Hold Your Fire

by Lisa Mangum

  Eddy’s mouth fell open. “No way.”

  I pulled out my phone, heart hammering. Would this finally be dramatic enough to matter?

  Behind me, the boy chuckled. I turned to glower at him. Did he mind? I was about to lose years’ worth of records of my life and adventures, and he thought it was funny? My eyes locked with his. He grinned.

  “What do you keep looking at?” Eddy asked me, not bothering to keep her voice down.

  I turned back to her, embarrassed that she couldn’t read the social cues. “Not so loud!” I whispered. “That boy over there. He keeps watching us.”

  Eddy strained her neck, looking around. “What boy? Are you talking about the barista? Because he’s, like, sixty.”

  I wanted to smack my forehead. “No, the guy one table down from us.”

  Eddy stared at me with a mixture of concern and alarm in her eyes. “You’ve finally lost it, haven’t you?”

  I gaped at her, then turned to stare at the teenage boy who was back to reading his book.

  “You can’t see him, can you?” I stood from my chair so fast that it fell over.

  The boy looked up as my chair crashed to the ground, then flashed me a charming smile.

  I marched over to his table. Eddy followed, looking ready to restrain me in case my madness took over and I leapt on the table to do an insane jig.

  “Do we know each other?” I demanded of the boy.

  Panicked, Eddy asked, “Dilly, who are you talking to?”

  The boy’s smile widened. He had a very nice smile. His eyes were so dark brown they looked black in the low café lighting. I felt myself sinking into his gaze for a moment until I gave my head a little shake to snap myself out of it.

  “We don’t know each other yet,” he said, “but we could get acquainted if you’re interested.”

  I stared, then grinned, heart bursting with elation, and whirled toward my sister. “Eddy, we did it! You can’t see him, but there’s a guy sitting here. Right here! I can see and hear him. Do you know what this means?” I grabbed her shoulders, squeezing them tightly. “It worked!”

  Her face was awed. “You’re muse-touched?”

  The boy cleared his throat. “Not quite yet.”

  I turned back to him eagerly. “Why? Do we actually have to touch?” I considered leaping across the table so as to get it over with, but then he stood.

  “Please, let’s take a look at what you’ve got.”

  Eager to obey, I pulled Eddy back to our table as the boy came over to examine my comic pages. He looked at my open sketchbook with interest, but made no attempt to flip its pages.

  “You can’t interact with anything, can you?” I asked. “To move things around or look through my papers?”

  He shook his head. “Muses are spirits. The only thing I’ll be able to interact with will be you. If I choose you.”

  Eddy glanced back and forth between me and the empty, silent air I was talking to. She looked distinctly unnerved. “This is going to be hard to get used to.”

  I ignored her, asking the muse, “What do you mean, if you choose me?”

  He relaxed into his chair, folding his arms behind his head. I noticed a large tattoo on his arm. It was a beautiful depiction of a bird tangled in thorny vines, its beak open, its eyes hollow. “Well, we’ve only just met. I need to decide if you’re worth it, don’t I?”

  My heart sank. “I thought that’s why you showed up.” What more would I have to do?

  “Let’s start with introductions,” the boy said, unmoved. “You can call me Chance. And you are …?”

  “Diella Magnolia Whitfield,” I said, trying to sound confident, like I was at a job interview. “But you can call me Dilly.”

  “Well, Dilly, you should know that this”—he gestured to all my props on the table—“was the most hilarious thing I’ve ever seen anyone try in order to attract a muse.”

  “Hilarious?” I huffed, mouth falling open. I turned to Eddy. “He thinks my techniques to attract a muse are hilarious!”

  Eddy blinked slowly at me. “I would have found it hilarious too if you hadn’t been so serious about it.”

  Chance snapped his fingers. “That’s it exactly. You took your quest so seriously I couldn’t help but come and find out more. So, tell me. You make comics. Is that your end goal?” He suddenly ducked his head to look under the table. I peeked down and saw the page of video game maps had fallen to the floor, face up.

  “Ignore that!” I insisted, sweeping the page away with my foot. “That’s just something I used to do for fun. But not anymore. I make serious art.”

  His raised his eyes to meet mine. “Like comics?”

  I pressed my palms against my jeans to wipe away my sweat. What if he didn’t like my answer?

  Noting my hesitation, Chance said, “Muses are drawn to whatever appealed to them in their former life. Which is why you’re in luck.” He gave me a dazzling, yet somehow devious smile. “Because I personally like comics. I even went through a video game phase before I got serious.”

  I blinked. If he’d enjoyed video games while alive, he couldn’t be a very old muse.

  Chance stretched his fingers to pop his knuckles. “Shall we get started?”

  My stomach jolted. “You mean you’re going to help me?” My heart hammered so hard that I wanted to leap up and run circles around the table in excitement. “So what can you do for me?”

  Chance leaned forward, and I found myself sinking into his gaze again. “Would you like to find out?” He reached his hand out, then paused. “Just one more question.” His eyes narrowed calculatingly. “What are you willing to do in order to create something that matters?”

  “What am I willing to do?” I whispered. “Anything.”

  Eddy was staring at me, wide-eyed. “I hope you’re not selling your soul—”

  The outside world melted into a blur as Chance’s hand touched mine. He moved to stand behind my chair, leaning over my shoulder as he guided my hand. The room around me faded away. Even my sense of my own body dissolved. All I could feel was his guiding touch as he moved my fingers to grab my lucky pen. Together, we picked up one of the unfinished comic layouts and put pen to page.

  It began like a burst of fireworks. My hand moved impossibly fast across the page, yet it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Perfect lines of ink flowed from my hand at what seemed like the speed of light. Full character drawings appeared like blossoming flowers. Panel lines and speech bubbles and sound effects. Page after page—all full of ink and art.

  I became vaguely aware of Eddy at my side, laying down more sheets of paper in front of me as I filled the ones I already had. She seemed to be moving in fast-motion, like she, too, was unbound from the tether of time.

  In what felt like a few minutes, I finished inking every comic page I’d previously sketched out. I considered switching back to a pencil to finish some more layouts, but with Chance’s hand guiding mine, I chose to flip to a blank page and begin drawing in ink with no sketches to guide me. What once seemed impossible was now the obvious solution. Why sketch first when I could go straight to the finished product?

  And the illustrations pouring out of my fingers were perfect.

  I was vaguely aware of night passing and daylight reappearing through the windows. People began to gather around the table. Eddy explained something distantly to them as I worked. Someone touched my shoulder, trying to shake me out of my trance, but I shrugged them off. I had work to do.

  People were taking photos and videos. I ignored them.

  Eddy tried to push a cup of water to my lips. I shoved it away. How dare she get water near my art!

  I heard my mother’s concerned voice as she tried to press food into my hands. Oh, so she was finally here to witness my brilliance? I pushed the food away. Didn’t they understand how important this was? Was Chance the only person who understood? I could still feel his solid presence at my back, his firm, insistent guidance on my hand. He and the pen
were the only things that were real.

  Night fell again. I could feel a dull ache behind my eyes, but my work was not done. I drew even faster. I knew I could finish my entire graphic novel in one sitting if I kept this up. And yet, something was changing. Even though the art still poured from my fingers, it felt distant now. Everything was growing darker. I was fading.

  I saw myself drawing as if from a distance. The empowered, artistic Dilly sat glowing in a spotlight, while the ghostly apparition that was my current awareness sat cold and tired in the dark.

  Chance walked toward me out of the darkness. He stood next to me, arms folded, and watched the muse-touched version of me continue to draw flawlessly.

  “You’re holding up well. Many artists collapse or give up after just a few hours. They don’t have enough resolve. You obviously don’t have that problem.”

  I remained sitting on the black, empty floor, staring numbly. “Is it supposed to be this way? This whole experience has felt so … rushed. And now … so distant.”

  “Every muse is different. This is just how I work.”

  “So working with you will always make me feel this … empty? There won’t ever be peace?”

  Chance snorted. “Did you get into this business for peace? I thought you got into it so you could make something amazing.”

  More time passed, and an aching coldness closed in on me. I was being crushed by a weight I knew I couldn’t bear much longer.

  I whispered, “I’m dying, aren’t I?”

  Chance laughed. “Of course not. I didn’t take you for the type who’d die so easily.”

  My shoulders slumped under the unknown pressure, even as my other self continued to draw. “When will I get to rest? When will this be done?”

  Chance crouched beside me, giving me a pitying smile like I was a whining child. “It's never done. Sure, you can eat and sleep sometimes, but you only win by never truly stopping. If you stop, you lose.”

  “So I’ll never be satisfied?”

  “It’s not about being satisfied. It’s about being remembered. It’s about accomplishing something that makes your life matter.”

  I shook my head, wishing I could break this numbness. “That sounds like a great way to never be happy.”

  “Listen,” Chance said, finally sounding angry, “someday you will die. Someday, everyone will forget you. Unless you do something worth remembering. You need to make something they can’t possibly ignore, something they can’t possibly forget."

  I sensed in him a wild hunger, a yawning, craving emptiness. All those things he was describing … those were things he had never had. He’d failed to make something lasting while alive. He’d been forgotten.

  I suddenly noticed that Chance wasn’t crouching casually anymore. He was kneeling, his shoulders bowing just like mine were. The same weight that was upon me was crushing him as well. I looked at his tattoo of the bird entangled in thorns and shivered.

  I struggled to breathe. “We can’t go on like this.”

  It wasn’t just about me anymore. We were in this as a united whole. We were intertwined, our creative journeys coming together as one.

  Chance looked at me, and I could see the dark desperation in his eyes. “We have to. We have to create something that matters.”

  I gazed at the version of me drawing flawless pages of art. She was brilliant. A genius. But also … empty. She had once created things because it brought her joy. Now she’d decided she would never be happy until she made something that people would love, praise, revere …

  But would it ever be enough?

  “I know you said it’s not about being satisfied,” I told Chance, “but if you died right now—for real this time—would this have been enough? With the crowd around us and the spotlight on our creations, do you feel like you could finally rest easy, knowing that your life mattered?”

  I thought about the pages of video game designs I’d joyfully created with Eddy. I thought of how I’d abandoned them once I’d decided that having fun wasn’t a good enough reason to do anything. Chance seemed to have gone through something similar.

  Tears filled my eyes. How I wanted to sit down with Eddy now and create simply for the sake of creating. No expectations. Just joy.

  Asking myself just as much as Chance, I said, “If your soul died now, would you feel like something was still missing?”

  Our gazes locked, intertwined.

  “Happiness,” I whispered. “Don’t you want it?”

  Chance closed his eyes.

  I closed mine as well.

  Once again, I could feel myself at the café table, feverishly putting ink to the paper. I could feel Chance’s hand on mine, pushing me onward and onward.

  “Let me go,” I told him.

  “No. We’re not done.”

  “Let go of me and listen!” I took a shuddering breath, struggling to focus past the crushing pressure. “I want you to have a turn. A chance to create the things you never did while you were alive.”

  Chance said nothing.

  “What is it that you love?”

  I felt his grip slackening, his guidance waning. My hand slowed. Everything slowed.

  “Let me help you,” I whispered.

  This time, I took his hand. I pressed my pen into his trembling fingers and helped hold it steady. He couldn’t truly touch the pen, but he could touch me. Together, we could do this.

  For a moment, we were completely still. Painfully so. Then, Chance’s hand moved. My hand moved along with it, carefully, slowly moving the pen in beautifully delicate strokes. Before, his guidance had been all fierce, brilliant efficiency, but now his touch was gentle, almost loving, like he didn’t want to miss a single moment of how it felt to create his own art again.

  He finished the last lines, and I finally opened my eyes.

  On the paper before us was a bird with outstretched wings. Unlike the tattoo on his arm, this bird did not have hollow eyes. Its eyes were bright, its mouth open in wondrous, glorious song.

  I breathed deep, feeling the weight lift.

  The raw, empty hunger in both of us was gone.

  And finally … there was joy.

  I slumped in my chair and looked at Chance. “I think I need a nap.”

  Finally able to see clearly, I looked at the crowd of people around me. Most were strangers. I even saw several news reporters. But sitting beside me was my faithful sister. Her expression was both expectant and relieved. Behind her, I could see my parents approaching, food and water in hand like they’d just been waiting for me to snap out of my trance.

  I had a lot to explain.

  But I had time.

  “After the nap,” I said to Chance, “I know what we should work on.”

  He squeezed my hand. “What do you have in mind?”

  I ducked under the table to pull out the sheet of video game level designs. Setting it before us, I smiled. “Let’s work on something fun.”

  About the Author

  When Tanya Hales was a baby, she enjoyed books by chewing them to pieces before eventually moving on to the higher art of reading. Tanya splits her time between her work as a writer, an illustrator, and a mother, all of which she loves intensely. She now lives in the Utah Valley with her family, constantly daydreaming about imaginary worlds.

  The Hunter and the Hunted

  Raphyel M. Jordan

  It was another beautiful summer day in the country of Dahomey, Africa, as Oseye climbed a lone tree set upon a hill. The young woman gazed across the terrain of a valley below, evaluating the layout of the land. The area was lush and green, complimented by a riverbed that was fueled by a nearby waterfall she had just taken a drink from.

  “I’ve finally found it,” the huntress said to herself, relieved.

  Venturing to the river below wouldn’t be easy, given that wild game would be present upon arrival. Lions wouldn’t trail too far behind. However, Oseye was more concerned about another predator, one far more exotic and treacherous, perhap
s even supernatural. She was hunting the Grootslang.

  Legend said the creature lived in a faraway cave located in the south, though it often journeyed to this specific riverbed in her region since it offered the freshest water. The beast—part elephant, part snake—was an accidental abomination made by the deities when the world was new and they were unaware of the consequences in making such a powerful creature. While most hunters avoided the land because of the creature, Oseye had no choice but to risk an encounter if she wanted to pass her trial and become a Mino warrior, one of the all-female elite soldiers chosen to defend her country. Besides, she’d have a little help as soon as he arrived.

  “Most mortals stay clear of this land,” a voice below her proclaimed. “Was I that bad of a teacher?”

  “There you are, Agé.” Oseye hopped down from the tree. “Thanks for meeting me here.”

  “My dear Little Oseye, as Fon of the Hunt, you know it’s my duty to guide you. Besides, you’re a favorite.”

  Oseye smiled as she leapt into his greeting arms. His face had remained unchanged ever since she was little. Her friend’s skin still looked as fresh as umber, perfectly molded on his refined physique, and his hazel eyes glistened in the sun. Clean-shaven, he boasted a prominent jawline. Many would describe Agé as being the most handsome specimen of a man they had ever seen, if he were but a man. Fons like him were deities credited for creating and bringing order to the world, each gifted in a specific role.

  Agé pulled away and examined Oseye, a proud smile on his face.

  “I always look forward to this day,” he said. “No matter how many times I’ve witnessed it. And to think you now face the trial to become a Mino … I must be getting old.”

  “Very funny.”

  “You human creatures grow too quickly for my liking. I won’t know what to do with myself when I hear that you are to be married.”

  “Can we make sure that I survive all nine days of the trial first?” Oseye led her friend down the hill toward a ledge. She pointed at the riverbed.