Promotion

There’s a big clock in the detainment facility. It hangs at the end of the long row of cells. Prisoners, or tenants, as we’re supposed to call them, to make hem feel more at home, can see the clock from their cells. It is visible in every cell. I know because I’ve walks past every one and checked over my shoulder to make sure I could see the hour, the minute, the seconds tick past.

I asked one of the staff, the elderly ones who have seen so many tenants they don’t want to hear why they’ve been detained, why the clock was there? It woudn’t do the tenants any good to see the time. IF any of them were counting days they would know that it didn’t matter how many days they counted. Their sentences were perpetual. There was nothing to do but look at the clock and watch time pass and known that each second is not a countdown, just a breath. But then I thought, that was probably the point.

The staff of the detainment facility are organized into sectors, each corresponding to a sector of the facility. The tenants within the sectors might be categorized by the severity of their punishment, the severity of their crimes- sorry, misdemeanors- by the amount of time the tenants have spent here, or by any other criteria. The truth is, I have no idea. But there are six sectors, and the newest staff begin in sector F.

New staff were recruited out of academy. I remember the day Ellis and I were spotted by the recruiters in secondary academy. The recruiters, staff from sector B, had told us they were from the Vaccinations Council and they were going to give us new pills to boost immunity and prevent topical infections and sexually transmitted infections, as they did annually. They gave us each small paper cups and, when we held them all out, came around again.

The students on either side of me tilted their cups back. Their throats bobbed. I looked into my paper cup.

But there was nothing inside of it. I looked at the floor, to see if I’d dropped its contents, but there was nothing there. None of the tiny liquid gel capsules that tasted like fluoride and benzadril. When Ellis saw that I hadn’t taken mine, he tilted his empty cup toward me with a quizzicall expression and mouthed that his was empty.

Mr.Axe looked at our empty cups and said, the pill isn’t going to swallow itself. And going down your throat is the only place its going to go. Ellis was too nervous to speak, so I told Mr.Axe, in case he’d gone blind, that the cup was empty.

Twenty-seven pairs of eyes turned to me. I felt all of them.

Mr.Axe told me that if that was the case I could take my empty cup to the principal’s office and see what he had to say about it. I offered the empty cup to the gentleman from the Vaccinations Council and told him that, if he could see it, he could have it.

He didn’t even take the cup from me.

The tenants in sector C are nothing special compared to the tenants in sector D. They each have their own strange punishments, their own tasks and rules, like any other tenants. One in sector C told me once of the way hunger is eating away at him. I’ve never seen him eat, and I have delivered his food to him for three years. It sits on a tray just out of his reach, next to a glass of water, so clear that the small minerals in it may as well be visible.

He never touches the food or drink. He never can. But he will try. Every morning he stands, eager, when I bring his tray in. He shuffles to the bars and slides onto his belly, to stick his arm through the bars. Then, he’ll shift to his side, straining, dutiful in his attempt to eat. He tells me about his throat and tongue, thirsty from thirst and hunger. His eyes role back, his pupils dilate and contract. He clutches his hollow stomach. Each day it must eat his insides a little more.

He asks me if I’ve felt real hunger before. Of course I have. I’m hungry all the time coming out of these sectors. I want to tell him that he isn’t so special. That every tenant has problems, sentences, obligations, illusions, unattainable fantasies. I would feel worse for him if he told me about the fatigue, or the spacelessness, the airlessness or the fact that he would never see his children again. That makes the small creature of my sympathy sit on my shoulder and bite at my ear.

I have to remind myself that he must have done something awful not to be fed. I have to remind myself that when any of them appeal to me.

I tried to ask him once, what did he do? He only pointed to the milk carton on the tray and licked his lips.

After the pills, Ellis and I were sent to the principal’s office. We were made to sit on opposite sides of the room, so we could not touch. It was winter. Our school uniforms consisted of layers of pants and undershirts and blouses and vests and jumpers. We couldn’t have touched anything but our fingertips if we’d wanted to.

The recruitors from sector B came into the office. There was a man and woman, both took a seat at a desk in front of Ellis. I watched the back sof they heads while the woman took something out. His was cut sternly, like the hair cut of a soldier or a banker. Hers was a severe plait, braided closely to her head, the way the girls in the academy did their hair in early summer.

The woman withdrew a feather from her bag. It was large, not a downy, soft feather of a young bird, but the hard, un-malleable feather of an eagle. It was as long as her forearm, with prongs so soft it swayed as it was held still. The woman instructed Ellis to hide it in he room, somewhere she would never see it.

Ellis bit his lip and took the feather. The woman shut her eyes, as did the man, and Ellis waited before prowling quietly, so quietly, to principle Bell’s desk. Bell kept a taxidermied bird on it. The face was stretched into an eternal shriek, wings constantly poised for a flight that would never happen. They accepted the feather easily. It was the same colour, nearly the same size. If you hadn’t seen Ellis put it there, you wouldn’t have guessed where it had gone.

When the recruiters opened their eyes, their gazes seemed to fall, as one, on the desk. The woman squinted her eyes at the bird for a long moment and told Ellis that if he wasn’t willing to try, there was no point. Ellis protested that he did try, but he had failed to put the feather where she would not see it. She told him, noticing was not the same as seeing. She might not have noticed the feather, but she had seen it.

Ellis’ shoulders ducked. I was envious, as he slouched out of the principal’s office. I was still sure that I’d done something horrible, in the time that Ellis and I had been in the nearly empty office.  

Then it was my turn. When they’d both closed their eyes, I took the feather, stood up without being careful (it didn’t matter how much noise I made) and tucked the feather into the woman’s plait.

The woman sighed and told me that she knew it was there, that if she reached around to feel it, she would be able to grasp it with her fingers.

So look at it, I told her. She almost spun her head, trying to see it.

Sector C is wider in structure than the previous three sectors. As though it needs more room for the punishments, more space for tenants to pull large objects over the grooved and hilly floor. They can push them quite far but one, or all, of them lose their grip. Their hands ache with the strength it takes. When one falters, so do the rest, right behind, like children bumping into one another.

One of the other staff, a warden called Calli, goes into one of the cells each day and hacks at the stalks that grow there. Tall reeds that look like they’d be more appropriate on a river’s edge, drifting up between bars and against the walls. Calli takes a scythe in and hack away at the tops. Though I don’t see the cell more than once a day, I hear crying from it, after the floor is covered with stalks and the fluff of the weeds.

There is a clock in this sector, in all sectors. Sometimes I time the amount of time it takes for a warden to dig out the liver of a tenant, or for it to regrow, I once asked about medics, for those with particularly gruesome punishments. I was laughed at- rightly. Then I asked about the severity of the punishments, and what makes one worse than the other. They only look to the clock.

I used the clock to measure my own time, as well. I didn’t age, inside the detainment facility. Outside it time was heavy on me, on my face. Within it, the tenants never aged, nor did they die, become sick, or grow. Which was what made the clocks seem especially insulting.

One of the worst punishments inflicted on a tenant that I’ve seen is that inflicted upon the Jug in sector C. He lives in a room that is forever damp, where there is never enough time between one carrying of water and another, where the floors never have time to dry. He sleeps on the wet cinder and concrete. His jumpsuit is stained by the wet dust. His fingers are always pruned.

Each day we bring him buckets of water. And empty buckets. The full buckets stand on one side of the room, the empty on the other. He gives them a daunting, but resigned look, glances at the clock once (most tenants look at it constantly, or not at all), then begins. He dips his hands in one bucket of water and cups it. He’s gotten better in the years I’ve been here, at ferrying water from the full buckets to the empty. He knows how to cup his hands, how to pour the water without spilling. But it is never dropless. Water seeps between his fingers, downs his wrists, and a single drop means that he hasn’t transferred all water from one pail to another.

He spends hours filling the buckets each day, unable to carry all of the water. He needs a jug, but we are not allowed to do it, and he knows too well to ask. He glances at the clock once when he begins, and once when he ends.

His sentence is not the worst. Not the bloodiest. He has no children, that he’s spoken of, or hunger, that he’s mentioned. He has never directly a pitiful, hopeful, despairing, glance to me.  But the sight of water dripping from his hands, the floor stained by hours of work, useless work, of his face when the first water spills, and every hour awake after that, chills me.

He wants this punishment, believes in it. That could be the worst.

When I’m ready for my promotion to sector B, I come into sector C with my lunch. I keep it in an insulated lunch box, with entirely reusable packaging. Nothing wasted as I watch the tenants work, watch their eyes flicker to the clock, ticking down the numbers until I can go, though they never can.

I pull up a chair from the staff room and stand on it, just below the clock.

All of the tenants go silent. I can hear their breaths, closer to being countdowns, closer to providing rest, than they ever have been. I grab the clock on the wall, and bring it down.

Then I go to the Jug and pull out a Tupperware container from my lunch box. It will take him a while to figure out how to use it without spilling a single drop, but it’s better than fingers.

You’ll get fired, one of them says, looking at the clock in my hands, ticking, counting, as time goes by again.

I assure them I won’t. Because I’m sure that the punishment for this is much worse than getting fired.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay 

Last Will & Testament of the Raven King

Last Will & Testament of

Desmond A. Richards.

Article 1

Preliminary Declarations

I am married to Marie E. Dougherty and any and all references in this Will to my spouse refer to Marie E. Dougherty.

I am the foster brother to Corrin S. Richards and all references in this Will to my “partner” refer to Corrin S. Richards.

I have three living children, named Sean T. Richards, Andrew C. Richards, and Elizabeth D. Richards. All references in this Will to my “child” or “children” or “issue” or “student” or “students” include the above child or children, and any child or children hereafter born to or adopted by me. All references to “youngest ward” refer to Elizabeth D. Richards.

Article 2

Specific Bequests and Devises

I give the sum of Thirteen Million Dollars ($13,000,000) to a separate trust which shall provide for the perpetual care and maintenance of the property referred to as “the Cage” (see item C) and for the care and housing of my spouse. This trust shall be executed by Marie E. Dougherty until she is otherwise unable to do so, at which point the execution of this trust shall be the responsibility of Sean T. Richards.

I give the sum of Nine Million Dollars ($9,000,000) to my son Sean T. Richards, once he has reached the age of eighteen.

I give the sum of Nine Million Dollars ($9,000,000) to my son Andrew C. Richards, once he has reached the age of eighteen.

I give the sum of Nine Million Dollars ($9,000,000) to my daughter Elizabeth D. Richards, once she has reached the age of twenty.

I give the item referred to as “the Dream Loom” (see item B) to my daughter Elizaeth D. Richards, once she has reached the age of fifteen.

Article 7

Further Condition

Upon my death, my youngest ward shall not trespass the physical boundaries of “the Cage”, not disturb any of the contents there or of the adjoining property known as the “Richards’ Estate”, living, inert, linear, or non-linear, or the assets dealt with in this Will shall be redistributed instead to the Hampshire Society of Corvids, apart from the Trust established for Marie E. Dougherty’s continued care and “the Dream Loom”.

Article 2a

Further Bequests

I give my entire interest in the real property which was my residence at the time of my death (“the Cage”), together with any insurance on such property, and all contents there, to my youngest ward.

I give the entire contents of the real property which I owned in Yorkshire at the time of my death (“the Mirror Library”), together with any insurance on such contents, to my youngest ward, once she has reached the age of fifteen.

Desmond A. Richards was, at the time of so executing said Will, of sound mind, memory, wakefulness, and understanding and not under any restraint or in any respect incompetent to make a will. This Will stands as fact unless a newer document is created.

Signed this day: Lucem non uro rege. Somni, corvi, somni.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Linear View

They hold their trapped time in their hands, between their fingers as if it were a flat, linear thing without fraying edges. They believe that they've struck the right bargain, that they can put their time next to vases and china in cabinets or on mantels. They believe the absence of time means infinity and eternity.
It will be years before they realize their mistake.
Time is not a vacuum.
They touch their fingers to their faces, the corners of their eyes and mouths, as if they can feel the wrinkles there, frozen in their emergence.
There is no aging gracefully without age.
Rainy springs blur in other rainy springs. Sunsets and sunrises turn grey, never counting down to the last sunset or sunrise; each day's beauty has the potential to be outdone. There is no urgency. No impulse.
When they realize, they try to pry open the box, dig fingers into locks, slide nails between lids. Time, cubic, slithering, reusable, cyclical time, evades them. Time had no regard for their forward/backward view.
They pry much longer than they should be able, past the years they have trapped in their boxes.
While time skips and spins, always borrowed and reused, never truly halted.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Imaginary

Mama and Papa didn’t understand that he wasn’t imaginary. Mama said imaginary like she really meant dream or hope, and when Papa said it he always sounded as though he’d missed the words fucking childish and landed on imaginary instead. I tried to explain that he was invisible, not imaginary, but that seemed to siphon away at their conviction instead of fortify it.

Mama asked if he was my guardian angel. He was my guardian. I couldn’t say he was an angel. He looked nothing like the creatures in the stained glass windows of the church we went to Sunday mornings. He looked nothing like the paintings I saw in a picture book at school that looked more like a catalogue for the L’Ouvre than a children’s story.

I didn’t have a name for him at first. I thought of him as an echo, because he arrived after spring, in June, when the damp was tapering and the heat was swelling and bleaching the rocks in the river, schorching the grass and turning our yard into a burnt brown rug. The air was filled with breathlessness and swelling like it would pop. He appeared, cool and dark like soil that had been rained on, like an echo of spring. I was trying to sleep under my bed, which was cooler than under my sheets. I was covered in sweat, everything sticking to me, and flipping onto my stomach, then my back when sweat pooled on my stomach. Outside the window cicadas were already humming, too loudly to hear thoughts. Frogs chirped. Birds didn’t bother. It was too hot for their song.

It was black. Outside the room. Inside of it. Even with the fan whirring and blowing a weak cold breath across my tummy, I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t think I would ever sleep.

I turned my cheek against the floor. It was sticky but cool, the ridges of the wood so pronounced I could feel it as I rubbed the side of my face against it. I whispered a word into the dark, to test it. House. Language dissolved in the dark, as if the neural mechanism to turn sounds into words could be eclipsed by the dark. House sounded made up. It delighted me endlessly to say it, over and over, hushed.

House, said a voice that was not my own, joining in.

He was on top of the bed, speaking over the edge of it, down to me. His voice was smooth, like butter softened by the summer heat. It was deep like nighttime. I giggled so loudly that Papa came stomping down the hall in his boxers and Coca Cola logo t-shirt to tell me to shut the hell up because the middle of the night was no time to make noise and it was already too goddamn hot and loud to sleep. If I wanted to goddamn play I could do it when the sun came up. He didn’t mention my invisible friend.

But I didn’t stop talking. We traded nonsense words through the night, in whispers, both of us trying to speak more quietly than the other until we couldn’t hear the words we exchanged at all. House, sugar, gecko, bat… We played with my dolls and I tried to show him how to use a yo-yo, but he just liked to watch me do it, even when I tangled the string and had to get it undone, slowly, in the dark, feeling for the knot.

One night, before bed, I was having tea with him, when Mama came and stood in the doorway, with a can of beer in her hand, condensation gathering on her fingers, her eyes narrowed, or maybe just looking narrowed because they were red and puffy. I looked up at her, because he did, and said, “Mama?”

Mama didn’t look at me at first. She looked at the window, like I’d spoken from outside. The heat made her curls stick to her neck. Her curls were shiny, her lip stain fading, but I thought she was beautiful. Mama was always the prettiest person, I thought.  Then she turned to me. “What?”

“I don’t know what name to choose. I want a good name. He needs one.”

Mama’s red lips pursed. One of her eyebrows was critical of me. “Who’s he?”

“My… guardian.” I tried out the word on my tongue. It tasted like house did in the dark.

“Why can’t your guardian think up his own name?” She didn’t sound indulgent or amused, but not angry about him, like Papa was. She didn’t care what his name was, and that bugged me, made my throat sticky.

“He wants me to name him. But I can’t think of anything good.”

“Spot,” Mama said.

I shook my head. There was an age when you realized your parents didn’t have the answer to everything, and I wasn’t at that age yet, so answers that didn’t satisfy me still left me feeling betrayed. “That’s a dog name. He needs a good name.”

“Alshat.”

Alshat was a star’s name. Mama had probably learned it in her days at university, which we almost never talked about because one time I’d asked my parents if I was going and Mama had gotten a sour, pinched look on her face while Papa’s cheeks and ears turned red. But Papa didn’t know Alshat was a star’s name. Mama called him Alshat when she asked if he was coming to dinner, or asked if he needed an extra seat at the table. Papa told me that if I didn’t stop pretending Alshat was real, I was going to get my head shoved in a toilet at school because people don’t like retards, Ginny.

Mama and Papa got into a lot of fights over that summer. It was too hot not to fight, and too hot to stay in the same room, so once they were done shouting they always went into separate rooms, or Mama left the house while Papa knocked something over. They were fighting in the kitchen while Mama made gravy and Papa tested the meat to see if it was done cooking, glaring at its pink insides. Alshat and I were sitting quietly at the table in the dining room to wait for dinner. I’d put out all the plates, but Papa had shoved the meat back under the grill, so I guessed it would be a while before we ate.

“-dying out here. This heat. There’s nothing to paint. Nowhere to study, for Christ’s sake,” Mama said. The wooden spoon she used to stir the gravy traced a wobbly shape in the air as she talked and gestured. Alshat was watching it too. “Not that you care. What’s wrong with university? Too hard or do you really not care about living in this dust bowl with no idea what’s out there in the world? Do you even know who Van Gogh was? Do you know him from your brother?”

“Don’t condescend to me. I bring home your food. What fucking right do you have to talk to me like that?” Papa snarled, sounding more like an angry cat than a man.

“I have every right,” Mama said. “I-”

“Alshat, don’t say that,” I said, putting my hand on the table between us. I leaned in and whispered, “We can go to my room and finish having tea. Or we can build a castle.”

Papa slammed one of the cupboards in the kitchen closed. It banged, once, then twice as it bounced. Mama looked ready to kill. “Fine!” Papa shouted at his fist. “Go to your fucking room, Ginny. Go!”

“Don’t you dare speak to her like that!” Mama growled. “Ginny, baby, don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about your daddy.”

I wasn’t worried about Papa as much as I was about her. I didn’t like the scraped sound of her voice, or her gentle hands curled like claws, reaching for me. I hopped off my chair, Alshat behind me, and bolted for my room. I pulled it shut, even though it was like putting cardboard between myself and the hallway. I lay under my bed, the fan pointed at me, tracing my fingers in the dusty, and another in the sweat on my tummy. The dust stuck to my hot palms. “Alshat. I don’t want you to say that again, all right? They were just having a fight.”

Alshat apologized and found new words to make un-real. Then he started to sing. It felt like a siren, like an ambulance coming down the road, like the promise that something bad had happened and it was only going to get worse until it didn’t.

The next day I went to the front door and looked for my shoes. They were usually under Mama’s but Mama’s weren’t there. I put on my shoes and looked for her boots, the ones with the little hills and the holes at the toes that made her look beautiful and made men look at her when we went to the proper grocery store. Mama was gone with the shoes. Papa came out of his room to make coffee and grab a bear, and in the afternoon he went to the backyard and starting putting together the flattened cardboard boxes we kept in the shed. He made one phone call during dinner, and I watched him while I ate spaghetti from a can. I couldn’t hear the person on the other side of the phone but I guessed it was Grams, because he kept saying No, She’s your daughter, and Well, she’s all right, I didn’t tell her anything, I don’t know what the hell to say, She’s fine, Really?

“Ginny,” he said, holding out the phone as far as the cord would stretch. “It’s your Grandma. Talk to her. Stop talking to your invisible friend, talk to Grandma, come on.”

“Yes, sir.” I took the phone- somehow the cord stretched a little bit more to read me, all the way down on the kitchen floor, because the received was high on the wall. The phone smelled like Papa’s beer and cigarettes. “Grams?”

“Ginny. Oh, baby,” she said. She sounded a lot like Mama, but like Mama’s voice on a scratchy record. Mama had never smoked. “I’m getting a bus. I’ll be with you the day after tomorrow, all right?”

“Mama’s gone,” I said. “Alshat, stop.”

“Al- what? I know your Mama’s gone. You’re going to be just fine, sweetie,” Grams said. When she said it I knew that Alshat had told the truth, and he hadn’t listened to me the night before when Mama and Papa were fighting.

Grams came two days later, with her small bag full of things that smelled like her house in the larger town. She cleaned the linens and I helped her hang them on the line in the garden. She prodded Papa until he took a shower, then vacuumed his room while he was in the bathroom, then the living room, and my room. She set up a chair at the table for Alshat, even though Alshat was tall enough that he could stand during meals. She asked me to stay quiet at night because she was a room away from me and could hear me talking to him.

Alshat stayed all summer. Grams did too. The branches on the trees sagged, like the heat took something out of them as well. The air over everything shimmered, like the earth had become a furnace. Papa ate in the garden, or his room, and didn’t give Grams the chance to vacuum his floor a second time. When we ate I spoke to Alshat when Grams was staring at nothing, the way Mama sometimes did. But Grams heard me, when Mama didn’t. She looked disappointed when I only gave her one-word answers to questions. But I didn’t have anything to say to her at the empty table.

“You’re excused,” she said, voice laced with sadness. “You can go to your room, Ginny. You and Alshat. Except- listen. Even if your Mama doesn’t come back, you know maybe she’ll send you a letter, right? You know she loves you, right? She didn’t leave because of you, baby. You know that, right?”

I nodded and waited for her to finish. Sometimes people needed a few moments to let the words coalesce and sort themselves out on their tongue before speaking them. Grams leaned across the table and patted my hand. She had painted nails, like Mama, but her hand was covered with wrinkles, like the folds in laundry. She raked my wrist with her nails as she pulled her hand away. Alshat was looked at the spot on my wrist she’d touched.

“And here,” she added, picking up something from one of the chairs. It had been pushed under the table so I hadn’t seen the shopping bag sitting on it, but it had a plastic bag inside of that, and in that there was a Polaroid camera. It was black and plastic-looking with a few stickers on it. “It was your Mama’s. She said you could have it. She said you could have anything of hers you wanted. That’s nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.” I remember smiling, so wide it almost hurt, because I’d never had my own camera. And Grams looked happy to give it to me, and I could feel Alshat excited beside me. “How many pictures can I take?”

“As many as you want,” she said. “We’ve got extra rolls of film. Try to make these ones last at least a week, all right? I have to go into Golden Lake to get more film, and I don’t want to do that too often.”

I nodded. I didn’t say thank you. I was already running to my bedroom. I kicked the door shut and told Alshat to pose for the camera. He didn’t want to pose anywhere except under the bed. I lay down on my tummy and slithered halfway under the bed, turning the camera on, the bulb leaping up, ready for action. It was dark under the bed, even though the sun hadn’t gone down and my room was bright with sun. “Say cheese,” I said, like the photographer who took our school photos.

Alshat didn’t say anything. I took his picture and listened to the camera spit it out, looking at the shiny grey surface of it before I waved it around, waiting for the grey to resolve into shadows, into shapes, into Alshat. I held up the picture to show Alshat himself, like wide crocodile-mouth, his eyes like slashes of light, the outline of him, which was all that appeared in the dark, and all that showed up on film.

Your Mama is never coming back for that camera.

“I know that, Alshat,” I said.

Alshat’s eyes were all colour in the Polaroid picture. No pupils.

Do you want me to get rid of your Papa too?

Art by RovinaCal

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Water-Logged

The sun was hanging low over the sea, turning everything to fire.

The sand was hardened by the tide, into a sucking grainy slope the colour of blood. It carried rock sediment, deep red and brown. Where the sand lightened it was the colour of whole cream, so thick it might have been ivory. The water shone brilliant shades of gold and amber, like a rolling mixture of summer honey and autumn honey. The sandbar, rising out of the water, was a black patch in a glowing red ocean. It flashed scarlet when the water crept up on top of it and reflected the skyful of sunset.

The horse that stood on the sandbar was white.

Its hooves were caked with mud, but its long, gargantuan body was white as snow. It looked like a patch of winter that faded into being, into the stitched autumnal landscape. Its mane swayed like river grasses, or wheat in a field, a long ripple from the root that almost made it a whip in the wind. Pointing to the horizon, the sky, the horizon again. It was so bright the edges of it seemed to blur, as if it wasn’t real.

It didn’t move. I didn’t know if it noticed my presence at all. Animals pricked their ears when they sensed trouble or danger, but its ears were motionless. When its head moved it did so slowly, drifting, as if it were a mistake or unconscious rather than an effort. Then it began to wade into the water.

I waded after it. My shoes were already water-logged. Now my trousers were soaked too. I could feel them clinging to my legs as I went in deeper, cold and skin-like against my calves, but I didn’t take my eyes off the horse. Water horses were almost never seen. Some said they were seen only if they wanted to be. I walked around large patches of weed, as much as I could without making my path to the water horse longer. Something about the cobweb-like quality of its tail- no, not cobwebs, like an antique wedding veil, made my spine prickle with cold. But I couldn’t not follow.

My boots were slick with the muddy, sandy bottom, my pants surrounded by red-gold water now. Every step I took sucked my foot deeper, with dirt warmer than the water and softer than the sand on the beach, like fingers. Birds swooped over my head, and over the water, gliding and screeching. The music of the water was lovely and haunting. It filled my head often. The water horse suddenly tossed its head as if it too could hear the music. It looked ready to dive.

“Wait!” My voice was louder than the gulls. “Wait! Don’t go!”

Water horses could be dangerous. I’d known that since I was old enough to apy attention to the world. But all creatures were dangerous. And I had wanted to see a water horse for so many years. To see any impossible thing. And it was here. In front of me.

The horse was up to its stomach now in water. Its stomach was not large, but the curve of it disappeared beneath the waves. The water around it was black, darkened by its shadow, free of fire. It was against the sun, becoming a shadow, but still with softened edges, still looking like the suggestion of a horse, rather than a horse. Its hair whirled like a ribbon of snowflakes caught up in the wind. Its mane dragged in the current. White water snakes.

The water lapped at my thigh. I could climb for the sandbar, but the horse was moving away from it. I was close enough to see the patched on the sandbar where water that ran over it collected. They were ribboned with reflections of the copper and bronze canyons in the clouds. I turned away from them, and the smell of hot wet sand, toward the sun, dipping over the horizon like a heavy yellow fruit.

The horse didn’t turn around. It dipped into the water, in a smooth quick movement, like the disappearance of water fowl. A bow of the head, a white shadow under the water’s surface, then a ripple on the surface where it had been. I had dared to follow the water horse and now I was alone in the water, the pull of the tide around my waist, tugging me to and fro like a tree in a wind. The current was as powerful as hands.

The gulls sailed over me, screeching as if they could drown out the sea’s song.

I had lost my magic. Or it could have been the water horse’s teeth, tugging me under, sucking at me like the dirt, pulling me down so the water licked my waist, embraced my shoulders. The tide swam over my head. It was warm, filling my ears with song. My mouth was full of sea.

I lifted one hand out of the water. The water horse closed its teeth around the other. The sun glowed on the surface of the water, spreading its long fingers over the waves as it sank and sank.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Stalkers

Kiera didn’t want to travel with Alexei. She thought it was a particular gesture of bad will from the universe that Alexei was the only one to travel with this time. The universe had been doling out bad will these days, these years, as if it had been designed for it. But that was a sort of generalized bad will, like giving humanity a pitbull when they’d asked for a puppy. This felt personal, and Kiera resolved to right it later, by spending the least amount of time with Alexei as possible.

To be fair, he probably wasn’t having such a great time with her. He’d never understood why his sister hung out with her, why they chose to spend their time doing the things they did while he chose to spend his time complaining about things that made no difference when they were complained about, like cold tea or noisy dogs barking or the government or new failing safety measures around the over 50,000 population cities. Which was especially absurd, Kiera thought, because their own city didn’t qualify, with its population just upward of 20,000.

“Why is she here, of all places?” Alexei said, sounding victimized. Kiera was sure he meant to say, Why am I here? With you? And it had just come out wrong. The place itself was not all that bad.

Kiera looking up and down. It was one of those factories that had had a false front, a sort of area for tours where people saw machinery that looked more complicated than was actually required, and the beginnings of the a process and the final product and nothing messy in between. Kiera might even have been here once before. She couldn’t remember, which worried her. When the spores began to spread, two of the first things to go were art and memory.  No one needed art when they were struggling to eat, to hide, to run. And suddenly all of one’s memories of life Before were replaced with questions about how they could have possibly lived that way, then memories of life After. Kiera had always made it a point to keep her memories, but they were drifting away from her, like spirals of fog separated from the rest of the cloud that thinned out into nothingness.

They were picking their way through the entrance, Alexei grumbling about his rubber boots. Kiera had made him wear them, and had given them to him (they were her father’s, Before) out of kindness, and because she didn’t want him to step in any spore-infested water. The boots were high, coming up to both their knees. If they had to step in anything suspicious that was taller, they might have to turn back, but Kiera had thought she was being practical and sensible when she’d suggested the boots. Alexei probably hated practicality and sense, considering the things he often said.

“I could be at home right now,” he said, slamming the door behind them in a way that made Kiera want to bite his head off. If he was this loud, something else might. Alexei was fiddling with his bicycle gloves, as if the safety precaution of them offended him. Even with his gas mask on, she could tell he was frowning judiciously. “I could be watching television. I could be eating those stupid canned fruits she hordes. But no.”

“I’m so sorry you have to haul your sister out of a candy factory,” Kiera said, catching sight of a Cadbury_TM sign that had fallen off the wall. The edge of it had a soft white rime to it that Kiera didn’t like the look of. “I’m sorry she might actually be hurt. I’m sorry you don’t have anyone actually looking forward to you being back home.”

“And you do? Didn’t your boyfriend run away? Decide to take his chance with spore-heads rather than you?” Alexei was so amused by himself that his words ended in a chuckle.  

Kiera desperately wanted to reach for a chocolate bar in a display on a desk, but spores always got the food first. She wanted to smell it, but the gas mask wouldn’t let her. When the spores first spread, they’d used n-95 respirators, and she would have been able to smell the stale chocolate. That was back when n-95 respirators did the trick. Now it was gas masks. Stores had been vandalized and looted when people looked for gas masks, and long shirts and pants and hats and scarves and high boots and gloves and anything to cover themselves should a single spore come in through a crack in their window.

They passed walls covered with graffiti. Art may have been the first to go, but the survivors, the travelers and fighters, created new art wherever they went. Somehow spray paint was nearly as important as gas masks. They drew block letters and symbols on the colourful walls and phrases like THE WHORES EAT THE PLAYERS’ MEAT, and WHITE CROWN-THERE’S MORE AROUND. They were both true statements, Kiera thought, though she wouldn’t have said it that way.

“Does she even have her phone?” Alexei said, looking at his own. His battery was almost dead. Lily’s phone was notorious for running out of power, and since Kiera and Alexei had gotten the texts from her at least eight hours ago, it was likely that her phone was dead.

“It probably doesn’t matter,” Kiera said. “She’s inside, anyway. She said she was staying on the second floor in case- in case. She said to watch our step too.”

Alexei’s brows knitted in the large glass circles of his mask. He breathed out deeply, in the way that made Kiera’s skin crawl. “What? Why?”

Kiera stopped at the edge of a room- one of the room’s of the real factory. She said, “It’s rained.”

The room in front of them looked as though all the rain had been concentrated into it. It had flowed from the cracks in the walls, and the hole in the ceiling that trickled water from a room upstairs that had also probably been flooded. The room looked as though if might have been mid-renovation when the spores started attacking it. The smell was so pungent that Kiera caught a whiff of it through the gas mask. Her heart skipped. If they could smell it, it was bad. She also couldn’t see the floor through the water. That was bad, too.

“Do we have to go through this?” Alexei said, voice stretched with dismay. “Did she go through this? Did she have boots? Lily!”

Kiera turned on him. “Shut up. Jesus. I don’t know if she had boots. But come on, you should know your sister. She isn’t that stupid. She wouldn’t go through here unless she didn’t need boots.”

Alexei’s brow arched and disappeared beneath the mask. “Did she?”

Kiera rolled her eyes. She was bereft of any hope that this water was clear and uncontaminated, but it made sense to check. She cast around for something to put in the water. Softer metals might do, but there wasn’t any gold here. Just steel and iron and some alloy, probably. Wood would be alright. Or skin, she thought, briefly, looking at Alexei.

“Don’t look at me,” Alexei said. “I don’t have anything. And no, you can’t use my belt.”

“I don’t want to,” Kiera said. “It might actually be keeping your pants up. I don’t want to see things I don’t have to.”

Alexei said, “You wouldn’t be so lucky.”

Kiera made a noise, generated purely from annoyance, and went back to the room with the desk. She peered behind the desk but there was nothing but a white rime on the baseboards and the wheels of the wheely chair. There was also a pencil. Lead, she hoped, picking it up. Though graphite would probably work too. No one knew why it attacked metals the way it did, when the spores attacked all organic matter by growing- by infecting.

She came back to the manufacturing room where Alexei was leaning against a metal railing. It was pretty cavalier of him, Kiera thought, considering that if it fell apart he would go hurtling back into the water. Then she noticed he was also gripping the doorframe, his black mesh-clad fingers curled around it like a claw. She showed him the pencil, as if he were about to perform a magic trick with it, and he pretended to be uninterested. But when she dipped it into the water, parting the white film on the top, he leaned over to see the result. Kiera counted to five, slowly, then removed it. The white film closed over the top of the water again, like one of those mattresses that retained its shape the moment you rolled off it. Kiera held the pencil sideways, away from herself, and they watched it.

“That’s- well, it’s infected,” Alexei said in the same moment that Kiera said, “It’s stalked.” Alexei liked to use the term infection, as if it weren’t a mind-altering parasite, a destroyer. He preferred clinical terms, which did not properly describe the spore. At least Kiera called it what it was.

Either way, some of the white film that had collected on top of the water was eating away at the lead pencil- Kiera was sure now that it was lead- and starting to branch off into delicate, coral-like stalks on the end of the pencil. It was spreading up toward the pink eraser at the top, like a quick-growing vine strangling a tree. Kiera dropped it before the parasites could go for her glove. The gloves would only actually hold it off a little while. Ophiocordyceps manducilis ate soft metal, infected humans, and gnawed lazily at clothing. Even their boots, if they did not wash them off within hours of walking on top of the spores, would be eaten through. And then it would take only a single spore touching their skin before they had a problem.

“Not through here, then,” Alexei said, finally.

“Your powers of observation are astounding,” Kiera said. “And your ability to state the obvious with such a sense of discovery- amazing. Really. Also, there are stairs.” She pointed when she said this last bit, to the staircase in the corner. It had spores on the railing and the metal stairs, which wasn’t promising. But at least it would take them upstairs.

Alexei said, “It’s covered. Ugh.”

Kiera shared his sentiment, which was rare. But she also felt a prickle of irritation that Alexei was not already moving toward the stairs, that he thought they might have any options, and that it was possible that elsewhere people were protected in a metallic, air-tight dome from the spores while they prodded puddles with lead and tightened their gas masks and pulled their hoods over their faces to protect themselves from the possibility that the spores might be on the ceiling too.

They climbed the stairs to the second level. Alexei insisted on going first, clutching the revolver in his hand. There was ammunition in the breast pocket of his shirt, and in the pockets of Kiera’s jeans. They stepped consciously, without touching the white, crusted railing. O. maducilis crusted if it had been there long enough. Small fresh stalks stuck out of the crust. When they were mature enough, they would release spores too. Kiera had seen much bigger stalks, big as the foundations of a high rise, and the sort of spores they released, large as pillows, fluffy as clouds.

Alexei called Lily’s name, into the room in front of them. His voice changed when he was worried for his sister. Kiera was a little touched by it. If he wasn’t such a shit all of the time, then the few times he was worried for Lily might have endeared her to him. Alexei was peering left and right in the room, looking for a sign of Lily, while Kiera crossed the threshold, so he was the first to see the body, and let her know it by stumbling back into her, stepping on her boot, with a muffled exclamation of, “holy fuck!”

The body was long dead. The spores must have gotten it at least a month ago. It had that mildly preserved look, like a bug that had frozen inside its carapace. It was wearing clothing covered with spores, and its eyeballs were crusted over. One of its arms had been torn away, probably eaten, the stump reddish brown. There was a stalk growing out of its head, white like marble, fluffy with spores that hadn’t fallen off yet.

“Was it infected by spores?” Alexei asked. He lifted the revolver in a trembling hand. “It was a man, wasn’t it?”

Kiera made an irritated noise again. Of course it was a man. Every body that had been eaten was a man. The spores only settled in to plant their stalks and spread their seed. At that point, or before, when the man was still alive, still uninfected, it made a good snack for an infected women. They were a host, but not an instrument, not like the women. The women were the ones to watch out for. Several under 50,000 cities had succumbed to fungal spore exposure because of infected women entering the barracks. Afterward, all that was left were the mutilated bodies of men, fertilizing the spores, and the women that hadn’t died, still looking to eat and infect.

“Oh God,” Alexei said, in his different voice. “Lily, what-” The revolver went back and forth in his swinging hand as he bolted for the next room. Kiera swore and ran after him, on to the fluffy bed of spores, into the room that looked as though it was filled with winter. There were more spores than Kiera had ever seen. Piled on the floor. Falling from the ceiling. Even with their boots and their near body-suit clothing, and their hoods pulled up, they would have to be very careful not to let the spores touch their skin.

“Lily!” Alexei said.

At first Kiera thought he was calling her name, trying to draw her to them, but then she saw that was not the case.

Because Lily was already there. She was in front of the doorway opposite them. There were livid scratches on her neck, and white crust coming out of them. Her eyes were crusted white too, the lashes heavy with O. maducilis. Pus bubbled over it, and at her ears. A white stalk was growing out of her head, about two inches tall. Powerful spores grew fast. She was looking at Alexei with anticipation, Kiera with pensiveness.

When Lily had come out of the womb, one of the first people to see her, though she was only a month old herself, was Kiera. She had been her friend over two decades. She reached for Alexei’s gun. “Shoot her.”

“How-” Alexei’s hand was fumbling for it. They were taking slow steps backward, though Kiera didn’t thin that the spore made stalk-heads like the predators you didn’t want to alarm. Stalk-heads didn’t get alarmed.

“Do it, you wuss,” she hissed, reaching for the gun.

“I’m trying,” Alexei said, trying to pull back the safety.

Lily was advancing on them. Her eyes kept flickering between them, then beyond them, in a way that had Kiera spinning around, cursing herself for not remembering. Stalk-heads travelled in packs. The ones that had just come in the doorway behind her and Alexei did not look as good as Lily, though she had only been infected for a few hours. These ones looked infected by days. Unlike the men, who could not survive once infected, women lived days, sometimes a couple of weeks, with the spores burrowing inside them, until it frosted over every organ and they became a balloon of fungus. These ones looked ready to burst. Vitreous humour trickled from their eyes as it was replaced with spores. Some were already blind. But that hardly mattered.

Kiera grabbed for the revolver, pulling back the safety, and pulled the trigger. The shot went wide, hitting the doorframe, which exploded with wood chips and spores. None of the stalk-heads flinched. When Kiera turned her head she saw Lily still watching, though she’d stopped moving.

Kiera froze. One of the stalk-heads had a glass bottle in its hand, a rag stuffed inside. The end of the rag, hanging out of the bottle, had been covered with spores. An O. maducilis Molotov cocktail. This was something Lily might have come up with. A trap Kiera should have seen.

Kiera threw up her hands just as the stalk-head hurled the bottle at her. It struck her shoulder, the cloth flying up in her face. Spores plumed over her exposed neck, drifted into the collar of her shirt. They touched her skin, tingling just a little. Kiera remembered when she’d been stung by a wasp, the initial pain, then the waiting before the real pain started, in less than a minute.

Alexei looked at the spores on her skin, then to Lily. He grabbed the revolver back from her, before her hands had a chance to close on them. He laughed, as if this were all happening on a television and he could turn it off when he wanted to.

“Fucking perfect,” he said. “This is so typical. We’re both going to die. We-”

He didn’t get a chance to finish. Lily sprang at him. Kiera watched, hoping her best friend spared her a piece.

Art by RovinaCai

Text by Lucie MacAulay

Crackers

First, Leah closed the door on his hand. She wasn’t entirely sure that he was dead, so she felt somewhat badly about this. It took a few seconds, in which she had to lean down and ladder her tights before his hand was out of the way and the door shut firmly. That was one of five offices in the larger ‘Office’ that had a window. There were four others. And the windows could not be open.

Secondly, Leah went to the water cooler. One of those sad communal places where people in the Office gathered to complain about the Office, and how they only had cubicles whereas others had proper offices. This was not the life they dreamed about for themselves in their late twenties, they often said, as though saying it would prompt the universe to create something more techni-colour for them, something with spangles and tulle. Then the water cooler was one of the only furnishings that had not been turned over in a mad dash for the Office door. Leah’s throat was swelling with dryness, furring as if mold were growing in it. Water, she thought. That means I need a drink.

Thirdly, water was probably not the priority then, Leah thought, after a moment. Her breaths sounded as if they were being churned out of her by a machine, as if each one produced carbon dioxide and cotton balls. But she needed to close the other office doors, seal herself off from the windows. It wouldn’t stop them. Locks hardly could, and those doors didn’t have locks. But she would feel better, knowing that they couldn’t smell her fear. But maybe it was seeping out of the windows anyway, the way it seeped out of her. She tried not to look at the face of her coworker as she stepped over her. She and Jill had gone out for drinks the night before, and Jill had done karaoke on a stage, though Leah hadn’t been brave enough.

Fourthly, Leah found quickly that one of the offices- the one belonging to Dean Ackleman, whom she had never much liked, though she felt badly about it now, looking at the stains on his carpet and the pieces of him that were visible around the edge of his desk- did not lock. She swore, several times, because it made her feel better and the alternatives were to cry, which wouldn’t do any good, and scream, which would do the opposite of good. She tried not to remember the time Ackleman gave her a box of her favourite loose-leaf tea at an Office Christmas party, as she grabbed an overturned chair, sat it upright, and jammed it against his office to lock him in. He was probably dead, she reasoned, though she didn’t check.

Fifthly, Leah decided that closing the windows first, in all of the offices, was probably a good idea. She didn’t like the idea of being stuck in here with all her coworkers- it was never an appealing idea, really, but being stuck with her coworkers’ corpses was even less so- but she liked the idea of letting something else in less so. She stepped over another coworker, or his legs, because he was propped up against the cubicle’s wall. He was pale, like china, like a piece of crockery that had been filled with blood and broken. There were black marks all up his arms that reminded Leah of the lines of a mosaic. Thank God he was dead.

Sixthly, why did Leah thank God? She’d never believed in God. Possibly lots of people had stopped believing in God when they looked outside and saw what was waiting for them. Possibly, there was no one else outside. Possibly birds had stopped chirping and the sun had stopped shining and Leah was the last person alive. Leah found that the fourth of the offices was blocked by Richard, who was sprawled there, but didn’t look particularly dead. If he wasn’t, she couldn’t help him yet. She grabbed him under the arms and dragged him away from the office door. If she didn’t want to close the windows, he was actually heavy enough to have been a deterrent, to stop something getting through the door.

Seventhly, Leah went back to the water cooler and grabbed one of the paper cups. The water cooler was three quarters full. She felt she could probably drink all of it. She might have to, if she was going to be stuck in there for ages. She tried to remember if they had more bottles of water. She gulped down the water. Richard had weighed so much. She tried to listen for a sound at the windows, in the offices, at the front door of the Office. There was nothing. Not even the hum of cars outside. Only the hum of the printer.

Eighthly, Leah wondered what the next step would be. She tried to think practically, and couldn’t help but be reminded of her high school graduation, of entering university and feeling betrayed that the previous twelve years of education did not prepare her for taxes or mortgages or apartment hunting or CV-writing or anything pertaining to survival and the real world. And university had not prepared her for surviving this sort of disaster. She might have to raid grocery stores, and warehouses, and outlets, and convenience stores that were full of bodies like Jill and Richard. She tried to imagine never speaking to another human being, if she was the last one left alive. Things might get better, or they might get worse. She accidently stepped on someone’s hand as she backed up, then stepped off quickly, and apologized, as if he were alive.

Ninthly, Leah looked around for something she could use as a weapon. There were several pieces of broken glass. Every glass dish, and some of the finer porcelain ones, was cracked. Like an infection of hairline fractures had spread through the cabinets that served as the staff room. The glass mirror inside Morgan’s cubicle was cracked. Every time Leah looks at the splinters across the small windows in the office doors, she thinks she hears the humming begin again, but it’s still just the printer. Leah takes another sip of water, but she only tastes the plastic cup.

Tenthly, Leah took off her blazer and pulled as much furniture as she could in front of the office doors. She realized that her throat was still dry and that no amount of water would help, probably. She wished she had drunk more the night before, enough to be sick and to not come into the office. One of the exit signs flickered. She hadn’t realized how many of them there were, but they all seemed pointless, suddenly. She didn’t think she would be making an exit any time soon.

Eleventh, Leah went back for Richard. She knew how to check a pulse, in his wrist, but he was wearing a suit jacket, and had cuff links in his cuffs. Getting them off, checking for life, was looking less like a priority. Especially when she felt the buzzing under her feet, as if there was construction near by. She thought about her boyfriend, who was a construction worker and, if he was alive, might be thinking of her, or might have packed and was climbing into his car, speeding onto the highway that led out of the city, south, to his family. She’d kissed him four hours ago. He’d tasted like toothpaste. Right then her mouth still tasted like plastic cup. Then like terror, when the splintering began.

Twelfth, Leah dropped Richard’s wrist. The splintering was like the sound that came before an explosion, but an explosion was a quick release of fear, not the quiet hum that built up when they were near, that never reached a zenith, or that no one thought reached a zenith until they were already dead. Shattered like the windows and the glasses and the crockery. It was like the hum of cicadas, if it could rattle bones. Leah didn’t want to die. She didn’t want to scavenge for food or give up running water or electricity and live in a world that was worse than archaic, because it had once been civilized, but she didn’t want to die, either. Richard was probably dead, she decided, and dove toward the bathroom. It was a single bathroom, which usually meant long lines. No line then. Leah didn’t look at the mirror. She grabbed her blouse and pulled it off, jamming it under the door, glad there was only one piece of glass in this room, over the sink. Though, maybe the toilet would shatter too. She pressed her back against it anyway, felt the cold porcelain through her camisole. She clapped her hands over her ears, pressing in until it ached.

Thirteenth, Leah shut her eyes. The water in her stomach was sloshing. Plastic and copper were in her throat. She could hear the mirror cracking, even through her hands. Her insides, the pieces of her, were shaking. She couldn’t hear it, but it wasn’t something you heard. She blinked and saw a glimpse of her feet.

She told herself she would be all right. Even though she saw the cracks. 

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay