What books were important to you when you were younger and just getting into science fiction and fantasy, and have your feelings about those titles changed?

Asimov’s Foundation series. The concept of a quantitatively precise social science (psychohistory) was so cool to me as an eighth-grader. I also read the seven books of Piers Anthony’s Incarnations of Immortality around the same time. I haven’t gone back to re-read either in a long time, and I’m sort of curious how my memory of them would match up with reality. On the other hand, maybe I don’t want to know. The impression those two series left is still with me and I don’t know if I should mess with that.

Does the influence of those stories show up in your writing in any noticeable ways?

In my first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, I invented my own made-up discipline (chronodiegetics). It’s not really like psychohistory, which is much harder sci-fi, whereas my sci-fi is definitely on the fluffy side. But the idea of making up a field of study, coming up with theorems for it, that was really fun and helpful in constructing Minor Universe 31.

In the first book of the Incarnations series (On A Pale Horse), being Death is basically a job. One of the things I find myself coming back to in my own writing is weird jobs: third class superhero, time machine repairman, generic Asian man.

So, yes, I’d say both series have had influence, both general and specific!

How did reading become writing for you, and what was the journey to breaking in like for you?

I’d written poems as a kid, and I took poetry workshops as an undergrad at Berkeley. But I didn’t make a sustained effort at writing until my mid-twenties, after graduating from law school. Instead of studying for the bar exam, I found myself at the bookstore every day, reading story collections. Going into a new career as a lawyer, I think I was searching for a creative release valve, some private headspace I could carve out. So I started writing little things in the margins of notepads, or sending emails to myself with scraps of language. My first pieces were very short, weird experiments. I don’t even know you could call them stories.

After a few months (I was young and dumb but that was kind of an asset because I didn’t realize how little I knew) I started sending those experiments to literary journals. I got hundreds of rejections. As soon as a story was rejected, I’d take it out of the SASE, slip it into the next publication on the list, and send it back out. It was painful and humbling, but after a couple of years, I found myself with a few stories published. And then I entered a contest sponsored by Mid-American Review, and Jean Thompson judged it, and selected my story as the winner, and from that story, I got an agent.

You are known for novels as well as short fiction. Are there important differences in the way you approach the two formats, or are they similar? Do you struggle more with one or the other?

They’re very different. Novels are long enough that they can’t have perfect unity. In assembling it, there’s going to be some glue, some staples, some seam. A story can have that unity—of form, language, shape, sound. At least in theory. So it’s a lot more pressure on every sentence.

One thing they have in common is that I struggle with both equally.

Has the Pandemic and/or current events impacted your writing practice? And how have you adjusted?

I have more time. And mental space. So that should help, in terms of getting immersed, except there’s so much news and it’s mostly terrible. I find myself alternating between periods of doom-spiraling and then furiously typing out thoughts and feelings, trying to make some sense of it all. But not too much sense. For me it’s also important not to assume I know what’s going on, where things are headed. Living day to day, appreciating what I still have – my wife and kids in this household, Zooms with other family and friends. And writing. Sorry, that got a little heavy.

Coming up to your recent story, The Only Living Girl on Earth, with Scribd. Something about the satirical humor reminded me a bit of Douglas Adams, but with a more soulful, bittersweet feeling to it. There’s also this confidence and ease to the voice. At Fantasy, we get a lot of humor pieces in slush. What is the key to writing humor or satire and making it work?

I wish I knew. When I try to be funny it never works. Or when I write a sentence and sit back and am kinda pleased with it, usually what happens is that I’m told to cut it because it’s not actually as good as I thought it was. Mostly I try not to take myself too seriously.

When I do get lucky and come up with something amusing, it’s usually because it’s honest. Basically it all boils down to Homer Simpson: “It’s funny ‘cause it’s true.”

In your interview with Bomb Magazine, you said that the 2016 election was the catalyst for Interior Chinatown. What was the catalyst for The Only Living Girl on Earth?

The original impetus was an invitation to contribute to an anthology honoring the work of Ray Bradbury. I wrote a very short piece, “Earth (A Gift Shop)” that was inspired by Bradbury’s story, “There Will Come Soft Rains” but over time I found myself still thinking about the story, returning to it and adding. Which I don’t usually do, but there was something about this idea that I couldn’t get away from. Out of the blue, I got an email from Amy Grace Loyd, an editor with whom I’d worked in the past, asking if I might have something for Scribd—and this just felt like the perfect format and venue for the story.

Editing the piece last year, with everything going on in terms of the pandemic, the election, it was hard not to think about civilization and how precarious it has felt recently—especially in the past few months.

One of the things I love about this story is seeing the entire world distilled over and over again in different ways, rendered as a theme park or as a kitschy item in a gift shop. What is the subtext in this? Or: what is the conversation happening with these ideas?

Theme parks are physical manifestations of the stories we tell ourselves. Our fairy tales, our fantasies, our nostalgias, even our fears. Places where we reduce, distort, package and present our culture to ourselves. Souvenirs are our artifacts. Not the only ones we’ll leave behind, but probably the ones that will survive the longest—a thousand years from now, archaeologists will be unearthing plastic commemorative cups in their dig sites.

I get the sense from looking at some of your other interviews that one of the themes which interests you as an author is the complicity of participation, even if one is unaware of said complicity. There’s this passage in The Only Living Girl on Earth – “We are the customers, but we are also the underwriters of this entertainment.” What brings you back to this theme?

I’m always interested in our blind spots. What we take for granted. The things that are most invisible are the things I want to look at the most, because it’s in them where we hide our tacit assumptions, our beliefs.

While there’s this conversation going on around culture and the distillation of things and, I think, also some sly commentary on capitalism, this story is really centered on, or grounded by, family. It opens with the conversation between mother and daughter, beautifully capturing that combination of tension and love. I feel like a lot of Jane’s character arc, or her journey, actually happens in that last section, and really ties in with the setting. What is important to you in the depictions of family throughout this piece?

I wanted to write about home. Is it a place? A feeling? The sound of a mother’s voice, a daughter’s voice? Jane is a quarter million miles away from her mom. And yet there is still a closeness, an intimacy between them when they talk. They create that together through their conversation, this subspace channel for their minds and hearts and memories and worries.

What do you like most about the central character, Jane? What is important to know about her or her journey? Do you relate to her in any specific ways?

I like her curiosity and, I like that, despite her sarcasm, she’s an optimist. At the beginning of the story, she’s doing her job, earning a wage, restocking kitschy tourist stuff, and as the story goes on, she gains perspective and scope and history and maybe even a sense of duty or at least attachment as the steward of the remaining bit of Earth culture, however fragmentary it is.

The last section, more so perhaps than other sections, at least for me, ultimately evokes a sense of cultural disconnectedness, as well as the notion of extinction or annihilation going unnoticed. Can you talk a bit about the last section and how it relates to the earlier pieces, “Gift Shop” and “America: The Ride?”

Ooh, without spoiling it, I had this idea of living in a bubble. Of being oblivious to change, or maybe a society assuming its own competence or even permanence. It’s during times of success, of material wealth, that societies can get most complacent, insular, stagnant.

What is the heart of this story for you? What do you really want readers to know about it?

With Jane and her mom, in their conversations, and also when Jane’s alone, thinking about the shop and the merchandise in it. I’d love for people to come to the story for the fun of it, the ideas and the jokes, but for me the heart of it is Jane’s relationship with this place, her home.

What was the hardest thing about writing this one, and what was the most fun?

Getting the shape right, first within each section and then structuring the whole so it builds. The most fun was coming up with souvenir names!

Looking at your short fiction, is there a story which stands out for you as important, which you really want people to read, and why?

You mean, other than this one? Well, after they’re done reading “Only Living Girl,” I’d love for people to read “Fable” which was published in 2016 (I think it’s readable online, and also available in audio, both at The New Yorker website). I’ve had good responses from readers over the years about that story, and so if someone’s not familiar with my work, that’s probably as good a place to start as any.

What else do you have coming up which you’d like readers to know about?

I’m working on a feature adaptation of this story—it’s too early to share any details, but I’m excited about the possibilities of visualizing this world.

Thank you for your time!

Thank you for the great questions and the chance to talk about all of this!

I had a spot of skin that was flaking, and the premise popped into my head. I finished the first version in two days, which is about as quickly and smoothly as anything I’ve ever written, and the final version hasn’t changed much from the first.

This is the kind of very personal, internal point-of-view story that I always gravitate toward—I really enjoy sitting myself inside a single character’s head, turning time forward, and writing down every crystal-clear thing I find.

When Sarah loses her initial patch of skin, her first thought is of her childhood sandbox. That and the title provided a hint as to the course the story may take. Was that your intent?

Yes, though not from the very beginning. I always think of writing as a two-stage process. In the first stage, I set up a puzzle for myself, which is a challenge in and of itself, to be solved. In the second stage, I either figure out the solution or stash the story in the WIP folder forever.

For this story, the premise was the first part, and the resolution is the second—what happens at the end that would make sense and serve as closure? It was when I came up with dissolution in the ocean that I then went back and added the foreshadowing, such as the sandbox.

As Sarah’s condition progresses, she registers concern, fear, then, finally, relief. Can you tell us about this progression of emotions?

One of the main themes of this story is how our feelings about ourselves are intrinsically tied to that self and are not something we can separate. While Sarah undergoes this inexplicable transformation, her feelings about it seem to parallel the transformation somewhat. But how much of her numb acceptance at the end is because she’s mostly sand, and how much of is her actually coming to terms with it, whatever that even means? I don’t think there’s an obvious answer to that.

The scene where Sarah reshapes herself, based on images of her favorite celebrities, is a powerful one. What message did you want to convey?

Of course, anyone can (and should) take away from the scene whatever they saw in it. But when I was writing it, I was thinking of the memories that hang in the back of our minds for our whole lives, especially very emotionally-colored scenes from our formative years. Sarah’s lost a lot of what her original self would think of as her, but that thirst to become someone else stayed in her core, even as she’s mostly sand by this point. In my head, it’s not as simple as merely conforming to beauty standards, which is why the subsequent sequence where she digs into herself is important as well. She’s trying to get some answers about who she was and who she is now in a very physical way.

What are you working on now, and what can we look forward to seeing from you in the future?

Writing is such an odd beast of a venture—some days I stare at my computer screen and marvel that I was ever able to write at all. There’s no other thing I do where my feelings and skill level fluctuate quite like this.

I always have many stories stuck in the WIP folder, hoping to make it out to the world someday. For something concrete, I have a poetry chapbook, Sudden Sharp Sunstrokes, coming out soon with Zelda Knight and Aurelia Leo, on the fears and transformations of a woman’s body and identity during a fantastical childbirth—very on-theme for me!

Huh. Her first thought is the favorite sandbox of her childhood. Or perhaps spun sugar, like the swans she saw on a cooking show last week. She sweeps once more and a few more particles come off, crude flimsies nothing like those television-beautiful candy arabesques. And then the phone rings, and she returns to the world of scheduling meetings.

The sand doesn’t make itself known again until she is making dinner in the kitchen and looks up to see one of her two housemates appear in the space between the counters. She stops humming the pesky bubblegum pop song that’s been stuck in her head all day. Lydia, she thinks. Lydia is the one with the button nose.

“It’s braised eggplant,” she offers a smile until she notices the awkward expression on Lydia’s face and drops her spatula back in the pot a little too loudly. Not here to praise her cooking, then.

“Um,” her housemate shifts her weight from one foot to the other and twirls a lock of her hair. “Did you leave your hairbrush on the sink? The purple handle one?”

“Oh. Yeah, I’m sorry. I’ll put it away.” Seriously? It was seven in the freaking morning and it’s a freaking hairbrush.

“Sorry for making it a big deal. Thanks!”

A toss of brown hair and she’s left staring at the mush in front of her, with the insane notion that she just hallucinated an awkward encounter with a patch of air. She hefts her stew onto an unoccupied burner and marches into the bathroom. What did Lydia really mean? Had she done something wrong already? She’s only had a week to learn the intra-domiciliary politics and has no idea what this is code for. Not until she sees her hairbrush sitting there at the sink, covered by some kind of foreign substance that resembles sawdust.

She picks it up and the world sway a little. In front of her is the center of a mutant sunflower, pale yellow pollen radiating in a hypnotizing pattern, that feeling of vertigo when you squint at far too much detail and it threatens to pull you in indefinitely.

She rakes a shaking hand through her hair and comes away with a palmful of sand.

• • • •

“You’re here for a…skin problem?” The doctor flips his chart.

She picks a clod—a corn kernel chunk—off her head and shows it to him.

“Bad dandruff. You should use a shampoo,” he drawls.

She transfers the clod to her other hand and reaches behind her right ear to peel off a large yellow flake, thick and pliable like a tasteful business card.

He does not take it from her. “Seborrhea. A common condition in skin folds.”

“On the internet, it says—”

“The internet has lots of misinformation. There’s nothing to be concerned about.”

“Would getting contacts help?” The glasses, that’s what started it all.

“You’ll have to talk to your ophthalmologist about that.”

She tries one last time. “I’m shedding all over my room. I just moved here from Arizona. Do you think there’s any—”

“Get a vacuum. Is there anything else?”

“No,” she sighs.

The doctor’s eyes narrow, probably trying to decide what kind of idiot would wait two hours in a coffin of a waiting room because of flaky skin. She feels her insides clench and shift, a jagged puzzle trying to fit impossible pieces together. Maybe he should be happy that she has no gushing wounds, no deadly mystery diseases, so he can pocket the visit fee and move on to whatever non-issue he has to see next.

She doesn’t realize she’s run her hand through her hair again until she feels the coat of dust on her fingers as she fumbles for her subway card. She’s just endlessly dirty now, like grimy mushrooms from the grocery store that she can never fully clean.

Only when she’s home does she realize a piece of her, the one the doctor called s-something, is still tucked neatly in the creases of her left hand.

• • • •

“Look, look.” She runs her nails across the packed silt of her back and presses crescents of yellow into the cocktail napkin, one below the other like a perverse collection of fossilized larvae.

“Wow. Bodies are weird, man.” Rich continues sipping his margarita, as if she’d just showed him a new mole.

“Sure, but making sand weird? It’s like my scalp spread to the rest of my body.” A week after the disastrous doctor visit and she is already a seasoned field researcher on the morphology of her evolving landscape of soils. The clay on her scalp, the salt shaker whitehead sites on her nose, the gritty chalk clinging to the soft inner surface of her thighs, the moist, non-Newtonian bouncy putty from her armpits.

“Have you ever seen My Crazy Body? Some real freaks out there, like the guy with the cauliflower pe—”

“Ew, no thanks.”

“Just get a dandruff shampoo and use it everywhere.”

She resists the urge to upend her drink on his head. “You don’t think I’ve tried that already?”

He pats her on the shoulder and she can feel a sheet sloughing off. “Don’t worry so much, Sarah. It’ll get better.”

• • • •

You haven’t had a period in two months, her phone chirps one morning. Did you miss reporting one?

She rolls over and wipes trails of grit from her eyes. Every night she walks around her dream apartment and taps each appliance, like duck-duck-goose-sand, finally sitting down on her couch and collapsing it into a sea of yellow. She runs down the sidewalk, arms stretched to fingertips to transmute every tree and pedestrian into dust, cackling helplessly. This dream has sound effects, too: a whoosh for each explosion of yellow, like the pounding of the surf, in time with her pulse.

“Whoa, what happened?”

She blinks to clear fine-grained pinpricks of light from her field of vision. She’s in the office lounge, somehow, standing next to a mound of dust all around her mug.

“Nothing!” She looks for an excuse and sees white packets right next to the coffee machine. “I spilled salt. So clumsy, heh.”

Another question handled. Not enough that she’s freaked out about herself, she has to pretend everything is fine, too. In her waking days she leaves a trail on every surface: door handles, reports, computer keys. She wears a full-body sheer nylon stocking, from the feet up to her neck, under her clothes and does not take it off. She no longer sweats or smells, so there is no need to shower and unclog the drain afterwards. And she hasn’t shit or pissed in at least a week, but she still drinks water as a force of habit: she’s not sure where it goes, but it makes her feel a little more substantial. Three days ago she stopped feeling hunger entirely after seeing her other housemate—name escapes her—eat sesame halva in the living room. She can’t even think about it, the smooth-sandy texture, the flashes of greedy teeth gaps lined with beige grout, the way it splinters then crumbles just like—

She picks up a salt packet and carefully saws a small hole on the side with a plastic knife, pinching the opening to make a spout for every grain to flow into the water in one seamless white flurry.

It tastes like the sea. Achingly, inexplicably familiar. Delicious.

• • • •

“This report”—papers wave in the air—“makes no sense at all. What have you been doing, Sarah?”

Why does she even work? Work is for pounding her fingers to dust atop square pyramids. No, it is for money and food and roof, but she doesn’t need any of that now. Sand just sits on mountains of itself, content to exist. Sand is for her and her alone.

She stands and walks out the door while laughing inside at her new freedom. Flurries of non-sand people push around her, all in great hurry. She was like this once, too, but it’s better now.

“Sarah? Sarah! Do you remember me? Shoshanna, from Holly Hall?”

She does not. She cringes as she is being hugged from the side on the street and hugs back as lightly as possible. As she is released, she sees a fine dusting on Shoshanna’s face and neck, as if pollinated by a monstrous bee.

Shoshanna’s forehead shifts and reforms. “Oh my god, you look amazing! What’s your secret?”

I’m turning into sand.

“I’ve been trying this new diet.” She feels the shape of each word churning around her cavern of a mouth. When’s the last time she even tried to talk? The people around her are almost always content with her silence. Shoshanna peppers her with more questions, seemingly satisfied with perfunctory nods, then disappears into the milling crowd.

There is a ghost of something like relief. For a while she continues to be a lone boulder fording the streams of people going to and fro, until someone bashes her with their briefcase, gashing her side deep like the moat for a sandcastle, and continues without even noticing. She puts two fingers in the wound, half expecting water to froth out and round her shapes into something gentler, but nothing comes out. It gives her an idea.

• • • •

“You need to see a doctor.”

At the sound of those last two hard syllables, her body involuntarily stiffens inside the loving embrace of an invisible boa constrictor. Her knee whaps the table and dust showers down her feet. Is it dust when it’s yourself? Can you shower in yourself?

“I’m fine.”

The person across from her—her mother, that’s right—narrows her eyes, a familiar pattern in her memory, now a collection of longstanding truths like the striated rocks that hold millions of years of history in their bands. Human-scale instances no longer register: she does not know why her mother is in front of her, only that she usually isn’t.

“You talk so slowly, Sarah. And you look different. Almost…blurry. Did you do something to your face?”

She had. That day after she lost her job and a chunk of her, she decided to scratch off the mole on her cheek. One, two digs and it vanished in the mirror, replaced by an obvious groove. She packed some of the sand back in, smoothing the contour, just like something else she used to put on her face but doesn’t any more.

That night she waited until her housemates left for a party to line the bathtub with a large plastic tarp. Gingerly she peeled the stocking from her body with eyes closed, studiously ignoring the very long fffff of a large sack being emptied of sand. She picked up the hand mirror and fruit peeler she placed on the sink and shaped herself into what she always wanted to look like, instructions tucked inside her from long-ago nights poring over glossy pictures of her favorite celebrities. Nose a little thinner, tummy tucked in, armpit sculpted like a Grecian hero. It didn’t hurt at all, only the sensation of pressure and then freeing lightness, what she imagines an apple would feel being skinned.

When she finished, she turned the peeler in her hand and smoothed all of her new edges with the curved handle, the other end cutting deeper into her palm with each stroke. Blending is important, as her mother always said.

Her mother. The person in front of her with the narrowed eyes. The person who birthed her, but isn’t turning into sand. Dully, she ponders why this is happening to her.

“You didn’t need to change yourself. I know surgery’s all the rage these days, but you looked just fine, Sarah.”

Maybe I’m a golem. Was I always a golem?

The why isn’t important, really. There’s something else that clings to her like water beading around fine sand. “Did we ever go to the beach?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I want to know,” she pushes each sound out clearly, “if we’ve ever been to the beach. I want to go back.”

“Sarah, please. You’re not making any sense. Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

Another truth in her record is that they have always been like this, impossibly out of sync like the sun and moon. She shakes her head, heedless of the rain.

“I’m so worried. How can you not be?”

Worry? She has long ceased feeling that. Why would sand be worried?

She leaves, ignoring the voice behind her rising and rising like the tides. At night she goes back to the tarp. She dips two fingers in water and runs a trail from eye to chin. She rakes a long line from the tip of her left middle finger down to the end of the elbow and draws a swirl at the end, like a garden she saw once that was patient sepia instead of green.

She likes the swirl. She makes them on her cheek, big and small, across the plains of her neck, around her breasts, up and down her legs. It isn’t enough.

She pushes the peeler through what used to be her belly button, slowly and deliberately until it comes out the other side, then rotates the sharp side of the peeler to widen the pit of her cavity, a vulture at her own funeral. Didn’t she used to have a heart? Lungs? Coils and coils of tubes where food goes, isn’t that what she learned in school? She digs and digs, looking for something, anything, buried pieces of her old self, broken shells, small crabs, but all she finds is homogenous beige, packed tight.

Then a crack appears on her left side, snaking all the way to the edge. A tremendous nothingness overtakes her until she feels the peeler sink into her hand and looks down to the gaping hole in her middle. She stops at the precipice, particles trembling down her sides. With great effort she swings her legs out of the tub, holding them over the edge then step by step into her bed, both puppeteer and puppet. She stares at the random pattern of dots on the ceiling. Surely she doesn’t have much left to go.

• • • •

It’s not surprising when her eyes fail to work, but it’s terrifying nonetheless. She reaches for something at her bedside out of instinct and hears a clatter. That’s it, then. Slowly she folds her arm back on her chest and waits until she forgets even fear, and just is.

She knows someone has found her when she feels the scant sensation of an arm separating. She tries to make a sound with her mouth over and over, not knowing whether it has been heard.

• • • •

There is a new feeling of coming and going. She lets it wash her in rhythmic pulses until it is categorized: the rush of water, flowing over her and then back out again. Sea. Yes. Sea.

She has the tiniest mote inside her of the last time she was at the beach. She would have been young, with her parents. Sandcastles and buckets. Sea spray. Maybe roar and fervor of the waves, but she doesn’t know what sounds are any more.

She doesn’t have to wait long. The next wave pulls off her feet and legs, then her chest, and then she feels nothing at all.

The knight shone brighter

and smiled wider than the

princess who would be his

bride and said, “I have done

It. I climbed the cliffs until

the clouds wove fog from

my breath. I broke through

your untamed forests. I speared

the leopard, one-eyed ravager,

and left its head for the townsfolk.

I rode when I could and

walked when I could not.

I ate my horse.

I stood at the edge of the caldera

and looked down on lava and felt

the dragon’s breath, brimstone

blossom and drew my spear

and launched it true”–

and the princess raised her hand

and said, “Enough.

“Unasked you drove

spikes into our sacred mountain

and destroyed our wood, the

prized wood of which so little

remains and killed a leopard

and killed the dragon,

our dragon,

the beast which so many flocked

to see, that so many watched

riding the thermals under our

hot sun, and left its carcass

here, for us to remove, to eat

or bury or let rot under our hot

sun, and for this you think you

have earned my hand

and our land.

“And I ask you, who will clean

your mess?”

The knight turned red

and furious and his fury

was nothing,

a dead dragon’s corpse

lying under a hot sun

that was not his

and he was silent.

Kongamato has breath like tendrils

of leathery fog. it blisters

skin. clogs pores thick with terror.

no one dares meet its eyes.

instead, they summon

prayers. crouch beneath

a veil of

shadowed

screams.

She gripped her cup, the plastic cracking between her fingers, the piss-warm and piss-taste beer threatening to overflow. Careful, careful, she chastised herself, easing her grip, forcing herself to relax. To ignore that itchy feeling between her shoulder blades. The tingling at her fingertips that drove her to something. Was it one of them? She puzzled over it while she watched, her eyes catching everything.

Mona did not dip and trip. She had never danced.

She pushed heavy strands of hair behind her ear. It did not catch the light. Oily, black, it bled into the shadow, clinging to the space she had come from and would slide back into when she found why she had been called here. Her laugh, if she laughed, would be deep and raspy. The part of her that could make sounds like the girls, high, clear tones, was not her throat.

Quietly she watched them, dark eyes following their movements, a hunter, always a hunter no matter what the stories said. Attempting to unravel the mystery of why she was there at all. Out of place in her drab dress, her still body.

They smiled with lips stained bright colors, their cheeks glowed, golden shine like sun, their eyes were large, ringed with shadow. Beautiful and young, impossibly young.

How? she thought, darting her pink tongue out quickly to moisten her own lips, red, so red. Her cheeks did not glow, what gold she had ringed her eyes.

They did not notice that she was not like them when she slipped from the shadows. But then, people see what they want to see, and if Mona knew more of the world, she would know that. But all she knew was hunger and feast, so she held herself tight and close, nervous to be alone, but the others wouldn’t come. They didn’t answer anymore.

It had been so long since the burn, the itch of the blood. The need to answer. How could they ignore it? They had laughed their throaty laughs, said it would pass but helped her anyway, for they were good sisters. Mona was happy for them in the long empty days they sat hungry, waiting for the feast.

“It will be worse,” they said, digging through rags. Cloth so old it crumbled. “When you come back, the hunger will be worse.”

Mona didn’t care, it had been so long since anyone had called.

The clothing, a loose dress in a dirty gray color that once, perhaps, had been black, hung awkwardly on her. Bunching where it was meant to drape, draping where it was meant to fit. But she straightened her body and tried to look proud anyway. She needn’t have been so worried. People see what they want to see.

Dressed in those stolen threads, she slipped out of the shadows, came where the blood called. A basement, a party, a plastic cup of piss beer passed to her and the low thrum of music, but the why of it all still unclear.

“You’re not like the other girls here.” Deep, ringed with laughter, a sound closer to her own, and she turned to him, her dark eyes focused.

“Oh?” A sound, not quite a word. He looked down at her, his own plastic cup gripped in his hand.

“Yeah, they’re all,” he frowned, his nose wrinkling in the dim light, “not like you.”

She glanced away, her eyes passing quickly over the girls that had held her attention, then back to him. Tall, lean, a dusting of hair on his face, too fine to groom. Her eyes flicked past him, to the men who leaned up against the wall, still nearly boy-young. They snickered at him, at her.

“I’m Alvis.” White teeth, straight.

She nodded, unsure of what to say. He expected something, but words stalled in her. A panic built, she had not thought this would happen, this was not how it happened before. But this was different, the others hadn’t come. “Mona,” she breathed.

“Mona,” her name sounded like his laughter for a moment, full and deep. An invitation given, hand out, palm up.

She eyed it, keeping her own at her breast, the plastic cup held in them, her tingling fingertips curling and itching just like that space between her shoulder blades. The need called, but she was a creature of sight and she saw what she needed to see.

“It’s alright.” He crooked his fingers, pulling at the air, and she followed.

The men on the wall laughed. “You sure you want her?” one asked, his words half slurred.

“Don’t listen to them. They don’t know what they’re looking at,” Alvis said, reaching for her, and she froze, her fingers clenching in his hand, the sharp tips of nails digging into his fleshy palm. He let out a surprised yelp, the sound higher than she thought it would be, before he grasped the cup, slipping it from her fingers and setting it down.

“Your face is so pale,” he breathed. Wet warmth trickled over her fingers. The smell, rich and alive, filled her nostrils, a memory long dry flared back to life in her.

She shifted, pressing her shoulders together, attempting to scratch the itch. The jingle jangle sound of her true self filled the room, and she stilled, dark eyes locking on him, but he smiled. The others fell silent. Confused. Only the music played.

“I’ve always wanted to meet a girl like you. I used to have dreams, you know,” he tried again, his voice a whisper, and the tips of her fingers tingled and burned.

She tilted her head and listened, his whispering repeating old tales, lost stories. “Displeased,” she said, the word a memory. She understood. Libations, sacred dancers, what was a party but a call to the gods?

He nodded, “To meet you. Your wings,” he said, “are beautiful.”

She grinned, flattered, showing sharp teeth, and unfurled, ripping the dress to pieces as she moved. Her wings rattled and shook. Free, the feathers clanged against each other, brass, not quite gold, shining in the dim light as the hair of the girls had done before.

She stretched, each movement releasing a sweet music, letting her wing tips reach as far as they could before snapping them shut, the roll of thunder pealing through the air as the wind entered, answering her call, sweeping away the remains of the tattered dress.

“This isn’t where,” he started, his words lost to the chime of her feathers. He touched his chest absently, enchanted. His injured hand leaving a wet shadow over his heart.

She paused for just a moment, accepting his invitation.

“Oh,” he breathed as she struck, rising in the air briefly before her talons hit their mark, pushing him back. Ripping through soft flesh and muscle, rending fat aside to reveal her prize. With gleeful fingers she plucked out his stomach. Ate it, swallowing the pieces she ripped off whole, her tongue delighting in their touch as they slid past it and down her throat.

When she looked at him again, she could only see his eyes, starving and full of love in the face of near divinity. He had seen exactly what he wanted to see, what he had defied the gods for.

The warmth of the feast spread through her, settled deep in her guts, speared through her core, filled her in a way she had never been filled. Her sisters were wrong. This feast would sustain her; and she wished they had come.

Alvis, she thought, touching his face, his name a song to her. And she knew why it had felt so different. Why it had been her and only her. He had not called in service. He had called to worship, to lay praise. And she had accepted. A starving priest he would be, but hers, forever hers, and she would never be hungry again.

She snapped her wings again, and the winds came hard, the rain fell outside, and now the world started again. The girls were screaming, scrambling, but she was pleased. The itch had stopped, and she slipped back through shadows and into myth.

Thank y’all so much for helping this weird little story find its audience!

The worldbuilding that went into “Man vs. Bomb” was originally inspired by a series of discussions about the comic book series Y: The Last Man, as well as the realization that if Animal Farm were set in North America, it would have to feature a lot more White-tailed Deer. Deer , like, have all of the scary qualities of different farm animals combined into one wild creature, including the fact that they will eat human flesh under the right circumstances.

I wrote the story at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ workshop in 2019. When it became clear that my 9,000-word tour of the Jewish afterlife in the form of a bird identification guide wasn’t going to be ready by my workshop deadline, I picked “Man vs. Bomb” out of my stack of outlines, figuring I could put together something short and finish the bird guide later. I cranked out the first draft in a day and handed it directly to Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, who had just arrived to mentor us that week, because who really cares about first impressions anyway? Needless to say, it’s come a long way since then.

The emphasis on the predator vs. prey dynamic reduced to a spectacle really resonated for me. Beyond the clear textual fact of the world being changed and humanity no longer being an apex predator, were there any particular realities that inspired the story’s setup?

Around the time I was outlining this story, I was living in a communal house in Columbus, Ohio. A big part of my decision to move out of there was the fact that another one of the residents had bought an AR-15 rifle without any discussion and was keeping it in the house, often unsecured, sometimes even left unattended on the living room coffee table. In the Pulse/Vegas/Parkland era of mass shootings, I thought it should be easy for my housemates to understand why this was a big problem for me, a queer domestic violence survivor with PTSD, but it wasn’t. After all, our housemate was one of the good guys, and he just liked the AR-15 because it appealed to his mechanical sensibilities, so why would there be a problem? Some of them had grown up with guns kept in the house, so for them it was normal. There was no consideration of the fact that, for most people on Earth, one antisocial white man with an assault rifle looks much like any other.

That’s something I hoped for this story interrogate: how do you look, to someone who doesn’t share your frame of reference? When you or I think about, say, zombies, we tend to think that what separates them from normal people is their amoral mindlessness, their bottomless hunger, and the fact that they will instinctively slaughter pretty much whoever happens to be in front of them. But for a prey species, like a deer, that’s just a description of a human. They wouldn’t see any meaningful difference between what we call a “man” and what they call a “bomb.” One is just a more honest version of the other. Likewise, every American who owns a literal killing machine with no logical purpose beyond mass murder has their justifications for why they “need” it, or why the social prey species of our culture shouldn’t be afraid of this particular killing machine enthusiast. But from an outside perspective, the only visible difference is who has fired into a crowd and who hasn’t fired into a crowd yet.

Second person isn’t the most common narrative style out there. Was this story written in second-person from the beginning, and can you give any insight on why you chose that perspective for it?

I guess my hot take here is that second person is actually very common, just not in things that tend to be considered “real” literature. If you like visual novels, or Choose Your Own Adventure books, or D&D campaigns, second person is something you see quite a lot of, because it’s usually what works best for interactive storytelling.

“Man vs. Bomb” isn’t interactive fiction, of course, but I wanted it to feel like it, which is why even that rickety first draft was narrated this way. I was specifically going for something close to the Star Trek VCR Boardgame I had as a tween. The idea of that game was that a Klingon has locked himself on the bridge of the Enterprise, and you have this videotape of him taunting you and trying to put you in stasis fields and making you do weird tasks, while you roll dice and draw cards to try to kick him off the ship. So it wasn’t just second-person narration, it was a second-person narrator who is also an antagonist in the story he’s telling. In retrospect, it’s a little weird that someone gifted 11-year-old M. Shaw a game that was basically a “getting topped by a bratty alien” simulator. I enjoyed the game, but thematically it was way above the sexual pay grade of someone who’s just entering adolescence. Now, I kinda wish I still had it.

. . . Sorry, what was the question?

I was struck by the depersonalization of the characters, reducing them to their job roles of “man” and “bomb” and “trainer,” and the emphasis on money in the context of blood sport. Were you specifically aiming at a critique of late capitalism here?

Late capitalism is so often a parody of itself that I never really feel the need to put in the work on critiquing it. But, yes. Yes, I was.

Are there any projects you’re working on now that you’d like to talk about? What can our readers look forward to seeing from you in the future?

As of this interview, I’m editing the third draft of a novella that I really hope the world gets to see. It’s about loneliness and codependency, albeit in a way that involves a lot more cadavers being resurrected post-dissection and a lot more people eating, uh, things that aren’t food, than you might expect. For readers who enjoyed “Man vs. Bomb,” you can look forward to more stories about coming to terms with your own mortality under extreme duress, more stories about people being attacked and/or enslaved by animals, and more stories in which I try to make the horrors of late capitalism as amusing as possible. I have a Twitter and a website for those who want to stay updated on all the fiction, nonfiction, and poetry I’m putting out.

The starter pistol sounds. The man takes off running. Five seconds later, the bomb takes off after him. The man is young and strong, for a human, but his legs are short. He’s naked and doesn’t have much hair, even on top of his head. His genitals swing frantically, like a smaller, more terrified version of himself, as he runs from the bomb.

The bomb is visibly less ashamed of his nakedness. He freely displays his many open sores, his exposed rib cage where the flesh was chewed away by the bomb that caught him yesterday, when he was the man. He pursues today’s man without malice, only hunger. Behind his ribs, you can see some of the prize money stuffed between his remaining organs.

This transformation is the most beautiful thing about the race. Even if the bomb explodes before he catches the man, the man will never get back what he believes is his by right. The man craves his lost ability to dominate the world through force and industry, but the forest people have taken this from him. The bomb craves only skin and sinew between his teeth. He is closer to his roots as an animal, a purer kind of human than the man and, as such, he has already won.

The deer packed into the stands cheer on one contestant or the other as they circle the track. The man keeps looking over his shoulder. He refuses to resist the urge. Every time he strains his body to check the bomb’s progress, the distance between them shortens. He keeps forgetting that all he has to do to win is run, and nothing else, for long enough to beat the bomb’s timer.

You will have to understand this, too. To survive the race, you have to learn to think like the prey animal that the new world has made of you. To watch like prey, listen like prey, breathe like prey. To repeat this pattern until you no longer can. To let go of the idea that you will ever stop running.

The man turns to fight. Another common mistake. He throws a punch and misses, his motor control shot by his terror. The bomb tackles him and sinks his teeth in, ripping flesh from the man’s face, from his torso, from his throat. The man’s limbs flail under the bomb’s weight, until they stop. He relaxes. Falls silent. His eyes glaze. He is already ceasing to think about anything more than his desire to feed. He will not even need to sleep or mate anymore, after this. He is being wiped clean; renewed, and, in his renewal, ready at last to be part of a civilized world.

The bomb explodes, a series of muffled pops from the small charges planted along his spine, littering the track with the money sewn into his body cavity. Paper bills shower the man as he lies, uncaring, on the ground. The deer in the audience celebrate, or swear and rip up their tickets. The man is unaffected. The handlers come to collect him, scooping him up by the shoulders with their antlers. They help him into the stable where he will spend the night.

He will be your bomb.

• • • •

Listen.

You are a criminal. Understand this, above all else. Asking what crime you have committed is almost beside the point. You’re a human in a deer’s world; it would be more apt to ask what crime you haven’t committed. You have taken what is not yours: you have destroyed what you cannot keep. You have murdered, and devoured your kill without respect for the sanctity of the hunt.

But we are not cruel, like you. We believe everyone deserves a second chance; the race is yours. You will be judged by the criteria that your kind always applied to us: survival of the fittest. Just be aware: fitness, for you, no longer looks the way you think it does.

And so you find yourself here, tethered in the stable. As your trainer, it’s my responsibility to prepare you for the race tomorrow. I hope you’ll take what I’ve shown you in the video to heart. You may not believe I want you to win, but I do. I take pride in my reputation, and that’s why I’ve told you everything I’m allowed about what to expect. I’ve also made sure that your needs are taken care of. Here, in the stable, you’ll be fed in accordance with your dietary needs. You’ll be allowed to bathe, to clothe yourself until you are stripped bare for the race tomorrow. You have a safe place to sleep, which, I imagine, is a welcome relief from being out in the world at large, constantly fighting other humans over the scraps of your dead society. Isn’t it nice, knowing that tonight, at least, you are safe?

Do you remember the world before the forest people rose up? I don’t, of course. Even with all the benefits of medical science, deer only live 25, maybe 30 years. But your kind live much longer, even without the aid of all that technology. I’m only 10 myself, but you, if I understand human aging correctly, you must have been an adult before it happened. Maybe you even hunted us. Maybe you had a stuffed head on your wall. If so, I don’t hold it against you. Our relationship is purely that of a trainer and his charge. I think nothing of you outside the context of the race, and neither should you.

I leave you to yourself for the evening, though I can still observe you on the stable cameras. I need to take note of your behavior, to see if you need any more instruction tomorrow morning. Often, captured men are tempted to try to escape, or stay up all night, consumed with anxiety, in some sad attempt to make sense of their situation.

Not you, though. You eat your dinner, clean yourself, and then lie on your bed of straw. Good. You should get as much rest as you can. If you do this well, you’ll wake with your mind fresh, rid of any illusions of meaning. The brain can only handle so much activity at once, and you’ll want to spend it all on moving your legs. For the rest of your life, until you can’t anymore. My expectations are high.

• • • •

Breathe.

The starter pistol sounds. You take off running. Five seconds later, the bomb takes off after you. The bomb who was the young, short-legged man yesterday. You have the advantage in stride, at least. Here’s to finding out if you take it for granted.

You certainly run like someone intimately acquainted with what it means to be a prey species. No looking back, no temptation to confront your pursuer. I really get the sense that you understand: being prey is neither as difficult nor as complicated as your kind tend to think of it. All you do is run.

The bomb, of course, understands what it means to be a predator. He pursues you with complete single-mindedness. He doesn’t try to outsmart you, sensing that he can rely on your fear and your exhaustion to do it for him. The bomb doesn’t think of himself as a bomb. He doesn’t even really think of himself as a hunter. In his mind, there is only his hunger, and you, and a straight line connecting them.

You make one full lap around the track, then another. By the third lap, the air is thick with the dust you’ve both kicked up. Coming around the curve, you see that hurdles have been set across the track while you were on the other side. I wasn’t allowed to warn you about this, and I can see in the momentary slowing of your pace, the swing of your arms, that you’re letting your feelings of betrayal penetrate the purified mental state that we worked so hard on yesterday. The line between you and the bomb shortens.

Just in time, you launch yourself toward the first row of hurdles. Jump, and over. The second row of hurdles. Jump, and over.

As you clear the third hurdle, the bomb collides with the first. His body crashes clean through, wood snapping as splinters fly. This is where most men turn and look, if they made it this far. And here, you finally do.

So few of your kind are willing to let go, when it comes down to survival. You have to hold onto the delusion that you are still in control of the world. As if by divine right. This is why you look. You cannot relinquish your entitlement, even when refusing to do so would kill you—and I’m afraid it will.

You pick up the hurdle in front of you and swing it in a wide arc, smashing it across the bomb’s shoulder and knocking him on his side. It won’t matter. He’ll recover from the fall quicker than you will from delivering the blow. You rush over the remaining hurdles, but he catches you by the ankle as you clear the last one.

You both fall. Your head recoils when it smacks, face-first, into the earth. The bomb’s arm tangles in the hurdle, breaking the bones of his forelimb. But then, he only needs one hand to catch you.

You manage to slip your leg out of his grip, kicking off into a renewed sprint. You even manage to make it a few steps before he tackles you again, with his remaining arm around your waist.

From my seat next to the announcers’ box, with the other trainers, I see your fingers sink into the dirt. Your elbows brace, trying to pull your prone body forward. To draw out the line between predator and prey by just a few more inches, a few more fractions of a second before the end. The bomb’s head strains forward, teeth bared.

The bomb explodes. When you hear the pops, your face plunges into the dirt, believing, I imagine, that the sound means death for you, that the sudden, searing pain in your leg is from a bite, not the explosives. You lie, trembling from the adrenaline dump, as a roar goes up from the stands, the losers and the ones who are still in it, tickets clenched in the clefts of hooves. Bills flutter to the ground around you, onto your back.

The other trainers nod to me. I nod back, swinging my antlers in their own small victory lap. I’m proud of you, in this moment. It was giving in to instinct that saved you, your willingness to rush and scrabble and strive for your life until the very last moment. That is the prey mentality, and you’ve taken it to heart. We can all see that, now.

Moments pass, and you begin to realize that you are still alive. You stagger upright. Hobble a few steps on your burned leg. It’s painful, but you can get around. You take in the sight of the cash littered at your feet.

Nearby, the door back into the stable opens. You can leave the track anytime now, and this is the moment when we will see if you really are a winner, or just another bomb waiting to happen. A canny prey animal would abandon the money, too eager to escape the kill site to give it so much as a second look. A man, on the other hand, would foolishly hold onto the idea that the money is why he is here. He would gather up as much as he could, dreaming of the control it once afforded him over the things he desires, of buying shelter, or weapons, or food, or sex. A man would dare to believe that mere escape is less than the best-case scenario.

At the other end of the track, another door opens. If you are paying attention, you should already be able to intuit what is waiting to be released, just beyond the threshold. The deer in the stands who haven’t lost yet hold their tickets close, waiting to see what you will do. If you will survive in fear, or die in ignorance.

Watch.

Listen.

Breathe.

That of course is in addition to our other subscription options, all of which you can find on our website, at fantasy-magazine.com/support-subscribe.

• • • •

CY: As we write this, we had our first spring-like day in the lower American mid-west. I can see buds on the trees outside my window. We’re finally coming out of a very long, dark winter, literally and figuratively. As we start to see more and more people getting their Covid-19 vaccines, that despair that kept so many of us down for the past year is starting to lift a little for some.

AS: Hope can be a dangerous thing! It’s so often the foundation for heartbreak. But I think hope is also essential: It keeps us going, keeps us striving. In fiction, even in darker stories, hope can give the reader a moment to breathe, and keep the read engaging. As spring unfolds, our country is beginning to move through a number of transitions, and so many people are feeling a bit more positive and hopeful again.

CY: I wonder how that will spill out into the stories we read in coming months, as we finally gain a little mental space to process what we’ve all been through. Some people can write about heavy stuff while they’re in it; others need some distance before they can touch it.

AS: It’s true! I also wonder how it will affect our own responses to stories. Part of this depends on what we get, and I do believe that finding a great story can have a huge impact on your mood. But I also wonder how much our environment and the things we are going through plays a part in what we are hungry to read.

CY: I’m looking forward to more stories of hope, change, and community.

AS: That… sounds really good! I’ve always liked dark stories, but I also like well-told stories of hope. I can’t wait to see what people send us!

• • • •

In this issue, you’ll find the following fabulous fantasies: Original fiction by M. Shaw (“Man vs. Bomb”) and Hal Y. Zhang (“Arenous”); flash fiction by McKinley Valentine (“The Code for Everything”) and Donyae Coles (“Close Enough to Divine”); poetry by B. Sharise Moore (“Black Beak”) and Priya Chand (“Dragonslayer”); and an interview with Charles Yu. Enjoy!

Izzy had prepared for the party like a general preparing for battle. Strategies examined, analysed, selected. The Facebook invite said “starts at seven,” so she would arrive at eight. Not falling for that one again. She would compliment people on the right things: shoes, nail polish, haircuts. She would ask the right questions: What are you studying? What do you like best about it? She would make eye contact, or look at the spot between people’s eyebrows when eye contact got overwhelming.

But it had all fallen apart. Again. She wiped her eyes with the cuff of her borrowed flannel shirt.

A black cat jumped on the couch beside her. She reached out to pat it, and it reared back, looking affronted.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to touch people you’ve just met?” the cat said.

Izzy stared, processing frantically. But people think you’re weird if you talk about a different thing when they ask you a question. So she said: “Lots of times. Even if they’re wearing something fuzzy or shiny and you really want to. But I thought it was different for cats.”

The black cat’s ears flattened back on its head. “I don’t know why you’d think that. Have you seen Midnight anywhere around here?”

“I think it’s only ten.”

“Midnight the cat, not midnight the time. White fur. About my length. Fluffier tail.”

“I haven’t seen any other cats.”

The black cat gave a huff of annoyance. “She must have got lost. Every damn time, I swear. Now she’s late, and that means you’ll be late, which means offending faeries, which is never good.”

Izzy had no idea what to say to that, but for once in her life she was sure a regular person wouldn’t either. “How come you’re not called Midnight?” she tried.

The cat turned its yellow eyes towards Izzy. “Because my name’s Noonday. How come you’re not called Midnight?”

“Because . . . my name’s Izzy?”

“I was told Isobel, but close enough,” said Noonday. He eyed her smudged make-up, her red eyes. “Lord, look at the state of you. What’s got you so upset?”

When Izzy didn’t have a script for a social situation, she defaulted to being honest.

“There’s a . . . look people give you, when you’ve done something weird. Something that everyone else just magically knows you’re not supposed to do.”

“Probably not magically, but go on,” said Noonday, settling onto his bitumen-black forepaws.

“It’s like . . . confusion, and pity, and what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you, all at once. Everyone was giving me that look before I’d even opened my mouth, so I knew something must be wrong with my outfit. But I didn’t know what was wrong. It’s all clothes I’ve seen other girls wear at parties. I thought I looked pretty. Then Annika got there, she’s in my geoscience course. She always goes out of her way to be nice to me.” Izzy pressed her fingertips into her brow bone, the pressure a comfort. “But she still gave me the Look when she saw me.”

“Oh, sweetheart. Here, come with me.” Annika grabbed Izzy’s hand and pulled her into one of the bedrooms.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to go in here,” Izzy said.

“We’ll just be quick. Did you bring a jacket?”

Izzy shook her head.

“No worries.” Annika took her flannel shirt off, leaving a black band t-shirt underneath. She passed the flannel to Izzy. “Put this on. You can wear a short skirt or a low-cut top, but both is too much. It’s just a dinner party.” Annika buttoned the shirt up to Izzy’s collarbone, then pulled it smooth. “There. You look great. You can give it back to me in class.” She gave Izzy a quick smile and led her out of the bedroom.

“I was trying to dress fancy, but it ended up slutty, I just . . .” Izzy’s face burned. “I keep thinking of everyone who saw me before Annika did, what they must have been thinking.”

“They were probably thinking about how you dressed wrong,” said Noonday.

Izzy looked at him sideways. She couldn’t tell if he was trying to be mean or helpful.

“And then there was the jam,” she went on. “The invite said ‘bring something to eat.’ I wasn’t sure what to bring, but I love apricot jam, so I brought a jar. Everyone likes jam, right?”

Noonday gave a non-committal mew.

“The jam was wrong. I knew it as soon as I saw Simon’s face. He said thanks, but in that way that trails off at the end. Then he looked around, like he was trying to figure out what to do with it. Later I saw he’d opened the jar and put it out on the table with the crackers and the hummus and the chunks of salami on toothpicks. No one had touched it. Every time I came over to get food, someone would say, ‘who brought jam?’ and I had to act like I had no idea, like, how embarrassing for that person.”

“You should have brought baby birds,” said Noonday confidently.

“Or sardines,” suggested a white cat with a fluffy tail, approaching out of the darkness like the rising moon. She jumped up beside Izzy. With a white cat on one side of her, and a black cat on the other, Izzy felt sort of mythic. Like a figure on a tarot card.

“Time to go,” said Noonday.

An arc of electricity leapt between the two cats, forming a crescent over Izzy’s head. The world flashed white.

• • • •

Noise smashed into Izzy like a wave: clattering metal, sizzling oil, and shouting layered over more shouting. She looked around. The stainless steel benches, the rows of gas burners and sinks, the rubber matting on the floor. She was in a restaurant kitchen, she’d seen them in TV shows. A flame flared up a metre into the air, and the smell of burning sugar hit her nose.

She was sitting on an upturned milk crate, the hard plastic digging into her butt. The cats sat on either side. A woman with a messy ponytail and forearms striped with old burns was yelling at Noonday. “It’s well past ten, how is she supposed to learn everything in time? Your reckless attitude—”

“How is shouting at me helping?” Noonday interrupted.

The woman paused. “Right, right. You’re right.” She raised a menacing finger. “Later, though.”

She turned to face Izzy.

“Izzy, yes? Don’t answer that, I know it’s Izzy. There’s no time for pretending we don’t know things out of politeness. My name’s Dominica, you’re in Faerieland, faeries are real, huge news, process it later. It’s the Summer Feast, and we’re short on waiters. That’s why you’re here. The pay is good, but strange.”

“I’m not a waiter though!” Izzy squeaked. “I don’t know how to be a waiter!”

“You can carry a plate, right? You’ll be fine, just bring out the meals we tell you to. The tricky part is etiquette. Faeries are super-easy to offend, and have almost no impulse control. This is life or death stuff, I’m not kidding.”

“For example, you must never say the word ‘iron’ in their presence,” said Midnight.

“That’s not so hard,” said Izzy.

“If a faerie arrives late,” said Dominica, “—that’s anyone who arrives from now on—complain about it loudly. Otherwise they’ll be offended you didn’t notice they were missing.”

A bell rang. “Listen, I have to get the first course out.” Dominica shoved a long scroll at Izzy. “Just—memorise as much as you can. Midnight will fetch your uniform.” She strode off.

The scroll was written by half a dozen different hands, from elegant calligraphy to all-caps biro. Rule 1: Fairies dressed in silver get served before anyone else. All the way at the bottom, she saw Rule 276: If a faerie asks how long you’ve been in Faerieland, they don’t want a real answer. Give the traditional reply: “seven years and seven days.”

“And this is all of them?” she asked Noonday. “This is every single rule I need to know?”

“What, you want more? Yes, that’s all of them.”

She kept reading. The list covered every possible dimension of behaviour—what to say, what not to say, how far away to stand, what different hairstyles signified. It was quite possibly the most beautiful piece of writing she’d ever seen in her life.

A chef clapped Izzy on the shoulder as he walked past. “Poor sod.”

Nah, she thought, grinning. Beneath her feet, the ground felt solid as anything.