There’s a huffing sound, and a shrill whirring, metallic. There’s a sound like something stretching, another like the pages of an encyclopedia being ruffled. There’s a sound like something landing from a height, and trying to be quiet. There’s a sound like something cracking.
Wren wonders if she’s the one cracking.
She clutches the bottle more tightly. If she could leave the center of the light, she could break the bottle’s neck, and then it could be used, but she can’t move. There’s something about the edge of the spotlight. It’s not a clean circle any longer. There are things out there.
Wren can see shadows, cast inward toward her. Spiny shadows, antlers, horns, fur. Tails. Something lashing and coiled. She hears her cat again, yowling, and she clucks for him to come to her. Susurrus bolts out of the dark, running, fur on end, ears flattened.
The shadows move nearer. One of them leaps over another. Something rears up on its hind legs, and another something rolls and begins to unfold. The shadows are growing larger.
We have our ways of testing, our ways of seeing if someone is ready.
The circle is smaller now. There are things coming closer to her. The cat hoops its back and howls, and Wren catches the faint echo of tinny piano.
She can smell burning popcorn. She can hear a crowd, but the crowd isn’t even whispering. They’re just breathing in, breathing out as something tumbles down to her, shining, twisting, a metal bar suspended on thin chains.
In the space between the chains, in the rectangle outlined by the bar and the links, is darkness. She tries to look through it, to the other side of the circle, but there’s nothing. Now it’s on the ground just before her, the bar nearly under her bare toes.
She can hear the string of lights creaking. She can hear something growling. Oh, she is tired of Earth. Oh, she is tired of the things outside the light, the way they are always circling. This has not been an easy ever after, not since the beginning, and not since last week. Her life has always been larger in the rearview than it appears. There have always been terrible things in the blind spots.
When she turns her head, she sees eyes, flashing in the dark, but nothing else. There’s a heavy sigh from the silence. Somewhere far away, there’s a brass band, but it sounds like music from a television set, wrong slightly, missing notes. Her cat is wrapped around her ankles, tightly curled, hissing. She shivers, and laces her fingers through the chains to steady herself. She can smell her own skin now, the blood on her shirt, the way her hair reeks of cigarettes, and she can smell pipe smoke, too, and something brighter and stranger.
A shadow stretches from the edge of the remaining light, extending itself elegantly over her foot. Susurrus spits and claws and the shadow stretches again, extending its paw, unfurling, until it moves away from the edge of the circle entirely, and arrives before her, a bulk, a shape made of silhouette.
She can feel the crowd waiting. The air hums with a collective intake of breath as she kneels down before the shadow.
We rejoice. She is the one we’ve been calling to. She’s the one we dropped the fliers to find.
It opens its jaws, and she looks into its mouth. There’s nothing there, nothing but her head in the teeth of a shadow, but all around the clearing the trees quiver, and for a moment, she feels the invisible crowd, applauding her bravery. The shadow shakes itself and then leaps through the chains, into the dark suspended above the trapeze.
The cat purrs in greeting and follows it, and Wren jolts forward, shocked, reaching. She can’t see him anymore. His gray shape is gone, like that, not falling, but gone completely.
There’s a strip of black stretching up from her toes, and into the sky, and she stands on the edge of it and stares into it. Something is there, but it isn’t the cat. Something pale, a disc or orb. It’s far away.
She can’t tell what it is, nor how it moves, but it is better than anything she has found here. She blinks, and it’s gone, then returned, then gone again.
It is glad. It is entertained.
Wren can feel the invisible crowd leaning in, watching her. There’s a gasp, an intake, an unbreath, as she puts one foot onto the bar. The ring of keys on her wrist rattles against the metal links suspending the dark. She can feel their cold lips. Little skeletons, married to locks that have nothing to guard.
She thinks of her sister falling face first into oblivion, poison in her hands, ruined by one mistake piled onto too many others. She thinks of the first Wren as the trapeze begins to rise. The first Wren started wrong and got worse. The second Wren is better than the first. She’s sure she must be. She will keep going. Things have happened, but things happen to everyone.
This isn’t how she planned to run away, running up instead of out. This was not what she’d imagined. She is running away to join something. She is running away from the ground.
The trapeze begins to rise, suspended from the night.
The town, now, is visible below her, like something carved out of salt, the buildings covered in pale drifts of popcorn and ticket stubs, our circus flyers in the wind, drifting down like provisions over a warzone. The piano’s faint, playing from the trees and the earth, from the mud, and the shadow animals circle the clearing, doing their tricks in darkness.
The second Wren stretches her toes on the trapeze, and extends a foot into the air. She arches her spine and leans back, looking at the Earth from upside down. She can see the snow plow driven by the janitor, pushing another load of ticket stubs out of the streets and into the fire. She’s not frightened, no, not anymore, though she’s spent her life feeling frightened.
She is glad. She is entertained.
Wren clasps the chains hard in her hands, and dangles in the splits, upside down under the sky. She points her toes, and the trapeze spins as she dances in space, a woman hanging in thin air.
We know that everyone loves a circus. The smell of the greasepaint, we know the recipe. The rolls of tickets, printed in a small machine we purchased at auction. The two-headed goatgirl and the tattooed lady, the fire swallower, all persons we found lost and bewildered, persons looking up. Persons who’d grown exhausted of Earth.
We know that no one can resist popcorn, and so we pop it here. They used to come from miles around, baited by the show, tickets clutched in grubby fists. Families, and single men looking for the carnival strippers. Women used to arrive in groups, holding hands in the dark, fearful, but ready. Grandfathers with their grandchildren. There are fewer now than there were.
We are not a stranger coming to town. We were up here before the town was here.
The second Wren is on the trapeze, her clothing turns to a tutu and a glittering cape. All around her are hoops and balls made of fire, and through them the shadows put on a show.
We’ve been bringing new performers into our circus for a century. Sometimes one doesn’t work out. We lower the trapeze and leave those on the ground, in the center of a clearing that once glowed white with our tent lights. Sometimes they stagger back to town, trying to tell the rest of the people about what they saw when they went into the sky.
“Did you die?” people ask them, and they say they did, or that they saw something they can’t explain. It doesn’t matter which. Dying and returning to life never make most people believe in anything more than their own private glories. One can drop into a well or rise into the light.
It’s always the same, we make sure of that. White glow, a tunnel, a levitation. The sound of our piano and our popcorn machine, the barkers around the edge of the world. We bring performers up, and we treat them well, better than they’d be treated on the ground. All of them are on the run from something. All of them are lost and lonely.
On the trapeze, Wren remembers everything that’s ever happened, a shining rush of color and touch, warbling birds and dishwashers. A whisper of someone in a movie theater, the sound of an arrow leaving a bow and piercing an apple, a balloon popping.
Susurrus leaps out of the dark as she rises, into her arms, and the cat—we have always
enjoyed cats—comes with our new performer, into the hold of our ship.
We’re not looking for the things people think we are. We’re searching for echoes, for light that has traveled a century, the pale ripplings of Charlie Chaplin, bouncing out and up to us, the songs we heard when we were tiny things traveling between far-flung destinations. We are looking for wonders, just as everyone else is looking for wonders. We are looking for the glory of flight.
On the trapeze, the girl and her cat spin, and as we watch, she glitters, she shines, she is our winged wonder, she is our newest act.
See the Unseeable, Wren whispers as she spins, Know the Unknowable.
She swings on the trapeze, and we see the wings we knew were always there. We watch the wonder of her running away to join us, and far below her, far below our vantage of bleachers and sawdust, of striped tent—we can make anything we wish seem true—we can see the janitor looking up.
He points at us as he drives the snowplow, pushing a mile of popcorn, and behind him our animals gallop, a string of horses with feathered headdresses, an elephant made of mist, a visitation from something that exists at the edge of the light.
As the janitor watches, pointing up for no one but himself, though perhaps there are others from this town watching this, too, the girl in our spotlight rises, and rises, a spinning performer in a tutu, hanging from nothing.
At last, she disappears.
Out of the gloom and into the dazzle, into the sawdust ring with her tremendous cat and her bare feet, with the air full of flowers as she takes her bow.
The janitor doesn’t see that part. The town doesn’t see it. But all over the woods, the ticket stubs blaze for a moment for all the people we’ve taken up.
Then we’re gone, a comet, a wonder, a hoax, and the piano fades and the brass band quiets, and our animals run trumpeting and nickering, roaring and singing, all in their formations, dancing across the dark face of the Earth.
© 2016 by Maria Dahvana Headley. | Art © 2016 by Reiko Murakami.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Maria Dahvana Headley is the author of the young adult sky ship fantasy Magonia, from HarperCollins, the novel Queen of Kings, the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes, and The End of the Sentence, a novella co-written with Kat Howard, from Subterranean.
With Neil Gaiman, she’s The New York Times-bestselling co-editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, and has recently appeared at Uncanny Magazine, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, Subterranean Online, The Lowest Heaven, The Book of the Dead, and many more. It’s anthologized in Glitter & Mayhem, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction 2012 & 2013, Paula Guran’s 2013 The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Laird Barron’s The Year’s Best Weird Fiction.
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The Wilderness Within
Tim Pratt | 5980 words
I went to the window of my half-empty apartment that morning expecting to see the usual foggy San Francisco summer street, but instead, there was a volcano: looming over the city taller than the skyscrapers in the financial district, rising from the depths of Golden Gate Park, casting a long shadow to the west. The steep slopes, visible above the rooftops of my neighbors across the street, were gray and rocky, the peak jagged as a mouthful of broken teeth, and faint wisps of smoke rose from the top.
I dropped my coffee on the carpet. I screamed, frightening my cat, who was still anxious from all the recent upheavals in the household. I turned on the TV, prepared for newscasters babbling about unprecedented overnight geological upheavals and impending cataclysms, but found nothing of the sort. I spun through screenfuls of social media on my phone, but there was no hashtag volcano, no mention of earthquakes among my local friends. (Surely such a thing could only be the result of an earthquake? I’m depressingly ignorant about the movements of the Earth for someone who lives so near the Hayward and San Andreas faults.)
My plans to spend the morning at home tidying up the digital paperwork for my last marketing job, ramping up for my next one, and trying to figure out if I could afford to pay rent on the whole apartment by myself for another month were immediately abandoned. My hands were shaking too much to deal with buttons and zippers, so I pulled a pale blue sundress over my head and slipped on open-toed sandals before grabbing my purse and pelting down the stairs and out the front door of my apartment building.
I passed a few people on the street, but none of them were even looking at the volcano, as if the sudden appearance of a mountain on fire in our midst wasn’t worthy of attention. That made no sense at all. At the very least, people should have been posting selfies with the volcano in the background.
I’d never doubted my sanity before. I didn’t do drugs, except pot, and in my experience that doesn’t make you hallucinate volcanoes.
My neighborhood coffee shop (not the one that sells very expensive cinnamon toast, that one’s a few blocks away, closer to the ocean) was in its mid-morning lull, my favorite barista Andi sitting on a stool behind the counter reading something on their tablet while a couple of lit-hipsters gazed seriously at their laptop screens and a guy with messy black hair rested his forehead on the surface of a wooden table, apparently asleep.
Andi looked up, smiling around their lip-rings, and said, “Hey, how are you doing?”
I’d come into the shop immediately pre-or post-crying a couple of times in recent weeks, as things with Juliana went from bad to cataclysmic to dissolved, and Andi had broken the aloof barista code to offer comfort. I wasn’t thinking about my disaster of a personal life and the cascading financial problems of becoming a one-income-household at the moment, though; funny how the appearance of a volcano can lend you a little perspective.
The volcano didn’t seem to make any impact on Andi, though. Was I losing it? I’d thought I was over the worst of the post-break-up crazies, listening to The Smiths and sobbing in a ball on the carpet, breaking down when I found an old toothbrush and a red bra Juliana had left behind in her haste to vacate, sacrificing my circadian rhythms to lose myself in old beloved video games, flaking on my kendo classes, and just generally never leaving the house unless a friend insisted … but maybe hallucinating volcanoes was just step seven in some strange complicated grieving process.
I realized I was staring off into space, so I shook myself and dredged a smile from the depths. “Oh, yeah, I’m, well, you know.”
Andi was all sympathy. “I do. Flat white?”
I’d gotten addicted to drinking those during my year abroad in Australia, and though they didn’t make them quite right here, it was nice of them to try. “Uh, sure.” I decided to risk exploring the extent of my mental disfigurement. “So. Did you see the volcano?”
“Hmm?” Andi made steamed milk. “Why, is it extra smoky this morning or something?”
I stared. They were acting like the volcano was an established fact of the landscape. I couldn’t be that oblivious. If I have a weakness (at least one I’m willing to admit), it’s sometimes pretending to understand things I don’t—a reluctance to show ignorance, or to seem uncool, or to reveal I don’t get a joke. “I … don’t know. Does it ever feel weird to you, working so close to a volcano?”
Andi shrugged. “I don’t really think about it. It’s not like it’s super active or anything. I mean, every place you live tries to kill you somehow. If it’s not a volcano, it’s earthquakes or tornadoes or hurricanes or blizzards or monsoons or whatever.”
“I guess. It’s just—wow. I’m totally blanking on the name. What’s the volcano called?”
Andi stared down into the cup of foam and caffeine, then looked up at me, their eyes slightly glassy. “It’s, what, Mount St. Helens, right? Like your name?”
“No, that’s the one near Portland …”
They put the cup in front of me and swiped at the tablet the café had instead of a cash register, tallying me up. “Right,
no, of course. It’s called, uh, Kamehameha.”
That was the name of a long-dead king of Hawai’i—not even a Hawai’ian volcano—but I didn’t argue, just said, “Oh, right, thanks,” and paid for my coffee. I managed to keep my hands steady enough to carry the cup out to a sidewalk table, with a view of the volcano towering over the buildings, but I didn’t trust myself to take a sip without spilling all over myself.
The messy-haired guy came out of the café, blinking in the morning light. He was maybe twenty-five—just a few years younger than me—and skater-boy lean, wearing black jeans and a plain black t-shirt that clung to his torso in a way I would have found worthy of close examination on another day. His face was beautiful, especially his long lovely eyelashes. He lifted his chin at me. “Heard you asking about the volcano in there.”
I just nodded.
“It’s called Mt. Kilroy.”
“I … oh?”
He gazed at the peak, visible above the buildings across the street, his expression serene. “Yep.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure thing. Your name’s Helen?”
“Helena, actually. Andi just shortens it.”
“That’s the barista? I couldn’t tell, is Andi a chick or a dude?”
My tone was pretty frosty. “Neither, I don’t think. Not everyone divides up that neatly. Their preferred pronoun is ‘they.’”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. Just … never been to San Francisco before. Haven’t run into that kind of thing much.” He offered a lopsided smile. “Anyway, nice to meet you.”
Social niceties seemed ridiculous in my new volcano-filled world, but something between habit and autopilot led me to say, “You, too. What’s your name?”
“I’m Kilroy.”
Before I could react to that, he started sauntering away.
I leapt up, leaving my coffee behind, and chased after him. He was walking like someone with no particular place to go and all the time in the world to get there, so it wasn’t hard to catch up. “Wait, Kilroy, like, the same as the volcano?”
Lightspeed Magazine - September 2016 Page 9