Mothership Zeta issue 1, volume 1

by Escape Artists, Inc.

  When he looked back up at Lydia, she was smiling sadly. “So. I’ve said my goodbyes. I’m ready whenever you are. Deborah is just in the other room. Would you like to see her? Do you need to be in the same room to...do it? She won’t know you’re here, I’m afraid. Palliative care.”

  Malachai did not want to see the dying female. He also did not want to take Lydia’s soul. For the first time in his career, he did not want to do his job. Lydia folded her hands on the table again, a gesture of infinite patience. He stalled desperately.

  “Wait. How did you know how to summon me?”

  Lydia smiled. “I’m a snoop. I found it in Deborah’s diary.”

  “Where did she get it?”

  Lydia shrugged. “How should I know? Is this important?” She was growing impatient. “We don’t have long. The doctors said she could go at any moment. Do I need to sign anything?”

  Hearing her sharp tone, Baxter whined and dropped his ears—a portrait of canine guilt. Lydia scratched under his collar. “Good boy. Don’t worry, I’m not mad at you.”

  Malachai wanted to stall more but didn’t want Baxter to blame himself for Lydia’s frustration, so he came clean. “I. Geez. This is—I mean. I don’t want to take your soul, Lydia. This is a bad arrangement. Sacrifices—they’re meant to be selfish. Most people kidnap someone, or trick a spouse, or buy a baby on the black market. It’s supposed to be, you know.” He looked at her meaningfully, but her face remained blank. “Evil.”

  Lydia frowned. “Well, I don’t want to kidnap anyone. And I only get one request, right? You can’t make us both young again. So why would I want to stick around? To be old and alone? No thank you.” She folded her thin arms across her chest with an air of decision.

  Malachai didn’t like the feeling of conspiring with a Foolish Mortal, but he felt compelled by propriety. This woman was doing it all wrong. He lowered his voice.

  “I could probably do it if you held hands with her, and if you phrased it just right. ‘I Demand That You Make Us Young And Hale Again, Pestilent Creature,’ something like that.”

  “But you still need a sacrifice, and I’m sorry, but I don’t have anyone else to give you.”

  Baxter rolled onto his back, hoping to elicit more belly rubs. Malachai looked down at the old dog, then back up at Lydia.

  “... you can’t think of anyone?”

  The office was massive. A wall of windows looked out over a sparkling city. The spotless desk was made from brushed platinum; the desk chair was upholstered in premium tiger leather. Several overstuffed armchairs were poised around a coffee table made from interlocking elephant tusks. A man in a white suit stood facing a towering fireplace, his hands clasped behind his back. In the fireplace, a sheet of ancient parchment smoldered and crackled. On the panda-skin rug, his captive writhed, struggling to free herself from her bonds before she was to be sacrificed. The man turned as he finished the invocation, prepared to face the demon. He would dominate it. Bend it to his will. He would own this city. He would own the world.

  Smoke (steam) billowed through the room. A peal of thunder sounded from somewhere near the brushed platinum desk, and a bolt of lightning split the ivory table in two. The hounds of Hell snarled their rage and wuffled their interest in belly rubs, and the man in the white suit could hear the creaking of their iron chains as they strained to tear his soul from his body with monstrous, gnashing teeth.

  A figure appeared in the smoke.

  No—two figures.

  “I am the Great and Ominous Malachai, Devourer of Miscreants, Archduke of Nightmares, Usurper of Souls, Master of the Hound of Chaos!”

  The man in the white suit cowered. A dark stain spread across the front of his slacks.

  The Hound of Chaos farted softly.

  “Baxter, damn it. You—sit. Baxter. Sit.”

  The man in the white suit coughed. “Uh, Please, O Ye Harbinger, I Beg Your Mercy.”

  The Hound of Chaos sat and thumped his tail against the platinum desk. The Devourer of Miscreants fed him a treat and clicked a little metal training tab before rounding on the man in the white suit.

  “Frail Mortal! Do You Know The Covenant Which You So Foolishly Invoke At Your Own—Baxter, down. No, don’t pet him, he needs to learn not to jump up on people. Baxter, sit.”

  Malachai gave up. The Hound of Chaos was well on his way to becoming a suitable companion, but he had no sense of theatre at all. The Archduke of Nightmares let out a sigh as the man in the white suit rubbed the Hound’s velvet ears and repeatedly affirmed his status as a Very Good Dog.

  It had been worth it, though. It had been worth it to see Lydia and Deborah together, young again, so in love. That had been his first time seeing mortals weep with anything other than terror, and it had been worth the farting and the crotch-sniffing and the endless, constant shedding.

  And besides, Malachai thought. Even if Baxter lacked a sense of theatre, he really was a Very Good Dog.

  Sarah Gailey is a Bay Area native and an unabashed bibliophile living and working in beautiful Oakland, California. She enjoys painting, baking, vulgar embroidery, and writing stories about murder and monsters. Her fiction has appeared in Cease Cows Magazine and The Literary Hatchet and is pending publication lots of other places. You can find links to her work at sarah-gailey-writes-stuff.squarespace.com. She tweets @gaileyfrey.

  /fiction

  In the midst of many lighthearted, funny stories, we present something layered and dark, warm yet strangely bittersweet. Suyi Davies Okungbowa spins a mesmerizing tale of shackles both physical and psychological, in which a mother observes her daughter on the day that will change her life forever.

  Places

  by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

  In the South-West province of Ubinu, our women are shackled, and we are glad to be so. Every single one of us, from the newborn infant to the senile aged, we willfully submit to the chains we are presented from the day we are born. And at adulthood, when the chains have transcended the physical and set up roots deep in the psychological, we are presented the illusion of freedom, which we willfully embrace as well.

  Even though it is difficult to understand, we cling to the regimens of Valerian root and Catmints and the compulsory rigorous training on Kundalini Awakening. We take pride in the shiny silver bracelets, daily reminders of what lies unbridled within us—I wore mine until I was twenty. It makes it easier to understand how, as Udazi will say, we all have our place.

  Nanavi has never shared with us this joy. Or any joy, for that matter. Her wide sloe eyes that have seen too much at twelve sift through the crowd of tweens and find everything and nothing in common with them. It’s little wonder she sits on the dirty veranda, right above the yellow bush by the steps, hugging her adobe-skinned self with adipose-filled infant arms and watches the party happen in the front yard.

  The lawn is filled with ten-year-old dreams: the boys harry and scuttle and play water wars by the pond-fountain on the west, while the girls, under Nanavi’s watchful eye, play What Am I with nail polish, eye shadows, mascara, and blush. Parents are holed up in the living—I can hear Udazi entertaining them with his big, booming bassoon of a voice that he seldom uses—and I am in the kitchen, on a break from keeping the children in line, heating up some popcorn in an aluminum bowl with an eye on the yard through the double jalousie.

  Thinking about it later on, I feel the popcorn could’ve waited.

  One of the girls—Eseiwi, I think, from the Aleles three houses down—walks out to the group in a half-blouse, a golden face mask, and a flamboyant skirt on her tiny waist, topped by rings and rings of multicoloured beads that shek shek with every step. Colours masquerade her face in what I figure should be makeup. She twists this way and that, to the amusement of the other girls. Then she wriggles her fingers, and a tiny spark jumps from them, fizzes in the air, and extinguishes. A little frown crawls up to her forehead as she f
ingers her bracelet, reminded of the reason for the inhibition, an ever-present mild annoyance. Then, she shakes it off and readies her two hands, lifts them higher, breathes in, and draws on her psion.

  Sparks fly every here and there around her in a simulation of fireworks, and rain down and singe the grass.

  “What am I?” she asks.

  The girls cheer and giggle into chatter, but I don’t miss the subtle flicks of their fingers that send the shower of sparks flying sideways around them, swept by invisible energy out of the way of their perfectly braided hair, their well-made clothes. I glance at Nanavi, hoping she missed it all, but her eyes are right there, taking in everything she can’t become. The pain is like a heat wave around her, and I feel it too.

  “An actress,” one of the girls says.

  “How can I be an actress?” Eseiwi retorts.

  The girls huddle and squint their faces. I’m here, hand on pot, wondering how on earth she’d found out what a belly dancer in the early millennium years had looked like. The Aleles had plenty to answer when I returned to the living.

  “Oh, I know,” another overeager one says. “A dancer?”

  Eseiwi’s face lights up. “Yes?” She jiggles her waist again to urge the girl on. “Yes? A what dancer?”

  The girl’s face is a poster for confusion. “A very good dancer?”

  Eseiwi blows her cheeks and exhales.

  “A dead dancer,” a voice says.

  All the heads turn at once, including mine.

  Kedo is ten, but you’d never know. Half his mates are a head shorter than he is, and his voice might be too early on the way to breaking. Add in the fact that he’s been shot across training twice—making him two levels ahead of his peers—and I can’t blame the girls for the collective gulp they take.

  His birthday shirt. The black one with animated drawings of an early 2000s show about a boy who could change into ten different creatures—I forget the name now. He’d been so, oh my God so ecstatic, to get it for a birthday gift. It is now a shirt with a bit more design in the form of many tiny holes. Holes burnt in by the sparks the Alele girl forgot to extinguish after raining her fireworks.

  He stands before her, red, chest rising and falling. The whole yard is on a playback pause.

  “Look at my shirt,” he says.

  That little frown crawls up Eseiwi’s face again. “What hap—ooh!” She puts her hands to her cheeks. “Oops.”

  Kedo’s chest heaves and heaves. “My shirt,” he says again.

  “Sorry?” the Alele girl whimpers.

  “My birthday shirt.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t know tha—”

  She doesn’t see the water coming. Or Kedo’s fingers move. Even I don’t. All there is is a little girl, clearly torn between remorse and amusement. And then, there’s water rising from the pond, hurling across the yard, and meeting its target. The image that greets widened eyes and opened mouths is now a dripping child in soaked hair and running colours.

  Eseiwi’s face contorts like this and that, sparks starting to jump around her, her psion mixing with the churning rage in her tiny body but thankfully held down, the silver bracelet doing its job well. Her mouth opens, building up for the shriek I sense is coming. But she never gets there.

  Kedo flexes his fingers, wriggles them like octopus tentacles. He’s good with his psion, you know. Flexible. We know he will become a psionist one day, like the ones who train him. The problem is that he too knows this, and knows it too soon. It makes him feel superior in a way no child should.

  The water from the pond obeys his commands, I see through the jalousie. It rises from the pond, first in a stream, and then up into something rounder, iridescent in the high noon. Kedo flexes his wrists and swings his arms like a professional dancer, molding sheets of water around molecules of air and plucking it in a globule from the pond. It’s a tough skill, something Udazi himself did not master until he was an adult.

  The ball fizzes across the yard and goes straight into the Alele girl’s open mouth. The girl goes down in a choking fit; at the same time my hand flies from the heating pot.

  Thinking about it later on, again, this is the point I should’ve run out. Yet, something—I don’t know what it is—makes me plant my feet there. Maybe some form of fate, or universal ordination that needed it to happen, I don’t know. Instead of succumbing immediately to motherly instinct and dashing across the kitchen, through the living, out to the veranda and down into the yard, I opt for a bellow. But just as I’m about to holler my well-meant threat (Ei! Kedo, apologise now, or you’ll never sit on two buttocks again!) through the jalousie, something happens.

  “Kedo. Stop that.”

  Nanavi is no longer on the veranda, above the yellow bushes by the steps, but she’s stepped down and in the centre of the lawn, a few paces from the Alele girl.

  Kedo swings his eyes around and lets them rest on his sister. His eyes are cloudy now, seem darker than normal. There’s something within them, something beyond mere annoyance. Something that digs deeper. It’s that thing he’s enjoying, and it’s irritated at being impeded.

  “Don’t be telling me what to do.”

  “Shut up,” Nanavi says, in that calm but firm voice; I don’t know where she got it from. It reminds me too much of myself. “You can’t be doing that.”

  “You can’t be telling me to shut up,” he says.

  “I can. I’m older. And Mama put me in charge of the girls.”

  “In charge of them. Not me.”

  “I’m your older sister. I’m always in charge of you.”

  Kedo’s chest heaves again at that word always.

  “You’re not my sister,” he says through teeth. “You’re adopted.”

  In the kitchen, I put a palm over my mouth. How can he say that! My feet shuffle restlessly, yet I still don’t move.

  To my surprise, Nanavi isn’t moved. She simply smirks and says:

  “But so are you.”

  Kedo doesn’t like that at all. The circles under his eyes become more visible as he wriggles his fingers again. A globule of water floats from the pond and sits in front of him at chest height, his eyes shiny, basking in the glow of his own prowess. This one is much bigger than the one he let fly on the Alele girl, and it seems to have fewer air molecules trapped inside because the iridescence is gone. Then another follows in its wake, and another and another, swift as the eye can blink. All at once, there are five globules lined up in front of him, an array of water grenades ready for launch.

  “I said stop that,” Nanavi reiterates, her voice firm, but now losing its grip.

  “Or what?” Kedo replies. His eyes drop to her bare wrist, devoid of any bracelet, and with that one look, he disarms her.

  I fully understand, at this point, that things have changed. Children may bicker and fight, and that’s alright with me, but when this degenerates into psychological warfare, then that is far too dangerous ground. Especially with Nanavi.

  It took us a while to get it about her in the beginning, after the adoption. She was only seven, thereabouts. She’d paint a lengthy sheet of paper with shiny gray markers, then fold it into a strip and wind it around her wrist. She wore that thing everywhere—at home, at school, to the stores. The girls would tease (Ei! Make a fire, Nana. Ei. Wait. You need matches, Nana. You need matches), and sometimes, they’d be mean and yank it off, but she’d have another ready before the next day.

  We didn’t get it then, how being an orphan without psionic abilities was like being, not even the lowest rung on the ladder, but the dirty brown sand beneath it. How that strip of paper was her little mind’s way of surviving the world’s cold shoulder. So, when Udazi and I decided she’d outgrown it and made it stop, we didn’t understand her spikes in anger and depression, her sudden loss of interest in everything. And after we got drained and tired of talking to a statue, we w
ent and adopted a genius psionic boy because we wanted to feel complete, and that was the biggest mistake we ever made.

  I think that was when she finally packed her bags and settled in Outcasttown. Nothing better than a brother to remind you every day that you’re not only half a person, but half of what is half of society. The anger and bitterness ended, but a vacancy crept into her eyes and took up permanent residence there. We no longer had a statue, yes, but we had a numb mass with a cycle of eat, sleep, study, exist. Even the digs by the girls now ran off her like water on a greasy surface. She gave in to the prison of the pain, embraced it, lived it.

  On some lucky days, she set herself free for a minute, and lived for that minute before returning to its cold embrace. On such days, I longed to be there, to make it last, to help her see that what she had was a gift, not a curse. A gift, Nana. Because now, you’re your own place. You don’t have to be like me. Like all of us.

  But she wants to, and it eats her up deep inside. She suffers, Nana. She does not deserve to be reminded every day. She does not need her fears—that she is weak, vulnerable, that she is no one without psionic abilities—to be fed. Which is why I finally give in to motherly instinct and dash out through my earlier planned route.

  “Kedo!”

  And of course, as with all parental instinct, the people in the living room pick up the scent of my haste like bloodhounds, and spring to follow in my wake. What? Eh? Mrs Okuta!

  But we’re all too late, anyway.

  By the time my foot lands on the veranda, Kedo has swiped his fingers, and all five—yes, all five—balls of water have been flung at Nanavi at a speed that can only be measured in metres-per-second.

  We brace for the splash. Nanavi braces for the splash. Some of the men put up their hands and exert their psionic energies to hold the water up if it gets to the veranda. But it never gets there.