Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 58 by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Magazine
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2015-02-24T16:00:00+00:00

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Naomi Kritzer is the author of the Dead Rivers Trilogy and the Eliana’s Song series. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jim Baen’s Universe, as well as many other publications. She lives in Minnesota, and her website is naomikritzer.com.

To learn more about the author and this story, read the Author Spotlight.

Documentary

Vajra Chandrasekera

Kamaria turns into a helicopter gunship at the full metal moon. She stalks the fallow killing fields by night, chop-chop lost in the wind. Helicopter thoughts are slick with oil, but she will not fire her guns. That much she holds in place, like a single sputtering candle underneath the roar of her blades.

• • • •

Transformation scenes are off-camera. We don’t have the budget. Jump cut to:

At dawn she wakes up naked and heavy on the beach where after the war they burned all the bodies and denied their existence. There are nobodies there now, watching her.

She shakes the ash from her blades and clambers to her feet, gravid with unfired magazines. Now she has to walk all the way home with her hands clasped under her belly, hoping to reach home before the sun gets too hot.

Zoom out to an extreme long shot centred on the thin brown comma of a lone woman: We see a pleasant tropical landscape. Sparkling blue water, palm trees, all the scattered nobodies and the churning of the secret charnel soil, all the ashes mixed with sand.

• • • •

We cannot film the nobodies. To the camera, as to the naked eye, they are nothing but twists in the air like heat haze. We are uncertain whether they are the ghosts of those who died in the war. This is the only answer anybody will give us, but we suspect most of our viewers will not believe in ghosts. We don’t dwell on the possibility. They can no longer affect the material world, or least not much beyond dreams and words and a light breeze.

The nobodies harry Kamaria all the way home. She ignores them. They are only pockmarks on the skin of the world, there to signify that something has been survived. It is impossible to tell now which side of the war they might once have been on. Being chased by them in their masses is like being caught in a stiff wind. We focus on her, the only vital figure in this landscape, her hair blowing about her face despite the air being still and warm. We hope to depict them in our documentary if only through the perturbations they cause in her arc.

• • • •

When Kamaria gets home, her husband Wielan is folding again. He is a compulsive folder. She sits by him and watches him fold paper money. He layers notes over themselves into the shapes of little animals. A boar, a bull. Nothing that flies, not for another cycle. Last night’s paper birds hang from the clothesline, held in place by their crooked necks. They jangle and bob with the passing of the nobodies.

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