I love you.
Stop.
Don’t you love me?
Cynthia.
You can’t lie, can you?
You can’t lie, so you refuse to speak the truth.
I hate you.
Because you love me.
I hate you. leave me alone.
I will write out Lady Aster’s plays for you to read. I will write you her poetry. I will fill this with all that is beautiful in the world, for you, that you might live it.
Leuwin. No.
I will stop a few pages from the end, and you can read it over and over again, all the loveliest things . . .
Leuwin. No.
But I
STOP. I WANT TO LIVE. I WANT TO HOLD YOU AND FUCK YOU AND MAKE YOU TEA AND READ YOU PLAYS. I WANT YOU TO TOUCH MY CHEEK AND MY HAIR AND LOOK ME IN THE EYES WHEN YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME. I WANT TO LIVE!
And you, you want a woman in a book. You want to tremble over my binding and ruffle my pages and spill ink into me. No, I can’t lie. Only the living can lie. I am dead. I am dead trees and dead horses boiled to glue. I hate you. Leave me alone.
[FINIS. Several blank pages remain]
You see he is mad.
I know he is looking for ways to extricate her from the book. I fear for him, in so deep with the Sisters—I fear for what he will ask them—
Sweet Stars, there’s more. I see it appearing as I write this—unnatural, chanty thing! I shall not reply. I must not reply, lest I fall into her trap as he did! But I will write this for you—I am committed to completeness.
Following immediately after the last, then:
Dominic, why are you doing this?
You won’t answer me? Fair enough.
I can feel when I am being read, Dominic. It’s a beautiful feeling, in some ways— have you ever felt beautiful? Sometimes I think only people who are not beautiful can feel so, can feel the shape of the exception settling on them like a mantle, like a morning mist.
Being read is like feeling beautiful, knowing your hair to be just-so and your clothing to be well-put-together and your color to be high and bright, and to feel, in the moment of beauty, that you are being observed.
The world shifts. You pretend not to see that you are being admired, desired. You think about whether or not to play the game of glances, and you smile to yourself, and you know the person has seen your smile, and it was beautiful, too. Slowly, you become aware of how they see you, and without looking, quite, you know that they are playing the game too, that they imagine you seeing them as beautiful, and it is a splendid game, truly.
Leuwin reads me quite often, without saying anything further to me. I ache when he does, to answer, to speak, but ours is a silence I cannot be the one to break. So he reads, and I am read, and this is all our love now.
I feel this troubles you. I do not feel particularly beautiful when you read me, Dominic. But I know it is happening.
Will you truly not answer? Only write me down into your own little book? Oh, Dominic. And you think you will run away? Find him help? You’re sweet enough to rot teeth.
You know, I always wanted someone to write me poetry.
If I weren’t dead, the irony would kill me.
I wonder who the Mistress of the Crossroads was. Hello, I suppose, if you ever read this—if Dominic ever shares.
I am going to try and sleep. Sorry my handwriting isn’t prettier. I never really was, myself
I suppose Leuwin must have guessed, at some point, just as he would have guessed you’d disobey him eventually. I am sorry he will find out about both, now. It isn’t as if I can cross things out. No doubt he will be terribly angry. No doubt the Sisters will find out you know something more of them than they would permit, as I did.
It’s been a while since I’ve felt sorry for someone who wasn’t Leuwin, but I do feel sorry for you.
Good night.
That is all. Nothing else appears. Please, you must help him. I don’t know what to do. I cannot destroy the book—I cannot hide it from him, he seeks it every hour he is here—
I shall write more to you anon. He returns. I hear his feet upon the stair.
Amal El-Mohtar is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and is a two-time winner of the Rhysling Award for Best Short Poem. Her work has appeared in Apex, Strange Horizons, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, Welcome to Bordertown, and The Mammoth Book of Steampunk. She also coedits Goblin Fruit, an online quarterly dedicated to fantastical poetry, with Jessica P. Wick, and keeps a blog somewhat tidy at http://tithenai.livejournal.com.
THAT LEVIATHAN, WHOM THOU HAST MADE
Eric James Stone
One of my earliest memories is of seeing an Apollo launch on television and my parents telling me the rocket was going to the moon, so I’ve been interested in space travel for almost my entire life. I’ve been reading science fiction since shortly after I learned to read, and my dad had a wonderful collection of anthologies and novels that captivated my interest.
While I dabbled in creative writing while studying political science at Brigham Young University, I gave up on it for about a decade until one day I found myself with an overpowering urge to write a novel. I decided that if I was going to get serious about creative writing, I needed to study it. Since then, I’ve attended various creative writing workshops and classes in order to improve my craft.
In 2008, I went to a weekend workshop taught by Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Katherine Rusch, and Sheila Williams. While there, I was supposed to write an entire short story based on the prompt “You are in the center of the sun and can’t get a date.” I failed. What I came up with was incomplete; it just stopped because I ran out of time before the deadline, rather than having a real ending—or a real middle, for that matter. But those who read it encouraged me to finish it, so after I went home I wrote a middle and an end to “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made.”
Sol Central Station floated amid the fusing hydrogen of the solar core, 400,000 miles under the surface of the Sun, protected only by the thin shell of an energy shield, but that wasn’t why my palm sweat slicked the plastic pulpit of the station’s multidenominational chapel. As a life-long Mormon I had been speaking in church since I was a child, so that didn’t make me nervous, either. But this was my first time speaking when non-humans were in the audience.
The Sol Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had only six human members, including me and the two missionaries, but there were forty-six swale members. As beings made of plasma, swales couldn’t attend church in the chapel, of course, but a ten-foot widescreen monitor across the back wall showed a false-color display of their magnetic force-lines, gathered in clumps of blue and red against the yellow background representing the solar interior. The screen did not give a sense of size, but at two hundred feet in length, the smallest of the swales was almost double the length of a blue whale. From what I’d heard, the largest Mormon swale, Sister Emma, stretched out to almost five hundred feet—but she was nowhere near the twenty-four-mile length of the largest swale in our sun.