The voices gibber and whisper and weep. Last time they came, I looked at the light behind them for as long as I could. The spaces behind them, between their silhouetted bodies and the jagged edges marking my world. Things slid and dragged—amorphous shapes. Too many eyes, too many limbs. Some of them used to be human, I’m sure.
I lied to Austin and Sheila and all the rest. I came here because if the voices can come through, other things can as well. A ghost. A little girl already out of time. I’m not here to save the world, just to take responsibility for what I did, will do, have always done.
The smell made me look through Ricky’s door. He spends twenty out of twenty-four hours in his ‘lab’, birds pinned down, so he can draw the mechanics of their wings. Like we don’t know how birds work by now. (Except the birds aren’t birds.) It’s okay; drawing keeps Ricky out of the way. It keeps him from going off screaming onto the ice like Austin did.
Did I mention Austin disappeared? We found the arm Cordon printed for him and nothing else. He went out into the snow and vanished. Or maybe he’s still here in another when, reunited with his original arm.
I thought maybe Neelie would be looking over his shoulder again. She wasn’t, and Ricky wasn’t at his drafting table either. He was crying, wiping at his face and smearing blood all over. Did I say about the blood already?
Ricky was covered in it. His hands, his clothes, all the places he’d tried to wipe the tears away. Only some of it was red. The rest … there isn’t a word for the color. Green, but purple. Iridescent: beetle shell, crow feather. The color itself made the stench, clogging up my mouth and nose.
“I needed to see inside,” Ricky said. “The birds aren’t birds. I told you so.”
He held a scalpel, probably nicked from Sheila. He’d made a real mess of the bird pinned to the table, a storm petrel, I think, but not like someone inexperienced at dissection. More like he got scared and tried to stab what he saw out of existence.
It buzzes. The picture of the bird in my mind buzzes, like flies going all at once. It drips, melting wax too close to the sun. Icarus is falling and drowning and drowned, and the world is ended, always ending, has been ended since the beginning of time.
Okay, I just read back, and I’m letting that sentence stand. Some things are just true. It isn’t my fault if anyone reading this doesn’t understand.
I don’t know much about the biology of birds, but I know what they’re not supposed to look like inside. Nothing living should look like that inside.
Picture a city with angles folding inward and protruding outward at the same time. A city made of bone and flesh, intestines and organs, sinew and blood. Picture something like a starfish. Picture all of that and throw the picture away. Remember the worst migraine you ever had. The inside of the bird on Ricky’s drawing table was like that but more so.
I pulled Ricky out of there and hid him in my room. I had to get him away before Risi saw what he’d done because then she would kill him for sure.
Ricky cut his throat. Probably with the same blade he used on the bird. He bled out in one of the showers, slumped against the wall. Or maybe Risi killed him, a murder-suicide. No one has seen her for two days.
I found Ricky’s notes after we burned his body. We dragged him to the ghost part of the station and set him on fire. Nervous energy. We needed something to do. He was probably too young to have a will. Kid like that thinks he’s going to live forever. Hopefully, he wanted to be cremated.
After we burned him, I went through his stuff. Clothing. Razor blades. Deodorant. Cologne. A dildo, tucked down in the bottom of his bag under the socks and underwear. He’d never unpacked. He’d left everything in a duffle bag, like he’d be going home any day. A family portrait: mother, father, daughter, golden retriever, cute as hell. No one in the picture looked anything like him. His drawing supplies.
I found his notes wedged between the mattress and the bed frame. Crumpled, like he wanted to destroy them but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. There was a notebook filled with gibberish; each entry was neatly labeled with the date and location. The sketches were perfect. Gorgeously rendered in accurate scientific detail. Until they started to bend. Until you could tell from the outside that what I saw when Ricky cut open the bird was lurking just beneath the feathers and skin.
I keep a picture of Neelie in my room. Yesterday, Neelie was gone. The picture was still there, showing our yard and the swing I built for her hanging from the old maple tree. The arrested motion of the swing made it look like she’d jumped out of the frame. She used to pump her legs as hard as she could and jump when the swing was at its highest point. It put my heart in my throat when she did that. There were days when I expected (wanted) her to fly, keep going up forever.
I turned the picture over, like I might see her on the other side, giggling. Hide-and-Seek post-mortem.
It’s proof. Time is broken. It’s always been broken. A vast, cyclopean city rose everywhere and everywhen. Neelie isn’t in the picture, but she’s out there waiting for me. I’m coming, baby girl.
I woke up outside. Sleepwalking, I guess, though no one really sleeps anymore. I’d thought to put a coat on but not to button it up. Boots, but I was still wearing a nightgown.
(Neelie was wearing a nightgown when she died. Maybe, I wasn’t sleepwalking. Maybe, I went looking for her.)
Neelie was patting my cheeks when I woke up. She was crying. “Don’t go to sleep, Mommy.” My dead daughter saved my life. After I could have hit the brakes but didn’t.
“I’m sorry, baby. I’m so sorry,” I said and threw my arms around her. Not a ghost. Solid and real.
She looked at me. Her eyes just the way I remember them: flat, black, seeing everything. I almost took it back. I almost pushed her away and ran across the ice, begging it to take me, like it took Austin. Can I live with my dead little girl looking at me like that, knowing? Yes. I have to live with it—the choice not to hit the brakes, and the choice to find Neelie again. There are no third chances.
Funny (not ha ha), but it wasn’t cold. The ice groaned. An old sound. A deep sound. “Don’t be afraid, baby girl,” I said. The birds circled between us and the sun, throwing harsh shadows on the snow. Piping while the ice groaned. Almost a song.
The voices were there, too. Begging, screaming. Why did you stop, they asked. Why didn’t you do more to fix the future that has always been broken? I didn’t answer; they already know. Acceptance is a stage of grief, too.
“Look, Mommy,” Neelie said. She pointed to the thing in the ice that James had talked about.
Did I say what happened to James? I don’t know. I don’t know if I said, and I don’t know what happened. We’re the only ones left here, me and my little girl. And the voices. And the thing in the ice. Not things, despite the multitude and the vastness of it. One thing, stretching all the way out under ice that’s clear and blue and shining. It turned while the birds sang. Waking up.
Haruspex. I always liked that word. I read to Neelie about ancient Rome. She liked stories about soldiers. I didn’t tell her about the bloody prophets who dug their nails in the entrails of birds to spell out victory and doom.
Ricky was right about the birds, even though he wasn’t scrying the future when he cut one open. Somewhere, a city is rising, has risen, will always and forever be coming up from the waves. The future, as a concept, is obsolete.
I stood with my daughter, and we watched a vast thing turn in the ice. We listened to the birds whose bodies are cities and angles and impossible, multi-limbed things. This is the new shape of the world. This is the shape it’s always been. We listened to the birds-who-aren’t-birds weep in their weird, piping way. This is where it begins, where it began.
Ricky was right about the birds. They’re an omen but not in the way of a warning. Voices crying in the wilderness, heralding what has already come.
AC Wise’s fiction has appeared in publications such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Hor
ror 2015. Her debut collection, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published be Lethe Press in 2015. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story and contributes a monthly Women to Read column to SF Signal. Find her online at www.acwise.net.
The Sky Isn’t Blue
Clinton J. Boomer
The detective was good.
Competent.
He looked around, eyes drawing with slow and individual care over each object in the room. He stood relaxed, noticing the tiny things—scrutinizing them, she decided—in stoic, unperturbed silence.
This big black man was at ease, his breathing steady and his core loose but firm. His confident gaze loped around her office, playing over every surface for a few moments and sliding away to examine another new discovery with fresh eyes: laptop, hand sanitizer, facial tissues, Thai menu, prescription pad, coffee mug, planner, notebook, dry flowers in a glass vase.
All of these were seen, noted, categorized.
He was tuned in, receptive, seeing without judgment, picking up on all of those little things that homicide investigators presumably look for.
Dr. Ashland liked him.
He was sensitive, she thought, in a way that most men who were “sensitive” could never be. A man with a goal, driven by a mission, psychologically fulfilled by his own desire to complete the task before him for whatever primal, personal reasons, no matter the cost.
A shame that he would fail, she thought. Some things simply weren’t meant to be.
Long, thin fingers of bright, late-afternoon sunlight streamed in slanting angles through her half-open windows, catching motes of golden dust. A cool October wind stirred the grey and empty branches outside.
It would be dark early tonight.
From two stories below, the sound of children laughing and shouting and playing rough on wet sheets of fire-colored leaves. A dripping train of school buses groaned through the tree-lined suburbs, some slowly pulling even with the frosted-glass doors of the little 1970s magnet school across the shadow-draped cobblestones.
On her desk, the plastic water heater flashed green twice as the crimson contents within began to boil with a low hiss; the tea would be ready in a moment.
The detective nodded finally and put his large, calloused hands into the pockets of his fresh-pressed slacks. He closed weary, dimly bloodshot eyes. Collecting his thoughts?
Perhaps he counted back from ten.
As he moved, the weighty and well-worn badge at his hip caught the light, glimmering, before slipping back behind the fold of his black sportcoat.
She cleared her throat, projecting false nervousness. “Any questions?”
“Yeah,” he said, after a moment, half-turning to face her. “This.”
Dr. Ashland met the fathomless darkness of his eyes. “Yes?”
The man nodded, frowning. “What’s this picture of? Some kind of … tentacled crab-thing?”
She followed his gaze to one of the dozen steel-framed photographs dotting her beige walls. The image was slightly larger than the others, centered and well-lit, dominating the visual field. She examined it carefully and pretended to laugh. “Ah? Yes, I suppose it is in a way. A tentacled crab.”
He frowned. “No?”
“Well,” the doctor said, drawing it out, “several of my patients have said that it reminded them of a deep-sea creature. So I suppose it is.”
“It’s not, then.”
Dr. Ashland smiled. “No, it’s just ice and water. The sunset behind makes it appear quite a bit more substantial than it really is.”
“More … substantial,” the detective repeated, matching her tone.
She shrugged. “The dark lavenders and reds you perceive aren’t really there. They exist only as an artifact of light dispersion. You’re seeing uncountable layers of nearly translucent material, each with tiny imperfections, shading and illuminating one another, lit from behind. Much the way the sky looks blue on a cloudless day.”
“Because the sky isn’t blue,” said the detective after a moment.
“Not really,” said the doctor. “It’s empty air. No more blue than the air in this room.”
He grunted. His gaze remained fixed on the photograph as he swallowed. The veiny, reddish specter seemed to swim, undulating on invisible currents, moving just a touch too slowly for the eye to perceive.
“As to the image itself,” continued Dr. Ashland, “it’s what the mind makes of it, like so many things. My patients have told me that it looks like a hand or a face or even a head. Sometimes a body, crouched in the fetal position, with either wings or flames coming out of its back. Some have said that it reminded them of a tree or a crooked set of bloody towers or even a burning doll.”
“Huh,” he said, distracted and fascinated, reaching out to almost touch the image. “It kind of looks like these are … you know, legs. Sticking up. Or …”
Dr. Ashlan, smiled, finishing the thought for him. “Or other, more personal body parts, yes. Privates, perhaps. I deal with children who are sexual-abuse survivors. I’ve heard it all.”
He glanced at her, his focus on the photograph instantly broken with a raw defensiveness. She saw that he was an abuse survivor.
Good.
“It’s just ice,” she said, smiling.
A coach? A counselor? An uncle? Who had touched him, she wondered, and how would his trauma manifest in this, his final hour?
“Just ice,” he said, turning back and approaching to examine the photograph from close up, his breath ever-so-briefly steaming the smooth glass. “Are all of these pictures of that, Dr. Ashland? Of … what, ice and sunsets?”
“You’ve cracked the code of my decorating schema,” she said with a smile. “It’s meant to be soothing, neutral. But pretty. Tea?”
“No thanks. So who sculpted these?”
She pretended to be confused. “Who?”
He stepped back from the photo and looked around, trying to take in all the images at once. “The sculptor. Of the ice.”
“No one. These photographs are all ‘found art’: just floes of frozen or melting water in a state of nature, observed and caught at one precise moment in time. Taken by any number of photographers, some of them amateur … and some of them both very professional and very expensive. Take that one, for instance.”
He nodded, not bothering to look where she pointed. “It’s a … cute collection. Very unique.”
She smiled. “The water and ice—and the light that gives them color—have a certain tranquil quality, I think. Mesmerizing, in their way, and for that reason, useful in my line of work. It doesn’t hurt that I personally rather enjoy these sorts of images as I’m sure you can tell.”
“I can. Tell me more about ice,” he said. His gaze raked up and down her skin, and she felt herself tensing but fought it.
“Of course, detective,” she said, pouring herself a cup of the steaming, bitter tea; the ruby-red liquid was dotted with countless caramel-colored fungal spores. She leaned against her desk and calmly picked up the tiny, thumb-sized remote for her stereo. “What would you like to know?”
The big man smiled. “I’m here to talk about a patient of yours.”
He was trying to catch her off guard, shifting topics so quickly and so casually.
She admired it. Excellent execution.
“I suspected as much. You know, of course, there are limitations as to what I can discuss with you: strict limitations for reasons of professional, legal, and ethical oversight, not to mention issues of insurance, both private and corporate, as well as tax-code liability. Rules both beyond my control and entirely out of my hands even if I wanted very much to help. Even if you had a warrant from a federal judge, which I suspect—no offense—that you do not.”
“I am more than aware,” sighed the detective, “of the legal pitfalls and roadblocks here.”
Dr. Ashland feigned a child-like innocence. “Are you?”
He held up a meaty hand for silence. “I’ve been down
this endless rabbit hole before, and I know that you deal with particularly … troubled patients here. Troubled youth, especially, and their families. I know all about HIPAA and court-sealed documents, corporate-sponsored drug research NDAs and non-profit religious-entity charters, including a few that your clinic services. I know that there’s a lot I can’t know, can’t be told. So I’d like to talk about anything you can tell me, about anything you want to talk about. And you seem like you have a lot to say about ice.”
He paused, watching her nod.
“I see,” Dr. Ashland said, frowning. “Just a friendly talk, then.”
“A chat,” he agreed warmly. “And who knows? Maybe, you’ll slip up and tell me something I can use.”
She laughed and returned his smile as best she was able. It was meant to be a joke, or if she had something to hide, it was meant to be a veiled threat.
Yes, the detective was good.
Dr. Ashland liked him.
“So,” she began, hesitant.
“So,” he said, turning to look at the rest of the photographs, pretending to relax. “Tell me more about ice.”
Dr. Ashland took a sip of tea, wincing at the bitter, earthy, almost meaty flavor; the steam reeked of vinegar and something charred. “Ice is interesting to me because humans—we humans—invest so much … emotion into it. Energy, if you will, in the mystic sense. Some ancient peoples from Nepal literally called it ‘locked-away life force.’ We need it; we curse it. We cart it and sculpt it; we clear it from our streets even while we manufacture it in bulk. Above all, we attribute personality and motive and meaning to it.”
“Interesting,” he mused.
“Not particularly,” Dr. Ashland said, shrugging. “As a species, we may have a hard and complicated relationship with ice, certainly, but unlike … what? People attribute motive and meaning to the weather, to the stock market. To baseball scores, cat behavior, and volcanic eruptions. To stars in the heavens and trees up the hillside. Ice, as a metaphor or phenomena, is interesting only insofar as it’s tangible, unlike a cloud or a passing comet. Tangible but temporary.”
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