Love Hurts: A Speculative Fiction Anthology

LOVE HURTS

A Speculative Fiction Anthology

Edited by

Tricia Reeks

Assistant Editors

Kyle Richardson

Margaret Reeks

Meerkat Press

Atlanta

Copyright © 2015

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form.

Collection, introductory materials, and arrangement copyright © 2015 by Tricia Reeks.

Copyrights to the individual stories remain with the authors, and each has permitted use of the work in this collection.

Published in the United States by Meerkat Press, LLC, www.meerkatpress.com

Edited by Tricia Reeks

Cover and book design by Tricia Reeks

Illustrations by Sergio Garzon

ISBN-13 978-0-9966262-2-4 (acid-free paper)

ISBN-13 978-0-9966262-3-1 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015916017

Introduction

Tricia Reeks

I’ve always had a taste for dark—whether it be fiction, movies, chocolate, or wardrobe. I blame it on my mother for letting me watch The Exorcist at the tender age of twelve. What was she thinking?

So, when the idea for a collection of speculative fiction stories about love started percolating, I automatically tagged the word hurts to the end. Like adding a shot of whiskey to your coffee: sure it hurts going down, but the pain is so worth it.

Although a longtime consumer of speculative fiction novels and film, I didn’t discover the short fiction market until more recently. Two things prompted it—stumbling upon Hugh Howey’s Wool during a particularly intense post-apocalyptic reading frenzy, and learning about publications such as Tor.com and Daily Science Fiction through my own writing journey.

I found a whole new world of exceptional authors I’d never even heard of, some of whom are included in this book. My Kindle quickly began to fill with the collections they appeared in, and I became intrigued by the dynamics of a themed anthology—the way the intense emotional ride of a short story can be enhanced by its association and arrangement with others. Intrigue turned into obsession, and obsession turned into Love Hurts.

So with the help of my assistant editors, Kyle Richardson (whose heartbreaking story, Catching On, is in this collection) and Margaret Reeks (who knows her way around The Chicago Manual of Style like nobody’s business), we’ve gathered twenty-six brilliant speculative fiction stories about love, and the pain that so often accompanies it. Sometimes funny, occasionally happy, frequently gut-wrenching—these stories will take your heart on a wild emotional ride.

Love Hurts includes a few hand-picked favorites—previously published work such as Karin Tidbeck’s Sing and Jeff VanderMeer’s A Heart for Lucretia. Stories we read and couldn’t get out of our heads (not that we wanted to). The other eighteen are new—like Steve Simpson’s haunting dystopian fantasy, Jacinta’s Lovers, and Shannon Phillips’s action-packed sci-fi romp, Favor. Great stories that we hope you’ll like as much as we did.

The anthology wasn’t limited to romantic love, though as you might expect with a theme of love hurts, most selections fell into that category. But we also have some fascinating tales about other relationships such as between father and son, brother and sister, alien and child.

So join us on this sometimes dark, often painful journey called love. Individually, these stories are wonderful, but I hope we have also managed to capture a bit of the magic that comes from reading them as a collection—that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The Sorcerer’s Unattainable Gardens

A. Merc Rustad

Originally appeared in Daily Science Fiction, April 17, 2015

Wrought iron fences loop around the gardens: six deep, the outer three progressively higher, more elaborate, and with more spikes atop, while the inner three create a mirror effect. Say you make it over all six fences without impaling yourself or falling or getting trapped between iron bars that suddenly constrict or twist or move. Say you avoid the fourth fence, the electric one, or the second one with the poisoned varnish, or the sixth one with a taste for blood.

***

Once upon a time, a sorcerer lost their shadow in a bet with a magician. The bet itself is unimportant. Shadowless, the sorcerer wandered the world until, unexpectedly, they found a shadow whose person had been lost to a bet with a sea-witch long before.

***

If you make it past all six fences, then you reach the first garden. It’s a great circular loop of hawthorn and foxglove hedging that has no convenient holes or doors. The hedge speaks with a rusty, gravely, morbid voice; its cadence is so slow you forget the first word before you hear the third one. The hedge asks riddles, like hedges are wont to do in a sorcerer’s garden and, if you get it wrong, the gophers eat you.

***

The sorcerer and the unattached shadow fell in love. Can we stay together forever? asked the shadow, twined with the sorcerer under the autumn stars, and the sorcerer said, Yes. The sorcerer did not intend to lie.

***

But let’s say you answer the riddle, which no one has been able to guess for sixty-five years, and the hedge opens just enough for you to squeak through with lacerations on your sides and foxglove pollen infecting the cuts. Then you reach the second circle, a rose garden.

***

What the shadow did not know was that, once upon a time, the sorcerer made a bet with a demon and lost. The bet itself is unimportant; the wager was the sorcerer’s happiness. As soon as the sorcerer found true joy, the demon came to collect.

***

Roses of every color imagined or not imagined fill the garden. The air is so thick with fragrance you get high with the first breath and overdose with the second. But let’s say you can hold your breath, or you brought a mask. You hear the roses speaking. Not riddles, of course, because the roses are too polite to infringe on the hedge’s territory. What the roses say is: eat you eat you eat you.

And then they will, of course. Roses need fertilizer just like any other plant. Your bones might become thorns for the next bushes that sprout, if you’re fortunate, and if you’re even luckier, one of the yellow roses will drink your soul instead of the red ones. And if you’re especially tasty, it won’t even hurt.

***

The sorcerer said to the shadow, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean for this to happen. To look on the shadow brought only grief to them both. So the sorcerer banished the shadow, because once a sorcerer makes a bet, they cannot go back on the wager. Shadows can’t weep.

***

But let’s say you don’t get eaten by the roses. The circle you find yourself in next is a lightless tower that goes downward and never up. Chains spun from hanged men’s gurgles crisscross the stairs that don’t really exist. Beware of the ivy along the walls, for it grows on memory, until your mind is choked and full of leaves, and roots dig out through your skin and you forget why you came, and you sit there forever, and forever, and forever, and . . .

***

The shadow found itself in a glacier. The ice the shadow absorbed melted and dripped down the shadow’s face, and it looked at its hands and clenched them into fists and said, I will find you again, love. Somewhere on the other side of the world, the sorcerer heard the shadow’s words and despaired.

***

But let’s say that you don’t trip over nonexistent steps and fall into the abyss, and you bring herbicide for the ivy.

***

The shadow traveled the world alone, becoming a master of disguise, a jack-of-all-trades. No cost was too great to acquire what was needed. The shadow absorbed knowledge and languages and magic and shut away grief so deep it forgot, for a time, it was there. Then the shadow learned how to hunt demons.

***

The second to last circle is made of bubbles, translucent spheres summoned from the essence of Death Itself, for Death has always had a whimsical side. If you pop one, it swallows you, compressing your lungs, siphoning your blood, unraveling your nervous system, grinding your bones into dust. There is no space between the bubbles through which to pass.

***

On the other side of the world, the sorcerer put all their skill into making an unattainable fortress, circles of gardens no one can ever penetrate. There will be no more bets, and no more loss, and in their self-made prison, the sorcerer sits alone. One day, the sorcerer hopes, they will fade from memory so the shadow may mourn, and perhaps one day find peace again.

***

But let’s say you brought needles to prick the bubbles ever so carefully and catch the pieces of death in a lead-lined pouch. When you carve a path through this circle, you find a simple wooden door that asks for a password. If you answer wrong, the door will never have existed. But you answer: Heart, and it opens.

***

The shadow laid a delicious trap for the demon: freshly picked souls, harvested from the Tree at the Center of the World. The demon approached, feet soundless on the ice floes the shadow drifted on. What game shall we play for this luscious prize? the demon asked, and the shadow said, No game. I’m here to kill you.

***

Let’s say you make it into the final circle, the one made of plain stone.

***

The shadow lunged, a lasso made from angel sinew in one hand, and in the other a poniard forged in the eventual heat death of the universe. The demon screamed as the angel sinew snared tight about its neck. The demon’s form flickered through every horrendous shape it knew; yet it couldn’t escape the noose. You hurt the one I love, the shadow said. I do not care for that. The demon howled for mercy. Shadows are neither merciful nor cruel, except when they are. With the poniard, the shadow cut out the demon’s guts, and in the steaming entrails found every item the demon had stolen with tricks or dice or cards. The demon withered into flakes of ash and sank into the frigid sea-salt waters. The shadow gently scooped up what it had sought for so long, trembling, hoping it was not too late.

***

There are no traps or puzzles or illusions here. This garden is brick, lopsided piles of brown and red and gray stone in no discernible pattern. The sorcerer sits on the middle heap, alone except for the bones. Oh, yes, of course there are bones. Don’t ask what they are from.

The sorcerer is a thin, hunched person of no specific gender, dressed in a blue habit sewn from fish scales. Dull eyes, bones sharp against slack skin. Building an unattainable garden takes its toll on a body.

Why did you come? the sorcerer says. There’s deep tiredness in that voice, so much pain. You will only find sorrow here.

I know. You sit beside the sorcerer, your love, and unzip your ribs. Tucked under your heart is a small oak box, plain and unvarnished. You offer it to the sorcerer. I brought this for you.

Their hands shake as they open the box.

Inside, wrapped in turquoise tissue paper, is the sorcerer’s stolen happiness.

They let out a small gasp of shock. How . . .

You press a finger against the sorcerer’s lips. Later. Please take it. You’ve hoped since the moment you found the wrought iron gates that the sorcerer will not refuse. If the sorcerer says no, you are finished.

The sorcerer folds the paper aside for later use. How long has it been?

Too, too long.

I don’t remember . . . The sorcerer’s voice catches in their throat. They turn away. Why did you come?

I want you back. You wait, trembling. There is nowhere else to go. Please come back, love. I will help you laugh again, I will make you strong. One day, we will tear down these unattainable gardens and walk free. I am here because I need you. Unsaid: Please don’t banish me to loneliness forever.

The sorcerer shuts their eyes. Then with quivering hands, replaces the happiness inside them. A shudder ripples through the sorcerer’s frame, and they press their face against your shoulder. You stroke their hair and wait.

I’m so sorry, the sorcerer says, over and over and over.

You wrap yourself around them and hold them close. For now you are safe from wandering magicians and cunning sea-witches and unsatisfied demons.

It will be all right, love, you whisper, because shadows never lie. And for the first time since they built this labyrinth, the sorcerer smiles.

A Puzzle by the Name of L

Carla Dash

When Death knocks on Stephanie’s door, she is wallowing in the aftereffects of her fiancé’s death, trekking aimlessly through the boggy muck that was once her heart, her life, and wondering if this year, finally, will be the one that drains away what’s left of her will to live. Also, she is working on a jigsaw puzzle. The interruption annoys her because, even though most of the cardboard pieces are lying in dark, senseless piles, the blue-black of the river has just started to distinguish itself from the blue-gray mist hovering above it. This is important, she knows. The turning point of the whole activity. The first step towards completion. Stephanie is something of an authority on jigsaw puzzles. She has been doing a lot of them in the two years since Hayden died.

Looking through the peephole, she knows the guy standing on her threshold is Death because he’s wearing a billowing black robe and swinging a scythe back and forth at his side in short, fluid pendulum arcs. Also, there is something about his looks. Something ashen, unfinished. Something not quite existent. She thinks, I should be afraid. She stands perfectly still, unbreathing, waiting for the emotion to flood through her veins, but she feels nothing, so she opens the door.

Boo, says Death. His voice is grainy, a new or seldom-used thing, but with a deep, languorous current running beneath it. It is a voice with potential, Stephanie thinks. The kind of voice that could sing arias, seduce in seconds, if only he’d give a little cough or clear his throat.

You aren’t a ghost, she replies.

I’m not? he asks, all innocence.

Stephanie slides her eyes down the length of his body, once, slowly, just to be sure. Black robe. Still billowing. Scythe. Still swinging. She notices as well that his chest is quite broad, but that his fingers are long and thin.

Obviously, she says.

Hm. Good to know. Then he smiles, straight and bone white, but fetching, charming, like a guy who just a moment ago scored the winning touchdown and is now posing for a photograph, his dad’s proud, vicarious arm slung across his shoulders. Can I come in?

No.

As he sticks out his bottom lip and rounds his eyes into pathetic, puppy-dog orbs, Stephanie thinks there is something familiar about the arrangement of his features—the alignment of his pupils with the corners of his lips, the tilt of his nose, the curve of his eyes. A name flitters through the depths of her skull, but won’t float to the surface.

I’m losing my mind, she decides, says, and shuts the door in his face.

But when she turns, he is sitting on her living room couch, ankles crossed, arms folded behind his head, smirking. Again, Stephanie feels she should be afraid. She should call the police. Try to throw him out. But she’s never been one to fight the inevitable. If he got in once, she figures he can get in again.

So instead she flings out an arm and says, Over there is the kitchen. Down the hallway on the left is the bathroom, at the end my bedroom, never go in there, on the right another room, definitely never go in there. This, obviously, is the living room. The couch you’re sitting on is where you’ll be sleeping. Do you even need to sleep?

Death shrugs. Sure. You done with the tour?

Yes, Stephanie says.

Great, because this place is giving me ideas. Death springs up from the couch and bounces over to a wall. You’ve got a loose socket cover here, he says, prodding the plastic and the wires beneath. Maybe you can stick a finger in. I doubt it’d do the trick, though. Maybe if you stand in a bucket of water at the same time? Or, he says, dashing to a window, maybe you can jump through this, while it’s closed, of course, for maximum effect. Looks like a long fall. What is it? Eighteen floors? Nineteen? Wouldn’t be very much left of you. Maybe you can stick your arm through the glass, then drag it back and forth across the shards. Or, if bloodiness appeals to you, maybe . . . do you have knives? he asks, shooting off to the kitchen without waiting for an answer.

Stephanie hears drawers jiggling and the clang of silverware bouncing around. Death reappears, holding two of the largest knives she owns like nunchuks or sai, one in each hand. He slashes graceful semicircles through the air, then drops into a fighting stance. Or, he says, popping back into verticality, letting the knives fall carelessly to the floor, if you don’t like the bloody approach, maybe you can go the drug route. And then he’s darting down the hall, opening and closing cabinets, mumbling, Jeez, these are a lot of pills, you’ve thought about this before, haven’t you? and stepping back into view, a bottle curled in the crook of each arm and one shaking in his left hand like a maraca.

Stephanie stalks up to him, snatches the bottles away, glares into his foggy eyes—amused, but impersonal, uncaring—and grits, I’m not going to off myself, asshole.

Are you sure? he asks, voice bland. Because my presence here begs to differ.

Stephanie takes a deep breath and holds the air tight in her lungs to keep from responding childishly, turns her back, and walks down the hallway, footsteps measured and light. Don’t follow me.

Oh? And why should I listen to you? Death asks, arms folded across his puffed-out chest.

Please. Just don’t, Stephanie murmurs as the door on the right side of the corridor clicks shut behind her.

Death plops onto the couch, fingering the faded, matted plush. Fine, but you’re no fun. If you take your time with this thing, I’m going to get bored.

In the room, surrounded by potted poisons—Atropa belladonna, Digitalis purpurea, Datura stramonium, Conium maculatum and the like—Stephanie kneels in front of the windowsill and tips a watering can, attempting to spout liquid out of the porcelain jug at the pressure and volume her mother would, wetting the soil so it’s just barely damp to the touch.

***

The next morning, Stephanie wakes cold. During the night, her tossing and turning has bunched the blanket around her arms and hips and pulled it away from her feet, leaving them exposed and icy. Her nose feels frozen, numb. The arrival of consciousness is a slow, difficult ascent, like swimming upward through a deep, viscous bog. There are moments when she doesn’t think she’ll ever reach the surface. That’s okay. She doesn’t care. She stops wanting to. She embraces the sensation of complete immersion, of floating, of sinking, of burning oxygen-deficient lungs. But eventually, she rises. The thoughts rushing through her head, like a school of wild fish, slow into sense. She can catch and examine them. She can dissect their beauty until there is nothing left but corpses in her hands. She sniffs, disappointed, and swings her legs over the side of the bed, slipping her toes into the fuzzy, carnation-pink slippers her mother bought her when she was a girl. They are too small and worn; Stephanie’s heels hang three inches off the backs, and she can feel the cheap, industrial carpet through their jagged-holed soles. Hayden used to say, Momma’s girl. But Stephanie doesn’t allow herself to think about that, doesn’t permit Hayden to shake his head, bemused, or grin around teeth digging into his lower lip, attempting to hold back a smile. Instead she spots the image floating up through her memory from a distance, coalescing as it rises, and shoves it back under, dissolving it into harmless, sodden pieces.

Stephanie stretches and shuffles down the hallway, past the faded, flowery wallpaper she hates but doesn’t have the motivation to change, because, one way or another, she’ll be gone soon. The living room is drenched in a shade of cool white. Through the open curtains, she can see it is snowing. Heavy flakes cascade down in front of the glass. The ground is a river of white. The sky an ocean of silver. She frowns. Another winter.

Death has been snooping through her things. Books are askew on shelves, cabinets are open, picture frames full of sunshine and Stephanie’s old life—she and Hayden on a beach in Hawaii, his head in her lap, her hands tangled in his dark, curly hair; she and Hayden, lounging under a white umbrella on a beach in Brazil; her mother, kneeling in her rose garden, light bouncing off her shears and seeping into her wavy tresses—stand erect on surfaces they usually lie flat upon. Stephanie itches to turn them down again, but refrains.

She can’t see Death over the back of the couch, but his robe is draped over one of its arms, and his scythe, so dull and subtly curved Stephanie wonders if it would even cut her if she ran a finger across its edge, is propped against the side, so she figures he must be there. She wonders what he wears under the robe, if he’s naked, what his body looks like. She peers over the top of the couch. He’s wearing black cotton boxers and a white undershirt. His legs are hairy. His arms are thin, but defined. She thinks perhaps his complexion is a little more brown and a little less gray than it was yesterday. He looks ordinary, familiar.

Throw yourself in front of a bus. Hang a noose from the ceiling fan in the kitchen, Death mumbles around the cushion his face is smooshed into. Stephanie sighs and he rolls over, rubbing his eyes.

I’m telling you, he says, I’ve thought about it. Broken bones jutting through your skin, blood pooling around your limbs, a snapped neck or a blue face, you could pull them off. They’d look good on you. You wouldn’t be one of those hideous corpses. You’d be beautiful.

He yawns wide, stretches long and slow like a cat. Stephanie thinks, how cute quickly followed by yep, I’m losing my mind and pads into the kitchen to make tea. She pulls a china kettle down from a cabinet. It was a birthday gift one year from her mother to Hayden. Her mother never really liked him, always said she thought Stephanie spent too much time with him, neglecting her old friends and interests. But Stephanie knows the truth. Her dad was a deadbeat, uninterested and so long gone she doesn’t have even a partial memory of his face, and there were no other children; she is all her mother has. When Stephanie told her she and Hayden were engaged, her mother relented, though. Alright, alright, she said. Stephanie was with her, walking through a flea market under a hot, blue July sky, when she bought the kettle, green and oblong, like a leaf, with embossed vines crawling along its surface. Here, she said, porcelain for the maker of dead things.

Mom, Stephanie said. Her mother sighed, Alright, alright. The memory of Hayden’s dark fingers moving close to hers as they worked together to pull the floral wrapping paper away from the irregularly shaped pot bubbles up behind Stephanie’s eyelids. But, as she runs water, watching the sink distort behind it, listening to it softly tap against the tarnished metal basin, sliding her fingers beneath the stream and feeling it slip silkily between them, the image sinks obediently beneath the surface of her thoughts once again.

When she returns to the living room, Death is sitting up, rubbing a hand over his face. Stephanie passes him a mug, decorated in concentric circles that lap like waves at the rim of the cup, and blows into her own matching one. Death perks up.

Is it poisoned?

No! Stephanie says, a little loudly, a little sharply.

Aw, Death pouts. So you’re not going to kill yourself today either?

No.

Oh, well. Hey! These are nice mugs. They look handmade. Did you make them?

No, Stephanie says. My fiancé did.

That him in all the photos?

Yes.

What happened to him?

He’s dead. Shouldn’t you know that?

Lots of people die, you know. I can’t be expected to remember them all. So? What happened?

An image springs into Stephanie’s mind before she can clamp down on it. The brown, flailing arms she sometimes imagines she saw sinking into the ocean in slow motion from the shore. The churning water. The swollen blueness of his skin when they finally pulled him out.

He drowned, she says.

And? Death asks, eyes hungry, voice hushed and rapt. What was it like?

I don’t know, Stephanie says. It happened fast. I don’t remember.

***

Stephanie gets used to having Death around. He whirls through her apartment, causing chaos in every crevice, snooping, flipping through leather-bound photo albums and leaving them open on the carpet, running fingers over Hayden’s bright, ceramic cups, mugs, and baking dishes and discarding them on the Formica kitchen countertops, pulling her boxes and boxes of jigsaw puzzles off the rough, unfinished, wood shelves that line the living room, turning them over, studying the pictures on the fronts, shaking them up, and replacing them in tall, precarious, asymmetrical piles. But Stephanie finds she doesn’t mind. She has been alone for a long time and she is enjoying the little things about having a man around: the noise, the cooking for two, the picking up after someone else’s messes.

One afternoon Stephanie is working on the jigsaw puzzle from the day Death showed up. She is agitated because as much as she wants to assemble it using deductive skills alone—as much as she longs to see only the size, shape, color, and pattern of individual pieces—she can’t help but recall in perfect, vivid detail the scene on the front of the box. The dark water, the inky sky, the shadows of the trees on the distant shore, the motionless skiff and its obscure passenger all hover in her imagination with irritating clarity so that each jigsaw piece becomes a streak of water, a grain of wood, or a chunk of pine needles instead of a black, gray, or green sharp-edged, rounded, or protrusion-nubbed irregular polygon. Stephanie sulks, pushing the cardboard pieces around with the tips of her fingers, and tries to forget the whole to which they belong.

It is at this point that Death walks up to her, holding her cell phone delicately between the thumb and forefinger of one hand like he might a snake, by the head, cautiously, and afraid, as if he can’t be sure he won’t imminently suffer a life-threatening injury.

What is it? Stephanie snaps. You want me to eat the phone? Beat myself over the head with it?

No, Death responds quietly. Stephanie squints at him.

What then?

Did you know you have twenty-seven messages from your mother?

You’ve been listening to my messages?

Did. You. Know. Death snarls, slamming a palm against the flimsy, metal, foldout card table Stephanie uses for assembling puzzles. It squeaks and wobbles, but doesn’t buckle. Stephanie takes a breath, counts to thirty in her head, then pushes it back out.

Yes, I know.

Have you answered any of them?

No.

Why not?

Obviously, I don’t want to.

But why not?

Why do you care?

I don’t know. It’s just . . . you used to be so close to her, Death says in a voice as smooth and deep as a bow sliding across the strings of a cello, a voice so familiar it hurts.

What? Stephanie asks, fear, shocking and novel, jolting through her diaphragm.

Hm? Death asks, eyes distant, distracted.

How would you know that?

I don’t know. It just feels true.

***

Incidents like this become the norm. Instead of greeting Stephanie in the mornings with gung-ho suicide suggestions like a bullet between the eyes and roll around in a pile of glass shards, Death often begins the day with observations like your hair is longer than it used to be or when did you stop running? You never used to be able to sit still. He wanders, glassy-eyed, through the apartment, dragging his feet and running palms across the ceramics in the kitchen, the fuzz of Stephanie’s slippers, the gloss of photographs, and Stephanie knows he’s recalling memories that aren’t his. Sometimes he even reaches out and touches the top of her head, the side of her face, or the length of her sleeves, but Stephanie can’t find it in herself to stop him or the wispy shivers that ripple through her limbs in the wake of his fingertips.

As for Stephanie, she spends increasingly more time in the room on the right side of the hallway and takes lots of baths, sometimes as many as three or four a day. Her bathtub isn’t much, plastic and rectangular, no porcelain contours or lions’ feet—an adjunct professor of horticulture, especially one who only works two out