Restart

The world only took so long to make the first time. After that, whatever or whoever made it must have gotten much better because it started getting real fast. Pretty soon, it only took a night. It was on Wednesday, before that night, that Papa and I found out it was going to happen again, from the radio, in a station that was partly static and partly an Ella Fitzgerald song. Neither was loud as the crickets, and I had to turn it up to properly here. There’s also the wind to contend with in the pickup. The pickup truck is a monster, like no one had told the manufacturer that people and not elephants were going to drive it. The steering wheel, which is people-sized, looks a little like a mistake when you first glance at it. The wheels are frightful things to get close to, like an angry cow or a frightened horse, when your face gets right up close to theirs. I like being on the inside of it.

Which is where I was. I was carrying one of Mama’s baking dishes, filled with lemon squares meant for the church bake sale. They looked prettier than the sort of things one could find at bake sales, with pretty lace patterns of icing sugar dusted on top. There were two chocolate honey cakes in the back as well, but they required less looking after than the gooey lemon squares. It was getting close to suppertime and it was becoming harder and harder to hold the squares in my lap without looking at them. It was that bit of sunset where pale green light rises over the horizon, so thin it could be a trick of the eye. The sun had just gone down, and the radio had just started behaving. Papa asked for the evening news, so I changed to the one channel that played the news in this area. Most of the time, unless you were too close to the mountain range, it was reliable. One of the news anchors was speaking with a voice that sounded like it had retired, even if its owner hadn’t. He passed the discussion to someone else, someone in a windier place that started talking about a drought, before it was passed back to him and he told us, “It’s an ongoing investigation, but a consensus has been reached, and tomorrow will be a re-start. Tomorrow the world will be re-started, just so you know. You may experience longer than usual delay as it catches up to speed again.”

I could only remember two re-start days before this one, and one of them seemed half a memory and half a dream. I wanted to see what Papa had to say, but he’d gone quiet for a moment, listening to the knews. This was how Papa learned: silence. Mama learned from noise, from moving, and sometimes it drove her up the walls when Papa just let things be. Papa turned on the windshielf wipers of the pickup for a moment to get rid of the fly. The pickup slowed down a little, and as it did, the crickets got louder, more wanting for attention, and the wind gave it to them. Eventually, Papa seemed to have learned all he could from the quiet, because he told me, “Find out if your mother’s at home, Chickadee.”

I haven’t been able to make the proper chickadee sound that real chickadee birds make in a long while, but people around here take to a nickname so well it’s like it’s been sitting on their tongues their entire lives, waiting for you. I’ve never wanted to shake it loose, but it’s hard often to remember my real name, not that I want to. No one but the doctor has used it in all of the years I can remember. You could as well shout flycatcher or wren across the grass and I would respond to it more quickly. It isn’t anyone else’s fault that I was named wrong in the first place, and my parents and I have put that transgression behind us. I start to look for the phone.

Papa talks and drives at the same time. He can’t multitask, but he says that he wouldn’t need to anyway. Parts of him are doing different tasks at once. He holds the ear up near his head, and clamps it between his ear and his shoulder when he needs to shift gears. Eventually, I put my hand on the gearshift, so all he has to do is hold down the clutch and give a signal. “Things are never exactly the way they were before,” he said. “Every time it’s a little different, no matter how caught up the world is. You planted tomatoes today. Will they be there tomorrow? I think all this re-starting is causing the problems that make us re-start.”

“It’s a circle, then?” Mama said. Her voice was filled with more static than the radio, but Papa had turned up the volume to make it clearer. I don’t think that is how to make it clear, but it helped. “It would be useless to do the washing, then. Sometimes the clothes go missing. I’m going to count how much we have in the biscuit tin. Last time we lost a few dollars in the re-start. I could start that book Lily leant me.”

“There’s not much else to do,” Papa said. “Is dinner still being cooked or are we counting potatoes, too?”

“I think dinner can still be made. Did you drop off the lemon squares yet?” Mama asked. Papa made a noise. Mama, through long exposure, is not as annoyed with these noises as most other folk are. She isn’t charmed, either. It’s as though he actually has spoken. “You were supposed to. I hope you do it before coming home. I hope the pastor is still at the church at this hour to take it.”

“I’ll leave it on the altar,” Papa said. I could not tell if he was joking or not. I’d asked Mama at one time or other and she said Papa was being disagreeable, because he believed in God but sometimes got testy with his ways. Then she’d told Papa that if he blasphemed around me she would clean his mouth out with soap. I’ve seen her do it to Sonny, and when you see soapsuds on another person’s teeth and getting snorted out of their nose it is really enough to put you off cussing or blasphemy. At least in front of Mama.

“It won’t hold overnight unless it’s in a fridge. You’ll have to give it to his wife. Their house is on the other side of the bridge,” Mama said. “But check the church first.”

“Or they can pick it up in the church tomorrow morning,” Papa said. It wasn’t that late after all, but I suppose the pastor and his wife had dinner at the same time as everyone else. I thought it might be worse to interrupt the Daniels’ at dinner than to leave the lemon squares to get more larval in the church overnight, but not according to Mama. Papa was looking unhappy to have the phone in one hand when it could be on the steering wheel. He and phones didn’t get along, even less than he and words. “We’ll be home either soon or later.”

Papa gave me the phone, and I tucked it into the seat between us. It was silent again, but there was nothing to learn. Just the crickets screaming madly outside. Papa was grinding himself up, fingers getting antsy and knee jittering like the engine. I could feel the shaking bowls of the pickup truck under my feet. The green line was almost gone from the sunset, and now pink and purple light was tripping over the clouds. There was something like reverse god fingers in the mountains, the last of the light. The light turned rosier, and Papa’s knuckles with it. When they were easy on the steering, Papa steered the pickup toward the fence. It wasn’t much of a fence, designed to keep local children from wandering off onto other people’s property. The people didn’t think much of the local children if they thought chain link was enough. Papa cruised right next to it and stopped. The headlights were too bright for the duskiness. Midges and wheat dust bobbed in their light.

“What are you doing?” I asked. The lemon squares in my lap still looked delicious but the saran wrap had treated the icing sugar patterns unkindly. Everything was just smudged sugar and lemon now.

Papa nudged the door open and dropped. I waited for the drop to finish. He walked around the front of the truck, toward my door. I struggled to open the finicky latch with only one hand, because the other was busy making sure the dish didn’t fall off my hot, jittery legs.

I went to put the squares down but Papa shook his head. He didn’t look to be in a question-answering mood, so I didn’t ask any. I just took his hand to jump down and shook the pins and needles out of my feet. We walked along beside the fence for a few minutes before Papa found a spot that was mostly green. Everywhere around the wheat looked purple and blue. The fence had gone up only a year ago and people planted thing right along its edge. Easily grown wildflowers and brambles. I grabbed a couple overripe raspberries and shared them with Papa. Our hands were purple and sticky. Papa and I looked ahead, toward the church and the pastor’s house. He was right about the re-start. A while ago, there was lattice trim on the windows of the house beside the church, and now it was gone, like it had never been there. I did not mind so much. There was a lot going into the world now. Nothing and no one could keep track of every little thing that needed to come back and grow in the time it took to get the world up and working again.

“Open ‘em up,” Papa said.

“What?”

Papa pointed at the lemon squares.

I gaped. “What?”

“Are you looking to catch midges, Chickadee?”

I shut my mouth quickly. I’d had enough of midges this summer. “Mama said it was for church.”

“Well, tomorrow, if the world has restarted, there isn’t much for her to do except make it a second time,” Papa said. We pried the saran wrap from the squares and took one for himself. The air smelled like summer and sugar instantly. Papa gave me a lemony smile and then I was a thief as well. We ate the lemon squares as best we could, though mama had only half cut them. There was nowhere to wipe our sticky hands but the grass. There was nowhere to put the squares but our stomach.

When we could eat no more, Papa stood up. He peered through one of the diamonds of the chain link fence as if it were a keyhole, and out into the field. It was almost twilight. All the shades of blue were conspiring to turn the rest of the world into black shadows. Papa stood up and took the lemon square dish. “I think if the world is re-started,” Papa said, “Something will just have to make sure that one of those changes it makes is a lemon tree. Right in our backyard, hm?”

I reckoned it was the best sort of thing that could come out of a re-start. We went back to the pick up and Papa helped hoist me up into my seat. The crickets had been chirping so high and long that it was like the roar of water. Who could tell one cricket apart from another? I spat on my hands and rubbed them into my trousers to clean them. Papa rubbed his fingers into the hem of his shirt. When he wasn’t leaving sticky fingerprints anywhere, he started to drive. He pulled up on to the road and headed for the church. There was still chocolate cake to deliver, I supposed.

From the other side of the church, where the pastor lived, headlights came into view, small and bright as the glowing eyes of a night animal.

“Is that the pastor?” Papa said. The car was driving past the church, in our direction. “I suppose we really are leaving these cakes on the altar.”

It was the pastor, in his old Chevrolet car. It rattled over the dusty road, like it was driving over beads or rocks. The engine was making a noise that said its time was nearly coming to an end. The headlights blinded us, then swerved away, then swerved back. The whole car was swerving. There was turmoil behind the wheel, driving us to pull to the side and nearly hit the fence. The Chevrolet didn’t care. It turned away from us, then followed us. There wasn’t any direction to go that didn’t end with hitting the pastor’s car or hitting the fence.

The Chevrolet hit the pickup truck. There was more damage to the truck, because Papa swerved. The lemon square dish went into the windshield first. Glass broke and lemon filling smeared the dash. The collision was louder than sound. I couldn’t make out all the noises of glass shattering and fragile things breaking. The pickup wore the fence for a moment like a veil before it tore through and tumbled. The sky jumped under my feet. Pink clouds rattled in my head.

As soon as the truck stopped moving, I started. The truck was turned upside down and the cab was crushed partly into the sand. There wasn’t much in the way of the cab left. Or Papa. I kicked at pieces of the cab until it released me into the grass and debris. There was blood somewhere on my back, hot like I stood partly in the sunlight, but I couldn’t find it right away. My hands were sticky with lemon and blood. I walked away from the truck before it could do something like explode. I wondered where Papa’s phone was. There was a lot of wreckage to search for it. The crickets hummed noisily as I walked back to the road.

It was twilight, and all of the clouds were black or purple. Cicadas sang too, in the trees. One dropped out of a tree and hit my shoulder, hard as an acorn, as I walked down the road. It was like there were no more cars, as I walked.

My lip was in danger of letting me down, so I bit it to keep it steady. I turned away from the church and the pickup and started walking home.

In the new world, I hoped there wouldn’t be any cars.

Art by Frederico Infante

Text by Lucie MacAulay

This Kind Winter

Tonight is the longest night of the year. Before sunset, there will be blood in the water.

It’s the kindest winter I’ve ever seen. The sun is a cruel beacon, bright and heatless, turning the sea into a piece of black and silver foil. It shifts over the brown sand, curls into white caps farther out. The cliff face that curls close to the water on my left keeps the wind from tossing everyone on the beach into the sand. The patterns in the sand on the shore are made from people only, walking the Ley line.

Horses run up and down the beach as well, but they run in the water, churning up sediment and pebbles instead of just sand. They race over part of the line, filled with the energy of its activity. The road for the race this year has been mapped out, from the black water to the cliffs to the tussock grass beyond. That is the trickiest part of the road. It begins in the water. And you should never turn your back on the sea.

For the last month, there is not a part of this land where I have not tasted the air. I have breathed in this beach, and the wet smell of the rock, and the dusty grass. My face is chapped and raw from the wind, from my hair snapping against my cheeks. My thighs have been aching for weeks, from sitting in a saddle, from running. When the pain recedes, that is a sign to push harder. My back is twisted up from climbing onto my horse and dropping again, from swimming and sprinting. I have not known a full night of sleep in ages. I have not eaten enough to fill myself in weeks. I have not heard my name spoken in a month, only shouted across sea and sand.

There is fire in my chest.

My brother leads me toward the start of the race, across the beach. A couple of neighbours say hello to my brother on the way down. A race official eyes me and must think that I am too young to be here, because his mouth twists down and goes still. One of our elderly neighbours, Thomas Beecham, takes a moment of our time. My brother stops in the sand. Thomas says, “This one is very young to be in the race, isn’t he? Just lost all of his baby teeth, hasn’t he?” When this gets no response from my brother, he turns to me. “Connor Hanegan, don’t you think you’re young to be in the races?”

“I think I’m young enough to be in the races.” Let him parse that out. Several of the usual racers this year have dropped out from old age. He dropped out not long ago. His face cannot decide whether it is amused or unhappy. He speaks to my brother for a moment, lowly, about the game and age, but there are no rules about age restrictions. I know; I’ve checked.

My brother has too. It is a brief exchange. “These are violent races,” Thomas says to me. “Be careful. I can think of better ways to end your life if that’s what you’re looking to do.”

I look at him until he realizes he isn’t going to get another answer. I wait for him to walk away on the sand first, then I have to jog to keep up with my brother.

Everywhere along the beech are racers getting ready to start. There are a few new horses on the beach, a few more nightmares tossed up from the sea. They rear against their equipment, even the ones that have been trained well. They are not meant for bits like normal horses. One of them rears and paws at the sand. It is the colour of the water behind it. All of the horses are the colours of an autumn night: black, grey, red, brown, orange, gold, silver. Some of them are decorated for the race. Some people believe it is a blessing, or that their talismans bring the rider closer to the Ley line. I would not trust an herb or a bell or a metal charm to keep my horse focused. They would sooner turn back to the sea than follow someone’s directions all the way down the racetrack. That is part of why the track doubles back to the sea. But they are most dangerous on the shore. Water horses with flowered garlands have torn riders to bits in the surf. And two years ago one of them dragged its rider out too far and down. The body washed up, or part of it, almost two weeks later.

When mam told my brother and I not to turn our backs on the sea, she was not talking about the waves. The horses are swift as nightmares, and as hard to detect coming. You would not know until its jaws were around your collar. And, stuck on the Ley line, separating yourself from the beast is not always possible.

My brother’s horse is fast, but without great endurance. She is panting not far away on the shore, being held almost still by our neighbour, Killough. She foams at the mouth and turns on the spot.

She loves the race. She hates the track. Any track that leads her from the ocean is her enemy.

My brother’s mare only needs to make it as far as the grass. Then there is only a short distance along the line that he will be riding her. At some point, all of the riders will dismount and run. It is up to them to have trained their horse to stay in one spot. My brother has trained a month for this, running when he is not riding, riding when he is not sleeping.

“Help me here, Connor,” my brother says. He is holding his sash. It drapes over both shoulders and ties around the bottom of the rib cage. It is the same blue-black colour as his horse. The race officials, and the crowd, will know who he is by his sash. Some riders adorn theirs with talismans or embroidered sigils so they will be remembered. My brother is remembered without.

A man from the village passes. He hails my brother as he leads his horse. His arms are made of rock, his legs meant for moving villages. They look almost as muscular as the beast that he’ll keep between them. “Fine morning, Connor Hanegan,” he calls. Something in my stomach stirs at that, being called to across the beach like I am another racer, another contestant. Like I am a part of this, as much as he or my brother. In a year, I will be. But Thomas Beecham was right- I am too young this year. I nod to the man from the village. My brother and I get his saddle situated on the mare. His hair is stiff with salt. He has not been away from the beach for days. I think there is as much salt in his blood as is in the sea.

He is not frightened of the water, but as I pass him his bottle of water, I can tell he is unsettled by the mare. She does not like the people, or being separated from the beach. I think she will follow direction, but her hesitation makes my brother unsure.

I wish I could join him. I am a sure rider.

When the horses begin to assemble on the beach, on the line, the air changes. It is the Ley line, not just awake, but paying attention. There are very rarely this many people on it, with this kind of intention, all in one spot. The mare gets more difficult to hold. My brother wrestles with her a little, trying to sooth her until her she stops snorting. She will ride very fast today.

My brother hands me the reins once she has calmed a little. He adjusts his sash and double checks her saddle- you can never be too sure. There is salt on both our lips, and they are chapped. I lick at mine, though it does not make it better. My brother bites his lips. I have seen him race for years, and this is the first year I see his fingers slip on the knot of his sash. He is not keeping himself as close to the mare as he can. She frightens him.

I have been on this mare without a saddle. Bareback, I have felt the heat of her body beneath me. The wind buffeting me, the drop of her hooves like thunder in the sand and on the rocks. I have been sprayed by the sea and by the dirt thrown up by her hooves. I know that on this beast, someone could win the race.

I put a hand on her nose. Most of the horses do not like this, but I do it slowly, so she can see and smell my hand. I stroke the velvety part of her face, following the grain of her hair.

“Move! What are you doing?” my brother says. His voice is sharp enough that the mare snaps her head away from my hand. They are an agitated pair. “Keep your hand away from her face, unless you’d like to lose it. This is no friendly creature you’re standing next to, you know? Come away, or do you think you’d look handsome without a nose?”

I do not come away, just drop my hand away from the mare. Her head is dipped forward. I speak to her, lowly, so my brother cannot hear it, and so it might sound like the wind.  Her ears prick forward again.

My brother sees my lips move. He steps forward and draws me away by the wrist. “Help me up, now. Then get on up to the cliffs. It’s about time. Here-” I steady him as he swings over the horse’s back, into the saddle, settling his feet.

The horse moves under him immediately. His wrists and hands get to work trying to hold her in one place. She is restless as a stallion. The mare moves the bit in her mouth. Her head tilts, like she is trying to watch two different directions at once. I would tell him that is not the way to do it, but it is not me up on her, and I do not have the reins.

I look at her to make sure she remembers what I’ve just told her. Bring him back alive, in one piece. My brother is not careless in the race, but you do not need to be careless to suffer a loss. I look up at my brother and say, “Luck. I’ll see you after.” My brother steadies the mare to be able to reach down and pat my shoulder. Neither of find goodbyes particularly agreeable.

I go up to the cliffs to watch with the spectators. We are in the safest part of the cliffs, where, when the horses pass us, they should already be taken with the enchantment of the Ley line. A couple this year have not forgotten the sea, and they turn back the moment their hooves touch chalk. My brother makes it all the way to the grass, dismounts, draws a circle in the grass with the dirt, and begins to run. He mounts the mare again once he’s returned and heads down the Ley line, toward the sand.

He has just about won the race when the horse beside his clamps enormous teeth around his shoulder and drags him into the water.

I breathe in a breath of sand that I do not release again. The water has gone still, the riders frozen. I cannot hear horse’s hooves. I see nothing but those teeth in my brother

Then sound returns. My brother falls sideways off his horse. He falls into the water and stands, lurching toward the shore. It is not his black mare that goes for him, but the other rider’s horse, a gold one, that gets a grip of him. Red froth bubbles up on top of the water where he thrashes. Several horses come in behind him and if he is not already dead by the horse’s teeth, he is dead from the trampling. His elbow bobs on top of the water. The black mare dives into the sea, missing it more than she wants a meal. The Ley line tingles with energy, as it always does when someone dies on it. Blood is still surfacing, but not because my brother is alive. The sea is churned to peaks that day.

When they drag my brother away from the reddened surf, they tell me not to look at him. I do, but I see instead my brother as he climbed on the mare, a heart full of fear.

Now, I know better.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay

The Apocalypse, Almost

Of course, the end of the world loomed close more than once an era. Commoners really had no idea how close they’d come to the end and how many times they had. The kings always felt a little bad for letting it slip this close without appealing to the gods for some sort of saving, but they found that despite the economic consequences, there was always a rise in the approval of the people when the king stepped up to offer food, housing, blankets, alcohol- anything to help them get through the apocalypse. Ajax didn’t care much for approval, and the apocalypse had really only gotten so close to happening because he’d skipped his trip to the temple to watch Twin Peaks from the living room couch. This was a pitiful thing to do with his night, he thought. What was even more pitiful was the fact that no one could seem to come up with a better alternative. There were things and people to do, but he’d done them all. Not the people, but enough to tire. He always had more options, but here he was. Twin Peaks. He was on the second episode.

He knew, in the way that he only gave half of his attention to, that the apocalypse was coming. He didn’t want to offer to help. He wanted to be called upon. But this was the downside to commonor ignorance. Having never looks the end of the world in the face, they did not know exactly how desperate they should let circumstances get before they called upon him for help. They might wait to see the state of the next dawn before they asked him, and the next dawn might not even come. He couldn’t quite tell if it would. He’d only just seen Laura’s father burst into tears.

Kaylin was not in the mood to hear it when she phoned. She was also impervious to his apologies, even when there was a speckle of sincerity on them. Kaylin, he also thought, was not her name. He thought this every time she came to see him. But no ruler ever went by their first names in public. Partially because it was only members of the royal family and the gods that could speak them, and partially because they did not necessarily want to say them. They tended to accumulate (depending on where you were from) unnecessary vowels, or unflattering consonants. Ajax was not his real name either, but his name was made for someone with three tongues and a lot of time on their hands to say. It had left his mother sweating to say it in its entirety. One day, some royal relative’s name would anger the gods and bring about an entirely separate apocalypse. No amount of prayer made by any royal family would help. Kaylin, or whatever her name was, told Ajax that he’d been putting off saving the world again because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to live in it.

“I beg to differ,” Ajax replied. He was in a silk robe. He’d gotten it from an eastern country, imported, and it had cost him as much as it would have to feed one of the villages in his kingdom for a month. But it was a beautiful shade of seafoam green that a common girl had once told him made his green eyes look luminescent. This was the sort of thing to him that seemed celestial, godly. Kings liked godliness and despised it. There was only one step between kings and gods, but as kings did not have supernatural powers, it was not a step that could be overcome. The flattery and his luminescent eyes were as close to magic as Ajax was going to get.

Kaylin made a gloriously resentful noise on the other end of the line. “You don’t beg for anything. What did your last slave die of anyway?”

This was because Ajax had suggested Kaylin end the apocalypse instead of hm. Sovereigns did not like to pray in the place of others, and it wouldn’t make him look very good in front of the gods. He cared more about how he looked in front of Kaylin than the gods. Ajax wold have apologized, but his father had taught him that kings did not apologize. They did not make mistakes, or commit misdeeds worth apologizing for. Beside, Ajax didn’t really wish for the earth the fold under a rain of asteroids or boil under a sheet of molten rock from a sulfurous explosion. It was just that he didn’t want to put in the effort to stop it.

“Don’t answer that,” Kaylin said. “For goodness’ sake. What is it, anyway? Flu, I heard. I’ll go ask them to stop it.”

He told her how nasty the flu was. What the gods wanted for it. Kaylin snorted.

“This is something you could have fixed a week ago,” she told him. “If it had taken out any of my kingdom you can bet I would be asking the gods to contain it just to your country. I’ll take care of it, I don’t mind. No, really. And you’re welcome. Which temple?”

He told her.

Kaylin snorted again. “I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

Ajax didn’t care much for correspondance, but: “Come over. Let’s do something. One of those unity between nations, things. We’ve done nothing but praying for ages.”

Kaylin hung up on him. She didn’t call him back, but the flu receded. In between episodes of Twin Peaks, Ajax checked the news. The number of cases coming into the hospital had slowed to a trickled, then ceased all together. The flu could not be caught from contaminated bodies. Patients were already making a remarkable recovery. The flu was fleeing from the respiratory system as the news caster spoke. Ajax had little to do but watch Twin Peaks again. The gods might be upset with him, but they’d been negotiated with. He was both bored and wary of truly forcing himself into action. How many people had the gods been planning to take out with that flu?

A few day later, Kaylin’s entourage was knocking at the door and holding it open for her when she stepped inside. She stepped all the way inside, to the private reception chambers. Ajax shooed everyone outside. He didn’t like anyone except himself getting ogled in the private reception chambers. But Kaylin was lovely, with dusky, dark skin and lips the colour of squid ink. She had eyes as yellow as a wild cat’s. She looked furious and deadly.

“Were you wearing that when I called?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at his seafoam robe. “How bored are you?”

Ajax pulled his robe tightly around himself. He felt that this moment was a misrepresentation of his natural glory. The chamber itself was a bit of a mess with papers and several cups of coffee from different nations. He thought he liked something from Asia, or a blend from Africa. It was interesting to put different flavours of dirt in your mouth. He offered her a cup of flavoured, hot dirt and reminded her that if she wanted to drink from a clean mug she had to call for one herself, and then fix the coffee maker herself. He had someone who usually did it for him, but he’d sent them out. Kaylin took one of his pre-existing mugs and topped it up. She sat on a daybed and eyes the seafoam robe. Ajax opened his eyes wide, so she could see how luminescent they were.

“You can’t wear that,” Kaylin said.

Ajax looked down at himself. “I certainly can. I have evidence right now that I can.”

“You can’t wear that out.”

“Out? Outside? Where to?”

Kaylin said, “You said you wanted to do something unifying.”

Ajax did want to do something unifying, just without the rest of the court. The rest of the court wasn’t present, though. While Kaylin sipped her transcontinental coffee, he went in search of proper outdoor robes. As a king, he had a plethora of robes to choose from. As Ajax, nothing was what he wanted to wear. Kaylin turned her head while he changed in and out of one and another. The country ran itself outside and Ajax finally settled on something embroidered with winged snakes and man-eating flowers. It was resplendent, even if it wasn’t seafoam. It was the fourth most expensive robe in his closet, but this was a special occasion.

Kaylin looked back at him three hours later. She’d dumped the contents of each coffee cup down the sink and found his liquor. She was drinking either red wine or watered down blood when she assessed his outfit. “Somewhere no one knows us, then.”

“Is it too much?” Ajax said. “I can tone it down.”

“I really don’t think you can,” Kaylin said. “It’s fine. Let’s just go.”

Outside, in Ajax’s kingdom, he took stock. He sometimes forgot that this was the kingdom he’d chosen to create, from his father’s. All choked with people, cars, stray cats and dogs. Every alley branched off into a warren of alleys, thin as corridors. Everywhere, people of different colour, race, religion, gender, tunneled and dispersed. Ajax had been enchanted by the multiculturalism of it once, but that was the state of the world, now. And people were really no different. Not to kings. They shred this with gods. The commoners looked like a frantic population that did not share a common goal with Ajax. He could not exactly tell any of them apart.

It was a girl that caught his eye. Kaylin’s too. Not because the girl was beautiful or he particularly desired her. Though she was beautiful. But she was young, with a china-doll face and huge black eyes, and a skein of silky golden curls down her back. She was tossing her ball quite close to a fountain. The fountain was deep and the ball heavily weighted. Kaylin and Ajax both knew a story when they saw one. The gods loved stories like this, and kings liked to make them happen, with a little help from the gods. It was easier when a god was the direct subject of a story, but surely one of them was willing to give a hand here. Ajax prayed and, when the girl tossed her ball into the fountain and broke into tears, watching it sink, a frog leapt onto the fountain’s edge to offer its services. It had a voice and a personality. Making it human would be a little trickier, but the kings and the gods had time. Really, if it was speaking full sentences to the girl, it was halfway to human already. The girl had to take the frog home, first, and who knew where that was anyway?

Ajax fetched a samosa and a couple vadas and trotted happily back to Kaylin. It was a little obvious that he was pleased with himself. A king’s happiness was almost never out in full force, but his was right now. He turned it accidentally on a poor passerby, who tripped and spilled her trundle buggy of produce. A god melted in the sky, reminded of why they were so fond of humans, and why they cared for them at all in the first place. Kaylin, beside him, was reminded too, in a way that bothered her. Particularly because she knew this story too. The gods loved romances that spanned countries or conflicts. So several were made happy when she leaned forward to kiss Ajax.

Ajax had not been kissed by her before. He’d kissed many of his own subjects, brought to him by his face or the gods’ will, not by a phone call. He felt warmed by several degrees, like a polar ice cap melting. He was sure something had gone wrong with him. Everything had gone sharp at the edges for a moment. The streets and the faces, like it had been when he’d only been his father’s son, before he’d inherited the kingdom. There were hundreds of stories to tell in this square. He need only insert himself in one to know the rest of it.

“That felt more like the apocalypse than anything,” Ajax said.

“Well, keep an eye out,” Kaylin said.

Art by Maja Wronska

Text by Lucie MacAulay

All Of Her Choices

The best people for spreading lies are the pretty ones. The majestic and regal ones. The ones who charm the birds from the trees, sing the storm to sleep. They are the best at turning the tables, tilting the lights. If you look upon me and see only darkness, it is their doing. If I am the thing that creeps in the shadows, it is because she made me this way. I had done nothing to the king’s daughter. Nothing she did not ask.

I knew her before she explained who she was. Everyone within the sea knew the king’s strange daughter. The one with a propensity for throwing herself at the shore, for dragging herself onto the beach, for crusting her scales with sand, for the sake of watching the people on the rocks. She was grossly anxious when she swam into my home. Her hair amassed around her, uncut. The king’s daughters never cut their hair until marriage. Through it, I could see her lovely face, beautiful like the patterns of sunlight on water.

Her spine was rigid. A new tension crept into her shoulders when she entered my home. She was the kind of creature bred to fear the space outside of her territory. The shadow of a passing, overlarge fish might look to her as threatening as a bilious cloud of blood. It is always hard for the sheltered to discern true threat, since they have never been threatened.

I gestured her in. She did not see me the first time, until the gentle movement of my fingers became an aggressive movement of hands and elbows. She flinched and approached slowly. I am not comely or gilded like the folk of the court. I was raised among algae and pebble and coral. My hair and skin and eyes are the colour of the dirt from which I come. It never bothered me, until she appeared. And even then, it only bothered me very little.

I was not a vain thing.

“Are you a witch?” the king’s daughter asked. I could not recall her name. Her forehead was smooth and unlined, except when she raised her brows. She had never had a worry in her life before now, and her skin was unused to the effects of it. She clasped her hands in front of me in an artificial sort of gesture.

“A magician,” I said. We share with humans a certain dislike for the word witch. In those times, being a witch and living at the same time was not likely.

“What is your name? I would like to trust you if, if I only knew your name.”

I shrugged this aside. Names were not necessary. I said, “I’m help. That is all.”

She smiled. It was a hopeful smile. This was the first terrible thing love had done to her. I knew it as soon as I saw it upon her face. The thing about love was that it was not only poison, but a poison that one thought could be remedied by further doses of it. If she were smart, she would have asked me for an antidote. She would have asked me to make it impossible for her to love him. “I don’t know if you can help. If you can bring us together. I did not mean to love someone from the shore, but I do. My father would never allow us to live together. I just want a choice.”

This, I liked. I believed in choices. I said, “I cannot make him one of us. But I can make you a human.”

Suspicion and joy warred upon the king’s daughter’s face. Her face had clearly been used poorly. It was unprepared for so much confusion. I ignored the look she gave me, as though she could see all the way around me, and inside of me, and was still suspicious. “In exchange for what?”

At least the king’s daughter was not entirely stupid. Just a victim. I had sympathy for her; no one had ever told her she would need those skills her royal father had never taught her. Here was the world, and no one had told her she would have to face it. “Your voice. I can give you legs, but I need something of yours in return. It could be your eyes, but I assume you want to see the one you love.”

She was apprehensive, as people are when they’re about to amputate a part of themselves. “But how will I speak? How will I communicate with him? He does love to hear me sing.”

“He will have to love some other part of you,” I said. “I am sure there is much to love. But not if you waste away down here for the rest of your life, pining. There are other ways to communicate.”

Wasting away didn’t sound appealing to her. She gestured, to indicate that she did not know how to give me her voice. I told her I would be gentle, but when I approached her she had to hold herself still, as though I were a barracuda or a hungry tigerhead.

I coaxed it from her throat. The voice lived in many parts of the body, but the place it could mostly be found was the throat. My finger brushed her throat when I took it, and she nearly flinched. Her voice was a soft, fluttering thing between my palms, but I could see that it was beautiful. Of course he would have loved to hear her sing.

I pointed at her tail. Not a tail much longer. She would have to find her way to the surface.

Surprise and delight lit her lovely features.

“Don’t thank me,” I said. Her tail was beginning to split. I helped her reach the surface first.

It was less than two months when I next saw the king’s daughter. In that time, the kingdom had fallen into disrepair while the king searched the chasms and sandbars for his daughter. I was silent and unintrusive. I had not seen the king’s daughter. Perhaps she could be described to me? But they had no time for it. The king’s daughter coaxed me to the ocean’s surface. Even voiceless, she could force the sea to listen to her. I came when called and found her on the beach, unaccompanied, scandalous by the people’s standards.

She had been weeping, that was evident. Her eyes were puffy and red, and she had to discretely wipe her nose upon the lace cuff of her sleeve before she spoke. The sun had almost sunk below the waves. There was light cast across one of her ankles, peeking out from under her dress. She did not continue to weep when I appeared. She did start, still unnerved by my appearance. Love had taken its toll. Her face was bored by despair. Her forehead settled into familiar lines when she furrowed her brows. She clasped her hands to her chest and wrote in the sand, “Witch. Magician. I did not know if you would come. I did not have your name to call for you. I need your help, as I needed it before. Only your pity can help me.” Her movements were less lovely outside of the water.

This, I doubted. But I swam a little closer to her, until I could prop my elbows upon a rock. She recoiled a little, though not as much as the first time. “And what are you doing here, in tears?” I asked. “I thought you were with your true love. What could mar this for you?”

The king’s daughter looked both pitying and indignant. She wrote, “I gave up my voice for him. And he loves me, but he does not love me as much as another. She can speak. She is from a kingdom on land. How can I make him love me?”

I shrugged. I was not in the business of telling people who to love, orally or magically. Magic worked only so well. If I were to enchant this man, there would be a part of him, deep down, that was aware of the enchantment. That kind of festering poison was almost as bad as love.

The king’s daughter was taking the poison to heart. It had struck an artery. “You must help me,” she wrote. “I will give you anything.”

I knew of only one course of action that would help her, because the poison had dug deep, and there was nothing to do now but abstain from it until the rest drained. “You must give him up. I can give you back your voice now, and you will speak and sing again, but you must return to the water. Your legs will be gone.”

She reeled back and bit her lip. If she had had a voice then, I am sure she would have turned it on me. “No,” she wrote. She wrote it several times, then smoothed out the sand with her hand again. Her fingers fumbled as she wrote. “That is not what I asked for. I must make him love me, but I cannot without my voice. Ask for something else, and give me my voice back.”

There was nothing else to give me but her eyes, and when I told her this, she shook her head and pointed at what she had written already. She did not understand exchange, and I was beginning to curse her father again for her ignorance. And herself. Instead I thought of something new. It was magic of the kind I did not do, but I pitied her.

“If this man kisses you,” I said, “before the setting of the sun, three days from now, you will remain a human forever, and he will love you, with all of his heart.” This was a little bit of a lie- I am not proud of that. “If you do not, then come back to me, and I will return you to the sea, with your voice. That is all I can offer you.” And it was. This was the truth.

The king’s daughter clapped her hands together, delighted again. She looked almost as though she did not mind my terrible appearance, or my presence. Her gaze strayed to the road, to the end of the shore, away, away. “I can ask from him one kiss,” she wrote. “He will have to give it to me. I love him so dearly.”

“I am sure you will fair well,” I said. There was no point in saying anything further. She had made her choice.

I swam a little farther out and watched her walk away along the shore. Her legs must have been aching, but she could not tell. She did not even see it as an option- not loving him. The wind brushed away her words in the sand.

I knew what the problem was before she came to tell me. The sun had long gone, and so she brought a candle to the shore, and warned me back so she had space to write in the sand in front of me. The shadows made sharp all the anxious angles of her face. The lines that would not fade beside her eyes and on her forehead. She was lovely and older, in only a few months. “He did not kiss me,” she wrote. I was not surprised. She was sorrowful, and raging. “You must make me human longer.”

“I cannot,” I told her. She had ceased crying a time ago. She dug her fingers into the sand beside the candle. Wax fell on to the back of her hand. “I warned you that if you could not kiss him, then I could only offer you your place in the sea.”

She recoiled, and this time it was not because of my appearance, but because of my certainty. I had done all I could do for her. Her only option was the return to the sea. The poison had set in too deep. It might not even be allowed to drain. And if it did not, it might fester instead, and transform. “Take this,” I said. I held up my palm. There was a perfect blade on it, something I’d scavenged from a human wreck. Something I had made my own. “Put it deep into his heart, and you will be able to return to the sea with your voice. Otherwise, you will die.” I had done all I could for her.

Her eyes flashed. She snatched the dagger from me. It glanced across my palm; blood welled there. “You tricked me,” she wrote.

I said nothing. I knew what she would choose, in the end. She was more kind than I gave her credit for, because in the end it was not his life that she gave up.

And she did return to the sea. It was the best of the options. Anyway, she had used up all of her choices.

Art by Erin

Text by Lucie MacAulay

The Tiger In My Car

I knew she would take it the wrong way when she got here. She wasn’t a fan of most animals, but she’d always had a problem with cats. In theory, the bigger the cat, the bigger the problem. Mia would be apoplectic when she saw the tiger in my car.

I had to walk around all of my evo to see just how much tiger was wedged into it. It was much more tiger than should have been possible, and more tiger than I thought was actually attached to a tiger. As far as wild cats went, it was the largest I’d ever seen, and there was something primal to the build of it. This cat hadn’t weathered hunting seasons and greedy humans and global warming; this cat had weathered terraformation, ice flows, the birth of islands, wars and natural disasters. There was a chip in the tiger’s left ear. The ear flicked when I opened the driver’s side door and dropped into the seat. “Look, if you don’t get out now, my friend is going to be pissed when she gets back.”

The tiger didn’t have much space for adjusting positions. My car is small, but there’s only so much space that can be robbed by a tiny budget. And efficient tiger or large person would have been able to fit themselves in here. As it was, the tiger was draped over the reclining passenger seat and part of the tiny backseat. It growled and the car shook. Its eyes were not quite feline. They reminded me of the mosaic, earthen eyes of a crocodile. When it spoke, it sounded like the force of buffeting wind. “It was not my choice to get in, and it is not my choice about whether or not I will be getting out.”

“What?” I didn’t know how this answered my question. In what language would that answer my question? “You’re in my car by accident? Can’t you just-” I made a shoving motion with my hands, as blatant as I dared. I was very aware that it was a large jungle cat and I was a young woman with recent acquisition of her license.

The tiger tried to tilt its head. This was as much of an answer as I was getting, I supposed. I raked my hair away from my face. The city was too hot in the summer; sunshine bounced off every available surface. Tarmac, glass, steel; even in a residential area everything conspired to bake the residents. There was not much to do but wait. I turned on the air con. It sputtered to life a couple minutes before Mia got back.

Mia took it the wrong way immediately. She was good at that.

“Seriously?” she said. She was in the blouse she’d worn to some meeting that day in which she’d sat on the sidelines and waited for her employer to say something worth noting. She was essentially a net for all of the remarks that her employer missed and forgot. From the state of her notepad after these meetings, he looked pretty clumsy with remarks in general. I’d asked if he had a problem with memory or work ethic. This is why you should be grateful to work for Jonathan, she’d said. Mia glared at the tiger. “I told you to commit yourself to your job, Tara. Not to getting out of it. And the office party? I went to incredible lengths to get you an invite. If you didn’t want to go, you could just say so. Fine, maybe you’ll decide I’m worth your time when I get back.”

“Oh, come on,” I said. “I didn’t do this on purpose. I didn’t ask it to get in. Beside, why are we taking my car? You’ve got one. Just-”

Mia had perfected this to an art; turning away so quicly she looked less rude, and more as though she’d been pushed. There was something performance art about it, as though from a different angle, someone might interpret that I were the one pushing her away. She went to seize her own car, a prettier, German car that had seen more of the world than either of us.

I rounded on the tiger. “Fantastic.” This was not the tone to take with a tiger, but the tiger was not in the position to round on me. “We were going to get dinner too, before the party. You know what’s in the house now? Pasta. Leftover pasta. From the last three nights. Fuck this, we’re going to the store.”

The tiger didn’t protest. It would have been simple to leave the tiger there if not for the fact that there truly was nothing left among the apartment but dried out pasta. There is a tolerance threshold for all things, including pasta, no matter what shape I decided to buy. It was pretty suitable for a university student, but I was supposed to have surpassed that now. Mia’s cupboards were empty by virtue of not having eaten in the apartment for several days. She did have generous coworkers.

“Your tail,” I said. The tiger’s tail was wrapped around the gear shift, and was partly on my lap. It was heavier than a tail really had right to be. I’d read once that tigers use their tails to communicate with other tigers, and to balance when they made quick turns while running after prey. I would be more enthused about a giant, muscled tail on my lap if I thought the tiger was going to catch us dinner with it.

The tiger drew in its tail. I reversed out of the parking spot. About seventy percent of the reflections in my rear and side view mirrors was orange and black. I tried not to run over any lives while I backed out of the parking spot. Everything was still living when I left.

“Who was that?” the tiger asked in its windy, impact voice. It was the sort of androgenous voice that I thought thoughts in in my head. Asking the tiger what gender it considered itself sounded like a great way to get hurt.

“My roommate. Friend. Best friend. Except for right now, maybe,” I said. I pulled onto a main street and aimed for the highway. The car, I noticed, tipped a little toward the tiger’s side.

“Is that my fault?”

“Huh?” I switched lanes quickly and cut off a driver. I felt bad right up until he gave me the finger. It was like seeing a kitten try to menace you with their claws. I laughed and sped up. “She’ll get over it. She likes the idea of working with her best friend in the same office. She couldn’t do that anymore if we weren’t best friends.”

“Are we speeding?” the tiger wondered. It was strange that a tiger might have a concept of speeding. How quickly could a tiger run? This one might easily overtake the car at the speed we were going now. I pressed on the gas a little more, until I could feel the engine’s mini-seizures through the floor.

“Not… now,” I replied, pulling the car quickly off the interstate. There was a grocery store/supermarket here. It was the sort of place you came to buy fertilizer for your plants, diapers for your baby, fancy but disgusting cake for your racist mother-in-law. A teenager was probably smoking in the back somewhere. “You good?” I climbed out of the car and double-checked with the tiger. It had been locked in my car before I found it, but that hadn’t had anything to do with me. When the tiger nodded, I locked my car- for the safety of the tiger more than the safety of others; there were some crazy people in Maryland- and went to the door of the supermarket.

I imagined that some day I would be able to wring in a proper supper on a debit card instead of rifling for change for two small yogurts and a bakery bagel at the cash. There was a woman a little younger than me behind the counter, looking unimpressed with the entire exchange. I hoped the tiger didn’t expect something. I hadn’t seen any bloody carcasses in the store, and I really didn’t have the money for once anyway.

“If I had my credit card, I could have done some real shopping,” I said to the tiger. I put the bag with yogurt and bagel in the console between us. “Like, noodles or something. Pay day is in a week, though. Yeah, this is it for now. When did you last eat?”

The tiger thought for a moment. “Not too long ago. A day, two, perhaps. I am not hungry yet.”

“Hungry for what? Rabbits? Birds? Buskers?” I asked.

“Your roommate looked good,” the tiger said.

There was no expression to the tiger’s face; it was impossible to tell from its voice or face whether or not it was joking. Because there was no way I was letting it get at Mia, I decided the tiger was joking. “You’re welcome to her,” I said. “If you get hungry for someone’s terrible boss, let me know.”

On the way home, we pulled up next to a cop car at the red light of an intersection. The immediate result was that I had to pull over. The tiger was sitting right in front of the license and registration, which were in the folded up mirror in the passenger seat.

“It’s there.” I pointed.

The police officer followed my finger, then shifted a couple inches to the right, to the tiger’s muzzle. It was clean, but when you considered that the muzzle was easily as big as my palm, there were sudden, new, difficult dimensions involved.

“Can you get it out for me?” the cop said. I shrugged and leaned back. There was a perfect path through my window, to the opposite mirror. “It is your duty to get it out for me. Don’t make me ask again. The tiger can’t properly wear a seatbelt, can it?”

“Maybe.” But there was no way for the tiger to actually sit up in the seat with the seatbelt on in the position it was in now without cracking something spinal. The cop ticketed me for speeding, for the funny sound the engine made- the engine was always betraying me this way, and though I dearly loved the Evo, I was beginning to suspect it didn’t love me back- and for the tiger’s seat belt. I would add the ticket to pile of bills I could not pay. When we got back on the road, I worked my way up to a couple miles above the speed limit and very carefully did not go over. If I had been younger, I would have let the needle on the tach climb and climb. I would have kept going until cars with strobe lights stopped me. I wrestled the car straight as the tiger’s weight pulled it right and right again.

“IS this your job?” the tiger asked.

“My job?” I couldn’t be offended. What did the tiger know of the business world? “No. I actually do have a job. I’m an intern for a shareholder and business executive.” It sounded a lot better with long words tacked onto it.

“What does that entail?” the tiger asked. Then the tiger seemed to rethink the question, or to lose interest in my answer before I gave it. “What does that mean, actually? Interns do the same regardless of who they work for, to an extent, don’t they? Or are you shareholding and doing business? You could be an intern if your prime function is not being paid-”

“I was so unaware,” I said. “I did not realize I wasn’t getting paid. I didn’t know I was at the bottom of the food chain. Well, shit, there it all goes. How silly to invest in this. Just because it worked for Mia doesn’t mean it’s a viable path for me, oh no. Whatever you’re saying, it’s all right. Eventually I’ll actually be paid to do- basically what Mia’s doing.”

“And that’s what you want to do?”

“Isn’t that what everyone wants to do? Get paid to do something they love? Well, I like business.” I stopped rather abruptly because I realized I’d actually passed the turnoff for my neighbourhood. I was heading into an area that was alternately an imitation of the old Georgian homes of D.C. and an imitation of a post-apocalyptic ghetto. “And you like my car. Or you don’t. But you’re in it. Speaking of, when are you getting out? I doubt you’re really enjoying our talk that much.”

“I’m getting out when you let me out,” the tiger said “It’s not so bad.”

“What? Let you out?” I had to brake quickly again. The car behind me made a very showy screeching halt as the driver honked their horn. Everyone thought stop signs only needed to apply to the rest of the world. “I’m not keeping you in.”

“But the door is locked,” the tiger said.

I could see from here the tiger was lying. “It is not.”

The tiger nudged the roof with its head. “It is. I can’t get out.”

“Are. You. Serious?”

The tiger looked mournfully so.

I took the next exit to try to turn around. I’d come out in the kind of area that did not know that cars could look like my car looked. That is to say, that they looked like less than five figure cars. This area was probably pretty if you’ve grown up around cream baseboards and decorative paperweights. “That would require dismantling my one true love. I can’t do that to my Evo.”

“What about business?”

“What about it?” I snapped. I had no desire to be lost here. Already one of the natives had lowered their monocle to look at me. Possibly just their reading glasses. But you wouldn’t have seen reading glasses like those in my corner of Maryland.

“Do you not love business?”

“That is not the point at all. And yes. Would I be eating a plain bagel for dinner if I didn’t love business?”

The tiger flexed its paws. I’m sure there were claws somewhere in there, but as they weren’t in my line of vision and I was pissed, I couldn’t care at the moment. “Your friend made it sound lie you have a problem committing. Do you really? You seem committed.”

“Thank you!” But I wasn’t sure the tiger was saying it to agree with me. Taxpayers’ money hemmed us in on either side with groomed greenery and sculpted landscape. “You could tell Mia that. You know, if you were sticking around at all.” I slowed near a sign. I slowed some more to try to read it around the tiger. I slowed until I was almost sure I was going backward. The sign directed me toward squalor. I headed in that direction. “Anyway, did I ask you?”

“You didn’t have to. We were already having this conversation. This is what happens when you have a tiger in your car. It wouldn’t happen to me.”

“What? The tiger in my car is you!”

“Don’t yell at me,” the tiger said. Its whiskers twitched this time. I decided that maybe it did actually have an expression.

We doubled around near the interstate. There were a few miles of road to burn before I would reach a ramp. On the way there, the houses regressed. The degree of shittiness rose. The population of gas stations and corner stores increased. The number of completed houses declined. Several were under construction. One was still piled with tools outside of it, and a construction crane. “I’m not yelling. You are a tiger. In my car. Telling me- what, to get a life? Well, this is life. You do the things you don’t want to do to do the things you do want to do.”

“And business is what you want to do?” the tiger said. It didn’t have eyebrows, just long whisker-like hair over its eyes that rose when it asked the question.

“Who knows?” I said.

I pulled the car over sharply in front of the work-in-progress house. I drove over a wrench or a rock or a dug-up artifact. There was an auto garage across the street eyeing the tiger, and me, and the situation in general. “The thing is, tiger, I have this one plan. If I don’t have it, I’d have to make a whole new plan. You know how hard it is to start from scratch?”

The tiger blinked. One of its eyes was glowing phosphorescence under the street lamp. “Choices.”

I pointed at the windshield of the Evo. I said a silent prayer. “Do you think you’d be able to climb out through that?”

The tiger considered. Then it nodded.

I trudged through the yard, which looked more like a bombsight than the partially built house. I hefted a sledgehammer over my shoulder.

I queued up beside my windshield.

Inside the Evo, the tiger shut its eyes, preparing for impact. “Be gentle,” it advised.

“No point,” I said. I swung.

Art by Adam S. Doyle

Text by Lucie MacAulay