Shoreline of infinity 25, p.1
Shoreline of Infinity 25, page 1
Shoreline of Infinity 25
Science Fiction Magazine
Ed. Noel Chidwick
* * *
Issue 25 August 2021
Award-winning science fiction magazine published in Scotland for the Universe
ISSN 2059-2590
* * *
© 2021 Shoreline of Infinity.
Contributors retain copyright of own work.
* * *
Submissions of fiction, art, reviews, poetry, non-fiction are welcomed: visit the website to find out how to submit.
www.shorelineofinfinity.com
* * *
Publisher
Shoreline of Infinity Publications / The New Curiosity Shop
Edinburgh, Scotland
060821
Editorial Team
Co-founder, Editor-in-Chief, Editor:
Noel Chidwick
Co-founder: Mark Toner
Deputy Editor & Poetry Editor: Russell Jones
Reviews Editor: Samantha Dolan
Non-fiction Editor: Pippa Goldschmidt
Art Director (Acting): Caroline Grebbell
Copy-editors: Pippa Goldschmidt, Russell Jones, Iain Maloney, Eris Young
Proof Reader: Cat Hellisen
Fiction Consultant: Eric Brown
* * *
First Contact
www.shorelineofinfinity.com
contact@shorelineofinfinity.com
Twitter: @shoreinf
also Facebook and Instagram
Contents
A Flight of Birds
E.M. Faulds
They Came To Hear Him Play His Music When The Sun Went Down
Simon Nagel
Danae
Elana Gomel
The President is Possessed
Gary Gibson
The Death and Resurrection of Mantis-Class Destroyer ‘Sentimental Journey’, previously ‘General Patty Styne’, deceased.
Cat Hellisen
Jane Yolen, Elizabeth Dulemba and Atzi
What is Hard Science Fiction?
David L Clements
Reviews
Citizens of Nowhere: an Anthology of Utopic Fiction - Rowan B. Fortune (Ed), Ten low by Stark Holborn, Axiom’s End by Lindsay Ellis
Shoreline of Infinity
A Science Fiction Ghost Story
Flash fiction competition for Shoreline of Infinity Readers
Also available from Shoreline of Infinity
Cover Artwork
A Flight of Birds
E.M. Faulds
I’m hungry. How long are you supposed to leave it between feedings anyway? The question floats above my head every now and then; a scribbly little black cartoon cloud with lightning bolts and knives stabbing out of it. For a cloud, it’s heavy. It stands up against the fug of the coffee house as the espresso machine gently farts and hisses disapprovingly at my
side. I’m hungry. But, more importantly, Jimmy’s late.
I lean low over the counter, check the light levels through the steamed-up glass frontage behind Mr Chowdhury. The space around the black and orange curlicue font decals is still dark. No need to panic, yet. He sips from the tiny cup of cortado that he takes after his shift at the all-night newsagent and rustles a paper with the headline ‘Police Baffled’. We never talk while he’s sitting. It suits us both that way — he likes to wind down and I don’t like talking too much. It shows my teeth. Don’t worry, I’d never bite him. Then there’d be no-one in here for large swathes of time and that would be worse than the hunger. And besides, he’s silent, but it’s the good kind, the amiable kind. I don’t think he’s ever hurt anyone in his life. But the world outside the coffee shop? That’s a different story.
Byres Road, West End, Glasgow. This time of night it’s nose-to-tail parked cars. Cycle back a couple of hours and it’s jumping, filled with entrepreneurs talking about engagement dynamics on their way to a craft beer popup, managing directors pushing past students in the plethora of vegan cafes, bus after bus, drunkards struggling back to the subway after the work’s night out, or the people so lost in their lives they can only express themselves through a ragged, existential yawp. And I get to deal with them all on a nightly basis. But from now until end of shift, it’s Monday-night quiet. Morning will come and the machine winds up again until all you can hear is the buzz of people and the rumble-shake of the train tunnel under your feet. Not that I get to see that.
04:30. A time etched onto the leathery surface of my heart. It’s the earliest the sun ever rises in Glasgow. If I’m not home that time around the solstice, I’ve got drama coming. By July, August, there’s some play. Two extra minutes of darkness every morning. A wee buffer if it’s raining, which it usually is. By winter, I’m golden. Some days it’s as if the sun just doesn’t bother. But it’s May, the sunniest weather, and I’ve got to be careful.
The angry growls of hunger in my stomach are making me obsess-spiral. As far as I know, there’s no reason to worry.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to kill anybody, but my urge to bite is rubbing at me like sandpaper. It’s a pain that never goes away. Neither do the cold fingers, even now in summer. I’m reliably informed it gets roasting in here when the espresso machines are going full bore in the middle of a July day, but I’ll not get to find that out. I told Scott I was studying palaeontology at Uni so I could never do daytimes, always had to be out the door by 04:00 at the latest. He never wondered when exactly I’d sleep, and I only have to endure the occasional quiz about what the best dinosaur is. (“Well, you see Scott, the more you learn about them, the more you realise they’re all special in their own way.”) And the nickname DG. For “Dino-girl”.
Mr Chowdhury brings back his wee cup and saucer with a smile. His neat moustache has a little smoosh of froth on it, but I don’t want to embarrass him. “Goodnight, darling, or should I say good morning?” He always makes the same joke and always calls me darling because he thinks it’s a nice thing to say to a woman. I tell him I’ll see him tomorrow and he’s off home.
I’m alone again for a while, only the wall-clock and the espresso machine’s conversation with itself marking time. I wonder what’s waiting for Mr Chowdhury at home. A quiet, sleeping household of warm beds? A bare mattress in a flat above the shop? The ghost of cooking clinging to the soft furnishings or a wreckage of take away containers? You never know what goes on in someone else’s home. And I can never get close enough to ask.
The vanishing people. That’s what they should call us. Hotel staff, refrigerated lorry drivers, bartenders, office cleaners, alkies, call centre workers, cops, and robbers. People who vanish from the daytime world’s consciousness. We may as well not exist as far as they’re concerned. But we exist for each other. There’s recognition in their eyes, relief when they see there’s space and peace here for them. And they have absolutely no idea what they mean to me.
* * *
A baobhan sith’s never born. They’re made. My maker was some old prick in Queen’s Park who lurched out of the bushes. I thought he was just a homeless person off his face on Buckie, so put my black belt in Taekwondo to good use and sent him back into the bushes. But before he disappeared, I got a scratch off one of his teeth on my little finger. Not a bite. Not a sensual clinch of neck nibbling that looks pure like sex. No, a bit of a tear. I’ve had worse cuts making a sandwich. And that was it.
Adrenaline and shock made me go to the out-of-hours clinic at the Victoria, but they just gave me a bandage and stuck my arm with a needle the size of a drinking straw, “Just to be sure.” I didn’t bother going to the police. I told the medical staff it had been an accident. What was I going to say? That I’d kicked a homeless guy in the baws?
I went home. It was there, tucked up in my own bed, that the wrongness came down on me.
A long time later, I cottoned on to the fact it’s not just passed on to anybody. That there has to be something else. Something inside you that says, enough.
* * *
There are customers who come in during the wee hours that don’t fit the late-night crowd so neatly. Like her. She works both days and nights, gets to walk both sides of Glasgow’s darkness and light. I don’t know her, but she comes in wearing purple scrubs and orders one of those coffee cups as big as your heid. She sits at a small table by the power sockets, typing on her laptop for up to three hours. Sometimes she’s there as I come on shift, sometimes as I’m about to go off. I know the name on her debit card is Miss C. Thompson. Whatever the ‘C’ stands for, she doesn’t look like she wants to be a Cathy or a Claire, fingers thumping at the keyboard so fast it’s like a hailstorm on a garden shed. Maybe a Charlotte or a Cordelia, maybe a Celeste. It’s one of those initials that can swing right through the spectrum from hard to soft. But I just think of her as C.
In the intricate daydreams I have during a shift, C knows all about my condition. She’s constantly pestering me to come forward and share my condition with science and get on the telly and I have to regretfully refuse, saying, “I work best in darkness.” In reality, I know exactly the face she would put on. Right before she told me not to make such a stupid joke.
It’s 04:45. Jimmy still hasn’t come in to take the early shift. He hasn’t replied to my texts and I’m getting antsy. The details of the street outside are far too crisp; the sliver of sky above the shops opposite has gone from navy to steel blue. C’s still here, and the apprentices have drifted in for their triple-shot Americanos — showing off, bless ‘em. I want to kick them all
“C’mon, Jimmy,” I mutter and jiggle from one foot to the other. I’m so twitchy I hardly notice that C is staring at me. She has earbuds but they must have been down low. Or she’s using the trick where she just puts them in her ears to keep people away.
She takes one of the headphones out.
“Sorry,” I say, finally clocking her. “Talking to myself.”
She smiles and nods awkwardly. “Sorry, I thought you were speaking to me.”
I mean, yes, that’s obvious. “Sorry, no. No.” This could go on all night. I want it to stop but it’s like a car crash. I watch the words fall out of my mouth. “Just wondering where my colleague has got to.” Why do I do that? Just say no and leave it at that.
“Is your shift over?” she asks. C, please stop.
“Yup.” Me, please stop, you’re no good at this. You were never good at this. Always on the periphery of conversations, back when you had a group of pals to hang out with. Walking between pubs on a night out, you’d always manage to fall between the twos and threes who were chatting arm in arm. And even those days are just a Vaseline-smeared lens of memory, now.
“Are you going to miss your bus or anything?” She’s still poised with that earbud halfway out, tentative. Like a deer on the edge of a forest. I guess she can see the stress lines I get on my forehead. Or how I’m nearly dancing on the balls of my feet. “I could give you a lift maybe?”
“It’s okay, I can walk, it’s not too far.”
“Are you sure?” C, I’m begging you. Please stop, you’re killing me with awkwardness, and I’m basically immortal.
“No, it’s fine,” I smile, a closed-lips tight little smile. “I could use the exercise. Thanks, though.”
The badness. The wrongness. It came over me while I lay in bed trying to shake off the jitters after the prick in the park attacked me. I hate confrontation, spent most of my life trying to avoid it. I’m not a coward, mind. And I have a black belt in TKD. That’s not easy to do. But confrontation rattles me, it takes me ages after to stop chewing it over and over. Like, how dare he? Should I have gone to the polis? I was staring at the strips of light and shadow on my ceiling, playing it over in my head, when it came down.
How to explain it? Have you ever seen that video of the deep- sea footage of a giant squid? It looms out of the black, bobs and dances for a while, caresses the camera equipment with its tentacles and drifts off. Then it comes back like a reverse explosion, all its arms pointed together like a knife and at the last second, they lunge and wrap and that’s the end of the recording.
That. It’s like that.
* * *
I have to ring Scott and he comes in. Jimmy’s getting fired, I can tell that much by his face. “Thanks, DG,” he tells me and says he’ll put the extra time on my wages. I barely take the time to nod as I hang up my apron and scramble a hoody on. I’ve got about fifteen minutes to get half an hour across town.
I’d duck into the subway, but it won’t be open for another hour. I like it down there when it’s quiet. It’s the safest place I could be in the daytime but it’s more than that. The sound of the train is loud but that just means hardly anyone bothers talking and you can retreat into your own little world while the carriage rocks you back and forth. The stations smell like wet stone and metal, and I can’t tell you why I like that, but I do.
Today, though, I have to run. I dig sunglasses out of my pocket. I’m already wearing trainers, but I’ve been on my feet for six hours and my backpack is full of junk that juggles about and digs into my kidneys. I consider a bus, but the routes are wrong, they’ll take too long. I head down towards the river. I can follow it back to Finnieston, scarper across the bridge at the SECC.
If I could live in the West End, I would. But it’s as possible for me as flying, which, no. I can’t.
I try to keep to the shadows at the foot of the row of shops but soon the disadvantage of living south of the river hits me, quite literally, in the face. I pull my hood forward as far as it’ll go, but it’s not quite enough.
* * *
I remember blundering into the sunlight when I was just new. I mean, it really hadn’t sunk in. I wasn’t thinking, walked smack bang into broad daylight. Not for long, mind, but long enough.
There’s no baobhan sith support group to tell you what to do. I didn’t even know what I was. I thought it was classic vampirism all the way, the Bela Lugosi stuff. To be fair, a lot of it basically works the same. But Scotland’s always had a history of blood- drinkers. True, the folklore that accreted around it is mostly wrapped up in transparently sexist bullshit.
Some men go get pished in a little isolated hut, a shieling. They start dancing, just for fun. They make the mistake of wishing for some female company and all of a sudden there’s a knock on the door. A sexy lady appears. One of the men notices she has the feet and legs of a deer, so instead of warning his pals that something is up, he legs it. So, of course, Mr Lucky is the only survivor, as the rest are massacred, their throats laid open. He says it was a baobhan sith that did it and he was spared her attack because he was the only virtuous one among the group.
People believed what they wanted to back then, didn’t they?
Baobhan sith means: the human plus package — not quite super-strength, but tough, not a lot going on in the heartbeat department, a shocking sunlight allergy, an outsize desire to drink blood. Tick in each of those columns. No deer feet. And no get out of jail free card for lying wee shites like the guy in the story. Quite the opposite.
* * *
I slam through the door of the close and take the stairs two or three at a time. When I’m safe in the flat, I strip off and rush to the bathroom to sit in the tub, spraying my face with the shower hose attachment on cold.
I get out after about half an hour, inspect the damage in the bathroom cabinet mirror. (Yes, I have a reflection. If photons could pass through me, UV light wouldn’t be so bloody problematic, would it?) I look like what I am — a burns victim. It’s mostly confined to my cheeks and chin, some of my wrists where they weren’t deep enough in my pockets. Even with the hoody and my head down, the light bounced off the pavement. Without the sunnies, I guess my eyelids would have welded shut. I touch the tender area with my fingertips and some of the top layer sloughs off with a cut-glass pain. I can’t even scream because it’d stretch my lips, so I end up clenching my jaw and mewling like a kitten.
I think about calling Scott to see if I can take tonight off, but I doubt he’ll let me if Jimmy got bounced from the rota. I creak the cabinet open, tired, and get the tube of aloe vera.
It takes a couple of hours of lying still, coating myself in green gel and holding a bag of frozen peas to my face while at the same time trying not to touch it at all. I don’t heal per se. But the pain stops being so insistent after a while. The skin will stop peeling soon, just look like a huge rashy sunburn, which will fade back to the regular anaemic pallor eventually. But for now, I have to wait, lying here, listening to the world wake up and get on with it on the other side of my blackout curtains while I weather the pain. I want to go to sleep but every time I do, some wanker bangs the close door or beeps a horn. Every sound is too sharp, layering on top of the burns. Eventually, I grit my teeth and get out my phone for something to do. Open up Fotousi and scroll through the posts of accounts I follow. Nothing great. A few interesting ones from @mejer_playa, but it feels crap having nothing to post of my own. I try to put something up every day. Gives me that little buzz when someone likes a pic, Pavlov’s dog that I am. And it feels like connection, even if it’s not really real.
