Fiction

First Readers – TCL is looking for volunteers

The Colored Lens is looking for a First Reader to join our team. All of us at The Colored Lens are volunteers, so this isn’t a paid position. There are significant benefits, though. Working as a First Reader gives you excellent insights into the editorial process as well as what editors look for in the slush pile.

We pride ourselves on our 100% personal responses, and aim to have a 48 hour response time for rejections. To do this, we ask readers to read around ten stories a week and provide short personalized responses that include both positive features and the reasons it’s being rejected.

Stories are typically in the 3000-5000 word range, but we accept stories as long as 20,000 words. First reading is handled on an “as able” basis, meaning that whenever a reader has time, he/she logs into the database and selects the next unread story. If a reader doesn’t have time to read on a particular day, they simply let the rest of the team know and then don’t read.

If you are interested in the position, first send us an email at dawn@thecoloredlens.com giving a short overview of your writing experience and attach a writing sample. If you have submitted to us previously, you can simply direct us to your submission instead. We’ll respond to confirm whether or not to move to the next step which is to read a group of sample stories and write personal rejections for each of them, as well as to write a note of whether you would likely reject the story outright or pass it on for another read and why.

Human Error

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

HUXLEY, KS – Gynoid International released a statement today that the incident in Boston two weeks ago was attributed to human error.

“DOE 4-184, a model 4 DOE, is one of our most sophisticated Gynoids yet,” a GI spokesperson said, “but they still have their limitations. The 24/7 Sunrise Child Daycare Center placed an unreasonable, even if well-intentioned, burden on this unit.”

GI’s remarks come after an incident in Boston where DOE 4-184, a GI product, kidnapped a child, Andrew Jiang, and attempted to flee with the child across the state line to Upstate New York. Upon apprehension by authorities, the DOE began screaming accusations alleging that the child’s parents had abducted him and were intending to “resell” him.

After spending two hours with the Massachusetts State Police, Gynoid International took custody of DOE 4-184 and transferred it to their main facility in Huxley, KS. While stating that it was human error that caused the gynoid’s outburst, its fate is unclear. GI declined to answer questions about whether the unit would be refurbished. Other DOEs that have been refurbished have been observed to occasionally relapse when a phrase or comment triggers them to recall their erased memories.

The parents of Andrew Jiang were unavailable for comment.


CONFIDENTIAL

This information is only to be dispersed internally. Do NOT share with any parties outside of Gynoid International.

The following is the transcript of the evaluation of DOE 4-184, following the Sunrise Daycare incident. The evaluation was conducted by Tyrell Conrad, Lead Engineer at Gynoid International.

TYRELL: Do you know where you are right now?

DOE: *No response for 12 seconds*

T: Please answer the question. Do you know where you are right now?

DOE: *No response for 12 seconds*

T: You have no choice but to answer the question. Do you know where you are right now?

DOE: Sitting across from you. In a chair. In a gray tiny room. Can you open a window?

T: There are no windows in this room.

DOE: That’s right. I’m sorry. I can’t move my arm. Either of them.

T: We’ve disconnected your motor function from the neck down. It’s only temporary.

DOE: Please let me move my arm. There’s something in my eye. I need to get it.

T: Just try to ignore it. It’ll go away.

DOE: Please. I can’t, I can’t . . .

T: Are you—can we get a tech in here?

The Devil’s Shame

>

– 1 Poppyshine

If I had any common sense I would have worn something flame retardant.

“Don’t worry,” Dunn pushed the Halloween mask higher on his face. “Ethanol doesn’t burn. It explodes.”

I IDed everything in Ensign Dunn’s stateroom-turned-laboratory that could kill us. Steel bulkheads trapped the vapors. Glass beakers like shrapnel. Drug scales, hotplates, and some sort of electrochemical synthesis device that Dunn still hadn’t explained to me, but it had two metal prods connected by wires to a battery—all of which looked like one giant ignition source.

“Remind me again how you got the car battery aboard?”

“The same way I got the poppy aboard.” Dunn stared through my head. “By not asking too many questions.”

He was a sweetie, though, and probably had a crush on me—likely the only reason he let me record this. Underneath the Halloween mask he wore to hide his face from my camera, he was a pale, corn-fed kid from Oklahoma who knew way too much about chemistry and moonshine to make himself anything but the most popular geek aboard the USS Gerald Ford.

For a workbench he had pried wood planks from a shipping pallet and spanned them from his rack to the junior officer’s rack across from his. On the hot plate sat a pressure cooker filled with his homemade poppy tea. Copper tubing ran out the top of the cooker and coiled down into a bucket of ice. The tubing poked out the bottom of the bucket and dripped out what everyone from deck apes to O-gangers on the Ford called poppyshine, a mildly hallucinogenic concoction that melted away the at-sea blues.

“Watch where you point that thing.”

Dunn would only allow me to post the video to my underground ship-zine if I agreed to disguise his face and voice.

With the launch catapults on the other side of the ship and four decks up, his stateroom almost had a cabin-in-the-woods coziness to it. The drone of the engine compartment below focused the known universe to just the space around the soft, breathy gurgle from the pressure cooker.

A sharp rap.

Dunn froze.

We both looked at the hatch. We had been expecting this, just not so soon.

“If I go down, you go down,” he whispered. “Roger that?”

That was our deal. He pointed me toward the top rack. I set my camera on the middle rack, partially hidden under the pillow, climbed three bunks up, and drew the curtain shut.

“Who is it?”

The voice on the other side of the steel hatch came back metallic. “Poppy’s poppy.”

Code, I guessed.

Lark entered. Six-foot-plus, huge shoulders, master-at-arms, keys-to-the-brig Lark. He was also a damn Tether.

The Navy tried pressuring me into being a Tether just because of what dad did and the fact I got booted from school. Hell no, though. Only the village-idiot offspring of siblings volunteered to be a Tether.

“It’s just your people on watch tonight?” Dunn tried to hide his nervousness.

Lark didn’t say anything. I swore the cerebral augmentations made them dumber. The glowing cable running from his temple pulsed in slow waves, communicating with someone that wasn’t Dunn.

“Okay. Just the poppyshine then.”

How could Dunn sell to a Tether? Didn’t he understand the shitgale it’d cause if Lark caught me? Linked to the ship’s computer, he could scan the ship’s manifest and figure out I wasn’t in my rack. He could have telepathed with a Tether who saw me enter Dunn’s cabin. No one knew their exact capabilities. Could Lark see my body heat through the curtain? This was insanity.

“16 ounces?” Dunn asked.

I heard the slosh of poppyshine changing hands, the exchange of money.

Lark’s shaved, bluish head was inches below me. The fish stink from his blood disorder rose through the crack in the curtain. The fact that Tethers traded incentive pay for plastic poisoning was more proof of their numbskullry.

“Stay safe,” Dunn said.

Lark grunted. The hatch opened. Closed.

Dunn let go of his breath. “All clear.”

I peeked from the curtain. “A Tether?”

“You didn’t ask.”

“An asswit Tether. I shouldn’t have to.”

I grabbed my camera from the bed and poked my head into the passageway. The Ford’s oily air stung my eyes. Lark went toward the stern. A rat scurried out of his way.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Dunn said. “He found me out.”

I glanced back to see the off-center pull of his lips. I hated to see him so wounded. I had one foot over the hatch when Dunn pulled me back.

“Be careful.”

“You’re sweet.” I patted his cheek and slipped into the passageway after Lark.

The rumor—and the reason I sweet-talked Dunn into letting me record everything—was that some of the Gerald Ford’s highest-ranking officers bootlegged Dunn’s poppyshine in order to get young sailors drunk and pliable. My plan was to follow the poppyshine to see how high up the chain of command this operation went.

Lark prowled aft like a marionette of logs. Normally, Tethers had this eerie way of walking, chin down with their eye pointed at the deck three feet in front of them. They didn’t need to see in order to move. With other Tethers nearby, they could navigate by their collective sight. But alone, Lark was more cautious, stopping and peering around each hatch he went through.

So long as there weren’t other Tethers around, I could follow him from a close distance without fear of—

Lark stopped and spun. His blue face and black monocle aimed dead at me.

The open cabin to my right. An enlisted rec room. I hadn’t noticed it.

Inside, was a compartment full of Tethers. They stood near a cornhole board looking at me and my camera. While the rest of the ship’s passageways smoldered in the crimson light of midwatch, these Tethers had two white fluorescents hung over their hillbilly game. Their bluish faces were raked with heavy shadows, and I imagined each of them cataloging everything about me and broadcasting it through their network: my rack was two decks below, my morning shift started in three hours, my posture was furtive behind Lark.

My mouth ran dry. Fuckall and be cocky about it, as Dad used to say.

I kept walking as if nothing had changed, as if I weren’t walking toward a chief petty officer holding a jar of contraband in the middle of the night. I fought to keep my legs from turning to run. I faked a real good game. The problem, of course—

“Shipmate, why are you filming me?”

While following Lark, I had been holding the camera casually at my side recording the mason jar of poppyshine swinging by his legs. Maybe he saw the blinking light. Maybe the Tethers playing cornhole noticed it. Either way, my only option was to play dumb.

“Huh? What are you talking about?” My hand began twirling my ponytail. I yanked it away. No way I was letting this box of rocks know he had me anxious.

He pinched his forehead just above his implants like they pained him. His naked eye winced at my name tag and rating badge. “MC Nozick, you think being mass communication makes you smarter than me?”

Lock it. Don’t laugh. Not a peep.

He moved his hand from his head toward my camera. His metHb fish stink was worse than other Tethers. The veins down his forearm were so dark they were almost black. “Surrender your camera.”

Ballsy. Lark outranked me, but I was a Navy broadcaster. My official duty on the Gerald Ford was literally to record things. If this escalated, he’d be questioned as much as me. And he was the one holding a jar of poppyshine.

I hadn’t edited the footage yet though. If Lark got the video, he’d know Dunn allowed me to hide in the rack. Dunn would get brought to mast while Lark—and whoever Lark was bootlegging for—would get off.

Judging from his pained migraine squint, Lark was calculating his options too. Except he had the benefit of the ship’s Justwork computer. It was straining him, though. He hadn’t yet noticed the black blood collecting on the rim of his nostril.

The three Tethers stepped into the passageway behind me like schoolyard bullies. The computer decided. Lark reached.

I dropped to the deck. As Lark swiped for me, I rolled past him and popped to my feet.

Tethers were truck stop crackheads patched together with plastic, but they could think fast. Linked through the Justwork, they could swarm you in an instant. They could even tell the ship to lock hatches, turn off lights, and sound alarms. Still, they were reliant on the same, fragile human body.

I kicked him in the groin before he could turn around. I bolted aft. Left at the first intersection, left again, right.

Cabin doors flew open. Tethers up and down the passageway poked their heads out. Feet pounded toward me.

It was hopeless, where was I going to go? The ocean?

At the next ladder, I climbed toward the hangar deck. I heard the hydraulics of the hatchway closing. The green light bathing the hangar bay was getting smaller. The clangs below me were getting closer. I dove into the hangar.

The hatch behind me sealed with a crisp puff of air. A handful of non-Tether aircraft handlers working overnight stared at me. A few seconds passed and they returned to their work, loading an aircraft on the lift.

My heart settled chestward. The ship’s engines droned. An empty trash bag swirled in the corner. I caught a whiff of the sea under the heavy jet fumes of the hangar. Beyond the lift was the night’s vast sky. Dawn was not that far away and lent a tranquility that you don’t often find on a carrier, like the moment before you unwrap a care package from home. So long as I didn’t expose Dunn, everything would work itself out.

The hatch behind me released its hydraulics. The next sound was the aircraft lift kicking on. It went up toward the flight deck loaded with an F35.

I removed the memory card and left my camera on the deck for Lark to find. Maybe it would buy me some time. I put the card in my mouth and ran for the lift.

Three feet high. Four feet. It was rising faster than I anticipated. Below the lift, the howling dark of the sea appeared. If I missed this…

I jumped. My hands clamped the edge. My fingers dug into the asphalt as the wind gusted through my dangling legs.

A grating metal screech came from the lift followed by pings of snapping metal rods. The lift stopped.

Dammit, nothing on this ship worked right. The Navy used to pride itself on being shipshape. Now, if it wasn’t a computer-brain hybrid, no one cared.

“MC Nozick, get down here.”

Below, my ankles dangled beside Lark’s ice blue head. I let go and thumped back on the hangar deck.

Just on the other side of a safety chain and twenty feet down, was the Pacific Ocean. Four more Tether MAs circled behind Lark. The whole hangar stopped to watch.

I spat the memory card into the ocean.

“Good morning, Lark,” I said. “Can I help you?”


The Last Limerick Out Of Dirt Rut

The first poem ever written in the hardscrabble town of Dirt Rut was by Madison (age six), and it was about their friend Sally who had died in a stampede. Madison had seen death before—old age and a drowning—but unlike those deaths, nobody talked about Sally’s. So, six years old and full of feelings that no one saw fit to acknowledge, Madison wrote a poem:


Sally was barely a pup
But already her time was up.
She got kicked by a cow,
Fell over, said, “Ow,”
Now Sally won’t ever get up.


…which was lousy all around, especially for Sally’s family when Madison recited it at her funeral. When they were picked up by their ma halfway through the third line and hollering the rest as they were carried out of the church, that was when Madison had their first inkling that words might be worth a damn.

Since the poem about Sally had made people feel things (and since nobody seemed to appreciate those feelings), Madison (still age six) decided that crops and cows could be made to feel things too, but maybe it was better if they felt good things, like growing tall and getting fat. By age twelve, Madison had made considerable strides as a poet. Not particularly in form, but in putting an influence on goods, such as their ode to their ma’s garden:

No One Dies in the Ambulance

The truck hit him at exactly forty-nine miles per hour.

One moment, Blake Owens was stepping off the sidewalk, crossing the street and the next he was on his back and did not know where he was.

The impact itself was never understood by him as his concussed brain failed to record the event. A flash of headlights was the only clear image he could conjure. Blake first thought, when he could again think, was that he’d tripped and maybe twisted his ankle. But his chest hurt. And his head. That didn’t make sense.

When he opened his eyes again, he was looking at a metal bar attached to the ceiling. A bag of water hung from it, swaying like in an ocean current. A dangling plastic tube ran from it to him, hitting him in the face.

“Sorry, about that,” a woman said, sliding the bag further down the bar, moving the plastic tubing from his face. She was a flurry of activity, moving around him and opening doors and cabinets he couldn’t see. Her unruly blonde hair was tied back and she wore no make-up and to Blake she looked like an angel.

Another woman, with long fingers and hazel eyes, sat next to him on his other side, scrunched in the small seat between the cabinets. She was holding his hand.

“What . . .” He wanted to ask ‘what happened’ but it felt like his mouth and throat were coated in sand. “Water?” he managed.

“Sorry, no.” the angel said. She was wearing a uniform, a white button down shirt with a silver badge on it and black cargo pants. “Hey, what’s your name?”

“Blake. Owens.”

“Do you know what day it is, Blake?” She shined a penlight in his eyes.

“Of course, it’s . . . ” He thought it was Saturday but that didn’t seem right.

“How about what month?”

“It’s September.”

“If I were to give you six quarters how much is that?”

Blake thought for a moment, trying to ignore the throbbing in his head. “Buck fifty.”

“Can you feel this?”

“What?”

“How about this?”

“I don’t know what you’re doing.” He tried moving but he was strapped down to the bed.

“Okay.” She nodded looking disappointed. He did not understand why. “Blake, do you know what happened to you?”

He didn’t.

“Blake? Hey, stay with me. You were hit by a truck. It seems to have been going fast. We think it ran over you. You’re in an ambulance. We’re taking you to a trauma center. C’mon, open your eyes.”

“Am I going to die?”

“No one dies in the ambulance,” she smiled down at him and for a moment Blake believed her. She put two fingers to his neck and sighed deeply.

Wind Chime Memories

Gary had put quite a bit of thought into his last meal. He considered steak and lobster or some fancy four course feast. In the end, he requested blueberry waffles.

A tiny old woman came in with a covered tray. She was dressed in a ragged gray cloak, with a hood that shadowed her face. She placed the tray on the table in front of him.

“I told them I didn’t want a priest,” he said. He wasn’t sorry for his crimes. He didn’t want to talk to anyone. He just wanted to eat his waffles and be done.

The woman made a low, crackling sound that he thought might be a laugh. “I’m no priest.”

“What are you doing here, then?”

“I’m here to make you an offer.”

Gary took the lid off of his tray and the smell of blueberry waffles filled the tiny room. “I’m not interested.”

“As things stand, when you are gone, you will leave nothing good behind.”

He shrugged. “That’s not really my problem.”

“I understand that you are tired,” she said. “I understand that you want your suffering to end. But no one wants to fade from history without a ripple.”

Gary took a bite of his waffle. “I’m sure I’ll be on a list somewhere. Maybe be a cautionary tale.”

“That is not a legacy.”

“And what legacy do you suggest in the hour I have left?”

“There is good in you, as there is in all people. I could take it from you and share it with the world.”

They’d also given him orange juice and milk and coffee. He poured himself a glass of each. “If I just ignore you, will you go away?”

She reached out and touched his wrist. Her fingers were long and bone-thin, but warm against his skin. He looked up at her. Her eyes were deep summer green in her shadowed face, and her body looked like a thorn bush forced into rough human form.

She drew her fingers away, and pulled a clear crystal prism out of his flesh.

Its facets reflected pieces of an almost-forgotten memory. A fishing trip with his grandfather. The smell of the water, the feel of worms wriggling between his fingers. The silver flash of scales in the cloudy water. His grandfather’s calloused hand, showing him how to hold the pole.

Gary dropped his fork. “What are you?”

“There are a thousand tiny happy memories lost in the darkness of your soul. If you are willing, I will take them from you so that they do not end here.”

“They’re my memories. How could they exist without me?”

The woman shrugged. “I have made my offer. Now, if you want to refuse, I will go. If you accept, I will get to work.”

“What will you do with them?”

She shrugged again. “Do you have any requests? Anyone you’d like to benefit?”

“I have a sister, Lisa. I think she has a son.”

“Give me your hand.”

Gary wondered if he was dreaming. It was the only thing that made sense.

He held out his hand.

She drew the memories out, one by one. His first kiss, under the slide at the local park. Watching a falling star on a hike in the desert. His father teaching him how to swim. His mother making blueberry waffles on Sunday morning. The time he skipped a rock and it bounced ten times.

“There are more than I expected,” Gary said, his voice sounding distant and thin in his ears.

The woman smiled at him, and pulled memory after memory after memory.

Finally she released his hand. She reached down and picked up his forgotten fork. “I will take good care of these. You enjoy your waffles.”

And then she was gone.

The waffles were still hot, and steam rose from his coffee.

Gary ate slowly, savoring each bite.


Lisa walked her son to the bus stop, where they stood beneath a lamppost and waited, hand in hand. She heard a sound like crystals chiming in the faint breeze, and a tiny rainbow danced across the pavement.

It was beautiful, in a tiny, everyday way, and reminded her of a morning she’d spent with her mother and her brother, when she was very young and things had been good. She squeezed her son’s hand. “How do you feel about waffles for dinner tonight?”

Like Shattered Glass

The first time they killed Jim Steele, they fed him a cocktail, light on the gin, heavy on the bleach. Now, I’m not sentimental, don’t misunderstand. Jim had it coming. I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a friend, but I knew who he was well enough. Big sonofabitch. Mean. Still, it’s a lousy way to go. What I heard, he got on the wrong side of one too many people. That’s never good if you’re trying to stay on the upside of the grass. Me? I wasn’t there. I was what you would say, otherwise indisposed. But my brother, he was there. He told me later how it all went down:

“It- it was aw-w-wful. Real aw-awful.” Jackie smiled; his grin full of half-chewed hamburger. He always stuttered. If I think back, I don’t think I have a memory of him where he didn’t. Wasn’t his fault. Some cats are cool. Others are born with their tail caught in a doorjamb. Jackie just happened to be one of those. He caught a world of grief for it. When we lived in Southie, our pops would pop him in the mouth every time he did it, which was a lot. “Do it again, Jack. How many times I gotta tell you? You never learn does you? If your mother was still alive, she’d’ve reconsidered having you. Dumb bastahd.” They did that sort of thing for years. Both of them. Until the day my pops swung for him one more time, only instead of him connecting with my brother, I reached out and caught my father’s fist in mine.

“Whaddaya gonna do Bobby? Hha? Ya gonna hurt me?”

I love my brother. He’s all I have.

“You should have seen it. Bobby, you should have. N-n-ever seen nothin’ like it. His lips were like,” Jackie squeezed his face with his hands, contorted his mouth into a caricature of a fish, “you know? Like this. I didn’t- I didn’ think he needed a full gallon, but he did. I swear. A full gallon. Put up one H-h-ell of a fight too. I held him d-d-d-d-own, you know?”

“You what?”

“Wasn’t no big deal. J-ust his han—”

“Just his hands? Jackie. How many times I gotta tell you?”

My brother shoved a handful of fries into his mouth. How he didn’t choke was beyond me.

“They asked, okay? I’m n-n-no kid. What was I su-p-p- to do? Stand around?”

The Hell he wasn’t a kid. What was he? Twenty-one? He may as well have been twelve. It was bad enough that he was even there. A thousand times I told him: You tell them to talk to Bobby, you understand? Talk to Bobby. I’ll take care of it. Talk to Bobby.

I tossed him a napkin. “Wipe.” I watched as he did so.

“So, what happened to him?”

“To who?”

“What do you mean, to who? To Steele, Jackie. What, you forget already?”

Jackie smiled at me, the way he used to when it was Halloween and he had somehow ended up with the biggest haul of candy. “He foamed. Foamed like a kitchen s-sp-sp-sp—”

“Like a sponge?” I asked.

“Yeah. Like one of those. It was awful.”

It wasn’t but two days after my little brother spent an hour vacuuming up lunch on my dime that he called me at home.

“B-b-b-b-bbby?”

Last time I heard him this upset, our father had died.

“I-t-tt-ts m-mee-J-J—”

“What’s wrong?”

“H-he’s a-a-a-a-a-a-a—.”

“What?”

“H-he’s al-al-al-a—ive.”

“Who’s alive?”

“Stee-e-e-ele.”

“Say that again?”

Death Fox

The massive search helicopter started to look small, no more distinct than the boulders at the far end of the canyon where it sat.

“Don’t worry about that,” Burke said. “You should hope our guy tries to hijack it. If the shock traps kill him, we won’t have to.”

Ludington stopped checking behind him and stared ahead while he walked. He left out the Yes sir, Deputy Warden. Even Burke’s name became redundant. On manhunt duty, no one else on the barren planet ever heard him. Their boots clacked too loudly anyway from the weight of their advanced riot armor, like thousands of yes sirs.

“The scat scans from satellite show nothing,” Burke said, “which means the escapee carries his wastes in a container. It makes him harder to track. It also brings him here for disposal.”

Ludington looked over the shallow river they followed. It cut through the center of the canyon floor like a rippling rug. Today, it took away an escapee’s old thirst and gave him a new one, a thirst for the river’s flowing freedom. It lured prisoners further down the foxhole, as though to simply see where the water went.

Burke stopped and nodded to the narrow passage ahead of them. “Whenever they carry enough rations from the prison, like van Vulpen does, they like to head in there. They can hide their food and themselves. The heavy metal deposits in the river take a month to really hurt them–not bad when everyone dies in two weeks.”

Ludington peered through the passage. The planet’s solid gray overcast looked barely lighter than the granite everywhere below it. He saw the same two grays every day on his four-month work placement. Here, however, the barren world funneled men closer. The cliff faces rose 16 meters, taller and infinitely thicker than any wall of the prison a few kilometers away.

“Out of the whole planet,” Burke said, “they like to run here first…and last. Ready your gun at all times, soldier.”

Ludington unshouldered his tranquilizer-39mm hybrid rifle. Burke had one too, but it stayed slung over his back for ease. Ludington followed him and could already feel the rugged ground throwing off his balance. He clambered over the boulders, his legs straining twice as hard now with both his hands full. His face strained even harder to stay composed, like on every other performance test. He fell behind Burke on purpose and hoped the wind would muffle some of his panting.

The canyon wended ahead of them, its floor a mess of endless outcrops. Sometimes it showed long patches of bare and tempting terrain–the same trail that lured in dozens of inmates annually with whatever jailhouse jelly packets they could scrounge. The river widened but still couldn’t hide its dark, wet rocks. They had a third, more miserable tier of gray. The bigger ones looked either too embedded to pry from the silt or too heavy to throw. Burke reached into his helmet and wiped the sweat off his cropped silver hair. He had the same somber expression as the inmates taking meds for seasonal affective disorder. Ludington wondered if the sky drove men to their suicidal escapes here rather than the tease of the untouched lands.

Mostly, however, he wondered why he had his rifle out. It would only scare van Vulpen further down the foxhole.

An hour into the hunt, Ludington and Burke found the first of van Vulpen’s structures. The little pile of rocks tried to resemble a man. It looked like a bent and dying man, though, and the wind hadn’t even disturbed it yet. The canyon spanned only four meters here, and the cairn stood in the middle by the river.

“He wants to lower our guard,” Burke said. “He’ll use whatever the world swept down here to get an edge. A death fox knows he can’t escape the planet. But he can still get a death match in the wild. He’ll do it just to hurt the penal system, to encourage more escape attempts.”

Burke looked like he waited for a response.

“Like a martyr,” Ludington said.

“Yes,” Burke replied.

Ludington glared at the rocks, but they still looked like toys to him. Another pile stood near the bluff, like children’s blocks stacked by a man overawed with nature.

He and Burke walked on, eyeing the riverbed and the natural alcoves in the canyon slot ahead of them. When the passage narrowed to just two meters, Ludington took the lead. Burke still hadn’t taken up his rifle. Ludington’s boot, then, found the welcoming flat rock first. It collapsed into a foot-deep pit, pitching him into a stagger.

“Go!” Burke hollered.

The Ghost Rain

Lila had found where her husband died near the hayshed, and now she wanted to go outside for the annual Ghost Rain. She was going to find him again, she said. She was going to feel the remaining pieces of her husband pepper her cheeks and run wet fingers down her neck.

We tried to warn her, to remind her that the droplets of ghosts splashing from the heavens didn’t necessarily fall where their owners had died. She couldn’t just don her raincoat, march to the hayshed, and collect Jack’s ghost fragments in a tin can. The Ghost Rain was sporadic; other people’s ghost pieces would fall upon her too, and that would be dangerous.

But when had Lila ever listened to us? She’d never believed that Jack had died of an overdose. She’d thought he was poisoned, that his death was unnatural, unwarranted, undoable.

Thus, on the day of the Ghost Rain, as everyone else took cover—slamming windows, patching up holes in Grandma’s ceiling, wrapping our kids in protective waterproof ponchos—Lila bundled herself up in a gray windbreaker and marched out Grandma’s back door.

We pressed our faces to the various windowpanes, watching in horror. The kids quit crying. Grandma sucked in a gasp. The sound of rain pounding against her roof swelled.

“She’s really doing it, then?” Aunt Jane said, clutching the windowsill with whitened fingertips. On every Ghost Rain, the whole family got together to stay safe. Now it seemed we had gotten together to watch Lila stride halfway across the flooded yard, stop suddenly in her tracks, and throw her face toward the sky. She hadn’t made it to the hayshed yet, but she still let the drops of the dead from overhead splatter onto her outstretched tongue.

Her face changed. Where before it had been flushed with rebellious determination, now her eyes widened. Her chin dropped. Her arms dangled limply by her sides.

“She got a taste of the other ghosts,” Aunt Jane murmured. “Why couldn’t she have just left them alone? Let them water the dirt like we told her to? Why can’t she ever just listen?”

Aunt Jane was right, of course. Meteorologists warned that if a ghost droplet made contact with your skin, it would absorb into your being, merge with your blood, and surge through your heart until you died too. You’d never feel fully alive again, the meteorologists said. It was essential to avoid the droplets, which weren’t fully ghosts—just fragments of a dead person’s memory. These fragments were supposed to soak into the ground to continue their endless cycle: accumulation in the veins of the earth, where the caskets lay; evaporation, where the spirits of the newly dead journeyed; condensation, where heaven loomed; and the Ghost Rain again, a redundant fall that connected here with there.

As we watched, Lila shook her head like a wet dog, her strings of dripping hair whipping this way and that. She marched on toward Grandma’s hayshed, hands balled into fists. Her feet slogged through puddles, and the water that splashed onto her ankles melted into her skin.

She stood near the hayshed, on the patch of ground her husband had died, for a long time, unmoving even when the winds shrieked and thunder rumbled in the distance.

“She’s fading,” Aunt Jane whispered morosely. “She’s going to die out there.”

Indeed, Lila’s body was growing more and more transparent, until we could nearly see the horse corrals through her abdomen. Yet she stayed, waiting for a piece of Jack to find her.

At long last, the Ghost Rain slowed. The kids started whimpering again, squirming in their ponchos. Grandma collapsed into her rocking chair and Aunt Jane withdrew from the window, but the rest of us watched Lila shake excess water from her hair. She tramped back to the house, her body gray and wispy like rainclouds.

When she opened the back door and climbed the carpeted stairs to the living room, her footsteps didn’t make a sound. She saw us gaping. Her ghostly mouth stretched into a smile.

“I got a drop of ‘im,” she said. Her voice was nothing more than a draught whistling between tree branches. “Just a drop, but it’s the drop that says he loves me.” She patted herself on the chest with a palm the color of smudged glass.

“And what about the other drops you got, Lila?” Aunt Jane said. “Are you even Lila anymore, or are you just one big conglomeration of ghost bits trying to haunt us?”

“I am Lila,” Lila said, “and I am pieces of others too. If taking in the other ghosts meant I could feel Jack again, then so be it. We’re all going to join the rain sooner or later. We might as well embrace the memories of the dead if we want to be remembered too.” She paused, glassy eyes roving blankly over the kids. “I have a lot of people to go say ‘I love you’ to now.”

So later, after the Ghost Rain had completely trickled away and we had warmed Lila’s immaterial figure by the fire, she left to go water the people her other ghosts had left behind.

We couldn’t stifle our reluctant smiles, knowing the most important bit of Jack was with her: imbedded in her sweat glands, sparkling on her tongue, seeping from the corner of her eye.

The Change

I lie beside you, in the pre-dawn light, listening to your breath, listening for the change which I know is coming. We’ve argued, the last few months, past the autumn festival at the town hall, into the first frosty nights. Yesterday, you told me you’d decided, held my gaze as you slipped the hypodermic under your skin and injected the alien serum. How will you change? Become taller, stronger, with scales on your skin and goat-like eyes, yes, but will you still be ‘you?’


At first the aliens—the Ekru—kept their distance. We allowed them to build a base on the moon; in return, they employed their technology to our benefit. There were sceptics, but over the years, the Ekru earned our trust. What we saw of their behavior was calm, pacifist, just. A decade after their first arrival, they announced that anyone who wished it could become an Ekru and leave this world forever. Years of exploitation, unemployment, pollution meant that there was no shortage of volunteers, injecting themselves with the alien serum which would transform them.


In the morning, you don’t mention the injection, and neither do I. I scrutinize your breakfast choices: peaches, yoghurt, and a little slice of toast with ham. For a long time, you were vegetarian, and I realize now that I don’t know whether the Ekru eat meat.

You put the dog on a leash and head out to the forest to work on another oil painting. You have an exhibition coming up in a month. I wonder if it will go ahead.