Diamonds and Pearls

by JL George

Diamonds are two a penny, but everybody wants them anyway.

At first, Osian thinks it’s because they hurt. Every time he speaks a new word in the common tongue and a diamond comes up, it feels like dying, like its hard angles will tear his throat open. Something you have to suffer for like that, you hold on to. You want to believe it’s worth something.

On the other hand, once you’ve brought it up, wiped away the blood and sucked on a lozenge to soothe the soreness, you can pretend a diamond didn’t come out of you at all. It’s such a sharp, mineral thing. Pearls are different — stubbornly organic. They roll out of the throat with ease, sticky only with saliva, and they come with the old tongue. Rounded, with a dull shine, they look like a product of the flesh.

At the end of each week, Mrs. Toms has the class empty out their handfuls of diamonds onto their desks, with a bar of chocolate or a book token for whoever has the most. The stones spill everywhere, and the classroom becomes a cold, bright place, an ocean of diamonds whose images glitter behind Osian’s eyelids when he blinks.

They don’t count up the pearls. Some of the other kids have strings of them, pale shimmering legacies from grandparents, worn discreetly beneath their school shirts. Osian doesn’t. Grandmother never passed the old tongue down. Her knuckles were rapped when she spoke it in school, and later, friends would hesitantly say, Well, I suppose we have to move with the times, and You want your kids to get good jobs, don’t you? and What’s the point? (Continue Reading…)

A Girl Is Blood, Spirit, and Fire

by Somto Ihezue

Scattering through the bushes, blades of elephant grass swaying high above her, Njika could see the Sanctuary etched into the mountainside — she only had to reach it. Across the shifting streams and the trees once men, she made it to the mountain’s foot, sweat glistening down her neck. Njika had ascended Nyirigango’s jagged terrain a dozen times, but nothing ever prepared her for the cold. It seeped into her bones, and the bison skin draped over her body could sparsely keep it out. Her breath forming plumes of white steam, up and up she went towards the Sanctuary walls as hornets of crystal ice stung her face. Stealing in through a window, she latched it shut else the cold whirled in behind her and put out the torches lining the aisles. The sensation in her toes returned, and Njika ran. Past the great pillars ensnarled by blooming vines that crept to the ceiling, down a flight of stairs, and into the archway of songs, its balconies overrun by hibiscus tendrils. Despite the cold outside, the Sanctuary of Nné Riliùgwū, They Who Drowned Seas, was as something alive, like September’s rains had poured right in.

Getting to the Hall of Faith, Njika skidded to a stop. She stifled a sneeze. The daisies sprouting on the marble sculptures always did that to her. At the hall’s centre, her spirit-sisters skirted a fire. She was late, again. An elder priestess waded around the girls — her hair locs of smoke reaching for the stone floor.

“To receive is to — ” Né Olude, the priestess, paused, as Njika inched towards the other girls. “Where have you been?” she asked, her tone suggesting irritation but not surprise.

“Milking the goats, Né.” Squeezing between Dubem and Amina, Njika sat and crossed her legs in meditation. “The stores ran dry this morning.”

Né Olude’s gaze stayed on her, and Njika shifted where she sat. She straightened her hair, composed herself, tiny white flakes showering down her face. Mountain frost. To all the spirits, Njika prayed the elder woman’s eyesight was as bad as they said. Initiates were forbidden from leaving the Sanctuary without a priestess. Orphaned like the other girls, if she got expelled, she’d have nowhere to go. She probably should have thought of that before traipsing down the mountain to go splash in the warm springs with the village children.

“ … to receive is to give.” Né Olude peeled her eyes off Njika, resuming her lecture.

“Né, what must we give?” Dubem asked, keen as ever.

“Everything, sweet child.” (Continue Reading…)

Aurum & Indigo

By LP Kindred

Aurum sits on a wooden stool, hunched over the oakwood bar, stained darker by shellac and low lights. In spite of them, he stares into his book while a second lies closed atop the bar. His feet dangle, kicking softly. Eyes rake over words but their meaning never reaches his mind. The barman doesn’t offer a mug of ale as often as the skulking leches whose eyes scrub his body in hopes of finding interest in his eyes.

Aurum manages to avert his eyes — the book — when they come calling, but his heart triple beats each time the door opens and Shikaakwa cold invades the warm dark. After scouring the door, he draws his book closer.

There is a gentleman caller for whom Aurum journeyed from the Deep South to City Center. The nightmare of crosstown travel hastened Aurum to leave with abundant time to arrive punctually. Consequently, Aurum arrived one hour and one quarter before their arranged time to meet. Should anyone be this nervous about a man he’s already inundated?

(Continue Reading…)

[Note: This is Part 3 of a three-part novelette. Visit our previous posts to read Part 1 and Part 2.]

ALIZARIN CRIMSON

I’m still fighting the ultramarine depths of despair some fifteen years later, when I meet Joshua at the Club DeLisa. We get to talking, a fragmented conversation to fill the space between sets. He’s a singer and he used to play trumpet in a swing band, up until he got caught in Chicago by wartime travel restrictions. Little Brother Montgomery and The Red Saunders Band are playing tonight, along with a comedian and some dancers.

“I love the music, but what really brings me here is the energy. It reminds me of the Café Guerbois —  in Paris. I used to go there with some artist friends of mine, painters who wanted to push boundaries and create something new.” There’s something about him or the music or the energy of the club tonight that compels me to keep talking. “The way the musicians build on each other, changing the nature of music, it fills me with nostalgia. They have a passion that I’ve been missing for a long time.”

He gives me a strange look. “You’re one of those immortals, like Pops.” (Continue Reading…)

[Note: This is Part 2 of a three-part novelette. Visit our previous post to read Part 1.]

Colors of the Immortal Palette

by Caroline M. Yoachim

COBALT BLUE

I paint the English Channel at Étretat, shortly after sunrise. The sun is a fiery vermillion and the water shimmers cobalt blue. It is roughly my hundredth impression of a sunrise, spread across the year on whatever days I can gather up the energy to greet the dawn with my easel at the shore.

I have painted skies both cloudy and clear, water in a variety of hues. When the tide permits I paint from the beach and include the white cliffs, and when the tide is high —  as it is today —  I paint the vast expanse of the channel from atop them. Sometimes the dark silhouettes of ships break the line of the horizon, and sometimes there is fog, a thin white mist that gives me shivers not entirely accounted for by the crisp morning air. Monet set off a movement with his Impression, Sunrise, painted not far south of here. Monet, and before that Manet, changing the world of art forever. Or so the historians like to spin the tale, imposing order onto the chaotic jumble of the past, pulling a single narrative thread from the fabric of time. Providing a focal point, like the bright orange sun that hovers above the water. And their focal point, of course, must always be a man.

(Continue Reading…)

Colors of the Immortal Palette

by Caroline M. Yoachim

LEAD WHITE

I will always remember the view of Paris from his window. Snow, pure and untouched, softens the outline of the buildings and covers the grime of the streets. White, the color of beginnings. His canvas is primed and ready to be painted, and stark winter sunlight glows bright on his undead skin.

The studio is cramped, drafty despite the heat radiating from the stove. One corner is clean and lavishly decorated, the rest a cluttered chaos of painting supplies and personal effects. He studies me intently as I take in the room, evaluating me much as he did at the Café Guerbois when I’d first caught his eye.

I wait for him to ask how I came to be in Paris. Artists are so very predictable that way — no trouble at all accepting this pale immortal creature as one of their own, but a woman of my mixed ancestry? Utterly implausible.

“You should hear the stories they tell of you at the café,” he says. “If Émile is to be believed, you arrived here as a ukiyo-e courtesan, nothing more than paper wrapped around a porcelain bowl. A painter — he will not say which of us it was, of course — bought the bowl and the print along with it.”

“And the painter pulled me from the print with the sheer force of his imagination, I’m sure,” I reply, laughing. “Émile is a novelist and can hardly be trusted to give an accurate account. The reality of my conception is vastly more mundane, I assure you . . . though it does involve a courtesan.” (Continue Reading…)

Ribbons

by Natalia Theodoridou

Monday’s lover tugs at Jan’s ribbon with his teeth. Jan doesn’t yell at the lover to stop. The guy just received bad news from the front — a friend lost to a bomb, perhaps, a sibling blown to bits; Jan doesn’t ask. He tells the lover, instead, to be careful: We don’t want my head rolling off now, do we? We’ve all heard of them, after all, the stories of women taking it off and their heads falling to the ground.

Monday’s lover nods and keeps his teeth to himself. Says he’s never seen a guy with a ribbon before.

What can I say, love? Jan tells him. I’m special. (Continue Reading…)