IGMS Issue 39 Page 7

  I woke to the sounds of hammers and saws and heavy twanging lumber falling in stacks. They were building a new addition to Madame Blye's, and they were in a rush to get it completed before the first snowfall. It was long overdue.

  Big Roy wouldn't let me eat before cinching me into my corset. Only after, when I was breathless and dizzy, my fingers and toes tingling, did he bring a meal. He lingered at my door while I ate. I stopped eating and watched him. He pulled something from his overalls pocket, tossed it onto the bed beside me, and fled before I could say anything. It was the second half of the book Daddy had bought me.

  It seemed so long ago that I had read it, I couldn't remember what had happened in the first half. While reading what was left I lost myself in making up what had led to it. I hid it in my petticoats.

  By the time I received my first month's wage, snow blanketed the valley and was as deep as the hitching post. The money wasn't much. There were deductions, my clothing for one. Heating, too. Food. Clean linens. Hot bath water, unless I'd like it cold.

  I couldn't make it down to the hollow. I would've left a trail in the snow. People from camp would've followed it and emptied the cache. If they emptied the cache, nothing would've stopped them from continuing on in search of more that had been covered by snow. They could've found you. Worse, you may have seen their tracks and followed them to me.

  Madame Blye paid me once a month. Her interest in me slackened, and she took notice only when I exchanged glances with Big Roy, when I touched his hand in passing, when I hugged him for no reason. It was harmless, and she had found another young girl, besides. They say the new girl was eleven years old.

  When the seasons changed and the snow melted from camp, the hollow wasn't where I remembered it.

  Stories told about me:

  My name is Bonnie. My name is Winifred. My name is Delia. I am never the same person twice. That way, ghosts can't find me. They're confused by change.

  I write prayers to the mountain and hide them up and down the slopes. They can be found mouldering under rocks, blowing along the mountainside, and stuffed down inside pockety hollows. They are rarely found intact. Those that are, are covered with cairns designed to warn miners away from them. To take my prayers is to court disaster. The mountain doesn't always receive my prayers, but it receives enough of them to know if something was missing.

  I can make a man have an orgasm just by looking at him.

  School teacher Strobel was my first client. I search for the bottles of poison he hides around camp. If I find them, I won't move them. I'll increase their potency. On moonless nights, I can be seen darting between the buildings of camp like a shadow, always a step behind school teacher Strobel.

  My fingers can grip so tight Big Roy is afraid of me.

  I am attuned with the growth of the mountain. When men are with me, they feel it. It is slow and sure and steady. It is tectonic.

  I do not drink. I only eat snow. When it is summer, I climb to the summit snowfields which never fully melt. Every day, I sit in boiling hot bathwater until my body freezes it into a solid block around me and I must be chipped free. The movement of the mountain inside me is the only thing that keeps me from freezing solid -- something ungiving pressing against something else ungiving to create heat.

  Whatever you hear, believe this:

  I am your mother.

  I am waiting.

  Daddy is waiting.

  The mountain is going nowhere.

  I will look like all the other girls at the selection rail. I will look like Madame Blye. But you will be able to tell it is me by the tears I haven't cried which will shine in my eyes. No one else can see them. You can see things others can't.

  You can do anything.

  You are a wizard.

  Rapture Nation

  by Jennifer Noelle Welch

  Artwork by Nick Greenwood

  * * *

  At dusk, our automotive caravan makes a slow arc off the highway. Lavender light glints on our vehicles: the RVs, in the lead, followed by pick-ups hauling water containers, a series of four-doors like plastic take-out boxes, and at the rear, a reclaimed school bus. Horns blare at us for slowing the traffic that rockets through the corridor of strip malls and roadside scrub. Our congregation rolls in a slow spiral over the faded paint lines of the Walmart parking lot before coming to rest on the asphalt like an old-time wagon circle. Our prayers of thanks rise like incense.

  The news of the Rapture's approach blessed us with a new focus. K105.5 FM "The Light" broadcast the End Date. With months to prepare, we followed the advice of the Elders on the radio. We withdrew the children from school. Second vehicles and flatscreen TVs went the way of the rummage sale. "Won't you come to church?" we exhorted our neighbors who came to pick through our belongings. Hurrying away with our Kitchen-Aid mixers, they received our pitying smiles. Only believers can perceive God's invisible spiritual warfare. Whatever we had been before -- teachers, waitresses, doctors -- the coming Rapture made us His soldiers.

  The Elders needed our donations for billboards, t-shirts, and TV ads proclaiming the End Date. We cashed out any investments that placed faith in a future He hadn't ordained: mortgages, college funds, bank accounts. We sold our houses, and last of all, the church and the land it stood on. Uplifted by the Elders' constant prayers on the radio, we headed for the assembly point with joy and trembling. Even if our hearts ached for our hometowns, our faces shone with the conviction of being right with God.

  When the radio station went dead at the appointed hour, we cried out in happiness. The message-bearers had been swept up already! Though we could not yet feel it, the Earth had begun splitting. We visualized a wind moving across the globe, drawing believers up to Heaven. Soon it would embrace us. For several minutes, we teetered in hope on the edge of a yawning silence.

  Hours passed. People sank to their backsides on the ground. No one voiced the dominant question: What if God had come and found none of us worthy? Rumors of miscalculation circulated. A reprieve, someone said, to bring more unbelievers into the fold. But the broadcast did not return.

  Different voices lorded over the crowd, reasoned, bickered, and split off. Twenty-four hours later, only our core congregation remained. "Disperse!" barked the police, over their megaphones. Having no earthly home, we turned to the road. "Stay tuned, believers!" was K105.5's motto, and our radio dials have not wavered. Rolling from one superstore to the next, we listen for His direction in the crackles of static.

  Not long after the last brake-light flickers off, the teenagers set up nylon tents around our perimeter. Others arrange lawn chairs at the center for the old folks to get fresh air. The smell of grilling frankfurters masks the reek of unwashed clothes. When we scrutinize the heavens which He set spinning, the effervescent stars look both colder and more beautiful. Luckily, the lampposts' holy orange glow shields us from too much contemplation of the void above.

  During the evening Bible readings, the women pass jars of sun tea they have brewed from dandelion heads. Children blacken their bare feet skipping in and out of the concentric circles of vehicles. Collectively, we have decided against school for the young ones. With the end-days ever at hand, they have no need for reading on their own.

  We keep busy. When the colder months come, the older women fashion warmer bedding from crumpled newspapers and shopping bags collected along guardrails. The teens play a game like jacks with stones and pigeon bones. We pray for the old-timers, whose coughing we hear more often. In the midst of our prayers, now, a song occasionally breaks out, turning wordless amid stamping feet and guttural shouts. The little ones look on, sucking their thumbs or scratching their scalps, eyes large in their grubby faces. We remind our brothers and sisters when they forget to include the name of God in their worship.

  On the road, we rise and retire with the sun. The men trap and skin birds, drying the meat on car hoods. We twine the feathers in our sun-bleached hair. Our flock increases by two over the spring, and five more women a
re expecting. Such fruitfulness can only indicate God's satisfaction. He took just one of the babes to himself, seven hundred miles back in some weeds on the side of the highway.

  Our hair has grown long, our bodies sun-tempered and hard. Just before dawn, we squat on our haunches in fear, anticipating the End. If any secret flicker of gratitude invades our heart as the sun pushes over the horizon, we smother it with shame. We are supposed to welcome the Day of Judgment. But when our thronging voices herald "the return of the Son," we have begun to wonder if all of us mean the same thing.

  Soon, faint incantations accompany the morning's first sunbeams. In the midst of packing up the chairs and tents, we discover symbols like pagan runes scratched on some of the vehicles. Spiral sunbursts, surrounded by rays of light. Some of us, alarmed, rub them out.

  Our motorcade crawls back onto the highway, suspensions creaking as we pick up speed. For days, our headlights have pointed towards the morning sun. Some speak of a new calling from just beyond the horizon. The believers hear it through the radio, which we have never turned off, and we strain to hear this new calling with them.

  Whether it is His voice, or some ancient solar echo, matters little. We aren't the first to follow a star. We are drawn to the light, even as we run out of road.

  Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust, Earth to Alluvium

  by Gray Rinehart

  Artwork by Jin Han

  * * *

  The door leading to the Tephrist's studio reminded Cerna of a clam's shell turned on its side, except it was grossly oversized, indigo-painted, and steel.

  "Let's go back, Phil," Cerna said. "Why do you want to go in there? They're the ones making you sick."

  Keller would hear none of it. His hand shook a little as he pushed against the damaged identi-plate. The plate and the imperfectly patched wall around it bore the imprint of the only human revolt to have reached this far into town.

  As the door-halves swung apart on smooth tracks, Cerna resisted the urge to pull his friend away. The interlocking flutes were sharp edged and equipped with heavy-duty pins as long as his forearm that secured it in the off-hours.

  The front room was square, and stark in its simplicity. It smelled pleasanter than Cerna expected, faintly of cinnamon. Not like death at all.

  The ceiling was mostly open to the afternoon sky, typical of Peshari construction, but buttresses rose from the corners that were interconnected with steel bars. Shadows from the bars made patterns on the rough, pale, orange tiled floor and the sand colored brick walls. A few bricks were adorned with dead Peshari in miniature bas-relief.

  A heavy-beamed archway roughly opposite the entrance led back into the work area. In between, a holo-pillar took up about a square meter in the center of the room, but it was turned off. Otherwise, the room was bare, with not even a plant to break up the uniform color. Cerna guessed that a place devoted to death might not be the best environment for living things.

  Keller walked around the holo-pillar and tried to look through the archway, but Cerna stayed in the shade near the entrance. Air conditioning was too much to ask for where the Pehsari were concerned, with their constant demand for open skies, and Cerna was slick with sweat after their walk from camp. Keller, on the other hand, seemed to huddle further into his coat. He'd been a bit slow on their walk, and oddly reticent; he was usually spry, and full of Earth stories.

  A young Peshar entered through the archway, and Cerna gave up speculating about Keller's illness.

  Keller backed up to give the pseudo-lizard space. It was still sexless, though the telltale lumps on the sides of its throat indicated its siring glands would soon develop. Cerna guessed it was eight or nine Alluvial years old. Its forebody was upright, its forelimbs held together against its chest as if it were carrying something precious. It wore a robe only a shade darker than the sand-colored brick walls, and moved with surprising grace on its four legs, well balanced for a creature nearly five meters long from nose to tail.

  "Not often humans here," it said. Its enunciation was distinct enough, though words formed by a Peshar's exhalations always seemed to vibrate excessively because of the way their nostril flaps moved. In this case, the tone was clear-- not only a statement of fact, but of disapproval.

  Of course it would disapprove. In Cerna's experience, most Peshari found the humans useful, though barely tolerable.

  Keller glanced at Cerna, as if asking permission to speak. Cerna shrugged.

  Keller cleared his throat. His voice wheezed, about as raspy as the lizard's, but more liquid. "I would converse with the engraver . . . , uh, the Tephrist."

  The fine scales around the Peshar's eyes prismed the light as its skin tightened; otherwise, the creature expressed no emotion. "Busy," it said.

  "I propose a contract."

  The Peshar tipped its head to the left. "Wish memory-stone?"

  Keller hesitated. "A monument, yes."

  Cerna stepped to Keller's side. "What are you talking about, Phil? Nobody's died."

  Keller shushed him and told the Peshar again that he wanted to contract for a monument. The creature nodded, and Cerna allowed a small grin at how the human gesture had permeated Peshari society. The clerk or apprentice or whatever it was turned, miraculously keeping its tail from striking the holo-pillar, and went to the back room.

  "What do you want? That thing to carve a statue for something?"

  "In a manner of speaking," Keller said. "Why else would I come here?"

  "If you'd have told me, I wouldn't have to guess. I just wanted to get out of camp for a while. Why come to them? Why not just fab whatever it is you want?"

  Keller did not answer, and presently a larger Peshar wearing only a beige, rough-woven apron entered through the archway. This one was past siring and bearing -- it had grown into the species' fourth gender stage and walked with an air of authority Cerna had rarely seen in the Peshari.

  Without preamble the Peshar said, "Uncommon." It sounded less derisive than the young Peshar had, almost curious.

  It activated the holo-pillar and a representation of one of their species' memorial bricks floated above it. The Peshar manipulated the control until a larger brick appeared, about the size of a concrete block, which featured a human woman's face on one side in bas-relief. "Not since Jean-El."

  Cerna and Keller both stepped closer to examine the hologram. He had never seen the original -- it was in one of the Peshari official buildings -- but the hologram matched what he remembered of Jean Lynn: soft features, slightly upturned nose and wide eyes in an oval face.

  "First contact," Cerna said.

  "First," the Peshar agreed. "High honor. Uncommon."

  Cerna frowned. The human encampment was seventeen Alluvial years old now -- a bit under twenty-two Earth years -- and Commander Lynn had died shortly after the Peshari arrived . . . what, eleven local years ago? He had been a boy, only four Earth years old when the colony landed, and almost thirteen when the Peshari showed up.

  This Peshar would have been a sire or an early dam at the time, so it was unlikely it was the one who had immortalized Lynn in the practice of their species -- her remains reduced down and incorporated into a permanent display in the form of a building block showing her sculpted face. Cerna couldn't recall any human other than Lynn who had been so treated. It wasn't uncommon, it was downright unique.

  And given how the Peshari had subjugated the human colony since then, he was surprised this Peshar would even humor them by considering the idea.

  The Peshar waved its forelimb through the hologram. "Human memory-stone? What human?"

  Cerna looked at Keller, whose tear-filled eyes were still on the Lynn memorial. Cerna closed his own eyes for a second, remembering Keller holding Lynn's body after the Peshari emissary had killed her. They had been husband and wife.

  "Sacrifice," that Peshar had said at the time, as if it had paid Commander Lynn the highest honor.

  Cerna had understood none of it then, and was not sure he understood it even now. H
e had not seen the actual attack, but he recalled with crystal clarity the look of stunned anguish on Keller's face.

  Cerna touched Keller's shoulder. His friend glanced at him, then wiped his eyes and turned full-face to the Peshar.

  "Me," Keller said. "It's for me."

  "I don't believe this," Cerna said as they stood outside the Tephrist's doors.

  "It's true whether you believe it or not."

  "So you say. Okay, I kept quiet in there --"

  "Thank you."

  "-- but what is wrong with you? Why do you need one of their memorials? Are you sicker than you let on?"

  "Don't need it, not exactly," Keller said as they started back toward camp. "And it seems to me that everybody is sicker than they appear."

  Keller was silent after that, hunched a bit with his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, and Cerna fought the urge to intrude on the silence. But they had seven kilometers to walk, so he could afford a little patience.

  Cerna reflected on Keller's proposal to the Tephrist. The old man had uploaded a hologram of a simple ceramic slab to the Peshar's display, not a lizard-style building stone with his face on it; merely an oblong piece of stone with his name etched on it.

  Cerna shivered a little at the memory of how the Peshar had laughed -- it was one of the few sounds they made with their mouths, jaws wide like a young bird stretching for food. The barking noise had set off little tremors along his spine.

  "No artistry," the creature had said, assessing Keller's design. "Graceless."

  Keller, unfazed, had been deferential to a fault as he tried to fix a price for the monument and negotiate around the Peshar's refusal. He had offered a portion and then his entire share of the mineral wealth the Peshari allowed the camp to retain.

  The Peshar was unmoved, arguing that a monument such as Keller wanted was too big to fit most buildings' aesthetic, and besides, without an image his spirit would go mad, trapped and unable to see the world around it.