The central dome is pressurized
With an exotic atmosphere
The star-farer who resides therein
The only one who might survive inside—
I know
Because the other patients
Told me so
III. Theories of Madness
Come, let’s go to Bedlam Street
Star-faring ladies for to meet
Who stare transfixed upon the glow
Of Earthly seas above, below
During Thursday’s group therapy session
One of the west-wing Astronauts
Advances her innovative theory:
Here is the secret (don’t flinch
While I whisper in your ear; you know,
Despite that pinched lip, that glazed look
You carefully cultivate, pretending that
None of this has any,
Anything to do with you), here ‘tis—
All go mad, not just the far-travelers,
Not just those surfers of light-speed,
Not merely those who’ve dared the wormholes,
No—
All.
Somewhere out past the orbit of the moon
Madness comes—
Slow, mind, for those who think they travel safe,
Travel sane and measured—
Sometimes they die before the disease rooted deep
Within them hatches,
Like an alien egg
Unleashing what into our minds?
What fungus grows about our eyes
Before we succumb?
Live long enough, and it comes to this.
The Cosmonauts in the East Wing
Offer contradictory explanations
Maintaining the human body
Is like a SETI antenna
Receiving messages
From diverse alien civilizations
Strewn throughout our Milky Way
Galaxy, and beyond
They fashion crinkled aluminum foil helmets
To ward off the signals
Shielding themselves
From interstellar insanity
And the maddening music
Of the spheres
IV. A Conversation
With Your Uncle-Astronaut
On Bedlam Row, in madman’s mire
We orbit swift, a dizzy gyre
Or bask in dying stars’ dim glow
And dream of things you’ll never know
Or maybe you are the Astronaut-Uncle,
Visiting on the landscaped grounds
At a picnic table
In sunlight
Out past the triple dome shadows
During a moment so real
(despite taking place within
Asylum gates)
You perceive each leaf of grass,
Every blade-shadow
As one of you turns toward the other
And says: “Listen—
After the last Apollo Mission
I felt concerned
Mankind had forgotten how to walk
Upon the Moon—”
One of you pauses,
Contemplative of a cloud
And the unseen daylit stars beyond.
“Now, after being stranded on Ceres,
After penetrating the surfaces
Of Jovian moons
And dancing upon Asylum ceilings,
I feel confident
One might step anywhere.”
V. The Youngest Cosmonaut
Come with me to Bedlam Row
And see the mad go to and fro
These Astronauts who only trust
Their phantom bags of lunar dust
One of the cosmonauts
Is only 6 years old
On the cusp
Of becoming five
Suffering from reverse entropy
Ever since his final re-entry
This is either gospel truth
Or perhaps the staff
Has confused him
With someone else
One of the orderlies
Recently lamented:
“Communication is impossible
We record his words
& Run the tapes backwards
“But no one can recalclass="underline"
Precisely what was it he said
In his reverse Russian
When he last spoke to us
Tomorrow?”
VI. Epilog
Three Cosmonauts
Inexplicably disappeared
During the recent solar eclipse
& No one could explain
The staff’s panic attacks
Slip Bedlam’s locks.
Hide Bedlam’s Keys;
We’ll drown beneath
These star-filled seas
On nights when the moon is full
The Astronauts stride
Thru sparkling lunar dust
Traipsing asylum corridor floors all aglow
Leaving luminous footprints to follow
Stories and poems by Kendall Evans have appeared in Amazing Stories, Fantastic, Weird Tales, Asimov’s, Dreams and Nightmares, Nebula Awards Showcase 2008, Mythic Delirium, Strange Horizons, Space and Time, and many others. He is currently at work on a ring cycle of four connected chapbook-length dramatic poems: The Mermaidens of Ceres, Battle Dance of the Valkyrie, Sieglinda’s Journey to the Stars, and The Rings of Ganymede. In addition to winning the Rhysling Award for “In the Astronaut Asylum,” he is a previous winner for “The Tin Men,” a collaboration with David C. Kopaska-Merkel.
Samantha Henderson’s poetry has been published in Weird Tales, Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, and Lone Star Stories. Her short fiction has been published in Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Abyss & Apex, and the anthologies Running with the Pack and Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded. She is the author of the Scribe Award-nominated Ravensloft novel Heaven’s Bones and the Forgotten Realms novel Dawnbringer.
PISHAACH
Shweta Narayan
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
I was born in India and lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California, and my internal landscape is a patchwork of places, myths, languages. “Pishaach” is the first story I tried telling from that fragmented perspective, about my sort of outsider position.
The perspective makes it a deeply personal story, but only one thread is autobiographical—Shruti, the protagonist, cannot change enough to leave her liminal state and become a full member of one culture or the other. The normal mythic solutions don’t work, and she has to deal.
“Pishaach” was one of my submission stories to the Clarion 2007 workshop. We workshopped it in week one. Two days later I heard from Delia Sherman that she’d talked Ellen Datlow into looking at it for The Beastly Bride. I looked up from my computer to my short stack of books I couldn’t do without—more than half of which were edited by Datlow & Windling. That was a high-pressure rewrite!
I’d call most of what I write mythic fiction. Some is also steam-punk, and a little SF sneaks in; I’m not great with boundaries, and often cross genre and form lines. I’m also (slowly) writing a dissertation about how people understand comics, doing worldbuilding research for novels I can’t start till I have a thesis draft, and thinking out loud at shweta-narayan.livejournal.com.
On the day Shruti’s grandfather was to be cremated, her grandmother went into the garden of their apartment complex to pick roses for a garland. She never came back. Shruti’s father and uncle went on to the crematorium with the body and the priest, while Shruti’s mother sat cross-legged on the floor in her heavy silk sari and wailed on Auntie’s shoulder, and the police searched for Ankita Bai.