Hendry shows illustrations and video of the birds under discussion, sitting in a well-appointed room with fascinating wallpaper, all while holding a tea cup that's as big as a plant pot. They appear to have four white devil horns thanks to the impressive antler mounted behind Hendry’s head.
Hendry is clearly a firm believer in factual content: corrections appear in the first comment; citations are in the description as well as all the links in a Github Gist. They have 28 other YT videos on divers topics plus more on Patreon.
Access
Accurate captions, except from 9:20 to 10:23, where Hendry sped up audio to get full value after splashing out $10 for the research paper defining the correct Latin gender nomenclature — Strigops habroptilus — NZ kākāpō.
The first link here and the listed video on YouTube go to the version where there’s an operatic music bed during the research paper recitation. My “stream here” is the no-music edition Hendry provides for “for my fellow auditory processing disorder strugglers”
No image descriptions
No flashing lights but lots of picture-in-picture video of birds.
When you’re given a book about a subject you’re interested in but know little about, you likely have in the back of your mind an idea of what you want to read. Are you sufficiently interested in the subject to delve into an exhaustive, thoroughly-researched dissertation, or are you looking for a shorter, condensed, highlight-driven overview that can help you get your foot in the door without overwhelming you with information?
Knowing very little about manga but interested in learning about its origins and evolution, I approached Manga’s First Century with an idealistic perspective about how quickly and easily it would inform me of the subject. The first chapter showed me that this wasn’t the book I had received. Rather, Andrea Horbinski’s exploration of manga is a massive onslaught of detailed information that would constitute a feast for hard-core manga fans hungry for a roadmap to how the art form found its groove from the early twentieth century through its development into the late 1980s, where she ends her account. Instead of the lay-reader-friendly introduction to manga that I was hoping for, Manga’s First Century is nonetheless a fluent, eloquent account of the art form and its many iterations across Japan’s rapidly-shifting social, political, and economic landscapes during the tumultuous, accelerated twentieth century.
Despite its intense popularity in Japan and the increasing number of bookshelves dedicated to the form in American bookstores, relatively little scholarly work has been done on manga. The first, Frederik L. Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics (1983), was published by Kodansha International and sought to introduce Western comics fans to the manga that itself was influenced by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American and British satirical cartoons. Helen McCarthy, a British scholar who has written extensively about manga and anime since the early 1990s, gave Anglophone readers A Brief History of Manga in 2014 (which includes extensive illustrations and focuses on specific, important dates) and is coming out with The Manga Bible this year. The only scholarly studies of manga that I could find prior to Horbinski’s book are Eike Exner’s Comics and the Origins of Manga: A Revisionist History (2021) and Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics (2025). In the latter book, Exner begins in the 1890s, but then takes the story into the twenty-first century, focusing on the art form’s “structural development” and the ways in which manga publishing itself has shaped its development.
One of Horbinski’s major claims in this book is that she is specifically choosing 1905 as her start date because she wants to decouple manga from earlier forms of Japanese art. However, Exner’s earlier Comics and the Origins of Manga specifically claims that it, too, “challeng[es] the conventional wisdom that manga evolved from centuries of prior Japanese art” and “explain[s] why manga and other comics around the world share the same origin story” (publisher’s synopsis). This argument over timelines is important in how scholars and fans understand manga’s origins, so it’s not surprising that both Exner and Horbinski are interested in nailing down a date. Horbinski specifically points to “ponchi-e,” the Japanese term for Punch drawings, a form which itself derived from the magazine of the same name, launched in England in 1841.
Inspired by Mr. Punch of the Punch and Judy puppet shows popular in England from the nineteenth century, the magazine focused on social and political satire. In Japan, such cartoons evolved into what we call manga at the turn of the twentieth century, thanks to the work of pioneers Imaizumi Ippyō and Kitazawa Rakuten. The latter’s “artistic and satirical innovations, focused on political subjects, made Tokyo Puck [a satirical Japanese magazine inspired by the American magazine of the same name] Japan’s first manga magazine and him its first professional mangaka” (p. 307). Rakuten was succeeded by Okamoto Ippei, who moved manga out of its political and social satire corner to comment on the larger Japanese society as it industrialized and competed with Europe and America.
Horbinski appropriately launches us into this history of manga with the image of a boy dashing through the streets of Kumamoto, desperate to get his hands on a monthly manga magazine and some of the freebies that come with it. Reading this, I was reminded of my older brothers, who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s reading every Marvel and DC comic they could get their hands on, begging my parents to take them yet again to the local comic book store so they could get the latest issue of … whatever it was. It’s this devotion and enthusiasm that, according to Horbinski, has characterized manga since it launched into the popular Japanese imagination with Ippyō and Rakuten.
For the two pioneers, manga was a break from Edo-era visual art (1603-1867) and situated itself more forcefully in modern times, which allowed it to easily morph and evolve with the changing times (and the changes came thick and fast in the twentieth century—see two world wars, Japan’s “economic miracle” of the ’70s and ’80s, etc.). Horbinski clearly explains in her introduction that she wants to tell “a history … rather than the history,” focusing on a few key themes in order to develop her argument. Given this, it is surprising that Horbinski offers little discussion of the studies that have come before by Schodt, McCarthy, and Exner. Though her bibliography is extensive, she only cites Exner once in the book and never mentions the other two authors except in the bibliography.
One could counter this by noting that Horbinski must have spent countless hours in the archives that she lists, finding information about the many manga magazines and clubs that sprang up as manga gathered steam. Her specific interests in this book (given the subtitle) include the ways in which the manga establishment and the manga on the periphery have established a productive tension over the years, with “upstarts working on the margins seeking to revolutionize the medium’s content and audiences” (p. 5). Horbinski has also offered a focused analysis on format and “format as platform,” since “manga has oscillated between newspapers, magazines, four-panel comics, serialized multi-chapter stories, dojinshi [self-published works], and ebooks” (p. 7).
Horbinski offers us a street-level view of the impacts of, for instance, censorship, changing gender norms, technological innovation, and marketing (especially to children) on the shifting of manga from satire to storytelling, taking us on a tour through: Manga’s Origins, 1905-1928; Manga During Wartime, 1928-1946; Manga in the Postwar Era, 1945-1963; TV Manga and the Age of Revolution, 1963-1975; and Manga Turns Postmodern, 1975-1989. From political cartoons in the early 1900s to a dizzying array of magazine and book manga telling stories for every demographic and about any topic one could think of, Horbinski shows how manga has come to stand for an art form that the masses love because it speaks to them.
Some manga reflects the speed of our modern age (content, style), while some is more stylized (flowers, celestial bodies), and yet others offer us adorable cats and other animals. Despite its seemingly infinite variety, however, manga still has at its core a specific kind of style that has evolved for the twenty-first century. I took my own tour of the manga section at my local Barnes and Noble after reading Manga’s First Century and was immediately intimidated, faced with hundreds of manga volumes. Taking a few off of the shelves and paging through, I thought of what Horbinski writes about how the art style has been driven by the artists who read manga growing up first imitating those forebears and then launching their own interpretations. Reading Manga’s First Century deepened my appreciation, then, of the ways in which manga has saturated Japanese society and spread around the world. It didn’t take me by the hand and give me recommendations, though, so I’ll have to get those from a trusted manga enthusiast who can guide me toward the books and compilations I might like. But I have no doubt that I’ll find something.
The other night on the Olympic broadcast[^1], US figure skater Amber Glenn said in an interview that she is a huge fan of Magic: the Gathering and also that she is queer. So of course I had to make a custom Magic card of her!
[^1] For those of you in the US who are streaming on Peacock, it was during the women's free skate section of the team competition.
So, there are things and then there are Things. The big thing is that over the past few years I've been having intermittent pain in my right leg and hip. It started when I was rounding a corner at the Oakland Marathon 5K back in 2023. The only way I can describe it is that I stepped wrong; suddenly my hip got real twitchy and I was thinking, "Well fuck, what is this?"
Cue me not really thinking about it that much until I started having moment's where the muscles in my right leg would go slack for no good reason. i could still move my leg and what not but it just felt like the muscles went dead and then would come back online with everything feeling super tired and the like. But I kept on with doing what I was doing: walking, biking. Also sitting because I work from home. I sit a lot. Probably an unhealthy amount.
Anyway, fast forward to last year: my legs hadn't been great which meant I hadn't really been training like I usually do. On a good day, I can knock out 3 miles (my house to downtown Oakland and back) and not even think about it but it was becoming harder to do. I walked the Oakland Marathon 5K, San Francisco Marathon 5K and Berkeley Half 5K. The Berkley Half was where I finally realized that something might really not be okay. The last part of the course takes us into the campus, past Sather Gate and then an incline up towards the Campanile. I absolutely detest that section but I know it's there and normally I bitch in my head about it but I do it. Last year I had to stop. Really stop. My hip was barking and so was my leg. Not good.
I finished but I was also meeting a friend who was doing the 10K so I had to walk down from the Crescent to Civic Center Park where all the festivities were. Not a problem but I could feel my leg twitching and my brain was trying to suss out what I was feeling. While waiting for my friend, i had a chance to talk to one of the PT folks who was there doing post race assessments (mostly to drum up business), but she did give me some good advice - i.e. it might be this thing but go talk to your primary doctor, which I did; she thought it might be sciatica. I had some preliminary imaging done; right hip, knee and my lumbar spine. And got a referral to PT at Berkeley Community PT.
So, the upshot is this: my lumbar spine is compressed like whoa and things aren't real happy which translates to the issues with my hip and leg. I have some degenerative things happening but that's mostly due to age. I've been in PT for just over a month which means I have homework.I also now have a referral to orthopedics at UCSF. They'll probably do more imaging and make a recommendation for next steps.
Right now, as much as all of this is a pain in the ass, I am thankful I have full insurance to cover it. Shirley is also feeling the aches and pains of her job but trying to get her to go get some body work done beyond seeing our chiropractor is a lot. I make vague noises like, "Hey, you know, the acupuncturist has some time."
The biggest thing in all of this is having to acknowledge that I am getting older (we both turned 60 last year) and my body is changing into a newer configuration. None of what is happening is insurmountable but how I engage with sport and exercise are changing. Right now, I'm not doing a lot beyond PT because I don't want to aggravate anything. My Garmin sits there and accuses me of not getting enough steps in.Lol. I do have new trekking poles and I use those for walking for the extra support but I also have a touch of plantar fasciatis right now so I'm not doing a lot of that.
If you're looking for a gorgeously curated selection of stories, Arley Sorg suggests you check out The Best Weird Fiction of the Year Volume One edited by Michael Kelly.
One of the central questions I’ve been exploring within these destinations is the idea of dreams, both literal and figurative. There’s a way we live in a dreamworld constantly—both from the daydreams we have about the future (locations we dream of moving to, hopes we have for travels, our wishes for better professions or love lives) to the more mystical experiences of wondering whether, as the Buddhists claim, this world is indeed an illusion.
Your guidebook writers acknowledge that there’s been a great deal of debate about how exactly an eighth continent appeared in our midst. Amid some circles, there’s talk of the landmass as an intergalactic spaceship, its presence entering our reality like a sparrow flying through an open window. There are speculations that it rose from the […]
The settlement was barely two weeks old, and so her own habitation husk had to serve as an ER room for the man who was carried in from the planet’s surface, screaming and blue-lipped with trauma shock. “What happened?” The doctor listened as the man’s coworker explained how he had been guiding a transportation eelcraft when something huge and obscure rose from the river, crushed him against the bank, and made off.
a.k.a. "Shuos Jedao says howdy from the land of Battlefleet Gothic and pinochle trauma" - we'll see if the local game store is interested in carrying this and/or some of the other 11"x17" prints as they've carried my smaller art prints in the past.
Meanwhile, back to napping (recuperating from sickness) and/or schoolwork.
Speculative fiction has a long history of association with “the idea.” High-concept, premise-driven, and philosophical fiction can be found in a wide variety of contexts across the genre. I’m a huge fan of many of these kinds of books: Nightfall (Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg, 1941/1990), On a Pale Horse (Piers Anthony, 1983), The Left Hand of Darkness and Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969 and 1985), The Starless Sea (Erin Morgenstern, 2019), Piranesi (Susanna Clarke, 2020), The Spear Cuts Through Water (Simon Jimenez, 2022), Rakesfall (Vajra Chandrasekera, 2024); the list could go on. [1] This type of fiction is an opportunity: It allows writers to ask big questions about society, knowledge, being, and meaning; to propose bold answers in the realms of politics, culture, and metaphysics; and to explore possibility at the edges of the real.
Ivan Leonov’s Arctic Knot wants to be one of these sorts of books. Unfortunately, it is, instead, disappointingly unsuccessful at essentially every turn. However, Arctic Knot’s failures serve as a really excellent window into what makes idea-driven fiction work—and does so in a moment when the SFF community is embroiled in fraught discussions about generative AI, the relationship between the writer’s mind and the writer’s work, and many people’s apparent belief that a concept or “idea” is the same thing as (or the real, true, and essential work of) a book. More specifically, a reading of Arctic Knot helps reveal that not only does a book, a story, or a fiction of any kind live in its execution, but actually the ideas and thinking inhere there, too.
One hallmark of the “high-concept” is a catchy premise: “a planet that is always winter where the people are unsexed most of the time and can take either role in reproduction,” “a world where it never gets dark,” “death is a position you assume by killing the previous officeholder,” etc. At first glance, Arctic Knot is aiming for such an idea, building its plot around the fracturing of time on the remote Russian shores of the Bering Strait. What causes these ruptures? What do they mean? What is the metaphysical significance of the slippage the characters experience between times and worlds, seeing different versions of themselves and their homes, of a world where “if you stared long enough into the snow—it would show you your own footprint, left tomorrow”? Yet the novel is unable to sustain the interest that the experience might produce, despite Leonov’s attempts to reinvoke it with each movement between alternate Chukotkas.
The most obvious failure of execution as it relates to the matter of ideas is in the answer the novel provides to these questions:
Chukotka stands upon a border. Men call it the East of the East, but it is in truth the West of the West. The world tangled words, and so the rivers of time run crooked [. . .] You think it is coordinates that rule the world. But it is not numbers that guide it—it is faith, and names. When the spirits hear a lie the earth answers with a crack.
That is, the diegetic explanation for the temporal anomalies that make up the plot and texture of the novel and its world is that the Russian (and Soviet) codification of Chukotka as the easternmost part of the Russian (Soviet) Far East is a metaphysical affront to land that is “really” the westernmost portion of the Western Hemisphere. This answer is unsatisfying at best, and at worst seems to partake of all of SFF’s worst habits: It ontologizes epistemology (if we grant the precise boundaries of the Prime Meridian even the dignity of qualifying as an epistemology), offers a pat rationalist answer for a phenomenon built up as a beautiful mystery, and establishes an opaque relationship between all this and the processes of exploration and discovery.
But a catalogue of dissatisfactions does not an explanation of what is missing make. After all, Leonov’s frustratingly unconvincing explanation is far from the first time that an uncharitable summary could seem implausible or unconvincing. Asimov and Silverberg’s claim—that, if a planet never got dark, then a total solar eclipse occurring about every two thousand years would introduce the population to the stars and cause them to all lose it and burn their whole society to the ground—shares some of Arctic Knot’s flaws when expressed this way. So, too, might the revelation that Clarke’s House is essentially a pocket dimension in which Piranesi was imprisoned by an occult ritual by the Other. It’s possible that, the less science is an essential part of a work’s aesthetics, the more ambitiously explanations can stand by narrative fiat. But beyond this, what actually works against the assertion of cartographic metaphysics that makes up the final resolution of Arctic Knot?
First, it might be my own instinctive rejection of the truth of cartography as metaphysical reality. I was not “convinced” that the question of whether Chukotka is “the East of the East” or “the West of the West” is of the great social, political, or metaphysical importance that its spiritual and ontological centrality to the novel would imply. But a novelistic idea need not convince me of its “truth” in order to be worth exploring. So what could have transformed Leonov’s novum from a half-baked premise into an interesting idea, even if in the end I didn’t “like” the novel’s conclusions?
To answer this question, I want to start with the issue of characterization. One thing that can get a reader invested in a high-concept idea is a connection with the characters to whom it matters and who experience it. Take, for example, Genly Ai and Estraven’s relationship, which forms the central organizing logic of The Left Hand of Darkness: It is through getting to know the people of Gethen, in particular coming to understand Estraven, that Genly and the reader learn how to think with and about the ambisexuality that characterizes Le Guin’s “concept.” In Nightfall, meanwhile, the psychological believability of the characters is absolutely essential to accepting the idea that seeing stars when no one in a society had ever conceived of their existence would be burn-the-city-to-the-ground levels of frightening. Arctic Knot, by contrast, fails to deliver characters who feel real and believable, and in the process reveals the vital importance of fleshed-out characterization for the ideas of fiction.
The novel centers around a group of five young adults who are investigating the temporal anomalies, but they all blend together, motivated by an unexplained burning desire to understand—and little else. In particular, the protagonist, Olga, fails to do anything with her distinctive characteristics—including the visions of the future she receives and which seem to have startlingly little impact on her subjectivity. Why, you might ask, would a young divorcée be attracted to the absolute remoteness of the far northern village of Lavrentiya? What makes her need so badly to understand and solve the time anomalies? Why is she so invested in her own rationality? How do all of these aspects of her personality shape her reaction not only to time travel (which all five of the protagonists experience) but clairvoyance (which only she does)? The novel does not answer any of these questions.
Olga’s internality is stubbornly inaccessible even as the novel appears to be trying to reveal it, with details like “[w]ith each passing day, Olga dreamed more often of other people’s dreams” and “Olga trembled inside. And in that trembling was not only fear—but recognition.” These details seem like they would contribute to a sense of Olga as a person, but they ultimately slide off any sense of her as a complete self, in part because all the characters in the novel seem to respond to things in essentially the same way through essentially the same language. All of them fear and resolve and tremble and doubt and so on in tandem and the result is that they feel a bit more like wooden dolls or puppets than like people. The generally stilted dialogue contributes to this impression as well, even (and especially) in moments that should be tense, like a futuristic prison break facilitated by Olga’s clairvoyance, during which she is told to “[h]old onto the ones where we survive” only immediately also to be told “[f]ocus on the good outcome. Try to hold it.” This sort of artificiality (perhaps the artificiality of trying too hard to sound like real conversation, which meanders, repeats itself, and generally doesn’t read well) deflates scenes of energy and makes the characters feel even harder to distinguish as individuals.
The effect of this is to reduce the characters to props for the ideas of the novel, but that, in turn, vitiates the novel’s thinking. Unlike other idea-driven fiction—in which the living enactment of the idea in developed characters allows the reader to really sit with all the implications of the thinking as it is performed—this sort of reduction here punctures ideas. It prevents the metaphysics from feeling grounded in the human, and thus from feeling like a serious consideration which can move beyond an initial instinctive response to a basic statement of concept or explanation.
The other contributing factor to the way in which this failure of execution leads to a failure of thinking is more distributed. Arctic Knot is, at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, awkward and uneven. Its em-dashes are persistently slightly off, signaling breaks that aren’t really there, like the one between the staring and the showing above or between Olga’s fear and recognition. These minor infelicities are everywhere. They are coupled with what seem like attempts to recreate the tone of a writer like Le Guin: “Life in Lavrentiya did not begin with dawn—it began with the wind. Not with birdsong, but with the screech of metal sheets covering old sheds.” But the various stumbles reveal this voice as false, even before it is abandoned for something more like reportage: “The debate raged on—Alexi and Olga for Naukan, Georgy for Anadyr, Natalia torn between”; or “They exchanged a quick glance: the place was the same, the time entirely different”; or even a call to the pulps (“Immortality activated”).
All of which is to say that a charitable read on the novel’s voice would be to identify it as a shifting tissue of pastiche; but the attempts at imitation feel too disjointed, as if the surfacing and dropping of echoes happens not for effect but because Leonov couldn’t maintain it any longer. As a result, I think the book is also missing the cognitive presence that narratorial voice (including deliberately shifting and fragmentary narration—like Rakesfall, like The Starless Sea, like Always Coming Home) usually provides. I don’t know how Arctic Knot thinks because I don’t feel like I have a sense of the voice or perspective of the novel or of Leonov as a writer. The production of a narratorial whole—through either consistent voice or a plethora of trackable voices with distinct effects, through fluid (or perhaps carefully alienating, rather than merely disjointed) prose, through all the stylistic effects that produce the suite of aesthetic experiences known vaguely and idiosyncratically as “good writing”—seems, in light of this, to be an essential part of a book’s thinking. That is, the failure to provide a compelling voice and the sentence-level infelicities actively prevent Arctic Knot from thinking through its ideas about the relationship between time, culture, meaning, and place, reducing them to mere concepts or proposals.
Ideas need to be thought rather than merely posited. And that active thinking happens, Arctic Knot inadvertently shows, in the execution of the novel, in the sentences and words, in the characters, in the playing-out of plot as a written experience, rather than as an outline or a premise or a “concept.” In failing to live up to its ambitions, then, Arctic Knot demonstrates what makes idea-driven speculative fiction work, the essential transformation that makes an idea into something that can animate a story, that needs to be explored in narrative. Through this revelation, the novel offers a sort of object lesson which answers anxieties about what resistance to the equation of idea and story might do to the long tradition of idea-driven SFF. If the idea lives in the particular execution of fiction, then not only can we continue to read and write idea-forward work and simultaneously insist on the centrality of the book as a work created with intention (whether or not we believe the author themselves is discernable within it); we must.
Endnotes
[1] There are also non-SFFnal examples of this form of literature, ones which locate their intellectual or philosophical work within realism, such as a novel like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938); we often rely on conceptual ambition and speculative imagination to mark the distinction between this sort of ideas-driven fiction and SFF. [return]
This episode features "Think of Me Before I Disappear" written by Raahem Alvi. Published in the February 2026 issue of Clarkesworld Magazine and read by Kate Baker.
In 1912, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars saw publication in The All-Story (under the title Under the Moons of Mars). It introduced the American reading public to John Carter: a swashbuckler extraordinaire whisked away to Mars to court beautiful women, to bounce about the red planet with gravity-defying leaps, and to swing a sword. Burroughs’s pulp sensibilities drip from the opening pages and launch the reader quickly and expertly into what has become one of the most influential action-adventure power fantasies, injecting his narrative with heaped helpings of wistful longing for a world in which physical prowess reigns supreme—and he packaged it all within a boundless imagination that, even today, feels exciting to read.
Burroughs’s Barsoom saga pulses with energy. Indeed, much of Burroughs’s writing can be characterized by momentum and motion, slinging the reader literally across the solar system with the blink of an eye or the turn of a page. Faced with the question of getting Carter from Earth and onto Mars, Burroughs simply channels the power of “irresistible enchantment” (A Princess of Mars [Penguin, 2007], p. 12). As Carter stares at the red planet, “it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron” (p. 12). Readers (both in 1912 and 2025) might wonder how Carter planned to travel to Mars, a seemingly impossible task in a world still reliant on horses and trains. But Burroughs’s Carter is quick to remind us that, “[my] longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness” (p 12). And thus Burroughs ends one chapter and dares the reader to continue onto the next, which he opens with a wonderfully understated sentence: “I opened my eyes upon a strange and weird landscape” (p. 13). Questions of explanation, of rationality and logic and sense are completely eschewed in favor of immediacy, wonder, and imagination: pulp, in a word. “My inner consciousness told me as plainly that I was upon Mars as your conscious mind tells you that you are upon Earth,” Carter explains, continuing with “you do not question the fact; neither did I” (p. 13). Leave your reason at the door; we’re here to rock and roll.
Nathan Ballingrud’s Cathedral of the Drowned, a sequel to his Crypt of the Moon Spider (2024), exists in this pulp tradition, reveling in the inexplicable and launching its characters across the stars with the flick of a short and declarative sentence, disappearing them into “angles of light” across the cosmos (p. 91). But where pulp afforded Burroughs an opportunity for tales of heroic escapism (tossed with imperialism for good measure), Ballingrud takes a decidedly different tack. While he maintains the imaginative wonder of pulp storytelling, he dumps the conventional male power fantasy and replaces it with an alternative fantasy (or horror, depending on your philosophy): (dis)entanglement. If A Princess of Mars imagines an embodiment of power and physical superiority encapsulated in the sculpted physiques of beautiful, individual bodies, Cathedral of the Drowned collapses those boundaries. In Ballingrud’s hands, the body itself disintegrates into pulp, enmeshed not in the Cartesian safety of singular consciousness but instead spread across a mass of entangled, creaturely bodies which is cosmic in reach.
It is this interrogation of embodiment, wrapped in the Lovecraftian dread of the Other and the pulp sensibilities of Burroughs, that I found most compelling in Ballingrud’s novella, a slim volume that never feels slight. His characters are at turns ruthless and pathetic, endearing and distancing, and the scope of the characters’ relationships remains grounded, even while the scale reaches out to the stars. As with Ballingrud’s previous short story work (particularly his excellent collection Wounds [2019]), I was simultaneously repulsed, fascinated, horrified, and certainly never bored.
The story begins in medias res, shortly after the events of Crypt of the Moon Spider. Veronica, the abused housewife shipped to the moon’s experimental mental asylum run by (mad) scientist Dr. Barrington Cull, has found seeming fulfillment as “the new queen of hell,” abandoning her human shell in order to assume the mantle of a spider god (p. 54). The inmates are now running the asylum, as it were, and Dr. Cull has fled to Earth. Meanwhile Charlie (also called Grub), a former bodyguard sent to protect mob interests on the moon, has been bifurcated between mind and body, with the former—Charlie—strapped into a satellite and blasted to the moon of Io and the latter—Grub—finding itself the new home for hundreds of soon-to-hatch spider eggs. But we open in 1924 in Red Hook, with mob boss Goodnight Maggie dealing with Sicilians encroaching her territory, a disruption to her supply chains of moonsilk (a resource spun from those creepy space spiders on the moon which is used as an hallucinogenic drug), and a pining for Charlie, who she believes has been lost.
As with all good pulp, the explanations for 1920s space travel and interdimensional spiders that weave magical webs is left where it belongs in the stuffed bin of Who Cares. Instead, the inciting incident is a series of two unexpected visits for Goodnight Maggie: Dr. Cull—whose face “no longer looked much like a face at all,” having mostly sloughed off in his escape from the moon—arrives desperate for refuge from the Alabaster Scholars (moon people who worship the spider queen); and Charlie, who seems to manifest in her closet as “a metal orb sprouting dozens of long silver spines in every direction … oily water trickled from it in a series of steady streams, as if it rested beneath a small waterfall she could not see” (pp. 2, 8-9). This is all in the first few pages. Even for a sequel, Cathedral of the Drowned is bursting at the seams with expansions of the setting: intersecting and competing character motivations, a giant rocket cathedral that crash-lands on the lush jungles of Io only for its missionary crew to fall victim to alien centipede monsters, and time travel. It’s a lot. But for me, the storytelling seams are stretched but never split. Ballingrud somehow holds all of this together and in the process raises a giant middle finger to the in-vogue narrative conventions, so encouraged by the age of streaming, in which stories are stretched beyond their proper bounds. This novella moves with the speed of Burroughs and the detail-density of your average Warhammer 40k novel (not to mention lots of 40k imagery—see the giant rocket cathedrals that have crash-landed and decayed in the swamps of Jupiter’s moon).
My initial attraction to Ballingrud’s work is this sense of horrific wonder and Lovecraftian worldbuilding. It’s all so cool and ticks all the boxes in my pulp-loving brain. Dr. Cull explains to Goodnight Maggie: “My belief is that the silk tended by the lunar spiders contain the memories of a spacefaring being, of which our moon is a remnant. Perhaps its skull, or perhaps just part of its skull. I believe the use of the silk somehow grants the spiders access to hidden avenues through space and time, allowing them to bypass the restrictions of conventional travel” (p. 31). The moon as part of the skull of a galaxy-huge eldritch being? Transdimensional spider silk? Yes, please, give me more. When brain-in-a-jar Charlie arrives on Io’s moon and is carried by the titular “drowned” to the sinking cathedral, “he beheld the vaulted arches of the cathedral’s interior, stone walls decorated in frescoes besmeared with lichen, the twinkling lights of switchboards and circuitry lighting the darkness like candy-colored stars” (p. 20). Ballingrud’s prose glories in the gothic and the gory, often mixing them to great effect—and generating a wonderful tension between beauty and ugliness that is a hallmark of pulp horror.
But, while my initial interest in Ballingrud and his Lunar Gothic Trilogy comes from the heavy metal of it all, my lingering investment is rooted in the ecologies and philosophies undergirding the texts. Crypt of the Moon Spider established an interest in the Cartesian dualism that informs much Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought, and Cathedral of the Drowned pushes this philosophy into the kind of literal symbol that genre storytelling makes possible. In brief, for centuries Western culture has labored under the belief that the mind, one’s consciousness, wields supremacy over the merely animal meat-sack of the body: “I think, therefore I am.” In other words, who we are becomes divorced from the materiality of our own existence; or, more accurately, what we call consciousness is divorced from materiality itself and instead imagined as purely abstract and symbolic and somehow disconnected from the body. Of course, this belief is ultimately incorrect, or at best incomplete, and for decades now much work has been done to correct its harmful implications, particularly in the work and writings of disability activists and disability studies. As an alternative to Cartesian dualism, we might imagine our bodies—including our minds—as an always-emerging series of overlapping materialities that are infinitely enmeshed and mutually dependent. The implications of this are, potentially, horrifying and exposing: We don’t like to imagine that our own minds are outside our control and beholden to material influence, existing in the same state of perpetual vulnerability within which our “non-thinking” bodies exist; we don’t like to imagine that something else is making our decisions. Ballingrud’s work understands this anxiety.
The Charlie/Grub character is my favorite in the work precisely because he becomes our angle into interrogating embodiment. Charlie, as we learn, “was born in a jar on the moon,” and his brain/consciousness is placed by Dr. Cull into a small satellite that is then launched into space, to peer into the dangerous mysteries of the cosmos (p. 13). As he comes into his consciousness, Charlie is aware of his body—Grub—on the slab next to him. He wonders “was the part of the brain in his body on the table the defective part? Or was it this part, himself, contained in the jar? Both were being rebuilt by the spiders and the moonsilk” (p. 13). This kind of disembodiment and existential dread at its recognition is familiar territory, and there are times where Ballingrud leans a bit too heavily into the body/mind split, to the point where the critique itself becomes muddled, a victim of its own critique, and the edge of the idea is dulled. Indeed the text maintains the distinct separation of Charlie and Grub despite their origin as a singular organism, a move that seems to reify the Cartesian split itself. But when Charlie arrives on Io, the novella introduces an embodied ecology of violence that sharpens and complicates everything, exciting me as a reader.
Ultimately, at the risk of spoiling how wild and weird Ballingrud makes everything, Charlie becomes inextricably entangled with the truly bizarre flora and fauna of Io, and his own individualism is collapsed into a violent, non-human collective. Ecology itself is neither sentimental nor sterile nor sanctimonious—it is consuming, violent, and terrifying because it requires self-annihilation, and Ballingrud’s work is never afraid to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth. Charlie’s violation leads to disambiguation, and from that loss of self something new is born. It is here that Goodnight Maggie re-enters the narrative in a truly stunning turn of events which takes the novella into mythic territory, where those pulp staples of sex and violence and revelation all collide to form new worlds and new peoples and—actually, you’ll have to read it for yourself. No, really: This is a novella to be experienced.
We thought we were bringing good things to life until sometime in the night, we heard rocking and knocking and rapping and tapping, a million trillion tiny feet skittering across the open oven door. Before we could get a handle on refrigerator demons and washing machine monsters, a horde of unhappy housewives filed for divorce and the course of the future veered left, leaving history in the hands of men who built appliances for someone else to use. We choose to believe they won the warehouse war, but the blood on the floor says otherwise: a million, trillion tiny footprints spell out “we were here and then we weren’t.” Not even an apron left as evidence.
The triangles bred and twisted,
replicating themselves.
Layering, one on top of the other.
Spinning and spilling over,
They drew into themselves the spaces between
encountering, to their surprise,
circles
who dreamt of spinning spheres.
The two strangers fought,
but decided the better of it,
and instead, grew enamored.
Interbred.
Interlocked.
Sweating hands grasped in mutual, moaning ecstasy.
Sharing secrets immemorial:
the mysteries of angles,
the enigmas of Pi.
To create square and ellipse.
Hexagon, sphere, and cone.
Parabola and hyperbola,
Chladni figure and Gabriel’s horn.
Cassini’s oval and torus’s knot.
Together,
they forged new realities,
becoming all that is:
All shapes, asymmetric and isotropic.
All sounds, harmonic and dissonant.
All numbers, real and imaginary.
All beings, fantastic and factual.
All thoughts, fleeting and terminal.
And all those things we mistake for the living—
and for the dead.
[Editor’s Note: The publication of this poem was made possible by a donation from John Klima during our annual Kickstarter.]
A thin line of drool traced from the corner of Nanea’s mouth down to the wooden desk beneath her head. The makani outside had died down, so only a light breeze danced its way into her room and across her forehead. The pages of the notebook next to her fluttered ever so slightly.
Bzzz. Bzzz. Bzzz.
The desk shook with the vibration of her cell phone. Nanea sat up slowly and shook her head a few times, trying to remember where she was. Her mind was swimming with images of pixelated mountainscapes and she had the strange urge to leap over a too-blue river. Through a thin veil of mind fuzz, she could hear a short, but steady, beeping sound emanating from one of the many devices pushed haphazardly around the desk in front of her. Sitting up a little straighter, her eyes alighted on the bright red notifications flashing across her desktop screen in sync with the beeping. 23 new emails. 45 unread messages on ʻElele.
“Oh, boy,” she muttered under her breath. The mountainscapes and river disappeared, remnants of last nights’ gaming session with her cousins. Now, she was faced with her work laptop humming angrily and a half cup of black tea that was cold to touch. Nanea had been assigned to the overnight on-call position for Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke, the panakō’s catch-all information technology team, and she was supposed to be monitoring the flow of data while another team was doing a large system upgrade for the website. She had even turned up the volume of her ‘Elele notifications in an attempt to keep herself awake, but that strategy seemed to have failed. Evidently, she had fallen asleep in the middle of the upgrade deployment, and something had gone wrong. She wiped away the fine layer of sweat that had formed on her forehead and tapped her phone to answer the incoming call.
“Hello?” She murmured.
“Nanea! Where have you been?!”
Nanea grimaced. The sound of her manager Maʻa’s half-awake yet fully exasperated voice blasted through the phone’s speakers. “Hey, kala mai,” she apologized. “I fell asleep, what’s going on?”
“I’ve been trying to get through to you for nearly fifteen minutes. Teams don’t do late-night deployments because it means there’s extra time to relax.”
Nanea sighed and pinched her cheeks as she tried to wake up while Maʻa continued to berate her.
“I thought you were supposed to have a knack for staying up late after sleeping through the afternoon? Remind me to call you for sleeping advice some other time, huh? Anyway–have you read through these emails yet? The upgrade seems to have gone through successfully, but now the testers are in the system, and they aren’t able to see the right data. Can you check the latest email that they sent? It should have a timestamp of 4:01.”
Nanea winced at the mention of the time. She navigated to her email and searched for the timestamp in her inbox.
“Do you see it?” Maʻa asked impatiently.
“Yup!” Nanea answered quickly, opening one of the many unread messages clogging her screen. “I think I found it. I’m reading it now.”
From: Work Order Updates
Subject: 1 Task Added. Work order number: 9005. Org: Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke.
Status: URGENT.
I am not able to access the internal client data for multiple users from inoa hope Kāpili to inoa hope Kūʻaeʻa when conducting a routine moʻokūʻauhau analysis via the admin-side portal of the Profile page of the website. I am not able to see inoa beyond the most immediate circle of relatives, and the Personal Information sections are empty. Please advise. My ID # is 698237.
“One of the testers isn’t able to see the right data. Can you check on that, please? The only error logs we have keep saying that the data wasn’t found. I think it might have something to do with this intense makani we’ve had lately. You may need to check the greenhouses.”
Nanea bit her upper lip and silently clenched her fist. She should have known better than to volunteer as the on-call assistant in the middle of hoʻoilo. Something like this was bound to happen.
“Also,” Maʻa added, “I don’t want another repeat of what happened last month. I convinced the big bosses that that was a one-time mistake, but you had better not be trying to prove me wrong.”
Nanea winced at the threat. She had been the only one on call for a late afternoon deployment several weeks ago, but she had—unsurprisingly—fallen asleep in the middle of the afternoon while working from home and didn’t wake up until the around midnight to several voicemails from Maʻa about the panakō facing a minor shutdown. They ended up being out of commission until noon that day, and while the largest user-facing consequences were a small handful of angry customers, the higher-ups (Big Boss and co.) were very disappointed and brought the hammer down on Maʻa, who, in turn, brought a smaller, but no less impactful, hammer down on Nanea.
“Of course, I understand,” she said quickly into the phone, “I’m looking into this now.” Nanea pulled up a map of the server rooms on her personal secondary monitor, which she had hooked up to her work computer to use as an extended desktop. At the same time, she closed out a few windows with half-watched playthroughs of the Graceful Gamble online multiplayer video game and took a large gulp of her ice-cold tea. “Ach,” she retched at the bitter flavor.
“Mahalo, Nanea.” Maʻa said through a stifled yawn. “And try not to fall asleep this time. I have to be up on time tomorrow–well, this morning, so I won’t be available again tonight. But plan to meet me in the office around 8 to give me a report on how everything went.”
“Alright,” she responded, silently cursing herself. Usually, team members got the day off after a late-night deployment, but evidently Maʻa wasn’t going to let her go so easily. “Again, really sorry about falling asleep.”
Maʻa sighed audibly. “Talk later.”
She hung up the phone and buried her face in her hands for a moment. Just six months ago she had been let go from her previous job for sleeping in a few too many times and not getting to the office in a “timely and consistent manner.” She could not let this happen again. With another gulp of bitter tea, she tried to shake the sleep from her eyes and looked back at the desktop monitor. The map of the greenhouses was a combination of tiny red, yellow, and green lights that blinked on and off intermittently. She clicked on the “K” icon on the left-hand side, triggering the map to zoom into a small corner of the chart where the red and yellow lights were far outnumbering the greens. It looked like the server room in charge of storing clients’ Ka- through Kū- was not functioning properly.
“Ugh,” Nanea groaned. She would have to go out and check on them.
Opening ‘Elele, Nanea searched for the name of the team lead in charge of the system upgrade that night. Ignoring the multitude of unread messages that flooded her screen as soon as she opened their conversation window, she shot off a quick message:
“Looking into 9005 right now. Yellow and red in the server room. I’ll check it out shortly and will be in touch.”
The team lead, Kaʻua, responded immediately: “Keep me in the loop.”
Nanea groaned, stood up from her desk chair, and looked around the room. A gust of makani blew in and cooled the sweat on her neck, causing her to shiver for a moment uncontrollably. The storm from earlier that night had blown over a number of fliers she was supposed to hand out at a volunteer work event that upcoming weekend. Now, she could see that they had infiltrated every corner of her room, in and around her laundry basket and tucked between the pillows on her bed. She would have to clean it all up when she got back. For now, she closed and tucked her laptop into her backpack, along with a few other necessities, grabbed her rain jacket off the edge of her desk and made her way out the door.
Once outside, she swung her backpack on and hopped onto her bike to make her way toward the offices. As she neared the edge of town, she could see the lights of the main building, and the large expanse of dimly lit grassy fields behind it where the greenhouses were situated. She rode up to the entrance gate where Keoki, the security guard on duty that night, was sitting.
“Hey, Keoki,” she said, trying to catch her breath as she paused in front of the booth. She could see her breath shimmering in the light as she spoke.
“Aloha,” he replied, shifting in the booth to face her.
“I gotta check in the greenhouses for something going on with the deployment. Can I get through with my ID?”
“Oh yeah,” he nodded, “should be fine.” He waved absentmindedly toward the office building. “Let me know if you need anything.”
“Gotcha, mahalo.” Nanea hopped back on her bike and headed toward the greenhouses.
Once she reached the edge of the field, she slid off her bike and continued on foot. The greenhouses each stood around ten feet tall, filled with row upon row of tables of pūʻolo–large green bundles of ti leaf that were hooked up to different wires. The wires transferred data between the bundles and the larger cables that ran along the greenhouse ceilings. These in turn ran all the way to the office building, where the data could be accessed and modified as needed via user-friendly computer interfaces.
After walking for several minutes, Nanea reached the greenhouse that contained data from Ka- to Kū-, demarcated in large print across the side, and turned the corner to enter.
“Uh oh,” she said, peering through the darkness.
A branch was leaning against one of the double doors, propping it ajar. She looked out at the field surrounding her. A large Albizia was stretched out on the ground nearby, its roots upturned at the edge of the forest about ten yards away and its bare fingertips reaching toward the ground where Nanea was standing. She could see a number of branches from other trees as well, all scattered along the ground.
“I thought they were working on clearing all of these,” she said to herself. Albizia was a known invasive species that had a tendency for collapsing unexpectedly. Plus, with all the strong makani lately, the odds of one of them falling was even greater. The greenhouse doors were automatically locked upon closing with extra strength deadbolts, but some of the locks were old, and this one clearly hadn’t been replaced in time.
Nanea walked up to push the door open, flinching at the ice-cold touch of the metal door handle. Bracing herself, and pulling her jacket sleeve up to cover her palm, she confidently pushed open the door and walked inside. Everything was silent except for the soft hum of ‘ike in the pūʻolo and the makani continuing to blow in the distance.
“Hello?” She called out as she turned on the light, but nothing made a sound or scrambled out of sight. Usually, inside the greenhouses, the air was kept to a cool-yet-warm 70 degrees to ensure the best environment for the pūʻolo bundles to maintain their shape and health for as long as possible. However, with the door propped open all night, the cool, dark air had been flowing inside for hours and Nanea shivered as she walked into the structure.
She leaned her bike up against the wall and attempted to close the door behind her, tossing aside the rusted lock and pushing a box in front of the foot of the door to keep it shut. Turning around, she looked at the pūʻolo on the tables. Near the doorway, a few of them had blown onto their sides, wires twisted around one another and hanging down in all the wrong places. She would have to fix what she could and notify the Hui Kupuna if any needed to be replaced.
Sighing, Nanea opened her computer to verify that the damaged pūʻolo matched the ones with red and yellow signals on the system map. Before she could look at the map, however, she was faced with a number of new messages from Kaʻua, the team lead she had contacted earlier.
10 minutes ago: “How is everything going?”
5 minutes ago: “Were you able to check out the pūʻolo?”
1 minute ago: “What’s your status?”
Jeez, Nanea thought to herself.
“Checking on it now,” she responded promptly, rolling her eyes behind the safety of her computer screen.
She then opened the map of the pūʻolo, complete with their red, yellow, and green signals. After copying the identification numbers to her phone, she walked up to the pūʻolo that had been blown over and confirmed that they had numbers matching the ones on her list.
Around each of the pūʻolo were a series of wires, all placed so that they reached between the folds of the lau to the ʻike contained inside. The inside was always just out of sight, neatly tucked away. Nanea had never seen it, and in fact had no idea what it might look like. The Hui Kupuna kept their ʻike under heavy wraps, so that it would not fall into the wrong hands. After their initial placement in the greenhouses, the Hui ʻEnehanaʻIke–Nanea’s hui–took over and were responsible for appropriate management of the pūʻolo. This meant making sure that they were always functioning and if they weren’t, making whatever small change was necessary or contacting the Hui Kupuna technicians and notifying them of the issue.
When she got up close, Nanea could see that the damage wasn’t great–a few pūʻolo had been knocked on their sides, and some wires had come loose that could be easily fixed. She dutifully righted the fallen ones, and carefully tucked the wires back in where necessary.
One of the pūʻolo appeared to have some fraying on the lau itself, which she could see were yellowing with age. Jumping back to her computer for a moment, Nanea sent an email off to hui.kupuna@panakō.com and let them know the whereabouts of the aging pūʻolo. There was no danger of the pūʻolo falling apart unexpectedly, at least not for a few more weeks, but it was best to give the Hui a heads up so that they could get to it sooner rather than later. While in her inbox, Nanea also sent off an email to the greenhouse groundskeepers, letting them know about the Albizia and the lock on the door. She then conducted a manual resync of the pūʻolo map and saw the lights turn green on all of the ones that had previously fallen over.
“Sweet,” she said, drumming her hands on the table in celebration. The black tea from earlier was starting to kick in, as well as her impromptu nap, and she jumped up and down for a moment to settle her new-found energy. She pulled the ʻElele app up on her desktop and searched for Kaʻua’s name and chat box.
“Just got the pūʻolo up and running again,” she messaged. “Can you have the users retest?”
Kaʻua responded quickly. “Testing now.”
While she waited, Nanea opened her email and found the initial work order notification. She clicked on the link to take her to the order portal, where she added a comment saying that the issue had been resolved and asking them to test again.
After a minute of staring at her computer screen and waiting for something new to happen, Nanea hopped up on the table and leaned against the wall of the greenhouse, taking a deep breath. She could have gone back home, but figured she should stay out in the event that something else was going to happen. The temperature control system had begun to kick in and she breathed in the warm air, shedding her jacket and hanging it on the handlebars of her bike.
Nanea recapped the events of the night so far to herself. She couldn’t get fired again over her inability to hold a normal sleep schedule. It was her fault anyway, she had stayed up the previous night playing a video game with her cousins online–Graceful Gamble, the latest installment of the Stormy Skies series. Her cousins all lived elsewhere, so they would play games online, and they had an unhealthy knack for staying up way too late in hopes of reaching the next layer of the in-game universe. One of her cousins was even ranked on one of the worldwide forums, so they had a tendency to take these things too seriously. Groaning, Nanea sat up at the sound of a notification beep and looked at her computer.
One new message from Kaʻua: “Not working still. What fix did you do?”
“Some of the pūʻolo were knocked over in the greenhouse. I set them up and reset the wires in them,” she responded, shaking her head in frustration. She thought for a moment about what else might be causing the issue. “Maybe there’s something wrong along the cable path?”
If there was something wrong with the cables–which funneled data between the different islands–she would have to stay out in the cold for much longer than she had wanted, and she would need to travel farther than she could easily bike. She sighed and looked back at her computer. There was another new message.
“Something might be wrong with the cables. User is able to see the information, but now the page is taking an extra-long time to load.”
“And it’s not a local issue?” Nanea asked.
“No, it looks like everything is slow now. Can you check?”
“Send me an ID.”
“Same user. 698237.”
“Checking.”
Nanea opened up the logs from the deployed service and looked for the user ID. There were a few Not Found error messages, but they didn’t follow a clear pattern.
“Are you at the greenhouses?” Kaʻua asked. “Can you take a car and go check the cable station?”
“Damn,” Nanea whispered to herself. Since she was the only one out and about already, she would have to check out the cable station herself.
“Will do,” she responded on ʻElele.
Nanea packed up her things and turned the light out at the greenhouse, making sure to close the door behind her as she left. Hopefully the handle alone would hold until the groundskeepers could swing by. She walked out from between them, noticing that the sky was beginning to lighten. Once out of the greenhouse area, she jumped on her bike and rode toward the main offices. If the issue wasn’t fixed before the panakō was officially opened, or before her meeting with Maʻa at 8, there would be hell to pay. Especially since she had wasted all of that valuable time falling asleep on the job earlier.
“Hey, Keoki,” Nanea said, pedaling back up to the security office. “Can I get into the garage? I need to take a car out to go and check the Puʻuloa cable station. Something might be up with one of the cables.”
“Oh, sure. Let me walk you over.”
Together, they walked over to the security garage, where work vehicles and other large machinery were housed for easy access by those in the building. There were a few cars stored for cases like this–when office members needed to travel at unexpected times to a location quickly. Nanea parked her bike at the far end of the garage, jamming it behind the bike rack itself in hopes that this would deter any opportunistic thieves. She hadn’t brought her locks, since she didn’t realize she would be driving out from the office that evening, so she crossed her fingers and silently hoped that her bike would be okay. She then jogged to keep up with Keoki as he pointed out the vehicle that she could use. Once Nanea’s ID number was logged into the borrowing system, Keoki handed over the keys and she jumped in.
“You’ve got it for 24 hours,” Keoki said in a surprisingly grave voice through the car’s open window. “After that, we’ll start looking for you.” He then winked at her and slapped the side of the car, smiling.
“I’ll bring it back on time,” Nanea reassured him as he laughed. She quickly took stock of the car’s interior before carefully navigating it out of the garage and off the property.
Nanea drove away from the office building and out toward a cluster of short apartments in the distance. The clock on the dashboard read 6:23 AM, immediately triggering a sour taste at the back of her throat. She had only about an hour and a half to rectify this issue or she was pretty sure she’d be out of a job. She put a little more weight on the gas pedal.
Some twenty minutes later, Nanea pulled up to a short, concrete building that was situated a hundred yards off the water. There was a gravel clearing just to the right, with a truck parked there. Nanea pulled up next to it before brushing herself off and heading up to the small building. The scent of the ocean spray hit her nose with force, and she breathed in deeply, wondering when the last time was that she actually went to the beach. She had spent the last few weekends mostly asleep, catching up on her rest after some busier days at work and some unexpectedly late nights on the computer. Her hair wrapped itself around her face and neck and she had to grab it and hold it down so she could see where she was going. The makani here was stronger than near the offices or her apartment.
She walked up to a large metal door and rapped her knuckles forcefully against it. The hinges looked like they had been recently replaced, a sharp contrast to the mix of brown dirt and white sand crawling up the bottom half of the door itself. She could hear movement on the other side, and then it swung open to reveal an older aunty dressed in a pair of jeans and a baggy sweater.
“Are you here from the main offices?” She asked.
“Yes,” Nanea responded. “We’ve had some complaints about slowness on the website, and I’m supposed to come down and check it out.”
“I’m Benny, come on in,” she gestured toward the back room and left the doorway open for Nanea to enter. She pulled a thick rain jacket off the back of a chair and swung it on over her shoulders, adding a shh noise to accompany her heavy footsteps as she moved around in the office.
Nanea followed Benny inside, where she was met with walls of monitors and various devices covered in an array of buttons.
Benny pointed to a red blinking light. “That one came on just a few minutes ago, right after the makani picked up around here. I called the main office to let them know, but couldn’t get a call through. Good timing that you came now anyway. We can go together and check out what’s going on out there.” She grabbed a flashlight that was hanging on the wall and led them out of the building.
“Sounds good,” Nanea muttered in response, pulling her rain jacket tightly around her.
Benny led Nanea out of the station and away from the beach, following a small gravel path into the surrounding forest. Quickly, they were enveloped into the surrounding greenery.
Nanea had never been out to a cable station before–in fact, she had missed that day of orientation when she first started at the panakō. But she had heard about the cable line stewards, those like Benny who usually descended from generations of ʻohana living out near the cable stations, long-term custodians of the ‘āina and, in turn, the cable lines that ran through them, enabling communication across the islands.
As they walked, Nanea noticed Benny’s flashlight alight on the pāpōhaku, about a foot tall, running parallel to their walking path. She knew the cables were stored inside, and began to lift her feet a little higher and set them down a little softer as she continued walking. Lining either side of the pā was an ongoing procession of ti plants, both juvenile and adult. The adultti had some of the broadest, largest lau that Nanea had ever seen.
“I’ve never actually visited the pā before,” she said out loud. “Is this where they gather lāʻī to make the pūʻolo?” she asked.
“Yes,” Benny responded, glancing to see where Nanea was pointing. “Here and in other places as well. Many of these ti have been growing for decades now.” She paused for a moment. “I think about all the work you guys do, you know, up in those offices, and I think that all of that work actually starts from right here, in the ground, all covered in the earth and the pōhaku and the ti. Most people don’t even know it, but it all starts right here.”
Nanea nodded, taking the information in. She was beginning to think about all the long nights she had spent crouched over her computer trying to get a program working again. Her scuffed up desktop and hand-me-down office chair were a far cry from the soil and vegetation flourishing beneath her shoes at the moment.
“Ah,” Benny sighed. “Looks like something fell.” She motioned up ahead.
“Oh no,” Nanea gasped.
Together, they walked up to the damaged section where the branch had fallen. The ti were disheveled and a few had actually broken in half. A few pōhaku from the upper layer of the pā had toppled over, and Nanea caught a glimpse of something dark green underneath.
“It's not too bad,” said Benny, quelling Nanea’s worries that she would have to report bad news to her boss in nearly an hour. “Sometimes this happens.”
She lifted the branch up, gesturing to Nanea to give her a hand. Together, they lifted it up and over, carefully laying it on the ground parallel to the pā. Then, Benny placed the fallen pōhaku back into their respective places, covering up the dark green cable lying underneath.
“I’ll contact the Hui about this when I get back,” she said. “They’ll send someone to double check everything.”
“Hopefully everything is working now,” Nanea wondered aloud.
“I guess we’ll have to head back and see.” Benny clapped her hands together and began walking back along the pathway. In due time, they made it back to the station house, where Benny confirmed that everything was running smoothly once again.
Nanea breathed a sigh of relief. “Mahalo for all your help,” she said as she left the station, waving goodbye.
Benny waved back. “Just give me a call if there’s anything else you need.”
Once in the warmth of the car, Nanea opened her laptop and sent another message to Kaʻua, letting him know that the cable issue had been rectified, noting the time on the dashboard clock as 7:33 AM. She waited a few minutes for Kaʻua to respond saying that everything looked okay from the tester's side, and then drove back to the main office, already rehearsing an apology speech in her head for Maʻa. By the time she got back to the office, Keoki had already switched shifts with a new security guard, so Nanea left the keys with the new officer before walking over to the main office building. She continued running through a half-hearted apology speech in her head as she entered through the main lobby.
By the time she arrived at her desk, she could see Maʻa waiting in his office, drinking his morning coffee. He looked up expectantly as she walked in through the doorway.
“All good?” He asked.
“Yup,” Nanea nodded, wringing her hands together nervously. He had probably already been filled in by Kaʻua. “Sorry about falling asleep again,” she apologized, trying to suppress a yawn. The black tea and the cool night air were wearing off, and the silence of the office was starting to lull her into a state of drowsiness. So much for her well-rehearsed speech.
Maʻa sighed. “I heard that you ran all over town fixing the problem. Mahalo for that. Just—try not to let it happen again, okay?” He responded.
“You got it,” she said, running her fingers nervously along the bottom of her jacket, still unsure whether she should be bracing herself for a verbal tirade.
He looked at her for a moment. “Alright, take the day off. You’ve had a long night. See you tomorrow,” he nodded.
Nanea breathed a sigh of relief. Maʻa was usually more bark than he was bite, and he generally didn’t mind her lack of precise timeliness as long as her work was up to par. “Will do, mahalo, see you tomorrow,” she said as she walked out of his office.
Nanea retrieved her bike from the security garage and began riding back to her apartment. The cold air of the night before had all but faded, and by the time she got home, she was sweating and feeling uncomfortably hot in her rain jacket. She jumped into the shower to rinse off the sweat and random pieces of dirt she had accumulated, thinking about the cable lines that she had walked along earlier, imagining the dirt on her ankles as bits and pieces of the machinery used to build the pūʻolo transmission lines or her Internet router. Once out of the shower, Nanea stood and watched the rays of light streaming in through the open windows before slinking over to her bed, laying down and slowly warming up in the sun-soaked sheets. The crinkle of an event flyer was the only sound emitted as her mind drifted off into thoughts of knotted and twisted roots erupting from the electrical socket in her wall, running the length of her Ethernet cord and then merging and solidifying with a pile of dirt and moss at the base of her desktop monitor.
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Every week for most of the last 30 years, I have volunteered as an English language partner. Since 2024, I’ve treasured my time with two people who’ve learned English as a foreign language. I get to spend time with people who have weirdly requested that I correct their pronunciation and grammar. It’s a pleasantly zen task: listening carefully then offering precise feedback about a language I love. In return, I’ve enjoyed learning their stories from Chile and Taiwan/Germany/hiking world-wide.
source: Extraordinary Birder with Christian Cooper audio: Eels, "I Like Birds" length: 2:31 download: 306MB on MediaFire summary: Christian Cooper likes birds.
source: Hook (1991) audio: Hans Zimmer, "Drink Up Me Hearties" length: 4:34 download: 549MB on MediaFire summary: What's lost can be found…in Neverland.
I watched the whole thing, start to finish, and I thought it was good. Not as good as Paris (2024) or Pyeongchang (2018), but good. Both A. and L., who watched it with me, were kind of freaked out by the large-head dancers of Puccini, Rossini, and Verdi, but they were actually one of my favorite parts of that section. The performance by Andrea Bocelli was enjoyable, but at the same time felt kind of stuck in. The multi-site Parade of Nations struck me as a good idea, because athletes not being able to march in the parade because they were up on the mountain has long been a problem for the Winter Games — I hope future host cities make this into a tradition. I got a laugh out of the DJ switching over to The Barber of Seville for the Italian team to walk in!
I also have to give NBC a big thumbs-down for one of their choices during the Parade of Nations: There were only about half a dozen nations that NBC chose not to show in the streaming version of the ceremony (there might have been more skipped over in the broadcast version), and they picked Mongolia for one of them?! WTAF! Mongolia is always one of the best-dressed teams and I think skipping them was a terrible idea!
And while we're on the subject of team uniforms: I will be so, so, so, SO glad when Team USA lets someone other than Ralph Lauren design their uniforms! (And just in case anyone from Team USA is reading this: By "someone other than Ralph Lauren," I don't mean Tommy Hilfiger. I mean someone actually different.)
ETA: I just noticed that the article I linked above had the Mongolian uniforms from the Paris Games. You can see their current (equally awesome, if not more so) uniforms here.
Hazelthorn, the eponymous estate of C. G. Drews’s latest novel, is a vine-bound gothic pile. It features in a novel that tackles class and the consequences of wealth accumulation. But, when you dig deep enough, loneliness and queer yearning are at the roots of both.
The novel’s protagonist, Evander, has been deceived into believing he has been sick for seven years, and regurgitates the narrative his “caretaker”—Byron—has given him: scion of the estate Laurie Lennox-Hall tried to dissect him with a shovel, and because of it, Evander is a homebody constantly under the scalpel and receiving medicine. Despite his “permanent injury,” Evander longs for Laurie’s “cornflower blue eyes and the beautiful shape of his wretched mouth,” a key tension asserted throughout the story (p. 10).
But in fact, Laurie—“this family’s bad apple, the academically defective and offensively queer Lennox-Hall who runs their mouth”—once fed the Hazelthorn garden his blood and wished for a friend, and Evander appeared. This warped creation metaphor isn’t lost on Drews: through the breath of life (in this case, blood), a man springs from the dirt. In fact, near the end of the novel, this beautiful line addresses the relationship of Laurie with Evander: “God was stronger than me when he made Adam and didn’t fall in love with him” (p. 345). Another similarity with God: Laurie hides the truth from Evander, and the only way for Evander to learn he’s been deceived is for Byron Lennox-Hall to die.
When Byron Lennox-Hall suffers a poison-induced death-seizure, then, Evander will learn the truth. The path to these revelations begins when a tall woman enters Evander’s room. She has gaudy taste: leopard-print heels, red pants, and “overstated and lavish” jewelry—including ruby bracelets and earrings. But most interesting are her “white saber teeth” (p. 75). Oleander Lennox-Hall’s condescending attitude matches her fashion sense. When she asks a non-verbal Evander if he speaks, she says each word slowly, like he’s a simpleton. When he doesn’t answer, she grabs his jaw and inspects him. She says the prettiness of his eyes is “wasted on a boy,” calls his hair a “ghastly mop,” and, very obviously, thinks she has inherited all the money and property left to Evander in Byron’s will (p. 77). This introduction characterizes Oleander and the remaining Lennox-Halls perfectly—conniving, judgmental, and greedy. It mirrors the relationship the Lennox-Halls have with the garden as well, feeding it corpses for blood rubies. They all see Byron’s death as an opportunity to enrich themselves—and Evander as an obstacle.
The Lennox-Halls, save for Laurie, view all people as resources to further enrich themselves. In one scene, Evander follows Oleander’s son, Bane, and her assistant, Jessica, into the garden. As you might have guessed, Bane murders Jessica and buries her to make rubies (p. 189). In another, Laurie’s aunt Azalea tries to seduce Evander in order to gain access to the resources left to him in Byron’s will (p. 221). Eventually, we find out that Byron himself has been fed by the other Lennox-Halls to the very garden he abused, to make more rubies. Even the lawyer and executor of the will is greedy, lying about the will to misdirect the whole family and then cutting a deal with them to take a “clipping” of the garden to start his own Hazelthorn elsewhere. Of course, this clipping is a part of Evander.
In contrast, Laurie thinks the garden is right to try and kill the Lennox-Halls: “The garden fucking hates Lennox-Halls, and why shouldn’t it? … The garden wasn’t like that until they started feeding it blood. They made it a monster. So I guess it gets revenge when it can … Good for it, quite frankly” (p. 255). Evander’s existence is Laurie’s fault: He fed the garden his own blood to get a friend, rather than feeding it a victim for riches. In fact, Laurie is so different from the other Lennox-Halls that his family decides to kill him (p. 316).
The wedge Drews drives between Laurie and his relatives, of course, is meant to endear him to us. And it works, in the sense that Laurie’s snarky behavior is preferable to that of unrepentant murderers. Laurie’s beauty (described in sometimes derisive detail, and ad nauseam, by Evander in the novel) is seemingly “balanced” by his wrist disability, inflicted by Byron. One scene features Evander sneaking into Laurie’s room and spying on him as he tends to his arm: “This is a moment so raw and skeletal it feels wrong to see” (p. 112). “He would core him like a pear and throw away the soft, rotted skin until he saw him as he really is: horrible and beautiful and real” (p. 114). This is our first taste of Laurie beneath his moody teenage mask, and it’s braided with Evander’s conflicting desire and detestation for him. (This is further fueled, of course, by Evander’s years of loneliness.)
Evander vicariously derives romantic experiences from “mildewy books” where “the lord marries a lady without much variation”; but he desires variation, frequently fantasizing about kissing boys, Laurie usually being the boy in question (p. 153). His reclusiveness feeds his Laurie obsession, the pages are absolutely bursting with sensual thoughts of Laurie, but one directly relates to Evander’s hermitism. “Not that Evander would kiss someone like that. That would be akin to swallowing poison and relishing the taste. He can picture himself kissing girls, and he likes that idea, so his addiction to Laurie must be born of starvation, of deprivation, of memories from a ruined childhood friendship that he can’t quite get over” (p. 65).
Evander’s yearning seems unrequited through most of the novel, but near the end we discover Laurie’s snark is a shield to hide his affections for Evander. Laurie is “shitty” towards him because he needs Evander to hate him, but he eventually admits: “I’d split my bones, I’d open my throat, I’d do anything to be near you and have even one second with my mouth against yours” (p. 283). Once they’ve established mutual desire, these boys are ready to burn the world down for each other. In Evander’s case, it’s closer to a bloodbath.
Evander poisons the Lennox-Halls at a wake and the garden comes to life, murdering many of them, including the lawyer. After this scarlet ceremony, Laurie and Evander (now calling himself Hazelthorn) remain in the garden, where all they do is kiss. This romance at the core of the novel is its resolution, in which the “odd” Lennox-Hall remains with the garden because he is less greedy, less murderous, while the others scatter into the wind, never to see their inheritance.
While all of this was enjoyable, ultimately I found the prose to be too submerged in a stream of consciousness style. It leans on the idea of a “good” rich person pursuing better communion with the earth, meshing queerness and wealth critique within the gothic. Ultimately, it neatly combines a critique of the rich themselves with one of the exploitation inherent to gaining massive wealth.
Hi everyone! Still here, still super busy, but I saw an item in the news today that I had to jump on and share with you: The most humorous (potential) Olympic doping scandal ever!
The event: Ski jumping.
The rule: In order to prevent ski jumpers from going full flying squirrel with their suits, they undergo a 3D body scan, which determines the dimensions (and hence the surface area) of their suit.
The ruling: WADA (the World Anti-Doping Agency) has said they have no definitive evidence that this has ever been done, and in fact they aren't even sure that this would fall under the definition of doping, but they do say they'll be looking into it.
Wanted y’all to hear it from me: CROWNWORLD (book 3 of the Moonstorm trilogy) is canceled. I will not be completing the book (the trilogy). I’m very sorry to readers who were hoping for the conclusion.
This was a mutually agreed, amicable decision between the primary/US publisher (Delacorte), the UK publisher (Rebellion Publishing - Solaris Books), and myself.
Between sales and publishing realities (MOONSTORM sold poorly and its prospects are unlikely to improve for political reasons you can guess), this was a rare situation where this benefits both publishers and myself. I could not announce the cancellation earlier for legal/contract reasons, and can't "simply" release the partial draft of CROWNWORLD for same.
I didn’t plan on MOONSTORM being a market failure. But novel-writing is a career with baked-in instability and career risk. I knew that going in.
Abbreviated version of what happened on my end: I have 66,000 words of a near-finished draft that I don’t plan on resuming. The breaking point was when I had a concussion in March 2025.
You might ask why I don’t “just” yeet the last 10,000 words to have a book for release to readers even if the print publishers are no longer interested in publishing it. After illness and family crises, I’m exhausted. More than one person close to me nearly died; I set writing aside for months to do caretaking. I have peripheral neuropathy (among other things); my hands and feet might recover, or they might get worse and curtail my ability to do the things that bring me joy.
Both my publishers extended incredible grace and kindness to me during this period. This is not on them. The trilogy existence failure is on me.
I’m moving on. I’ve spent the past several years writing ~three books every two years (or 1.5 books per year - releases won't line up because of production/publishing variables). This probably sounds slow/leisurely but was not sustainable with my health as unstable as it is. There would have been a breaking point down the line even if it hadn’t happened with this specific book. I'm going to spend some time on endeavors just for the joy of it.
I hope y’all have many books you’re looking forward to reading, by other writers.
Note: I’m not in financial distress at present. Please don’t worry on that account.
This is actually all of December and January, which I wrote up for my professional blog.
The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo is horror, a genre I read only rarely, but I was completely gripped by the 1930s rural setting. Leslie Bruin, a trans man and veteran nurse of World War One, now works for the Frontier Nursing Service. Sent to the tiny, isolated town of Spar Creek, he is quickly put on his guard by unfriendly townspeople and louring forest, but stays to try and help young Stevie Mattingly, a tomboyish local whom the entire town seems to want to control. The building tension is very effective, and finally explodes in dark magic and violence. Trigger warnings for off-screen sexual assault and some gory justice doled out towards the end.
The Incandescent by Emily Tesh is very excellent. It's a magic school story from a teacher's perspective, which fully demonstrates the ridiculously huge workload of a senior administrator/teacher and the difficulties of having a "human" life separate from teaching. It has great characters and deep worldbuilding, and even shows what graduate school and career paths the students might take. The solidly English middle-class point of view character Sapphire Walden, socially awkward with a doctorate in thaumaturgy, is brilliantly depicted, including her grappling with how to communicate with her students who vary in race and class. This novel read as a love letter to teachers and teaching that also showed their humanity with its mistakes and flaws.
Troubled Waters by Sharon Shinn is first in the "Elemental Blessings" series, a secondary-world fantasy with magic and personality types associated with/linked to elements or combinations thereof. The protagonist, for example, is linked mostly to water, which has a relationship to Change; in her case, she's part of major political changes. The story begins just after Zoe Ardelay's father has died. He was a political exile, and Zoe has mostly grown up in an isolated, tiny village. Darien Serlast, one of the king's advisors, arrives to bring her to the capital city, ostensibly to be the king's fifth wife. At this point, I was expecting a Marriage of Convenience, possibly with Darien. This did not happen; instead, the first of several shifts in the plot (much like changes in a river's course over time) sent Zoe off on her own to make new friends. While there is indeed a romance with Darien, eventually, it was secondary to the political plots revolving around the king, the machinations of his wives, and Zoe's discoveries about her heritage and associated magical abilities. I enjoyed the unexpected twists of the plot, but by the end felt I'd read enough of this world and did not move on to the rest of the series.
A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett is second in a series, Shadow of the Leviathan, but since my library hold on it came in first, I read out of order. As with many mystery series, there was enough background that I had no trouble reading it as a standalone. This secondary world fantasy mystery has genuinely interesting worldbuilding, mostly related to organic technology based on the flesh and blood of strange, metamorphic creatures called Leviathans who sometimes come ashore and wreak destruction. The story revolves around a research facility that works directly with these dangerous corpses and is secretly doing more than is public. Protagonists Dinios Kol and his boss, the eccentric and brilliant detective Ana Dolabra, are sent from the imperial Iudex to an outlier territory, Yarrow, whose economy is structured around organic technology and the research facility known as The Shroud. Yarrow is in the midst of negotiations with the imperial Treasury for a future entry into the Empire when one of the Treasury representatives is murdered. Colonialism and the local feudal system complicate both the plot and the investigation. If you like twists and turns, this is great. There are hints of the Pacific Rim movies (but no mecha) in the leviathans, and of famous detective pairings including Holmes and Watson and Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, the latter of which the author explicitly mentions in the afterword. (Similarities: Ana likes to stay in one places, is a gourmet of sorts, sends Kol out for information; Kol has a photographic memory and is good at picking up sex partners.)
The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett kicks off the Shadow of the Leviathan series. Kol and Ana begin the story in a backwater canton but soon travel to the imperial town that supports the great sea wall and holds back the Titans that invade in the wet season. The worldbuilding and the mystery plot are marvelously layered, and Ana's eccentricities are classic for a detective. I kept thinking, "he's putting down a clue, when is someone in this story going to pick it up?" and sometimes, I felt like the pickup took too long. This might have been on purpose, to drag out the tension. As a writer, I was definitely paying attention to the techniques the author used.
Paladin's Grace by T. Kingfisher is first in the "Saint of Steel" series, which has been recommended to me so many times by this point that I've lost count. While the story is serious and begins with an accidental massacre, the dialogue has Kingfisher's trademark whimsy, irony, and humor. When the supernatural Saint of Steel dies, its holy Paladins are bereft but still subject to a berserker rage no longer guided by the Saint. The survivors are taken in by the Temple of the White Rat and then must...survive. Paladin Stephen feels like a husk who serves the White Rat as requested and knits socks in his downtime until he accidentally saves a young woman from danger and becomes once again interested in living. Grace, a perfumer, fled an abusive marriage and has now stumbled into a murderous plot. Meanwhile, a series of mysterious deaths in the background eventually work their way forward. This was really fun, and I will read more.
Paladin's Hope by T. Kingfisher is third in the "Saint of Steel" series and features the lich-doctor (coroner) Piper, who becomes entangled with the paladin Galen and a gnole (badger-like sapient), Earstripe, who is investigating a series of very mysterious deaths. Galen still suffers the effects of when the Saint of Steel died, and is unwilling to build relationships outside of his fellow paladins; Piper works with the dead because of a psychic gift as well as other reasons that have led to him walling off his feelings. A high-stress situation helps to break down their walls, though I confess that video-game-like scenario dragged a bit for me. Also, I really wanted to learn a lot more about the gnoles and their society.
Paladin's Strength by T. Kingfisher is second in the "Saint of Steel" series but arrived third so far as my library holds were concerned; I actually finished it in February but am posting it here so it's with the other books in the series. This one might be my favorite of the series so far. Istvhan's level-headedness and emotional intelligence appeal strongly to me. Clara's strong sense of self made me like her even before the reveal of her special ability (which I guessed ahead of time). They were a well-matched couple, and a few times I actually laughed out loud at their dialogue. I also appreciated seeing different territory and some different cultures in this world. I plan to read the fourth book in this series, and more by this author.
Wrong on the Internet by selkit is a brief Murderbot (TV) story involving Sanctuary Moon fandom, Ratthi, and SecUnit. It's hilarious.
Cold Bayou by Barbara Hambly (2018) is sixteenth in the series, and I would not recommend starting here, as there are a lot of returning characters with complex relationships. Set in 1839 in southern Louisiana, the free man of color Ben, his wife Rose, his mother, his sister Dominique and her daughter, and his close friend Hannibal Sefton travel via steamboat to an isolated plantation, Cold Bayou, for a wedding.
As well as the inhabitants of the plantation (enslaved people and the mixed-race overseer and his wife), the sprawling cast includes an assortment of other family related by blood or otherwise through the complex French-Creole system of interracial relationships called plaçage or mariages de la main gauche. These involved White men contracting with mistresses of color while, often, married to White women for reasons of money or control over land rather than romance. The resulting complexities are a constant theme in this series, as Ben and his sister Olympe were freed from slavery in childhood when their mother was purchased and freed to be a placée; meanwhile, his half-sister Dominique is currently a placée, and on good terms with her partner Henri's wife, Chloe, who later has a larger role in the mystery plot.
Veryl St.-Chinian, one of two members of a family with control over a vast quantity of property, is 67 years old and has decided to marry 18 year old Ellie Trask, an illiterate Irish girl whose past is revealed to be socially dubious. Even before Ellie's rough-hewn uncle shows up with a squad of violent bravos, tempers are fraught and no-one thinks the marriage is a good idea, because of the vast family voting power it would give Ellie. Complicating matters is the inevitable murder and also a storm that floods the plantation and prevents most outside assistance for an extended period.
Hambly is one of my autobuy authors and I greatly enjoyed revisiting familiar characters as well as seeing them grapple with mystery tropes such as "detective is incapacitated and must rely on others for information" and "isolated assortment of plausible murder suspects." She's great at successively amping up the danger with plot twists that fractal out to the rest of the story, and though justice is always achieved in the end (as is required for the Mystery genre), the historical circumstances of these books can result in justice for some and not others. I highly recommend this series if you like mystery that successfully dramatizes complex social history.
I love some green veg at lunch. Commercial frozen green veg are hard as rocks and nastily overcooked. Here’s how I bulk prep fresh swiss chard for my lunches
I got the idea to write a story about several different alien planets in their last few days of existence before the apocalypse. I thought it would be interesting to explore snapshots of these alien societies in their final days. Eventually, I got the idea to connect them through some kind of psychic anomaly that brings them together in their moment of death.
1. KING Once upon a time there was a king who had a daughter that he loved very much, and when she disappeared, he called you to the throne room and requested your services. “Tell me what happened to her,” he said. It had been three days since the Crown Princess Jieqiong had last been […]
On the necropolis space station of the Tau Andromeda planetary system, the keepers of the tomb attended to the dead and the dying. They cleansed, prepared, and prayed over the bodies. They performed the last rites, paying intricate attention to the customs of each person’s native community. This was the most sacred of tasks. Carelessness or disrespect was not tolerated; just one mistake meant immediate dismissal.
It's now February. Lots happened since my last post.
Life/family
Fought my bank for more than a month and got my money back (their app disappeared some of my money through a "Piggy Bank" feature that disappeared), so now I have book funds! But this has been a background stressor for a bit because I hate having to continuously follow-up with the bank to find out the status of my money. It's not a huge amount, but it's still RM1000+ and that can feed me for a whole month (more if I am frugal)! ( The not so good )
Games
I caught up with the archon quest in Genshin Impact. It's enjoyable enough but I'm definitely not really feeling the magic of early Genshin anymore. Dottore was fun though. 10/10 will get kidnapped again.
I also started playing Arknights Endfield and I've been utterly consumed by it. The factory gameplay is incredibly fun! I didn't even know I'd enjoy this factory style game (but I do have a friend who immediately pinged me as someone who would enjoy this type of game a lot). I'm advancing the main story quest just to unlock more factory things (new mining spots, new outposts, etc.). And I love that you can make the whole map into a tower defense (or is it tower offense if you put weapons everywhere? XD). I know this gameplay is very polarizing, but those I know who like it really, really like it.
I'm also still playing Where Winds Meet but I really cannot main two games. I'll prob just switch between these two in terms of time investment and energy level. This game takes more time and energy because it's hard to just stop halfway to attend to my mother.
Other things
Huffing a cat is the key to getting rid of excess stress (be careful of the cat's paws when they get annoyed though!). Seriously, having a cat has been great. I can sit with her when I'm feeling frustrated, stressed, worried, etc.
I'm visiting Vietnam for the first time in March. Very excited to see my housemate again! And excited to try all the foods, see the sights, take in the vibes and all that! Will be staying with her family, so I'm gonna start collecting a bunch of gifts to give when I see them. Also time to start learning Vietnamese beyond Vietnamese food names and greetings XD;;
Which reader among us hasn’t fantasised about owning a little bookshop of their own, with perhaps a built-in cafe to boot? Even the vision it conjures up in our mind’s eye oozes all the cozy comfort we could wish to bottle for our forever personal use. But anyone who has actually worked in or owned their own place will tell you that, while cozy moments aren’t exactly thin on the ground, the stress factor is far more than the daydream will allow us to believe.
However, this reality, as valid as it is, is not usually something that is explored in a novel that claims to be cozy, at least not with any real stakes. And yet that’s exactly the direction in which Travis Baldree takes Brigands & Breadknives, technically the third book in the Legends & Lattes universe, but the second in terms of chronology, if Bookshops & Bonedust (2023) is considered as “ground zero.”
“It seems like relaxing work,” famed ancient immortal Elven warrior Astryx says, making a seemingly casual observation to her semi-accidental drunken stowaway, Fern. “Easy. Calming. Not the sort of thing to drive anyone to drink.” In response, an indignant Fern—the foul-mouthed, kind-hearted rattkin bookseller we met in Bookshops & Bonedust—sputters:
”I have spent my life convincing people to buy blocks of paper with marks on them for more money than they want to part with. I fill a room with them and pray to the Eight that I filled it with the right ones, and that I can get them into the right hands, and I never get enough of that right. It’s like tossing fistfuls of fucking silver up a hill and hoping enough of it rolls back down that I have more silver to throw. I bet on odds that any self-respecting dice player would run screaming from, and half the time, I lie awake wondering whether I’ll be able to keep at it for another week, or a month, or a year.
[…] “I only do it, because I’m stupid enough to think it’s important.”
“So it’s important. Then why did you run from it?”
“I … no, I mean I … loved … it.”
This, in a nutshell, is the existential struggle at the core of this novel. It puts centre stage not Viv, the orc mercenary and star of Legends & Lattes (2022), but Fern herself. When we meet her again, she is, along with her pet gryphet Potroast and their carriage driver, being rescued from a pescadine by Astryx One-Ear, the legendary Blademistress and Oathmaiden. The immortal elf makes easy work of the creature, retrieves the carriage’s horses, and melts away before Fern can so much as thank her. The rattkin, we find out, is en route to a new life in the city of Thune, where her old friend Viv has been living a happy, domestic existence running her own coffee shop since hanging up her sword. The property next to Legends & Lattes awaits. (“A new start. A new bookshop. The embers of an old friendship to fan. Perhaps even something she might one day call family.”)
Amidst the excitement and nerves this naturally engenders, a careful reader will sense immediate doubts, a certain unease, flowing underneath. Fern seems aware of this, to an extent—she is desperate to find comforting, logical explanations (which she does), from nerves to hunger to the fatigue of a long journey and the butterflies of a new start; but whether they reassure her longer than a few breaths is another matter. Initially engrossed in getting the space in shape for the opening, and then in getting the various systems of a working store set up, it is much easier for her to keep kicking these increasingly gnawing worries into the next day.
But then, when everything settles into an easy rhythm—the bookshop is flourishing and she can tell that it belongs in the building, the neighbourhood, the city—she can no longer ignore the “hollowed-out feeling of dissatisfaction that had steadily eroded her center for the past few years.” Nothing seems to matter.
“I wasn’t supposed to feel this way,” she confides in the steady hob carpenter Cal, whom the readers of this series already know and love. “Who says?” he challenges. He listens to her detail the emptiness she feels, the nagging feeling that somehow, somewhere, she took a wrong turn, without knowing what it was or when—and, more importantly, having no clue about the solution—and tells her to open up to Viv. After all, Viv—who has been through a similar dilemma in her previous warrior life—would understand better than anyone how it feels to not belong in an old life, and what it means to figure out what a new one could look like. But Fern had thought that a change of scene, an old friend, and new acquaintances would be akin to “a fresh breeze in a stale room”: “I leaned on the kindness of others to get here, it didn’t fix what I wanted fixed, and now I’m ungrateful to boot.” How can she face her old friend while wrestling this grief and guilt, how can she admit she wants something more, something different, but has no idea what that could be?
A drunk Fern, armed with her cloak and a battered leather satchel filled with her parchment, quills, and current reads that used to belong to an old friend (just in case), sets out, with a book as an apology, to cross the few yards between her bookshop and Viv’s coffeeshop before deciding that a walk first might clear her head. Said walk leads her to a cart parked under a streetlamp, and to Astryx One-Ear tying up the tarpaulin before disappearing into another alley. Fern wonders whether bumping into a legend twice is coincidence, or “maybe a sign.” At this point, she has her bearings and could easily trace her footsteps back to Viv’s. But something has her moving to hide under the tarpaulin—and then, even as she debates the mad decision and decides whether to get out, Astryx comes back, and Fern’s stuck waiting. Until she falls asleep, and the rest of the decision is made for her.
This passivity, it seems to me, is a deliberate move by Baldree: Fern, at this point, is scared to make any decision, even though she knows she must, for fear that it will be the “wrong” one—and also for fear that she doesn’t actually know what she wants. Her choice here becomes another almost-unconscious means of letting someone else make a decision for her, so that she won’t be responsible. In this context, letting her guard down and falling asleep almost becomes a challenge to the universe.
It turns out that Astryx is travelling with a bounty in tow (an enigmatic red-haired chaos goblin named Zyll) who has to be delivered to the city of Amberlin halfway across the Territory. Fern understands a handful of goblin swearwords, and manages to convince Astryx that she’d be useful as a translator—at least until they reach the next big city, where Fern can buy passage back to Thune. But a series of incidents later, and our intrepid bookseller is accompanying the duo (with their two sentient weapons, known as Elder Blades, and the best horse ever) to their final destination.
Now, I understand the argument levelled at Legends & Lattes: famously, about “high fantasy and low stakes,” about its lack of forward narrative momentum (though it was a story I still thoroughly enjoyed, I might add). But I’d also argue that its prequel, Bookshops & Bonedust, actually both set the stage and paved the way for Brigands & Breadknives. It existed between the cozy (what’s more comforting than books and bookshops and the restorative and transformative magic of reading?), the adventurous (a dangerous necromancer with powers of osseoscription), and the existential (a lack of mobility through injury, suddenly thrust upon Viv in her fighting prime and necessitating compulsory rest). The new novel takes this even further by not only eschewing the comforting elements, but also raising the question of what happens when those once cherished elements—that comfortable, cozy life—start to feel stifling. What happens when you can recognise the worthiness of your old purpose and even believe in its importance, but it’s not enough anymore? Where does that leave you, who even are you without this thing you’ve done for a quarter of a century?
In the prequel, by helping Viv discover parts of herself she never knew existed, and want things she never knew she wanted, Fern rediscovered her life’s purpose, why she did what she does, rekindled a dream inherited from her long-gone father. But what if that was not a permanent fix, just a small piece of something bigger?
“It’s like I can see what I loved—still love?—about it, but it’s behind thick windowpane. I can’t feel it or smell it or taste it, and I don’t know that I’ll ever be on the other side of that glass again.”
Fern was a wonderful supporting character in Bookshops & Bonedust; here she makes an equally sympathetic protagonist. Baldree supplies her with her own supporting troops, each a capable, well-fleshed out character on their own, and—in this out-and-out adventure story with lots of swordfights, chases (on account of Zyll’s considerable bounty), and yes, blood—we get to traverse much more of the diverse Territory with them than in the other books, in which we were only in Thune and Murk, respectively. Fern’s dynamic with Astryx is different from hers and Viv’s, but equally compelling, and watching the two rub off on each other for the better—despite the often frustrating and frictional nature of their at-odds conversations—was all kinds of lovely.
There was even a surprising, but welcome, narrative side thread involving Astryx—about heroes and legends, responsibilities and covenants, and how stories can be shaped and reshaped. Fern, her own life still in shambles, helps the ancient warrior come to the realisation that, after a thousand years of doing the same thing, she is allowed to deviate from what she has always done, without anything falling apart. Later, Fern wonders—a little guiltily but not for long—whether she’s responsible for turning Astryx into less of a legend but more of herself.
The book manages the balance between Fern’s external and internal battles well, and as a reader we get to live the journey with her, not knowing until she does what the ending is going to be. At one point early on, Fern notices a “painful tearing in the very center of herself, like a sapling being slowly peeled apart down the middle [...] an aching growing tension that would either snap back together and resolve itself, or split forever into something unrecognisable.” She carries this split in her through the course of their journey, trying to shine light on what it might be telling her, and getting no closer to an answer even as Amberlin approaches: “I feel a dreadful anticipation, like unbelievable possibilities lie ahead, if only I say the precise magic word required [...] but I don’t trust myself to recognise it.”
The answer when it arrives isn’t perfect or permanent, nor is it fully voiced, but it makes sense for Fern, just as it must for many others.
“Does anyone [even] want a ‘cozy’ story about the grief of disappointing your friends, and the agony of saying ‘no’?” the author asks in his acknowledgements. He describes how much longer this book took to wring out of him than anticipated. “Would readers be okay with Viv taking a backseat to Fern for the story I wanted to tell?” Baldree explains that, while he didn’t have the answers to his anxious doubts, he also didn’t want to write the same story over and over. He didn’t want to pretend that fantasy small-business ownership is the answer to all of life’s woes. The solutions for every challenge are not the same for everyone, nor are they neatly resolved (not to mention, they don’t always stay resolved), and he wanted to reflect that.
Brigands & Breadknives is a brave book to write, a cozy fantasy novel that acknowledges the hard, the messy, the jagged, and the wrenching bittersweet, while simultaneously advocating for hope and belief in an essential goodness. It’s a book that’s all the stronger, more beautiful, and more emotionally resonant for its messiness and vulnerability, and nobody embodies this complexity better than Fern.
“Always remember, although the unimaginative see life as a thread stretched from one point to another, birth to death, a life truly lived is a glorious tangle. One is never lost. And if one is lucky, one is never found, either.”
BugsAppleLoves.com summarizes 17 long-standing bugs in the Apple computing ecosystem, and calculates entirely bogus yet entertaining cost estimates for the time we Apple users waste -- while trying to select text on an iPhone or trying to maintain window sizing in macOS' Finder.
(At least it confirmed the iPhone text selection issues was not just me).
Festivids went live on Saturday! I have still not watched most of the vids because I was at an Alex Pretti memorial bike ride on Saturday and then at some transit activist events on Sunday and I am trying to also do an Escapade premiere, but what I have watched has been great. And I got a great gift vid!
[VID] Find Your People (9 words) by Anonymous Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Star Trek: Prodigy Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Gwyndala (Star Trek), Jankom Pog, Dal R'el, Zero (Star Trek), Rok-Tahk, Murf (Star Trek), Hologram Janeway (Star Trek) Additional Tags: Crew as Family, Fanvids Summary: You can't go it alone, everybody needs help
Really there can never be enough Star Trek: Prodigy vids as far as I'm concerned, and this one is full of great character moments and team/found family feels.
I myself made two Festivids this year, which means I'm already at 100% above my vid production for 2025, so I am very happy about that.
In the United States, immigrants and their loved ones and communities have been reckoning with intensified anti-immigrant operations for months. Every day, people are abducted, and many of those being targeted live in hiding, supported by their neighbors.
Strange Horizons stands with immigrants in the US facing these conditions. At this time, we have the opportunity to lend our strength as a global community to a strategy that organizers in impacted areas have been using: putting pressure on hotels not to provide rooms for the agents, making their operations that much more difficult to enact.
This year, Worldcon will be hosted in Los Angeles, California, and the hotels they have partnered with are two major providers of accommodations for anti-immigrant operations: Hilton and Marriott. We all can help by contacting the hotels with our concerns, and/or by contacting Worldcon 2026 organizers about their choice of hotel partners. The risk of losing the revenue from convention attendees has the potential to sway the hotel chains' decision makers at the top.
Adrian Tchaikovsky knows what he’s doing. In his Clarke-awarded Children of Time (2015), he gave us the arachnophobe’s nightmare, a race of spiders ultra-evolved to sentience thanks to a terraforming/uplifting project that goes wrong and focusses on the wrong species. Spiderlight returns, at least in part, to this scenario: It begins with a brood of sentient spiders racing to protect their Mother from an invasion by humans. But Tchaikovsky is returning to a favourite theme only to shift the conversation along in a number of different directions.
His first success came with the Shadows of the Apt series (2008-14), fantasy rather than SF, which—so his publisher’s website tells us—had its roots in his university involvement with a role-playing game (Bugworld) that then drew him to think about translating insectoid characteristics into human societies. Similarly, within a few pages of Spiderlight, it is clear that this is not only a fantasy novel with the obligatory Dark Lord, but that it is in part a generic Quest role-playing game spin-off.
Among the characters are Lief, a seedy sneak thief; Penthos, a pompous wizard; Harathes, a warrior who can actually speak sentences like “It will be an epic journey … [a] worthy quest, through monsters and the servants of the Dark one, past evil forests, marshes, and jagged rocks” and mean them; and Cyrene, an archer driven to her part in the quest by some anger or guilt. And yes, her anger is to do with the fact that people like Harathes think that one sexual encounter means exclusive possession and “just because I take up a bow and fight, and don’t just sit in a kitchen with my hair bundled up … I have to be giving it away.” Heading this bunch of misfits is Dion, brought up in the service of the Light and in the possession of a magical talisman called the Disc of Armes, but already discovering uneasily that Light and Dark are not necessarily the same as Good and Evil.
But this is all, to repeat a phrase I have already used twice, “in part.” Tchaikovsky might be back on familiar ground, but he is doing something more than giving his growing range of fans something that they have had already.
There is, of course, a prophecy, and like all prophecies it is carefully ambiguous. In this case, the Dark Lord Darvezian will be defeated by means of a spider’s tooth and his realm entered by means of a “spider’s path,” which turns out to be not so much a map as the shared knowledge of the ways and byways into his domain. This knowledge the Spider-mother imparts into one of her brood, Nth, who Penthos transforms into (more or less) human shape. And so the quest is joined by the semi-monstrous Enth, who has to discover by himself such complications as individuality (what is a simple designation of his status as a unit within a mass becomes a name), the difficulties of handling only two legs, the incomprehensible nature of human communication, and the attractions (or otherwise) of beer. Much of the story is seen from the point of view of Enth, although each main character is given their own share of viewpoint.
There are, in the great tradition of RPG fantasy quests, the obligatory borrowings from Tolkien. If The Lord of the Rings (1954-5) has its Dark Lord’s nemesis, Aragorn the Ranger, Dion’s team encounter Lothern, a “Ranger of Elwer” with a Darkness-detecting lodestone which works perfectly. (The only snag being Lothern’s inability to understand exactly why the lodestone is detecting evil wherever they go with their Darkness-spawned human/spider hybrid constantly at their side!) There are also Doomslayers, who perform some of the functions of Sauron’s Nazgûl. And later, the team enters the realm of the Dark Lord by means of a realm ruled by a spider matriarch, calling up memories of Shelob. But a section entitled “The Third Rule of Arachnophobics” nods to a very different branch of the fantastic, when it becomes clear that Enth’s ability to fight and kill must be drawn upon only if it can be certain that he would fight for his human companions rather than against them. The mage Penthos confirms the consensus—Enth must be bound by magical commands not to harm them, not to harm anyone else unless defending itself or ordered to, and to obey orders. Any reader of classic science fiction will here recognise, as Tchaikovsky is nudging them to do, something very like Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and especially the loopholes and contradictions which arise from such “laws.”
Spiderlight is, then, certainly an entertaining romp in which Tchaikovsky has enormous fun with the clichés of the modes both he and his readers enjoy at face value. In doing so, he cleverly exploits his own gift for turning deeply researched zoology into vivid and plausible world-building. There is, in particular, some clever characterisation with Penthos’s hopeless crush on Dion, and the equally hopeless dimwit hero Harathes. But it is not long before Tchaikovsky turns the quest into an interrogation of the nature of “Dark” and “Light.” This is done through Lief who, as the standard character of the “thief,” is allowed a bit of ethical ambiguity anyway. In the “uncertain territory” of Shogg’s Ford, he is ordered to mind Enth and confesses to him in the bar that his recruitment to Dion’s band was as much due to being offered that or “the mines,” after being caught temple-robbing, as to any moral qualms about Dervezian’s ruthlessness. Equally, we learn about the “Holy City” of Armesion, to which Dion wants to return to seek the blessing of the Potentate for their mission, from Penthos, himself a member of a profession viewed with suspicion by the Righteous: “Being at the heart of the Light, they are remarkably lax at checking for corruption. It’s amazing what you can get away with … Or so I’ve heard.” As Lief remarks shortly afterwards, “There’s a lot of people who make a good living there satisfying needs that the holy and the laudable aren’t supposed to have.” Long before our band enters the realm of the Dark Lord and learns some interesting truths about him, then, we have already had our sense of moral certainty undermined.
Enth, and the others’ reaction to his nature and his presence, is important here. Enth is a monster, partly because spiders are monsters anyway and partly because in this world the intelligent spiders are creatures of the Dark. But once, for the purpose of the quest, he is transformed into (approximately) human shape, we enter the “uncanny valley” in which he is both somehow less and even more monstrous. The reaction of the humans is to consider him as unhuman. His default pronoun among them is simply “it.” As Lief begins to see Enth as simply another misfit on a quixotic quest, however, he starts to chide others for calling him a “monster” and “it”; and Enth himself, though bound by his Asimovian laws, still insists on some sort of agency when he protests against being called a “that.”
When Abnasio, Supreme Prelate of the Brotherhood of the Dawn, seems to have decided that the fulfilment of the prophecy which outlined Dion’s quest involves taking Enth into custody—and into closer acquaintance with some sort of sacred disembowelling fork—Lief goes so far as to channel the dilemma Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn faces when he, too, is faced with breaking the moral code he knows to be right: “Enth was a creature of Darkness. There was no getting round it. And what if Dion is wrong and Abnasio is right? Am I really about to rescue a monstrous servant of evil from the hands of the righteous?” Like Huck’s “[a]ll right, then, I’ll GO to hell” when he allows his friendship for Jim to trump every sense of morality and right and wrong he has been brought up with, Lief’s “[f]uck the righteous” puts comradeship and compassion above abstract codes. That this does not lead directly to rescue—that the argument that Abnasio is morally wrong is reduced to a cut, thrust, and parry academic analysis of obscure texts, as Dion and Abnasio debate the true meaning of the “prophecy” before actual battle commences—is more evidence of Tchaikovsky’s playfulness.
Indeed, it would have been easy for Tchaikovsky to have turned this amusing piece of genre-bending into slapstick farce, and while there is a fair share of slapstick in Spiderlight, he manages to turn many openings for humour into something darker. For example, when Cyrene realises, some time after the event, that what she took for a fairly mindless sexual encounter has very different implications (“I wasn’t thinking that he couldn’t say no”), the humour—and it’s very dark indeed—comes when Enth thanks her for not killing him, drawing our attention to the very different nature of arachnid sexual encounters.
Despite this light and shade, it's certainly possible to read Spiderlight as a lightly amusing deconstruction of the kind of fantasy we have all read too much of. At the end of the day, it’s a guilty pleasure. We know where we’re going, and we are happy to have a skilful guide to take us there. But if this novel is play, it is thoughtful play. The last part of the book, in which we meet the Dark Lord and discover the spiritual “cosmology” of this world, is, on one level at least, evidence of the adage that fantasy is “good to think with,” as China Miéville puts it in his “editorial introduction” to Historical Materialism 10, no. 4. We are focussed upon some quite fundamental examples of the way fantasy—and not only fantasy, but our general ways of system-building—“thinks about” the world as a structure of moral dualism. I shall be vague about the ending, because what Tchaikovsky is giving us, important though it is, is more a chat than a lecture, more a nudge towards the obvious than a self-important declaration of moral certainty; but it will come as no surprise to the practiced reader of fantasy. What the novel leaves us with is a sense that maybe we should think for ourselves, which is perhaps the most important moral lesson we must be asked to study in these times.
Wendy knew it wouldn’t be long now before her daughter was taken. She had put the idea from her mind as long as she could, but now Jane was days away from turning thirteen.
From the window of the nursery, Wendy saw Jane wobbling her way down Kensington Park Road on a borrowed bicycle, hair unbraided and wild like she’d been flying. Wendy’s throat seized with fear. Was that gold glittering in the girl’s hair? Had the neighbors seen? Was that his laughter that rang out from Kensington Park across the way? Wendy ran into the street and hauled Jane off the contraption and into the house.
The row they got into after was one of the worst ones yet, leaving Wendy’s heart a limp and ragged thing by the end of it.
Wendy had never wanted to move back into 14 Kensington Park Road, with its drafty windows, dilapidated frontage, and earthy reek of fairies, and she’d certainly never wanted to raise Jane there. But her family’s flat had been damaged in the first Zeppelin raid of the War, and her parents had insisted she take over the London house, themselves having retired to the country. Her brother John had fled to the Americas long before the War and her youngest brother Michael was later lost to it. Now, after a decade, with her siblings gone, the economy sunk, and her husband having twice been passed over for promotions, it seemed like the house would remain Wendy’s responsibility, whether she wished it or not. But it was a roof and a hearth and so she had convinced herself that the smell of pixies was simply her imagination.
Her husband had approached the ownership of No. 14 with his usual unbridled enthusiasm. He had long ago promised they’d restore the moldering wallpaper; re-tile the fireplace where she’d once split her lip; and do something about the cellar where she and her brothers had played hide-and-seek, which now nursed two inches of water after a rain. But her husband rarely had a true sense of their accounts and Wendy had known his aspirations for upkeep had the solidity of soap bubbles. So she had long ago taken it upon herself to whitewash the walls, put a cheap, but colorful, wool rug over the broken hearth, and lock the cellar door.
Times had not gotten better. Jane’s birthday was celebrated without fanfare: a small cake, new galoshes, and definitely no bicycle.
“She will come around,” her husband said, putting a hand over Wendy’s after Jane stormed out. But he was not the seawall that took the pounding of their daughter’s rage. In its wake, Wendy could almost see her own father sitting in the seat Jane had just vacated, going over the accounts her mother had meticulously kept, wheedling over each penny spent on the children. Each small gift commensurate with a cost.
“Just because you are too hen-hearted to go anywhere, does not mean I am,” Jane had said coldly, before scraping her uneaten birthday cake into the waste bin.
So it came as little surprise that a mere week after Jane’s modest disaster of a birthday, she vanished. The only traces that remained were a cold breath of air from the flung-open window and the unmistakable grave-rot of fairies. The milk of the full moon turned the nursery into a ghost of itself, shimmering with the shadows of all the children who’d flown from it since the last time that window had been opened, Wendy included.
She gripped the windowsill, goose bumps on her bare arms, a mixture of relief and bitterness warring within her. She had guarded against this moment, but still it had come. She resisted the fantasy of doing nothing, of letting Jane fly off into her own mistakes. Or doing something rash, like burning the whole house to the ground.
Instead, Wendy gave herself one, no, two long moments, to hate Peter Pan.
Then she got to work.
**
Wendy had never told Jane about Peter, and with good reason. She didn’t trust her daughter not to romanticize him the way she once had. At bedtime in that old house, the veil between here and Neverland felt dangerously thin, as if she could turn her head just so and see its beaches and crystal waters out of the corner of her eye.
But Jane’s demand for new and fantastical stories every night had to be met, if Wendy was to have any peace. So she read her the likes of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. For Jane, the darker the tale, the better.
“Alice is so foolish,” Jane said, haughtily. “I would never have let the Queen speak to me like that.”
“But she was the Queen. Alice was in her kingdom,” Wendy said, helpless before her daughter’s imagination.
“And if I were Queen, I wouldn’t just sit around and play croquet and yell at people. I would go off and have adventures. I might still behead people, though,” Jane said thoughtfully.
“Well, it’s all just a fantasy,” Wendy said, closing the book with a snap.
“Maybe.” Jane pulled up the covers. “Didn’t you have adventures as a child, Mum?”
Wendy froze. Was that a hovering face in the nursery window? No, just her own reflection.
“Certainly not,” Wendy said. “Ordinary girls don’t go on outlandish adventures.”
“How dull,” Jane sighed, her young eyes full of pity.
**
“Did it all really happen?” Michael asked Wendy, just days after she moved back to No. 14. Michael was home on holiday, his schoolbooks spilled unceremoniously across the rug where Wendy cradled a tiny Jane in her arms.
“Did what happen?” she asked, stroking Jane’s hair. The baby was almost asleep in the drowsy afternoon light. She hoped her brother wasn’t asking about the Zeppelin raid. She was still convinced the scent of sulphur and smoke clung to her, though she had washed several times since the bombs fell.
“Neverland,” Michael whispered, “the pirates, Peter, the flying, all that?”
Yes! she wanted to shout, because they hadn’t spoken of it since they were young children, since she’d finally stopped waiting for Peter to come for her. But the baby brother who she’d help raise, who’d flown to Neverland, wasn’t the person sitting before her. This Michael was a young man, tall and broad-chested, trying desperately to grow a mustache. Hadn’t she only just carried him to bed from where he’d fallen asleep in front of the wireless, clutching his bear?
She looked down at Jane. Back inside these walls, Neverland seemed impossibly present, dancing just behind her daughter’s eyelids. She didn’t want her daughter waiting and waiting, as she once had, as Michael apparently still did, for a dream that would never be realized. For a dream that, now viewed through a lens of adulthood, was tinged with nightmare. The world was enough a nightmare as it was.
“Those were wonderful stories, weren’t they Michael?” she said, and instantly regretted it. The look in his eyes was one of betrayal, of loss. Like something in him had died.
A month later, he packed a rucksack, slipped a note through the mail slot, and joined Kitchener’s Army, to enter what was becoming The Great War. “I may not remember how to fly,” he’d written, “but I remember how to fight.”
*
Good sturdy shoes. The bag she’d kept stocked since they’d moved back into this house, containing: a torch, with a set of fresh batteries; needle and thread; bandages; a sharpened kitchen knife wrapped in a dishtowel; a handful of iron nails. She added several fresh packages of biscuits and chocolate, and a light sweater for herself and her daughter. Wendy remembered the chill nights, piled together with the Lost Boys like piglets for warmth. She shuddered.
And finally, she went down and unlocked the cellar. Descending by candlelight, the support beams and dampness put her in mind of the belly of a galleon or a secret cave dripping with bats. Just the kind of dark place fairies liked to lurk, though none were left here now, as far as she could tell. But she knew they’d been here; they’d marked their territory long ago with that dank, fungal smell. And there it was, in the mortar between the bricks: the glimmer of their dust.
Wendy took out her kitchen knife and chipped flakes of gold fairy dust into an open pouch. When she’d extracted what she could, she sprinkled herself with several large pinches of the stuff. It made her sneeze, the grave-earth smell of it. She wondered if fairy dust went stale, if she’d still remember how to find her way.
Her husband had found her escape bag once. He’d thought she’d intended to leave him, and he’d looked so crestfallen, she had felt compelled to tell him the truth. It was difficult to tell him about Peter, especially since her youngest brother, Michael, had believed in Peter the longest and Michael had been gone for years by then. To conjure up Peter was to conjure up Michael and she could hardly bear to do it. But both boys alighted in her mind as she told her husband about Neverland.
When she finished describing Peter and his home, her capture and escape, her face was wet. She didn’t know who the tears were for. For Peter or Michael? For herself? Either way, for something lost. Wendy saw a strange sort of knowing on her husband’s face—he believed her or believed that she believed. After so many years, the story had taken on a kind of timeless madness and she could understand his pity, even as she resented it. But he was softhearted, and so they had forgiven each other. But she’d been sure to hide her preparations after that.
Wendy re-locked the cellar door, just in case.
She checked in on her husband now, his face rumpled with sleep. She hoped he’d forgive her for leaving without him. Of course, he would. She was saving their child, their family, as she always did. She was setting their little world to rights so he could go on sleeping, his face and dreams as innocent as a boy’s.
What was more questionable was if he could manage in her absence. He could barely boil an egg and their accounts would, undoubtedly, be overdue upon her return. At least he would have their cook about to make sure he stayed fed, but she was sure he’d go to work, unthinkingly, in unpressed shirts and scuffed shoes. How the secretaries would talk.
No, she couldn’t think like that, not now. She hefted her pack over one shoulder and decided to instead think hard of the seaside. Of sticky toffee pudding. Of her daughter, in a good mood and laughing, amidst glowing red balloons on a previous, easier birthday. Of how her husband had looked at her when she told him she was pregnant. The sweetest thoughts she could summon.
She opened her eyes to find herself bobbing near the ceiling, the feeling of flying both effortless and familiar. Seizing bookshelves and furniture, Wendy pulled her way back to the nursery’s open window. The edge of the world was just starting to brighten with a hemline of pink. She didn’t have much time before her access to the island would begin to unravel.
“Wendy?” It was her husband, rubbing his eyes before they widened at the sight of her hovering in the window, bag slung over one shoulder, moonlight making her a shadow poised to leap.
“I am going to get Jane,” she said, with as much certainty as she could muster. She waited for him to try to stop her, level guilt at her like a rifle as her father would have done. Instead, he stood, helpless and pale in the moonlight. Her buoyancy faltered. She sighed and swam through the air until she was close enough to kiss him delicately on the head, where his hair was thinning.
“There is little time to explain,” she said, as he looked up at her. Wendy was sinking slowly back to the floor. “But I won’t let Peter keep her. Leave the casement open. We will be back soon.”
He saw her struggling in the air and grabbed her hand. But he didn’t pull her down. Instead, he kissed her palm. She rose, her hand pulling away from him.
“Take care,” he said, watching her regain her position in the window. “And come back.”
Wendy knew her husband loved her. But from her view against the ceiling, he merely looked lost. She tamped down the frustration. Love and need were so tangled for her. That was Peter’s doing.
“Of course I will,” she said. She sent up a quick, silent prayer for her husband’s continued patience, as well as for her own. “Don’t forget, the window must stay open. Oh, and do see the shoeshine boy on your way into the office, won’t you?”
She turned toward the second star, twinkling ahead of her. Straight on ’til morning, she thought. With big spoonfuls of sweet, toffee pudding.
And without looking back, she pushed off.
⁂
Neverland, for those who have never been, is an odd sort of place. It is an island and also the warm beating heart of a boy, with all the things a boy could dream: jungles and white sand beaches and dangerous riptides, caves and tunnels and secret passageways. Perfect weather and perfect storms. Magic, danger, adventure.
And when Wendy arrived as a young girl, gilded in pixie dust and flying for the first time, she was shot.
Oh, the children Peter collected, the Lost Boys, had blamed the fairies and their trickery. The fairies blamed the boys with their bows and arrows. Either way, it was Wendy who suffered. She hadn’t felt the arrow so much as the fall, the wind rushing up to greet her, stomach lurching with the plummet. She hadn’t had enough breath to scream or pray, only to watch the clouds rise up and up, the stars fading into the blue, waiting for death’s hands to catch her.
But the magic of the island caught her instead, snapping her nightgown taut like a kite. She glided to the forest floor on wings of ragged linen, where Peter’s gaggle of dirty boys crowded her. They realized then that she was not a bird, as they’d suspected, but must certainly have been a gift from Peter: a lady to care for them, make them whole.
The missile had not quite pierced Wendy’s heart, and by the time Peter arrived, the arrow had dissolved into pixie dust and cloud, leaving her merely breathless and bruised. To have avoided death and still be wanted so desperately by these lost children had indeed felt like a kind of gift. They built a house for her from branches and named her “Mother” and she had called it love before she’d known any different.
**
The trouble began with Michael’s toy sword.
Jane, age seven, emerged from the attic covered in dust, the weapon wielded in one hand with a tarnished silver serving tray in the other, and tore through the house with a blood-curdling war cry. It took Wendy nearly a quarter of an hour to talk their typically unflappable cook out of the pantry, so convinced was she that the house was being attacked by Cossacks.
“Jane, this is not acceptable,” Wendy said, sitting her daughter down. “You scared Cook half to death. That sword is not an appropriate toy.”
“You said it belonged to Uncle Michael,” Jane insisted. “He played with it, why can’t I?”
“Your uncle is a soldier,” Wendy said, the unspoken past tense tight in her throat. Michael had played with that sword, screamed at the top of his lungs while lunging at the coat rack in the front hall. No one had taken the sword away then. Nor when he used that same sword in Neverland to slaughter a pirate, before he understood what death really meant. In the protective bubble of Peter’s story, toy swords could be real weapons and good boys always won the battle. But reality proved different.
Wendy keenly felt the double-edge of it, what boys were allowed and girls were not, and the true price of violence. Michael had been told the proper thing was to take up a rifle and run screaming at the enemy. And he had never returned.
“I want to be a soldier too,” Jane declared, stabbing the point of the sword into the floorboards.
“Only men are soldiers,” Wendy said. Jane’s eyes went wide.
“What, no girls ever?” she protested.
“It is far too dangerous,” Wendy said, shaking her head. “It’s not allowed.”
“That isn’t fair!” Jane said, stomping her foot. “I want to fight like Uncle Michael.”
“Uncle Michael is gone,” Wendy snapped. “War is a great big monster and it swallowed him up. Do you want to be swallowed up too?”
Jane went silent and pale, the terror in her eyes so palpable Wendy wanted to pluck it from the air and cast it away.
“It’s just a game,” Jane said, her eyes tearing up. “The children at school, they are always playing at battles in the yard.”
“Jane,” Wendy said, softly. “There are some things too real, too close to play at, even as make-believe. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” said Jane, shoulders hunched. She turned and walked woodenly to the stairs. But then she’d paused and turned back, her small, fine face hard with determination.
“Next time, I shall find a better weapon,” Jane said, one hand on the banister. “To fight the monster. So you will not have to be sad about Uncle Michael any longer.”
*
The morning was raw and the stars were sharp in the inky sky. It was hard going, flying toward Neverland as an adult. Children were smaller and lighter, whereas it took all of Wendy’s concentration to stay above the rooflines. Her sturdy shoes nearly took out a weather vane. It seemed almost impossible that she should slip between the stars and sky to Neverland, as weighed down as she felt, so old and full of feelings more complicated than joy or sorrow. Joy was a weightlessness, a forgetting. Peter was always forgetting. Wendy remembered everything.
So instead, she thought about her daughter, back when things were simpler. That first golden lock of hair falling across her tiny face. How, before her daughter’s birth, it had seemed impossible that there could be room in Wendy’s heart for another soul and then, suddenly, with a cry, a crow, there was a baby, her baby, and Wendy had pushed away the terror and discovered a new door inside herself, leading to a bright, freshly aired room she’d never seen before: Jane’s room.
She’d only ever been a mother to Lost Boys, before Jane had come along, when she had been little more than a lost girl herself. But when her daughter opened her navy-blue eyes, Wendy felt as if she was being truly seen for the first time, all at once. She felt found.
A change in the light let Wendy know she’d crossed over or through or under and now was in the clear skies above Neverland. Her eyes stung with tears and wind as she slowly sank towards the white sand beaches. She tried to catch an updraft, but seeing this land again, after so much time, was too heavy to keep her aloft.
She bumped down on the shore, the warm waters washing up and over her shoes, soaking her stockings. She took them both off, tying her laces together and hanging the shoes around her neck. She’d meet Peter like she’d found him: barefooted.
But she couldn’t find a way to his hideout, if it was even still where he hid. She walked for what felt like hours, the wet sand molding to the arches of her feet. The beaches here were lined with impenetrable cliffs draped in lush, emerald greenery, glittering with the occasional waterfall. The air was rich with salt and the sun-baked smell of endless summer.
Wendy’s throat ached. She finally leaned over one of the pristine pools to quench her thirst.
“Ah, Wendybird, didn’t know if I’d see the day,” said a voice, warm and gritty. A voice from her grimmest dreams.
Captain James Hook lounged on the beach, his back against a rock, his dark curls limp on either side of his face. He looked no older than he had when he’d held her captive so many years ago, bait for both Peter Pan and the crocodiles alike. His legs stretched out before him on the beach, his one good hand propping up his other arm, which had a glowing cigar speared on the end of his loathsome hook.
But while he hadn’t aged, Hook himself was not the same. His left leg now ended just before the knee, the pant leg knotted beneath it. And instead of his long, blood-colored coat and gaudy ruffled shirts, which would not have scared her now, surely, he was dressed in the grey wool uniform of a German army officer with the spiked helmet and gold-braided epaulettes. She was put in mind of a poster she had seen in Piccadilly Square: a grotesque drawing of the Kaiser, gnawing on a British soldier’s helmet with a glint in his eye.
“Captain,” she said, keeping any form of quaver out of her voice. “I thought you’d been eaten by a crocodile.”
“Not all of me, not yet,” Hook said, a grin flashing from beneath his mustache. He slapped his good hand against his bad leg. “And it’s General now. Can’t be any kind of captain without a ship, and Pan, of course, has scuttled it.” He gestured down the beach where his ship, The Jolly Roger, listed and loomed, its prow dug into the white sand.
“And your crew?” Wendy asked, far more calmly than she felt. He would not be able to chase her at least, but she was waiting for pirates to swarm her from the cliffs or emerge as seaweed-shrouded corpses from the waves. She slipped her hand into her bag and wrapped her fingers around the handle of her kitchen knife. These pirates had taken pleasure in scaring children, in hunting them down, just because they could. But she wasn’t thirteen anymore.
“Ah, my men, all lost to the waves or the perils of growing ordinary,” Hook mused. He looked her over, bare feet to tousled hair. “Thought the waves had taken you as well, but looks like you’ve gone and grown up. That sort of thing should keep you from coming back here. Have you gone and become ordinary too, Miss Darling?”
Ordinary, like it was a curse. Ordinary, like it wasn’t something she’d worked her whole life to achieve. She put on frocks of ordinary, but they could never quite cover the parts of her that burned with the memories of Neverland.
“It’s Mrs. Davies now,” Wendy said, her own voice an echo of her daughter’s imperiousness. “I thought this place never changed. And I wanted to.”
Hook let out a hah, his dark curls blowing across his face. “Peter may not change, but his country does. Tiger Lily and her tribe left long ago, as soon as Pan forgot about them. They knew to get out, when they could. Unlike the mermaids who still cling to a manic hope, and the fairies that have infested the Roger, randy little creatures. You’d think they’d invented lust, the way they go at it.” He arched an eyebrow at Wendy, but she refused to be baited, even as she felt a hot flush climb her neck.
“Well, you too seem to have been forgotten,” she countered.
“Peter has not forgotten me,” Hook said, darkly. “But a dashing pirate no longer served his games, and so I am a German General until he needs another enemy. Meanwhile,” he said, cocking his hook out to sea, spilling ash on his uniform, “I play my own game, you see, with the mermaids.” Wendy recognized it then, the large outcropping in the water. Marooner’s Rock, where she and Peter had nearly drowned. Mermaid’s Lagoon.
“We watch one another all day, the merfolk and I, waiting for high tide,” Hook continued. “To see if this will be the day it’s high enough for them to reach me with their razor teeth. Falling out of Pan’s favor has left them quite mad. And hungry.
“You look hungry too, Mrs. Davies. It’s a look that tells me you’re after someone.” Hook looked pleased, taking a puff on his cigar. “Someone who stopped caring about you long ago.”
“I’m not here for Peter,” Wendy said hoarsely. “Peter took my daughter. I’m here for her.”
Hook’s laugh was like a gunshot. Sparkling fish scattered in the tide pools around them. Hook’s cackle quickly turned into a hacking cough through the cloud of blue cigar smoke. It smelled like burning leaves and, yes, fairies.
“Oh, Wendybird,” he said, gasping, his hand splayed across the gold buttons of his uniform, his eyes glittering, “you’ve finally come back to see what a little shit Pan is.”
⁂
Wendy had just finished telling the Lost Boys their bedtime story: her own imaginings of her happy return home. She could see her brothers forgetting and so she told the story night after night, of the flight home and the glad reunion. It became a kind of spell that she hoped would be cast in its repetition. That maybe having lost their children for a while, her parents would be more thankful for them and the obedient daughter she always tried to be.
But that night, Peter listened in. He groaned and rolled his eyes and made a mockery of her. He proceeded to tell his own story: of the mother he once had who had barred the window and put another little boy in his bed. The Lost Boys all agreed that mothers must be terrible creatures—“you excepting, of course, Wendy”—and even Wendy’s brothers vigorously agreed.
“You must let us go home at once,” Wendy said, feeling her grip on her brothers and reality slipping.
“Oh?” Peter had replied. “But it is not safe for you out there.”
Then above them, where before there had been silence, came the cries of combat and clanging of steel. That was when Wendy knew that he wouldn’t let her leave, not without a fight.
*
“I will deal with Peter,” Wendy said. After all, she had done so before. “Tell me where he is.” A stiff breeze blew in off the ocean, filling the tattered sails of the Roger. Out in the open sea, a flash of iridescent scales. Hook smirked, then gazed up, like a beatific saint.
“Atop the cliffs, in the Never Woods, I hear the boys running,” Hook said, closing his eyes. “And the sound of cannons and other weapons, fast and deadly.”
“Guns?”
“Aye. The boys have turned it to a battlefield.” He patted the sand next to him, an invitation. “Wendy, you were right to come to me. Neverland is a terrible place for us grown-ups.” He shuddered. “You’ll see.”
The man looked wet and miserable, like a dog missing the warmth of its master’s hearth. She remembered a younger James Hook, one with fire in his eyes, so desperate for love he’d commanded her, a child, to be his mother. Those eyes, once the bright, baby blue of forget-me-nots, were now the color of the lagoon, a watery blue-grey. And she could see clearly now, in a way she’d only suspected then, that Hook was what happened when Lost Boys were allowed to grow up this side of the second star.
She could see in Hook’s face the boy he might have been, once: beautiful, heartless, self-important, just like Peter. Except in adults, that same heartlessness lost any pretense of innocence; it was callous, malicious. Irredeemable.
Would she have become like this horrible man, had she not had the prudence to escape, to flee? She thought back to her younger self, imagined her childish weaknesses and assumptions magnified. Would she have become a villain, a harpy fixated on the rigid sort of mothering brewed from fairy tales, resentment, and a child’s distortion of adulthood? Or something more akin to the mermaids: a monstrous open maw, hungering for whatever scraps of love, attention, or praise a child deigned to offer her?
Those would-have-been-Wendys flanked her now, watching Hook pitilessly. They thought they understood motherhood and motherlessness, a distillation of her parents’ example and Peter’s rejection. A world made simple, cruel, and grossly deficient.
But they did not have a daughter. They did not have Jane.
So Wendy did not sit on the sea-darkened sand. Instead, she dug out her bag of salvaged pixie dust. There was barely a teaspoon’s worth left at the bottom. If she had to get up the cliffs or fly further inland to find Jane and have any hope of getting home, the help she needed was from the fairies, not this washed-up pirate. She’d have to board The Jolly Roger.
“I didn’t come for you,” Wendy said to James Hook, setting her shoulders back. She sprinkled herself with two more large pinches of the heady dust.
“You need me,” Hook snarled, “and you’re not the only one with unfinished business with Pan.” He seized her ankle with his one good hand. In that moment, the other-possible-Wendys collapsed into one: the girl she’d been at thirteen, bound and shivering in her nightgown, forced to watch Michael walk the plank.
But there were no more pirates and she was no longer a little girl. And Wendy had not stayed behind, to curdle into someone like James Hook. She’d gone back to the Mainland, to the real world, and grown up, for better or worse. She’d had a daughter of her own, who was more terrifying, at times, than this man had ever been. In fact, if there was one thing Wendy had gotten better at with age, with motherhood, it was this:
“No,” she said firmly, removing Hook’s hand from her ankle. She turned and walked away from him down the beach, figments of those almost-Wendys winking out behind her.
⁂
Once, Peter and Wendy had been trapped on the spit of stone that was Marooner’s Rock out in Mermaid’s Lagoon. The evil Captain had speared Peter with his hook before fleeing the even sharper teeth of a crocodile. The tide was coming in and drops of Peter’s blood bloomed in the water. They lay on the rock panting in the thick, oncoming dusk.
Then a mermaid seized her by the ankles and tried to pull Wendy under. She’d screamed and Peter had dragged her back out of the surf. But the tidewaters of the lagoon had risen to Wendy’s waist by then, the water an icy blade of terror sawing at her belly. She and Peter were too tired to swim or fly to safety.
“Do you mean we shall both be drowned?” she’d asked. Peter’s eyes were bright with a keen fervor, which should have been proof enough that these calamities had all been his intention, from his grievous injury to the rising tide. But Wendy had only been able to stare, frozen, toward the inescapable tidal wave of her own mortality, the cold ocean gripping her ribs.
Then, as if a miracle, Michael’s magical kite had drifted by and Peter had bound Wendy to it, sending her soaring for the shoreline. She had no control of the flight, nor her destination, but thought it gallant, him securing her rescue before his own. That’s what it meant to be a hero, surely.
But Peter did not save himself; a mother did. From across the lagoon, a lone Neverbird had paddled her nest to the boy so he could sail it to safety. Peter had once told Wendy not to disturb the mother Neverbird’s floating nest, though sometimes he took the liberty of skipping stones across the water, trying to land them in it, to the bird’s great dismay. But here she was giving her nest up to Peter, even as her eggs lay cupped inside, warm and vulnerable, though there wasn’t room for Peter and the eggs both.
Wendy had watched from her buffeted perch, a cold fear tumbling in her stomach as the Neverbird covered her face with her lovely, white wings. They both knew Peter cared only for himself. And still the Neverbird had given him her nest with its precious eggs. Why? What was it about being a mother that made sacrifice so implicit? Did the Neverbird feel obligated to return Peter’s protection? Or was it simply that, as on the Mainland, all creatures, especially females, contorted themselves to accommodate the needs of boys before themselves?
“One girl is more use than twenty boys,” Peter had told Wendy to get her to come to Neverland. He’d held out his hand and she had taken it. She had thought it the finest of flattery but had never thought to ask: more useful to whom? And for what purpose?
Peter saved the eggs after all and everyone applauded him, none louder than the Neverbird herself. For doing the right thing when he so easily could have done wrong and not been faulted for it.
*
The Jolly Roger looked like a beached whale, pale and huge against the tropical blue sky. Wendy tried to shake off Hook’s curses echoing off the cliffs behind her and the stuttering of dread behind her heart and set her sights on the Roger’s bleached hull.
As she drew closer, she began to feel a kind of vibration. A hiss. She soon realized the sound was the sand beneath the bow of the ship, buzzing and hopping against the aged wood as the whole ship shuddered. Wendy’s face grew crimson. Fairies might not be human, but they were creatures, and she couldn’t begrudge them their needs.
Everyone had needs. But only some were allowed to act.
To board the ship, Wendy closed her eyes and tried to remember joy. It finally came to her: an anniversary, their first one, where her newly minted husband bought her a peacock-blue scarf. The blossoming warmth of such a perfect gift. The eagerness of their lovemaking beneath the skylight of their first home together, that tiny loft with a just-fashionable-enough address.
When she opened her eyes, Wendy was hovering near the crow’s nest of the ship, the ocean spread beneath her like cerulean silk. She almost wished her husband was here to see the crystal blue waters, the winking, rainbow coral beneath the waves.
Almost.
That anniversary had been Before. Before Jane. Before the apocalyptic Zeppelin raid that had set fire to her little life. Before she’d had to move back into the home where her abductor could find her. Before her husband’s tenderness had turned tedious.
Wendy stumbled down onto the deck of The Jolly Roger, scraping her hands on the splintering wood, the grief of homecoming hanging like weights around her neck. All about her were tangles of light, tumbling through the air like illuminated puffs of dandelion seed.
Fairies.
She could feel their frenzy through the deck, up through her hands and knees. A trembling desire bloomed between her legs. She pressed them together, but that only intensified the sensation, an arc of pleasure straight up her abdomen. No, no, she could not allow herself to be controlled by desires, certainly not now and not in Neverland. That was what had honed Peter into a needle of misfortune: pure desire. And she would not allow herself to be anything like Peter Pan.
Wendy staggered to her feet. She was suddenly conscious of her body, the size and breadth of herself, standing among the tiny, pulsating fairy forms. The boat smelled of trees turned to soil and the rot beneath. Of sludge and saltwater. Despite the blinding sunlight, Wendy couldn’t help feeling like she’d stumbled into a dank marsh or a dark wood. Or a party gone sour.
“I’m looking for my daughter,” Wendy said to the lights, her voice ragged. “Her name is Jane. Peter has her.”
It took a moment for the glowing gyrations to slow and stop and stare at her, shifting swiftly from magical to menacing. They closed in on her, their drone like a swarm of wasps. Wendy dug down to the bottom of her bag and came up with the handful of nails she’d packed. She wielded them at the fairies like a shield. They flowed away from the iron, cursing at her in wind-chime and sleigh-bell voices.
“I don’t want to hurt you, but I need to find her. And to do that, I need dust.” She tried to hold steady, despite the air humming with hundreds of wings.
One glowing speck drew away from the crowd and flew close, right up to her face. She flinched, involuntarily. It touched her lower lip and Wendy let out a small gasp. So close, the fairy smelled like the compost spread beneath the lilacs, rich and sultry. Wendy could just make out the curve of the fairy's body inside its glow, wings a hummingbird blur. She swallowed. The fairy circled her slowly, then chimed at her.
What would she give them? Oh what wouldn’t she give them. She dug in her bag and offered up biscuits and chocolate. The wall of fairies jangled and twinkled at her, laughing. No, they didn’t want anything sweet.
Her bitterness. They would take it from her, in exchange for the dust and directions. Fairies were so small they could only feel one thing at a time. Lust had been a lovely distraction, but they were ready for something fresh, jagged. There weren’t many newcomers to Neverland. And the fairies were hungry too.
Bitterness should be an easy feeling to give up. But her bitterness drove her, got her here, got her up every morning. It had carved her jaded heart into a weapon. Without the bitterness, what was left?
Wendy was afraid to find out. But she said yes anyway.
**
It was months before Wendy heard from Michael, after he’d run off to enlist. The first telegram she received said he’d be home on leave for a week, come Saturday. Her parents came in from the countryside and they went together to the train station.
But when the train pulled up and the soldiers poured out through clouds of steam and oil smoke, she couldn’t find her brother. Just a forest of brown uniforms that made all the young men look the same. Private Michael Darling, who eventually emerged before them, bore scant resemblance to the boy who had joined up. He was taller, his mustache a cruel hook across his upper lip, grey eyes struggling to focus, as if he had cataracts like their father. Like he was peering through a fog.
Their mother flung her arms around Michael, leaving Father unmoored in the sea of disembarking passengers, shouting “What, what? Is the boy here?” Wendy gently guided him to her brother, whose face was a rictus of distress, clutching his rucksack as he had once gripped his stuffed bear after a nightmare. Wendy had almost thought to bring that worn, old toy. She was glad she hadn’t.
At 14 Kensington Park, she had Cook prepare Michael’s favorite meals and put fresh, butter-white daffodils in his room. But he stared at everything as if it was alien. Wendy knew that feeling intimately. When she’d brought Jane home for the first time, her sense of space and time had been recalibrated. Hours crawled by, days blinked away, everything was experienced through a new level of attention. She saw it in the way Michael moved through the old house. Like a wild animal, feeling out the confines of its cage.
“Stop,” he finally snapped at her. “Stop following me around everywhere.”
“I just,” she’d stammered, “I want to make sure you’re alright. You haven’t been yourself.”
“I’ve been to war, Wendy. I am every ounce of myself. There is nothing wrong with me. It is the rest of the world that tilts towards madness. Gliding along above as if nothing were wrong, while darkness lurks beneath.” He stared into his cup of now-cold tea in the lemon light of the sitting room.
“I understand …” Wendy began, reaching for him, but Michael slammed the cup down so hard tea sloshed over his hands onto the pristine tablecloth.
“Michael, you will wake the baby,” Wendy hissed, tucking her shaking hands beneath her arms.
“Let her wake,” Michael said, his voice strangled. “She has that liberty, to wake safe in her bed. When I return to the front, that is not a luxury I shall have.” He lifted the half-empty tea cup to his lips, hands trembling. “Do not presume to know what war is like, Wendy. You are safe because I do know, and you do not.”
“Do you forget why I live beneath this roof?” Wendy lashed back. “Had I been asleep when the incendiaries dropped, I would not be here to serve you tea. I know something of war.”
“Why do you think I volunteered?” Michael snapped, too loud. Far at the top of the house, in the nursery, baby Jane began to wail. Michael put his head down, hands gripping his hair.
“Oh, Michael,” Wendy said, softly. She sat down beside him at the table, but he launched away from her.
“No,” he said. “It is not for you to try to protect me.”
As if caring for her baby brother was something she could ever halt or harness. It was a reflex, not a service. She had certainly never expected gratitude for the ways she had kept him safe as he grew up: from their father’s harshest demands, from schoolyard bullies, from Peter Pan. And neither his height nor uniform, she felt, acquitted her of that responsibility for him as her youngest brother.
Above them, Jane’s howls increased to the keen of an air siren. Michael winced, knuckles white where he gripped the edge of the table.
“Can’t you make her stop?” he said, through gritted teeth.
“Of course, I will see to her,” Wendy said, standing to clear away his dishes, biting her tongue against any recriminations. Maybe that was the problem. She had given her life to service, been expected to, and never thought to seek or receive gratitude. He had chosen service, without knowing the weight of its ungracious obligations.
“You are right, Michael. You do protect us. Thank you,” she said, hoping to assuage his feeling. But he looked at her with such disgust that she immediately turned and fled. In the nursery, she tried to soothe Jane, but it was impossible when she herself was so discomfited. She had tried so hard to protect Michael, but through her diligent care, she had held from him any lessons of responsibility by taking them upon herself. Now her brother had been forced to learn those lessons on his own, in blood and bullets.
**
As one war ended, another was just beginning. Jane had been a sweet baby, reminding Wendy much of Michael in that respect, but even as Armistice was declared, Jane’s willfulness became clear and she and Wendy began to engage in an endless series of their own battles.
Nannies deemed Jane too difficult, too inconstant to be reformed. Wendy wished they could see the Jane she knew was tangled inside all that want and demand: a brave, sensitive child who struggled to conform to the needs of others because she did not know how and nor see a reason to. Wendy knew what it felt like not to fit. She had tried to make herself into the expected shape and form: demure woman, obedient wife, doting mother. And Jane absolutely undid her.
Wendy had picked out a new dress for Jane, that had been her first error. She’d hoped it would be a peace offering. The fabric reminded her of one of her own mother’s dresses and how protected she’d felt, pressed against her mother’s emerald skirt. But the safety of such a dress was her comfort, not Jane’s. Her attempt at parlay met a blockade.
“You didn’t even consult me,” Jane said, “on the dress or even whether I want to go to this beastly party.”
“It is the company Christmas party,” Wendy said sternly, exasperated. “The affair is for families. It would look poorly for your father to show up without his.” Her husband seemed content to be passed over for promotions, but Wendy was not. She hoped to appeal to his employer’s better nature by showing off a charming wife and daughter in need of provision.
“I have no interest in eating Christmas pudding with Father’s colleagues and their dull children. I will stay here, I can look after myself.”
Wendy’s own father never missed an opportunity to tell her she coddled Jane too much, gave in too easily to her whims. Wendy knew all about whims, had worked hard over the years to scrub herself clean of them. The dress had been a setback. She was paying for that now.
“You will do no such thing,” Wendy said, gripping the dress. “We are all going to the fête and you will look splendid in this dress. You love green.”
“The dress is hideous,” said Jane, folding her arms. “You cannot make me wear it.”
“I purchased this dress for you at great expense,” Wendy said, slowly, deliberately. “I would’ve been more than grateful to wear a dress this fine at your age. Any young girl would be.”
“Well, give it to some other girl, then,” Jane said. With that, she snatched up the dress, stormed over to the window, and before Wendy could reach her, opened the casement and flung the garment out into the wintery night. It fluttered, like a child trying to take flight, before landing in the snow far below.
Wendy slapped her daughter.
She hit Jane hard across the face, just as the girl was turning toward her mother triumphantly. Jane staggered back, cheeks red with shock and fear. Wendy felt something in her rear up, like she was leading the charge against a band of pirates. It felt ugly. And right.
“You will go out,” Wendy said, “and you will fetch that dress. You will hang it in the kitchen to dry. Then next week, when we go to the party at the very fine home of your father’s employer, you will wear that dress with your good black shoes. And there will be no more protests, do you understand?”
Jane did not respond, just gave Wendy the same look Michael had when she’d denied their past with Peter Pan. The truth sank in, then. Her daughter might love her again after this, but things would always be different between them. In her anger, she had shown weakness. A crack in her defenses.
Just wide enough for Peter to slip in.
*
Wendy woke up hacking as she accidentally inhaled a breath of fairy spores. They coated her mouth and tongue. She looked down to find she was covered all over in cold mud and a tingling, shimmering miasma of pixie dust.
The woods she’d been dropped in were leafless and mud filled; nothing like the adventure-laced enchanted forest she remembered from her youth. Despite the bright light of the beach, the air here was dim, oppressive. There was the plaintive sound of birds and wind, but nothing that made her want to venture deeper in.
She pulled her bag out of the mud and found it full of shifting, sparkling dunes of dust.
Well, the fairies had wanted all her bitterness and they’d repaid her in kind. She sat now, seeking out the splintered places inside herself to see what remained. There was still pity and sorrow, even anger, ripe and bright. But all that had been bitter was now brittle.
Which wouldn’t get her daughter back.
The ratatat of guns echoed among the bare trees.
“Jane?” Wendy called, trying to move through the thick mud. She grabbed a tree trunk to steady herself. “Peter?” The woods went quiet around her.
Then from behind the trees emerged soldiers, sepia-toned and mudslick, helmets pulled low, guns out. Pixie dust spilled from her bag until she found the handle of her kitchen knife.
“Stay back!” Wendy shouted, sweeping the blade in wide arcs. The infantrymen drew closer. Their features seemed to shift as they stepped in and out of the shadows. Was that one Michael? The wry smile seemed familiar. They were all young, nothing more than boys. There were too many of them. She couldn’t save them all.
If they even wanted to be saved.
Something exploded beside her ear, and she screamed. One of the soldiers burst apart, as if he was made of mist or sand, a shattered reflection and shower of pixie dust. Wendy dropped to a crouch, covering her ears. More gunshots, more shattered ghosts. She turned around.
A beam of sunlight suffused the haze of the woods, illuminating Peter Pan. He looked exactly as he had when he’d stolen her away, except dressed in an officer’s uniform, his cap cocked jauntily across his brow. He grinned at her, balancing a rifle against one hip, its bayonet glinting in the weak light.
The thirteen-year-old girl inside her felt a stab of want that took her breath away. The thirty-five-year-old woman she was in this moment expected the jagged stab of bitter loathing she’d cultivated in the years since. Instead, her heart broke a little, seeing him, and she thought, Mercy, he really is just a child.
Peter held the gun casually, his face full of bemused curiosity. Not an ounce of recognition, an absence both crushing and a relief.
“Hullo,” Peter said, with a taunting grin. “Friend or foe?”
Both, she wanted to say. What was this hook that made her feel as if she needed to earn his admiration? She was old enough to actually be his mother. There was no reason to try to please him. She shivered, shuddered, couldn’t seem to get warm.
“It’s me, Wendy,” she said. Peter had nothing but disdain for grown-ups. After the poor state of James Hook—who, in truth, deserved it—she wondered if she wasn’t making a mistake in telling him the truth. Pretending was always easier. He had taught her that.
Peter Pan tipped his head. “Wendy? What’s a Wendy?”
**
When Wendy received word that Michael was missing-in-action, she left baby Jane in the cook’s flour-coated arms and went straight to Kensington Gardens, hoping for some sign of Peter Pan. She knew it was Peter’s favorite place to steal away children, so she usually avoided it, but Wendy felt certain that if she found him, he could find Michael. But Kensington Gardens had been transformed into its own war zone. Lush lawns had been overturned for soldiers to practice digging trenches: long, deep brown scars in the earth where the roses used to be. Sandbags piled to her shoulder, lined with curls of barbed wire. She could almost see her little brother, curled around a cigarette in the mud of the trench, grinning up at her. Or was that Peter’s grin she was imagining on her missing brother’s face? It began to rain. She stood there staring at the washed-out trench until a soldier she didn’t know came by and guided her back to the street.
Though she had written him off long ago, Peter’s absence was a bitter sting. She had hoped he would step in again, as a hero, preserve her brother as she could not. But that was a fool’s thinking; she knew the truth of Peter and his bravado. It was stolen, like so much else.
Still, Wendy left the window open for weeks afterward. There was nothing but a damp, cold draft.
*
Peter marched Wendy, at gunpoint, to his new hideout. It loomed out of the fog, a large wooden fort surrounded by barbed wire.
“What have you done with Jane?” she demanded.
“Silence, prisoner!” he said, “Or you’ll feel the cold steel of my bayonet.”
More gunfire spat from the forest behind them. Ghost soldiers, shifting from the woods, too many to count. Peter turned to meet them, a feral glint in his eye. Wendy dropped to the ground again, just as a hailstorm of bullets turned the phantoms into explosions of sparks and smoke. The deafening clatter continued until there was nothing of the soldiers but winking dust. Wendy ventured a glance at the fort and there, on the parapet, straddling a machine gun, was her Jane, still in her pale yellow nightgown, hair a wild conflagration. She was beautiful and fierce and looked, dangerously, right at home.
Peter crowed with pleasure. “Our latest recruit to Pan’s Army is a fair shot!” From the fort came cheers and whoops. Peter gestured for Jane to join him. She came down through the gate in a pair of army boots, a rifle cradled in one arm. She stopped when she saw Wendy, a frown tracing her lovely face.
Peter slapped Jane on the shoulder. “Thatta boy,” he said. “I’m putting you in charge of our first POW.”
Jane shot Peter a glare that Wendy knew too well. “I’m not a boy, I keep telling you.”
Peter looked quizzical. “Well, what are you, then?”
“A girl,” Jane said, lifting her chin and her gun.
“Oh,” Peter said, carelessly. “Girls can’t be soldiers.”
“You said I could do what I pleased here,” Jane insisted.
Peter weighed his gun in his hands. “Girls are far too clever to be soldiers,” he finally decided, with a definitive nod. “No, you’re to be a nurse. Every platoon needs a nurse. You’ll take care of our injuries and make us take our medicine and tell us stories to cheer us during difficult nights in the trenches.” His face grew solemn, contemplating, surely, other people’s sacrifices in those battles rather than his own.
Like heat rising off her, a distortion marred the air around Jane, and quite suddenly she was no longer in a nightgown, but in a nurse’s uniform, stark white, with a crisp white cap and red cross. Jane looked down at herself, eyes wide, gun still gripped tight. She plucked at the fabric. Solid. Starched.
“Now you look the part,” Peter said, his grin like a mouth full of pearls.
Wendy had a horrifying vision of Jane trapped here like James Hook, caught in awful tempers even as an old woman, snared in the shadow of Peter’s waning attention.
“Jane does not belong to you, for you to do with as you please,” Wendy spoke up, trying to draw the boy’s focus, though she knew it would draw Jane’s ire. “She’s my daughter. She must come home with me.”
“What is a ‘daughter,’” Peter said, wrinkling his nose.
“I don’t belong to anyone!” Jane shouted, tearing off the nurse’s cap and throwing it into the trees.
I made you! Wendy wanted to cry out, to wrap her arms around her precious, ferocious child. Shouldn’t that give her some power, some control over Jane and her choices? But it never seemed to. She held her breath and counted the buttons on Peter’s uniform, letting her fears unspool.
“A daughter is a person, Peter.” Wendy did not look at Jane as she spoke. “One with her own intelligence and wit, strength and cleverness. One that has a mother who cares for her very much and wants to see her safe.”
“Oh, you have come to speak to me about Mothers,” Peter scoffed. “Nasty things. Make you wash behind your ears, go to bed at night, and take lessons during the day. They don’t let you run through the woods or howl at the moon or fight to the death. Mothers only try to make perfect little children with spit-slicked hair who say please and thank you but never have an original thought. It is mothers,” he said, spitting out the word, “that turn children into adults.”
It was supposed to be a taunt, but Wendy would not have it.
“What did he promise you, Jane?” she said, keeping her eyes on Peter. “Never having to grow up?”
“And flying,” said Jane, excitement creeping into her voice. “Heroic battles. Adventure. Freedom.” She hefted the gun. “All the things you will not allow.”
“Children are not meant to stay children. Not forever,” Wendy said, this time with eyes only for Jane. “There is so much more to the world than what children can reach. There is plenty of adventure to be had.”
“But children see all that is worth seeing,” Peter said. He slung his gun over his back, adjusted his cap. “Come, Nurse, this conversation grows dull. Let us go inside and find a proper place for our prisoner.”
“I told you, I’m not—” Jane began.
“Come home, Jane. I will keep you safe,” Wendy cut in. “Here you will only ever be what fits Peter’s story.”
“And whose story must I fit at home, Mother?” Jane said, brushing hair out of her face. “For it certainly isn’t my own.”
The words were Wendy’s slap, wielded with precision. Jane was right. The world they had left was no more kind to girls than Neverland, especially for fighters like Jane. What safety could she promise her daughter that would be any different? There was safety and a future behind the walls of a house, in the arms of a husband, at the bedside of one’s children. Wendy wanted to wrap her child in the safest story she knew. One in which Jane would, no doubt, suffocate.
“Neverland may feel like an adventure, but stay here long and it becomes a prison,” Wendy insisted. “Peter hasn’t told you about what he has done to the pirates, to the mermaids. He is playing war, but what is real and what is illusion make no difference to him.”
“You can’t die for real in Neverland,” Jane scoffed, her eyes flicking to Peter. “This is a land of wishes, is it not?”
“Even wishes have consequences,” Wendy said softly.
“I kill things all the time. It is no great task. If I want someone to stay dead, they do,” Peter said, haughtily. He examined Wendy, as if choosing a proper target. “Mothers are no longer allowed in Neverland. Didn’t my boys shoot down one of your kind before? Yes, but you were a bird, were you not?”
Wendy’s shoulders seized and it was as if her back had been sliced open by a bayonet. She fell to one knee and must have made a sound too, because Jane was in front of her, small hands pressed to Wendy’s face, saying Mum? Mummy?
Then Wendy’s shoulder blades unfurled into two great white wings, like that of a Neverbird. She grunted beneath the awkward mass of them. Neverland is a terrible place for grown-ups.
She forced herself to her feet, struggling for balance and trying to ignore the horror of the weighty appendages. She had sworn she would not let Neverland trap her again but here it had her in its grip.
Jane backed away, hands over her mouth. “Peter, what have you done?”
The boy merely shrugged. “Grown-ups are not good for much else, Nurse. Especially Mothers. If you do not wish to become what a Mother would make of you, she abandons you. Replaces you.” Peter’s eyes narrowed. “That is what my mother did to me and no doubt what this one would do to you. This way, I make grown-ups as I will them. She will make for a great quarry, far more interesting than a prisoner.” He slung one arm over Jane’s shoulder.
“No!” Jane pushed Peter away, her face blotchy with held-back tears. “You cannot make us into someone else!” Jane gripped the front of her crisp, white uniform, as if to tear it asunder. Instead, Wendy saw, she was summoning the same distortion Peter had used to dress them both. The space around Jane struggled in and out of focus. The nurse uniform blurred into the brown fatigues of a British soldier, then flickered, for a gut-sinking moment, into the emerald green Christmas dress, a jewel in the dim woods. Then the nurse uniform, and back again.
“Nurse,” Peter said, taking a conciliatory step towards Jane, but Wendy lumbered forward and put her arms and wings out between them.
“She is my daughter,” Wendy said to Peter, loud enough that Jane could hear. “But she is wholly her own person. And she is choosing a course different from either of ours.”
“Get out of my way, Mother,” Peter mocked.
“No,” Wendy said, arms crossed, wings outspread. “I am not your mother. I am Jane’s.”
With a final pulse, the haze around Jane coalesced into her yellow nightgown and, on her feet, the hated birthday galoshes. The rifle she had dropped dissipated into pixie dust, but with a look of intense concentration, Jane caused the dust to amass into a new shape. She picked up the sword and stepped between Peter and Wendy. No fear, no bitterness, all Wendy saw on her daughter’s face was righteous anger. And for a shining moment, Wendy dared to hope.
⁂
The final time Wendy went to Neverland, she had been sure Peter had forgotten about her like he had everything else. Even so, she wore the same nightgown as the night they’d first met, though she’d had to add a panel to the back and several inches to the hemline to make sure it continued to fit. She had felt indecent sitting there, sixteen, waiting for a little boy to come steal her away. She was so nervous she had risked taking a bit of bourbon from her father’s decanter, seeking calm in the liquor’s smooth, smoky burn. Michael had sat up with her, but even he had curled up on the rug and fallen asleep. It was long past midnight and she’d all but drifted off herself when Peter’s shadow fell across the windowpane.
“Wendy,” he crowed, “come with me! Spring is here!” And she’d been so flush with joy to see he wasn’t a dream that she’d taken his hand again and together they’d hurtled into the sky.
“It’s good to have you back, Mother,” he said, twisting in the air. The comment felt barbed somehow, though she tried to ignore it. Wasn’t that why she kept returning, to care for Peter and these boys? Wasn’t motherhood what she’d always wanted? The pain of it stuck in her chest, long after they landed and burrowed their way into Peter’s hideout.
It didn’t occur to her until much later, when her arms were elbow deep in wash water, scrubbing clothes while Peter was off hunting wolves, that what had started as a game for them both, was now only a game to him. She took her role seriously and he did not. What was she hoping for, a future with Peter? There would always be the washing and dirty noses, meals to prepare and floors to sweep, and never once would Peter show an ounce of caring. He only needed her as much (and as long) as he was entertained by her.
The dirty clothes sank to the bottom of the wash bin.
She’d stared down at her hands, pruned like that of an old woman. Was this motherhood, held out like a prize, but wielded as a blunt instrument?
Peter, she was learning, was incapable of feeling. That fact seemed to have no effect on the clenched-fist feeling in her pelvis when they flew together, fingers brushing against the clouds and one another, wind rushing cold up her gown. She was growing up and he was not. She had held so tightly to her own childhood that she had only just begun to untangle the idea that there was more than one kind of love. And that while society considered motherhood a virtue, mothers themselves held little value.
Maybe the truth was she clung to the role of mother, of Peter’s caretaker, because it seemed the only way she could get him to care for her. But Peter cared only for himself. He had no use for her, even as she felt ill-used.
When she’d returned home, she’d locked the nursery window and shoved her old nightgown in the waste bin. She’d stared ferociously at her naked skin in the long mirror in the hall, willing herself to see her own future, however it would emerge, resolving it would not involve Peter Pan in the slightest.
But she didn’t recognize the person she saw there, a girl with a woman’s body, who couldn’t admit how much of her childhood she had given to a dream that wasn’t hers.
*
Among the darkening trees, Peter stared down Jane’s blade with a rueful smile. “Are we to fight, then? I never lose, you know.”
His expression belied a child who had never been denied anything, had never been held to consequence. But Wendy could not hold to the sour feeling that he deserved Jane’s blade. Instead she felt a pang of grief for the boy, even as he leveled his bayonet at them.
“We just wish to leave,” Wendy said calmly.
“But this one does not wish to,” Peter said, cocking his head at Jane. “Look at her, ready to do battle. ”
And with that, he lunged, his bayonet a white flash.
Wendy screamed, but she couldn’t hear herself over the sudden report of a rifle and a violent clang of steel.
Jane had caught Peter’s blade with her own, both hands on the hilt, pressing him back. But Peter’s strength was slackening. He looked down in shock where red was blossoming around a bullet wound on his right shoulder. With a shove, Jane pushed him away and then Jane ran to her mother’s arms. They had both almost died, quite possibly, but for once, Jane needed her and Wendy was embarrassed at her own elation.
Peter collapsed to the ground dramatically, one hand flung across his brow. “Nurse,” Peter cried, reaching for Jane. “Nurse, I’ve been shot! Save me!”
Behind Peter near the fort, there stood a ghostly soldier between the twilit trees, just now lowering his rifle. It was Michael, it had to be. Same eyes, same baby face beneath his mustache, his rage at the world in the shape of a gun. But upon catching her eye and seeing Jane in her arms, he lowered his weapon, anger softening. He gave her a sad smile and mouthed one word:
Fly.
Lost Boys burst from Peter’s fort to help their fallen leader. They were all so small, dirty feet and ears, ill-fitting uniforms. Child soldiers. Peter winced and groaned and assured them all they could go on without him. Then he pointed at Wendy. “Our nurse has been kidnapped by the Mother Bird! Get ’er boys! Take no quarter!”
But around them, the woods were filling with more ghost soldiers, winking into existence between the brown trees. Now a single pursuit had become an ambush. With cries of “For Peter!” and “Huzzah!”, the warrior children stormed toward Wendy and Jane and the ghost soldiers flowed up to meet them. There was the clash of gun and steel. Michael met Wendy’s eyes once again across the battle.
Fly.
Of course. Wendy scooped dust from her bag and Jane into her arms. Someone grabbed hold of one of her wings, tearing out feathers, and through the pain and the overpowering must of pixie dust, she thought: Jane is with me. We girls can rescue ourselves.
With that, Wendy shot up into the sky, breaking through the forest canopy and into the clear dusk air above Neverland, pixie dust trailing behind them like the tail of a comet, bullets and cries following in their wake. The sun spilled firelight across the water and the moon hovered low over the white-washed beaches, impossibly large and the color of old bone. She spread her wings, and the wind caught her too, lifted them higher and higher, like a kite, towards the first stars of the evening.
Behind them, rising from the Never Woods, came the eerie throbbing that still haunted Wendy’s dreams: a Zeppelin’s engine. It loomed up behind them, impossibly large, blotting out the stars. From the gondola beneath its enormous, bullet-shaped hull came the clattering of a machine gun. The bullets tore through Wendy’s wings, rending flesh and bone, and she cried out as her wings disintegrated into feathers and fairy dust. They fell, the cold sea rushing up at them.
She did not trust the magic of Neverland to catch her this time. She was on her own.
No. She had Jane.
“Hold on!” Wendy cried to her daughter, who tightened her cold arms around her mother’s neck. Wendy reached for something happy, even pleasant, anything to keep them aloft. Being a mother. It was her happiest self and also the most agonizing, but in this moment those feelings were inseparable. Being Jane’s mother. A thrill pulsed through her, the pixie dust fueled by her joy mid-tumble and they rode it back up, curving back towards the night sky, the airship’s machine gun shredding the clouds behind them. She did not need to see him to know that it was Peter smirking behind the trigger.
Then, from the beaches, came a loud boom. The Zeppelin shuddered and began to turn broadside. Below, Wendy saw The Jolly Roger lit as if for a Christmas party, pulsing with fairy light, and at the helm, James Hook, curls blowing in the wind, aiming the pirate ship’s large cannon up at them.
“Pan!” the Pirate-General roared, “we aren’t finished yet!” And as fire hurtled at them from above and below, Wendy flew faster and faster, on and on toward the second star until that mad island was barely a shadow behind them.
The night sky deepened to black and blue. Wendy and Jane flew onward, the second star staring at them, distant and unblinking. They had been flying for hours, hadn’t they? Now the sky was almost black and Wendy’s hands were ice. She worried Jane would fall from her numb arms, plummet into the sea. Just a little further.
The star shone on, no closer, but now it multiplied, wavered. The sky was filled with constellations, or was it a reflection? Were they flying towards the sky or plunging into the sea?
No, it was the lights of London in the distance, the Mainland spreading out beneath them, a lamp-lit tapestry. They were going to make it.
“Mum?” Jane said softly, gripping her mother’s sweater. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” Wendy said, her body flushing with relief at Jane’s voice. “No, darling, you may grow up at your own pace.”
“But Peter …” Jane’s voice trailed off.
“Peter is of no consequence,” Wendy said. She clutched Jane close with one arm and reached into her bag, then smeared pixie dust along her daughter’s back.
“Think lovely, wonderful thoughts,” she whispered in her daughter’s ear. And let her go.
Jane gasped and dipped for a moment, reaching for her mother. Wendy stayed beside her, pacing her, but did not offer a hand. It took Jane a moment of bobbing alone in the night air before she spread her arms and let out a whoop of joy, diving away into a loop through the midnight sky. She did not look like a child anymore, hardly. She looked like a young woman. And Wendy knew Peter would not come for her again.
Time had its role in growing up to be sure. But so did mothers, who lay the path before their children. She had not served her brother in trying to carry him along it. She had only served Peter, who desired all paths to lead back to him.
In the distance, Wendy heard the deep tones of Big Ben calling out over the city as they approached, its clockface as bright as the moon. It wouldn’t be long now. She closed her eyes, letting the night wind fill her.
“Must we leave?” Michael had asked plaintively when they’d fled Neverland all those moons ago. His hand had been so small and cold inside her own. “Didn’t you see that pirate I killed? I would make a grand pirate, wouldn’t I, Wendy?” She had had the sense then to simply smile, to let him linger in his fantasies. Had they been so different from her own? To be praised? To feel alive?
“We are almost home now, Michael. There, do you see it? Number fourteen?” Wendy had said, pointing.
“I don’t hardly remember it,” Michael had replied, squinting against the wind. “Are you truly not my mother?”
Wendy opened her eyes to find Jane was flying beside her again, framed by the night sky. She released her thoughts of Michael and instead took the warm hand of her smiling daughter. Michael didn’t get to come home. He would keep flying, wherever he was. She hoped he was free, even if it meant he’d never land.
Tears streamed from Wendy’s eyes, as she and Jane swooped down through the clouds. The wind they rode in on whipped through the trees and gardens of Kensington Park, the lamplights flickering as they coasted to where a lit window had been left open for them both.
“They are the world’s largest boney fish, weighing up to 5,000 pounds … They are so completely useless that scientists even debate about how they move.” — User on r/copypasta
Don’t know what I am. Don’t know
what is large. Don’t know pancake, don’t
know Ferris wheel. Know the drift. The cut-star glow.
Like it pelagic. Don’t know seaweed stinks. Love soft ooh
of eel larvae. Don’t know maggy craw of mouth. Don’t know
fearful keratin. Bright beak smack. Love all is mine,
love my clavus fin. Don’t know why they
bob? In blue death boxes? Sunless wreck.
Ozempic and Brylcreem. Their blue—
my blue. Beautiful me.
I am learning to knit! I am very proud of my casting on, and am working on the tension while actually knitting. Today, I did multiple rows for the first time; I got up to row four before I tangled something too badly to continue and started over.
I am currently using a giant pair of kids' plastic needles that C. had from a kit she did last year, and some neon purple acrylic yarn. I also have a nice pair of circular needles that drinkingcocoa helped me to pick out at our local yarn store; I started with those, but am now seeing how a longer row works.
I have no idea how long it will take for me to knit something that I'd actually wear, but the point for me is the process. It requires some concentration plus being in the moment, and will be a good thing to do while waiting for things or, potentially, getting back into listening to audioplays and the like. Plus, it's more mobile than doing a puzzle.
I know you don’t remember me. Last night, your cult erased me from the memory of all mankind. Each sister disciple gave me a parting gift, knowing she’d forget me […]
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