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

“Sorry, sister. Am I in the way?” He wiped the sleep from his eyes, trying to focus his vision. The young nun looked like…

“No, Brother 9ine, you are fine. The Order asked me to see to your needs. Should I bring you food?”

Virgil stared. The tiny body he knew so well hid between layers of fabric, and her face had none of the sharp curiosity he’d always loved, but somewhere inside, he knew what had happened to her.

“Avi?” He reached out for her veil.

“Brother!” She jumped out of the way, stopping him from pushing back her headdress so he could see if her head had been shaven, if the telltale black veins ran beneath the thin skin of her skull. Nuns were supposed to be free of biotek, but he knew it was her.

The nun attempted to stand, but as she did, she tripped on the edge of her skirt and tumbled backwards, the fabric pulling up and exposing her metal plated shins.

“Avi?” Her name sliced him like razors as it slipped from his mouth.

“No, you have me confused with someone else.”

And then she looked at him, directly in the eye. No spark of recognition. No lingering look or secret smile to tell him she remembered who he was. Who she was. Who they had been.

Avendui 5ive had been recogged and would never know him again.

Scott H. Andrews

I lay on the drowned grand piano, naked, my head that of a chess-horse, my hands and feet stumps oozing black-green blood onto the keys.

“Beautiful!” the voice I knew so well thundered above me. “Beautiful! Come here, Oinhoa, I am sheer genius.”

“Isn’t she…uncomfortable?” a gentler contralto responded.

“Why would that matter?”

And it didn’t matter. This was not my blood; it was but part of glamorous transfiguration. I was beautiful, or I believed I was. What did it matter, the beauty a woman was born with, my long fair hair that was now a wooden horse’s mane, my hands and feet that had once moved in the dance so skillfully? Beauty was a construction, a blueprint geniuses dictate to mere mortals who could not know for themselves what it meant.

I had come to the Royal Conservatory of Halispell as a mere girl from the border provinces with a talent for dancing, with the faint hope of finding a genius mentor and inspiring him—it was undoubtedly a ‘he’—to re-shape me, to transfigure me, into something other than the raw material of a Hestland village girl.

Fool that I was, I had thought the mentoring would be in dance.

The woman who had stood in a corner near the stage and watched me dance at my first year-end recital had seemed nothing extraordinary. Her simple pale-blue dress made her merely a splash of color from the stage, something to spot on when I spun, my head always returning to that splash to keep from losing balance and orientation. After the recital, when I was basking in the applause—not as much as for the true stars of the class, I knew; I was at the time a second-rank dancer, and I nurtured the hope of a mentor to send me to the first ranks—when she approached me, the face above the blue dress was plain, lacking classical features, and she moved like one untrained, her posture that of a pine tree among the slender palms that were my fellow dancers.

“I am Oinhoa,” she said, and the name triggered a vague familiarity. “You danced beautifully, and you have a beautiful body. My husband wishes to speak to you. Would you join us at the Butterfly for a glass of wine tonight?”

The Butterfly Lounge was a bit far from my lodging, and more dear than my student stipend’s means. She must have spotted my quickly-masked dread. “It will be on us, of course. My husband is very interested.”

“Who is your husband?” I asked, and immediately felt like an ignorant provincial at her look of surprise.

“You’ve heard of Avardi, I’m sure? The…” still smiling, she seemed to search for an adequate word, and finally settled on “… artist ?”

And now only focusing on her blue dress once more kept me from losing balance and orientation. Every man and woman at the Conservatory read Arts Today , and Avardi’s face was on this month’s cover in full glamour, shifting from himself to the breathtaking transfigurations he wrought. Here was a man who knew no veneration or limits, who proudly declared that he would not just challenge but annihilate the fossilizing artistic traditions. We girls had quickly passed the magazine around in the dressing room, whispering at the dynamic-captures, before the dance artistic director, gracefully withered as a century-old lemon tree, furiously confiscated it.

But even before I had seen any of his art, I had read the old men in the monochrome papers railing that the moral fiber of our youths would be destroyed by this Avardi-ism; he had replied with “ Moral Fiber ,” a mocking composition of oat bran, excrement, and naked models that even Arts Today had not dared to print a picture of, but we all wanted to see.

He had his choice of models, of performers in his static and dynamic transfigurations, the girls had whispered; he could choose the best . So this was his muse, the woman who had left the richest man in Europa for him, whom he adored such that he signed his own works, “Oinhoa-Avardi,” taking her name with his.

The taxicab slowed before the fire-opal facade of the Butterfly, but my heart and stomach kept going faster. My only presentable dress, a simple black one, seemed all the more drab in these glittering lights, and I imagined that perspiration that my lightning-fast sponge bath had missed was still painting the crevices of my skin. In the few seconds I had before I had to follow the cool, confident Oinhoa out of the cab, I surreptitiously rubbed my calves because I’d had no time for a proper cooldown. Who was I, a dancer good enough to be accepted to the Royal Conservatory, good enough to have small solos, but clearly not among those destined for stardom? I had heard my teachers comment that I might make it as a corps dancer, fated to transform into one of a faceless mass with one objective: to be the same as all others.

As all other details of the inside of the Butterfly Lounge turned into a faceless mass in my mind when at the corner table I saw Avardi himself, real to the last hair.

If a small corner of my mind did note that he was shorter than I had imagined, and his voice was overly loud and had an unpleasant grating edge, the rest of me overrode that. His costume, a robe from an Eastern priest of three hundred years ago, the pantaloons of a Caltavan lord from four hundred, and shoes of crystal and paper from the imagined far distant future, clashed defiantly with the Butterfly’s aristocratic decor and decorum. I remember little of what actually happened that evening, except how seahorses and crab claws had sprouted out of Oinhoa’s dress and my own, how the wine had flowed like blood and my body wanted to dance to its pulse more than to the music, and how my heart had raced, wanting to itself break free of chrysalis and spread wings into the wind.

I could not sleep that night and was late to rehearsal, the first of many I was late to before I started missing them altogether. What did it matter, the endless practicing of stag leaps and wolf spins and peacock poses to the tinkling of a grand piano, when I had been the stag and the wolf and the peacock and the grand piano, had been them at the bottom of the sea and in midden heaps and in rivers of cheese and when kissing a basilisk and an icosahedron while hanging by my ribcage from the pendulum of a clock? In contrast with the color of the Avardi studios, of the sea cliffs and the city ports where he created his transfigurations, with the flashing of capture-bulbs from the swarming journalists of the arts and culture worlds, the Conservatory where before I had so yearned to merit dissolving into the corps was grey and drab and empty. One would call it a soulless land of machines, but I knew what soul Avardi could breathe into machines. It was the old putrefying art of choreography, representing the hollow rotten legacy of the centuries, and exactly what Avardi fought against.