Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #1

by Ken Liu

  "Hell."

  "And I can't help but wonder: what if Dee had woken up when I went down to the kitchen the other night? Would she have seen me? Haven't you wondered about that?"

  "Maybe she would have just seen the refrigerator door open and the beer float out of it."

  "I don't think so. People tend to fill in the blanks too much for that. I think she would have seen me, only I don't know how I would have appeared to her."

  "Maybe you would've looked like one of those hunky guys from her romance novels."

  "Or like a burglar."

  "A hunky burglar stealing beer."

  A few beers later If said, "What if you're the imaginary friend and I'm real?"

  "Go screw yourself!"

  "Or maybe you're Dee's imaginary husband. She does love her romances."

  I considered this a second before kicking If hard on the shin.

  "Ow! What was that for?"

  "For getting me to think these crazy thoughts. For getting me to read all those Philip K. Dick books."

  "Somebody's been getting too much Dick lately."

  "Ha, ha. Now I'm wondering if I'm the imaginary one. Like if Dee were to pop a clozapine, would I cease to exist?"

  "That's deep. Better have another beer."

  No, I wasn't the imaginary friend. I went on living my life but as time wore on it became increasingly obvious I was just going through the motions. In class I gazed upon a tableau of blank faces, but maybe they were just reflecting back what they saw in me.

  I was weighed down by things that hardly touched me before. I performed my duties as required but every day the hollow spot inside grew.

  Maybe I just needed some excitement. I decided to embark on a bigger, scarier Annual Expedition than ever before. When Spring came, I would swim amidst the sharks and to hell with a cage. Or I'd hunt something truly dangerous, just as Hemingway had done.

  But nothing really excited me.

  Worst of all was that damn wall inside me when I was with Dee. I was a Hemingway character trapped behind a wall in a Poe story. I had feelings and passions but could never find the key to unlock them.

  I kept thinking about If's amazing minute of freedom and how pale my life felt in comparison.

  Up in the loft I said, "I think you're real, after all. Maybe you weren't always but somewhere along the line something happened. I felt what you felt that day you went to the fridge. It was intense."

  "I try to live up to my name."

  "You try to live up to 'Imaginary Friend'?"

  "Do you really think that's the only reason I'm called If? Because of that silly little pun?"

  "Why else?"

  "You're the college professor, you tell me."

  "The Kipling poem?"

  "Bingo!"

  If reached over and put his hand on top of mine and the memory flooded in.

  "My God. Dad used to quote it. The part about filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run."

  "Bingo again."

  I dug through the icebox and handed If a beer but he shook his head.

  "No thanks. I'm good."

  "That's a first."

  From downstairs I heard the door open and Dee call out, "are you up there?"

  "Aren't you going to answer?" asked If.

  I heard her climbing the ladder and I thought about the world outside my cave and how much I had come to dread facing it.

  "Open the door, If."

  "Me?"

  "Yes. Let's see how real you are. Open the door, step outside, and talk to Dee. See if she can see you. It'll be a fun experiment."

  "What do I say?"

  "Whatever comes to mind."

  From outside Dee said, "Knock, knock."

  If looked at me.

  "Go ahead. You have permission."

  If opened the door and stepped outside. He closed the door behind him.

  Dee's voice came from the other side: "Oh hey Sweetie. I know you need your cave time but I was getting lonely. Hope I'm not intruding."

  "You could never intrude," I heard If say. Only it was my own voice. "You do know that I love you more than life itself."

  I heard it all then, heard it all: If kissing my wife in a way I had not kissed her for years and moments later the two of them climbing down the ladder. I heard Dee giggling. I heard the house door opening and closing.

  I almost ran after them. But then I looked around my cave. I have everything I need up here. I have my icebox and my beer. I have Hemingway and Poe and Hawthorne and Steinbeck. This is our world. Like the sign says: NO GURLZ ALOUD.

  © 2014 by Seth Chambers

  * * *

  Seth Chambers is an ESL teacher the author of SF, fantasy and absurdist tales. His work has appeared in many publications, including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Alien Skin, Isotropic Fiction, and Perihelion. His story collection, What Rough Beasts, is available online, and includes the brutal time-travel novelette, "We Happy Few."

  Wind in the Reeds

  David Sklar

  They say he was there when the gods made the world—and he would have offered to help, except that they looked like they had it in hand. So he sat in the absence of reeds and played on the absence of a flute, and where he dawdled those things came to be.

  The gods took the credit of course—that's what gods do: they make things, and tell you to worship, and never worry about where they got the idea. They say, "Aren't I clever, I made a horse." And yeah, they made the bones and the muscle, the blood that pumps through the horse's veins. But that feeling you get when you ride a horse through a meadow in the sun-that comes from him.

  And on the sixth day, when the gods had done most of the work, but before they could bicker over what was whose, he played them a lullaby, and they slept through the seventh day.

  They take credit for that, too, as if the sabbath were their idea.

  And while they slept he danced in the world and played his music there, and the notes of his pipe made the wind beneath the wind, hidden underneath the wind you can hear and feel. If ever you feel a breeze on the hairs of your arms when no wind blows, now you know where it's from. That's why he still walks in the world, when the gods cannot.

  It's better this way. The world is unfinished, and good people suffer—sometimes a lot. But if you die in a snowstorm, you die in a snowstorm—you don't get turned into salt because of somebody else's squabble over who created squid.

  This is why we sing in churches, and why we rest on the seventh day—it may be why we sing and rest at all—because of the man who stole the world when the gods were almost done.

  © 2008 by David Sklar

  First published in Membra Disjecta: Scattered Thoughts, edited by Deena Fisher, 2008.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  * * *

  David Sklar grew up in Michigan, where the Michipeshu nibbled his toes when Lake Superior was feeling frisky. His work has appeared in such places as Strange Horizions, Ladybug, and Scheherazade’s Façade. He co-edited the anthology Trafficking in Magic/Magicking in Traffic, which will come out in May of 2014 from Fantastic Books, and his novel Shadow of the Antlered Bird will be re-released in October from Eggplant Literary Productions. David lives in New Jersey with his wife, their two barbarians, and a secondhand familiar.

  In the Shadow of Dyrhólaey

  KJ Kabza

  Einar Jónsson wasn't the first to see the ship entombed in the rocks, but little did I know then, he was one of the few Icelanders who could actually do something about it. "If I only had enough time," he said to me, as we stood on the black sand and stared at the tell-tale stones, "and sharp enough chisels, by God, I think I could really bring out the shape of it."

  Einar pointed out over the water. It was that time of year when the air was mild and the sun wheeled round the mercurial sky, barely dipping below the horizon before arcing up again into another dawn. To the south, Iceland's ocean was a dirty mirror, its tarnish glittering with
every churn of the breakers. "Look, Gunnar," Einar said. "Have you really looked at it? It seems like it doesn't need much work."

  "It's a fisherman's yarn," I said.

  "It's three great sails," said Einar.

  "It's reynisdrangar. A beautiful cluster of rocks in the sea, all in a row, that just happen to be shaped like great sails."

  "It's a troll ship."

  "Einar." I kicked at the coarse, black sands by my feet. "Come now."

  "And I suppose you believe now that God is a fairytale, too?"

  I studied my friend critically. He had been away for a long, long time. First studying sculpture in Rome, then living and working in Copenhagen. We had exchanged letters, now and again, but letters move slowly and anyway, they are not the same. Not when as boys, we could run across the green, green fields of Galtafell, where the sheep are fat and the days sweet and slow, and be napping in the cozy bunks of each other's baðstofa well before noon. Back then, we'd been closer than natural brothers, able to predict what the other was thinking before he himself knew. But now? "Of course not," I said. "But Einar, we're not boys anymore. You and I both know that no great, ancient troll ship ever tried to storm the beaches at Dyrhólaey, and froze into stone when the dawn fog suddenly lifted and revealed the sun. Those are just rocks."

  Einar frowned. His frown was still the same, dark as an autumnal storm. "Trolls," he said, firmly.

  I sighed. "Forget the trolls. Look, the sun's peeped out. Let's go wading before it disappears."

  Einar appeared to drop it. We waded and ate the lunch we'd packed, tender hangikjöt on rye bread, but all through the morning Einar kept giving morbid looks full of meaning to those craggy stones. As the tide receded, more of the "troll ship" appeared, the wet coloring the rough basalt. You could just see where the "sails" connected to the "deck." It really was a lovely formation, and the whole point of our journey together was to see more of the southern coast, but I didn't want to look at it too much. It would only encourage him.

  "I suppose it's only a wild fancy," said Einar at last, when we finally trudged up the beach.

  The fishing hamlet of Vík í Mýrdal awaited us, hunkered down in the dusty black dunes. Like much of the area, or indeed much of Iceland altogether, the Modern Age had not yet arrived there, though of course I only knew this because Einar had told me. I'd never had a reason to go so far as Europe.

  "Well," I said. "Don't worry about the fancy. I heard somewhere that you have a creative mind. Forget it."

  "I will. After we go out and take a look."

  "After we what?"

  "Take a look," Einar repeated, solemnly. "We'll ask around the village. Find a fisherman to take us out to the rocks tomorrow, in exchange for a day's labor."

  "You're mad. We won't be able to get that close. The rocks below the waterline will snap us to pieces."

  "What do you know of it? You're a farmer."

  "So are you."

  "We'll be fine."

  "I'm not going."

  "You'd leave me to die alone? At sea?"

  "I am not going, Einar. And neither are you."

  But back in the hamlet, Einar charmed the first fisherman's wife he met into offering us a place in their baðstofa for the evening, and later, her husband into giving us a place in his boat upon the morrow.

  So we went. Damn it all.

  Einar, I suppose, had seen something of the sea, having traveled across it twice. I've never been further away from Iceland than Heimaey, and even that short trip was unpleasant enough. I didn't get seasick, but the boat did become beset by a flock of kittiwakes ("Welcome to Heimaey, sir; is that bird shit in your hair?") so excuse me if I don't trust boats or the men who steer them.

  The fisherman who rowed us out was named Olaf Sigurðsson, a red-faced barrel of a man with oilskin clothes that stank and a gap-toothed grin that wouldn't quit. He sang to himself in a creaky tenor as he manned one pair of oars while Einar and I gamely took turns with the other. The bastard got a lot of work out of us since he insisted on leaving at dawn, and dawn near the summer solstice happens at around, oh, 3 a.m. "Tired yet, boys?" he finally cackled, as he hauled up the anchor for the last time. "Sitting on your rears and watching sheep all day isn't quite like hauling up fish in this sun, now, is it?"

  Einar smiled. A loose fish flopped about his ankles, its lips popping breathlessly. "It certainly isn't. How long have you been at this work now?"

  "Oh, about 40, 45 years," said Olaf. He jerked his grizzled chin at the nearby reynisdrangar to indicate that we should bring the boat round. Olaf rested his oars on the gunwales as I pulled. "Been out to the troll ship dozens of times, it's perfectly safe if you just know where to anchor and when. The kids love to see it, you know. Soon as we get near, they scream and carry on like I don't know what-all. Whoops." Olaf looked up. The temperamental coastal weather was turning, and a thick flock of clouds, gray and low, scudded into the harbor and swallowed the sun. "Well, about time. Could use a good cooling off. Whoa, Gunnar my friend, close enough!"

  I stopped pulling and Olaf dropped the anchor. We were near the rocks that were furthest from the shore, close enough to see fulmars wheeling up and down the irregular cliff-face in alarm at our proximity. On either side of us, the receding tide made powerful eddies above unseen hazards, but our little vessel just quivered in its place.

  "Now you know the story of the troll ship, of course, don't you?" Olaf asked.

  "Oh yes," said Einar.

  "It was a year and a day after the beginning of the world…" began Olaf, as though Einar hadn't spoken.

  I tuned them out. Let the two fools be dazzled by each other. Instead, I peered more closely at the basalt rock face, studying the birds wheeling through the thickening mist.

  That is, until it moved.

  I blinked. There were so many fulmars, I was seeing things.

  No I wasn't. The rock face did it again. The movement was barely detectable, a glacial undulation of stone, as though the rock were the hide of a monster inhaling.

  Or a sail, filling.

  I couldn't speak. I could only swallow and point. My other hand flapped madly at Einar's shoulder.

  "For pity's sake, Gunnar, what is it?"

  The fog abruptly thinned. A blot of white appeared behind the clouds, growing brighter as the wind pushed them away. The rock face stilled. "It was… I saw…"

  "Trolls," said Olaf good-naturedly, and laughed. "Usually only the littlest kids say they can spot 'em, but you must have a good eye!"

  Einar laughed with him. I sagged on my seat and couldn't even manage a smile.

  "Well, if that'll be all?" asked Olaf.

  "It will," said Einar. "I'm so happy I could see it up close. Thank you very much, Olaf. This day has been most instructive."

  After we came ashore, as we three settled in for a nap, Einar whispered to me, "You saw it too, didn't you, Gunnar?"

  I opened my eyes. We were napping in Olaf's baðstofa while his wife minded the children outside. In the dim light, filtered through fishskin-covered windows, Olaf snored in his small bunk. On the floor in front of me knelt Einar, his grave eyes searching my face.

  For the first time since this visit had begun, I felt that I could read his thoughts, like the old days. "Yes," I whispered back. "I saw it."

  "I have to carve it."

  "You're mad, Einar."

  "Think of it. If I can somehow cut away all that excess stone, smooth it out, bring out the shape of the sails… I mean not literally I alone, it's far too big—but a team of us, somehow, for it will take many men… I know a man in Copenhagen, no, two civil engineers who know how to take raw rock and—"

  "Stop it."

  "The sails, Gunnar. Think of it. We take all the dross away, the crags and the bird shit, and we shape the features just a bit, just a little bit. From the shore, on the nights when the moon is high, you'd be able to see that whole beautiful, terrible ship, forever frozen in the sea, and its three sails billowing."

  "It
would set the entombed monsters free!"

  Olaf's snoring paused. I cringed. Einar's eyes bore into mine, our mutual agitation frozen until the fisherman's breath began again to putter. "I wouldn't," Einar whispered. "They're trapped. You can't ever completely free a troll once it's turned to stone. Everyone knows that."

  "But nobody's ever tried what you're proposing."

  "Nobody's ever been positioned to. But I am. Iceland has a magic humming deep in its bones, Gunnar, and the entire reason I went away was to learn exactly how to reveal it to ourselves, so that we can never forget."

  "And you can reveal it! But you can do it by making some nice, normal, little statues in that new studio of yours out in Reykjavík when you return home!"

  Einar's autumnal frown came on. He shook his head. His eyes were distant, glittering, like the mirrored surface of the ocean churning over its secrets. "We need to begin with a test," he said. "Yes. A little test carving, to see how workable the stone actually is. I didn't study much stonecutting, you know, but I know a few things. I've got one small chisel with me. And I'm sure Olaf has a mallet I can borrow."

  I sat up. "We are not doing this."

  " 'Give your eldest son another day off from fishing,' I'll say to Olaf. 'It's no trouble at all.' "

  "I said—"

  Again Olaf's snoring paused. I reigned in my tone to a soft and desperate hiss. "I mean it this time, Einar. We are not doing this."

  Einar eyed me. He rose from his kneeling position on the floor and strolled to the bunk Olaf had given him. "You're right," he said, coolly. "We are not. I am, alone. I don't think having you along tomorrow will be very constructive, after all."

  "Einar!"

  "I know you, Gunnar. You'll try to stop me. Don't pretend that you won't."

  I couldn't lie to him—truly couldn't. All I could do was hiss his name in frustration: "Einar!"

  The sculptor lay down and pulled his blanket up to his chin. In his mind, the matter was clearly settled.