Uncanny Magazine Issue 37

by Lynne M. Thomas

  Rang touched her hairline again, scratching at a bygone miracle. She didn’t know how to explain this bizarre gift she’d experienced.

  Her hesitation earned her two toothless and accusatory looks.

  Len said, “We Orphan Cousins are all family. We’re all we’ve got.”

  Un said, “You wouldn’t hide something important from your family, would you?”

  Len and Un sold her story for booze. The camp danced long past when they ran out of daylight, and they burned things they shouldn’t to keep going. They sang about having miracles in their pockets. Rang kept trying to leave, and people blocked her with drinks so strong their fumes could’ve ignited. They made dolls and effigies of her likeness.

  “Looks like you, don’t it?” said Len, waving an effigy at her. It had a hole through its heart. “Going to sell them for a fat price each.”

  Un said, “Hold one of them, and show it off. So people see you and it. Come on, it’s for the family.”

  They thrust one into her hands, and it sold right quick.

  She had to ask the buyer, “What do you want to do with it?”

  A man twice her age showed her, hoisting it up and spearing it through the chest. He waved it about like it was the flag of their enclave. Kids clapped their little palms, cheering the impaled effigy. Soon they begged for effigies of their own.

  The man asked, “Aren’t you honored?”

  Rang didn’t want to answer. Straying away to avoid answering was how she saw the silhouettes. They were funny shapes out in the sea, triangles nested together, bobbing and coming closer. It took her a long stare to recognize the ships, sailing without so much as a match lit to give them away.

  There was a big crowd ignoring the pirates in favor of partying, and she ran into them, jumping onto the backs of as many dancers as she could. She yelled, “Get to the boats! The raiders are back!”

  “We’ve got this,” said Len.

  Len and Un got on either side of Rang, carrying cudgels. Other Orphan Cousins circled her, thicker than tall grass. Some had effigies, and more had pistols.

  It was easier to let them do what they thought they had to. They all needed this, they all prayed at her desperately, and they were her family. She thought maybe she wouldn’t feel it.

  She did.

  The dawn sky was gray already, Old Ma’am Mountain having woken up and reminding everyone that ten generations of sleep didn’t mean she wasn’t still a volcano. That was the miracle this time. Between the tremors and the lava, both sides roasted in a mutually ugly battle. Some Orphan Cousins strayed from the fight, sheltering under thick trees, and calling for her.

  Un stood shy of the battle, beating her cudgel against a boulder and screaming, “Rang! Rang, get here now! We need another miracle!”

  Rang had a long life ahead of her of being sacrificed again and again, with the Orphan Cousins milking good fortune from her veins.

  Part of her wanted to give them every last drop of her miracles. Part of her was ashamed that she hadn’t sacrificed herself sooner. There were so many loud parts of herself.

  She ran. She ran from the part of herself that didn’t want to run.

  When she finally found another enclave, it was half-empty, and most of the people still there ignored her in favor of playing dominoes. They slept among groves of unpicked citrons. The fruits were all thick and bottom-heavy in ways that made Rang’s tongue dance. She’d work here for food, happily.

  A boy came up next to her with a smile like he’d never known hardship. “I wouldn’t pick here. These grounds are tainted, too. One bite’ll do you.”

  “I heard that,” she said, trying to sound like she already knew. “You found a place that isn’t tainted?”

  “Depends. You ever cut dominoes?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Then my name is Hillhill.” His smile made cracked teeth pretty. “I love to teach.”

  Her face got so hot it felt like it’d boil and slide off. She tried to shake his hand, except Hillhill couldn’t move his right hand. He shrugged and laughed her gesture off. He had an unflattering, careless laugh.

  He said, “I caught the sickness late, just before people knew to be scared. First you cough. Then you lose your right side. A lot of us got it; it’s in all the fruit.”

  He sounded so earnest for someone who was filling her in on things she’d know if she was local. That meant things.

  All she had in her pockets was an, “I’m sorry. That’s hard.”

  “Could be worse. I could’ve been one of those saps who went raiding south and got eaten by the sea. You get hungry enough, you’ll do anything, I guess.”

  And then Rang knew which enclave she’d stumbled into. She tried to hide it from her face.

  In exchange for shelter, she taught anybody that wanted the secrets of net fishing, without saying where she’d learned it. Most of the Sea Hornets enclave kept distance from her like she had a disease, or maybe they recognized she was from the Cousins on account of how bushy her eyebrows were. They all had such thin eyebrows. Hillhill’s were the thinnest she’d ever seen.

  Hillhill taught her to play dominoes. Sometimes he let her win. Sometimes she won on her own, and each time she hid how proud she was, and wasn’t sure why.

  “Don’t do that,” Hillhill said. “Gloat on me.”

  When she didn’t stick up for herself, he brought out the materials. They carved more than they played. By watching she figured out how to put artistic flourish into the dots on their faces, sometimes in triangles or pointed cones. You could trade ten sets of quality dominoes for two thirds of a bag of rice, which supposedly didn’t carry the sickness. She could make it a month on two thirds of a bag.

  She tried to carve more than he did, and hustle them more than he did. Hillhill was determined, and with his one good hand, he often insisted on carrying both of their bags of dominoes.

  The second time he did it, she said, “Give those here.”

  He answered, “Who caught breakfast this morning?”

  “I did.”

  “And who caught dinner last night, and roasted it?”

  “Did I cook it wrong?”

  “You don’t have to keep giving all the time. Soon you’re going to corner the domino market. Let me do something for you.”

  When he carried them, she didn’t know what to do with her hands. When he was talking to customers, she tried to organize the sets, and it wasn’t enough. Her thoughts squirmed. She wanted to kiss him, and every time it felt too selfish. If he tried, she’d let him do it, just like she’d let Len and Un take her life.

  One night she wondered if giving could be a curse.

  When Hillhill came asking for her, Rang hid under the floorboards. She didn’t know what conversation they needed to have, and was too afraid to choose. She said nothing and hoped he didn’t hear her breathing.

  It was such a sunny day that Rang couldn’t look up with unlidded eyes. Smoked yellowfin was in the air, and she was too late.

  The day she went to find Hillhill, he was carrying some short, pudgy girl’s sacks of dominoes. The sacks clicked, so she knew the two had been carving. Rang’s chest ached, and she prayed to her absentee father that those dominoes wouldn’t sell. She followed them to market and seethed when a mariner bought ten sets. Their good fortune made her spit at her own feet.

  Her only pleasure was when this new girl fell to her knees coughing. Rang stalked them all the way to a squat hovel, and on the stoop, the new girl hacked up a mess and shuddered and winced with one eye in the way that meant that side could soon be paralyzed.

  If Rang was fortunate, the girl would be dead in a week.

  Rang practiced straining with her bags of dominoes, but it was too theatrical. She never needed him to carry them in the first place. This wouldn’t win him back.

  So she practiced conversations:

  “What do you think shark tastes like?”

  “What if we made a set of dominoes we didn’t sell, tha
t were private to us?”

  “Need a date for that new girl’s funeral?”

  None of them sounded right. She couldn’t even woo an imaginary lover.

  Twice more Hillhill came to visit her, probably wanting solace about this dying other girl. Both times Rang hid, holding her breath rather than facing him.

  Twice she went to see him. Both times he was at the short girl’s place, with a prayer candle lit for the god Life. Hillhill was so attentive to the girl’s needs, holding the cup to her lips when she couldn’t. They were so sweet together. The sickness was killing her. It’d take a miracle for her to make it, and they were praying to a god who’d never even answered his own daughter.

  Rang told herself they deserved better. She could give them better.

  There was a bluff not too far from the Sea Hornets enclave. The fall hurt worse than Rang ever imagined, crumpling her up and leaving her conscious as she rolled into the waters.

  She should’ve hated her stepmother; her stepmother had killed her real mother. But as much as Rang enjoyed various strands of pettiness, she knew Stepmother Death had no choice and killed indiscriminately. Her stepmother was just one of The 99 Deaths, each as overworked as the last gatekeeping the afterlife.

  All of The 99 Deaths sat along an impossibly vast desk, beyond which no eyes could fathom. Each Death was gargantuan, dwarfing the souls waiting in line, and they all looked similarly exhausted, surviving on tea and spite.

  As Rang walked up to the desk, her hundred-foot tall stepmother clucked her tongue. The woman had tattoos that would pass for murals in the living world, so broad and vivid, of fields of hogs chasing something hidden by her stepmother’s jacket.

  At least none of the souls waiting in line looked mad at Rang for cutting in line like this. None of them acknowledged her at all, and looking at them was like trying to focus on sun bursts in her eyes after a flash.

  Rang put her hands together and asked, “Can you please find my dad for me? If I talk to him, I’m sure I can fix this.”

  “Life is a deadbeat,” Stepmother Death said. “I haven’t sniffed him around in two rainy seasons.”

  “Is he, like, nervous to see you again? Maybe he doesn’t know what to say.”

  “Don’t stand up for people who won’t stand up for you.”

  This advice didn’t help Rang’s situation. It just made her resent her own pettiness, and she was clinging to that right now. “I’m trying to…talk to a boy…”

  “You can’t romance the dead, fool child. Because of the trust your father set up, you can’t even stay down here.” Stepmother Death drew out a sheet of paper, a fresh form, and began inking the sections for Rang. “You ought to be grateful. It’s the one thing Life left you. More chances, more miracles.”

  “Can you fix it so the next miracle helps the sick people? And that girl?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t. Those are your burden, little demigod.”

  “Living feels impossible.”

  “And you want your daddy to come fix it? There’s a way with that.”

  Rang gripped the edge of her stepmother’s desk in both hands and peered up at her. “What way?”

  “Realize it ain’t gonna happen. If you want to meet someone, you’d better hurry up.”

  Stepmother Death stamped the form, and Rang was alive again, her clothes dripping from the sea.

  There was gunfire in the distance, and the stink of spent powder closer. All along the river there were dead people strung up in nets.

  Without thinking about where her feet were headed, she came to Hillhill’s shack. The door hung open like a slack jaw. Inside sat one person, that meddlesome girl whose name Rang had never gotten, fighting fits of tears. She clutched Hillhill’s carving knife like she was fixing to turn herself into a domino.

  Rang fought about it, and lost the fight to herself. She opened the rickety door. “Hey. Is Hillhill around?”

  The girl’s eyes were puffed nearly shut, and she looked wearily over at Rang through all that hurt. “Somebody found a load of fresh meat. The holy load. Thought Life sent it himself.”

  A miracle of feasts. Why did that miracle sound so bad?

  “We were lugging it back when the Orphan Cousins struck. They heard we were sick and easy prey. They took most of the food, and weren’t satisfied there. Hillhill got in the way so I could…He…he should have…”

  Rang’s mouth went as dry as an old grain of rice, her tongue threatening to crumble up into dust. She couldn’t make words. She couldn’t apologize for the miracle, for the food that had gotten hungry people dead. The person she wanted to apologize to would never hear it.

  The girl asked, “Did you know him?”

  There was a hunger in her face, like she was ravenous for more of Hillhill. The look made Rang feel greedy on top of dry.

  Rang managed to say, “We were friends for a while. I’m Rang.”

  “You’re her? Hillhill asked for you a lot.” The girl looked down at the knife in her hands, and tried to hide it behind her side. “I’m Berry.”

  She said her name was Berry, and the sentence was punctuated with bombs exploding in air. The palm trees shuddered over the shack like an artificial storm rolling in. The noise was a demand that rattled in Rang’s chest, threatening to usurp her heartbeat. She wanted to collapse onto Hillhill’s floor and lie where he used to at night. A pile of his old shirts lay there, a collection of holes.

  Another bomb went off, and Berry grabbed Rang’s elbow and pulled. Berry said, “Come on.”

  Rang asked, “What are you doing?”

  Berry said, “We’ve got to take care of each other or else we don’t have anybody.”

  The girl dragged Rang into a run. Rang followed. Following was all she could give tonight.

  Following Berry was dizzying. She looked like Hillhill—not in appearance, but in how she looked at surroundings. She looked for where others could go without checking whether her own footing was safe.

  Under the thickest patches of the trees was an old sulfur mine. Rang and Berry joined the rest of the Sea Hornets as they plunged inside it. It smelled like mineral baths, but they had to look out for where gasses leaked from cracks. Red foxes had dens in the mines, and wherever they lived, the refugees could also hide.

  Berry and Rang came upon a pack of clever elderly physicians who were carrying the injured to shelter. Old folks with gnarled hands pressed their palms to open wounds to keep them closed. They all had that same way of looking for others, like Hillhill and Berry. It was like being surrounded by a dead boy.

  She had to help them.

  Together Rang and Berry grabbed any end of a stretcher that needed hands. They carried crying survivors towards the mines. Berry kept trying to take the heavier end of stretchers from Rang. It was a hurtful kindness. A feeling gnawed in Rang; she wasn’t giving enough.

  When another crop of injured people arrived, Rang abandoned the mines. She streaked in the wrong direction, south for the river where the Orphan Cousins’ boats would be. As she went, she hopped and waved her arms. Armed people were happy to give chase.

  This time her sacrifice would mean something. Even if this was her last life, it would be worth it to give the people in the caves another minute. Thinking of any other way to help was like trying not to think about suffocating when you were underwater.

  They pursued her with nets and guns in the utterly wrong direction. She was actually proud of how far astray she led them before she was split in half.

  She screamed at her stepmother, “You stole Hillhill!”

  Stepmother Death removed her giant bifocals, dropping them on her desk with a report like an abrupt hurricane. “Firstly, it was another of the Deaths that took him. I don’t even like optimists. Secondly, it’s not my fault you didn’t live your life with him.”

  “You said to go find someone if I wanted them, and he was gone. I tried to go back to him as soon as I was alive.”

  “Which wasn’t fast enough. It’s almost as
if the universe doesn’t wait around for your bullshit.”

  “You’re not my real mother.”

  “Then why did you bring your problems to me again?”

  “Fuck you!”

  “I’m sorry you’ve been cursed with perspective,” her stepmother said in a tone so dispassionate it could’ve cracked continents in half. “If you see Life out there, please, tell him to masturbate more often so I get fewer of you on my hands.”

  “The miracles don’t do what I want. They’re making things worse. The fighting is getting worse. Hillhill’s dead. His whole village is dying.”

  Stepmother Death gestured with her stamp to ninety-eight other busy members of The 99 Deaths. Each was burdened with an infinite line of souls. “I’m aware people are dying. It’s why I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “What am I supposed to do? I’m killing myself and it doesn’t help.”

  “If you want a chance at anything being better?” Stepmother Death brought her stamp down, hard and soundless. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to live.”

  The Sea Hornets found a cache of guns lost a generation ago deep down inside the cave system, all perfectly preserved without a speck of rust or grit anywhere. No one remarked how impossible this was as they rushed by Rang, loading pistols and hoisting tubs of fuel that smelled like rotten vegetables. They raced down the mountainside to take the beach back from the Orphan Cousins.

  The first Rang saw of this miracle was a man’s legs being blown off so cleanly that a butcher could’ve done it. His name was Kasp, a local carpenter. Rang dragged him to safety, what safety there was with death flying in both directions overhead. Kasp was delirious, and she kept apologizing to him anyway.

  “Berry, come help me! Please!”

  Berry slumped next to the mouth of the cave, in an old crack in porous stone. She watched everyone without blinking. Rang couldn’t tell if Berry shook her head no, or was merely shaking.

  Lugging an injured person wasn’t so different from lugging a sack of rice with a few rips in it. Rang carried Kasp on her own, making sure nothing spilled. You had to mind the sensitive spots so they didn’t break open. She joined the mobile hospital before she knew one had sprung up around her.