by Steve Berman
Table of Contents
Wilde Stories 2018
Copyright
Ghost Sex | Joseph Keckler
Serving Fish | Christopher Caldwell
Some Kind of Wonderland | Richard Bowes
Pan and Hook | Adam McOmber
The Summer Mask | Karin Lowachee
The Library of Lost Things | Matthew Bright
Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me | John Chu
Salamander Six-Guns | Martin Cahill
Cracks | Xen
The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter | Sam J. Miller
Uncanny Valley | Greg Egan
Love Pressed in Vinyl | Devon Wong
There Used to Be Olive Trees | Rich Larson
The Secret of Flight | A.C. Wise
A Bouquet of Wonder and Marvel | Sean Eads
Afterword
About the Contributors
About the Editor
Wilde Stories 2018: The Year’s Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Copyright © 2018 Steve Berman. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2018 by Lethe Press, Inc. at Smashwords.com
www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]
ISBN: 9781590211724
The stories in this volume are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
“Some Kind of Wonderland” copyright © 2017 Richard Bowes, first appeared in Mad Hatters and March Hares (ed. by Ellen Datlow, Tor Books) / “The Library of Lost Things” copyright © 2017 Matthew Bright, first appeared at Tor.com, August 23, 2017 / “Salamander Six-Guns” copyright © 2017 Martin Cahill, first appeared in Shimmer #38 / “Serving Fish” copyright © 2017 Christopher Caldwell, first appeared in People of Color Take over Fantastic Stories of the Imagination (ed. by Nisi Shawl, Positronic Publishing) / “Making the Magic Lightning Strike Me” copyright © 2017 John Chu, first appeared in Uncanny Magazine #16 / “A Bouquet of Wonder and Marvel” copyright © 2017 Sean Eads, first appeared in Georgetown Haunts and Mysteries (ed. by Jeanne C. Stein & Joshua Viola, Hex Publishers) / “Uncanny Valley” copyright © 2017 Greg Egan, first appeared at Tor.com, August 9, 2017 / “Ghost Sex” copyright © 2017 Joseph Keckler, first appeared in Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World (Turtle Point Press) / “The Summer Mask” copyright © 2017 Karin Lowachee, first appeared in Nightmare Magazine, #62 / “Pan and Hook” copyright © 2017 Adam McOmber, first appeared in Vestiges:Mimesis, Winter 2017 / “The Future of Hunger in the Age of Programmable Matter” copyright © 2017 Sam J. Miller, first appeared at Tor.com, October 18, 2017 / “The Secret of Flight” copyright © 2017 A.C. Wise, first appeared in Black Feather (ed. by Ellen Datlow, Pegasus Books) / “Love Pressed in Vinyl” copyright © 2017 Devon Wong, first appeared in Strange Horizons, April 3, 2017 / “Cracks” copyright © 2017 Xen, first appeared in FIYAH Literary Magazine, #3
Cover design: Inkspiral Design.
GHOST SEX
JOSEPH KECKLER
I am not saying I believe in ghosts at all, but I did have sex with one.
I never saw it but I did feel that cold feeling that you feel, supposedly, when a supernatural presence enters the room. I had only felt this cold feeling two other times in my life. Once when my friend Thain—who aspires to be a cult leader one day, by the way—took me to a séance in the Bronx and people were huddled into a side room at a botánica. One occult practitioner was waving some branches around and mumbling, trying to summon an otherworldly entity, and when I entered everyone looked at me and pointed and shouted “Brujo! Brujo!” announcing that I was a witch—even though I don’t know the first thing about magic and what have you. But then, a few moments later: whoosh, a cold air overtook the room and the hairs on my forearm stood on end. Their spirit had apparently arrived.
The other time was when I’d been enlisted to portray the New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders in the reading of a play. I began studying videos of him intently on YouTube, trying to imitate him and become him and then again, whoosh—my living room became alive with a chill and I was left to assume that the spirit of Johnny Thunders was suddenly near. I am not sure I did a good job acting as Johnny in the presentation later that week, but I am inclined to suspect he was keeping tabs on me from the beyond.
Anyway, back to the story at hand. I was staying at an art colony that is famously haunted—if one believes in that sort of thing. Its lore involves fires, ailments, and the deaths of children whose graves are still scattered across the property. The place certainly gives off a gothic vibe. For instance, there’s a Victorian mansion there where legend has it Truman Capote used to hold court from a strange velvet throne. Earlier that week I had been singing Schubert’s “Litanei” in the music room of the mansion and a bat flew in and began circling me. I just kept singing: and those who never smiled in the sun, but under the moon waited on thorns to see God, face to face in the pure light of heaven, all souls, rest in peace. (In German, of course.) Round and round went the bat as the other artists snickered and cowered in the pews. I didn’t even duck as it grazed my hair.
I sang in the mansion but I wasn’t sleeping there. I had been put up in one of the satellite buildings, a partly subterranean apartment in a house. Dank but charming, it had linoleum floors and faced a distant wall of trees—it felt like the home of some old relative I’d visited in my childhood. A frazzled playwright warned me that he had once stayed in that room and a ghost threw a teacup at his head. But this man was terrified by the entire premises and would drive in his SUV from building to building—distances of twenty feet or so—for fear of hostile outdoor specters, and insisted that other residents accompany him to and from his car. He also had contended with spirits at other art colonies and in the town where he lived. So I assumed that he was just a universal ghost-magnet, irresistible to the unseen. And I didn’t anticipate that I myself would have to dodge flying china in my cozy little abode.
Aside from hauntings, this art colony is known for being host to much cavorting; various twentieth-century masters of literary and musical form reputedly engaged in orgiastic escapades here. So when I received the acceptance letter, my friend Sheila implored me, in her Southern accent, with all the drama of a Tennessee Williams character, “Joe, please tell me you’ll have an affair there! God, promise me you’ll have one! Don’t you understand? It will make your relationship stronger!” But I was determined to be on my best behavior because, as Sheila indicated, I had recently entered into a decidedly monogamous arrangement. In fact, I had just returned from a romantic trip to Italy, and I set up various postcards of Bellini, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico around my bed to remind me, at night, of my trip and my love.
But it was hard to go to sleep in my apartment. First off, it was very dark outside and I had to creep around a stone path in the black buzzing woods, to the back of the house, which spooked me a bit. Second, my apartment was attached to an old tool shed that you could get to from a passageway connected to the living room, through a filthy corridor that looked like the perfect terror-chamber for a serial killer to keep his victims chained up in. Third, every time I was on the verge of sleep I would see a white flash of light that would snap me back to the waking world and then there’d be a series of frantic footsteps emanating from the ceiling directly above my head.
I knew there was an eighty-something who once wrote for the macabre soap opera Dark Shadows somewhe
re in the building, working on a novel or something, and I figured he must have taken to doing midnight dashes across his room, perhaps as a form of physical fitness. Or maybe he was still asleep, and was simply being swept into spasms of somnambulant dancing. This explanation still wouldn’t account for the white flashes, but I was willing to accept those as figments of my imagination.
One morning, after a particularly restless night, I inquired as to who was in the apartment above me. The lady behind the desk in the office replied, “Oh, no one’s been up there for years. That’s just used for storage. The only other active rooms are on the other side of the house.”
This piece of information, which clearly supported the existence of the paranormal, both troubled and delighted me. I was unsure of what to do. Should I call my love, a self-avowed “materialist” who claims not to believe in anything that can’t be observed? Yes, perhaps some skepticism would be of comfort. I picked up the phone, but instead found myself dialing my witch friend, Thain, an expert on supernatural codes of behavior and spectral etiquette. He had just awoken at four p.m. “So you want to banish a spirit?” he asked in his low, slow, South African drawl.
“Well I can’t banish this ghost, because it lives there and I don’t,” I explained worriedly. “But is there some way I could make peace with it, so it would stop stomping around and disturbing my sleep?”
“Okay, calm down. I hear what you’re saying. I do hear what you’re saying,” he repeated, like a drunk therapist. “I’m hearing that you want to commune with a spirit.”
“Yes, commune,” I repeated. “I guess that would be it…. A friendly gesture. Is that possible?”
“It is possible,” said Thain. “It is…possible. It’s possible. What I can do is I can—what I can do…. What I can do is…is I can give you an incantation. Okay? An incantation, and a few instructions. Listen carefully. You’re going to need a hand-dipped white candle and some whiskey.”
“Scotch or bourb—”
“Bourbon,” he said decisively, as though I were offering to hand him a glass of it right then.
That afternoon I made one trip to a new age-y store in town, and another over to the liquor store. I had no idea how a ghost could drink whiskey, but I hadn’t made a fuss on the phone and chose not to overthink it now. After dinner that night, and the customary coffee hour that followed, I ventured back to my dwelling, and prepared everything just as Thain had instructed me.
I was to set out the whiskey on its own surface in a conspicuous location, as one would when leaving a glass of milk out for Santa Claus. So I dragged my nightstand to the center of the room and poured a generous amount of bourbon into a clean tumbler. Next to this, I lit the candle. I had scrawled the words to the incantation with purple Crayola marker on a sheet of paper torn from my giant desk pad.
I studied the words and tried to memorize them. Some phrases were in English, some polite way of expressing, “Spirit, let’s get real, wouldn’t you fancy popping in for a few glugs of bourbon?” And other phrases were in an unrecognizable language—I’d transcribed Thain’s words phonetically, but had no clue what they meant.
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I began repeating the invocation, the invitation. At first nothing happened. A distant creaking startled me. I arose for a moment, poured myself a glass of whiskey, took a sip, and set it aside. I closed my eyes again, regained my composure, and muttered the words again. Then I waited and repeated them again. I don’t remember how many times I repeated these words but at a certain point: whoosh.
I was enveloped by a coldness, a coldness that did not, however, make me huddle or shiver. My arms lifted, as though they were preparing to wade in a pool. Then I was overtaken by a pleasant numbness. I felt that I no longer had control of my body, but I could feel it tingling everywhere. My arms moved very slowly up and down, and into different positions, twisting gently, as though guided by another presence. My spine shifted. It was like an erotic physical therapy session. And though Angela Lansbury’s workout routine for the elderly, which Sheila had often described to me, sounded more aerobically vigorous, I suspect now that this strange yoga amounted to a more blissful experience.
My ghost was a body worker.
I was not sexually aroused in the traditional male sense, but every part of my body was erotically alive, the way I imagine people feel on certain drugs. If someone had been watching I guess they would have seen me sitting there in the candlelight, raising my arms again and again, like a lost raver, for perhaps an hour or more.
At some point I felt like I was being carried to my bed. For the first time in that room, I slept quite peacefully.
When I awoke that next morning, full of life, I found a puddle of white wax and two glasses of whiskey, both seemingly untouched. The footsteps ceased for the remainder of my stay, as did the flashes of light. We engaged in no further sessions. Although it was brief, and possibly imagined, I supposed that now I had an affair to tell Sheila about. But I would wait to tell my partner, who I knew would be upset that I believed in ghosts.
SERVING FISH
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
Eric ran towards the shore of the lake, still half made-up as Mahogany Eternique, heels in hand, gaffing tape undone, red taffeta train dragging behind in the mud. He sprinted until he reached the water’s edge, picking up speed despite snagging his dress twice on branches that littered the shore, and fell to his knees. The cool water soaked through all four pairs of pantyhose as it lapped against his knees and calves. Panting, and clutching the side which ached from running a mile and a half in a corset, Eric tried to work up enough spit to speak without croaking. His nostrils flared wide. He breathed in the dank, algae smell of lake water. He licked his lips, glitter rough against his tongue, and pitched his voice as loud as he dared across the water. “Flounder, flounder in the sea, rise up from the depths for me…”
He stared across the surface of the lake for nearly a minute, watching the city lights reflect. Except for a few leaves washing up onto the shore, the water seemed untroubled. Eric called out over the water again, his voice cracking with expectation, “Flounder, flounder in the sea?”
But the lake’s surface remained placid. He stared across the water for what felt like forever, not daring to blink. At last, Eric shuddered, and shut his eyes. A great spasm shook his body. Tears mixed with mascara clumped like oil droplets in his false eyelashes.
A rasping baritone rose above the sound of the cars behind and the water lapping against the shore ahead. “This is not, strictly speaking, a sea.”
Eric’s eyes snapped open. An enormous black shape lay just beneath the lake’s surface. It’s grown as big as an eighteen wheeler, Eric thought. The front end of an immense flatfish, scaly and covered in barnacles. broke the surface. Two jaundiced eyes the size of dinner plates on the same side of a misshapen head regarded him; a sideways mouth opened and closed, spiny teeth gnashing in the air. Eric straightened his back, his bodice sagging against his chest without the padding he used to fill it, and spread out his arms in supplication. “Though you may not care for my request, I’ve come to ask it, nonetheless.”
The sideways mouth opened, and the voice echoed over the water. “I wondered when you would ask again. What is it this time?”
Eric’s eyes glittered dangerously. “Revenge.”
The yellow eyes seemed to wobble slightly. “You know the costs.”
Eric smiled sadly. “I do.”
The surface of the lake roiled, and a sudden salty wind sprang up from nowhere, stinging Eric’s cheek and eyes.
The baritone voice cracked out up over the howling wind as the giant fish sank down into whatever depths it had come from.
“Granted.”
When Eric was ten, his parents, deciding that he needed to toughen up and be more of a man, sent him on a long crabbing and fishing trip with his grandparents. Nestled in the plush back seat of his grandmother’s rust-colored Chevrolet Caprice, Eric read facts about Pacific marine life from the
backs of collectible cards with glossy colored photos while his grandfather fumed about the traffic from Sacramento to Bodega Bay. “I don’t know why these fools even get in cars if they can’t drive.”
Eric’s grandmother sucked at her dental bridge; it gave her a sour look. “Roland, you pull over at the next stop and I’ll drive the rest. Doctor said to mind your blood pressure.”
“My blood pressure’ll be fine. Wait’ll we get to the boats. Sea air and a reel will fix us up. Maybe straighten the naps out of that boy’s hair.”
“Roland. Leave him alone.”
“I just don’t get why his mama let his hair get wild like that. He needs a military cut. Don’t know where that nappy hair comes from, not my side.”
Eric’s grandmother sucked at her bridge again. “Quit pretending you had good hair before you lost it and drive if you’re going to. I’m going to rest my eyes.”
Eric read about the mating habits of the grunion. His grandfather turned up the radio and grunted in approval at the Stylistics. Eyelids heavy, lulled by the sounds of classic R&B, Eric fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was twilight and the Caprice was parked in front of a weathered motel that had seen better days. The seafoam green door to room seven was ajar, and his grandfather bustled in carrying luggage and a tackle box. His grandmother was still sitting in the front, and patted him on the cheek. “You hungry? I brought some red beans in Tupperware. I’ll heat ’em up on the hotplate if you want something to eat.”
Eric nodded and slid bonelessly out of the car, and trudged into room seven, wiping his feet on the mat and staring at the swirls on the carpet. They were the colors of pea soup and chocolate milk. The motel room smelled like the sea and old cigarettes. Eric lay down on the double bed closest to the window without taking off his Keds and stretched his arms out wide as if to fill as much space as possible. His grandmother poured a grey-brown mass of red beans and hamhocks into a little pot on the hot plate and hummed softly. Eric fell asleep to the sounds of the sea and his grandmother’s wordless hymn.