This will be your only chance. The most important thing about this moment is not that it has never happened before but that it will never happen again.
In three years you will rest your hand in the soft ruff of her neck as the needle goes in, and she will relax under your hand, and you will let the moment go.
You touch her bandaged paw through the cage. She does not withdraw.
“I’ll never leave you,” you whisper, and you never do.
Contributors’ Notes
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a writer from Spring Valley, New York. His first book, Friday Black, was chosen by Colson Whitehead as a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and won the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. He graduated from SUNY Albany and went on to receive his MFA from Syracuse University. He was the 2016–2017 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in fiction at Colgate University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Guernica, Printers Row, Gravel, Esquire, The Paris Review, Longreads, and others.
▪ “Through the Flash” was one of the most difficult stories I’ve had to write, and somehow in that difficulty I knew it was the piece that would complete my collection. I wondered what it would be like to have a young girl who had somehow traveled to the very bottom of evil, seen what was to be seen, and come back intact and ready to help, knowing there was nothing worthwhile in the pit. To get there I needed an event. I imagined a nuclear fallout. One so devastating the future might try to stop it. And what if in their changing of history a timeline was flung from the continuum and set to a loop? What were the possibilities there? This story offered a chance to play in that possibility, starting with Ama, a girl who is as bad as they come and also the best. It was fun to learn who she was: a reformed viscous monarch. Still, it was also very hard to get the story to stabilize in a way that was followable. Time is a quick looping circle and I had to find a way to make that clear. More importantly, I had to find ways to make it feel that even in a loop, even if everything every day is the same, there might be a chance for something better.
Lesley Nneka Arimah was born in the U.K. and grew up in Nigeria and wherever else her father was stationed for work. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, McSweeney’s, and Granta and have been honored with a National Magazine Award and an O. Henry Award. She has received support from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the MacDowell Colony and was selected for the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.” Her debut collection, What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, won the 2017 Kirkus Prize and the 2017 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and was selected for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour–New York Times book club, among other honors. Arimah is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow in Writing. She lives in Las Vegas and is working on a novel about you.
▪ I was surprised by how much harder this story was to write than other speculative fiction I’d written to that point. It was originally intended to be in my first collection, but I couldn’t get it together to make the story work. With most of the speculative stories I’d written, there was a specific element of “magic,” whether live hair babies or someone with the ability to remove grief, and those elements helped to drive the story forward. In this case the invention (forced nakedness) was a state of being, not a propulsive element that provided any momentum. It didn’t help that Ejem, the protagonist, didn’t want anything tangible that I could send her after; she just knew she didn’t want what other women had. This uncertainty led to a lot of narrative aimlessness, something I’m not used to, and I threw a lot of things at the story that wouldn’t stick (A resistance! A revolution!). What finally grounded the story was lessening the scope to the everyday. It didn’t need a big bang or a “final battle”; it was at its center a story about female friendship.
Martin Cahill is a writer working in Manhattan and living in Astoria, Queens. He is a graduate of the 2014 Clarion Writers’ Workshop and a member of the New York City–based writing group Altered Fluid. He has had fiction published in Fireside Fiction, Nightmare Magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer Magazine, and Lightspeed Magazine. Martin also writes nonfiction reviews, articles, and essays for Book Riot, Tor.com, the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog, and Strange Horizons.
▪ Through every draft of Hark’s story, he and the reader are immediately confronted with the strange: a cut of godmeat stinking of hibiscus and saltwater. “Godmeat” takes the reader to a strange, fantastic world of gods, monsters, and magic and the many people living amid that chaos. It also offers a new perspective on this strange world: that of a chef. Bringing that grounded perspective in with Hark, seeing how he dealt with the fantastical, how he cooked and prepared the gods themselves, was one of my favorite parts of the story. But watching him navigate a world full of beings beyond him with only his innate talents was one thing; seeing him recognize the power and position he finds himself in was another. For someone who’s never had power but who holds so much pain, Hark doesn’t realize until too late what it is he’s allowed himself to keep doing. When he finally does see how his actions have put the world at risk, it breaks something in him and pushes him toward a potential chance at redemption.
“Godmeat,” can be a story about many things: what addiction to power does to someone in pain, how you can’t truly serve others without giving away a part of yourself, how redemption and change can come at any age, and much more. I hope readers get something out of the story they never realized they were looking for and enjoy this first, strange foray into the Wild World. Most of all I hope readers finish the story and find it hard to shake that first image and what it represents: the raw godmeat on the counter, stinking of hibiscus and saltwater, and the skilled, broken man who will cook it, only just becoming aware of what he’s doing.
Adam-Troy Castro made his first nonfiction sale to Spy magazine in 1987. His twenty-six books to date include four Spider-Man novels, three novels about his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator Andrea Cort, and six middle-grade novels about the dimension-spanning adventures of young Gustav Gloom. Adam’s darker short fiction for grownups is highlighted by his most recent collection, Her Husband’s Hands and Other Stories. Adam’s works have won the Philip K. Dick Award and the Seiun Award (Japan) and have been nominated for eight Nebulas, three Stokers, two Hugos, and, internationally, the Ignotus (Spain), the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire (France), and the Kurd Laßwitz (Germany). His latest release was the audio collection Other Stories, which features thirteen hours of his fiction, including the new stories “The Hour in Between” and “Big Stupe and the Buried Big Glowing Booger.” Adam lives in Florida with his wife, Judi, and a trio of revolutionary cats.
▪ “Pitcher Plant” was initially called “The Intruder,” but the editor said that this was awfully generic and I ultimately agreed. This title actually tells you more, though you won’t know it until after you finish it. I could just as easily have used the metaphor of a roach motel, I guess.
The premise is one I’ve been toying with for some time, for a novel that has yet to gel and might never (or, conversely, might). If the novel ever shows up, it will not be an “expansion” of this premise but an entirely different creature, attached to this iteration only by the flimsiest of threads. Don’t hold your breath.