SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

It could have been coincidence. Could have been some other person standing in the middle of a cemetery in the middle of the night, happening to finish a call at the same moment I hung up. Could have been.

I slipped my phone into my pocket. I dropped Conrad’s leash. Then, I grabbed the fence, and began to climb.

There were no lights in the cemetery at night, but the city glow was enough to see where I was going. I could hear the guard dogs in the distance, howling at the invasion of their territory, but too cowardly to get anywhere near what I was approaching.

I pulled a pair of latex gloves out of my pocket and slipped them on. Whatever I was about to see, I didn’t want to touch it.

She was still standing, at least. Looked like she hadn’t been dead very long.

“Jane.”

One word. Four letters. Rhymes with pain, rain, and stain. I’ve never liked it much.

Except that hearing her say it, I could feel my heart cracking open in my chest.

“Jane.”

“I—”

I tried to answer her. But I couldn’t. She didn’t say my name again. Maybe she was waiting for me to continue. But I couldn’t. So we stood there.

I stood there until I couldn’t stand anymore, and then I sat.

At some point. I started crying.

She just stood there. Waiting.

I don’t know how long I was at the cemetery. Eventually, I think I slept. And woke. And maybe slept again. Around us, the city had realized what was happening and was losing its collective shit, but no one wanted to be anywhere near a cemetery, and so we were left alone.

I remember lying on the ground, looking up at what used to be Gina standing over me. Death and fear and longing looking out at me through her drying eyes.

She had reached out a hand for me. All I had to do was reach back.

I don’t know why I’m different. Maybe it has nothing to do with being gestated by machines in the body of a dead woman. When some new bright spark of the medical arts figures out what makes the dead rise, maybe we’ll know. Of course, most people just want to know who this “Jane” person is, and why the dead ask for her. They don’t know that zombies collapse at her touch. Or that when she talks, they listen. Ultimately, I’m not sure that’s the most screwed-up thing about me.

Conrad and I caught the first ride leaving the city that would have us. It took us to Detroit. The next one went to Tennessee. I don’t remember the one after that, but there were plenty more.

I was fourteen when I met Gina, and I thought I had everything figured out. I thought it was too late for me to have a mother. I thought I didn’t need one. I thought I didn’t deserve one.

My multiple mothers had raised one more stupid child than I had thought.

But I’m learning. After a particularly hard day, or when I especially hate myself, I’ll call. When I think that no matter how many of the undead I put an end to with my touch, it will never make up for the dozens I may have infected with my still-oozing bite wound as I rode the bus home from the hospital; when I believe that ignorance is not an excuse, I call. Just like I promised I would if she could stay hidden, stay safe.

Sometimes, I just need to hear my mother say my name.

“Jane.”

Originally published by Wisdom Crieth Without

At first, the little cabin had no windows. Only open staring holes, waiting for glass to give them a name. I had brought panes with me in hopes of finding a house that they would make a home, and once they were placed I could not help covertly admiring how they first let the sun pass through, and then as the day went on, caught the light and threw it back into the valley. I told myself the flashes looked like leaping fish, or a treasure long lost to the depths pulled gasping from the waves. I could even tell myself that I believed it.

Hidden on land that rolled like the sea, the cabin was my treasure. I had come looking for solitude, for silence. And I thought I had found it. Until the afternoon Jonas walked out of the woods.

This is how love stories begin.

Mine is not a love story.

But there is love in it, later.

I reacted without thinking. One instant I was whirling at the sound of a stranger’s footfall, and the next my axe-blade was swinging towards his chest. By the time I realized what I was doing; he had caught the axe-haft with one hand and brought the other forward so that his knife hovered at my stomach. At you. Although he could not have known that. Even I only suspected that you were there, and had shared my suspicions with no one. The other who might have guessed, the one who had been there at the getting…Well, nothing had stopped my axe on its swing towards his chest.

I told you mine was not a love story.

Not at first.

“You’re far from home,” the man said, after the knife and the axe had been put to better use, and the roasted bird removed from the fire and divided between us.

“What makes you say that?”

“You have sea eyes.”

It was a simple statement of fact, although I had grown up with girls, and some boys, who would have taken it for poetry. In my village, everyone had the gray-blue eyes of where sea and sky met, or of fog rolling in after the sun went down. I suppose there was some poetry there, if a person was inclined to trust poetry.

His eyes were the brown of the earth and the green of the trees, shot through with the gold of afternoon light. He was not far from home at all. If he had told me he had been born of the fallen leaves of this land, I would have believed him and wouldn’t have been surprised.

“How did you find me?”

“Your glass flashed across the mountain.”

I did not allow my sea-eyes to move from my dinner. “Oh.”

We finished the bird together, and he left. He took the bones. I took the feathers. Winter was coming, and—in case you were—I wanted the down.

From the time I was small, even smaller than you, I was taught that a human could not live in a home without glass in its windows. Everyone knew this. Even the man who lived in the tiniest hovel of our village, his shack without so much as a door, scrounged sea glass to wedge into the knotholes in his board walls. They taught me it would keep the demons out. No one ever explained how something as powerful and implacable as a demon could be deterred by a pane of glass.

But by the next morning, I had resolved that—demons or no—the glass would have to be removed. I had come to the cabin to be alone. Already my flashing windows had compromised my aloneness. If I wished to avoid further visitors, the glass must go. As far as demons went, I would have to take my chances.

The day wore on, and I did not remove the windows. I even caught myself wiping a smear from the panes.

I tried to marshal logic to my cause. I told myself that the superstitions of my childhood were meaningless. That the windows were nothing more than a reminder of an unfortunate past filled with tragedy and mistakes. That it had been an error to take them with me when I fled my childhood home. That if I was with child I could not raise it within glass that had seen what this glass had seen.

But the longer I argued, the more it became grimly apparent that the windows would have to be removed by someone else. The glass was all that remained of my old home. The panes were clear, pure, and untainted—perhaps the last part of me that was. And as simple as it would have been to smash them, I could not bring myself to do it.

Until late afternoon returned. When the light flashed from the panes again, theory became necessity, and while I might quail from theory, I have never been one to shirk what must be done in need, and I lifted my axe.