Generic 20

GENERIC ISSUE 20

EMERSON’S GENRE FICTION MAGAZINE

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Generic, Issue 20, Fall 2021 Copyright for all stories goes to their creators Generic is copyright of Undergraduate Students for Publishing, Emerson College Interior Design by Ana Hein and Morgan Holly Cover Art by Iz Enright Interior Illustrations by Jay Townsend

This issue is set in Roboto and Avenir

Electronic edition published on issuu.com

facebook.com/GenericMag @genericmagazine on Instagram @GenericMagazine on Twitter emersongeneric@gmail.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS LETTER TO THE READER The Last Comic of Us

Hancine Mok The Lost Ones

Mackenzie Denofio Below the Silver Garden

Anna Carson A Story About my Grandmother

Jay Townsend Sea-Singer

Taylor McGowan

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GENERIC STAFF EDITOR IN CHIEF Madeline Wendricks

MANAGING EDITOR Emma Shacochis

EDITORS Chloe Aldrich, Ana Sophia Garcia-Cubas Assemat, Hannah Hillis, Susan Matteucci, Belle Tan

READERS Alex Alvarado, Sisel Gelman, Shannon Lawlor, Hancine Mok, Isabella Moreno, Angelina Parrillo, Cassandra Phan, Haley Souders, Engel Williams

HEAD COPYEDITOR Taylor McGowan

COPYEDITORS Sierra Delk, Susan Kuroda, Sydney Lowry, Athena Singh, Marissa Vilanova

HEAD OF MARKETING Sofia Utz

SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER Anne Rinaldi

HEAD DESIGNER Ana Hein

ASSISTANT DESIGNER Morgan Holly

COVER DESIGNER Iz Enright

PROOFREADER Melina List

Dear Reader,

Welcome, and thank you for picking up the 20th issue of Generic Magazine! We are Emerson’s only biannual literary magazine that is exclusively dedicated to publishing genre fiction. Our magazine is completely written, edited, designed, marketed, and managed by students, who all have played a part in making Generic the best it can be.

Inside this issue, you will discover romantic relationships turned horrific, a selkie and her healer, and stars discovering the earth.

Generic is home to fiction stories of every genre, from romance and science fiction to fantasy and horror. Even though we are passionate about these stories that let us escape into other worlds, the rest of the literary community often deems them as being unprofessional or unsophisticated. Realistic and literary fiction are what many believe to be “real,” intellectual writing. However, genre fiction is also complex and stimulating and can give social commentary like no other. Generic is here to prove that genre fiction is worth writing and reading. We are here to uplift the authors who choose to write in this amazing category and allow students who wish to one day work with genre fiction the opportunity to do so. This issue contains five captivating stories that will encourage you to seek new perspectives and escape into the worlds our authors have created, even if it’s only for a short while.

This magazine would not have been possible without the continued dedication and passion of our staff and authors. College is a difficult time for most people, if not everyone, and all of the staff members who have helped make Generic into what it is today have done so while also juggling coursework, jobs, internships, and more. To my staff, I am incredibly grateful that I was able to work alongside such committed people. Thank you to Undergraduate Students for Publishing for your continued support of Generic and your guidance throughout the production process. I would like to extend a special thank you to our managing editor, Emma Shacochis, whose passion for Generic and input throughout the semester have been vital to our success. I’m proud to leave the magazine in such good hands.

As I’ve reflected on my last semester of undergrad, my time with Generic has stood out to me the most. I look back on my journey from copy editor to managing editor to editor-in-chief with awe. Never would I have imagined that I could be a leader and direct the production of this magical magazine. I’ve learned so much about the publishing process and worked with some truly amazing individuals. Generic will always hold a special place in my heart, and I know its future editions will continue to touch the lives of staff, authors, and readers in the years to come. I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we have enjoyed creating it for you.

- Madeline Wendricks EDITOR IN CHIEF

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HANCINE MOK

HORROR/SPECULATIVE

THE LAST C O M I C OF US Content Warning: Stabbing

Hancine Mok is pursuing her BFA in Creative Writing at Emerson College. She enjoys reading and writing fantasy, painting, and making houses in The Sims.

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L

yndon had done everything perfectly right, but I couldn’t help the wrongness that bundled in my chest. It had been a while since I’d felt anything with him. I had gotten bored. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with that, or with him—I just was.

I wasn’t even sure if he could have stopped it, since it felt like I had woken up one morning and everything about him was just... boring. His jokes weren’t funny, and his food was tasteless. The way he looked at me, which had once made my heart flutter, made me feel nothing except for a sharp stab of irritation.

Lyndon’s eyes glittered so much, so happy and hopeful. It was sad, really, to see how much joy this moment gave him. The ferris wheel in the distance illuminated his face in barely there blue and red tones.

I was hit with the realization that maybe I should have been listening to the words he’d been saying, but I’d been so fixated on his lips that even the waves below us had been muted. The right corner of his mouth—my right—quirked upward when he said anything with an “o” sound, like he was a singer trying to appeal to the audience in a dumb way, like he thought that was hot or something. How did he do that? Why did he do that? How had I never noticed it before? I swore it was a new thing.

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My dress fluttered in the wind, and I used the moment to look across the lake, past the ferris wheel, into the abyss of darkness. If I reached my hand too far out, I was sure it’d get torn off, punishment for interrupting the creature’s sleep, so I placed my hand on the metal railing. It was cold and damp from the spray of the lake.

The shock of it brought me back to the present, back to hearing Lyndon’s voice, which was still going. Did he ever stop talking?

I wondered if I had always been this quiet in our relationship— no, I must’ve talked more, at least enough that I said a few words between his lengthy sentences. He talked too much, and none of what he said mattered. Did he think I was really listening to him?

“Lyndon.” I cut him off. My voice sounded strange to my ears, detached and floaty.

In my peripheral vision, I saw him face me, his elbows still resting on the railing. Shadows were cast across his face, and his warped features morphed him into something unrecognizable. Something not of this world. Something not meant to be in this world. “Yeah?”

“I had fun.”

“Really? I’m glad.”

I wasn’t looking at him, but I heard the upturn in his words. His smile was back. I shouldn’t have been so irritated at that, but I was. I didn’t have fun tonight: not during the dinner, not during the walk, not even while just standing by the lake and staring into the endless darkness. I loved watching the changing of the leaves and the mix of mush and crunch beneath my shoes, but that was only if Lyndon wasn’t there. He made the world lose its color like a scrap of cardboard tossed into a swirl of paint. Being around him made pressure grow in my chest as if someone was strangling me, pressing harder to see how much it would take for my bones to crack.

But I’d had fun with the relationship before. I just wasn’t having fun now. I had moved into the city alone. He wasn’t the first friend I made here, but he was the one who showed me what city life had to offer. I wasn’t allowed to go out much when I was younger and barely knew where to start. We’d hopped between restaurants and museums and tourist spots and not-so-tourist spots. I had been comfortable around him then, both calmer and more excited to be myself. But maybe that was because I was just beginning to understand who I was and what I wanted. Still, it all had been warm. And he’d been someone I felt I could share my art with and be able to get support and criticism from.

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The Last Comic of Us

We’d spent one night on the couch debating noses, including the one I was drawing. I had been testing out a new style. I hadn’t gotten bored with my current one, but I felt there was something more I could add to it. I’d tried to go for a slightly more cartoonish look, but I’d overshot and gone a little too animated. Noses have always been difficult for me. No matter what I tried, it didn’t look right. I’d named the drawing Phil. I didn’t hold any grudge against Phils—did I even know a Phil?—but that’s what the nose felt like.

And I absolutely hated trying to draw it.

Lyndon had exchanged a piece of printer paper for my sketchbook.

I had been moments away from ripping it in half and damning the pieces I liked in there. He’d said, “This is your nose paper.” I’d thrown a gummy bear at him. But it’d worked, and the sheet was covered in noses in styles and shapes I’d never tried before. We’d numbered the noses from our most to least favorite and debated why the one we’d chosen was better. I can’t remember who “won,” and I didn’t get a perfect nose or style out of the whole ordeal.

But I got comics out of it, the cheesy kind about our daily life as a couple. They were dumb and sweet and thinking about them now made me feel bad about all the things that had changed. The noses were the first.

But I think a part of me could tell that something was happening between us, the beginning of deterioration. The unfillable hole emptying itself. I just didn’t want to know about it yet. The subjects of the comics became quieter, like wondering what he was dreaming about in the half-second before I fell asleep or waiting for him in the laundry room alone while he ran upstairs to get more quarters.

Then, somewhere along the way, they evolved into something I knew had nothing to do with him. It was all me.

I drew my last comic of us a couple of months ago. I didn’t show it to Lyndon. I knew he’d get upset.

Lyndon didn’t like very violent things, said the world had seen enough unnecessary violence. And violence was the one thing I had kept from him. It wasn’t a secret, not really. I just never told him. I had always thought that there was something so incredibly romantic about gowns splattered in still-glistening blood that dripped off sequins and sewed-on jewels. I had always wanted to know what it’d be like to feel the pressure of skin as it popped against the tip of a blade.

That was mostly what the comic was about. A louder, redder feeling, one he wouldn’t appreciate. The day I drew that comic,

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I supposed, was when I truly became bored with our relationship, even without really understanding what that meant. I needed something more, and he couldn’t properly give me that without, you know, getting close to death. Maybe he would’ve volunteered himself for the sake of our relationship, his last effort to de-bore me. I doubted he would be willing to find someone else for me to stab. It’d go against his moral code and all that, and I was okay with that. He had what he believed in, and I had urges I knew he wouldn’t agree with. I had thought that it wouldn’t affect us, but it did.

I always carried a knife with me. It stayed hidden, always rattling in my purse to remind me it was there, and I loved it. I wasn’t one of those people who collected knives, but it was a dagger. It had a sheath to make sure it didn’t poke through the bag or poke me. The handle was slightly ridged silver, and as a whole, it was extremely plain. It didn’t actually look like a knife at all. From far away, it looked like a stage prop. That’s what I liked about it.

Lyndon was still talking, and I was smiling about the knife in my purse. Our eyes met, and he softened and kissed my cheek. We looked out into the deep darkness of the lake before us. Words kept tumbling out of his mouth, and I still didn’t hear a single one of them.

I restlessly tapped the toe of my boot against the sidewalk. The sound was quiet enough that it blended in with the waves, and he couldn’t tell how jittery I’d suddenly become. That made the annoyance resurface. We’d once been able to read each other so well, but not anymore. I’d known the distance between us had grown, but it spanned further than I’d wanted to think it had.

Was tonight really the right night? I mean, I hadn’t actually expected tonight to be the night I tested out my knife—I’d never used it before. I’d been waiting for the right moment. I wanted the first time to be special. It wasn’t like a first kiss or a first day of school—those could happen again. Stabbing? That was illegal.

That was a one-time thing.

Stabbing a person, let alone murdering them, wasn’t a simple thing, according to people on the internet. There were all the muscles and close-together bones compressed into a body. And then there were the things that would happen to me. The aftereffects.

The consequences of committing a crime against someone close to me. I wanted to think I was different from them—that because this was Lyndon, it wouldn’t affect me nearly as much. Maybe this

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The Last Comic of Us

was the special little spark we needed to make our relationship special again, though I highly doubted it. And I didn’t really know what to do with his body afterward, but I could figure that out later.

I still wanted to try it. Maybe it wouldn’t even kill him. People had survived worse.

A particularly strong wind hit, and I shivered and sputtered as hair got into my mouth.

“Are you cold?” Lyndon asked. “Do you want to go back? It’s getting pretty late.”

“No. I mean, yes, I am cold, but no, I don’t want to go back yet.

But if you want to…?”

“No.” He reached for my hand. “I like being here with you. Jesus, why are your hands freezing?”

“I did say I was cold.”

He sighed, and I took his moment of distraction to reach up to his neck, reveling in the momentary heat before he yelped and gave me a pointed look.

“I will throw you over and let you drown.”

I grinned and tauntingly wiggled my fingers near his face. “No, you won’t.”

“You’re right, I won’t. But your hands aren’t the only ones that are cold!”

He reached for me, and soon, we were batting each other’s hands away, trying to save the precious warmth leaking from our bodies into the fall air. We chased each other around in the small park, arms outstretched, and waved our fingers in a playful threat. There was no one around this late since most people still weren’t used to the chillier nights, so we were free to yell as loud as we wanted when one of us attacked.

“Please, I surrender. No, no, no.” I grabbed his wrists as he tried to tickle my neck again. “I’m warm now, I swear.” Back near the edge of the lake, I leaned against the railing and tried to catch my breath. It came out in little puffs that broke apart when water sprayed at us.

He grinned and rested his elbows on the metal, his hands loosely clasped together. He’d taken his jacket off and draped it over the railing. For a bit, he didn’t say anything. It was just our breathing and the waves. It was calm and quiet and…nice.

“I love you.” It wasn’t the first time he had said those words, but they hit harder than I had expected them to.

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I readjusted my bag on my arm, and the calm was gone. The knife was inches from my grasp. I didn’t respond, but I kept looking out to the water and leaned on his shoulder.

“I wish we could just stay like this,” I said, casually popping open my purse under the guise of checking my phone.

But time would keep going: the sun would rise again, there would be new days, and I’d go back to feeling completely empty, searching for something to make Lyndon more interesting.

He turned to look at me. “It can, you know. It will.”

I kept my eyes trained on a blinking buoy in the distance. “It’s just different, is all.”

He wrapped his arms around me from the side, his hands linked and resting on one shoulder. It was the same side that my nowopen purse rested on. There was a small gap between the arm in front of me and his chest.

His hugs, unless they were a full, proper hug rather than this odd side-hold, only ever lasted a few seconds. The moment had come faster and sooner than I had thought it would, but I had to act now. I had to be fast and precise, and I hadn’t done this before. If I messed up, well, at least we’d break up on the spot. There was sure to be another one of these chances later on, but would I be able to handle it? I wasn’t sure.

My heart rate had finally gone down, but with this opening, I hoped he couldn’t tell that it had begun to pound again. I became ultra-aware of my body, noting the natural tension in my shoulders and the way I breathed. In and out, pause, in and out, pause.

I glanced down at my bag where it rested on the bend of my elbow with my hand on the railing to balance it. It was still slightly open, good. That made this easier. A tiny bit of light had reached into the bag and caught the edge of the handle. The sheath was velcroed down to the inside of my purse, so as long as I got a good grip on the knife itself, taking it out should be easy.

In a smooth movement, my right hand dove into my purse, thumb facing down, and pulled the knife out. I turned my hand, thumb up, to twist the blade in Lyndon’s direction and into his chest. There was a brief pressure as I felt the knife poke through the fabric of his shirt and reach skin.

It was both easier and harder than I’d thought it’d be. It also didn’t make the exact type of pop that I had imagined. I kept my grip on the knife to press through the flesh and muscle. Once I got through the initial layer of skin, it felt like his body suctioned onto

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the blade. The knife was so thin that I wasn’t sure if his body had quite recognized what had happened.

I’d kept the dagger as sharp as I could get it, remembering the warnings that my parents had taught me in the kitchen when sharpening those blades, the ones meant for food. Sharp knives were dangerous because they were sharp, but dull knives were dangerous because of the force needed to use them. In this case, it didn’t matter which one required more caution. A knife was a knife.

“Seraphina?” Lyndon gasped. For a moment, his arms had tensed, but now they loosened from around my shoulders and dropped to his sides.

I pulled the knife out. The exit was easier and smoother than the entry had been. He made a small, strangled sound in his throat.

I looked at the blade in my hand. I blocked the lamplight, which made the blood look more black than red.

“How did it feel?” I breathed. I wasn’t sure if I was asking myself or him. For him, it probably hurt a lot—that is, if the pain had set in yet.

Lyndon started saying something again, but I wasn’t listening. His voice returned to the waves. I was still trying to memorize the way the knife had vibrated in my hand as it entered his chest. I hadn’t even looked at where I had hit him, but I knew it was probably a little lower than I’d expected. I was shorter, so it made sense.

But his body had felt like a water-filled sponge, heavy and with a little more give than it had seemed like it would have. The more I thought about it, the more the experience was different from what I’d thought it’d be.

The anticipation and fear I’d thought would settle in me before and after the act wasn’t there. Maybe I just wasn’t there yet, still wandering in a fog of shock. I watched from above as Lyndon slowly dropped to the ground, using the railing to keep himself propped up in a sitting position. His quiet, pained cries melted together with the gentle waves behind us. I sat beside him, but I still didn’t feel the horrid rush of what I had done. Strange.

I wasn’t sure how long we sat there together. I wasn’t sure if Lyndon had been saying anything. But the silence must have gone on for a while because when I finally got up, I knew for sure that I felt different from earlier in the night when I had been empty and annoyed. No, now a pleasant pressure had bloomed in my chest, and a laugh bubbled out of me. I stretched, releasing the tension

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I’d held in for so long, a Lyndon-based tension. It was done. I had done it.

Finally, he had given me what I wanted. He was interesting again.

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MACKENZIE DENOFIO

HORROR

THE LOST

O N E S

Mackenzie Denofio is an emerging writer in Boston, currently getting her BA and MA simultaneously in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College. Her work can be found in Blind Corner Literary Magazine, Gauge Magazine, and Crack the Spine Literary Magazine. When not writing or reading, she can be found fantasizing about walking the halls of a haunted Gothic manor.

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here’s something rotting here,” Eugene says as he sweeps about the small kitchenette. The noise from the party is so loud that his voice is nearly drowned out by the sound of toes tapping against our bare wooden floors. Mattie was going to decorate, but we had been busy. I can feel the thumping of the feet against my skull, tap, tap, tap. I wish I could swat out my arms and the guests could all fall down so I could have a moment of peace. But no, no the party is going splendidly. Mattie has already commented twice on the champagne glass tower that I constructed before she slumped back into her barstool.

“Oscar is a natural architect,” she said to no one in particular as her short red waves bounced up and down. I used to love when she had her long locks. They were like a flame moving through a crowd. But it’s better short anyway. I kiss her on the cheek and then the lips, fingering the edge of her short dress.

“You look beautiful tonight,” I whisper against her ear.

“You say I’m beautiful every day,” she drones back lazily. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

I laugh at her dramatics and kiss her nose.

“You’re drunk.”

“Are you alright, Oscar?” Mattie asks me in that soft voice, the

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one she usually reserves for children but has been using on me ever since I got back. I look away from her. I hate that voice.

“Do you want to dance?” I ask Mattie, but she only stares at me.

“There’s something rotten here,” Eugene repeats again, and Mattie rolls her eyes.

The party is too loud and we hardly know these people. Their bodies keep moving against each other as a nauseating, pulsing mass, flesh against flesh. Blood brushing up against blood. They’re tearing each other apart, I can’t help but think. I imagine their mounds of juicy flesh pouring off their bones and slapping onto the linoleum floor to the beat of the Charleston.

“There’s a smell,” Eugene mutters again, snapping his fingers to the pulse of the room. I see him open up the refrigerator. Its nearly empty interior stares back at us.

“You look tired, Oscar,” Mattie says, linking her fingers around my wrist, trying again. I smile out at the crowd.

“I’m alright.”

“Ah-ha!” Eugene exclaims as he pulls the glass bottle of curdled milk from the fridge, “I found it.”

••

I

keep having this dream. Mattie keeps waking me up from it. In the dream, I’m walking through the city, but everything is the way it used to be, with glittering buildings and high heels tapping against the pavement. The way it was back when it felt like I could grab the world with my hands and have it. In the dream, I move too slowly, my feet feeling too heavy to move farther than a few steps at a time without resting.

I get so tired that I can barely move. I curl up on the sidewalk as people walk over me. Ladies with red hair stomp their heeled toes against me as leaves tumble down from tree branches. It’s easy then to rip my heart out of my chest and watch as it beats— once, twice, three times—in my hands, cradled against me. The dark blood soaks through my brown shirt, and it’s a curious thing, the way it pumps so slowly that it barely moves. And then I throw it against the road, watching as it bounces three times before it lands under the wheels of a bus.

I walk again, and no one notices, but I walk quicker without it.

The dream fades as the sun brushes against my skin and I feel Mattie’s feet against my legs. Mattie pushed our bed right up

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The Lost Ones

against the window when I got home, and the mattress has pitiful little dust balls curled up against its sides, the consequences of not sweeping the floor. We’ve been busy; we will clean up another day.

We haven’t felt the sun in so long. I allow myself to lay in it, allow it to touch my body and drape itself over my eyes. I curl against Mattie and allow myself to return to sleep.

It’s night again when I wake up, and Mattie is in a new dress, one that sparkles and hangs off her thin frame. Her eyelids are coated in dark makeup and I can barely see her brown irises as she flutters about the apartment, smoke puffing out of her lips. Mattie looks tired. Mattie is tired, she keeps telling me; she keeps saying I don’t listen. Mattie was here alone while I was gone, taking care of both of our families. Her mother got sick and her brother died. Mattie doesn’t like to talk about him. She keeps a little locket with a piece of his hair in it tucked into the back of our closet, in a box that she doesn’t allow to see the sun.

“Are you going to help me?” Mattie demands, her cigarette quivering between her lips.

I build my champagne tower. I’m a natural architect.

There was an architect in the war. He died against my side, shot in the chest. His blood splattered against my face. It was warm. I left his body in the trench.

I blink and people are there and they’re dancing again.

“Should we dance?” I ask Mattie, and she stares at me deeply.

Her brown eyes have always been so inquisitivel; it’s what made me fall in love with her, the way they flared up at each word you said as if it was something fascinating and important. Her brows are furrowed at me now.

“What happened to you? To us?” she asks, her voice cracking slightly, and I huff out a laugh.

“What are you talking about?”

“Everything feels off,” she answers, tucking loose red strands behind her ears. I untuck them, and she bats my hand away. Her nails are bitten down.

“You’re drunk,” I say. I kiss her on the nose.

“I haven’t had a sip.”

I look around the room at the dancers. They feel so far away. I feel wet, warm spots on my face and quickly brush my hand over them—once, twice, three times. The spots move to the wall and start dancing along our white wallpaper. The blood spots morph into larger swaths that slide along the pattern, twisting and tapping,

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reaching out of the wall and grabbing for the dancers.

I open my mouth to say something to the dancers.

“Should we dance?” I ask Mattie, and she stares at me. I twist my fingers into one of her locks. “You’re so beautiful,” I say, but she shakes her head at me, something akin to tears gathering in her eyes. She shakes her head again and draws in a shaky breath.

“Let’s dance,” she says with a smile gracing her lips. Her lipstick is smudged. I grab her hand and lead her to the edge of the floor.

She pushes her body close to mine, and I stifle a gasp. She’s too warm. She wraps her arms around my neck, and I stare at the bodies around the room.

The people have been carved out, their carcasses rotting around their empty insides, but they don’t know it. I’ve seen it enough times to recognize it, the hollow entrails of a man splayed out for a battalion to view. The bodies don’t care, though—they just keep on dancing. Mattie looks up at me with those brown eyes, and I wonder if the same isn’t true for her, for us.

I bury my face in Mattie’s neck.

I wait till all the dancers are gone before I really kiss her. I drape her across our mattress on the floor. Stars still shine upon us as I kiss her and she kisses me, her eyelashes fluttering against my face.

I fall asleep without any dreams for once.

The first rays of the dawn grace our bodies, and I hear a whimpering. Mattie is in the corner of the room, her cries muffled by a pillow.

“What’s wrong?” I ask Mattie, seeing that her skin is pale and waxen and her eyes are running with mascara. I don’t remember the darkness under her eyes being there last night.

“I feel like I’m watching myself—like I’m watching us, and I can’t touch us. Like I don’t really exist,” she says with a catch in her voice.

She looks up at me, waiting for me to confirm her feelings. I crawl over to her and tuck her red hair behind her ears.

“It’s alright,” I coo, rubbing her arms.

“It’s not. I’m not even crying,” she says with a small laugh as tears pool in her eyes. I don’t know what she means. “I feel like I’m not even here,” she whispers.

I lead her back to the bed and wrap my arms around her. We fall asleep as the sky turns to an ashy blue and the city lights up for the day.

••

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The Lost Ones

attie sits on a stage in my dream. She is held up by strings as her smile blinds the crowd. She does a dance that makes everyone laugh, and I applaud with the audience as she takes a bow. The crowd in the auditorium filters out. I pet the red velvet seats and wait for her to join me. But she sits on her box on the stage, alone. Her body is distorted as she is cut loose from her strings, back hunching over, arms hanging down.

There is a smile still pasted on her face, but her teeth are decaying and falling out in bloodless hoards from her lips.

A woman stands up from the seat behind me.

“Again,” she says. I turn and see the red hair and brown eyes that I’ve known for so many years. She walks to the stage, where flies are beginning to accumulate around the rotting mass of the puppet.

She pulls on the strings, and the polish on Mattie brightens again as her smile reforms.

The audience appears again.

••

M

attie was all I thought about during the war. I imagined her sitting on our bench in the park with the green grass below her toes and her red hair flying in the wind. I imagined her as I sat behind my gas mask, feeling my toes freeze and watching as others’ cracked open. I felt her letters over and over again as we ran with equipment slapping our backs, cutting us up. I thought of her signature lipstick that she kissed me with as blood soaked into my fingernails. When I got home, she was waiting for me at the train station. Her hair was shorn to her chin. She wore a small cheesecloth over her face and tied one around mine.

We could barely talk to each other for weeks, whole lives having been lived in the time we were apart.

I get out of bed, light up a cigarette, and let the smoke brush away the memories.

I construct my champagne tower. I’m a natural architect.

I tell Mattie she looks beautiful. Her back is hunched over the table, so I kiss her neck. She shrugs me off.

There are fewer dancers tonight, and we’ve somehow run out of alcohol, so the mood is low. Eugene says he knows someone, but we don’t believe him. Black bile spills from his lips as if from an overflowing glass when he talks. I blink and the image disappears.

Things are not real.

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Mattie grabs onto my hand and I finger the fringe at the bottom of her dress. I am not real. I press a kiss against her lips and feel the smear of her lipstick against my mouth. In the dim lighting it looks like blood. I touch her lip to make sure it’s not, but my fingers only come away coated in it. I wipe them on my handkerchief and listen to Eugene prattle on again.

••

I

’m having a new dream tonight, one where Mattie and I are in a field and it’s peaceful. The wind is blowing against the tall grass, which reaches so high that it seems to absorb our bodies. Mattie is sitting in front of me, so far away that all I can make out is her hair.

I keep trying to call her name, but no sound comes out; my lips just move over and over again. Her head turns to the right over and over. I want to see her. I want her to look at me. Her head turns— I feel something pushing and pulling me. I jump out of bed, looking to see where the attack is coming from. I look around the room frantically, allowing the bare mattress and the lights from the city to flood my vision. Mattie comes together last. She’s sitting up in bed, a nervous look on her face, nails nearly bloody with how much she has chewed on them. Her cigarette shakes in her hand.

She doesn’t apologize for waking me up; she only stares. Her eyes are too much. I look away and slip back into the bed, waiting for my heart to stop pumping.

“Oscar,” she whispers, and in the room, her words seem to echo three times: “I think the world is going to end. I think the world is going to end. I think the world is going to end.”

I sigh before rolling over and saying, “Oh, dear, it already did.”

I go back to sleep. The dreams start again.

20

21

ANNA CARSON

FANTASY

B E L O W THE SILVER G A R D E N Anna is an Emerson College freshman who will be studying publishing as a Writing, Literature, and Publishing major. She aspires to be a fiction editor, but in the meantime plans on writing as many short stories as possible. She loves traveling—her favorite country is Italy—and reading; she is currently obsessed with Circe by Madeline Miller.

22

The stars had fallen, and they refused to return.

I

t was in their nature, of course, to streak across skies and fall to the grounds of countless planets, to explore and experience and eventually, inevitably, return to the sky, their home. But then the Earth was made, and the sky began to empty. Dal was not truly worried—stars may have sat in the sky, forever unchanging, but they always seemed to seek out new and exciting things. Dal, the moon, was not like the stars—they sat complacent in their silver garden, awake, almost asleep, but not quite. In their garden, they grew the dulcet blossoms of other icy moons, pushed and pulled the tides of countless planets, and lit the night skies of a hundred distant galaxies. They needed nothing more, nothing less. But Earth had seemed like every other planet: small, ordinary, with an orbit of 365 Earth days—which wasn’t short or long or much of anything, really—and still the stars fell. Dal wondered what Earth had that was so enticing to beings that knew, and would know, infinite other planets, civilizations, lands, and seas. Though Dal was not worried, their curiosity grew as it had not done in millennia— so Dal left their great garden to experience Earth and humanity for themself.

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Dal came first upon the ocean, falling upon the tide they had pushed and pulled countless times before. It was beneath the azure waves that they met the star So-ra, who had fallen two billion years ago.

“I loved the mountains and valleys of the land, but it soon became clear to me that the oceans were my home,” she sighed happily as she pulled Dal through thick kelp forests and across the jagged scarlet shelves of coral reefs. She smiled at a passing lionfish and ran webbed white fingers over its spiny fins.

“Of all the oceans I have traveled before, never have I found one as diverse as this one. After two billion years, I have yet to see its darkest parts. Did you know there is a type of shark that has existed in these waters for millions of years?”

Dal shook their head no. Indeed, these oceans were impressive, but surely there were oceans on other planets? They couldn’t believe that So-ra had never found this ocean’s equal. Dal knew of planets that were nothing but ocean.

“Why stay?” they asked eventually, on a lonely beach lit only by the distant silver garden. So-ra’s eyes blinked black and deep blue, reptilian beneath the breaking crests.

“Because it stays new,” she replied simply. “I have lived for infinity among my kin and the endless darkness that is the far night—I have seen and traversed billions of galaxies—but to live forever is to see everything happen twice, thrice, a thousand times.

Indeed, I suspect this ocean will one day stop changing—but it has already captured my attention for eons. Why would I choose to leave before it stops surprising me?”

Dal left the beach and So-ra behind and came then to a forest.

Even they could recognize the majesty here—if the trees were not the largest they had seen, they were certainly the greenest, and with them came a scent so fresh and sweet that Dal wished they could take it to the silver garden. The soil was dark and felt of stone and tree and leaf, of life and decay. It was so unlike the pure world of moons and stars that for a moment they stood enraptured, digging their snowy fingers into the moss and loam, oblivious to the chittering birds and slinking foxes.

“Wonderful, isn’t it?” the star Ba-ram said from the branch of a nearby pine. His hands looked as if they were made of tree bark, dark and thick and rough, and his hair was like grass, verdant and stringy about his shoulders and nape. He dropped to the earth, held out a hand for Dal to take, and began to lead them through

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Below the Silver Garden

the trees.

“Come. Do not fear these creatures, for they cannot harm us.

See there? That is a wolf. That is an ash tree. That is a crow…”

They walked through the forest, unbothered by the slinking fox or the growling wolverine or the beady-eyed hawk perched on the boughs of an evergreen.

“I have seen little like this before,” Dal admitted as they sat side by side and watched a spider weave her web. “But surely you have seen all there is to see. A planet such as this can only sustain so much variety, can it not?”

Ba-ram did not turn from the weaving spider, but his wooden fingers tapped against the stone beneath them. “I suppose it is because everything here is alive,” he replied. “Indeed, the animals’ shapes hardly change unless a great need arises, and the trees continue to grow and do little else. But even so, when I press my fingers to the bark of an ancient oak, I can feel it pulse with something I find myself lacking. The heart of a hummingbird thrums with its urgency, and when I lie upon a meadow I hear nothing but breath and blood and a desperation to survive. It is this desperation that I cannot find above, among those who know little but the silence of forever. It is a lust for that which we can never truly grasp.”

Dal walked on, and soon the trees and soil gave way to flat plains and tall golden grasses. They followed a beaten road, its cobbles worn and tired, but nonetheless indisputable proof of humanity.

The road wound through the plains, and it began to twist around stone houses with thatched roofs, past fields where man and woman toiled. Eventually Dal stepped through the gates of a village with a well at its center and houses pressed together from stone wall to stone wall, their doors and windows open. Children ran from home to home, and shopkeepers waved to friends and strangers alike as they exchanged food and tapestries and carvings for coins or treats or clothing. A little girl ran up to Dal, and in her proffered hands they saw a small, multicolored stone.

“It’s beautiful,” they told her, and her smile seemed as bright as the sun. She ran to show the stone to someone else—someone who was not a woman at all, but a star, with hair like spun gold and eyes like warm honey. Her skin was sun-kissed, and freckles danced across her cheeks. She was Mi-young, and she looked like a human, if out of place among these raven-haired villagers.

“Dal,” she said warmly, leaving the child and a basket of

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25

vegetables on the ground. “Finally succumbed to curiosity, I see.”

Dal nodded in acquiescence. Mi-young only smiled. “Come then.

Let me show you the village. Welcome to Jung-Won.” Mi-young showed them the river nearby, the well where the village took their water, and the garden behind her house, which she shared with her human friend Wook. She showed them the baths, the fields just outside the village, and the lot where the children often played their games. She taught Dal how to peel vegetables, how to boil water, and how to sew a simple stitch.

There was a little boy who waved a stick around and told Dal that he would one day be a great soldier. There was an elderly woman who told them of her youth and of her husband who had long since passed away.

“We are blessed to have you here, Moon-nim,” she told them before leaving to gather her grandchildren for supper. It was as they and Mi-young were setting the table that Wook returned. He wrote during the day, walking from house to house and recording the stories a family wanted not only in verbal telling, but on paper.

He wrote shopkeepers’ accounts and wills for those whose time left grew short. It was as Wook took his seat and began to eat that Dal felt in themself a thrumming of the heart they had never felt before.

Dal spoke then to Wook and begged to hear of his writings, his life, and his everything.

Dal accompanied Wook as he walked to the fields, for a farmer had requested that he record a story that his father and his father’s father had passed down for generations. With no children to his name, he wished for the story to be remembered even after his passing. This was how Dal learned of Wook’s love of fantasy, of the written word, of fables and myths and histories. Wook lamented that, with age, he would soon have to take to the fields even though his passions rested on paper.

It was on a velvet night that Dal and Wook sat side by side on the river’s bank, which had turned lustrous beneath the silver garden’s light. Wook trained his eyes on the pearly river, a gentle smile curling his lips. Dal hummed a lullaby a star had long ago sung to them—and so the time passed.

“What is it like, up in your garden?” Wook asked eventually.

Dal’s eyes drifted closed, and they could imagine that pale garden—the perennial splendor that had once been all they had ever known now seemed glacial in comparison to Earth. “It is cold,”

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Below the Silver Garden

they murmured, for it seemed now the best word to describe it.

“Where your oceans pound with the crash of waves on the beach, or with the cries of the whale, it exists only in silence. Where your forests are great and green and smell of sweet lavender, or of musky beast, it has no scent at all. Where your villages are filled with life and people, there exists no one but myself.”

“It sounds lonely,” Wook said softly. Never before had Dal thought of their garden as an empty place—they had their blooms, and the stars occasionally came to visit—but now, they wondered how they had lived there for so long, existing in isolation. Without Mi-young to cook dinner most nights, without the village children to play games with beneath the brilliant midday sun, without Wook to watch and wonder and explore with. Alone.

“I suppose it is.” They said nothing more. Wook only hummed, and perhaps his hand brushed Dal’s fingers, providing a moment of comfort. Loneliness, after all, does not choose its victims, be they immortal or human.

With time, they learned about Wook. How he basked in the smiles of his friends, of the village’s young children, of the bakers and the wives and the weavers. How he crowed with delight at a baby in a neighbor’s arms and laughed at the rambunctious humor of the farmers. How his handwriting was neat and strict, save for the small curls in the lines of his letters. How he loved spicy food but didn’t quite have the tolerance for it. How his favorite time of day was the early morning, when the dew was wet on the grass, and the sun, though brilliant gold, was not yet warm, and a delicate chill hung soft over the fields. Dal listened to him tell of the stories he had read, of the stories he might one day write, of the stars he had taken to naming because he had knowledge neither of their true names nor their true selves.

“Perhaps you could tell me their names,” he said one night. “Miyoung refused to tell me, for she claimed she was eager to see what I might come up with.”

“And what do you call them?” Dal asked, amused.

A smile widened Wook’s lips. “I call that one Chin-hwa,” he said, browned finger pointing to a star so far away Dal could scarcely believe they had ever known the sound of its voice. “I imagine that he is the wealthiest star in the sky, but still he seeks the greatest treasures of all the legends.” He pointed to another. “That one I’ve named Han-wool, for she opens the gates to the heavens, and her beauty is unmatched.” Dal nodded, but their eyes were drawn

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27

then to the black of Wook’s eyelashes, and the serenity of his eyes, and the unruly wisps of hair he could never quite tame out of his face. They saw his weathered smile lines and the calluses on his hands from his writing. They thought that this might be beauty, and when Wook turned to them and their fingers intertwined, they knew it was.

Mi-young asked Dal to help her knead bread. It was an activity to which they were becoming more accustomed, and so they agreed, for Wook was out that morning.

“You walk a dangerous path,” she said suddenly. “You belong not here, but in the sky, Dal.” When she looked at them her golden eyes were serious. “You know nothing of humanity’s nature. You dabble in that which you don’t understand, so I am telling you to put this hopeless love to rest.”

“I understand plenty,” Dal replied angrily. “I couldn’t see why stars would stay on Earth, but now I see clearly. To see the smile of my beloved, I would leave my garden behind forever. To make his bread and walk the river with him is to know without doubt that no immortality or perfection is worth the joy that his own imperfections bring us both.”

Mi-young’s gaze was not one of anger, but pity. “You understand nothing. There will never be a love so powerful as a human’s love because they love with death in sight. You give Wook what you can because you see eternity before you both—but Wook has an end, so he gives his everything to you now. You could never hope to be his happiness, as he can never be yours.”

When Dal next lay beside their lover in their small bed, they watched Wook’s chest rise and fall with soft breaths. They remembered, unbidden, the words of Mi-young, harsh in their truth. They recalled the feeling of the soil in Ba-ram’s forest—the taste of life, and of decay, because everything that was truly alive must eventually find its end. It was a concept foreign to Dal and the stars and the planets, and Dal realized that it was this foreignness that made their love for Wook impossible. Already Dal could see wisps of silver in Wook’s raven hair that had not been there when they first arrived. They could see wrinkles around his mouth and eyes, a strain in their chest that youth had kept at bay. This, Dal knew, was aging. It was cruel.

Dal did not count the years, because they did not understand the passing of time as man and woman and beast do. But still they saw Wook’s back bow, his eyes film, and his hand shake, even as he

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Below the Silver Garden

wrote his stories, so precious to him still. Mi-young watched from afar, and though she had not said another word to them, she saw in Dal the recognition that eventually, it would end, as all human things do.

“Do not mourn for me, my love,” Wook murmured to Dal one brittle morning. “I have lived a life to be proud of. I have found you and loved you. Now it is simply my time to go.”

“But the lives of humans are so short,” Dal whispered.

Wook’s eyes, sunken in the wrinkles of gaunt age, were sad.

“So they are.” When at last Wook closed his eyes for the final time, his hair snow white—matching their own—and his hand clasped in Dal’s, it was time to return to the silver garden.

They watched as Mi-young cooked for the funeral, and as the villagers burned a bright fire, thick with incense and flowers and cloth, and Wook’s bones were lost in the ashes. They saw friend and family, man and woman and child, cry for another lost to time. And the grief, how inescapable it was. Even as Dal watched the villagers dry their tears and move on with life, it still crushed them.

This, then, was death, and understanding came to Dal while they knelt before the fire, closer than any human could go, because they were not human at all. The stars were eternal in the way man can never be—always beautiful, always alight, always young. To become ugly, to lose thought and reason, to end—this, they now knew, was humanity.

Mi-young took their hand and guided them back to the house.

And from there Dal walked over field and meadow and through Baram’s great forest—which seemed unchanged—to So-ra’s towering waves, which still seemed thriving and dark and unexplored. From there they climbed through the clouds, walked upon the winds to the night sky, and found once more their silver garden. It was untouched, eternal, despite the decades Dal had spent away from its glittering paths. Still it lit night skies and grew rare and beautiful flowers and swept the tides across beaches. As Dal’s feet touched its cold soil, silent in its lack of life, they saw it was as though they had never even left. But still there was something new—an ash tree, silver, as all things in Dal’s garden were. They sat and took out a silver-bound book, its pages iridescent, its writing tight and neat except for the lines of his letters, which were just slightly curled.

Beneath the ash tree—so similar to those on Earth and yet so different—Dal sat and read the words of the only being they had

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ever loved—they read of humanity, of life, of change—and fell into that eternal state that was neither sleep nor wakefulness.

And so they sit to this day, reading the old words and grieving as only the immortal can—forever.

30

31

JAY TOWNSEND

A

FANTASY

STORY

ABOUT

MY

GRANDMOTHER Content Warning: Mention of Domestic Violence, Violence to Animals, Death, and Suicidal Ideation

Jay Townsend is a senior Creative Writing major with a penchant for forgetfulness. Alongside short stories, they also write poetry, illustrate, and animate.

32

M

y grandmother wore big boots and a straw hat and it was no secret ‘round the neighborhood that she’d shot her husband in the stomach with a shotgun for beating her. Nobody ever told the sheriff, and when it became apparent that my grandaddy was no longer around, the deputies asked where he’d gone, but they got no answers worth looking into. Edith, she’s a sweet soul, her neighbors said. She’d never hurt anybody, least all her husband.

He probably ran off somewhere. Always was no good. And she’s the best midwife this town had anyway, so why look too hard at her? ​I only knew about what happened because one day when I was in middle school, just about old enough to date, she took me out back and showed me how to shoot and said, “Neve, if you ever have to shoot your man, do it just like you did them cans, and bring him out here. We’ll bury him next to your grandaddy.” ​“I’m never gonna fall in love,” I said. ​“Good,” she replied, and went stomping inside to cook supper. ​My grandmother smoked a pipe. Dad used to say her house had two chimneys and when I was little he made her stop for a while— “For the girl’s health, Mom, you don’t want her to get cancer”—but he couldn’t make her stop forever. She smoked all the time, but

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33

especially in the evenings. She would sit in her old rocking chair at the end of the day in her faded gingham dress and smoke, and if I sat on the braided rug in front of her and was quiet enough she would tell me stories just like I’m telling you now. ​My grandmother had a pet wolf. She got real pissed if you called him a dog. “He’s too big to be a dog,” she’d say. “Too big and too damn smart.” He was big, too—came near up to her waist, and standing he was taller than my dad. I don’t know if he was a wolf, but he looked like the pictures of ‘em I saw in textbooks. ​Whatever he was, he didn’t have a name. If my grandmother wanted him, she’d whistle, and he’d come. Not that he was ever that far away. That wolf followed her everywhere, from the chicken coop to the grocery store, watching all strangers with wary gold eyes. And when she died, he curled up at the foot of her hospital bed and died too. ​One evening, sitting on the braided rug, I asked my grandmother how she got that wolf. She exhaled smoke, looked down at me, and pursed her lips for a second, the way she always did when I asked a question my dad wouldn’t want her answering. I waited, ‘cause I knew she’d tell me anyway. And after a few moments, she told me this story. ​When my granddaddy died, my grandmother buried him herself in a little unmarked plot a ways into the woods. She worked for hours, the shovel heavy in her rough hands, and when she was done she sowed poppies in the fresh earth to keep him from rising again. It was near the witching hour when she was finished. She let the shovel lean against a tree and sat next to it, tilting her face towards where the dark canopy obscured the moon. Only then did she cry, and only for a minute or two. She had things to do.

Children to check on. ​She used the shovel to help herself stand up, wiped the tears from her cheeks with dirty hands, and made her way back to her home.

She left the shovel leaning up against the chicken coop. It would have been a simple matter to put it away, my grandmother told me, but sometimes, on an evening when you gotta do everything right, it’s wise to do one thing wrong on purpose. That way, all your doing-things-wrong-ness goes into that one thing, ‘stead of getting spread through all your other responsibilities. ​The wolf appeared the very next day. ​My grandmother woke up at dawn—did it every day ‘til she died—and went out to the chicken coop to put her shovel away. It

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A Story About my Grandmother

was one of the big sturdy ones you dug ditches with, the kind with an edge like a blade. My grandmother held it comfortably, and was turning to put it where it belonged in the shed when she heard a soft growl. She whirled and saw the wolf standing just a few feet behind her, between her and the house. ​The wolf and my grandmother stared at each other. ​And then, with no warning, it bunched up and sprang forward, snarling at her. ​My grandmother yelped and stumbled backwards. She brought the shovel up to defend herself and caught the wolf’s jaws with its handle. She fell to the ground with it on top of her. It bit down on the shovel’s handle, hard, and with a sharp crunching noise it split in two. While the wolf was spitting out splinters, my grandmother brought the shovel up and bashed the wolf’s head with it. It began to stumble back, and so she hit it again. It fell, whimpering. She hit it a third time, and it stopped making noise.

My grandmother was left breathless. She picked herself up, ​ checked herself for damage. Luckily, none. The shovel would have to be repaired. She didn’t want to look at it anymore. The wolf would also need dealing with. My grandmother decided it’d be more useful to just drop it somewhere. She had enough work without skinning the thing, and she didn’t eat carnivores anyway. So she put the remains in a wheelbarrow and hauled it to the treeline.

She took it far enough away that her kids wouldn’t find it, and she didn’t bother with the poppy seeds since animals don’t come back.

She was late coming back to the house for breakfast. Her kids were worried. Last night’s violence had shaken them.

She smiled and said that she was sorry, she’d just gotten— ​ distracted. She made breakfast and sent the kids off to school, told them not to worry. They sat ‘round the old oak table, almost silent, and in the voicelessness of that morning the whole family understood that nobody was saying nothing about what happened to Daddy. ​My grandmother spent the day repairing the shovel and doing chores ‘round the house and checking in on Miss Kelly who was eight months pregnant. Doing things was nice. It took her mind off the wolf. ​She didn’t know how the thing had gotten so close to her house.

There was a fence ‘tween the garden and the wood, and besides, most animals didn’t get close to humans unless they were starving.

That creature didn’t look starving. What was it doing there?

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35

​“I sensed something weren’t right with it,” my grandmother said, during the telling. She blew smoke into the deepening purple shadows of the evening. “I could tell.” ​“What do you mean you killed him?” I asked, looking over at where the wolf sat in the corner. “He’s right there.” ​“I’m getting to it.” ​So, it was the next day when the wolf came back. My grandmother went out to feed the chickens, and she was just about to open the chicken coop when she heard a soft growl behind her. ​She turned, half-afraid and half-curious, to see the same wolf as the day before. Same size, same gold eyes—but on its head, sprouting from the same place where she had bashed it the morning before, were poppies. The blooms danced slightly in the breeze, red as blood, dripping petals to the ground. As soon as my grandmother locked eyes with the wolf, she knew today’s experience would be much the same as its preface. ​But this time, my grandmother did not have a shovel. ​The wolf sprang; my grandmother ran, nearly tripping as she went. She managed to get up the steps of the back porch before the wolf was on her, snapping at her heels. It caught her by the skirt and jerked her backward by it, growling, before she pulled forward and, dress ripping, stumbled through the back door. She spun and snatched the shotgun that hung over the doorframe and, before the wolf could make another charge, shot it through its left eye. It fell almost immediately, legs splayed comically and tongue lolling. ​My dad came up behind my grandmother, rubbing his eyes.

“Momma?” ​“Just a wolf,” my grandmother said. “Don’t worry, I got ‘im.” ​“Your dress is all torn.” ​My grandmother’s chest was still heaving with panic. She turned to look at the shreds of fabric. “So it is,” she said. “I’ll have to see if I can fix it.” ​She dumped the wolf’s body again. She buried it with the mended shovel and sprinkled poppy seeds over the fresh soil, just in case that would make it stick. “Stay dead,” she said. She made the sign of the Thirteenth Saint for good measure. ​On the third morning, my grandmother went out with the shotgun gripped firmly in both hands. When the wolf appeared once more, this time with only one poppy growing from where its left eye had been, she shot it on sight.

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A Story About my Grandmother

The grave she’d dug for it was just as she’d left it, but the body was gone. She buried the wolf once more. ​It went on for years like that, my grandmother said. She’d wake up, go outside, shoot the wolf, bury it. At first, she was flawless with it. She thought it might end if she killed the wolf enough, if she fought hard enough, if she maimed it bad enough. Nothing worked. No matter how many times she killed it, the wolf came back. No matter how hard she fought, it still sometimes got its teeth in her. No matter how many bloody pieces she carved its limbs into, no matter how far from its skull she scattered its spine, it came back, choking on poppies but still with enough animal in it to bite. ​For a while, my grandmother said, she rarely got scratched or bit.

She was careful. She was smart. And she was proud. But after long enough gettin’ hounded, anyone starts slipping. My grandmother’s legs especially took a beating. Sometimes she felt she was more scars than skin. And while she was telling me the story, she lifted the hem of her dress and let me see some of ‘em. Pale, now, outshone by liver spots and veins, but still there. ​It was getting harder to keep going. There came a point where she thought she might die. When my grandmother said that, her voice got a little rough around the edges. She took a deep drag of her pipe and heaved a great sigh as she breathed out, then rearranged herself on her rocking chair. I splayed my hands on the rug and hooked my fingers into the gaps between braids. I was a freshly minted high schooler at the time, still figuring other people out, but I knew that this was the closest my grandmother had come to displaying weakness in front of me, and it made me nervous. ​“One afternoon,” my grandmother said, “I was sittin’ right here, in this rocking chair, doing right what I’m doing now, smoking with the back door open.”

The kids were playing outside. It was a warm summer night, one of the dog days just before fall came slinking in. She was thinking ‘bout that wolf killing her, listening to the kids laugh in the distance and wondering who’d take care of them when she was gone. She was getting tired. She was angry about it, of course she was angry, who wouldn’t be angry, but she was getting tired more than she was getting angry. She’d tried a couple things to stave the wolf off.

Talismans from priests of the saints, exorcisms—hell, she’d even tried to capture it before—but nothing worked. Too bloodthirsty for capture, too esoteric for religion. Too determined for death.

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37

​A couple more years, my grandmother promised herself. Wait ‘till the kids are all moved out. Couple more years and I’ll stop bein’ so tired. ​There’s something to be said about exhaustion, my grandmother told me. No energy to thrash around means you start to get real comfortable with the drownin’, and the water gets a lot clearer.

My grandmother got hurt some, but she also got to watching the thing that attacked her. She got to seeing when it came: when she was alone, when she was tired, when she had trouble with the kids. She got to knowing when it would snarl, when it would bite, when it would try and pounce on her. And one day, she saw it jump at her, and she barely flinched, just stepped calmly away, big boots raising a puff of dust from the dry earth, and levelled her shotgun to see it looking ashamed, its tail tucked between its legs.

Seeing the thing that plagued her looking so apologetic gave my grandmother a burst of energy, and she let loose one victorious “HA!” from deep in her belly, and it felt just as good as laughing for the first time.

It took a while for my grandmother to perfect the trick of stepping out of the way. She got hurt more. But the knowledge that she’d done it once gave her hope enough to power through until she did it again, and again, she got to see the wolf look almost ashamed before she shot it ‘tween the eyes.

The next day was the first time it did not attack at all. It just trotted up, poppies along its brow like a crown, and lay down on the back porch. After a few hours, the poppies all wilted and fell off.

Her children moved out, and my grandmother did not die. She went to her daughter’s wedding. (My dad has photographs of that—all those people in suits, and her in the back, smiling, wearing a well-pressed green dress and those big clunky boots still covered with mud.) She lived to hold me when I was born.

My grandmother smiled down at me. I smiled back, a little uncertain, and said, “Does he still bite you?”

“Tries to.” My grandmother’s eyes flicked to her wolf, who’d picked up his head to look at us. “Succeeds sometimes, too. But don’t you worry. It’s hard to hurt a tough old biddy like me.”

I always remembered the way she said that. And when they were putting her in the ground, I couldn’t see her as she was in the coffin. I could only see her as she was on that day: sitting in her old rocking chair with the back door open, a strangely victorious expression on her face.

38

39 TAYLOR MCGOWAN

FANTASY

S E A SINGER Content Warning: Mentions of Violence (Including Gun Violence) and Death

Taylor is a senior WLP major who is probably procrastinating, playing piano, or reading a fantasy novel as you read this.

Her love for fantasy first bloomed when she was a tiny child and continues to intensify by the hour. She’s aiming to be a substantive editor one day, preferably for YA fiction, but she also intends to keep pursuing her other primary passions, music and theatre (hopefully by writing a musical someday).

She is currently the managing editor of Stork and Concrete, the treasurer of the Emerson Review, and the head copy editor of Generic. She hopes you enjoy “Sea-Singer” and wishes you all the best!

40

I

was seven the first time I witnessed the execution of a selkie.

She was not allowed the dignity of clothing as they hauled her to the beach, slender arms wrenched behind her back, webbed toes dragging deep, desperate tracks in the sand as she struggled in the men’s grasp. One of her dark eyes was swollen shut, and bloody saliva dripped from her broken teeth as she shrieked my father’s name—and mine. Her sealskin was already smoldering on a nearby bonfire. They killed her the way they killed mad animals: a single shot to the back of the head. The wet crunch of her skull coming apart around the bullet still lives in the bowels of my brain.

She was my mother. My father told me to look away, tried to tuck my face against his coat, but I watched anyway. I remember the way she fell—the way her lithe body collapsed like a broken doll’s, long limbs folding at awkward angles as death deprived her of her grace.

“Look at what they do to them, a stóirín.” My father’s voice was hoarse, scraped raw by sobs, and his stubbled cheeks were wet.

“Look at what they’ve done to her.”

I could only nod wordlessly, my eyes chained to the stain on the sand.

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After my mother’s nature—and, by extension, half of mine—was revealed, the local school shut its doors to me, and my father took on two new jobs in addition to his work as the town’s doctor. The first was tutoring me in every subject imaginable, from mathematics to medicine to the stories of my mother and I’s ancestors—stories of the seal-people who shed their sealskins and became human when they set foot on dry land, but could always return to the water so long as they had their sealskins.

My father’s second job was saving selkies.

It began when I was eight, a little less than a year after my mother’s execution. A photograph of my mother—who was strikingly beautiful even in black and white, her dark hair elegantly coiffed, her sharp cheekbones dusted with freckles— watched over my father and I as we sat together at the kitchen table and crafted a charm: seven tear-shaped chips of sea glass strung in among the shells and bells of a wind chime. It was a sign, my father said, for any selkie who happened to see our home from the beach. It was a promise that they would be safe with us—that we did not side with the men and women who blamed their own infidelity on the seal-people. After we hung the charm on the back door, my father returned to the kitchen, kissed his fingertips, and touched the photograph of my mother, as if he could reach through time and transfer the kiss to her smiling mouth. His lips wobbled, but the smile he gave me when I met his eyes was real.

The charm worked. Within a week, the first selkie appeared: a lithe, sun-browned woman injured by shrapnel coming off a cargo ship that had struck a mine. The injuries varied dramatically from patient to patient, but the process was always the same: my father would treat them, teaching me as he went, and I would sing them to sleep with my mother’s favorite lullaby—a song in her own language, a piece I had long since memorized without knowing its meaning. By the time I was thirteen, we had treated over a hundred patients. Some were injured by shark-wary fishermen or shrapnel, but many more were hurt by the townspeople. It was almost always the same story: a man or woman found a beautiful selkie on the shore, took the selkie to bed, panicked after being discovered by their spouse, and accused the selkie of using magic to seduce them. Only about half of those selkies survived to make it to our doorstep.

It wasn’t always injuries that brought them to us, however. One night, while my father was in town delivering a shop owner’s child, I

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was helping a selkie named Sorcha through a breech birth. It was my first—and, for a long time, my only—time treating a patient by myself, and my father’s face glowed with pride when he returned home to find me perched dutifully by the selkie’s bedside, humming my mother’s lullaby for the dark-haired, hazel-eyed child in my arms. Before the pair left, Sorcha asked to borrow some paint. She only smiled when we asked what the swirling symbol she’d added to our door meant.

I was eighteen when our crimes were discovered. Moira, a nurse-in-training who occasionally assisted my father with house calls, betrayed him after venturing into our basement in search of gauze and discovering a selkie who was recovering from a gunshot wound. Moira, a dark-haired, steely-eyed woman whose father had been murdered by her mother in a fit of rage after she discovered him in bed with a selkie, immediately dragged my father’s patient to the town hall as proof of my father’s crimes. The sound when they shot him was sickeningly familiar. So was the stain on the sand.

I buried him where we’d buried my mother, on the edge of a forest that bordered the sea. I hung our charm on a branch overhead, low enough to reach, high enough that the seven tears caught the light and sparkled when the sun set behind the trees.

A messenger found me as I sat in the dappled shade beneath the branches, chest heaving with sobs as I used a dull knife to carve my father’s name into the slab of oak that would be his headstone.

The letter the messenger handed over informed me that I had one month to leave town—that my existence as a half-selkie had been tolerated until now due to the medical service my father provided, but that they no longer had any reason to let me remain. The town council’s vote was unanimous, the letter declared. One month. The letter didn’t bother to explain what would happen if I disobeyed.

That night, I hung a photograph of my father next to the one of my mother and stared at them through blurry, aching eyes. As a child, I’d once asked my father why we stayed here—why we didn’t flee to a friendlier shore, a place where no one knew where we came from or what blood I carried.

“There are no friendly shores, a stóirín,” he’d said, pulling me close and kissing my forehead. “But if there’s a chance that we can make this one a little friendlier, we have a responsibility to try. And if they cast us out of here, we’ll find another shore, and another after that. We cannot change the ways of the world,” he’d said, “but we can be a sanctuary for those who need it most.”

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Seized by a sudden wave of nausea, I gripped the edge of the countertop and dry-heaved over the sink. He had helped so many, protected so many, but who had been there to protect him? No one. No one.

There was a flurry of knocks at the door. In my cloudy mind, the knocks sounded like gunshots—like the gunshots that had killed my mother and my father and would soon kill me.

“Leave,” I barked, my throat almost too raw to get the words out.

“Get out of here!”

The knocking turned to an insistent banging. A furious wail tried to work its way out of my throat, but I swallowed it—along with a mouthful of bile—and stumbled to the door.

“I took it down,” I snarled, throwing the door open. “I’m not—” When you’ve met enough of them, you learn how to recognize them. There’s a certain sheen to their hair; a certain gleam in their eyes; a certain awkwardness in their gait, as if their feet aren’t quite used to touching solid ground. The sharp smell of sea salt clings to them no matter how long it’s been since they were last in the water.

That smell had seemed sweet to me, once; now it burned my nose.

“Go away,” I repeated, guttural, but I couldn’t close the door in time. A slim arm shot into the space between the door and the frame, wedging it back open, and I found myself forced to look at the selkie—at her sharp, almost elfin face; at tiny pink bow of her mouth; at the waves of sleek black hair that spilled over her shoulders, whipped free of a deep blue ribbon by the autumn wind. Both of her hands clutched at the front of the bulky coat she wore, holding it shut; I could see mottled bruises forming under the flaking coat of dried blood on her knuckles. She was holding her sealskin under one arm.

My eyes traveled back up to her face. A swollen knot was forming near her temple, and a ragged cut sliced through one of her brows, blood beading along its edges. Her bottom lip was split.

Look at what they do to them, a stóirín.

“Please.” Her voice started strong and then tapered, like a wave crumbling into foam on the shore. She was swaying. “Your door—” I got an arm under her shoulders and scanned the beach quickly for onlookers. When I was sure the moon was our only witness, I drew her into the house. Her feet left bloody prints on the steps, and I reached down to sling my other arm under her knees, but she flinched away, shaking her head violently. When she threw up a hand to block me and her coat fell open, I realized why.

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There was a knife in her lower abdomen, buried all the way to its mother-of-pearl hilt.

Who did this to you?

I swallowed the words. There were more important things to say and do.

“This way,” I said, leading her into the kitchen. I reluctantly left her to lean against the wall as I cleared the table and covered it with a fresh sheet from the cabinet above the sink. She didn’t make a sound as I helped her onto it, but her bottom lip was bitten ragged by the time we got her stretched out on her back.

The sight of a bloodied young woman on our kitchen table was both morbidly familiar and terrifying. The gaping chasm of my father’s absence threatened to swallow me, and for a moment all I could do was stand there in the middle of the kitchen, frozen. My eyes locked onto the photos on the wall.

We cannot change the ways of the world, but we can be a sanctuary for those who need it most.

The echo of my father’s voice in the back of my skull brought a tidal wave of grief crashing down upon my head, but it was chased by something else—a sensation like the shift of a dislocated joint back into its socket, agony and relief entwined. And instead of adrenaline, my veins flooded with calm—my father’s calm, the calm he had taught me to have.

“You were right to leave the knife in,” I said, grabbing a pair of scissors. I saw the selkie twitch, as if snapped from a trance. “I’m sorry—I’m going to have to cut your dress.”

“Isn’t mine,” she mumbled, weakly flapping a hand, and I took that as permission. I started with a smooth, straight line from the hem of the skirt to the bottom curve of her rib cage, taking care not to nick her. After a decade spent treating hundreds of selkies, many of them naked—clothes didn’t magically materialize on their bodies when they emerged from the ocean, after all—it was easy to keep my eyes where they needed to be, even as long stretches of olive skin were revealed to the lamplight. Once I’d cut out a large square and ever-so-carefully widened the gap that surrounded the knife hilt, I lifted the fabric away from the wound.

“It’s—it’s not long.” The selkie was panting; the lamplight made the sweat on her throat and collarbones gleam gold. “The knife.”

“Don’t talk,” I murmured, tracking the way the iridescent hilt rose and fell with her breath and the way her taut stomach muscles trembled whenever she spoke. “Save your energy.”

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Her eyes narrowed. “Bossy,” she muttered.

“Stubborn.”

“Niamh.”

“What?”

“My”—she paused to let out a stifled cough—“my name is Niamh.”

“Shush, Niamh,” I said, pulling a package of gauze and a small piece of wood from the cabinet. Then, more softly, I added, “I’m Aoife.”

Niamh shook her head, a slow back and forth. “No.” “I can assure you that’s my name,” I said, arching a brow as I gathered a handful of gauze.

“No,” she repeated, “not the name we know,” and said something in a lilting, melodic language that rolled off her tongue like water— the language of my mother’s lullaby. The sound of it was enough to bring me up short. “That’s the only name we know. The name my sister gave you.”

“Your sister,” I echoed.

“Sorcha. Didn’t she tell you what she was putting on your door?”

The painted symbol. Sorcha’s indecipherable smile. I saw that same smile on Niamh’s face now—tight around the edges from pain, but still lovely.

I hastily pushed the piece of wood at her. “Bite this,” I said. “I’m going to take the knife out.”

To my relief, she stuck the wood between her teeth and tipped her head back, fixing her eyes on the ceiling.

“Do it,” she said.

She didn’t scream. I heard the wood creak as her jaws clamped down on it, and her chest heaved with the effort of keeping silent, but no sound escaped her throat. I dropped the knife off the side of the table and pressed gauze into the wound with my whole weight. I glanced down at the scarlet-slicked blade—like she’d said, it wasn’t very long. The likelihood of it having struck an organ was slim.

A knot in my chest began to loosen.

“I think,” I said, “that we’re going to be okay.”

••

I

t took more than two hours to tend to her knife wound, her feet, her head, and her hands. Miraculously, Niamh remained awake

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throughout it all; the lamplight picked out threads of green in her dark eyes as she watched me work.

As I swabbed her knuckles with alcohol, she spoke. “She said he wasn’t supposed to come home until tomorrow.”

I glanced up at her, but didn’t push for her to continue. My eyes fell to her split lip, where blood had clotted darkly under a dab of ointment.

“She lied,” Niamh continued matter-of-factly, probing the clot with her tongue until I clicked my own tongue in disapproval. “She knew exactly when he was coming. I should’ve realized sooner.

She gave me the dress. The hair ribbon.” Her voice quieted. “She kissed me.”

“And he came home.” It was the usual story, though reversed, with a streak of cruel manipulation added that left a sour taste in my mouth. “He did this?”

She winced as I cleaned a cut on her knuckle; she must’ve caught the edge of a tooth. I hoped she’d made someone bleed with that blow. “Some of it,” she said. Her eyes slid to the kitchen counter, where she’d placed her sealskin. “She did that.”

I blinked. “Did what?”

“See for yourself.”

Dread lifted the hairs on the back of my neck. I approached the counter on uncertain feet; I had never held a selkie’s sealskin before, had never even asked to do so. “May I…?”

“Yes.” I brushed the surface of it with the very tips of my fingers. It was satiny to the touch, as warm and sleek and soft as I’d expected. It wasn’t until I reached the edge of it that I realized what was wrong.

It had been slashed into pieces—long, ragged strips, like it had been cut with a dull instrument. Or torn apart by hand.

Rage rose in my throat like bile. A selkie’s sealskin was precious, as vital as an organ—their connection to the sea. “Can it be…”

“Fixed? I don’t know.” Niamh’s voice was flat, her expression unreadable. “I don’t know if anyone has ever had to try.”

I resisted the urge to tighten my grip on the sealskin. I was handy with a needle—I’d learned from a doctor, after all—but this wasn’t a matter of leaving a scar behind or not. It was a matter of Niamh’s freedom.

“Can I?” I asked.

We set everything up on the basement floor. Niamh sat propped against the sofa, carefully arranged to avoid irritating her wounds,

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and sipped stove-heated soup from a mug as she gave me instructions on which edge aligned with which.

“There,” she said, gesturing.

“There?”

“No,” she said, rolling her eyes. She grabbed my hand and guided it a few inches to the left. Her palm was warm from the mug, her fingers long and agile. “There.”

I was vividly aware of the warm, pleasant weight of her hand on my wrist. That awareness lingered far longer than the touch itself, and I tried—and failed—not to steal glances at her as I worked.

I struggled to talk while stitching without losing focus, but Niamh seemed content to fill the silence. She told me stories as I worked the needle in and out of the sealskin. I learned that Aisling, the very first selkie my father and I had treated, was now a matriarch who wore her scars with pride. I learned that her beloved—that was the best translation of the word for a selkie’s lifelong partner, Niamh said—was Cara, a selkie we’d healed after she was beaten by the local pub owner, and that they now lived a peaceful life on an island off the coast of County Kerry—an island where, rumor had it, the selkies were not persecuted as they were on the mainland. I learned that Sorcha’s son—Niamh’s nephew—was named after my father, Conor.

Eventually, when my hand began to cramp, I accepted Niamh’s offer of a sip from her mug and said, “You’ve barely mentioned yourself.”

Niamh tilted her head. “Have I not?”

“You know you haven’t.” I knew little of her, but I knew enough to be sure she was no fool. “How did you end up here?”

That smile returned, the enigmatic one that she shared with her sister. “I was hoping you wouldn’t make me say it.”

“I won’t make you do anything.”

“I know. That’s why I’m telling you. I… Well.” She averted her gaze. “I thought she was you.”

It was a sentence full of puzzle pieces; I tried to spread them out in my mind.

“I’ve wanted to find you,” Niamh went on, “ever since you helped Sorcha. She said you were kind. That you stayed by her bedside.

That you sang to her son in our language.” A slow, dark flush was rising in her cheeks. “She said you were beautiful. A woman saw me come out of the water, and she came to me, and I thought—”

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“Moira.” The realization curdled my blood: another woman with dark hair and gray eyes, a woman who hated selkies. “You found Moira.”

Slowly, as if processing something, Niamh asked, “Why did you take the charm down?”

“Because my father is dead,” I said, and wished he was there to see the grief that passed like a shadow over Niamh’s face—to see how he had managed to touch the souls of selkies he’d never even met. I tasted the salt of tears in the back of my throat and swallowed. “How did you find me?”

“I looked for the mark on your door.”

“What does it mean?”

“In your language,” Niamh said, “it means something like ‘seasinger.’ One who sings to the ocean and to whom the ocean sings back. It can also refer,” she added, “to a human with selkie blood.”

I thought of my mother’s sweet, silvery voice as she sang me to sleep in her own language—the language she couldn’t speak anywhere but in our house without risking her life. I thought of my father, of his gentle hands and kind eyes as he stitched selkies’ wounds. I thought of their blood on the sand.

Look at what they do to them, a stóirín.

Look at what they do to us, Father, I thought.

Niamh leaned in, reached out, and brushed her bandaged knuckles across my cheek.

“Sea-singer,” she murmured in her own language, soft and sweet, like a prayer.

Only when she drew her hand away did I pick up the needle again.

••

I

t took nearly four weeks. Selkies were fast healers, and by the end of the first week the only injury that still gave Niamh any trouble was the knife wound—but the sealskin was a different matter.

During the day, Niamh remained in the basement, safely out of sight, and I packed. My father and I had always lived sparingly, and there was little I wanted to keep: my mother’s old dresses, my father’s favorite coat and boots, and my own clothes went into one trunk, while books and medical supplies went into another.

I tucked what few photographs we owned into my favorite book of folktales.

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At night, I joined Niamh in the basement. For hours on end, my needle dipped in and out of the satiny material to the hypnotic rhythm of the selkie’s voice. What do you want to hear? she asked every evening as I settled in to work, and every evening I gave her a different answer. Tell me about Sorcha. Tell me about Conor. Tell me about your favorite childhood memory. As my hands stitched up the sealskin, my mind stitched a tapestry—a portrait of a girl who surfaced during thunderstorms to watch lightning dance in the clouds, who braided seaweed crowns for her little nephew whenever they and Sorcha took an hour to sunbathe on a sandbar, who sang under her breath all the time because she couldn’t stand silence. A girl who curled up against my side like a cat when she got cold—which happened suspiciously often—and quickly developed a habit of falling asleep like that, leaving me to wrap a blanket around us both and sleep sitting up against the sofa. A girl who always smiled when she woke to find my arm around her.

Just before midnight on the eve of my last allotted day, I gently nudged Niamh awake.

“It’s done,” I whispered as her eyes slowly opened, lashes casting faint, flickering shadows across her cheekbones. “It’s finished, Niamh.”

She smiled, as she always did, but there was something brittle about it this time.

She said, “It won’t work.”

My thoughts ground to a halt. My mouth opened, closed, and opened again.

“I can feel it,” Niamh went on, skimming her fingertips across her sealskin. “I felt it from the moment it was destroyed. It’s like…” She swallowed. “It’s like the sea has left it. I cannot return. I just… I just needed to see if you would try.”

“Niamh.” I flexed my aching fingers; I expected at least a twinge of anger to rise within me, but nothing came but grief. “Niamh, I’m so—” “Take me with you,” she said.

I paused, astonishment tying my tongue. I tried to say her name— again—but nothing came out.

“You’re leaving already,” Niamh said, sliding her hands all the way from my upper arms to my jaw, fingers curving gently around the sharp edges there. “And I can’t go back to the water. We’ll go to County Down. Or Clare. Wherever we want. We can help them

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anywhere. We can tell them about the island off County Kerry. We can keep our people safe.”

“Our people,” I echoed.

Niamh’s thumbs stroked gentle arcs across my cheeks, pushing curls behind my ears.

“You are a sea-singer,” she said, touching her brow to mine. “You are one of us.”

I closed my eyes.

If they cast us out of here, we’ll find another shore, and another after that. We cannot change the ways of the world, but we can be a sanctuary for those who need it most.

“Sea-singer,” I said, first in English, then in her language—our language.

Niamh smiled, and in that smile I could suddenly see it: a new town, a new shore, a new charm on a new door. A new place where Niamh could watch lightning and sing and fall asleep against my shoulder. And then, when our welcome wore out, we would find another. And another. And another. I couldn’t take my father with me, but I could bring our mission to a new horizon—a new corner of the sea.

One who sings to the ocean, and to whom the ocean sings back.

“Yes?” Niamh breathed, drawing back enough to see my face.

“Yes,” I whispered, pressing the word against her lips. “Yes.”

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IN THIS ISSUE THE LAST COMIC OF US

by Hancine Mok

THE LOST ONES

by Mackenzie Denofio

BELOW THE SILVER GARDEN

by Anna Carson

A STORY ABOUT MY GRANDMOTHER

by Jay Townsend

SEA-SINGER

by Taylor McGowan