When he had run out of things to swear at, he managed to pull himself together enough to climb out of the cramped cockpit and into the empty cargo bay. He felt terrible. A sick fear had churned his guts and made his head ache.

His safety net was gone. And it had failed at the worst possible moment.

When Rig was promoted to XO of the Ultor, one of his first projects had been to surreptitiously purchase a collapsible, concealable, two-seater escape craft with enough power to get him to a neighboring system if he ever found himself in a no-win situation. Knowing the Ultor and the guy who commanded it, this was an almost guaranteed prospect. And knowing her crew as he did, Rig had no doubt that every one of them would have made their own escape plans for this exact eventuality.

Maybe there was someone willing to let him tag along? Some groveling might have to be involved. It would be humiliating, but it was better than dying.

A new wave of anger washed over him. The ship had cost him nearly an entire year’s wages. Scammed? Sabotaged? It made no sense. All systems showed green, and the meager onboard AI was as flummoxed as he was. He released another torrent of curses until he managed to calm himself again.

Not sure what else to do, Rig began folding up the wings so he could slide the small craft back into its hidey-hole again. But as he was securing the covering panel, a new idea came to him. Wait a minute. Since every diagnostic comes up clean, maybe there’s no scientific reason for launch failure. This left only one possible culprit. It was something he should’ve considered in the first place. It made sense. And he could prove it as well.

Of course, confronting the culprit might get him killed even faster—you never knew where Elgia was concerned. But what other choice did he have?

Exiting into the passageway, he halted in the corridor. 

Uh-oh. 

His sixth sense began twinging. It told him he would have to run a gauntlet to get to Elgia’s quarters unscathed. You don’t serve aboard a mercenary ship like the Ultor for long without recognizing panic in the air: a sour yet electric scent that was equal parts adrenaline mixed with cold sweat. If Rig could capture it in a perfume bottle, he’d call it Impending Doom. Cautiously, he began making his way to the lower decks.

A few moments later, he spotted the bobbing blond head of Pora, the Ultor’s navigator, hurrying in the opposite direction. Rig secretly fancied her and believed there was a chance she might’ve felt the same way in return. (He held on to this faint hope despite the fact she had once threatened him with a plasma torch after he had denied her shore leave. Typical Ultor attitude; great to work with, but don’t cross certain lines.)

“Hey, Pora,” he called, feigning nonchalance. It sounded fake to his own ears, but Pora didn’t react. More accurately, she didn’t react to him at all, walking briskly past him with a preoccupied, anxious look in her eyes.

Huh. Interesting.

Other crew members he passed carried the same expression, confused and deeply troubled. He caught whispers of “What do you mean it wouldn’t work? I thought you checked it?” and, “He owes me big time and is worth a rescue sortie out here, but I can’t raise him on the comms at all. I just get dead air…”

Okay, that pretty much clinches it.

He began jogging like he was going somewhere vital in order to do something that could save their asses if he could only get there in time. He’d used this act before. Everyone was rattled now, but that could worsen fast, especially if they spotted someone in authority to blame, like a young, arguably inexperienced XO. So what if everyone knew the Captain was solely to blame? No one would be able to get to Drooghelm, who would be barricaded in his quarters by now, hiding behind blast-proof hulls and reinforced bulkheads. Their fearless captain always pulled this maneuver when he royally screwed up.

Rig managed to reach the sub-fifth deck without incident. He turned and headed down a corridor.

He was getting close. Familiar, telltale scents filled his nostrils; wafts of strange herbs, roots, and unrecognizable concoctions hovered thickly in the air. The light was dimmer here. The lighting covers were coated with grime, and the deck plates as well. Nothing had been cleaned in months, but Rig never scolded the cleaning bots, knowing full well that they were too nervous to venture around these parts. Even the mechies had enough intelligence to stay away. But what did that say about himself? 

It pretty much says I’m an idiot.

Ahead, a flickering yellow light spilled from an open hatchway. The bulkhead around it was covered in crudely painted runes and symbols. A beaded curtain made from rough, fibrous strands covered the opening and two bleached skulls from odd, bird-like creatures hung in the upper corners. He swallowed nervously.

Approaching the doorway cautiously, Rig raised his hand to knock.

“Enterrrrrr…” croaked a wizened voice from the other side.

He shuddered and thought: I hate it when he does that, before entering the room.

Suddenly, a green specter appeared from nowhere, floating in mid-air before Rig, moaning piteously. It was a ghastly phantasm of a male technician with torn overalls which glowed with an unearthly, sickly aura that matched his emerald, sore-riddled skin. The specter’s eyes and mouth were as black as the darkest singularity, no pupils or tongue visible as he groaned at Rig: “Deaaaaaaaaaath!”

Though he had been expecting this, Rig still cried out like a tween-aged schoolgirl and almost jumped out of his skin. “Augh! For pity’s sake, Franz, it’s me.” His hand accidentally passed through the creature, which immediately turned ice-cold. A deathly chill ran up his arm.

The hovering creature abruptly stopped wailing and straightened up. “Oh.” The voice was fairly ordinary now, though disappointed. “Sorry, XO. Didn’t know it was you. Thought it was one of the regulars.”

Rig exhaled slowly, consciously. “Forget it,” he grumbled. “There’s a crisis. I need to talk to Elgia.”

Franz pivoted mid-air and called into a back room: “Sweetie!”

“Coming, Franzie,” came back a creaky voice.

The eyeless face turned back to Rig and smiled pleasantly. “She’ll just be a minute. Please have a seat if you wish. Help yourself to some tea.” And with that, he vanished.

Since the only seat in the room seemed to be made from the pelvic skeleton of some unknown, large creature, Rig chose to stay standing.

He looked about. Elgia’s lair hadn’t changed much since the last time he was here. The same wooden drawers were set in ancient cabinets, each holding a pungent cache of herbs and roots from far-flung corners of the galaxy, the same cauldron bubbled lightly over a stone brazier with a smoldering fire in the middle, and the same dust and gloom coated everything, all of which likely concealed a thousand arcane and mystical items that would bring horrible, painful death or a lifetime of humiliating curses if you touched them the wrong way. On the far wall, a framed piece of cross-stitching depicted a grey tabby kitten playing with a ball of pink yarn. It was definitely the creepiest item in the room.

Finally, Elgia Jossinah Wrigglia, Black Mistress in the Everlasting Sisterhood of the Shadow, hobbled her way in from the back room with a gnarled wooden cane, looking like a pale prune that had spontaneously sprouted limbs. The stuff on her head was either hair or sentient cobwebs, a tangle of wispy vagueness, the strands occasionally moving of their own accord. Two squinting eyes, each pale blue-white, were set in her crevassed face and were not easy to gaze into when you were sober.

Most non-magic spacefaring folks—Rig included—tended to avoid mystical objects or beings as they would the black plagues from the swamps on Golgotha Prime. Why Drooghelm had decided to hire a terrifying creature like Elgia to be part of their little “spacefaring family” baffled Rig.

The ancient woman smiled cheerfully on her way to the cauldron, yellow and grey teeth peeking through dried lips. “Hello, Ducks. How’s tricks?”

“Good evening, Sister Elgia.” Best to start formally.

“Oh, relax, Ducks. You’re one of the ones I like.” She peered at him briefly. “You look very upset, you poor thing.”

“Yeah, I’ve been better. Do you… er… mind if I ask you something?” Elgia’s assurances notwithstanding, Rig’s tone was polite and calm. He wanted to scream his question, but you never annoyed members of the Sisterhood without having your head examined first.

Elgia leaned over the bubbling cauldron, sniffing. “Of course, Ducks. Always willing to help the deputy leader in our little home in space.” She took a few sticks from a nearby pile and placed them into the smoldering fire in the hearth below. (Open flames on any spacefaring vessel were, unsurprisingly, completely forbidden. Unless, of course, you were someone like Elgia, who would take your copy of the Spacefarer’s Trade Union Safety Book and burn it in her hearth in order to make her point clear.)

Clearing his throat, Rig explained how his small escape craft, for no apparent reason, wouldn’t work. He also added that similar malfunctions seemed to be happening all over the ship, including communications. “So…” he paused, attempting to compose his question carefully, “Did you…?” Nothing came to mind, so he stretched his hand out and waggled his fingers suggestively.

Elgia made a disgusted noise. “Ugh! Is that how you ask if I employed my sacred arts? The ancient craft of spell crafting, handed down through millennia and across star systems innumerable?”

“Sorry—”

“Well, yes, I did. His Nibs ordered it, naturally. He wanted to make sure nobody could abandon ship behind his back. Apparently, some job he recently accepted requires a full crew.”

Rig exhaled, then scowled. “Did you happen to ask about it? The job, I mean.”

She shrugged. “Don’t know, don’t care. He’s the boss.”

“Oh, you should care. Let me fill you in. He—”

“Hey, no, belay that, XO!” The deep voice came from the back room. A second later, Captain Drooghelm’s imposing bulk stepped into the room. “Rig, her Unholy Sisterness here doesn’t need to be bothered with the details of ship’s business.”

The Captain looked shockingly awful: disheveled, sallow, and drawn, with massive bags under his eyes and ugly splotches and stains all over his shirt. Rig spied some mysterious things stuck in his beard that might have been flecks of vomit. A while back, he had managed to peek at the Ultor’s accounting sheets and was amazed to learn how much money a supposedly hard-as-nails mercenary Captain could allot for a private publicist and hair care products. If Drooghelm had allowed himself to look this bad in front of anyone, then he was very shaken indeed.

Elgia nodded in agreement. “Captain’s right, I don’t need to be bothered. How he runs his ship is none of my concern. I’m just a Mystical Consultant, after all, I don’t do policy.” Elgia hobbled over, pulled open one of the drawers, and began sorting through the contents.

Rig’s patience began to wear thin. “Oh, sod this. Elgia, you need to know the truth. This jackass—”

“Check your tone, Rig! You know how I deal with insubordination.”

“Are you bloody kidding me?” Rig yelled, the last pretenses of decorum falling away. “We’re all dead! You’ve screwed all of us, and then you make her cut off the exits!”

“XO, a crew has to pull together in times of—”

“Save it. You might as well tell her now, Captain. If you think I’m pissed off, imagine what she’s going to feel like once we get there if you haven’t told her.”

Elgia cocked a blue-white eye at Drooghelm. “Oh?” She looked back at Rig. “Okay, boy, you’ve got my attention. What did the drunken bastard do this time?”

“I was not drunk,” protested the Captain weakly.

Rig laughed. “I literally had to cart you onto the ship in a wheelbarrow.” He turned to Elgia. “He had the signed contract lying on his chest when I went to collect him. Our newest client had it notarized, too. Ironclad. PO Crandall was there when I read it, so now the whole bloody ship knows as well.”

Elgia looked at him expectantly.

Rig took a deep breath, then spoke as calmly as he could manage. “There are suicide missions, and there are suicide missions. And then there’s this job.” Rig paused. “Drooghelm has agreed to kill a god.”

A sudden silence filled the room. Elgia just stared at him for what was probably a few seconds but felt like an hour.

Finally, she yelled: “I quit! Franz?”

The green ghost popped back into view. “Sweets?”

“Pack our crap! We’re outta here!” She began to gather up objects around her.

Drooghelm groaned. “Look, Elgia, it’s not that bad—”

She spun on him. “Not that bad?” she growled, more infuriated than Rig had ever seen her. “A god?” She threw her arms up in exasperation. “You drunken sot! Why not just say you’ll eat a planet in one gulp? At least a fat bastard like yourself has a chance there! We’ve got no chance against a god.”

“Okay, yes, I had had a lot to drink…”

She laughed mirthlessly and continued packing.

“… and when they named their price, well… er… I don’t remember much after that. I think I might’ve agreed right there and then.”

“Think? There was no thinking involved, that’s for certain. Move, you great moron!” she spat as she pushed past him to grab a sickle hanging on the wall behind him. “Franzie, where’s my satchel?”

“Back of the closet, I think,” the ghost replied. “Next to that cursed halberd, the one Rennazi de Winterstorm owned back in 12574 from the Karrakos Era. Or was it the Spon era?”

“Elgia,” Drooghelm interrupted, “this is an unusual situation.” He shot a nervous glance at Rig.

In a flash, Rig knew what his Captain was about to do and took a cautious step back.

Drooghelm continued, “And I would hate to have to contact the Sisterhood—”

Elgia spun on him so fast it made Rig start. The effect it had on Drooghelm was like a freezing ray; he became an instant statue.

“You would hate to do… what, exactly?”

Sweat began to bead on Drooghelm’s forehead. “To…” he faltered.

“Yessssss?” she hissed. Her tone was colder than space.

“C-c-c-contact… the… Sisterhood…” he stammered.

“You sure you want to do that, Captain?”

The mercenary Captain was silent for a moment, his eyes as wide as saucers. Finally, he managed to say very quietly: “Yes?”

By this point, even the ghost was holding his breath.

Elgia stared hard at him and said nothing. Then, abruptly, she swore and seemed to deflate into the pelvic bone chair. Pulling a pack of cigarettes from a table drawer, she retrieved one and lit it. “Well,” she said in a resigned tone, blowing out a cloud of smoke. “Life was fun while it lasted.”

Rig and Franz exhaled at the same time, but only one of them created a breeze.

Elgia produced a hip flask from under her robes and took a swig. She looked at Rig. “You said it was notarized?” He nodded. “Wonderful,” she growled.

“This,” she said after another healthy swallow, “is technically known as a state of ‘screwed three ways to Sunday.’ If we run, the bailiffs are after us for breaking the contract. And they do not mess around. If we try to carry out the contract, we’ll surely be flattened by a bloody god…” she yelled this pointedly at Drooghelm, “and if I were to fry our beloved leader here into a charcoal brisket and do a runner, the Sisterhood would be on my tail like a rabid weasel who had just spotted her mortal enemy.” She shuddered at the thought.

Rig rubbed his temples, trying to stop his headache from worsening. “Okay, okay,” he began grasping at threads, “Maybe there is a way to… well, do it. Complete the contract.” He couldn’t bring himself to say it directly.

Elgia scowled. “Do it? You mean off the Holy sonofabitch? Ha!” Nevertheless, she turned to Drooghelm and asked: “Well, tell me about this god at least. Which one is it?”

The Captain mopped his brow with a rag from a tabletop. “Uh, well, he’s new. Named Zaxxos or something. Just attained godhood a few years ago. Some mystical accident, according to the client.”

“Who’s the client?” Elgia interrupted.

“These dark cult guys on a planet about ten light years from here: Universalis Sancta Subiugatio, whatever the hell that means.”

Elgia made a guttural sound of disapproval.“Ugh, those arseholes. I know ’em. Charming lot. They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams, stuff like that. Boys and girls, mind you; very progressive not to discriminate, eh? So, it’s these asswipes you decide to go into business with, Droog?”

Drooghelm managed to look even more pale and uncomfortable. “Oh. Er, Eglia, in my defense, I had no idea they did stuff like that when I signed…”

“As drunk as you were, I’m surprised you could remember your own name in order to sign it,” said Rig.

Drooghelm glared. “As I was saying… These Subiugatio guys were fiddling with spells to obtain godhood. Your typical dark cult stuff. Then one of their lesser acolytes, some old guy who had been toiling at the problem for his entire life, stumbled on the solution.”

“So, that is the so-called target?” Franz asked, trying to be helpful. “This lesser acolyte you speak of?”

“Eh, no. It’s his fourteen-year-old grand-nephew, actually. This spell was generational, so one of the caster’s heirs was going to have to take up the family tradition. The acolyte guy was trying to get the kid interested in it as a career choice.

“And then something screwed up, and the spell suddenly worked. The guy was so stunned that he didn’t notice his nephew had walked up to the spell circle and got, um, ‘godded’ instead. Reportedly, the guy was pretty pissed and said some, you’d say, ill-advised things to the kid. Things did not go well for Mr. Uncle, and now they’ll never know how the idiot managed to successfully cast the spell in the first place.”

“How long ago was this?” Elgia asked.

“A little more than five years.”

She rolled her eyes. “Wonderful. We’re going to get flattened by a god whose balls just dropped.”

“Great Herald!” Drooghelm cried, a slight manic tone creeping into his voice, “There has to be a way to get it done!”

“That’s another thing,” Rig said, “when the hell did we become contract killers? When I signed up for your crew, you swore assassinations were off the table.”

“Oh, grow up,” Drooghelm scoffed. “A mercenary crew has to find work where they can. Besides, gods aren’t people. You ever watch one of their kind in an interview? They all think they’re better than everyone else. Buncha pricks.”

Rig put his hands to his face. “Sure… what better argument for murder could you get?”

Drooghelm ignored him. “They must be able to die. In the stories, myths, stuff like that… With the staggering amount these guys are paying us to complete this job—”

“How much?” Franz and Elgia asked at the same time. Rig told them and they whistled appreciatively in unison.

“Exactly,” exclaimed Drooghelm. “So, what if—I dunno—we get the biggest, baddest plasma cannon on credit and—”

“Forget it.” Rig shook his head. “According to what I looked up, there’s this inherent principle to godhood that says ‘a god can only be slain by another god’s hand.’”

The Captain looked at Elgia. She nodded, adding, “Clumsy phrasing, but he’s basically right. Most religious scholars and philosophers would back that up. I wouldn’t call it a universal law or anything, but it’s pretty close.”

“Okay, fine. We hire another god to do it.”

Elgia laughed. “Gods—you great oaf—don’t care about money! They’re beyond monetary or material needs. Besides, there’s only a handful around. It’s incredibly rare for gods to be created. I can only think of a couple off the top of my head that are in this region. Once they master their powers, most leave our universe to create their own dimension. It’s like moving to the coast to build your dream home, but on a quantum level.”

“And just for kicks,” Rig added, “I tried reaching out to the few gods she’s talking about, the ones that are still in our dimension.”

“And?” Drooghelm asked hopefully.

“They won’t return my calls.”

Elgia rolled her eyes. “That tears it.”

This declaration seemed to be the final straw for the Captain, who fell against a wall and slumped to the floor.

Rig went over and squatted down to his level. “Look, Captain…” He tried to put a friendly spin to his voice, “I know you’re in a tough spot here. But the only thing to do now is, well, you have to order Elgia to let the crew go. You signed the contract, not us. The noble thing here…” It was ridiculous to try the nobility angle with Drooghelm, but he had to give it a shot. “The noble thing to do would be to let us bail. Besides, you always said you wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. What better way than to take on a god? Single-handedly! Talk about epic! They’ll be talking about it for… well, forever.”

Elgia snorted. “Sure. Hey, did you hear about that putz who got punched into the next galaxy?”

Rig winced. He was about to try a different tack when he noticed a strange expression had formed on the man’s face. It took him a few seconds to realize what his Captain was doing. He was thinking.

This was not good.

“Hey,” Drooghelm began slowly. “That gives me an idea.”

Zaxxos the Magnificent was in a bad mood.

He was pensive. Grumpy. Cranky, even. This whole ‘being a god’ thing was not panning out like it should have.

Long ago—five years to be precise—he thought he had hit the ultimate jackpot, and everything was going to be totally jackballs awesome for all eternity. Even though it was by accident, he had achieved what quadrillions had dreamt of since magic was first practiced in the galaxy. He was a mother-loving God.

Supposedly, he could do whatever he wanted, make whatever he wanted, go wherever he wanted, and nobody could say boo. If anyone gave him any backtalk or static, he’d just smite the little turd. Plus, there’d be as much sex as he could handle. Hotties, he figured, should be mega-stoked to make it with a god. Things would be the best forever and ever; all praise himself.

But it hadn’t turned out that way at all.

The smiting was still okay, at least. The first guy he smited—or smote, whatever—was his great uncle, Warringanor. Sure, who wouldn’t be pissed if your family had been casting this meta-complicated spell for about two hundred years, and then your niece’s grandkid trips over it and ruins it for you? Yeah, okay, anybody would be upset. But then his great uncle said some really hurtful things, and he got angry, and… Well, it wasn’t pretty.

When he realized he could kill someone so easily, it was really unnerving. At first. But then he discovered how creative he could get with it.

Turns out, there were a crap-ton of different ways you could smite someone. Exploding ’em, crushing ’em, or just making ’em fall over dead. That last one was the coolest. Plus, you didn’t get all that horrible mess or smell.

However, doing other godly things was tricky.

If he tried creating something from nothing, for example, he had to be real careful, or it’d go all wrong. Especially if it was a living thing. Yikes, that became a horror show real quick. Good thing he had been practicing all that smiting before he tried creating life.

Objects, so long as they were simple or straightforward, were easy enough. A giant chair, for example, for his recently-resized giant body was okay. But when he tried making a spaceship, the problem was he didn’t know how they worked. He had no clues about the basic FTL drive principles, for example. So, they tended to blow up. Actually, they always blew up.

Magically-infused objects were tricky, too. There was this time he was going to be a War God and tried conjuring this really bad-ass sword as the central part of his ‘look,’ with a big, red gemstone in the center, which would shoot out these awesome, kick-ass red lightning bolts whenever he unsheathed it: Boom! Pow! Zap!

It blew up as well. Most of his stuff tended to blow up. It was one of the main reasons for his bad mood.

Plus, there were those loser clowns who had started worshiping him after he ‘ascended.’ He was glad he changed his name to “Zaxxos the Magnificent” after the transformation. Nobody would worship at the Church of Kevin Fenward, right?

At first, it was cool having people literally singing your praises; how amazing he was, how they were so insignificant next to him, et cetera, set to music, no less. This must be a perk, for sure.

But the whole thing got unbelievably annoying when he discovered that he always—always—heard his worshipper’s prayers. He couldn’t turn it off. What was this crap? Here he was, a guy who could turn a starliner into a goat—yeah, it would be a weird-looking goat that would blow up before too long, but he could still do that little miracle—yet somehow, he couldn’t turn off the speaker in his head that heard all those whinging little complaints.

So much of it was about money! I’m so poor. I can’t pay my rent. I need a new transport. My kid needs medicine. Petty, petty, crap all the time. It got so bad, he started conjuring gold bars just so they’d shut up. Then word got around that prayers to him actually paid off, and it became so much worse so fast. Money prayers began flooding his head. Not surprisingly, it became ‘smiting time’ once again. That finally shut ‘em up real quick.

So: his powers were hanky, his worshippers were jerks, and his creations kept exploding. But the worst part was the sex thing.

Instead of cartloads of Vestal virgins (something he’d heard from history—he wasn’t sure what it referred to, but they sounded seriously hot) lining up to service his every whim, chicks avoided him like he was a chess club president covered in cold sores. He listened in on some of the conversations the novice priestesses had in the convents so he could understand why they weren’t showing up in droves, boobs out, legs open. The words he heard were along the lines of: terrifying, death sentence, and ick.

This was the most depressing part. Incredibly powerful, immortal, feared… and he still couldn’t get laid. 

As Zaxxos sat brooding, leaning against a mountain, he absentmindedly scratched his cheek with a finger the size of an eight-story apartment building. He didn’t have an itch—his body never suffered from aches, pains, or even the minor unpleasantness of dermatitis anymore—it was strictly from habit.

Bored and frustrated, he decided a year ago to make himself two thousand feet tall.

Why? Firstly, it was fun. Secondly, it pissed off the Subiugatio cult that ruled his home planet big time. The priesthood had kept pestering him about an alliance in order to take over the galaxy. The idea sounded like work, so he passed.

Then they tried convincing him to make this big weapon that would give them the conquering power they required. To get them off his back, he did it. But—sigh—it exploded, killing a big swath of their priesthood in the process.

He did the ‘bigging thing’ soon after that so he could avoid their whining. He rose above it all.

The bonus benefit was how he terrified the priesthood by stomping around their grounds. Their planet was mostly a series of archipelagos surrounded by a giant, plant-spanning ocean. The biggest island, where Zaxxos currently lounged, was where the top echelon of the priesthood lived. He liked the idea of looming over them. What could they do about it?

But this, too, was getting pretty boring. And he was getting worried about shrinking himself down to normal size because he wasn’t sure how to do it.

It was all so unfair. Why couldn’t he catch a break?

Then, something caught his eye. Instinctually, his brain said it was just some flying insect pestering him.

But then that would mean the bug was the size of…

“Ahem,” said a voice in the air in front of him. Zaxxos narrowed his gaze. It was a ship, hovering before his eyes. And a crappy ship, at that.

“This is Captain Cicero Drooghelm of the starship Ultor.”

The Captain’s voice quavered a bit as he spoke into the microphone; the braggadocio attitude he had been projecting for the last few weeks melted away once the moment arrived. He sounded pale and sweaty again, and all those reassurances of “trust me, this’ll work,” Rig could hear puddling at the man’s feet. The giant speakers they’d strapped to the hull amplified Drooghelm’s voice—but also that quaver—a thousandfold.

“We respectfully request the attention of the great and mighty Zaxxos the Magnificent,” Drooghelm continued.

Elgia had suggested this approach. You don’t want him thinking about swatting us until we’ve got everything lined up. Appeal to his ego. Distract him from the real threat.

The giant god’s eye narrowed on the ship, a relative housefly, and seemed unimpressed. Yet he hadn’t vaporized them right away.

“Well, this is different, at least,” the god smirked. “I’ll give you that.”

Rig found the god’s voice terrifying. The Ultor trembled a little as if they were being buffeted by a storm. He swallowed hard but kept his hands steady on the flight controls.

Drooghelm’s voice broadcasted again. “Er… well.” He coughed nervously. “We, the honorable and brave mercenary crew of the Ultor, are deeply honored to be in the presence of such a… a magnificent being as Zaxxos the, er, Magnificent.”

Rig glanced down and checked their alignment. So long as the big bastard doesn’t move…

“Get to the point. I’m a busy god,” the giant grumbled.

“Er, right…” fumbled Drooghelm. “Well, honored as we all definitely are to be in your presence, the regrettable task has fallen to us to… entreat you to…” he coughed nervously again, “leave this dimension.” After a pause, he added: “Or else.”

Silence hung for a moment in the space between the ship and the giant god.

It was broken when Zaxxos began to laugh uproariously, the force buffeting the ship like a category two hurricane, forcing Rig to compensate heavily to keep the craft steady. “Settle down, settle down,” he whispered. Drooghelm would have to readjust his aim now.

“Or else?” the god cackled. “You gotta be kidding me.”

Rig could hear Drooghelm swallow hard over the speakers as he straightened the ship. His palms were sweating heavily under the hand controls. Risking a split second to wipe them on his shirt, he could feel his heart pounding.

“What can you do, little ship, to a God?” Zaxxos growled, the final word reverberating through the ship like it was made of tin.

Drooghelm, to his credit, redoubled his efforts and threw more gravitas into his voice. “We are very serious, oh, honorable Zaxxos. We have a weapon at our disposal that could dispatch ye.”

Rig looked over at Pora, who was manning navigation, who looked back at Rig. She mouthed “ye?” at him, her expression incredulous.

“We have no desire to do this.” Drooghelm was definitely warming to the dramatics now. “We respect and admire your magnificence and are loath to risk the wrath of any gods who… er… aren’t down with the whole, you know… killing a god thing. So, what is your response, Zaxxos? Leave? Or face oblivion?”

We’re all dead, thought Rig.

But, incredibly, Zaxxos seemed to be considering something. His enormous, youthful face seemed to go slack for a moment, and his cavernous mouth hung open like a dullard who had been given an algebra equation to solve.

Then his mouth closed, his eyes hardened, and he spoke a single word.

“Bull.”

Bloody hell, take the shot!

This was Drooghelm’s great plan:

A few years ago, Drooghelm had come across a story about a holy relic, a scepter, that was stored in an ancient stone temple on a planet called Vargran Six. The scepter’s rod reportedly contained the hair of an old god who had left our dimension for good. Drooghelm admitted he’d briefly considered stealing it at the time but decided it would be too difficult to fence.

But if the follicle was still attached, that made it god-flesh, right? And if it took ‘a god’s hand to kill a god,’ then, he reasoned, all you needed was to get ahold of part of a god, god-flesh or something similar, fasten it to a giant projectile, and fire it into the bastard’s brain.

Everyone else thought this was the kind of plan a six-year-old would come up with. However, they also had no other ideas.

So, they raced over to Vargran Six, opened negotiations with the jungle natives who had worshipped the holy dude for the last thousand years, gave their best bribe to the head shaman, then hit the lot with a stun-burst when they realized the bribe was gloriously backfiring, and ended up stealing it after all. Afterward, half the crew had to be treated with anti-toxins because of poison darts.

Luckily, there was, indeed, a follicle attached to the hair inside the scepter.

Elgia did her best to bolster the god-essence in order to maximize potency, whatever the sod that meant. Then they attached the holy follicle to the tip of the sharpest, biggest, hardest titanium-ultrasteel bolt they could find.

The Ultor, hovering before Zaxxos’ face, was merely a distraction.

Drooghelm’s voice was being transmitted to its exterior speakers from Rig’s heavily cloaked escape craft flying below them, pointing upward at a steep angle. Drooghelm had decided to fire it up Zaxxos’ nose, reasoning it was the best route to hit gray matter without striking his skull, which would likely be impenetrable. A makeshift cannon barrel had been installed on the underbelly, along with the best cloaking system they could afford, which wasn’t very good and would almost certainly break down after the shot was taken.

Both Rig and the crew felt they had next to zero chance of succeeding. Wills were updated, and goodbye letters were sent.

Rig heard the shot. Even though it came from about a half-mile below them, it was that loud.

Zaxxos’ head snapped back as if he had been punched with a mighty uppercut to the schnoz.

Blood!

Amazed, Rig saw a great red droplet appear before Zaxxos’ face. It hung almost motionless in the air for a split second before falling. Zaxxos’ gigantic body slammed against the mountain behind him with a crash that even Rig could feel through the ship’s hull. His heart leaped, daring to hope he might survive this. Everyone on the bridge held their breath.

Then, a moment later, the god sat up.

Zaxxos pressed one of his giant hands against his bloodied nose and said: “Ow.”

Rig swallowed hard. When he saw the look in Zaxxos’s eyes, he tried to swallow again but found that his mouth had gone completely dry.

“You little bastards are so dead,” snarled the god.

Rig spied the muscles tensing in Zaxxos’ shoulder a split second before the huge arm whipped out in an impossibly wide arc. His reflexes responded immediately, yanking the ship controls and twisting the Ultor into a downward spiral.

On the monitor beside him, he could see that Drooghelm had the same idea—but he wasn’t quite fast enough. The giant hand clipped the wing on the smaller craft, sending Drooghelm spiraling in a chaotic tumble off into the neighboring sea, where his ship crashed with a rather sad little ‘splot.’

Crew members on the bridge were screaming at Rig to get them out of there. As if he needed to be told that. Rig swung the ship landward. Maybe he could hide in the mountain range? His mind raced. An orbital path makes the most sense. But switching to escape velocity thrusters would take ten precious seconds. Besides, could Zaxxos fly? Could he just kill them with a thought? How did this guy smite people, anyway?

As if to answer his thoughts, a mountain peak next to the ship exploded in a conflagration of stone and crimson light. Rig screamed in shock and yanked the ship away from the shower of boulders. “Crandall,” he yelled, “Give me a view of the bastard!”

A second later, the bridge viewscreen had a window inserted showing what was happening behind them. They saw a colossal figure climb over the mountains with shocking ease, two ruby-red dots glowing in the center of his face. Zaxxos’ eyes were literally ablaze with fury. Going off-planet was no longer possible; initiating the engine shift would leave them sitting ducks.

Rig spotted a fogbank to port and veered that way.

That was a mistake.

The fogbank was only a small one, maybe two kilometers wide, with a major city on the other side. Rig suddenly found himself hurtling towards a menagerie of towers, buildings, and a hundred other handy structures for them to crash into. He swore as he almost struck a huge temple spire, then narrowly missed another one that seemingly sprang up in its place. For the next few seconds, every spire, tower, or ziggurat he managed to dodge would be replaced by a new one behind it.

Worse still, this was the capital city, which had been built next to the biggest mountain on the whole planet, a behemoth of ten thousand meters in height and easily the same in circumference. It effectively cut off half their maneuvering space, and Rig was forced to violently adjust course away from it. This, naturally, placed him right in the path of more spires and towers.

It took all of Rig’s concentration to fly the ship. Behind them, Zaxxos was still firing crimson energy bursts from his eyes, burrowing charred furrows in the streets, his giant body smashing through buildings like a pimply kaiju from hell. The client was going to be super pissed.

A warning light flashed. The ambient energy from that last eye-blast had melted part of their wings. At this rate, they weren’t going to last long.

“Elgia,” he cried into the comm, “Bolster ship’s integrity!”

“I’m doing my best, you little—” The rest was cut off.

Movement caught Rig’s attention on the rear viewscreen.

The main Holy Temple of the Subiugatio was behind them, a huge structure with banners and flags flying everywhere. Each had a symbol at the center: a silhouette of the enormous mountain that dominated the skyline to the stern.

“They sometimes sacrifice virgins by pushing them into underground lava streams…”

The idea struck him like a bag of hammers, unpleasant but effective. Especially unpleasant because of what he had to do now.

“Hold on,” he yelled and threw the ship into a tight spin, effectively turning them 180 degrees. They were now facing Zaxxos.

“Rig,” cried Pora. “What the crap!”

He accelerated the ship towards the god like he was attacking. Several gasps of terror surrounded him.

The unexpected move made Zaxxos pause. Was it because he had felt pain for the first time in several years? Maybe the experience re-awakened his sense of vulnerability? It didn’t matter. It gave Rig the few seconds he needed to fire all the Ultor’s forward guns right at the god’s eyes.

The energy weapons didn’t hurt Zaxxos at all, but the brilliant volley blinded him for a few seconds, enabling Rig to fly directly between his legs. “In for a penny…” Rig murmured, making a beeline for the giant mountainside.

The shout of fury behind them was, in a word, epic.

Rig glanced at the rear viewscreen. Zaxxos was running full tilt toward them with eyes that had gone pure white, almost too bright to look at.

Now!

Rig rammed the Ultor into an impossibly tight turn to starboard, skirting above the colossal mountainside by mere meters. G-forces pushed against him to the point where he thought he might pass out and puke at the same time. Behind them, he could see a blast of white energy ripping into the stone just behind them. Granite disintegrated like it was papier-mâché, dust clouds billowed, and tens of millions of stones exploded in their wake. Somehow, Rig managed to hold the ship on course and not crash as it curved around the mountainside.

What followed was a mammoth explosion, not unlike a supersized volcano that had suddenly burst into full eruption, which is exactly what it was.

It was a very, very unnerving sound.

After a second or two, Rig curved the ship skyward and dared to check the rear viewscreen. There was nothing but dust.

Then, from within the cloud, a massive hand burst towards them, reaching out to catch the ship and crush it like it was a bug.

Well, crap, Rig thought.

Then, there was another explosion that made the previous one seem like a sparrow somewhere had a bit of a cough. The ship buckled wildly, threatening to shake itself to pieces, and the rear viewscreen filled with black smoke and a hellishly deep, red light. The giant hand that was only a few feet away from grasping the ship was suddenly yanked back into that cloud as if Zaxxos had been attached to a tremendous bungee cord.

Then came the screaming. It was horrible. But they could barely hear it over the concussive sounds of many more explosions behind them.

Rig eased the Ultor into a gentler curve. Blessedly, she held together.

Silence settled on the bridge as all eyes turned to look at the rear screen. Below, the newest god in the galaxy was writhing in agony, the lower half of his body submerged in a growing pool of molten lava that flowed from a gigantic fissure newly carved in the mountainside.

Not wanting to see any more, Rig aborted the orbital engine shift and pointed the Ultor back to where she came from.

Drooghelm reluctantly opened his eyes.

Everything hurt, even his eyelids. It hurt to focus. It hurt to breathe. He closed his eyes again. His entire being felt like one giant bruise that had been kicked around for an entire season of galactic footie. He groaned.

“Ah, there he is,” came Elgia’s cheerful voice somewhere beside him. “How you feeling, Ducks?”

“Not dead,” he managed to murmur.

“Give the boy a prize, his brain ain’t broken either.” Drooghelm heard her stand up and walk around his bed, which he realized was in Ultor’s sick bay. This confused him a bit. Shouldn’t the ship have been destroyed?

“You get to fill his Nibs in, Rig. You’ve earned that, at least.”

“Much appreciated.” Rig’s voice had come from somewhere down by his feet. He heard the sick bay door open and close.

“The patient,” the ship’s medical AI chimed in, “should get as much rest as possible. Excitement and agitation is not advisable.”

“I’ll keep that in mind, Doc, thanks.” There was a tired amusement in Rig’s voice. Rig asked: “Talk now, or later?”

“Now. How…?”

“After your ship took the biggest bitch-slap in the history of history, it crashed in the ocean. By sheer luck, the cabin seals weren’t fully broken. We sent down two mechies who found you floating in an air bubble. Touch and go there, but, obviously—”

“Zaxxos?”

“Dead.”

Drooghelm’s brain boggled. “It… worked?”

“You mean the bolt up the nose?” Rig laughed. “No, no, that failed. But then I got this idea.” He felt Rig sit on the bed. “Elgia mentioned our clients liked to sacrifice people in lava flows. That giant mountain is on all their iconography, so it had to be part of the religion. Cultures have done similar things in the past, dumping virgins into volcanoes and so on. I reasoned that made it a holy mountain.”

“I gambled. Zaxxos’ eye beam thingies were destroying everything around us. If I could make him mad enough, he’d fire everything he had into that holy mountain and hopefully trigger an eruption. Even if I was wrong about the mountain being a sacred instrument or an actual god, I figured that anyone taking a dip in a giant lava pool would not fare well. Turns out I gambled right.” Drooghelm could hear his XO smile.

“Holy… we did it? Hit the jackpot?” Drooghelm exclaimed with as much energy as he could muster.

Rig sighed. “No, we didn’t.”

“Huh?”

“Between the incredible amount of destruction that Zaxxos carved through the capital and the torrents of lava from the volcano, the city was obliterated. Our clients, the entire Subiugatio cult leadership, were wiped out in a few seconds. What’s more, once the planet’s populace realized what had happened, they immediately revolted. None of them have been too happy about those guys and their religious practices for a long, long time. The whole place is a revolutionary battleground, and the cult itself has filed for bankruptcy.”

If it were possible, Drooghelm felt worse. “So?”

“So, no money. Plus, that titanium-ultrasteel bolt wasn’t cheap, nor was the cloaking device, which got fragged along with my escape ship. Our accounts are so far in the red, it’s not funny.”

Rig stood. “On the plus side, the Doc system says you should be up in a couple of weeks. We installed a physio chamber next door, but, ah, all we could get was a second-hand version. The anesthetic system is on the fritz, so, unfortunately, you’re gonna feel everything.”

He could hear Rig walking towards the door and pause at the threshold. “Two weeks off, Captain. I guess you could look at it like it’s a vacation.”

“Wonderful,” Drooghelm groaned.

The hatch closed, and Rig found Pora leaning against the bulkhead beside him. “You,” she said with a wry smile. “You enjoyed that, you naughty boy.”

Rig tried to look innocent. “Who? Me? Nah.”

They walked together toward the bridge. Pora asked, “Are we really that screwed? Financially, I mean.”

Rig shrugged. “Financially speaking, yeah, pretty much. But, hey, we’re still alive, and that’s not nothing. There are other positives, too. Killing a God and still standing at the end is doing wonders for our reputation.”

“Minus the fact that we destroyed the client in the process,” she added.

“Uh, yeah, minus that,” Rig admitted. “Not a slam-dunk, as the ancient saying goes, but not a total loss either. Regardless, it will probably get us some new work before long. Probably insanely dangerous work that no one in their right mind would take on, but—”

“Not at a total loss?” she suggested. He nodded, grinning.

Then Pora gave him a wicked look and slipped her arm around his waist. “And I’ll admit this much: being next to an actual god-killer is one serious turn-on.”

Definitely not a total loss.

Rumors hold that everything worth remembering in human history has been written down by one person, someone who has been around to see it all. No one can imagine who it might be; human history has been written for thousands of years, yet no one can live that long. Except a god, one recording humanity’s actions for a purpose they were too little to understand.

No one knew who first spoke of a god of written history; the best historians could only find short sentences describing this god, but no mention of its name. Many gods were known in that time: the god of the sun, the god of the moon, and many gods that helped people in their times of need, but a nameless god that kept history was still a great mystery. These other gods were more concerned about the number of worshippers they had, how many temples were built in their honor, and their own divine stories of greatness and power, not stories about humans. Their stories were meant to be tales that were passed down through the ages: tales of great courage or wrath or kindness, these stories were reasons to worship and build temples for these gods. A god with no temples and no stories of their own was no god. Though no one knew what this supposed god looked like, everyone from the biggest cities to the smallest villages agreed that whoever was written down in this nameless god’s books was one to be remembered throughout history. Even though no credit was given and no praise was held, the nameless god still wrote down everything that was necessary; a thankless job but one the god knew was necessary for humans to keep moving forward.

While the stories of gods were told more than any other, humans were still desperate to reach the level of remembrance that the gods had by having their own tales of greatness. Whether it was kings conquering lands untouched or emperors creating mountainous civilizations, it is human instinct to want to be remembered and those who are remembered can be remembered for anything. Families have tried for centuries, gods for millenia, and while not everyone is remembered, every story worth passing down was written down by some god, somewhere. If you were not written down, you may as well have not existed.

For those who could not make their name in eternal history, they were content with leaving a legacy their own family could remember and be proud of. Some became local legends rather than national ones; others were famous within their own families. Shino had a family that had no legends and no legacy, but this was not for a lack of trying. His grandfather’s grandfather had tried to save his village from an oncoming flood, but his body had been swept away by the rushing currents. Shino’s grandfather’s father had thought he could launch himself to the moon to conquer land no one else could reach; his footprints are still marked with soot in a town center somewhere Shino has never visited. Shino’s grandfather had thought he could gamble their family’s little worth on bad bets and Shino’s father had thought joining his country’s military would be the safest option to repay the debts Shino’s grandfather had accumulated. These were stories that would be passed down and forgotten one day, just as the names of the people in these stories were gone. Shino knew his family was not written in history, not yet.

After seeing the failures of his forefathers to reach any sort of height or fame or leave a legacy worth sharing, Shino took it upon himself to make his name in history.The rest of Shino’s family wanted little in life; the siblings who survived to adulthood despite poverty were grateful to be alive. While his siblings saw their failures as reasons not to search for notoriety, Shino took his family history as motivation to do better. Shino had already forgotten his grandfather’s name by the time he was old enough to leave, as had the rest of his family. He did not want the same legacy for himself, so with little knowledge but rumors and prayers, Shino searched for the historian god. “If my name is great enough to be written down by gods themselves, we are sure to live fruitfully,” Shino reassured his mother the night before he left on a quest for a better legacy.

Shino had listened to what little he could go on to begin his quest, mostly whispers from other gods written down by devoted worshippers, largely forgotten by humanity. It was said that the god of history stayed on a mountain that never changed while history changed around it. Shino could not find much of what it meant for a mountain to never change. How much was a mountain supposed to change over time? Shino did not know and checking every mountain in the world would have been an arduous task, so Shino took his time to ask masters in knowledge what such a rumor could mean.

“A mountain stuck in time,” one master said smugly. “Find a mountain where nothing happens and climb to its peak.”

Shino pondered the master and asked, “What happens when nothing happens?”

The master said he had no more time to answer questions and needed to return to his studies. Shino knew the master had no answer.

“A mountain in the middle of nowhere would have no history. If the mountain is nowhere important, it would have nothing to occur,” a second master reasoned.

Shino thought about this too, and asked, “Are there places in the world left unexplored?”

Unlike the first master, the second master was excited by Shino’s curiosity. He answered, “There is always land left to conquer, something for rulers left to seize. As much as we record every piece of knowledge, there is always something new to learn from our world.”

The second master’s answer left Shino unsatisfied, had most of the world not already been recorded by adventurers older than Shino? Shino also knew that conquering an unexplored land required an army, resources only few in the land could afford. No one was going to give Shino what he needed so his name could be recorded by some mythical being. The second master’s answer made Shino concerned this task was an impossible one, so he sought after a third opinion, one that he felt he could take on his own with only a satchel on his back and food to trade.

Shino was able to find his answer with the third: “Find a mountain for which nothing changes. A height that does not shrink or grow, a peak that does not melt or clear, a storm that never leaves, the parts of a summit that would change with time. There are a few that fit, but there may be one close enough to make the journey close to home. But would this make the journey worth it?”

The third master’s answer reignited Shino. There was hope in such an answer, it was so obvious to Shino that he was surprised the masters couldn’t see it earlier: find a mountain whose weather never changes. He took months of climbing to scour the mountains of his country, praying that whatever god was watching over Shino was recording his journey. While climbing mountains alone was not worth a legend, Shino reasoned climbing to the peak of every tall, snowy and stormy mountaintop might be. It became an arduous task, Shino frequently having to climb down his mountain once the storm settled after days of raging furiously. He had never bothered to ask how many tall peaks his country may have had, he only had a map to cross out where he had been.

Starting up one of the last remaining mountains on his map, Shino could feel paranoia and anxiety creeping in at every crack in the clouds. Despite looking for a god, Shino never considered himself religious. With the luck his family had in their own fortune, what god could possibly have been listening? Knowing this, Shino still prayed. As he lay in his shelter, preparing for the scouting ahead, Shino prayed aloud, “Please lead me to you, whoever you may be. Am I not worthy? Am I the first to seek your guidance? I cannot go back home as much of a failure as my forefathers and only you have the solution, oh god of history.”

Until, one day, around the age of 20, the same age as his father when he left, Shino found a cabin in a blizzard, halfway up the last mountain he could check before he would have had to ask permission to leave the country to search nearby countries for other mountains. The cabin was shoddy, Shino was surprised to see it still standing against the fiercest winds he had faced. “Shelter,” he told himself as the snow crushed under his worn boots.

While the outside of the cabin had seen better days, the inside was a different story. Inside the cabin was a golden sheen that illuminated the dull colors on Shino’s wet coat. As Shino stepped inside, he looked and saw the walls were coated in lights and scrolls. The room itself was small, only another door and a fireplace displaced the walls. Shino followed the scrolls upwards and saw the cabin had no end, contrasting the shabby cabin roof outside that was at most two heads higher than him. Closing the door behind him, Shino began to strip away the snow-soaked clothing and warm up by the fire, its flames licking a wood that never seemed to burn.

Once finished and down to his barest garments, Shino saw the other door open. The warmth of the cabin had caused Shino to drop his guard, along with his weapon. He scrambled towards his knife, one that had helped him defend himself against thieves during his journey, and held it close to his chest.

This isn’t your home, a small voice reasoned in Shino’s head.

This voice was drowned out by the louder, Protect yourself, you are the most precious thing.

Standing close to the fire but far from the door, Shino saw a child, maybe younger than when Shino was when he left home on his journey for the god. The child had hair a paler blond than any scroll in the cabin, the lights gave them a golden aura.

No, it wasn’t the lights doing anything, the child themselves glowed.

The child closed the door behind them and greeted, “Hello Shino, how may I welcome you to my home?”

Shino lowered his knife, no one had said his name for months. In order to be safe, Shino had always opted for a fake name, especially if there was any chance he would have to owe money. He knew it wasn’t right, he knew his mother told him his father did something similar, but Shino reasoned that nothing should get in the way of finding this god. Now that he was in the presence of one, he thought about how stupid his actions might have been.

“Are you—”

“Please, call me Um. I am but a humble archivist. I write what needs to be written.”

Shino smiled. “That is excellent because you need to write about me!”

Um turned their head before they turned away and began to make tea over the fire. As he took a metal rod and began to poke the fire, Um asked, “Why do I need to write about you? Have you done something noteworthy?”

“I climbed every unchanging mountain to find you! Is that not worthy of being written down in history?” Shino was given a cup and told to wait for tea. As he waited, he wondered why Um looked the way they did. He thought the god of history would look, well, historical. As if to prove Shino wrong, Um reached out an arm to the ceiling and watched as a scroll fluttered down from the pile on the wall. Um didn’t open the scroll but held it tight in their hand as they began to pour tea for Shino.

“You climbed five hundred and twenty eight mountains, but I have a record of someone who climbed over a thousand mountains. Do you think climbing less than half the mountains the person in this scroll did makes you a legend?” Um asked.

“No.” Shino took a shameful sip of his tea. It tasted close to the brew made at home.

“Shino, to make legends, you need to have something worth passing down. Come back in double your lifetime after you have done something will be passed down.”

Shino accepted Um’s challenge and, in a blink and a sip of his tea, found himself at the bottom of his first mountain, the one closest to his hometown.

Once he returned to his village, Shino’s peers began rumors that he failed. None of this deterred him, Shino vowed to himself he would find something worth passing down. His first step was to leave his family home and start his own. While the chastisement from his mother was a harder sting than the disapproval of his village, Shino left his home and started a new life in a new village.

After finding a new village a week’s time away from his own, Shino was able to integrate himself. He took an interest in the village’s administration. He volunteered for all the work no one else wanted and gave helpful advice whenever asked. This attracted one of the village higher-up’s daughters to Shino’s side. After a short time together, Shino was married with a few children.

Once Shino was forty, he saw his new home thrive. Thanks in part to his efforts, his village was one of the few that was able to survive several droughts and a handful of famines. When a plague soared through the land like a blanket of death, Shino was able to help keep the village clean and away from any dirty omens. He was claimed a hero in the village many times over. He saw how his family looked at him, full of hope and pride for their patriarch.

Shino knew he was ready.

“Do you have to go to the mountain?” Shino’s fourth oldest child asked him.

“They said to return at the time when my life has doubled. When I went then, I had nothing, but now, I have everything. When you get to my age, what will you tell your children about me?”

“That their grandfather saved his village many times and was a hero!” his child cheered.

Shino smiled before he headed off, making sure everyone knew he was going to come back a legend. If he had been in his old village, Shino knew he would have been ridiculed many times over before he had left the front gates. Here, with all the good he knew he was doing, the most anyone did was a passing glance. For the first time, Shino found himself feeling respected.

The god’s cabin on the mountain didn’t change, neither in location or shabbiness. Shino felt blessed to not have to wander mountains for ages again just to meet and ask a simple favor. On the shorter journey, the more he found himself talking to himself, the more Shino was assured that he was due to be written in history.

Opening the door, Shino saw that nothing had changed. Even with styles and cultures changing in areas Shino had seen twenty years prior, the cabin had remained the same. Its intense glow bathed Shino as he began to take off his coat, rather than stripping almost entirely. As the fire flickered nearby, Shino declared, “Um, I am here to be made a legend!”

Their inner door opened and they rushed to Shino. After a moment of inspection on both ends, Shino saw no change in Um’s appearance. They looked as young as the first time Shino met them. He couldn’t find any wrinkles on the child’s face while Shino unconsciously felt the slight folds on his face crease further. His mouth twitched.

“It is further proof of your godliness that you remain so young after so many years, Um. Please, as the god of history, you must have seen my contributions.”

Um backed away, tending to the fire. “I have, yes. Do you feel these are sufficient for you to be written as, how you say, a legend?”

“Well, yes, my village may have perished without my help. Is saving a village after what could have been numerous disasters not enough for my name to last generations after me?”

Um shook their head. “Maybe a few… Maybe your great grandchild will know your name, but there are many others and there will be many others that will save their fellow countrymen from danger and their names will last until they die. After that, they are as important as the spit from a full man. I cannot write your name down as you have not done anything any other man would not have done in your place.”

Mouth agape from the god’s bluntness, Shino watched as Um made their way back to their hidden room. Before they grabbed the door, Shino came to his senses and asked, “You gave me advice last time; can you give me more? I will spend just as many years and come back to show you I am worth writing down, even in a single line.”

Um’s hand cradled the knob while they watched Shino in their peripheral vision. “Do something worth remembering, else why should history remember you?”

Before Shino could protest or ask for further explanation, he felt his body flying back through the door and ended up back at home, crashing into a nearby table while he heard his wife cooking nearby. Rushing from another room, Shino’s wife shrieked, “Shino! I thought you would have been at your mysterious mountain at this point. Tell me what you’re doing!”

Regaining his composure, Shino stood from the ruins of their table and announced, “We will be moving to the city, I have a new goal in mind.”

After getting the god’s advice, Shino took less time than before enacting a new plan to be written down in the history scrolls. When picking the village he would move to, Shino originally picked a village a week’s time away. Unknownst to Shino, he had picked a village that was less than a day from his country’s capital. When he explained to his father-in-law why he wanted to move to his country’s capital, Shino assumed that his wife’s father would have forbidden Shino from taking his daughter away from him.

Shino was never happier to be wrong; not only did his father-in-law approve, he wrote Shino a letter of high merit for when he went to apply for a job. Once Shino and his family reached the capital, the letter allowed Shino to start his job in the government in the city. His family lived better than they ever could in the city, a large house near the capitol building with enough rooms to have at least three more families move into, if Shino’s children wanted to stay.

As Shino aged, he gained more respect from his fellow countrymen, helping strategize and lead battles as the number of enemies of the country grew. Shino grew to be a natural leader, his oldest children starting families in the house that only grew with age. While his decisions were thought to be more ruthless against any country that tried to smudge the beauty of their prosperity, Shino was well liked by a majority. Once it was time to elect a new leader, Shino was the almost unanimous winner, with the few dissenters changing their mind once Shino brought further happiness to his country.

His rule was bloody, but only to outsiders that refused to come. Many saw the wealth and joy Shino brought to his country and were nothing but jealous. He cut leaders down like the threshing of wheat, giving any land captured during the times of war to citizens who had nothing. At the peak of Shino’s reign, a quarter of the world was under his command.

Once he was sixty, Shino saw everything he ruled over and everything he had accomplished. He saw his children grow up to fine adults, his wife raise a home that gave Shino the support he needed to guide his people, and the citizens he gave a better life to than he had at the same age. He knew the god would be pleased.

“Father, you have accomplished more than any man I could find, why do you still go on what appears to be a fruitless journey?” One of Shino’s sons grew to be an academic, one that questioned if the person Shino was meeting was even a god.

“If you saw them like how I saw them, you would understand.” As Shino aged, he found himself giving vague answers to his children about his goals. His children would never understand, his wife never did and argued with Shino the days leading up to his journey.

His son continued to complain, “Then take me with you! Let me see this so-called ‘god’ and prove to you that this dangerous journey was never worth it.”

Shino put his foot down. “If you are calling it dangerous, I refuse to allow you to journey alongside. I forbid it. Besides, young one, if I did not go on this journey, we would not have had this wonderful home, or the education you received to be able to snap at your elders. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

The son wanted to snap back, but it would have only proved Shino right. Even though Shino was the highest politician in the land, no one followed Shino in his journey. Bringing such a time of peace and prosperity into the country itself, many felt grateful to have Shino as their leader and those who didn’t were terrified of the consequences of hurting the sixty-year old man. This made the journey to the mountain much easier than in previous years, despite his old age slowing him down.

Instead of letting himself in once he reached the cabin, Shino thought it would be polite to knock. He raised a fist to the door but before he could rap the cabin door, he heard Um say, “You may come in.”

The door opened on its own and Shino shuffled inside. Um was sitting, waiting for Shino’s return. They were unaged while Shino’s joints cracked and popped more than the burning wood. The fireplace looked unchanged, still flickering as brightly as the first time he came through. The only thing that seemed old in this cabin was him. “I followed your advice.”

Um looked Shino up and down, Shino wearing coats made out of animals only found in countries he had taken over. Exotic furs lined his body, Shino asked for only the warmest for his journey. “I can see.”

“Am I a legend in your history?” Shino asked.

“What advice did you follow?” Um asked.

Shino was taken aback, wondering if the god couldn’t remember the past twenty years. No, it had to be a test, to see if Shino was paying attention to the god’s words. Shino answered, “You said to do something worth remembering. I did. You must see the gifts this country has been bestowed under my leadership?”

Um asked, “Is the slaughter of thousands worth remembering?”

“Yes, we remember the lives of those we have had to cut down in order for us to better our people.”

“Do you remember Okin, the fifty-ninth throat you had to slice? Do you remember Chi-Won, the mother that you executed? Or do you remember the idea of them, the concepts of dead citizens to be remembered?” If Shino had not known better, he would have assumed Um was mad. Instead, Shino knew Um was asking in earnest. They were testing Shino, getting towards the end, he felt the title of a legend was within grasp.

“While I do not remember, the fact that you do means you have been looking, watching. I must be ready,” Shino rationized.

“You are not,” Um responded.

Shino stopped, his heart sank. It had been sixty years and he still wasn’t ready. Before Shino could protest, Um clarified, “People come and die all the time. Killers are not new, there are and always will be people who kill in different names, whether it’s religion, their country, or their way of life. Killing for the sake of making a name of yourself is nothing new. Do you want to be a legend?”

Shino nodded vigorously. Shino heard the door open behind him. Um looked to Shino and said, “Come back in twenty more years after you do something that will leave a true mark on history.”

Shino was once again swept away before he could ask for an explanation. Sixty years and the god refused to put his name down for him. All Shino ever received was vague sayings instead of real answers. Frustration from divinity erupted into a loud anger as Shino started to destroy valuable art pieces his wife had spent time curating to make their palace a home. When one of Shino’s sons found him and restrained Shino from destroying their home, the son asked, “You just left not that long ago, why have you returned?”

“I am quitting as this country’s leader, effective immediately. I have a new goal to make my name matter,” Shino explained.

“But your name does matter, father. It matters to your family, isn’t that all that matters?”

“No!” Shino cried.

He knew his time was coming, this next visit would be the last one he would have with Um. After Shino’s resignation, the country began to enter a time of war, wiping the peace Shino worked for within half the time he had spent working for it. Before his meeting, Shino would have cared that his legacy in the country might have been destroyed, but Shino continued to swallow his anger. Some of Shino’s grandchildren were drafted into the wars ahead, but Shino didn’t care when he heard over half of them perished on the battlefield.

Shino’s wife left him after she found her husband becoming an uncaring patriarch. His kids stopped visiting his home, shrinking Shino’s living space from a large mansion to nothing more than a shack, smaller than the cabin he was destined to see. All the while, Shino spent his time in pent-up rage. He had lost almost all of his belongings he gained during his leadership, but kept around a knife he had taken from a foreign temple. The knife’s blade was nearly invisible, only small black specks were seen in the blade’s edges. Shino had always felt there was something special about this blade, so he decided this was the one possession he needed. He focused all his anger into this blade as he trained to use the knife to the highest of his potential.

By the time Shino was almost eighty, no one visited him anymore. Shino didn’t notice anyone coming in or out of his cabin, just whether someone had touched his most important knife. On the day before his final visit, The academic son spent one more visit to convince Shino to give up on his mission.

“Mother is dead,” the son announced.

Shino didn’t move. It took him a long moment to realize what the son had said. All Shino could respond with was an unenthusiastic, “Shame.”

“Do you care? Most of your family is dead, do you care?”

Tears swelled in the son’s eyes as his father responded, “I don’t know.”

The son slammed the shack’s door, the whole foundation shook under his anger. Shino didn’t look at his son during the encounter, he refused to give any of his negative emotions where it didn’t count. Instead, he packed, focusing his anger on the knife. He knew where he could make history.

Shino didn’t pack anything for the journey, not that he had anything worth packing. The cabin was still there, undisturbed by time while still falling apart. Once Shino opened the door, he saw Um was not inside. It looked as warm as the first time around, but the heat felt less inviting. Instead, Shino felt rage, nothing had changed but he continued to age. He felt the god mock him from the other side of the door.

The door he had yet to open, the one that no doubt contained Um’s living quarters. It was ridiculous, why would a god need to sleep, but Shino rushed to the door. Inside, he saw Um, sitting at a table, hunched over something Shino was unable to see. Their back was turned to Shino, but they still greeted him like an old friend. “Shino, have you made your mark on history?”

They sounded happy, almost excited, infuriating Shino further. He took the knife and plunged it into Um’s back, holding them against the table while Shino sliced in further. Shino dragged the knife and watched as black blood spilled from the god’s back, flooding the floor as the god began to shrivel. The body turned to a shade of white devoid of any life as Shino stabbed them for the umpteenth time. Once the god no longer moved, Shino saw what he had done. The body looked aged and decrepit, as if all the years spent young caught up to the poor god.

After he finished inspecting his years of anger abused onto one god, he saw what Um had been working on on the table; a piece of parchment with one line: “Shino killed the god of history—” The name was covered in ink and Shino was unable to remove it.

At first, Shino smiled; he had finally made his name in history, the god had written Shino down like he wanted. He grabbed onto the parchment and read it against the nearest light. For a short moment, he was proud. Then the consequences of Shino’s actions filled his mind. Shino had only known one god, but there must have been more. Killing a god had to incur the wrath of many others. He looked back to the parchment and thought about how to spin this in the positive. “People conquer gods all the time, right? I cannot have been the first warrior to do so. Let me just write down their name, so I’m secure in history. It was, um…”

Shino couldn’t remember. The god’s name refused to surface, Shino couldn’t think of any of the times he had addressed the god by name. “Well, I told my children at some point, I must have, I’ll just ask—”

Shino stopped, the names of his children were fading from his memory. Panic set in as Shino ran out of the god’s room into the main cabin. Once in the main room, Shino noticed it was dark, only moonlight illuminated the room as it began to fall apart. The cabin began to shrink, scrolls from the infinite ceiling rained onto Shino before turning into dust once they hit him. Shino attempted to grab a scroll from the wall but it disappeared into nothing once his fingers touched.

The cabin became smaller and the threat of Shino getting hurt inside grew larger. He ran out into the snow and closed the door behind him. His heart began to slow and he looked to the cabin falling in on itself until it disappeared. Shino looked around at his environment, he had no idea how he got to the mountain or why he was sitting next to a pile of wood in a blizzard. He reread the piece of parchment as winds began to pick up. “I am Shino and I killed the god of history. I am Shino and I killed the god of history.”

Those who travel the mountains claim to hear the voice of a god killer, crying as he repeats the last thing he ever read. History went on without him as his country faded into obscurity and his family legacy was lost after two generations.

– National Ukrainian song

When the Vasylkovs’ willow dried out, the family decided to leave.

The Vasylkovs lived near the forest, where the houses were new and extravagant. Few people liked them because Oleg, the father, worked in the town, and their mother never bought anything from the local shop. The kids were like everybody else though: bruised knees and elbows, grimy faces, funny laughs behind jagged teeth.

Zhenya knew they were lucky. Their old but sturdy house, built by her great-grandfather, was at the crossroads far from the Vasylkovs. Her father was neither a policeman nor a rich man, but the news came to him first, like gifts. People brought their words, pains, and fears to him. Perhaps because he had plenty of others’ dreams, her father had never had his own. He had a tanned, sharp, and noble face — as a kid, Zhenya often imagined all knights in fairy tales with his chin. And not a single person dared call him a rascal.

Zhenya’s father had always been the head of the village, though power had never tempted him. Maybe that was the reason everyone liked him so much. The habit repeated itself: the news about the Vasylkovs’ willow was brought to them first.

“Talk to him,” said Maria, nervously studying the window. “Olezhka’s ready to leave. He’s not completely insane, is he?”

“He isn’t local,” answered Zhenya’s father. “Hard to guess what’s in his head.”

Zhenya saw the doubt on his face. That was why no one wanted the newcomers in the village: they lacked the guts to sprout here, and their trees were weak too. Far worse: the Vasylkovs had almost cut down theirs when they moved in! They would’ve been refused their house deal had her father not intervened. It was strange, in a way. The willow near their house was watching them from above every night, and they didn’t even know. It was watching, without averting its gaze, and it knew where everyone slept.

“I’m coming with you,” Zhenya caught her father’s sleeve as soon as Maria left. “I’ve got to learn, after all.”

He gave her a small sort of smile. Their family had only one child, and it would be only Zhenya who would listen to the future people’s grief. She already knew them — saw them in her dreams. She was visiting everyone head by head, like houses. Zhenya was her mother’s daughter, after all; it had taken years for them to get used to her.

“Just don’t make them too uncomfortable,” her father said softly. “We need them to stay.”

Spring was cool, as if it shied away from the village, kissing it lightly and stepping back. Her light touch was barely audible in the air. The motionless branches looked dead when Zhenya and her father went outside the yard. It felt like bad weather. Moribund.

While they were walking to the Vasylkovs’ house, Zhenya saw frightened faces in the windows: children and adults who did not want to go outside and join the talk. They didn’t want to look at the willows in their yard, like a person with cancer who would not want to know their diagnosis. But they watched anyway. Tall, strong silhouettes, like elongated figures, were waiting for them.

It seemed to Zhenya that those peeking at them from every yard were not only people. The willows, leaning forward, almost climbing out of the ground, reached out to them, bent their long, delicate hair-like branches, and almost touched the road. Scratched their heads with catkins. Zhenya jumped over the puddle, slipping on the dirt —

The wood creaked right next to her. Above her ear.

She turned sharply and raised her head. The dark crest of the tree kept looking at her, peering into the depths of her pupils. A chill slowly crept up her spine. The thin fingers of fear.

“Zhenya,” her father called, “Don’t look.”

She ran after him. Ancient, wise, hungry creatures these were. There was something predatory about them, as if this motionlessness, this being stuck in the ground was an artifice. As if they were playing a game: look away — and they will catch up.

Everyone in the village had hoped that her father would persuade the Vasylkovs to stay. Zhenya looked uncertainly at the high fence, the new car, the dry twigs near the roof of the house and muttered:

“How did they last so long? Did you look after their tree yourself?”

Her father stayed silent. He probably had something to say because he was gentle, weak towards his wife and daughter, never saying a rude word to them. But he did not say anything this time because Oleg opened the gate and went out to the car. His face was sweaty despite the weather, and his hands held the boxes too tightly. His fingers were whitened from the power of his grip. Her father looked behind him, but Zhenya already knew everything herself; she moved aside, hid her hands behind her back, and stood up like a guard. She was always a bit of a wild child, slow in her movements, but something about her, despite all her attempts to appear nonchalant, scared people. While her father got people’s respect, Zhenya… Zhenya was needed so that they did not run away. Sometimes, they joked about it at home when no one heard. Mother always laughed the most.

“Ivan,” said Oleg gloomily, and then to her: “Hello, kiddo.”

They always spoke to her like that, as if the name did not belong to her. Zhenya did not even blink. Her father took Oleg by the shoulder when he put the box down and faced him. He was strong — stronger than most — but his fingers were relaxed. Calm. Oleg was standing like a statue; his shoulders shook like twigs in the wind.

“You don’t have to do this,” said her father, “you know, Olezhka. Just plant a new one.”

Olezha had the face of a wounded dog. Zhenya knew that he would die soon. It was similar to an apprehension some people possessed when they guessed the weather in the evening.

“Your Katya should have told us,” Oleg spat on the ground. “And now what?”

Something passed between them. Zhenya stared at the grass. She hated people attacking her mother, but she knew there was no use arguing. Her father cleared his throat, and his courage almost broke.

“She is sick,” said her father, “she can’t guess anymore. The Kovalchuks’ tree is already dry. Old Liuda’s, too. Don’t take that on your conscience. Plant a new one. Stay.”

Instead of eyes, Oleg had bottomless wells.

“It has already infected those houses, Ivan. I have two children.”

Zhenya kept looking at his shoes, at the old sneakers, green from grass and paint, and thought: who will catch up with him? No one plants willow trees in cities. There is no need. But Oleg would bring his disease into the world, and they would find him, and he would not rest. She had dreamed about it, but dreams, like tree seeds, had a tendency to scatter everywhere. Not all of them sprouted.

“At least close the windows,” said her father, “and they won’t get in on the first day even without you inside.”

Because willows were about home. About people on the other side. What climbed from the dead trunks did not spread to other families until it opened the house like a shell. And it was the duty of everyone who lived in the village to be a bank that could not fall. An obstacle.

“Well,” said Oleg, “I’m not a complete asshole.”

He didn’t look at them anymore.

On the first day, they loaded the car. On the second, they left. On the third, twenty people gathered, all of them with seedlings. Zhenya was among them, holding two pieces. But she had to do everything herself. People always dropped stuff when she was around.

She slowly dug a hole, stroked the tiny leaves like they were puppies, and urged them to grow. She listened to the noise of people while the sky above them slowly darkened.

In the morning, before the fog had lifted, they found the Kovalchuks on a willow. Father, mother, son, swaying. It was a high tree, protected for generations. The legs barely rocked without the wind.

“Don’t look,” her father told her, “Zhen’ka.”

But she did anyway. She noticed that the Kovalchuks’ son, Kolya, had rather tiny feet.

Her father covered her face with his wide palm, and the dry hand softly hid everything from her.

“Turn away. Stop! No. Find their cat. The black one, remember? Take it home.”

They knew the cat would be alive because it was not human. Zhenya remembered it: small and weird-looking, a little cross-eyed. Cross-eyed cats sometimes wander into the wrong places. So they say. Zhenya knew that such creatures had better intuition, and she rushed to the Vasylkovs as soon as a black tail appeared behind the fence. Her father also saw that and did not stop her.

Strange, Zhenya thought, crawling through the hole in the fence, and the house was still standing. If they broke into it, there would be cracked windows and broken doors, not a home but merely a box. And this one looked as if nothing had happened.

Zhenya went around the house, not looking at the tree trunk. She had heard that they were climbing out from there after the tree had died. Where there was an old hollow, something slowly moved and shuffled, and the noise grew.

Something blew into her ear, like her mother in childhood, and Zhenya turned her head a little and felt the cold slowly flowing under her feet from the dry roots. It was as if something slowly creeped out from there, pulled out of the ground like rot. She never looked. The cat didn’t look, and she wouldn’t. Animals are smart. The wet grass tickled, said sorry, sorry, and rustled sadly. All the windows looked at her with black eyes, barely catching the sun’s rays. Dead, the house stood still, deceptively friendly. Like a trap.

Zhenya stepped aside and made an arc around the house. She went out into the backyard, which was littered with old things. She looked at the windows behind. They were closed tightly.

Except a window into the basement.

Zhenya felt a damp fear slide down her neck.

There was no need to break the glass or the door if at least one way was open. They climbed into the house and studied it, felt the walls, penetrated the floor, the ground, and furniture, and the place was lost. And then they attacked the neighbors.

“Prick,” hissed Zhenya.

Oleg had propped up the window with books, leaving it wide open. He did not protect his own house, and in taking his barrier down, he had let the putrid current from the dead willow’s heart flow through the Kovalchuk’s house. His house was a lost cause, and it didn’t stand its ground, the barrier disappearing instead of resisting the attack. Oleg gave the Kovalchuks up to the creatures like a badly wrapped present.

If the families’ willows didn’t die out and continued to grow, they weren’t found on the branches. Everyone knew it, and everyone was ready. But such families were few.

From morning till the evening, the children collected catkins around the lakes and near their houses, passing them from hand to hand, from palm to palm. And put them on the windows and around their homes. Little by little, the smiles disappeared from their faces, something empty nesting in their eyes. House after house fell like dominoes. The cemetery, which had known no deaths for years, was expanding, and the smell of damp earth hung in the air. That’s why they didn’t hope anymore.

Within a month, the Hudymchyks’ willow tree also withered. They were neighbors. Zhenya was playing with Liza, their youngest daughter, in her yard, but the girl kept turning her head, looking back at the dead tree. Zhenya didn’t look. She believed that it could feel and get inside.

“Can’t your dad do something?” asked Liza. “Anything at all?”

Zhenya counted her own fear through the beats of her heart against her ribs. She had already thought everything through. Everything she could. She considered offering Liza to stay at her place for the night, but the shadow on Lisa’s face stopped her. Anguish had already left a mark on her; you couldn’t hide that in the house.

So Zhenya knew that Olezha and his family were dead. She heard the Vasylkovs’ willow breathing heavily with strained dry branches and felt its sad murmurs when she watched the family’s house and its closed door. Good riddance. Not Liza, though. Not all the others.

Words got stuck in her throat, but she did not cry. Zhenya restrained herself, knowing that if she revealed her alarm, it would only rot Liza’s mood. And the willows needed to be believed in.

“Listen, Lizka, my folk’s the same as yours,” said Zhenya, “and you planted the new ones. They started to grow, didn’t they?”

Liza looked at the thin trees, caressed by the weak spring’s warmth. A crinkle passed between her eyebrows. She thought intensely.

“They did.”

At night, after closing the windows and hiding the cattle, Zhenya and her father listened to the night. Zhenya looked into the living room, coming into the pale light of the TV. Her mother was silently crying, covering her face with her hands. She fell ill and could no longer hear the willows. Zhenya thought that she also heard them sometimes. Their rustling of leaves, their hungry sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh, like a creature lulling a child to sleep before suffocating it. But her mother was like a radio station, and instead of music, she heard the tongue of trees. Zhenya sat beside her and patted her shoulder awkwardly, like any daughter trying to comfort her mother. She heard her father enter the room and listened to his soft steps approaching. He surrounded them with such peace and warmth that even Zhenya’s tears stung her eyes.

“This has happened many times before you, and it will happen after you,” said her father into her mother’s hair. It was thick, curled at the tips, and it tickled Zhenya’s cheeks. It looked a bit like the catkins. Zhenya could feel how calmly her father’s heart was beating and wondered: was he telling the truth, or had he learned to lie calmly?

They went to sleep. Tears always made her fall asleep better.

The thump was quiet and stealthy, and the hair on Zhenya’s arms rose up. The house was asleep, but they had woken up outside.

If she didn’t listen, she could imagine rain pounding on the walls and roof, sickeningly beating its rhythm. She could open the window, place her palm under the drops, and catch one.

Or they would catch her.

It sounded like hundreds of paws running on the Hudymchyks’ house.

A few passed right along her bedroom wall, jumped on the window, and Zhenya pressed herself against the bed, petting the dog. It twitched a little, and Zhenya felt the animal’s pulse racing against her fingers, fearing that it would now snap, revealing them, and the creatures would turn their heads to the two imposters, catch the glance of them through the curtains, absorb their fear.

All sound vanished from the street.

Zhenya kissed the dog on the nose and smoothed its ears, mentally asking: be quiet, oh pretty please, don’t whine. Her heart pounded in her throat, and she didn’t know whether they were noisy because she couldn’t hear anything underneath the static in her head.

Slowly, very slowly, the dog fell asleep. Fear left Zhenya’s body in waves, leaking from the sweat, and she started to dream, wrapping her arm around the dog. It seemed to her that this way, she could control it till the morning.

Just before dawn, she heard the glass outside cracking. At first, it was a tiny, barely audible sound, like the distant buzzing of a mosquito, then an explosion, as if someone had yanked it with all their might. Zhenya sat up sharply, forgetting all about caution, and her consciousness was going away with the sound of the glass breaking. The dog was nowhere to be seen, and Zhenya slowly stood up, burning her feet against the cold floor. Now, it was no longer quiet. It was complete chaos.

She pulled the curtain aside.

The moon was full, and everything around was gray and flat. Hundreds of bodies, black as nothing, fell through the window of the Hudymchyks’ home. The creatures were as flexible as water. There were many of them, and they crawled and covered the house with themselves.

Liza shouted, then stopped. Zhenya got up to go to another window, pressed her face against the glass—

The window was barely open, like the mouth of a half-sleeping beast. There was a shadow right next to it. Zhenya froze next to the glass, her eyes leveled with the eyeless, mouthless face. Its face was nothingness. It clung to the house like a piece of cloth, and its head spun from side to side.

It did not breathe or make noise, but the space around it seemed incredibly loud. It was looking for an entrance. It was listening.

Zhenya took hold of the edge of the window and pulled inaudibly, not breathing.

She knew that it came from the Hudymchyks and didn’t get lost — the creature was looking for more. There were many of them against her wall: bodies in a negative photograph. They pressed against the glass on the other side so the sky vanished.

Zhenya pulled again. Her fingers barely found the thin handle. She was shaking. She tried again, but her fingers did not obey.

Zhenya swallowed. She made a movement so rash and quick that she almost slammed the window. The glass began to crack from the pressure of bodies. She stopped a second before making a sound.

She bit her cheek from the inside, slowly rocking her whole body, coaxing herself to calm down, and with that movement, slowly, centimeter by centimeter, she closed the window.

Her wet palm froze in front of a creature’s face. It poked its face into the glass. Let me in, asked the creature silently. Zhenya sucked in air through her teeth and froze. She could no longer feel her fingers.

Someone shouted — and the creature jerked away. They all ran, and their stomping rang through the house for the last time.

Liza’s mother screeched. The sky became visible again.

By the end of the month, the bodies hung like bells in front of almost every house. The willows were no longer protecting them, only letting more and more creatures out. Children were not allowed outside, and their thin parents were trudging and collecting the remains of catkins, boarding up windows and doors. The streets became empty.

Zhenya went downstairs and saw two silhouettes, her father and mother, against the background of a foggy window. Everything was gray and melted in the air. And they? They were as if carved from wood. But Zhenya stepped forward, the board creaked under her feet, and they slowly turned their heads towards her. They did not retreat, did not run away. Her parents had always loved each other simply and honestly, and it was the best truth about her life, the first she had learned after their love for her. The same was happening right before her eyes. She was made of their faces, their bodies, woven from their emotions, and everything they felt, she also knew.

“No,” said Zhenya, “no, no.”

The light did not pour but slowly flowed through the curtains, threadlike, not the enemy of darkness, but its lazy, attentive brother. Her mother patted Zhenya on the cheek as she took a step towards her, and they hugged. Zhenya’s thoughts, except for this one, were slowly decaying, but then, something was unfolding inside her, clinging to her throat, like Zhenya to her mother’s shirt.

She started to shake and cry. There was the same dead light under her eyelids. The village was slowly dying; she knew they would be the last. It should be so.

She and her father took axes and kindling. Only Zhenya cried. While Zhenya was clinging to her mother, she leaned over and kissed her daughter’s forehead. She smelled like spring, sun, and leaves.

“Sometimes it doesn’t work out, no matter how hard you try,” said her mom, “But it’s alright, little one.”

They cut down and burned all the willows in the village, both healthy and diseased. They went around all the houses, walked through every road to the forest. Few people helped them because they knew it was none of their business. Such things stay in the family.

Leaves with flowers covered the ground like a carpet. The catkins stuck to the skin, the droplets and dry branches hid behind their ears and fell into their pockets, and her father and Zhenya did not look at each other. They did not listen to the slow crackling of the fire. Like families destroyed from the root, dozens of lights emerged all over the village.

Scratches and calluses bloomed under Zhenya’s fingers, and her eyes were blinded by tears and smoke.

In the evening, when not a single willow tree remained, they walked home to the joyous, drunken shouts of the survivors. Zhenya saw small children, pregnant women, and tired men waving to them. Only the faces of the old people were sad. They did not congratulate Zhenya and her father; they mourned.

The infection passed, but the payback was theirs.

Zhenya and her father entered the house; the warm light of the corridor caught the black eyes of the open door from the shadows. No one came out to them. How difficult it was for her to take at least one step! To break this silence!

They went into the room where her mother was. It was dark there, although the moon was visible through the open window. Zhenya looked at the bed, feeling the taste of ash on her tongue. Her father allowed himself the first sob and took a step forward. His tired hands touched the bed.

They collected everything left: burnt bark instead of skin, leaves instead of braids. They took it all in their palms, kissed it, and burned it in the backyard.

He made it home safely this time and with an unsteady hand, nicked and bruised and calloused with jagged fingernails as yellow as his skin, locked the door behind him. One, two, three, four locks. Without removing his tattered coat (although he didn’t know it, it reeked from constant use as if he were decaying underneath)—there was a time when he needed more outside, there was a time when he needed less, now there was just this—he headed for his kitchen, placing the plastic bag of ingredients on the stained and decrepit and crumb-laden counter.

And then the room began to spin. He closed his eyes, but it was no use; even the blackness he withdrew into spun like a wasteland cyclone. In a mind long devastated, his thoughts tumbled, his memories shuffled and mixed into further irrelevance and fiction, and when he collapsed, his knees pounding the floor hard enough to launch a searing jolt of pain up his thighs and into his back, he slumped forward, gasping for a reprieve as spittle sprinkled the floor.

It was minutes before his vision settled and when he focused, he focused on the ingredients resting on the counter and nothing else.

Finally, he rose, removed his coat and threw it aside, never checking to see where it landed. He licked his lips, not with hunger but with desire and, crouching, opened a cabinet, and then another, and then another, each time peering in, unable to find what he needed—a bowl, just a bowl, he thought, plastic, ceramic, brass, whatever, please, just a bowl, God, please, just let me find a fucking bowl, how could I forget to grab a fucking bowl while I was out there?

He spat on the floor, a sewage-like mixture of bulky mucus and stale saliva streaked with blood, pus and disease conjured from the humid and putrid recesses of his mouth and throat. Smearing it with his shoe, the former beige tone of the tile emerged amongst the layers of crud surrounding it. Not that he noticed, for at that moment he recalled where he had last seen a bowl. His first instinct was to grab his jacket—no, no, no, he thought, I’m not going outside, just across the hall, just across the hall, you stupid fuck.

One, two, three, four locks undone. His head darted out past the door and back in, out and back in. The hall was clear—clear as in no eyes were on him, no living eyes, for the bloated body was still there with a silver rod up its spine, awkwardly posed at the top of the stairs like a fallen scarecrow. Four doors down, he thought, no, five, no, four, five, five, five, it’s five, and you know it, fucking five. Out he ran, again jumping, jumping more garbage and holes, more bodies, more puddles—this time reflecting nothing but a pale and cracked ceiling. Without slowing, he came to the door at full speed, lowering his shoulder and knocking it clear off its hinges, sending him rolling across the floor, jagged glass biting into his arm. Helga, Helga, Helga, he screamed as he ran through the room and into a small kitchen, where, buried beneath the black goop of the sink, its blue rim, a thin lip protruding from the muck as if seeking air, he saw the bowl and reached in, his fingers closing on it while the rest of his body had already turned in preparation for a quick exit. He pulled the bowl free, sending a splash of filth across the floor and wall, and brought it up to his lips and kissed and kissed and kissed, his face smeared with the lingering liquid.

Back down the hall he ran, and back into his home, locking up behind him—one, two, three, four times. A yellowed and broken grin across his face, he set the bowl down on the appropriate counter space and began to dump in his ingredients, never bothering to clean what he had gathered. (Clean? He hardly knew the word.) He ripped bag after bag open—a brown powder here, a grayish powder there, a slow ooze of a yellow paste, a slab of a blackened blob—piling them one on top of the other, and, finally, vehemently mixing them with his fingers. He was breathing heavily now, his protruding ribs pressing tightly against his skin beneath his red, floral-patterned woman’s top; his hands trembled, his teeth clattered, splitting one in half and sending it far down his throat with the faint taste of blood.

Wheezing with glee at the mixture of ingredients, he grabbed the plastic bag and pulled it securely over the bowl. After cleaning his hands with a wipe against the wall, he ecstatically tiptoed to his bed—a creaking mattress complete with attacking springs and wire from a rusted frame—collapsed onto it face down, and drifted toward sleep.

Outside his window there was a glow, neither a celestial body nor artificial light. Lately it had been persistent in its presence, night and day, hovering over the landscape, a banished halo. It used to scare him, this green glow, but now he preferred to ignore it, even as it seeped uninvited through the glass and walls of his home, even as it descended like a fog over every street, the people breathing it in without reservation.

As he twisted in bed, still dressed, holes in his socks, holes in his pants and underwear—the top was clean, the top was perfect—he began to sweat, then, just as quickly, he was ice cold again, an irritating process that would continue throughout the night. Yet, he was optimistic, for the first time in a long time (Time? He hardly knew the word). He wasn’t even sure it was night; it was dark but there was also the glow, sometimes it seemed to be like this far too long for it to be night. He had hope now, it was there in the bowl, there in the ingredients that were suddenly starting to stink. Or was it a sweetness he smelled? But, then again, what is sweet?

The bowl, sitting in stains and darkness, the iridescent glow from the lone window slowly creeping toward it, the plastic bag now loose over the contents, was as still as the cracked television from across the room, as still as the upturned rocking chair, as still as the rat poison under the man’s bed; yet, as the night progressed, the bowl, ever so slightly, kicked; just a slight bump, pushing it a mere centimeter from its original placement. But inside, things were working much quicker.

When he awoke, he immediately went to the kitchen, pulling up a wobbly chair and sitting directly in front of the bowl, his chin resting in his palms, his eyes, bloodshot and wide, focused and unblinking, filled with tears that never fell. Before him, raised above eye level, the bowl sat like an idol, worshipped and paramount to his day. Nothing else mattered, not the gnawing within his stomach, not the tics beneath his skin, not his bladder, only the bowl mattered and the ingredients inside. He didn’t move; he wouldn’t move. He only continued to stare and stare and stare…

It was a large lurch; the bowl shifting a full four inches to the left, and the man jumped back in his seat, squealing with delirious merriment. Kicking the chair aside, he rose, pissing his pants without even realizing it. He began to clap, loud, boisterous applause, accompanied by the staccato stomping of his feet as he rotated in a circle, dust and dirt disturbed and drifting into the air about him, a different kind of mist, something almost magical for him to play in.

Then came the rustling of plastic. His head snapped back over his shoulder and his eyes fell on the bowl and the movement of the bag concealing it. Something was poking at the top, a small blunt jab from within. Hovering over the bowl, through the bag, he could see a misshapen shadow moving about, the tip of which continued to push against the plastic in an attempt to rip through. The bag peaked and stretched, until finally the object receded and all was still again.

This isn’t right; all wrong, all wrong, the man whispered, clearly in distress. He swiveled back around, his eyes surveying his dilapidated home. Not right at all, he moaned, what the fuck am I going to do, what, what, what? Spotting his coat, he grabbed it, slipped it on, undid his locks—one, two, three, four—peeked out into the hallway, and, seeing all was clear, ran out and down the hall, over the dead body, down the stairs, and outside. Pulling his coat tight, he warily headed deeper into the city.

Each street looked worse than the next, small fires flared along the sidewalks and the sewers overflowed, gurgling green ooze. Ahead was the usual assembly of people within the dying greenery of the square, hunched over on the small plastic white and yellow seats neatly aligned in a circle and quietly chanting and humming, rubbing their naked bodies with the backs of their hands, their fingers bent like claws grasping at air. On this day, in the center of the circle was a battered machine of sorts, a machine distorted well past recognition, its cord being used as a whip against it by rotating members of the group. From the corners of their eyes they watched him hustle by, their bodies jerking in their seats, trembling to abandon their perch and approach him; but none did, none ever did, and he knew that.

Knowing which streets he could cross and which he couldn’t, which were safe and which weren’t, he trekked several blocks south until he was in the area he so desperately sought. Overhead, tied to strips of wire hanging from windows and broken streetlights, off building roofs and from dead trees, were long planks of wood painted black. They swung back and forth, creaking in the stale air, dead space against dead space. In the distance a board flopped through the air, falling from the seventh floor of a building, and hit the ground with a blistering smack, splitting into several pieces, shards and splinters scattering about the concrete, and the echo of it all spreading up and down the street like a mushroom cloud of noise.

There was laughter, a cackle that cracked like the wood, and it came from a red-haired woman dancing along the inside of a chain link fence at the far end of the block. She twirled in a pink bathrobe, her fingers gripping the fence for balance, her pale legs kicking at the air. The man approached quickly, the wood dangling overhead suddenly forgotten, a threat so constant it had to be shoved aside. Repeatedly he kicked the fence, rattling it free of rust, but there was no response from the ragged woman, not even a glance of acknowledgement of the chain song. The woman continued dancing her way to the far end of the fence and, just behind, he followed, his fist slamming into the fence with each step. Finally, he spotted a hole and he reached through, familiarly cutting his wrist in long biting streaks. Arm outstretched, he grabbed her by the robe and pulled. But his hands only held the pink cloth and the woman was left bare, not that she noticed, although he certainly did. Her stomach was riddled with splinter punctures; small, sharp shards protruding from the skin, dried blood caked over every piece.

The ingredients! he screamed, revealing a crumpled piece of paper up against the fence. Are these right, are you even her, are you the one who told me, are there others back there?

The woman cackled again and continued to dance but this time, she danced backward, away from the fence and deeper into the lot, bending over and grabbing something from off the ground. What you created, she yelled as she returned to the fence, what you made doesn’t matter anymore. It’s only before your eyes, isn’t it?

I don’t want to look at it, he said, it’ll kill me, won’t it, it’ll kill me if I look, won’t it?

Then don’t look, she screamed, and her arm shot forward, a sharp object in her hand fast approaching his face, his eye. He swung away just in time and the jagged knife poked through the fence where his left eye would have been. The woman shrieked, the knife conducting its own dance in her hand, and without another glance the man ran back the way he came, his footsteps heavy beneath the hanging black wood.

After he finished locking his door—one, two, three, four times—he rushed to the kitchen and discovered the bowl was now completely across the counter, up against the dead refrigerator. The bag rustled in greeting and, seeing this, he ran to his bedroom, ducked beneath the bed, and grabbed the rat poison with his shaking hand.

When he returned to the bowl, he noticed the small hole in the top of the bag. It broke through, he thought, it’s only a matter of time now, it won’t stop. Peering into the tear, he attempted to make out his creation. Squinting, he hovered closer, but there was only blackness.

Then came the whisper.

He couldn’t make out the words, but there was a quiet squeezing of a voice, a puff of air, an attempt at speech, and this caused him to recoil, dropping the poison to the floor. What is it? he asked in a trembling voice, what are you trying to say, what the fuck do you want from me? He suddenly grabbed the bowl and brought it close to his chest, swaying with it as if holding a child. What is it? he asked again, it doesn’t have to be like this, what is it?

There was another puff of air, this one a bit stronger, and a word formed: out. Is that right? he wondered, is that what I heard? He placed the bowl back down on the counter and sat on his chair, hands beneath his thighs. His feet tapped uncontrollably as the sweat dripped from his shaggy graying hair.

Outside, the glow continued to smother the city. Looking out the window, past the creeping muted light, he saw the still ocean and the far-off landmass. He wanted to get out, desperately, but there were risks, dangers, and there were no guarantees. It could be more of the same, he realized; it could be worse. Maybe. A risk.

He decided to sleep on it—there was always time, always (right?)—knowing how some decisions simplify as the days progress.

Over the next few days, he pulled the chair beside the bowl and talked to it, waiting for a conversation to form, but all he heard were more wisps of air, more empty attempts at dialogue, and, sometimes, if he listened very carefully, the word ‘out’ reemerged. I know, I know, he said over and over again to the ingredients in the bowl, but it’s not all bad here; I have you and you have me; if you go out there, well, then you might not exist anymore; I can help you, you can help me, we don’t need anything else.

But still he heard that word: out, out, out. And one day, when he awoke, he found the bowl tipped over, empty. His heart churned, his body went cold, his knees buckled. There on the floor, wrapped and lost in the bag, an eye peering out of the lone hole—an eye? is that an eye? —were the ingredients inching its way to the window. Sprinting across the room, he snatched up the bag, and without looking in it, dumped the contents back into the bowl. No! he screamed, no, no, no; I created you, I control you, you’re mine and you can’t leave, I won’t allow it.

There was another puff of air, and this word was clear. Eyes widened, the man, with his own breath, repeated it with a quiver: please. And something, a finger or small hand perhaps, protruded from the hole. You won’t make it, he told it, I promise you, and that will kill us both.

Again, the puff of air. Please.

No! And he scooped up the rat poison from where he left it, and, crying now, poured it into the hole. Day after day, shaking and delirious with sadness, he continued to sit before the bowl, waiting for it to move, waiting for the puff of air, but nothing ever came. He sat all alone, a green glow upon his shoulders, rarely sleeping, hardly eating, safe, but still somehow dead.

It was peaceful outside, the sky ultramarine as the last shafts of orange and purple hues slashed the distant horizon, abandoning the earth to let the strangers in. The sultry autumn air mingled with the scent of baked banana pie, the last trace of normality that soured under the siren.

Sam scratched her nose, went to the window, locked it and pulled the thick curtains—her sunset ritual when the siren screamed. Complete darkness engulfed their house.

Josias grabbed her wrist and led her to the basement.

And finally the siren closed its mouth.

He closed his eyes and opened them again and saw no difference. His world was pitch-black. The only relief in this twelve-hour world was the warm skin over his hand. Samantha leaned her head on his shoulder, slowly caressing his wrist.

His stomach rumbled and she clutched his arm. The things outside didn’t bother about bodily functions unless it was too loud but it still made their hearts skip a beat.

Josias sniffed her hair, then ran his finger along her hand, writing now?

She remained still for a moment before she wrote ok on his elbow.

Every night, to pass the time and wait for sleep, they’d invent a story by writing on each other’s skin using a finger. Tonight they continued from where they had left off last night. He wrote and she ran. Sam grabbed his shoulders and squeezed them, indicating he should turn around. She then wrote on his back to a purple house so far away she could see the frozen mountains. Her knight in shining armor would arrive shortly. She invited her brother to dance in the night and bathe in starlight. Josias smiled in the dark and wrote on her wrist that was cute.

This imaginary world, where people still explored the outside, kept them sane and entertained from the doom that haunted them every night. At first, it had seemed silly but he grew used to it because he was doing it with her.

Samantha took his hand and wrote—

She froze. He held his breath. Something in a distant corner of the pitch-black world outside yapped until the sound transformed into an incessant bark. Someone’s dog alerted the world of its presence.

Josias closed his eyes and opened them again.

The dog barked and barked. Then its bark became a suffocating cough, then short panting, happy and louder than the world itself. And even louder than that, as if somehow the dog stood right there in the room. Then as abruptly as it had arrived, it was gone, the sudden silence making Josias’ ears throb.

Samantha was shaking, her skin cold and sweaty. He searched for her hand, kissed it and nibbled at it until she calmed down and hugged him.

There were no more stories that night, only the silence and their touches. Sleep soon came with dreamlessness.

A faint lullaby of birds chirping dragged him out of the black ocean. Josias rubbed his eyes and got up.

They went upstairs to open the doors and windows to welcome a new day into their home, the sight of a clear sky bringing tears to their eyes.

“God, I’m so jealous of them,” Sam whispered, watching the birds flutter across the roofs, her mouth a grin, her eyes wet and red. For some reason, small animals like birds were never targeted by the-ones-that-come-at-night.

Josias kissed her hair. “When will we get used to this?”

Sam breathed in the chilly autumn morning air. “We’re not meant to. Remember what Pedro—” She bit her lips. “I’m sorry.”

His laugh echoed inside Josias’ mind so loudly, he felt as if his throat were about to burst.

“Will you go to the farm?” He tried to brush Pedro’s voice out of his mind.

Sam glanced down. “Yeah, why not?”

Josias went outside after breakfast, welcoming the blessed kiss of sunlight against his skin. He said good morning to a neighbor placing a boom box beside a lamppost across the street. The sky was open and bright with only a few smudges here and there but down here, gloomy faces trod through a gloomier neighborhood. Most houses were empty, left to rot after they came for the inhabitants. Some left their homes thinking that out there, somewhere, they might find a safe haven but no one ever heard from them again. Others moved into better houses once they saw them empty. Next to the charred ruin of a three-story house that had burned down an eternity ago, a short geezer, who always wore floral dresses, sobbed against a young woman’s arms as a tanned man carried out of her home a lump wrapped in a pink blanket. A brown tail dangled out of one of its ends.

And a few blocks from that house, a couple sat on the sidewalk holding the mangled body of a child, their faces devoid of expression. Josias offered his condolences, as he did every day when someone was found. That was part of his job, anyway.

Alongside a group, his job was to knock on the houses that were still occupied. When nobody answered a locked door, he pried it open with a crowbar.

Today nobody answered the knocks on a derelict house standing alone among two barren trees, so a crowbar it was. As he stepped inside, the stench of rancid meat slapped his face. Within was all dark as thick curtains covered every window; the smell covered every corner. A podgy man called Roberto, who lived next to Josias’, stooped forward and vomited.

Yesterday, they had knocked here, and Mr. Casagrande had answered.

“Someone’s been dead a lot longer than a night.” Roberto spat and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

They searched around the first floor until one of them found a locked door almost hidden under the upstairs staircase. The stench, sweet and pungent, grew heavier as they approached it. They covered their faces with respirators but the smell seeped in nonetheless. Another one vomited and Josias soon joined her.

The stench of death was never easy to get used to.

After they broke the door handle, putrid hot air hugged them. Swollen and gray and swarming with house flies, three bodies huddled together. Their bloated limbs coiled and wound around each other in a disgusting mockery of a family embrace. One was a woman, another a man, and one, thinner and shorter than the other two, a teenager. Mr. Casagrande had said some time ago that his family had gone somewhere south to find shelter.

They did find shelter right here but the things had still managed to find them.

Half an hour later, the group took the bodies to bury them with the many others, the burring of the wheels of the gurneys the only dirge for the dead.

Whenever they could spare some hours in the afternoon, Josias and Samantha enjoyed sunbathing in a lawn chair in their front yard. Black thunderheads gathered in the distance, cloaking the neighborhood in cold shadows when the clouds swept past the sun. His thoughts were blacker than the clouds. Six bodies only today, with Mr. Casagrande missing. Thousands of years ago, he could hear the noise of hammer against nail, men shouting orders, music playing, dogs barking and even children playing.

The only music now was the whistle of the wind.

“Tell me what’s on your mind.” He took Sam’s hand and kissed the knuckles.

She squinted at a lowering pall looming over white clouds, her eyes as silent as her face. “Pedro was right, you know. We were never meant to get used to this.”

That was a cloud blacker than all of them.

He was only a few months older than Samantha and yet much wiser. When their father died, the world was still alive; people could still go out at night and make noise. Both became each other’s anchors as their mother deteriorated inside and out. Or, as Pedro used to say, she “rotted from the inside out.”

Don’t make any noise and stay in the dark. Her brother’s words murmured inside his brain, poking out of a tight corner to haunt him again. Josias had never heard a sound like that, the mad crackle and wheeze bobbing out of Pedro’s throat when the things had come to twist his limbs.

“But we must.” Josias took a sip of cold coffee, watching some people passing by, faces carved by fear and loss—a sight he’d grown used to by now.

“There’s no salvation, no way for this to stop.”

His heart tightened. They could be each other’s salvation, each other’s reason to live. They made it after all; against impossible odds, they managed to keep on living. They even had electricity again.

But for what?

They couldn’t have a family. It wouldn’t make sense. Some still followed the instinct to reproduce and most paid the price. An eternity ago, a couple who once lived next door had decided to have a baby, their way of bringing hope and normalcy; they’d even named the poor baby Hope. She’d slept through the first few nights thanks to the sleeping pills, but one night her wailing had cut the silence. First, it had been a soft crying that had turned into sobbing. Then it had stopped for a second before returning louder, until sobbing became laughter. The baby had laughed and laughed until her voice had broken and after one last sharp shrill, silence had come.

He wrote on her wrist: the knight had a golden sword and he swore to protect her against the nocturnal creatures.

Samantha shook her head and giggled. “I love you.”

They kissed as the wind whistled.

Swollen black clouds soon covered the world. The drizzle gave way to a raging storm and the people gathered inside their homes.

A few minutes later, the blaring of the siren cut through the deafening storm, imposing and sharp. Josias locked the windows upstairs while Sam took care of the living room. Then, the siren shut its mouth to announce their coming.

From where he stood to the basement was an entire universe of distance. Anything could happen along the way.

And so Josias inched forward, one step at a time. A cold finger ran down his body as he exited the bedroom, still alive. He continued on downstairs, each movement a potential death sentence. Midway, he stopped and waited.

Still alive.

He went on, one step after the other, then another. With the stair behind him, he turned and saw the living room window uncovered, Sam staring right through it. A scream stuck in his throat, a lump of agony ready to call forth the strangers into his home.

But nothing happened. Samantha stood there, watching the storm, half her body hidden in the dark and the other tinged by the yellow glare of the lamppost. Josias approached her. She read his face and lightning flashed, bathing everything in pale white for a split second. The roar of the thunder came soon after.

She turned her head and he followed her gaze.

The night was never truly empty. Silhouettes, their shapes outlined by the raindrops, ambled through the streets, front yards, even the roofs. They trod around as if floating or traversing an invisible road only they could see. Some were as tall as the lampposts, others no taller than a child, capered around a shape that seemed to hold an umbrella, danced between two giants and jumped from roof to roof. One of them peeked at their window, dancing and teetering as if mocking them. Two shapes held hands on top of a lamppost and in their front yard, others gestured as if having a lively conversation.

These were the ones that had ruined everything, the ones that had brought the entire world to heel. Josias had heard friends and neighbors talking about seeing them in the rain and yet he’d never dared to look, could not look. Now actually seeing them in front of him, around him, it was almost peaceful, that relief that comes after going through a long-awaited event. Even the tall ones didn’t seem as monstrous as he’d imagined, perhaps because he couldn’t see them, only their outlines.

No, no, those shapes had nothing peaceful about them. They mocked the living because they knew nothing could be done against them.

Once a man called Virgilio had attempted to hose them off but the water had simply streamed out. He had called out for his wife before he began to chortle.

Josias took Sam’s hand and inched backward. She stood still. He wanted to scream at her, lock her in the room until dawn. But he couldn’t move quickly or speak, so he clutched her hand harder. She still didn’t move.

A vibrant blue light blinked across the street. Then a raucous noise of plates breaking boomed across the world, louder than thunder, louder than the rain.

“Hello, morning, afternoon, evening! This is your one and only Miss Flower Sunshine!” The childish voice shook the walls and the ground. This time Sam was the one who clutched his hand. The front door of the house across from theirs flung open with a loud crack, and a woman burst out of the darkness on an electric bike and drove off.

Some people never, ever learn.

The woman, whose name was Carolina or Catarina, her wet black hair flailing behind her, managed to drive a good ten feet before the bike slid from under her, and she stood hovering in the air. The bike skidded off and hit a tree. The man, whose name Josias didn’t remember, drove a bit farther away. The dwarfish form that stared at Josias and Sam swirled around and jumped and jumped. Two other dwarfs leaped over the boom box and grabbed the man’s legs and he slid away from the bike and slammed onto the ground. His bike jerked and swerved and fell and lay rumbling.

“Mommy, will you help me bake chocolate cake?” The child’s voice joined the man’s shrieking.

Then the giant form holding an umbrella also turned and hugged the man as if comforting a sad child. And the man laughed louder than the storm, louder than Miss Flower Sunshine. His piercing guffaw faltered and became a mad howl as the enormous wet outline twisted his arms, snapping each bone as calmly as a man snapping twigs. And still, a broad smile never left the man’s face.

“But don’t eat too much sugar!”

Another giant shape held the woman as she hollered and howled like a mad woman. A middle-sized silhouette approached her and twisted her neck as if turning a screw. When her head completely faced backward, the body slumped down, shuddering.

This time Sam stepped back and took Josias with her. Thunder raged, Miss Flower Sunshine sang about the pleasures of chocolate cakes and the wet shapes outside sauntered away from the mangled bodies to resume their lively nothingness.

The creatures were too many, strong and hungry. I’ll defend you! The knight in shining armor brandished his sword toward the night and he slashed and slashed as the bodies fell.

He dragged himself out of the cushion in the basement and out of the house, ignoring his rumbling stomach. He left Sam still snoring and went to check out the results of last night’s slaughter.

The streets glistened wet and blotches of clouds still lingered in the sky. By midmorning, the bodies had already lost color, the astringent scent of death beginning to ooze from them. Josias and a couple of other workers covered the bodies in a tarp and dragged them to be buried in the cemetery half a mile east of the neighborhood.

Before noon, they would find five more bodies, including a cat, two men, a teenager, and the geezer who had lost her dog—her pale gray body adorned in a pretty pink floral dress.

“Don’t you wanna go? Mr. Oliveira will cook some burgers.”

Sam didn’t leave bed all morning, which was odd, and refused to go to Mr. Oliveira’s, which was even odder since she loved burgers more than humanly possible.

“Go, please go and have fun. We both know you need it.” She rolled to her side and propped herself up on an elbow.

“We both need it.”

She raised an eyebrow. “You’ll go. And I’ll be really pissed if you don’t bring me some burgers.”

He shook his head and grasped his crotch. The silly gesture was worth it just so he could see her laugh.

Once in a while, the neighborhood would organize a small get-together to forget, for just a moment, the ones that come at night. They could gossip, share trivial things about life and their jobs (at least those whose jobs didn’t involve retrieving dead bodies from their homes,) anything that could distract them for a bit.

If only for a moment, they allowed themselves to forget about last night and many nights before and the nights to come. All his life brought him to this simple medium-rare burger dripping with onion and green sauce. Nattering with those who still remained and enjoying the afternoon sun was that glimpse, that spark that told him: life could still keep on going, despite everything.

But the siren opened its metal mouth to blare its usual message: night is coming and they are too.

Conversations snuffed out. Smiles withered. Plates and cups fell, spreading half-eaten burgers on the ground and orange and lemon juice plashing down. Neighbors and friends ran without uttering a word as the siren screamed.

His house was visible from two blocks away, the windows still uncovered. Then he ran as fast as his legs could take him.

And stopped.

Complete silence engulfed the world and he heard only his panting and his heartbeat throbbing in his ears. The sky was a deep shade of dark blue. Stars already blinked and stippled the quiet firmament, watching him.

Do it now.

He bolted to the house closest to him, praying it was open. For once, his prayers were answered, so he slammed the door shut behind him.

In this dark world smelling of dust and spoiled food, he breathed in through the nose and out through the mouth as slowly as possible, gagging through the effluvia. A smooth wave of relief washed over him when he felt his body still intact.

He had been here last week to retrieve the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Souza, an elderly couple. They were found mangled together on the living room sofa as blow flies swarmed about them. The smell still lingered.

He could go, bolt out of the house and reach his. A single block wasn’t that far. He could still reach—

No.

Silence meant the door was open and they had come in.

It wasn’t raining today, so there was no way to see them. But he had to reach her, embrace her, hold her all night long until the morning sun came to appease them. Would she do something crazy and come looking for him? No, no. She was smart, smarter than him. She should know he was safe.

Josias sneaked on toward the end of the hallway. The yellow light of the lamppost illuminated part of the L-shaped staircase and a corner of the empty living room. Ahead was a small kitchen reeking of burnt olive oil. The food had been thrown in the garbage; the furniture—except the couch—was distributed among the neighborhood, so the kitchen was also empty.

He sat on the floor, his back against the wall.

Waiting, waiting…

No matter how hidden you are, how deep underground, or how many walls between you and the outside world, those outside reached anywhere. A lifetime ago, a friend of a friend of theirs had turned his basement into a bunker by covering every corner, from floor to ceiling, with soundproof panels. He had thought that maybe this could help. It had taken two men to pry open the door. Josias had never forgotten his face contorted in agony, facing up like a faithful pleading for divine help.

When they had cleaned the room, it had looked too neat to abandon, so he had moved in with Sam. He didn’t know who first had the idea to sleep in the basement every night. However, it became their ritual; perhaps by doing so, it offered a sense of security, albeit false.

Sam…

Perhaps if he moved slowly, he could reach her safe and sound. They would survive another night and another.

Instead, Josias remained sitting, stretching his legs and back when they got too sore. Her soft voice danced in his mind, her calling out to him. It wouldn’t hurt to try. He had survived until now; why wouldn’t he survive another night?

Instead, he lay down on the cold, hard floor and closed his eyes to embrace the gloom that was already there. He’d survive again. Nothing had changed. He was in another person’s house, that’s all.

Now go to sleep, soon it will be over.

When he opened his eyes, only the pitch-black welcomed him. Utter silence. Josias raised his hand and didn’t see it. He had drifted off but not enough to go through the night. His back was sore and the back of his head ached. Hunger and thirst commingled with the pain in his crotch and stomach. He begged for a waste bucket and a cup of water; he begged for a sleeping pill. He begged for Sam.

Thinking of her relieved the pain for only a moment.

Was she crying right now? Or had she gone outside to look for him? He’d have heard, yes. He’d have heard her scream and laugh. He’d have felt it.

He rose, biting through the pain, and went to the kitchen door and saw the still black of the night, smudged by the yellow tinge of the lamplight. He knelt and put his member out as close to the wall as possible so as to not make a sound, then relieved himself. He could almost smile if he weren’t here alone. With his mind clear, he tried to think of a way out.

No idea came.

It was impossible to reach his house without stepping outside. The things were blind when people moved quietly indoors in the dark—as long as there were no doors or windows open—but sharp-eyed when they moved even a fraction of an inch outdoors after the blare of the siren until sunrise. No, just forget about it.

Go back to sleep.

Josias breathed in the stench of burned olive oil and lay down again, this time on the other side of the kitchen. It didn’t matter if his whole body was sore in the morning as long as it was intact.

The night stretched out for eternity, a minute longer than a decade.

Sam, Sam.

When would the night end?

The darkness did dwindle, bringing in a dim pale light.

A motor bellowed out and smashed the silence like a hammer. Josias jumped, only to groan and bite his tongue when a sharp blade sliced along his neck and down the back. He rolled to his side and stood there.

Josias eventually rose and pissed on the floor right there and then again.

He shouldered the door open and ran as fast as he could, ignoring the pain. His house wasn’t locked, so he went straight to the living room.

Her body was already cold and not yet stiff. She sat on the couch facing the window with her arms sprawled out. Dry blood drenched her left wrist, seeping to the floor and blooming like a dark-red flower. Her face, almost serene, was kissed by the faint morning sunlight, so relaxed. Josias whispered her name and shook her shoulder. Perhaps she was still asleep.

Of course not.

He sat on the floor and rested his pained head against her leg. Next to her foot, he found a piece of paper adorned with her neat handwriting.

She invited her brother to dance in the night and bathe in starlight. Her knight in shining armor kissed her brow and put his hand on top of hers. We will be together forever, she said.

Josias laughed as loud as his throat allowed as warm tears blinded him. It was a lovely morning out there, full of birds singing and gloomy faces. He kept on laughing because tonight, her knight in shining armor would see her again.

Shadowy images,
forging in the soul
what living visions
have sought to express,

Words

are riparian forms,
bearers of dreams,
eager crimson rivers
ascending wind-swept limbs
of newly born castles,
filled with night beasts
among the Carpathian mountains.

Candle Light

Within a candle’s gentle glow,
amidst the flame of this lit statue,
I find the warmth of your kisses.
I yearn for your fangs upon my body.
Our bodies stretch out to become
fiery canvases in each other’s mouths.
We pass our hands through the flame,
and we become artists—
Surrounded by dim reflections
of life on the walls around us.

On a lower level, the basement carpark of the hospital, a sleep-wary woman has arrived before anybody else and she lights a cigarette. She leans against a pillar opposite the elevators where those nurses and paramedics will soon come streaming out with coolers in tow. She settles into looking unavailable and occupied. It isn’t necessary to know what kid, mother, father, which total nobody these organs once comprised or what nighttime crisis called the surgeons to the operating table and compelled her trip across America tonight. There’s no drag to eliminate when you never let it cling in the first place. This is only a moment, and the moment will soon pass.

The elevator chimes. Its doors open. Everyone’s quickly falling to the task of stacking coolers across the backseats of a legion of cars that have been idling, waiting for their cargo and drivers. They pack them in like oblong luggage, less delicately than you might expect, stacking the kidneys standing up, squeezing in a heart where they can. A lot going out tonight. It all has to fit and there’s only so much space in these compacts to work with. Down the line they go loading each car, leaving the keys and a pen-marked road map in the passenger seat before moving onto the next.

With the first of the fleet ready and waiting on its driver, she extinguishes her cigarette with the heel of her boot and moves ahead. All around her is a dance of headlights and shadows, of thudding doors and hurried orders, of other on-call drivers trudging back to their haunts like ghosts, of helping hands each hoping to make the implausible just a little more obtainable tonight, of all nights, please, please. She soars past all of this along a benign comet’s trajectory through a busy solar system, ignorant to the collisions that never take place, unphased by disaster, by all of it. Take it as the value of her inertia, the absence of impacts for proof that you arrive anywhere at any moment of your life only by acts of graceful momentum. She is a constant hurdling through an uncertain ballet that she can’t believe in but is nevertheless a part of. She is a driver arriving at this car because she goes on.

Her reflection glides through the chrome of the car’s interior as she takes the driver’s seat and closes the door. The itinerary for this vehicle is already planned and written on the folded map on the passenger’s seat as a series of marked highways, specific turns, no stops, one exact destination. Tonight, it’s a coast-to-coast trip, to be made in record breaking time, with a hectic, winding and baffling excursion through the MIDDLE-DISTANCE. Most navigational bearings would never take you through that sliver of twilit territory and if ever crossing the Middle-Distance became a time saving factor, the tendency was to eat the cost and go the long way around.

But as a matter of geography and closing distance, the route is efficient. She can determine no fault of logic as she studies every merger and shortcut running reverse along the map, all the way to its origin and five-letter designation, route JUNTA. That’s fine. Tonight, she can be Junta on a flagship voyage with a cargo of cooling organs, passing through but to inevitably arrive somewhere on the other side.

An East Oregon surgery ward is an intangible image in her mind that only her arrival will make solid; a vague and unformed image the long night travel ahead threatens to steadily obscure mile by mile until Junta completely forgets why it is she’s driving, why this and not anything else. A long trip like this, though necessary to make a living, and for the lives of others, is an endurance run, a bout with protracted uncertainty that only by reaching her destination does Junta ever feel requited, like she isn’t just some mad woman prone to all-night trips with a stack of leaky coolers in the back. Her credentials, the tabs on the car, her assignment and destination, yes, Officer, my registration even, and those organs, are all very much real.

But those organs are here in bad faith. They whisper behind Junta’s back about a plot to slowly let themselves die off. They’ve lost it. Severed from the living rhythm of their warm host bodies and now it’s dark, cold… is this how it is to end, if it hasn’t already? So be it, some are content to think.

And Junta worries, what if it (the non-specific it, too much to account for) what if it all catches up to her? Because when it does—an obliterating thought—it will hit me all at once.

But for now, and for a little while longer, her sanctuary will be buttressed by the factors of time and distance.

Junta drives away from horizons starting to show signs of a world quickly ending in creeping ice, stratigraphically razed, peeling away fleeting human factors, discarded souls escaping their taxing bondage moving, not upward, but across (she watches) latitude and longitude, sent, seeking, disappearing into a bottomless cartoon hole… that Middle-Distance.

The compact she’s riding in groans until it is a monster fastened painfully to a metal, 18-wheel chassis. There is no cargo precious enough to justify this thing’s existence. Looking in one of her side-mirrors Junta can see the rig isn’t steel; it is comprised of bone and reeking meat. Two skeletal arms originate from the cramped space behind the cab she sits in, stretching outward to cover the highway’s span. While she drives, they swat at the sky as though attacked, swinging through clouds of exhaust whose whorls shape into the confusion of a bat swarm, past which these hands grope at a sun that’s fading from bleached-spine yellow to a dying rust red. If the rig she’s hauling is truly living, it seems to be rapidly choking to death.

Four hippie kids and their talking dog barrel down the highway in a stylish green van and match pace beside the abomination. They gawk at her up in her high cab and offer speculations about what a small lady with a look like hers is doing hauling a rig like that.

“Doesn’t it suggest some misunderstanding,” Scooby Doo is first to posit. “It’s obvious, she was never meant for this specific haul! Look to her hands, much too small—the fingers disappear in their journey ‘round the circumference of that wheel. Another victim of the screwball chimps back at dispatch if you ask me.”

“Zoinks, talk about a need for new management,” cautious Shaggy, knowing he’s about to ask a stupid question, “but, ah, you don’t mean real monkeys, do you, Scoob?” Up in the cab, it looks like Junta’s really losing it. She starts grabbing at every knob and switch in the cab, finds a dangling pull cord, pulls it hard and the rig lets blow a megalithic scream. It’s a fine excuse for everyone to ignore Shaggy proper but it is also just terrifying.

“Doesn’t look like she knows what she’s doing. You think she’s licensed for a haul that big?” Daphne looks to Fred for a response, who is locked in a deep motorist’s focus, and his attention won’t be diverted from the challenge of setting pace just out of the range of those sweeping arms.

“There’s really no way you could pilot a machine like that if you weren’t trained for it,” Velma interjects, brandishing, like always, her rational mind against the cartoon logic of a bizarre universe. “Those can’t be moving on their own, clearly there’s a complex mechanism at work.”

But Fred is familiar with Junta’s condition here. He furls his brow while his eyes scan an interior distance for an explanation he can offer. “It’s a sort of long-distance, big-haul madness. These roads can do that to you. I know it because I’ve contracted it before.”

Daphne’s intense curiosity for the mad trucker then transforms into concern, flying from her heart to Fred. “But how can that be true if,” reaching for his shoulder, she hesitates. Vulnerability, Daphne knew, doesn’t look like this in Fred. Wounded and suddenly disoriented, imagining other drivers from his past looking at him the way she was looking at that horrible woman, she insists, “you never told me Freddy!” But that forward and undeterred gaze, the look of a captain whose destined lot is to navigate so that no one else must is telling her to let Fred have his mysteries.

“Just don’t look at it too long, gang. It’s not safe, and the only cure is to arrive someplace. Let’s just hope she makes it and there’s someone waiting for her when she does.”

Shaggy screams, “Fred, watch out,” but he’s entered a slow banking trajectory around the obstacle ahead. Junta, however, inside the monster rig, is gunning straight toward an abyssal hole planted across the highway with no sign of stopping. The gang cover their ears as Junta tugs the pull cord again and the rig starts screaming its head off as it disappears, cab first into the hole Fred has pulled off the road to avoid. Desperate, like vestigial wings in a terminal free fall, the skeletal hands grab at the edge of the hole to hang on, losing bits of white bone on impact.

It manages to hang on long enough for the gang to recompose, get out of the mystery machine and walk a little forward together, where they can watch the tail-end of the rig and those hands slide away into darkness.

It’s a silent desert highway moment, before Shaggy says what everyone’s thinking. “Shit, Scoob. Shit.” The noises of strained bone giving out accompanies a laugh track in the distant clouds, like thunder.

Junta’s car crashes through the backdrop and comes to a sputtering, smoky halt after nearly a mile of chaotic careening and skid marks so dark they seemed to be pure absence peering through tears in the material world. The ordeal is taxing and enough to knock Junta unconscious. Sprawled across the steering wheel, she dreams about something these car rides keep her far away from.

She is walking through some stretch of interstate desert with Anna, tracking the motions of a slow-moving shooting star in the night sky above them. Only Junta seems to notice or care about the comet. She walks ahead of Anna as navigator, eyes on the slow burning rock above, wandering through the desert in erratic loops, sometimes doubling-back when it decides to do that. The comet travels through satellites, space trash and stars, combining its immense heat with their own in fiery collisions, expending their brightness and blinking out forever, carrying on and leaving them in its destructive wake. But that has nothing to do with Anna and Junta.

Junta loves Anna but is so overwhelmed by that feeling, she can’t bear to hear her begging that she stop wandering and just face it:

“Don’t you see,” Anna pleaded, “don’t you feel that we have something here?”

Have something? “Something like what,” Junta bites off without looking at Anna. Stars going out above them only she notices. “Your task in these dreams,” she whispers mostly to herself, “is often to pens—”

“—something together, Junta”

And here the comet, like a flick of a fairy’s magic wand, dips its arcing toward the Earth and heads their way. It moves too quickly for Junta and for a moment she is disoriented. Where did it go? And then, ah, a growing light, not rising from the East, but descending behind Junta out of the Northern sky. She turns around and Anna is silhouetted in the approaching light, but her own features, Junta realizes, Anna can see clear as day. She wears the terror of knowing this burning light will pass through them non-stop, because what little mass their togetherness might comprise is not enough to be its terminus. They are merely points along an arc that this something will sweep through, to obliterate or to gather and carry them away forever.

Junta feels the prickling of tears well within her face but there can be no damp regret or sorrow, no time to feel terror in this burning intensity. Took too long and now it’s too late. There was never enough.

The silhouetted Anna stands patient, holding Junta’s gaze. She doesn’t notice or care about the comet; cares only for the person they love who has at last stopped and now seems ready to face them. Wavering in the heat-light, Anna tells Junta “you deserved more,” and is then completely absorbed.

Junta knows there is always the danger of being absent for stellar occurrences like this. Blink and you miss it, a light a little brighter, a little less. She doesn’t miss it; for at least this star, she is there to witness its last moment. She doesn’t dream about the rest. Mostly to herself, she whispers “I do.”

Her eyes are already scanning 15 seconds into the future, hands locked at ten and two, spine supporting her as the brochure example of great driving posture when she realizes the dream is over. It happens like a jump cut, stitching there to here and then to now. Junta can’t remember waking up.

Headlights barely cut the fog that surrounds Junta’s car, adding a thicker bleariness to her already bleary vision. The radiator hisses, trickling and snapping from the violent careening. She feels a cool liquid pooled in the well of the driver’s seat, seeping through the soles of her boots. And something else, out there, a gothic secret sequestered in tendrils of this swirling mist wails and wails. In her stupor, this all amounts to a question for her eyes, her ears, her skin, about where she is and where she isn’t.

She asks, probing her senses for an impression, where am I?

And they tell her, you are right here, Junta. But they can’t tell her why.

The wreck has upset the organ coolers’ neat organization, and some have flown forward onto the middle console and passenger seat. A few have even cracked open and spilled their contents about the car. A half-kidney on the dash, paddling in a little pooled body of amniotic fluid like a canoe with only one oar, rudders closer to the sloping edge, catches Junta’s wandering eye and pleads for rescue. She doesn’t reach out to help it but it isn’t like she’s reeling either; the kidney slops down and away into the unseen space beneath the seat, escaping Junta’s curious gaze. Straining to lean across the center console, still fastened by her seatbelt, she stares and can’t help but wonder, where did it go? She wants to find out, so she gets herself unbuckled and now she’s free to wander.

Junta exits the vehicle and walks around to the other side, her soles trailing wet impressions on the asphalt road as she does. Three coolers have managed to spill outside the car entirely, tumbling out the passenger door, which somehow opened during the commotion, where they lay scattered and gaping. Inside, the organs are missing and, orphaned like that, the coolers just look confused laying alone in the middle of the road. But Junta’s just projecting here.

She doesn’t realize, can no longer remember that these coolers and their absent organs, are the reason she is out here in the Middle-Distance. Their sad affair is her own, but, blessedly, she’s been out too long to recognize that. In Junta’s state, everything out here is just as it is, configurable. Her shored-up sympathy pulls them into the intimate context of her orbit and to her they become something sad, lonely, hopeful or ruined. But these are just things she finds along the road.

In the high beam light up ahead, something fluttery catches Junta’s attention, and, like a child slipped away from their parent’s guiding reason, she floats along abandoning one distraction for another and discovers a folded road map. Ink from the markings meant to guide Junta through the Middle-Distance hasn’t run yet, despite it being a little drippy. That doesn’t hold her attention, however. What does are the drops, the exploded shape they perfected and always seem to make when they hit the ground, much like her own cross-hatched boot print behind her, and the damp trail of insteps embarking from the wreckage and Junta along the cracked road, into the mist and wailing night up ahead.

Jeepers. What have I forgotten? Was I riding with a passenger tonight, and where have they gone? Ahead into… Full moon territory, gallows-woods, dragged acres for dead crops to gather. Junta sets out. She follows the tracks of a person she can’t remember, compelled forward by the possibility toward another who she thinks is somewhere out there, lost, missing, need to find them. That wailing.

Her running takes her farther in, miles offroad, through bramble and hidden ditches, scrambling over cattle fences into a vast moonlit field of mud. It’s a sea of undisturbed lunar vanity, except the path Junta’s mystery has walked; except the pocks of coyote prints circling the last craterous blemish, a driverless flatbed truck, high beams almost smothered as the whole thing, including its cargo, an actual living suit of armor, a Black Knight, wailing in lonesome panic, hunched, and interred in stocks, is slowly being swallowed by the muck. The coyotes’ mirrored-eyes signal their blinking patience, waiting for the truck to lower to ankle-nipping height before going in. When they peel away poor Knight’s breastplate what do they expect to find, what substance in this third or maybe fourth packfeast, but the same empty expanse to entice their gibbering jowls as the miles they’ve already trekked and will continue to, still hungry and still compelled, forward, forever and on.

Stepping into tracks left by her forgotten passenger at the outset of the circling pack, Junta stops to view the desperate scene from the same vantage. Stellar and meditative, distant and indifferent. But what a strange sight, she thinks before turning away. Soon, she follows tracks to where the field heaves skyward, where the moon hangs and showers light upon a large building, waiting in monochrome. Onward through terrain where a road map isn’t useful, but she keeps it in her pocket anyway.

Boss got hurt on the job.

I don’t know how serious it is because I’m no doctor, but I worry. Ub’s too scared out of his wits to tell me what he thinks and he always tells me what he thinks even when I don’t ask for it and I keep asking for it but he won’t tell me. Boss won’t stop moaning “My head, oh” but there’s no light in the van and I can’t see, so all I can do is try to soothe him, but that’s not helping. My hands are wet from touching his face where the ladder swung and hit him. Boss doesn’t cry, says he never does, ever in my life! but I hope this is tears, and I know Boss can cry. It’s okay to cry, Boss.

Ub cut the wires out back at the museum and when he came around to tell us that all was done, he screamed at what he saw, what already had me and Boss stuck in fright. I turned so fast. Oh, Boss, forgive me, I wasn’t thinking like you always say. After that I dropped the ladder. Then I saw Ub running as if he was to try and tackle the ghost. I did wonder if that would work, if you could just deck a walking shadow. And I guess I started thinking like Boss, like if he got it pinned down, then what’s the next step and the one after that, but Ub just wanted to get the hell away from it and somewhere safe. Ub’s already prone to night terrors, so my heart goes out to him, but he sure dipped like a real fink leaping in the van and shutting us out. Had to schlep Boss all by myself, and Boss is a real heavy guy.

Which means I spent more time exposed to that thing than I’d like. Boss and I, we saw it as it made its approach, weren’t caught off guard like Ub was. We saw it come out of the night, across that muddy field leaving deep imprints in the earth—heavy ones, heavier than it should’ve been making—walking slowly, like it was just learning how to or something. First, we thought it was a guard and figured the jig was up but then we saw how little there was to see about it. Nothing but silhouette, no features, no sounds except each step was drenched like it is when you climb out a pool. But it’s a dry night, and I doubt this thing can swim, its walk being as uncoordinated as it was.

It was slow, never really got that close and I don’t know what it would do if it did. There wasn’t time to go back for the ladder after getting Boss in the van and maybe that’s all the better. He doesn’t see what hit him so soon. Neither I nor Ub, or Boss in his condition, can remember what roads we took to get out here, so we’re stuck. And Ub’s crying, we need an idea we need a plan, and the only idea I have goes No, it’s worse than that. Not stuck but trapped. And Boss always barks, leave the planning to me. Because I’m no good, I could never. So, I tell myself a story no one can hear because I can get away with it. And the story goes, for now, we abide by listening for signs that the haunting is over; silent as its passing is underneath the chattering of Ub’s wind-up teeth. And how, tonight the wind is wailing.

But Junta knows that wailing’s not the wind and what it means when it dissipates into yipping echoes and howling, way back across the field. Now she moves in muddy boots on the concrete path leading up to a multi-storied, columnated building. The STILL MUSEUM, est. 1872, a welcome sign in gold relief informs her, flanked by parallel topiary bulldogs, bereft of their green and common dog colors, and rendered monochrome by moonlight.

Indeed, here’s a no-man’s-land for pigment. It begins with garden flowers, which she then compares to the silver of the gurgling fountainhead and the silver of the licking flames on the silver candle fixtures to the left and right of the museum’s front door adorned with silver handles and silver hinges. The only color—the bravest—that the moonlight cannot leech, as though saying you will have no more of me, is the earthen brown contained in the trail of Junta’s shoes and those she’s followed all night, and which have finally led her here.

Around the Still Museum’s side, Junta observes the tracks taking on a vertical trajectory, up the rungs of a ladder leading to a window on the third story. Paces away, a non-descript van begins to jostle, disrupting the painterly stillness of the place. Then there’s a voice, a man calling out to Junta, going PSSS’T.

He says his name is Kog and he’s got this wild story about him and his buddies holing up in this van, waiting for a ghost to pass by and leave them alone. A real ghost, he emphasizes, it’s a true story. Kog wants to know what Junta is doing out here in the Middle-Distance, if she put up that ladder, if she knows a way out and, if she does, can they help each other. He’s looking to put together a plan, because, he relents, the old one called for bravery he just doesn’t have.

So, they strike a deal and Kog proposes his vision. Junta agrees to go inside the Still Museum to unlock the front door, bartering for a ride out of the Middle-Distance using her map, with a stop-over along the way to pick up her cargo. Once Junta manages to get the front door open, Kog, and a wreck of a man named Ub, will go in and nab what Kog’s calling, some pharaoh’s little kitty. And because his two left feet would make a poor jitterbug with the pedals, he explains, while Junta’s inside, Kog will work on Ub, calming him down enough to drive them all out of there.

They work it out, they get to work. Kog holds the ladder for Junta to climb up, and while she does, he says “glad that horrid wailing died off, was summoning me nightmares for sure.”

To which Junta replies, “I saw it, this terribly lonely thing, but I didn’t stop to help.”

“Heh. Heartless but I’m not much better. Hope you got a hanky if you end up running into what it was me and Ub saw.”

On the last rungs of the ladder, Junta looks behind her along the terrain of the Middle-Distance. It strikes her how unlikely it is to encounter anyone out here at all. What chance, to have gone wandering on this night and along this crowded trajectory. Waking in the wreck a minute earlier or later, would she be the one slipping through this opened window? Would she be here for the sound of boots lightly touching down and splashing in a puddle collected beneath the sill? A moment later or earlier, would the chance to see the way moonlight and her shadow plays on the sleek marble that leads deeper into the museum not have been hers?

Would it be her, if she moved any faster? If she moved faster than this.

Slowly, at first, through this room and on to the next, and the next, past sculptured portals, ranks of doors, galleries, then through silent rooms onto more silent rooms. She leaves centuries behind her as she navigates the Still Museum’s exhibits, searching for someone she cannot remember, searching for life and finding only the interred past of things whose day has abandoned them. Framed living places, preserved living cultures, catalogued living histories, gathered, crated and carried to this place for nobody. She observes only certain angles in the dark, but Junta knows there are more than just these catches, more than is possible to appreciate in the briefness of her passage. If she moved slower or any faster, would there be time to bring the portraits closer to touching and return ancient tools to ancient hands?

Moving through rooms like this brings to her a quiet sensation. The factoring of Junta by rooms of time and distance, the expression of a terrible loneliness she hardly recognizes anymore. In this darkness, isolated in the dim cabin light of her long road trips, held by Anna in the heat of her direct attention, or out there in the hollow space of the Middle-Distance, Junta is continuously traversing such rooms where single moments and rote processes distend into passages of incalculable and unstable dimensions. One room leads onto the next as walls gradually adapt the shape of other vaults, shrinking and expanding beyond her view into all directions.

Not that she can truly appreciate the architecture or the way these rooms have captured her. Flooded as they are with drowned, dull and undifferentiated life that floods her in turn, she fails to apprehend the immense power of seclusion that places her so apart from everything that is, truly, so near to her. And how drab it is to wade through all this interior space. Even if there are collisions, encounters with someone or something, they leave no impression she can sense, no dead crater for her unfeeling touch to trace and wonder whatever might have happened to her. Such a waste of phenomenon spent on Junta in this way. She moves like this through the diffuse night of every room, alone in her eternal approach and never near arrival.

But in the unseen upper reaches of these expansive rooms, a darker suggestion remains unconfirmed: if every room Junta inhabits is just the same, then perhaps there is only one room. A single room dominated by time and distance, whose dimensions are so large that Junta, racing off into any direction, could dwell inside for years without ever discovering a limit or way out. An unending room to contain all her days, or her one interminable night. It grabs her like a limb in a crowd attached to no one when Junta realizes she never actually entered this room. It is impossible to trace her memory in reverse along the path she had spent years following to a moment where a door or portal or gate was crossed. She lacks the comfort of such a regrettable and specific event. In its absence, suspecting that maybe there isn’t an exit, she feels only doom.

The window that allows her and tonight’s moonlight to enter the Still Museum remains in sight behind Junta, only smaller from her far vantage, reduced to a glimmering star point. It consoles her. She realizes the dimensions of the museum are limited and the possibility of an outside bares down on Junta’s awareness of an inside. There is a sudden expansion where every room Junta has ever been in empties out, and entrances, like beginnings for endings, seem to be just echoes of exits. And after all her tumbling through the dark tonight, here is a door with brightness bleeding through its jamb. Gradient amber licks at her shoes while she hesitates to turn the nob. It contains a promise, she truly believes, to transform her if she’ll allow it. So, with trepidation, she turns the knob, steps inside and closes the door behind her.

She has entered some liminal space, an anteroom of a kind for guests to pause and prepare before diving forward into all that history Junta’s just now closed the door on for good. Color is permitted here, she notices, first with the bone-white and auger adornments studding the walls. There are spines for the room’s vaulted reaches, teeth along the balcony’s arched opening to her left, shoulder blades on a hearth embedded in the parallel wall, and elaborate orbital decorations of a door frame, an alcove for balustraded stairs descending, opposite to Junta when she enters. On shelves which crowd the narrowing spaces of the vaults overhead sit a variety of repurposed glass bottles and jars, too high above and too clouded anyway by dust or whatever shedding for Junta to know what they contain. And this is just as well. The amalgams of living tissue, bundled appendages and unborn creatures embalmed within these cluttered containers, for the last time, have turned their small, cramped backs to a world they wish to forget and be forgotten by.

A dim fire persists in the fireplace, over which hangs an elegantly framed mirror reflecting a view of the balcony and the vantage outside. She has seen something in it that compels her to cross the room, to step out once more into the befuddling night of the Middle-Distance. Oblivious of the culture of exclusion and isolation that reigns secretly above her, Junta moves delicately across clay tiling and the familiar trail of damp imprints to reach out, assure impact if it can be willed, with a ghostly image standing on the balcony, so alone-seeming.

Outside, the moon holds a spotlight on shadows amid a strange ritual. It shines clear upon the movements of an esophagus skating through the translucence of an incoherent body. It descends through a shoulder and down the length of the figure’s only arm, dropping off from its hand into the latest in a sequence of jars, set upon a narrow table like potted plants. They bask in just as much lunar light as Junta’s forgotten passenger, whose shape diminishes with every part that’s sloughed into these containers.

Her curiosity takes her past the standing shadow to kneel beside the table, to get an eye-level look at that esophagus and whatever else might be inside the other jars. With its scant humanoid form, the ghost crouches beside her. Its curiosity outpaces Junta, mounting not because of the mystery of the jars, but for the imminent reaction it expects of her. An excised jaw still red from surgery is submerged within the ebbing shadow of the ghost’s bodily form. Pressed this close to Junta, its half-grin could be construed as a greeting. The jaw salivates just inches from her face with eager encouragement for her to watch. Be certain not to miss this one.

But this is an indirect language Junta thinks she’s interpreting. No tongue in that mouth to wag and confirm just how interested in her the ghost really is. Despite this, an amber drool is pooling beneath them. It trails off a long distance back to Junta’s car, and then beyond to abscesses of anonymous cadavers hundreds of miles away. A hard journey that’s harder to return from. Exhausted and collapsing into itself, Junta watches as the jarred throat turns to pitch and a fluid of shadow begins to fill the jar’s volume to its brim.

 Standing and sealing the jar before it can spill, the ghost looms over Junta. Beside the macabre display, it looks almost satisfied, emanating a pride that urges her to remain kneeling and look closer. She studies the jars in sequence, backward and forward, like a sentence whose meaning she is on the verge of intuiting. There is a cool touch reaching through the fabric of her jeans. It’s an amniotic chill she knows, a wet recollection that pierces her confused condition to explain that interred within these glass containers are the cargo organs she is meant to deliver. And they are expiring, or else beginning their departures before she could even reach them.

While watching inky bubbles coalesce and rupture against the jars’ glass, Junta wonders if there is anything inside herself that could compel a person to stop their leaving and remain where they were. If it is there, she cannot picture what it looks like. So, she searches with unfamiliar vision through the dark sheen of glass before her, seeking something honest and innate in its reflection to be shared and embraced. Junta peers through the pitch in search of more than nothing and can only peer deeper.

She is dizzied by this sudden reversal of movement that sweeps her inward. These night dispatches were never taken up to close the distance between her and someone else. They were only the continuous pursuit after an indefinite state. In this movement Junta composes herself; she is as a navigator’s motivation to chart a path through and away, to be the line but never the point, to avoid capture by the design of someone or something capable of encompassing her. She moves to elude definition by another. Tonight, however, all this momentum culminates in delay. In uncertain fractures she has never noticed before, her own reflection hounds her to consider, where have we been led? Through a movement too slow, onto not much of a place, a nowhere that pervades inside her, and peering deeper.

The Middle-Distance occupies a space beyond her sight but a curtain of clouds has moved to block the moon and eclipse everything. Background peripheral and foreground blur with her immediate vision. The entire region turns into the same pitch substance contained in these jars and in a quick, passing moment, all its territory may be traversed without movement, every distance made equivalent before her. Sightless in this blind terrain, Junta feels as though she could be anywhere; all the curvatures of earth are inside her; she holds the intensity of being beside everyone all at once. Then just as suddenly as it happened, the curtain is drawn away, leaving Junta in her glass reflection.

But well past the surface image, through the slight seams formed on the glass, passed into the pitchy nowhere inside, she listens to a deep-throated voice suggest: The places you could reach, Junta, without moving at all.

A clap resounds inside that nowhere space. It races through her skull, threatening to drive her back into that old continuity but its veering is erratic, and she can tell this is something different. Like a bat whose confused screeching works to orient it in dark cave spaces, this internal echo flies after surfaces she cannot see. An intensity, not a movement, emanating inward, not outward, reaching for the unseen limits of that greater room, to its ruined walls Junta thought would close her in forever. Flying over their crumbled ramparts into an eternally unending everywhere within her. No cheap movement; she exudes only speed. Through herself, she reaches out for someone and there’s no distance between them. Inside her there’s enough to hold the ghost and its organs, the whole Middle-Distance with its residents and itinerants and even those people out there in the world waiting on them, waiting on her.

Junta stands. “You have come a long way, I can tell, so you must be tired,” she tells its destitute body. “But there are people out there who expect us. They are alive but only for a while longer, alive in a way that’s not much like living—especially without you.” Inside the shadow pitch containers, glowing cartoon eyes peek, swim and silently return her gaze. “We should go, we risk too much if we just stop.” They swim away, receding into their personal interiors and distances to never reemerge. “Move, let me carry you.” The faceless thing, if it hears her pleading, does nothing. But in what way could she expect a response, without eyes, without a tongue, with a form that’s ever diminishing?

No speech and no body language. What would you say, if you could? Tell me.

“Are you content?” How could you be?

“You’re tired, you want to give up, and now that you’re cut loose, you think a disconnected life is better and this is your chance.” It’s true. This is their only chance to seize control, to determine their own course. Every organ is subject to the influence of a movement that functions automatically to perpetually keep them from failing, from selfishly opting out. A pulsation that confines them to a prison of living health. The movement is constant, though it seems to take them nowhere. The organism overrides whatever selfish desire the organ might have to function for some other purpose. Suicide motivates the organs of this ghost tonight; they harness spite against the resistance to let a heart slow down to the pace of a blinking eye, to speed up and become the flipbook of a caged bird taking flight. It is a tyranny to insist that a lung remain a lung when it might also be something else.

So, remaining still is a motion that seems especially meaningful tonight.

But just the same, conceding perhaps, the ghost does move to pass Junta onto the other corner of the broad balcony where a straight-back chair is placed. Beside the chair it wordlessly stands, waiting with patience for Junta to accept what seems to be its offer for a rest. Between the decorated nodules of the chair’s shoulders, she can see how it frames an image of the Middle-Distance with the crushed perspective of a painting. Her entire journey is depicted with all its distances reduced and folded together. The territories of the field and the band of woods she scrambled over in panic are layered on top of each other, comprising what seems to be just inches of space. Because there are no words the two can communicate with, she moves to meet the ghost and leans with her back turned to it, against the railing where the image before them fills her vision completely. She does not sit, she won’t.

Above these layers winds the road, a dark cut snaking across the canvas where Junta started out on foot. It shrinks to the image’s vanishing point where the moon bows heavily over everything. In the sky, it is the dominant object in the frame. A distorting moon that dictates scale for the night below, holding space together and apart. Suspended between its sloping belly and the asphalt below is Junta’s car with all its scattered cargo. Falling or rising amid an ambiguous state of pre-crash or recomposed ascent. And the night is so quiet; across the flattened distance she thinks the sound of its idling motor might be heard. A familiar humming, far from her, that still seems so close.

Are you coming or going? I can’t tell with you.

You haven’t decided yet, is that it?

Well, you must know by now; no one is going to just wait on you.

The ghost slips away while her back is turned. Its farewell sounds a final surging thrush of substance, rapids of shadow spilling into the last empty jar along the table. Grinning still and chattering, now relinquished, the jaw lands with a buoyant plop. In its last dithered seconds before what happened to the throat happens to the jaw, its own phantom organism sends an itch of laughter along its gums.

Ah, just try to laugh without a jaw. Hilarious; it would have cackled.

A weight in the sky. The midnight vacancy of space which, on nights that are not like this, nights in other places, is cradled serene over land where only a fine scattering of stars occupy the sky, now presses downward onto the terrain, bears itself against the Middle-Distance with the force and presence of that domineering moon. All over there is isolation, and continuous departures and wanderings; a suicidal motion where things appear only to vanish, wherein their vanishing imposes onto presence a frustration of absence, of two mouths mouthing “remove” and “adhere” to each other shoulder inside shoulder, overlapping, compacted and scattered throughout the invisible crowd all over.

At the railing where she leans this atmosphere suddenly grows dense and aggravated. Junta experiences it like a haunting so forcefully against her back, it seemed, that she was threatened with the possibility of being shoved over a ledge. She turns sharply as though to protect herself yet discovers no one on the balcony with her. Despite the unfixable sensation of being rudely crowded into a tight order among other bodies, she walks with an unrestricted gait in her search along the balcony and the connected anteroom for whoever could be blamed. But in a moment, as the same crowding feeling persists and she adjusts. It dawns on her that there is no one here, that she is all alone, and that she is probably the only moving thing in all the Still Museum. Returning to the balcony at a startled pace that almost sends her colliding with the table, which would have sent one lidless jar tumbling, Junta discovers she isn’t just suddenly alone but that she is abandoned.

The last jar is filled; these cargo organs have gone a distance that she cannot follow. Staring into the black nothing, she finds that its warbling surface distorts all reflection, presents images, signs, possible hints for direction but all incoherent. Standing next to the table, feelings of loss flirt with Junta but it’s all too intangible for her to mourn. Nothing here for anyone, especially for her, and she has grown tired of seeking comfort through absent things. Inside her, in that vast everywhere she contains, there is a tangible medium through which she can reach anything, take comfort in contact and touch. And it would be real.

Still at the table looking down at the quivering liquid in the glass container, she reaches out for something to hold—for those who might love her, for those who are waiting for her, for those who aren’t, for a pharaoh’s mummy pet downstairs, those boys outside, and a seal to place upon the jar. With one movement she gathers all these things and takes them with her when she leaves the balcony, headed to the first floor.

And in still silence, black pitch rejects the pestering of moonbeams against glass and will not permit their begging to be let in.

We are gone, Junta is too; just let us alone.

“We can’t trust maps on nights with moons like that.,” she shouts, running out the front door of the Still Museum and jumping in the passenger seat of the van. “Let’s go, I know the way enough,” and Ub peels off. The smell of rubber; you could tell that’s where he channeled his terror. “For jobs like this, you need focus. And now I can appreciate why you always tell us not to think too much, stick to the plan, not second guess nor start improvising. It would be so easy to fly apart at the seams when you see such inexplicable things, when your plan gets away from you as it did.

Boss, take it easy, don’t try to get up. It’s dark in here but you’re safe.

Just listen. Let me tell you. I know you’ll be proud to hear it.

Ub and I, we got that kitty.

But we very nearly left without it. There was a moment, Boss, where, yeah, the plan did fall apart. When you weren’t responding, and it seemed like Ub and I would have to go it alone. We just couldn’t get unstuck from our roles, it seemed impossible without you. Ub could only think of driving, and I was just a pair of helping hands there to hold things when told to. It was like if the two of us could somehow function like normal then you would have to function like that too. But you weren’t waking up.

It was lucky that she came along.

Because when she did, something inside me started to move and, you know, Boss, I started to see myself sort of as I see you. For a moment, when you weren’t there, I was something of a Boss myself. But not actually. I just brought her in on the old plan. It was like you were still there when you really weren’t. We both needed help. It was the only way we could get the job done without you.

She told me her name is Robin. She’s the one who went inside and grabbed the cat.

Then we left. Robin had us moving quickly through the zone, off roads, through parts not on any map. She was charting us a course because neither of us knew the way in, out, or through this kind of space. That was part of your expertise, but you weren’t awake then.

On our way, we had to stop to pick up cargo she had stranded after totaling her car along the main road, north from where we were. Just a bunch of coolers scattered all over the road. I helped her gather and put them in the back with us. (You looked like a pharaoh all your own, I think to tell you, laying still beside those coolers, watched over by a mummified cat waiting for the doors to close and resume its eternal rest.) One of them was leaking, just useless, damaged cargo. Robin reached inside it, handed what it was to me and said, “Here, if there’s any swelling,” and closed us in.

It was firm, damp and cool. I pressed it to your cheek while Robin directed Ub where to go next, and I think it might have helped with your swelling. But if nothing else, Boss, it kept my worry down. Which is just as good, I think.

We were rolling through the dark for some time. Through the window in the partition, I watched Robin guide Ub to avoid parts of the Middle-Distance that were painted by the moon’s glow. We drove along barely perceivable wooded roads, beneath thick canopies, where vision was so poor and Ub really should have slowed down but kept up at Robin’s insistence.

Then we came out into the open, and up ahead I saw a sign welcoming us to the FARM FOR ANIMALS. We passed beneath it, traveling along a dirt road that sloped downward and ended, just ahead, I could see, not at a farm, Boss, but at the edge of a cliff. Before us was just the maw of craggy expanse and overhead the hanging moon.

Before the road could run out ahead of us, Robin asked Ub to pull off, guiding him to this destitute wooden shack. It was all that was left, it seemed, when the rest of what must have been the Farm For Animals slid away or was bitten off the map; at least that’s how it seemed to me. Robin got out, leaving just the three of us, the old crew, alone in the idling car. We didn’t talk, but Ub and I watched as Robin approached the shack and, after knocking, entered. Neither of us said it then because said or unsaid it couldn’t make any sense; but even though the moon was hanging bigger than ever over our heads, its glow was weaker here than anywhere we’d been all night.

It was like we were out of reach, Boss. There were shadows where it seemed like there shouldn’t be. I don’t know if I could explain why but that was a strange kind of comfort. I don’t know. We looked up at it for a long time and all the while my thoughts were empty. Nothing of the usual moon things like astronauts, cheese, distance, ghosts and crimes at night. What we were looking at might as well not have been the moon.

And while we looked, the shack door had opened, and someone stepped out and crossed in front of Ub. A man in blue overalls, his neck held to a stiff tilt, squinting past acknowledgement as he walked with purpose in a direction I couldn’t see. Then, from the shack exited several more men, similarly dressed, but otherwise different. They followed the first somewhere off to the left, toward the cliff edge. Robin was the last to exit and now she too was wearing overalls. Following the group of men, she signaled Ub to bring around the van as she passed.

He moved the car over to where the road disappeared. Through the window, I could see some of the men waiting idly around, speaking to each other without animation. Around them there were chained together various vehicles made for farm work, worn and weathered through time, rusting and in noticeable states of decay. Linked together as they were, with tow cables snaking in a powerful mess that disappeared off the cliff behind their herd, they seemed like ruined beasts of burden who had grazed on everything these indifferent farmers allowed them to reach for. When all the men had gathered, Robin addressed the man with the squint in a discussion I could only hear fragments of.

“Union job.” 

“The waitlist.” 

“Dreaming,” 

“Out there.” 

“Only now.”

The man turned and spoke with the rest of his crew while Robin returned to the van. “We’re getting out of here,” she said, like it was all taken care of, as though we could just drive off into the maw below the moon before us.

Boss, I want you to understand what happened at least as much as I understand it. It feels like I can’t remember, but I do. Just listen.

These men and their machines that whinnied like horses when they struck them to get moving watched the sky beneath the moon without astonishment, like it was absolutely ordinary, as it was yoked like a sleeper’s eyelid that’s delicately drawn open by a nurse or a surgeon just before operating.

Over the puttering of diesel machines, along thin night air, Boss. “Go in,” is all one of them said; the last word anyone has spoken since.

The way your own words get told inside you works differently than how they get told on the outside. This is the difficulty that confronts me, Boss. Knowing what a word holds when it’s on the inside, like a brick that’s laid to something grand, but seeing how it struggles to hold anything and flies away from me when I tell it to you. Well, it’s my terror, Boss, and I haven’t got to tell that before. I’ve been told to, in the past, keep it quiet and so I have. But now I’m going to tell you. Tell you about what just happened and at the same time tell you how I’ve always told myself and never tried to tell on the outside.

Let me tell you, Boss.

It fell over us, covered us, went over us like a blanket and we crawled in under it. And I mean that; there’s no other way I know how to say it. The briefest glimpse of a night beyond a curtained window as the wind, well, opens it like a sleeper’s eyelid yoked. Ub flicked on the high beams and we peered at the space beneath the moon. “Go in,” someone said, and we did.

It fell over us, it covered us, we crawled in under it and have been crawling since that last word someone said. We entered into this undermoon domain.

Ub was showing signs like he might never let up. It took an equal effort from himself and the machinery of the van to drive through terrain like this where there were no landmarks, roads, nothing near or in the nonexistent horizon that the furthest burning high-beam could ever reach. His face was changing, another terror reaction like he’d gone through at the Still Museum when he saw that ghost, but happening too slowly, too mechanically. It was as though the clutch had been leveraged between the hemispheres of his brain until it snapped just to keep things operating.

From the passenger seat, Robin kept her eyes on Ub. I can’t be certain, but I don’t think there was any overt concern in that look. She might have been watching his rapt attention, trying to imagine what he was seeing, because outside the windows there was nothing.

But, Boss, that’s not what it was. Robin was watching out for Ub and at some moment I couldn’t distinguish from the rest of them, here in the dark where time didn’t seem to work, she reached an arm out to his shoulder and said “I can get us the rest of the way, Ub.” She pulled him out of that stasis so steadily, understanding his blinkered reaction with no need for words, seeing him and wanting to help. I don’t think I could have done it, Boss.

After some elaborate maneuvering over each other, Ub got into the passenger and let Robin take over. He stared straight off for a minute but then turned his attention back to me and you, Boss. He didn’t say anything. I just watched him watching me, held him in my vision, glad he was okay.

“Hey, Ub.”

He lifted his arm onto the shoulder of his seat and laid his chin against it, then he said “never gonna take another job like this again,” and rested his eyes.

You must have heard her say it, “this is a truly awful way to get through it.” You were awake then, Boss.

“Yeah, I don’t like it, but it’s how we’re going to get there.” She signals turns, flicks on the wipers, and seems like an expert even out here.

“Just don’t take that to mean it’s going to be quick, we’re not almost home yet.”

“But I’ll see that we get there,” she says. Here, where it’s as dark inside as it is outside, I can’t see anywhere else without Robin, Ub and you, Boss.

I lay upon the white table
In dissected fashion
Saturated in guilt
I remember my love
She’s beautiful to me
I want to call her name

All days grey
All days medical yellow
All days blue
I look dull in this pastel hue

Here comes the saw
Skull-cap buzzing
Don’t take my brain away
You don’t need it
I’m unhinged on this marble
I’m disturbed

If you put that inside someone else
They’ll be just like me
And you wouldn’t want that
Would you?

Take this stardust heart
It must have some use
For it holds no memory
You can re-start it
It’s yours
I offer it freely

Victor
I’m only making fun
Do what you want
I don’t need this shell of a body anymore
Here comes the light
Goodbye friend

From the Heart Sutra

A knock came to the heavy steel door, loud and insistent. She stopped in her tracks toward the bedroom. She was not expecting anyone, especially at this time of night. Her eyes shifted back and forth, as if she was groping for a forgotten invitation, appointment, nosey neighbour. Nothing. Her hands trembled.

Ayako Fukunaga’s Toronto condominium was sparsely furnished: beige unadorned walls, a grey couch and sofa chair, a low oak cabinet against one wall, a simple dining set with two wooden chairs in the living room. A bedroom was off to the side, hidden from the rest of the apartment. No television set, no radio, no books anywhere in the place. There was one telephone, a flat black rotary planted on the cabinet. Whenever it rang, infrequent as it was, she ignored it. A solitary clock, counting the remaining seconds of her life, hung on the wall above the dining-room set. And a single Japanese doll dressed in a bright red kimono rested in a wood and glass case beside the phone. Next to it stood a mahogany butsudan, the family altar, open to photographs of ancestors and a small incense burner prominently displayed up front. A tiny scroll sat among the images of the dead.

She shuffled to the door, plagued with bad knees and muscle pain – the fate of an eighty-six-year-old. The knock came again.

“All right, all right,” she rasped out loud.

Looking through the peephole and seeing only darkness, she called out, “Who is it?”

No answer.

“I said, who is it?”

“It’s me, Auntie,” a loud voice responded. “Chad.”

She opened the door to a shadow in the hallway, black flames of night licking at the figure of a man before her. She shivered.

“Who are you?”

“Your nephew,” he answered brusquely.

“I have no nephew.”

“Do I have to call the nursing home?”

Ayako bristled at the thought.

She half-turned into her condo.

“Oh… oh yes, Chad,” she acknowledged as he stepped into the light. She eyed him suspiciously. She knew she’d forget things but how could she forget a nephew? There was something familiar about him.

“Auntie, I was in the neighbourhood, so I thought I’d drop by,” explained the twenty-something man. He was tall. His thin face was handsome with a defined jaw though his crooked smile betrayed contempt. His stare gave her pause; the pupils were deep black.

“Huh?” she said cupping her ear. “I can’t hear too good, you know.”

“Wear your hearing aid,” he said louder.

She grimaced and waved her hand.

As Chad moved farther into the condo, he took off his light jacket and tossed it onto the chair. The cold that had clung to the coat sprayed like water.

Ayako frowned.

He suddenly turned and asked, “Why haven’t you called?”

“Huh, called? Who?”

“Your sister.”

She looked at Chad confused and a bit upset.

Ayako’s beauty had all but evaporated in her eighties, but anyone could see that she had had pleasant features in her youth. A round face with soft, brown eyes and a ghost-like complexion, probably through cosmetic surgery, but she wasn’t telling. Her hair was unnaturally black. Acquaintances suspected a wig, but they never dared ask. Her small stature, about four-foot-ten, was a sore point with her, but she had learned to live with it.

Her sister, Yaeko, was a true beauty. Her round face was a family characteristic, but her sunny disposition made anyone who met her want to be in her company. She was younger than Ayako by four years.

Their brother Robert was the oldest: he had eight years on Ayako, and so had “grown-up” concerns. Back in the days when the family lived in Vancouver, he was seldom around for gatherings, dinners especially. Even at Christmas, he opened his presents the night before and went out with friends for the day. When he became old enough, he joined the army.

The Fukunaga family had led a secure life in Vancouver, living in a rented two-storey on East Cordova, centred in the Japanese sector of town. The place was filled with refugee furniture left over from the Victorian era.

Ayako squeezed her eyes at the protected good times she had enjoyed. Back in the day, her father, Toshio, worked hard as a labourer on the railroad while her mother, Fumiko, took in laundry and sewing to make ends meet. Toshio was tall, for a Japanese, and strong. He had rugged good looks and saw life as a struggle.

Ayako had been her father’s daughter, even if she and her sister looked like their mother. As a toddler, she followed her father everywhere. She carried on so every time he left town for work, she knew he wouldn’t be back for a long time.

“Papa, did you bring me something?” she always asked upon his return.

“Now, what do you think, Aya-chan?” She sat in rapt attention as her father pulled out a bunch of candies from his pocket. She just smiled at him as the confections tumbled into her outstretched hands.

But not after her sister was born. The baby had done something that was inexcusable to Ayako: she had become the favourite of the family. Ayako used to be the centre of attention; she used to be the one to get candy, the one to get a new doll from Tokyo or wherever he had gone. True, when she was old enough, she could buy her own dolls, but that was not the point.

Fumiko was short, with a peasant’s body. The problem was that she doted on Yaeko from the get-go. Mother had brushed Ayako’s hair at night, tucked her in bed to make sure her “aka-chan” was safe and secure. From then on, it was all Yaeko, the youngest could do no wrong. Maybe it was her sister’s attractive looks or her yasashii demeanour. Still, Ayako had said nothing. She just internalized it, until such time she could act on her anger.

Fumiko or Mama had an outgoing disposition. Whenever friends came to dinner, she laughed and kept the conversation going. Toshio remained silent.

And when they gathered around the dining room table, a simple but gleaming table with heavy legs and eight matching chairs, so large it pushed everyone near the wall on three sides as they squeezed and pinched their way to their seats. It was Fumiko’s pride and joy. She had worked harder than usual at her sewing and laundry to make the money to buy it at Woodward’s Department Store on East Hastings. She only hoped it was still available when she had saved the money. Fortunately, it was.

Ayako frequently remembered the dinner party after which things changed. She mulled over the fact that she should have known.

It was Thanksgiving 1941 when her parents invited a few lonely souls for the holiday dinner, an occasion they had started to observe the previous year. The first really Canadian thing they did.

Takahashi-san, a distant cousin of Fumiko’s, Tanaka and Sumida, both fellow workers on the CPR line with Toshio, graced the table. The three men each had no family living in Vancouver.

They wore identical black wool and ill-fitting three-piece suits with matching wide ties. They sat uncomfortably. The clothing was either too big or too tight; it was clear they were not used to dressing so formally.

But they gushed appropriately when Fumiko brought in the twenty-pound turkey roasted to perfection. The tempting skin was brown, crisp, and glistening in the light. The condiments, like stuffing, cranberry sauce, gravy, and steamed vegetables, too were unfamiliar for the most part but the aroma made the mouth water. At least, there was cooked rice and shoyu to keep things Japanese.

The conversation was convivial at the beginning.

“Takahashi-san, have you heard from Japan?” Fumiko opened.

“Hai, Shigeishi-no Ojiichan passed,” he said gravely, his youthful face drawn by sadness.

“Ara, he was so young,” she remarked.

Takahashi perked up with the challenge. “Well, if you call 70 young, I suppose he was.”

Everyone at the table laughed, even Fumiko.

That was the signal for Toshio to carve the bird. As the knife sliced into the breast, steam rose from the moist, white meat. The pieces looked so succulent on the plates as they were passed around the table. Condiments and gravy followed.

Ayako, Robert, and Yaeko sat at the “kids’ table” in the next room. Ayako appreciated the segregation. She could hear the talk but didn’t have to participate if she were called upon to comment. Robert called her “baka” since no one would be interested in what she had to say.

As the Canadian Club whiskey flowed, so did the talk.

“Japan is so strong. Nobody wants to challenge them!” the blustery Tanaka said, his face as red as an embarrassed child.

His eyes so bloodshot they looked like a roadmap, Sumida agreed with his workmate. “Look what they’re doing in the Philippines.”

Fumiko expressed dread. “I don’t like what I hear about China. All the massacres.”

“Ah,” scoffed Takahashi, “what do you care about a bunch of insect Nankin?”

Fumiko turned away for a moment. “What if Japan goes to war with Canada?”

“Why would they do that?” Takahashi asked.

“But if they did, what would Canada do with us?”

Toshio sat and said nothing. Ayako caught sight of his face. It was glazed with worry as he gazed at them in the next room.

Fumiko’s fears came true. With Pearl Harbor, a place no one knew or heard of, the Fukunagas along with 21,000 other Japanese Canadians were exiled inland to remote ghost towns. The only reason given was “for your own protection”.

Internment camp days, an unsettled time. Ayako fretted and wept quietly – her house and secure surroundings gone, forever, she suspected. Fumiko just felt she had to “get on with it”.

The family left Vancouver for New Denver, a settlement somewhere in the middle of the mountains. They lived in a shack with cracked thin walls. The first winter at the end of 1942 was the worst with icy winds invading the cabins indiscriminately. The liquid, soup stock (dashi) or just plain water, in the pots froze solid overnight. It took hours to start the fire since all the wood was caked with ice and snow.

“Why are we here, Mama?” Ayako questioned as she shivered under the blankets in the morning. “Must be your fault.”

“Baka child,” she admonished as she held her two daughters close to her in bed. “Think of better days.”

She looked at her mother’s eroded face. Ayako’s eyes narrowed to a frightened glare. Besides the heavy snow and ice, the surrounding forests seemed to close-in on them. The sisters especially clung to each other, terrified of unseen beasts and dark shadows.

Ayako had heard rumours of wolves dragging children into the woods. Yaeko was told by friends that internees simply walked into the surrounding area when all hope was gone. They were never seen again.

Sleep only came after many tears and much shivering. Their eyes closed, ensnaring the fear within. They dreamed of ghosts among trees.

Late that first winter in New Denver, Robert made an astonishing announcement. “I’m joining the army… as an interpreter.”

 Everyone was dismayed. “Baka!” his father swore in Japanese.

Fumiko at first didn’t believe him, but when she saw he was serious, she shed tears and ran out of the cabin.

Ayako then spoke in English. “Quit your kidding. The government isn’t taking Japs into the army.”

“They weren’t,” answered Robert, “but the British said they wanted us. The Canadian government was so embarrassed, they agreed to take us.”

“Where you going?” Yaeko asked.

“Don’t know yet. I heard Indonesia.”

“Damare!” Ayako commanded her sister. “Why do you want to help a country that calls us Japs?”

“So, they’ll think of us as Canadians and stop calling us that word.”

“Baka!” she shouted, her lips trembling. “You should be here, with us. Protecting us. You have an obligation to us, to the family! We’ll never be accepted.

“There’s nothing out there,” Ayako continued, pointing to the nearby trees, “but lost souls.”

Robert ignored her. He left and the family never saw him again, just as if he had walked into the woods.

Reluctantly and with much resentment, Ayako took on the responsibilities of the eldest. She shook at the thought, but an ambition soon emerged as she watched her baby sister.

Even with the freezing temperatures and Robert’s sudden disappearance, Ayako hated the spring even more. The weather was better, of course, and the food was too since her parents could scrounge for plants like fiddleheads and mushrooms, but it was still a clammy cold. She saw fog rise above the ground, like souls climbing out of their graves, and drift through the trees. Some strands became snagged and shredded in the branches. The knots and furrows in the tree trunks grinned maliciously at her as the fog thickened to envelop everything. She cried out inexplicably at any given moment.

Ayako turned her fear into anger towards her sister. When they played outside, Ayako frequently tripped Yaeko and rolled her in the dirt so she would be punished for her dirty dress. She particularly liked the day Yaeko wore a white bluebell-flowered dress. At first, she threw dirt on it and then tripped her to the ground. Ayako then rubbed mud into the fabric. No one saw anything; no one heard Yaeko’s screams as she tried to fight back.

By the time their mother saw Yaeko’s ruined dress, Ayako had washed up and stood watching. Yaeko tried to blame her sister while Ayako secretly smiled. Fumiko broke into tears before her daughters. The dress was the last she had made in Vancouver. Still, Fumiko forgave Yaeko. She always had. Ayako hated her sister even more.

She continued to torment her younger sister. Besides soiling Yaeko’s clothes, she spoke Japanese to her parents all the time. Yaeko’s face turned red because she could barely speak it. She had never gotten beyond “baby Japanese”.

Whenever Ayako was sick with a cold, she took Yaeko into a private corner and sneezed in her face. Ayako comforted her sister in her sick bed by whispering, “I hope you die.”

The war finally ended with the mysterious bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was front page news in the New Canadian, the only Japanese-Canadian-community newspaper allowed to keep publishing. Toshio scoffed.

“How could one bomb destroy such a city? I don’t believe it… propaganda.”

Fumiko wandered around the cabin and outside. “70,000 dead with one bomb,” she kept repeating, her eyes wide with horror. Her extended family was from Hiroshima.

In 1949, the Fukunagas moved to Toronto. They rented a house, and the girls went to school. Other problems came to the forefront. Ayako became the “Dirty Jap”. The boys left her alone for the most part, but the girls called her the name and beat her. For all the hardships of New Denver, she had never been attacked by ‘Canadians’. No, there the enemy was unseen, the attacks legislated and incomprehensible.

“Jap, Jap, Jap!” screamed one little pale girl, much younger than Ayako. Others, more her age and bolder in a gang, slapped her face, kicked her shins mercilessly, and punched her stomach until she fell to the ground where she was attacked repeatedly. She often came home in tears with a bleeding mouth, torn clothes, or scraped knees. She hid from her parents, but Yaeko saw her and suppressed a chuckle. Ayako noticed and cried into her pillow, repeating her sister’s name while cursing her mother for giving birth to her. She said nothing to anyone.

Ayako hated coming home in the winter when she had to avoid the long, growing shadows and dodge the neighbourhood bullies. It reminded her of the forests around New Denver and the hidden animals waiting to pounce.

A few years later, Mama became sick.

Toshio’s long back grew taut, his face shadowed grim as he stood before his two daughters. He wore a heavy three-piece-suit, inappropriate for an early summer and out-of-style for the 1950s. Yet the heat didn’t seem to bother him.

Toshio or Papa by this point had streaks of grey frosting on his hair. His body had thickened round the middle, but his shoulders were still broad, his arms muscular. He needed strong arms to wrestle the piles of clothes that arrived daily at Matsuba’s Drycleaners (changed to just ‘Drycleaners’, shortly after rocks smashed the front window) up on Dundas near Bathurst. He gazed through the front window of their narrow, semi-detached two-storey home, through the leafy branches of the front-yard cherry tree to Huron Street, running north and south to Dundas Avenue. The narrow street was empty, strange for an early afternoon. The overcast skies and cold humidity encouraged clouds of fog to roam the immigrant area of Toronto, creating a spooky and lingering melancholy.

After being summoned, the daughters remained quiet in front of their father.

At length, their father spoke. The lines in his face may have betrayed his thoughts but the girls’ soft, delicate features, long hair, and under-nourished bodies always touched his heart and he proceeded gently. “Ayako-chan, Yaeko-chan, have you been good girls?”

“Yes, Papa,” Ayako said diffidently.

“Of course,” Yaeko said defiantly.

Ayako shoved her sister slightly.

Toshio continued, “Mama tells me you two want to go to university.”

“Oh yes, Papa,” they said in unison.

“Well, you’re doing well in school. You should do well in university…”

The two girls looked at him with expectant eyes.

“But there’s a problem… we can’t afford to send you.”

“Oh, don’t worry Papa,” Ayako said. “You know, we both have summer jobs to pay for the tuition and books, and there are scholarships.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Papa said. He turned away. “Mama is sick. We must pay a lot for treatment. More than I can make.”

The girls’ faces dropped with the news. They knew she wasn’t feeling well but had no idea how badly off she was.

“You two must keep working so we can pay our house bills too.”

In Toronto, Fumiko Fukunaga had developed thick calves, a solid trunk, and arms made strong by hard work. She gave the impression that she would last forever. Her laughter and endless energy told everyone that she didn’t have a complaint in the world. As she did in Vancouver, she took in laundry and looked for sewing jobs from neighbourhood wives. She once argued with her husband about a boarder when he suggested one. She didn’t like a stranger in the house, especially a man. But they needed the money, and if their landlord didn’t know about the sublet, they rented it to Masato Sato, a single man and co-worker. He lived in the attic.

Recently, Fumiko walked with a stoop, grew noticeably thinner, and held in her stomach as if to quell some mysterious pain. She retreated to her bed. Though meagre, her income was vital to the family’s well-being. Even more so when their boarder married and moved out.

Yaeko began crying before speaking. “It’s not fair!”

“Damare!” Papa slammed.

Yaeko stopped crying with a start, as Ayako glared at her.

She continued in English. “Don’t worry, Papa, I’ll ask Mrs. Tsuruoka for more hours in the beauty salon. Maybe she’ll take me on full-time.”

“Oh, that’s okay for you!” Yaeko complained. “I don’t want to be stuck in a no-nothing job forever!”

“Who said we’ll be in those jobs forever?” assured Ayako. “When Mama gets better, we can both go to university.”

Papa interrupted, “That’s good, yes.” He covered his eyes with his palms to let the worry drain. “Of course, your brother should have been the one to go to university.”

For a few months, Toshio’s eyes swirled with worried thoughts that plagued his mind. He finally expressed them a few weeks after that.

He gathered his nerves and said, “Mama is not doing well. Dr. Kuwabara told us she must go into the hospital.” He quickly added, “But only for a short time. She’ll come back to us. But it means we must watch our money. You two will have to keep working.”

Ayako glanced sideways and shook slightly, “Papa, I was counting on going to university next year…”

“What does that mean for me?” Yaeko asked.

“Ayako-chan, it means you can’t go. And Yaeko-chan, it means you’ll continue to go to high school.”

“But that’s not fair!” Ayako complained. “Why can’t I go and Yaeko work? I’m older.”

Papa glared at her and said, “You know, Yaeko-chan has to finish high school like you. Think of her future.” He then turned to walk out of the room, waving his hand in a gesture of finality.

The sisters faced each other and contemplated what to say next. The significance of his words danced in the surrounding air.

“I have to go to university,” Ayako insisted. “I have plans for the future.”

“Me too! I’m gonna be a doctor.”

Ayako burst out laughing. “A doctor? What makes you think you can be a doctor?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re a girl.”

“So?”

“So? Who do you think you are? Some rich girl? You can be a secretary or maybe a hairdresser. Teacher, at most. Something appropriate.”

“Yoneyama-san is a doctor.”

“I rest my case. She comes from a snooty family. Don’t rise above your station. Listen to me and I’ll steer you right.”

“No! I’ll be whatever I want to be,” she said almost in tears.

“Stop crying. Mama’ll be back soon and then life can go on as normal.”

“I think she’s gonna die,” Yaeko said with a pout.

“Baka!” screamed Ayako. “How could you say such a thing?” She then roughly grabbed Yaeko’s arm and pulled her towards the family altar. She placed both hands on her sister’s shoulders and pushed her to her knees while digging deep with her nails.

“You’re hurting me!”

“Ask for forgiveness!” Ayako insisted. Yaeko grumbled words of apology through her tears. Ayako smiled behind her.

Soon their mother’s photo joined the other recent and long-departed relatives in the butsudan.

At their mother’s funeral at the Toronto Buddhist Church, the family listened to the Reverend Tsuji as he spoke gently to them, “I send you oceans of compassion during this sad time. Take comfort in knowing your mother is now in the Pure Land, free of suffering. The Buddha is ever present.” His face beamed in the incense-filled worship hall. He then led the gathering in the chanting of the Heart Sutra. The reverberating bell summoned the Buddha.

Outside the building, Ayako spoke seriously to her younger sister. “Okay, I’m in charge now. You can go to university this September. I’ll be working full-time at the beauty salon by then. Tsuruoka-san has promised to train me to be a hairdresser. I’ll give you the money for your expenses.”

“Really? Are you serious?” she said, surprised at the change of heart.

“…your teacher’s college tuition and books.”

Yaeko frowned.

“Do as I say,” Ayako ordered. “Teachers college.”

“Okay, I’ll pay you back… with interest.”

“Never mind that. Just obey me. That’s how you’ll pay me back.”

“But what about you? University?” Yaeko said.

“I’ll figure that out later.”

“That’s not how I heard it,” Chad informed, his dark eyes narrowing.

“Huh?” Ayako said, waking from her reverie.

“I said that’s not true!” he said loudly, while examining the doll.

“What are you talking about?”

“Your story about university.”

“I didn’t say anything.” Ayako hadn’t said a thing. Or wondered if she had. She looked at him with a questioning expression.

Chad frowned and insisted, “That’s not the story I heard.”

“Ach!” Ayako growled as she dismissed with a wave of the hand. “Your mother’s lying. She always does.”

Ayako struggled to the couch and sat down as her nephew patrolled the room. “Papa chose your mother to go to college. I stayed behind…”

“Not really, but we’ll let that go… for now,” he said. “Why do you have this doll?”

“I stayed behind,” she insisted, ignoring the distracting question.

“And you did well for yourself,” he said. “You started your own beauty salon and prospered over the years.”

“That’s not the point. I sacrificed everything for the family. For my sister. She never listened to me. So ungrateful.”

“That’s not true. She did everything you asked. She became a teacher and not a doctor. You made her feel so guilty, she had no choice. You always held the money over her. That’s why you didn’t want to be paid back. You even put the kibosh on the most important person in her life.”

Ayako just scowled and dismissed Chad with a grunt and a wave of the hand.

“You can’t see that man anymore,” Ayako said to her sister back when they were young and strong.

Yaeko glared at her sister. “Why not?”

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t.”

“He’s Korean!”

“So what?”

“You know what they’re like.”

“Bill is a good, kind man. Another teacher. He treats me good,” she insisted. “And I love him.”

“Aw,” she said dismissively. “They only love one thing: your money.”

“I don’t have any,” she whined.

“That’s right,” Ayako snapped. “I gave you the money to go to university, out of the goodness of my heart.”

“And I offered to pay you back! With interest.”

“I don’t want your stinking money. I want you to do what I say –”

“That’s not fair!”

“You want to be Christian?”

“What? No!”

“Well, that’s what you’ll be if you stay with this Moon Kim Korean man,” she hissed. “You’ll be a poor Christian woman abandoned and coated in shame.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You do what I say, or you’ll bring shame to the family!”

“I told you I love him!” she said with her eyes turning moist.

“So what? Think about what’ll happen.”

“And what is that?”

“No decent man will want you.”

“What do you mean by that? I don’t want any other.”

“What happens when he abandons you, after he gets…” Her voice trailed away.

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know. Gets what he wants. You know what I mean.” All the venom in Ayako’s body flooded out and into her words.

“You interfered with the love of her life,” Chad accused.

“What’re you talking about?” Ayako asked, her lower lip slightly trembling. “I had nothing to do with that. She made her own choice. Is that what she told you?”

“You haven’t answered my question,” he said, changing the subject.

“What?”

“Forget it,” he said loudly.

“That’s what they all say,” she said with sudden anger revving with intensity. “Making make me feel like I don’t matter!” Her face contorted with rage.

“Fuck you!” she screamed. She immediately regretted her outburst and turned away, her face flushing.

Chad should’ve been as shocked, as anyone would, at such an outburst by an octogenarian; instead, his gaze hardened and carried on with his original question. “All right then, why don’t you call your sister?”

She began to raise an objection when she heard a noise close-by. A buzzing.

“What was that?” she asked as she looked around. “Did you hear that?”

“You heard something? That’s a first.”

“Whatever it was…,” she said, looking around the room.

Chad paused and ignored her; his face darkened as he again turned his attention to the doll on the cabinet. “Why do you have this thing?”

Ayako fell into herself.

“Auntie? Why do you have this doll?”

“What? I like it.”

“It looks like… it’s like…” He thought for a moment and then sighed. “Retribution.”

The Japanese doll was a noppera – a fully formed human body with beautiful long hair and clothed in a formal red and gold kimono, but with no face. Smooth as an egg and terrifying in its implications. It was mute, blind, and deaf to the world. Legend has it they are shapeshifters, tricksters, ghosts to frighten their victims to death; their no-face heightened the horror.

Ayako smiled, “Just decoration.”

Chad turned away. “Call your sister,” he said loudly.

She bristled where she sat. “Why hasn’t she called me?”

“Now that’s a silly thing to say.”

“Why?”

Chad paused before he next spoke. “She gave up Bill.” And only spoke in a perfunctory way to Ayako for the next fifty years. Even at their father’s funeral, they did not comfort each other through their grief.

“This again!” Ayako twisted away, avoiding her nephew’s disapproval. “She did what she wanted,” she insisted.

“She never found true happiness.”

“So what? Look at me, I never married. I don’t need a man… especially a Korean man.”

Chad dismissed the bitterness. “You have money, yes, but you’re all alone here with no one to love, no companionship –”

“Shut up!” she screamed.

“Are you going to swear at me again?”

The lull was deafening.

Ayako insisted, “I gave her money to go to university, didn’t I? And look where that got her – she became a respectable teacher with a long career.”

“Why are you changing the subject?”

“I’m not! Did I give her the money to go to university or didn’t I? She never appreciated my sacrifice. Never even thanked me.”

“Why didn’t you let her pay you back?”

“That’s not what family does. I provided the money so she could see her dream come true.”

“She wanted to be a doctor.”

“Ach!” she dismissed. “That was a pipe-dream. She took her appropriate place in society.”

“Appropriate?”

“Yes, she was being high-minded. She saw the error of her ways and did the right thing. The least she could do is to protect the family. To protect our reputation.”

“According to you.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“She always had to check with you with every decision, with every dream she had.”

“So what?” Ayako pulled herself to her feet and moved toward her bedroom. “No appreciation… I sacrificed everything for her.”

As she passed the family altar, she heard the buzzing again, like a mosquito. She looked to the altar; the sound came from inside.

Nothing unusual, except one of the photos glowed, a soft light at first that steadily intensified. She bent down and gazed at the picture and recognized it immediately. It was a photograph of Yaeko. She straightened up and turned to Chad.

“You’re not Yaeko’s son! She committed… Who are you?”

“Yes, that’s right, she died a deeply depressed, unloved woman. All alone –”

“I said, who are you?” she yelled.

“I never said I was Yaeko’s son,” he said loud enough to hear. “I’m your brother’s son.”

“My brother’s…? He died in the war.”

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t have children.”

“What? Why didn’t he say something?”

“Because he married a Chinese woman.”

“Chinese?” she sneered. “A Chankoro? No, not possible.”

“Met her in Indonesia where he was stationed right at the end of the war. Never told anyone in the family knowing how you’d react.”

“What do you mean?”

Chad fell silent. He stood as still as a cold statue.

Ayako walked away perhaps ashamed, more annoyed than anything.

“Look behind your brother’s picture… in the butsudan,” Chad instructed.

Ayako moved forward and felt behind Robert’s picture. There was another photo – a sullen and thin woman with pulled back hair and dressed in a soiled dress. She wore a Chinese peasant’s clothes and held a new-born baby in her arms.

“Where did this come from? Who is this?” she asked as she held the picture up to Chad.

“Me and my mother.”

“Your mother… so you’re Chinese?” she sneered at the obvious.

“Half.”

“Who put the photo in there?” she asked, pointing to the altar.

“It’s there for a reason.”

“What?” she asked, frowning.

“I said it’s there for a reason.”

“What reason?” she clarified.

“Why else is any photograph in a butsudan?”

“To… to,” she stuttered, beginning to realize the implication.

“To memorialize the dead,” he stated, turning his back to her.

“But you’re not dead.”

A heavy knock came to the door. Chad moved forward to answer.

“No, don’t open it!” Ayako urged as she reached out to stop him.

Chad ignored her and twisted the knob to swing the door open. On the other side, two figures stood in the darkness of the hall. They moved into the condo light. One wore the soiled uniform of a Canadian soldier, and the other was dressed in a mud-splattered bluebell-flowered dress. Both faced her with closed eyes and withered ashen skin.

Ayako stumbled to the couch and quickly stared at the strangers. She shuddered with the realization. Her face blanched and her mouth fell open as she tried to speak. Her throat dried with terror. “Robert… Yaeko,” she finally choked out.

The two said nothing.

Ayako closed her eyes wanting the apparitions to go away, but when she opened them, they were still there. “How… how is this possible?” She looked at the butsudan. She could clearly see their photographs inside and confirmed that they were truly dead.

“What do you want?”

On her knees, she shimmied across the floor to sit in front of the butsudan. She then raised and placed her hands together, closed her eyes, and recited the Nembutsu. Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu, Namu Amida Butsu.

The front door yawned, distracting her. Her chanting interrupted, she turned her head with eyes wide open.

Another figure stood in the hallway. Ayako didn’t recognize the apparition in ragged clothes but felt herself stand and rush towards it. The aroma of incense rose in the air.

“Mother!” she said instinctively; her eyes glazed with horror. “You know what I did for the family. Tell them, tell them.” She pointed to the three behind her.

But it was not her mother. The same body shape, perhaps, but with no face. It was smooth, featureless.

Ayako recoiled and soon found herself on the couch again. She looked upwards and saw the four before her: three with disapproving and menacing faces, their eyes open now and glaring; the fourth glowing with ominous anonymity.

A disembodied voice reverberated about the condo. “You didn’t care about the family’s reputation. You didn’t care about your sister’s welfare. It was your plan for revenge for your sister’s birth, for your parents’ perceived indifference toward you.”

And then silence hovered like an entity about the four. It grew and expanded until it enveloped Ayako. Her ears hurt in the vacuum. She uselessly covered them with the palms of her hands. A scream escaped her lips.

Chad stepped forward and reached for his face with both hands. With a great audible tearing, he ripped away a mask to reveal a blank face: no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind. He uncovered his true self: a noppera.

Robert and Yaeko did the same. They were all noppera, and all four reached for her.

Ayako’s eyes widened; she shivered and then her whole body quaked. Her arms went up, her hands open in a defensive position. She whimpered as her face contorted with terror. She slid to the floor in her confusion. No color, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of senses until no realm of consciousness.

“What have I done?” she managed to shout in the onslaught. A chest pain flourished and spread. “I did everything for you… sacrifice… Papa, Papa… where are you? Tell them…” Words fell from her mouth and dissipated into the darkness. Her torso tightened.

The police discovered her body about a month after. A neighbour had complained about the smell, the smell of rot and stale urine. The body lay upon the floor in a near fetal position. She had died of a massive coronary.

There was a touch of the comically macabre about her body. Her black wig, a badly kept secret, had fallen off revealing a nearly bald head, the wisps of white hair swirled around the scalp. She lay mired in her vanity, decay, and perversity. Free from its glass cage, a Japanese doll, with no face, stood beside the body as if watching over her.­­­