Uncanny Magazine Issue 41

by Lynne M. Thomas

  “Yes,” I said. My lungs spasmed. I bent over coughing until a ruby the size of my thumbnail dropped out of my mouth and onto the lap of my dress, leaving a small smear of blood. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “Sorry. Yeah. I’ve thought about it. But we’re wrapped up in the ritual now. Stopping the play would kill us.”

  We sat there in silence as the lights from the rest of the theater shut off one by one and the darkness settled into place around us. An awful exhaustion hung over him. He hadn’t yet found in himself whatever it was in me that made me keep going. It was because I hated seeing him like that that I said what I said next, even though I was certain it was doomed to fail.

  “If you stop a ritual it destroys everything they’re tied to, the ritual-doers included,” I said, “but you can modify them. I’ve wondered if it’s possible to keep modifying it until it breaks, without immediately vaporizing anything.”

  “You can?”

  “Well—yes, but this play’s been cycling over and over for about a thousand years now. Even the smallest change would be dangerous.”

  “More dangerous than this?” He held up his bandaged hands.

  “Yes, actually. You might hurt the audience, not just us.”

  Sebastian, ordinarily all waver and tremble, was suddenly hard-edged. “Don’t you think they’d deserve it?”

  “You used to be in that audience. You used to come every night.” I hadn’t quite forgiven him for that.

  “We should bend the script,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Bend it until it breaks.”

  “Maria won’t let you.”

  “She can’t stop me.”

  I didn’t want him to find out how wrong he was, but I knew I couldn’t sway him.

  I was tense, waiting for Sebastian to enact whatever disastrous plan he had devised, but most of the play went by without him abandoning the script. It was only after the lady’s death that he made his move.

  The alchemist was weeping over the body. It was time for him to cry out, “But I will make it so that she’ll always hold the light.”

  But he said nothing at all. He didn’t turn the lady’s corpse to crystal. The audience muttered to each other in discontent as the curtains closed.

  Maria waited for us. A swarm of artificial stars hovered around her shoulders, spitting sparks. They gilded her with a sickly glow. “Sebastian, would you like to hear what just happened downstairs?”

  “Why do I feel like you’re going to tell me anyway?”

  “The staircase in the east wing collapsed! It’ll take weeks to repair the damage. You seem to have forgotten what is necessary to uphold this fine old establishment. Still. Better late than never, as they say.”

  She flicked her hand. Her stars hummed, high-pitched and grating, like a thousand fingers on a thousand wineglasses, and dove at Sebastian. He cried out. The air filled with curls of smoke and a sickening smell. They charred through his costume and burrowed into his skin. She flicked her hand again and they darted back into the air, readying for a second strike.

  There was a thick glass pipe the length of my arm by my feet, a discarded prop for the alchemist’s equipment. I picked it up and swung wildly at the stars. I hit one, two, three, and sent them careening against the wall, where they smashed and fell to the ground, lifeless. The glass flared molten where it struck them. I hit two more before the pipe began to melt in my hands. Maria was occupied by guiding the last star in pelting Sebastian, who was in too much pain to fight back. Without thinking, I snatched the star from the air with my hand.

  I might have screamed—it was hard to be sure. The burning filled my whole world. It hurt more than any of the stars Maria had ever made for the play. It batted at the cage of my fingers, which were still somehow clenched around it, too paralyzed by pain to even flinch open. Desperate, on instinct, I did the same thing I’d done with every other star I’d held. I put it in my mouth and bit down.

  At first: fire. But then blissful coolness, sweet enough to overshadow the familiar sting of the shards cutting into my flesh.

  I breathed out, shuddering. Maria frowned faintly as she watched me swirl the shattered piece of the star around my mouth. I glanced at Sebastian. He’d fallen to the floor, eyes squeezed shut.

  I spat the shards in Maria’s face.

  They weren’t moving fast enough to cut her, but she recoiled as they battered against her cheek and fell down onto her dress. They left bloody smears.

  I spat a mouthful of blood at her feet. She didn’t move to stop me as I went to Sebastian and helped him to his feet. With him leaning on me, we staggered down the hall and away from her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to me suddenly.

  “For what?”

  “When I was sixteen, I came to see the play. It was… you and… him… you were… so bright. I loved it. I kept coming back. I never got tired of it. It was why I wanted to be an actor. I was so excited when Maria asked me to do this. I’m sorry.”

  I’d thought I would have more anger in me, when we finally had this conversation, but I couldn’t find any. I sighed. “You never did anything to hurt me. You just watched. It’s—this place turns everything pretty. It’s—fine.”

  “I’m not dumb enough to think that’s an excuse for applauding.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it is. Figuring that out, that’s your business, Sebastian, not mine.”

  He didn’t seem to be expecting that answer.

  I woke to halls coated in dust. I stooped down and traced a finger through the white dust layered over the floor, then winced. My hands were injured. Ordinarily Maria’s magic cleaned and mended our wounds to a minimal degree by the time of our next performance, but she hadn’t extended us that courtesy today.

  The walls were slowly sloughing apart without sufficient agony to serve as mortar. I was sure Maria would have the damage repaired by noon, but I felt grim delight despite that. I still thought Sebastian had acted rashly, but a sense of inevitability had settled over me. He had broken the script; I had spat star-glass at Maria. We had set our course, for better or for worse.

  I went to breakfast. Sebastian was walking and talking, which I thought a small miracle. I was confident the audience wouldn’t notice his wounds. They never seemed to notice any suffering too ugly for them to dig their fingers into. Maria smiled at me and asked me to pass the butter dish. I did.

  That night, the lady did not put the stolen star into her mouth but into her pocket. It smoldered against the cloth, but didn’t catch fire. I plucked another from the sky, then another, then another, then carried them to the alchemist intact and unbroken by my teeth. Then I took up the hammer on his work bench and smashed them into fragments of glass and quartz. He gathered up the pieces with a strip of satin I tore from my dress, preventing him from burning himself. And this time, when she learned that someone would have to die for magic to stay in the world, the lady wept and screamed as she died. She never smiled. Her corpse lay dull and without luster under the stage lights as the curtain closed.

  I tensed for a fight when we went backstage, but Maria just said, “You realize what will happen if you keep doing this?”

  Sebastian said, “We’ll be free of this.”

  I said, “I don’t care if the theater collapses.”

  “Those things will be a symptom of it, yes, but magic is already draining out of the world. I know you’ve never seen the world beyond these walls, but Sebastian, do you really want to see your home withered and dead?”

  “I mean, yes,” he said. “After this? Yes. I do. Why not.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, but I spoke first. “No stars?”

  She looked taken aback. “Excuse me?”

  “You don’t have your stars with you. Why not?”

  “It may be an unfamiliar concept to you, my dear, but I was hoping to reason with you. More is at stake here than your comfort. If you’re selfish enough not to recognize that—”

  “You can’t make them powerful enough to hurt any
more, can you,” I said. There’s a peculiar joy that lives beyond the point of no return. “Your sorcery’s withering too.”

  “If you don’t—”

  “What are you going to say? What are you going to threaten us with? There’s no amount of pain that we won’t eventually learn to stomach. What are you going to do, kill us?”

  She didn’t answer.

  If tonight was the last night I performed, I was not going to be beautiful. I ripped off the tiny rubies and amethysts sewn into my dress and took the golden pins from my hair. I dragged my fine clothes through the dust in the halls until I looked like a wraith or a memory. I put on lip rouge without thinking, then scrubbed it off so fiercely that my skin felt raw.

  The lady stole the stars from the sky and tucked them into the folds of her dress, then gave the alchemist a pair of gloves, serviceable and dull, to handle them safely. Something effortless and graceful flowed invisibly back and both between Sebastian and I. We reacted to each other’s movements almost before they happened. We had been stitched together by the play’s repetitions, and when I felt the cycle’s magic wavering, I knew Sebastian felt it too.

  As they always did, the lady and the alchemist learned that someone would have to die.

  “Someone always dies,” I said. I spoke without rhyme or adornment. I hoped the audience thought my words ugly. “But I don’t think it will be me.”

  It was more of a sigh than a snap, the final breaking. I was ready when the metal and stone that held up the stage gave way beneath us. Fear did not touch me. The splintering building and my unscathed body, we made a new circle together, lightning-swift, etching a new truth into the heart of the land.

  The sound of cracking split the air—people screamed—we were in freefall through darkness. I saw Sebastian, crushed stardust trailing behind him, and reached out—

  I was surprised when I woke up and even more surprised to find that I was unhurt, save some shallow cuts here and there. I was nested in rubble and snapped wood and still cloaked in chalky dust. Carefully, I stood. I looked up. There was something wrong with the ceiling. It was domed and impossibly far away, an infinity of air swimming between me and it. It was broken, too: light poured out of what looked like tiny pinpricks gouged into its surface. I couldn’t see the walls.

  And then I realized there were no walls or ceiling at all.

  I heard footsteps. Sebastian was stumbling towards me, cloth wrapped around a gash in his arm. “You made it out,” he said.

  “Did anyone else?”

  “Some.”

  “Not all, though,” I said.

  “No. Not all.”

  I tried to decide whether I was glad or not, but I couldn’t. “What do we do now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Anything?”

  © 2021 Shaoni C. White

  Shaoni C. White is a writer and researcher of speculative fiction and poetry from Southern California. Their work has appeared in PodCastle and is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine. They are currently pursuing a BA in English Literature and Linguistics at Swarthmore College, where they spend their free time LARPing, swing dancing, and embroidering. Find them on Twitter at @shaonicwhite.

  Presque vue

  by Tochi Onyebuchi

  People often spoke about hearing voices: commands, cajoling, or observations made by a chorus of individuals, a collective. But for Sam, it was always just one voice. It had sounded vaguely like her mother’s, and as she fought her way through girlhood and found the certainty and wholeness of identity waiting for her in womanhood, the voice sounded more and more like her own. It wasn’t the voice that had changed, but her. Still, it was as much a part of her life experience as the toes she stuffed into Converse All-Stars, then heels, then flats; or the fingers that cramped over crayons, then cramped over medium .7 mm Sharpie three-color pens, then cramped over PC and MacBook keyboards.

  Dad called it her Conscience, but he was wrong. And Mom called it her Intuition, which felt closer to the truth but still wrong. It told her when to unclench her fists, and it uncurled the innards of a math proof, all in the same timbre. It was silent for her first kiss like it was paying witness, and the same happened at her wedding a decade later. Mom and Dad, beaming, while the voice sat oddly silent.

  It seemed loudest whenever numbers had been put in front of her. Well, not loudest, but clearest. In high school, it gave her the answer to trigonometry problems far too quickly, too quickly in fact for her to show her work. And it showed her where holes could be poked in the arguments of her classmates at university.

  For a period of time, she tried experiments of her own on the voice, trying to pinpoint its frequency, trying to plot its occurrences on the graph of her life, testing for which situations should belong in the control group. If the voice was silent at her wedding, but loud and clanging when she punched Brandon in the nose in third grade, did it have something against boys? If the voice had hurried her through school problems in middle school but had seemed to become more…patient…as soon as high school was in her rear view, what did this say about the nature, the character, of the voice?

  But then it seemed the voice only got better at hiding itself. Where words might be or where she might have felt pushed in one direction or another, toward confrontation or away from it, there was instead an image or a burst of color or some other synesthetic gust. Almost like the voice’s bearer was running away from her.

  A thesis adviser once took her into her office and asked her about it, asked her how she managed to work as swiftly as she had. But she cautioned Sam against doing what she was doing, filling the time freed up by working efficiently with more and more work. “The body is keeping track of all of this, Samantha. You’re more than just a mind on fire.”

  Is that what this is? Sam wanted to ask her. Had so much of her life been the simple product of a brain fever, a prolonged hyperobject of a manic state? Those moments when it truly did feel as though the space behind her eyes were overheating, was that not the voice announcing itself? Was it as simple as a dice-throw gene-quirk of her brain chemistry?

  In that thesis adviser’s office, her mind’s fingers grasped for an answer, collected puzzle pieces—this voice or other presence, the furious pace at which she worked, the ways her problem-solving skills seemed to defy social convention—and alighted on neurodivergence. “I feel like I’m on borrowed time,” she told her thesis adviser, which was all she could think to say. But it was the first time she attached to her Difference a terminal diagnosis. She’d never heard of this symptom of brain cancer, and it didn’t feel like any side-effect of early onset dementia. Nights spent on WebMD, afternoons with a therapist, phone calls with Mom who seemed the closest to naming the thing, all of it produced wrong answers. Or, rather, answers that felt wrong. Sam’s experience, her life, expressed in an equation, and she’d spent so much of it searching for X, trying to assign a numerical, intelligible, value to that unnamable quantity, that singular voice in her head.

  On the eve of her dissertation defense, she saw the look in her thesis adviser’s eyes, like Sam were some animal with a broken wing she’d tried to heal, like Sam were in need of aid or at least consolation, the type given to those nearing their end, and it had only deepened the notion in Sam’s mind that what ran through her was not necessarily poison but rather some electric current that would eventually fry her beyond functioning. She’d been gifted with an outsized amount of experience points, but the price had been her health. “Traditionally, with auditory hallucinations,” the psychiatrist at her intake told her, “the voice or voices narrate one’s thoughts and/or actions.”

  “There’s only one of her,” Sam replied, and it was the first time that Sam felt the thing as separate. Venom that spoke of a cosmic snakebite it could be sucked back through.

  So she took to arguing with the voice in her quieter moments, seeking the solitude of a lab or a study in a barren condo, hoping to cast the thing out. No scientific breakthrough was worth the bruises
on her brain. No longer her almost-conscience or almost-intuition, no longer her guide. Now, an intruder. Fermented fruit she was unable to expel. Neither drink nor drug, neither prescribed nor purloined pill, none of it worked to excise the thing from her. Each new method only served to strip her of control. Therapy ended. Angela left. The voice persisted.

  Sam’s mother saw her suffering, and Sam saw her mother seeing her suffer and was grateful, in the moment, that she had no children of her own, because she couldn’t imagine watching your issue endure hurt you couldn’t do a thing about, watching and wanting nothing more in the world than to trade places with them.

  “I’m okay” and “It’s not your fault” didn’t feel like lies so much as not the whole truth, the same way Conscience and Intuition weren’t false monikers for the voice so much as describing only a sleeve of the whole outfit. But it was what Sam told her mother, even as her mother grew ill, and when she lost her voice, she would look at her daughter and she would look at her husband, and Sam would wait for the question to pop up in her eyes. Would wait for this old woman to get to the point where she had forgotten her family, and maybe she had but every time she saw either of them in her hospital room, she smiled and hugged them and Sam knew that somehow her mother knew that she loved her, even if she had forgotten that Sam was her daughter.

  Sam’s former partner would call on occasion but more often text, and Sam no longer waited for the voice to tell her whether or not to answer. The voice was what had driven Angela away. So sometimes, undecided, Sam would refuse to answer the call or wait before responding to the text and sometimes, undecided, uncoached, she would pick up on the first ring.

  And one day, the phone rang at the same wavelength as Sam’s hurt, still raw from the news of her mother’s passing, and Sam picked up and they talked and talked and talked, and if Sam had taken just a second to pause, she might have noticed something driving her, directing her through the forest of words, guiding her toward reconciliation. She might have heard a voice.