Beneath Ceaseless Skies #203 Read online

  At this hour, the night bazaar must be packing up. A few snakes and lizards skitter through the gutters. Hester follows them to the gouge in the sand where they have dug a hole beneath the wall. They slither and wriggle and just slip through. Overhead, ropes creak as the mummified corpses swing.

  Before she can lose her courage, Hester unwraps Marick’s heart, sliced into strips like a mango, her final hope on a wooden tray.

  Hearts are eggs, she realized when Shayna slit open Marick’s body and piled his organs on the stained batik. Hester wonders what will hatch from hers.

  Hester eats it, piece by piece. If this fails, the police will find her. Her body will swing overhead with the rest, always within sight of the desert but never able to go there.

  The heart slides into her belly, easier than glair, and settles in the empty space which once held fear. The quivering in her bones becomes a violent shudder. A change is coming, churning her like a sandstorm. She slips and twists inside her own flesh, full to the brim, a straining wineskin, a sated leech, an egg about to burst.

  It does not hurt much, the hatching, the shedding. No worse than picking off a scab. When it is over, she slides free onto her segmented belly, the sand warm, the wind drying her damp newborn back. Her tongue tests the air, and tastes water far to the west, beyond the husk of her old body, through the gouge beneath the wall.

  Over the wall the bodies swing and creak on their ropes, but they are only shells, and the poison rests between her teeth now, a gift for those she chooses to kiss. Oasis shrinks toy-like under her unblinking reptilian gaze. It is a nest, a golden pot with an amethyst lid, trapping asps until the music plays, but it cannot hold her anymore. All over the city, people pitch and turn inside themselves, sliding against the smooth walls of their prison, but only a few buck against the shell and break it.

  But the desert is a city too, vaster than Oasis, and the reptiles are its people. Hester tastes them on the wind. Blood and incense, jasmine and mango, they call to her, all the ones who went before, the peasants and merchants, the old women and the young, the Emperor and Marick all, now fully themselves, unchanging day or night. Their prints erase the footsteps trailing into Oasis. Their bodies are arrows which point to the sea. They are waiting for her. It is almost time to go.

  Hester waits beside her cooling body until sunrise breaks upon the city. Oasis turns over in its old familiar rhythm. Moonside lovers kiss and part. Footsteps hurry from house to house, and chalk symbols are found and read and quickly erased. And then, for the first time sunside, Hester sees her: Shayna the moonside butcher, come to unseam her body.

  Hester knows Shayna will sell the parts piece by piece, a last providence for her Oasis family. A family can live for a month on the price a human body would fetch. Her hair will go to the weavers, her bones to feed the lemon tree groves, her fat to fuel the lamps, everything given back to the city that bore her.

  Except her heart.

  Shayna saves it in the same scrap of bloodstained batik that once held Marick’s. Hester hopes it will be enough.

  But now, the part of her that cannot be bought or sold slips beneath the wall, tastes the distant water, and goes to find it.

  Copyright © 2016Rachael K. Jones

  Read Comments on this Story on the BCS Website

  Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, an addiction to running, and a couple degrees. Now she writes speculative fiction in Athens, Georgia, where she lives with her husband. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in many venues, including Shimmer, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, Strange Horizons, Escape Pod, Crossed Genres, Diabolical Plots, and Daily Science Fiction. She is an editor, a SFWA member, and a secret android. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

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  COVER ART

  “High Above the Savannah,” by Martin Ende

  Martin Ende is a self-taught artist from Germany who began in pencil drawings and moved to digital mediums in 2011. He worked as a concept artist in small game projects such as Liberico from Enraged Entertainment, as well as doing illustrations for some tank restoration projects. View more of his art at maddendd.deviantart.com and www.mad-and-nice.de.

  Beneath Ceaseless Skies

  ISSN: 1946-1076

  Published by Firkin Press,

  a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization

  Compilation Copyright © 2016 Firkin Press

  This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.