Fantasy Magazine, Issue 80 (June 2022) by Adamant Press

Author:Adamant Press [Adamant Press]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Adamant Press
Published: 2022-05-30T23:36:37+00:00

©2022 by Wen Wen Yang.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wen Wen Yang is a first-generation Chinese American, raised in the Bronx, New York. She graduated from Barnard College, Columbia University with a degree in English, Creative Writing. You can find her fiction in The Arcanist, Factor Four Magazine, and more. She updates WenWenWrites.com and tweets @muteddragon.

Potemora in the Triad

Sara S. Messenger | 3297 words

There are always three: the father, the unfather, and the child. That’s why Vriskiaab threw my unfather off his back after she bore my baby sister, or so Vriskiaab tells me when he stops in the shade of a dune, his massive scales warm under my calves and the tail of him stretching behind me for leagues. My baby sister is soft and crimson-tacky in the crook of my arm.

I cup her warm, wobbly head. Her birth shook the earth, and the sand shakes under us still.

We have no milk, I say.

Hush, child, says Vriskiaab, his voice a thrumming coil under my heels. That infant is not ours. Your unfather left me a riddle, and now I must solve it.

I don’t care much for the balance of our triad, but the earth will crack open unless he solves it, so I hug my sister to my chest. Her cries are so shrill, and they ring like struck ceramic.

• • • •

Things I will say to my baby sister, come the end of the world: If you need to kill me, I don’t mind if you watch me kneel; and, vultures flock in odd dozens, and cactus fruit come in fours or seven, and you have two tiny moles under your left eye; and, I don’t care that you have a different father because we tread in the desert the same.

• • • •

Vriskiaab names my sister Baaiksirv. This quiets the rumbling under our feet, but not entirely; some of the canyons we pass have already collapsed, and there are no altar-men where instead exists rubble. Vriskiaab goes without his slain offerings and drinks from a nearby river, muddier than befitting him, and he filters it as he trickles it down the length of his back to the ridged hood under which I live.

The water is cool and silty, and my tears hot, my mind empty.

Father. Unfather. Child.

My unfather’s stories never depicted a triad with a hole inside.

My father cradles my sister in his mouth, in a birthing pocket behind his fang. His eyes are hooded in consternation. The ground shudders still, but we are not bereft, yet.

It will be two years before I see Baaiksirv again.

• • • •

Baaiksirv will smell like venom, a sharp, sour smell that rises from her soft cheeks and hair, but mostly her suckling mouth. Unlike me, she will have round pupils, and no scales anywhere, not even in a thin line down her spine. In that way, she is just like our unfather.

• • • •

When I turn twelve, I will sneak off my father’s back during that rare time he is deeply sleeping, after he fondly observes one of his festivals.

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