APPARITION LITERARY MAGAZINE

Issue 10, April 2020

Lyndsie Manusos, Leah Bobet, Xan van Rooyen, Avra Margariti, Rachel McKinley, Jessica J. Horowitz, Amy Henry Robinson

Cover Art by Tijana Jankovic

https://www.artstation.com/tijanajankovicart

Edited by Tacoma Tomilson, Managing Editor Rebecca Bennett, Associate Editor and Cover Art Director Clarke Doty, Associate Editor Amy Henry Robinson, Associate Editor, Poetry Editor and Webmaster

Copyright © 2020 by Apparition Literary Magazine All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a review.

https://www.apparitionlit.com/

Table of Contents Editorial

A Word from our Editor by Tacoma Tomilson

Short Fiction and Poetry

The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

All the Better by Jessica J. Horowitz

The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet

What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti

Still by Rachel McKinley

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos

Interview

Artist Interview with Tijana Jankovic

Essay

It’s OK to Cry During a Pandemic by Amy Henry Robinson

Thank You to Our Sponsors

Past Issues

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A Word from our Editor by Tacoma Tomilson

Welcome to Apparition Literary’s transfiguration edition. We wanted works that transformed characters, questioned social mores, and changed our perception. As a writer, I often wonder what kind of stories a magazine is looking for, the secret to cracking a market, and why my story was rejected. I think we’ve all been there, wasting time looking for clues in Twitter threads. As such, I thought I’d share a look into our selection process.

Not every work included in this issue involves a physical metamorphosis. When we select themes at the beginning of the year, we can never guess how authors will view them (and that’s part of what makes diving into our submissions so exciting). We consider each work by itself—the quality of the writing, the central idea, and how the writer approached the theme. We look for concepts that recur throughout different submissions, but we also seek works with singular visions of the theme.

When it comes time to decide, we often find we’ve put similar works on hold, showing that certain ideas resonated with the Apparition Lit team and with our submitters. This makes it much more difficult to narrow down the four stories and two poems we can afford to publish. Sometimes we have to decide between two similar stories (although it is tempting to publish an entire issue of six witch works), but we like to provide our readers with variety.

Our next theme is Redemption, publishing in July. Considering the times, it’s a promising theme. Hopefully, the self-isolating will have worked and July will be a better month for all of us. But in the meantime, if you’re at home wondering what kind of story we’ll be looking for during the submission window (May 15th through 31st) know that the theme must be central but that sometimes it comes down to us already having seven stories on hold about a dancing beetle.

Editorial

A Word from our Editor by Tacoma Tomilson

But without further ado, we are pleased to share the following selections with you this April and hope you are taking the time to be kind to yourself and others.

Stories:

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos (3,200 words) The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet (3,800 words) The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen (4,200 words) What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti (3,400 words)

Poems:

Still by Rachel McKinley (45 lines) All the Better by Jessica J. Horowitz (18 lines)

Please consider supporting us on Patreon and following us on Twitter. Without our barnacled friends, this issue wouldn’t exist.

Thank you,

Tacoma Tomilson

T.M. Tomilson’s short fiction has appeared in Crossed Genres and Devilfish Review among others. She received an MLIS from San Jose State University, where she learned the obscure skill of identifying books based on one sentence descriptions. A constant student, she is currently an MFA candidate at Seton Hill University. When not engrossed in homework, she can be found playing video games or enjoying a round of kickboxing. You can find her forgetting to tweet @TMTomilson..

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The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

The heart in my chest aches and trembles, it stutters and lurches behind my ribs. It’s always been too big, leaving bruises on my lungs. I press my hand to the bulge on the left of my sternum. Feel the scar tissue crack against my palm, a seam splitting as ventricles quake and falter.

Two hundred years. It was never meant to last this long.

The bucium sounds and the mountain echoes the call, note for solemn note, until the very stone beneath my feet starts screaming. I move, drawn by the bugling, down the winding stairs of our school. My slippers whisper across uneven flagstones, the bottom of my robes catching on the gnarled fingers of reaching creepers, leaves burnished by autumn.

Above me, the sky is a wound. The sun has gashed open the clouds, bleeding ribbons of red through twilight blue and dousing the flanks of the mountains in violet.

Fellow Solomonari join me in the descent. Most are clad in similar mossy green. Some wear the white of Elders; few wear the patched, brown robes of acolytes. Tonight, those who have proven studious, pious, obedient, and courageous will cut open their chests to lose their human hearts.

The scales across my cheeks flare despite my efforts to remain impassive. When I was an acolyte, the courage required to transcend was real and necessary. We trained as warriors, learning the way of the sword long before we learned the art of spell-weaving.

On the night I transcended, five acolytes began the ritual. Only I survived. And only barely. Tonight, I suspect all seven hopefuls will find their transformation far too easy.

The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

“Come now, Zia. You don’t have to scowl all the time.” Ilie sneaks his arm around my waist, red eyes flashing as he brushes his lips across my cheek. I inhale his scent: the honey of his hair, the tarragon on his breath, the rancid copper-salt leaking through his skin from the strigoi heart slow-pulsing between his ribs.

“This is wrong,” I say softly, as we continue down the stairs, hemmed in by swishing robes.

“It’s progressive and far more efficient.”

“Doesn’t make it right.”

“You’re just old and bitter,” he says, prodding me in the ribs with his elbow, a smile twisting his lips.

Our school lies in rising tiers of pale stone up the slope of Mount Zalmoxis, the pinnacle of our tiny nation—a shrinking autonomy. And, at the foot of this glacier-topped mountain lies the menagerie.

We reach our destination.

Inside the earth-scooped hollow, the cries and groans, growls and shrieks are deafening. It stinks, the air fetid and simmering with the rage of those confined in iron or silver cages.

The bucium sounds once more, an ominous bellow. The Solomonari quieten, hands folded in gaping sleeves, all standing at attention. Except for Ilie who still has his arm around my waist, the pressure of his grip painful on my kindle-crackling wings concealed beneath my heavy robes.

The Elders begin the ritual and I chant my part as required, my gaze darting from acolyte to cage, wondering which of the poor wretches will find themselves rendered heartless tonight.

Two hundred years, ago I went hunting for the monster from which I would steal a heart with nothing but my courage and a dagger. Two hundred years ago, a fresh heart and the magic within it was a reward for tenacity, an honor earned through blood by those few truly worthy of the title Solomonar. My right shoulder throbs with the memory of my battle on the mountain, the pain spreading to the dozen other scars from fangs and claws etched across my skin.

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I am old. I am bitter.

These days, graduating acolytes can pick from the array of cloned creatures imprisoned in the menagerie, or place a custom order for green-robed geneticists to splice and concoct as required. Instead of braving dark forests or swamps, dank caves or wind-whipped mountain peaks in search of monsters, acolytes simply shop through bars, safe from harm.

“They don’t earn their hearts,” I say. “Not like we did.”

“You want them to suffer? You want most of them to die?” Ilie asks. “Besides, there’s nothing left to hunt. Magic is gone from the wilds.”

“Your modernity saw to that,” I bite back. As humans fought over changing lines drawn on their little maps, our creatures paid the price. What was once impervious to pitchforks proved more susceptible to bullets and chemical gas. Our monsters were slow to evolve and so were quick to die, especially when armies exchanged gold for spellwork at our doorstep.

Unfortunate collateral damage, some Elders said while counting their coin.

Survival, others called it, the only way to remain the sovereign of our diminishing kingdom.

I clench my teeth, molars grinding, jaw aching as I watch.

The seven acolytes kneel and wait their turn. The first rises, slips naked from her robe, bowing as she receives the ceremonial dagger from the Elder. Her face is hidden in the shadow of her cowl except for her exposed wolf-snout. She’s on her third heart now, the blood in her veins more vârcolac than human.

My scales riffle and Ilie tightens his grip, his fingers digging sharp as knives into my hip. I remain rigid as the acolyte strides to the chosen cage. Her quarry is some sort of hybrid, one of the custom orders whose attributes she’ll absorb as soon as she has its heart. The beast is a griffin variant, with a tail of bright feathers. It bares small fangs, its saliva foaming and hissing—perhaps venomous—as it growls in warning.

As is common practice now, the creatures have been forced into a state of lethargy. Either by the administration of modern tinctures, or by an

The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

Elder’s spell. Regardless, the creature can barely lift its head, let alone swipe with a paw, already declawed lest the acolyte get hurt.

The acolyte raises the dagger. At least the death blow is true and the monster doesn’t suffer. The acolyte hacks open its chest, standing ankle deep in gore before raising the blade, the point trembling above her sternum. This is the only true test of valor remaining. I watch, hoping she will fail.

She drags the blade through skin and muscle. The Elders catch her as she falls and the green-robed Solomonari take up the requisite chant.

I remain silent. Ilie nudges me, but the words are trapped between my teeth.

The Elder with iridescent feathers sprouting from their knuckles reaches their hand into the acolyte’s chest and removes the girl’s still-beating heart. Gently, they place it in an amphora for safe-keeping, a generic clay creation bearing a bar-code. Mine I molded for days before the ritual. We all did. Each amphora unique to the acolyte who made it.

Another Elder tears the throbbing organ from the cavity in the beast’s torso, the monster’s heart small and engineered to fit beneath human ribs. My own heart lurches and Ilie places his hand over mine.

The Elder slips the monster’s heart into the acolyte’s chest and seals the wound with thread and spellwork. Her scar will fade, dwindling to a faint tracery of silver through her pale skin. Unlike mine, puckered and still smarting centuries later.

The Elders, white robes splattered red and black, drape a green cloak around the girl’s shoulders as she sways on her feet, smiling. Behind her the carcass of the beast steams, its blood congealing in a mottled mosaic on the concrete floor.

My stomach roils, gorge rising, as the second acolyte steps toward another cage.

*

“They could make you a new one,” Ilie says, his breath against my ear as his hands slide beneath my robes. His fingers trace the scar down my chest and I shrug him away, hunching my shoulders, rustling my wings.

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Before, I might’ve taken to flight to avoid Ilie but my wings are too thin, too weak to carry me anymore.

The wind taunts with the sound of revelry. Laughter and the blasting bass of electronic music reverberate through the stone, throttling my bones. I retreat into the shadows of the balcony, away from the glare of the electric lighting.

It’s cold and harsh and smells of nothing. Too bright, the artificial light smears a pall across the sky, obscuring the stars. I miss the oil lamps and wood-burning braziers, their warmth and flickering glow. I miss seeing the constellations. The dragon-cluster should be perched close to the eastern horizon this time of year, so at dawn the sun seems to rise from the serpent’s mouth. I haven’t seen a dragon-fire dawn in decades.

“You’re acting like a child,” Ilie says.

“You were the last to hunt for your heart,” I say without looking at him. He was among the last group of acolytes sent into the wilds to prove themselves worthy. I remember waiting and praying, burning black candles and opening my veins in supplication, begging Zalmoxis to protect the beautiful boy I’d so recklessly started to love.

Two acolytes survived that night and for almost four decades, Ilie has been by my side, eyes once deepest brown consumed by brightest red as his body leeches power from the stolen heart.

He licks his lips, tongue flicking over the sharpened points of his canines.

“I was, so I understand why the new system might seem unfair,” he says.

“Unfair?” Fire spits from my lips, my scales bristling. He doesn’t understand. None of them do. They see only what we’ve gained; I see all we’ve lost.

Ilie is speaking but I ignore him, as a thought flutters free from its roost.

“Zia, wait.” Ilie hurries after me as I find myself once more wending down the mountainside. My feet take me on nearly forgotten paths, leading

The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

me inwards, toward the old tunnels illuminated only by flame. I hold the heat between my fingers, my heart pounding as I draw on the remaining traces of magic oozing through my veins.

“Where are we going?” Ilie asks.

“There’s only one other heart for me.”

“You’re choosing death?” He grabs my arm, blackened nails digging into flesh. His eyes catch the glint of my flame, twin pools of blood.

“I’ll die anyway.”

“But you’d choose to die—human?” His voice is ragged, breathless with disbelief and something akin to horror.

“I’d die myself.”

“Do you hate what you’ve become so much?” There is hurt and indignation in his voice, a frown cutting across his exquisite face.

“This is not the institution I pledged my life to. This is not who I want to be. I hate…” I hesitate.

“Say it,” he says.

“I hate what we’ve all become.”

“You just want them to suffer as you did.”

“They have to earn it. But they don’t. Not anymore. They are not worthy!”

“And we are?”

“Yes! We fought for our hearts, with honor.”

Ilie’s expression darkens, the frown deepening across his forehead, lips pressed tight and thin.

“Come then,” he says, turning away from me, the shadows drawing closer to him, sputtering the flame in my hand. The darkness is his to command, his heart younger and stronger.

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I follow as he leads us through the tunnels we haven’t ventured down since the day after we transcended, when each new Solomonar was expected to place their amphora in the catacombs and forget they were once ever human.

The catacombs should’ve been locked, with a dedicated Solomonar standing guard. There is no guard and the lock on the gate has long since rusted and crumbled. Tonight’s amphorae have yet to be interred, but there are others, dozens set on warped shelves illuminated only by the guttering fire between my fingers.

The frigid air smells musty and rank. Old blood and moldering rot.

Ilie strides through the stacks, away from the more recent additions in their uniform arrays to shelves wreathed in cobwebs and blanketed in dust. Rats skitter across our feet, their voices shrill in the quiet.

Here the amphorae are lopsided and twisted, made by inept hands. Some are painted or glazed, many are not. I remember carving scales into mine, meticulously shaping the pattern over the squat belly of the jar that would forever house my human heart.

Forever has come to an end.

“Somewhere here,” Ilie says from the impenetrable black gathered beneath the shelves. He doesn’t need the light of my fire to see. “But…” His voice falters as something crunches beneath my slipper, a jagged edge digging between my toes.

Clay shards litter the floor. I lift my gaze to the shelves, to the untidy jumble of broken amphorae. Some have toppled over, cracking their shoulders against their neighbor’s. Some have fallen, shattered. Did no one notice? Did no one care? The answer lies at my feet, in the forgotten contents reduced to a fading stain… to dust.

I search the shelves, my heart stuttering, my breath coming in shallow sips, my head buzzing as if filled with carrion flies. Words tumble from my lips, prayers and desperation.

“Zia, over here,” Ilie says from a pool of darkness and I follow his voice. I crouch beside him and he lifts a shard of clay bearing the careful carvings of serpent scales.

The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

“How did you know?” I ask.

“It’s faint, but I can smell it. I can smell you.” He lifts the shard to his face and inhales. “I’m so sorry,” he says.

I drag my fingers through the shadows pooled at our feet, nails snagging on other broken pieces. The dust sticks to my slippers and clings to the hem of my robe.

“What about yours?” I ask.

“Broken. Gone.”

My hand balls into a fist, extinguishing the flames. Together we sit in the darkness, his shoulder pressed to mine, his breath against my skin as he kisses the tears from my face. His cheeks are damp with his own. Salt and blood.

Ilie’s strigoi heart has made him near invincible. Even the gash in his chest has healed, the skin smooth as if it never saw a blade. But some wounds run deeper, coiling through sinew and muscle, wrapping around bone and threading through veins. They burn and fester.

When my tears have dried and the heart in my chest aches a little less, I rise, letting Ilie lead me from the crypt. I don’t bother with the fire this time; I haven’t the strength. Instead, I extend my hand, my fingers tracing the edges of shelves and their neglected contents.

I leave a wake of shattered amphorae, a symphony of destruction as I push and shove my way through the catacombs, blindly knocking over shelves and sweeping their contents to the floor. Dust burns my eyes and makes me cough. Hearts squelch beneath my feet, the stone slick with blood. The air becomes choked with released spellwork, the hearts no longer preserved in sacred clay.

“Feel better now?” Ilie asks when we reach the exit, his voice carries neither reproach nor disgust. Perhaps something closer to relief, though still tinged with pain.

“How quickly can they make me a heart?”

“Depends on what you order.”

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“You know what I want.”

“A month, maybe two,” he says. “Do you have that much time?” He presses his body against mine and my lips find his. I promise him with kisses, with tongue and teeth and wandering hands that I’ll force my stolen heart to keep beating for as long as it takes.

*

It took the geneticists six weeks to make my monster. I wanted my zmeu bigger, as big as the one I defeated once before, but there were safety concerns and new rules governing the ferocity of the creatures kept in the menagerie.

Tonight is clear. In the new moon sky, the stars would’ve been quicksilver conflagrations were the lights illuminating the menagerie not deemed necessary. The bucium sounds and the Solomonari gather.

Ilie helps me down the stairs, my heart sluggish and the blood curdling in my shrinking veins.

The zmeu waits for me, coiled cat-like in a sinuous ball. It lifts its horned head, gazing at me with yellow eyes sliced vertically by a narrow pupil. They have drugged or spelled it—probably both—despite my demands, my requests, my pleas.

I stare transfixed, transported over the centuries to the night I fought my way up the mountain in search of the zmeu’s lair.

I found it, a cave carved high in the side of the peak. That night my monster reflected full moon light, scales a shimmering cascade of silver, wings snapping, mouth curved into a rictus-grin, its face equal parts human and dragon. Fire spit from its serpent lips as it laughed. Its tail thrashed, tearing scraggly trees from the mountain side. I dodged and rolled, but I was too slow. The zmeu’s tail severed my right arm at the shoulder.

Still, I fought. In a previous life I’d been a soldier, my hide already scarred before I donned the patched robes of an acolyte. And so I wrestled with my monster on that mountain top, our spilled blood steaming, my lungs burning in the altitude.

The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

It pinned me with the hooks of its wings, roaring fire at my face. I twisted beneath its body, almost losing my remaining arm to drive my dagger between its ribs.

Its blood boiled over my hands, over my face, and I swallowed mouthful after torrid mouthful. The battle was not yet won, but the monster’s magic filled my veins and sealed the wounds in my flesh. One handed, I hacked the heart from its chest, the organ four times the size of my fist. Afraid I’d die before my Elder reached me to complete the ritual, I drank more of the zmeu’s blood, ignoring the pain of blistered lips and scalded throat.

I cut open my chest and dug for throbbing gristle. The Elder found me trying to fit the zmeu’s heart beneath my ribs, ribs I’d been determined to break if that’s what it took to keep what I’d stolen. My tongue tangled over the words of the requisite spell.

With three hands and the Elder’s power, we managed to seal the heart within my chest. My wounds healed to scars, my skin grew scales and my shoulders sprouted sinewy wings, but not even the magic contained within a zmeu could replace a lost arm.

Will this lab-created zmeu renew my life?

This pathetic monster caged and weakened, stares at me unblinking, as if it understands the dishonor and denigration.

I shuck my robe and shake away Ilie’s concerned grasp, taking shaky steps toward the cage. An Elder unlocks the silver bars and I sway, drawing what little power I have left into a single spell. I wait for the words to taste just right, for the spell to take shape between my teeth, before spitting the incantation from my lips.

My zmeu rises, waking to full power. It stands no taller than me, tail whipping and stunted wings fanning behind its broad back. I clutch the dagger, ready, resigned. I will die a warrior. I will die worthy of the heart I’d stolen.

The zmeu launches its attack, claws aimed for my chest. I try to block the blow, my forearm splintered by the creature’s strength. I fall, the dagger tumbling from numb and useless fingers. The zmeu looms above me,

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laughing fire. Solomonari scream as my monster roars to a chorus of shrieks and howls.

At least I will die with honor.

The zmeu dives toward me, but Ilie streaks between us. I can only watch as he is impaled by the beast’s talons. His ribs snap like twigs as the creature wrenches its fist from his chest, taking chunks of heart and lung with it.

My zmeu drops Ilie beside me, its attention drawn by the panicked Solomonari, irritated by their spells and slow transformations. How weak our order has grown, how complacent, how deserving of this bitter end. The zmeu tears through the open bars of its cage and I roll toward Ilie. He remains alive despite his ruptured chest. I watch the magic in his blood strain to heal the frayed edges of tissue, but he has lost too much. His strigoi heart is in tatters.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “You didn’t deserve this. I’m so sorry.”

“You should know…” Words and blood bubble from his lips. I kiss him, swallowing his copper-salt. He holds my face, cheeks cupped in blackened hands, his gaze boring into mine even as the red drains from his eyes.

The menagerie disappears as if washed away by a rock-slide. Ilie’s hands are still pressed against my cheeks but I can’t see him, nor the blood smeared concrete. Instead, I find myself in boggy forest. A torch trembles in my hands, breath burning fear in my lungs, human heart pounding as I pick my way through swamp and thicket.

This is Ilie’s hunt, the memory of his acolyte night.

I hear the battle before I see it, the shrieks and screams of the strigoi; the cries and shouts of my friend.

Through Ilie’s eyes I see my fellow acolyte battle the monster and as Ilie, I wait. The acolyte hears the branch snap beneath my boot, turning in my direction as the strigoi rakes a powerful claw across his middle. Guts tumble through shredded skin, and still the acolyte fights. I run forward, brandishing the torch, as the acolyte stabs the distracted strigoi in the legs, in the belly, in the chest.

The Order of Stolen Hearts by Xan van Rooyen

The acolyte falls, and I—Ilie—ignore him. I ignore his cries and pleas, turning instead to the injured strigoi rendered easy prey.

The Elders find me with the strigoi’s heart already in my chest, the wound healing, fading, its power infusing my veins, sharpening my vision and my teeth. They never question the death of the other acolyte. Acolytes die during the hunt.

And so I win a heart and shed brown-robes for green.

The memory fades as Ilie’s hands grow cold against my cheeks and his blood turns putrid on my tongue.

All around me there are flames and screams, shrieks and growling. The night air sings with the voices of monsters unleashed, an anthem of retribution. And in my head, a threnody as I cradle the boy I thought I knew, the boy I used to love.

Beneath my ribs, my heart aches and cracks. Its poison seeps into the hollows of my body, an acid wash of agony.

Even stolen hearts can break.

Xan is a tattooed story-teller from South Africa, currently living in Finland. Xan identifies as non-binary and genderqueer, using she/they pronouns. You can find Xan on Instagram or Twitter @Suzanne_Writer

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All the Better by Jessica Jo Horowitz

When grandmother tells me stories, it isn't the woodsman

who comes and saves Red in the nick of time.

That, she says, is an outright lie.

Oh, the wolf dies alright—Red slits his belly open

and crawls inside to see how it feels

to wear this hunter's body, this predator's shell.

She strips his pelt, drapes it round her shoulders,

peers through his skull, still glistening red on her tangled hair.

Thus garbed, she strides back out into the woods,

feet in the shadows, breath quiet, eyes sharp.

Her basket lies abandoned, no hands remain to hold it,

no stomach left for bread and wine.

Instead she finds fondness for this midnight lope,

this long, lean body, this bloodred fur.

The wood that once hid monsters

now opens to her amber eyes, a-rustle with welcome

as pale nails lengthen and curve to bite the earth,

All the Better by Jessica Jo Horowitz

her lips stretched wide to fit her moon sharp smile.

Born in Korea, Jessica now writes speculative fiction and poetry in New England, where they balance their aversion to cold with the inability to live anywhere without snow. Previous work can be found at Flash Fiction Online, Fireside, Anathema, ApparitionLit and others. They blog infrequently at pengolin.wordpress.com and have slightly more frequent feelings and opinions on Twitter: @transientj

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The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet

"She never cooks,” he said, "and it’s been six weeks since there was laundry."

Alice clucked her tongue from behind the bar, and no telling if it was for the idleness of Sanchez’s wife or the three-day complaint in his voice. He stared at her, his elbows splayed at a dead angle, and she stared right back ‘til he hid, shamefaced, in his beer.

"Don’t know what you want us to say," she said, and rubbed detergent off the pint glass in her hand. Big Jake, two seats down the bar, snickered. He’d told Sanchez about his wife before the weather turned, hoping to gloat or maybe even to save him. If that's what you like, he’d said, and picked up his end of the line pipe, and Sanchez had just smiled.

Sanchez wasn’t from around here. He’d come up from Vancouver to work fracking at Horn River, and moved from the Thriftlodge in with Betty Nosemaskwa at the height of July. The couple moved in a cloud of dark hair and gap-toothed smiles until the winter came on hard and early: thirty centimetres of snow in just September. It’d been drifts and chained tires ever since, and slowly, week by week, Sanchez started coming into Alice’s Neighbourhood Pub alone.

"Don’t want you to say anything," he mumbled, four drinks and forty days into a silence that poured like concrete down his throat. Everyone in town had already had their say before the weather’d turned. He’d laughed it off to all of them; small towns had their politics, and he had Betty Nosemaskwa, her radiance, her sly warm jokes, her berry-red fingernails gesturing every time she spoke.

He couldn't have said when she faded. Between the rolling heat of August and the September leaves, before the snowstorm, she had already

The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet

retreated to the house, and then two rooms. Before he could trace what had come over her, if it had entered by window or door, she took to her bed and stayed there, and he was here, coping with the remains.

"You know what you do with an animal wife," Jake said. "You take the pelt away; they always keep it close by. You hide that thing and she’ll smarten right the fuck up."

Alice stiffened mid-inspection of her clean glass. Sanchez stared at her turned back as if to read its palm lines, and then swirled the bitter foam in his pint.

"Nah," he said. "We’re not like that at all."

*

The snow pressed close to his knees by the time Sanchez staggered up Betty Nosemaskwa’s front drive. The bungalow was sinking in a cold white desert: ice crept across the windows and vined the siding apart, and the front walk was a treachery of footprints. Sanchez spotted the red shovel handle three feet into a snowdrift: nose up, abandoned, and sinking fast. He stared at it a moment and gave up.

Inside the air was stuffy, the curtains rich with dust. Dishes lay in a scattered trail across the kitchen counter, stained with dried egg and ketchup. I begged her, just one sink of dishes, he thought, and pressed his hand to his forehead.

Betty was lost in the dim bedroom; lost in a landscape of sheets. They rucked about her knees and thighs in warm and private snowdrifts, and beside them, curled next to her, the brown bearskin spread its arms wide. It was the same shade as the delicate places on the insides of her wrists, the places he used to kiss and then wait for her smile to widen.

Sanchez was an only child; he had never learned to tiptoe. He toppled the overflowing trash can just three steps into her lair, and when he had righted it, Betty had opened her eyes. They were as heavy open as they were closed: dark brown and dull, eaten whole by pupil. Sanchez’s heart lurched. "Oh, querida," he said. "You look so tired."

"Mm," Betty answered, low in her throat. She was never beautiful before her morning shower: her arms were seamed by blankets, her strong

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face reddened with sleep. Sanchez looked down at her, and the beer in his belly bloomed, tender and helpless and warm as the sun.

He brushed a tangled black lock off her forehead, and she sighed softly, nuzzled deeper into his hand. "How’re you feeling?" he managed, caught in her soft lashes on his palm.

"Tired," she murmured, and her eyelids fluttered with anxiety. "I'm sorry. I’ll be much better tomorrow." She held out both arms for him and he folded between them, folded against her drowsing skin and the bearskin between their hips.

There was a moment when it was all good again: wrists and foreheads, the thick abandon-smell of them, his thumb circling her right shoulder blade, her fingers tracing constellation lines between the sun-dark moles on his back. And then her breath drew heavier, crunched like snow beneath footsteps, and she was sleeping: drawn down again, drawn away.

Sanchez ran a hand over the dense, prickly fur. It was coarse-soft, tough down to the claws. There were lockboxes in the compressor station, built big for industrial tools. He could drive it out into the bush. Fort Nelson was surrounded by wilderness, land owned by numbered companies and ignored 'til the permits came through. Like as not, nobody’d ever find it.

He watched the pinpoint lines on her forehead smooth, and thought: The dishes don’t matter. He could shovel the drive tomorrow. He eased himself away from her with the greatest delicacy and wiped both hands on his jeans.

"Mm?" Betty said, and grasped at the cold where his body had been.

"Baby, don’t worry," he said, and kissed her forehead once. "Go to sleep."

*

Sanchez went to work the next morning sweat-soaked from shovelling, fossilized egg wedged under his nails. Big Jake caught him up at the tool locker. "How's your woman?" He had not called Betty by her name since she and Sanchez took up together.

"Fine," Sanchez said tightly, through his two knit scarves. The loggers had gone home when the snow drew deep. But Northland Resources had

The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet

orders to fill before winter shutdown, and nobody cared if the floorhands got cold.

"Did like I said, hm?" Big Jake's elbow jostled, threatening to go in for his ribs.

Once, when Sanchez was young and lost, he’d mistaken bright bluff confidence for knowing anything worth a damn. That had been years and miles ago. It was as far behind him as the Vancouver coast. Sanchez's tongue touched his teeth, lingered, pulled away. "We're not like that," he repeated, and kept his gaze trained straight into the tool locker.

Jake Morris was not grasping the hint. He moved in closer. Sanchez felt, in the cold air, the radiant heat of his breath. "Like what?"

Sanchez turned full to face him, and tipped his chin up. "I don’t want a girl with me who doesn’t want to be with me," he said neutrally, and pulled on his gloves.

Jake’s face darkened. "What’re you sayin’ about me there, chico? What kind of guy are you saying I am?"

"Nothing," Sanchez said, and thought, you fat honky fuck. "I ain’t saying nothing."

Big Jake Morris squinted at Sanchez through his flushed chipmunk cheeks, a distorted map of different wild land: red fault lines spilling heat into the pits of his nostrils, flared with uncertain fear and rage. "I love women," he said. "I fuckin' love 'em. You ask around. Ask anyone how good I am to a woman."

Any comment would further inflame him. Sanchez picked up his helmet and started for the wellhead, leaving Big Jake to trail after him. "You ask," he shouted, and then the sound drowned in the endless noise of the pump.

*

At the end of shift he drove the back way home, eyes on his rearview, looking for headlights. It would have been the first time someone tried it in Fort Nelson, but for Sanchez, it wouldn't be the first time.

Apparition Lit |21

He pulled up at Betty Nosemaskwa's bungalow under an undyed wool sky, the snow he'd shoveled last night ripe for replacement. There were new plates scattered across the living room table, freshly scarred with peanut butter and small raisins gone hard. Saskatoon jelly dripped like bloodstains across the blue melamine. He held his hands to his eyes to hold the tectonic pressure back: at least he knew she was eating.

The house hung still and dormant. He moved through it, an intrusion, and drew the blinds. She wasn't better, but they’d both known it had been a lie.

*

November blew in like a death sentence. He felt the cold like nails digging in; so cold turning the door handle in the mornings burned. The job was over; even the company had scented the air, a sharp edge of woodsmoke and endless ice, and cut the seasonal men loose. There was nothing to do in Fort Nelson but lie low until spring.

In the heavy air of the back bedroom, Betty Nosemaskwa sank deeper and deeper. The pads of her palms felt like motorcycle leather. They scraped when she reached up to touch, fluttering, his cheek. "I dreamed about you," she mumbled, still probably dreaming.

"Oh yeah?" he asked gently, and ran a hand down her unwashed hair. She spoke so little now. Her big-throated sunshine laugh felt like something he'd fabricated on a secondhand lathe down at the job site, conjured up from imagination and a stray long black hair to get through the endless nights.

"I dreamed you were carrying the whole of the world on a waterfall plate on your head," she murmured, and I am, he thought: groceries cleaning heating working waking up alone in the dark. That night he dreamed it too: a universe balanced precariously on the spot where his brown hair was already thinning, and the muscles of his neck swayed in an Arctic wind. There were no safety cables on him. There would be no quarter if he dropped her.

He read everything there was to read about bears. Most of it was about how to scare them away: face them directly, make noise, fight back. Make yourself look big. He was a veteran of oil and lumber camps up and down the coast; he found nothing particularly inventive about the approach.

The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet

Fort Nelson had spotty broadband in the summer, with the horseflies out, and now that everything was buried under winter white it was worse. He downloaded wilderness videos an agonizing frame at a time, and listened to the clicks and small sounds bears made at play. When they blew air, they were anxious. Either Betty snored or the winter made her frightened all the time. He sat next to her on the musty bed, his hand tracing warmer languages on her back, listening for translation. He sang her sleeping songs she'd have understood if they'd grown up the same.

On the days he couldn't take the silence anymore, he paged through a 1970s edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in Alice's back booth, nursing scrambled eggs and an oil-well headache, reading the entries on Indigenous folktales until he admitted he wasn't reading anymore. He could go back to Vancouver, find a winter job in a warehouse or driving at a ski hill; buckle down in a rooming house and endure the rain. But each morning, he was still living in her house. The bills were still paid. Each evening, he sat next to her in the back bedroom, her sheets a raked sand garden, and whispered: "Betty, baby, what do I even do for you?"

He listened close to her soft sounds, uttered random or in a try at reply. She clung to him, whuffing like a wounded thing. Fear, he thought, with his stomach icing through. Anxiety. Fear. Betty's eyelids fluttered, and Sanchez sat beside her, helpless, and held her limp and roughening hand.

*

The sun went.

"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six," the man on the TV intoned, through the frazzled single speaker in Alice's Neighbourhood Pub. In the darkness, the scattered singles of Fort Nelson and laid-off site workers lifted chipped glasses and dented cans. Their roar drowned out the last of the year: "Happy new year!" A burst of plastic confetti flew up and then fluttered down to the floor. Someone clapped him on the shoulder, and Sanchez, alone, squeezed himself smaller and ordered another pint.

"You should go home," Alice said, an hour or more past midnight. He was the only one still in Alice’s Neighbourhood Pub. The storm was howling outside, digging fingers into every crack between wood and glass and brickwork. Anybody sane had finished their drinking at home.

Apparition Lit |23

"Don't you think I know that?" Sanchez snapped, and let out a breath, and slumped. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't give you shit."

Alice had pursed her lips; ready, Sanchez clocked, to blow air in a preliminary threat. Plastic fragments stirred in the chill breeze prying through the pub’s glass doors. He picked a bubblegum-pink piece of confetti off the table and rolled it between his callused fingers. "It's hard. This is hard. She should be here too."

He saw the spasm across Alice's face. Shut up, Sanchez, he thought fiercely, but it was too late. He was drunk, and he was uncontrolled as a geyser. "How can you say you love a girl when you can't be what she needs? When you can't even understand what she needs? Would it work," he asked her, eyes on Alice's shuttered dark ones, too demanding, too intense, too much, "if I was from around here?"

Alice drew a breath, and he shut his mouth, hard. They were walking perilously close to the tale everyone shrank from hearing but which needed, so badly, to be told: how there was so much love in him, dammed up, routed from its natural canyons, shoved underground, contained, and the pressure of it frightened him; it spilled, and spilled, and spilled. Every man in the cities or work camps he'd seen acted like it was fine, like they were smooth waters over a smooth riverbed, but in the moments any one of them looked it in the eye, they knew: if a man excavated that boundless love wrong, the explosions could wreck cities.

"I just want to love her," he said, and tried, like he always had, to swallow that horrible loving back.

Alice's hand eased around the neck of her broom. The women were always a little kinder in towns like this, except when they were differently unkind. "Go on with you," she said, oddly, but it wasn't the flat-angled face she reserved for Big Jake Morris.

The car was cold. It took the engine twenty minutes to warm. Sanchez sat behind the wheel, insufficiently sober, and leaned his sweaty forehead against the unworn country between ten and two. The light inside Alice's flickered off, and then the light out front. Perhaps it would have been better if he had taken the skin and locked it away on the work site forty miles away. If they had done what men and women did, no matter how imperfect.

The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet

He'd spent time with men on the crews here and farther downriver: men who wanted him to dress wrong, eat wrong, sing along when they cranked their own music too high as if he'd always known the words. It wasn't that they hated him; it was just so they could like him in the only ways they understood. How could he not want to be liked by them, after all? What cost was a skin compared to that?

He heaved a breath, sick-scented: car heat and old upholstery. He could not ask her to be any different. It was her body doing this. It was her own skin.

Inside, the house was so warm. The smell of unruly bodies hung in the air sweet and definite, a promise not written in languages he knew but which pulled him, regardless, closer. He shed socks and sweaters as he made his way down the undusted hall to the bedroom, where the shell of the woman he loved had laired. His outdoor clothes left a trail through the disused front rooms of the house.

It was by moonlight he saw it curled among the blankets; by moonlight and the arc of one weak lamp: a soft-breathing brown bear, black nose atwitch, its long lashes just as girlish as Betty Nosemaskwa’s eyes. It slept with one paw stretched out: reaching for a ghostly source of warmth abandoned between the stained sheets. It was her, he thought, through the reflexive amygdalian terror, reaching for him: musky, unknowable, and still so recognizably her. Still tinged with sweat and baby powder; still soft in the tiniest places between paw pad and flexed ankle. That damp nose flared when he lingered at the doorway. A huge eye opened, unfamiliar, and fixed on him with pained, frustrated love.

"Bet," he said softly. The warm bulk of her huffed an anxious sigh, and buried her face in the sheets. He held out his hands, not a dominance stretch but an offering. There is a bear in your bedroom, his animal brain shrieked, and the adrenaline was sparkling confetti in his vision, and when she saw his hands she wailed, a short, sharp howl of distress that shook the walls and shook his bones.

And then his voice was joining, a furious sob that rang in chorus octaves higher, and he was across the room and whispering with hands and skin, the only language they had left in common: I love you. I love your bearness. I love every hair of you, I love you happy, I love you sad, and I miss you so much it's destroying me.

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Men didn't speak those kinds of words, but they weren't like that. He could not map what they were like, or describe it to passersby, but even languageless and ursine, the sight of her made him want to pour out pine needles for a soft bed, feed her horchata to see her eyes change at the taste, run his fingers over the joins and tendons of her world and guide her hands through his. Oh, god, he wanted to never be bored of her.

The bedside lamp shuddered and then it was loose, the secret part of him, the thing that shifted continents and left wreck rock and poisoned water behind. The pressure of his boundless love was filling the close bedroom, spiraling five hundred feet into the dark grey sky, a leviathan loosed upon the both of them, enough to blow the foundations outward. Sanchez and Betty Nosemaskwa looked at each other as the laundry blew back against the baseboards, as the 1960s paisley wallpaper fluttered and caught at its loose corners.

"I miss us," he said, and his eyes were stinging.

She drew a deep cyclonic breath and clicked at him softly with her long tongue.

The ground bucked. He buried his hands in her brown fur and held on. Hands and skin and grief were still a language. They were still a den two people could inhabit together, and if they were together, they could stand hip to hip and dig outward until the air licked spring. Her paws were sure through the snowbanks. His legs, strong from bush work, gripped steady on. The snow swirled down outside, and then inside, and then upon his cheeks, and they were moving down the darkened streets, through the stormlight, holding on for dear life.

When they got to the river the ice was cracked, the water moving. It trickled sluggish. Her skin was warm. He did not know what lay across that border. He had never traveled nightwise this way, out of Fort Nelson, due north.

The plume was still behind him, a burst well in the sky; Betty Nosemaskwa's house a little fish atop it, balancing by the tail. And he understood, abruptly, that they would find it when it landed—by whatever combination of noses, hands, and feet. She wouldn't leave him to the cold.

Sanchez sat back on his heels like a fisherman, patient, and her paws carried them outward under the dazzling white sky: past the work site, past

The Bear Wife by Leah Bobet

the maps, onto the frozen river, walking, together, across the treacherous ice.

Novelist, editor, and critic Leah Bobet's novels have won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Aurora Awards, been selected for the Ontario Library Association's Best Bets program, and shortlisted for the Cybils and the Andre Norton Award. Her short fiction has appeared in multiple Year's Best anthologies and been transformed into choral work, and is taught in high school and university classrooms in Canada, Australia, and the US.

She is guest poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice's 2021 issue.

She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds civic engagement spaces, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at www.leahbobet.com.

Apparition Lit |27

What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti

Men drowned in these depths. Their bodies fed the fish and fungi, and the forest thrived in turn. Women had a different fate. They transformed into something else, something cold and slimy and not entirely human.

Everyone who looked at her saw a boy. But the water recognized her for who she was.

*

The first time she sees the lumberjack, she dives underwater. She doesn’t need air anymore, though she clings to the act of breathing like so many other things from her old life. The light is distorted down here. Floating pieces of algae and lichen glint in the sluggish ripples like disgraced stardust.

The lumberjack sits under the biggest willow tree by the pond and unfolds his lunch. He sings a folk song to himself, each husky note filling her empty lungs with nostalgia. His axe rests by his side, and leather straps hold his oversized bundle of kindling together.

When he shoulders his pack again, ready to leave, she emerges from the water. It’s only for a second. Only to take one more look, because she hasn’t seen another person in more than two moons. He swivels around, and she sinks back underwater with barely a splash.

This is it then, an aberrant event, rare as a black moon. Yet the next day he is back under the same willow, his long legs spread out on the grass as he unwraps his lunch from its flannel cloth.

“You can have some, if you want,” the lumberjack says.

What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti

Her heart, cold as pond sludge and slow as a spider weaving its web, beats faster for the first time.

He places the checkered cloth on the mossy ground before him. When she doesn’t reveal herself, he stands up with measured movements and dusts off his hands. She watches from behind a craggy rock formation as he leaves. Half his lunch remains behind. For the longest time, she doesn’t move. It could be a trap, like the hidden snares hunters leave in the wood for hares and quails. When hours pass and he doesn’t return, she scrambles out of the water and drags herself across the crabgrass to snatch the lumberjack’s offering.

The only food she’d had for weeks is small fish and edible plants that scratch her still-sore throat on their way down. Now, she devours the hard rye bread and soft goat cheese. By the time she finishes the last bite, the water on her face is saltier than usual thanks to her tears.

When the lumberjack returns the next noon, she decides to reveal herself, because fear should have no place with the not-quite-living. The strange interloper has russet hair, a sparse beard that speaks of his young age, and eyes that match the forest’s ambient viridescence. He doesn’t seem the least surprised when she hoists herself onto the bank. Water drips off her. Her hair, grown past her shoulders, sticks to her gray-hued skin in matted, dark tendrils.

“Why aren’t you afraid of me?” she asks, flinching at the roughness of her voice.

“My Babulya, rest her soul, told me many stories in my childhood. Most were about the rusalki, the drowned maidens. She’d met one, in her youth. Couldn’t stop talking about her even on her deathbed.”

And because he called her a maiden, and he talks with such tenderness about his late grandmother, she doesn’t dive back into the water right away.

“My name is Tolya,” he says. “What’s yours?”

Tolya. Anatoly. Sunrise. She looks at him, with his kind eyes and slow, easy smile. A fitting name.

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In that moment, she names herself, or rather speaks the name she always used to fear would break through. The name that always echoed in the safety of her head loud and clear. “Nadja. I am Nadja.”

He bows low before her. His smile is the sun peeking through the dense tree cover. “It’s so very nice to meet you, Nadja.”

*

Tolya treks to Nadja’s clearing when he isn’t turning felled trees into logs and kindling. The late summer days might still be mild, but winter likes to catch folk unawares. It’s backbreaking work, which Tolya does on his own since his father’s death last summer. Yet he keeps coming back day after day, bringing with him food and songs and stories.

Nadja thought she hated the people of her village, who used to mock the softness of her speech and mannerisms. Now, she finds herself leaning forward to listen better to Tolya’s voice. Each word hammers a nail of yearning into her breastbone. He must notice the change in her whenever he mentions the village, because one day he gently asks, “Who do you wish to know about?”

She swallows hard the brackish water residue and says, “Everyone.”

So Tolya talks about the baker’s daughter, who gave birth to a healthy baby girl; the florist, who eloped with the blacksmith; the children who dyed the elderly Mrs. Frolova’s chickens red using a paste of honey and paprika.

Sighing, she flings her arms out and lies on her back, swimming circles around the pond. The nightgown she stole from her mother billows around her. Its bobbin lace gone from pure white to bile-yellow. Water crawls into her ears, mantling every sound. Although the forest used to bring her piece when nothing else did, Nadja misses the frantic loudness of her village, the dogged peddlers and disgruntled housewives, the children and animals running in the streets. Here, not even the birdsong can penetrate the blanket of hush falling over everything.

She swims another slow lap. When she reaches the willow again, dipping its tear-shaped fronds into the water, she forces the words out of her throat. “What about the Zamolodchikova widow?”

What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti

She makes her voice buoyant, but she cannot hide the burn of longing in her eyes. Her mother, Aleksandra Zamolodchikova, is the only one left in their family. She used to make Nadja get down on her knees and pray the things that made her different would disappear with morning light. Despite this, guilt spears Nadja for forcing her mother to mourn her only child. It temporarily eclipses her ever-present anger, directed at anyone she can think of.

Early on, she made Tolya promise not to ask her any questions about who she was or how she ended up here. Tolya keeps his word, as she knew he would. He speaks about her mother in the same even cadence he used while discussing the rest of the villagers.

The next day, however, he says, “Promise you won’t be angry.”

Callused fingers peel back his usual handkerchief. A pained moan flies out of Nadja’s lips as she recognizes the bread inside, pan-fried to a golden crisp by her mother’s practiced hands.

“What did you do?” Nadja asks, even as she grabs the potato-stuffed flatbread, rubbing it over her lips to makes sure it’s real.

“I paid a visit to the Zamolodchikova house after our talk yesterday. Fixed the broken roof shingles for when the rains come. Mrs. Zamolodchikova was kind enough to treat me to some khychiny.”

Nadja bites into the savory bread, as flaky and lightly salted as she remembers. Tolya’s eyes watch her with an intensity that should have been terrifying to her, who was always in hiding.

“Forgive me if I overstepped,” he says. “I know it’s not my place, but—”

She throws herself into his arms and squeezes, because she can’t help the overflow of emotion. The cotton of his shirt smells of pine needles. His heart barrels away inside his lean-muscled chest. He hugs her back just as tightly, as if to say he doesn’t care about the frigid slime, the brackish stink, or the moss growing on the hem of her ragged nightdress.

Over Tolya’s shoulder, Nadja glimpses the slivers of sky peeking out between the trees. The day is still clinging on to the last vestiges of light, but the rich color of iron gall ink is never far from the horizon.

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“It’s a full moon tonight,” she whispers. “Please stay.”

Tolya returns to the village to pick up supplies while Nadja floats in her pond, unmoored. A restlessness worms its way inside her. She curls in on herself mollusk-like, wanting to be shielded from the Barley Moon’s probing, too-bright light. There was a full moon across the sky too when she first stepped into the pond wanting to disappear from the world. Its cratered face, akin to a freshly plowed field, remains imprinted behind her eyelids.

Tolya, hurry back. After all this time, she isn’t entirely convinced he will. She wouldn’t blame him if he decided to stay away for good.

When Tolya returns, he carries in his sinewy arms blankets and kindling, vodka and meat-and-cabbage piroshki. He arranges everything under their willow with immense care. Nadja makes to climb out of the pond and join him, but Tolya shakes his head. She cannot read the thicket-tangle of emotions on his face. Yet for once, she isn’t afraid of the unknown.

Tolya removes his soft leather boots, shirt, and woolen pants. Eyes fixed on hers, he steps toward the pond, through the green loam. He waits for her permission, and she nods, though perhaps someone better would have said No, don’t waste your future on me. Nadja quiets the disparaging voices in her head while Tolya lowers himself into the water. The muscles of his back ripple as he dives below, then emerges again inches away from Nadja. He shakes off the water from his igneous red hair, and a few stray droplets land on Nadja’s lips. Her tongue gathers the waterdrops inside her mouth as if they are precious pearls. Then Tolya’s lips press against hers. Warm, so warm, and soft. He holds her, and they swim together, twirling round and round under the moonlight’s burnished brume.

Afterward, while Tolya lights a fire, she gathers wild raspberries from a nearby bush to surprise him. It’s the farthest she’s ventured away from the pond. She places some of the red, ripe fruits on his palm, an offering of her own. Smiling, Tolya drapes one of the blankets over her shoulders, and they share the piroshki and berries between them. The flames breathe hot, dry air against her prickled skin, melting the numbness from her chilled bones. Nadja had stopped noticing the cold. However, with the fire warming her inside and out, returning to the pond water later will be torture. The thought of the coming winter makes her shiver down to her tailbone.

What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti

“Why are you crying?” Tolya’s wood-gnarled fingers glide over her damp cheeks with the gentlest ghost of a touch.

“Because I regret trying to end my life, and now I’m caught in this limbo, like the hell my mother always feared for me. You being here… It changes everything.”

It feels good to let it all out, to scream and break the quiet of the forest. All this time, she hasn’t properly mourned herself and her old life. Nor has she allowed herself to fully succumb to the undercurrent of anger. Toward her mother, her God, and everyone else who led Nadja to this forest.

“I should have told you earlier, but… I remember you,” Tolya says. “From before.”

Nadja pulls away. The bitter memory of the boys back at her village floods her senses. All the ones who would approach her were chasing something swift and dirty. They wanted to be with her in secret, but refused to accept her for who she was in the light of day. And Nadja let them. She had craved human contact, even if it was only thirty stolen minutes in the woods and a deluge of ridicule around the village afterward.

“No, let me explain,” Tolya pleads, and the sincerity in his voice stops her in her tracks. “I saw you once, in the forest. I was twelve or thirteen, one of my first times picking firewood alone. You were in a clearing, much like this one. You thought you were alone, so you sang to yourself as you wove wildflowers through your hair. Every time our paths crossed in the village after that day, I saw you. The girl with the flowers.”

She remembers. Cerulean forget-me-nots and dainty chamomiles falling out of much-too-short hair, another dress stolen from her mother’s drawers, and the hope that maybe, one day, someone would see her the way she saw herself.

Nadja melts back against Tolya. Ηe strokes her hair, and places a flower behind her ear. It’s blue and fragile, but tenacious enough to grow in unlikely places. Under the caving willow boughs, he tells her about his father and how he taught Tolya to cleave wood for the fire. How Tolya and the rest of the village men had to haul his father’s corpse free from underneath the cedar trunk that crushed him. And how one might forget the pain for a while, before one sinks into sleep and after one has just emerged from it, but the

Apparition Lit |33

void never really goes away. Again, Nadja thinks about dead parents and children. About mourning.

Although she has trouble sleeping when the moon is full, she drifts off, wrapped snug and safe in Tolya’s arms until morning.

*

Tolya doesn’t come.

Nadja swims. She catches minnows and crappies and sleeps at the bottom of the pond so the moonlight’s silvered beams don’t flay her open. She sits under the willow tree and imagines the dripping leaves’ caress against her face is the back of Tolya’s beloved hands.

She waits.

On the third day he returns. The sun is gone from his eyes, replaced by a cloud cover thicker even than the forest’s insulation. Nadja’s heart is preternaturally still inside her ribcage. Of course. He’s here to tell her that they can never meet again, the madness has passed and he’s realized he cannot be with her after all. Tolya immediately reaches for her hand. She could sob from relief. Yet the doubts still gnaw even as his fingers clasp hers.

“Nadja, we need to talk.”

Her stomach is a fathomless pit. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ll be going away before the first snow. I received a letter from my mother’s side of the family. They want me to move to the city, closer to them.”

“No…” she utters. Every other word fizzles out on her tongue, bubbles popping toward the surface while she sinks, she sinks.

Grief strikes Tolya’s face. His mouth pinches into a shape that looks impossibly small. “You know how lonely I’ve been ever since my father’s death. Earning a living has been tough. I have no family here.” His gaze becomes imploring. “No one but you.”

“So this is goodbye then.” Nadja remains as unstirring as her pond, with every emotion swirling and surging under the surface.

What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti

“No!” Tolya squeezes her hand in his big, warm palm. “Come with me.”

“I can’t… Don’t ask this of me. Just don’t.” No matter how much she’s tried to distance herself from fear, it always seems to follow her like a dog snapping at its own tail.

“Remember the first time we met? I told you about my grandmother’s stories of the rusalki. You can leave your pond and survive, as long as you always keep close to a body of water, any kind will do. And the city is so big. You can get lost in it, and nobody will bother you. My grandmother and her companion made a life for themselves there for decades. They were happy together. Why can’t we?”

Nadja bites her lip hard enough to draw watery blood. All the moons she’s stayed in this limbo-like clearing, she never once tried to leave her pond. And why should she? She still remembers the villagers’ cruel contempt; her mother begging Nadja to suppress whatever made her different, therefore vulnerable; the two of them praying together until their knees ached. What is there to guarantee things will be different in the city Tolya speaks of? The water changed her in some ways, but in others she remains the same as before.

The pond is glacial, algae-smothered, and treacly, but she was numb to it before Tolya arrived. The water offered her freedom, and it asked for nothing in return. But she knows the world won’t be satisfied until it breaks her like a sapling in the howling gales.

“You don’t understand.” Nadja pushes Tolya’s hands away. She tries to ignore the way her words snuff out the light from his sunrise eyes. “You should have never come here.”

She splashes back underwater, and this time Tolya doesn’t follow. He stands at the bank for several minutes. Nadja watches the water-blurred shape of him. When she doesn’t re-emerge, he sighs, shoulders slumping like a man several times his age.

“I understand this is sudden. You need time to think. I’ll come back a week from now to hear your answer.”

Nadja listens for the sound of his voice, but he’s gone. The saltiness of her tears heightens the salinity of the pond. She screams, fully submerged,

Apparition Lit |35

for what feels like hours. She might have compared the feeling to drowning, had she not performed the act of drowning once already with little success.

*

On the night before Tolya is due to return, Nadja doesn’t sleep. She stares up at the sky’s funerary veil and the dark green canopy of the trees. She listens to the familiar bird cries that only manage to accentuate the quiet instead of cutting through it. It’s safe here, in her weed-choked pond deep in the woods. Safe. Safe. Safe. She repeats the word in her head until it loses all meaning.

Wrapping her arms around her drawn-up knees, she sinks like a stone to the murky bottom. Her tangled hair and tattered dress fly behind her like a jellyfish’s tentacles. The light is faint, weakened rays of moonlight converging far up above. She woke up here, immersed in the green half-light. In the uncanny quiet. It’s the first memory she has of this second life she was given, and she’s held onto it for the longest time.

But Nadja doesn’t want to live in her almost-grave forever.

Tolya and his namesake, the sunrise, walk into the clearing hand-in-hand. He folds himself onto the grass under their willow tree, moist with morning’s breath. The sun renders each strand of his hair a live flame.

Nadja swims toward him and rests her elbows on the bank. She wipes the pond water from her face: the water that transformed her in some ways, allowed her to flourish on her own in others.

“Have you decided?” he asks. There’s hope woven through the spidersilk-softness of his voice. Fear, too. Nadja would recognize that feeling anywhere.

“I have.” She matches his tone, gentle as the pinks and oranges crawling across the drowsy sky.

“And?” he asks with bated breath.

Nadja thinks of browned flatbread, rough hands, and prayer-ravaged knees. Of closure. “Can we make a small detour into the village first? There’s someone I need to visit.”

What the Water Gave Her by Avra Margariti

Tolya blinks, long eyelashes catching against one another. “Does this mean you’re coming with me to the city?”

He appears too dazed to reach out to her, so Nadja lifts herself out of the pond and presses into his arms instead. “I am,” the words breathed out against his lips.

“Nadja, are you sure? There’s nothing I’d love more, but if you don’t want this for yourself—”

Nadja quiets him by brushing her mouth over his. “Shh. I want this.” She entangles their hands and presses them against their chests, where two hearts thunder. “I want us.”

The sun climbing over the treetops finds Nadja and Tolya clasped in embrace. They will visit the village one last time and each put their memories of it to rest. She will return her mother’s nightgown and say goodbye, but she won’t ask for her mother’s blessing.

Nadja feels plenty blessed already.

Avra Margariti is a queer Social Work undergrad from Greece. She enjoys storytelling in all its forms and writes about diverse identities and experiences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online, Daily Science Fiction, Mithila Review, Three Crows Magazine, and other venues. Avra won the 2019 Bacopa Literary Review prize for fiction. You can find her on twitter @avramargariti.

Apparition Lit |37

Still

by Rachel McKinley

First

My mother, the little elephant,

They called her.

At only seventeen, her huge belly,

(Burdened with the enormity of my sister and I)

Entered the hospital ahead of her.

Then

The nurses lay her

On a gurney, and

I am no longer my mother,

No longer my sister’s reflection.

Resentful of the solitary solidity of my flesh,

I howl and root into the blankets.

My sister emerges as a separate self.

Too weak for indignation, she is silent.

Our mother’s veins used to holding us,

Still by Rachel McKinley

Collapse in our absence,

And my sister, used to three hearts thumping

Decides her one cannot sustain her.

I feel them still,

The way I imagine an amputee

Feels the itch on a severed limb.

I begin to believe

I am not like others.

Having lost my mirror,

I believe the extra limbs are real.

Too young to count,

But old enough to have fairy friends,

I imagine myself a starfish fallen from the sky.

Older

I grow angry when

I am told my additional appendages don’t exist,

And I need to quit insisting others acknowledge them.

I realize I am a wasp,

And I sting and I sting and I sting.

Apparition Lit |39

Still older

I take refuge as a squid

And swaddle myself in ink

Happy to be hidden.

Finally,

I have lived long enough,

And we are all lamenting flesh lost,

Naming our phantom limbs, and

Calling to them in the night.

We have no need to baptize this new creature we have each become.

Rachel McKinley, a rock star, I mean high school English teacher, performs three shows a day to reluctant audiences of teenagers. When not extolling the virtues of other writers, she pens her own poems, memoirs, and novels. She has her MFA from Western Connecticut University and lives in Asheville, North Carolina with her husband, son, and dog.

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos

Miranda carries a Styrofoam box with a large red cross on it. She’s trembling. I smell her sweat, tangy and sharp, all the way from the couch.

I stand up and reach out to her. My fingers feel stiff, and I realize I look like the monster from the black-and-white movie Miranda showed me two nights ago. A creature with rigid arms outstretched toward the creator, voiceless with need.

“Can I help?” I ask.

Miranda shakes her head. “I got it.”

She curls one leg around the door and slams it shut. Then she puts the Styrofoam box on the counter in the small kitchen. Miranda brings her hands to her face, sees the reddish brown smears on her palms and under her fingernails. She looks down at her chest, her stomach, taking inventory. Then lurches to the kitchen sink and heaves. I have never seen her vomit before. Her back arches in a perfect curve, like the cat we watched in another black-and-white film. Miranda has no tail, no thick hairs to stand on end.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

Miranda holds out her hand to wave me off.

“Fine, Theta,” she says. “I’m fine.”

She turns on the faucet, grabs the retractable hose and sprays the sink, then she turns the hose on her face. She opens her mouth to let the water in. Then she shuts off the hose and gargles. I gather she is not, in fact, fine.

Apparition Lit |41

She grabs a towel and wipes her face. The spray of the sink hose seems to steady her, despite the dark clouds of mascara under her eyes now. She turns and leans back against the sink, eyeing the Styrofoam box as if something might crawl out of it.

“Is there an animal in there?” I ask.

Miranda blinks.

“What?” she asks. “Oh, no. It’s what I promised, Theta. It’s what we’ve talked about.”

I stand a little straighter, place my hands on my hips.

I remember what we’ve talked about. Memory is something I am very good at.

“I understand,” I say.

Miranda nods. She seems more confident now. Her shoulders settle into the stone-like surety I admire. She lets me lean on those shoulders when we watch movies. When she wears shirts that expose her skin, I am able to scent the lotion on the long curve from her neck to her arms. Scents I know very well. In fact, I wish I could bottle them. Miranda had not laughed when I told her so. She said that is one of her projects, eventually, to bottle scents.

“But not just any scents,” Miranda had said excitedly. “Ephemeral scents. Memory scents. I want to bottle the scents of people’s loved ones after they die. Scents from childhood. Their first birthday. Their cribs. The smell of their favorite toy.”

When I asked her how she would get such specific memories, she had shrugged.

“Data mining a mind is no different than a computer,” she said. “It’s just a matter of digging deep enough.”

She explained it to me, motioning with her hands. At times, she pressed her fingertips to my forehead or the back of my skull, massaging the silicone skin, telling me what she could glean from that part of the brain.

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos

When Miranda becomes inspired, her voice rises to higher decibels. It is like an aria. I am also exceptional with sound, and I enjoy Miranda’s sounds the most.

Miranda motions for me to sit on the couch, and I do. She brings the Styrofoam box to the coffee table and kneels beside it. She takes off the lid, and I smell plastic and a sharp, sweet, scent. I recognize the scent because I am adept with memory, recalling the smell of Miranda’s finger when she’d cut it while slicing vegetables for dinner.

Miranda lifts out a clear bag, and I’m not sure what I expected when it comes to the human heart. The way Miranda talks about the organ – the way the characters in the movies talk about hearts, the way they clutch their chests and exclaim whom their hearts belong to – has always led me to hypothesize that they look like lightbulbs, or perhaps more accurately, chandeliers. Like the enormous chandelier from the other black-and-white movie Miranda showed me. It was gigantic, and even though the film was in black and white, I imagined the light from the chandelier radiated in unfiltered color. The beams reflected little rainbows off the crystal, bending light.

I know how light works, too. I know multitudes. But I do not know why Miranda sometimes frowns, or why, when she starts breathing hard and fast, she needs to go to the bathroom and lock herself inside. I hear her sob, counting forwards and backwards from eight, because eight is her lucky number. After counting, I hear her move on to solving complex calculus problems out loud. When her panic softens, she sifts through the latest alchemical formulas she pores over at night.

I know this process intimately, because each time it happens, I plant myself on the other side of the bathroom door and listen. I count Miranda’s breaths and time the length of the episode. I bottle each occurrence, cataloging it, and find myself hoping the number of breaths and the length of time is less than before.

There is still much I do not know, which is why I had asked Miranda for this favor.

Miranda stares at the heart as well.

Apparition Lit |43

“We’ll try this one first,” Miranda says, then seems to hesitate. “I’m good with numbers. Formulas. Metals. Not so good with bodies. Honestly, I don’t even know if this will work.”

I lean toward her as I sit on the couch, taking her hand in my own. She feels soft, warm.

“I’d like to...” I begin, searching for the right words. “What I mean to say is that I believe in you, Miranda.”

Miranda swallows and some of the color in her cheeks flushes into a red bloom. She looks as if she might vomit again. Instead, she sets the bag on the coffee table and cups my cheeks with both of her hands.

“I’ve said this before, but you already feel, Theta,” she whispers. “You don’t need a heart. You’re better than most without having one.”

I look into Miranda’s eyes. Her irises are bright, metallic. Gold and silver and copper swirling in on themselves. She probably does not notice, as I do, that the color changes from day to day. Today they are more gold, whereas yesterday they were silver.

“I’d like to try,” I say. “You promised.”

She nods. “I promised. But I want you to know in case this doesn’t have the effect you desire. Know that you are exactly who you think you are, Theta.”

Her thumbs brush against my jaw, and I wonder if I could sit on this couch forever, as long as her thumbs move like that.

Miranda’s hands fall away, the warmth on my face fleeting. Touch. That is another thing I am very good at.

The muscles in Miranda’s jaw twitch and pulse, and I cannot tell if she is angry or sad. Both, perhaps. Miranda has said that I am observant, so much more so than others, so much more perceptive than the previous ones. The thought of them makes my memories blur a little. I twitch. The Previous Ones.

“Did the others come this close?” I ask. “To loving you?”

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos

Miranda leans away, and now there is too much space between us. Her jaw ticks and pulses. I hear her grind her teeth. It sounds loud to me, a roaring.

“I did not –the previous ones never came close to you,” Miranda whispers. “I don’t enjoy talking about them.”

“Because they failed?” I ask.

“Because I failed,” Miranda says. The last syllable comes out in a sob.

There is a long, extended silence. I used to fear silences. The loudness of the world made me think that any silence is a failure to connect. I used to speak in tumultuous waves, rushing into questions. Miranda was exhausted at first, especially because I couldn’t stand her going to sleep. Sleeping created deep silences, and I was left alone to navigate them. Then, one day, Miranda sat me down and showed me silent films. Old films where there was only music or text. Sometimes there were no sounds at all.

“Silence is not a bad thing,” Miranda said. “Silence can be good. A resting period. A pause. It is not a failure, Theta. It is a journey to the next moment.”

We watched many silent films that day. I leaned on her shoulder. I smelled the lotion on her skin. After Miranda went to sleep, I watched all the films again, memorizing them.

I let this particular silence between us extend. Miranda likely doesn’t want me to ask more questions, and I agree, because I might not enjoy her answers.

After the silence runs its course, Miranda goes back to the bag. She asks me to take off my shirt. I pry open the panel on my front. There is a small generator there, and Miranda has been working, at my request, to replace the generator with a human heart.

Miranda takes out her tools, a leather satchel that she keeps under the coffee table. In the satchel is a recorder, and she presses a button to turn it on.

Apparition Lit |45

“Heart Implementation Test 1,” Miranda says, following with the date, time, and – checking the dials on my generator – the state of my vitals. She puts the recorder down and opens the bag.

“You might black out,” Miranda says. “If the heart doesn’t take. Or perhaps if it takes too well. Don’t panic. I will bring you back.”

“I know you will,” I say.

Before she goes to open the plastic bag, sirens wail along the streets outside. Angry sounds. Usually, Miranda does not mind them, but at the sirens’ sudden onslaught, all color leaves her face. She stands, a visible tremor going from her neck to her knees. Her eyes widen into discs, her pupils dilate. She breathes hard and fast, like the thrumming of a piano. I wonder if she is counting in her head, and I decide to as well:

Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Miranda finds the remote control. She exits my movie database profile on the viewport screen in front of us. Miranda usually discourages me from watching the news.

“You are not ready for it,” she’d said. “You’d feel too much.”

Instead, I’ve watched more films. As many as I can find, but preferably the black-and-white ones. The old ones. The silent ones. Long forgotten. The ones that seem as desperate for a human heart as I am.

But this time, Miranda flips to the government channel. “Breaking News” flashes in red on the screen.

“An unregistered alchemist is believed to be the culprit in a theft of organs from the City Hospital this morning,” a voice said as an image of the hospital was shown on the screen.

It was a Pay-to-Stay Hospital. Miranda explained those to me, I remembered, and I was glad that she was the one to fix my ailments when they appeared. Few were so lucky. I saw Miranda’s knuckles turn bloodless as she clutched the remote.

The image of the hospital cuts to camera footage. The footage was in color but soundless except for a loud hum. From a helicopter, perhaps. The

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos

footage showed a figure running out of hospital with a Styrofoam box in her arms. She wore a jacket and large, thick sunglasses, no doubt to hide the metallic of her eyes. Multiple figures ran in pursuit. Some held weapons. They fired them on Miranda and, even though she stands before me now, I tremble at the sight. Bursts of light and lines of smoke erupted from the weapons, but Miranda is good at running, “at maneuvering,” she’s told me before. She can easily heal herself if given the time and proper metal, which she always keeps little discs of in her pocket. Miranda puts distance between the suits as she nears a busy street. Before long, there’s a blink of light, blinding and silver on the screen, and Miranda is gone. A Tether, as Miranda had described it once.

“Like cutting in a long line of people,” she’d said. “Only with matter.”

But it was not a clean cut. As Miranda stands near me, facing the viewport, I notice little beads of red staining the back of her shirt. The blood that was on her hands had not been from the bag.

The voice on the viewport continues:

“Although the hospital will not yet confirm, anonymous witnesses said possible human hearts were stolen. Since organic human hearts are rare and saved for government cloning, a military operation is underway to find the thief. This is not the first time alchemists have targeted the City Hospital. The White House gave a brief statement moments ago, promising to capture the alchemist. Once caught, the suspect will be tagged and placed in one of the alchemical internment facilities until further notice.”

I turn from the viewport to Miranda. She is no longer trembling. On the contrary, she is completely still, like the frozen pictures in a book.

“You were in danger,” I say.

Miranda sighs, turning slightly to place a hand on my shoulder.

“You did not say this would be so dangerous,” I say.

A feeling inside me rises up. Rising and rising like the chandelier, when it was hoisted to the ceiling by the backs of a dozen humans.

Miranda says nothing. More silence. This one feels wrong.

Apparition Lit |47

Miranda’s voice begins in a whisper and rises with the feeling in my chest. “Do not let anyone tell you that you are anything but yourself. You are full. Filled. Limitless.”

She throws the remote control at the viewport, and the screen cracks. The red “Breaking News” flickers and blinks off. The rising in my chest plummets.

Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Two floors below, there’s the sound of glass breaking. Screams.

Miranda moves fast, circling the apartment and smashing smaller viewports, and tablets. Then she takes a small cube, her back-up server, and hands it to me to place in the notch she built into my lowest vertebrae. I reach behind me and insert the cube. A warmth spreads through me, and now I am filled, just as Miranda said. I process and process while Miranda works.

She’s prepared me for this. She calls it Eurydice.

Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Miranda goes to her desktop viewport, an older model. It’s filled with her formulas. Schematics. The black-and-white films she uploads to the viewport by the couch. Things that mean the most to her. Memories.

She takes the desktop viewport in her hands. She folds it and holds it like a pillow to her chest. She hesitates only for a moment, then hurls it to the floor. When it hits, there’s a loud crack! A fissure erupts from the middle. There’s a single spark, and then nothing. The film database. All gone. A sounds rips from me. A sob.

Miranda drops to her knees in front of me on the couch.

“Do not be afraid,” she says.

She takes my face in her hands again, leans forward, and presses her lips to mine.

Perhaps a human heart is unnecessary after all.

Possible Human Hearts by Lyndsie Manusos

Her breath feels hot. I smell her lotion, feel her presence. Like in the camera footage, a faint, glimmering starts to emanate from her skin. Her eyes shine like gold coins. She had never Tethered with someone before, but it seems she may try.

The light envelopes us.

“You are who you say you are,” she whispers against me.

“I am who I say I am,” I confirm.

The banging on the door rattles us both.

Lyndsie Manusos has work appearing or forthcoming in PseudoPod, Apex Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, PANK, and other publications. She lives in Indianapolis with her family and writes for Book Riot.

Apparition Lit |49

Artist Interview with Tijana Jankovic

In two months, our global lexicon changed. Words like physical distancing, social distancing, and self-isolation are at the tip of our tongue, waiting to be said every time we leave the house for work or shopping or when we call our family and tell them to be careful, stay safe.

Language evolves based on culture and knowledge, and I’m still learning the language of art and aesthetics. Japan’s ama divers (ama translates to 'women of the sea') inspired our April cover. Ama divers were free divers, meaning they trained their breathing techniques to withstand the freezing temperatures and water pressure. This was a traditionally female profession, with training passed down through family lines. We’ve always loved exploring feminine strength and power, especially when we’re able to look beyond the tip of a sword. We wanted to show a provider, someone hunting and foraging for her family. For our cover, our diver stands at the foreground of a swamp, surrounded by dense foliage. She holds netting and reeds, just having returned from diving into the waters. There’s an ethereal glow around her, highlighting the gills and scales on her neck and arms.

Tijana produced the finished version well before her deadline. The editors and I loved the result, but we wanted more, more strangeness, more fantasy, more something. Just like the worst client any freelancer ever had, we couldn’t express exactly what it was we wanted. Tijana was patient as I tried to find the right words to convey our thoughts for the cover, providing us with small alterations to the work, slowly layering more scales and glow.

Interview

Artist Interview with Tijana Jankovic

Language has formed much of Tijana’s life. She’s fluent in German, English and Serbian, and knowledgeable in French and Latin. How words are used and their influence has inspired Tijana to continue her education and inspired her to use that research in her artwork.

Languages are a wonderful medium to get to know a culture by and that’s why I give them credit for introducing me to different history and people. I like learning idioms and phrases of different languages in general, so I enrolled and now I’m majoring in German and English.

Art and storytelling are deeply entwined for Tijana. She aims to create fully realized characters in her work, finding ways to show the uniqueness of each character concept. On her Artstation page, you can see examples of her character design. In each piece, both original and fanart, there is a depth of individual detail. Clothing, posture, and setting are all carefully considered.

I believe that it is about the personality traits. The writers write the character, but concept artist need to ‘convey’ them. Show, don’t talk, is basically how we operate. If your character has a certain type of style of clothing to tell you who they are, it needs to be accommodated so. Most authors don’t write their characters that are ‘forgettable’ unless they were needed to. Same goes for characters that aren’t ‘needed’ to be dynamic to the storyline.

Recently, Tijana posted an update of an older piece to show her progress over the years and the new approach that she’s developed. For Envy, Tijana focused on incorporating more emotion and animation in the illustration.

Apparition Lit |51

…the first skill that I initially developed that helped me with art was through life alone and that was observation that came from natural curiosity. Why does a certain object seem that way, why is it there, if it’s an animated one, capable of moving, in what way can it twist itself? Can we twist it? These questions just popped up as I was looking on my hand typing away. It is essential for visual artists to understand when they are trying to convey the object in question on a canvas.

Tijana’s care for her language and her art is something we can all aspire toward. When you become focused on the negatives of our new language of isolation, remember to stay challenged and honest. Tijana’s leaves us all with fantastic advice:

Definitely don’t be afraid to challenge yourselves and never be afraid to seclude yourself to an idea that you want to develop or something you want to achieve. Pay attention to the times when you are doubting yourselves and stay always honest with what you want to accomplish. Art is something wonderful. Sometimes it is more challenging. More importantly - love that you do.

Interviewed by Rebecca Bennett

Find the full-length interview with Tijana Jankovic on our website

It’s OK to Cry During a Pandemic By Amy Henry Robinson

It’s OK to Cry During a Pandemic

By Amy Henry Robinson

This essay was meant to be about the magical power of words to alter reality, both real and perceived. What other people say to you, the language you use to talk to yourself, can summon demons faster than a passage from the Necronomicon. Talk therapy uses words to heal. Guided meditation, hypnosis, or just the kindness of hearing “I understand you.” show how language can soothe.

Add math to words and you build civilizations. Combine musical notes with words and you can divine songs that carry us away. A hurtful word embeds deeper than a tattoo or scar. Hateful dogma can alter the way society acts forever.

That’s where my prep for this piece started in February 2020, but things changed. Those plans were blown up by another transfiguring word: PANDEMIC.

Things everywhere will change, this is guaranteed because, to paraphrase the Buddha, “Everything is impermanent.”

This immediate shifting of our cultural behavior is about survival. The norms of commuting to work, kids to school, happy hour or night at the cheap theatre, making any plans, those are gone for now. People are actively sick and dying and losing jobs and loved ones. As badly as I want to know the future, to see when all this will end and predict exactly how our universe will be altered, it’s impossible to see. Do what you can now. If you can, stay at home.

In the early 1990s, my job was to help older people--folks who didn’t have family--transition from living on their own to moving into care facilities. I sorted through the client’s life, home, and possessions. The majority of these

Essay

Apparition Lit |53

folks lived through the Great Depression and WWII, and the majority of our clients were hoarders.

When they were younger, those clients could not have predicted that in their old age they would live among piles of boxes and bags and cans packed in so tightly that there was just a narrow path to the bathroom or the kitchen sink. They were living day-to-day with a feeling deep in their psyche that it was entirely plausible that one day they would need one of those boxes or bags of cans they didn’t have during the tough times early on.

Based on how those clients clung to security of “stuff,” I can guess how the world will change. Can you still imagine grabbing a bag of chips from the gas station and just open them up and start snacking without wiping down that bag with a disinfecting wipe and then wash your hands a few times. I think handshakes will disappear entirely, people will save hugs for the closest of relationships, that the housing and healthcare models will change in America, but those are just guesses.

Everything we’re experiencing feels like a question right now and the answers seem to shimmer like an oasis that keeps shifting farther away as we move through this thing.

We’re deep in the middle of the trauma, or maybe just at the start, so anything labeled “the new normal” is pure conjecture. Even if theories are based on how people behaved historically, we’ve never seen a time like this. Societal changes happened after worldwide tragedies like the Spanish Flu or the Great Depression or the World Wars, and localized cultures changed based on the wounds of colonial oppression or natural disasters.

But the changes we will see will be unique to this time in history. We are more connected and have instant access to information. Before, we didn’t have social media and 24-hour news feeds serving both vital news, and conflicting updates and anxiety.

Alternatively, we are fortunate now to have the option to call a friend, parent, or grandparent to alleviate their isolation, and the benefit of FaceTime, Zoom or Slack to work from home, stay connected, or share virtual concerts, workouts, art lessons, or storytelling.

When we entered isolation early in March, my own mind began to change, not on a full alteration of society level, but just for me, just a little. The transition to staying in was not terribly jarring for me. I’ve been working from

It’s OK to Cry During a Pandemic By Amy Henry Robinson

home for a decade, my main hobby is this magazine, which is done entirely in the virtual environment, and I was housebound by an iatrogenic illness most of 2018-2019. I’m used to not interacting IRL every day. But, as everything changed on a global scale, I see my privilege even more clearly now. As terrified as I am for the world, for my family, for the future, I am trying to let go of the fear a couple of times a day and breathe into the things I am grateful for: the internet, a loving and safe home environment, food to eat and, as always, functional indoor plumbing.

I highly recommend finding a breath meditation or body scan that suits you on the free Insight Timer app. There are hundreds, so shop around until you find one that grounds you or sweeps you away, whatever you need. I’ve had “The Anxiety Calming Meditation We Need Right Now by Melanie Britzon” on repeat for the past few weeks.

I’m not a doctor, scientist, nurse, grocery store clerk, postal delivery person, utility maintenance person, pharmacist, trucker, sanitation worker, or any of the myriad of other essential workers who we are all relying on to keep our society functioning right now. I’m just an editor who gets to read about worlds woven out of words by talented writers, and then I get to share those words with you. But really, the only power I have is over my own actions and my own words.

The world is going through a transfiguration. Transformation, good or bad, is coming and the universe will be completely indifferent. Right now the most powerful words we have, the most powerful action we have is to try to bend the curve toward good: Stay At Home.

Amy has a chequered past leading writing workshops for Writing Pad L.A. & Write In Ventura, and as the column editor for FierceAndNerdy.com. Her poetry & spec. fiction has been in Strange Horizons, Pearl Magazine, Six Penny Review, & Flash Fiction Press. She lives in a small house beside the ocean with her husband. Amy can be found on Twitter being weird, and mocking her cats, at @Amyqotwf

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Thank You to our Subscribers and Patrons

We wanted to thank our friends, family, and fans. Their kind donations have helped us pay our authors, illustrators, and kept us online for another month.

We want to extend a special ‘Thank You’ to our 2020 patrons who generously donated $50USD or more:

Esmeralda Languzzi

Iain Davis

Lauren Schellenbach

To our Patron’s who are supporting us on a monthly basis, not only do these contributions help pay our writers but everything donated stays in Apparition Lit’s bank account. You’re helping us commission new artists, pay better rates, and slowly climb that ladder of success.

Andrew Bishop

Ashley Gloria

Aurelius Raines II

Casey Reinhardt

Drew Brooks

Genevieve

Isaac Lockhart

Jamie D. Munro

Janenn

Julia August

Thank You to our Subscribers and Patrons

Laura DeHaan

Laura O’Brien

Maria Haskins

Matthew Bennardo

MBV

Naomi Solomon

Oreolek

Shannon Lamb

Finally, thank you to Seen Robinson, who has spent countless hours honing his catlike reflexes at Photoshop and web maintenance for us. It’s never mentioned enough, but it’s no less appreciated.

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Past Issues

Not subscribed for a full year of Apparition Lit? Pick up past issues on Amazon, Kobo, Smashwords.

Year 1: Apparition (January 2018); Delusion (April 2018); Vision (July 2018); Diversion (November 2018)

Year 2: Resistance (January 2019); Ambition (April 2019); Retribution (July 2019); Euphoria (October 2019)

Year 3: Experimentation (January 2020); Transfiguration (April 2020)