A quiet, rainy weekend.
I spent a lot of it pulling together the next issue of Kaleidotrope, which should be more or less ready to launch later tomorrow. I’m really happy with the stories and poems in this issue, although I do hope in the Summer issue I can make a return to the fake horoscopes and advice columns that let me put a little more of my own personal spin on the zine. I mean, why else am I continuing to do it otherwise?
Oh, and I haven’t mentioned this here, but one of the poems from last Summer’s issue — “Leaving Papa” by Darrell Lindsey — was recently nominated for a Rhysling Award. That made me happy.
I spent the rest of the weekend out at dinner, it seems. Last night, I attended a surprise party for my aunt’s seventieth-something birthday, and tonight I went out for dinner with my parents to celebrate my own birthday earlier in the week.
Somewhere in there, I managed to watch several episodes of The Good Wife, and the latest Hannibal, and write this:
They come out when the sun goes down.
They don’t talk, or not often, even among themselves, for to talk would be to reveal that they don’t belong there, their accents thick like oil splashed across the water of their words. They are not worried that their meaning will be lost, but that who they are and where they’re from will be found out. The others, these so-called natives, are a superstitious lot and quick to violence, and they have seen, from weeks now of quiet study, what happens to those who are not as careful when threatened with such violence. Mannerisms and mistakes can give a man away — they have seen at least one man hanged for no more than a single gesture — and their mission is too important to jeopardize in such a careless way. They dress according to the local style, the finery and golden beads strung around their necks a sort of camouflage that would be unthinkable back home, perhaps even a kind of sacrilege. They are often glad that no priests were selected to join them on this mission; the test to their own shared faith has been difficult enough. But they also know that they must not reveal themselves, must look no different than the natives themselves. These beads are the custom, and they really are no more than baubles — hardly the sort of thing to truly anger the gods — and so they wear them in this place.
When they first arrived, they were shocked by the sight of the moon in the evening sky, a harvest moon larger than any they had ever seen before. Back home each of them had seen slivers of the moon in the sky, and they are not as ignorant of basic astronomy as some might think, but they have only seen it against a backdrop of blue sky and cloud. To be outside after dark, for hours after the moon has stolen that sky from the brighter sun, that too would have unthinkable. And yet it is a sin that each of them knows is required. If they are damned for it, then they are damned. The natives — or rather those who have taken this valley and now call themselves natives — these people do not come out except after dark. It is their way, the peculiar nature of what these people are, have allowed themselves to become in turning away from the old gods. And they, the dayrunners, have learned that they must mimic this to stay alive.