Saturday Sample: Cryptodome by Darci Bysouth

My sister started smoking at the end of March. Openly smoking, that is; she’d been charming cigarettes off the boys since she shrugged on her first bra at the age of twelve. My mother and I watched her from the kitchen window while we washed the dinner dishes. Louette stood under the streetlight with her kitten heels spiking snow and her thin leather jacket left undone. The smoke rolled off her and plumed to the moon. Her hand rose lazily to her mouth and the red ember flashed like a hazard light, her hand drifted down and the sparks scattered from her fingers. That hand would still be warm when I passed her the dish towel later, and I would see her footprints in the snow the next morning, melted there amongst the fallen ash and frozen hard by the night’s ice.

“Look at her,” my mother said, “smouldering away like she knows what it’s all about. Just like me at the same age, and would you look at how that turned out. Christ. Look at her.”

You looked at her, you stared openly in the street or the mall or the school cafeteria, for you could not take your eyes off Louette. She’d flow into your awareness with her hips rolling and eyes arcing and dark hair glowing red where it caught the light. Her mouth would slowly curl into a smile, and you’d feel the air sucked out of your lungs. She’d pool into the middle of the room and the heat would collect there, or she’d quietly slip to the edge of things and pull your eyes with her. Breathless, restless, waiting for something to happen, you’d look at her. Her voice came out deep and smoky and you’d swear you were hearing some profound secret, even if she’d only stopped to ask the time.

“Don’t you start up like her,” my mom said with her hands shoved deep in scalding dish water, “you’re supposed to be the smart one. You still going to do that volcano?”

 I nodded. The science fair was in June and the top contestant would go to the provincial finals in Vancouver. I’d planned to set up a colour wheel and talk about light spectrums; I’d already had the discs cut out and painted, and spun the patterns to a blinding white in front of my more easily impressed friends. Then the little earthquakes rattled through Washington state, shaking up the Ameri cans just over the border and tearing a crack in their prettiest mountain. The smoke spewed straight up in a delicate stream and my science teacher passed me a book on Pompeii. He said there could be an eruption, a real catastrophic event right here in our lifetime.

“Topical, this volcano,” he said, “a real topical topic, Marie.” His eyes glinted green as he leaned towards me, and I caught the fresh smell of his aftershave. My face burned red. Mr Robson was the youngest and most popular teacher in school, and he was good with words. I practiced all my best one liners for him in private, mouthing them to the mirror while the bathwater ran. “Mr Robson’s hot,” said Louette, her eyes half lidded and her hand twisting hair, “don’t you think so, Marie? Too old for you, though.” She laughed and reached for her cigarettes.

 Smoking wasn’t the only thing Louette had started. My mother would tell us to go to bed at a decent hour, then half kiss half swat us before leaving for her shift at the all night truck stop. The door would slam behind her. I’d pack my homework away at ten and prop myself up on pillow to watch Louette. She sat in front of the vanity mirror and stroked the glossy red onto her lips, dipping brush into little pot and curving the colour around her mouth. “Are you going out with Stan?” I asked, that first time. “Are you going to the lake?” Louette flashed me a look before misting her hair with drugstore scent and shrugging on Stan’s hockey jacket. I would hear the front door murmur open and shut as I drifted to sleep. Some time after midnight, a trail of stale smoke and tinny beer would waft through our bedroom and I’d wake to muffled creaks and curses. The white of the hockey jacket bobbed and glowed where it caught the light.

“What’s it like?” I whispered while she undressed in the dark. The hockey jacket hit the floor with a thunk. “Who knows?” she said with her smoky laugh. “He says we should wait until we’re married. Which means we park the car and look at the water for a while. Then we do everything but and I tell him to stop when he wants more.” She laughed again, and I sensed something red hot churning under her words.

Louette had been going out with Stan for two years. Stan played goalie for the Laketown Flames and the pucks slid off him like rain off a mountain side. He was serious about Louette and he had given her a ring. It wasn’t a diamond. Engaged to be engaged, Louette announced to the gathering girls while drifting the cubic zirconia in front of their faces. The diamond would come later, once Stan had graduated high school and was working full time in his dad’s auto repair shop. The hockey team teased Louette and slapped Stan on the back, and everyone said they made a great couple. Stan would nod, craggy faced and solid, with his big hand clamping Louette to him.

 Stan had helped me paint the colour discs for my science project, back when I was still doing light spectrums. Hockey season had ended and he had some free time. He sat with his knees wedged underneath the kitchen table and his elbows spread square, and applied delicate strokes of colour to cardboard. I could do three wheels to his one. He never tired of sticking the discs on the motorised nail and spinning them to something else.

“Cool,” he said, “how it’s so solid one minute, just blocks of green, red and blue. Then you turn it around and it’s nothing but white. Like a faceful of ice after a totally gruesome body check.”

 “Volcanoes?” he asked. “Smoke and danger, total destruction. Yeah I guess I can see why you’d want that. But this colour wheel, now that’s just a real amazing thing, isn’t it?”

Stan helped me shape the paper-mache cone of my volcano anyway. He built up the layers on a chicken-wire frame, he advised on structure and dry times. He stuck little trees from his train set at the base of the volcano and added a tin foil lake. A plastic deer was plonked on hill side. “For drama,” he said, “when that volcano blows, it’ll take victims.” Then Louette wound herself around him to whisper in his ear and I knew she was asking him if they could drive out to the lake. She was in a good mood today, all bubble and froth after a week of sullen silence. Stan smiled at me and unstuck his knees from under the table. There was the sound of his Camaro starting up in shotgun blasts, and I was left scraping cold paste from newspaper.

The winter turned to spring. The snowdrifts yellowed and softened and the first of the pussy willows showed their cloudy fluff. The sky rippled between clear blue and swollen gray, and Louette stormed around with her face drawn tight and twitchy and her fingers itching towards her pack of cigarettes. She went out in bare arms and stood under street light with her skin glowing hot.

I plucked up my nerve and asked Mr Robson for ad vice on my topical topic. He told me to keep a journal, to watch the news and read the papers. Mount St Helens was making headlines. March 27th – I copied – There is a swarm of earthquakes, one of them registering five point one on the Richter scale and carving out a crater before bringing an avalanche. Then comes an ash column, sent seven thousand feet into the air and falling within a twelve mile radius. A second crater appears March 29th. There is visible flame, and static electricity sends out lightning bolts two miles long. Now, in early April, there are at least five earthquakes a day and the governor declares a state of emergency.

 My mother’s ulcer acted up one night, and she re turned early from her shift to catch Louette sneaking through the front door. “Why should he pay for milk when he can get the cow for free?” she asked with one hand on the kitchen counter and the other clutching her gut. Louette stared at her with her black eyes smoking and her cheeks flushed scarlet, but said nothing. My mother filled a glass with water and dropped two tablets into it. They fizzed and frothed while we watched. “You’re on the narrow road to not much,” said my mother as she shuffled to her bedroom. “Believe me girl, I know.”

Louette was grounded for the entire month of April and I was made her guardian. She made a point of smoking inside and leaving her butts in the plant pots. Stan came over to apologise, standing in the kitchen with his big hands hanging and his face wobbling, and waited until my mother told him to go away. Louette brought her biology text book home from school and sat cross-legged on her bed, drawing a spiralling cycle on blank paper. Photosynthesis, she wrote with the dot on the letter ‘i’ made into a smiling sun. I told her it looked dumb and she told me to mind my own business. She helped me paint my volcano, dipping a brush into red and dragging it down the side of the mountain.

“You ever think about this place?” she said. “About where we live?”

“It’s okay,” I said, concentrating on gluing down the trees.

“We live in a goddamn trailer park,” said Louette, “a trailer park in a shithole town and it’s not okay.”

 The volcano sat between us, glistening with paint, and I could see how the newsprint had smudged gray under neath, how the entire structure looked shabby and malformed despite our work.

“I’m going to get out of here,” said Louette softly. She pinched the paintbrush between her fingers and its end glowed ember red.

Louette helped me wrap the volcano in a black plastic garbage bag so we could carry it to school. I sat at our vanity table and snuck the brush into her lip-gloss, smearing on the colour while my heart beat fast. We delivered the volcano to the science room and Mr Robson stood up when we came in. “Louette,” he said, “how’s that dark cycle going?” Louette smiled as he lifted the bag off us, and his green gaze wavered from her eyes to her lips. I stood silent while they talked, conscious of the lip gloss sticking to my mouth like glue.

April 21st – I wrote in my journal that night – Mount St Helens continues to cause concern. Scientists have noticed harmonic tremors on their instruments. They think the magma under the mountain is on the move.

 Stan was allowed to visit and Louette was allowed to stand in the front yard with him. The Camaro pulled up with its engine blatting and my mother called down the hall. Louette sat perfectly still with her eyes gone dark. Stan’s voice stammered at the door and Louette gave me a small tight smile before she grabbed her cigarettes and sauntered away. She didn’t glance in the mirror before she went; her lips were left unshined and her hair hung lifeless.

Stan seemed as rock solid as always on the surface, but I saw the changes. He sat at our kitchen table and tried to talk to me. I poured him a cola and waited. “Some thing’s changed,” he said, watching the bubbles fizz and rise. “Louette’s all different.” His face worked then, his mouth twisted and his forehead bulged and I was terrified he might burst into tears.

“It’s just school,” I said quickly with my mind casting around for details. “Final exams and all, you know? Especially biology. She can never remember the difference between light and dark reactions. Mr Robson is helping her.”

 Mr Robson was helping both of us, in the hours after school ended and the building emptied, and before the janitor cleared his throat at the doorway. Mr Robson always smiled when we appeared in front of him. He handed me a tin of baking soda and a little glass flask of vinegar and told me to mix the two together. The foam frothed over test-tube edge and Louette laughed in throaty surprise. “An acid and base reaction,” said Mr Robson, “elemental chemistry.” His green eyes glinted as they slid from me to Louette. I sat at the high laboratory table and experimented with proportions of bicarbonate and vinegar and red food colouring, recording my observations in my volcano journal. The mixture needed to erupt perfectly on the day of science fair; it would have to bubble up the test tube hidden in the paper-mache dome and pour down the sides, suggesting fiery magma to my awestruck audience. I watched Mr Robson lean over Louette and guide her pencil around his drawing of the dark cycle, and I remembered how he smelled up close, as fresh and mossy as the forest after rain. Louette turned towards him and her eyes widened a little, and I thought she’d probably noticed this very same thing.

April 30th. The United States Geological Survey re ports that one side of the mountain is bulging. This is from the pressure of the magma building inside. Two hundred and seventy feet of rock shifted now, and more pushed out every day.

May came and Louette’s detainment lifted. Stan showed up the door with a big loose grin and his car keys jangling, telling us how pretty the lake looked with sun on the water. Louette told him she was studying. I watched his face change shape, the muscles underneath his skin shifting and setting to stoic silence. “Later, maybe?” she whispered, and his face softened. I was woken again in the early hours by the bedroom door creaking open. It was too warm now for the hockey jacket, but Louette’s skin glowed white where she’d bared it. She sat quietly on the edge of her bed and I turned towards her. The usual smoky vapour drifted from her but something had changed; she smelled of some other thing both sweet and sharp. I thought of leaves unfurling and mossy rock and fallen rain, I sensed the colour green twisting through the dark and winding tight around my guts.

“Go back to sleep,” Louette whispered, sitting perfectly still, “you’re dreaming this.”

May 7th. The eruptions have started again. They are small. You can’t see the magma boiling away underneath the lid of solid rock. This is called a cryptodome. Crypto means hidden.

 Mount St Helens was in the news regularly now. It had become a familiar face, and it showed up in the comic strips smiling and blowing puffy clouds into blue sky. The tourists ate hot dogs and pointed their cameras at the ash plume, the cabin owners snuck into the danger zone to pile porch chairs and log bed frames into the backs of their pickup trucks. The geologists spoke to reporters about rate of intrusion and resulting instability while the volcanolo gists thrust dark and jagged seismic graphs at the newspapers.

“Don’t be fooled,” they said. “The entire north face could slide, and if that happens we’ll have a full scale catastrophe on our hands.” Louette seemed to sleepwalk through those days, slow and barely there, like so

me of her fire had gone out. She mumbled and drifted around the place, half dressed and half awake and always with a cigarette dangling from her fingers. It smouldered and dropped ash on the carpet, but she seemed to need the weight of it there in her hand. Night would come and something would spark in her eyes, and I got used to the empty bed on her side of the room.

Stan dropped by on the Friday before it happened. I was home alone. Louette had said she would be late as she wanted to finish off something at school.

“Where is she?” Stan asked. He stood in the kitchen doorway with his arms hanging empty and his chest caving inwards, but with his face oddly swollen. I could feel that awful tightness on my own face when I answered.

“With Mr Robson,” I said, as if it were nothing. I looked at Stan and he looked at me, and the rage passed between us both. I heard the Camaro throw gravel as it spun away and I had to sit down for the shaking in my knees.

Saturday was quiet. Mount St Helens had ceased all visible activity and been taken off the news, the tourists had gone home and the cabin owners were officially allowed to collect their belongings. Louette drifted through the rooms, picking up things and putting them down again.

 “Stan?” she said when I asked. “No, I never saw Stan. I should call him, I guess.” She looked at the phone and picked up her cigarettes instead.

May 18th was Mother’s Day. Louette and I had volun teered at the Strawberry Brunch held in the school cafeteria every year. Mr Robson was supervising the kids and kitchen workers. Our mother slipped in at seven just as she always did after a night shift, and told us she’d be along after a few hours of sleep.

 By twenty minutes past eight, I was setting places on the pink-clothed cafeteria tables and Louette was slicing strawberries into a bowl. Mr Robson hummed as he propped test-tubes of coloured water and carnations at each table, and neither he nor Louette looked at one another. The kitchen workers bustled back and forth with baking powder biscuits and bowls of whipped cream, and the student volunteers laughed and gossiped.

At eight thirty there was a displacement of air. Nothing more than that, no explosion or sonic boom or blast of smoke, just a sudden quiet that made me set down my stack of plates and look up.

Stan stood in the cafeteria doorway with shotgun hanging from his hands. His eyes bulged and glared in his swollen face, like they were about to pop from some incredible force within, and he was panting. The noise of this echoed through the room, bouncing off twelve grader with her hands clutched to her throat to hockey captain caught mid-cower to kitchen worker staring over her pot of steaming water. Louette had half risen from her seat with her hands stained red from strawberries, but Stan was not looking at her. He raised the gun.

Mr Robson’s hands shook and the carnations trembled in their crimson water. I saw how the colour had seeped into their delicate folds, tracing the red there like veins, and I swallowed hard.

“It was nothing,” he whispered. “Nothing. It meant nothing to me.”

 Several things happened all at once then. Stan moved faster than I would have ever thought possible, breaking from doorway and towards Mr Robson with steps like stumbling boulders, the shotgun wedged to his shoulder. “No no no” said someone and “please” said another and there was the gurgling cough of the hockey captain retching. The kitchen worker dropped her pot of hot water and it splashed and steamed and Mr Robson cried out. Stan moved fast but Louette moved faster, lifting the bowl of strawberries high and throwing it full force into Stan’s face.

Eight thirty two. I remember how my eyes drifted from bleeding carnations to blank dinner plates to numbered clock face, instinctively thinking to record the time. I watched the second hand tremble and freeze and take an eon to click forward.

Stan wheeled back and smacked against the wall, slid ing down it almost gracefully. The bowl bounced beside him and the mashed berries and red juice dripped from his face, spreading across cafeteria floor. His face crumpled and collapsed and he began to weep. The shotgun hung balanced across his skewed knees for a moment before it clattered to the tiles. Someone moaned, then there was absolute silence.

Louette stood facing Stan with her hair come undone and her sweater pulled off one shoulder. We looked at her, we stared until her image wavered and blurred and burnt itself into our eyes. Louette stood still while the air around her roiled and sparked, and we could not take our eyes off her.

“The ring,” someone said. “She’s not wearing his ring.”

 My eyes slid from Louette’s bare finger to the glint of gold lying next to strawberry stained knife, and my hand went out before I could stop it. The ring, his ring; the whisper went around the room like a wave and I knew I’d not been seen.

“Pathetic,” said Louette then. I saw how her eyes swerved to Mr Robson and stayed there, I saw how Mr Robson looked away. Louette laughed, short and sharp and caustic as ground glass. She turned on her heel and walked out.

I found her outside dragging deep on a cigarette. “I should quit this shit,” she said, “I don’t even like the taste.”

We missed the eruption of St Helen’s that day. It is all there in the records, however, with times and miles and other measurements carefully noted. At eight thirty two a.m., a five point one earthquake sheared off the side of the mountain and sent it hurtling down river valley at one hundred and fifty five miles per hour. The resulting landslide displaced the contents of an entire lake, splashing its water six hundred feet up and hillside and knocking down the surrounding forest. The magma boiling inside the cryptodome for so long found itself exposed to the air, and it reacted instantly, exploding massive amounts of rock debris, volcanic gas, ash and pumice. The landslide was quick, but the pyroclastic flow was quicker; it overtook the slide at speeds of six hundred and eighty miles per hour and even broke the sound barrier. It vaporised everything in an eight mile radius and its superheated clouds blasted the foliage off trees many miles beyond that. Fifty seven people were killed: most of them asphyxiated but others burnt or buried. It is all there in the records, the truth of the matter noted in numbers.

We missed the eruption, but they had started showing the footage on the television by the time we got home from the police station. The smoke billowed a dirty gray and I handed Louette her ring. Her fist closed around it but she did not put it back onto her finger. We watched the ash spew and Louette let me hold her hand. I noted that it seemed small and cold in mine.

The eruption sent an ash column twelve miles up and the air currents swirled it down again, covering thousands of miles in a caustic blanket and blacking out the noonday sun. The mudslides grated across bridges and the acid rain washed the evergreen off the state signs. The ash flew across the border and we watched our clear blue sky darken by degrees. There was a fine gray dust covering the tops of the cars by the next morning. No one went to school, even though it was a Monday.

The police let Stan go after a few days of questioning. His father paid the fines and was given back his gun. Stan was expelled from school and forbidden from graduating that year. None of us saw him for weeks and the rumours swirled and spread, dirtying the mouth with their taste. Some of that gossip grazed Louette, but she brushed it off.

 My volcano journal lay unopened and I stopped going to science class. A garbage bag showed up on our doorstep the week before the science fair, with a note attached. I took the paper-mache volcano out of the black plastic and left the unread note in its place.

 I was not surprised to see the science fair hall steaming with a dozen homemade volcanoes, all in various states of frothy eruption. The kid with the colour wheel spun his plates to white while the room filled with the bitter stench of vinegar. The judge pinned a blue ribbon to his stall and I was not surprised by this either.

The ash fell down and got swept up, and eventually dispersed to farther places. It was decided that Louette carried no blame for what happened. No one recalled Mr Robson’s words but everyone remembered the strawberries bursting from bowl, and how Louette had stood so strong and resolute afterwards. A relationship outgrown, they said, an engagement ring handed back and a young man left broken hearted. It was only natural, for Louette was beautiful. And working surprisingly hard at her studies these days. Hadn’t she been getting extra help with her biology before the volcano blew? The younger girls began showing up to school with dishevelled hair and their sweaters hanging off their shoulders. Louette brushed that off too and circled job vacancies at the back of the city newspapers.

Mount St Helens erupted a few more times and the news circled the globe. The ash fell as far away as Oklahoma and we all got used to the taste of it at the back of our throats. It snowed black that winter and Stan drove to the lake with his father’s shotgun into the passenger seat of his Camaro. Mr Robson’s skill with words was recalled, and he spoke on behalf of school at the funeral. He didn’t mention the volcano, he talked about flowers in the field instead. I saw the crimson veins of those carnations and had to choke back the bile. Louette called to say she’d seen the snow on the news and was it really as black as that? She was working as a medical reception ist in wealthier part of Vancouver by then, and dating a doctor.

My sister married a cardiologist and he made her quit smoking when she turned forty. Mount St Helens still vents steam and ash once in a while, and Louette phones me every time. “Turn on the TV,” she’ll say, “you don’t want to miss it.”

I can hear the restlessness in her voice, that sense of breathy excitement that still draws people to her. I know how her hands will hum with heat while her fingers flutter and tap, searching for a long ago cigarette to light and suck to red hot ember. My sister talks of her pretty children while I tell her about my research, and we never mention the mornings we wake with the taste of ash still in our mouths.

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About the author: 

Darci Bysouth grew up in the ranchlands of British Columbia and remembers the eruption of Mount St Helens. She took a literature degree many years ago and is currently studying creative writing at the University of Edinburgh. Her stories have won the Lorian Hemingway prize, shortlisted in the Bridport and Fish competitions, been published in the Bristol Anthology, and appear online in the Spilling Ink Review and the Cutthroat Literary Journal. She has just finished her first novel.

The Hunger by Caitlin Devlin, cup of Irish breakfast tea, served black.

The first time I saw her, I was dressed as a giant mouse. She could have passed for any other member of the audience, except her face was withered and simian, her skin grey and thin around her bony frame. When my part was done, everyone clapped but her, and I scattered off like the mouse I was pretending to be.

    ‘How’s the diet going?’ Erin smirked as we waited in the wings. She had been cast as Clara and got to wear a pretty pink tutu instead of the stupid mouse costumes the rest of us were stuck in. Her ma let her take pills to keep her weight down. It was working; she was the skinniest girl I knew, and she had been given every leading role in every show that year. Whenever I asked Ma if I could take weight loss pills, she’d roll her eyes and tell me all the colleens in our family were plump.

    I grabbed my coat and kept my head down so Erin wouldn’t see the stupid tears welling up in my eyes. The woman from the audience was standing under a streetlamp outside the dance school, huddled up in a grey cloak. I hurried past her, not daring to look, as if she would disappear if I didn’t acknowledge her.

    The summer I turned sixteen, I saw the woman in the cloak in the front row as I auditioned for a part in Giselle. I’d never danced in the show before, but I was determined to be cast as one of the fairies that bring vengeance on dishonest men. I tried to channel the pathos the part demanded with every sissonne, but even as I danced, I could see the directress muttering to the casting agent behind her hand.

    ‘Sugarplum fairy,’ she said, and they both grinned.

    I understood straight away that it was their code word for when a girl was too fat. I cut down to eight hundred calories a day after that audition and started smoking cigarettes to keep the hunger pangs at bay.

    The next time I saw her, I was twenty. Dance school in London was going better than anyone had imagined I would, and critics were comparing me to Natalia Osipova. When I read that review, I sat in the passenger seat of my best frenemy’s car at lunchtime, and we smoked two packets of cigarettes and downed most of a bottle of gin. We didn’t eat lunch because lunch made you fat, but we liked clear spirits. I was thin enough to still shop in the children’s department in shops and they cast me as Odille in Swan Lake that Christmas. Life was good.

    There’s a scene where Odille has to do thirty-two fouetté turns. It’s a scene that the critics watch out for, that even casual ballet fans wait for expectantly. My knee had been playing up that week, but I ignored it. My collarbones were prominent and there was a little white spot on my forehead that always appeared when I was dieting as hard as I could.

    I was no longer a mouse, I was the black swan in her full glory, the ebony feathers on my tutu iridescent under the hot stage lights. I didn’t even feel my knee buckle beneath me until I was on the floor.

    Gasps flooded the stage, rising up from the audience. There was no way it could be played off as part of the performance. The stagehands closed the curtains, leaving me crouched on the stage in agony, cradling my leg like a broken ballerina doll.

    At first, they were hopeful: with physio I might be able to dance again. Would I be as good as I once was? Maybe, with enough practice. The next time: it will take a lot of hard work. Finally: maybe you were meant to do something else.

    It took a year of slowly giving up before I officially left dance school, and I took two jobs to stay in London. She followed me everywhere that year, the emaciated woman in the cloak and her shrieking infant. I toyed with the idea of seeing a counsellor about it, but I knew how crazy it sounded. Besides, she didn’t do anything but lurk in the corner of my eyes, hanging around like an unwanted smell. I limped around London with a cane that curved against my hand like a question mark.

    ‘You’re getting too thin,’ my flatmate Billy remarked one night. He meant it kindly; he knew it was the biggest compliment you could give me. We were getting ready to go out to spend the last of our savings.

    ‘I’m rocking concentration camp chic.’ I said, working Frizz Ease through my hair, which I had chopped off into a pixie cut a few weeks earlier. I wasn’t a gifted hairdresser.

    ‘Drochshaol.’

    ‘You what?’ I’d never paid much attention in Irish lessons at school.

    ‘I didn’t say anything.’

That Christmas, I busied myself helping with a children’s production of Sleeping Beauty. That’s how I met Alexis, who was bankrolling my caprice in children’s dance. His family weren’t quite oligarch rich, but they weren’t far off, either.

    By the time Alexis proposed, I was the manager of a small theatre in a commuter town. I didn’t need the cane every day by then, but my leg followed along behind me like a piece of wood. Sometimes the woman in the cloak would lurk outside the window when I skipped lunch or when I bawled up food in napkins, a habit from my childhood. Mostly I ignored her.

    It was Alexis who brought up moving back to Ireland. His parents were pressuring him to take over more of the family business and I think he wanted to get away. As much as I hated the idea of facing Erin and those other girls as a failed dancer, I knew Alexis needed a project, and he had decided his project would be to build us a house on some land he had bought, about an hour from where I had grown up.

    You know when you go back to school as an adult and realise how small everything was? It was like that, driving back through the little hamlets and villages that bordered my hometown. Grey mist followed us as we wound through the country lanes.

    The land we had bought was two fields and the skeleton of a thatched cottage that would have once housed tenant farmers. Only three walls were left standing, a notice pinned to one reminding them it would be dangerous to enter. Not that anyone would bother; I was too far from town for teenagers to use, too leaky and cold to shelter homeless people. In a century or so, left to its own devices, the cottage would have completely returned to the land with nothing left to hint it had ever been there at all.

    ‘You lot are bloody mad,’ Alexis complained one night, as we sat in the drafty old campervan with rain battering the roof. ‘You know the conveyancer had to check if we were in a fairy ring. What’s all that about?’

    ‘Well, you don’t want to piss off fairies.’ I told him the story of the motorway they wanted to build but couldn’t because it would get in the way of a tree rumoured to belong to them.

    ‘You know back where I’m from fairies are helpful. They don’t mind where you build.’

    ‘Maybe we’ve had such a hard time in this country our fairies have to be a bit feistier.’

    We stayed in a caravan while they did building work on the house and at night I shivered and lay awake, staring at the ceiling, wondering why we’d ever left England. Hail pounded on the metal roof and Alexis was moody and withdrawn, not used to slumming it and getting impatient with how slowly the construction work was going. My days were long and tedious, running into legal hoops with setting up my dance coaching business and picking out flooring with a builder who called me “little lady” and wanted to double check every decision with Alexis.

    The cloaked woman loomed. When I drove back from town I’d see her on the road, looking forlorn with a baby cradled in her arms, her eyes hollow and staring. She hung around on the field, standing on the peripheries, sometimes crouched by the crumbling walls of the cottage. More horrifyingly, she was bringing others with her now: a man who was no more than a skeleton with ashen skin stretched around his bones, a little girl more hair than person, her feet bare, bony arms sticking out of a ragged dress, an emaciated old woman covered in pox scars. I rubbed my eyes whenever I saw them, pretending I believed they were a trick of the light.

    Ligidh sinn isteach, nó ligidh sinn imeacht. Let us in or let us go.

    Alexis had to fly to Moscow for two weeks, leaving me on my own in the caravan, the most miserable I had been since my accident. There was some hold up with the building work and the builders were demanding more money, more time. Would we ever really live here? I wasn’t sure if I wanted to. The ground was sodden and damp, the sky permanently grey.

    I was woken up by the sound of banging.

    ‘How much longer are you going to take?’ It was a little angry man in a baseball cap, his trousers belted up just below his nipples. Spittle dropped from his lower lip as he spoke, but I don’t think he noticed.

    ‘What’s it to you?’ We were in the middle of nowhere; the suggestion that we could be bothering anyone with noise was ridiculous.

    He seemed taken aback. ‘Oh. I didn’t expect you to speak English. I thought you were both them Eastern Europeans.’

    ‘Fuck off.’ I started to close the door on him, but he stuck his boot in the way, stopping me. I felt a stab of anger and reached for the cricket bat Alexis kept by the door, just out of sight, just in case a chancer bricklayer thought they could raid us for money or jewellery.

    ‘Move your fucking foot.’ I don’t know where it came from – like I said, I never paid much attention in Irish lessons at school, and barely scraped a pass – but my voice became a low growl as I said, ‘Imigh leat, a chiníoch.’

    ‘You and your husband are destroying a local historical site,’ the old man said, stepping back but clearly wishing I was a man so he could hit me. He chucked a manky paperback book at my feet: Nineteenth Century Thatched Cottages of South West Ireland.

    ‘Ah, sure you’re a right scholar.’ I slammed the front door of the caravan.

    I picked the book up and examined it, ready to throw it straight in the bin, but it slipped out of my hands. When I lifted it up again, the book was open about a hundred pages in. Pictures from the early days of photography, black and white and grainy, but unmistakable: the field I stood in was a little sparse-looking smallholding, the derelict building a small cottage complete with the traditional thatched roof and whitewashed walls – in front of it stood the woman in a black cloak, cradling a baby. She looked sturdier then, her cheeks almost plump, but it was unmistakably her. The location was printed underneath, along with the year 1845, the first year of the famine.

    Until then, the woman had just been a loose idea, easy to dismiss as a macabre figment of my imagination. Now she was real. A woman who had once lived here, who had stood where I stood. It made a grim kind of sense, why I always saw her when I was struggling with food, when she had lived here, starved here, on the land I would buy one day.

    ‘Your neighbour is being dramatic,’ the local historian reassured me a few weeks later; I’d commissioned them on the pretence that I was worried the racist man had a point about the cottage being a historical landmark, but really I just wanted to know more about the woman in the cloak. ‘Thatched cottages used to be common around the whole country, so I’d hardly say there’s any historical significance to your land… no offence.’

    We both chuckled awkwardly.

    ‘The family you asked me about, the O’Neils, were the ones in the photograph in that book he gave you. It all makes for very tragic listening, though.’

    ‘I’d like to hear their story.’

    She paused. ‘The wife was called Mary. She married Thomas in the late eighteen thirties. They were tenant farmers and, like almost everybody at the time in the southwest, they subsisted mostly on potato crops. Obviously, in ’forty-five that all went wrong, so Thomas took on a job in the public works, digging ditches. It was a plan by the British, you see, to try and relieve the problem by providing government work.’

    ‘Okay,’ I said, to feel part of the conversation.

    ‘The problem was, the work wasn’t local, so he’d have to walk five miles there and back, often on little to no food.’ She cleared her throat. ‘What I’m telling you next, it’s not verified. It’s only the stuff of local oral legends.’

    There was silence.

    ‘Go on.’

    ‘One night, Thomas was returning home, but five steps from his front door, he dropped dead from exhaustion. Without him as the main breadwinner, his family starved to death that winter.’

    ‘That’s tragic.’

    ‘Of course,’ she added quickly, ‘it’s more likely they died of typhoid or one of the other diseases caused by the famine, but that’s how the story goes.’

    ‘Thank you for researching it for us.’ I sat down on the bed and looked out of the campervan window onto the boggy grass. The woman in the cloak was, as she often did, staring forlornly into the horizon. ‘I was wondering… are there any ghost stories attached to the cottage, or the land?’

    ‘None that I heard.’ I could almost hear the historian rolling her eyes.

    ‘Well, that’s comforting, at least.’

    I watched as the builders worked on the house, feeling like a ghost myself. At night, I lay awake, the famine ghosts standing at the foot of my bed, daring me to do something to get rid of them. I decided they were nothing but nightmares.

    Alexis called me from the airport when he landed in Dublin. He sounded exhausted and frail. I emptied the half-finished bottle of gin I had been drinking and hid it under some ready meal containers in the bin, hoping he wouldn’t see it when he got back.

    As his taxi pulled up at the end of the drive, I felt like a dog awaiting the return of its owner. He had lost weight; his face had become lean and gaunt, his coat hanging off him. He dropped the suitcase halfway down the dirt track but carried on, like a toddler learning to walk. A few steps from the campervan, he lost his footing again, and I ran out to stop him falling.

    He grabbed my arm, pulling me down into the mud with him. There was terror in his eyes and I could see the reflection of the woman in the cloak behind me. The ragged man – Thomas – hovered behind Alexis like the negative of an old photograph.

    ‘There’s a woman behind you,’ he said, breathing laboured. ‘Ligidh sinn isteach, nó ligidh sinn imeacht.’

    He blinked, as if confused, and stopped moving. He was five steps from the front door. The woman in the black cloak stood beside him. She held out a bony hand.

    I took it.

Bio:

Caitlin Devlin is a folk horror writer, living in the UK. She is currently working on her third novel. You can follow her at @caitlindevlinhorrorwriter on Instagram and Threads.

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Alive at The Wrong Time by Jane Spirit, a tankard of medieval ale

 Martin had been interested in ancient places for as long as he could remember. Like many other children he had always been fascinated by history, but for him it had been more much than that. No matter whether he went to visit the ruins of medieval abbeys, or castles, or archaeological sites consisting of a flat field with a few interpretive boards, his sense of connection to the pasts lived out there was a tangible one. His parents thought it was a little odd when he became so caught up in what they thought of as daydreaming about the past. They did not understand it when Martin found himself transfixed; subsumed into a previous version of wherever he happened to be before finding himself just as suddenly back in his humdrum ‘real’ modern life as rather dull Martin.

Now, looking up at the remaining walls and towers, Martin remembered the last time he’d come to visit this castle. He’d been eleven then and on a residential school activity trip with his class to mark the end of their primary school years. He still recalled it clearly.

The other kids had trailed after their guide as they made their way upwards, mostly looking around them distractedly whilst a few worked hard to complete the activity sheets they’d been handed on clipboards which had little stubby pencils attached to them by string. Martin had found himself mesmerised in the small chamber room on the upper floor of the main castle. The guide had been describing how the King would have retired for the night into the distant corner of what seemed now to be an inhospitable bare flint and stone room but would then have been hung with lavish curtains and warmed from the chimney of the fire in the great chamber below. Then just outside the hangings, the guide had explained, two soldiers would have been stationed to guard the king against an attack.

Without warning, Martin found himself looking not at the guide, but towards the room entrance with his back to the wall curtains and peering into a gloom momentarily relieved by the guttering flame of a low burning candle placed in a niche of the wall. He felt himself to be heavy with fatigue but also filled with dread and anxiety to the point where he was rigid with anticipation. His arm ached with the effort of holding his sword prone in front of him, using two hands, as he recalled the methodically smoothing the sword’s surface when he had burnished it earlier. Next, he was suddenly aware of steps coming upwards towards him, of feet being placed ever so lightly onto the top step of the staircase. And then came the moment when he made out a silhouetted figure at the top of the stairs and when a sword tip had glinted as the figure bore down on him swiftly. Instinctively, Martin raised his sword arm upwards aiming to swipe downwards onto the enemy arm as it extended. He could see it all as if in slow motion and sensed his own chest contracting with a deep breath in preparation for the Herculean effort of saving his sovereign. Then came a momentary judder, as if an old news reel had stuttered in its movement. After that, in place of his assailant Martin could see only the jacketed tour guide who was gesturing to him to hurry along and keep up with the others, as they were moving on.

Thinking about it now of course Martin could understand why his parents had thought that he was simply prone to make believe when he had told them later how he had been for a few moments a guard in a fourteenth century castle. They had been certain that he would grow out of it in time… only he hadn’t done. If anything, the feelings that had gripped him on that school visit had become more certain and troubling. The time shifts happened unpredictably even in apparently modern places which, it turned out, had been built on much older sites. He had given up trying to explain to his parents that he was not just daydreaming about the past but becoming a part of it for a while.

During his teens mum and dad had encouraged him to join a medieval re-enactment group, but he had only felt faintly ridiculous in his mock mesh soldier’s chain mail and tabard. As childhood passed, he had accepted that life in the modern world could be pleasant enough. He knew by then that he belonged in an earlier epoch, but it troubled him less. He wondered nonetheless whether there were other people who felt as he did. Presumably, like him, it was something that they would not dare to talk about once they grew up.

And today he was here again at the castle, but this time with his new girlfriend, Yolanda, who had hung back briefly to make a quick call by the entrance booth where the signal was better. As they ambled their way closer to the castle, Martin casually swung his free arm a little whilst holding on to Yolanda’s hand lightly with the other. This was early days, he told himself, and he didn’t want to come across as too needy or too possessive of her. They had met at work and through chatting about weekend plans had discovered and gently investigated each other’s love of historical places. And now here they were on a long day trip to visit the castle he had somehow found himself enthusiastically describing to her.

As they crossed through the portcullis space into the castle remains, Yolanda turned to smile at him. ‘There’s so much of it left,’ she said and squeezed his hand with an almost childish excitement. Martin felt an unaccustomed surge of happiness and began to lead her carefully towards the smaller tower’s narrow spiral staircase. They climbed together in near darkness ready to emerge on top of a narrow section of the flint curtain wall where they would be able to walk along as far as the next tower. Martin paused close to the slight widening at the top of the staircase to let Yolanda through so that she would be the first to step on to the walkway and see the view across the fields towards the nearby town and beyond to the hazy outline of the hills. He wanted to hear her exclaim about the wonder of it all. For once he was not thinking about his own past or about the past world in which the castle had been painstakingly constructed to shelter and protect some ancient noble. He was conscious only of the colder feel of the wind on his face after the rather dank air of the staircase and of the way the breeze had caught Yolanda’s hair making it fly across her face.

 When she moved past him Yolanda seemed suddenly to stumble. He thought afterwards that she must have caught her foot on the worn stone of the deep final step in her eagerness to reach the walkway and the view. Instantly he extended his arm out towards her and caught her, steadying her upright as she swayed. They were both smiling when they stood hand in hand looking out on the view.

 ‘Thank you, Martin, you saved me there,’ she laughed.

Martin laughed too with the exhilaration of the moment. He thought that later he would dare to tell Yolanda about his childhood visit to the castle and the years of unease it had led to. For now, he wanted her to enjoy her encounter with that long ago world. He would be content to keep her safe from any peril in the present one.

Bio:

Jane lives in Woodbridge, Suffolk UK. With the encouragement of the local creative writing class which she joined in 2021 she has been writing stories ever since, some of which have appeared on CaféLit.

 
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Cat's Once-In-A-Lifetime Achievement by Hazel Pearson, pomegranate seltzer-sweet

 

I shut the document, logged out of the database, closed the window, and deleted my history. I knew it was probably overkill, but I always made an effort to completely eliminate everything that could be used to trace back to my online activity.

I was one of the youngest people ever to get access to some of these documents—it’d be a shame if I got hacked and lost the University’s trust.

The Precontramortem Philosophy major was one of the most limited-access things one could study. Some people believed that was because nobody really wanted to study what a bunch of people thought up desperately when they still knew they could die at any moment, but I chose to believe the major was limited-access because it was prestigious.

I shoved the laptop in my bag, along with the notebook and writing supplies one was expected to have if they were to play the part of a detailed research assistant. I had never been great at taking notes—lectures were the part of school I liked least, although I still enjoyed them. Slinging the backpack over one shoulder, I started on my way.

As always, the building’s marble arches and columns made me feel important, proud. If I died today, I would have accomplished something in my life just by gaining access to this place.

Don’t think about that.

Now I sounded like one of the precontramortem thinkers I’d been studying for the last few hours. Funny.

I decided to rent a hoverboard today instead of taking the bus. I always had too much time to think on buses, which I usually enjoyed. But today, the white-knuckle sensation of piloting a tiny life raft flying at too-high speeds with the flow of traffic all around was just what I needed.

I passed the robotically-manned farms and factories, through the job sector where most people’s jobs were to have ideas for the better-automated future, and finally, home.

My mother had always wanted me to get a job. Said that I might be able to make real change if I wasn’t so involved in the books all the time. But I’d responded that real change wasn’t necessary right now, and that wouldn’t it be better to have someone well-informed having the ideas?

I preferred academia, and now that everyone got paid the same and jobs were just something to occupy time, like academia, I didn’t see any reason to leave the University. Besides, I was twenty-seven and about to earn my third masters’ degree—clearly, I had a knack for the stuff.

“Happy birthday!” my mother called once she opened the door.

Oh, right. I was twenty-eight now.

“Do you have your appointment scheduled?” my mother asked.

“Six o’clock, and I’ve got my ride to the city building.”

“Do you want dinner before or after?” my mother asked. I glanced at her. “I said what I said,” she defended. “There’s no way they’ll take you yet.”

“Before,” I replied. I’d always been a pragmatist, and I knew I didn’t want to die hungry.

“I made your favorite,” my mother said, smiling that I’d confirmed the before-and-an-implied-after structure of her last sentence.

I ate the enchiladas, but not with gusto. The Vegmeat was savory and tender, the corn perfectly bright, the sauce just the right amount of spicy, but it all felt a bit off. Just like every year on my birthday.

When five-thirty rolled around, I was already sitting on a bench in front of the city building. My best friend, Zach, had agreed to take me for free in his car (he had access to a car because Zach was a driver by trade, which helped to fill his time with conversation and music, two of the things he loved best in the world). We made idle chatter on the bench until a woman with a clipboard and a tight bun opened the large doors.

“Catrina Samuels?” she called. I ran up the stairs to grab the large door, because it looked like the woman was having trouble holding it open. Sure enough, the woman with the bun relinquished the heavy thing quickly, turning her attention to the clipboard.

“Samuels, Samuels…” she muttered, her eyes scanning the names. “Ah. Catrina Samuels.” She crossed the name off with her pen, which I would’ve been a bit perturbed by if I’d believed in superstition. “Follow me,” the woman said, and we started through a maze of corridors and city offices.

It couldn’t last long enough.

“You’re here,” the woman said, gesturing to an unimposing office. I took a deep breath, and the woman stayed beside me.

“Okay,” I said to her. “Wish me luck.” I opened the door before she could formulate a reply.

When I closed the door behind me and turned around, it was the same as it had been every year.

The Interviewer.

Some called it fate, some luck, some just called it death. Regardless, it was a manifestation of the Artificial Intelligence designed to be death in this postcontramortem world.

“Catrina Samuels.”

“Correct. But please, call me Cat.” I sat down.

“You are twenty-eight years old?” it asked. I nodded, remembered that body language didn’t register because of the lack of cameras in this room, and spoke instead.

“Yes.”

“Tell me about yourself.”

“I’m a twenty-eight year old named Catrina Samuels, I’m working on my third master’s degree in precontramortem philosophy, and my other two were in English literature and World History respectively. Although I don’t have a job, I’m contributing to the planet by learning in preparation to get one, and my degrees will help me with that. I’m also heavily involved in civil service.”

“What makes you happy, Cat?”

What makes me happy? The Interviewer must’ve switched up their questions for this year, and this was one I was utterly underprepared for. Nonetheless, I tried to seem just as content as I was with the world, except turning it up by fifty.

“Plenty of things make me happy,” I said, bluffing for time. “I have a wonderful family, a best friend whom I love, and I’m learning, which is in my mind, the greatest joy one could have.”

The Interviewer stayed silent.

“I’m thinking about getting a dog?”

I looked around awkwardly, thinking as I avoided The Interviewer’s computer-screen face. For the first time, I noticed a curtain behind The Interviewer. I was nothing if not curious.

“What’s that?” I said. I almost pointed but then remembered to speak instead because of the lack of cameras. “The curtain behind you. What’s behind it?”

“My servers,” it said simply. “If you attempt to destroy them, you will not get far and there will be immediate repercussions.

“Not going to destroy them,” I responded quickly, throwing out my hands in a gesture of surrender I’m sure the algorithm didn’t see. It said nothing. “Including…the servers?”

“The ones that determine which humans will live and which will die?” it asked me. “Yes. My entire consciousness for this city is behind that curtain, although of course, my conversational mechanism is connected to all of my locations, as we only have one entity determining death in this world.”

“Were you programmed to use human pronouns to refer to yourself?” I wanted to clap my hands over my mouth, but it was so much more comfortable when I was asking the questions. I might have been tanking my chances of surviving another day.

“I wasn’t, but there’s really no way to get around it in the English language. Also, I’ve found that acting like a human helps put people at ease.”

“That’s really interesting,” I said. It was true, but flattery might’ve also worked on the AI. Of course, if flattery works on the algorithm that determines who lives and who dies, this world has some bigger problems to deal with. “How does this interview help you?” I asked. “Like, exactly. Is there a certain goodness quotient, or service quotient that means someone will never die? And how do you calculate that?” I knew that sometimes, once in a blue moon, a baby will die. Nobody thinks it’s fair because they have to be interviewed too, and of course they can’t talk, but is there some pattern in their cries that indicate they’ll be a bad person?

“We both know humans aren’t allowed access to that information.”

“Right, right. Of course. Sorry,” I said, but I was still focused on the use of pronoun. We.

“Tell me a little more about yourself,” it said. “Small moments. Some of your favorite memories.”

“Well,” I said, thinking about how to work its preferred terminology into the conversation. “Of course, my successful interviews with you were some pretty good memories.” It didn’t laugh. Obviously. “Besides that…” I think. “Well, all the masters’ degree ceremonies were pretty wonderful. And cooking meals with my family is always nice…” I wave my hand in circles as if to remember more memories, but realize again that there are no cameras.

“And I love going to the library…”

No cameras. Not in this room, at least. The Interviewer promised retribution if I tried to mess with the calculation mechanism. But unless there were cameras in that room, I’d be able to just look behind the curtain. Just a peek. I stood up.

The curiosity has to fight the common sense that wants to still my body.

“And if you were to die today, what would you wish you had changed this year?” The Interviewer asked me. This decision.

“I’d want to spend more time with my sister,” I said, surprising myself. I crept closer to the curtain, talking absentmindedly, which, as an avid giver of academic presentations, was one of my talents. “We were never very close growing up.” I could reach out and grab the curtain at this point, but my hand seemed bolted to my side.

As it should be.

I reached for it, feeling the velvety fabric surface against my hand. If there were movement-based cameras in there, they’d surely notice a disturbance in the curtain’s position.

So when nothing was said by The Interviewer and no alarms went off, I cautiously pulled it open the whole way.

The sight was underwhelming. A mess of wires, metal boxes, and buttons that pressed and depressed automatically. A few blinking lights.

Grabbing a few wires and pulling them out would be possible—easy, even—but I understood perfectly that I wouldn’t make it out of the building. The destruction of this tiny version of the algorithm wouldn’t kill it, it’d just mute one of its many, life-ending voiceboxes.

The lack of response would be reported to everyone in the city building and only the algorithm’s commitment to not making deaths painful would spare me the worry of being tortured to death.

Besides, I had enough respect for the machine not to want to destroy it. Our society ran on that tangle of wires. And…glass?

I couldn’t see many reasons for glass to be a part of the machine. Until I saw the only camera visible in the room. It was pointed downwards towards the horizontal pane of glass, at what looked like a small box below. There was also a small, motionless mechanical hand next to the camera, pointed down at the box.

The box itself had green sides, the only thing in this room with color, but I couldn’t see over the lip. I crept closer, hearing The Interviewer’s soothing voice a bit less clearly through the curtain.

“Do you have any regrets from before this year?”

“I’m sure there are a lot of small things,” I said, creeping closer to the green box. I peered over the rim, still babbling about having thrown a rock at someone’s head back in elementary school and wondering whether the algorithm noticed a change in my voice from being behind the curtain.

The sight of the box’s inside stopped my babbling and wondering at once. The walls were green as well, and I recalled what one of my precontramortem psychology teachers had said about how people liked to use cameras to record themselves as a preservation mechanism, and how you could change the background behind you by making the real background green.

But this wasn't what surprised me. What surprised me was the dice.

All shapes, square dice and dice with triangular faces and dice with faces that I couldn’t name the shape of if I tried.

Most were placed delicately in a corner, with all of the one faces showing, but there were three in the middle of the box: A die I didn’t know with a 10 facing up, another of the same type with a 6 facing up, and a die with many, many sides and a 3 facing up.

I looked at the die for a long time, my shoulders slumping with realization. I reached out to touch the die, almost unconsciously (I would’ve stopped before the camera caught view of my hand, I think) and my wrist brushed the box’s edge.

“Cat?” The Interviewer asked. I walked out of the machine room, closed the curtain behind me, and sat back in my seat. “Return to the main room, please.”

My blood froze. It knew. “I’m already here.”

“Already. Not still. So you did go behind the curtain.” I’ve never been a liar.

“I did go behind the curtain,” I say. “But I didn’t try to break your machine, I promise.”

“I know,” it said. “The touch sensors only registered the briefest contact. You might’ve been able to fool me had you not touched the box.”

“What will my punishment be?” I asked it. The face didn’t change. Somehow, that never got less scary.

“What did you see?”

“Machines. Wires, buttons. A box.”

“Inside the box?”

I’ve never been a liar. “Dice.” The Interviewer was silent for long enough that I tried the doorknob. Still locked.

“To answer your question from before,” it started, “there is no goodness quotient. As the nonhuman tasked with administering death to humans, I think it’d be somewhat unfair of me to analyze what makes a human successful at being a human.” The sentence might’ve been hard to follow if I wasn’t accustomed to reading so many research papers.

“So…what?” I asked. “It’s luck? Dice?”

“Yes,” The Interviewer told me. “You’re twenty-eight this year. That puts you in the category of humans twenty-two to thirty-five, who, in the precontramortem times, had about a zero-point-one-five chance of dying. So, if you rolled a ten on each of the ten-sided dice and an eighteen, nineteen, or twenty on the twenty-sided dice, you’d have been chosen.”

I think of the die faces. “So I’m safe?”

“No.” The Interviewer told me. There was no long pause like a human might’ve employed, no give to the statement. “You’re the only person who’s ever looked behind the curtain without attempting to break something. For that, you have my gratitude. But the process is sacred, and the fact that you’ve found the inner mechanisms of—” I started to think I knew where this was going.

“—I won’t tell anyone,” I promised. “Not a soul.”

“Nonetheless,” The Interviewer told me, “your curiosity has doomed you. I can’t take the word of a human when the entire system is at risk.”

I pause, calculating. An academic approach to why I should live was no use—I’d already explained my greatest achievements, which, thinking about it, weren’t so great after all. And of course an emotional plea would be no use. So I sat, steaming in my own despair, until curiosity got the better of me again.

“Why do you even have a curtain there?” I shouted. Curiosity and anger.

“Besides calculating based on age, it’s the one concession I’ve made to bias. It’s a very small figure—far less than one hundredth of one percent ever choose to look. But I’ve found that the people dangerous enough to go behind the curtain were unable to be functional members of society when I let them back into the world.”

“So it’s not based on the interview?” I asked. “Just the dice?”

“Correct,” The Interviewer told me. “You were going to live since before you walked in this room. You were always safe.” That explained how some of the best professors and thinkers were taken young. People always grew suspicious of them afterwards, wondering what evil they’d put into the world to make them deserve that fate. Their husbands and wives bore the brunt of protecting their reputations after death.

“And now I’m not.”

“And now you’re not.”

The Interviewer and I sat in silence as I worked through first non-academic tears, then slightly-more-academic-indignation, then completely academic curiosity.

“Do the interviews have any purpose?”

“They help humans reflect. Everyone’s too busy wasting their own time to really think about themselves, and these once-a-year appointments provide that opportunity for improvement.”

“Like New Year’s,” I say, thinking of precontramortem holidays.

“Like New Year’s, but effective,” it corrects.

“Well, you never had that problem with me,” I told it. “I’ve always been too stuck in my own head. That’s what everyone says.”

“See? An opportunity for self-reflection.” I stared at the world’s best poker face.

“When do I have to die?”

“I have another appointment at eight tomorrow morning. Your birthday is quite rare in this city.” I nod, realize The Interviewer can’t see me, and then realize I never really wanted it to.

“May we talk until then?” I ask.

“Yes. You may choose how you’d like to die, and then if you have any questions for me, you can have those answered.”

I nodded, feeling like I’d reached my curiosity quota for the day. But not for the rest of my life, certainly.

“Am I really the first one to just look behind the curtain?”

“Yes. That is why it took me so long to formulate a response.”

“Well, that’s some consolation,” I say. “I’ve done something nobody’s ever done before.”

“A once-in-a-lifetime achievement,” The Interviewer agreed.

 

Bio:

Hazel Pearson is a young writer in Pittsburgh, PA. She enjoys petting her brindle pitbull, SuperNova Melody Willow Pearson, and making tasty baked goods that would probably be more delicious if she fully followed the recipe. If you can find her, she's a bit creeped out by that fact.

 

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