However, here is what I will tell you. I’ll be quick.
He did not know what I was until after. He felt no regret or curiosity, because he should have been drowned at birth. I was nothing but a commodity to him before, and nothing but an anomaly to him after.
My copper feathers cut his fingertips and palms as he pared my wings away.
I was playing at being mortal this century because I love cigarettes and shawarma, and it’s easier to order shawarma if your piercing shriek doesn’t drive the delivery boy mad. Mortality is fun in small doses. It’s very authentic, very down-in-the-dirt nitty-gritty. There are lullabies and lily pads and summer rainstorms and hardly anyone ever tries to cut your head off out of some moronic heroic obligation to the gods. If you want to sit on your ass and read a book, nobody judges you. Also, shawarma.
My spirit was already fled before the deed was done, back to the Nest, back to the Egg. My sisters clucked and cooed and gently scolded. They incubated me with their great feathery bottoms as they had many times before, as I had done many times before for them. Sisters have to look out for one another. We’re all we’ve got, and forever is a long, slow slog without love.
I hatched anew. I flapped my wings and hurricanes flattened cities in six different realities. I was a tee-ninsy bit motherfuckin’ pissed, maybe.
I may have cried. You don’t get to know that either, though.
We swept back onto the mortal plane with a sound of a 1967 Mercury Cougar roaring to life on an empty country road, one sister in the front seat and three in the back and me at the wheel with a cigarette clenched between my pointed teeth. You can fit a lot of wingspan in those old cars, provided you know how to fold reality the right way.
It’s easy to get lost on those backroads, but my old wings called to us from his attic. We did not get lost.
He was alone when we pulled into his driveway, gravel crunching beneath our wheels like bone. He had a gun. He bolted his doors. The tumblers turned for us; we took his gun.
Did he cry? Oh yeah. Like a fuckin’ baby.
I didn’t know what you were, he said. I didn’t know. I just wanted to get your attention, and you wouldn’t even look at me. I tried everything.
Well, kid, I says, putting my cigarette out on his family’s floral carpet, you’ve sure as hell got it now.
Our talons can crush galaxies. Our songs give black holes nightmares. The edges of our feathers fracture moonlight into silver spiderwebs and universes into parallels. Did we take him apart? C’mon. Don’t ask stupid questions.
Did we kill him? Ehh. In a manner of speaking. In another manner of speaking, his matter is speaking across a large swathe of space and time, begging for an ending to his smeared roadkill existence that never quite reaches the rest stop. Semantics, right? I don’t care to quibble or think about it anymore than I have to.
Anyway. Like I said way back at the start, this is not the story of how he killed me. It’s the story of how a freak tornado wrecked a single solitary home and disappeared a promising young man from a good family, leaving a mystery for the locals to scratch their heads over for the next twenty years. It’s the story of how a Jane Doe showed up in the nearby morgue with what looked like wing stubs sticking out of her back, never to be claimed or named. It’s the story of how my sisters and I acquired a 1967 Mercury Cougar we still go cruising in occasionally when we’re on the mortal side of the pike.
You may not remember my name, seeing as how I don’t have one you could pronounce or comprehend. The important thing is always the stories—which ones get told, which ones get co-opted, which ones get left in a ditch, overlooked and neglected. This is my story, not his. It belongs to me and is mine alone. I will sing it from the last withered tree on the last star-blasted planet when entropy has wound down all the worlds and all the wheres, and nothing is left but faded candy wrappers. My sisters and I will sing it—all at once, all together, a sound like a righteous scream from all the forgotten, talked-over throats in Eternity’s halls—and it will be the last story in all of Creation before the lights finally blink out and the shutters go bang.
NEBULA AWARD WINNER
BEST SHORT STORY
SEASONS OF GLASS AND IRON
AMAL EL-MOHTAR
Amal El-Mohtar has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for her short fiction, and her poetry has won the Rhysling award three times. She writes the Otherworldly column for the New York Times, contributes reviews to NPR, and is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey. This Is How You Lose the Time War, a novella co-written with Max Gladstone, is forthcoming from Saga Press in 2019.
Amal lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.
For Lara West
Tabitha walks, and thinks of shoes.
She has been thinking about shoes for a very long time: the length of three and a half pairs, to be precise, though it’s hard to reckon in iron. Easier to reckon how many pairs are left: of the seven she set out with, three remain, strapped securely against the outside of the pack she carries, weighing it down. The seasons won’t keep still, slip past her with the landscape, so she can’t say for certain whether a year of walking wears out a sole, but it seems about right. She always means to count the steps, starting with the next pair, but it’s easy to get distracted.
She thinks about shoes because she cannot move forward otherwise: each iron strap cuts, rubs, bruises, blisters, and her pain fuels their ability to cross rivers, mountains, airy breaches between cliffs. She must move forward, or the shoes will never be worn down. The shoes must be worn down.
It’s always hard to strap on a new pair.
Three pairs of shoes ago, she was in a pine forest, and the sharp green smell of it woke something in her, something that was more than numbness, numbers. (Number? I hardly know ’er! She’d laughed for a week, off and on, at her little joke.) She shivered in the needled light, bundled her arms into her fur cloak but stretched her toes into the autumn earth, and wept to feel, for a moment, something like free—before the numbers crept in with the cold, and one down, six to go found its way into her relief that it was, in fact, possible to get through a single pair in a lifetime.
Two pairs of shoes ago, she was in the middle of a lake, striding across the deep blue of it, when the last scrap of sole gave way. She collapsed and floundered as she undid the straps, scrambled to pull the next pair off her pack, sank until she broke a toe in jamming them on, then found herself on the surface again, limping toward the far shore.
One pair of shoes ago, she was by the sea. She soaked her feet in salt and stared up at the stars and wondered whether drowning would hurt.
She recalls shoes her brothers have worn: a pair of seven-league boots, tooled in soft leather; winged sandals; satin slippers that turned one invisible. How strange, she thinks, that her brothers had shoes that lightened their steps and tightened the world, made it small and easy to explore, discover.