Transcendent 4: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lethe Press
Published: 2019-11-16T00:00:00+00:00

The Face of the Waters

• Sonya Taaffe •

‘The clue you’re looking for at thirteen down,’

She said, ‘is river-stairs, and learning that

Will cost you.’

—Sean O’Brien, “On the Toon”

She took the cigarette with fingers as cold as scallops, her nails in the streetlight slicked with a glass-eel gleam. “Of course it’s bad for me,” she agreed. Smoke trailed through her words, lingered where her breath did not fog in the chilly air. “But you think that’s so much better?” Her gesture scattered sparks like a comet’s tail, hissing out as they earthed themselves on wet bricks and bollards. The waters of the canal slopped patiently at their feet, as dark and opaque as time.

Beside her in the shadow of the old toll office, Julian Elmslie shivered and dug his bare hands deeper into the pockets of his coat. He was still drunker than he would have liked, not so wasted that he had stopped feeling like a fool—nearly forty and slamming out of the flat after a shouting match with his boyfriend, pulling on his coat like a ham actor playing the part of a disgruntled husband as he stormed up Ledsam Street, the righteous adrenaline already draining and the d’escalier conviction of having been in the wrong stealing in. The mobile in his pocket was silent and reproachful as a stone. He drifted toward the Flapper more out of inertia than desire, head bent and coat open to the rain misting sideways over the enameled colors of the narrowboats moored on the far side of the footbridge at Cambrian Wharf; seated alone beneath a barrel-curve of backstage-black brick and old posters, he drank steadily through two rounds of local post-punk and walked out on the third when he realized his ears were ringing as numbly as the music, all sludgy, chunky guitars and feedback that swirled like silt through the blurred violet of the stage lights. Somewhere behind the thrashing drums the vocalist was doing something he broadmindedly supposed was singing, lung-wrenching glassy wails like she was fighting for her life in a shipwreck. The overtones followed him out onto the pavement, clinging inside his skull. The temperature had dropped disorientingly for June, as if the solstices had gotten confused; his face felt feverish in the rain, or perhaps it was a consequence of ordering his ales based strictly on their names. He was trying to recall what had appealed about High Wire Grapefruit as he doubled back across the locks, a shortish, thinnish man in an army surplus coat the color of wet slate, his bramble-brown hair curling scrubbily in the damp, five o’clock shadow just starting to silver in, when the sudden slipperiness of stone under his next step knocked it out of his head forever. He flailed for a comical, useless second and fell. In the slow motion before he struck first kerb and then water, he could hear the brainweasels like a well-worn record, Oh, well done, if there was a way to make a night worse,

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