Another Story in Interzone: Spin of Stars

I've got another story in the current issue of Interzone (Issue 260), the UK's longest running science fiction magazine.

It’s called The Spin of Stars – one of my favorite short stories in a manuscript currently in-progress. Each story in the manuscript features an encounter with a changeling type creature (maybe the same one). They all take place in North Florida, in many different time frames. Conquistadors, carnivals, prison executions, veteran hospitals. The Spin of Stars is primarily set in the ‘60’s. 

And the illustration in Interzone by Richard Wagner that accompanies this story is 
Kickass. 

Illustration by Richard Wagner

You can order one copy and/or subscribe directly to Interzone (scroll to the bottom of the page to order one copy). Or you can buy a digital copy from Weightless Books (eventually - it hasn't shown up for sale there yet). You can also find copies in various bookstores around the US. Here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, it's available at Hastings. 

Issue #260 (Sept/Oct 2015) includes work by John Shirley, Priya Sharma, Jeff Noon, and C.A. Hawksmoor. The opening paragraphs and accompanying illustrations can be seen below.

Weedkiller by John Shirley
illustrated by Richard Wagner



The squid balloon was hovering over East L.A., a mile past downtown. The sky was like a gray steel lid, as it usually was. Venter’s observer was hovering just under the thickest layer of haze from the sea’s gradual evaporation. Venter remembered, in childhood, L.A. had been famed for its clear, sunny days. Now the palm trees were shriveled and brown from lack of sun.


Blonde by Priya Sharma
illustrated by Martin Hanford



“When did you go bald?”
Only Clarice would ask such a forthright question.
“Leave her alone.” Jake drains his beer. Only he would dare contradict his sister.
The clock hands have gone from late at night to early in the morning. Jake’s bar is empty of customers. The staff, who are sitting round the table, fall silent, intent on their drinks.
“It’s okay,” Rapunzel says. “I was sick and it all fell out.”
Her scalp is shiny, every follicle devoid of life. Nor does she have any eyebrows. Or hair elsewhere for that matter.
“What colour was it?”
“Blonde.”
There’s a pause, then laughter.
Jake nudges her. “You’re a joker after all.”
She knows what he thinks of her. That she’s vague and evasive and hasn’t a clue what’s going on most of the time.
“Lucky you’re beautiful enough to be bald,” he adds.
Rapunzel touches the nape of her neck where she feels most exposed and tries not to smile.


No Rez by Jeff Noon
illustrated by Dave Senecal 



Waking   the same   every morning,                   into darkness
The darkness        of the eye
Waiting for   the day to      kick in, the first little

pixel


Murder on the Laplacian Express by C.A. Hawksmoor
illustrated by Warwick Fraser-Coombe



“It’s all right,” Shai Laren said as Anselm swung down into the driver’s cabin of the Laplacian Express. “I’m almost sure I know how to fly this thing.”
Anselm stepped through the haze of bitter smoke pouring from the split control panel, almost stumbling over something obscured underneath it. “Where’s the driver?”
Shai didn’t look up from what was left of the controls, but the iridophores in her skin rippled blue and green with irritation. “I believe you have just found him.”


The Spin of Stars by Christien Gholson
illustrated by Richard Wagner 



The high desert night stretches out on all sides of the Jeep. Beyond the limits of the headlights, I can feel how the dark space curves away from the earth, folds in on itself, over and over, producing the billion stars that move across my windshield. There are moments, bumping over this dirt road, when I can feel the Pleiades star cluster above me; hundreds of stars spinning, keeping time. Real time – where past and future twist around each other; where beginnings and endings converge…

 

3 poems for Labor Day

The first poem below arrived while I was working at the now defunct Border's Books & Music chain. A girl around seven or eight came up to the register, slid a CD across the counter. I picked it up: The World's Most Beautiful Melodies! Sure, it was one of those cheesy repackaged CD's by some fly-by-night label, but I immediately thought what could they possibly be if it were true? All for only $3.99.

 

For The Girl Who Came to the Cash Register with the CD Entitled The World’s Most Beautiful Melodies                     

     What can they be?

                      The record of a sea-creature,

                                          half-woman, half turtle, floating

                      in the surf, tuning it’s eyes to the sea?

                                             

                        Or the rain,

                                     drumming the branches of a tulip tree,

     in a forest long gone, torn down, locked

                                                                    inside the mind of a poet

             walking an empty corner of the Paris Metro, lost.

                                                                                   

                                                                                     Or the scrape

      of beetle legs against cardboard

                     (song of cement-dust falling softly onto clay tile:                              

                                                                                    jagged stones

            coupling on the bank of a jagged stone river,

                                                                        no water in sight).

                                                           

                                                                                  And there is a man

                       putting a dead sparrow out to dry in the sun,

              waiting for the ants to eat their way down to the source.

            When they are done,

                                      he will take up the paper-light wing bone,

                          cut three holes in it with a grass blade,

                                                                                              and blow…

***

 

Sure, it's an odd choice of what 'beautiful melodies' might be, but being odd is the joy of being on this earth, yes? Revel in it. 

The second poem arrived during a blizzard year in Iowa. I had a crap car. To make sure that I got to work in the morning when the temperature dropped below zero (Fahrenheit) I had to start the car up around 3AM. It's about work and time. Why are most of us trained to accept that the natural order of things is to spend most of our lives doing something we don't want to do?
 
I think it's apt to quote William Morris here:
 
"It has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself; a convenient belief to those who live on the wealth of others."

  

Cold

                                                                             three AM, four AM Time

                                       to lace up the boots, creak of powdered snow

                                                                under the soles five dollars an hour, six

                           dollars an hour seven Force open the frozen car door,

                                                                slip behind the wheel eight hours a day, five

                       days a week Through the crystal windshield

                                                       a hooded figure moves porch to porch, clutching

                           a plastic bag to pass through these hours, so desperate

                                             for them to end Can’t shake this dream. Turn the key

                               there is a life out there, there is a life  –

                                                                    the way the dandelion releases its seed

                                                      when you whisper the right word    The car

                                         moans to life. Come dawn, I can make it to work.  

    (previously published in Hanging Loose Magazine)

  ***

All true. Hooded figure included. No symbolism required. 
The last poem is one of the first I ever wrote. It may be the first, writ back in the foggy ruins of time, Northeast Philly, when the world was young and pretty. I think it's self-explanatory.

Work

  

Old man beckoned with an index finger

Wandered across his yard

Boots sunk in wet grass

Said he needed help

In his dark garage lifted a bag of cement

He thanked me

Left his driveway

Left wet boot prints

Never said a word

Never saw him before or since

Most honest work I ever did

(previously published in Lilliput Review)

The Hiroshima Panels & The Truth of War

The Hiroshima Panels

A little over twenty years ago, I sat in a Quaker Meeting House in a small town west of Des Moines, Iowa, looking at slides of several folding screens painted by the late artist couple, Iri and Toshi Maruki. The screens contain depictions of the horrific aftermath of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, and are known world-wide as The Hiroshima Panels. By the time I saw images of those screens, I had seen many photos of the devastation in books, but those screens were different. This was art. A horrific event transformed into art. 

Hiroshima Panels

          

What was shocking, what the photos had never revealed to me, was movement - the body writhing in pain. And that movement was extremely uncomfortable to witness. I can honestly say that that moment was the first time I really felt the horror of the atomic blast. Those bodies in agony were suddenly alive, in the process of dying. Instead of seeing those images in terms of the past, and so safely distant, I suddenly saw those people – their terror and pain – as something that was happening right in front of me.

It was not hard to come to the conclusion that this should not happen to anyone else, ever again.

It Saved Lives! & Willful Amnesia

Today is the 70^th Anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The official US version is a recycling of the same old message: The bomb bay doors opened, the bomb flew out, and the war ended. It saved lives on both sides, so move on. We are a culture that’s good at ‘moving on.’ Of course what we really mean by ‘moving on’ is ‘forgetting.’ In part, this willful forgetting is a refusal to look at the complexities and consequences of war itself.

The US military spent a lot of time and energy on keeping footage of the devastation from the US public in the decades after WWII (See Atomic Cover-up by Greg Mitchell ). In the sanctioned images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no Japanese victims ever appeared. And so it was not only easier to think about the bombings as just, but also to think about nuclear power and nuclear weapons as powerful and deadly, but good – because they were in the right hands.

Official Image

 

Censored Photo

Twenty years ago, there was controversy over the Smithsonian’s exhibit on the 50^th anniversary of the bombing. Along with the fuselage of the Enola Gay (the B-29 that dropped the first bomb), the Smithsonian staff wanted to include the Hiroshima Panels and some artifacts collected from the aftermath debris. Conservative and WWII veteran’s groups rose up in arms, saying that this inclusion would present the Japanese as victims. The exhibit was eventually scaled back and the story of the consequences of the bomb was dropped.

Weirdly enough, the story of the panels being displayed in the US has fared no better. Very few galleries have been willing to display them over the years. According to Yoshiko Hayakawa, who has  brought the Hiroshima Panels several times to the US, it has always been difficult to find a gallery or museum willing or able to display them. They were last shown here in 1995, in Minnesota. (Japanese art on atomic bombings exhibited in Washington, AP, June 12, 2015) 

How we see the bombings supports

how we see ourselves now

             

From my readings, it’s clear that there were many alternatives to dropping the bomb and none of them were pursued. According to Paul Ham (Hiroshima Nagasaki, St. Martin’s Press, 2011), when the decision was made to drop the bomb the planned invasion of the Japanese islands by US troops had already been called off as unfeasible and not needed to end the war.

So, how we tell the story of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki supports how we see ourselves now. To blindly accept the official version – or to ignore the whole thing – is to accept or ignore how we are currently conducting military actions around the world. To accept the official version is to accept (or be willfully ignorant of) the funneling of untold billions into research and development for unneeded weapons of mass destruction. 

It saved lives! This was also the line used by both the Bush and Obama administrations in relation to torture. It is constantly invoked now when anyone questions the various conflicts the US is engaged in around the world – Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, The Congo, etc. (according to Washington Blog the US is currently engaged in military conflicts in 74 countries).

Our refusal to examine the motives and horrific consequences of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings is directly related to our refusal to discuss and question the countless hellfire missiles fired from drones throughout the Middle East and Africa today that murder hundreds of civilians. By reducing such a devastating event to a few simple phrases we shelter ourselves from the complex truth of the past – and so continue to shelter ourselves from the present.

 

The Hiroshima Panels & The Complex Truth

Detail of Crows

One of the Hiroshima Panels depicts the death of American prisoners of war in the bombing.  Another one portrays the plight of the Korean slaves in the aftermath. The one depicting Koreans is called Crows, a rendering of crows picking at the corpses of Koreans in black ink. The Japanese buried Korean bodies last, reflecting the discrimination that the enslaved Koreans faced even in death. 

The panels portrayed the Japanese as victims, yes, but also as victimizers. This is the truth of war. Forgetting the complexity of this tragedy means that we can continue to see war from only one side: meaning, all of ‘our’ actions are necessarily heroic and all actions on the ‘other side’ are necessarily evil. Note our current media and military influenced kindergarten language that labels victims of drone strikes as ‘the bad guys.’ It’s grotesquely simple. And it helps make the killing that much easier.

On the 70th Anniversary of the first atomic bombing, the panels have finally made it to Washington, DC. They are currently being shown in The American University Museum, located in the Katzen Arts Center at The American University.

Iri & Toshi Maruki

A great series dedicated to the 70^th Anniversary on the Al-Jazeera America site can be found here:  

Hiroshima Explored: 70th Anniversary

 

Other articles worth looking at:

Joseph Gershon - Our 70th Anniversary Homework

Christian Appy - America's Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Susan Southard - Under the Mushroom Cloud  

             

Hiroshima Today/70th Commemoration