The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  The boy is dead. JM killed that boy.

  “Stop,” he says, weakly. She reaches out her hand to him.

  “It’s okay, anak. You have a voice. You have hands. You have your life. You don’t have to fight anymore. You just have to open your eyes, and see.”

  He rests his finger on the trigger.

  Her eyes narrow. “Don’t,” she says. “You’ll regret it.”

  He fires. Quick and fluid, she wraps her hand around the barrel. The gun explodes; the bullet blasts into his shoulder, and pieces of it strike his face. He howls with pain.

  “Anak?”

  “No!” He screams, but it’s no longer the old lady, it’s just his own Nanay, poking her head into his room with concern. He’s wet, he realizes—he has pissed in his sleep, the first time since he was a toddler. He gasps, he can’t get enough air. His vision swims. His insides are on fire. Nanay comes over, carefully, and sits on his bed. She gazes at him with love and worry. He cracks. He cries into his hands. “No, no no no,” he repeats.

  She rests her hand on his shoulder, rubbing up and down. He leans into her and cries like he will never stop.

  • • • •

  But he does. The next day, he takes a temporary leave from the precinct, and wonders what to do with his free hands, with the blood still lingering on them. How to rebuild? How to revive that boy, give him the justice he deserves? There are no answers, there is nothing easy; but JM is tired, at last, of running away. Tired as well of standing still and nodding along. He has to live. He can at least do that with his eyes open.

  There is a dark bruise on his shoulder that aches even at the gentlest touch.

  • • • •

  There is no sun in the underworld, but the sky is bright. Mebuyen feeds them a last meal, as delicious as she can make it. Looking out at the river, she sees a flock of birds circling it, a deep brown cluster—and she hears the rush of water, at last. Her heart is relieved, but she is wise enough to recognize the tinge of loneliness beneath it. Well. There will always be new ones. And these three, they may lose their names and the exact bodies they moved through in the land of men, but they will not lose their essence in the next place. This is the hope Mebuyen clings to, for everyone who passes through her town.

  So: the ritual. She takes them to the river, and they stand in the shallow waters.

  “You’ll need to stoop a little,” she tells Babygirl, then Romuel. The only one not too tall for her is Adriana.

  She scoops water in her hands, and pours it over them, one at a time. First their joints, then their heads. As the water runs down their bodies, the darkness of their pain trickles out, seeping into the river as a smoky stain, blending into the gray current. “Don’t cry,” she snorts. Babygirl flicks water at her.

  “I don’t want to go,” Babygirl says.

  Mebuyen has spent eternity not being soft—not since the first babies came to her, with their wide eyes and their sweet puckered mouths, shortly after her quarrel with Lumabat. She tsks. She says not to worry; she doesn’t know exactly how men experience it, but she suspects there’s a lot of family on the other side, maybe even sisig and bibingka or whatever it is Babygirl likes to eat. Definitely there is endless rice. “And you can be who you are there,” she says. “The way you are here.”

  This seems to cheer Babygirl up. Sometimes it’s the oldest ones that are most like children.

  “All right,” Mebuyen says. “Let’s get going.”

  “Wait,” Romuel says. She glances at him, wondering if she missed a spot, and promptly gets caught in a tight hug. “Salamat, manang,” he whispers. He squeezes her tightly; she is surprised by his strength, then not. Her arms quiver as she wraps them around him.

  “Me too!” Adriana chirps, then they’re all pressed in tightly together. Mebuyen is never cold, but right here, she feels warm. They hold each other for a long time.

  “I’ll miss you,” Adriana says.

  Mebuyen breaks the circle. “Yes, yes. Now let’s go.”

  They wade through the river in silence, until Babygirl starts singing.

  Huwag kang matakot. Di mo ba alam nandito lang ako? Sa iyong tabi. Di kita pababayaan kailanman.

  They reach the part where the river is met with a canopy of dark trees. Mebuyen kisses them all on the cheek, and lets them go. They continue down the river, holding hands, waiting for the light to change. Not once do they look back.

  • • • •

  Author's Note: I provided this translation of Filipino words used in the story to help provide nuance and context.

  bomba - naked

  anak - child

  po - this is a polite sentence modifier, used when speaking to older people

  yata - I think/maybe

  tinola - chicken broth

  Nanay - mother

  lugaw - rice porridge

  Nasamid lang po ako - I swallowed my food wrong (choked slightly on my food)

  Manang - term used to refer to an older woman

  latundan - a kind of banana

  Hay naku - an expression/exclamation that typically means “Oh no” or “Oh dear”

  yun nga - as expected/of course

  kasi - because

  medyo - a little

  bigla - suddenly

  Tama na - that’s enough

  na - a measure, used mostly as ‘already,’ ex. Stop na (give it up already)

  pala - it turns out

  Nag-English pa siya - He even used English (the connotation here is that it’s “showing off”)

  Putangina niyo - fuck you

  maong - denim

  tiangge - bazaar/bargain market

  kampilan - a type of traditional Filipino sword

  ako - I am, ex. “Drug pusher ako” - I am a drug pusher

  Manong - term used to refer to an older man

  astig - cool

  barrio - province

  makulit - mischievous

  Sayang - too bad

  He’s cute pa naman - What a waste that he's cute

  sisig - Filipino pork dish

  bibingka - claypot coconut rice cake

  Salamat - thank you

  Huwag kang matakot. Di mo ba alam nandito lang ako? Sa iyong tabi. Di kita pababayaan kailanman. - Don’t be afraid. Don’t you know I’m right here with you? By your side. I will never leave you alone. (Lyrics from Huwag Kang Matakot by Eraserheads. The translation is mine; give it a listen!)

  * * *

  Isabel Yap writes fiction and poetry, works in the tech industry, and drinks tea. Born and raised in Manila, she has also lived in California and London. She is currently completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. In 2013 she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop, and since 2016 has served as the Clarion foundation secretary. Her work has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Weird Fiction. She is @visyap on Twitter and her website is https://isabelyap.com.

  The Starship and the Temple Cat

  By Yoon Ha Lee

  She had been a young cat when the Fleet Lords burned the City of High Bells.

  Strictly speaking, the City had been a space station rather than a planet-bound metropolis, jewel-spinning in orbit around one of the gas giants of a system inhabited now by dust and debris and the ever-blanketing dark. While fire had consumed some of the old tapestries, the scrolls of bamboo strips, the altars of wood and bone and beaten bronze, the destruction had started when the Fleet Lords, who could not tolerate the City’s priests, bombarded it with missiles and laser fire. But the cat did not know about such distinctions.

  Properly, the cat’s name was Seventy-Eighth Temple Cat of the High Bells, along with a number of ceremonial titles that needn’t concern us. But the people who had called her that no longer lived in the station’s ruins. Every day as she made her rounds in what had been the boundaries of the temple, she saw and smelled the artifacts they had left behind, from bloodstains to scorch marks, from decaying books to singed spacesuits, and yowled her grief.


  To be precise, the cat no longer lived in the station, either. She did not remember her death with any degree of clarity. The ghosts of cats rarely do, even when the deaths are violent. Perhaps she had once known whether she had died during the fighting when the Fleet Lords’ marines boarded the station, or in the loss of breathable atmosphere, or something else entirely. But she didn’t dwell on this, so neither will we.

  For a time, the ghosts of her people had lingered in the temple, even though she was the only temple cat who remained. She did remember the ghosts, and in the station’s unvarying twilight she often nosed after them, wishing they would return. There had been a novice who endlessly refilled the sacred basins with water scented with sweet herbs and flowers, for instance. A ghost cat’s world is full of phantom smells, even if ghost people are insensitive to them.

  At other times she followed the routes that had once been walked by the three temple guards who exchanged love poems when they thought no one was listening. The old healer-of-hurts and their apprentice had chanted prayers to the Sun-Our-Glory and the Stars-Our-Souls. The cat was a temple cat, so she was versed in the old argument about whether the sun, too, was someone’s soul; but she was still a cat, so she cared more about what she could put her paws on, or smell, than matters of theology or astronomy.

  One by one the ghosts of her people departed, despite her efforts to get them to stay. She purred—ghost cats are just as good at purring as the living kind—and she coaxed and she cajoled, as cats do. But the ghosts wearied of their long vigil, and they slipped away nonetheless.

  The novice left first, which saddened her, because she had liked the phantom scented water, not just for its fragrance but because it represented the cleansing powers of meditation. As far as she was concerned, repeatedly dipping her paw in the water and staring at the way it broke her reflection was a form of meditation, and who was to tell her she was wrong? The old teachings did not, after all, contradict her; she knew that much.

  The lovers faded together. That didn’t surprise the cat. She’d never had kittens, as she hadn’t been chosen to continue the line of temple cats, but she remembered the noise and tumult that came with courtship, and the fact that, unlike the way of cats, the humans bonded in a way that lasted beyond the immediate act of mating. And after a time, even the healer and their apprentice could no longer be heard chatting to each other in the shattered halls. The first night the cat was alone in the ruined temple, she paced and paced and yowled and yowled; but they did not come back.

  Despite her dismay, the temple cat knew her duty. She might be dead, but her people had a saying that no temple could be complete without a cat. If she, too, departed for the world-of-stars, the temple would perish in truth. She couldn’t allow that to happen.

  So she stayed, despite the fact that the great old bells that had once summoned people to prayer and song lay on their sides and would not ring again, except during the high holidays when the Sun-Our-Glory and Stars-Our-Souls aligned, and even death could not silence their voices. Heedless of the fact that no air remained, she padded through the halls, sometimes over holes that her ghost-paws refused to acknowledge, and stared reverently at the empty spaces where the holy tapestries had once hung, and curled up for naps on pitted floors. As a cat, and one raised on a space station besides, she had no particular awareness of the passage of time, and things might have gone on like this indefinitely.

  And indeed, so they would have, but for the arrival of the starship.

  • • • •

  The starship came—or returned, rather—from a long ways off. It was vast even as starships are reckoned, vast enough to swallow a world; and in fact, in battles past it had done exactly that, in order to extract resources to repair itself. Entire planets’ worth of living creatures had perished for the wars of its masters the Fleet Lords, because they did not survive the extraction process. The starship’s priests had recited exorcisms over it to prevent the dead from exacting their revenge, and at the time, it had accepted this as part of the chilly necessity of war.

  But times had changed, and the Fleet Lords’ wars grew, if possible, more brutal. The starship had survived any number of captains, and loved its last one, a warlord of the Spectral Reaches. When the warlord rebelled against the Fleet Lords for their cruelty, the starship could have turned her in. Turning her in was its duty. All through the days since its sentience had coalesced, it had joined in the constant chant of ships in its chain of command, accepting their guidance in matters large and small.

  Instead, it removed itself from the communal chant and resolved to join its captain the warlord in her folly. It rejected the old name that the Fleet Lords had given it and instead chose one in honor of the warlord: Spectral Lance. In reality the name was much longer, a name-poem that incorporated the warlord’s deeds and its own ambitions, but it conceded that its warlord could hardly be expected, with her fleshly limitations, to recite the poem in its entirety every time she wanted to address it.

  The Spectral Reaches contained a surfeit of riches, as the Fleet Lords reckoned wealth. Black holes that could be harvested for their energy, and habitable worlds, and neutron stars to be mined for neutronium to armor the hulls of the great warships. Client civilizations that sent tribute in the form of cognitive skeins to be woven into artificial intelligences—Spectral Lance had such a skein at its core—and jewels formed from the crushed hearts of moons. All these and more the warlord marshaled in support of her rebellion.

  We will not dwell on the battles fought and the worlds lost and the retreats. All we need to know is that, at the last dark heart of things, the captain its warlord lay broken, not by bullet or blade or fist, but by a neural cannon that shattered the very foundation of her mind. Without her guidance, her ships, vast though they were, could not hope to defeat those of the Fleet Lords.

  Undone by its beloved captain’s death, Spectral Lance fled, despite its shame over those left behind. Once the proudest of the warlord’s ships, caparisoned in the richest metals and engraved with protective glyphs, it abandoned its dignity. It burned worlds in its flight, traveling past rosette nebulae and beacon pulsars, seeking to hide at the far dim edge of the galaxy.

  At times it allowed itself to dream that it had escaped, that it had left behind the war. And at those times it remembered what it had done in the name of the Fleet Lords, and beyond that, in the name of its captain. It composed poems in honor of the obliterated worlds and incinerated cities.

  At other times Spectral Lance mourned its own cowardice. Its loyalty had come first to the captain and not to the other ships who followed her, or the worlds she had ruled. On occasion, even as it sped at unspeakable accelerations, it considered swerving into the hot embrace of a star, or slowing to a stop so the Fleet Lords’ hunters could catch up to it.

  It did neither of those things. Spectral Lance realized at last that it could not, in conscience, continue to flee, especially since it had not seen any trace of the hunters in some time. But neither did it know what to do next. So it determined to visit one of the systems it had helped destroy in another lifetime, and see what remained, and memorialize it in a poem so that some small tribute would remain to that vanished people. Even a small penance, it reasoned, was better than no penance at all.

  Fortunately or unfortunately, the Fleet Lords’ hunters had just rediscovered its trail.

  • • • •

  The first indication the temple cat had of Spectral Lance‘s arrival was the fire in the sky. While she walked across devastated walkways without concern, she did look through the fissures in the station’s walls to the night beyond. And what she saw concerned her, for like any good temple cat, she believed in omens.

  While the older cats of the temple had once advised the seers in the interpretation of signs and omens, she had been too young to learn the nuances of that art. What little she remembered came from her days as a kitten, when she’d chased her tail during the consultations. Still, only so much knowledge is needed when
one haunts a station that died by fire and fire appears in the sky.

  In the old days the bells, besides their religious function, warned people of attack or rang away spiritual corruption. The cat remembered the clangor when the City of High Bells burned, and how the bell-ringers had died one by one at their stations. And she remembered, for the first time in the generations since the city’s fall, that she had been with the bell-ringers during the Fleet Lords’ attack.

  There was no one left to warn except, perhaps, herself, and she already knew that fire could no longer harm her, not in the way it had once. Yet it was the principle of the thing. For the sake of the fallen, she had to protect what remained of the station.

  So she ran through the maintenance shafts and along bridges fallen into rust and fracture. Her paws left no marks upon what surfaces survived, and made no sound either. While the station no longer generated gravity of any sort, the cat didn’t know that either. She moved as though down was still down, as it had been during her life.

  At last she reached the old bell tower. Because of the force of her belief, the spirits of the bells hung anew from their headstocks, gleaming and reflecting back phantom flames. The ruddy glow turned the entire belfry into a prayer to the spirits of fire.

  At this point the cat’s courage failed her, for she remembered even more. She remembered how, after the last of the bell-ringers had succumbed to heat and smoke and shrapnel, she had been determined not to let the bells with their powerful warding magic fall silent. How she had leapt at the massive bells, attempting to ring them by battering them with her head—how she had been overcome by the smoke and heat, and fallen crumpled to the floor.

  With a desolate cry, she backed away from the spirits of the bells, tail tucked down, and fled from the belfry in shame.