Generic 11

ENERIC

Issue 11

Emerson’s Genre Fiction Magazine

11

Generic, Issue 11, Spring 2017 Copyright for all stories go to their creators Generic is copyright of Undergraduate Students for Publishing, Emerson College Interior Design by Kelsey Aijala and Zoe Chen Cover Art by Jaclyn Withers This issue is set in Roboto and Athelas

Electronic edition published on issuu.com Print edition printed at Emerson College Print and Copy Center, Boston

facebook.com/GenericMag @GenericMagazine emersongeneric@gmail.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LETTER TO THE READER

The Teacup Tale

Megan Jensen Igni

Daniel Zambrano Fernandez Zanzibar

Bailey Tamayo The Butterfly

Theresa Miele Birdsong of Ovristan

Allison Rassmann

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GENERIC STAFF EDITOR IN CHIEF Rachel Cantor

MANAGING EDITOR Melissa Close

HEAD EDITORS

Sarah Dolan, Emily Hillebrand, Emily McNeiece

READERS

Kelsey Aijala, Mary Baker, Alyssa Capel, Sammi Curran, Emma Grant, Philip Hubbell, Cassandra Martinez, Allison Rassmann, Alana Scartozzi, Emily Sierra, Caitlin Smith, Nicole Swisher, Bailey Tamayo

HEAD COPYEDITOR Allison Rassmann

COPYEDITORS

Rafael Barraza, Mia Daniele, Philip Hubbell, Olivia Williams

PROOFREADER Oliver Kaplowitz

MARKETING MANAGER Mary Baker

MARKETING ASSISTANT Max Baker

DESIGN HEAD Kelsey Aijala

DESIGN ASSISTANT Zoe Chen

COVER DESIGNER Jacyln Withers

DEAR READER, Welcome to the eleventh issue of Generic! As you might have guessed from the cover, we are the genre fiction magazine at Emerson College.

What does this mean? We’re the only magazine on campus to publish solely genre fiction: if it could happen right now in real life, you won’t read about it in Generic. It also means that every part of this magazine was written, edited, copy edited, marketed, designed, and produced by Emerson undergraduate students.

Every time you pick up an issue of Generic, you’re about to sail just beyond the bounds of reality. We tell tales of horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and more—pretty much anything that’s not considered plain “literary” or “realistic.” With all the disquiet of our new reality—and the daily rush of disquieting news—it can be fun and calming to tune in somewhere else instead. But even as genre provides an escape, it often reminds us of deeper truths. This January, sales of Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 spiked, as readers searched genre fiction for an answer to “alternative facts.” While genre fiction is often set in an alternative reality, it doesn’t lie.

This is my first semester as Editor in Chief, and it has been a challenging and wonderful journey. I’d like to thank the entire Generic staff for all their help and hard work in making Generic 11, with special thanks to our marvelous Managing Editor Melissa Close. More special thanks are in order for our department heads Kelsey, Mary, Allison, Sarah, Emily H., and Emily M. And a round of applause for Pub Club—we’re honored to be your scrappy sidekick on each semester’s publishing quest.

Thanks for supporting our zany but magical little magazine. Read on: nothing here is real, but I promise it’s all true.

-RACHEL CANTOR

EDITOR IN CHIEF

MEGAN JENSEN MAGICAL REALISM

THE TEACUP TALE

Megan Jensen is a senior Writing, Literature, and Publishing student at Emerson College. Along with her short stories, she enjoys writing and reading children’s literature, as it is far more interesting than anything for adults. She grew up in Seattle and is moving to Austin, Texas after graduation in May for no reason other than to have an adventure and enjoy the sun. Megan knows nearly everything about tea and will most likely judge you for liking kombucha.

H

e found it poking out of the dirt in the old state park by the county line.

An old chipped teacup, pattern half worn away by the earth, with light blue etchings on the side and up the curve of the porcelain handle.

The boy from the schoolhouse pulled its handle from the soil and examined its round edges, how the lip curved outward, further from the heavy bottom.

He plopped the cup in his left hand and then his right, feeling the weight move from palm to palm. Keeping his hands preoccupied and his imagination running, he paced to his home on the edge of town, a little wooden house built by his father’s hands at the turn of the century.

The boy, James, flopped his bag on the porch and watched the sunset with the cup in his hands. As the air grew cold, he imagined magic in the porcelain.

From the well on the side of the house, he filled it and sipped. He imagined that drinking from it would help him become a king, or a knight, or save the day with his powers and bravery. He jumped from stair to stair, waving his invisible sword and calling out to the thieves and robbers, beckoning them to stay away. He felt stronger once all the water was out and the empty teacup lay on the third porch step. Once the sun was down, his mother called him inside to help with supper and put his sister to bed.

The young girl, Mary, had felt ill all day. While she usually sang and played in the house before her brother returned from school, she had spent the time laying in the living room, sweat dripping onto the dusty floor, bright blonde curls sticking to her face.

“She’s only pretending,” their mother said, ladling soup for her son. But when time came for the young girl to sleep, James felt that something must be wrong.

Mary’s forehead was hotter than the dirt on a summer’s day, and her eyes were

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barely open enough to see figures. He asked her to count his fingers, or remember the neighbor’s name but she only moaned and clutched his hand in pain.

James then thought of his teacup, the chipped one from the park, and knew what he must do. If he could get powers from such a thing, then certainly it would give strength to his small sister. Without a second thought, he filled the cup with water and brought it to his sister’s parted lips.

Within seconds, Mary sat up; suddenly dry from sweat, face gaining color, pink like the inside of a peony. James stared down at his sister and the teacup.

With an excitement that could reach the heavens, he ran to his mother.

“It’s magical! It’s magical!” he sang, beaming.

His mother laughed and patted his head. “She was only pretending. She learned from you.”

James lowered his head and went back to his room. He sat on his small cot of a bed and placed his head in his hands. As frustration grew inside, his cheeks turned bright and his eyes felt coated in tears, like the rocks from the river down the lane. He saved her, he could feel it. He could save everyone if he wanted. But if nobody was going to believe him anyhow, what was the point? Kings didn’t reign without their people. Heroes didn’t fight without fans. He wrapped the teacup in a towel and hid it far under his bed, behind the boxes of schoolbooks and wooden toys.

The next morning at school, Mary swung through the schoolhouse and told her friends of the miracle. By mid-afternoon, a boy with a cold gave James three pennies to use the teacup, and right away could run and jump again, no more sniffles, no more coughs. The next evening, Mary’s friend brought over her dog, a fluffy black one like on his picture book, and he licked up drops from the cup to cure his gurgling stomach. Soon all the neighborhood and town children knew of the object.

After a week, when James arrived home from school, he found a man on the porch. The man was one of the farmers from a strip of land on the south edge of town, by the market and the big barn with broken windows that children threw stones into in the night. The man wore a striped shirt and dirty boots, and his hat was faded in more than one spot.

“Well now, boy, you aren’t the one with the teacup, are you?” the man asked, squinting at James through the rays of sun.

Just then, his mother came out, making a racket with her broom. “I told you to leave!” she yelled at the man. “James, come inside, leave this man be.”

She huffed at the man and James followed her in as the screen door slammed shut behind them, a whisper of dust finding its way to the ground.

James went to close the wooden door, but the man hissed at him through the screen. “Boy, James, huh? My wife is sicker than a bee in winter. I’ll give you every cent I have for that cup.” His eyes seemed to burst with madness.

James would only know this feeling as fear later in his life.

The man let go and wiped off his pants. “Sorry.”

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Before James thought of an answer, he rushed into the house and away from the man. But the rest of his night was spent in contemplation. His rough sheets and wool blanket scratched at his skin. He imagined what the farmer’s wife must feel like with sheets like those, sick and unable to get comfortable. When he couldn’t sleep, and the light from the moon wafted into his bedroom, he picked at the woolen balls that appeared on the blanket, wondering if she had those on hers as well, and if she was too weak to pick them off.

The only clock in the house was in the kitchen. When James quietly left bed, he pulled on his long sleeve and noted the early time before leaving out the back door with the teacup. By the time he was near the fields and the big barn, the sun was beginning to rise. All the windows in all the houses were dark except one. At the end of the lane, one window was lit by a candle, which matched the sunrise and the wheat in the fields.

James walked up the steps to the house, a rickety thing, and found his way around back to one of the windows. The sill was lit with a candle, and inside was a woman coughing up a storm, lurching into a bucket by her bed. James lurked by the window, hands pressed up against the wooden siding. When he saw the farmer enter by his wife, he ran away, back to his room to forget he even tried.

After days, rumors fled about the farmer’s sick wife, barely able to sit up in bed. His mother whispered something over the dinner table about saving a poor woman like that, if there was a choice. Never had kids or nothing. When the town started planning the funeral, he decided it was his chance.

That night, after a trek to the farmland, he knocked softly at the wooden door. The farmer from before answered, wiping his brow and a tear away.

He looked differently at James now, with less fear and more hope. His hands stopped shaking and his cracked lips showed the beginning of a smile.

“Well, look at you,” he said, wiping his pants and smiling softly, “come to save the day.”

James perked at this. He stepped inside and stood as straight as he could.

His father always told him to stand straight and be brave. But his mother said his old man was the most cowardly she’d ever seen, leaving their family like he did.

The farmer walked James through the house, getting excited. “Your sister spent all day going on and on about that magic in that there cup. Said so to all the neighbor kids. I bet you never thought you’d be a source of gossip in this little town.” The farmer’s teeth were yellowed and brown, but his smile was pure.

They ended in a small room with the same candle from before. James stayed silent, and stared at the woman on the bed. Her hair was pushed back like when his mother took a bath, and a wet towel placed on her forehead.

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He couldn’t tell if the wet was from water or her sweat. She looked whiter than anything he’d seen, and green too, like when the grass starts dying in the heat.

“Helen? We’ve got a boy here for you.” James watched the farmer kneel next to his wife. He tried to catch her chest rise, any sign of life, but nothing seemed to come. “He’s here to make you good again, fix you right up.”

When Helen didn’t move, the farmer’s voice went up a little. His hands gripped the blanket on the woman a little tighter, and he spoke with his teeth pressed tight together. “Helen, wake up. Helen. Wake up.”

James stood in the doorway, half in and half out. His lips parted and he felt like he could burst into tears right then. The room suddenly felt larger, like he was outside, in the field, and the sun was blinding. He held the doorframe to keep from falling.

“Boy, come here. Try your cup. I have water, try it. Come on, now.” The farmer was staring at the unmoving woman.

James hesitated. He wanted to leave and crawl back into bed and ignore the coarse wool and the dirty sheets and sleep until it was time for school.

“Boy, come here now.”

He walked over and knelt next to the farmer. The bed smelled like something wicked, like when his sister left a bowl of food out back for a stray cat one day and they found it a week after, molded over and rotten. He tried not to breathe.

“Take it out now, son.”

James unfolded the towel and revealed the teacup, shaking in his palms.

The farmer sloshed water inside from the well out back, spilling on the floor and on James’s pants. The cold made him shiver a bit, teeth clenched.

“Do it, do now, boy, before she’s too gone,” the farmer breathed down his neck in a panic. James reached shakily to the woman’s mouth. He placed the lip on her own and let the stream fall inside.

He quickly took the cup back in a protective gesture, and they watched the still body for what seemed like impossibly long moments. The farmer squeezed the blanket next to his wife and turned toward James.

“Why ain’t it working? Why ain’t she back?” The farmer grabbed his shoulder and shook. “You trying to trick me? Why ain’t it working?” His voice was bigger now, and right up close.

James shook his head. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” he said. The grip on his shoulder tightened. “I don’t know, sir, I don’t know.” He couldn’t blink, it felt like. He just kept staring at the farmer, with the red in his eyes and the snot down his mouth.

The farmer looked down, then, and steadied himself. “Get outta my house, boy.”

James stood, staring at the man still. He held the cup close to his chest, getting his shirt wet and soggy.

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“I said get out.” His voice was rising, growing in anger. The room suddenly seemed too hot, and he felt the farmer’s breath in his face as he got closer, angry.

James turned quick and started walking, the creaks of the wood echoing under his shoes, but he heard the steps behind him. By the time he was back at the front door, still open from when he got inside, the man pushed him from behind, down the steps and onto the ground. James shuffled to turn to the sky, facing the man. The new sun haloed his head, and his face was almost too dark to make out.

The farmer grabbed the teacup from his hand and before James could let out a cry, he threw it onto the ground so that little shards went everywhere, all over James, and a dog barked one house down at the noise.

“I’m sorry!” he shouted, not sure at whom.

The farmer just stared, then pounded back up the steps and threw the door closed behind him. The sun was blinding and hot, and he couldn’t stop shivering from the wet clothes. He tried to feel for places where his skin was cut up.

Before long he was on his feet, staring at the shattered fragments, dirty and small on the ground.

“It’s just like I found it,” he thought, “in the dirt, not saving anybody.”

He dusted himself off and straightened his hair. The walk back home would take a little while, and the kids from school might see him on their way out. It didn’t feel like a real school day, like any normal day, really.

“It’s back where it belongs, covered in dust.” He picked up a shard and held it in his palm for the walk home.

When he arrived, the sun beamed on his porch, and the normal dirt that circled the sunbeams seemed to be gone, his mother must have swept it the night before. Mary stepped from the front door, twirling in her yellow dress for school.

James smiled and set the last piece of teacup on the porch railing. Perhaps Mary would use it as a makeshift plate for her doll. Or his mother would throw it in the trash. Or maybe, if it was still there when he arrived back home, he’d bury it, and maybe he’d bury his memories too.

DANIEL ZAMBRANO FERNANDEZ URBAN FANTASY

IGNI

Daniel Zambrano Fernandez is a film student at Emerson College. He was born in Monterrey, México and calls America his home for the moment. His favorite book is “One Hundred Years of Solitude” but he gets a lot of flak for it for having read it in English. It’s not his major but sometimes he try to write good.

F

eilen woke up, turned his attention to the fire, and quickly remembered that everything he ever loved and cared for in this world was flammable.

Half-eaten morsels of hard candy crystalized and melted into dark puddles of syrup on the healthy, green grass. The screams of tourists and attendees filled the air, but drowned in the sea of flames they fled from. Fei could only hear the incandescent blaze, and he could do nothing but head toward it now. The crackling cacophony of a thousand thunderbolts.

The flames atop the Grand Tent were much taller than any grown-up Fei had ever met. Although his mother had once told him that when she was a girl, the company included for exactly eight months and twelve days a very tall, very old man. He left after falling in love with a Prussian door-maker, who had been the first-ever normal person to care enough about him to provide doors with frames high enough to accommodate his lofty stature. His mother told him the company at large was rather sad by this development and threw him a great, big bonfire after his last performance. Fei asked her why he was a part of the show in the first place, since the company ran on collecting the outlandish and the breathtaking. Next to most of the other performers, being tall was little more than a curiosity. Fei’s mother told him that, with enough imagination, any human being could be sufficiently remarkable.

Would the man be taller than the flames? Fei wondered to himself as screaming attendees ran past him. It wouldn’t matter, of course, as the blaze had grown so fierce and hot that no single man could hope to put a stop to it, regardless of tallness.

Fei walked toward the fire as if hypnotized, his eyes glazed and unmoving. The flames smothered everything and seemed to blink in

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constant, beautiful meter. Beneath it, Fei could see the bright yellow tent waving against the wind like it always used to. For a second, it almost seemed impossibly unremarkable or downright quotidian. He was home.

Truly, the only thing differentiating this particular moment from any other was the fact that the air on top of the tent just happened to be on fire. The warmth encircled Fei and the young boy felt the world suffocate and stifle under a blanket of glow.

“Feilen! Feilen!” Fei, awoken suddenly from his daze, turned his gaze upward to see Dr. Carlov flapping his wings. Strapped to his legs by a rope was a metal bucket spilling over with water onto the tips of the flames to very little effect. Fei waved at him and ran to the side of one of the smaller tents that was not yet, but would surely be in due time, on fire. Dr. Carlov landed next to him. Carlov wasn’t big, but he carried himself and his so-called deformity with a majesty seldom encountered elsewhere. His mother always joked that the Owlman of Bohemia was only allowed in the company due to his supernaturally dashing good looks and sterling singing voice. Quite a few of the grey-and-brown feathers that covered most of his body were singed and burnt. His large yellow eyes focused on Fei and his sharp beak seemed to twitch in a fashion he’d never seen before. Fei didn’t think a bird could frown, but he suspected this might be as close as one could get.

“You need to get out of here. It’s not safe.”

“Where’s my mom?” Fei screamed. “Where is she?”

A thud echoed from the Grand Tent as one of several wooden beams inside collapsed. Dr. Carlov shielded Fei in his wings as a shower of sparks enveloped them. The fabric of the tent began to cave-in before barely hanging on to the surviving supports.

“Elena must have floated out. I need to get you out of here, Feilen. It’s not safe.” Dr. Carlov started dragging him away from the tent, but the fire had spread to the perimeter of the circus, forming a wide ring around the area.

Fei felt his feet lift off the ground and hover before falling back to Earth.

“Damn it!” shrieked Carlov, “I can’t lift you. I need you to stay still, Feilen. I’ll be back here as soon as I can with help. You understand?” Carlov grabbed ahold of his shoulders and looked into his eyes. Fei nodded. Dr. Carlov hugged Fei tightly before he lifted off and flew over and past the plume of smoke blocking the outside world.

Fei stood there in shock. Don’t go anywhere, stay put, help is on the way, he repeated to himself. He turned to face the Grand Tent. Its bright yellow fabric was now completely obfuscated by even brighter flames. A huge thud came from within as another one of its wooden beams gave way. This time, however, it was followed by another noise: a woman’s scream. Fei had never heard his mother scream, and yet he was sure it could be nothing else. He felt his legs paralyze with fear. Stay put, he repeated, help is on the way. A second scream tore right through the crackle of the flames and sent a chill down Fei’s

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spine. He closed his eyes and never wanted to open them again. Except he did, and his feet were already moving in the direction of the fire.

Inside, the Grand Tent was almost entirely engulfed in white-hot flames.

The stands had collapsed into themselves and the sand at the far edges of the arena had turned to glass. At the center of the tent, however, was a large steel anvil. A rope extended up from the heavy block. It reached high toward the ceiling where, tied down by her foot and almost entirely hidden from view by the smoke, Fei’s mother lay unconscious.

Fei’s mother had the pesky habit of forgetting to follow the laws of gravity.

As the show’s closer, her act consisted of an acrobatic display of levitation.

Tied to a heavy metal block in the middle of the arena, Elena the Floating Damsel would spin above the crowd and twist the rope around her ankle in a dazzling aerial-dance.

“Mom! Mom!” Fei cried out toward the top of the tent, to no avail. He looked around for something he could do to help her. If he could separate the rope from the block, then he could pull his mother down and drag her out, but a blazing piece of one of the wooden beams had fallen on top of the anvil and blocked the knot at the base of the rope. Fei struggled to lift a long piece of wood he found near what used to be the stands. He leveraged it against the fallen pillar and put all of his weight against it. For a second, the rubble moved to the side before the wood in Fei’s hands splintered and he fell to the ground. He picked himself back up and looked at the rope. If Fei couldn’t untie it, then maybe he could cut it. He looked around for anything he could use. He looked everywhere for one of the knife thrower’s knives or the sword swallower’s swords, but found nothing. He grabbed the sharpest looking splinter he could find and made his way to the rope.

As he rubbed the dull chip of wood back and forth across the piece of hemp, he looked up at his mother and started to cry. I’m sorry I can’t do it, Mom, he thought, I’m not remarkable.

One of the few remaining supports fell near the anvil, knocked Fei down onto the sand, and moved the debris out of the way. Fei stood up and wiped away his tears. He stared at the base of the rope. The rubble was out of the way, but the fire remained. He could clearly see the knot, and he could even more clearly see the flames engulfing it. It wouldn’t be long before the fire caused the rope to snap, and it wouldn’t be long after this before the entire tent collapsed on top of him. He looked up at his mother, hovering unsettlingly close to the now-blazing inferno of the tent ceiling. He looked at his hands and at the lit rope. He closed his eyes and thought of his mother. He took a deep breath and reached for the knot.

Fei expected a searing pain to travel through him like nothing he had ever felt, but it didn’t come. He thought perhaps this meant he was dreaming, but he opened his eyes and found himself still surrounded by unforgiving flames.

His hands lay idle on top of the knot, and the fire careened around them like

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a spectral hand, caressing them harmlessly. His mouth agape, he pondered what was going on before the sound of one of the other beams splitting under its own weight shocked him out of it. He quickly undid the knot and started pulling his mother down. He walked towards the exit as he used every ounce of energy he had to pull his levitating mother closer to ground.

Finally, Fei walked outside, dragging his mother close to him. He tied the rope around his waist and fell to the ground outside the Grand Tent.

The firemen had arrived at the scene and Dr. Carlov approached him. Fei could hear him yelling, half-grateful and half-angry, but he could not hear what he was saying. “She’s going to be all right, she just needs to rest,” he could hear the firefighters saying as they held his mother down from floating away. He would not allow them to cut the cord between them, but did give them permission to wrap him in a soft blanket.

“I simply do not understand what could have caused the fire,” Fei heard Dr. Carlov explain to the firemen. Who knows? thought Fei as he stared at the palm of his hand. A tiny ember flickered and danced within it. It grew and grew, before Fei willed it gone. Back into the ether. Who knows?

BAILEY TAMAYO SCIENCE FICTION

ZANZIBAR

Bailey Tamayo is a writer, a lover of anime, and a reader of comic books and fanfiction. When inspiration for a story hits hard, she often becomes so absorbed in her writing that she forgets to eat and sleep. Bailey will graduate Emerson in 2017 with a double major in Communication Disorders and Writing, Literature, and Publishing.

T

he rich types get their bots from catalogues and TV screens, all personalized and prettily made, but I got mine on Zanzibar.

Zanzibar is this tiny dink-ass moon orbiting an outer colony one or two galaxies out. A lot of fighting goes down on it, but a lot of fighting goes down on a lot of tiny dink-ass moons, and this one doesn’t matter much to anyone important. Give us a whole universe of empty space and humans will still manage to find things to fight over, even if, nine times out of ten, bots are the things doing the fighting, and even if what’s being fought over is just a barren little pebble that won’t do anyone any good.

In my seven years of service watching that moon get blown to hell, the only thing worth talking about was my bot. I can’t remember much of how we met. I know that the only reason I climbed out of the trench in the first place was because I was trying to catch the shooting stars whizzing overhead.

They weren’t stars, of course, I’d seen how the rifles atomize bots and humans alike, but damn if whatever contained nuclear bullshit that comes out of the barrel doesn’t look just like a white-tailed comet when you’re high as a kite off stardust, which is what I was. That’s probably how I’d gotten it in my wrungout skull that if I could just catch one I’d be the lucky exception that got to keep my molecular structure intact. I would’ve been dead to rights if this twoton hunk of junk hadn’t tackled me back into the trench and brained me on moonrock. I’m still not sure if it was the concussion or the stardust that makes it all so hard to remember now.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” said the bot. “If I had been half a second later you would’ve been space dust, you idiot. Jesus, are you high? You useless flesh bucket, that’s what we get for sending organics into a war zone, Christ.”

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He didn’t really say any of that. It’s funny: for all that the rest is mush in my memory, this part is crystal clear. I remember those words, I remember how he said them, the shape of his unnatural mouth and how loud he had to dial up his voice so I’d hear. But he didn’t, not really, because he couldn’t have. He didn’t have personality back then, didn’t have the know-how to use human colloquialisms and insult my humanity in the same sentence. He wasn’t even a he—just another bot fresh off the assembly line, all well-oiled steel and unfrayed cables. But I liked him best when he had a temper, and when he told me to fuck right off. Maybe that’s why I remember him like that. Human memories are screwed up and funny that way. Or maybe I was just high.

So he kept lecturing me, kept calling me a waste of carbon and fatty acids even though that’s not what he said at all, and I cracked up because I had realized that he was the replacement for the medical bot that got dusted a week earlier, and the thought of this poor son of a bitch waking up for the first time in a place like Zanzibar made me laugh and laugh and laugh.

It still makes me laugh. The bot cut himself off to look at me all weird. I was still high, and it was still funny, and the stars were still shooting overhead and disintegrating everything in their path so I kept laughing. And the bot kept watching. And the whole fucking world burned up behind him.

That’s how I met my bot.

At first he was just like any other combat bot, medical class notwithstanding: obedient, dull, and ruthless in battle. The fancy domestic ones that everyone wants come with programmable personalities, never mind all those protest groups popping up saying that they’ve got personalities of their own already.

Shows you how much money and time people got on their hands, so bored as to worry about things that aren’t even alive. I don’t have the luxury to care about bots now and I definitely didn’t then, but this one caught my interest.

Bots don’t do things they’re not programmed to do, is the thing. The medical ones’ll fix you up with the proper sequence of orders and all of them are preprogrammed to exterminate enemy soldiers, but risking life and limb for some strung-out death-row starduster is not part of the job description.

Going out of his way to save me made this one different, and that made him intriguing. Aside from getting the next fix there was very little left to intrigue me; the constant threat of death gets old pretty fast. So when some malfunctioning med class combat bot came around, sure, I was willing to indulge my own interest to see how long it lasted.

“What’s your name?” I asked him, after the battle was over and I was sobered up some and my cracked head was bandaged. Our bots had won today but their bots would win tomorrow, so I was scavenging the busted enemy hulls for the stuff that makes them tick while I still had time. Later I’d

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grind it down into stardust, shoot up, and then go scavenging again when I ran out. Rinse and repeat.

“I do not have one,” said the bot, and he might’ve looked surprised if he’d known how to; most bots, combat ones especially, don’t have names. When I told him I needed something to call him by he started rattling off his serial number like a prerecorded message. I cut him off and latched onto the first number I heard, and his name was Four from then on.

Four learned from me. It started with body language, with the way his choppy movements smoothed out into something fluid. I happened to be the only human in the squad and he was always watching how I moved, how I walked and talked and slept. I only realized what was going on when he adopted my facial expressions. He was surprisingly expressive once he got the hang of it, all the fine little plates of his face fanning into smiles and folding into frowns and eyes that moved like clockwork, tiny bits and pieces whirring around just behind the fiberglass. I remember having the thought: why’d the manufacturers put such care and detail into a bot just to get it blown up on Zanzibar, of all places? Then I remembered that I didn’t care, and that none of it mattered anyway. Doesn’t make seeing your own face on something that’s not you any less creepy.

“Quit it.”

“Quit what.”

His hand was a blowtorch and he was soldering a wrecked bot back together—he was a he by that point, because calling him it got tedious and combat bots don’t really have defining features either way. He never told me to stop so I didn’t.

“You know what. Stop stealing my face.”

The bot he was soldering remained blank-eyed and uninterested, but Four mimicked what might have looked like resentment on my face. “I do not know what you mean.”

“Sure you don’t.” I rolled my eyes. “Just remember you’re not a real boy, Pinocchio.”

Click click click, blowtorch back to hand, and his fingers twitched the way mine do when I’m irritated. “Do not call me that.”

I rolled my eyes again and left to get high. He didn’t stop copying me and by the time he started picking up my speech patterns I’d gotten used to it. He took up my cusses and swears and sarcasm; his voice gained inflection. I gave him hell for it because it came out stilted and fakey at first, a bot playing at human, and he’d get all twisted up over it and wouldn’t talk for days. With enough practice he eventually figured out how to sound natural, but what I never told him was that he got cynicism right off the bat. He learned it from me but he learned it from war, too, from Zanzibar and the bots that died screaming, and once he caught it he owned it. When any other bot was

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curt with you, it was because it was a combat bot that didn’t know how to be anything else. When Four was curt with you, when he made his voice flat and his expression flatter, it was because he was insulting you, like you weren’t worth the effort it took to be emotionally attentive. It was damn effective, too.

What made it even better: for all his affected apathy, he developed a temper.

He went zero to hundred in the blink of an eye if you knew the right buttons to push, so pushing buttons became my favorite pastime. I couldn’t be bothered to care about bot rights but Four started whining about them whenever the enemy wasn’t shooting at us. He could say whatever he liked about humans being stupid meatbags but he lost it if anyone so much as used a slur against bots, the hypocrite, so he learned not to take my shit lying down. If I was being a more particular bastard than usual he’d steal my stash of stardust just to be an ass. Nothing worse than taking a starduster’s stash.

I remember him staring down at me as I went through the shakes.

“Stardust inhibits optimal function in the human brain, which increases the chances of getting you and my fellow bots killed.” He looked fantastically bored. “As a medical class unit I’m well within parameters to confiscate this from you. For your own good, of course.”

“Christ on a hovercraft, Four, would you just—just—” “Eloquent.”

I ground my teeth together to stop the chattering. “Just give it to me already.

You’re a machine, be a machine and follow orders,” “That’s discrimination, you outdated subspecies,” he snapped, and then pretended he hadn’t, as though I wouldn’t notice the way his hands were still twitching. “All you had to do was ask.”

Then he held the stardust out—within my reach, even, the bastard, because he knew I was too weak to make a grab for it. It makes sense, I think about it now: he learned from me and that means he can’t have learned kindness. I don’t think I was ever prouder.

Four’s company kept me entertained while I waited for one of three things to happen: either I would die, or he would die, or I’d get bored of him.

Probably one of the first things. Here’s something I learned on Zanzibar that they might not tell you at home: you can’t hear the humans when they die.

There are so few of them anyway, and all the fighting drowns them out. But you hear the bots die. A bot’s death is a loud and violent thing, all screeching feedback and shrieking, rending metal. When that first medical bot died it deafened my left ear. I already knew how low my chances were of getting out of this alive, and that incident, less than a month after touchdown on the moon, just drove it home.

But none of it happened. Four remained the most interesting thing about Zanzibar and the two of us kept surviving, somehow, against all the goddamn odds, even when the other bots got torn apart at the molecular level around us. It was so ridiculous that other soldiers started seeking us out to ask what

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we were doing right. They were usually new to Zanzibar, and neither of us were ever especially kind to them—by that point we’d both been on the stupid rock for three years, and we didn’t have any sympathy for innocence.

“Are you afraid of dying?” I’d ask them, and either they’d be honest or they’d be silent, which was honest enough, and I’d give their hull a friendly shove and say, “That’s okay, bud, that just makes you human.”

It was best when they were actually comforted because then Four would cut in all clinical and cool: “If you are exhibiting human traits that means you are defective,” a hint of disgust, right there, subtle and expertly inserted, “and that much more likely to be destroyed. You should decommission yourself now to save us the trouble of scavenging your parts.”

They’d slink off, more terrified than ever, and I’d start laughing before they were out of earshot. Four never laughed because he liked to pretend he couldn’t, but I knew better. He still had my face. The only thing that beat tearing each other apart was tearing someone else apart, together.

He only asked about death row once.

The nights are long on Zanzibar, and long means cold. In the quiet hours between battles everything would ice over. Sometimes it lasted long enough for the sun to catch it, crystallized peaks and valleys as far as the eye could see. If it weren’t for our firefights melting it all the moon might have been less of an eyesore.

Hard to appreciate any of that when you’re about to freeze to death. We were the only surviving members of our squad, fifth time in as many years, all hunched together in another makeshift foxhole courtesy of the never-ending explosions. Not very far away at all the enemy bots were camped, but Four said that the best likelihood of survival was staying quiet and staying put, because running would probably ping their sensors; if we were lucky they’d move on without noticing us. Four lost his arms but otherwise he was fine, despite the sparking wires and hot oil leaking out. He was half blown to hell every other day—it just meant I’d have to repair him with a hodgepodge of parts from other dead bots when we got back to our side of the moon, if I survived that long. I lost my supplies in the fight and I probably should have been more grateful that Four could double as a heater, but at the time it was precious little fucking comfort.

I was busy shivering through withdrawal symptoms and hypothermia against his processors when he said it. “Why were you on death row?”

“What?” It was surprise, not misunderstanding. No one had ever asked.

He said it again, and added, “Why did you take the deal? You could’ve died on a peaceful planet in a secure facility.” A pause. “You’d have been comfortable. Warm.”

By the tone of his synthesized voice it occurred to me that he didn’t think I’d make it through the night. That was okay. I didn’t think I would

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either. I said what was expected of me, the same thing all human soldiers say, handful of us that there are: survive the war and be pardoned of all your crimes, get a second chance at life. We both knew it was bullshit, that it really just kept overpopulation down in prisons and spared the cost of more combat bots. Less than five percent of humans survive a war fought on cosmic scales, which is why most soldiers are bots in the first place. I knew all that but I took the deal anyway.

“Didn’t have anything better to do than die somewhere else,” I told him, watching as crystals formed on my hand. It was true, and that surprised me too. I didn’t think I would be honest.

“But why were you on death row at all?”

I wasn’t honest about that. Told him something unkind to shut him up instead, something cruel and direct about bots knowing their place, maybe.

I don’t know the exact words—it’s another memory that got messed up with time, all warped and watered down. I think I called him Pinocchio. But I know he didn’t ask again.

Bots get discharged after seven years of service. Apparently they start acting up right around then, get all wonky, unfit for fighting. Used to be they’d be decommissioned once their time was up—decommissioned, fancy politician word for destroyed—but apparently those protest groups managed to get somewhere by the time Four’s seven years were used up because he got shipped to some rinky-dink little start-up colony out on the edge of space and told to make a life for himself, never mind he’d never known anything but war. I followed him out: convinced Four to shoot me somewhere non-vital by something non-lethal and shipped myself off to the same colony. What else was I supposed to do? Nothing for me on any of the crowded planets I’d been and nothing I cared for on any of the planets I hadn’t. And anyway I was used to life with a bot by that point, and it wasn’t like I’d be able to afford another on my own even if I survived the war. I might as well try my damnedest to keep this one.

The planet was called Prosengua Delta. I don’t know what happened to the Prosenguas that came before it but Delta was bigger than Zanzibar and even colder, yet small enough still that the people who lived there liked to debate whether or not it was technically a planet at all. Maybe it was hot way deep down because it had these huge geysers that spat out hot water miles high that always froze before it touched down, which led to a planet that was covered in snow all year round. No bots at war to melt it this time.

Me and Four shacked up in a little place on the edge of town. The start-up colony was more or less forgotten as soon as it began, which meant the people had to rely on themselves instead of resources from the bigger planets. They were wary at first—most of them had never seen a combat bot before—but we needed money and they needed help, so Four took up odd jobs that they

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had trouble with during the worst of the weather. They learned to tolerate each other, and with time even the most mistrusting of them grew fond of his help and dry humor.

It was easier for the kids. There were a few handfuls of them, came up to his knee or hip and no higher. They’d never seen anything like him, and something about that inspired delight instead of fear, because kids are stupid and have no sense of self-preservation. Four had never seen anything like them either.

“This is disgusting, is what it is,” I’d say, when they crawled all over his chassis or swung from his arms.

“Children are irritating and I hate them,” he’d say back, but he kept very still and never shooed them off.

I, meanwhile, had no problem telling them to get lost. I didn’t like people much, kids even less, so I stayed home and mooched off of Four’s funds and got high on the watered down stuff they had in the boonies, which was about the only thing I missed from the war: the stardust was pure and always in supply. Four would call me a lazy-ass meatpuppet but he never kicked me out. I’d call him a bucket of rust that ought to be scrapped for parts but I made sure he didn’t kill anyone during his episodes. At least, I’d try. Not that it counted for shit in the end.

Episodes is the nice politician way of putting it, but I didn’t know what else to call them. Still don’t. Sometimes his eyes went dead and he was all machine. Sometimes his hands would click back into rifles and he’d go outside and incinerate drifts of snow. I didn’t think bots dreamt but every now and then the radiator would putter the wrong way and he’d explode right out of sleep mode into combat mode, and he’d forget that there was nothing to fight. I did what I could to help him, I went out of my way to haul his heavy ass back inside afterward so that his core wouldn’t freeze over, but it only ever got worse. Certain noises reminded him of Zanzibar and then he’d be back there and frankly, it was a miracle I managed to keep him from killing anyone for as long as I did.

We were living there for a year when he just up and glassed the whole start-up colony one day, right in the middle of howling blizzard. Hands to rifles and rifles to shooting stars—all the snow in town was melted. I was too busy getting high to stop him, classic fucking starduster, but sometimes I imagine those kids and what they must have looked like when they realized they should have feared him all along. Sometimes I imagine I heard them screaming, even though I know I couldn’t have, because the snowstorm sounded exactly like bots being sheared apart and human death was never loud enough to hear.

Four didn’t realize what he’d done until the episode was over, and then he just sat there, quiet as anything, for hours and hours. Nearly froze to death right there in the ruins of what he’d done, buried in fresh snow. That was

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probably the first sign, though I didn’t know it then, because all I knew was that I had to dig him out when the storm was over. All I knew was we had to run.

Bots started dying, though dying isn’t the right word. The manufacturers were saying willing decommission but that’s not right either. What they really started to do is commit suicide, even outside of battle. Some of them, out of nowhere, just started throwing themselves out with the trash. It was a weird quirk that I didn’t give any thought to until I had one of my own, and even then it only passed my mind once or twice. I was a little busy running from interstellar authorities who were trying to destroy my bot for turning rogue, so sue me. We had to stop at various planets for fuel, as far out on the fringes of space as I could manage. We’d barely even landed when Four said, “Let me turn myself in.”

He was curled up in the backseat, too busy examining the stumps of his forearms to look at me. The melodramatic asshole had started removing his hands whenever he could, as though they had only ever killed. He liked to forget those hands had patched things back together too.

“Shut up,” I said, and didn’t let my fingers twitch, didn’t show any of my tells. The planet was an ashy volcanic hellhole, populated mostly by outlaws who didn’t give a shit about a human and a bot idling at a fueling station, but drawing any attention would still be unwise. “You’re a malfunctioning machine, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I am a malfunctioning machine,” he agreed, perfectly nonchalant.

“Which is why you should let me turn myself in.”

“They’ll scrap you.”

“Yes.” The only thing I could think to say to that was that he shouldn’t care if he was malfunctioning, since the only thing the malfunction resulted in was a bunch of human deaths and he’d pointed out how much he hated humans more times than I could count. Try as I might I couldn’t force the words past my teeth.

“Shut up,” I said again, and hightailed it to the next unappealing pit stop before the ship was fully refueled. He kept telling me to turn him and I kept telling him to shut up until one day he did. I was grateful at first. The quiet made it easier to deal with the withdrawal, what with how tough it is to get the good stuff when you’re hopping from planet to planet and trying to keep under the radar. But withdrawal meant the nightmares came back, all that twisting, screaming metal battering my deaf left ear, and soon enough it got too quiet. If I insulted him he’d insult me back, but he wouldn’t really start conversations anymore. Eventually it got bad enough that he wouldn’t say a word for days on end if I let him. So I tried not to let him, because if I did then I’d wake up one morning and he wouldn’t be there, and I’d have to risk

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blowing our cover by scouring the whole town we were hiding out in until, finally, I’d find him in a dumpster. Just chilling the fuck out there, not a care in the world. And if I asked him what happened he’d be nauseatingly blasé about it, and he’d tell me, “I threw myself out, what does it look like?”

I dragged him out of the dumpster and flew off to another planet—he didn’t appreciate it. While Four was in sleep mode I finally did my research on suicidal bots: the manufacturers said it was because sometimes they feel like they’ve outlived their usefulness, and with no innate, programmable desire to continue living, they decided to just… shut off. That’s natural of a machine, they said in the interviews, wearing sharp suits and false smiles, and I thought of how humans still looked alien to me, how I almost missed Zanzibar and the bots. Most days now I think that I was a lunatic for even considering that.

Some days I don’t.

When I dug a little deeper I found the things they didn’t say on camera: nearly all the bots that decided willing decommission was the way to go were ex-combat.

Maybe I should’ve said something. Maybe I should’ve told him to get over himself and move on. Maybe I should have told him about the nightmares.

Maybe I should have told him why I was on death row.

I didn’t tell him anything. I knew jackshit what to do with this information so I did jackshit with it. Just kept running, and kept fishing him out of dumpsters. Poked and prodded at him as I went, anything to get a reaction.

He was too quiet most days and I couldn’t stand it; I’d do anything. Sneer and make rude comments about bots not being human in the hopes that he’d snap back that humans are inefficient and inferior. If I was desperate enough I’d even try being kind to him, or something like it. Respected his boundaries but was thoughtful, for once in my goddamn life. Brought him gifts, little keepsakes from the towns we holed up in, or broken electronics I’d find on the street to give him something to fix, something to do. On the worst of days I’d give him secrets. My home planet. My family. Stupid little things that made me feel vulnerable, something I’ve always hated to be, but I’d give them to him anyway because even though I wasn’t high, my skull was still wrung out, and I had convinced myself that if I could just keep him interested then maybe he’d stop trying to get himself killed. Maybe if I’d told him about death row it would’ve worked.

Some days he was almost kind in return, in the quiet ways he was with the kids back on Prosengua. He might give me secrets back, his private thoughts about the war and the bots and sentience. He might thank me, something neither of us were used to. He might smile, and it might even be sincere.

But days like those were far and few between. Most of the time he remained unresponsive to my needling, and cold to my kindness. It left me spurned and itching for a fight, but since he refused to respond we just started ignoring

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each other. I’d drag him from the dumpster when he tried to throw himself out, and I’d beat up the junkman he tried to sell himself to, and we were both too proud to mention the hopelessness of our situation. But he learned his apathy from me, didn’t he, and he still had a long ways to go. He broke first.

“God, stop doing that,” he said, in the dry and cracked heat of a moon called Mercy that was too close to the sun. I’d rescued him from another suicide attempt and when he said that I thought finally, it took the metal bastard long enough. Then I said, “Stop doing what?”

I rolled my eyes, rolled my shoulders, made sure not to look at him. He got wound up and flustered and it was great, like old times, a savage delight.

“This! What you’re doing!”

He flailed his handless arms as though to indicate exactly what I was meant to be doing, but in his distress his learned-humanity fell away and his limbs moved in halting, mechanical arcs, swinging like stilted pendulums. It was hilarious, such a human action acted out so poorly.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Fuck you, you don’t know what I’m talking about!” He jabbed me in the chest with a stump, probably harder than he meant to, a testament to his tantrum. “You can’t decide my life for me. I’m not your plaything and I’m not your robot slave, you can’t just keep me around until you want to throw me out—I get to choose if I want to be thrown out, it’s my life!”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. Sometimes I try to imagine what might have happened if I had, but even in my own daydreams my response is petulant silence, and into the silence he says: “I’m not human either. I wish you’d stop treating me like one.”

And that hurt, that cut so fucking deep, because I didn’t know how to tell him that he was more human than I had ever been in my entire life.

That thought burrowed my heart right out from beneath my ribs, and to protect myself from bleeding out I said, “What do you want from me? Do you want me to apologize for saving you? Fine. I am sorry. Maybe if I never saved you, that whole fucking town would still be on the map.”

Four reeled back, the shock plain on his face. His ever-whirring eyes went still, all the pretty clockwork of his innards gone silent. It was the one thing we never spoke about and I knew then as I know now that this was a moment I couldn’t take back. It was exactly the fight I wanted, wasn’t it? I tried to root out the satisfaction from beneath the bitterness, but I couldn’t find it.

Four’s shoulders shuddered, but he didn’t say anything. He just stood up and walked out and I let him go. The door closed with just a gentle hiss of latches. He didn’t even slam it.

That’s how I lost my bot. What I remembered best then is still what I remember best now: that bots are supposed to die loud, deafening, and unforgettable, and I will hate nothing more for the rest of my life than the fact that my bot died so fucking quiet. Not even on the right moon.

THERESA MIELE DYSTOPIAN FANTASY

THE BUTTERFLY

Theresa Miele is a sophomore Writing, Literature, and Publishing major. When she isn’t showing off pictures of her two dogs and cat, she can be found with a cup of tea and her most current YA read. At this moment that happens to be Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo. She wishes she were funnier.

T

he rickety bookshelf popped open with a soft thwump. Bridget dug her dirty, stained nails into the small groove between the wall and door. Red paint streaked down her fingers and onto the backs of her palms. She pried the gap open wider and slid through a crack just big enough for her body. The door closed softly behind her, plunging her into darkness. It didn’t matter; she could walk this path blindfolded if she had to.

Piles of junk lined the rough stone walls of the hallway. Bridget knew from memory what she would see had she brought a candle or lantern with her: boxes of broken metal parts and wires; countless baskets filled with blankets or mittens and hats; stacks of kitchen goods like plates and cutlery. If anyone found the passageway behind the bookcase they were led to assume that James, the man who owned the house, was a hoarder who desperately tried to hide it from his wife.

Bridget walked carefully down the hall and let her fingertips drag across the cold stone to keep her path straight. At twenty steps, she stopped and carefully held out her hand in front of her until it was flush against a dead end. She knocked three times at the center of the wall, twice at the top right corner, then crouched and knocked four times at the bottom left hand corner.

Each member had a different knock to make themselves known. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it was all they had.

Bridget jumped slightly as the stone wall creaked open toward her.

Though she had been working with James for a few months, the creak of the door always made the hairs on the back of her neck raise. A beam of warm yellow light streamed out from the crack.

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The space was about as large as an average sized living room. Two huge metal printing presses sat in the center of the room with stacks of flyers and pages situated around them. Gas lamps with red glass detailing hung from the walls, illuminating the space. James had abandoned the door and moved back to his desk against the wall to Bridget’s right. He was tall, with dark black hair and eyes that were so brown they seemed almost as black as the ink that caked his fingers and nails.

Bridget closed the door behind her, all too aware that James was angry. He had his back turned and was filling up the last box of flyers. She could almost see the tension knotted in his shoulders as he rolled them back and forth.

“You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago,” he said as he fought to keep his voice level.

“I know, I’m sorry,” she said, her neck heating the same red as her hands, which were currently hidden behind her back.

“Bridget, I know what you’ve been doing,” he said bluntly, turning to face her. “You have paint all over your clothes.”

Bridget looked down, surprised to see streaks and smudges of reds, purples, and blacks intertwining across her shirt. In her rush to hide her paints, she hadn’t even thought of changing into something that wasn’t a dead giveaway of what she had been doing.

“Here,” James said. He threw her an ink stained apron which she caught and tied around her waist. James rubbed a hand over his face, smudging fresh ink from his hand onto his forehead. Dark bags rested permanently under his eyes, and the frown marks by his nose were only getting deeper.

“You’ve got to be careful out there, okay? The soldiers have been ordered to find whoever is painting in the streets.”

“I know that,” she replied, fiddling with the frayed edge of the apron. James nodded and the knots in Bridget’s chest loosened. “Have you heard anything about when Strada will turn the power back on?”

“No. My informants told me that it’s supposed to help save the city money, although both they and I know they’re being lied to. My guess is it may have something to do with his control over the city. No power discourages people from going out at night, meeting up with each other. You know who meets under the cover of darkness?”

A slithering feeling crawled up Bridget’s spine. “Rebels,” she replied. “But I don’t get it. If he knows we’re meeting, why doesn’t he target us directly?”

“My assumption is that he has only the vaguest idea about the rebel groups around the city. If his soldiers went blundering around arresting people, it would send us on high alert. He would scare away his prey.”

Bridget shuddered at the word. Prey. She didn’t like to think of herself as being one of the hunted, though she knew that was exactly what they were.

She collected the boxes, glancing at the flyers on the top. They were illustrated with an image she knew well, one she was just about finished recreating in

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an alleyway a few blocks down the street. The Carter family. A mother, father, and daughter. Both the parents had worked with the Rebels, and the information of their involvement leaked to Strada’s men. They had been planning to leave the city to find safety when they were captured and killed.

“Make sure you bring those boxes back once you’ve finished,” James said as Bridget closed the door behind her.

James’ home let out onto a small side street off one of the main roads.

Bridget balanced the boxes in one hand and pulled her hood up with the other, keeping out the frigid fall air and obscuring her face in the moonlight.

She turned left, letting the sliver of moonlight guide her way. It must have been one, maybe two o’clock in the morning on Saturday night—the perfect distribution time.

Bridget turned up the main road and passed by a few bars, their lamplights casting shadows of dancing figures into the street and onto the buildings.

Animated chatter and laughter drifted toward her on the breeze, along with the distinct scent of alcohol and food that made her stomach clench with hunger. She glanced inside one of the bars as she passed, keeping her hood tight around her face. The doors were thrown wide open, folding up like an accordion so it was easy to walk in off the street. She counted five uniformed soldiers, two male and three female, drinks in hand, leaning over the bar and laughing. Bridget smirked and kept walking.

She tucked around the next corner, resting her back against the cool brick.

She pursed her lips, her thoughts drifting to where she had left her paints in the middle of her work. The breeze was heading down the main road, in the direction of the bars and people. It smelled of dust and trash and made Bridget’s nose wrinkle. If she was quick, she could disperse all the flyers and get back to her painting.

There were about twenty flyers, all of them with the same news story: the deliberate murder of the Carter family ordered by Ezekial Strada, leader of Parisia. The city’s last leader, Mae Cortez, had been assassinated. It was reported that a group of rogue citizens were responsible, but Bridget and James and many other rebels knew it was an inside job; that Strada, who had been Army General at the time and next in line if Mae was killed, had planned it. The unrest of the people after Strada took power was fierce, though soon quelled by laws meant to silence challengers—called radical revolutionaries by the government, though they referred to each other as Rebels. Strada soon took away rights to assemble and protest. Nobody spoke their minds about him publicly. If they did, it would be the last thing anyone heard them say.

Bridget took the flyers out of the first box and peeked around the corner.

The street was deserted, save for the silhouettes gliding across the brick walls.

She took in a breath, feeling the breeze move flyaway hairs across her face. It was this moment, before letting the fly batch go, that made her most nervous.

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She felt vulnerable standing stagnant in the street while these illegal prints left a trail that led directly to where she stood, though she would never tell James that, or anyone else for that matter.

When a particularly strong gust of wind came, Bridget let the flyers go and watched them dance and twirl in the breeze. She turned and nestled the second box into the first and ran in the opposite direction, putting as much distance between herself and the flyers as possible, her heart beating up into her throat.

She spent the next half hour sticking the remaining flyers under people’s front doors. She stayed far away from Uptown, where the government officials lived, and focused her attention on the Eastown, where she knew she wouldn’t run into any trouble.

Bridget tried to slow her breathing as she put the last flyer underneath the front door of a crumbling three story home. She picked this route because it would bring her right back to where she left her painting. The empty boxes rubbed uncomfortably against her hip as she jogged through the streets.

It took her only minutes to come across her painting.

It was nestled in an alleyway between two brick homes. Bridget dropped the boxes and recovered her paints that she had hidden behind the exposed piping that led from the home into the ground. The familiar wood of her brushes eased the adrenaline in her veins. It was almost musical, the way everything seemed to quiet as she held them, falling away until it was only her and her work. Her soul.

She stood back to look at her painting. It was a family portrait; not of her own, but of the Carters. Bridget never knew them personally, but they were James’ friends, and so they were her friends too.

It took James three days to leave the basement after they were killed.

Bridget had never seen him show pain like that, and it scared her—the way a child seeing their father cry for the first time would scare them. When he finally emerged, it was as though he had channeled his hurt into passion, and his passion into his printing presses.

Maria, the mother, had dark skin like Bridget’s own that contrasted beautifully with the worn out red of the brick behind it. Her eyes were bright, so hazel they were almost gold, and her long black hair fell gracefully around her neck, just touching the shoulder of her husband, Jonathan. His blue eyes and white skin stood out stark against the darkness of the night. Bridget’s throat tightened as she looked at the last part of the family she needed to finish: their daughter, Olive. She was in the middle of the painting between her parents.

Bridget picked up the brown paint and began again, her throat tight at the thought of Olive, a nine year old little girl, facing the unimaginable. She pressed her lips together, carefully painting every curled lock as if it were its own piece of art. She avoided looking in Olive’s eyes. Too young, Bridget thought. Her eyes

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burned as she continued and she rubbed at them, smearing cool brown paint from her hand onto her cheek. Every stroke of her brush was an extension of her emotions. They exited her body one by one, with each lock of Olive’s hair and each shimmer of life painted back into the little girl’s sparkling eyes.

Bridget poured her passion, her anger, her outrage into all of her art, though this piece felt different, almost fierce in her execution of it.

Her heart ached for Olive, and for her mother and father. They only did what they thought was right—and died because of it. That thought alone was enough to make her consider leaving James and this mixed-up life of the Rebels for something else, anything else. But less meaningful, she thought, and she pushed that fear down, right into her core and sealed it off. Bridget took in a breath, letting it calm her as she signed off her painting with a large B that looked almost like a butterfly in the way the lines curved around each other.

She knew that by the next morning her work would be gone, washed away by whatever soldiers stumbled across it early in the morning. Much of Bridget’s art was only for her, and she never really cared when she walked by the next morning to see it gone. This was different. She didn’t paint this just for herself, but for Maria, Jonathan, and Olive. It was a gift for them as much as it was an outlet for her. Bridget gathered up her paints in the empty boxes and took one last look before heading down the street.

She ended up sleeping on the paisley covered couch in James’s living room. She had been too exhausted to change, and dumped the boxes and the paints right next to the front door and collapsed onto the couch.

Sounds of shouting and rustling woke her from an uncomfortable sleep.

She walked to the door and found James anxiously looking out the window, raking his hand through his hair as if trying to clean it of invisible paint that was stained there. “What is it?” Bridget asked. James started and turned. His forehead was creased and his eyes were laced with concern.

“Let me see,” she said. He chewed on his bottom lip, a rare nervous habit he almost never did. She stood up straighter and pushed his arms out of the way.

“Whatever you see—” Bridget looked out the window. There were people running south down the street, jogging to keep pace, but no soldiers. Bridget frowned. Where were the soldiers? Why weren’t they keeping everyone from stampeding down the road?

She blinked at the flash of color that caught her eye because she couldn’t have seen what she thought; it was just a smudge of dirt on someone’s face.

There it was again, painted on a man’s shirt this time, and she couldn’t have explained it away if she wanted to.

It was her artist signature, she was sure of it: the B that looked like a butterfly.

It was everywhere. On people’s faces, clothing, and arms. Bridget’s heart stopped, and without a second glance at James, she opened the door and ran

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straight into the street, letting the people lead her, though by now she knew exactly where they were going. She heard James shouting behind her as they ran. Down two streets, one left, down past three more streets and then a right turn.

And there it was. There were twenty or so people all sitting with their arms linked together in front of her painting of the Carter family. There were soldiers stationed around the entrance of the alleyway, blocking more people from joining those on the ground. They all had her signature painted somewhere, most on their shirts, but many on their faces. There were a few people there who were just as old as her, maybe even younger at fifteen or sixteen.

Bridget felt herself being compressed by the oncoming crowd. The soldiers seemed at a loss for what to do. Shouts echoed around the buildings and people jostled her from all sides as she tried to stay standing. Soon the unintelligible shouts formed into words, and Bridget tried desperately to hear what they were shouting.

Maria. Jonathan. Olive. Maria. Jonathan. Olive.

The sound of rushing water startled Bridget out of her daze. The soldiers were spraying the people sitting on the ground. With a roar like thunder, the crowd pushed in from behind her and Bridget was taken with them, pressed against bodies as she tried to fight her way back out to somewhere she could breathe. From behind she heard fights breaking out—wood beating flesh and the crunch of bone meeting pavement.

“Bridget!” It was James. Bridget looked up and saw him fighting his way toward her, his hand outstretched. Relief coursed through her as his hand closed tightly around hers.

The streets were filled with shouts of pain and passion and the continuous sound of rushing water. As she and James fought their way from the chaos, the hoses were turned from the protestors to the advancing crowd. Both Bridget and James were doused in frigid water that made her teeth chatter in the cold air.

The crack of a gunshot tore through the cacophony like lightning. Bridget’s heart threatened to beat out of her chest as everything seemed to slow around her.

“For the butterfly! Our voice!” a man in the crowd shouted, and it was as if time corrected itself and sped up, hurling the people into motion as they clashed with the red armor of the soldiers. Bridget’s ears rung, her fingers numb as James clutched her hand. They rounded the corner and ran down the street; away from the fighting, the shouting.

The words the man yelled stayed with Bridget, rattled around her brain with every heavy step she took down the street until she realized what they meant. The butterfly was her signature, the symbol the people were wearing like armor on their bodies.

He was talking about her. She was their voice.

ALLISON RASSMANN DYSTOPIAN SCIENCE FICTON

BIRDSONG OF OVRISTAN

Allison Rassmann is a junior BFA Writing, Literature and Publishing student. She grew up in Massachusetts and loves spaces between spaces and the people who don’t quite fit in.

Find more of her work at http://allisonrassman.wixsite.com/allisonrassman.

W

hen Elphie saw the creature outside her window, she thought at first that someone had flung mud against the glass. It was a small patch of brown, organically shaped with no rhyme or reason to its structure. Nothing like the usual steel delivery or surveillance drones that buzzed across the leaden sky. It was the first patch of color she had seen against that sky her whole life.

When she told her mother about it, her mother was more concerned about her being close to the windows than anything. “You know they’ll see you,” she said, her usual warning. “You know what they’ll do.” But with insistence she tugged her mother upstairs to her attic room and drew back the curtains just enough to point out the creature. Her mother refused to be anywhere but hidden in the shadows when she looked.

“Probably surveillance—but new cam-bots are supposed to blend in, not stick out like that….” she murmured, ignoring her own rule as she leaned closer to the window. The creature outside peered at her with beady optical receptors, then emitted a shrill note. Her eyes blinked, squinted and widened.

“It’s a bird,” she said. “Your grandma used to tell me stories about them.”

Elphie had to hold herself back from running to the window. She had seen one or two pictures in the books she kept, but those pictures looked nothing like this one. It was a muddy brown color with a fuzzy-looking exterior. Its white belly looked soft and lovely, but whenever she tried to pet it, it hopped away on those spindly tripod legs it had. “But I thought birds were white?”

“Some are, but others aren’t. There are lots of different types of birds. But see, that coat it’s wearing is called feathers, and all birds have feathers. You

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would have learned that in fourth grade next year.” Her mother stared for a second longer before closing the curtains. “Maybe they’re coming back.

That would be nice.”

Her mother ruffled her hair as she walked back downstairs. Elphie waited until she was sure the footsteps were gone, then she ran back to the window to watch the bird.

It took an hour of ushering it in with bread and bits of crackers, but it all paid off when the bird flew into her room, and Elphie proudly shut the window behind it.

There was little to do nowadays, now that the school was gone. Elphie remembered they used to have weekly drills on what to do if a bomb or a drone struck. At the sound of the alarm each student would dive under their desk, cover their head with their hands, and hold their breath until it was safe to be escorted down to the shelter below. Each day they waited, wondering if today would be the day. Then the drone strike came at night, and by morning there was no school left to go to, and all their training had been for naught.

Elphie’s parents said it was just as well, that because she wasn’t Registered they would have had to pull her out soon anyway. She didn’t understand it much, but she didn’t mind, either. What she did know was this: on the night the school was bombed, just when Registration was becoming mandatory, Elphie was declared legally dead. Official reports said she snuck into the playground after hours and got caught in the blast. From that day forward she was shuttered in her attic bedroom. Safe from the military draft, safe from labor camps, and if it ever became time to leave, no one would report her missing, so no one came looking.

These things meant little to Elphie. What it meant was an inexhaustible boredom that lasted each day, cooped up with her also Unregistered and legally dead mother, waiting until her father came home from his work in the recycling plant at six o’clock and they could all settle down for dinner. They were lucky, her mother said. The plant didn’t check files, and never cared as long as the work got done. They had money, and bits of food scraps her father found tossed in with the recycling. That was more than most people had.

Dinner that night was tense, as it always was when supplies were low. Her parents talked in small voices, like they could barely trust each other. Elphie could hear the manic squawks of the bird above, muffled through the walls.

It was almost unnoticeable, but almost noticeable still put them all in danger.

As Elphie slathered butter on to her bread, heart thudding, her mother muttered, “We’re almost out of bread. I need to stop by the Warrens’ and ask for more. It feels like they’re the only people who don’t check nowadays.”

Her father, already through with his parse meal, stopped. Elphie held her breath as the bird jeered overhead.

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“They’re tightening things up even more than usual. You’d be lucky to even get off this street,” he said, looking at her mother as if he hadn’t heard.

He paused before, “There’s rumors they’re going to be closing the Kajikstani border soon.”

“I thought the border was already closed?” Elphie piped up, half because she meant it, half to cover the noise.

“Mostly,” her dad said. “Only to non-citizens, which includes people who aren’t Registered. But some people are talking about closing it for everybody.”

“Oh,” she said. “Can I be excused?”

If it had been any other night, her parents would have said no. But she could tell the anxious look in their eyes whenever they wanted to talk about something without her present. Sure enough, her mother nodded, so she took her buttered bread and milk up to her room.

The bird was waiting for her, now perched on her bed’s headstand, still chirping strange signaling noises.

“You gotta be quiet,” she hissed to it, lying on the ground with her meal.

The bird hopped down to greet her. When it chirped again, it occurred to her that this animal was the closest she had come to speaking to another person besides her parents in months. It made her heart ache.

She sighed and began alternating dipping the slice in milk for her and tearing off pieces of crust to feed to the bird. Earlier, she had tried to look up what type of bird it was in one of her old biology textbooks, but it didn’t mention anything about them. She had tried to give it a name, but nothing stuck, just rolled off like the water droplets from its beak whenever it tried to drink. She tried again now.

“Junie. Brownie. Feather. Birdie,” she whispered, watching as it swallowed another bread chunk. “Mabel. Tristan. Mr. Fluffystuffs.”

It cocked its head at her.

With a sigh, she abandoned that effort and got up to pull another book down from her shelf. The books in her room were like her: they weren’t supposed to be there. They were remnants of a bygone era. All material that used to be printed was now uploaded to the National Library Index, where it was monitored and approved before being distributed to personal tablets.

Previously printed documents were obsolete at best, and unauthorized at worst—much like being Unregistered.

Elphie, whose name was in no computer system in the country, had no access to those government-distributed tablets. Instead she had these, saved from the recycling center by her father. It was a mishmashed collection of textbooks, fiction, and biographies, some of which were too dense for an eight-year-old like her. She loved every one of them just the same.

Today, she took out an old sketchbook and laid it on the ground. She tried not to jump when the bird fluttered backwards, both startled by the other’s presence, still getting used to the company.

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“These are my friends,” she told it, flipping open the book to reveal the drawings she and her friends had done of one another some time ago, hiding the book under their desks and giggling at the way their doodles filled in the margins of every colorful page. One by one, she pointed to them. “This is Maeve. She was the smartest girl in our class, but she was really nice, too. And this is Apolla. I heard she got her legs blown off in a strike, but I haven’t seen her in a long time, so I… I hope it’s not true. And Liberty, and Caden...” She paused, a lump forming in her throat. “I hope things go back to normal soon.”

The bird ruffled its feathers, then flew up towards the window. It sat on the ledge and nudged its way past the curtains so it could tap on the glass with its beak. Elphie rose to her feet and wandered over to the window, clutching the curtain as she peered down into the street. Three stories below her, three girls played jump rope. The girl in the middle danced with the rope, over the crumbling sidewalk and blades of grass pushing forth, making each movement come alive. The two girls holding the rope sang a jump rope rhyme or laughed. She saw their lips move, but she couldn’t tell which.

She didn’t recognize them at first, the way their faces were smeared with dirt and their malnourished bodies crumpled in too-big clothes. When she did, she clapped her hand over her mouth. “Caden! Liberty!” she whispered.

She opened her mouth to call out to them, but the bird called first with its shrieking whistle. The jumping girl stumbled. The girls below turned their heads to look upwards, and out of habit, Elphie dropped the curtain and staggered back into the darkness. She stayed there with tears brimming in her eyes for five whole minutes, and when she returned to the window, they were gone.

At first the bird liked to hide from her, or so it seemed. It spent its time huddled on top of her wooden armoire or pecking at the window, only spending time with her for food. Soon it grew used to her enough that it would flutter down and greet her whenever she entered the room. No name she gave it ever stuck, so she just called it Bird.

Bird was the best company she ever had. She sat with it for hours, talking to it about her life before everyone got Registered, about when she could run out into the streets and play without fear of air strikes or stray bombings.

She told it about more things she had heard of but never seen, like trees and snow, because she thought it would like those things. Some days they got into singing competitions. Bird loved to sing.

One day in the midst of teaching Bird a song she used to skip rope to, her door flung open. Though she was relieved it was only her mother, she couldn’t get the fear to go away.

“What are you doing?” her mother hissed. “Remember the quiet rule!”

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Elphie nodded, relieved. Her mother was just beginning to close the door when Bird, suddenly deciding to be alarmed, flew up into the air and began flapping in circles with distressed peeps. Her mother gasped.

“Get that—thing out!” she said. “We don’t know what it is. It could be another cam-bot!”

“But you said yourself that it was a bird,” Elphie said.

“Listen to all that noise it’s making. It’s going to be the death of us!”

Her mother threw her hands up and started snatching at the bird. Elphie, meanwhile, ran for the window and blocked it with her arms. When her mother next looked down, attempts at bird-catching proving fruitless, she stood with defiance. Bird settled down into its favorite hiding spot atop the armoire again.

Her mother sighed and shook her head. “Elphie, listen. There are some creatures you just can’t keep cooped up. Little things don’t survive like that.”

“But it’ll die out there,” she protested. “A bomb, or someone will take it, or— or—” “I know, love.” For reasons she couldn’t understand, she thought she saw her mother’s face break. Like its resolve was shattering into fragments of something else more overwhelming. Her mother’s eyes grew red as she pulled Elphie in for a hug. They lingered like that for several moments, the only sound being Bird’s anxious feet tapping on wood. When she pulled away, her mother’s face had hardened again.

“The bird needs to go.”

She was about to protest further when they heard the knocking coming from downstairs. Three knocks in a row, a pause, then two more. “Dad’s home,” her mother said, and went to go unlock the door. Elphie was left alone, staring up at her bird. They shared a knowing look.

Downstairs she could hear her father tossing off his coat and talking to her mother. He must have been upset, because he didn’t seem to care that his voice travelled up the stairs.

“They’re doing Registration checks on employees at the plant next week,” he said, voice full of cold air and urgency. “We need to go.”

“To where?” her mother said.

“Over to Kajikstan while we still can. You have cousins there. We’ll stay with them, then maybe go on to Belaria…” His footsteps thudded up the steps like mini earthquakes. He had forgotten to remove his work boots.

The tiny patter of her mother’s steps scurried after him. “But what if they close the border by then? It’ll take at least a week to get there. The order could be given any day.”

“At least now we have a chance.” Her father knocked on her door, then entered without waiting for her to answer. Bird nestled further into the shadows. “Elphie, pack your things. We’re leaving tonight.”

“What about my friends?” she asked, glancing up to Bird.

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“You can make new friends,” he said in his this-isn’t-a-discussion-this-issurvival voice.

Her bottom lip quivered, and she clenched her hands into fists. “I don’t want to go,” she insisted. “I want to wait until things are normal here.”

“Things aren’t going back to normal here, Elphie, not for a very long time.”

“If you two leave, I’m staying here.” To prove her point, she sat on her bed, arms crossed.

“Pack your things,” her father said. “I love you. Pack your things.”

Her parents left her after that. Her resolve stayed for just as long as the door was open. The moment they closed it, she collapsed into a sobbing pile.

The sketchbook she and her friends made ran through her head, and she squeezed her eyes shut to commit each picture to memory. When she opened them again Bird was there, just inches from her face. She could see herself in its little black eyes, and she thought she had never seen such sad eyes in her entire life.

She stared at Bird, expecting it to nestle up and comfort her like she needed, but it just watched her. Its feathers seemed dingier than before, a more muddled and dismal brown, and its feathers were crumpled and beginning to fall off. Her mother’s warning rang through her head, but she blocked it out the best she could.

Maybe it would get better if she found it something else to eat. She hated eating only bread on these low-ration days, and she couldn’t imagine how such a tiny creature with no explanation for it felt. What else did birds eat?

Swallowing her sadness, she began to dig through her bookshelf, looking for something—anything—that could help.

She tossed through the books with fervor, eyes flickering through pages and blocking out every word but “bird”. There was only one that contained it, and just a fleeting mention: her old geography textbook, the one with a big map of Ovristan in the middle. It read: “Kajikstan was known for many years as a refuge for multitudes of otherwise endangered animals such as mountain lions, wolves, and various species of birds. Today it continues to serve as a home for a variety of flora and fauna absent from the rest of the hemisphere, thanks to its strict National Preservation Acts…”

Kajikstan. That was the place her parents wanted to go. Maybe Bird had come from there.

She flipped backwards, page by page, until she saw the great big topographical map of Ovristan, colored a pale yellow to stick out against the blue sea of the East. She traced the borders with her finger until she caught the name: Kajikstan, colored light green to the north, right next to Heimrad, a flush red to the west. She wondered what it would be like in those countries.

Ovristan had been at war with Heimrad for years now, to the point where the border was closed and all communications had been cut. She decided she

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would not like to go there. Kajikstan, the neighbor who liked to stay out of their affairs, she knew nothing of.

Elphie turned the pages until she returned to the description of Kajikstan. For five whole pages it described things like the country’s leading biotech research—bio means life, she thought, like the bird. It talked about a rich culture that put emphasis on the arts, and mountains uninhabited by people, even land preserved by the government called forests. She closed her eyes and pictured it. It might have been because of the pale green of the map, but everything she saw there was green. Not green like the aestheticenhancing oxygen emulsifiers planted at the end of every city block. Real green. Forest green.

She pictured Bird, soaring up in a sky that wasn’t pollution-grey, and she thought about running through fields below Bird. Then, with some guilt, she thought about her friends here and all the games they could play. But with them came the thought of war-torn buildings, omnipresent cameras and cracked asphalt unsuited for chalk or jump rope. She thought about them laughing without her.

Bird chirped, and her mother’s advice echoed in her head once more.

Some things weren’t meant to be cooped up.

Elphie came downstairs hours later, when the silence was too much. When she reached the bottom step, she peeked around the corner to see her mother sitting in the armchair by the window, clutching the curtain and only just resisting not looking out.

“He left for supplies and hasn’t come back,” her mother said, hushed. “He should have come back.”

To this, Elphie crept through the room and sat down by her mother’s feet.

There, they waited together in silence, breaths held.

Two full hours had passed and night had descended when the knock came at their back door, three-pause-two. Her mother leapt up with an energy she hadn’t thought she had any more. When they opened the door, her father staggered in, covered in plaster dust and smeared with blood. He clutched his arm with a grimace.

As her mother guided him to the armchair, demanding to know what happened, Elphie jumped up and closed the door behind him.

“I tried to go out to the Warrens’,” he said through gritted teeth, slumping in the chair. “But when I was headed back, a drone hit the street. Collapsed a few buildings near me. I hid out in the rubble—stop worrying, Mari, only a few scrapes and bruises—but by the time I got there, the supplies were gone.”

“It’s not nothing,” her mother cried. “Look at your arm!”

His left arm hung limp at his side, broken and useless. “I’m more worried about the supplies.”

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Her mother slumped to the floor next to him, gripping his hand tightly while hiding her face with her free hand. “You’re hurt. We can’t leave with you hurt.”

“Or with no food, either. The last of our money was in that damn order.”

He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Inspection’s not coming for another three days. That’s enough time for me to work a little more while I search for another job to take up. There’s got to be some place that doesn’t check if you’re Registered anymore.”

“But your arm. They’re not going to take an Unregistered cripple.”

“We’re not going?” Elphie asked, still lingering by the doorway. Both her parents looked up at her.

“There’s no way we can,” her father said. “We won’t be able to reach the border in time, especially not without supplies.”

“What about by boat?” She expected her suggestion to be met with equal despair, but both her parents were silent. Unsure, she continued. “The sea is only three days away. If we sneak onto a boat headed for Kajikstan, we don’t have to cross the border.”

The eerie quiet flowed through the room. “How do you know that?” her mother said in a hushed voice.

“It’s in my book. I’ll show you,” she said. Leaving her parents, she ran back upstairs and headed for her bookshelf, where her geography book was already dog eared to the page on Kajikstan. She was about to head out the door again when she heard chirping behind her.

Turning around, she took in everything that made up her room: all the books and clothes she’d have to pack, the bed and the furniture she’d have to leave behind, the window to the street below. Everything close to her, but nothing she couldn’t cram into a suitcase. Above it all, she saw Bird looking down at her from the armoire. Its coat had lost its sheen and plumpness, and its eyes begged.

Slowly, she set the book down by the door. She walked over to the window and, for the second time in her life, flung it open.

As if it had been waiting for that moment for years, Bird swooped through the air and dove out the window, already off to parts unknown.

IN THIS ISSUE The Teacup Tale // Megan Jensen Igni // Daniel Zambrano Fernandez Zanzibar // Bailey Tamayo The Butterfly // Theresa Miele Birdsong of Ovristan // Allison Rassmann