Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: science fiction, fantasy, magazine, science fiction magazine, fantasy magazine
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2012-12-11T05:00:00+00:00

Daniel Abraham (www.danielabraham.com) has published sixteen novels and almost three dozen short stories. He is also adapting George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones into graphic novels. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, and has won the International Horror Guild award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James SA Corey. He lives in New Mexico.

With Tales in Their Teeth, From the Mountain They Came

A.C. Wise

She woke with the words I love you on her tongue, speaking them aloud to an empty room.

They tasted of smoke and ash drifting over a far-distant, muddy field. The War that had taken her lover had lost him. She knew he was dead, because she’d never spoken the words aloud before.

He’d whispered them in her ear countless times—lying side-by-side in the furrows of their sheets, offered on summer days, spoken in the midst of roof-drumming rainstorms keeping her from her dreams. She’d smiled in return, meaning to answer every time. But she found her teeth locked, her lips stitched closed. He would squeeze her hand, echo her smile with sad patience, and say, Some day. When you’re ready.

Ten years passed in a single, conjoined heartbeat. Then news came from beyond the Mountain. The papers were full of men and women dying in rain-battered fields. Her lover read them, and every day carved deeper lines around his mouth, and between his eyes.

Over breakfasts of buttered toast, his untouched, he read to her of mud-spattered corpses, of bright poppies trampled beneath heavy-soled boots, and children crushed the same way, until their skin no longer hid their bones. He read of mass graves, of torture, and atrocities, and leaving grew in his eyes. When she wanted to ask him to stay, fear once more stitched her lips closed.

She held him as long as she could in their house by the sea. But hands pressed to his skin, and stubborn lips and teeth refusing to shape words, could only hold him so long. His love was vast; it encompassed strangers, dying in fields he’d never seen. He went to War. Her love was small, and encompassed only him. She stayed behind.

I love you.

Now she could say the words until her throat bled with them; he would never hear.

Moonlight streamed through the window, illuminating soft-rumpled sheets. She wrapped arms around her body, surveying furniture and knick-knacks that would never mean as much, absent of his hands. She retraced his footsteps; she fit the whorls of her fingertips into the ghost of his touch.

There was nothing to hold her here anymore. No hands pressed to her skin, no words waited to be spoken.

She packed, and left at dawn. The absence of words had lost him, but there was a place she’d heard of in tales where she could drown herself in them. Abandoning the house by the sea, she set out for the Library on the Mountain.

The Librarians shaved her head. They called her Acolyte. They gave her a new name, Alba, which they told her meant dawn.

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