Category: issue 13

After surviving yet another day of feigning pleasantness for clients and coworkers, the small, pink, pearlescent dragon sitting on Lily’s doorstep felt like one more damn problem.

So now I’m in a cold, dark cellar. I can sense the weight of the stone above me, but I can’t see anything. Up there I know there are undergraduates, professors, all noise and footsteps, but none of that makes it through the thick sandstone. The air is as dry and cold as any midwinter frost, and dark as an Ohio night.

Filomena woke to the sound of weeping. Not unusual. The Chapel of Perpetual Decomposition had excellent acoustics, and the mushrooms were always weeping about something: climate change, unrequited fungal love, the ethics of yogurt. But this was not a mushroom cry. It was something wetter.

Every year the mudflats get bigger. I smell Smith and Tangier Islands in the silt, lands slowly pulled apart to our south like confetti in a palm—the currents blow. The elders like the mudflat. It helps them ease their way out of the water when the sun rises, as the bones in their tails writhe and pop and snap back into the shape of legs. I don’t need a mudflat. I drag myself up into the reeds, hands turned inward like club feet. My bones are young. It doesn’t take long to be human again.

I can feel it in my fingers, barely gripping onto the crumbling ledge of the cliffside. A rumbling of horse hooves approaches. I know that there’s only one way that today will end.

The calls come from the caves underground and even you could follow it, slithering slowly as the heat scalds your scales. In there, your progenitor hangs, mouth forever forced open, venom falling in a constant drip. Below him, a god lies groaning, naked except for threads—intestines—snaking across his body, crisscrossing around the stone slab.

My grandma used to say “every terrible thing will fade when that blessed day comes, my dear.” Now that it’s finally happening my only comfort is that she isn’t around to be disappointed.

The first man to summon me is Whitney, my boatswain on the Dharini. This is how I learn that Virat didn’t cremate me. My body still lies on the white sand of our cove, rotting in the turquoise waters of the Laccadive Sea.

“What do you mean, you don’t believe in the oracle?”

The priests had read the signs and the signs were clear: the Phoenix was returning to Heliopolis.