2014 Campbellian Anthology

by Various

  “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

  His eyes turn troubled. “Why? We have only your word to say this is how it actually happens, and I bet a lot of the rest of us would be just as happy to imagine it differently.”

  My eyes dart to the other kids and when I meet the boy’s gaze again, I shrug. I’m not so sure. And I’m already changing things—only not with permission or by consensus.

  “Not just my word. Chela’s, Pato’s, Memo’s. And, this is how it is. The game wouldn’t be real otherwise,” I say.

  He stays quiet, disappointed I think. I’ve given him the standard response—what we all heard from whomever first came up with the game. After a moment, he gives me a half-hearted cuff to the face. It catches my cheekbone, and even without much intention behind it, my skin tingles and the throb makes my eye water.

  “You’re going to have to do better than that to get me out of here.” I know I can safely goad him in a way I can’t Ron or any of the other boys who start on the outside. Even if this one hits me again, it will be a checked blow.

  But he drops my hands and steps away, a funny look on his face. Then I hear it, a whimper.

  Without thinking, my eyes dart up the ladder. Leila is almost to the shadowed top. I can see her shoes and the fat drops of liquid poised to fall from them. She must be so scared she peed her pants.

  The boy’s gaze follows mine. I catch his hand before he starts up the ladder.

  “Forget what I’ve been saying. She’s so young. It’s okay if it’s not real for her.” When he shakes me off, I close my eyes.

  I hear the mumbling above me as he tries to coax Leila down from her perch, and grunts of pain from the other side of the shed. There are still plenty of strands of magic in the air to pick through, and tons of words in my head clamoring to be formed to the poetry of conjure. But I’m fried by the initial surge of adrenaline and I’m pretty sure nothing will hit its mark now, no matter how wily the wording.

  Memo’s temporary blind is the important thing. If he isn’t found, the outsiders can’t call their part a success, and it’ll be our win by default. Then, for the next week or two it takes to get another game together, the outcome of every future game will be put in question. At least that’s what I imagine will happen.

  “Elena.” I’m not sure who calls it out, and I’m stunned by what I sense trailing after it in the ether.

  It’s all the warning I get before someone brings the butt of the two-by-four down on my head and I black out.

  • • •

  Memory is a strange thing. There’s no predicting what will be kept vivid.

  I remember the feel of cloth and metal, not the screams.

  I crawl in the dark from my bed to the walk-in closet, then pull myself to standing thanks to the winter coat I’ve bought in anticipation of leaving. Its boiled wool bears my weight without rending. I shove my hand in one of the pockets and come up with the key.

  I don’t want to think of what’s happening to the others as I lock myself in.

  I grab the passports from where we’ve hidden them, then I pull out the drawers for steps, and climb up to the high shelf. I stretch out behind empty suitcases and hatboxes and wait for what will come.

  And it will come. It always has.

  • • •

  When I open my eyes, I’m stretched out in Ron’s backyard, a good twenty feet from the shed. Chela is sitting near me, arms wrapped round her ribs, and Leila next to her, eyes fixed on the patch of lawn at her feet.

  “Is it done?” I say as I push myself to sitting.

  “They’re furious that Memo seems to have vanished,” Chela says without looking at me. “They’re trying to figure how we got the win. Pato’s still inside.” There’s accusation in her voice.

  When I look away, the American girl whom Pato had stepped in front catches my eye. She’s got this shade of reddish-brown hair that looks like it might burst into flame and feed the fire at the same time. I envy that more than the legs.

  “Ron has his dad’s gun on him,” she says.

  I nod, turn back, look at Chela again. We don’t do anything, just sit and wait, as the rules of the game dictate we should.

  Out here, we’ve been disappeared.

  Out here, we’ve been taken to some secret police facility never to be heard from again.

  Out here, we’re dead.

  Out here, we can’t help the living.

  There are no words that can change this.

  • • •

  When I finally locate Chela, I fly out to see her instead of calling.

  The years have barely passed for her—she’s still got the same tidy body, the same black hair, the same wide eyes that break your heart.

  “It’s a good thing you didn’t call,” she says as she ushers me into her house. It fits the academic she’s become, there are more books than places to sit. “I wouldn’t have agreed to this.”

  “Even after all these years?”

  She shrugs and sits in a corner of the couch, then pulls her legs up to her chest and wraps her arms around them. “It could have ended differently. You could have stopped using words as weapons. You could have just let it be, and waited, like most of us.”

  It’s nothing I haven’t told myself year-in and year-out for as long as I remember.

  “I was never as powerful as you all thought I was. Or even as I imagined I was.”

  I stretch my hands out, palms up. I see her take in the criss-cross of scars. I don’t know if she knows that it’s what magic does to you when you want too much, when you try too hard, when you’d rather die than fail.

  “You and I were best friends once,” I say after I drop my hands.

  “We were children then,” she says.

  There’s a long silence.

  “You still a bruja?” she asks finally.

  “A church bruja, like my mom. God and magic. I need both species of the supernatural to keep me going these days.”

  She cocks her head. “What do you want from me?”

  “Confirmation.”

  “Of what?”

  “Memory,” I say. “None of the others remembers. It’s as if it didn’t happen.”

  She scoffs. “It was never their country. They were all just passing through.”

  “Not Memo.”

  “Did he say he didn’t remember?” she asks, sharp.

  “Not exactly.”

  Her eyes go distant. “It got worse after you left.”

  “That’s hard to believe.”

  “Is it? Someday I’ll write my memoir.”

  “I hope so.”

  She focuses on me. “I thought by now you would have realized words aren’t all that.”

  “They’re the only ‘that’ I have.”

  She shakes her head, then looks away.

  “My brother loved you,” she says. “And sometimes you loved him too.”

  “It’s no fair quoting Neruda.”

  She gives me a smile so like the old Chela I feel the breath catch in my chest. Then it’s gone and her face is grave as it’s been since I knocked on her door. “You left afterward. You understand how that makes things different, right?”

  “You left too.”

  “Years and years later. What you bear on your palms, I bear on my heart.”

  When I don’t say anything, she gives a short, humorless laugh.

  Then, “Of course it happened. All of it. The little game and the big one. But, what does it matter who played it, or how, or why? The dead are still dead, and they can’t help the living.”

  “Don’t come here again,” she tells me a half-hour later when I get up to leave.

  • • •

  It is as I knew it’d be.

  Memo is hailed as either a hero or a villain depending on whether the person recounting the tale is an outsider or insider. But he gets described as a badass in either case.

  Other things I can’t foresee.

  Memo never again meets my eyes. />
  Ron’s father bans the game when he steps into the backyard and sees Memo finally staggering out of the shed, and a visibly pistol-whipped Pato high-fiving me when he does. Then, we all sit around with our bruises and concussions acting as if it’s just an ordinary Saturday game.

  Which, except for who emerges victorious, it pretty much is.

  But, given half a chance adults blind themselves to the things they don’t want to see and Ron’s father swears up and down that he had no idea the game was so violent even as we played it under his nose week after week. Our parents scream at each other and threaten to press charges, but everyone knows it’s bluff. No one in his right mind would go to the Guatemalan police for justice.

  And the Americans, who might actually have recourse to a different justice, feel guilty. Not so much that their children aren’t also hurt, because they are, but that even imbecile kids like us understand they’re part of the larger game.

  Ron leaves two years later, standard rotation for American military; Leila a year after that. Those who remain do no more than nod as they pass us in the school hallways.

  It is always this way with childhood friends. But I might be wrong. It might only be this way with me.

  • • •

  The door splinters even though it is made of solid wood.

  One of them pulls the clothes off the rod when he steps in. He rakes the space he’s made with the muzzle of his gun. The second one notices the open drawers.

  I long ago perfected the bubble of dark emptiness that magically shields me when his head clears the edge of the top shelf. He sweeps the boxes and cases with his rifle. I hear the clatter as they hit the floor below, then a muffled stream of invective from the other soldier.

  I still my breath to nothing. Nothing around, nothing within.

  The soldier looks right at me, touches my arm without knowing he’s touching it. To his eyes there’s nothing but dark, empty space before him.

  Then I hear the shuffle of feet, a groan, broken breathing. The soldier who’s been checking the shelf ducks back down.

  “Where is she?” I hear a soldier ask it.

  A mumble. A crack.

  I inch to the edge of the shelf and look down.

  One of the soldiers has caught my husband under the arm so he more or less stands. Pato’s hair and face are matted with blood, his hands hang at odd angles, and one foot folds under him.

  “I told you, she’s not home,” he says, the words distorted by the condition of his lips and teeth. They’ve busted him in the mouth with a rifle stock.

  “It’s sad when a man can’t control his wife,” the soldier says. He’s got one of those regional Guatemalan accents that lets you know he was recruited young and went straight from farm to polytechnic.

  “If I had been you,” he continues, “I would have broken her hands so she couldn’t type her reports. I’d have shut her mouth with a fist. If you had done that, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Yes, you would,” my husband says. “Or, if not you, others just like you.”

  The soldier who checked the shelf laughs. He swings his rifle up, places the muzzle in the center of Pato’s forehead, then pushes hard enough that my husband’s head snaps back.

  “What happened? Too slow to follow the bitch to her hidey hole?” he says.

  “I’ve never once hidden,” Pato answers. “I’ve always stood in plain view.”

  The words make me squeeze my eyes shut. Some things we outgrow when we trade childhood for adulthood, some things we don’t.

  The telltales of proximate exile—the passports digging their corners into the small of my back as I lay on the shelf unseen, the clothing for other climates now crumpled on the floor of the closet—aren’t my husband’s doing. To him, leaving is as much a cheat as hiding.

  It’s me who’s never been willing to play by the rules.

  There are hundreds of thousands of strands of magic for me to pick from. The living, the dead—every person lost to this dirty war that turns us daily against each other—they all cast a trace in the ether that I can draw upon. My hands comb through.

  I’m searching for a spell to reclaim and keep both husband and country. A working so large it cries for witnesses, and begs for voices doubled and trebled. A conjuration of justice beyond any I’ve ever sought to cast.

  When I am ready, I push it outward with both hands open.

  Like wood, bone splinters with a groan. The roots of teeth crack and erupt from their nests of gum. Skin squelches as it’s stripped from tissue. Hearts keep to their wet thunder one, maybe two, beats longer than they should. Soon there’s nothing but scorched earth without, and within, and a dark emptiness that never fully goes away.

  Magic doesn’t save Pato. And it doesn’t save my country either. Just me.

  • • •

  I tell you so there’s no doubt.

  Call it a game. Call it collateral memory. Call it real.

  Gerald Warfield became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “The Poly Islands” in Writers of the Future, Vol. XXVIII (2012), edited by K.D. Wentworth.

  Visit his website at www.geraldwarfield.com.

  * * *

  Novelette: “Spores of the Volcano” ••••

  Short Story: “Pageant for a Crazy Man” ••••

  SPORES OF THE VOLCANO

  by Gerald Warfield

  First published in NewMyths.com (Dec. 2013), edited by Scott T. Barnes

  • • • •

  The volcano rose into the sky, high above the glaciers that bound its lower slopes to the frozen planet. From its gaping caldera a dark plume spread into the frigid air and drifted south where flecks of ash, fallen from the cloud, began to dot with black the vast and barren plains of ice.

  THE VOLCANO trembled, and deep within the hollow tunnels that riddled its slopes a youngling Kree, wide-eyed and shivering, slithered into the dark temple chamber. The sacred room was forbidden to younglings, but Yothe had snuck into the quiet space many times. Synthe, the blind high priestess, did not seem to mind. The floor of the temple was always warm, and Yothe was always cold since the hair had yet to grow on her body and the back of her tentacles. Sometimes Synthe scooped her up and cuddled her and told her stories about orphans who grew up to be big and strong, and that eased her loneliness. The old priestess even slipped her mush balls from a stone bowl that rested in a niche on one side of the room.

  But now Synthe rested unresponsive on her listening stone, a square platform where—she had told Yothe—she listened to the voice of the volcano. Yothe cautiously approached and reached out to touch Synthe. Nothing. She curled a tiny tentacle about a limb of the ancient Kree and gently pulled. Still Synthe did not move. Yothe whimpered and shrank away.

  The ground trembled again, sending the solitary orb that lit the chamber swinging on the leather strap that suspended it from the ceiling. The sphere, woven from the antennae of luminescent insects, cast enough light so that shadows in the room wavered back and forth. The moving shadows frightened Yothe, but not as much as the voices and the shuffling sounds she heard from the tunnel. Adults were coming, and there was no other way out of the room. Quickly, she scuttled behind the altar into a corner, wrapping herself into a spherical heap. But then, hardly daring to breathe, she raised a limb to peek out between her trembling tentacles.

  The huge form of Thor-Att slithered into the room, his head inclined so as not to strike his Nautus shell on the top of the low doorway. Yothe did not dare to move. If the great Thor-Att should discover her there, he might seize her and throw her into the volcano.

  Thor-Att straightened and expanded, flashing orange waves of agitation the length of his body. It was not anger—not yet, which gave Yothe hope that he might spare her. Two lesser priestesses glided into the room behind him. Groveling close to the floor, they were careful to flash no emotion as they went quickly to their own listening platforms. Still, the high priestess did not move.


  Another tremor shook the small temple, and Thor-Att unfurled his tentacles, two to the upper stones to steady himself, and it seemed to Yothe that, with his great strength, he held up the ceiling. Dirt and small rocks fell to the floor. The orb swung anew, and the bowl of mush balls rocked and then tottered over the edge of its niche, breaking and scattering bits of bowl and tiny mush balls across the chamber floor. Only with the greatest control did Yothe refrain from crying out.

  “Honored one.” Thor-Att’s deep, resonant voice filled the room, his great round eyes fixed on Synthe. “There is no more time. The tremors of Mondermount inflame the females; their Nautus shells throb. If I do not intervene they will begin the Spawning. You must tell me, now, if the volcano will erupt.”

  The ancient priestess opened her sightless eyes, her withered Nautus shell a diminutive peak above her head. “The lava rises, but then it falls. The volcano… does not speak clearly.”

  Thor-Att flashed again the color of agitation. Stiffening on his two standing tentacles, he gestured with the others. “I will not have our unborn younglings die in the frozen wastes unless there is no hope.”

  The white orbs of the priestess’ eyes moved as if searching for Thor-Att. “But the voice of the volcano is not clear.”

  A rumble rose from the depths, and moans from the Kree gathered on the surface carried down into the room. Thor-Att flashed the purple of disgust, and with a swipe of his tentacle scattered bits of stone and mush balls across the floor. A shard of the bowl struck Yothe, who recoiled as if it were a burning cinder. Then Thor-Att turned to the lesser priestesses who lay prostrate on their listening platforms. They raised their heads, the ends of their tentacles writhing.

  “And what say you?”

  “Leader Thor-Att,” the nearest of the two said. “We hear the churning of lava below. It is close.” At that, both cast furtive glances at Synthe, but the ancient priestess did not contradict them.

  “The walls of our mound are thin,” said the other. “We fear it will collapse, and it will be… sudden.”