io9 is proud to current fiction from LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE. Once a month, we function a narrative from LIGHTSPEED’s present subject. This month’s choice is “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird” by Maria Dong. You can learn the story under or listen to the podcast on our web site. Enjoy!
In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird
In the start of me, I used to be a hen.
A magpie, though I’ve since been a jay and a red-tailed hawk and even a giant, black crow, crying tok-tok-tok at each passerby.
But the magpie was particular: on my first day, I noticed these flashing blue wingtips, and I used to be myself. And on daily basis after, I awoke and flew to a shiny window, simply to admire my plumage.
Birds don’t final. Their hearts beat so quick, the seeds burn them out. We didn’t know that but—the sky had solely simply break up open, the almost-microscopic seeds floating down on thorn-tipped maple wings to drill their method into no matter they landed on. Sometimes it was soil, or water, or concrete—however usually, it was flesh.
Once you bought the seed in you, the clock began. After a couple of jumps, you thought of your choices rigorously. You in a magpie isn’t you in a dragonfly or a trout or a noticed dalmatian. We like greatest the animals that make us really feel most ourselves.
As for me, I solely really feel proper once I’m some sort of hen.
Here is a narrative about us, from earlier than I used to be you:
“Get off that branch!” I whistle a pointy warning by my beak, however you’re playful, and you’re daring, and you’re the quickest finch on this tree or another. You will not be advised.
You descend branches till you’re a couple of above the bottom. How seen you make your self, how loud your tune! Who cares if there’s a fox beneath you, staring up hungrily? You are the invincible hen, king of—
But oh, that’s not simply a fox. You flit down, nearer, as a result of you may see the spark of the seed—this fox is such as you, human and never human.
(And pondering of it now, you ache—as a result of it was early, but, and you may nonetheless be stunned.)
“Hello,” you tweet, solely simply out of attain. There are tales of individuals going utterly native, unable to regulate themselves, however you suppose these tales are inaccurate. You suppose it’s extra seemingly these individuals had been foxes all alongside, and discovering the best physique solely gave them the excuse.
“How are you?” says the fox. “I am finding this a bit disorienting.” Their voice is—not muffled, precisely. It reminds you of assembly somebody that’s solely lately arrived in your nation. Accent—sure, that’s the phrase. An accent.
(It was onerous to recollect what international locations had been. What accents had been. You questioned, not for the primary time, when you would ever cease being a hen.)
You decide a mite out of your wing. “Is this your first hop?”
The fox nods, swaying a bit—it may be onerous to get used to the equilibrium of a brand new physique, the semi-circular canals within the incorrect locations.
“It’s okay,” you say, your tweets gold and glowing.
“It’s not okay,” says the fox. “My body—”
“Has been invaded. And now you’re an invader.” You nod and hop-hop-hop across the department—nearer, after which away, as a result of the fox nonetheless seems to be hungry. “But you have to let go of that, I think.”
“I don’t want to be a fox,” says the fox. “I want to be a bird, like you.”
“You should have decided that before. When you feel yourself get hot, you need to—”
The fox lunges, russet size a hunter’s snapping entice. Incensed, you flit to the best department, however you’re too proud to fly away.
The fox waits for hours. Eventually it leaves, as a result of a fox can by no means catch a hen with out trickery, and this fox is simply too new to try something intelligent.
Maybe I’ve made a mistake. I assumed this was a narrative I may inform because it comes. But now?
I’m sorry. It’s onerous, piecing collectively the . . . I wish to name them recollections, however that’s incorrect. It’s as if I’ve jammed a large needle into your temple, and once I pull the plunger, out comes every part you’re. Shove that into one thing else’s mind—one thing that hears frequencies you’ve by no means dreamed of, that may scent dying on the wind two miles away, that’s rutted however by no means made love. Something with a coronary heart that beats 4 hundred instances a minute—scale and tempo, keep in mind this for later: it’s all scale and tempo.
Without the identical nostril, or eyes, or coronary heart, or mind, what do you keep in mind? And a greater query is: who, or what, are you now?
In the start, earlier than I used to be me, I used to be sick. It was two weeks after I’d felt that seed burrow in—a prick like a fang, after which the gentle, gradual wriggle of a bit of hungry worm. If I moved the incorrect method, it could pinch, like a splinter I couldn’t discover.
I didn’t know what it was. Still, I ought to’ve advised somebody—however I had simply moved to a brand new place: a squalid, shoe-box condominium on the fifth flooring. And even when that hadn’t been the case, I used to be single and unemployed and sort of shy—truly, I believe that is all you must find out about me: on the uncommon events I traveled, I needed to go to the publish workplace and inform them to carry my mail, as a result of there was no one who would possibly decide it up.
The ache grew till it adopted me all over the place: stabbing me every time I shifted, waking me from a lifeless sleep. Before lengthy, I wheezed by lungs full of sludge, and I may not go to my café to learn, although that was most likely for the perfect. The final time, the ache had gotten the perfect of me, and I snapped at a lady for sitting in my sales space.
And nonetheless, I didn’t name a health care provider. I didn’t consider I used to be dying, at the same time as I guttered like a candle flame drowning in its personal wax.
Toward the top, I fell, and I couldn’t stand up. A neighbor knocked on my door—maybe due to the thump, or maybe due to the scent I’d began to emanate, like soiled dishwater and burnt hair. I assumed it was a lady, as a result of I may see her footwear, black and white and glossy, with pointy toes—however I didn’t reply, and earlier than lengthy, she left.
On the final day earlier than I used to be another person—
Before I used to be myself—
—I sat in my cramped galley kitchen, too exhausted to make it to the couch. The window was cracked open, and the roving white cat I generally fed scraps of ramen noodles was on the window ledge, awaiting its dues.
“Help me,” I begged, however the cat simply sat there.
After a couple of extra minutes, I began to gasp, as if dry-drowning, and my coronary heart was beating so onerous it roared in my ears. My complete physique boiled with fever.
I couldn’t stand. I couldn’t cry out. I knew it was the top.
In my ultimate seconds, I had the thought—how good it was, that my mother and father had been each lifeless, as a result of seeing me die alone like this could’ve damaged their hearts—after which I floated up and out of my physique, no extra substantial than a mud mote.
It felt incorrect. The sort of incorrect that explains why each tradition has a narrative about being caught behind the veil. I may really feel myself dispersing, like whenever you open the door to the lavatory and all of the steam billows out—however then there was a tug, a knocking exterior—besides, no, I was exterior—and I grabbed on and let myself in.
I can see why you would possibly get mad. If animals are sentient, we are able to’t justify driving them round like machines.
Except—whenever you’re in a cat, you’re additionally the cat. Did you actually suppose you may be a cat and never carry a few of that away with you? Not depart some a part of your self behind?
You’re not even the one in management, at first. You don’t know what’s happening or have your bearings, and you retain switching from one thoughts to the opposite, as when you had been merely excessive and never of two minds directly. And though I used to be lifeless, there have been components of me that had been jubilant. My eomma had wished me to develop into a health care provider (or on the very least, a nurse.) She’d by no means, in all her life, imagined that I would develop into a cat.
And so there we had been, drunk and completely happy on our swishy tail and the way in which we may hear the scuttle of a mouse on the fireplace escape and the sturdy, sturdy, salty scent of noodles and burgers and the banh mi place down the street and—
Even now, I nonetheless get misplaced in smells, so we should always transfer on.
We, who had been sarcastically named Shadow, stalked the mouse on the fireplace escape. We pounced, grabbed it in our jaws and pierced its flesh—salty and candy was the blood—however we didn’t agree with ourself on what to do subsequent and fought over our jaw muscle tissues, and the mouse fell right into a garbage can under.
Then, we had been in settlement, each of us above soiling ourselves with rubbish. But we had been nonetheless hungry, so we went to Second Best Food Place, which was not as tasty as First Best Food Place, nevertheless it additionally had Soft Bed Place and Many Strokes Human.
We climbed one other fireplace escape—so quick, we had been so quick, even when we didn’t like the texture of the metallic grating on our paws—and slipped right into a window that led to the stairway, earlier than coming round to the entrance door of Second Best Food Place. We meowed and meowed to be let in, me marveling on the method our throat stretched and twitching of the muscle tissues in our legs and the little blossoms of life in our stomach—kittens, we had been going to have kittens, quickly, six of them, and the second refused to cease kicking us.
The door opened, and we went inside. It was solely then that I observed the girl’s footwear—shiny and black and white, and with pointy toes, and we didn’t know the phrase, however I did. Wingtips. They couldn’t have been the identical ones, I assumed as I fought with us to regulate our head, to look her up and down.
She was skinny, and never in a glamorous method. There had been darkish baggage beneath her eyes and a sheen of sweat on her brow, and she or he smelled . . . unhealthy. Like the time we scaled that tree and swiped that egg from the robin’s nest, after which we cracked it open and it was rotten—
No, I wasn’t there, I advised us, however we didn’t appear to grasp.
“Oh, Shadow,” mentioned the Many Strokes Human. She wrapped her arms round herself, as if she had been chilly. “What have you gotten into?”
Her lip curled up—disgust. She disappeared for a second—faucet sounds, squeak-squeak-squeak—after which got here again with a rag to wipe the blood from our face.
After she bathed us—which we permitted solely after an important struggle along with her and our selves—we spent the evening curled as much as her. At one level, she acquired up for the lavatory, and we performed pounce along with her toes, however we had been drained from having two minds and two souls and just one physique. Already, our insides had been sizzling, too sizzling, and I may really feel that the space between our selves was compressing, that components of me had been getting woven into us.
Lying there, on her mattress at midnight, it scared me, as a result of it didn’t really feel like I may get them again.
The subsequent morning, she went to dress. She opened her closet, and I noticed it—me. Not us, however me—picture after picture after picture, all black and white, of the individual I’d been earlier than.
The hair went up all the way in which down our backbone. We lashed our tail, however we padded nearer, barely noticing her as she shuffled round by the hanging racks for an outfit.
In the images, I by no means seemed on the digital camera. Some had been close-ups, taken from afar, as if with a telescoping lens. Others had been blurry thumbprints—cellphone images that had been printed and lower out, my face dispersing into fields of dots up shut. There had been many from the café I regarded as my café—I’d hardly ever left the home, however once I had, it was there, to learn—however solely once I may get my desk, the one within the very, very again, away from the home windows and the baristas and the sunshine.
From the angle of the {photograph}, it had been taken from the café’s toilet. There was even a sliver of the door within the picture, grainy and out of focus.
She’d been watching me. This girl, who I had by no means met earlier than, who I didn’t know the identify of, and I had no concept why.
I needs to be afraid, I assumed, however I used to be additionally a spirit inside a cat’s mind, and I’d simply spent the evening with the girl—and in any case, we didn’t really feel nervous about it in any respect, as a result of this was the Many Strokes Human, and we weren’t afraid of her.
I waited. We began to get anxious from being inside for thus lengthy (for though I knew easy methods to use the door, we couldn’t.) I suppose the girl may inform, as a result of she opened the door, and we slipped into the hallway.
But then she got here out after us, shutting and locking the door behind. I acquired one other take a look at her, this time within the gentle spilling by the window that we’d slipped by yesterday.
She seemed sick, and she or he blinked her eyes quickly towards the sunshine. I noticed for the primary time that she hadn’t turned on the lights once we’d been inside.
After a second, she went down the steps. We wished to climb out the window once more and go searching for First Best Food Place, however I used to be stronger now—though there was much less of me left.
I pushed and pushed and pushed, and we fought, however I received, and our legs turned and we went down the steps, skulking after the girl and her pointy black footwear.
Traveling was totally different—I used to be in a position to understand extra by our senses, nevertheless it didn’t match up with the psychological maps I had of this space, and I couldn’t orient myself properly. Perhaps that’s why we made all of it the way in which to the door of the café earlier than I noticed the place we had been going.
I debated making an attempt to slide into the café behind my neighbor, however we balked onerous at that—it was an enclosed house with no open home windows, and other people had kicked us and spat at us earlier than—so we stood on our again legs and put our paws to the window, scanning the glass for her picture.
She didn’t go to the counter. Instead, she went straight to the again of the café, proper to my desk. A second later, she got here out.
The subsequent place she visited was my condominium. She went straight to the door—however skulking, simply as we had been skulking behind, and I’m certain we’d have made a humorous picture to anyone watching—and knocked tentatively.
We didn’t like this. The knocks had been loud and sharp to us, and we may scent me inside, my ripe, rotting physique. It made us wish to yak all around the hallway carpet. I didn’t know, but, that the dizziness was from my presence, the pressure of getting us each within this cat-body, chewing it up.
She waited and knocked once more, after which she scrunched over and put her cheek to the door. “Hello,” she mentioned. “Are you in there?”
We meowed plaintively, however she didn’t appear to note. We waited for her to depart, however she slumped towards the wall and folded down, down, down, and now we may see her face, her cheek and its small pink blemish. Before, we’d have taken it for a pimple, however I knew what it was as a result of I’d had one prefer it earlier than I turned us.
A seed. A seed had drilled into her cheek, and she or he was weak and smelled unhealthy, nearly as unhealthy as my physique did, and that meant she was dying.
She would want a physique. This one was already occupied, however I had an concept.
We checked the dumpster, however the mouse was gone. We argued briefly, as a result of though we agreed that catching a mouse was a good suggestion in precept, my insistence that we not hurt it meant we couldn’t style the blood.
But I used to be stronger, as a result of our physique was getting drained, working hotter and warmer, and so I received. We caught a mouse and introduced it up by its tail.
The girl was mendacity down. We may inform she didn’t have the energy to sit down up. She shuddered when she noticed us and the wriggling mouse, however she didn’t attempt to transfer, and we waited whereas the mouse bit us and kicked and bit us—
She died, and I felt her, inside and outdoors, right here and there—after which she was herself and the mouse, and naturally, they had been each you.
Our friendship wasn’t a friendship, at first. You and I couldn’t speak, as a result of mice and cats couldn’t communicate to 1 one other but, and so I had no option to inform you who I used to be or ask you why your closet was filled with stolen images of me.
And you had been afraid of me, very afraid, since you had been you, however not but. Not all the way in which. Not the way in which I’d be, as soon as I turned a hen.
Before lengthy, our physique that was Shadow turned very sick—however you had been sicker, since you had been smaller, your tiny coronary heart working just like the fan in a gaming laptop. More than as soon as, you tried to flee, however you had been a small factor, and we an order of magnitude bigger, and we caught you simply.
When it got here near time, the we that was as soon as Shadow picked you up by the tail and dragged you to the zoo. We set you to relaxation within the giraffe pen, after which we used what was left of our energy and jumped increased, increased, till we discovered the button that unlocked the enclosure. We managed to swipe at it a second earlier than our physique hit the bottom, after which the we that was as soon as Shadow was not Shadow anymore.
This time, we had been each giraffes—knobby-kneed and long-necked and proud, and it wasn’t till I felt myself stretching into this new type that I noticed my miscalculation: we had been the identical species, now, the I-we and the You-we, however whereas giraffes talk, it isn’t with phrases. There was no option to say {photograph}, or condominium, or wing-tipped shoe. I attempted scratching figures within the filth with our cloven hooves, nevertheless it all got here out as wobbly squares.
Still, you may inform that we had been speaking to you—and maybe you may really feel me now, the way in which I felt you, no extra concern of my feline enamel and claws. Or maybe you’d realized what had occurred, how shut you’d come to expiring—I do know that every hop between our bodies frightens you, that you just always remember the wrongness.
Cat-me had made different miscalculations. For one, although the door was open, we had been nonetheless giraffes, and giraffes seldom go unnoticed. They can not traipse round downtown with out being caught and introduced again to the zoo.
But it was a consolation to wind our lengthy neck with yours, and although I burned to find why you’d been spying on me, the reality was that you just had been my solely kindred spirit—at first. As the times handed and other people visited the zoo, we heard their telephones, their conversations, their tiny radios taking part in the information. We knew extra individuals had been dying, although no one had put the our bodies and the seeds collectively.
Before lengthy, zoo-comers dwindled, till there have been none. We realized they may by no means return. Still, time was passing, and we burned by every animal within the enclosure, by the final.
We would’ve died, then, had not a pair of bees buzzed by.
We leaped into them, and then you definately took off, and I had no selection however to observe, although I couldn’t management this physique the identical as you may yours.
(I really feel a lot grief for you, for if I’m me once I’m a hen, you’re you whenever you’re a bee, and a bee is so tiny that you could be solely be you for a couple of minutes at a time.)
I didn’t know the place you had been going, however I used to be not going to lose you, and so I did my greatest with our wings. But you timed it incorrect, dropped from the sky like a shot. A second later, I felt ourself arc down after you, our bee-body already a shell—and that’s once I felt them under us, twisting and agile and muscular. You and I, we plunged into two dolphins, and once more, I used to be I-we, and also you had been you-we.
Dolphins can communicate, although it’s not the identical—not one thing I can translate, although I’ll strive.
I mentioned, “Who are you? I click-bounced you, outside the place I am always swimming.”
And you mentioned, “What is happening to us? Was it the kelp-sperm that floated down from the sky?”
And I-we nodded, and tried to face up on our tail, though we couldn’t try this but.
But you laughed, a sequence of stutters that we felt rise from our decrease jawbone, performed by the water just like the drumming of fingers on a desk. I used to be embarrassed, however you swam towards me and mentioned, “Catch me!”
The tougher we used these our bodies, the sooner they might burn away. But we felt your wake as you streaked away like a comet, and the a part of us that was not me pushed our physique to observe.
As the times handed, I began to listen to a thrum, a low susurration like waves. I couldn’t inform if it was new, or if I’d ignored it my complete life.
But I knew it acquired louder every time we modified.
We left the zoo within the our bodies of two smallish monkeys, for we’d realized, by then, that even when was simply the 2 of us, the zoo animals wouldn’t final eternally. And I attempted not to consider it—what it meant abandoning this carnage, what we had been doing, physique after physique burned out from the within like dugout canoes.
There was nothing else for it, was there? After all, we wished to reside.
I used to be afraid to depart that place, although, the protection of these partitions. Afraid there was no option to make it out of town to the true wild areas, however I shouldn’t have fearful. Amidst the streets and the automobiles and the buildings had been ten-thousand synanthropic hearts: little brown home mice and massive black roof rats, pigeons and geese and hidden city farms of bees and geese and chickens, falcons and foxes and silverfish, roaches and squirrels and raccoons and rabbits, small bevvies of skunks, hordes of flies and bedbugs, and as soon as, even, a pair of armadillos.
By the time we made it to the sting of town, I used to be detest to depart—however the murmur within the background of our minds had grown to a roar, a wild clamor of all of the voices that lay out within the inexperienced areas, each tamed and free—although to us, all of it was freedom. By then, too, we may really feel within the milieu round us the others like us—these the seeds had taken, an increasing number of on daily basis, although the people who had been left went on oblivious, saying issues like affordable precautions and illness.
We hurtled into the wild areas with the howl of monkeys, the stuttering chuckle of dolphins conducting up jawbone. By then we had been studying to talk, stumbling upon phrases as if we’d as soon as identified them, like immigrants with half-forgotten childhoods. It was a language not made with tongues or enamel or the click of mandibles, and but we understood it and one another and all of the furred and feathered and hard-shelled issues round us, for they spoke it, too.
And every time I closed my eyes and listened, I discovered new voices becoming a member of. I may hear the oak bushes and the whoosh because the bushes pulled water by their roots, their trunks, their leaves. The buzz of the celebs overhead, muffled by the hymns of clouds. The wild rumbling beneath our toes, a concerto of plates crashing into one another like rams butting within the mountains—for it was all scale and tempo, and it was all accessible to us.
And issues had been good, and we had been pleasure and wild pace, and I forgot all in regards to the images within the closet—
Until the day we coursed downhill, two deer, white-tails flashing, and the shot rang out, and also you stumbled into the earth under.
I didn’t flee.
You have to grasp. In each house we had explored, there was all the time one thing residing round us. Hadn’t there been Shadow? The bees? The rats working alongside the roof-lines?
But I may really feel all of the voices round us—even the varieties we couldn’t take, just like the bushes and the sky and the filth, and that’s how I knew it was solely us three: you, me, and the hunter.
His boots strategy you, heavy footfalls just like the titanic clashes of the plates under, and I hate him. I’ve no proper to hate him—isn’t what we’ve performed a thousand instances worse? The our bodies we’ve left behind, a multi-species extinction occasion—
And but, I hate him for the way in which you lay gasping, your eyes glazing over. Your tongue is out and moist with pink foam, and your sides heave.
There is nothing shut by—not a worm, not a fly, not a hen, for one thing has been performed to this spot, befouled it, coated with some rampant poison, and although I don’t perceive it, I do know that it was performed, that there isn’t any time.
He raises his gun once more. We plead with him with our deer tongue, with our stamping hooves, and when that doesn’t work, we howl at him within the language of all issues.
Do not do that!
Do not do that!
He stops and blinks. He shakes his head, even sticks a unclean finger in his ear—however then one thing comes over his face, and I do know it’s a hardness in his coronary heart, an sickness that I, too, as soon as used to have, that makes him deaf to the world.
He raises his gun once more.
I do know that this is not going to occur. It can not. This can not be the top of you.
But there’s a flash—and I really feel it, then, you inside and outdoors, and I do know you’re not within the deer, not anymore.
And there isn’t any physique close by. None, besides this one.
We’ve by no means tried to return to a physique that certainly one of us has left—however my-ours is new, and recent, and nonetheless sturdy. It would have lived one other few days, at the least.
Here, right here! I name within the language of all issues. We can share!
And it is a lie—I do know it’s. I do know we can not share. But if you’re not right here, I don’t wish to be right here, and so whenever you come hurtling towards me, swifter than the bullet that took you down, I prepared myself. In the second earlier than you storm inside, I flee—
But you catch me. You attain out and seize me, a comet clinging onto one other, and also you attempt to drag me in with you. There is a horrible ache—the scorching warmth of an excessive amount of, making an attempt to enter too little—however I can hear it, your thoughts working, neurons you don’t have firing—and when there may be not sufficient there, you draw outwards, as a substitute, from every part round us. You ask the leaves and the bark and the filth under, lifeless although it’s: assist us.
And all of the sudden, I hear all of them reply.
A second later, I’m again within the deer, and you’re with me. And because the hunter raises his gun once more—this time for us, for we, too, are a superb prize—we flip up our tail, and we’re gone.
We’ve tried, however we can not separate.
We nonetheless haven’t found out what any of this implies—the seeds that got here down from the sky, the way in which that they’ve linked us to all issues. You preserve that the our bodies we depart behind will not be lifeless, and although I can not agree, I say I do, as a result of we share one thoughts and physique, now, and it’s simpler when issues are quiet.
Secretly, I believe somebody will come for us at some point. That the seeds that took us from our our bodies couldn’t be an accident—however that day has not arrived.
You had been good and recommended the ocean, and now we all the time discover ample hosts round us, although we’re cautious to maintain ourselves near shoals of fish, to choruses of dolphins. Once, we had been attacked by a shark, however then we turned the shark, and it made you unhappy and me completely happy.
I used to fret that we’d run out of animals, however now I’m not so certain. The seeds are nonetheless falling, thorn-tipped maple-wings that float down from the sky like ash, and though people attempt to keep away from them, they can’t all the time. They should sleep, and the seeds are sturdy. They know no barrier. They penetrate stone and roofing tar and wooden as simply as flesh.
Animals are nonetheless reproducing, aren’t they? If there aren’t any individuals left, in the long run—if all of us develop into seeded—will we overtake them? Or will their numbers all the time be larger than that which we are able to take?
We’ve determined to go deep, leapfrogging from creature to creature, descending into an ocean trench. We are an anemone, a coral, a clownfish, a jellyfish, an eel. It’s simpler, in some methods, to solely want one physique for us each, although we’re all the time cautious, all the time able to flee.
Somewhere between when the darkish stops and the ditch ends, we run right into a patch of bioluminescent algae. It glows, disturbed by our actions, and I take that as an indication—it’s lastly time to ask you.
I wish to know, I say, in regards to the images within the closet.
By now, after all, you realize that I used to be as soon as the individual in them. It’s not a factor I may preserve secret from you, not once we are all the time collectively.
You are quiet, at first. Then, I really feel you give—a gentle give, just like the bending of a blade of grass. I used to be a personal investigator, you say.
Because this amuses me, I provide you with a dolphin’s jawbone chuckle. It’s my favourite chuckle as a result of it was yours. Were you investigating me?
No, you say. Before you may reply me absolutely, we sense one thing passing us by—a slimy pink fish—and we leap inside. I’m delighted to seek out that there are gaps in our cranium, that our bones are gentle—and that though we’ve got eyes, they don’t appear to do something. We had been tailored for this place.
I had a consumer who wished to know if his spouse was dishonest on him. I used to be watching her, and also you got here down and sat throughout from her in her sales space, after which she acquired up and walked away.
I’ve to suppose onerous about what you’ve simply mentioned, as if recalling the plot of a ebook, and never my once-life.
Finally, although, I keep in mind. I didn’t know her, I say. She was sitting in my spot.
And you chuckle—like a dolphin’s stutter, just like the buzzing of a bee. It doesn’t matter. I adopted you, and also you fascinated me. You by no means went anyplace, and also you had been all the time alone. You had been . . . so lonely.
Yes, I say, as a result of it’s true—although these phrases, too, are a part of that world I battle to recollect: alone, lonely.
Maybe I used to be like that. But so had been all of us, weren’t we?
And as a result of I’m proper, you say nothing, and we plunge ourselves additional into the deep.
About the Author
A prolific author of brief fiction, articles, essays, and poetry, Maria’s work is revealed or forthcoming in over a dozen publications, together with Apex, Apparition, Augur, Fantasy, Fusion Fragment, Kaleidotrope, Khoreo, Lightspeed, and Nightmare Magazine. Her debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, comes out from Grand Central Publishing in winter of 2023. Although she’s presently a pc programmer, in her earlier lives, Maria’s held a wide range of various careers, together with property supervisor, English instructor, and occupational therapist. She lives along with her associate and a potato-dog in southwest Michigan, in a centenarian saltbox home that’s nearly actually haunted, watching Okay-dramas and consuming Bell’s beer. She is represented by Amy Bishop at Dystel, Goderich & Bourret. She may also be reached by way of Twitter @mariadongwrites or on her web site, MariaDong.com.
Please go to LIGHTSPEED MAGAZINE to learn extra nice science fiction and fantasy. This story first appeared within the January 2022 subject, which additionally options work by Aimee Ogden, Jenny Rae Rappaport, Jendayi Brooks-Flemister, Vanessa Fogg, Leah Cypess, N.Okay. Jemisin, Lincoln Michel, and extra. You can await this month’s contents to be serialized on-line, or you should buy the entire subject proper now in handy e book format for simply $3.99, or subscribe to the e book version by way of this hyperlink.
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