Metaphorosis April 2019

By Kathryn Weaver and Metaphorosis Magazine

Beautifully written speculative fiction from Metaphorosis magazine.

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

Table of Contents

• A Yellow Landscape — Sarah McGill
• Forever and a Life — Daniel Roy
• With E

• Language: English
• Publisher: Metaphorosis Magazine
• Release date: Apr 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781640761377

Book preview

Metaphorosis

April 2019

edited by

B. Morris Allen

ISSN: 2573-136X (online)

ISBN: 978-1-64076-108-137-7 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-64076-109-138-4 (paperback)

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Metaphorosis

Neskowin

Table of Contents

Metaphorosis

April 2019

A Yellow Landscape

Sarah McGill

Forever and a Life

Daniel Roy

With Eyes Half Open

Frances Pauli

A Sacrifice for the Queen

Luke Murphy

Copyright

Metaphorosis magazine

Metaphorosis Publishing

April 2019

A Yellow Landscape — Sarah McGill

Forever and a Life — Daniel Roy

With Eyes Half Open — Frances Pauli

A Sacrifice for the Queen — Luke Murphy

A Yellow Landscape

Sarah McGill

I dream of vast landscapes. The distance bends like cotton on a washing line or a rabbit vanishing down a hole. In my dream, women come, carrying brutally tined forks. Their hands crook around their bodies and somehow they are monstrous and too big. I walk, and I think I’m looking for a better landscape. Or only another landscape. This place is too wide and I pool borderless across it.

A woman draws her fork around her and says, When I was a girl and I walked on the beach, I found a little house crusted in salt. I sat inside and ate lamprey and mint leaves. At dusk it flooded and I laughed, splashing my feet in the water. I grew into the shape of that house, ancient and mindful.

My nana’s house was a tent, I say and I am very proud. "I want to have walls like she did, but I don’t know how to grow into the shape of a tent. She walked barefoot on the mountain with her mule. She made acorn flour and shouted haloo haloo to the thrushes in the valley." I am barefoot too.

Well, it is good to love your great-grandmother. But there are loose rocks on mountain paths and tents aren’t houses. They’re unstable.

A woman says, She must have been sad with no doorway to frame her and no walls to hold her. I suppose she was unhappy because she had no house to grow up in and learn to be herself.

I scratch the dirt with my toes and think they’re wrong, but I don’t know how. I don’t know if Nana was happy. And I hadn’t known that a tent wasn’t a house. I wonder then what walls I can grow up into if not those. I turn around and walk away from their monstrous forks.

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I lived in a house that wasn’t my house, and I lived in a room that wasn’t my room. Out the window was a hill the color of clay, covered in scrub. The bed was my cousin Mosi’s, even though I slept in it with her. It was obvious it was hers because my blankets were yellow like soil. These were blue, like a bottomless lake. Mosi decided she liked blue when she went to school and the teachers told her the ocean was best. I kept my bird bones in a drawer with her shells and together we built white houses with bone frames and shell rooves.

Downstairs, someone knocked. Out the window, I saw it was a teacher and I hid in the cupboard in Mosi’s room. The teacher came sometimes and said I had to go to school, but she couldn’t come for me if I stayed in the cupboard. That’s what my aunt said. She said the woman would always go away. That sounded true. The cupboard was the smallest place in the house that I could fit. I knelt, folded up over my knees. Sometimes it was suffocating.

My aunt told the teacher I didn’t live in the scrubland. She said I lived with my parents in the mountains, even though that wasn’t true and they were dead. When the teacher left, my aunt came and knocked on the cupboard. She opened the door and I spilled out. I sprawled, my legs and arms going as far as they could, all the way until they knocked against the walls.

When I went down to dinner, my cousin jostled me out of my seat next to my aunt and I went to sit out of her reach.

Did you take the mule up to the hill today? my aunt asked.

I nodded. I want the hill to be as tall as the mountain Nana lived on.

My aunt served out the partridge’s breast meat with pine nuts and pennyroyal. If it were a mountain, at the top you would find the circle tent in the cloud, just like the hero Oupa did when he went looking for Buzzard. He lives there now and teaches everyone who comes to him.

Nana met Oupa, I said, clasping my hands very seriously. She laid down under a blanket and in her dream she was a kestrel and flew to the top of the mountain. Oupa smiled when he saw her.

My aunt pressed her lips together. She told that story a lot.

I want to do that. In my dream, I’ll be a buzzard. I added pepper and rosemary to my meat.

Mosi laughed, leaning back in her chair to slap the rug hanging on the wall. Every time she slapped it, she grabbed a little thread and pulled, so that someday it would unravel and she wouldn’t be embarrassed when her teacher came for dinner and frowned at the black goats leaping over the mountaintops.

My teacher said that if you jump from the roof, you’ll die, Mosi said. She says it’s a lie that Warbler jumped from a gable and learned to fly.

Birds learn to fly by jumping from their nests, my aunt said, her eyes down. She ate with her fingers, the grease running down her palms. You used to like the legends about Oupa.

My teacher said bird meat is dirty. Mosi wrinkled her nose at the plate and wouldn’t eat.

My aunt picked over her plate and I wished she’d say Mosi was wrong, but she said nothing.

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In my dream, the sand is unfamiliar. Each time I kneel, I stand up far away from where I was a moment ago. I hate it.

I’m looking for Oupa. I think, far away, I see a mountain the color of sky. If I find it, I will find him and he’ll teach me all the mountain’s stories and how to be a buzzard. I don’t look at the women when they come up behind me, although the terrible scraping of their forks makes my shoulders rise and my spine tingle.

The wind is hard on my face, a woman says. It burns my cheeks.

"You should wear a scarf like