Shattered Prism , Book 1 Read online

  Non-Fiction

  From the Editors … The Human Sea Amir Naaman and Carmelo Rafala

  I.G.Y. Nisi Shawl

  Fiction

  All My Life Like Glass Rati Mehrotra

  Dragons for Dummies Sarina Dorie

  Like Bogart Lavie Tidhar

  Kuszib Hassan Abdulrazzak

  The War? T.L. Huchu

  SHATTERED PRISM, Vol. 1,, No. 1. December 2015 Issue.

  SHATTERED PRISM is owned and published electronically by Rosarium Publishing, LLC.

  Copyright © 2015 Rosarium Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this electronic magazine may be reproduced without the written consent of Rosarium Publishing LLC. Requests for permission should be directed to:

  Rosarium Publishing

  PO Box 544

  Greenbelt, MD 20768-0544

  From the Editors …

  The Human Sea

  Isn’t it funny that the fantastic are considered to be the least threatening of arts? So much so, that we still consider works of literature that do not submit to the typical notions and schemes of bourgeois realism to be childish- not fit for serious students of literature to waste his time on.

  Yet what could be more dangerous than the imagination?

  Every literary convention is imaginary. Indeed REALISM is a genre of fantasy literature, dictated by the dominant culture and written down by writers who failed to notice that everything described in their fiction of reality is man-made. Whether it be a marriage deal or the will of a rich grandfather in the stories of Balzac; the suffering of factory workers in early 20th Century America in works by Dreier and Sinclair; or those endless college novels about middle class professors and the affairs they have—all these stories tell us of a society with its special behaviors, rituals and beliefs.

  The problem is that thinking the fantasy depicted in these stories is REAL is a mass delusion. It is in cases like these that the Novel becomes a vessel for life-style propaganda.

  There is a fantasy at the core of every human endeavor and, for good or for ill, it is the imagination that is the most powerful force on human history.

  This is our humble addition to the fight: stories of the imagination that know that realism—indeed, reality itself—is a construct. And it is how we construct reality through our own personal prisms of experience that the world around us takes shape. A personal experience.

  But this gives readers a great opportunity. Stories of the imagination asks us—indeed, demands of us—to step back and view another’s reality. It is in this viewing that we begin to recognize that there can be common understanding of the varied and beautiful people in this earthly kaleidoscope we call the Human Sea.

  And these short stories give us the perfect opportunity to do just that. Stories that shatter the prism of light, showing us new shapes and colors.

  Amir Naaman

  Carmelo Rafala

  I.G.Y.

  Nisi Shawl

  “What a beautiful world this will be; What a glorious time to be free…”

  —Donald Fagen

  Much has been written about the future that never was, the one projected for us today some sixty years ago. In the US of the 1950s compelling visions of cloud-high cities, moon colonies, underwater domes, and leisurely commutes to one-day workweeks filled contemporary media. Gradually they gave way to other visions: first psychedelia, which was somewhat compatible with these dreams of cosmic progress. Then corporatism and individually-achieved paradises came into fashion. And I submit it was at this point many of us lost our grip on that 1950s dream—not during the drug-clogged bumbling of hippiedom, but in the faux-clarity of inward-turning exceptionalism and bottom-line pragmatics.

  Even today’s protesting whines about what our present—the past’s future—lacks seem self-centered to me: “Where’s my hoverboard? My jetpack?” some authors ask.

  I’m not about to answer those questions, but I want to remind us all of an aspect of this imaginary future which was originally downplayed and which we can now play up. If we want to.

  “I.G.Y.” is the title of the Donald Fagen song quoted at this article’s beginning. Recorded in 1982, it’s a lightly ironic look at the technological optimism infusing the 50s version of the 21st century, in which spandex jackets are placed on a par with bullet trains and artificial intelligence.

  What the acronym of Fagen’s title refers to is the International Geophysical Year, an 18-month-long program of scientific exploration launched in July 1957 and concluding in December 1958. The idea was to make up for time lost to the “Cold War” posturing of superpowers. Our flight plan to the future had been filed but take off was delayed. Encouraged by the sudden formal thaw between the U.S. and U.S.S.R, physicists, seismologists, oceanographers, and specialists in over a dozen disciplines pooled resources across international boundaries. They asked questions and shared answers, making sure wars of any temperature wouldn’t destroy the data collectively gathered. Participating countries included Ghana, Guatemala, India, Israel, Mexico, Morocco, Taiwan, Tunisia, Venezuela, and both North and South Vietnam.

  This was a global effort. The future we reached for belonged to all of us.

  The list of the I.G.Y.’s participants is not without its problematic members. In addition to certain despotic regimes listed above, the nations of South Africa and Rhodesia were among those who made the I.G.Y. a success. Some would deem any government coercive, and reckon any people’s participation under the aegis of one forced.

  My point, though, is that involvement in the I.G.Y. was worldwide.

  Yet in the U.S., contemporary media images of the unrealized future didn’t reflect this internationalism. Reviewed now, they appear to pander to isolationism at its most extreme. Cover after cover of Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines, educational short film after educational short film, ad after ad, depict a world in which all men are white. Women and children are not only white but are shown in situations underlining their positions as dependents, or as annoying yet superable obstacles for white male protagonists, as in the clips accompanying one YouTube posting of Fagen’s song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k1m9TevgJM). Ostensibly tantalizing audiences with glimpses of self-driving cars and computerized bill payment, these images celebrate the reification of Western, white, male, and heterosexual privilege and extrapolate their continuation into the foreseeable future.

  Into the now.

  But today is the past’s unforeseeable future. Never mind the technological discrepancies: the absence of the promised food pills, the unheralded ubiquity of cell phones. It’s the 21st century’s social realities which deviate furthest from those people were encouraged to conceive of. Demographic shifts have transformed Europe and North America, former bastions of unquestioned white superiority. Across the political map governments have fallen, revolutions succeeded. And most important to my way of thinking, the common narratives of race and difference have begun to change.

  Often popular culture makes it possible for those of us formerly excluded from it to count ourselves in. Ads admit that people of color shampoo their hair; anthologies invite immigrants to submit their stories; websites offer those signing up for their services dozens of genders by which to identify themselves. Yes, a backlash has risen against this trend of accommodating diversity; some find it threatening. Yet both the coherency and multiplicity of the voices with which we air our beautiful differences, proudly proclaiming our variant glories, the focus and ambience of our cries for the freedom of the world to be comfortable with its complex self--these qualities bode well for our prevailing. Especially when it comes to the kind of futures we dare to dream up.

  An example: In their groundbreaking anthology Octavia’s Brood, c
o-editors Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown advocate for “visionary science fiction,” thought experiments aimed at helping authors and readers resolve problems impeding the advent of social justice.

  Another example: The Indigenous Futurism movement was initiated recently by Grace Dillon. Illustrated in part by the selections in her 2012 anthology Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, Indigenous Futurism proposes to reimagine our genre as the rightful domain of the colonized as much as of the colonizers.

  One more example: This magazine, and others like it—Omenana and Expanded Horizons, to name a couple—decenter the experiences of people who fit the dominant cultural paradigm. By reading it, by writing for it, by spreading word of Shattered Prism’s existence and sharing the delight and power and disturbance contained within its pages, you make this a truly beautiful world, a sincerely glorious time to be free.

  Nisi Shawl’s collection, Filter House, was one of two winners of the 2009 James Tiptree, Jr. Award. Her work has been published at Strange Horizons, in Asimov’s SF Magazine, and in anthologies including Dark Matter, The Moment of Change, Dark Faith 2, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond, and The Other Half of the Sky. Nisi was WisCon 35’s Guest of Honor. She edited The WisCon Chronicles 5: Writing and Racial Identity and Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars, and she co-edited Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction, Feminism, and African American Voices with Dr. Rebecca Holden. With classmate Cynthia Ward, Nisi co-authored Writing the Other: A Practical Approach.. Along with Bill Campbell, she co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany. She is a co-founder of the Carl Brandon Society and serves on the Board of Directors of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Her website is www.nisishawl.com.

  All My Life Like Glass

  Rati Mehrotra

  If there’s a way to live in this world without getting hurt, I sure as hell don’t know it.

  After Makeio died I thought, that’s it. I’m not doing this anymore. There’s got to be better ways of making a living than scrying. Selling potatoes, perhaps. Everyone needs potatoes and you can always eat the ones you don’t sell.

  But I wouldn’t make a good potato-vendor. I’d borrow the toxic eyes of the tubers and blurt out to my customers who their spouses slept with, what their children said behind their backs, and how much money their partner was going to swindle. And then I’d be hounded out of town as a witch with fire and curses on my heels.

  The thing about Makeio was that he believed in me. Me, Phedra-as-a-person. Maybe the only one who ever did. The rest—well, they parted with their coin and they hung on my every word-but they never ‘saw’ me. They saw the scryer, the teller of fortunes, the diviner of love and luck. Isn’t that how our gift plays out? Gain the sight and lose the self.

  But belief matters. Belief shapes destiny.

  I met Makeio when I was still under my mother’s thumb, a servant to the famous ‘Lady Devina’ of Ridley’s Fair. She was a charlatan, if ever there was one. But my, could she carry it off. She was every inch the scryer, from the elaborate hair-do to the golden heels, and the smoky eyes to the flowing black dress. From the perspective of her customers, at any rate. Me, I used to stuff my fists in my mouth to stifle the laughter.

  “I see a darkness,” she would whisper, peering into her crystal ball. “A darkness of the soul.”

  And the poor customer would whimper with fear and beg her to see some light. Given enough coin, she eventually would.

  It was all malarkey. Mama couldn’t scry as well as a cat, but she sure made a good show of it. The better the show, the smaller the talent, Gran used to say.

  But Gran was long dead in a fire of her own making; there was only me and Mama and some poor uncle who had wandered away when he was quite young and never been seen again. It was a blight on the men of our family; women got the gift of scrying and men got the curse of madness, like as not. Or perhaps they saw the future only too well and it drove them mad. I have teetered on the brink myself.

  But back then, I was proud of my gift. It was all I had, all that set me apart from the other girls who worked the fair. I knew the ordinariness of their lives, the meanness of their very dreams. What could they hope for? At most, a man to marry and a pack of kids they’d slave over for the rest of their lives.

  I didn’t scry my own future; I couldn’t. But I was confident there were better things in store for me. Better than living with the sharp edge of Mama’s tongue, her biting criticism and miserly ways.

  I’d known since I could walk and talk that she hated me. When I’d complained to Gran, she’d laughed. “She doesn’t hate you, Phedra,” she’d said. “She wants the gift which shines so brightly in you and barely exists within her.”

  But she couldn’t have it, of course. I made sure never to be alone with her, but then Gran burned the house down with herself in it, and: “That leaves just you and me, little one,” Mama had said, face streaked with sooty tears.

  That was four years before Makeio walked into our tent and stole my heart. I was sixteen years old, ripe with pent-up longing, and I knew the minute I saw the dark-eyed, coppery-skinned stranger that I’d never love any other man. Also how he would die, but I pushed that knowledge away for a while, buried it where I didn’t have to acknowledge its existence.

  Makeio had come in search of his cousin sister, who was sitting opposite Mama, breasts heaving with delight at the erotic future being painted for her.

  “A very handsome man, my dear, he’ll go down on his knees for you and stay down, if you know what I mean…”

  I made a face at the exact moment that Makeio pushed aside the tent flap and poked his head in. Our eyes locked and his teeth flashed in a grin, while beside me Mama continued, oblivious to his entry. I blushed, furious at myself, and cleared my throat loudly. Mama snapped her mouth closed and the cousin left in a hurry, pressing money into her willing palm.

  Makeio came back the next day and I slipped out with him to explore the fair—and to explore him. We crawled under the acrobats’ wagon to kiss and caress each other. I’ll never forget the smell of the damp earth, the feel of his breath on my neck, the endearments he whispered in my ear. That first time was the best, because everything after was tainted by memory and expectation.

  By the time I headed back to our tent, darkness had fallen and the fair twinkled with lights. Off to one side the Ferris wheel spun and children screamed with delight. I felt as gaudy as the Ferris wheel, as exposed with my beating heart, my hair in disarray, my skirt torn and muddy.

  No lights dotted the entrance of our tent and I felt a small stab of guilt. Mama relied on my patter to attract customers, and to make sure they paid before they left. I entered the tent and something lashed my cheek. I gasped and staggered back, clutching my face.

  “Whore!” screamed Mama, swinging what looked like a belt. “Slut!”

  She managed to land several blows before I caught the belt and threw her off-balance. The table overturned and the stupid crystal ball smashed on the floor.

  Mama knelt on the floor, fingering the pieces, little sounds of distress escaping her throat. When she looked up, I flinched away from her expression. “Think you’re so clever with your precious little gift, don’t you?” she hissed. “Enjoy it while you can. It will be the death of everything you hold dear. This I have seen.”

  I ran from her then. I fled to the quieter end of the fair, where the reek of the big cats pacing their cages kept visitors away. I pressed my burning face against a tree trunk and cried. A footfall behind me, and then Makeio was there, encircling me with his arms, kissing my tears away.

  I told him what had happened and he listened quietly. “There are other fairs in other towns,” he said at last.

  I opened and shut my mouth like a fish. “But how will I manage alone?” I stuttered, knowing how he would laugh and take my hands, and tell me he’d always had a wanderer’s heart of his own.

  I went with him, aware of
what would happen, that I myself would be the undoing of this beautiful, laughing man. This is the heart of my guilt. Could I have averted it? Perhaps not. Knowing the future does not give me the power to evade it. But I didn’t have to walk into the trap of my destiny either. I could have told him to get lost; I could have gone back to Mama and begged her forgiveness. But I didn’t.

  We had a wonderful few years. Oh, there was hunger and hardship and booing crowds and dishonest managers and jealous women and, once, an escaped tiger who roared outside our tent while we made love.

  Through it all, Makeio and I were together. We went from fair to fair, town to town, until we found one to our liking—and which liked us. “Lady Phedra” the people of North York called me, and they came in droves.

  I’d got my act down to a science by then. From Mama I’d learned the importance of looks and from Gran I’d learned to scorn the show. I wore simple black, my hair tied back in a bun, no fripperies of any sort. I didn’t use a crystal ball; those are for fools who don’t know any better. I used smoke and mirrors and, sometimes, a glass bowl filled with water.

  I didn’t fool around; when a customer paid Makeio to enter my tent, I could always tell right away what they wanted to hear. Sometimes, I gave them what they needed to hear instead. A mother with a sick child does not need to be told he will never get well. Instead she needs to hear that he will laugh and be happy despite his pain, that he will give joy to whomever he meets. A lovesick girl doesn’t need to be told her passion will never be returned, only that one day she will be married to a strong, kind man who will take her dancing.

  Or not…there is more pain in the business of living than there is in dying, and it always surprised me how resilient, how determined to live all the suffering men and women were who came to my tent. I never lied to them, but I tried to give comfort, and in my own small way I think I succeeded.