Uncanny Magazine Issue 56, page 14
When dawn approached, the two spirits found one another in the fading shadows. Their bellies bulged, protruded, ached.
“A pleasant evening, my friend,” the seirei murmured. Now strong and sans limp, by that evening the old man would be skin and bones and broken once again, yet, he had gleaned much to use from the foreign traders, between conjurings and the night’s delicacies, served on wobbling platters of flesh and bone. He would learn more in the nights to come.
“Until tonight,” Baku trumpeted, wagging his ox tail from side to side.
At sunrise, there was once again movement on the docks. The foreign traders yelled orders to one another, unloading and packing up shipments. They would have need of rice liquor again come sundown. Their tales would continue. Satisfied, Baku and the seirei disappeared between sunbeams.
The women of Dejima Island woke with daybreak, unsettled. Exhausted. And empty.
© 2024 Cheri Kamei
Cheri Kamei (she/her) is a Japanese-Okinawan American, queer writer. Her short stories have previously been published on Tor.Com and in Scott J. Moses’s horror anthology, What One Wouldn’t Do. She resides in Honolulu, Hawaii with her wife, plants, and a corgi named Charlie.
A Contract of Ink and Skin
by Angela Liu
The earliest versions included uglier things: ground up insect eggs and corroded bronze, but the ink you receive is pure, made only from blood of the Cursed.
They inject it into your eyes first because that’s the easiest way to tell you’re different. The black ink mixed with blue and red, a purplish nebula pooling into the whites of your eyes.
It takes three months for your body to fully heal, but you’ll be able to see the dark patterns within just a few days. The ink aches in their presence, sweating through the pores in your skin, but that ink is your shield, your bridge, your right to a Contract.
Hana’s the first one to ask what you see.
“Just black clouds,” you say, waving a hand as if gathering phantom threads of spider silk between your fingers. You ignore the way she winces at the motion. She sees through your lie because her brother got Inked just a few months before you. Before he stumbled into the forest, reaching for shadows, and never returned.
“He said to ignore the first few who try to make a Contract. They’re the starving ones, and they won’t hesitate to take more than they say,” she warns, changing the dripping iced towel on your eyes for a freshly frozen one. The cold stings the thin skin of your eyelids. You feel the ink squirm its way from the front to the backs of your eyes like an overly curious needle.
You know Hana is a liar too. Her brother never said that; how could he? The dead don’t speak about their own mistakes.
You dream of red rivers and purple skies. Of climbing impossibly tall mountains on long stilt legs, your tongue a paintbrush that never runs out of ink. You watch the mountains cast shadows below like black floods cutting through the endless poppy fields. Jagged wings burst through your luminescent spine. You become a bird and leap off the ledge, spilling into the shadows.
You wake, aching for planets you’ve never seen, your throat dry.
They put it in your fingers next. The needle breaks through the delicate skin on the tips, spooling ink into the dermis underneath. The ink traces its own black veins, ancient circuits across a new body, your body.
By then, the patterns have taken clearer shape. No longer splotches on a canvas of air or smoky trails under flickering streetlamps. They are now the familiar shape of objects, animals, people. A favorite book that disappeared one day while you were at school, a friend’s pet cat stretching under the sun, a torn-up hospital gown washed up from the riverbed, your mother curled up on the stained couch before the Council arrived to take her away. You reach up and touch them with your swollen inked fingers. They whisper forbidden things into your skin.
The Artist tells you the ink will tell you when it’s time. To be patient. That you’re doing well, reacting better than most. There’s only a 40% success rate, the unclaimed bodies in the forest and the caked blood beneath their fingernails all evidence of that.
You don’t tell him that the ink is restless, how it wriggles in your eyes and fingers when you sleep, frenzied by the moans of the Cursed at night. How it traces the face of strangers onto the steamed glass of your windows. You don’t tell him that sometimes you worry it’ll find a way out of your body and let them in. How sure are you there are no leaks? you think. A body has so many openings.
As he pulls fresh ink into the syringe, you fight the urge to drag him toward you, to sink the sharp tip into his eyes and give him a look. Maybe together you could parse out the meaning of the dark constellations you see.
No one’s ever told you this story, but you’ve pieced it together through rumor and old books: the Cursed arrived one winter night long ago during a heavy, luminous snowfall and never left. They lacked eyes, mouth, fingers. They spoke through spectres, tricks of light and shadows, words carved into the frozen ground outside our primeval forests. The townspeople believed they were a blessing when they took the shape of loved ones long gone, bodies given life again through the warm light of a fire or porch lamp.
But then there were the dead birds. The children staring at streetlamps at night like light-starved moths. The flickering apparitions, the unfamiliar faces in mirrors, the deep ripples over warm bath water, the phantom fingers trailing across sleeping bodies, thighs and throats. By the time the people realized what was happening, their hands were already quilted in black veins, already pulling open their windows to let in the night.
The Cursed desired connection. They loved the people. They wanted to be with them forever.
Hana doesn’t ask what you see anymore. She sneaks you bread and apple slices from the school, but you have no appetite. When she catches you standing near the entrance of the forest, she grabs your hand so tight it leaves red fingerprints on your skin.
She turns you away from the window at night and tells you a story about birds. How some can soar across the sea for days and weeks, for thousands of miles until they reach their next home.
“What do they want so badly that they need to do that?” you ask, turning your gaze back to the window, to the faces and shadows that clamor for your attention, the fire burning on the street that only you can see.
“They don’t want anything,” Hana says, still holding your hand even when your fingers lack the strength to squeeze back. “Their body moves before their mind has a say. A programmed reflex.”
You miss Hana when she stops coming. You wish you could have asked her more about the birds, if they ever find their way back.
They inject it in your lips last, the ink streaming through microscopic pillows of fat. You expect it to have a taste, but there are no gustatory receptors inside the flesh. Instead, a phantom bitterness inks your tongue, a viscous metallic taste, and you squeeze the armrests, holding back the urge to retch.
When it’s done, the Artist sits back and asks if you’re okay. He massages the tension from his wrists, the syringe on the metal tray with traces of your blood on the tip.
“You’re almost there,” he says as if behind a glass wall, the ink in your ears corking his voice.
In the corner of the room, you see someone that wasn’t there before. They wave to you, but you know not to wave back.
You try to recall the taste of summer fruit, the sweetness of cold watermelon slices, the two-toned color of the twilight sky behind your mother’s house, the fevered pinks and oranges, the red gates outside your old school, your slanting reflection in the blue pool, a firefly pinging neon near your ear as your best friend holds your hand—any stroke of color to feel like yourself again.
But your thoughts settle on the shuddering black shadows in front of you like brushstrokes in the air. You can see the black eyes of lost friends who were Inked too, the charred black skulls of lost friends who were not. You want to peel the last piths of color from your memories and share them like precious, fragrant treats the way your mother used to dice tomatoes from her garden and douse them in oil and pepper for guests.
But these are not your friends, and a body is nothing more than a burning house where everyone has left except you.
The ink speaks, tastes, smells, touches, and takes. You are the canvas, its oils, its nourishment. Just as the Artist said, it comes when it is ready, even if you are not.
The warm threads of ink envelope your throat, tracing the soft line of your shoulders and hips. The black globes of your eyes see them before you feel them. A hurricane of dark light. A taste like cinnamon and electricity fills your mouth.
No one tells you that the longest night is the night when you are finally offered your Contract.
It’s been three months, and your body has healed, but it no longer belongs to you. The Inked are here to serve, and you will, just like all those before you. This is the Contract of your ancestors, the way they chose to survive the hunger, the love of the Cursed. The cost of peace paid by the ink on the skin.
A creature calls out to you, hungry, your body like a beacon in the dark sea. You do not question when your fingers reach out.
© 2024 Angela Liu
Angela Liu is a Chinese-American writer from NYC. She researched mixed reality at Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design in Japan and now works in IT consulting and translation. Her stories and poetry are published/forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, The Dark, Nightmare Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Dark Matter Magazine, Cast of Wonders, khōréō, among others. Her debut short story collection, Beautiful Ways We Break Each Other Open, will be released in September 2024 with Dark Matter INK. Check out more of her work at liu-angela.com or find her on Twitter/Instagram @liu_angela
Scalzi on Film: When Fun Becomes Homework
by John Scalzi
The Marvels, the sequel to Captain Marvel, has come and gone in the theaters, and with it, a whole number of questions have been raised. The first film was tremendously successful ($1.13 billion in worldwide grosses), but four years later the second film struggled to break $200 million across the globe. It’s the lowest-grossing Marvel Cinematic Universe film, displacing 2008’s The Incredible Hulk, which brought in $264 million globally.
When any prominent film disappoints, lots of people fly in to suggest the causes. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, attempted to suggest that the problem was that there were not enough company executives overseeing the production, which simultaneously throws director Nia DaCosta under the bus while offering the generally dubious proposition that movies benefit from more studio interference, not less. The Manosphere wishes to suggest that the problem is that it was aimed at women, a foolish argument considering the success of the first film, not to mention that the highest grossing film of 2023, by a healthy margin, is Barbie.
The true answer is that there is probably no single or even primary reason The Marvels, or any big budget spectacle, flops. Just as lots of factors have to come together for a massive success, including the ineffable “right place, right time, right movie” factor (see, again, Barbie), so do a series of factors have to come together when a film crashes and burns.
With that said, and with the notation that I, for once, was actually looking forward to seeing The Marvels in the theater, in the week leading up to the film’s release, I was also thinking to myself: How much homework do I need to do with this one?
Because, you see, not only was The Marvels a direct sequel to Captain Marvel, it’s a constituent part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which multiple films and television series blend in with each other, refer to each other, and advance the character arcs of each other. The Marvels, in addition to Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel, also includes Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). She was a kid in the first film, but is an adult in the sequel, and also has superpowers. How did she get superpowers? For that, you need to watch WandaVision, the Disney+ television series, which also explains what Rambeau was doing in the intervening years.
Good news for me is that I’ve watched WandaVision, so I’m caught up there. So I’m good, right? Nope! There’s also Ms. Marvel (Iman Vellani) the bubbly teenage Pakistani American who accidentally gained superpowers in a different Disney+ series, Ms. Marvel, a series which, incidentally, ended on a credits scene that feeds directly into the new movie. Well, all right: as it happens, I’ve watched this series too—it was delightful and Vellani’s take on Ms. Marvel is one of the best things about the post-Avengers:Endgame MCU. Caught up!
Or am I? Because there is another Disney+ TV series that branches off of the original Captain Marvel film, featuring key characters from it in new and dramatic circumstances: Secret Invasion. In this one, Nick Fury (played by Samuel L. Jackson, a fact I assume you probably knew) has to deal with a Skrull uprising, the Skrull being a race that was assumed at the start of Captain Marvel to be the enemy, is revealed to be something else, and in Secret Invasion may be something else again. I say “may” because I haven’t seen Secret Invasion. Fury is in The Marvels as well, so the question is: What happened in Secret Invasion that has an impact on The Marvels? Does the film take place before or after the TV show?
While we’re at it, The Marvels is a “Phase Five” Marvel property, a phase which started with either the Loki TV series (I’ve seen both seasons) or the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania movie (have not seen) and leans pretty heavily on the character of Kang the Conqueror (played, for now at least, by the legally troubled Jonathan Majors) as the Thanos-level ultimate baddie. Where does The Marvels fall into the chronology here, and how much of that chronology am I supposed to know? Do I need to watch Quantumania and Secret Invasion before The Marvels to make sure I’m up on everything? That’s a lot of homework for just one movie, even one I want to see. I do have other things to do with my life.
Well, that’s just Marvel, you might say, and fair enough—Marvel’s film and TV concerns have their genesis in comic books, which are festooned with crossovers and multiverse-spanning narratives. So let us turn to…Star Wars. The most recent series there is Ahsoka, which tells the story of a former Jedi, played by the reliably watchable Rosario Dawson. Ahsoka is a character who appeared in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, interacted with the title characters, Baby Yoda and Luke Skywalker, and is spun off from there—
(gets note)
—Ah, I am informed here that in fact she’s not from those live action shows, she’s just in them, she’s originally from the animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Star Wars: Rebels, which have 11 seasons between them, the latter of which also provided most of the characters who are in Ahsoka, excepting the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn (Lars Mikkelsen), who is in Rebels but originated in a series of Star Wars “Expanded Universe” novels by Timothy Zahn, which are no longer canon, but Thrawn is, because everyone liked him and Zahn wrote a whole new canonical trilogy of books for him, so.
Have I seen The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett? Yes. The Clone Wars and Rebels animated series? No. Which meant that when I started watching Ahsoka there was so much I wasn’t getting, in terms of character backstory, in medias res conflicts and plot elements, that after three episodes I gave up on the series, because I was so acutely aware of all the things I didn’t know. The series stopped being nifty Star Wars fun and started feeling like I was being negged for not being a Star Wars completist, and not being up to date on all the nooks and crannies of the entire Star Wars universe.
I’m calling out Marvel and Star Wars here (both now owned by Disney) but they certainly are not the only franchises that have done this sort of thing, either in the contemporary timeframe—good luck stepping into the Fast & Furious franchise at, say, film 7 or 8—or in the history of cinema. Movie serials and franchises from the 30s and 40s also assumed a certain level of “you already know this” from their audiences: MGM knew that moviegoers were aware that Life Begins for Andy Hardy was the 11th film in the series, not actually the character’s origin story. Nor is it confined to film and TV. Genre literature is packed with book series where it is assumed that you’ve made a lifestyle choice by reading along. Fantasy and science fiction certainly, but also mysteries (Sue Grafton’s “Alphabet” series, which got up to “Y”) and thrillers (Lee Child’s Jack Reacher series), among them.
None of this is going away soon, certainly not from Disney, which even with the box office disappointment of The Marvels has raked in tens of billions of dollars in box office grosses from the Star Wars and Marvel films, and even more money from licensing, merchandising and streaming subscription fees (expect, by the way, for The Marvels to do just fine as a Disney+ exclusive). Nor should it go away, especially at a time when (at least in Disney-owned work), the properties are becoming more diverse in front of, and behind, the camera. The problem is not the sprawling nature of these universes. The problem is how much effort the companies creating the universes think is acceptable to ask fans to make in order to enjoy them.
We are nerds, and more than slightly obsessive—all the minutiae of created universes are our jam. But there’s a difference between salting in easter eggs to reward the faithful, and requiring hours of prep work—or at least the willingness to locate a wiki and dive in. And even the nerds have limits. I am a nerd by inclination and by profession—but I’m also a 54-year-old human who lives in the world and who requires at least some of my time and brain slots remain open for other things, like family and work and sleep and domain knowledge in other areas relevant to my life.
