All was gone, replaced with something new.
She woke on a dirty cot in a humid shack.
“Oh, Jinny,” said the black woman dabbing her forehead, “the fever all broke now.”
She staggered out into the yard, and was assaulted by the scene. The colonial white columned house surrounded by draping magnolias and live oaks, the song of cicadas, the smell of fresh tobacco leaves, and the branding scar on her calf. The awful familiarity of every sensation rushed back, as reality petrified around her.
The white-suited man on the great wraparound porch stood from his wicker chair and stared at her, removing the pipe from his mouth. Seeing Mr. Hightower’s face, the burning lacerations flared on her back. And seeing his mischievous young son Trevor standing next to him, she remembered the missing silver butter knife and every one of the thirty lashes and why she would no longer work in the house.
Jinny howled at the sky and the hidden moon. Let them think her mad.
She worked every day in the fields from sunrise to sunset, where blisters became calluses, her arms grew hard and weary, and the true world annealed. The scars on her back closed and settled to a distant gnawing.
She fell to exhausted sleep each night, but could not find the key to her dreams. The coast of the Six Kingdoms eluded her; no more did she smell the spindrift of the Cerenarian Sea, or feel the rise of the main deck beneath her feet. When she wept, she kept it behind her eyes.
Time got on, until one day in the spring, when Jinny cultivated the tobacco seedbeds at dusk and a wide shadow passed over the field. The workers all looked up in fear as a black galleon slid impossibly across the face of the rising full moon and swept around out of the sky to ground among the crop rows. The overseer fell from his horse and scampered away toward the big house with the rest of them, every soul on the plantation quaking with terror… save one.
Jinny dropped the hoe and took up the overseer’s fallen machete and pistol. She advanced on the reeking dark warship as the gangplank lowered to the earth.
She would paint those black sails a hot glistening red.
The Thief in the Sand
M. K. Sauer
Her execution was not set for dawn, as she had hoped, but rather at midnight — the coolest part of the day. She was to be a spectacle — something she had tried hard to avoid since she was a girl — to keep the denizens of the sandy desert capital occupied with gore and grandeur, instead of the scorching heat of the midsummer drought.
The palace, so barren and stark on the morning of her sentencing, was now lavish with expensive silks the color of the clarion sky set against the harsh orange of the surrounding sands. They twisted in the wind; an effusion of fabric that threw shadows across the polished floors. So many torches were lit that she had to blink in the half light to see her accusers. They stood before her like a row of statues in lavish, serpentine clothes, and looked down on her prostrate, ragged form.
Her last sight of this earthly realm would be the faceted jewels inlaid in the stone floor, while waiting for a wicked curved sword to slice through her neck. She wished the shadows didn’t show the silhouette of the executioner quite so clearly. She could feel the greedy eyes of a thousand spectators settling on her back.
“Last words?” the hooded swordsman asked, his black eyes gleaming with the promise of a swift death.
“Mercy,” she responded in a parched voice. Her lips cracked and even the blood dripping from the cuts felt sluggish in the midnight heat.
“Mercy! Mercy!” A few wailing voices took up the chant until her ears rang with their cries.
“Where was your mercy for the victims of your deft fingers? How many lives has your unscrupulous thievery ruined?” The shah’s disinterested voice carved through the sounds of a thousand people rearranging themselves. His large beard and necklaced chin moved with the practiced fluidity of one who had sent many to their deaths. Rings around his fingers tinkled as he fidgeted on his pillowed and perfumed throne. One of his sons yawned, as another picked at his nails. She was nothing to this mighty ruler, this deity of the desert.
“Mercy! Mercy!” the cries continued until the word no longer made sense to her ears.
“Still,” the shah returned, finally sitting up in his throne to give a proper look to his people, “even a thief deserves a respite, as the gods decree.”
Why the crowd wished to see her spared baffled her until she saw the shining ladle coming toward her. The entirety of the crowd became silent — so much so that she wondered if perhaps she had gone deaf. The water, straining against the edge of its container, had ensnared all of the hungry eyes and taken their voices. A single drop spilled and a thousand throats groaned with fevered anticipation. They didn’t want to see her live — mercy meant water, not life. They ached for even a glimpse of it on a faraway platform that might as well have been the heavens, it was so distant.
A glimmer of hope pulsed through her for the first time since being caught.
She felt a shift beneath her skin: a tunneling, excavating force that made her limbs rigid and begin to tremble. Her dry lips opened like leaves greeting the rising sun as another hooded man brought the small mouthful of water to her shriveled maw.
She wished she could taste it — how long had it been since she had tasted water? But before any reached her tongue, a million squirming parasites burst through her taste buds and pores, crowding to get a single drop to power themselves into a hurtling frenzy. A small explosion of worms rippled down her throat and spread to the very corners of her body. She felt her flesh spreading open — revealing the innermost tissues and delicate organs to the biting air for a brief second — before the whole world folded and she was heaved elsewhere.
The sky was no longer a caliginous cerulean, but a stormy miasma of sick-looking, pale green clouds and clawing creatures careening through the atmosphere. A large tentacle the thickness of five men abreast lazily dropped from above and laid waste to a desiccated landscape in exasperated fury. It was searching for her. As soon as she had shifted into this dimension, she had felt it begin to look for her. Six more tentacles threw themselves from the clouds as she appeared.
She had to escape quickly. It had been too long since she had appeased the creature, and it wanted her blood. Not too different from the situation she had just left, she mused, calculating how long before the few sips of water burned through her system. As soon as the precious liquid was absorbed, she would be stuck in whatever world she happened to be in. Pushing herself outward, straining at the very bonds that separated the two dimensions, she oozed her way back into the palace, an arm’s length away from the shah. A brush of a tentacle whiffed by her dark hair before collapsing into the spaces between worlds.
Her reflexes had been sharpened by her years on the streets and she drew the decorative sword at his side and pointed it at his throat. Dull as it was, it was still sharp enough to cut him open — especially as the rush of escaping the creature rocketed through her tendons and muscles, strengthening every part of her.
Within seconds the court erupted, and the thief could feel the numberless eyes on her again. Many recoiled in fear at her now green and scaly skin. Gills had formed around her jawline, her eyes were large and bulbous, unblinking in the torchlight, and webs had taken over the spaces between her fingers.
“Djinn!” the astonished shah choked out, as she drew her arm back to strike a blow that would take his head.
A sword clanged against hers. The vibration set her bones to aching, but she held on, only to be met with the grim face of one of the previously bored princes — the one who had been picking his nails. His eyes were alive now. His entire body reverberated with frantic intensity.