Uncanny Magazine Issue One

by Uncanny Magazine

  “So do I win?” I ask.

  Mr. Shuffleboard purses his lips as if he’s trying not to laugh. “I still need to look at the rest of the fair.”

  I look at my display, a little embarrassed. “But I brought back a photo, see?” I say. “And there was tape on it, and I know tape isn’t much evidence, but no one in my generation uses tape. Look.” I go to grab the photo to show him, but it’s stuck.

  “Leggo,” I say to the nanoglue, and it lets go, and I take the photo of my mother from its display.

  I’m astonished. The tape is gone, too.

  The dumb freshman with the crystals wins the science fair. Nobody is happy, except for the freshman. I tell Kelly it will be the high point of his entire life.

  My time machine project gets a “B.” It’s only that good because Shuffleboard liked my math. He wrote a note about how much he liked my math, but he was being kind and he knew it. The whole school thinks I made it up. That I didn’t even try. Worst of all, even Kelly laughed. I laughed too, like it was a big joke, but it hurt. In my heart I kept my truckers and the stupid pie with cheese. Who would make that up?

  I vent at Mom and Dad that night over dinner, and show them the photo. “See? If I hadn’t traveled through time, how could I have gotten this picture?” I ask.

  “That’s odd,” Mom says. Then she gets her old photo album from the closet. There’s a blank page where the picture fits exactly, as if someone had taken it out.

  “I’m not saying you did it, pudding pop, but see?” Mom says. She puts her photo back in. “Stay,” she tells the nanoglue, and then she closes the book.

  I am surprised and angry. But am I right? “This is just more proof,” I say, hoping it’s true. “Look, when I took it from the past, that changed where it was in the present. It’s just like the novel that I got from Grandpa. Because I took it, it wasn’t in the garage. You saw the cover page!”

  Mom says, “You are so before your time, cupcake.”

  Dad says, “How about we go out for ice cream? Sounds like you’ve had a pretty rocky road.”

  They look at me, expectant. They’re trying to bribe me with food. I’m ready to tell them to get stuffed so I can go and sulk.

  But it’s ice cream.

  “I guess I could use a shake,” I say. Dad sticks out his hand, and we shake on it.

  When we get back from Baskin Robbins, I put my time machine in the closet. Maybe it’s just my generation that thinks it needs to punish machines.

  I sit down at my computer. I think about what happened in Grandpa’s novel, which I only read the one time on the bus, and I didn’t get to finish it. I’m still bummed that it’s gone.

  But I know what happened. I could rewrite it. I wouldn’t get it all, but I could do it. I remember a lot of the dialogue, and the voice, and even some of the math.

  I open a new doco, and write: There And Back Again, by Robert Stroud and Celia Bergendorfer. I write as much as I can remember, and then I write more.

  At first, I thought I was going crazy. I still wonder if that’s so. Just in case, I’m keeping it to myself. My wife’d be on the phone to the booby home in a New York minute. They’re coming to take me away! You remember the song.

  But I’m no dummy: I read science fiction, and I know a few things about physics. My granddaughter Celia has invented a time machine and is using it to visit me. Or rather, to rifle through my computer—sometimes I only know she’s been here by the bad decisions she’s made in Oregon Trail.

  Celia leaves me pages from a story about a girl named Celia who invents a time machine to rescue her grandfather’s novel. She drops down the rabbit hole like Alice, and I have a feeling that this is the only way I’ll get to know her.

  So I started this journal–of–sorts, structured around the pages she’s brought. In my lucid moments, I suppose I’m humoring myself. But I’ve spent so much time on it, I’m not sure anymore which bits I wrote and which Celia brought me. I wonder if it’s the same girl coming back, or a series of granddaughters from multiple time streams? Is she visiting only me or a bunch of versions of me? See Chapter Six for a full explanation.

  I won’t pretend that I write fiction, so you can read the fiction as a shelter for my theories about time travel. As I describe in Chapter Two, our traveling through time at a rate of one second per second is, in a sense, a narrative device meant to explain our current sensory input in the context of our memories. If you look at a Feynman diagram, you can reverse the order of time by flipping the signs of the particles. What has happened and what will happen are just different points on the same chart. Just look at the diagrams—Chapter Three is composed entirely of diagrams. And Chapter Nine is anagrams, just so I don’t lose my sense of humor. Elvis = Lives. Time Traveler = Relative Term. A decimal point = I’m a dot in place. I’m sure Celia will like those.

  I have to make jokes because I worry about my granddaughter. I hope she knows to counter for the rotation of the Earth (see Chapter Ten). Also, she once stole my computer and I had to set a little fire to convince my wife that the computer had been destroyed so I could buy another. These things cost ten grand!

  It seems the only way to make her visits stop is to give her what she came for: this novel, which was neither created in her present nor, exactly, in mine. I’ve printed it out because I have no idea what hardware will look like in the 21st century. Every Celia will get a copy until these visits cease. THE END, I say.

  Please.

  (Editors’ Note: the Uncanny Podcast Episode 2 features “Celia and the Conservation of Entropy” read by Amelia Beamer, as well as Deborah Stanish’s audio interview with Beamer.)

  © 2014 Amelia Beamer

  Amelia Beamer’s biggest contribution to literature thus far is horny zombies: Barnes & Noble called her debut novel The Loving Dead one of the top genre novels of the past decade. She is at work on new novels and lives in Chicago after several years abroad doing things like riding horses across lava fields in Iceland and driving on the other side of the car in Australia.

  Migration

  by Kat Howard

  Outside, the rush of wings. The shadows of birds tessellated across my wall, a fraction of a second behind the flight. A flock of birds. An exaltation, a parliament, a murder.

  Their chirps and chatter filled the sky. This much commotion, it must mean a soul’s migration, from death to life again. One of the birds in the flock would be carrying the soul, winging it on its way to rebirth. The others, a winged honor guard, drawn by the life that needed borrowed feathers to fly.

  I had been carried on that flight myself; I wore the birds of my passage upon my skin.

  One final cry, a great lonely thing, burned itself out against the sky, and the wings flew on into silence. For a moment, I thought I smelled cinnamon, amber, burning contrails in their wake, but surely that was just the scent of my own wishes, burning themselves to ash.

  Lara slowly got to her feet in the embers and brushed the ashes from her skin. The air around her was thick and heavy with smoke from the bone fire, the cinnamon and amber scents that accompanied her resurrection already fading.

  It had been harder, this time, to come back through the burning, and there had been moments that she wished the burning was the end of it, that there would be flame, ash, nothing.

  She had felt herself growing heavy, tired, as she flew, and this person–shaped body she was in now felt strange, wrong, even though it was hers. Even though this had happened before, and before, and before.

  She was the phoenix. Resurrection was her nature.

  One last, bright pain, now that she had returned. The fallen feather, etching itself onto her skin. Thirteen feathers fell across the sky of Lara’s body. Thirteen souls she had carried with her, into the afterlife, into death permanent, the migration that was hers and hers alone.

  Thirteen reminders of her own resurrections, in flame, and in fire of bone. It didn’t seem like a lot, like a long time—people died every day after all—but so few death
s required a phoenix. She had died and risen for over a thousand years.

  It is a time longer even than it sounds.

  Next to her, in the glowing coals of her ever–burning fire, a new egg. Her soul. Held and waiting. Safe as a prison. Even if she were to smash it, it would only reform once she was resurrected. She would die again and again, and remain deathless. The first time, it seemed a miracle. She had changed shapes, she had flown, she had returned even from death.

  Then it happened again. Again. Eventually, even resurrection became a commonplace, an expected thing.

  Now, Lara preferred the fire. If death was impossible, if she couldn’t keep her wings and fly, she would rather burn.

  She shivered, hugging her arms to herself. It had gotten so cold in her rooms.

  Outside of her window, birds more ordinary than what she was flocked back and forth. They scattered and returned, drawn by the heat of the phoenix, by the scorched fragments of her feathers and bones they could use to line their nests. Such discards were coveted, scraps of feathered luck. Lara watched them fly past and envy pinched beneath her skin.

  I was dying. I knew it. It wasn’t as if this hadn’t happened before, again and again. Twice, my deaths had been sudden, but more often they were not, and I had learned to recognize the process.

  I could feel my body as it began the process of closing down and turning off the lights. The way the breath dragged itself from my lungs, the ache that echoed my heartbeat. My blood moved slowly through veins that burned like fire.

  I was dying, and this time, I did not want to come back.

  When we die, our souls are carried by birds. They are our psychopomps. From sparrow to albatross, hummingbird to hawk. When we return, we are reborn with birds inked in shadows on our skin, marking the deaths that we have returned from.

  But this time, I had no intention of returning. I did not wish to be reborn, soul renewed and returned. I wore thirteen birds on my skin. Not enough time for some, but too long for me. This life, I had felt the weight of all those years like iron shoes.

  I was tired, I was done, and whatever, wherever eternity was, that was where I wanted to go. And so, I needed a phoenix to carry my soul. To die with me, and then resurrect itself, leaving all of what I had been in its ashes.

  Chirping and flocking, the chaos of birds outside my windows took to the sky, red feathers falling like tiny flames in their wake. Too tired to walk outside to them, I stood at my window and watched from behind the glass.

  In every life I can remember, which is not all of them, not any more, I have longed to fly. To feel the air slide through my feathers, to cast myself away from earth, from everything that binds me here.

  I still want to fly. I no longer wish to land.

  Lara paced through her house. She was wrong in her skin, couldn’t sit, couldn’t settle. Tiny feathers of flame sparked through the air in her wake, burning to ash before reaching the ground. Leftover bits of mortality and death sloughing off. She felt only partially alive, still half–ghost, almost–bird.

  And cold. Too cold without the blaze of resurrection to warm her.

  As she moved, she reminded her lungs to breathe, her legs to move and to hold her weight, reminded her skin that it needed to be person–shaped, not winged. It kept forgetting, this time, pulling and shivering as if it could return to its former shape.

  She pulled the curtains over the windows, so she could not see the birds outside, their wings, their feathers, red like tiny flames, their so–easy flight.

  It was never the resurrection that was the hardest thing. That was magic, that was ritual, and when you’re born in flame there’s a comfort in the burning down. No, the hard part was everything that happened after stepping out of the ashes. The steps it took to reclothe herself in humanity, to wear flesh instead of flame. To seem normal. To do laundry. To shop for groceries.

  Remembering to be human, to walk and not to fly, was always the hard thing, but it had never been this hard.

  Lara raked her fingers through the tangle of her hair, and a feather, crimson and liquid as fire, fell to the ground. The shedding would stop soon enough, once she remembered what she was. She would, she told herself, remember what she was. She always had before.

  In the glowing coals of her fireplace, among the bones burned white, a hairline crack appeared in the egg that held her soul.

  Because I desired death permanent, there were rituals. Procedures.

  Death’s midwives walked quietly through my room. They moved like shadows in their feathered capes. Their voices were as soft as fog, their hands cool as evening. The weight of their collective gaze like judgment. I would have been surprised, had it been otherwise. Judgment was, after all, what they were here for.

  In the usual set of circumstances, none of this fuss would be necessary. I would die and my soul would be gathered by a bird. It wouldn’t matter what kind—one of the many that nested outside of my windows would serve. Had I lived in a city, I would have bought a bird and caged it against my need. Though even there, the precaution would probably be unnecessary. The birds knew. Death called them.

  If I had wanted to die as I always had, to die and then return, there would be no near–silent midwives gathered in my room, no need to answer questions or explain my choices. Death was as natural as wings, as flight, as a nest. Everyone knew the pattern of that migration.

  Things were different when you hoped for a one–way journey. Feathers whispered against each other as the midwives checked and checked again the progression of my illness. They measured the quality of my tears and the color of my blood. They gathered my breath in three small vials of blue glass. They cut a lock of my hair and burnt it, tracing runes in the ashes.

  My heart raced and fluttered in my chest, like a pair of broken wings. The weight of my body pulled against my bones. Fire raced beneath my skin. My breath tasted like cinnamon in my mouth.

  Once they had established to their satisfaction what I already knew—that I was indeed dying and in a fairly imminent manner—they counted the birds left on my skin from the various transmigrations of my soul. Notes were made as to kind and position. I had never before wondered whether it mattered that the kestrel was over my heart, or that the magpie winged its way across my left wrist, rather than my right.

  The birds were how you knew who you had been, if such things mattered to you. Their locations, once set, would stay the same, no matter how many bodies you were born into, no matter how many new birds inked themselves upon your skin. Some people bore entire flocks. I felt melancholy, grey, when I saw them. So many lives, yes, but still: The evidence of flight, with no memory of the motion.

  The three midwives plucked a feather from each of their capes, and stabbed the quills into the nightingale marked on the palm of my right hand. It sang three notes that hung in the air long after the sound should have faded. Then the three women pulled out the feathers. They used my dripping blood to write something I could not see, folded the piece of paper seven times, then burned it. They drew together, conversing in whispers.

  In an earlier version of this life, I would have asked questions. Would have made the flock of midwives explain to me all the pieces of the ritual, lingered with pleasure over discussions of the various esoteric details. Would have asked why it mattered that the birds were where they were as they flew across the sky of my body.

  But I was tired. I had no space left inside myself for questions and even less for the answers that would inevitably follow. I could not walk the words past the gate of my mouth.

  It wasn’t just every third thought that was of my death, but my every third heartbeat that echoed with it, my every third breath that exhaled the taste of ashes. I craved rest, quiet, peace. Oblivion, like a warm dark blanket.

  Then they turned and, solemn–voiced, told me I could not have it.

  Three days Lara had been back, had been human, and still burning feathers fell from her hair. Embers glowed in her footsteps. But even with these tangible memor
ies of the flame, she felt her blood too cold beneath her skin. She was constantly chilled, and walked about wrapped in a now–scorch–marked blanket.

  She was still not wholly herself. Either of her selves. It was as if some part of her had not come all the way back in her resurrection, or had perhaps gone on before.

  Something had gone wrong.

  Her shadow hung down her back in the shape of wings and the birds that had congregated outside of her house had become more aggressive in their desire to be close to her—flying in under the eaves and down the chimney. Nesting in her sheets and her sweaters. She let them stay—they only wanted warmth, after all, and she could understand that.

  She searched the white bones and ashes in her fireplace for some portent she could interpret. Not easy, not scientific, but that is how questions are answered when there is only one of you in all the world, sole and resurrecting. You clutch at whatever you have to hand.

  She found nothing.

  The crack in her egg had grown deeper. It branched, lightning–struck, fractal. Lara stretched out her hand to the egg, then pulled it back. Holding it made her nauseated. She avoided doing so whenever possible. Better to keep the distance between self and soul.

  Instead, she built up the ashes and the embers around the egg, and hoped that the warmth would be enough to mend the shell. She would light the fire again if she needed.

  She smiled, a harsh baring of teeth. If flames kept falling from her hair, she wouldn’t even need matches.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. I didn’t. I had thought their presence a little more than a formality. I had lived so many lives, and I was dying, and I had thought this was my decision. “Please.”

  The midwives stood around my bed, one on each side, and the third at the foot. All three of their voices chorused in response, though only one of their mouths moved.

  “Your journey has not ended. You have not flown far enough,” they said.

  Nearly a millennium of years inked on my skin in feathered form. How far would enough be, I wondered. How could anyone bear the length of it?