by Tricia Reeks
LOVE HURTS
A Speculative Fiction Anthology
Edited by
Tricia Reeks
Assistant Editors
Kyle Richardson
Margaret Reeks
Meerkat Press
Atlanta
Contents
Introduction - Tricia Reeks
The Sorcerer’s Unattainable Gardens - A. Merc Rustad
A Puzzle by the Name of L - Carla Dash
Jacinta’s Lovers - Steve Simpson
A Concise Protocol for Efficient Deicide - Mel Paisley
Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie - Charlie Jane Anders
The Woman Who Sang - Terry Durbin
Iron Roses - Michal Wojcik
Traveler - Michael Milne
Virgin of the Sands - Holly Phillips
Catching On - Kyle Richardson
Metempsychotic - Leah Brown
Possibly Nefarious Purposes - Michelle Ann King
A Heart for Lucretia - Jeff VanderMeer
Your Moment of Zen - Dan Micklethwaite
Back to Where I Know You - Victoria Zelvin
Green-Eyed Monster - J.D. Brink
By Bargain and by Blood - Aliette de Bodard
The Ghûl (A Nasty Story) - Matt Leivers
Past Perfect - G. Scott Huggins
Favor - Shannon Phillips
WHILE (u > i) i- -; - Hugh Howey
The Boulevardier - David Stevens
Stargazer - Keith Frady
So Fast We’re Slow - Jody Sollazzo
Alice - Morgen Knight
Sing - Karin Tidbeck
Contributors
Copyright © 2015
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form.
Collection, introductory materials, and arrangement copyright © 2015 by Tricia Reeks.
Copyrights to the individual stories remain with the authors, and each has permitted use of the work in this collection.
Published in the United States by Meerkat Press, LLC, www.meerkatpress.com
Edited by Tricia Reeks
Cover and book design by Tricia Reeks
Illustrations by Sergio Garzon
ISBN-13 978-0-9966262-2-4 (acid-free paper)
ISBN-13 978-0-9966262-3-1 (eBook)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015916017
Introduction
Tricia Reeks
I’ve always had a taste for dark—whether it be fiction, movies, chocolate, or wardrobe. I blame it on my mother for letting me watch The Exorcist at the tender age of twelve. What was she thinking?
So, when the idea for a collection of speculative fiction stories about love started percolating, I automatically tagged the word hurts to the end. Like adding a shot of whiskey to your coffee: sure it hurts going down, but the pain is so worth it.
Although a longtime consumer of speculative fiction novels and film, I didn’t discover the short fiction market until more recently. Two things prompted it—stumbling upon Hugh Howey’s Wool during a particularly intense post-apocalyptic reading frenzy, and learning about publications such as Tor.com and Daily Science Fiction through my own writing journey.
I found a whole new world of exceptional authors I’d never even heard of, some of whom are included in this book. My Kindle quickly began to fill with the collections they appeared in, and I became intrigued by the dynamics of a themed anthology—the way the intense emotional ride of a short story can be enhanced by its association and arrangement with others. Intrigue turned into obsession, and obsession turned into Love Hurts.
So with the help of my assistant editors, Kyle Richardson (whose heartbreaking story, Catching On, is in this collection) and Margaret Reeks (who knows her way around The Chicago Manual of Style like nobody’s business), we’ve gathered twenty-six brilliant speculative fiction stories about love, and the pain that so often accompanies it. Sometimes funny, occasionally happy, frequently gut-wrenching—these stories will take your heart on a wild emotional ride.
Love Hurts includes a few hand-picked favorites—previously published work such as Karin Tidbeck’s Sing and Jeff VanderMeer’s A Heart for Lucretia. Stories we read and couldn’t get out of our heads (not that we wanted to). The other eighteen are new—like Steve Simpson’s haunting dystopian fantasy, Jacinta’s Lovers, and Shannon Phillips’s action-packed sci-fi romp, Favor. Great stories that we hope you’ll like as much as we did.
The anthology wasn’t limited to romantic love, though as you might expect with a theme of “love hurts,” most selections fell into that category. But we also have some fascinating tales about other relationships such as between father and son, brother and sister, alien and child.
So join us on this sometimes dark, often painful journey called love. Individually, these stories are wonderful, but I hope we have also managed to capture a bit of the magic that comes from reading them as a collection—that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Sorcerer’s Unattainable Gardens
A. Merc Rustad
Originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction, April 17, 2015
Wrought iron fences loop around the gardens: six deep, the outer three progressively higher, more elaborate, and with more spikes atop, while the inner three create a mirror effect. Say you make it over all six fences without impaling yourself or falling or getting trapped between iron bars that suddenly constrict or twist or move. Say you avoid the fourth fence, the electric one, or the second one with the poisoned varnish, or the sixth one with a taste for blood.
***
Once upon a time, a sorcerer lost their shadow in a bet with a magician. The bet itself is unimportant. Shadowless, the sorcerer wandered the world until, unexpectedly, they found a shadow whose person had been lost to a bet with a sea-witch long before.
***
If you make it past all six fences, then you reach the first garden. It’s a great circular loop of hawthorn and foxglove hedging that has no convenient holes or doors. The hedge speaks with a rusty, gravely, morbid voice; its cadence is so slow you forget the first word before you hear the third one. The hedge asks riddles, like hedges are wont to do in a sorcerer’s garden and, if you get it wrong, the gophers eat you.
***
The sorcerer and the unattached shadow fell in love. “Can we stay together forever?” asked the shadow, twined with the sorcerer under the autumn stars, and the sorcerer said, “Yes.” The sorcerer did not intend to lie.
***
But let’s say you answer the riddle, which no one has been able to guess for sixty-five years, and the hedge opens just enough for you to squeak through with lacerations on your sides and foxglove pollen infecting the cuts. Then you reach the second circle, a rose garden.
***
What the shadow did not know was that, once upon a time, the sorcerer made a bet with a demon and lost. The bet itself is unimportant; the wager was the sorcerer’s happiness. As soon as the sorcerer found true joy, the demon came to collect.
***
Roses of every color imagined or not imagined fill the garden. The air is so thick with fragrance you get high with the first breath and overdose with the second. But let’s say you can hold your breath, or you brought a mask. You hear the roses speaking. Not riddles, of course, because the roses are too polite to infringe on the hedge’s territory. What the roses say is: eat you eat you eat you.
And then they will, of course. Roses need fertilizer just like any other plant. Your bones might become thorns for the next bushes that sprout, if you’re fortunate, and if you’re even luckier, one of the yellow roses will drink your soul instead of the red ones. And if you’re especially tasty, it won’t even hurt.
***
The sorcerer said t
o the shadow, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen.” To look on the shadow brought only grief to them both. So the sorcerer banished the shadow, because once a sorcerer makes a bet, they cannot go back on the wager. Shadows can’t weep.
***
But let’s say you don’t get eaten by the roses. The circle you find yourself in next is a lightless tower that goes downward and never up. Chains spun from hanged men’s gurgles crisscross the stairs that don’t really exist. Beware of the ivy along the walls, for it grows on memory, until your mind is choked and full of leaves, and roots dig out through your skin and you forget why you came, and you sit there forever, and forever, and forever, and . . .
***
The shadow found itself in a glacier. The ice the shadow absorbed melted and dripped down the shadow’s face, and it looked at its hands and clenched them into fists and said, “I will find you again, love.” Somewhere on the other side of the world, the sorcerer heard the shadow’s words and despaired.
***
But let’s say that you don’t trip over nonexistent steps and fall into the abyss, and you bring herbicide for the ivy.
***
The shadow traveled the world alone, becoming a master of disguise, a jack-of-all-trades. No cost was too great to acquire what was needed. The shadow absorbed knowledge and languages and magic and shut away grief so deep it forgot, for a time, it was there. Then the shadow learned how to hunt demons.
***
The second to last circle is made of bubbles, translucent spheres summoned from the essence of Death Itself, for Death has always had a whimsical side. If you pop one, it swallows you, compressing your lungs, siphoning your blood, unraveling your nervous system, grinding your bones into dust. There is no space between the bubbles through which to pass.
***
On the other side of the world, the sorcerer put all their skill into making an unattainable fortress, circles of gardens no one can ever penetrate. There will be no more bets, and no more loss, and in their self-made prison, the sorcerer sits alone. One day, the sorcerer hopes, they will fade from memory so the shadow may mourn, and perhaps one day find peace again.
***
But let’s say you brought needles to prick the bubbles ever so carefully and catch the pieces of death in a lead-lined pouch. When you carve a path through this circle, you find a simple wooden door that asks for a password. If you answer wrong, the door will never have existed. But you answer: “Heart,” and it opens.
***
The shadow laid a delicious trap for the demon: freshly picked souls, harvested from the Tree at the Center of the World. The demon approached, feet soundless on the ice floes the shadow drifted on. “What game shall we play for this luscious prize?” the demon asked, and the shadow said, “No game. I’m here to kill you.”
***
Let’s say you make it into the final circle, the one made of plain stone.
***
The shadow lunged, a lasso made from angel sinew in one hand, and in the other a poniard forged in the eventual heat death of the universe. The demon screamed as the angel sinew snared tight about its neck. The demon’s form flickered through every horrendous shape it knew; yet it couldn’t escape the noose. “You hurt the one I love,” the shadow said. “I do not care for that.” The demon howled for mercy. Shadows are neither merciful nor cruel, except when they are. With the poniard, the shadow cut out the demon’s guts, and in the steaming entrails found every item the demon had stolen with tricks or dice or cards. The demon withered into flakes of ash and sank into the frigid sea-salt waters. The shadow gently scooped up what it had sought for so long, trembling, hoping it was not too late.
***
There are no traps or puzzles or illusions here. This garden is brick, lopsided piles of brown and red and gray stone in no discernible pattern. The sorcerer sits on the middle heap, alone except for the bones. Oh, yes, of course there are bones. Don’t ask what they are from.
The sorcerer is a thin, hunched person of no specific gender, dressed in a blue habit sewn from fish scales. Dull eyes, bones sharp against slack skin. Building an unattainable garden takes its toll on a body.
“Why did you come?” the sorcerer says. There’s deep tiredness in that voice, so much pain. “You will only find sorrow here.”
“I know.” You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. “I brought this for you.”
Their hands shake as they open the box.
Inside, wrapped in turquoise tissue paper, is the sorcerer’s stolen happiness.
They let out a small gasp of shock. “How . . .”
You press a finger against the sorcerer’s lips. “Later. Please take it.” You’ve hoped since the moment you found the wrought iron gates that the sorcerer will not refuse. If the sorcerer says no, you are finished.
The sorcerer folds the paper aside for later use. “How long has it been?”
Too, too long.
“I don’t remember . . .” The sorcerer’s voice catches in their throat. They turn away. “Why did you come?”
“I want you back.” You wait, trembling. There is nowhere else to go. “Please come back, love. I will help you laugh again, I will make you strong. One day, we will tear down these unattainable gardens and walk free. I am here because I need you.” Unsaid: Please don’t banish me to loneliness forever.
The sorcerer shuts their eyes. Then with quivering hands, replaces the happiness inside them. A shudder ripples through the sorcerer’s frame, and they press their face against your shoulder. You stroke their hair and wait.
“I’m so sorry,” the sorcerer says, over and over and over.
You wrap yourself around them and hold them close. For now you are safe from wandering magicians and cunning sea-witches and unsatisfied demons.
“It will be all right, love,” you whisper, because shadows never lie. And for the first time since they built this labyrinth, the sorcerer smiles.
A Puzzle by the Name of L
Carla Dash
When Death knocks on Stephanie’s door, she is wallowing in the aftereffects of her fiancé’s death, trekking aimlessly through the boggy muck that was once her heart, her life, and wondering if this year, finally, will be the one that drains away what’s left of her will to live. Also, she is working on a jigsaw puzzle. The interruption annoys her because, even though most of the cardboard pieces are lying in dark, senseless piles, the blue-black of the river has just started to distinguish itself from the blue-gray mist hovering above it. This is important, she knows. The turning point of the whole activity. The first step towards completion. Stephanie is something of an authority on jigsaw puzzles. She has been doing a lot of them in the two years since Hayden died.
Looking through the peephole, she knows the guy standing on her threshold is Death because he’s wearing a billowing black robe and swinging a scythe back and forth at his side in short, fluid pendulum arcs. Also, there is something about his looks. Something ashen, unfinished. Something not quite existent. She thinks, I should be afraid. She stands perfectly still, unbreathing, waiting for the emotion to flood through her veins, but she feels nothing, so she opens the door.
“Boo,” says Death. His voice is grainy, a new or seldom-used thing, but with a deep, languorous current running beneath it. It is a voice with potential, Stephanie thinks. The kind of voice that could sing arias, seduce in seconds, if only he’d give a little cough or clear his throat.
“You aren’t a ghost,” she replies.
“I’m not?” he asks, all innocence.
Stephanie slides her eyes down the length of his body, once, slowly, just to be sure. Black robe. Still billowing. Scythe. Still swinging. She notices as well that his chest is quite broad, but that his fingers are long and thin.
“Obviously,” she says.
“Hm. Good to know.” Then he smiles, straight and bone white, but fet
ching, charming, like a guy who just a moment ago scored the winning touchdown and is now posing for a photograph, his dad’s proud, vicarious arm slung across his shoulders. “Can I come in?”
“No.”
As he sticks out his bottom lip and rounds his eyes into pathetic, puppy-dog orbs, Stephanie thinks there is something familiar about the arrangement of his features—the alignment of his pupils with the corners of his lips, the tilt of his nose, the curve of his eyes. A name flitters through the depths of her skull, but won’t float to the surface.
“I’m losing my mind,” she decides, says, and shuts the door in his face.
But when she turns, he is sitting on her living room couch, ankles crossed, arms folded behind his head, smirking. Again, Stephanie feels she should be afraid. She should call the police. Try to throw him out. But she’s never been one to fight the inevitable. If he got in once, she figures he can get in again.
So instead she flings out an arm and says, “Over there is the kitchen. Down the hallway on the left is the bathroom, at the end my bedroom, never go in there, on the right another room, definitely never go in there. This, obviously, is the living room. The couch you’re sitting on is where you’ll be sleeping. Do you even need to sleep?”
Death shrugs. “Sure. You done with the tour?”
“Yes,” Stephanie says.
“Great, because this place is giving me ideas.” Death springs up from the couch and bounces over to a wall. “You’ve got a loose socket cover here,” he says, prodding the plastic and the wires beneath. “Maybe you can stick a finger in. I doubt it’d do the trick, though. Maybe if you stand in a bucket of water at the same time? Or,” he says, dashing to a window, “maybe you can jump through this, while it’s closed, of course, for maximum effect. Looks like a long fall. What is it? Eighteen floors? Nineteen? Wouldn’t be very much left of you. Maybe you can stick your arm through the glass, then drag it back and forth across the shards. Or, if bloodiness appeals to you, maybe . . . do you have knives?” he asks, shooting off to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.