Calvaria Fell, page 24
Daisychain yips and barks and does a midair backflip. Then another and another till he is nothing but a whirring hot metal blur. And I should have been yipping and flipping alongside, because there before us stands, impossibly . . .
“Gramma!” And not a day older than however old she was back when we fought our way across the post-war soup. Except that . . .
“But Gramma—no way . . . How can you be here? And how come I can’t remember . . . or maybe I can? I am molecules away from doing backflips of my own. Not the joyous type—the meltdown kind.
“Long story, kid. Turns out I’m older than I look—and so are you. Santorini, however, well now, this island is as young as a spring chicken. Great to see you’ve taken good care of my dog.”
“Your dog?”
But by all that is almost holy I can see this fact is true—the doggo and Gramma, well now, they’re a team. Daisychain dances around her in a smoosh of figure eights before rolling on her back in a wriggling frenzy.
Gramma bends and crouches down to scratch his tin can belly. “There’s a good boy, best boy ever. Thanks for keeping an eye on my precious grandchild.”
And I want to ask so many things, but they all get tangled in my throat before the moment slips away entirely.
“This island achieved sentience during the 88-minute war,” said Gramma—as if that fact was anywhere near the top of my desperate-to-ask-list. “Must have been well shielded for this spittle-lick of salt and rock to avoid full spectrum wi-fi sterilization.”
As I watch our doggo wriggling in the dirt, it all clicks like it’s never clicked before. Santorini has regenerated based on a million momentary fragments, postcards all, one form or another. Once a bridal theme park, now a living beast with shifting moods, beyond the captured, trapped and static. Imprisoned memories catapulted, free range to multiply and seed. Pollinating and embedding into pocked volcanic cliffs; gnawed and pushed and jabbed and punctured, flowed like lava, stabbed like steel. Surged and spilled like cactus flowers after a once-in-a century splash of rain.
And how well the shipboard brides are blending, some more dramatically than others, but that’s brides for you, so the legends tell us, some being practitioners of stealth rather than flourish. No dress code regulations or traditions exist for interfacing with sentient islands—but looking like you belong here is a start.
And no one wore modular, load bearing tac force haute couture better than Rhyzonthella, who was always safe rather than sorry and looked amazing, blue hair blowing in the wind. But I soon lost her amongst the bustling, narrow streets, amidst manifesting holographic tourists and real-life flesh and blood descendant Greeks who’d never left, despite the manic changes. Who kept on playing, low and quiet, tricks learned withstanding decades of bridal entourage assault in summer months. AI governance seems a trifle in comparison. If governance is the appropriate word (it isn’t). For all I know the Greeks are AI too. Never one to quibble over details—and I’m still not.
At the day’s end, lurid sunset splashes fuchsia across vague Aegean dregs, when know-how is all very well, but not much good until paired with targeted know why. And as for knowing wherefore, well now, that’s a different story. Come back and check on that one next millennium.
Because I’m in love with this picture postcard, its vistas swift and inconsistent on the shift, and I can no longer tell my brides from ones with artificial hearts. Boatloads of tourists pull up at the groaning pier and wait for donkeys to take them up the side. Emissaries from other islands, joyous at heritage listing’s feisty abolition.
My brides have seen a lot of love and can sing you all about their great escape with the Admiral who braved the Winedark Soup for connectivity with a future not yet written.
About the Authors
CAT SPARKS
Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning Australian author, editor and artist. Former fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine, she also dabbled as a kitchen hand, video store manager, assistant library technician, media monitor, political and archaeological photographer, graphic designer, guest lecturer, festival director, panelist, fiction judge, essayist, creative writing teacher and manager of Agog! Press, which produced ten anthologies of new speculative fiction. In 2012 an Australia Council grant enabled her to study with Margaret Atwood in Key West, Florida. In 2017 she co-edited Ecopunk! Speculative Tales of Radical Futures with Liz Grzyb.
Cat has a BA in visual arts (CAI), a postgraduate certificate in editing and publishing (UTS) and a PhD in creative writing (Curtin), the latter concerning the intersection of ecocatastrophe science fiction and contemporary climate fiction.
Cat’s debut novel, Lotus Blue (Skyhorse, 2017) was shortlisted for the Compton Crook, Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Her collections, The Bride Price (Ticonderoga, 2013) and Dark Harvest (Newcon, 2020) were nominated for Aurealis Awards and won Ditmars for Best Collected Work in their respective years.
Eighty of her short stories have been published since the turn of the millennium and her twenty-five awards for writing, editing and art include winning the Peter McNamara Conveners’ Award twice.
Cat is a climate activist and keen traveler currently obsessed with photographing adorable birds and grungy walls.
KAARON WARREN
Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honor at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. She has also been Guest of Honor at Conflux in Canberra and Genrecon in Brisbane.
She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press), was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award and the Bram Stoker Award, winning the Aurealis Award. Her stories have appeared in both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best anthologies.
Kaaron has been reading Science Fiction since she plucked the Nebula Award anthologies off her father’s bookshelf at around ten. She loves the possibilities Science Fiction presents, as a writer and as a reader. “Air, Water and the Grove,” in this collection, won the Aurealis Award for SF, while both “Witnessing” and “68 Days” were shortlisted. Her most recent books include the re-release of her acclaimed novel, Slights, (IFWG Australia) Tool Tales, a chapbook in collaboration with Ellen Datlow (also IFWG), and Capturing Ghosts, a writing advice chapbook from Brain Jar Press.
Cat Sparks (left), Kaaron Warren (right)
Did you enjoy this book?
If so, word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews are critical to the success of any book, so we hope you’ll tell your friends about it and consider leaving a review at your favorite bookseller’s or library’s website.
Visit us at www.meerkatpress.com for our full catalog.
Meerkat Press
Asheville
Contents
Witnessing Kaaron Warren
Some Kind of Indescribable Cat Sparks
68 Days Kaaron Warren
The Space Between All Possible Ways Cat Sparks
The Emporium Kaaron Warren
Mandala Cat Sparks
Gardens of Earthly Delight Cat Sparks
Air, Water and the Grove Kaaron Warren
Dreams of Hercules Cat Sparks
Everything So Slow and Quiet Kaaron Warren
Doll Face Cat Sparks
In the Drawback Kaaron Warren
Hacking Santorini Cat Sparks
About the Authors
Landmarks
Cover
Kaaron Warren, Calvaria Fell
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“Gramma!” And not a day older than however old she was back when we fought our way across the post-war soup. Except that . . .
“But Gramma—no way . . . How can you be here? And how come I can’t remember . . . or maybe I can? I am molecules away from doing backflips of my own. Not the joyous type—the meltdown kind.
“Long story, kid. Turns out I’m older than I look—and so are you. Santorini, however, well now, this island is as young as a spring chicken. Great to see you’ve taken good care of my dog.”
“Your dog?”
But by all that is almost holy I can see this fact is true—the doggo and Gramma, well now, they’re a team. Daisychain dances around her in a smoosh of figure eights before rolling on her back in a wriggling frenzy.
Gramma bends and crouches down to scratch his tin can belly. “There’s a good boy, best boy ever. Thanks for keeping an eye on my precious grandchild.”
And I want to ask so many things, but they all get tangled in my throat before the moment slips away entirely.
“This island achieved sentience during the 88-minute war,” said Gramma—as if that fact was anywhere near the top of my desperate-to-ask-list. “Must have been well shielded for this spittle-lick of salt and rock to avoid full spectrum wi-fi sterilization.”
As I watch our doggo wriggling in the dirt, it all clicks like it’s never clicked before. Santorini has regenerated based on a million momentary fragments, postcards all, one form or another. Once a bridal theme park, now a living beast with shifting moods, beyond the captured, trapped and static. Imprisoned memories catapulted, free range to multiply and seed. Pollinating and embedding into pocked volcanic cliffs; gnawed and pushed and jabbed and punctured, flowed like lava, stabbed like steel. Surged and spilled like cactus flowers after a once-in-a century splash of rain.
And how well the shipboard brides are blending, some more dramatically than others, but that’s brides for you, so the legends tell us, some being practitioners of stealth rather than flourish. No dress code regulations or traditions exist for interfacing with sentient islands—but looking like you belong here is a start.
And no one wore modular, load bearing tac force haute couture better than Rhyzonthella, who was always safe rather than sorry and looked amazing, blue hair blowing in the wind. But I soon lost her amongst the bustling, narrow streets, amidst manifesting holographic tourists and real-life flesh and blood descendant Greeks who’d never left, despite the manic changes. Who kept on playing, low and quiet, tricks learned withstanding decades of bridal entourage assault in summer months. AI governance seems a trifle in comparison. If governance is the appropriate word (it isn’t). For all I know the Greeks are AI too. Never one to quibble over details—and I’m still not.
At the day’s end, lurid sunset splashes fuchsia across vague Aegean dregs, when know-how is all very well, but not much good until paired with targeted know why. And as for knowing wherefore, well now, that’s a different story. Come back and check on that one next millennium.
Because I’m in love with this picture postcard, its vistas swift and inconsistent on the shift, and I can no longer tell my brides from ones with artificial hearts. Boatloads of tourists pull up at the groaning pier and wait for donkeys to take them up the side. Emissaries from other islands, joyous at heritage listing’s feisty abolition.
My brides have seen a lot of love and can sing you all about their great escape with the Admiral who braved the Winedark Soup for connectivity with a future not yet written.
About the Authors
CAT SPARKS
Cat Sparks is a multi-award-winning Australian author, editor and artist. Former fiction editor of Cosmos Magazine, she also dabbled as a kitchen hand, video store manager, assistant library technician, media monitor, political and archaeological photographer, graphic designer, guest lecturer, festival director, panelist, fiction judge, essayist, creative writing teacher and manager of Agog! Press, which produced ten anthologies of new speculative fiction. In 2012 an Australia Council grant enabled her to study with Margaret Atwood in Key West, Florida. In 2017 she co-edited Ecopunk! Speculative Tales of Radical Futures with Liz Grzyb.
Cat has a BA in visual arts (CAI), a postgraduate certificate in editing and publishing (UTS) and a PhD in creative writing (Curtin), the latter concerning the intersection of ecocatastrophe science fiction and contemporary climate fiction.
Cat’s debut novel, Lotus Blue (Skyhorse, 2017) was shortlisted for the Compton Crook, Aurealis and Ditmar Awards. Her collections, The Bride Price (Ticonderoga, 2013) and Dark Harvest (Newcon, 2020) were nominated for Aurealis Awards and won Ditmars for Best Collected Work in their respective years.
Eighty of her short stories have been published since the turn of the millennium and her twenty-five awards for writing, editing and art include winning the Peter McNamara Conveners’ Award twice.
Cat is a climate activist and keen traveler currently obsessed with photographing adorable birds and grungy walls.
KAARON WARREN
Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren published her first short story in 1993 and has had fiction in print every year since. She was recently given the Peter McNamara Lifetime Achievement Award and was Guest of Honor at World Fantasy 2018, Stokercon 2019 and Geysercon 2019. She has also been Guest of Honor at Conflux in Canberra and Genrecon in Brisbane.
She has published five multi-award winning novels (Slights, Walking the Tree, Mistification, The Grief Hole and Tide of Stone) and seven short story collections, including the multi-award winning Through Splintered Walls. Her most recent short story collection is A Primer to Kaaron Warren from Dark Moon Books. Her most recent novella, Into Bones Like Oil (Meerkat Press), was shortlisted for a Shirley Jackson Award and the Bram Stoker Award, winning the Aurealis Award. Her stories have appeared in both Ellen Datlow’s and Paula Guran’s Year’s Best anthologies.
Kaaron has been reading Science Fiction since she plucked the Nebula Award anthologies off her father’s bookshelf at around ten. She loves the possibilities Science Fiction presents, as a writer and as a reader. “Air, Water and the Grove,” in this collection, won the Aurealis Award for SF, while both “Witnessing” and “68 Days” were shortlisted. Her most recent books include the re-release of her acclaimed novel, Slights, (IFWG Australia) Tool Tales, a chapbook in collaboration with Ellen Datlow (also IFWG), and Capturing Ghosts, a writing advice chapbook from Brain Jar Press.
Cat Sparks (left), Kaaron Warren (right)
Did you enjoy this book?
If so, word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews are critical to the success of any book, so we hope you’ll tell your friends about it and consider leaving a review at your favorite bookseller’s or library’s website.
Visit us at www.meerkatpress.com for our full catalog.
Meerkat Press
Asheville
Contents
Witnessing Kaaron Warren
Some Kind of Indescribable Cat Sparks
68 Days Kaaron Warren
The Space Between All Possible Ways Cat Sparks
The Emporium Kaaron Warren
Mandala Cat Sparks
Gardens of Earthly Delight Cat Sparks
Air, Water and the Grove Kaaron Warren
Dreams of Hercules Cat Sparks
Everything So Slow and Quiet Kaaron Warren
Doll Face Cat Sparks
In the Drawback Kaaron Warren
Hacking Santorini Cat Sparks
About the Authors
Landmarks
Cover
Kaaron Warren, Calvaria Fell
