by Alan Deniro
“The Order of the Lamb assented . . .”
I had no doubt that it would keep going.
I looked up and saw the faint tail-lights of an airplane above me. The airplane was making its descent into the airport. It might have been the same plane as it always was, or a different one. Even if the same things were happening, they would mean something different every time.
My body was still aching from the slightest movement, but I scurried down the embankment, which wasn’t as steep as I thought it was. When I went into the driver’s side to turn off the ignition, I startled, because I realized with a rush that this Corolla was not mine.
There were lots of green Corollas on the road, and there were many times when I’d find myself trying to open someone else’s car door with my keys. This was similar, though on a far vaster scale. The car was indeed nearly identical to my own, but not completely so. There were little touches that kept rising to the surface of my perception—the “1” button on the stereo that was scuffed a little on my Corolla was not; the window sticker pass for Minnesota State Parks was for 1999 and not 2000; the stain on the upholstery of the passenger’s seat was a couple inches lower than it should have been.
I wondered, then, whose car this was—and moreover, why I was driving it.
I was about to call Kristin on my cell, but searched my pockets. No phone. I went back to the car and searched all the nooks of the car that wasn’t quite my own, but no phone. Then it dawned on me that it was, in fact, 1999 and I wasn’t supposed to have a cell phone.
Wandering up from the embankment in a crouch, worn to the bone, I made my way to the warehouses. This was the address that I had been sent, and the paranoia about the two cars that had collided with me was more of an afterthought. What was I supposed to be doing there? I tried the door of the first warehouse but it didn’t open. I then happened to look at my keyring, which I had been clutching since the collisions, before I was going to put it in my pocket. There was a key on there that I didn’t recognize. Just a normal key. I slid it into the lock and turned. The interior was vast and dark, except for blue circular lights that shone in a slow crawl throughout the space. Bright and revealing nothing. There were also red curtains, acting as capes on invisible bodies, flowing toward me. And I could hear a song, in the distant recesses of the warehouse.
What was the warehouse holding? The warehouse was holding the song, the song that I had always longed to hear, but never could, because I was always too busy and too distracted with my own pains and insecurities. Like verses encased in lines—the hard forms of meter and rhyme—the music and the words were kept from the world inside these walls. This was Philip Sidney’s poem of dying, his lost last poem.
This was the story—I was listening to this song, at last. And I was there, and I was never to leave.
And yet, this is not the end . . .
In the second warehouse, it is completely dark. An antiphon of nothing-to-see. Then, a small square of orange light, flashing. The printer is out of ink. The paper, filled with The Words, has no light to reflect against it.
Footsteps. The opening of a machine. Ejection. Black fluid on unseen fingers. A shaking of a cylinder. Then a clicking shut. Everything in place. The whirring begins again, like a mechanical bird pecking at wood. The paper spools to the floor. Every twenty minutes or so, hands tear off a sheaf and place it into a manila envelope, sealing the envelope with a gummy tongue. Although it’s hard to discern the unilluminated dimensions of the warehouse, the envelope is walked to the other end and put into a slot, which leads to a disorganized back office, sealed off from the rest of the warehouse.
Here, in a room no bigger than a closet, there is a single overhead light in a socket. As soon as the envelope falls through the slot (with no light being emitted to the other side),
. . . I begin addressing it to you. I have been in here a long time. My need is great. I am going to die when you die. Who am I? I am part of you. The Words are Your Words, the totality of whatever you will say and think and write.
Alan, when you were a child, there was so much terror. So much. This was the reason you began to write, to make stories out of the things you could see. It was a way to make limitations out of the world. This was your Aeropagus, in the pencils clutched in your first-grade, sinister hand.
Things grew, you grew, and the terror became admixed with desire—and more than a desire not to be terrified. You wanted better things. You wanted people to admire you and your imagination. This was, this is, your Philip Sidney Game. Always thirsty. Always carted off from the battlefield but angling for water. So how do you signal? How do you let the knight-of-water inside of you know of your thirst?
Here in this story, Sir Philip Sidney is only a phantasm. The devolutionaries are an illusion as well—they are you, they are what you use to thwart your semblance of inner peace. They are in constant battle with what you want to create. It is a wide-ranging battle across many places of your life and over nearly all your years. You didn’t begin that story twelve years ago. You only began it this year, but its aims to show how you lived twelve years ago are true, and how much you are trying to be true is true. Though it’s nothing to be afraid of, one day
it will be finished. All the threads will weave
together and the warehouse doors thrown open,
and the office park of plasterboard and glass
will sink into the untouched wetlands, and
the passenger will board his plane for home.
Then it will be finished. God willing,
when you are at the end of your life, you
might come across this story in an old
ancient stick of memory, and with
your eyes creased with those necessary heart-
aches countless, you will read it and allow
the story enter into you once more,
and for a moment it will be your life
before you take your last breath, and you let
the horse lead you into the woods of May.
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications and anthologies in which some of these stories first appeared: Strange Horizons (“Tyrannia”); Spolia (“A Rendition”); Blue Penny Quarterly (“Cudgel Springs”); Interfictions 2, ed. by Christopher Barzak and Delia Sherman (“The Warp and the Woof”); Logorrhea, ed. by John Klima (“Plight of the Sycophant”); Caketrain (“Dancing in a House”); Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (“Walking Stick Fires,” “The Flowering Ape,” “The Wildfires of Antarctica”); and Interfictions Online (“The Philip Sidney Game”). “Moonlight Is Bulletproof” was published as a standalone ebook by Weightless Books.
About the Author
Alan DeNiro (alandeniro.com) was born in Erie, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the College of Wooster with a B.A. in English and the University of Virginia with an M.F.A. in creative writing. He is the author of the story collection Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead and the novel Total Oblivion, More or Less. His short stories have appeared in One Story, Asimov’s, Santa Monica Review, Interfictions, and elsewhere. He lives outside of St. Paul, Minnesota with his wife Kristin Livdahl and their twins, Ally and Toby.
Short story collections and novels from Small Beer Press for independently minded readers
Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, A Life on Paper: Stories
First translation from the French of “The celebrated Châteaureynaud.”—New York Times
Alan DeNiro, Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead: Stories
Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award Longlist · Crawford Award finalist · Book Sense Pick.
“A great debut collection of loopy, off-the-wall, and still-somehow-packing-emotional-weight stories; DeNiro can weld words into some mighty strange configurations.”
—Caleb Wilson, Davis-Kidd Booksellers, Nashville, TN
Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories
“In all these stories, Fowler (Sarah Canary, The Jane Austen Book Club) delights in luring her readers from the walks of ordinary life into darker, more fantastical realms. . . Fowler’s closing story, “King Rat,” is a masterpiece.”—Seattle Times
Greer Gilman, Cry Murder! in a Small Voice
Ben Jonson, playwright, poet, satirist . . . detective.
Elizabeth Hand, Errantry: Stories
“Elegant nightmares, sensuously told.”—Publishers Weekly
The Unreal and the Real: Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin
Two volumes: Where on Earth & Outer Space, Inner Land
“No better spirit in all of American letters than that of Ursula K. Le Guin.”—Slate
Karen Lord, Redemption in Indigo
Mythopoeic, Crawford, Carl Brandon Parallax, & Frank Collymore Award winner
“Filled with witty asides, trickster spiders, poets and one very wise woman, “Redemption in Indigo” is a rare find that you could hand to your child, your mother or your best friend.”
—Washington Post
Vincent McCaffrey, Hound
“McCaffrey, the owner of Boston’s legendary Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop, succeeds in conveying his love of books in his intriguing debut.”—Publishers Weekly
Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse: Stories
“Incisive, contemporary, and always surprising.”—Publishers Weekly Top 10 Books of the Year
“An imaginative homage to the human ability to endure.”—Booklist (*starred review*)
Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light
“The enchantments of Travel Light contain more truth, more straight talking, a grittier, harder-edged view of the world than any of the mundane descriptions of daily life you will find in the science fiction stories.”—SF Site
Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria
“Samatar’s sensual descriptions create a rich, strange landscape, allowing a lavish adventure to unfold that is haunting and unforgettable.”—Library Journal (*starred review*)
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