Mom said she was sorry, she didn’t want to tell me to stop since it seemed so important, but she kept finding them in her closet.
I said I’d never put them there, but she didn’t believe me.
“We can’t go there again,” Mom said, “no one ever gets to go back!” and she stomped out of the kitchen and into the rain.
Has my mom been there? Why didn’t she ever tell me? Why did you banish her too?
What did we do so wrong we can’t come back?
—Ellie
* * *
Zera’s knees feel about to shatter.
“Why are you doing this?” Zera grips an old, warped rocking chair. “You’ve blacked out the Land of Doors, haven’t you?”
YES, says the Book. ALL WHO GO THERE WILL SLEEP, UNDREAMING, UNTIL THE END.
Zera blinks hard, her head dizzy from the pressure in the air. “You can’t take away everyone’s happiness like this.”
NO? says the Book. WHY NOT? NO ONE EVER REMEMBERS US THERE. THEY FORGET AND GROW OLD AND ABANDON US.
“That’s not true,” Zera says. “Ellie remembers. There are others.”
Misu nods.
Zera pushes through the heavy air, reaching out a hand to the Book. “They tell stories of us there,” Zera says, because Ellie used to bring stacks of novels with her instead of PBJ sandwiches in her backpack. “There are people who believe. But there won’t be if we close all the doors. Stories in their world will dry up. We’ll start to forget them, too.”
WE MEAN NOTHING TO THEM.
Zera shakes her head. “That’s not true. I don’t want my best friend to disappear forever.”
* * *
Gatekeeper,
I don’t know why I bother anymore. You’re not listening. I don’t even know if you exist.
It’s been awhile, huh? Life got busy for me. High school, mostly. Mom got a better job and now we won’t have to move again. Also I met this awesome girl named LaShawna and we’ve been dating for a month. God, I’m so in love with her. She’s funny and smart and tough and kind—and she really gets me.
Sometimes she reminds me of Zera.
I asked Mom why she kept my letters.
She didn’t avoid me this time. “I had a door when I was younger,” she said, and she looked so awfully sad. “I was your age. I met the person I wanted to stay with forever.” She let out her breath in a whoosh. “But then the door just . . . it broke, or something. I tried dating here. Met your father, but it just wasn’t the same. Then he ran off and it was like losing it all again.”
I told LaShawna about Zera’s world. She said she didn’t want to talk about it. I think maybe she had a door, too.
I was so angry growing up, feeling trapped. You know the best thing about Zera? She got me. I could be a girl, I could be a boy, and I could be neither—because that’s how I feel a lot of the time. Shifting around between genders. I want that to be OK, but here? I don’t know.
The thing is, I don’t want to live in Zera’s world forever. I love things here, too. I want to be able to go back and forth and have friends everywhere, and date LaShawna and get my degree and just live.
This will be my last letter to you, Gatekeeper.
If there was one thing Zera and I learned, it’s that you have to build your own doors sometimes.
So I’m going to make my own. I’ll construct it out of salvaged lumber; I’ll take a metalworking class and forge my own hinges. I’ll paper it with all my letters and all my memories. I’ll set it up somewhere safe, and here’s the thing—I’ll make sure it never locks.
My door will be open for anyone who needs it: my mom, LaShawna, myself.
—Ell
* * *
The Book is silent.
“Please,” Zera says. “Remove the curse. Let us all try again.”
And she lays her hand gently on the Forgotten Book and lets the Book see all the happy memories she shared with Ellie, once, and how Ellie’s mom Loraine once came here and met Vasha, who has waited by the door since the curse fell, and Misu, who befriended the lonely girl LaShawna and longs to see her again—and so many, many others that Zera has collected, her heart overfilled with joy and loss and grief and hope.
In return, she sees through space and time, right into Ell’s world, where Ell has built a door and has her hand on the knob.
“Ell,” Zera calls.
Ell looks up, eyes wide. “Zera?”
“Yes,” Zera says, and knows her voice will sound dull behind the door. “I’m here.”
Ell grins. “I can see your reflection in the door! Is that the Book with you?”
The Book trembles. SHE REMEMBERS.
Zera nods. The air is thinning, easing in her lungs. “I told you. Not everyone forgets.”
I would like to see LaShawna again, says Misu.
VERY WELL, says the book. THE CURSE WILL BE REMOVED.
Ell turns the handle.
Bright lights beams into the Island of Stars, and Ell stands there in a doorway, arms spread wide. Zera leaps forward and hugs her best friend.
“You came back,” Zera says.
“I brought some people with me, too,” Ell says, and waves behind her, where two other women wait.
Loraine steps through the light with tears in her eyes. “I never thought I could come back . . .”
Misu squeaks in delight and flies to LaShawna.
Zera smiles at her friends. Things will be all right.
“We have a lot of work to do to repair this place,” Zera says. She clasps Ell’s hands. “The curse is gone, but we have to fix the doors and wake the sleepers. Are you ready?”
Ell grins and waves her mom and girlfriend to join her. “Yes. Let’s do this.”
NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE
BEST SHORT STORY
OUR TALONS CAN CRUSH GALAXIES
BROOKE BOLANDER
Brooke Bolander writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily toward fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon awards, much to her unending bafflement. Her debut book, The Only Harmless Great Thing, was published in 2018 by Tor.com.
This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck.
* * *
You want that kind of horseshit, you don’t have to look far; half of modern human media revolves around it, lovingly detailed descriptions of sobbing women violated, victimized, left for the loam to cradle. Rippers, rapists, stalkers, serial killers. Real or imagined, their names get printed ten feet high on movie marquees and subway ads, the dead convenient narrative rungs for villains to climb. Heroes get names; killers get names; victims get close-ups of their opened ribcages mid-autopsy, the bloodied stumps where their wings once attached, baffled coroners making baffled phone calls to even more baffled curators at local museums. They get dissected, they get discussed, but they don’t get names or stories the audience remembers.
So, no. You don’t get a description of how he surprised me, where he did it, who may have fucked him up when he was a boy to lead to such horrors (no-one), or the increasingly unhinged behavior the cops had previously filed away as the mostly harmless eccentricities of a nice young man from a good family. No fighting in the woods, no blood under the fingernails, no rivers or locked trunks or calling cards in the throat. It was dark and it was bad and I called for my sisters in a language dead when the lion-brides of Babylon still padded outside the city gates. There. That’s all you get, and that’s me being generous. You’re fuckin’ welcome.
* * *
However, here is what I will tell you. I’ll be quick.
He did not know what I was until after. He felt no regret or curiosity, becau
se he should have been drowned at birth. I was nothing but a commodity to him before, and nothing but an anomaly to him after.
My copper feathers cut his fingertips and palms as he pared my wings away.
I was playing at being mortal this century because I love cigarettes and shawarma, and it’s easier to order shawarma if your piercing shriek doesn’t drive the delivery boy mad. Mortality is fun in small doses. It’s very authentic, very down-in-the-dirt nitty-gritty. There are lullabies and lily pads and summer rainstorms and hardly anyone ever tries to cut your head off out of some moronic heroic obligation to the gods. If you want to sit on your ass and read a book, nobody judges you. Also, shawarma.
My spirit was already fled before the deed was done, back to the Nest, back to the Egg. My sisters clucked and cooed and gently scolded. They incubated me with their great feathery bottoms as they had many times before, as I had done many times before for them. Sisters have to look out for one another. We’re all we’ve got, and forever is a long, slow slog without love.
I hatched anew. I flapped my wings and hurricanes flattened cities in six different realities. I was a tee-ninsy bit motherfuckin’ pissed, maybe.
I may have cried. You don’t get to know that either, though.
We swept back onto the mortal plane with a sound of a 1967 Mercury Cougar roaring to life on an empty country road, one sister in the front seat and three in the back and me at the wheel with a cigarette clenched between my pointed teeth. You can fit a lot of wingspan in those old cars, provided you know how to fold reality the right way.
It’s easy to get lost on those backroads, but my old wings called to us from his attic. We did not get lost.
He was alone when we pulled into his driveway, gravel crunching beneath our wheels like bone. He had a gun. He bolted his doors. The tumblers turned for us; we took his gun.
Did he cry? Oh yeah. Like a fuckin’ baby.
I didn’t know what you were, he said. I didn’t know. I just wanted to get your attention, and you wouldn’t even look at me. I tried everything.
Well, kid, I says, putting my cigarette out on his family’s floral carpet, you’ve sure as hell got it now.
Our talons can crush galaxies. Our songs give black holes nightmares. The edges of our feathers fracture moonlight into silver spiderwebs and universes into parallels. Did we take him apart? C’mon. Don’t ask stupid questions.
Did we kill him? Ehh. In a manner of speaking. In another manner of speaking, his matter is speaking across a large swathe of space and time, begging for an ending to his smeared roadkill existence that never quite reaches the rest stop. Semantics, right? I don’t care to quibble or think about it anymore than I have to.
* * *
Anyway. Like I said way back at the start, this is not the story of how he killed me. It’s the story of how a freak tornado wrecked a single solitary home and disappeared a promising young man from a good family, leaving a mystery for the locals to scratch their heads over for the next twenty years. It’s the story of how a Jane Doe showed up in the nearby morgue with what looked like wing stubs sticking out of her back, never to be claimed or named. It’s the story of how my sisters and I acquired a 1967 Mercury Cougar we still go cruising in occasionally when we’re on the mortal side of the pike.
You may not remember my name, seeing as how I don’t have one you could pronounce or comprehend. The important thing is always the stories—which ones get told, which ones get co-opted, which ones get left in a ditch, overlooked and neglected. This is my story, not his. It belongs to me and is mine alone. I will sing it from the last withered tree on the last star-blasted planet when entropy has wound down all the worlds and all the wheres, and nothing is left but faded candy wrappers. My sisters and I will sing it—all at once, all together, a sound like a righteous scream from all the forgotten, talked-over throats in Eternity’s halls—and it will be the last story in all of Creation before the lights finally blink out and the shutters go bang.
NEBULA AWARD WINNER
BEST SHORT STORY
SEASONS OF GLASS AND IRON
AMAL EL-MOHTAR
Amal El-Mohtar has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for her short fiction, and her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. She writes the Otherworldly column for the New York Times, contributes reviews to NPR, and is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. This Is How You Lose the Time War, a novella co-written with Max Gladstone, is forthcoming from Saga Press in 2019.
Amal lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.
For Lara West
Tabitha walks, and thinks of shoes.
She has been thinking about shoes for a very long time: the length of three and a half pairs, to be precise, though it’s hard to reckon in iron. Easier to reckon how many pairs are left: of the seven she set out with, three remain, strapped securely against the outside of the pack she carries, weighing it down. The seasons won’t keep still, slip past her with the landscape, so she can’t say for certain whether a year of walking wears out a sole, but it seems about right. She always means to count the steps, starting with the next pair, but it’s easy to get distracted.
She thinks about shoes because she cannot move forward otherwise: each iron strap cuts, rubs, bruises, blisters, and her pain fuels their ability to cross rivers, mountains, airy breaches between cliffs. She must move forward, or the shoes will never be worn down. The shoes must be worn down.
It’s always hard to strap on a new pair.
Three pairs of shoes ago, she was in a pine forest, and the sharp green smell of it woke something in her, something that was more than numbness, numbers. (Number? I hardly know ’er! She’d laughed for a week, off and on, at her little joke.) She shivered in the needled light, bundled her arms into her fur cloak but stretched her toes into the autumn earth, and wept to feel, for a moment, something like free—before the numbers crept in with the cold, and one down, six to go found its way into her relief that it was, in fact, possible to get through a single pair in a lifetime.
Two pairs of shoes ago, she was in the middle of a lake, striding across the deep blue of it, when the last scrap of sole gave way. She collapsed and floundered as she undid the straps, scrambled to pull the next pair off her pack, sank until she broke a toe in jamming them on, then found herself on the surface again, limping toward the far shore.
One pair of shoes ago, she was by the sea. She soaked her feet in salt and stared up at the stars and wondered whether drowning would hurt.
She recalls shoes her brothers have worn: a pair of seven-league boots, tooled in soft leather; winged sandals; satin slippers that turned one invisible. How strange, she thinks, that her brothers had shoes that lightened their steps and tightened the world, made it small and easy to explore, discover.
Perhaps, she thinks, it isn’t strange at all: why shouldn’t shoes help their wearers travel? Perhaps, she thinks, what’s strange is the shoes women are made to wear: shoes of glass; shoes of paper; shoes of iron heated red-hot; shoes to dance to death in.
How strange, she thinks, and walks.
* * *
Amira makes an art of stillness.
She sits atop a high glass hill, its summit shaped into a throne of sorts, thick and smooth, perfectly suited to her so long as she does not move. Magic girdles her, roots her stillness through the throne. She has weathered storms here, the sleek-fingered rain glistening between glass and gown, hair and skin, seeking to shift her this way or that—but she has held herself straight, upright, a golden apple in her lap.
She is sometimes hungry, but the magic looks after that; she is often tired, and the magic encourages sleep. The magic keeps her brown skin from burning during the day, and keeps her silkshod feet from freezing at night—so long as she is still, so long as she keeps her glass seat atop her glass hill.
From her vantage point she can
see a great deal: farmers working their land; travelers walking from village to village; the occasional robbery or murder. There is much she would like to come down from her hill and tell people, but for the suitors.
Clustered and clamoring around the bottom of her glass hill are the knights, princes, shepherds’ lads who have fallen violently in love with her. They shout encouragement to one another as they ride their warhorses up the glass hill, breaking against it in wave after wave, reaching for her.
As they slide down the hill, their horses foaming, legs twisted or shattered, they scream curses at her: the cunt, the witch, can’t she see what she’s doing to them, glass whore on a glass hill, they’ll get her tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
Amira grips her golden apple. By day she distracts herself with birds: all the wild geese who fly overhead, the gulls and swifts and swallows, the larks. She remembers a story about nettle shirts thrown up to swans, and wonders if she could reach up and pluck a feather from them to give herself wings.
By night, she strings shapes around the stars, imagines familiar constellations into difference: suppose the great ladle was a sickle instead, or a bear? When she runs out of birds and stars, she remembers that she chose this.
* * *
Tabitha first sees the glass hill as a knife’s edge of light, scything a green swathe across her vision before she can look away. She is stepping out of a forest; the morning sun is vicious, bright with no heat in it; the frosted grass crunches under the press of her iron heels, but some of it melts cold relief against the skin exposed through the straps.
She sits at the forest’s edge and watches the light change.
There are men at the base of the hill; their noise is a dull ringing that reminds her of the ocean. She watches them spur their horses into bleeding. Strong magic in that hill, she thinks, to make men behave so foolishly; strong magic in that hill to withstand so many iron hooves.
She looks down at her own feet, then up at the hill. She reckons the quality of her pain in numbers, but not by degree: if her pain is a six it is because it is cold, blue with an edge to it; if her pain is a seven it is red, inflamed, bleeding; if her pain is a three it has a rounded yellow feel, dull and perhaps draining infection.