The Captive River

By C.T. Muchemwa

It was Siba’s eighteenth birthday, but instead of having a party to celebrate, she was standing by the Zambezi River in a thin, white, cotton slip, shivering despite the hot October sun. It was Commitment Day, the day she would be given to Nyami Nyami, the River God, to be his concubine.

Nearby stood four Basilwizi singing a doleful song, their voices shrill in the still, stifling air. The women looked sinister in their long white robes and headscarves. Around their necks, they wore wooden statues of Nyami Nyami, the signs that they were the chief servants of the River God. Basilwizi oversaw all religious ceremonies of the BaTonga people, including today’s. Every year, in the peak of the dry season, they took a girl to the River God’s lair to appease him before the rainy season. They had done so since the dam wall was completed in 1957, separating Nyami Nyami from his wife, Mweembe; if they didn’t, Nyami Nyami would abduct girls. It was better to sacrifice them willingly than to have the people of Kariba investigating their disappearance. This was the fate that life had given Siba when she was named one of the Chosen as a baby, to die after serving as Nyami Nyami’s concubine.

But the bold will find a way to subvert their fate. (Continue Reading…)

A Thousand Echoes in One Voice

by Deborah L. Davitt

You’ve snuck through doors that should have been locked to get here. Here, the subway station is silent, the kind of silence that comes deep underground, isolated from the hum of the human hive overhead. No electric lights. No neon. No vibrations. No voices. Not even a breath of moving air.

You’ve been in many such stations before; you’re ready, prepared. Heavy backpack of gear digging into your shoulders. Fingerless gloves, a frayed duster, steel-toed boots, the tread of which echoes back dully from the walls.

Sunlight streams in through skylights overhead, leaded panes set in loops and whorls like fleur-de-lis. The gold of the ancient brickwork warms to your touch, and the tunnel curves off into the distance like the spine of a living creature.

But the tracks lead into darkness. They always do, except when you’re on the trains.

You dig out the map you’ve been working on. As frayed around the edges as your duster. As your sanity sometimes feels. You check the red line against the violet one. Past and future, twining around each other. Check it against the faded map on the wall. The actual metro line map wouldn’t have been a help, but others have been through here. Others like you. They’ve left paint on the map, sketching in the track lines that they’ve mapped. Some of them tally with your own. Others trail off towards destinations that might not even exist. Some trackers are like that — they set up false trails. Give false information, to keep others away from what they’ve really found. You’ve done it yourself, once or twice.

And of course, some destinations that used to exist, don’t anymore. It’s the way things are.

This station’s been unused for decades, or so it seems. It’s a piece of the past, locked down forever. You can’t see signs of anything more recent than 1955. No debris, no crumpled beds of old newspapers used by rats or bums.

The few homeless that have broken past the locked access doors never make it far into the system. It’s from one of them that you first heard about the abandoned tunnels. You remember it as if it were yesterday, and in a real way, it was — a yesterday that’s lasted a thousand years. Wild, disordered hair, concealing the face beneath a nondescript hat. A checked shirt, probably picked up at a Goodwill, or from an unmonitored donation bin — you’ve worn the same, many times. An overcoat so weathered its original color had faded to gray, swallowing the figure. The clothes, the miasma of homelessness, erasing, effacing, all signs of identity.

But tight fingers caught your wrist. “You’d best be careful which stations you get off at, down there. Set a step wrong, and you’ll find yourself far from home.” (Continue Reading…)

The Morthouse

by Maria Haskins

In her forty-two years on God’s wide Earth, Gerda has read no books other than The Bible and Luther’s Small Catechism, but once, after Sunday service, she heard the sexton say that there are places where the dead traverse a river after death, paying a boatsman to ferry them across the water. Gerda knows such a thing must be either blasphemy or fable, and she knows for certain the dead will find no passage here, not this far north in Sweden, not in January when both the creek and inlet by the village lie frozen, the murky, brackish waters of the Gulf of Bothnia slumbering below windswept ice.

Here, in winter, the dead go nowhere at all, not even into the ground. (Continue Reading…)

Yung Lich and the Dance of Death

By Alex Fox

My Christian name was Thomas Kanfor but ever since that bastard wizard rose me from the grave I go by Yung Lich. On that moonless night he spoke some words from a tattered grimoire over my naked, somewhat-recently-dead corpse and voila, here I am. He called me a “Young Lich”. When you’re newly risen you don’t remember much else (other than the maggots), so I took that as my new name. I changed “Young” to “Yung” because I think it reads a bit fresher, and when you’re trying to break into the hip-hop scene, you gotta be fresh (though my body is not).

People can’t tell I’m dead unless I remove the mask. They think it’s part of my act. I stand outside of Times Square with my whole getup — long, black, hooded cloak, a ghastly off-brand Scream mask, an old gnarled branch. I lean and spookily sway and try to hand out my mixtapes. I mean, shoot. If there’s one cool thing about being given a second chance it’s that you know what’s important and what’s not. I never had the gall to pursue a career in music while living. Nah. Wouldn’t pay the bills, wouldn’t make my mom proud. But now? I’m free to be me . . .

“Want my mixtape?” I wheeze in my dry-as-sawdust voice to a small group waiting for the crosswalk. I extend a robed arm, a white CD in my hand. Across the front is the Sharpie-scrawled label Yung Lich — The Dance of Death. They hardly look my way, and don’t seem to appreciate my pestering.

A man shoves my arm aside and fingers an earbud out of his ear. “Ain’t no one got CD players anymore, pal. Try Soundcloud.”

The crosswalk changes and the folk quickly scramble across the street. My arm falls, dejected. Even though in this “life” I can pursue my true interests, that doesn’t mean anyone is interested in what I have to say. Been standing here for weeks on end and only four people have taken my mixtape, and I think only to be nice, as I saw two of them toss the CDs in the garbage once they crossed.

And what that man said rings true: not that many people have CD players these days. Guess I’m slow to accept change, but I know I need to adapt if I want to get my music out there. I’ve got an old laptop. I can look into Soundcloud — it’s something to go on, at least.

I gather my things and hobble to the Corner Café. They know me there. They let me use the Wi-Fi even though I never buy coffee. I don’t need to eat or drink much, or at all, really — tends to leak out of my swiss-cheesed stomach.

A few people idle in the café, and they look up as I open the glass door, a small bell tinkering to announce my arrival. I keep my head down, my hands well within my long sleeves, even as I hold the obnoxiously tall wooden staff. The staff double-bangs the bell as I amble through, loud as a cymbal crash, and I shrink into myself.

“Sorry, sorry,” I mutter. Wooden chairs creak as the patrons turn to watch me, this weirdo in the horror getup. I try not to pay attention to them. I mosey on to my usual corner, sit, and pull out my laptop. Soon I’m forgotten, like all the other freaks of the city.

On my laptop screen glows a text file with the lyrics of my finest work, “The Dance of Death.” I read it once, twice. (Continue Reading…)