Wilde staggers up, a walrus in his movements. He seizes Bosie by the waist and literally throws him to the side. He finds Ayat on the ground, coughing up blood. Bosie had started to bite his throat open.
“Not like this,” Ayat manages. “Kill me, Oscar. I don’t want to…come back.”
All men kill the thing they love.
Bosie rolls over. The cataract gaze locks onto them as he hisses.
“I—I can’t, Ayat.”
“If you love me,” Ayat says.
The brave man with a sword.
“But I am not brave, Ayat,” Wilde says, his melodious voice cracking. “I’m not like you, I cannot use the sword.” The fencer has no idea what he’s talking about. “I cannot even give you a kiss. But here,” he says, forcing the Webley into the Frenchman’s hand as Bosie manages to stand and shuffle toward them.
“Oscar.”
“We’ll do it together. I shall help you, if you lend me your strength. Oh, I am a fool. What strength have you left to lend? I am a pitiless borrower, Ayat. Here, both our fingers on the trigger—”
Ayat’s face shatters with the blast.
Wilde does kill Bosie afterwards, but not straight away. He takes up Ayat’s stolen blade and breaks into the nearest building and climbs the stairs. From the second floor window, he watches Bosie walk about in what appears to be stunned circles for twenty minutes before he suddenly decides on a direction. From his vantage point, Wilde detects the reason for this sea change—a child, lost and terrified, is standing in the middle of the road a block over. Bosie has caught the scent. Wilde’s breath hitches and he knows what must come next. He cannot permit such an outrage.
The memory of the deed lingers and refuses to stale. What’s so horrifying is the freedom each sunrise brings since Bosie’s beheading. He is at first philosophical about it, telling himself that he now realizes death is merely the state in which the striving mind finally perceives the Nothingness it has always suspected was there. He is a delight among the refugees fleeing across France to the Channel, an absurd entertainer, a legend, a perfect Christ. “The best way to conquer death is by not dying,” he says, and somehow to the people who have lost their friends and families, their very future, to the Lazarus plague, this statement proves the very essence of cheer.
There are rumors everywhere. The horrors that infected France have moved across Europe and there are reported outbreaks in England itself. This news makes the Channel crossing very tense, as someone announces the British military will either sink the vessel before it docks or else execute them all as soon as they got off. This image is so vivid to mad minds that several men and women jump overboard at the halfway point and are soon out of sight, swimming, swimming.
Wilde however hopes the outbreak has happened in England. He counts on it, for Bosie’s death troubles him with freedom. He senses his past life with Bosie no longer counts and that he can now live unfettered—almost. One chain remains about his neck, and perhaps around Bosie’s too, if his spirit lingers. But Wilde knows how to break it, and so he crosses back to the country that persecuted him.
All of Western Europe seems to be accompanying him, and nothing staunches the invasion. Wilde encounters no Customs clerk to whom he can declare his genius or Ayat’s sword or the more precious thing he carries in a black satchel. Wilde steps onto English soil three years after vowing to never return. In a way, he has not broken his pledge. The Wilde who made it no longer exists.
When I am dead cremate me.
Months ago Wilde heard—and delighted in—a rumor that Bosie’s father, despite the wishes stated in his absurd poem, was not cremated but instead buried vertically with his head pointing down, his gaze directed at more eternal fires. If true, his plan may work. Queensberry’s body is still far away, on the estates of Kinmount House in Scotland. It will be an arduous affair getting there, especially if every city in England and its countryside teem with Lazari. He already knows this must be the case. The wind is tinted with a familiar chill and scent, even this close to the sea. Survivors call it the Lazari’s Breath and it is a combination of mass, mobile decomposition and a sweating terror.
Wilde watches the refugees flock west—thousands of them with thousands more on the way. They are heading for larger ports with ships they will storm, if necessary, to seek shelter in America. Wilde remembers his own trip there decades ago as he stalks northward, stopping just once to set the satchel down so he can grasp Ayat’s sword with both hands. It did belong to Napoleon, after all—who is Wilde to deny anyone a thwarted dream? (And perhaps the Emperor too has risen and even now stumbles and slouches through the Arc de Triomphe in an abandoned Paris, his hand still famously tucked into his shirt, disconnected from any arm.) With a cry, he takes the sword and plunges it into the ground, releasing it to quiver like a living thing reveling in territorial conquest and triumph. Wilde admires the weapon’s grace and beauty, forged from steel and silver, shining with gold gilt but bronzed with dried blood.
Taking up the sword again as he retrieves the satchel, he says, “Bosie, we are on our way.”
The journey takes weeks. The sword conquers armies of Lazari. Wilde lacks Ayat’s skill but his stamina and ruthlessness, powered by a monomaniacal fixation, keeps him moving. It is more exciting, more electrifying, to dispatch British Lazari. He no longer even sees the business as gruesome—each is a small revenge and freedom leading to the greater one ahead.
If doubts possess him, he need only sleep to have all confidence restored. Each night his dream is exactly the same. He stands in Reading prison watching a young man’s execution. He cannot remember the man’s name, only that Wilde has sworn eternal love to him. The youth is hanged until death and then his body is lowered to the ground. Almost at once the body resurrects and becomes vibrant. Shocked, the prison officials hang him again. The body thrashes on its rope endlessly and the warden and all the guards flee in terror. The gates are left open and everyone escapes except Wilde, who stands pressing his forehead against the man’s bound legs and weeping.
“We are here, Bosie.”
The grave of Bosie’s father, John Sholto Douglas, Marquess of Queensberry. When I am dead cremate me. Perhaps the monster’s wishes were carried out after all—perhaps digging will reveal a vessel of ashes where the body should be. Wilde strikes his spade into the earth, snarling at the labor of it, willing the dirt to yield.
A half hour later he finds signs of—O wonderful paradox!—life.
The rumors are true. Bosie’s father has been buried vertically upside down. There is no coffin at all, just a body jammed into the earth. Wilde’s spade finds the feet and the feet are—moving. A thin layer of dirt pulses like a beating heart and Wilde clears it to reveal two worn and filthy soles. He gasps, falls back and hastens to the satchel.
He pulls Bosie’s head from within and sets it atop the tombstone. “Now at last I understand Salome,” Wilde says, considering the head. The desiccated blue cataracts leer straight ahead at Wilde as he resumes digging. Queensberry’s legs kick in greater strides as Wilde disencumbers them. It takes almost three hours before he can drag the body out of its hole.
The Marquess is clearly ravenous and Wilde recognizes a hunger that is unchanged by death. Had he been buried like a normal person, he would have clawed his way to the surface weeks ago. Wilde swallows, angered by his fear of the familiar, rotting face. He did not come all this way to indulge fear. Queensberry suddenly lunges stiffly at him and Wilde shrieks and bashes his head with a powerful backhand. The fear goes, replaced with a long nourished rage that seizes all of his being. He will use the sword.
There is no God, Wilde thinks. And if there is a God, what he does next is perhaps not technically a sacrilege, an immorality so vile that even the most decadent of men would turn from the very idea in horror. It is not necrophilia if the body is resurrected, after all, and he pins Queensberry into the dirt before the grave and shames the father in front of the son.
When it is finished, he takes
Ayat’s sword and beheads the Marquess and puts it on the tombstone next to Bosie’s. The air around Kinmount House fills with laughter and the echo of heavy footfalls. It is Wilde, his long arms swaying in the air as his body writhes, a man veiled with life, and he is dancing, dancing, dancing.
The Contributors
MATTHEW CHENEY’s work has been published by English Journal, One Story, Unstuck, Weird Tales, Web Conjunctions, Strange Horizons, Failbetter.com, Ideomancer, Pindeldyboz, Weird Fiction Review, Rain Taxi, Locus, and SF Site, among other places. He is the former series editor for Best American Fantasy and the co-editor, with Eric Schaller, of the occasional online magazine The Revelator.
JOHN CHU designs microprocessors by day and writes by night. His fiction has been published in Boston Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and Tor.com, among others.
R.W. CLINGER is a resident of Pittsburgh. His work includes the novels Nebraska Close, Just a Boy, Skin Tours, and The Last Pile of Leaves. The Boyfriend Season, his first short story collection, was published by JMS Books. He is currently at work on a new gay mystery. For more information, visit rwclinger.com.
SEAN EADS is a writer living in Denver, CO. He’s originally from Kentucky and currently makes his living as a reference librarian. His first novel, The Survivors, was a finalist for the 2013 Lambda Literary Award in the science fiction category. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including Shock Totem, Waylines Magazine, and the Journal of Popular Culture. His favorite writers include Ray Bradbury and Herman Melville, his favorite sports are basketball and golf, and his favorite beer is Gulden Draak.
Having been, at various times, and under different names, a minister’s daughter, a computer programmer, the author of metaphysical thrillers, an organic farmer and a profound sleeper, ELI EASTON is happily embarking on yet another incarnation as a gay romance author
CASEY HANNAN lives and writes in Kansas City. His debut collection of stories, Mother Ghost, is available from Tiny Hardcore Press. He can be found at casey-hannan.com.
CLAYTON LITTLEWOOD was born in Skegness, England, in 1963 and grew up in Weston-super-Mare. He has an MA in Film & Television and writing comedy scripts. In his recent incarnations Clayton has been running the shop Dirty White Boy with his partner, Jorge Betancourt, writing the “Soho stories” column for The London Paper and contributing regularly to BBC radio. His first book, Dirty White Boy: Tales of Soho, was named the GT book of the year. Goodbye to Soho is his follow-up.
SAM J. MILLER is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Electric Velocipede, Shimmer, Daily Science Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Minnesota Review, and The Rumpus, among others. He is a graduate of the 2012 Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the co-editor of Horror After 9/11, an anthology published by the University of Texas Press. Visit him at samjmiller.com.
J. E. ROBINSON received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award for his essays. His novel Skip Macalester was designated a Paperback Pick by the American Booksellers Association. An ancient historian, he teaches at the Saint Louis College of Pharmacy.
DAMON SHAW lives in the Canary Islands, fifty miles off the African Coast. He makes stuff; puppets and benches and sculptures and life-sized wooden camels, and other wooden inventions which he sells to the never-ending stream of holiday makers who pass his stall every Sunday. He also writes and his work has been in The Touch of the Sea, The Lavender Menace, and Daily Science Fiction, as well as other markets. Damon is threatening to write a novel.
CORY SKERRY lives in the Northwest U.S. and works at an upscale adult boutique. In his free time, he writes stories, draws comics, copy edits for Shimmer Magazine, and goes hiking with his two sweet, goofy pit bulls.. When he grows up, he’d like science to make him into a giant octopus.
ROBERT SMITH lives in Brooklyn. He has been published in Evergreen Review, several NYC queer publications, contributed to Lambda Literary Foundation, and read original material in curated events at various literary venues, galleries and spaces, including New Museum. He is currently writing his first novel, titled Numbskull.
NGHI VO lives by an inland sea. Her current interests include old gods, new gods, candymaking, alchemy, puppet theater, and the Ottoman Empire. Her work has appeared in Crossed Genres, Strange Horizons, and Unlikely Story.
KAI ASHANTE WILSON lives in New York City. His first published story can be found in the Bloodchildren anthology.
The Editor
STEVE BERMAN owns a great many books, a great many of which are gay-themed and a great many of those are eerie and fantastical. Well, the stories, not so much the books themselves, but he does possess a book reported to turn any flower pressed between its pages into a cordial (he’s never dared try because he fears getting the book wet) and a scandalous memoir penned by Didier de Grandin, the bastard gay son of Seabury Quinn’s famous occult detective.
Introduction-Steve Berman ix
Grindr-Clayton Littlewood 3
The Ghosts of Emerhad-Nghi Vo 13
How to Dress an American Table-J.E. Robinson 21
Caress-Eli Easton 33
57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides
-Sam J. Miller 67
Happy Birthday, Numbskull-Robert Smith 79
Right There in Kansas City-Casey Hannan 89
The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere
-John Chu 95
Seven Lovers and the Sea-Damon Shaw 113
In the Brokenness of Summertime-R.W. Clinger 139
Lacuna-Matthew Cheney 151
Superbass-Kai Ashante Wilson 173
Midnight at the Feet of the Caryatides-Cory Skerry 191
The Revenge of Oscar Wilde-Sean Eads 211
Table of Contents
Wilde Stories 2014
The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction
edited by
Steve Berman
Introduction
Grindr
Clayton Littlewood
The Ghosts of Emerhad
Nghi Vo
How to Dress an American Table
J.E. Robinson
Caress
Eli Easton
57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides
Sam J. Miller
Happy Birthday, Numbskull
Robert Smith
Right There in Kansas City
Casey Hannan
The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere
John Chu
Seven Lovers and the Sea
Damon Shaw
In the Brokenness of Summertime
R.W. Clinger
Lacuna
Matthew Cheney
Superbass
Kai Ashante Wilson
Midnight at the Feet of the Caryatides
Cory Skerry
The Revenge of Oscar Wilde
Sean Eads
Table of Contents
Wilde Stories 2014
The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction
edited by
Steve Berman
Introduction
Grindr
Clayton Littlewood
The Ghosts of Emerhad
Nghi Vo
How to Dress an American Table
J.E. Robinson
Caress
Eli Easton
57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides
Sam J. Miller
Happy Birthday, Numbskull
Robert Smith
Right There in Kansas City
Casey Hannan
The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere
John Chu
Seven Lovers and the Sea
Damon Shaw
In the Brokenness of Summertime
R.W. Clinger
Lacuna
Matthew Cheney
Superbass
Kai Ashante Wilson
Midnight at the Feet of the Caryatides
Cory Skerry
The Revenge of Oscar
Wilde
Sean Eads
Wilde Stories 2014 Page 23