Uncanny Magazine Issue 32
Page 16
Ada is a computer scientist at a university in southern Ontario, Canada, where she teaches computers to be creative and undergraduates to think computationally about the human mind. She has also worked professionally as a church soprano, free food distributor, and token autistic person. Ada is bisexual, genderfluid, polyamorous, and mentally ill. She lives with her primary partner Dave, her black cat Ninja, and various other animals and people.
You can find Ada online at http://ada-hoffmann.com/, on Twitter at @xasymptote, or support her work on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/ada_hoffmann.
Elegy for the Self as Villeneuve’s Belle
by Brandon O’Brien
I wish I didn’t hunger for this so badly
that I would have one so unripe, my plea
for it out of season. We should have both waited.
But we simply couldn’t be sated
by patience. Wanting pretty things is hunger, too,
and having is feasting, denied by few.
A rose alone was all my heart arose to ask.
I wish I offered any other task.
She offers me a love, constructs her heavy feasts,
our hearts’ loads both doubly or more increased,
we share a dim-hoped home for all our harried dreams.
I listen stilly, counsel naked screams
while nurturing a hope of love so high and fae
in this home that it anchors me to stay.
I count her gargoyle-scars, try salving each one’s source
in the prayer that it smooths romance’s course
after my anxious picking out of its season.
I patch the wounds with pages, with reason;
I knew what I was getting into when I came.
I thought that time would be breeze to the flame.
But upon arrival, what would greet me before
but pageantry and handsomeness galore!
To find the filling of any whim I’d foster
without a call of what it had cost, her
eagerness to share a table, be unfearsome,
unspool some deeper starmap or theorem
to the core of her tragic heats, her imprinting
on other bodies’ loves and fears sinking
through their depths, transmitting from campus roofs, cyan
images of seraphs’ full wingspan,
or any of the other pinprick-dreams at four
in the morning that she’d meekly endure.
I saw her wrestle with tea plates, scream the channels
of ink angels, call me out of panels
for fear of what would make of me if I stayed too
long. Wanting pretty things is hunger. You
must imagine I looked to be in this mess all
my own—my rose-begging made this my home.
And you’d not be mistaken. I dreamt of beauty
open and consuming me as duty,
casket-lips to sleep within forever enrapt.
Well, this is what clasped shut—the petals snapped
upon me wriggling. All I have now are dreams
of the beauty-thing coming to me, beams
of awe and clawlessness that trigger guilts in me.
What about the host here that I can see?
How greedy am I? To want a calm without the roar,
to wish to not walk a glass-cragged floor?
Isn’t love patience? Am I just the kind of thing
that impatiently keeps petal-plucking,
that makes the rose about me and gnashes at thorns?
That loves the feast, and bathes the host in scorns?
Just like a man, a child, a bitter babe like me.
Wanting pretty things is hunger. Carefree
and willing to do anything to earn this rose.
I guess at least I held to what I chose.
When she opens roars in sleep, I tend to each cry.
I wash the plates, I wipe the glasses dry.
I beg for home, but soft, when she erases their
numbers from the phone and calls it trust; share
reluctance to even venture past the garden
gates, to not watch her narrow heart harden.
But I need to see home, to share the joy and pang
of this one rose’s crimson and its fang.
They beg me stay a month, and weakly I say yes.
The weight of love must take more rest, I guess.
They tell me this attachment escapes their belief.
But here I am, at dinner. Their relief
can warm a time-cooled mug. They beg me stay four weeks
more. That won’t hurt her, no? The night air speaks
on her behalf—a threat that my distance steals her
breath, that if I meant it, I would defer
to her horses, or her blade, come castleward swift,
or admit my bitter heart has made a shift.
I cling to the dream, of wolf-lady lying still.
I wonder of the other princess-dream’s will.
Would that girl ever cry that love means sharing thorns?
Would that girl look as pushful under horns?
The lady of the castle fumes for me to die
and prove I’d dash my own calm at her cry.
I refused. What kind of belle did I think I was?
O, I must have broken all the soft laws
that make a prince—why turn your back on such a dear?
Once claws and lashes come, you cry out fear?
I stay a while of weeks at home without a plea.
I long for love still, this time silently.
I choose the humble warmth of books, hearth, the younger
dream-rose. Wanting pretty things is hunger.
© 2020 Brandon O'Brien
Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Strange Horizons, Reckoning, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is also a performing artist with The 2 Cents Movement, and the poetry editor of FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.
The Death of the Gods
by Leah Bobet
It was only her eyes that changed; gently,
until one day she saw about her not grace
but men: fragile in their frailties, their palms’
spread wingspan just as wide as her own hands.
They were born together, youths together, fought
arms linked in the grass-shot fields of Troy,
grew tall together: wan shadows of the gods.
In their days of beating higher for rumoured
mountaintops, their every step was ghosted
by those uncertain years: the torn-up seedlings
on their boots; the night Aglaia leaned sword-point
against the earth and wept, palm wide, into her hand.
Fleet of foot they ran along the twisting alpine roads,
and always behind them those awful nights,
limned with mud, mortality. They dreamed their
weakness on the trail, each hand wide as each.
On a spring day, rain-touched, later, she brought
her children to the coast, and they ate ice cream
from the first stall open on the pier. The fields were
greened over; there was a monument, here lies, and
for a while she walked, pointing out young hazel trees
or Aglaia’s furrow in the earth, until she said: there once
were giants, and led them among the graves.
In the old times they heaped barrows. The gods had
barrows still, on the battlefield where some nights, she
looked up and saw them wheeling overhead. Her children,
born godless, scrambled joyfully uphill, shouting king
of the mountain; chas
ed each other off the peaks.
The afternoon was mild. The wind wrapped their cheeks
like swaddling cloth, like first wool, and she lay down
next to the impossibly small mounds, measured the
barrows left of them: man-sized, each wide as each.
At twilight they came upon their mother: palm open,
spread wide, her fingers five wet feathers stained with
grief for all that none of them had ever truly been:
glorious and shining, immortal, sure of step—her
sky-giants, striding in a rare angle of light, one fleeting
and just right to cast a shadow.
—For Gene Wolfe. For Ursula K. Le Guin. For Madeleine L’Engle.
(Editors’ Note: “The Death of the Gods” is read by Erika Ensign on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 32B)
© 2020 Leah Bobet
Leah Bobet’s most recent novel, An Inheritance of Ashes, won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Prix Aurora Awards; her short fiction has appeared in multiple Year’s Best anthologies and is forthcoming in Nowhereville: Weird is Other People and Strange Horizons. She lives and works in Toronto, where she is settled in for winter, making cranberry jam and brown bread and dreaming of new trees. Visit her at www.leahbobet.com.
A tenjō kudari (“ceiling hanger” yōkai) defends her theft
by Betsy Aoki
at night I hover above the beams you’ve hammered
between heaven and your spread silk coverlet
the air, which is nothing to you, is everything to me
the wood, which is something hard to you, is nothing to me
I slip fingers beyond the pine knots and holding on to breezes
with my other hand see the dust dancing between the straw
reach down for your sleeping face
eager for your exhalations those moist, warm castoffs
they are spirals of rips bits of soft driftwood
eddying out from your body discarded as casually
as you threw down my bones wrapped in kimono-rags
cast away as you did your horse fleeing on the road
from my father’s huntsmen its lungs bursting beneath your body
nightly your dead horse and I call to each other strung singing
as we are from bough and beam sometimes hanging still as skulls
above your head as you sleep, as you ride, as you love
others far better than you ever loved us
tonight is the farthest I have ever stretched from the rafters
listening from the hackberry tree the horse whinnies in the cold
your eyelids flicker open as my cold lips fall on yours
no she does not even roll over as I steal your last breath
Inspired by The Hour of Meeting Evil Spirits: an Encyclopedia of Mononoke and Magic by Matthew Meyer
© 2020 Betsy Aoki
Elizabeth (Betsy) Aoki is a poet, short story writer and game producer. She has received fellowships and residencies from the City of Seattle, Artist Trust Foundation, Hedgebrook, and Clarion West Writers Workshop. She has a short story in Upper Rubber Boot Books’ anthology, Sharp & Sugar Tooth: Women Up to No Good, and her Uncanny poem “Okuri Inu, or the sending-off dog demon” was nominated for a Rhysling Award.
You can find her tweeting at @baoki or contact her via her website at betsyaoki.com.
Interview: Eugenia Triantafyllou
by Caroline M. Yoachim
Eugenia Triantafyllou is a Greek author and artist with a flair for dark things. She currently lives in North Sweden with a boy and a dog. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her short fiction has appeared in Apex, Strange Horizons, Fireside and other venues. “My Country is a Ghost” is Triantafyllou’s first appearance in Uncanny, a beautiful ghost story that examines themes of immigration and family, food and faith.
Uncanny Magazine: I love the way this story uses ghosts to show the pressure that immigrants face to assimilate, and also the sense of loss that comes with that. Was that idea the starting point for the story, or did you have a different inspiration?
Eugenia Triantafyllou: I wanted to write about the moment when a person enters a country that needs them for certain reasons (i.e. their labor) but by no means would accept the wholeness of them. The complexity of the person’s culture and identity or even their memories are considered unnecessary and so they have to be left behind.
Immaterial and intangible as culture and memory are, they can’t be stopped by physical borders. There are invisible borders meant to filter out those identities that do not fit the norm. I found that ghosts as a metaphor for all those other identities perfectly suited what I wanted to illustrate.
Uncanny Magazine: The story examines not only the experience of first-generation immigrants, but also later-generation immigrants, which adds lovely depth to the story. The challenges that Niovi and Remi face are different, though there is also some overlap. What drew you to these particular characters? Was one of them easier to write than the other?
Eugenia Triantafyllou: Niovi was definitely the easier one to write because the character has a lot in common with me and shares many of my own experiences. Remi’s character and Remi’s ghost came much later to me after the thoughtful feedback I got from the Clarion West students and from that week’s instructor Amal El-Mohtar.
Remi is a nice contrast to Niovi because he is not the exact opposite of her. He is, as you said, different and the same. His differences reflect Niovi’s anxieties about her present and her future in the country. It is because of his similarities that they come together and Niovi finds her place in the world again.
As a result the story doubled in size after CW—which I assume will happen to the rest of my workshop stories as well—and the treatment of the themes became more nuanced and deep.
Uncanny Magazine: Food often evokes memories, and I love the way that descriptions of food were threaded through this story. Do you like to cook? What is your favorite food from childhood?
Eugenia Triantafyllou: My mother worked as a cook. She was the cook at the summer camp I went to as a child and I have to admit I did receive special treatment during the meals. Her love of cooking has unavoidably been passed on to me. Cooking keeps me laser-focused and I am even able to ponder story ideas while doing it.
As a child, I was in love with spaghetti napolitana, french fries, and bread. Starch was basically my best friend. I was not a big fan of meat or fish, despite my mother’s desperate efforts, and didn’t taste okra unlike my protagonist (sorry!) until much later. Now, I am the least picky eater I know. I love variety and if I could have a buffet every day and eat a bite of everything it would be just perfect.
Uncanny Magazine: If you could have a ghost, would you want one?
Eugenia Triantafyllou: I think I already have one. If a ghost represents past moments that can be pieced together to recreate an iteration of a loved one that for some reason can’t be here with me, then I definitely carry more than one ghost. In fact, I don’t know what I would do without ghosts. I would probably be a much lonelier person.
You can imagine them as a cohort of friends, past and present, that can give you advice or inspire you with their own lives. Of course, it is just me projecting things back to myself. But this is what people do most of the time when interacting with people; we see them how we want to see them and take what we need from their company. So to me there isn’t much difference.
Uncanny Magazine: “My Country is a Ghost” is a beautiful story of family, immigration, food, and faith. Are any or all of these common themes across your stories? What other ideas or themes are you drawn to?
Eugenia Triantafyllou: As I was answering this question, I realized that the novella I am working on incorporates all these themes but in a very different setting!
Family is a very strong theme in my stories, particularly mother-daughter relationships. Probably because I feel more at home in that space and I revert to what f
eels natural when I am writing a new story. I try to push back at this urge because I want to experiment and try different sets of characters. Now I am trying my hand at sister relationships (I don’t have one) and friends (that I am fortunate enough to have).
Folklore is something I am also very much drawn to. Growing up in Greece and reading/hearing so many folktales can do that to you. I am particularly fond of the dark ones because I feel there is an authenticity in them that you can’t get from a happily ever after kind of story. It helps that things like ghosts, bones, hags, and grotesque descriptions appeal to me. They are an armory or elements I like to play with and use in my stories.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Eugenia Triantafyllou: I am focusing on my final edits for my science fiction novella that deals with immigration to other planets and has a mother-daughter relationship, alien-species poachers, and death tattoos. Fun!
I am also trying to revise all of my Clarion West stories and send them out to the world (like this one)!
Thank you for the lovely questions!
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for the lovely responses!
© 2020 Uncanny Magazine
Caroline M. Yoachim is the author of the 2017 Hugo and Nebula finalist short story “Carnival Nine.” Her fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Uncanny, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Asimov’s, among other places. Her debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out with Fairwood Press in 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
Interview: Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam
by Caroline M. Yoachim
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam’s fiction and poetry has appeared in over 50 publications such as Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Lightspeed, and LeVar Burton Reads, as well as in six languages. She has been a finalist for the Nebula Award and won the Grand Prize in the SyFy Channel’s Battle the Beast contest; SyFy made and released an animated short of her short story “Party Tricks,” set in the world of The Magicians. She lives in Texas with three cats: Gamora, Don Quixote, and Gimli.“Where You Linger” is Stufflebeam’s second appearance in Uncanny—a beautifully structured story that explores memory, relationships, and personal growth.