Community of Magic Pens

by Community of Magic Pens (epub)

  “Quick,” said Ziyu, swallowing the errant jalapeño. “Grab a squid circle.”

  Jingfei looked hesitant, but Ziyu elbowed her. “It’s spelling,” Jingfei said, as if she finally found her tongue.

  They grabbed the rubbery looped band. Ziyu looked back at her Grandma.

  Is this your doing? her eyes asked. No response.

  “I’ve seen this on TV. In that American movie . . . I can’t think of the name now,” said Jingfei, her voice quavering.

  Jingfei’s fingers felt soft and delicate as they brushed against Ziyu’s digits slick with oil. The squid circle budged. They started.

  Ziyu breathed out a breath of cheese and fish. She could smell it as she finally remembered to inhale again.

  “It’s happening!”

  Jingfei nodded, her eyes wide.

  The squid circle slid across the pizza, leaving cobweb strings of melted cheese in its wake. Amazingly, the ink that it glided over did not smudge, but stayed the same blurriness in its lettering.

  First, the squid circle settled on ㄨ (“w”) and ㄛ (“o”) and shifted towards the third tone ˇ , a V-shaped black blemish, like a bird flying in the sky. It moved to ㄅ (“b”), ㄧ (“i”) and ㄥ (“ng”) and to the tone mark ˋ that whipped downwards. It cut through a flurry of fish pieces and picked up some seaweed confetti as it headed towards ㄅ ( “b“) and ㄨ (“u”), using the same tone mark ˋ as a follow-up.

  Ziyu used her free hand to dip her fingers in the jasmine tea. Luckily, it wasn’t too hot. She scribbled the formed letters onto the inside flap of the pizza box, creating dark stains of the words that bled into the cardboard fibers.

  The room darkened as a downpour began outside, creating a clatter of raindrops against the windows. The panes banged, stopped, then banged again.

  When the squid stopped moving in her fingers, Ziyu looked up at Jingfei who shuddered. They both turned to the box, soaked with streaks of jasmine-scented stains:

  ㄨㄛˇ ㄅㄧㄥˋ ㄅㄨˋ ㄒㄧˇ ㄏㄨㄢ ㄑㄧˇ ㄙ

  They said aloud, “我並不喜歡起司 (Wǒ bìng bù xǐhuān qǐsī),” an incantation that allowed the phonetics to cohere into meaningful words.

  Jingfei jumped up. “I don’t like cheese,” she whispered pointedly. “It’s exactly what you said about your grandma.”

  Ziyu stretched, sticking her finger in her mouth to lick the oil off.

  “Ew, don’t do that. You don’t know what that stuff—” Jingfei said, gesturing towards the smudges of squid ink, “—will do to your body.”

  “I already ate a whole slice,” said Ziyu, but just as she said that aloud, her stomach churned.

  The rain was falling in sheets now and a thunderclap filled the air. The room turned bright white, then pitch black as the power went out.

  Ziyu could hear Jingfei whimper.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Ziyu said, as she took her hand, but Jingfei pulled away. Ziyu forgot her fingers still all had traces of the pizza. But, at this point, so did Jingfei’s.

  Another thunderclap simultaneous to the brilliant light flooding the room caused them to flinch. The storm was very near.

  Jingfei seemed to change her mind and reached her hand over to clasp Ziyu’s.

  Perhaps the cheese was projecting its own greenish light or perhaps Ziyu was simply imagining it, but now she could see the glossy, smeared letters of the pizza against an incandescent verdant glow of the cheesy canvas.

  Jingfei said, “Noooo,” drawing out her disbelief. Ziyu shook her head. She wasn’t imagining it.

  The cheese illuminated upwards, creating a funnel of light that hovered above the pizza. The black smudges broke off the flat X-Y axis of the pizza and infiltrated the Z, the inscriptions lifting up like corpses that gained mobility, like stickers unpeeling themselves from their bound parchment. They combined and swirled in the air, forming a tornado of stretched-out ink before settling into a phrase, releasing itself from that formation and resettling into another phrase.

  妳對奶奶這麼不尊敬啊。

  妳並知道我不能吃乳製品,有乳糖不耐症。

  Nǐ duì nǎinai zhème bù zūnjìng a. Nǐ bìng zhīdào wǒ bùnéng chī rǔzhìpǐn, yǒu rǔtáng bùnàizhèng.

  “Sorry, Grandma,” whispered Ziyu, after she read the shaky letters that scrawled in the air, “How dare you disrespect your grandma like this! You know I can’t eat dairy, that I’m lactose intolerant.”

  Jingfei seemed to lose her sense of fear and nearly giggled. Ziyu shot her a glance.

  The storm cackled as if in response to the lack of obeisance.

  Grandma lamented on, about her days of suffering in war and famine, and of all the strife she had been through. The least they could do was respect her while she was dead. Words splayed across the air, merging and coming apart.

  It was Ziyu’s turn to be transfixed. She nodded, a wave of shame filling her that she had cared more about her own dietary wishes than for her grandma’s spiritual wellbeing.

  Ziyu noted a rustling from where Jingfei was. Jingfei unlaced her fingers and was now moving towards her laptop at the tea table near the sofa. She was typing something. The screen glowed eerie and fluorescent against the green-tinted light coming from the pizza. Ziyu felt a wave of upset and dismay at Jingfei. First the laughter and now she was checking her email!

  Grandma, assuming this spirit writing in squid ink was Grandma, wrote about Grandpa and his woes. She wrote about Grandpa’s difficult time in the army being one of the smallest men and how he had to fight for respect. She talked about the son they had lost before Ziyu’s dad was born and the harrowing escapes they made across the seas to give her and future generations a better tomorrow.

  All Ziyu could do was bow and keep silent. The black ink shone and tiraded, becoming even more splotchy. The thunder rumbled in tune with the flow of words. Some of the specks hit Ziyu’s face like dark, angry spittle.

  After a while, a doorbell sounded and the pizza went dark. Ziyu watched as Jingfei used the light of the laptop to guide her feet towards the door.

  Jingfei pulled the door open, the hallway light flooding the room.

  “Your pizza,” said a spiky-haired girl in a collared delivery uniform. Her nose ring and five cartilage rings that fitted into the lobe of her ear seemed to beg to get out of that rigid, collared outfit.

  Ziyu, from her spot in the living room, reached into her pockets, not really understanding. But, we already got our pizza, she thought.

  But Jingfei beat her to the punch and forked over some crumpled bills.

  Once the faint jangling of the door chime above the main door outside announced the delivery girl’s departure, the squid ink on the ground rustled again.

  “Nu uh, granny,” said Jingfei, throwing a few tofu cubes in that direction. They seemed to sink into the cheese like animals caught in a swamp. A clamor of squishy noises came from the pizza and then a burp.

  “I did some research,” said Jingfei, picking off a few more mushrooms and throwing it over to the other pizza.

  “That one’s a knock-off. Using the same brand name but the website’s all messed up. You can tell with all the spelling errors and plug-ins that don’t work. The url also gave it away. Pizza Rara? C’mon. Then I found that it was run by an occultist.”

  The light emanating from the Seafood Delite knock-off dimmed.

  “I don’t think it’s your grandma. Just someone who hacked into your account and read your grandma’s obituary. Programmed the thing to run with this abominable fabulation. There is some phantasmic stuff going on with the whole rendering of words and the light and all that, but it’s not your grandma. I exchanged a few rough words once I was able to hack into their site and reach the site owner through chat.”

  Ziyu listened politely, as Jingfei picked off more toppings from the new pizza to feed the animate one. The animate Seafood Delite devoured them up, aggressive and croaking for more.

  Ziyu pointed at the creature. “But, it’s right,
Grandma or not. I’ve been thinking a lot about myself, about my part-time job and my break-up, and not really of Grandma’s life.”

  She walked over to the picture frame at the altar, considering Grandma’s tender countenance. She put her hands together and head down. She wished Grandma would forgive her for being so selfish.

  As Ziyu opened her eyelids, the lights had turned back on and the storm abated. The influx of artificial illumination hurt her eyes. She blinked as she walked over to the sofa, where Jingfei lay sprawled out, alternating taking bites of topping and feeding the knock-off that was still on the ground.

  “I’ll take this to the temple tomorrow. I think one of the shamans will know what to do with this,” said Jingfei.

  Ziyu grabbed a mushroom from the new steaming pizza, popping it into her mouth. The juice coated her lips, filled her tongue with a fragrant earthiness.

  “No, leave it here. It’ll remind me of my Grandma.”

  “You sure? It’s not a problem. You’ve helped me out before, Ziyu.”

  “It’s my duty. I’m doing this for me. Maybe one day when I’m ready, I’ll take it over to the shamans myself. But, right now, I can’t stand to leave it there. Besides, it’s a good reminder. For all the times Grandma sacrificed and put her life in danger, for her future generations. It’ll remind me how to be good like her.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Jingfei, but she sounded unsure. The ravenous gulping of the thing didn’t help.

  Jingfei pushed a few onions aside and grabbed a submerged pepperoni. She looked as if she’d throw it at Seafood Delite, but she must have changed her mind, popping it into her own mouth instead.

  They sat around quiet as the sound of the knock-off pizza devoured pieces of dough, a cannibalistic beast in Ziyu’s living room. They picked at the new pizza, sometimes grabbing a few mushrooms, sometimes the peppers with charred edges and sometimes taking bites of the dough with generous helpings of tomato sauce. The pizza was hot and tasty, and the cheese was particularly flavorful with its melty stringiness.

  Jingfei intertwined her fingers around Ziyu’s, as they used the free hand to feed themselves and Ziyu’s newly acquired pet.

  “Thanks for being here for me,” said Ziyu, shifting in the sofa, nestling her back against the pillow propped up against Jingfei. “It’s been a tough week.”

  Jingfei’s fingers squeezed back as a reply, slipping with pizza grease.

  D.A. Xiaolin Spires steps into portals and reappears in sites such as Hawai’i, NY, various parts of Asia and elsewhere, with her keyboard appendage attached. Her work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Strange Horizons, Nature Futures, Vice Terraform, Uncanny Magazine, Fireside Magazine, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine (Year’s Best Issue), Diabolical Plots, Factor Four Magazine, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Toasted Cake, Pantheon Magazine, LONTAR, Mithila Review, Reckoning, Issues in Earth Science, Liminality, Star*Line, Polu Texni, Eye to the Telescope, Liquid Imagination, Little Blue Marble, Story Seed Vault, and anthologies of the strange and beautiful: Deep Signal, Ride the Star Wind, Sharp and Sugar Tooth, Broad Knowledge, Future Visions, and Battling in All Her Finery. Select stories can be read in German, Vietnamese, Spanish, Estonian, and French translation. She can be found on Twitter: @spireswriter and on her website: daxiaolinspires.wordpress.com.

  Memories of a Rose Garden

  Beth Goder

  “I’m going to write a rose garden,” I told Matthew, so I found hills as blank as paper and wrote each individual petal, a softness of grey and yellow and green. I specified thorns curled outward, the rough feel of the stone paths, the beetles who would brush their wings against us feather soft.

  The words unglued from the paper, wiggling up industriously one letter at a time, and as they became part of the world, settling down into the earth and finding their shape there, Matthew reached out to touch the pen held lightly between my fingers.

  It has been so long since I wrote the rose garden. I look back on myself at sixteen, through those layers of years, and it is like peering through muddy water. How can I remember how I truly was?

  I learned, at that age, that writing has power, so I am writing down my story to see if I can catch the truth of it.

  A rose garden can be a wild place if you write it the right way. I wrote brambles, disorder, paths that twisted nowhere and everywhere, the sharp beaks of birds.

  The evening roses cradled us. Matthew asked me to write little things into the world—clouds in the shape of frowning mouths, yellow buttons, packets of mint tea, which we boiled in the patch of sunlight written bright by the pond choked with algae, sunlight which glowed even in the dark, even in winter.

  Once, he asked me to write his name into the bark of trees, into the grass, into the sky, but I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to write him into the world more than he already was. It was a wrongness he asked of me, but I didn’t have the courage to tell him so.

  I’d found the pen at the back of Persimmon Books, the used bookstore down Fifth Street where I worked when I was in high school. I was reshelving a textbook on plant biology when the pen fell off the shelf, the cap a little sharper, maybe, than a regular pen, and the blue plastic shiny and scarred, but looking normal aside from that.

  When I tried to write a poem about dandelions, white fluff materialized in my hands.

  I made up rules for how I would use the pen. The pen had come to me without my asking, at a time when I needed it, and so it seemed like I should use it to put gifts into the world. I wrote daisies into the cracks of concrete. I wrote rain and yellow leaves, and a certain softness that comes when the sun is rising over the mountains and the sky stretches out. I liked to write beetles with iridescent wings, watching them turn from words into something real.

  I think what I wanted more than anything was to write a place for myself in the world, a place where I could fit, but I didn’t know how to do it, so instead I wrote puddles and snails and once a rose garden that was mine.

  “Let me try it,” said Matthew. We were sitting in the rose garden on chairs woven from dead leaves. His face was never more beautiful than when he wanted something, filled with an intensity that could have shadowed the sun.

  “It’s mine,” I said, the anger in my voice startling me. But the pen wasn’t mine. It wasn’t anyone’s.

  Beetles brushed past his face. He swatted at them, nearly hitting one with the back of his hand. He had been so angry when I wouldn’t write the beetles out of the garden, as if it was so easy to take something out of the world once it was in. “I would write something no one would ever forget. I would write myself immortality.”

  “The pen isn’t for that.” I clutched the pen close to my body, under the sleeve of my ratty red sweater.

  When I was sixteen, I loved him. That can be hard to remember. My memories of him are like obsidian lodged under the layers of my past, jagged pieces that won’t dissolve. The good memories are the hardest. There was the tender way he blew on my soup when we ate at Chrysanthemums (I couldn’t stand hot soup), or the graceful arch of his eyebrows, which was most apparent when he was reading, or the time he placed his hand over my eyes, light as beetle wings, when we hiked up the mountain path and came to a bluff, and I was suddenly, intensely afraid of heights. He didn’t mind the things about me other people minded—my aloofness, my old clothes, my tendency to forget that I had said something and say it again.

  I didn’t know then that it was possible to love someone, and for them to love you, and to still be capable of causing so much harm to each other.

  I knew something was wrong when no beetles came to greet me at the entrance to the rose garden. I searched for them under petals and in the sky. No soft wings beat in the air.

  When I was sixteen, I used the pen to put gifts into the world.

  In my twenties, I would have used it to try to change the world; sweeping changes, impassioned and rash and thoughtless.

  In my thirt
ies, I would have destroyed the pen, for power is a dangerous thing.

  In my forties, I would have thought very hard about how to put goodness into the world, and done it. I would have examined the consequences, rejoicing at good outcomes, finding my way through my guilt at bad ones.

  Now that I am in my fifties, if I found such a pen again, I think I would use it to put gifts into the world.

  I found Matthew pacing by the dead leaf chairs. His face held righteousness and shame. When I think back on this memory, I am struck by how young he looked.

  “Why couldn’t you let me have a place of my own?” I said, my voice loud and hard. “Because you didn’t make it? Because it was mine and not yours?”

  He lunged for the pen, and in my astonishment I let it slip from my fingers.

  He had no paper, so he wrote against his skin, and the words sprang up. He gave himself invincibility, immortality, wealth. The words were too heavy to come into the world. They sank against him, drilling down into his arms.

  “Stop,” I said. “You can’t exist this way.”

  The words strangled in his throat, coasting over his body. He had asked for too much. He had asked for things that could not be.

  I grabbed the pen and coaxed the words back in, one letter at a time. As I pulled the ink from him, he crumpled forward, his breathing harsh, his eyes fluttering closed.

  With the unwritten words reabsorbed, I felt the power contained within the pen. I could have written him immortal. I could have written it for myself.