by Irene Gallo
No. Treat him like any other. Let your skill guide you. You take your knife and shave the hair on your husband’s left arm with the softest touch.
You remove every single hair on his body to use for kindling for the fire you will build to dry his bones, separating a small handful of the longest hairs for the decoration, then incise the tip of his little finger to separate skin from muscle.
Your daughter mirrors your movements. She, too, is fluent in the language of knives.
The palms and feet are the hardest to skin, as if the body fights to stay intact and keep its grip on this realm. You struggle at first but then work the knife without effort. As you lift the softly stretching tissue, you see the countless scars that punctuated his life—the numerous cuts that crisscross his hands and shoulders, from when he challenged the sword dancers in Aeno; the coin-shaped scars where arrowheads pierced his chest during their voyage through the Sear of Spires in the misty North; the burn marks across his left hip from the leg hairs of the fire titan, Hragurie. You have collected your own scars on your journeys through the forgotten places of this world, and those scars ache now, the pain kindled by your loss.
After you place your husband’s skin in a special aventurine bowl, you take to the muscle—that glorious muscle you’ve seen shift and contract in great swings of his dancing axe while you sing your curses and charms alongside him in battle. Even the exposed redness of him is rich with memories, and you do everything in your power not to choke as you strip him of his strength. This was the same strength your daughter prized above all else and sought for herself many years ago, after your spells and teachings grew insufficient for her. This was the same strength she accused you of lacking when you chose your mother’s calling, retired your staff from battle, and chose to live preparing the dead for their passing.
Weak. The word still tastes bitter with her accusation. How can you leave him? How can you leave us? You’re a selfish little man.
You watch her as you work until there is nothing left but bones stripped clean, all the organs in their respective jars and bowls. Does she regret the words now, as she works by your side? Has she seen your burden yet? Has she understood your choice? Will she be the one to handle your body once you pass away?
You try to guess the answer from her face, but you find no solace and no answer. Not when you extract the fat from your husband’s skin, not when you mince his flesh and muscle, not when you puree his organs and cut his intestines into tiny strips you leave to dry. Your daughter excels in this preparatory work—her blade is swift, precise, and gentle.
How can she not? After all, she is a gift from the gods. A gift given to two lovers who thought they could never have a child on their own. A miracle. The completion you sought after in your youth; a honey-tinged bliss that filled you with warmth. But as with all good things, your bliss waxed and waned as you realized: all children have favorites.
You learned how miracles can hurt.
* * *
You align his bones on the metal tray that goes into the hungry oven. You hold his skull in your hands and rub the sides where his ears once were. You look deep into the sockets where once eyes of dark brown would stare back into you.
His clavicle passes your fingers. You remember the kisses you planted on his shoulder, when it used to be flesh. You position his ribcage, and you can still hear his heartbeat—a rumble in his chest the first time you lay together after barely surviving an onslaught of skinwalkers, a celebration of life. You remember that heart racing, as it did in your years as young men, when vitality kept you both up until dawn. You remember it beating quietly in his later years, when you were content and your bodies fit perfectly together—the alchemy of flesh you have now lost.
You deposit every shared memory in his bones, and then load the tray in the oven and slam shut the metal door.
Behind you, your daughter stands like a shadow, perfect in her apprentice robes. Not a single crease disfigures the contours of her pants and jacket. Not a single stain mars her apron.
She stares at you. She judges you.
She is perfection.
You wish you could leave her and crawl into the oven with your husband.
* * *
Flesh, blood and gristle do not make a cake easily, yet the Cake Maker has to wield these basic ingredients. Any misstep leads to failure, so you watch closely during your daughter’s examination, but she completes each task with effortless grace.
She crushes your husband’s bones to flour with conviction.
Your daughter mixes the dough of blood, fat, and bone flour, and you assist her. You hear your knuckles and fingers pop as you knead the hard dough, but hers move without a sound—fast and agile as they shape the round cakes.
Your daughter works over the flesh and organs until all you can see is a pale scarlet cream with the faint scent of iron, while you crush the honey crystals that will allow for the spirit to be digested by the gods. You wonder if she is doing this to prove how superior she is to you—to demonstrate how easy it is to lock yourself into a bakery with the dead. You wonder how to explain that you never burnt as brightly as your husband, that you don’t need to chase legends and charge into battle.
You wonder how to tell her that she is your greatest adventure, that you gave her most of the magic you had left.
* * *
Layer by layer, your husband is transformed into a cake. Not a single bit of him is lost. You pull away the skin on top and connect the pieces with threads from his hair. The sun turns the rich shade of lavender and calendula.
You cover the translucent skin with the dried blood drops you extracted before you placed the body in the purification vat and glazed it with the plasma. Now all that remains is to tell your husband’s story, in the language every Cake Maker knows—the language you’ve now taught your daughter.
You wonder whether she will blame you for the death of your husband in writing, the way she did when you told her of his death.
Your stillness killed him. You had to force him to stay, to give up his axe. Now he’s dead in his sleep. Is this what you wanted? Have him all to yourself? You couldn’t let him die out on the road.
Oh, how she screamed that day—her voice as unforgiving as thunder. Her screaming still reverberates through you. You’re afraid of what she’s going to tell the gods.
You both write. You cut and bend the dried strips of intestines into runes and you gently push them so they sink into the glazed skin and hold.
You write his early story. His childhood, his early feats, the mythology of your love. How you got your daughter. She tells the other half of your husband’s myth—how he trained her in every single weapon known to man, how they journeyed the world over to honor the gods.
Her work doesn’t mention you at all.
* * *
You rest your fingers, throbbing with pain from your manipulations. You have completed the last of your husband’s tale. You have written in the language of meat and bones and satisfied the gods’ hunger. You hope they will nod with approval as their tongues roll around the cooked flesh and swallow your sentences and your tether to life.
Your daughter swims into focus as she takes her position across the table, your husband between you, and joins you for the spell. He remains the barrier you can’t overcome even in death. As you begin to speak, you’re startled to hear her voice rise with yours. You mutter the incantation and her lips are your reflection, but while you caress the words, coaxing their magic into being, she cuts them into existence, so the veil you will around the cake spills like silk on your end and crusts on hers. The two halves shimmer in blue feylight, entwine into each other, and the deed is done.
You have said your farewell, better than you did when you first saw him dead. Some dam inside you breaks. Exhaustion wipes away your strength and you feel your age, first in the trembling in your hands, then in the creaking in your knees as you turn your back and measure your steps so you don’t disturb the air—a retreat as slow as
young winter frost.
Outside the Bakery, your breath catches. Your scream is a living thing that squirms inside your throat and digs into the hidden recesses of your lungs. Your tears wash the dry mask from your cheeks.
Your daughter takes your hand, gently, with the unspoken understanding only shared loss births, and you search for her gaze. You search for the flat, dull realization that weighs down the soul. You search for yourself in her eyes, but all you see is your husband—his flame now a wildfire that has swallowed every part of you. She looks at you as a person who has lost the only life she had ever known, pained and furious, and you pat her hand and kiss her forehead, her skin stinging against your lips. When confusion pulls her face together, her features lined with fissures in her protective mask, you shake your head.
“The gods praise your skill and technique. They praise your steady hand and precision, but they have no use of your hands in the Bakery.” The words roll out with difficulty—a thorn vine you lacerate your whole being with as you force yourself to reject your daughter. Yes, she can follow your path, but what good would that do?
“You honor me greatly.” Anger tinges her response, but fights in these holy places father only misfortune, so her voice is low and even. You are relieved to hear sincerity in her fury, desire in her voice to dedicate herself to your calling.
You want to keep her here, where she won’t leave. Your tongue itches with every lie you can bind her with, spells you’ve learned from gods that are not your own, hollow her out and hold onto her, even if such acts could end your life. You reconsider and instead hold on to her earnest reaction. You have grown to an age where even intent will suffice.
“It’s not an honor to answer your child’s yearning.” You maintain respectability, keep with the tradition, but still you lean in with all the weight of death tied to you like stones and you whisper. “I have told the story of your father in blood and gristle as I have with many others. As I will continue to tell every story as best as I can, until I myself end in the hands of a Cake Maker. But you can continue writing your father’s story outside the temple where your knife strokes have a meaning.
“Run. Run toward the mountains and rivers, sword in your hand and bow on your back. Run toward life. That is where you will find your father.”
Now it is she who is crying. You embrace her, the memory of doing so in her childhood alive inside your bones, and she hugs you back as a babe, full of needing and vulnerable. But she is no longer a child—the muscles underneath her robes roll with the might of a river—so you usher her out to a life you have long since traded away.
Her steps still echo in the room outside the Baking Chamber as you reapply the coating to your face from the tiny crystal jars. You see yourself: a grey, tired man who touched death more times than he ever touched his husband.
Your last task is to bring the cake to where the Mouth awaits, its vines and branches shaking, aglow with iridescence. There, the gods will entwine their appendages around your offering, suck it in, close and digest. Relief overcomes you and you sigh.
Yes, it’s been a long day since you and your daughter cut your husband’s body open. You reenter the Baking Chamber and push the cake onto the cart.
HARALAMBI MARKOV is a Bulgarian critic, editor, and writer of things weird and fantastic. A Clarion 2014 graduate, Markov enjoys fairy tales, obscure folkloric monsters, and inventing death rituals (for his stories, not his neighbors … usually). Markov runs the Innumerable Voices column at Tor.com, profiling short fiction writers. His stories have appeared in Weird Fiction Review, Electric Velocipede, Tor.com, Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, The Apex Book of World SF, and Uncanny Magazine. He’s currently working on a novel.
The Shape of My Name
Nino Cipri
A time-travel story about what it means to truly claim yourself. Edited by Ann VanderMeer.
The year 2076 smells like antiseptic gauze and the lavender diffuser that Dara set up in my room. It has the bitter aftertaste of pills: probiotics and microphages and PPMOs. It feels like the itch of healing, the ache that’s settled on my pubic bone. It has the sound of a new name that’s fresh and yet familiar on my lips.
The future feels lighter than the past. I think I know why you chose it over me, Mama.
* * *
My bedroom has changed in the hundred-plus years that have passed since I slept there as a child. The floorboards have been carpeted over, torn up, replaced. The walls are thick with new layers of paint. The windows have been upgraded, the closet expanded. The oak tree that stood outside my window is gone, felled by a storm twenty years ago, I’m told. But the house still stands, and our family still lives here, with all our attendant ghosts. You and I are haunting each other, I think.
I picture you standing in the kitchen downstairs, over a century ago. I imagine that you’re staring out through the little window above the sink, your eyes traveling down the path that leads from the back door and splits at the creek; one trail leads to the pond, and the other leads to the shelter and the anachronopede, with its rows of capsules and blinking lights.
Maybe it’s the afternoon you left us. June 22, 1963: storm clouds gathering in the west, the wind picking up, the air growing heavy with the threat of rain. And you’re staring out the window, gazing across the dewy fields at the forking path, trying to decide which way you’ll take.
My bedroom is just above the kitchen, and my window has that same view, a little expanded: I can see clear down to the pond where Dad and I used to sit on his weeks off from the oil fields. It’s spring, and the cattails are only hip high. I can just make out the silhouette of a great blue heron walking along among the reeds and rushes.
You and I, we’re twenty feet and more than a hundred years apart.
* * *
You went into labor not knowing my name, which I know now is unprecedented among our family: you knew Dad’s name before you laid eyes on him, the time and date of my birth, the hospital where he would drive you when you went into labor. But my name? My sex? Conspicuously absent in Uncle Dante’s gilt-edged book where all these happy details were recorded in advance.
Dad told me later that you thought I’d be a stillbirth. He didn’t know about the record book, about the blank space where a name should go. But he told me that nothing he said while you were pregnant could convince you that I’d come into the world alive. You thought I’d slip out of you strangled and blue, already decaying.
Instead, I started screaming before they pulled me all the way out.
Dad said that even when the nurse placed me in your arms, you thought you were hallucinating. “I had to tell her, over and over: Miriam, you’re not dreaming, our daughter is alive.”
I bit my lip when he told me that, locked the words “your son” out of sight. I regret that now; maybe I could have explained myself to him. I should have tried, at least.
You didn’t name me for nearly a week.
* * *
Nineteen fifty-four tastes like Kellogg’s Rice Krispies in fresh milk, delivered earlier that morning. It smells like wood smoke, cedar chips, Dad’s Kamel cigarettes mixed with the perpetual smell of diesel in his clothes. It feels like the worn-velvet nap of the couch in our living room, which I loved to run my fingers across.
I was four years old. I woke up in the middle of the night after a loud crash of lightning. The branches of the oak tree outside my window were thrashing in the wind and the rain.
I crept out of bed, dragging my blanket with me. I slipped out of the door and into the hallway, heading for your and Dad’s bedroom. I stopped when I heard voices coming from the parlor downstairs: I recognized your sharp tones, but there was also a man’s voice, not Dad’s baritone but something closer to a tenor.
The door creaked when I pushed it open, and the voices fell silent. I paused, and then you yanked open the door.
The curlers in your hair had come undone, descending down toward your shoulders. I watched one tumble out of your hai
r and onto the floor like a stunned beetle. I only caught a glimpse of the man standing in the corner; he had thin, hunched shoulders and dark hair, wet and plastered to his skull. He was wearing one of Dad’s old robes, with the initials monogrammed on the pocket. It was much too big for him.
You snatched me up, not very gently, and carried me up to the bedroom you shared with Dad.
“Tom,” you hissed. You dropped me on the bed before Dad was fully awake, and shook his shoulder. He sat up, blinking at me, and looked to you for an explanation.
“There’s a visitor,” you said, voice strained.
Dad looked at the clock, pulling it closer to him to get a proper look. “Now? Who is it?”
Your jaw was clenched, and so were your hands. “I’m handling it. I just need you to watch—”
You said my name in a way I’d never heard it before, as if each syllable were a hard, steel ball dropping from your lips. It frightened me, and I started to cry. Silently, though, since I didn’t want you to notice me. I didn’t want you to look at me with eyes like that.
You turned on your heel and left the room, clicking the door shut behind you and locking it.
Dad patted me on the back, his wide hand nearly covering the expanse of my skinny shoulders. “It’s all right, kid,” he said. “Nothing to be scared of. Why don’t you lie down and I’ll read you something, huh?”
In the morning, there was no sign a visitor had been there at all. You and Dad assured me that I must have dreamed the whole thing.
I know now that you were lying, of course. I think I knew it even then.
* * *
I had two childhoods.
One happened between Dad’s ten-day hitches in the White County oil fields. That childhood smells like his tobacco, wool coats, wet grass. It sounds like the opening theme songs to all our favorite TV shows. It tastes like the peanut-butter sandwiches that you’d pack for us on our walks, which we’d eat down by the pond, the same one I can just barely see from my window here. In the summer, we’d sit at the edge of the water, dipping our toes into the mud. Sometimes, Dad told me stories, or asked me to fill him in on the episodes of Gunsmoke and Science Fiction Theatre he’d missed, and we’d chat while watching for birds. The herons have always been my favorite. They moved so slow, it always felt like a treat to spot one as it stepped cautiously through the shallow water. Sometimes, we’d catch sight of one flying overhead, its wide wings fighting against gravity.