Metaphorosis October 2016

By Andrew Leon Hudson, Amelia Aldred, Jared Leonard and Karl Dandenell

Beautifully written speculative fiction from Metaphorosis.

All the stories from the month, plus author biographies, interviews, and story origins.

Table of Contents

• The Hole in the Wall – Andrew Leon Hudson
• Shine – Amelia Aldred
• Undertow – Jared Leonard
• Comes the Tinker – Karl Dandenell

Cover art by Ekaterinya Vladinakova.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Metaphorosis Publishing
• Release date: Feb 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781640760691

Book preview

Metaphorosis

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October 2016

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edited by

B. Morris Allen

ISSN: 2573-136X

ISBN: 978-1-64076-069-1 (e-book)

Metaphorosis

Neskowin

Table of Contents

Metaphorosis

October 2016

The Hole in the Wall

A question for Andrew Leon Hudson

About Andrew Leon Hudson

Shine

A question for Amelia Aldred

About Amelia Aldred

Undertow

A question for Jared Leonard

About Jared Leonard

Comes the Tinker

It came from Karl Dandenell

A question for Karl Dandenell

About Karl Dandenell

Metaphorosis Publishing

Reading 5X5

Best Vegan SFF of 2016

Metaphorosis: Best of 2016

Metaphorosis: Best of 2017

Susurrus

Copyright

October 2016

The Hole in the Wall — Andrew Leon Hudson

Shine — Amelia Aldred

Undertow — Jared Leonard

Comes the Tinker — Karl Dandenell

The Hole in the Wall

Andrew Leon Hudson

It wasn’t a door, because it didn’t meet the ground. It wasn’t a window, because—no matter how high or low they are on a wall—windows show something, even if it’s just drawn curtains. Or a room previously filled with things, all now gone.

This was just a hole in the wall. It showed… nothing.

Yohaena stared across the cobbles from her splay-legged slump. She was exactly as far from the world’s finest market as a life-long sober woman could stagger after enjoying her first sinful drinks. Bought with her last honest coins.

Until the moment they threw her out, the other drinkers in the tavern had found her entertaining. She could curse the taxman, curse her audience, curse the stars that shone on her birth, curse the King even—though perhaps not quite so loud as the rest—but the minute she insulted the market of all things she was out on her ear, clutching a wooden mug containing only dregs.

The market that had taken everything she had with a smile, and given her nothing back in return.

She swung her bleary gaze away from the hole, trying to orient herself. With greasy rain slicking out of her fringe and down her face, she felt like having a bit of a cry. With the world suddenly spinning around her head, she felt like having a bit of a puke as well.

Her head and shoulders rested against another wall, the wall of… she sneered …of a shop, of course, what else? The urge to cry went away and the urge to shout incomprehensible insults rose again, to rant in tongues, to slur slurs—she giggled.

Her chin hit her chest, and confronted by the nothing in the hole in the wall the giggling died away. That’s what she had: nothing. Only a worthless mug, and nothing to drink from it.

#

Yohaena had been born and raised at the foot of mountains so distant that from the capital they were barely a shadow on the horizon. But they towered over Wallys, her home, like the stairway of giants, each high plateau overshadowed by those beyond, dawn breaking over their edges like molten gold, pooling and spilling from one to the next.

Only on the highest of those mountain plains grew the stone fruit. The trees were short and sturdy, their roots cracking the rock with their grip, with thick trunks to stand against the hardest wind. Their few leaves were clustered like fists around the fruit itself, more suited to protection than begging the sun for energy.

Late in the year, the fruit fell. In Wallys, tradition said it all dropped in one day, and that (if the festival were only a little less boisterous—it never was) you could hear the echoing of the fruit’s impacts like applause coming down from the peaks.

Much time would pass before the small, stony fruit came to human hands, if it did at all. It dropped from the trees, black and hard as coal, flecks glinting on its impenetrable skin like quartz. Over months, even years, the wind blew the oval fruit over cliffs, down slopes, some vanishing into gulleys and crevasses never to see the light again—or to wash out from the springs and underground streams that fed the waters of the plains. The people of Wallys kept fine nets to pluck fruit from the flow, gifts as strange as the fine fish spawn that spewed forth on irregular autumns only to return years later as blind, translucent giants, fighting upstream in their thousands to disappear back underground, breed, and swim no more.

Those fruit which failed to reach the lowlands would never ripen. The mountain birds and animals knew it, and made seasonal pilgrimages to dig through the shale slides, or picked out their glinting rewards with sharp, circling eyes. They bore them down to warmer ground and hid them away, waiting out the long months until they came good; and enough of the seeds within were carried back to the heights through the ways of nature that the sparse but long-lived forests in the sky would be maintained.

Only once had someone attempted to trade stone fruit with the wider world: Maynehla Paraesei, Yohaena’s own mother, long before her daughter’s birth. Yohaena had grown up hearing the story, lived it in her mind’s eye—how as a young woman they’d thought her mother a fool.

Her old ma, a fool! Young Yohaena had laughed. A fool much respected in every household in Wallys.

As the years passed, she dreamed about doing the same. After Maynehla passed, the dream slowly matured into something more. The following spring she prepared for the journey, secretly planning, buying what she didn’t have and disinterring the old tools of her mother’s trade. Four months of travel, and no time in that to spare. It could be done.

When summer came, she climbed to where the stone fruit could be harvested in numbers—a risky excursion in itself, so much so as to keep the locals satisfied by what good fortune washed their way. The windfall harvest would be sparser this year—let the beasts hunt for whatever remained overlooked from years past, scattered across the mountain’s face still waiting to be discovered.

In the thin air she prised apart those fists of leaves, twisted their cold, hard fruit free. She filled one sack and then another, six in all, struggled with them one by one between the steep-walled plateaux down towards home. On the lowest, she piled cairns of heavy rocks upon each sack, protecting them from foragers, delaying until the last possible moment the beginning of their ripening. Until the day when all six could be carried the final step, loaded