Of the Body

By Eugenia Triantafyllou

When Osarah and I finally lie sweaty in our bed that night, I know that when the three moons align we will have a baby.

Osarah looks back at me. Smiling. The wetness of her face is lined by the cold light of the moon shining outside our window.

She can feel it too. She knows it like I know it.

“What shall we name it?” she asks. She takes my hand and gently kisses my knuckles one by one.

“I don’t know yet,” I lie. I hope she can’t feel my lie like she feels our child coming into existence.

I have thought of a thousand different names for our future children. Ever since our eyes first met. But right now, right at this moment when I should be the most happy, I am terrified.

Terrified of the moment when Osarah and I will hunt down the animal that bears our child and kill it. Will my aim be good enough to wound it without hurting our child? Will my hands shake as I cut its belly open and pry the baby out of its innards, slick with blood?

Osarah wraps her arms around me, sensing my fear. Her heat becomes my heat. Her cheek presses against my shoulder.

“It’ll be all right,” she assures me. “I’ll be there too.” Huddled like this, we let our minds travel to the valley, to a herd of sharpsnoots. Inside the belly of a special one, that’s grazing on the tender night leaves.

Ah, there! We both think. That’s the one. That’s our baby.

Now, we wait.

(Continue Reading…)

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…)