I know this is wrong of me. I know all writing is political. I know sharing our stories is an important way for us to work past media stereotypes, find each other, and reconstruct our collective histories. I have reread Babel and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and the Green Bone Saga over and over, as if by repeated consumption I could etch them beneath my skin.

Writing about “the diaspora experience,” though. On bad days, it still feels like slicing open a wound that won’t heal. Like vomiting from a sickness still curdled in my stomach. Like—despite Twitter reassurances to the contrary (shout-out to Dr. Lilly Lu!)—it’s the only thing I’ll ever be allowed to write, but I’ll need a PhD to be allowed to write it, in a program I’m not particularly interested in applying to and wouldn’t have the endurance to finish even if I got in.

And it feels deeply unfair, to think I have been assigned a specific set of topics, settings, and themes to focus on, just because of my race.¹

So: recently, I’ve been finding shelter in analogue, in metaphor. In books that resonate with my experiences without re-imposing the pressure to present “my people” in a way that is rigorous, “authentic,” and unassailable. I’ve been looking for reminders that stories can still speak to Asian-diaspora issues, to capital-P Politics, even if they’re not lifted near-directly from history books. That the world still has room for my stories, even if I don’t feel myself breaking new ground in this particular area of representation.

That I can use the verbal and visual languages I grew up with—even if they belong to the devouring empire²—to talk about aspects of my life that have historically been marginalized by native speakers of those same languages.

One of these books, for me, is Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light.

Honestly, I’m kind of outraged the diaspora parallel fits so well. This book is so British that Tor kept the two L’s in Marvellous for the North American edition. It is brimming with country manses and peerage-related etiquette and William Morris wallpaper and (ahem) extremely well-placed references to Turner paintings. And reading and rereading Robin’s and Edwin’s journey across the English countryside in search of new magic, pieces of the Last Contract—and, of course, each other’s hearts—has been an unmitigated delight.

One facet of that delight is, for me, interpreting Edwin’s position in the magical world as a diaspora metaphor.

Despite being born into a powerful magical family, Edwin occupies a liminal position between magical and non-magical society. He has much less power than those around him—a teaspoon to the average magician’s full cup—which facilitates disappointment from his father, bullying from his brother, and estrangement from magical society, such that Edwin primarily lives in London among ordinary people. When he’s forced to contend with other magical families, he is met with “pity . . . familiarity, [and] the blatant mirroring of Edwin’s own disgust at what he was compared to what he should be.”³ He himself describes his situation in the language of physical borders: “He’d spent his life feeling worthless around other magicians . . . walking a sort of ditch between road and field, brushing each side of the world, quite desperately alone.”⁴

Edwin is just close enough to magic for its lack to hurt. And as British as A Marvellous Light’s sensibility is, I also felt echoes of the Keko-Espenians in the Green Bone Saga knowing they would never reach the jade-wielding proficiency of a native Kekonese Green Bone; Mahit Dzmare standing on the outskirts of a Teixcalaanli oration contest, knowing she would never make poetic allusions with the ease of a child born in the City; Griffin Harley, plucked out of China so early that he stopped dreaming in Chinese and lost the only thing Babel valued him for. For all these characters, there’s a sense of having been born with the means to belong, by blood or education, and falling short in a way that feels like their fault.

Yet Edwin—like some of the Kespies, like Mahit, like (to some extent) Griffin—cannot leave the area of his lack alone. Even in self-imposed mostly-exile from his family home, he continues reading about different branches of magic and inventing his own spells, becoming “the only magician in England” who can perform his snowflake crystallization technique.⁵ It’s a kind of compensation, in the face of not having what comes so easily to others who share his blood; a gathering of proof—that even with the little power he has, he can create something that belongs to him alone. That is not dissimilar, I think, to all the years I spent believing that, if I could just read enough Asian-American literature—if I could take the right college courses, and enter the intellectual spaces where the most current discourse was being put forth—I would finally learn what it meant to be Asian American. I would finally belong, or at least have something to wield against those who reveled in my unbelonging. For both diaspora and magic, then, inheritance is just an entry pass through the gate—one must still earn one’s right to truly stay.

I’m also fascinated by the role that land plays in Edwin’s magic. Whenever he steps onto Penhallick, his family’s estate, he feels a physical unease: “There was an unsettling sense that the grounds themselves would rise up and buck him off like a skittish horse. It always felt identical to the message in his father’s eyes: coded on the best days, and blatant on the worst. I see what you are, and you are not enough.”⁶ Edwin harbors a visceral sense of rejection regarding the inheritance to which he was supposed to be born, which he conflates with his family’s treatment of him. The land, at first, seems to serve as a physical manifestation of Edwin’s liminality—without a sense of welcome in his own home, he is consigned to a bachelor pad in London, and deeply isolated.

However, this changes after he and Robin visit Sutton Cottage, following a lead on the Last Contract. Flora Sutton recognizes Edwin’s affinity for magic performed on things in liminal states, such as plants on the verge of sprouting: “You can create profound change if you slip in through the gaps,”⁷ she tells him—and this is a potent metaphor for diaspora as well. Creating one’s own “magic” through liminality has always seemed, to me, like a central endeavor of immigrants and their descendants, at least with regards to art and meaning making: the claiming of in-between spaces, the making of home in a place one was not born to. As Somali immigrant Jamila Osman writes:

I have always belonged at the beginning of the world, and where it seems to end, where the sky meets the sea, where the sea meets the land, on a plane when the two become indistinguishable from one another and you can no longer tell if you are going home or leaving it . . . I am from a place beyond the scope of any map or road atlas . . . I am from a land unmapped and entirely my own.⁸

To Osman, liminality becomes an entity unto itself: a place capable of holding a person, of holding meaning; of unraveling the bounds of space and language and time. Here, too, is a walking of a ditch between road and field, a brushing of each side of the world.

And A Marvellous Light’s magical liminalities connect explicitly to knowledge, hierarchy, and empire as well. Flora—primarily a self-taught magician, as women in this world are not allowed formal magical education—assures Edwin that “There are more kinds of power than the men of this country have bothered to know”⁹; Edwin later reflects that “Flora Sutton did magic one-handed, and soaked Sutton in spells I’ve never seen. I don’t think she knew how to practice within the normal rules at all.”¹⁰ On a similar note, the poet Yanyi writes about historical trauma involving a different kind of knowledge than is usually touted in mainstream society. Quoting Eng and Han’s summary of Rea Tajiri’s documentary, History and Memory (1991), in which a daughter has a recurring dream of a woman at a well, he relates:

Eventually, the daughter discovers that these nightmares are reenactments of the mother’s histories in [a Japanese internment] camp. Ironically, the mother has history but no memory, while the daughter has memory but no history.”

Yanyi concludes:

Memory is a funny thing. For those of us who inherit historical traumas, we remember without knowing why we remember. We remember without knowing. Domination doesn’t just take land or livelihoods—it takes language. It takes home. It takes a sense of belonging.¹¹

These situations both involve ways of knowing that have been discredited by those in power, silenced by dominant narratives—sourced not from what has been written or recorded, but from lessons worked out in the body itself. And so, for Flora, Edwin, and the dreaming daughter, belonging is found in recovering that knowledge—in accessing older forms of magic and memory that society has deemed irrelevant, and wrapping language around these things they do not know that they know.

Finally, for both Edwin’s magic and for diaspora, inheritance also comes with responsibility. After Flora is killed by those seeking the Last Contract and bequeaths her estate to Edwin, Sutton Cottage responds viscerally to Edwin’s emotions, tilting its floorboards and lighting lanterns to guide his way. At first, this is anxiety-inducing: Edwin feels the estate “a magic not his own . . . pressing around him, eager and impatient, demanding recognition,”¹² and believes “it’s just going to be something else for [him] to disappoint.”¹³ However, after his older brother Walt threatens him on Sutton grounds, and the house reacts to his distress by trapping Walt in a wall,¹⁴ Edwin realizes “This wasn’t just an ease of magic and of breathing. This was something ancient and unmapped, the land reminding him that blood-pledge was the oldest contract played out small—power for responsibility, to tend and to mend.”¹⁵ Here, then, is what feels like the most beautiful and terrifying aspect of the diaspora parallel: a claim one might not feel complete ownership over, a call that may be above one’s capacity to fulfill. A kind of lineage, even if it does not involve genetics or the native fluencies of others who may share our blood.

I’m still trying to figure out what it means, tangibly, to tend to in-between magics, to even begin to try fixing a vast pile of broken things. But maybe it’s enough to keep wandering around in the dark, when it feels like the spark has burned out. To keep studying and creating and trying to become a person who might be worthy of this thing I have claimed—or, perhaps, that has claimed me.¹⁶

In the meantime, however, I’m allowing myself to enjoy this book. To revel in the language I grew up speaking; in the glorious heart-squeeze of character arcs that are nonetheless Western; in one of the more picturesque facets of a country that colonized both my parents’ and my countries of birth—which, to paraphrase a prophet, I would have good reason to hate myself for loving.¹⁷ I’m allowing myself to believe this kind of storytelling can still say something, still mean something, to my capital-P Political in-between. And so: A Marvellous Light renewed my hope that maybe I’ve been making this too complicated. That my stories—sprung out of my own liminal existence, and liminal body, and knowledges I hold beyond language—can give words to some shared experience, whether I exhaustively replicate history textbooks or not; that I can have interests outside of Asian and Asian-diaspora politics and culture without being accused, if only in my own head, of not living up to my full narrative potential.

That maybe writing can be a world I’m allowed to belong to: this small marvel of creation I might still call my own.

¹. Which is not to say I’m advocating for people to go wild with writing from any culture, race, privilege level, etc. of their choosing, á la Lionel Shriver or Juniper Song—more that I’ve noticed a tendency for Asian diaspora authors to be more often praised—and paid—for writing about their own specific racial traumas, whereas white authors tend to be granted a more neutral, “universal” ground. This topic is explored more eloquently and in-depth in Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Stand Up” and R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface, among others.
². Martine, Arkady. A Memory Called Empire. New York: Tor, 2019.
³. Marske, Freya. A Marvellous Light. New York, Tom Doherty Associates, 2021, p. 25.
⁴. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 279
⁵. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 23
⁶. Markse, A Marvellous Light, 77
⁷. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 165
⁸. Osman, Jamila. “A Map of Lost Things: On Family, Grief, and the Meaning of Home.” Catapult. 9 Jan. 2017, https://catapult.co/stories/a-map-of-lost-things. Accessed 2 Jun. 2023.
⁹. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 163
¹⁰. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 357
¹¹. Yanyi, “Is Choosing to Stick to ‘Westernized’ Tropes Also a Form of Freedom?”. The Reading. 7 Feb. 2021, https://reading.yanyiii.com/letter-27. Accessed 02 Jun. 2023.
¹². Marske, A Marvellous Light, 191
¹³. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 231
¹⁴. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 347
¹⁵. Ibid.
¹⁶. Marske, A Marvellous Light, 371
¹⁷. El-Mohtar, Amal & Gladstone, Max. This Is How You Lose the Time War. New York, Saga Press, 2019, p. 55.

Anyone familiar with my past publications will know “time” is something I often play with in my stories, whether it’s splitting a person into their various selves at different ages (“Splits”), making my main character age in reverse (“A Fall Backward Through the Hourglass”), or writing a protagonist addicted to nostalgia in pill form (“In the Grip of Yesterday”), to name a few. But I’d always wanted to write a story that simultaneously incorporated several time periods. I have an interest in history, be it major world events or simply pop culture history, and I wanted to include things like my love of ’40s music, pop art, vintage food, the moon landing, and yes, even Star Wars, in a single story, but I didn’t know how to pull it off. This story finally came about in an almost accidental way. I’m a life-long insomniac, and I woke up in the middle of the night, so as I sometimes do, I got up to write. The opening line just came to me, and I started free-writing from there, the first draft flowing out of my exhausted mind.

What led you to place the Oakmont in Manhattan?

I realise this may seem an odd choice for a Canadian writer, especially one who spent years living in Toronto, which would make you think that an obvious choice for a setting, but I went with New York for a few reasons. For one, the first line, “On the island of Manhattan, there’s a building out of time,” was the first thing that popped into my head, and I went with it. Of course, I could’ve changed that in editing, but it made sense as a setting for a lot of the historical references I later included in the story. For instance, the silent film, Safety Last, which was filmed in and takes place in New York and sees Harold Lloyd dangling over the city from the hands of a huge clock. As a kid, I’d watched these old silent films with my dad and had always wanted to include Harold Lloyd’s work in one of my stories, since he never gets as much credit for his contribution to film as Keaton and Chaplin do. Safety Last is not just my favorite of his films, but it also came with built-in, time-related symbolism. There’s also the reference to Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph, V-J Day in Times Square. I’m a former professional photographer and have long been a fan of Eisenstaedt’s work—in fact, I focused an entire final project on him in college—so I knew this photograph had been taken at the end of World War II, in the midst of the celebration in the streets of New York. So, because of details like this, and the fact that it fit the “big city” aesthetic I was going for, New York just felt right for the setting.

I was struck by how, even with an apartment building that spans the decades, living in The Oakmont means living under threat of eviction. How much did the current housing crisis and general modern precarity factor into this?

I don’t know that I consciously included that in my story as a mirror to what the housing crisis is like now, but it’s something that’s definitely been on my mind. I look at how much rent has risen in Toronto, for instance, and I honestly have no idea how we could afford to live there now. We’ve also experienced it first-hand in our own desire to move to a more spacious house, only to find nothing that would suit our needs within our budget, despite already owning a home we could sell. In the end, we had no choice but to give up our search for a new home and opted to renovate our current home instead. I consider my family privileged for owning property at all. I honestly have no idea how anyone who didn’t buy when things were still reasonable can be expected to do so now, and rent isn’t really any better. As far as my story’s concerned, I feel like the people called to The Oakmont are a special kind of people in the first place, and so they accept that this is a magical place, and that this magic isn’t meant to last forever, and they’re okay with just getting to experience it for a limited time. Of course, the ending leaves that in doubt too. Time’s a funny thing. In some ways, maybe residency at The Oakmont is forever.

Given the way you built the setting, the theme of lost love feels natural for these characters. Was the love story between Sarah and Roger always at the core of the story, or did it emerge in the telling?

Though I often write about human connections of other stripes, I rarely write love stories, so this ultimate May-December relationship is a departure for me. The romantic thread was there from the start, though, and I think it had to do with the fact that I’ve always been struck by the sacrifice soldiers make going off to serve their country, knowing they’ll be away from their families for so long, if they return at all, as well as the courage of the loved ones left behind. My dad’s always been interested in war history, and I grew up watching war movies and documentaries, so I knew war was going to play a part in this story. World War II became the conflict Sarah and Roger have to contend with, but there’s also a mirror in the Vietnam War that Don’s against taking part in. At the core of both conflicts is Sarah, who bridges the different attitudes of the generations. On the one hand, she understands and even respects Roger’s desire to enlist, given that at the time it was a point of honor and men in the ’40s felt called to a higher duty in defense of their ideals. But Sarah also understands why her friend Don is protesting the Vietnam War, and even why he opts to go to Canada rather than face the possibility of getting drafted. Her position in history gives her a unique view of both situations, and being the person she is, she doesn’t interfere with their decisions, but it’s still difficult for her because she cares for them, and she knows how both wars unfold. But Sarah doesn’t know how things turn out for them as individuals, so it’s also extremely hard on her, especially where Roger’s concerned, since she’s in love with him. She represents the loved ones left to continue living life, never knowing if bad news will one day come from the front.

Is there anything 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?

I have a few short stories I’ve written that are still in a rough state, but I hope to get those out in the world soon. One of them also involves a time anomaly because I couldn’t keep from playing with time for very long. I’m also working on a novel that expands on my short story “Splits.” I can’t say when it’ll be done, but stay tuned for that. And I’m also putting together a short story collection, which is nearly ready, so I’m hoping to put that out in the not-too-distant future as well. I’m really good about updating my website, so readers can stay abreast of all my publications and any forthcoming stories through that, or by subscribing to my free monthly newsletter, the link for which is also on my website.

“What do you see when you look out there, Sarah?” Roger asks.

I stand next to one of the windows in his apartment and take in the view.

“The sun’s out and there isn’t a cloud in the sky. It’s a perfect summer day. The street’s filled with a steady stream of cars and people. There’s a busker on the corner—do they have buskers in your time? He’s drumming on a plastic bucket with his hands and feet.”

“He any good?”

“He’s too far to hear, but he must be. People are giving him money. Paper money.”

Roger raises his eyebrows. In his time paper money isn’t something people part with easily.

“What do you see out there?” I ask.

He places the needle down on the record he’s selected and comes over to the window to stand next to me as Billie Holliday sings, “Summertime.” I quietly hum along.

“There’s a newsboy across the street,” he says. “He’s calling something out to some pretty girls. The girls keep walking. They aren’t interested. Behind the kid, a man’s putting up a poster promoting Defense Bonds.”

I glance down at the newspaper that lies folded on Roger’s coffee table, no doubt purchased this morning from that same newsboy. The front-page story’s about the war, but I know it’ll still be a few months before America joins the fight. Still, the worry settles into my stomach. The attack on Pearl Harbor’s coming. It happens in December. I can’t tell Roger that, though.

There are rules at The Oakmont. The first, and arguably most important, is that residents are not permitted to share information about the future with other residents existing in their past that could influence the course of their lives. Residents also may not visit the apartments of those living beyond their own time, though the reverse is allowed.

I walk over to the record player and apologize to Lady Day as I lift the needle off her record and replace it with a different one. This one bends The Oakmont rules a little, since it’s technically from my time, and the song I’m choosing won’t be released for a few years yet in Roger’s time. But this isn’t the first rule Roger and I have bent during our time together. I find the correct groove, knowing it by heart by now, and carefully place the needle down. Glenn Miller and His Orchestra play our song, “Moonlight Serenade.”

I hold my hand out and Roger comes over to take it. We dance like we have so many times before. I think of that first time when we met, a few months ago in early Spring, and feel myself transported there. Maybe I am transported. Time, after all, moves differently at The Oakmont.

• • • •

Once a month, spring thru fall, Mr. Thomas hosts a movie night on the rooftop of The Oakmont. Although to him they’re moving pictures. In his time Mr. Thomas runs a theater where silent films are screened. Here, he uses an old bedsheet for a screen, but the projector’s real—taken from his theater when they upgraded. There’s also a piano that’s stored in a sort of shed he built. The walls open on hinges for full sound as he plays along with the films.

Today’s movie is Safety Last, starring Harold Lloyd. A personal favorite of mine, despite the film having been released before even my grandparents were born.

The film won’t start until it’s truly dark, though. First there’s the traditional potluck dinner. I glance down at the table at foods from every era. On one end Depression cake sits next to aspic. The other end holds a silver fondue pot. Just beyond that’s the grocery store sushi platter I brought. There are no rules about food at The Oakmont. There is, however, an unspoken rule when we interact with residents from other times.

At The Oakmont, we go with the flow.

There are things you just accept when you live here. You don’t question what’s normal for other residents. You don’t comment on their clothing or hairstyle, for instance. At least not to point it out as unusual. It’s understood that things like appearance—and, yes, even food—are a product of their time.

On this evening, I’ve set up an easel and brought up my oils. As people arrive, I paint them standing around the table, chatting. I’ve already included Mr. Thomas and the building manager, Ms. Knox, as well as a handful of others. Front and center are my closest friends, Linda from 1975 and Don from 1969.

There may be others here too, but The Oakmont has its secrets. Just as we don’t all perceive the view from the rooftop in the same way, there are residents here we may not be aware of and who in turn may not be aware of us. Only Ms. Knox interacts with everyone.

Of the residents I see regularly, the only one missing is Harrison, the odd loaner who lives next door to me in apartment 2055, but he never comes to movie nights.

There’s a number on the door of each apartment in The Oakmont. The number corresponds to the year the resident exists in. This number may change as time passes, but the residents don’t notice such things.

I put the finishing touches on my painting and lean the canvas forward to pencil in the title on the back of the frame: “The Gang at The Oakmont.” When I rest it back against the easel, I notice a figure I don’t recognize and don’t remember painting. I look over to the edge of the rooftop, where he stands smoking a cigarette. He wears a fedora, cocked ever-so-slightly to one side, and a jacket and tie over a shirt and slacks. A casual look for another era but coming from the twenty-twenties he looks dressed-up to me. They sure don’t make ’em like they used to, I think.

It’s been a while since there was a new face at The Oakmont. Someone must’ve received their eviction notice. It happens. Sooner or later, one will find its way under each of our doors. That’s understood.

I remove my smock and check my reflection on the side of the fondue pot to make sure there’s no paint on me, then head over to introduce myself, feeling a little underdressed in jeans and a t-shirt. That’s how Roger and I first meet.

He says he’s from the early forties. I tell him when I’m from. The connection’s instant and powerful. We talk like we’ve known each other for years. Later we sit next to each other, laughing as Harold Lloyd dangles over the city from the face of an enormous clock. After everyone else has left, we dance for the first time. On this occasion I only hum, “Moonlight Serenade.” I suppose it’s the look of him that makes me choose that song. As we dance, he describes the view of New York as he sees it. I lean my head against his shoulder and try to picture what he tells me.

The Oakmont was built over a time vortex. No one knows how long it has stood on this spot. There’s no record of its construction or design. The building’s architectural style is timeless, naturally. Its façade appears neither new nor weathered. The residents of The Oakmont can’t even be certain the way they see the building is the same way others do.

• • • •

Late in July, Don invites Linda and me over to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing. Linda watched it back when she was nineteen. For Don it’s the first time. I’ve seen it on TV and YouTube many times over my life, but tonight we’re in Don’s apartment, where it’s actually July 20, 1969, so we’ll be watching it live on his TV. I would love to have shared this moment with Roger, but The Oakmont rules are in place for our own good. I did slip a note under Harrison’s door inviting him to join us, but I never heard back.

I show up late, as usual. Linda’s clearly been here a while. The scent of pot they smoked earlier still lingers in the air, and their first questions to me are about snacks. I dump out the bag I’ve brought on Don’s couch. Everything I could find that didn’t exist in their respective times: key lime-flavored licorice, ruby chocolate, chips made from every root vegetable but potatoes.

“Did you get my Coke Zero?” Don asks, rummaging through the pile of goodies.

“Oh shoot! I forgot. There was this old lady in the aisle who started talking to me about the ridiculous price of grapes, and I guess I got distracted.”

“Classic Sarah,” Linda says. “Born too late, it seems. Can’t resist anyone old. Is that why all your friends are from the twentieth century?”

They both laugh.

“Technically, I’m from the twentieth, too,” I say. “Just made it at the tail end. Maybe that’s why my neighbor keeps avoiding me. Not twenty-first century enough for him.”

“What neighbor?” asks Don.

“You know, Harrison from 2055.”

They shrug and I find myself wondering if they simply haven’t met him, or if they just don’t perceive him. That happens at The Oakmont. It’s even more common when you’re talking about non-residents.

Take Linda; she works at a roller rink teaching roller disco dancing to bored housewives. The rink is owned by her boyfriend, who I know she’s mentioned many times, but I can’t for the life of me recall his name. I don’t even know if we’ve met before. All I know is in my time Roller Palace is long gone. It’s a Chinese buffet now that offers a killer dim sum service on Sundays. Every time I go, I’m tempted to pull up a corner of the carpeting to see if the rink floor’s still there. They kept the disco ball, after all.

People who reside outside The Oakmont may visit, but their experience is limited. They see only what pertains to their time. Should they encounter residents from other time periods, they’re left only with a vague impression there were people there, but they couldn’t begin to describe them. The perception—or lack thereof—is often mutual.

“Anyway, I think it’s sweet you talk to little old ladies,” Don says. “You can never know if you’re the only person a lonely stranger might see that day. Kindness costs nothing.”

“Wow, you are such a hippie, Don,” Linda tells him, before turning to me and adding, “Speaking of all things ancient, how’s Roger?”

I’m about to respond when Don shushes us and points to the TV. We watch Neil Armstrong descend the ladder, describing the surface of the moon as he does. I’m unexpectedly emotional, watching it happen live. He says those iconic words and tears roll down my face. Don and Linda see and burst into renewed laughter. Linda throws a beet chip at me.

“Oh, shut up! You guys just don’t get it.” Then I start laughing too as I wipe the tears away.

“Okay, so about Roger?”

They both perceive Roger, which is nice since we’ve been together for almost four months now. I tell them things are going great, and they are. He’s an old-fashioned guy, the kind that shows up to dates with flowers and slips handwritten love notes under my door. I love his little 1940s quirks that would be so out-of-place in my time, like the way his hair’s always Brylcreemed and flawlessly parted to one side, or how he takes his hat off when sharing the elevator with a lady, and how when his shoes get worn, he gets them repaired rather than buy new ones. I love that when I get emotional, he hands me a real cloth handkerchief from his pocket.

“I got him to quit smoking,” I add.

“That’s it?” Linda says. “Where’s the juicy stuff?”

“The juicy stuff stays between Roger and me.”

“More like between the sheets,” she says with a wink to Don. But Don’s looking at me with the kind of serious expression that only comes from the best marijuana strains.

“What’s wrong, Sarah?” he asks. “I can tell something’s on your mind.”

I hesitate, not wanting to bring this subject up with him, of all people, but with both of them waiting I have no choice but to continue.

“It’s the war. It’s coming and I’m worried about what that’ll mean for Roger. I hate not being able to warn him.”

Don gives a single, almost solemn, nod. He gets it, what with his own war to worry about. So far, he’s avoided it, but he knows it’s just a matter of time before they start drafting. I know he has his fears about having to go to Vietnam. Fears I have no way to assuage.

There are rules at The Oakmont. One is that residents may not research prior history in order to discover what became of a fellow resident who exists in a time prior to their own.

“Maybe you should just tell him,” Don says. “Tell him about all of it. How Japan bombs Pearl, but also how we retaliate. Tell him about dropping Fat Man and Little Boy. Tell him about the devastation that causes in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tell him about the camps, but also tell him how no one ever really wins a war, so it’s pointless to keep fighting them.”

His eyes dampen as he speaks, though he chants similar words in protest almost daily.

I nod in agreement, but we both know I won’t say any of that to Roger. It wouldn’t matter if I did. War is seen through different eyes in 1941. In 1945 our country will celebrate Allied victory for two whole days. The roar of celebration will go on for twenty minutes after the announcement’s made. A sailor will grab an unsuspecting nurse and plant a kiss on her in the middle of the street, and Alfred Eisenstaedt will capture it for LIFE magazine. It’s not the same kind of thing Don’s staring down the barrel of, and we both know it.

Before the end of the year, we stop seeing Don. He leaves a note with Ms. Knox letting us know he’s gone to Canada ahead of the draft. The Oakmont’s not the same without him.

• • • •

December 7 comes so fast it’s like a blink, but time moves differently at The Oakmont. I knock on Roger’s door that day, but there’s no answer. As I walk along the hallway back to the elevator, I’m filled with an irrational desire to knock on every door I pass. I want to see another human being—anyone at all—and tell them that in 1941 the country has entered World War II. I want to tell them I’m afraid for the love of my life. I want to see if any of them have phones that will reach his time so I can call and ask if he’s okay.

I pick a door at random and pound my fists against it, crying in frustration. But no one comes.

There are many doors inside The Oakmont that won’t open and corridors down which a resident can’t turn. The Oakmont allows us to see who and what we need to, nothing more. The Oakmont guards its secrets.

Several days pass before I see Roger again. When I do, he seems distracted, his mind elsewhere. I note the stress in his eyes. He avoids talk of what happened, and I don’t press. Instead, he speaks of his sister, Betty, who plans to enter the workforce as a telephone operator.

“I’m not sure this is the time,” he says. “Why does she need to work anyway?”

“Working women will become increasingly common in the years to come,” I say, refraining from mention that as men go off to fight in World War II there’ll be a boom as millions of women take their places. “I have a job myself, remember?”

“Yes, but it’s different in your time, Sarah.”

“Is it so different? Maybe this is just what your sister needs.”

“But how does it work for families?” he asks. “Who raises the children and manages the home?”

I smile. You have to accept this kind of thing when you’re a resident of The Oakmont. Times are different, and each one has its own set of values and attitudes that will inevitably become obsolete as the sands of time continue to fall. We must consider the source and share our varied points of view with the goal of finding common ground, especially with those we love.

“Families find ways to make it work,” I say. “Ideally, both parents share responsibilities. That is, in households with two parents. I can’t say how single parents manage, but they do. I imagine they found ways to do so even in your time.”

He nods, and we sit in silence as the elephant in the room that is the Second World War looms large over everything.

• • • •

Roger does his best to keep the mood light when we celebrate Christmas. He hangs mistletoe over his door and kisses me deeply when I arrive. On the radio, Bing Crosby sings, “Silent Night.” He’s even cut down a real tree and hung vintage ornaments from its branches. Well, vintage to me, anyway. Beneath the tree there’s a small package wrapped in plain paper with a simple red ribbon around it. I assume it’s for me, and I place the one I brought for him next to it. Mine looks so garish in its cartoon reindeer wrapping and iridescent silver bow. Roger can’t help laughing when he sees it.

I ask about his sister, and he tells me she got the job at the phone company. I tell him I’m glad and that I wish her well.
“That reminds me; she baked cookies.”

He grabs a tin from atop his fridge, opens it and offers me one. I take a bite and can’t help uttering a long “mmmm” as the flavor fills my mouth.

“This is so much better than the packaged stuff I buy at the store.”

“I can’t believe you don’t cook or bake a thing,” he laughs.

“That’s not true. I make a mean root beer ham. Mind you, it’s just a cooked ham I put in my slow cooker and pour a can of soda over.”

He doesn’t bother to ask what a slow cooker is. I guess the name says it all. He’s aware of some of the magical appliances I have. Well, magical to me. To him they seem wasteful—lazy even. “Why would any one household need more than one television?” he asked once. I didn’t really know how to respond to that. I think he’d have to admit my cell phone’s pretty cool though, with all the uses it has, but cell phones are strictly forbidden in apartments with numbers earlier than the mid-seventies.

We have some eggnog by the window, and I describe the Christmas lights that decorate the city in my time. New York is alive and festive in December 2023. In 1941, I gather, things are a bit more subdued.

Afterwards, we open our gifts. Always the gentleman, he insists I go first. I pull the ribbon and paper off the box and smile when I see the handkerchief.

“I thought you could use one of your own.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say. And it is. I’ve never owned anything like it. The fabric is cotton, I think, but the edges are hand-embroidered with violets, which he knows are the flower for my birth month. On one corner are my initials. I run my finger over them, turning the fabric over to marvel at the quality of the stitching. Machines are good, but not like this.

They don’t make ’em like they used to, I think, not for the first time.

He opens my gift next, and I wait on the edge of my seat to see his face. Carefully setting the reindeer paper aside, he holds up the canvas and stares at it a moment before looking at me. I can’t help it; I burst into laughter.

“Do you like it?”

“It’s . . . a still life?”

“You could say that.”

I look down at the painting I made for him. A painting of a single can of Campbell’s tomato soup. It’s an obvious rip-off, at least to those of us born after pop art became a thing. Roger shakes his head and laughs.

Years from now—for him at least—an artist named Warhol will paint a much better rendition of this very can. The punchline to my joke will land then. I wish I could be there to see his face when it does.

“I love it,” he says. There’s so much about me he doesn’t understand, and yet he still feels this way.

Residents of The Oakmont know there are things you must simply accept while living here, and questions you don’t ask, at least not with any expectation of their being answered.

Roger places the painting on his mantle. It actually looks good there. He stands admiring it for a while—or maybe asking himself, why a can of soup? I come up behind him to wrap him in an embrace and kiss him between the shoulder blades as he places a hand on mine. Then he exhales deeply, and I know immediately what’s coming.

“I’ve decided to enlist,” he tells the painting.

I bury my face into his back and hold back tears.

“There’s no rush,” I say. “The war goes on for years, and they won’t draft until next. You don’t have to decide now.”

He turns, wrapping his arms around me and kissing the top of my head.

“I know this isn’t what you want, but I’ve given it a lot of thought. They’re looking for able-bodied men. Our freedoms are at stake—and those of our allies. I can’t just sit this one out.”

“But to volunteer?”

He says nothing more. There’s no need. I know the man he is, and that this is exactly the kind of thing he’d do. It’s why I’ve worried for months that this moment would come. I know better than to argue, so I simply nod.

Later we fall into bed as we have countless times before, but somehow this feels different. Time seems to linger as we make love, as if stretching out our time together.

Just days later he goes to volunteer, and I walk him to the door. The main entrance to The Oakmont is a peculiar place. There’s a lobby with a revolving door that looks just like the many such doors you’ll find across the city. When you walk through this one, though, where you end up depends on who you are. Or should I say, when you end up. Even if Roger and I were to walk through together, holding hands, we’d still each step out alone into our own time.

He kisses me once, sweetly, then puts his hat on and gives me a smile. I return one as best I can. When he turns to go, part of me wants to run after him, but I stay and watch as he spins through the entrance, then vanishes into thin air.

I reach into my pocket, pull my new handkerchief out, and use it to wipe the tears.

• • • •

When Roger ships out, I can’t see him off. That happens long before I’m born. To take my mind off things, Linda asks me over to her place. We talk about movies, and in my frazzled state I let slip a Star Wars reference, though it’ll still be another year before it comes out in her time. Luckily, she doesn’t notice.

New Year’s Eve came and went without much fanfare. I’ve felt numb ever since Roger said he was going to war. It’s 2024 and 1942 where we are. Time marches on whatever the decade and no matter how much we might want to slow things down.

“Anyway, he’s thinking of selling Roller Palace,” Linda’s saying, and I realize I’ve missed her boyfriend’s name yet again. “Where the hell does that leave me?”

“Does he have another plan?”

“Wants to open something called a video rental store.”

“It might be alright,” I tell her.

“You know something I don’t?”

Her eyes widen with expectation, but I give her nothing more. She shakes her head, disappointed.

I hang out a while longer but call it an early night. When I get back to my apartment there’s an envelope sticking out from under the door. It’s yellowed with age and has no stamp or postmark. The mailing address reads only: Sarah – The Oakmont. I recognize the handwriting immediately.

Before I’m even through the door, I’ve torn it open, the scent of old paper contrasting with the anticipation of fresh news from the front.

Roger tells me of the time since he left, mentioning some of the guys he’s befriended—two of them New Yorkers like us. Neither has heard of The Oakmont, and Roger can’t seem to recall its location for them.

The letter goes on to say how much he misses me and how he thinks of me often. He wishes he could’ve brought a picture of me, but the modern look of all the ones I had would’ve invited curious looks in 1942.

By the time I’m done reading I’m both laughing and crying. Pressing the letter to my chest, I try to feel him there with me, through time and space. I have no idea how this letter reached me, but Roger’s generation was nothing if not resourceful. Dancing alone in my living room humming, “Moonlight Serenade,” I send him all my love and hope it somehow find its way to him, too.

• • • •

Letters continue to arrive, one each week. They’re always slipped under my door and yellowed from the passage of time. I suspect they’re delivered by Ms. Knox when she knows I’m not around.

There’s so much Roger isn’t able to share with me, so he mostly reminisces about our time at The Oakmont. He wonders what picture Mr. Thomas will be showing when he starts our movie nights back up. I want to tell him it’s Buster Keaton in Seven Chances, but I have no way to write him. In any case, I might not go. It’s not the same without Roger sitting next to me.

Then a week goes by with no letter. Nor is there one the following week. A month passes with the worst scenarios running through my mind until I can’t take it. I break the rules—not a little this time, but fully. I open up my laptop and Google his name, and any other information I have on his military service.

Nothing comes up.

There are results, of course, but they’re of other Rogers and other wars. There’s nothing to tell me what happened to my Roger.

I look up every Army database I can and search for someone to contact for answers. I call in sick to work and spend the next two days calling everyone I can. The responses are always the same. There’s no record of Roger. Things get misfiled. There was a flood in the fifties, or a fire in the eighties. The explanations are irrelevant. They all mean the same thing: that I have no idea what’s happened to Roger.

I can think of only one person that might have the answers I so desperately need.

Ms. Knox has been the building manager of The Oakmont for time immemorial. If you ask the residents what she’s like, you’ll find the descriptions vary enormously. Some will say she’s a young, attractive brunette with a fondness for hats; others will swear she’s ancient, bone thin, and always smells of cinnamon. Still others will tell you Knox is, in fact, an unusually tall man with an Australian accent. All are correct.

I knock perhaps a little too hard on Ms. Knox’s door, but she seems not to have noticed when she opens it and offers me a gracious smile. I’m invited in and offered tea, which I accept more out of distraction that any real desire.

I blurt out my confession as she holds a sugar cube in a set of tiny tongs over my cup.

“I’ve been searching the historical records for Roger in apartment 1942.”

The cube drops with a plop into my tea.

“Milk?” she offers.

I blink, waiting for . . . something else. Some admonishment maybe. Or perhaps a threat of eviction. She sits across from me then and exhales before speaking.

“The rules are in place for your own good. Has breaking this one brought you any measure of peace? Has it returned Roger to you?”

I shake my head.

“You want me to do that, then.” She sips from her cup. “You want me to tell you whether or not Roger survives the war.”

I nod.

“There are questions you just don’t ask at The Oakmont,” she reminds me. “You don’t ask them because they can’t be answered. Only time can give you the answers you seek.”

“Time,” I repeat. “Time is a thing you dangle from precariously as the city moves on below you.”

“Mr. Thomas and his moving pictures,” she says with a laugh. “Do you want to know what time really is?”

I watch her, saying nothing so she’ll continue.

“Time is nothing . . . and everything. It doesn’t actually exist, because we made it up, but if it did exist, it wouldn’t run in a line; it would run in a circle.”

Ms. Knox reaches into her blouse and pulls out a ring on a chain. She spins it one way, then the other.

“Time moves differently at The Oakmont. We can touch it at any point in time or at all points at once.” She demonstrates by tapping the ring at various points before placing it onto one of her fingers. “Time can pass you by and leave you virtually untouched, or it can fall on you like a cascade.”

“But what does any of this have to do with Roger?”

“There’s no fighting it,” she says. “It’s like swimming against the current. Better to give in, relax, and let the waves carry you to shore.”

She tucks the ring back into her blouse and takes another loud sip from her cup. I stare down into mine, searching for answers but knowing there are none to be found here.

Without another word, I stand and head back out to the hall. She makes no move to stop me. I’m so numb I don’t even consciously move through the building and only notice I’ve reached my door when it fails to open for me. I try the key again and again and finally burst into tears. Ms. Knox has locked me out somehow—punishment for breaking the rules.

“You alright?”

I don’t recognize the voice, so I look up and see my neighbor, Harrison, standing by his open door. I think it’s maybe the second thing he’s ever said to me in all the time he’s lived here.

“No, I’m not alright. My key won’t work.”

He comes over and takes a look, then removes and reinserts the key before turning it. The door unlocks and he pushes it open.

“You had your key in upside down.”

I feel like an idiot. No wonder this guy has wanted nothing to do with me. I continue to cry even while thanking him, and as I start to walk past him to enter my apartment, he stops me and gives me a hug. It’s uncharacteristic, especially in a city like New York, but I give into it—the way Ms. Knox said I should surrender to time. Through sobs I tell this stranger everything, from the moment Roger and I first met and fell in love, to the letters that arrived at my door so mysteriously, then stopped coming at all.

He listens to all of it in silence with a patience I envy. Then he does the unthinkable and invites me to join him in his apartment.

“I . . . couldn’t,” I say. “There are rules at The Oakmont.”

“I’m aware. Nevertheless, there’s something you should see.”

I don’t trust easily, but something about Harrison feels safe. I follow him to his door, rules be damned, and step behind him into 2056.
The apartment doesn’t look too different from my own. You expect there to be major changes from one era to another, but ultimately a chair’s still a chair and a lamp’s still a lamp. Apartments look pretty much the same, and New York rent’s probably way too steep in every time.

Leaving me standing by the door, he heads into his bedroom, returning a moment later with a shoebox. He removes the lid as he approaches, and I don’t understand what I’m looking at. Inside there’s . . . nothing.

“I’m confused.”

“My mother used to live at The Oakmont, though I didn’t always know that. I never met my father, but when I moved out, she gave me this box and told me it contained something that was his. She said he’d left it for me, with instructions that she give it to me when I got my own place.”

I take the empty box and wait for him to continue.

“When I opened the box, I found a bunch of letters. All of them looked old, but the one on top was the only one with my name on it, so I opened it. The letter was from my parents, written when Mom was pregnant. That’s how I learned she’d lived here too. They both had. Everything I’d known about them up until that point was, if not a lie, then certainly incomplete. My mother would’ve told me the truth, had she been able to, but . . . ”

“She didn’t remember,” I finished.

Residence at The Oakmont is a temporary affair. Those who live here only do so when the time is right, and when that time passes, they are evicted. Those who are evicted will find their memories of The Oakmont—and those they knew there—are fleeting, and just out of reach; like a word on the tip of your tongue you can never quite recall. At times, they may sense its existence. They may even search for it, never quite knowing what they’re searching for, but you can only find The Oakmont when it wants to be found.

Harrison nods. “By then I’d read the contract you sign when you move in, and I understood. In any case, the letter explained everything. How they’d met, their time together, how he’d gone off to war, all the way through to her eviction. The other letters were ones my father had written my mother during the war. In the letter to me, he said he’d resealed them in new envelopes and gave me specific instructions as to what I should do with them, and when.”

I’m at a loss for words as he tells me this. I see it now, as I let my gaze fall over him. The flecks of green in his eyes, so like Roger’s. The same unruly waves that drive me crazy in my own hair. This was why he’d avoided me. He’d known that if I looked at him—if I really looked—I’d see and I would know.

“It was you,” I say. “I thought it was Ms. Knox who kept slipping the letters under my door.”

My gaze then falls on the artwork that hangs above his mantle. It’s the one I painted a year ago—or maybe decades ago: “The gang at the Oakmont.”

“What I don’t understand,” he says, “is why you were evicted. I know it’s just something that happens here, sooner or later, but I thought there’d be an explanation for why it happened when it did.”

I smile, then burst into tears again. He looks concerned for a moment, but I start laughing. Relief washes over me and I clasp my hands and raise them to my face a moment before I regain some composure.

“I became pregnant,” I say. “That’s why.”

The Oakmont is an adult-only living environment. You won’t find children or families among its residents. There are couples on occasion, but for the most part residents live alone. Children are lovely, to be sure, but their futures are too uncertain and their pasts too meager. They’re as yet too resistant to the push and pull of time. Children also have great difficulty following rules, and there are of course, many rules at The Oakmont.

“This is great. This is unbelievable!” I tell him and wrap him in the tightest hug I can muster.

He looks confused, so I explain.

“Don’t you see? I’m not pregnant now. That means I must get pregnant later, or you wouldn’t be here. Which means Roger survives the war!”

He smiles an uncertain, lopsided smile as I jump up and down still hugging him. After a while he gives in to my joy and we both laugh and cry, and for the first time ever, Harrison accepts my invitation to join me for dinner. There are so many questions I want to ask that I know he can’t answer, so instead I let him ask questions of his own. We talk long into the night, and when we’re done, I describe to him my view out the window, and he tells me what it looks like in 2056.

• • • •

Roger returns a little over a month later, walking with a cane. I’m just glad he’s alive and back in my arms. We’re shy around each other at first, until we’re not, and then we’re back in his bed, just like old times.

The war continues where he is, but he’s done his part. I break the rules and tell him how it ends so he’s not surprised when the day finally comes. In early September 1945—or 2027, depending on your point of view—we celebrate the occasion in our own way and conceive our son.

I discover I’m pregnant as soon as I return to my apartment, where I find an eviction notice slipped under my door.

When I tell Roger both the good news and bad, we cry tears of joy and sadness, and afterward he plays, “Moonlight Serenade,” and we dance one more time.

“I’m going to miss this,” I say. “In my time no one who isn’t a professional really knows how to dance anymore. At least with you leading I stood a chance at a few decent steps.”

“I’ll miss this too, and I’ll miss seeing New York through your eyes.”

“Maybe we could meet in the future, where our lives overlap,” I say.

He kisses my forehead. “That would never work. You’d be a child or at most a young woman. I’d be an old man.”

I choke back tears and take a deep breath to steady myself.

“It’ll be alright,” he says. “I don’t think this is necessarily the end for us. After all, time moves differently at The Oakmont.”

I don’t know what he means by that, but I do know that in The Oakmont there are questions you don’t ask.

• • • •

I’m big as a house, waddling down the aisles of my local grocery store in search of the newborn diapers that match my coupon.

“My goodness,” says a voice with geriatric lilt. “You’re close to bursting.”

I have one of those faces, where older strangers feel comfortable talking to me. I stop and offer her a smile.

“I fear I may pop at any moment,” I agree, and we both laugh.

“Do you know what you’re having, dear?”

“A boy. I’m naming him Harrison.”

“What a great name.”

“Thanks. It just came to me one day.”

“Honey, in your condition you should be home resting. Let the baby’s father do the running around.”

“Oh, it’s just the two of us,” I say, rubbing my belly. “That’s why I’m here hunting down diapers.”

“Aren’t we all, dear,” she jokes, giving me a mischievous wink.

There’s something in that wink that seems familiar, and I’m about to ask if we’ve spoken before when my eye falls on a keychain clipped to her purse strap. A keychain in the shape of a roller skate.

It all comes back in a rush of memory. I see through her aged features to the youthful ones I once knew, and with them all my other memories of The Oakmont return. In that moment I see the same recognition in Linda’s aged eyes. She smiles and winks once more.

“My but we had some good times then,” she says.

I’m about to answer when it hits me that somewhere back at The Oakmont there’s a younger Linda, living in the seventies. If Linda can be in both places, in two different times, what’s to stop her from more? What’s to stop any of us?

I think of Ms. Knox and her ring, speaking about touching time at multiple points or all of them at once. I think of all those doors at The Oakmont that never opened for me. At least not the me I was then, at that time. Maybe somewhere behind one of those doors there’s another Sarah, with another Roger, and with them all our old friends. Maybe it’s movie night and we’re standing around the potluck table waiting for Mr. Thomas to start the film.

“If you’re the owner of a blue Toyota, your car alarm is going off.”

The announcement over the store speakers jars me out of my thoughts. I feel like I was somewhere else just now, but the memory’s faded. The elderly lady in front of me seems confused, then shakes her head as she remembers what we were talking about.

“They have the newborn diapers just there, next to the formula,” she says.

“Great, thanks.”

“Good luck with the little one.”

“Thanks again. It was nice meeting you.”

You won’t find The Oakmont on any maps, in any time. You don’t find it; it finds you. You’ll be living your life, happy as can be, then one day you’ll come across an advertisement for an apartment for rent. The ad might be online, or on a bulletin board, or in a newspaper, it makes no difference. What matters is The Oakmont will call to you when it’s your time. It will offer just what you’re looking for: a neighborhood close to work or the subway, stunning views of the skyline maybe, or rent control. Whatever the draw, you’ll know then and there you’ve found your home, and you’ll soon find yourself in Ms. Knox’s office, signing your name just below the list of rules.

leaves rattling like kettledrums
thumbing piano of the evening breeze
sonata of the sea mass

contrapuntal with simulacrums
music is garden is memory
is music is garden is memory

is tonic triad of semi intervals
is flat in major cadence
is solo in trinity in orchestra

is a god floating in ether
rhythms of pollen
is perennial throb of ethereal respiration

is pollinate of rhapsodies
keats bowing the crescent
byron trumpeting the robust cloud

is greenhouse with quietude
sound a slamming stone
organic with naturalism

is native climes of winter
pumpkins sprouting into tomatoes
hybrid grave

is a seed capsuled in bloom
cultivar with being
baby green to nature

A branch snaps, and it straightens, bone ears flickering like a rabbit’s when another rabbit is being skinned. But only a dead butcher emerges from the fossil-trees, a dark hole colouring his fading midsection. They face each other at a standstill, as if they are staring into a distorted mirror and haunted by their reflections.

What are you? he whispers.

The skeleton pig does not hear him because it is shivering and wondering if he had fallen on his knife.

Cold.

He frowns. I suppose it is.

Heat.

He opens his mouth, closes it. It’s too wet for a fire.

The skeleton pig nods like it knows this already.

The dead butcher glances towards where the river meets the horizon. Is that where we’re headed?

We. The skeleton pig has never considered this—that they’d end up in the same afterlife. It can’t make sense of it now. But when has anything made sense?

After a pause, it nods.

Would you like company as you walk?

Bewildered, it doesn’t know how to respond, and the dead butcher seems to take that as affirmation.

Come, let’s get you warmed up first.

It hesitates while the dead butcher waits. But skeleton pig is cold, so it goes towards him until they’re walking side by side, until it isn’t clear who’s leading the way. In the woods that bleed into the living, forgotten voices murmur and whisper of buried secrets and dead dreams, and it isn’t long before the pair arrive before the butchery.

• • • •

It is colder inside the butchery, where pieces of meat and complete pig skins hang from hooks like sacrifices atoning for an unspoken crime—a twisted puzzle that the skeleton pig will never solve. The dead butcher’s house is right behind. The skeleton pig sees the fireplace through the windows and the silhouettes of people huddled around it—the butcher’s son, perhaps, and his children. At the opposite door, the dead butcher finally notices the skeleton pig, rooted at the entrance.

As the skeleton pig treads through the rows and rows of stock, the dead butcher finally registers what it is, and even though he wishes he could look anywhere else, he watches.

The skeleton pig halts in the middle of it all, unhooks a skin-body, jaws clamping on the neck gingerly, and sets it down on the floor stained with generations of blood. When it noses the skin open and slips in, it is warmer, like coming home.

When it departs, the dead butcher does not follow. It suspects he might never be able to leave.

Outside, the snow has stopped. Sunrise thaws icicles lining roofs, withered grass, and lesser streams. Moss and blossoms bloom where flesh should be, and vines are weaving together skin and bone. The pig returns for the river to the heavens, the butcher’s son none the wiser.

Question I: What would you consider as constant

                  if all of these unknown variables wear

                  the memory of you?

Answer: Here’s the return of old habits. Of multiplying

                  nights & days to equal the number of times

                  I spent nursing the broken pieces of my past.

                  I teleport into childhood, and bathe in

                  its innocence. I unsee the clouds gathering in

                  my father’s eyes as they announce another

                  downpour of smith​er​eens. In my mother’s,

                  I recollect shimmers of her withered dreams.

                  I, fleshy strangeness, wrapped in naivety,

                  unperturbed by the world’s chaos.

Question II: If x = now, find y?

Answer: I, an offspring of a broken hymn stuck in

                  the diastema of my ancestors. I, an x with all

                  of life’s present tense, & the moon’s salty tears running

                  in my veins. every ar​te​ri​ole quakes with the

                  uncertainties of y, which is too big to feed

                  a clairvoyant’s delight. y, an amalgam of tomorrow

                  and now.

Question III: Interpret the expression y = kx

Answer: Like plastics obeying fire, I submit myself

                  to be scrutinized by time. I let the wind predict

                  the path I follow. I allow the things I can’t control

                  to providence. But, at constant time, tomorrow

                  is dependent on today. In this equation, everything

                  outlives time except memories.

Lara loves a tragedy. She dreams of them, rich and strong enough that her ma has to sing protection over her bed to spare their apartment neighbors from Lara’s love for a good, sad story and the sharp grief a witch’s love might bring. She thinks about them between classes at school, murmuring cantrips in two languages beneath her breath so she won’t ensnare her classmates. At fourteen, she finds Sanctuary Road. It’s a sad story to end all sad stories, which is to say, not good, but right. She draws, writes, spends long hours stewing about how someone on the other side of the country is wrong. She loves it in a way that you can only love something that hurts you, a thing that will hold you and knife you in the same breath. Every witch knows to be careful with a story like that, the kind that can turn, spines sprung.

And for a fandom witch, well, there are rules.

• • • •

The mundane, years from now

sanctuarysins21
holy.
fucking. shit.

tenlittlecats
DO MINE EYES DECEIVE ME DID THEY JUST MAKE JAGIEL CANON

astarael_girl
ok but are we gonna talk about how he held his face because I have an ESSAY about this

deaconjane
who the fuck in the writers room is reading fic and where do we send the gift basket

The witches, years from now

justiceformags
all right. fess up. who broke the salt rules? hope your craft is good and your legs are fast

• • • •

Sanctuary Road airs for the first time in September. Fall, especially in New England, is a dangerous time for a summer witch, full of the apple liquor and burnt sharp smell of the season ending, the false promise of just a few more warm days. It will run long past its own death and break a thousand, thousand hearts, but right now, Lara doesn’t know that. She is newly fourteen, drunk on her new inch of height. Her hair falls exactly to the center of her shoulder blades, not an inch longer, chopped blunt and straight across, so it’s uneven when she gathers it up.

Her mother sucks her teeth and calls her yellow-haired, which is to say it’s a black that gleams brown and not blue in the light. There’s a girl in Chinese school—fobby as they come, with her collars buttoned all the way up, clothes both ill-fitting and somehow too neat—who has hair so inky and straight Lara would suspect craft if Shen Jia weren’t as bland and exacting a rule-following witch as any that has ever lived. The type of hair the poet witches of the Northern Wei would have murmured from page to head. Lara’s ma loves above all to talk about how proper Shen Jia’s craft is, how filial the girl herself, how some Chinese girls still remember they’re Chinese. Yes, Ma, Lara says, nodding before her mouth has caught the sound. Yes, niang, she says pointedly when her ma is being pointed herself.

In the first episode she watches, Jack and Neal are trapped in an evil apple orchard. The trees are fed on unsavory things, but she imagines the crispness of a first bite on her tongue. Jack is older, blunt and confident, gray eyes, dark lashes, slow swagger. Neal is the quiet one, a sharp chin, a hunch to his shoulders like he might have ink stains on his fingers. They are both exactly the type of white boys Lara never talks to at school. They ignore her, and she ignores them. A silent agreement that suits all parties. She much prefers to see them on screen.

Jack and Neal drive a loud, unapologetic car—the kind Lara’s parents would never even imagine purchasing (it takes them years in this country to buy a car at all)—they eat junk food whenever they want, wear leather jackets (Jack), too-big Converse (Neal), and drive thousands of miles down American roads in American steel, with vengeance in their hearts and classic rock on their lips. Their America is a few decades and wars short of Lara’s. There are no Laras on the show (though ma will remind her that Qing Dynasty witches helped build the western railroads, that their blood and craft still sing in the iron); it is a world and a time contained and safe. These brothers love each other with a kind of feral, single-minded devotion that is as alien to Lara—the only daughter of an only daughter—as the idea of actual aliens.

They are as exotic as prairie houses, drop biscuits, journeys west with cowboys instead of monkey kings, homesteads, and apple pie. There must be a witch in the writers’ room, because the boys kill ghosts, vampires, revenants, and every other monster liable to walk an American road, but never a witch. It’s the kind of show she’s just a little embarrassed to tell her friends about. Sanctuary Road is clumsy and loudly American; she watches it furtively in the dark, ready to shut it off the moment that someone walks in. There’s an entire episode about their uncle’s cabbage-obsessed ghost. The jokes don’t always land. The special effects often involve an extra in a suit waving their arms around. It’s just not good.

She watches twenty episodes in two weeks, and writes her first fic in four.

• • • •

In the old days, it was harder to be caught. Meng Jiang Nu sang down a ten-thousand-li wall in all her rage—now they call it sorrow—and it took a thousand imperial witches to undo her working. The emperor buried the witches on top of those who built the wall, so their craft simmered still beneath the stones. Cleopatra and her sister had craft unparalleled, unraveling the narratives of men like badly woven carpet, and they went to their doom on their own terms. Esther wore the working of her courage like the steel that it was. Scheherazade was born an autumn witch and died a story witch of unimaginable power.

Some days, Lara burns with the salt of being born at the end of things, when all the great workings are already done. She knows Cleopatra probably sighed, imagining the days of wild Eleusis and dances in the deep wood, just as Lara sits at her window and traces patterns in the frost, dreaming of Wu Zetian, an empress winter-bred and winter-doomed. Now, kitchen witches still brew, but glamorists account for their spells lasting through every reproduction, and plenty of craft is worked online. Singing down a wall is a myth even to witches, too much effort with the workings in place to hold them all in line. All the fun—the kind of rule breaking that makes new rules—is happening in fandom.

There are different breeds of rules, and any good witch learns them alongside her craft. A wood rule is meant to be tested head on, splintered and seasoned in fire. A grass rule to be bent to give it strength. An iron rule to be laughed at, because iron rules are what those who hunt witches think govern the world, and when they are broken, those hunters will always say it was the witches who hunted them. The oldest rules are salt rules, the ones meant to survive sea voyages and flame and long years hidden in the dark.

Here are the salt rules of fandom: You will love without craft. You will bring no coven politics into fandom circles. You will reveal no true names when reading the work of a fandom witch. You will love without craft. You will love without craft. You will love without craft.

What this meant: Witch, you cannot fuck with canon.

• • • •

There are the Jack girls, the Neal girls, the ones who are hot for the dad, the ones who write endless fix-its about the sister (killed in the pilot), the mother (killed in the pilot), Neal’s girlfriend (killed in the pilot), Jack’s girlfriend (killed in the season one finale), or their grizzled monster-hunting ally who runs a garage the boys stop at from time to time (killed in the season two opener.) Lara buys a too-big leather jacket and starts clamoring for a driver’s license before her parents even own a car. She starts eight fics and finishes one, writes dreamy, distracted posts and messages about the America of it all.

She loves the vignette writers, the longfic writers who seem to generate epic AUs in mere weeks, the wholesome gen writers focused on the boys’ childhood, the lightning episode tag writers with their posts up by early light the night after the show airs, before the second round of better-quality downloads have even gone up, the filth writers she reads in a late-night blue glow, listening for the sound of her parents turning over in bed, the creak of a step, her cheeks hot.

Lara’s favorite is mantouhead, whose journaling posts make it sound like they work for a church or maybe a very, very conservative school. Their porn is unrivaled. There is no place they won’t go, no pairing they won’t write, and they are precise. They write one fic, barely a thousand words, that opens so boldly she closes the window on reflex. It’s disgusting. It ought to be reported. She loves it. Lara rereads it every day thirteen days in a row after it first posts, like a sacred rite. She feels like mantouhead has excavated the parts of her brain she doesn’t even want to examine, the dreams she would prefer to forget. Their username is sublimely stupid, and Lara spends her lit candles and ungoverned thoughts hoping it means they’re Chinese too. Every piece takes her apart at the seams in a way that feels like craft, one mind to another, but it’s impossible that it is. You will love without craft.

It’s not hard to get a feel for who’s a witch in fandom. Plenty of Sanctuary Road fans feel like Midwestern witches, a touch of real winter in their love, leavened by plates full of food warm and heavy with obligation; there are the Southern ones who think the show handles race just fine, calm down, and then the Southern ones who will fire back, sweet as honey, old moss and rich earth all wound up even in their shitposts. There are the stray West Coasters, all ocean and open skies, and she can always tell what side of the mountains they’re from. The New Englanders whose craft she can sense better: tree rot or rich salt in the Maine ones, sweetness and pine and mud from Vermont, the other Massachusetts ones either bound up in the oldest American craft there is—brittle and pressed deep, or immigrants like her. The immigrant fans are the hardest to pin by feel, the paths impossible to trace, some chosen and some chosen for them. Sometimes they’re untouched by the places they inhabit, and their craft feels like a familiar meal, flashes of Old World fire and long journeys across the sea, sometimes diluted by generations, but still there, rooted and waiting. Lara wonders what she feels like, filtered through an anonymous name and a screen.

She can hardly get a feel for mantouhead at all, just a vague coldness, the slightest breath of winter—more than a New England winter—in their innocuous posts, at odds with what they write. Lara loves mantouhead’s filth because mantouhead understands how good sadness can feel, writes with a knife pressed to the reader’s throat.

In one fic, deep into the sex scene, which Lara reads feeling her own blush all the way down to her chest, mantouhead writes Jack looking up in wonder at the demon Agiel, who is tall and beautiful and cool-eyed and steady, who once moved over dark waters with ancient wings, who fell so that one day he could aid Jack and Neal, betray them, aid them again.

She reads, and Jack looks, and Agiel looks back, his hands on Jack’s face, and he says, You have been loved, you are loved, you will have been loved. In all the days that have been spent and all the days to come, that will be true. Lara reads, and she can’t help it, the sudden heat of tears in her eyes, the press of her heart in the dark of night. It doesn’t have to be good; it only has to be true.

It’s a line that makes her think of long nights spent sleepless when they first came, aliens and witches slipping across an ocean in the dark, when she was small and afraid of what America could be, the coolness of her mother’s lips brushing her forehead, a fond, muttered chiding, a murmur of xiao shazi, why don’t you go to sleep? It will be better in the morning. Her ma sending her off to her first day of high school, looking thin and small and somehow Lara’s own height already. You don’t need those white people to like you. You just need to be better than them at their own games. Mind your dao. The terrifying trust in that, that Lara was a witch born to witches, that she could do it. With the next line, Jack does something so filthy Lara’s tears feel impossibly silly. But the words linger like good craft, carefully worked.

• • • •

She spends long days at weekend Chinese school doodling fic ideas in her notebooks, her character practice trailing off into messes that set her teachers clucking. Lara is fundamentally lazy. Her Mandarin is at its best when her grandfather stays with them for a year and they watch five full dramas together, end to end. 千岁千岁万万岁, she’ll announce, grandly walking into a room like she’s working craft—she’s never quite gotten the hang of it in hanyu, but immigrant witches have always found ways around and not through.

In Chinese class, they have assigned seats. Lara is always to the left of Shen Jia, the stuck-up, quiet girl who holds herself like she’s still got one foot in the motherland. Shen Jia will sometimes wear, of all things, a baseball jersey over her buttoned-up shirts. It’s secondhand and too big, and trails to her thighs. She keeps scorecards in a binder, neatly hole-punched and arranged by date, her handwriting so squared off and distinct the numbers look like calligraphy.

“How do you afford the tickets?” Lara’s never sure what to make of Shen Jia’s clothes or Shen Jia’s attitude. In New England, even the Chinese kids—and especially the witches—know when baseball will eat up all the love and anger and sadness in the air, and that craft is best worked during seventh inning stretches or on travel days.

“I don’t,” says Shen Jia, her face blank. Her right sleeve is just a tiny bit too short, and the bone of her wrist pokes out, a curve against the straight slash of the table. “I listen on the radio.” She gestures to her bag, and inside there’s the scratched gray surface of a Walkman. Holy shit, thinks Lara, is Shen Jia for real?

“Holy shit,” says Lara, “are you for real?”

Shen Jia prefers scorecards to baseball cards, peanuts to popcorn, offspeed experts to fastball pitchers. (That sounds dirty, says Lara. It’s not, says Shen Jia.) Singles to homeruns, spring baseball to the late summer slog, catchers who paint their nails to catchers who tape their fingers. Lara drifts in and out of her explanations, but the sound of her even voice, with its occasional lapses in accent, is soothing.

“But why,” asks Lara. It isn’t that she’s never watched. It’s hard to avoid.

“I thought it would make it easier to fit with the meiguoren,” says Shen Jia without expression. Meiguoren. Americans. But what she means—and what Lara hears, true as a well-crafted working—is white people. She must stare for longer than she notices, because Shen Jia, who hardly likes to comment on anything, looks up. There’s a mole just at the corner of her jaw, and when she smiles, very slightly, it shifts.

“It worked,” she says dryly, and then nods to Lara’s notebook, full of half-written fic ideas and misshapen sketches of Jack and Agiel doing things Shen Jia has probably never even conceived of. The leaves are turning, which means the end of baseball and season two of Sanctuary Road getting into full swing. “You should watch more baseball, read a little less.”

• • • •

The winter of the show’s third season comes long and mild and gray, backyard craft getting worked into December, the first real snow held like a breath until February. The actor playing Agiel had got into some kind of messy contract dispute with the producers, and there’s a new face on their screens halfway through the season. The fandom is in uproar, long screeds dedicated to the eye color of the new actor (repulsive, weird, mesmerizing), the specific way the old one sighed (perfect, boring, piglike), the way the new one wears his rings (it’s hot, it’s tacky, why does anyone even care Jesus let’s find a new ship). Every time the new actor reports so much as a hangnail, the fandom witches bristle with suspicion and mutual accusations.

Nothing feels right. Lara gets taller, and her mother gets thinner. Ma’s craft falters, and she goes to bed earlier, gets up later. Ba’s cooking is more routine, less careful, but they both watch every bite ma manages to keep down. They call the local medicine witch, a white American woman with a brusque accent and brutally direct craft, then the nearest Chinese one, a two-hour drive away, and finally the mundane doctors, who give them information and time, like Lara’s ma is only a complicated working to be undone with patience.

Ba worries like thunder, and Lara reads fic every waking hour. Humiliatingly, she doesn’t dream of her own mother, but Jack’s and Neal’s, dead after thirty-one minutes and forty seconds of screen time, doomed to cry out and fall and bloom dead and beautiful as cause for vengeance from the second she stepped into the frame. On the show, she’s frail even before her death scene, stronger as a dead thing to drive her sons to their work than as a living woman. Lara dreams of her, yellow-gold hair bright as an August afternoon, in her own ma’s bedclothes, familiar and careworn.

• • • •

One day, Lara looks up, and Shen Jia is a beauty. This is a thing that happens to witches, all of it coming to you at once, a thousand little details and the wishes of others all drawing together in sudden alignment, so that what was once awkward or unfinished has sudden luster. It’s a Wednesday in late winter—when Lara’s love is usually hidden and sleepy, waiting for the blush of warmer months—but it doesn’t matter on this Wednesday, a gray New England day, fuzzy with old slush and slow to start. Lara’s doodles in class are long, graceful lines of nonsense crossing her notebook as the teacher talks about owls going extinct. She raises her eyes, and Shen Jia is carefully bent over her own desk, taking notes in her serial killer-neat handwriting.

Lara’s eyes catch for no reason on the knobs of her knuckles, the graceful fingers, and her eyes run up Shen Jia’s arm, to her shoulders, sharp under her sweater, the curve of her ear softened by the fall of her hair. At the end of class, when Shen Jia stands, she realizes that all of Shen Jia’s gawkiness has become a sort of suspended grace. Like water shifting in a glass, her clothes hang on her differently, elegant even though she still buttons every button of her hand-me-downs, her stride measured instead of awkward.

Lara thinks about her collarbones that Wednesday, the way she holds a pen every Thursday after, the dip of soft flesh on the inside of her elbow on Fridays when she can’t concentrate. When she helps her ma wash, she thinks of how Shen Jia might wash her hair. She burns the rice imagining the way Shen Jia might make it, measuring the water by knuckle, gently stirring the grains with her fingers; starts and restarts four different fics thinking of Shen Jia’s squared-off handwriting. Mind your dao, her ma always says, but it’s hard to mind anything at all. For three weeks, she rewrites herself to look at Shen Jia, who now makes the American school boys pause and the Chinese school boys swallow their words.

Shen Jia watches her back. She never asks, but she seems to know, and she’ll sit with Lara for hours explaining the infield fly rule or her filing system for old scorecards. They rarely talk about craft. Lara’s is lazy, and Shen Jia’s is not. Lara can’t imagine Shen Jia watching an episode of Sanctuary Road, but she’s patient enough when Lara explains the plot or gets into a tangent, a curve to her mouth that transforms every disdainful look from their childhood into something warmer in turn. Lara confesses that she likes the new actor playing Agiel, the vulnerability in his voice. What she doesn’t say: He has a rasp in his voice she has always imagined when reading Agiel’s lines in mantouhead’s fic, as if mantouhead had somehow invited him in before he was ever on the show.

Shen Jia’s face is unreadable on the subject, but she doesn’t ask why Lara sometimes misses school, or smells of a mundane hospital. She doesn’t, like a hundred well-meaning aunties, suggest old craft un-found, as if Lara and ba haven’t lit incense, fed their altars, sung every desperation to the moon. She’s not a nervous talker, like Lara’s American friends, or full of pity like the other Chinese school girls. She’s quiet, a better listener than Lara would have guessed, because she always has the right episode number, agrees that Jack would throw a wicked curveball, the kind of 12-to-6 drop to break a fragile heart, that Neal would be the stats guy, all research and clumsy feet.

“Shen Jia,” Lara will say some days, teasing, “are you watching the show?”

And Shen Jia will smile her winter smile, slow to come, honeyed at the corners, just a little prim.

• • • •

A summer witch can smell a New England spring the first time the rain loses its bite. A green witch would know even earlier, a touch of fingers on cold soil enough to summon a vision of weak sunshine, fragile blooms. Lara, born on a July day fit to steam an egg custard firm in open air, misses it entirely. She sits exams that she forgets the moment she steps out of the room, waiting for the next appointment, for the next episode. Soon, they’ll be hearing from the hospital. Soon, she’ll have to decide what kind of witch she’ll be, what contracts she’ll sign, and which she’ll forsake. A witch comes of age when a witch comes of age. Lara feels it, pressure like a storm in the distance.

There are days where she doesn’t want to do anything but read mantouhead’s old fic, like picking at the edges of a wound. Mantouhead has been posting again, but not as often, the time stamps later and later, always a wintry touch to even their filthiest stuff. She stays up reading about Jack’s grief instead of her own, trails hollow-eyed to shop behind Shen Jia, whose reading Chinese has always been better than hers, who always knows what flour to buy, what cuts of meat to charm out of the butcher witches at the ghost market behind the 888, which bones to save for questions.

They stand side by side in Lara’s kitchen, making thumbprint tangyuan for her ma just as her ma likes them. Shen Jia’s are lined up like soldiers, neatly stacked, the same amount of filling in each, black sesame, peanut butter, cemetery honey, a touch of salt grief. Her fingers brush Lara’s wrist when they gather them up for the pot. It makes her think of Agiel learning to love human food for Jack, and she blushes to think of Shen Jia knowing she’s thinking about the stupid show, even now.

Later, when her ma carefully eats the tangyuan in their sweet broth, somehow knowing to pick out Lara’s misshapen ones first to relish—Lara’s eyes burn hot to see it—she runs her thumb over Lara’s brow. They talk, and she picks up the pieces, as she always has.

“Nothing is certain,” she says in dialect, soft and tired. “In love, there is always craft.”

• • • •

One Thursday, Shen Jia, Shen Jia, shows up with whiskey, cheap, exactly the brand that Jack favors on the show. She blushes, just the lightest rose across the top of her cheeks, when Lara says, unthinking, “I could kiss you, Shen Jia,” putting effort into her Mandarin for the first time in months.

They drink, and as all witches do, they eventually talk about mothers, lying on the floor, fingertips tangled. Shen Jia’s mother approves of her baseball project because a Chinese girl loving baseball startles a certain kind of white person, precisely the type of white person who deserves to be startled, and because she thinks it’ll help with Shen Jia’s math. They both roll their eyes at that, and sit up enough to take another sip. Shen Jia loves baseball because she loves a tragedy. Enough control to be certain, and enough uncertainty to feel in control. Drunk, her tongue is loose and she slips between languages, her accent bobbing up and down. She loves pitchers because the moment the ball leaves their hands, the game is for the witches and not the mundanes. When it finds a mitt, a corner, a rail it’s not supposed to hit, it returns to the world of the ordinary, but Shen Jia lives for the gap, the unknowing. You could be a young god with a golden arm and unerring aim, but sometimes your skill might vanish, the way that craft does, and you will never know why, you are never meant to know. Baseball, she says with ridiculous seriousness, is about how to be American, is a marriage of what’s ordinary and what’s beyond. Baseball, she says, before taking a full gulp, is about fucking.

The word coming out of Shen Jia’s mouth startles a laugh out of Lara. It shouldn’t belong, but it slips out as easily as the whiskey down their throats. There are rules for witches who love games too, she explains gravely, betting rules and craft rules, and rules about love. In love, Lara thinks, looking at Shen Jia’s closed lashes on her cheeks, smelling the whiskey on her breath, there is always craft.

• • • •

When spring deepens into near-summer, Lara’s craft simmers at the tips of her lashes, the baby hairs that escape her ponytail. They’ve heard from the mundane doctors, the aunties, the witches, their chances dwindling like outs, time stretching like niangao that won’t settle. She dreams of witches whose names have been burned from even their descendants’ long memories. Mind your dao, her ma mouths at her, because she has her voice only on good days, and days are things that must be counted now. Lara can see her mother’s veins at her eyelids, the tender skin of her wrists. Her craft has never been careful, but she learns to make it careful, nothing too tedious if it saves her ma a little pain. But they all know, all they’re saving is a little pain—time has already run ahead of them.

She can’t bear to read or watch anything new. Season three is going to wind to a close soon, and everyone is worried about what will happen to Jack and Neal and Agiel in the finale, if they’ll make choices they can’t come back from, born of dead mothers. She turns on the TV, waits.

Right now, in this moment, she has one up on these white boys. Her own mother is still alive. But Lara is a witch born to witches. She knows when the game is played with Death. Right now, she chooses her herbs, fingertips numb, lights the altar with rage as she’s been taught to never do, lets her fear move the brush so the ink spills deep and sharp. Mind your dao, she hears in her ma’s voice, faint, like she’s already nothing more than a name carved on a tablet. Lara thinks of yellow-haired mothers and her own, with time counted in smaller and smaller sips, her mind a storm. She loves, craft that strikes like a butcher’s knife in her ribs, scarring the bone for her daughters and her daughters’ daughters to read one day, loves what she dreams of and what she cannot hold on to. The anger doesn’t kill the fear, so she holds the fear tight in her chest, like a coal.

• • • •

After, a salt rule shattered in her wake, her body hardly her own, she goes to Shen Jia, who closes a notebook so quickly the cover slaps down when Lara walks into the room.

“I’m scared,” says Lara. She is, all the time. She usually doesn’t say it out loud.

A witch is born into fear, and to speak it would be to spend all your life talking. She has loved with craft, and loved not even a good thing. It’s a rambling, mother-killing, painfully white thing that has never loved her back, so why should she have cared about a rule, even a salt one?

Shen Jia is close enough that Lara can feel the warmth of her skin through her shirt, but she doesn’t touch her.

“You’ll live through this,” she says in her crisp Mandarin, eyes taking Lara in. “You’ll be OK.” She doesn’t ask what happened.

“Lara,” says Shen Jia again, this time in English. She takes a breath, another. The candles she’s lit breathe with her, a small craft, but a precise one, not easy, and she does it as easily as pouring water. “Lara.” The rise of flame. “Lara.” Breath against her cheek. “Lara, you have been loved, you are loved, you will always have been loved. In all the days that have been spent and all the days to come”—Lara’s own breath is stopped—“this is true.”

Oh.

Right now, Lara can’t think. Her ma is alive and Shen Jia is—

Years from now, she’ll never be able to say if it was her rule-breaking, craft-drowned love that made the season three finale the one every witch remembered—when Agiel put his hands to Jack’s face and kissed him deeply, reciting mantouhead’s words, Shen Jia’s words, to his face in that perfect, raspy voice—or this moment, right here, something that was not craft, but magic.

• • • •

Lara is a summer witch, born to love a sad story, to swell with joy in the heat of love or passion, and to shrivel when the winter comes, but she is a witch born to witches, a working of her own, the hope of two people fleeing a motherland in revolt, a foreign movie on their minds and a new country in her eyes. She was not born to love a winter witch, but it’s a winter witch she kisses with all the fruit on her tongue, all the craft in her blood. One day, she will mourn her mother, as all witches do, but today, she is loved.

The past three years have been a remarkable epoch in our lives. We are so grateful for your support of our magazine and our authors–it’s been an honor to showcase the first professional publications of so many of them. We’ll be watching their careers blossom, as we imagine you will, too.

We can’t go without making sure you know exactly who’s been working behind the scenes, making us look good. Every single one of them volunteered their time and expertise to this project.

Phoebe Barton and Mayookh Barua interviewed authors for the Author Spotlights. Phoebe joined us shortly after we launched; Mayookh took over when Veronica Henry moved on to focus on her novels. Mayookh has also handled a lot of our social media. In the time they’ve been with us, Phoebe has won an Aurora Award, and Mayookh earned his MFA and acceptance into a PhD program.

Madison Brake is our author wrangler, ensuring that we have updated bios where you can learn more about our authors and their accomplishments. She continues her work with the Lightspeed and Nightmare teams.

Chloe Smith is our tireless copyeditor; she has saved us from ourselves many times, as did Alex Puncekar before her.  Anthony Cardno has been proofreader for both Fantasy Magazine and Lightspeed for many years; Devin Marcus joined him in 2016 and has been proofreader for all three magazines in our publishing family since. Anyone who has worked in any kind of quality control role knows what all three of them have put up with: Everyone gets to be late but them, and they have tolerated our lapses with grace.

Wendy Wagner helped us get on our feet in the beginning, showing us the ropes of the Managing Editor role and generally being her amazing, supportive self.

The website itself was artfully designed and is expertly maintained by Jeremiah Tolbert of Clockpunk Studios.

Our submissions system is Moksha, created and maintained by Matt Kressel. Matt has simplified the lives of countless authors and editors.

And of course, the great John Joseph Adams is ultimately our publisher, the guy who handles all the fiddly details, makes sure that our authors get paid, our subscribers get their ebooks, and the web content isn’t eaten by packet mites.

Our content will remain online for you to read and hopefully for others to discover.

Christie has other editorial irons in the fire and will be giving them the attention they deserve, much to the relief of the authors patiently waiting for her to do so. She’s also looking forward to getting back to her own writing.

Arley has taken on a new role as Associate Agent with kt literary, which he describes as “in many ways, a continuation of things I did as co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy.” He recently taught week five of the six-week Clarion West Workshop. He is still a senior editor at Locus Magazine, still working with F&SF, Clarkesworld, and others, including reviewing books for Lightspeed. Look him up at arleysorg.com for calendar info and so on.

• • • •

Christie: What a ride this has been! We’ve had the good fortune to work with so many wonderful people, and I hope to do so again, one way or another. Everyone on this team has left their mark, and we wish every one of them the very best in all things. Thanks, too, to the many authors who submitted their work to us, whether or not we ultimately purchased it. It’s always an honor to be trusted with a person’s art.

To our readers, thank you so much for giving us a try and sticking with us. We hope that you’ve found stories here that moved and inspired you.

One of the things that I love about the SFF short fiction community is the “coopetition” between magazines. I’m grateful to all of the other editors and publishers out there who boosted FM and supported us from the start. Go subscribe and support your favorites!

Finally, I’m so glad to have done this with Arley. This has been a project of shared values and shared goals, and we’ve stayed true to them and to each other for the entirety of this three year run. It’s a thing we made together, and I love that Arley will forever be such a huge part of my personal and professional journey.

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Þe King of Tars, Anonymous. England ca.1330 CE.

The muse calls me ‘Digenia.’ It is not my real name; that is suspended while I am traveling through these verses, now some 690 years old. To pass through this realm of allegory and myth, of device and symbiotics, one needs to carry a standard. Mine is of the ‘two-blooded.’ Twice-blooded, I want to say. Down through the ages, this language which I speak and write in has no words that contain me. There are plenty of hyphenated adjectives: Half-breed, mixed-blood. But, like the Great Mystery, symbols slide off me. Looking too close is dangerous. I might look back.

And this is why I am here; in a way, I am on a quest. Led through this dream by the Muse himself, my nameless muse—not one of the nine. I am, like any hero of legend, in search of a monster. To see it for myself, to know it, to save it.

O Muse, show me the child of the Christian princess and the sultan of Damascus. Show me them: miracle and monster, Christian and Muslim. Take me directly there, give me no extra words—these clumsy tools that scrape at the hardest of stone. Give me another language that pierces to the bone. Give me a needle and I will embroider my tale.

The muse appears to me in black: long high leather boots with silver buckles, black shirt, black coat hanging down to his knees and a grey scarf around his neck. In one hand he holds a torch, and his other hand shows the way. We pass through metaphor and take a turn at imagery until my eyes adjust. Out goes the torch, and we stand there, listening to the muted sobs that play on the edges of our hearing.

Wordlessly, the muse descends, and we wade into the realm of description. This is where, I know, I will find them. The temple we enter is broad and airy, surrounded by niches filled with statues painted so cunningly they look almost alive in the half-light. Only their idealistic features and artful drapery give the game away. Here are Zeus and Hades, Ishtar, and a figure of a merchant with no face, his head aflame with holy fire.

The stones are old. But there has been a lot of love poured out here, and the scent of holiness is thick around the place like the ghost of incense. Out of a corner steps the man, the sultan of Damascus. His regal attire is subdued and dim, but his bronze face almost glows in the light of the lamps. “Are you here to teach me a lesson too?” he says. “You can see, I have yet to hack my gods to pieces in my rage at their betrayal—their lack of power over my own flesh and blood. Do not think that I won’t do it again. It is my fate to be the faithful one who turns apostate and slays my gods, over and over as the poet willed. Even your philosophers call me ambiguous.”

I use the standard I have brought with me, and by the name of Digenia I address him. “Ambiguous is a worthy name. If I wished to list the horrors unleashed by the Specific and the Formal, I would run out of breath.” He looks hard at me, his eyes large with surprise. “Even in my time, and outside of the narrative, so much pain and suffering come down on those who do not fit the concepts others have coined, who are not aptly described in language. As if it were language itself and not the person who is alive and matters.”

“Am I not a misbeliever?” says the sultan of Damascus. “Isn’t that the whole point of my existence? I prove myself misguided and untrue to the nature of reality to such an extent that my own child lies inert, formless, and lifeless from birth. Am I not a Saracen?” asks the sultan.

“That word . . . ” I pause. Another negative theology. Without, without, without . . . Always a lack, a less-than, always the Other incomplete. Half. “—Is a seal, forged by another, and was never meant for you to apply, neither to yourself nor to me. It is a language you do not know, should not know: the language of blood quantum, of racial categorization, and hierarchy.”

I can see that he does not understand me. What do these terms mean to him, a figure in a medieval romance? He was created before the concept of race, but he should understand the -less, and the sans-.

“I am Heathen,” he says.

“And, if so, what of it?” I say.

His eyes track the niches, scan across his gods and saints. They are beautiful, as they move—almost move—in the dim light of the lamps. Whatever artists created this place, they were masters of effect. I am moved.

The Muse steps into the light. He gestures to me, still silent. It is time to press on. We walk up a turning staircase. The stone shifts under my feet, my steps seeming to summon the blocks out of the air. I am not surprised; this is not my world. Here, I am the interloper, the Being from Beyond.

The sobbing grows more distinct as we ascend. “Is that the mother, or the child?” I wonder aloud. I prepare myself for the worst, and hang the words of another poet around myself, a lorica:

My heart has become able to take on all forms.
It is a pasture for gazelles,
For monks an abbey.
It is a temple for idols
And for whoever circumambulates it, the Kaaba.
It is the tablets of the Torah
And also the leaves of the Koran.
I believe in the religion of Love
Whatever direction its caravans may take,
For love is my religion and my faith.

These are the words of Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi, who walked the earth some 160 years before the story of the King of Tars was written in England. And it is with his words that I enter the chamber of the child of the King of Tars . . .

The sultana dries her eyes as I approach, still cradling in her arms a perfect sphere of white flesh. It looks, at first, like a huge pearl shot through with blue veins and still, for there is no heart within it to pump blood. This is the monster I seek, and the miracle. My words fail me as I step into the room and cross to the mother and her child. The child, formless, lifeless, is perfect. I wonder at the love radiating from the child, manifested into this world from a place where language does not exist.

“My child!” the mother groans. “I never wanted this marriage, never wanted to be unequally yoked . . . ” I recognise the reference. Saint Paul in his letter to the people of Corinth.

Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers:
for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness?
and what communion hath light with darkness?
And what concord hath Christ with Belial?
or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?

I know, then, that I have wasted my time here. This is, after all, an Englishman’s poem. These phrases, like the red cross that wards the armor of the Red Crosse Knight in The Faerie Queene, are imbued with power that comes from much blood. So much slaughter. What can I say to her? How can I persuade her that this being that is her child has come un-changed from the Great Mystery beyond the fabric of time and space? Where is the mystic in this heart that is wrung to shed hot tears over her monstrous child?

She says, “There is nothing of me in my child. It is formless, worthless, hopeless . . . ” She cries for herself, I see.

I turn to the Muse. “Unravel,” he says.

I am Palestinian. I know the horror that our syncretic and chaotic loves of mixing and miscegenation had on visitors and colonists. And so, it is my place to pick at the threads that the English poet has woven, to leave here with a hole of messy, frogged fabric. Through that hole will be born something Other. I bend to my work, and pluck out the weave quickly. I leave a hole that is perfect and round. Will that mother and father follow their child out of this textual hell? Would they learn to extend love to the flesh, to reach out toward the world as it is: ambiguous, and gloriously chaotic?

I turn back to look at them, the father joining his wife and child. They, too, will have to find a way on that path between the shafts of light and shadow that make up this cosmos. I have done what I can to let in some air, to leave a hole in the veil through which it is possible to glimpse the mysterious and real.

The Muse lights his torch again. Together we leave behind The King of Tars.