The Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, Year Five by Richard Parks & Gemma Files & Gregory Norman Bossert

Author:Richard Parks & Gemma Files & Gregory Norman Bossert [Parks, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firkin Press
Published: 2014-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

Benjanun Sriduangkaew enjoys writing love letters to cities real and speculative. She was a 2014 finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her work can be found in Clarkesworld, The Dark, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, and twice in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, most recently “Golden Daughter, Stone Wife” in BCS #144.

SINGING LIKE A HUNDRED DUG-UP BONES

Alex Dally MacFarlane

OUT BY THE MOUNDS, the ground thaws slowly. Frost-got grass and heather crunch under Knowe’s boots. There’ll be no digging for at least another month, probably closer to two. Knowe walks alone, wrapped in winter wools and hides, but the day is mild enough that she goes un-hooded, letting the wind grasp at her long hair.

Her mound-hair: peat-dark and thick, blowing over her face that’s pale as dried-out bones after the long, dark winter.

Now the sun gleams low above the distant sea. The sky is pale blue. Birds let themselves be blown about in it. Knowe can’t name them. Sea crows? Or is it still too soon for them? She’s no good with living things, that’re still covered in their flesh.

Smiling into the sunlight, she walks to the mound she opened in last summer’s long, light nights. The mound’s entrance is protected from snow and rain by a slab of stone she found among the heather—easy for her to tilt back, to lay flat. Then, slumping her shoulders and lowering her head, Knowe walks along the tunnel to the chamber at the mound’s heart.

The chamber’s stone walls and curved ceiling are so well-built and so old, fixed in the dirt by the centuries, that Knowe doesn’t fear their collapse. She sits on the bare dirt in the centre, looking at the first of the side chambers where, in the summer, she started clearing the layered dirt and finding bones and metal and three worked, word-etched stones. When winter’s darkness crouched around her, she stopped her work, but she knows there’s still more in that first chamber, more again in the three un-opened chambers: people with close-kept histories, locked up in metal and stone, in the state of their bones—stories for Knowe to spell out in slow, small pieces. Her ancestors’ stories.

There’s peace in the mound, with only the knowledge of this history for company.

Alone in that near-dark place Knowe sits a while, enjoying the silence after the winter in her family’s small, crowded house. She hums, then sings: lines snatched from a singer, Bess, a handsome woman with knife-grey strands in her long hair. Some nights Bess is with her sheep, singing to the wind. Some nights she’s with other people. Knowe listens, occasionally.

“On the rigs two three,” she sings, remembering the opening of one song. Her fingers tap on the age-soaked dirt of the mound’s floor. “‘tween the gloup and the sea. Lint grew there. . .” Then her memory turns to fog. A line about the girl and her mother? No matter,

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