fiefdom to fiefdom, their band pushed back the warlords to the foothills of the Alps. Those who survived sued for mercy, begged her not to raze their fields, pledged fealty to her. As a condition of the peace, Makeisha demanded their daughters in marriage to seal the political alliance. The little kings, too afraid of the barbarian-queen to shout their umbrage, conceded. They even attended the weddings, where Makeisha stood with her sword peace-tied at her waist and took the trembling hand of each Bavarian princess into her own.
Once the wedding guests left, Makeisha gathered her wives together in the throne room. “Please,” she said to them, “help me. I need good women I can trust to run this kingdom right.”
With their help, she established a stable state in those war-torn days. In time, all her wives made excellent deputies, ambassadors, sheriffs, and knights in her court.
Makeisha had been especially broken up when her time in Bavaria was cut short by a bout of pneumonia. Many of her wives had grown to be dear friends of hers, and she wondered for months and months what had become of them and their children, and whether her fiefdom had lasted beyond her passing.
She wanted to talk with her best friend Philippa, to cry about it, but her phone calls went unanswered, and so did her emails. Makeisha could not remember when she had last spent time with Philippa or her other friends here in the present. It was so hard to remember when her weeks and months were interspersed with whole lifetimes of friends and lovers and enemies. The present was a stop-motion film, a book interrupted mid-page and abandoned for years at a time. And when she did return, she always carried with her another death.
