Short Fiction
Proving Ground
…At last, Ruperion led Denalku off the bus in the tiny heart of Dugway Proving Ground, to the nondescript collection of beige buildings where the military claimed only defensive research occurred on chemical and biological weapons.
Ruperion hesitated a moment before following the last worker inside, the door slamming hard on their heels. He retraced a path he’d reconnoitered more than a Metathan year ago, although only weeks had passed here. The wyseer led Denalku over black-tiled floors framed by sea-foam green walls. He led him past defunct UV light washes and level-three biohazard labs where negative pressure hoods that sucked contaminants out of the building hummed at the arrival of the morning shift. Plastic-draped rooms held quarantined rabbits, mice and monkeys growing antidotes in their tortured bodies. Black widow spiders silently crafted webs used to capture toxin-rich dew after each weapon test. By clean rooms and emergency showers Ruperion led Denalku, at last to a room with giant, red, biohazard warning signs on what appeared to be an ordinary closet door. Black marble counters atop pine cabinets were littered with lab notes, syringes, beakers and someone’s breakfast spread out in a work space that just yesterday may have held vials of rabbit fever.
Ruperion maneuvered into a corner by a rust-stained sink. Shrinking back from each passing tech, he ticked off moments of routine that would soon bring an officer to fill the morning lab order for any of the toxins stored in that closet-like chamber of horrors. Anthrax, bubonic plague, q-fever, botulism—ills innumerable for this world—a plethora of bacteria and viruses, so harmless seeming, all awaited a moment of truth when released from their tiny sealed vials. In the lab, or maybe in the vast miles of open desert, researchers would aerosolize the agent to expose it to simulated soldiers in the field. The tale would be read from the dew-coated black widow web. How far would the cloud spread? How many spores or bacteria per dewdrop might a simulated soldier inhale or find clinging to his skin?
What means would Denalku order Ruperion to use against the saber-wielding horsemen of the Pale?
Most of Proving Ground is found in the Prologue to my novel Black River, which has gone through a number of revisions since a much earlier version of this short story appeared in Wizard Fantastic (DAW, 1997) edited by Martin H. Greenberg. The version in Adversity and Audacity sf & f from cancer survivors (2026) reflects that significant editing.
Shades
She inched her sword closer. The blade emitted an unworldly glint, the cold milky light from a land never touched by sun or a slice of moon from a place moonlight couldn’t penetrate.
How had she survived so long without sunrise? This morning, she thought she’d burst with joy on the first sight of it, or breathe too deeply of autumn and battle-bruised turf. For one hundred years only shadows: she would not go back.
Published in Front Lines, an anthology that explores what it means to serve in a war zone. DAW (2008). Ed by Denise Little and Martin H. Greenberg.
Garden of Souls
She upped the mag on the VisAir and squinted through the top half of the clear face covering that protected her eyes from unfiltered solar, like the thin Radskin she’d donned before entry. Magnification didn’t help dissolve the haze clinging to the distant glacier, a mist that rose with the sun.
The glacier’s snout, peppered with debris, had scattered a few massive blocks of ice onto the surface of glacial Lake Michigan. They floated like garbage islands in the milky summer melt. Clouds of gulls wheeled in search of the preserved food delved from landfills amongst the spires of antique appliances, castoffs of technology and a snowfall of diapers brighter than the filthy ice that supported them. As she watched, a seemingly small chunk of ice dropped into the lake to reveal an almost blue glacial face studded with sparkling silver strips of metal. The calved iceberg sent a low wave that gently lifted the islands of garbage, then reared up into a giant breaker as it neared shore to wash over the beach, scattering gulls and leaving a line of debris and chemical scum upon which they quickly descended.
This science fiction story about the abandonment of Earth, and those who choose to remain behind, first appeared in PanGaia Magazine #43 (2006), then was reprinted in the Science Fiction Superpack #1 (2014)
Medicine Rock
This short story is a prequel tale to The Enchanter’s Web. Published in Elysian Fiction 4, a webzine that no longer exists, I may share it here after the Enchanter’s Web has been published, or share it with subscribers to an email newsletter when that emerges. I’m not sure if I still like it.
Reality
A bus belched away from the curb, having disgorged a dozen college students onto the snowy sidewalk and absorbed their equal in academic staff. Cal sucked in a deep breath of diesel hanging in the air, savouring the taste of it in his throat. Then he hawked onto the pavement at the feet of a gaggle of sorority sisters crossing from the campus Common. He laughed at their disgust, one of his deeper, throatier laughs, the kind that made women speed their pace and throw nervous glances back at him, measure him, his tweed jacket, his brushed suede coat clean and the collar turned up, a beret pulled low. They didn’t know what he’d do. He shattered their stereotype. What a way to earn a living.
“Reality,” a psychological “magic realism” piece, was published in Interzone 118 in April 1997.
Sing Heavenly Muse
On a fine August day, in the year accounted by the Christians as 1637, a vessel passed into my notice as it traveled from the mouth of Dee toward Anglesey and beyond, perchance making for Dublin. The winds were calm, and as night fell they abated to a bare whisper rare to this tumultuous sea. I slipped aboard the vessel with a silent skill that never failed me in the thousand years and sixty since Arderyd. In the matter of perhaps an hour, I had drunk my fill of the passengers, stove in the hull, and left her to founder as I had the many ships before. Of the offspring of the Roman Church I drank, I their Judgment. The thirst for vengeance does not sate in centuries, nor a millennium. It consumes.
Among them, I learned later, was a man of no great account, a young clergyman, recently of Christ’s College, named Edward King. I don’t know which of them he might have been. Which of those begging for my mercy, whether he was the one who tasted sweet as if he’d fed upon honeycomb all his days, or the bitter one who had feasted instead upon sage and acorn flour. They were young and old on that ship. I can be certain the older ones were not Edward King, nor the women whose sweet breasts bore the sour milk of Christianity. Even shown a likeness, I doubt I would know him. In sixteen centuries I have seen much of this world.
One more foundered ship might have been of little note among the hundreds upon which I meted vengeance–and sweet taste the young–but some time later, I took note of a bard who had written an ode to this Edward King. I always listened for voices of reason among the clamor of righteousness in this land gone Roman. This bard sang so sweetly, but what pastoral claptrap he had penned! Within it smacked the better part of wisdom, and perhaps that pastoral nonsense was part of the irony he sought. Not only did he slash the almighty Roman Church with his two-handed sword, striking through the jugular, but he did so with relish, in the end deifying young Edward King as a poet, as a shepherd better than the corrupt clergy he walked among. And this creature I had drunk deeply of, the bard memorialized in a syrupy ode, “Lycidas.”
I knew I must find this John Milton, the bard.
“Sing Heavenly Muse” appeared in Blood Muse: Timeless Tales of Vampires in the Arts published by Donald I Fine (1995) and edited by Esther M. Friesner and Martin H. Greenberg. This story received an honorable mention in the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. A Publisher’s Weekly review noted: “In “Sing Heavenly Muse,” Meg Turville-Heitz adroitly suggests that Milton was in thrall to a vampire muse when he created the self-tortured Lucifer of Paradise Lost.”
The Crow
… The bird looked up at him and opened its throat, the squirrel’s flesh still dangling there like some grisly beard. Randall thought he heard a hint of the bird’s harsh caw through the sealed window. The crow flapped up out of the street, a shadow of asphalt escaping to fly straight at Randall.
The bird banked just as Randall instinctively ducked back.
The Crow, horror, appeared in Vol 1, Issue 2 of Skull, The Magazine of Dark Fiction which is not longer publishing.
Stand-off: Fox & Goose
They think I’m a ding bat, a real flake.
Sorry, “they” being coworkers, acquaintances. I don’t think my friends are that way. If they are, they have the tact not to show it.
But anyways, as I was saying, when they give me that “what-a-bimbo” smile, those mildly amused paternal nods, I always picture a dandelion seed — even milkweed — bouncing on some current. Not like helicopter seeds, all aimed and purposeful, making for the ground, but capricious and teasing like, always hesitant to go in one direction, never set for one side or the other of the stream.
Yeah, you’re right. I guess I kind of am like that. Or, at least I was. But in a way different than they mean. In a good way. I’m not stupid. I don’t care what they think. I’m not an airhead, just … They don’t know what I’m thinking, what random association, what connections I’m making. I kind of like it that way, I guess. But there’s side effects. My mind isn’t definably dingy, or fruity, or my favorite, loopy. I guess it just wanders.
Not since I died. No, I think I’ve got it together more since then, kind of found my focus.
“Stand-off: Fox & Goose,” a magic realism story, was my first published short fiction. It appeared in Volume 2, Issue 4 (Fall, 1994) of Mystic Fiction, which is no longer publishing. It was partially inspired by artwork by Owen Gromme titled “Stand-off: Fox & Geese.”
