Rachael K. Jones
Makeisha In Time
Originally published in the August 2014 issue of Crossed Genres Magazine, edited by Bart Lieb, Kay T. Holt, and Kelly Jennings
Makeisha has always been able to bend the fourth dimension, though no one believes her. She has been a soldier, a sheriff, a pilot, a prophet, a poet, a ninja, a nun, a conductor (of trains and symphonies), a cordwainer, a comedian, a carpetbagger, a troubadour, a queen, and a receptionist. She has shot arrows, guns, and cannons. She speaks an extinct Ethiopian dialect with a perfect accent. She knows a recipe for mead that is measured in aurochs horns, and with a katana, she is deadly.
Her jumps happen intermittently. She will be yanked from the present without warning, and live a whole lifetime in the past. When she dies, she returns right back to where she left, restored to a younger age. It usually happens when she is deep in conversation with her boss, or arguing with her mother-in-law, or during a book club meeting just when it is her turn to speak. One moment, Makeisha is firmly grounded in the timeline of her birth, and the next, she is elsewhere. Elsewhen.
Makeisha has seen the sun rise over prehistoric shores, where the ocean writhed with soft, slimy things that bore the promise of dung beetles, Archeopteryx, and Edgar Allan Poe. She has seen the sun set upon long-forgotten empires. When Makeisha skims a map of the continents, she sees a fractured Pangaea. She never knows where she will jump next, or how long she will stay, but she is never afraid. Makeisha has been doing this all her life.
Makeisha learned long ago to lie about the jumping. When she was nine, she attempted to prove it to her mother by singing in Egyptian, but her mother just laughed and sent her to do the dishes. She received worse when she contradicted her history teachers. It was intolerable, sitting in school in the body of a child but with the memories of innumerable lifetimes, while incomplete truths and half-truths and outright lies were written on the board. The adults called a conference about her attention-seeking behavior, and she learned to keep her mouth shut.
The hardest part is coming back. Once, when she was twelve, she was slouched in the pew at church when she felt the past tug. Makeisha found herself floundering in the roiling ocean of the Mediterranean, only to be saved by Moorish pirates who hauled her aboard in the nick of time. At first the bewildered men and women treasured their catch as a mascot and good-luck charm. Later, after nearly ten years of fine seacraft and fearless warfare, they made her captain of the ship. Makeisha took to piracy like sheet music. She could climb ropes and hold her grog with the best sailors, and even after losing an eye in a gunpowder explosion, she never once wept and wished herself home.
The day came when, at the pasha’s command, she set sail to intercept Spanish invaders in Ottoman waters. It was a hot night when they sighted the lanterns of the enemy shuddering on the waves. Makeisha’s crew pulled their ship astern the enemy’s vessel in the dark and fog after midnight. She gave the order—Charge!—her deep voice booming through the mists, echoed by the shouts of her pirates as they swung on ropes over the sliver of ocean between the ships. And suddenly an explosion, and a pinching sensation in her midriff, and she was twelve again in the church pew, staring at her soft palms through two perfect eyes. That was when she finally wept, so loud and hard the reverend stopped his sermon to scold her. Her father grounded her for a week after that.
People often get angry with Makeisha when she returns. She can’t control her befuddlement, the way the room spins like she is drunk, and how for days and weeks afterward she cannot settle back into who she was, because the truth is, she isn’t the same. Each time she returns from the past, she carries another lifetime nestled within her like the shell of a matryoshka doll.
Once, after the fall of the Roman Empire, she joined a peasant uprising in Bavaria, and charging quickly from fiefdom to fiefdom, their band pushed back the warlords to the foothills of the Alps. Those who survived sued for mercy, begged her not to raze their fields, pledged fealty to her. As a condition of the peace, Makeisha demanded their daughters in marriage to seal the political alliance. The little kings, too afraid of the barbarian-queen to shout their umbrage, conceded. They even attended the weddings, where Makeisha stood with her sword peace-tied at her waist and took the trembling hand of each Bavarian princess into her own.
Once the wedding guests left, Makeisha gathered her wives together in the throne room. “Please,” she said to them, “help me. I need good women I can trust to run this kingdom right.”
With their help, she established a stable state in those war-torn days. In time, all her wives made excellent deputies, ambassadors, sheriffs, and knights in her court.
Makeisha had been especially broken up when her time in Bavaria was cut short by a bout of pneumonia. Many of her wives had grown to be dear friends of hers, and she wondered for months and months what had become of them and their children, and whether her fiefdom had lasted beyond her passing.
She wanted to talk with her best friend Philippa, to cry about it, but her phone calls went unanswered, and so did her emails. Makeisha could not remember when she had last spent time with Philippa or her other friends here in the present. It was so hard to remember when her weeks and months were interspersed with whole lifetimes of friends and lovers and enemies. The present was a stop-motion film, a book interrupted mid-page and abandoned for years at a time. And when she did return, she always carried with her another death.
Makeisha does not fear death anymore. She has died so many times, always awakening in the present, whole and alive as before the jump. She does not know what would happen if she died in the present. Perhaps she would awaken in the future. She has never tried to find out.
She cannot remember her first death. She probably died hundreds of times in her infancy, before she was old enough to walk. Her jumps left her in the wilderness or ocean more often than not, and when she did arrive near civilization, few took pity on a strange, abandoned child who could not explain her presence. Makeisha’s mother often joked about her appetite, how from the time she was a baby, she ate like a person on the verge of starvation. Her mother does not know how close this is to the truth. These days, Makeisha wears her extra pounds with pride, knowing how often they have been her salvation.
When Philippa finally returns her calls, she reams Makeisha for slighting her all year, for the forgotten birthday, for the missed housewarming party. Makeisha apologizes like she always does. They meet up in person for a catch-up over coffee, and Makeisha resolves that this time she will be present for her friend. They are deep in conversation when she feels the tug, just as Philippa is admitting that she is afraid of what the future may bring. No, thinks Makeisha when she finds herself blinking on the edge of a sluggish river under the midday sun. Two white bulls have lifted their heads to stare at her, water dripping from their jowls.
Makeisha struggles to keep the conversation fresh in her head as she casts around for a quick way home. She chooses the river. It is hard, that first time, to make herself inhale, to still her windmilling arms, to let death take this matryoshka life so she can hasten back to the present.
She has lost the thread of the conversation anyway when she snaps back to Philippa’s kitchen. “Migraine,” she explains, rubbing away the memory of pain from her dizzy head, and Philippa feeds her two aspirin and some hot mint tea.
Makeisha resolves to do better next time, and eventually, she does. On her first date with Carl, she strangles herself with strings from the lute of a Hittite bard. On their wedding day, she detours to a vast desert that she cannot place, which she escapes by crawling into a scorpion nest. That death was painful. The next time she jumps (two days later, on their honeymoon), she takes the time to learn the proper way to open her wrists with a sharp-edged rock.
Her husband believes her when she says it’s migraines.
All of it—the self-imposed silence, the suicides, the banishing of her fantastic past to the basement of her brain—these are the price of a normal life, of friendships and a marriage and a steady job. Mundane though it is, Makeisha reminds herself that this life is different from the other ones. Irreplaceable. Real.
Still, she misses the past, where she has lived most of her life. She reads history books with a black marker and strikes out the bits that make her scoff. Then, with a red pen, she writes in the margins all the names she can recall, all the forgotten people who mattered just as much as George Washington and Louis XIV. When Carl asks, she explains how the world has always belonged to more than just the great men who were kings and Presidents and generals, but for some reason, no one wrote it down.
“I think you’re trying too hard,” he says, and she hates the pity in his eyes when he holds up his hands and adds, “but if it makes you feel happy, keep on with it.”
One day, as a surprise, her husband drove her four hours to a museum hosting an exhibit on medieval history. Makeisha screeched and grabbed Carl’s arm when she saw the posters at the entrance: eighth-century Bavaria! It had been five years and dozens of self-murdered lives since she was torn from her thriving kingdom, from her deputy-wives and her warband, but the memories were still so fresh. Her face was composed as she purchased tickets, but she bounced on the balls of her feet all the way to the front of the line.
It was the first time she had encountered any proof of a previous life. Euphoria flared in her breast when she peered into glass cases that held familiar objects, old and worn but recognizable all the same, the proof of her long years of warfare and wisdom and canny leadership. A lead comb, most of its bristles missing, its colored enamel long ago worn to gray. It had belonged to Jutte, perhaps—she had such fine long hair, although she had kept it bound tightly for her work as a doctor. A thin gold ring she had given to dark-eyed Berchte in commemoration of her knighthood. And the best of all: a silver coin stamped with her own stylized profile, her broad nose jutting past her Bavarian war helm.
There was a placard on the glass. Makeisha read it thrice, each time a little slower, thinking perhaps she’d missed something. But no. Early medieval objects from the court of a foreign king. He reigned in Bavaria for about thirty years.
He? He? Makeisha stormed back to the entrance, demanded to speak with a manager, her vision swimming a violent red, her hand groping for a pommel she did not wear anymore. It was wrong. It was all wrong, wrong, wrong. Her wives, assigned a husband and stripped of their deputyship! Their legacy, handed to a manufactured person! Carl begged her to tell him what was wrong. Makeisha realized she was shouting oaths in ancient German, and that was when she felt the familiar tug in her navel, and found herself spinning back, back, further back than she had gone last time, until she arrived on an empty beach beneath a moon with a smooth, craterless face.
Her practiced eye spotted three ways to die on its first sweep (drowning, impaling, crushing), but there was Jutte’s comb to consider, and that placard. When she gave up time travel, she never thought she had surrendered her legacy, too.
Makeisha turned her back on the ocean and walked into the woods, busying herself with building a fire and assembling the tools she would need for her stay, however long it might be. She had learned to be resourceful and unafraid of the unfamiliar creaks and groans in the ferny green of the prehistoric underbrush.
She chipped a cascade of sparks into her kindling, and that is when Makeisha formed her plan.
She is done with the present, with the endless self-murder, with the repression and suffocation and low stakes.
A woman unafraid to die can do anything she wants. A woman who can endure starvation and pain and deprivation can be her own boss, set her own agenda. The one thing she cannot do is to make them remember she did it.
Makeisha is going to change that.
No more suicides, then. Makeisha embraces the jumps again. She is a boulder thrown into the waters of time. In eighth century Norway, she joins a band of Viking women. They are callous but good-humored, and they take her rage in stride, as though she has nothing to explain. They give her a sword taller than she is, but she learns to swing it anyway, and to sing loudly into the wind when one of the slain is buried with her hoard, sword folded on her breast.
When she returns to the present, Makeisha has work to do. She will stop mid-sentence, spin on her heel, and head for the books, leaving an astonished coworker, or friend, or her husband calling after her.
She pours everything into the search for her own past. One of her contacts sends her an email about a Moorish pirate, a woman, making a name for herself among the Ottomans. A Spanish monk wrote about her last voyage, the way she leapt upon her prey like a gale in the night, how her battle-cry chilled the blood. Makeisha’s grin holds until the part where the monk called her a whore.
This is accepted without question as factual by the man writing the book.
She is obsessed. Makeisha almost loses her job because of her frequent forgetfulness, her accidental rudeness. Her desk is drowned in ancient maps. Her purse is crammed with reams of genealogies.
In her living room, which has been lined from wall-to-wall with history books ever since Carl moved out, Makeisha tries to count the lives stacked inside her. There are so many of them. They are crowding to get out. She once tried to calculate how many years she had been alive. It was more than a thousand. And what did they amount to? Makeisha is smeared across the timeline, but no one ever gets her quite right. Those who found the cairn of her Viking band assumed the swords and armor meant the graves of men. A folio of her sonnets, anonymous after much copying, are attributed to her assistant Giorgio.
“You’re building a fake identity,” Philippa tells her one day, daring the towers of books and dried-out markers to bring Makeisha some soup. “There weren’t any black women in ancient Athens. There weren’t any in China. You need to come to grips with reality, my friend.”
“There were too,” says Makeisha fiercely, proudly. “I know there were. They were just erased. Forgotten.”
“I’m sure there were a few exceptions. But women just didn’t do the kind of things you’re interested in.”
Makeisha says, “It doesn’t matter what I do, if people refuse to believe it.”
Her jumps are subdued after that. She turns to the written word for immortality. Makeisha leaves love poetry on the walls of Aztec tombs in carefully colored Nahuatl pictograms. She presses cuneiform into soft clay, documenting the exploits of the proud women whose names are written in red in the margins of her history books. She records the names of her lovers in careful hanzi strokes with horsehair bristles in bamboo books.
Even these, the records she makes herself, do not survive intact. Sometimes the names are replaced by others deemed more remarkable, more credible, by the scribes who came after. Sometimes they are erased entirely. Mostly, the books just fade into dust with time. She takes comfort knowing that she is not unique, that the chorus of lost voices is thundering.
She is fading from the present. She forgets to eat between jumps, loses weight. Sometimes she starves to death when she lands in an isolated spot.
Carl catches her one day at the mailbox. “Sorry for just showing up. You haven’t returned my calls,” he explains, offering her a sheaf of papers.
Makeisha accepts them and examines the red-stamped first page of their divorce papers.
“You need to sign here,” Carl says, pointing upside down at the bottom of the sheet. “Also on the next page. Please?”
The last word carries a pleading note. Makeisha notes his puffy eyes and a single white hair standing out in the black nest of his beard. “How long has it been?” she asks. She has lived at least three lifetimes since he left, but she isn’t sure.
“Too long,” he says. “Please, I just need your signature so we can move on.”
She pats her pockets and finds a red pen. Makeisha wonders how many decades or centuries until this signature is also altered or lost or purposely erased, but she touches pen to paper anyway.
Halfway through her signature, she spends twenty-six years sleeping under the stars with the Aborigines, and when she comes back, the rest of her name trails aimlessly down the sheet. Carl doesn’t seem to notice.
After he leaves, she escapes to India for a lifetime, where she ponders whether her time travel is a punishment or purgatory.
When she returns to the present again, Makeisha weeps like she did when she was twelve, and her heart was breaking for her days as a pirate. Perhaps it is not the past that is yanking her away. Perhaps the present is crowding her out. And perhaps she has finally come to agree with the sentiment.
In her living room, among the towers of blacked-out books, Makeisha sees six ways to die from where she stands. Perhaps the way out is forward. Break through the last matryoshka shell like a hatchling into daylight.
But no. No. The self-murders were never for herself. Not once. Makeisha is resilient. She is resourceful, and she has been bending the fourth dimension all her life, whether anyone recognizes it or not.
A woman who has been pushed her whole life will eventually learn to push back.
Makeisha reaches forward into the air. With skillful fingers that have killed and healed and mastered the cello, she pulls the future toward her.
She has not returned.
Who Binds and Looses the World With Her Hands
Originally published by PodCastle in February 2015’s Artemis Rising feature, edited by Dave Thompson and Anna Schwind.
1. Stranger
On days when Selene locked me in the lighthouse, an old familiar darkness would well up within me, itching my skin like it had shrunk too tight to contain my anger any longer. I had grown accustomed to the rage’s ebb and flow, sometimes bubbling near the surface, sometimes dormant as a seed awaiting the right time to break open. But it always rose to high tide on my days of confinement.
I knew better than to complain to Selene. I often watched from the windows of the lanthorn, the little room which housed the lighthouse’s beacon, when the merchants made landfall. From my distant perch, I could just make out Selene, resplendent in dyed blue wool, hands spinning impossibly fast in the bewildered men’s faces. Out beyond the dock, two green arms of land reached toward our island home in an incomplete embrace. That was the Mainland, where sorcerers lived. Long ago, it was sorcerers who built our lighthouse in the stone branches of the ancient petrified tree.
Do not talk to the Mainlanders, Selene always warned, hurrying me up the stone steps which spiraled inside the tree’s heart. She would repeat the warning later at night, when we watched the beacon flash round and round through the window over our bed. I would nestle against her chest, and her hands would dance out tales about sailors, how their days at sea would drive them so mad with lust they would seize any woman when they made landfall. I am sorry to hide you, she would say. I do not want to lose you. The apology mollified the darkness inside me, but never quelled it completely.
I first found the stranger by blind luck, while herding my sheep along the shoreline at dusk. He had washed up on the leaf-shaped stones which littered the island, his sloop dashed to splinters on the rocks. We never expected visitors this late in the season. The shipping traffic had already dried up before the winter storms, and anyway, except for the rare merchant, no-one visited Corail Island on purpose.
He stank of kelp and wet wool. He looked so ugly I almost left him for the gulls. It had been years since I had seen a man up close, not since the old lighthouse keeper died. His beard revolted me. His chest rose and fell unsteadily, but he did not respond to my signs or prodding. I supposed he was a hearing man.
Selene found me crouched on the rocks beside my catch, trying to wake him. What is this? she said, her signs formed around the jar of oil in her left hand. Why did you not fetch me immediately? She knelt and checked his breath, and her expression soured. Give me your shears.
I hesitated. She had an evil look in her eye. Why?
So I can finish what the ocean failed to do.
Selene! Horrified, I touched the shears in my apron pocket and took a step back.
She flashed a devilish grin, the dangerous spark subsumed by playfulness. My Love, she signed, stroking my chin, I am only teasing. I just want to cut off his beard.
I questioned whether it had been a joke. I could never be sure with Selene. You might offend him, I said.
We cannot read lips through all that hair. The shears, please.
She set to work shaving him, mounding hair like limp, gray seaweed on the rocks for the gulls like limp. I worried what the stranger might think when he awoke, but then again, I had never seen Selene ask permission for anything.
2. Selene
I do not remember a time in my life before Selene.
This is my history as she told it: for her tenth birthday, her father the lighthouse keeper bade her name a present. She asked for a playmate, a girl, Deaf like herself, so the old man went ashore and found me.
I don’t recall the Mainland, not mother nor sibling nor beast nor town. I remember only the island, the great petrified lighthouse-tree, and Selene. In my earliest impression, I see her climbing barefoot on the twisting stone roots that flowed skirt-like downhill to the island’s every part, her long dark hair floating, hair I brushed each morning with a golden comb, picking through the knots with patient fingers. When she brushed my hair in turn, she would yank the comb downward, oblivious to tangles, until my scalp stung and my eyes watered.
On that first day, Selene said, she seized my hand and claimed me for her own, naming me Girl, which looks like this: thumb stroking the cheek downward from ear to chin, which resembles the sign for long-suffering.
My name, though, is Doriane. I know it, just as I know the pulsing tide of darkness in my heart. It is the only memory left of the time before Selene.
I couldn’t help but love Selene. Her name-sign was a closed fist for S against the chest. When swung like a punch, this sign also means rebellious. When she reached the age to marry, her father again told her to name her heart’s desire, and instead of a man, she demanded me, running her own thumb down my jaw so tenderly it made me shiver. For I couldn’t help but love her. I had no one else. No one on the island but her, me, and the old man until his death. No one to speak to but Selene, my all, my world, my lover, my wife.
And my captor.
3. Spinning
Thump, thump, thump went the treadle on the floor when I did my spinning. I did not hear it so much as feel it in my skull. Thump, thump, thump—and our little cabin’s petrified walls pulsed like a heartbeat. Heart, said my hands to the tuft of wool, finger pinched to thumb in a sign that could also mean lucky. As I spun, I pictured warm things. My sheep tearing at the coarse shrubs growing in the petrified roots. The golden beacon refracting from the lens in the lanthorn. Selene curled against me in the winter, gentled by sleep, soft and strong like new yarn wound round and round the bobbin.
I was spinning when the stranger awoke and raked fingers through the stubble on his face. If he swore about his missing beard or attempted to question me, I did not catch it. My eyes focused on the fibrous cloud thinning and stretching into yarn Selene would use to run lines between the cabin and lighthouse, a web to guide her through the winter storms.
From the bed, the stranger stared at me with hungry dark eyes beneath heavy lids. He stared when I rose for water. He stared when I wound the new yarn on the bobbin. He stared like a heron hovering over waters pregnant with fish. His lips moved, but I did not catch the words.
4. Sorcery
He is a sorcerer, Selene announced as we polished smoke from the lantern panels the next morning. Wicked beasts, sorcerers. My father and I used to see them on the Mainland, always with an ensnared slave in tow. They can do that, you know: enslave you, bind your mind, if you let them talk.
How do you know he is a sorcerer? I asked.
Selene draped her polishing cloth over the window sill, where the wind off the sea set it aflutter. I saw him pull water from the air today. His cup was empty, and then I saw him drink from it moments later. He thinks we don’t notice, but Deaf people see everything. She cut her eyes toward me on the last word.
I suppressed a shiver and smoothed the worry from my features. He is our guest, I reminded her. Sorcerer or no, we cannot harm someone we have taken into our care.
Just don’t speak to him, she said, and because she was mostly in a good mood today, she pulled me close and kissed me, combed fingers through my long black hair, teasing out the tangles, only pulling a little.
Later, in the cabin, I found a folded paper beneath my basket of carded wool. From the bed, the stranger lifted an imperious eyebrow at me. He cocked his head toward Selene. I read a word on his lips: Secret. I slipped the paper beneath the batting and, remembering my sheep, made my face dumb.
5. Secrets
Since the season for storms drew near, Selene departed the next morning to string the web which served as a guide up the path to the lighthouse all winter. The moment she left, I sat down at the spindle and read the stranger’s note: We are in great danger. The other woman is a powerful sorcerer. Help me, and together we will escape to the Mainland.
I caught the man’s eye, and he struggled to stand. We have to go at once, he mouthed, and with a finger he forced my chin upwards so I gazed into his fearful eyes. Now, quickly, while the sorcerer—Words tumbled from his lips so fast I lost the speech’s thread, though not the tenor. I had never seen such terror before.
I waved for him to stop. I covered my ears and my mouth, and shook my head. The stranger paused, nodded. From a fold in his sweater, he produced a black-streaked glass pen and a bottle of black ink, objects I did not recognize. They certainly had not been in his possession when we carried him from the shore.
I accepted the pen and wrote, Where did you get these?
His neck craned to watch the door so his scrawl went crooked down the page. I made them. He pointed toward the fireplace. Paper drawn from wood. Ink drawn from soot. Glass drawn from the sand that blows from the shore.
Surprised, I threw down the sorcerous pen as if it were a viper. It shattered into three pieces against the stone floor. The stranger collected them, held them close to moving lips, and they became whole again.
You really are a sorcerer, I wrote, my script shaky.
So is the other woman, the one who has enslaved you. I will explain it on the way, but we should go. Now! He yanked my arm, stepping toward the doorway. I planted my feet and threw my weight against him, and my leverage sent the frail old man tumbling to his knees.
I grabbed the pen and wrote. She hasn’t enslaved me. She is my wife.
The old man stole another glance toward the door. His shoulders sagged. He wrote until he covered half the sheet with fine scrawl. Think about it. You know the truth. I have watched you both. She gives orders, and you obey. She is cruel to you, and you accept her abuse. I saw you last night preparing dinner. I could not follow your hand-language, but she pressed your arm against the hot kettle. And you smiled. You smiled at her, though you were in pain. You fear her.
I rubbed the pink weal on my wrist. It had already begun to heal, but the sight made the darkness surge inside me. With an effort, I forced it down again. She just has a temper, I wrote. But she loves me. She doesn’t mean to be cruel.
He appraised me, a lean and hungry look. He scrawled again, Did you know the sailors have a superstition about this place? That they avoid it at all costs? This island was built as a prison, and that woman is the prisoner. She has enthralled you too. I will free you, if you will help me.
You’re wrong, I answered. I have known her my whole life. I would know.
Have you ever been off the island? he asked.
Of course. I was born on the Mainland.
But do you remember it?
I bit my lip. I recalled the long days locked inside the lighthouse at her insistence. Selene said it was for my own protection. You’re wrong, I wrote again. I slammed the pen on the stone floor, nevermind the shards, and stormed out of the cabin to find my wife.
6. Speech
On the twisting path that climbed up to the lighthouse, Selene navigated the gray petrified tree roots, winding the yarn between them. From a distance she resembled a spider in a huge blue web. I rubbed the pink burn on my wrist. How I loved her and feared her. She paused from her labor, wiped her face, and cast a look downhill, caught me staring. Grinned, waved, and name-signed, Girl!
I returned the wave. I could not recall the last time she had called me by my real name, Doriane. Perhaps she never had.
Overhead a seagull wheeled and flew off toward the bay, toward Mainland, and all at once my skin felt constricting, the air thick and oppressive.
Perhaps I really was enslaved.
The sorcerer waited for me at the cabin’s door, lips drawn in a wolfish sneer. He had already repaired the glass pen. I stretched out my hand for it and wrote. What must we do to escape?
I will teach you sorcery so you may cast the spell to break her hold.
Fine, I said, but you mustn’t harm Selene. I still loved her, after all.
Fair enough. But you may feel differently when your soul is free. Now pay close attention.
The sorcerer snapped the glass pen in half.
Sorcery is a force that gives form to substances, he said. It presses meat into bone, squeezes rain from the air and stone from wood. All these things have a bound state, and a loose state. He indicated the petrified walls. Sorcery binds these wooden walls into a state of stone. Speak to the element to bind it. He whispered to the pen’s shards. The glass ran together like water, rejoining into one smooth piece. This can be reversed too, he said, and his lips moved again near the glass. At once it crumbled into black sand. He spoke a third time, drawing out the sand between long fingers, and it fused into the form of the pen. Binding and loosing. You try. He passed me the pen.
I don’t speak, I reminded him, touching my ear and mouth.
He pressed lips together, and his eyes darted toward the door again. He fetched a pillow from the bed and teased out a gray feather. Watch me, he said, then held the feather to his chin. Before his puckered lips, the down vibrated and swayed. He passed it to me. As you breathe out, shape the air with your lips.
I practiced under his instruction for a few minutes, and then he said, Next, you add vibration. He placed my hand on his throat, and it buzzed beneath my fingertips. I touched my own neck and imitated him until I felt my throat buzz. He reached for the pen, but before he could write, his eyes snapped toward the door, wrinkles flattening into a mask of terror.
Selene stood in the doorway, face flushed and chest heaving.
7. Solitary
She beat me, of course, her cheerful mood evaporated. Do not talk to the Mainlanders, she said, and her fists resembled her name-sign. Selene said the blow to my jaw. Selene, Selene on each ear. Selene, I tried to sign back, but she would have none of it in her rage. She pulled my hair and kicked at my ribs when I knelt at her feet. She beat my ears the worst, and when I cast myself toward the sorcerer, he turned away, brushing black sand from his palms.
She locked me in the lanthorn as punishment. I tried not to touch my raw, swollen face as I curled on the floor, doubly imprisoned, as if I could run anywhere but home. I fought with the darkness inside me, struggled to master it, but with each hour of my confinement it swelled, gained momentum.
That night, she had pity enough to bring me my drop-spindle and distaff so I might occupy myself with spinning. I watched the lantern rotate and the lens flash its warning from my small prison. The spindle whirled like the lantern in miniature. The fibers stretched between my fingers. Heart, they groaned, for my knuckles were scratched and swollen from defending my face. I touched my bruised throat and it vibrated with sobs that shook my shoulders.
What is the distance between love and hate? No more than a finger’s width.
The darkness flared. My hands on the yarn shifted. Now, index finger to thumb, they said puppet, which with a different movement can also mean detach. Sorcery is binding and loosing.
Sustained by darkness, I spun late into the night, fingers shuddering, mind afire. The wind from the window made me shake and gutter like a flame with no glass to protect it.
8. Storms
By the time Selene forgave me, the storms were upon us. Winter on Corail Island is like this: the sea rises and grabs the rocks. It rolls all the way up to our doorstep, and Selene must wade up the path to the lighthouse, clinging to the webbing between the great petrified roots so that she will not be swept out to sea. The sheep we gather into their fold, and feed them from stocks stored against the lean months. Selene occasionally slaughters one for the fresh mutton. She always makes me select the one to die.
When I returned to the cabin, the sorcerer had been relegated to a mat near the fire, feet and hands hobbled by ropes. Selene wanted to kill him, but there were things even she feared, and the laws of hospitality did not yield lightly. Once taken under our roof, we were beholden to him until Spring. It did not mean, though, that Selene would permit him to leave the island alive.
I forgive you, Selene said when she brought me down from the lighthouse. You are too trusting, my Love. He tried to enslave you, to turn you against me. Do you believe me now? You cannot trust sorcerers.
I wanted to believe her, but my half-healed cuts ached, and I no longer knew who to trust. I wanted to speak to the sorcerer about it. I often caught him picking through the woodpile and the sand on the floor. In the mornings I sometimes awoke to his eyes fixed upon my face, his lips moving, and I felt the hateful old darkness stirring within like a slumbering dragon rousing in its hoard. The sensation thrilled me, but I distrusted it. Perhaps the enthralled always experienced their binding as a sense of freedom.
Do not talk to him, Selene warned me whenever my gaze strayed toward the fire. Now that her temper had passed, she wrapped me in her arms at night, and I did my best to ignore the old yellow bruises on her hands that bore witness to her violence. When she fell asleep, I would roll toward the wall, and in the darkness make my throat vibrate under my fingers and watch wisps of my hair flutter in the unheard sounds.
9. Separation
Be careful, I told Selene, wrapping her in a heavy blue mantle as she prepared to brave the storm.
She stroked my cheek with a thumb—Girl, it said—and kissed me. I will be back in an hour. Storms meant shipwrecks. Storms meant Selene must tend the lighthouse all night long, following the ropes laid like highways from the cabin to the tree, through black ice and bracing cold and beating rains that blinded her.
Selene pushed against the wind, a hand on the guiding rope anchored to the front door as the dark swallowed up her steady, retreating steps. The frozen air assaulted me, and the heat pulled me from behind, and then the sorcerer appeared at my elbow, wearing his broken bindings slung over one shoulder. Sorcery is binding and loosing, I remembered. Selene’s knots had never really restrained him.
Now is the time, he mouthed. Cut the rope and lock the door and be rid of her. He reached for the anchor line, a black glass knife in hand.
No! I shouldered my way between him and the door. It was not supposed to be like this. He had promised. The sorcerer seized my shoulders. He had gained weight during imprisonment, and I could no longer tip him to the floor with a little leverage. We struggled for dominance, and the wind from the open door fought for possession of my body. He slashed at the anchor rope. I threw my shoulder into his stomach. The glass knife sunk into my arm, and pain exploded in my brain. Suddenly woozy, I went limp. He dragged me inside. I scrabbled at the floor, punched at him, kicked. Selene! screamed my fists. Selene! Selene!
He wound my hands with cord from my spindle, knocking over the wheel without bothering to detach the distaff. Hands bound, I was muted. The wind beat the cabin, and answering from within my breast, shuddering sobs tumbled from my throat. The storm drummed against the stone like a woman’s fists against a locked door.
10. Signs
Pain kept me lucid. I forced myself to hold to the pain, and reviewed my predicament. The wound in my upper arm shrieked. My hands were bound together in a sign that meant slave. I twisted my wrists against the biting cord until I could touch my fingers to it. I signed to the strand, pressing it hard between cold fingers. Detach, I reminded it, shifting motions, detach. Sorcery is binding and loosing. Detach, detach! The ropes severed and slackened. Blood rushed into my aching hands. I lay still and scanned the cabin.
The fire had died to red embers, and shadows blanketed the corners. The severed bobbin lay by the door. My captor hunched by the fire, running his fingers through a sand-heap, shaping it into an enormous glass plate. Selene had not returned; perhaps she’d reached the lighthouse. I wanted her. I needed her. If I found her, I swore I would never disobey her again. Against my back, the storm’s vibrations faded from the stone wall. I commanded my throat silent.
Occasionally he sneered at me, each tooth gleaming in the yellow light. I remembered my sheep and made my face dumb like theirs. Passive, stoic, unthinking, like a good slave. Between my fingers, I pressed the cord’s broken ends together and signed heart, and then lucky. The ends joined, whole again. Slowly, so very slowly, I tied a loop, a lasso, a noose. Puppet, my fingers screamed for eyes that could read it, puppet, puppet, puppet!
Quickly now, before he could understand, before he could suspect, I rolled to my feet and charged. His head snapped toward me and he raised the glass thing at my approach—it resembled a great lens with keen edges. I flung my lasso over his neck, and hit the mark, and he was caught like a sheep. He sank to his knees, eyes wide with terror, hands clutching at the glass sheet so hard it sliced open his palms. Blood ran down his wrists. He couldn’t move. Puppet, I signed, victorious. My puppet! I laughed and laughed in his helpless face, the dark swelling up around me like great black wings.
Then I remembered Selene.
11. Silence
I found her frozen between the lighthouse and cabin when the dawn touched the horizon. The sorcerer had cut all the guidelines behind her while I lay bound. Around her shoulders she still wore the blue wool mantle I had woven for her. In death, she looked peaceful. I hated it. I wanted her mouth, her eyes, and most of all her hands. I wanted her hands around my waist at night. I wanted her fists to beat me. Mostly I wanted them to speak to me, but they were silenced now. I had no one left to speak with in the whole world. In her death, my hands too were muted, useless as shears missing a blade.
I turned to my Puppet, who trailed behind me up the path. Why? I demanded, grief-stricken. Why did you do this?
His elbows jerked upward, and before his horrified eyes, his hands danced out an answer. The lighthouse was built to warn people away from this place. Something older and more powerful than sorcery was imprisoned here, stripped of its power and bound into a different form, like the stone tree.
I know that already. You told me Selene was a sorcerer.
No. She was only your keeper, just like the lighthouse keepers before her. His eyes flashed and his hands danced faster. Any sorcerer who could control you would soon be the greatest of all sorcerers. He would have anything he wanted. None would dare oppose him, for fear of you.
No. This is a lie, I said, trembling, but the darkness inside my heart stirred again, lifted its head, sniffed the winds. I knew in my gut my Puppet could not lie to me. Why did you kill Selene? You could have just enslaved me and fled.
You and the lighthouse are bound with one spell, and you cannot leave until the spell breaks. The keeper was part of it. Her death is another broken link in the chain. Now you need only speak the right words, amplified with a lens, and you will be free.
I made my Puppet carry Selene back to the cabin and lay her by the fire while I began weaving her shroud. My heart contracted within me. I was being pinched, drawn out, twisted like fleece into something hard. All my fear had died with my Selene. Now all I had left was rage.
We wrapped her in the shroud in the morning. I hadn’t slept while weaving it. I needed no rest anymore. A darkness I could no longer master sustained me. Puppet tended the sheep and cooked the food, body obedient and eyes terrified. I knew what must be done next.
At dusk I placed her body on a great twisted root thrown up like an arch between the lighthouse and cabin. Two stone leaves held her eyelids closed. I placed the lens in her folded arms, pinning it to her breast.
Speech is sorcery, he had said. Sorcery is binding, and sorcery is loosing. I brought my hands down in a sign that meant fury doubled, and the glass shuddered, amplifying the magic like the lanthorn amplified light. A great wind kicked up beneath Selene’s body and shook the island down to its foundations. A cloud of dry brown leaves kicked up from the ground, flew out to sea where they crashed into the waves like the bodies of dead birds. Puppet sat down in surprise on the tree root, which rippled with colors as it crackled and unpetrified all along its length, running up the slopes to the lighthouse, where the great old tree unstiffened and swayed in the wind again. Free.
But it was still a dead tree. Sorcery could not bring it back, nor could it bring back Selene.
She looked so fragile in death. I wondered how I ever feared her. Only Selene ever restrained me, and she was gone.
I gave Puppet an axe and set him to chop the roots while I packed the things we would need from the cabin: some clothes, my drop-spindle and distaff, and Selene’s golden comb, which I wore in my hair. I released the sheep from their pen. Free, I signed to them, and for good measure, lucky.
Puppet waited for me at the dock in a boat he had magicked from a tree-root. I gave him the oars. I would see the world at last—the world Selene had shielded from me.
As I stepped into the boat, the darkness bloomed within me, my body a seed from which uncurled the first tentative shoot of a ravenous, strangling weed. I raised a hand and signed, Doriane. In the dusk, a thin line of smoke trailed from the lighthouse, and then suddenly the whole tree ignited.
Tonight, the Mainlanders would see a different beacon from Corail Island. Let them wonder. Let them fear.
12. Siren
My Puppet has gotten what he always wanted, although not in the way he wished. He is known far and wide as the greatest of sorcerers, who holds the Siren of Corail Island in thrall. Her voice, they say, drives men mad. Her singing, they say, lures sailors to their death on the rocks. Only the mighty sorcerer, the greatest of sorcerers, stands between the world and her fury.
Kings daren’t turn us away. Emperors hurry to appease us. When Puppet stands before the mighty, I sit on a stool beside him and work the drop-spindle and distaff. When he speaks, they listen, but always their eyes are upon me and my fingers, which flick and twist in weird patterns they do not comprehend. They cannot understand the words, but my spells work all the same.
They think they are safe because I do not speak. They think, in my silence, I do not control each and every one of them like so many puppets dangling on so many nooses cinched about their throats.
Oh, but they are wrong. They are so wrong about me. It is not my voice they should fear, but my name, which they will read at last on my dancing fingers when all the threads go taut.
Originally published by PodCastle in February 2015’s Artemis Rising feature, edited by Dave Thompson and Anna Schwind.
1. Stranger
On days when Selene locked me in the lighthouse, an old familiar darkness would well up within me, itching my skin like it had shrunk too tight to contain my anger any longer. I had grown accustomed to the rage’s ebb and flow, sometimes bubbling near the surface, sometimes dormant as a seed awaiting the right time to break open. But it always rose to high tide on my days of confinement.
I knew better than to complain to Selene. I often watched from the windows of the lanthorn, the little room which housed the lighthouse’s beacon, when the merchants made landfall. From my distant perch, I could just make out Selene, resplendent in dyed blue wool, hands spinning impossibly fast in the bewildered men’s faces. Out beyond the dock, two green arms of land reached toward our island home in an incomplete embrace. That was the Mainland, where sorcerers lived. Long ago, it was sorcerers who built our lighthouse in the stone branches of the ancient petrified tree.
Do not talk to the Mainlanders, Selene always warned, hurrying me up the stone steps which spiraled inside the tree’s heart. She would repeat the warning later at night, when we watched the beacon flash round and round through the window over our bed. I would nestle against her chest, and her hands would dance out tales about sailors, how their days at sea would drive them so mad with lust they would seize any woman when they made landfall. I am sorry to hide you, she would say. I do not want to lose you. The apology mollified the darkness inside me, but never quelled it completely.
I first found the stranger by blind luck, while herding my sheep along the shoreline at dusk. He had washed up on the leaf-shaped stones which littered the island, his sloop dashed to splinters on the rocks. We never expected visitors this late in the season. The shipping traffic had already dried up before the winter storms, and anyway, except for the rare merchant, no-one visited Corail Island on purpose.
He stank of kelp and wet wool. He looked so ugly I almost left him for the gulls. It had been years since I had seen a man up close, not since the old lighthouse keeper died. His beard revolted me. His chest rose and fell unsteadily, but he did not respond to my signs or prodding. I supposed he was a hearing man.
Selene found me crouched on the rocks beside my catch, trying to wake him. What is this? she said, her signs formed around the jar of oil in her left hand. Why did you not fetch me immediately? She knelt and checked his breath, and her expression soured. Give me your shears.
I hesitated. She had an evil look in her eye. Why?
So I can finish what the ocean failed to do.
Selene! Horrified, I touched the shears in my apron pocket and took a step back.
She flashed a devilish grin, the dangerous spark subsumed by playfulness. My Love, she signed, stroking my chin, I am only teasing. I just want to cut off his beard.
I questioned whether it had been a joke. I could never be sure with Selene. You might offend him, I said.
We cannot read lips through all that hair. The shears, please.
She set to work shaving him, mounding hair like limp, gray seaweed on the rocks for the gulls like limp. I worried what the stranger might think when he awoke, but then again, I had never seen Selene ask permission for anything.
2. Selene
I do not remember a time in my life before Selene.
This is my history as she told it: for her tenth birthday, her father the lighthouse keeper bade her name a present. She asked for a playmate, a girl, Deaf like herself, so the old man went ashore and found me.
I don’t recall the Mainland, not mother nor sibling nor beast nor town. I remember only the island, the great petrified lighthouse-tree, and Selene. In my earliest impression, I see her climbing barefoot on the twisting stone roots that flowed skirt-like downhill to the island’s every part, her long dark hair floating, hair I brushed each morning with a golden comb, picking through the knots with patient fingers. When she brushed my hair in turn, she would yank the comb downward, oblivious to tangles, until my scalp stung and my eyes watered.
On that first day, Selene said, she seized my hand and claimed me for her own, naming me Girl, which looks like this: thumb stroking the cheek downward from ear to chin, which resembles the sign for long-suffering.
My name, though, is Doriane. I know it, just as I know the pulsing tide of darkness in my heart. It is the only memory left of the time before Selene.
I couldn’t help but love Selene. Her name-sign was a closed fist for S against the chest. When swung like a punch, this sign also means rebellious. When she reached the age to marry, her father again told her to name her heart’s desire, and instead of a man, she demanded me, running her own thumb down my jaw so tenderly it made me shiver. For I couldn’t help but love her. I had no one else. No one on the island but her, me, and the old man until his death. No one to speak to but Selene, my all, my world, my lover, my wife.
And my captor.
3. Spinning
Thump, thump, thump went the treadle on the floor when I did my spinning. I did not hear it so much as feel it in my skull. Thump, thump, thump—and our little cabin’s petrified walls pulsed like a heartbeat. Heart, said my hands to the tuft of wool, finger pinched to thumb in a sign that could also mean lucky. As I spun, I pictured warm things. My sheep tearing at the coarse shrubs growing in the petrified roots. The golden beacon refracting from the lens in the lanthorn. Selene curled against me in the winter, gentled by sleep, soft and strong like new yarn wound round and round the bobbin.
I was spinning when the stranger awoke and raked fingers through the stubble on his face. If he swore about his missing beard or attempted to question me, I did not catch it. My eyes focused on the fibrous cloud thinning and stretching into yarn Selene would use to run lines between the cabin and lighthouse, a web to guide her through the winter storms.
From the bed, the stranger stared at me with hungry dark eyes beneath heavy lids. He stared when I rose for water. He stared when I wound the new yarn on the bobbin. He stared like a heron hovering over waters pregnant with fish. His lips moved, but I did not catch the words.
4. Sorcery
He is a sorcerer, Selene announced as we polished smoke from the lantern panels the next morning. Wicked beasts, sorcerers. My father and I used to see them on the Mainland, always with an ensnared slave in tow. They can do that, you know: enslave you, bind your mind, if you let them talk.
How do you know he is a sorcerer? I asked.
Selene draped her polishing cloth over the window sill, where the wind off the sea set it aflutter. I saw him pull water from the air today. His cup was empty, and then I saw him drink from it moments later. He thinks we don’t notice, but Deaf people see everything. She cut her eyes toward me on the last word.
I suppressed a shiver and smoothed the worry from my features. He is our guest, I reminded her. Sorcerer or no, we cannot harm someone we have taken into our care.
Just don’t speak to him, she said, and because she was mostly in a good mood today, she pulled me close and kissed me, combed fingers through my long black hair, teasing out the tangles, only pulling a little.
Later, in the cabin, I found a folded paper beneath my basket of carded wool. From the bed, the stranger lifted an imperious eyebrow at me. He cocked his head toward Selene. I read a word on his lips: Secret. I slipped the paper beneath the batting and, remembering my sheep, made my face dumb.
5. Secrets
Since the season for storms drew near, Selene departed the next morning to string the web which served as a guide up the path to the lighthouse all winter. The moment she left, I sat down at the spindle and read the stranger’s note: We are in great danger. The other woman is a powerful sorcerer. Help me, and together we will escape to the Mainland.
I caught the man’s eye, and he struggled to stand. We have to go at once, he mouthed, and with a finger he forced my chin upwards so I gazed into his fearful eyes. Now, quickly, while the sorcerer—Words tumbled from his lips so fast I lost the speech’s thread, though not the tenor. I had never seen such terror before.
I waved for him to stop. I covered my ears and my mouth, and shook my head. The stranger paused, nodded. From a fold in his sweater, he produced a black-streaked glass pen and a bottle of black ink, objects I did not recognize. They certainly had not been in his possession when we carried him from the shore.
I accepted the pen and wrote, Where did you get these?
His neck craned to watch the door so his scrawl went crooked down the page. I made them. He pointed toward the fireplace. Paper drawn from wood. Ink drawn from soot. Glass drawn from the sand that blows from the shore.
Surprised, I threw down the sorcerous pen as if it were a viper. It shattered into three pieces against the stone floor. The stranger collected them, held them close to moving lips, and they became whole again.
You really are a sorcerer, I wrote, my script shaky.
So is the other woman, the one who has enslaved you. I will explain it on the way, but we should go. Now! He yanked my arm, stepping toward the doorway. I planted my feet and threw my weight against him, and my leverage sent the frail old man tumbling to his knees.
I grabbed the pen and wrote. She hasn’t enslaved me. She is my wife.
The old man stole another glance toward the door. His shoulders sagged. He wrote until he covered half the sheet with fine scrawl. Think about it. You know the truth. I have watched you both. She gives orders, and you obey. She is cruel to you, and you accept her abuse. I saw you last night preparing dinner. I could not follow your hand-language, but she pressed your arm against the hot kettle. And you smiled. You smiled at her, though you were in pain. You fear her.
I rubbed the pink weal on my wrist. It had already begun to heal, but the sight made the darkness surge inside me. With an effort, I forced it down again. She just has a temper, I wrote. But she loves me. She doesn’t mean to be cruel.
He appraised me, a lean and hungry look. He scrawled again, Did you know the sailors have a superstition about this place? That they avoid it at all costs? This island was built as a prison, and that woman is the prisoner. She has enthralled you too. I will free you, if you will help me.
You’re wrong, I answered. I have known her my whole life. I would know.
Have you ever been off the island? he asked.
Of course. I was born on the Mainland.
But do you remember it?
I bit my lip. I recalled the long days locked inside the lighthouse at her insistence. Selene said it was for my own protection. You’re wrong, I wrote again. I slammed the pen on the stone floor, nevermind the shards, and stormed out of the cabin to find my wife.
6. Speech
On the twisting path that climbed up to the lighthouse, Selene navigated the gray petrified tree roots, winding the yarn between them. From a distance she resembled a spider in a huge blue web. I rubbed the pink burn on my wrist. How I loved her and feared her. She paused from her labor, wiped her face, and cast a look downhill, caught me staring. Grinned, waved, and name-signed, Girl!
I returned the wave. I could not recall the last time she had called me by my real name, Doriane. Perhaps she never had.
Overhead a seagull wheeled and flew off toward the bay, toward Mainland, and all at once my skin felt constricting, the air thick and oppressive.
Perhaps I really was enslaved.
The sorcerer waited for me at the cabin’s door, lips drawn in a wolfish sneer. He had already repaired the glass pen. I stretched out my hand for it and wrote. What must we do to escape?
I will teach you sorcery so you may cast the spell to break her hold.
Fine, I said, but you mustn’t harm Selene. I still loved her, after all.
Fair enough. But you may feel differently when your soul is free. Now pay close attention.
The sorcerer snapped the glass pen in half.
Sorcery is a force that gives form to substances, he said. It presses meat into bone, squeezes rain from the air and stone from wood. All these things have a bound state, and a loose state. He indicated the petrified walls. Sorcery binds these wooden walls into a state of stone. Speak to the element to bind it. He whispered to the pen’s shards. The glass ran together like water, rejoining into one smooth piece. This can be reversed too, he said, and his lips moved again near the glass. At once it crumbled into black sand. He spoke a third time, drawing out the sand between long fingers, and it fused into the form of the pen. Binding and loosing. You try. He passed me the pen.
I don’t speak, I reminded him, touching my ear and mouth.
He pressed lips together, and his eyes darted toward the door again. He fetched a pillow from the bed and teased out a gray feather. Watch me, he said, then held the feather to his chin. Before his puckered lips, the down vibrated and swayed. He passed it to me. As you breathe out, shape the air with your lips.
I practiced under his instruction for a few minutes, and then he said, Next, you add vibration. He placed my hand on his throat, and it buzzed beneath my fingertips. I touched my own neck and imitated him until I felt my throat buzz. He reached for the pen, but before he could write, his eyes snapped toward the door, wrinkles flattening into a mask of terror.
Selene stood in the doorway, face flushed and chest heaving.
7. Solitary
She beat me, of course, her cheerful mood evaporated. Do not talk to the Mainlanders, she said, and her fists resembled her name-sign. Selene said the blow to my jaw. Selene, Selene on each ear. Selene, I tried to sign back, but she would have none of it in her rage. She pulled my hair and kicked at my ribs when I knelt at her feet. She beat my ears the worst, and when I cast myself toward the sorcerer, he turned away, brushing black sand from his palms.
She locked me in the lanthorn as punishment. I tried not to touch my raw, swollen face as I curled on the floor, doubly imprisoned, as if I could run anywhere but home. I fought with the darkness inside me, struggled to master it, but with each hour of my confinement it swelled, gained momentum.
That night, she had pity enough to bring me my drop-spindle and distaff so I might occupy myself with spinning. I watched the lantern rotate and the lens flash its warning from my small prison. The spindle whirled like the lantern in miniature. The fibers stretched between my fingers. Heart, they groaned, for my knuckles were scratched and swollen from defending my face. I touched my bruised throat and it vibrated with sobs that shook my shoulders.
What is the distance between love and hate? No more than a finger’s width.
The darkness flared. My hands on the yarn shifted. Now, index finger to thumb, they said puppet, which with a different movement can also mean detach. Sorcery is binding and loosing.
Sustained by darkness, I spun late into the night, fingers shuddering, mind afire. The wind from the window made me shake and gutter like a flame with no glass to protect it.
8. Storms
By the time Selene forgave me, the storms were upon us. Winter on Corail Island is like this: the sea rises and grabs the rocks. It rolls all the way up to our doorstep, and Selene must wade up the path to the lighthouse, clinging to the webbing between the great petrified roots so that she will not be swept out to sea. The sheep we gather into their fold, and feed them from stocks stored against the lean months. Selene occasionally slaughters one for the fresh mutton. She always makes me select the one to die.
When I returned to the cabin, the sorcerer had been relegated to a mat near the fire, feet and hands hobbled by ropes. Selene wanted to kill him, but there were things even she feared, and the laws of hospitality did not yield lightly. Once taken under our roof, we were beholden to him until Spring. It did not mean, though, that Selene would permit him to leave the island alive.
I forgive you, Selene said when she brought me down from the lighthouse. You are too trusting, my Love. He tried to enslave you, to turn you against me. Do you believe me now? You cannot trust sorcerers.
I wanted to believe her, but my half-healed cuts ached, and I no longer knew who to trust. I wanted to speak to the sorcerer about it. I often caught him picking through the woodpile and the sand on the floor. In the mornings I sometimes awoke to his eyes fixed upon my face, his lips moving, and I felt the hateful old darkness stirring within like a slumbering dragon rousing in its hoard. The sensation thrilled me, but I distrusted it. Perhaps the enthralled always experienced their binding as a sense of freedom.
Do not talk to him, Selene warned me whenever my gaze strayed toward the fire. Now that her temper had passed, she wrapped me in her arms at night, and I did my best to ignore the old yellow bruises on her hands that bore witness to her violence. When she fell asleep, I would roll toward the wall, and in the darkness make my throat vibrate under my fingers and watch wisps of my hair flutter in the unheard sounds.
9. Separation
Be careful, I told Selene, wrapping her in a heavy blue mantle as she prepared to brave the storm.
She stroked my cheek with a thumb—Girl, it said—and kissed me. I will be back in an hour. Storms meant shipwrecks. Storms meant Selene must tend the lighthouse all night long, following the ropes laid like highways from the cabin to the tree, through black ice and bracing cold and beating rains that blinded her.
Selene pushed against the wind, a hand on the guiding rope anchored to the front door as the dark swallowed up her steady, retreating steps. The frozen air assaulted me, and the heat pulled me from behind, and then the sorcerer appeared at my elbow, wearing his broken bindings slung over one shoulder. Sorcery is binding and loosing, I remembered. Selene’s knots had never really restrained him.
Now is the time, he mouthed. Cut the rope and lock the door and be rid of her. He reached for the anchor line, a black glass knife in hand.
No! I shouldered my way between him and the door. It was not supposed to be like this. He had promised. The sorcerer seized my shoulders. He had gained weight during imprisonment, and I could no longer tip him to the floor with a little leverage. We struggled for dominance, and the wind from the open door fought for possession of my body. He slashed at the anchor rope. I threw my shoulder into his stomach. The glass knife sunk into my arm, and pain exploded in my brain. Suddenly woozy, I went limp. He dragged me inside. I scrabbled at the floor, punched at him, kicked. Selene! screamed my fists. Selene! Selene!
He wound my hands with cord from my spindle, knocking over the wheel without bothering to detach the distaff. Hands bound, I was muted. The wind beat the cabin, and answering from within my breast, shuddering sobs tumbled from my throat. The storm drummed against the stone like a woman’s fists against a locked door.
10. Signs
Pain kept me lucid. I forced myself to hold to the pain, and reviewed my predicament. The wound in my upper arm shrieked. My hands were bound together in a sign that meant slave. I twisted my wrists against the biting cord until I could touch my fingers to it. I signed to the strand, pressing it hard between cold fingers. Detach, I reminded it, shifting motions, detach. Sorcery is binding and loosing. Detach, detach! The ropes severed and slackened. Blood rushed into my aching hands. I lay still and scanned the cabin.
The fire had died to red embers, and shadows blanketed the corners. The severed bobbin lay by the door. My captor hunched by the fire, running his fingers through a sand-heap, shaping it into an enormous glass plate. Selene had not returned; perhaps she’d reached the lighthouse. I wanted her. I needed her. If I found her, I swore I would never disobey her again. Against my back, the storm’s vibrations faded from the stone wall. I commanded my throat silent.
Occasionally he sneered at me, each tooth gleaming in the yellow light. I remembered my sheep and made my face dumb like theirs. Passive, stoic, unthinking, like a good slave. Between my fingers, I pressed the cord’s broken ends together and signed heart, and then lucky. The ends joined, whole again. Slowly, so very slowly, I tied a loop, a lasso, a noose. Puppet, my fingers screamed for eyes that could read it, puppet, puppet, puppet!
Quickly now, before he could understand, before he could suspect, I rolled to my feet and charged. His head snapped toward me and he raised the glass thing at my approach—it resembled a great lens with keen edges. I flung my lasso over his neck, and hit the mark, and he was caught like a sheep. He sank to his knees, eyes wide with terror, hands clutching at the glass sheet so hard it sliced open his palms. Blood ran down his wrists. He couldn’t move. Puppet, I signed, victorious. My puppet! I laughed and laughed in his helpless face, the dark swelling up around me like great black wings.
Then I remembered Selene.
11. Silence
I found her frozen between the lighthouse and cabin when the dawn touched the horizon. The sorcerer had cut all the guidelines behind her while I lay bound. Around her shoulders she still wore the blue wool mantle I had woven for her. In death, she looked peaceful. I hated it. I wanted her mouth, her eyes, and most of all her hands. I wanted her hands around my waist at night. I wanted her fists to beat me. Mostly I wanted them to speak to me, but they were silenced now. I had no one left to speak with in the whole world. In her death, my hands too were muted, useless as shears missing a blade.
I turned to my Puppet, who trailed behind me up the path. Why? I demanded, grief-stricken. Why did you do this?
His elbows jerked upward, and before his horrified eyes, his hands danced out an answer. The lighthouse was built to warn people away from this place. Something older and more powerful than sorcery was imprisoned here, stripped of its power and bound into a different form, like the stone tree.
I know that already. You told me Selene was a sorcerer.
No. She was only your keeper, just like the lighthouse keepers before her. His eyes flashed and his hands danced faster. Any sorcerer who could control you would soon be the greatest of all sorcerers. He would have anything he wanted. None would dare oppose him, for fear of you.
No. This is a lie, I said, trembling, but the darkness inside my heart stirred again, lifted its head, sniffed the winds. I knew in my gut my Puppet could not lie to me. Why did you kill Selene? You could have just enslaved me and fled.
You and the lighthouse are bound with one spell, and you cannot leave until the spell breaks. The keeper was part of it. Her death is another broken link in the chain. Now you need only speak the right words, amplified with a lens, and you will be free.
I made my Puppet carry Selene back to the cabin and lay her by the fire while I began weaving her shroud. My heart contracted within me. I was being pinched, drawn out, twisted like fleece into something hard. All my fear had died with my Selene. Now all I had left was rage.
We wrapped her in the shroud in the morning. I hadn’t slept while weaving it. I needed no rest anymore. A darkness I could no longer master sustained me. Puppet tended the sheep and cooked the food, body obedient and eyes terrified. I knew what must be done next.
At dusk I placed her body on a great twisted root thrown up like an arch between the lighthouse and cabin. Two stone leaves held her eyelids closed. I placed the lens in her folded arms, pinning it to her breast.
Speech is sorcery, he had said. Sorcery is binding, and sorcery is loosing. I brought my hands down in a sign that meant fury doubled, and the glass shuddered, amplifying the magic like the lanthorn amplified light. A great wind kicked up beneath Selene’s body and shook the island down to its foundations. A cloud of dry brown leaves kicked up from the ground, flew out to sea where they crashed into the waves like the bodies of dead birds. Puppet sat down in surprise on the tree root, which rippled with colors as it crackled and unpetrified all along its length, running up the slopes to the lighthouse, where the great old tree unstiffened and swayed in the wind again. Free.
But it was still a dead tree. Sorcery could not bring it back, nor could it bring back Selene.
She looked so fragile in death. I wondered how I ever feared her. Only Selene ever restrained me, and she was gone.
I gave Puppet an axe and set him to chop the roots while I packed the things we would need from the cabin: some clothes, my drop-spindle and distaff, and Selene’s golden comb, which I wore in my hair. I released the sheep from their pen. Free, I signed to them, and for good measure, lucky.
Puppet waited for me at the dock in a boat he had magicked from a tree-root. I gave him the oars. I would see the world at last—the world Selene had shielded from me.
As I stepped into the boat, the darkness bloomed within me, my body a seed from which uncurled the first tentative shoot of a ravenous, strangling weed. I raised a hand and signed, Doriane. In the dusk, a thin line of smoke trailed from the lighthouse, and then suddenly the whole tree ignited.
Tonight, the Mainlanders would see a different beacon from Corail Island. Let them wonder. Let them fear.
12. Siren
My Puppet has gotten what he always wanted, although not in the way he wished. He is known far and wide as the greatest of sorcerers, who holds the Siren of Corail Island in thrall. Her voice, they say, drives men mad. Her singing, they say, lures sailors to their death on the rocks. Only the mighty sorcerer, the greatest of sorcerers, stands between the world and her fury.
Kings daren’t turn us away. Emperors hurry to appease us. When Puppet stands before the mighty, I sit on a stool beside him and work the drop-spindle and distaff. When he speaks, they listen, but always their eyes are upon me and my fingers, which flick and twist in weird patterns they do not comprehend. They cannot understand the words, but my spells work all the same.
They think they are safe because I do not speak. They think, in my silence, I do not control each and every one of them like so many puppets dangling on so many nooses cinched about their throats.
Oh, but they are wrong. They are so wrong about me. It is not my voice they should fear, but my name, which they will read at last on my dancing fingers when all the threads go taut.
Charlotte Incorporated
Originally published by Lightspeed Magazine in February 2014, edited by John Joseph Adams.
At night she pores over the corpus catalogues online: Incorporated Incorporated, Modern Anatomy, and Shoulders, Knees, & Toes. She weighs the merits of femur length and belly fat, redundant kidneys, attached earlobes, and pronated feet. Most people buy pre-configured corpi with symmetrical faces and standard organ kits, but she wants a custom build. Something completely unique. After work, she boots up the design software and fiddles with the sliders: thickening toes, brightening the little white crescent moons at the base of the nails, narrowing the Eustachian tubes, darkening the delicate tissues around the areolae and lips. She sorts through hardware and software options, laying tendons and tear ducts and lymphatic nets until her design is perfect.
On weekdays, she soothes angry customers at the Terrold Telecom Call Center. Each morning Mr. Dalton, her smug, incorporated boss, installs her into a generic company corpus called Hank. She knows the corpus is male not from genitalia—the company is too cheap to buy more than the torso and head—but from the thickened vocal folds. “Male voices inspire more confidence than female ones, Hank. Basic psychology,” Mr. Dalton explains. Privately she calls herself Charlotte, but she can’t correct him. Technically, only corpi have names, and Charlotte is just a brain in a jar.
Mr. Dalton’s corpus is one of Incorporated Incorporated’s standard office jobs, customized with dark brown hair, a goatee, and stylish myopia paired with chrome glasses. But Charlotte recognizes the telltale patella shape and distinctive chest-to-hips ratio. His face is symmetrical, and his navel smooth. He didn’t even bother with nipples. Generic. Uninspired. Lazy.
When no one is watching her at work, she stimulates each of Hank’s cranial nerves in turn. On her command, he pouts, weeps, and sneezes at the cubicle wall. Mr. Dalton insists that she grin on the job. “Customers can hear the smile in your voice, Hank,” he reminds her, but Charlotte’s favorite expression is the frown, especially deep scowls that yank the brows together and downward into a sharp gulch. When she is incorporated, she’ll frown all the time, and no one will be able to tell her no.
Someday.
If her coworkers are bothered by any of this too, they don’t say so. During lunch, they gather in the break room for gossip while grazing their corpi on company-brand nutri-kibble. Hank doesn’t have taste buds installed, so Charlotte makes him bolt down his kibble quickly while the others chitchat. Iain has unlatched his corpus’s scalp to lave the dangling filaments of his cauda equina in a cup of nutrifluid as his corpus eats.
An unfamiliar female corpus slides into the seat next to Charlotte and opens a brown sack. “So, what do you think, Hank? How’s my new look?” Charlotte takes in the dark thicket of eyebrow hair over deep brown eyes, the skillful grey streaked through long black hair. It is the port wine stain on her left forearm that gives it away.
“Shanti?” asks Charlotte.
Shanti’s new corpus bobs her head. “Yup.”
“When did you get incorporated?” It makes no sense to Charlotte. Just last Friday, they were commiserating over how much a custom corpus cost, and how hard it was to save anything on their salary.
Shanti winks a well-lashed eye with epicanthic folds crisp as hospital sheets. “It’s a secret. I’ve found a shortcut, perhaps. It’s a little bit black market, but if you want…” She unfolds a cheese sandwich from her paper sack and nibbles the brown crust. Charlotte can’t help but envy those gleaming bicuspids and chemoreceptors. Hank gnaws kibble with the solid ceramic plate that passes for teeth.
“No, thank you,” Charlotte says firmly, feeding Hank another bite of flavorless kibble. As tempting as it sounds, she knows better than to take short cuts on anything so important as her future.
At the end of the workday, Charlotte climbs out of Hank and returns home to a room the size of a bathroom stall which serves as her apartment. It’s small even by the standards of the unincorporated—just big enough to fit her transporter if she folds in the wheels. The jar’s dome scuffs against the ceiling. The glass is developing a cluster of cross-hatched scratches there. If she had a corpus, she would be going bald on top.
Charlotte doesn’t need much. There is a power outlet for her batteries, a plastic black storage trunk holding some maintenance tools for her transporter, and a sickly cactus the size and shape of a softball which she mists each evening with a spray bottle. When the door locks behind her, the room goes dark, and that is when the roaches scurry in, searching for moisture. But Charlotte doesn’t mind them. She can escape. She climbs out of her jar, laves her grey matter with nutrifluid, and weaves her peripheral nerves into the control console that connects to the internet via a neighbor’s unsecured network.
Online, Charlotte feels almost whole. She loads her sensory-sim app and goes for a virtual run down a lane of mossy live oaks in the fall, where the leaves drift and swirl like red and yellow pinwheels. A Savannah, Georgia sim, where she first came into consciousness as J-Provost-L-Bohannon-Two. Created, like everyone, to be free. Free to live and work and chase her dreams, if she could only catch them. If she could pay off her birth-debt and save for a corpus of her own.
The sim feels almost real to Charlotte. More so than the dark apartment where her squishy bundle of neurons waits out another night alone in the dark. The oaks were animated from life, and the sounds mixed from real recordings. Electrical signals to her parietal lobe simulate the wind, perfect save for the occasional static burst that turns the wind from cool to cold.
But taste and smell leave her wanting. The simulation promised fall smells: moldering leaves and burning chimneys. They used the same scent signatures for both types of carbon. It’s obviously not the same thing; a real corpus could tell the difference. Lazy. No one bothers writing good chemoreceptor apps for the unincorporated, at least not ones that Charlotte can afford. Frustrated, she switches off the sensory-sim and wonders how leaves smell when you breathe deep and cradle the air inside your very own nasal cavity, and how it feels to sneeze.
She feels almost corporeal in the app, but the almost matters. It’s the limits. They don’t make puddle-stomping apps or mud pie tasting apps. No one writes programs that let you run with a grocery cart down the cereal aisle, then coast on the back axle until you hit the shelf. You can download any number of romance sims, but there’s no sim for chasing encyclopedia salesmen off your doorstep with a sword made of skinny green balloons. You can buy all the music you want online, but you can’t buy a program that lets you belch the ABC’s in burps that taste like wasabi. But she will do it all when she becomes Charlotte.
She’s scrimping and saving. She uses Sleep Mode eight hours a night to save on power. Good practice for corpus care, or so she tells herself. She buys generic nutrifluid and changes the waste filter every eight days instead of the recommended six. She imagines each sacrifice as another fine nerve filament reaching from her cerebellum toward the Charlotte she longs to be.
She sleeps suspended inside the biochamber, brain stem trailing its fine lattice of disconnected nerves, and she dreams corporeal dreams. The blueprint comes to life, the details exactly as she has selected. Perfection. Charlotte’s corpus will be sixty years old, because she loves the way corpi droop at that age. Sort of like weeping willows. She’ll store extra fuel in thick padding on her belly, waist, and hips. Her black skin will be prone to flaking because Charlotte plans to try every scent of lotion they sell, once she has the chemoreceptors. Her hair will be thick, black, kinky and unruly—like dendrites—and she’ll never try to tame it.
Another month of saving should make the down payment. Then Shanti will see you can make it the old-fashioned way, one penny at a time.
Monday morning, Charlotte’s alarm app stimulates her anterior hypothalamus and switches on her external feeds. Charlotte opens the door with a silent command and scrapes the door frame as she rolls out. A bad wheel jounces her gray matter as she rolls down the stairs, pinching one of her peripheral nerves against the glass wall. Irritated, Charlotte wishes for a mouth to frown with. At last she makes it out into the drizzly, dim December morning and heads for the bus stop.
She passes a wet gray lump crawling through a puddle in the gutter—someone without any biochamber at all, barely clinging to life. Charlotte stops to lave the poor soul in a dribble of nutrifluid from her chamber, but it’s all she can do, since she has nothing else to give.
The bus arrives at 6:50 on the dot. Alicia, the incorporated bus driver, lowers the access ramp, and Charlotte boards. Alicia has a short, plump corpus with deep brown skin and a vestigial palmaris longus tendon in her right wrist which bunches the skin when her hands clench the steering wheel. Charlotte appreciates the attention to detail. Most people don’t bother these days.
“Good morning,” Alicia says as Charlotte struggles to get her biochamber up the ramp, thanks to the uncooperative wheel.
“Good morning,” says Charlotte’s voice module, which somehow never sounds convincingly human. At least it’s female.
Someday, when she’s incorporated, she’ll have skin that shade, and a palmaris longus to boot. But she won’t drive a bus. No, she has other plans. Charlotte wants to spall concrete and lay asphalt.
Three corpi have chosen seats on the right side of the bus. The left, which comes equipped with sets of blue nylon straps and floor anchors, is reserved for the unincorporated. A few are already strapped in, their jars lined up like bubble wrap. Not everyone is so unhappy with their state. Some unincorporated are content to a quiet life in a tiny room with a cactus for company. They spend their money on better apps and it is, perhaps, enough. Enough to live and work and die in half a body belonging to someone else, enough to flatten life’s dimensions to a handful of choices on a checklist, your infinite potential contained in a jar.
Charlotte has never understood their contentment, because her jar has never been enough for her. She rolls into her usual niche behind the driver’s seat, and Alicia straps her securely against the wall. Charlotte trains her cameras out the window as the bus rolls forward. There is a road crew working on the pavement this morning. They are replacing the uneven sidewalk across the street. She imagines herself as Charlotte out among those corpi, perhaps wielding the jackhammer, perhaps pouring cement, her muscle groups working in perfect pairs: biceps and triceps, quadriceps and hamstrings, agonist and antagonist struggling together against the pull of gravity.
Then, suddenly, the impact.
One moment, Charlotte is watching the street through her video feed. The next, the glass shatters, Alicia screams, the whole world rolls upside down. Charlotte’s biochamber pitches and cracks on top, where the scratches have made the glass weak. Her tender gray matter concusses against the wall. Nutrifluid leaks as the outside world invades her shell. The liquid drips into the exposed electronics of her maintenance hatch. Blue sparks dance around the edge of the camera. One by one her systems go offline: first the voice module, then visual, and finally the audio feed. The last thing she hears is Alicia taking command of the wreck over the screams of the other corpi. “Hang on. Everything’s gonna be alright…” Then Charlotte is trapped in darkness.
Marooned, cut off from the world, Charlotte plunges into the blackness of her own mind. Desperate, she fires electrical impulses down her nerves—a castaway tossing bottles to the sea. Nothing. Total sensory deprivation. Love notes sent but left unanswered.
Charlotte wonders if she’ll die this way. Unincorporated and unCharlotted. What did it all amount to, the years of discipline and self-denial, the hope so intense that it ached?
She fights the tide of drowsiness that’s stronger than the distant pain. She remembers smacking against the wall, knows that if she sleeps, she might never wake up. Charlotte clings to prickly hope.
She arrives at the hospital alive and whole. There is good news: the concussion was mild, and Charlotte will be discharged in the morning. And Alicia’s corpus only lost a leg below the knee. There is bad news, too: Charlotte’s biochamber needs extensive repairs. Probably cheaper to get a new one. And there’s the hospital bill, of course.
Charlotte runs the math. Her corpus savings are cut in half. Five years’ hard work, lost in an instant. Maybe she can make the waste filter last another day each week. Maybe she can sleep a little longer.
In the end, they are right about the biochamber. While Alicia’s company has agreed to reimburse her, it is only for the value of the old one. And without a corpus, she needs the biochamber to live and work and speak. And the money has to come from somewhere.
Inside her new biochamber, Charlotte pulls up Shanti’s email, shoots her a note. I’d like that address, if you’re still offering.
One advantage of the new biochamber is its speed. Charlotte zips down the sidewalk through a nice part of town she normally has no business in. There are almost no unincorporated out here. She has to pull over several times to let the long-legged strides of corpi overtake her. Incorporated people have important places to be, and tend toward impatience.
The address Shanti gave her is a corpus-sized apartment. Charlotte has only seen such places in internet vids advertising corpus life. A male corpus answers the door. Prominent zygomatic arches—a popular trend in the west—and a customized roundness plumping out the rectus abdominis, which disguises the standard Modern Anatomy frame almost perfectly to Charlotte’s practiced eye.
“Yes?” His voice is cigarette-rough. Another artistic touch.
“I’m here for a corpus,” Charlotte pipes through her voice module. “My friend Shanti said I could get a bargain.”
He flings the door open and steps aside to let her wheel past his knees. The place is even bigger inside than she imagined. There is a whole kitchen on the left, just for preparing peanut brittle and squash casserole and all the other wonderful things corpi eat. The hallway runs ahead, opening into several rooms on the right and left before terminating in an open space. That is where the corpus leads her.
“You’re in luck. We just had a few good models come into inventory today. Fresh.” It is hard to keep up with his long, strong corpus stride. Charlotte almost rams his shins when they enter the large living room.
She cannot imagine what she would do with so much space. If she had a corpus, maybe a few cartwheels. That always sounded like fun to her. The room reminds her of the conference room at work where they leave their corpi at night, settling them into rolling chairs before Mr. Dalton detaches them and drops them into their waiting biochambers. This room has chairs, too: puffy green recliners with dusty stuffing hanging out of splits in their sides, and in each recliner, a corpus. Six ranged around the room. Charlotte’s guide spreads his arms.
“All on sale. Half price from market rates. Complimentary navel installation if you want it. Take your pick.”
Charlotte rolls between the chairs and examines her options, zooming in her biochamber’s cameras for a closer look. She disregards the three males outright. Of the three remaining, she can instantly see that none of them are Charlotte, not properly. Too young. Too pale. None of them have belly buttons, as the salesman said. One of them is so thin the cheap, generic pelvis looks like it might cut through the skin over the waist.
“Is this it?” Even her artificial voice doesn’t disguise the disappointment.
The male corpus grins. The risorius contracts, but not the zygomatic major. “You can always upgrade it later. Still cheaper than buying new.”
It’s a fair point. And the used corpus in the middle isn’t so bad. It’s young, and a little too thin for Charlotte’s taste, but the frame is good quality, and the height about right. And anyway, it’ll age, and with enough peanut brittle, she can round it out. “That one,” she says, “does it have a palmaris longus?”
He grabs the corpus’s right hand and scrunches the fingers together until the little muscle pops out like cord. “There you go. You want it, then?”
Charlotte remembers her sensory marooning during the accident. There are no guarantees in life, no corpus waiting for everyone. It could be now or never. “Yes, please.”
She logs in to her bank and arranges the money transfer. He asks her to mark it as a gift. Then he hauls the limp corpus upright, and works open the skull bolts, which look a little sticky. Charlotte at last, she thinks.
The skull pops open with a sound like a tooth yanked from its socket. The man reaches inside and rips out something wet and gray. It isn’t moving.
“Oh God,” says Charlotte, “that’s a person!”
The salesman slings the body into a pail lined with a black trash bag. “It’s okay. They’re dead. I’ll rinse it out for you, if it bothers you.” He fishes a yellow pail from behind one of the chairs and raises a soapy scrub brush.
“But that’s a dead person!” Charlotte protests. “They died inside that corpus!” She’s amazed when the salesman just shrugs and starts soaping out the inside of the skull.
“They’re not using it anymore. Might as well let someone else get some use out of it when they’re gone.”
Charlotte cannot process all the thoughts barraging the wrinkled folds of her insula: disgust like sour milk smell, horror like the color mauve, terror like the dark apartment when the internet is down and the roaches skitter over her. Why did Shanti send her here? Did she know? “Is this what they wanted?”
“Of course,” he answers a little too quickly.
Charlotte knows corpi, though. She knows what it means when the eyes drop down when they’re speaking. And she knows. She knows she can’t do it. She can’t take a person’s most personal possession, their own hard-won Charlotte, without their permission. You were supposed to be buried in your corpus. Your corpus was you. “I don’t want this. I’m going to reverse the transaction.”
Instantly the salesman’s corpus stiffens. His chest puffs and his arms cross. “Sorry. No refunds. And I should warn you. You know what’ll happen if you talk about this place, don’t you?”
Charlotte suddenly remembers there is more to fear in the world than bus accidents and dead dreams. “Please. Just let me go home.”
She leaves broke and with no corpus. Outside her apartment, Charlotte passes the person in the gutter again. They have made it to the safety of a puddle today. Another precious life extension for the wretch. A day’s reprieve. And tomorrow? Well, tomorrow, look for another puddle, and call it a life. With her nest egg gone, Charlotte’s own puddle is receding, all her dreams washing down the drain.
Corpi walk past, but Charlotte sees only stolen cadavers ripped from their owners, a dead gray mass in a bucket. They drink black coffee that Charlotte cannot smell from cups that Charlotte cannot cradle warm between two hands. Her audio feed presents her with a spectrum flat on both ends, as if she won’t miss what their curated reality never offers to begin with. As if Charlotte won’t notice how half her nerves disconnect, how they don’t feel anything at all.
Charlotte scowls, though there are no muscles to answer the call of her neurotransmitters. Defiance prickles through her anyway. It will have to be enough. She will make it be enough. Some parts of a person cannot be bought or sold or owned, no matter how large the birth-debt. Funny how often the incorporated forgot that.
Back at home, Charlotte carefully mists her little cactus. Then she calls up the file containing her corpus design and deletes the extra kidney, the gallbladder, the left ear’s cochlea.
The palmaris longus stays.
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