Live Nude Aliens and Other Stories

By JD DeLuzio

From a technological dystopia to small town Canada, this collection of short fiction explores themes of change, memory, and things hiding in the shadows. These tales, previously-published and new, take classic space opera, pest problems, and the recent past in new and fresh directions.

Will electric light cast a world into dark

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brain Lag
• Release date: Mar 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781928011682

JD DeLuzio

JD DeLuzio grew up in northern Ontario and now lives midway between Detroit and Toronto with his wife, Nancy. He has written several short stories, numerous reviews (many at Bureau42.com), several articles, and one collection of short fiction, Snow-Man's Land. As an educator, he has workshopped a number of original theatrical productions with youth. He also frequently runs panels at SF, pop culture, and literary events. His novel, The Con, will be published by Brain Lag in 2020.

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Live Nude Aliens and Other Stories by JD DeLuzioPublisher logo

Milton, Ontario

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, events, and organizations portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Brain Lag Publishing

Milton, Ontario

http://www.brain-lag.com/

Copyright © 2022 JD DeLuzio. All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact [e-mail].

Cover art by D. S. Barrick

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Live nude aliens : and other stories / JD DeLuzio.

Names: DeLuzio, Jeff, author.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210376376 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210376430 | ISBN 9781928011675

   (softcover) | ISBN 9781928011682 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Short stories.

Classification: LCC PS8557.E463 L58 2022 | DDC C813/.54—dc23

Preface

Most of these stories I wrote in this century; two are from the 1990s. Some were published previously, some were not, and three I wrote specifically for this collection. They run a range: SF, fantasy, slipstream, and one ghost story. A few veer into horror. Aliens, creatures of otherworldly origins, appear in several of these tales. Others feature alienated individuals with a more terrestrial pedigree.

You will also find little blurbs before each story. If you’re interested in aspects of a particular story and the creative process, by all means, read these. If you want to confront the stories without prior expectations, read them afterwards. If you find such things indulgent, ignore them altogether.

Inspiration and execution take many forms. I frequently plan my stories, but I’m not immune to pantsing (writerese for making it up as you go along). Either way, you are a fool if you do not revise. Then again, if you’re an author, you are a fool anyway, according to Charles de Montesquieu, a fool who should be happy enough to have bored those who have lived with him, but instead wants his foolishness to triumph over oblivion… and wants future generations to know forever that he was a fool.

¹

I fervently hope someone, anyone, is reading these stories after I’m gone. You of course may consider me a fool. As Lear’s fool notes, even kings are born with that title. I hope, however, you won’t be bored.

I would like to thank my editor, Catherine Fitzsimmons, and the readers who provided feedback on various stories, including Jo Deluzio, Tanya Jordan, Kristen Lee, Derwin Mak, and Darby Shaw. And my wife, Nancy Quinn, who tolerates my oddities and offers insightful comments on all of my writing. I would also like to thank those who shared their recollections of places that have moved on. Finally, I want to commend the cover artist, Dan Barrick, who brought to life several of the creatures and characters you’ll encounter in these pages—including that child at the window, whom he particularly wanted to draw.

JD DeLuzio

September 2021

When the baby died, we fed it to the Ghyel who lives in our attic.

When recycling goes out and the night starts to set, scavengers work their way through the streets, taking from the bins whatever might earn them money. I used to pass them, regularly, when my mother-in-law was still alive, and I walked from our house to hers each week to take out her garbage and recycling. That got me thinking about a world shared by two sentient species, one nocturnal and one diurnal.

Those thoughts led to this story, first published in 2013. It’s SF, but it also made Ellen Datlow’s review of the best horror fiction of the year.

Let There Be

Originally published in:

On Spec #91, winter 2012/2013

When the baby died, we fed it to the Ghyel who lives in our attic. Athalie rarely sees the Ghyel, though my work can keep me up late, the lantern burning and the window unfastened to let in the moon. On those occasions the Ghyel would sometimes visit, sharing the light broth one takes before settling down. I found the Ghyel an agreeable sort, kind if a little gruff, and neither the magical helper nor the dark villain of childhood tales.

We inherited our Ghyel. It has lived in the building for some time. During the day we ignore its presence entirely, thinking of it only when we hear footsteps above our ceiling. These usually fall near sunset or sunrise; the Ghyel otherwise seems a sound sleeper.

The Ghyel has taken interest in my workshop, set in an alcove off the parlour. I scrabbled for the equipment, though my employer provided me with some of the items. They believe my work may one day prove beneficial, and I do it on my own time. This means I stay awake some nights, late enough that certain respectable folk would murmur, if they could do so without implicating themselves. I considered the matter with practical mind. My workshop contains substances corrosive and hot and dangerous. I could not keep such things safely in the home during the child’s early days.

Those days will not come now—not for this first one, gone too soon even to have a name. I try but cannot stop myself from imagining lifemarks, the call of first words, the skip-skip of hesitant steps, the coming of color to his coat. But I know these things will still come, as Athalie and I are yet young. As for our Ghyel, that is a part of what must be. We should not upset our minds over what must be.

Two evenings before Athalie delivered the child, the Ghyel sat on the red mat reserved for guests—though being a Ghyel, I suppose it gave no significance to the colour. The Ghyel reached its hands back and spread its cloak in a fan. I showed it a weight on a thread, set into motion by forces generated in the glass container. Next I shut some of the lantern’s doors to dim the light of its fire, and created a faint spark: the bottled lightning which can kill a Corb or set a severed animal limb a-kicking. My Athalie had been shocked when I’d shown her similar things. Her fear sprang from pious caution, of course, but also from tales she’d heard, even ones I’d told her. Careless experimenters had burned themselves with corrosive substances, and in at least one case, summoned a fatal strike of the bottled lightning.

My displays delighted the Ghyel, however, who expressed itself with a barely-audible cawing, far higher pitched than the guttural sounds that were its regular voice. Such things I’ve heard tell of at mealtime talk, said the Ghyel, and I imagined I’d given the tall creature something its fellows would find entertaining. On their meals themselves, of course, I choose not to dwell.

I am curious about other matters pertaining to the Ghyel-folk, but not yet comfortable enough to ask. I do not even know for certain if this Ghyel is male or female. Popular belief holds that Ghyel themselves rely mostly upon scent to know, but I imagine they look less alike to each other than we Corboran say. Some of the general opinion I observe to be correct. Ghyel males and females alike have the extended, flat crest, longer even than the most masculine of Corboran, and not nearly so pretty. I have observed more carefully than many the dark, bobble-textured skin, like ours when age and wasting disease causes it to lose its down. I grant the Ghyel look diseased, even when healthy, and their elongated snouts smell of their meals. They speak in grunted mutterings, but they can sing in honks and squeaks, sounds that echo through the night and invade the dreams of good Corboran.

I generated another spark in the bottle. The Ghyel shrieked again, quietly. Given their somber reputation, it gives me a strange pleasure to hear that joyful cry.

Most Corboran who have viewed displays such as mine consider them parlour tricks, when they consider them at all. Perhaps I flatter myself, but I see further. In the time before my child’s birth, I stayed up as late as I dared, running the infant lightning through gaseous substances. I rediscovered and confirmed much but learned nothing new before the babe arrived. Still, on those nights when the Ghyel came to call, it would inquire after my progress. We are a curious folk, it said. Perhaps me more than most. These things you Corboran have done in recent times… That thought the Ghyel left unfinished, stillborn.

~

The cleric kept the ceremony short as befitted an infant. I had on my most formal cloak. Athalie of course wore the hooded cap of a female in mourning, dark as Ghyel-skin. The sun had settled over the horizon, and the Ghyel from upstairs waited in the appointed place, beside the ancient Ghyel who maintains the ossuary. I’ve never seen Ghyel garbed in anything other than the dark cloaks, and this pair, of course, had on their broad, asymmetrical headpieces. They do not go much for ceremonial garb; the headpieces we see at funerary rites, I’ve learned, are the same ones a Ghyel wears in the rain or on those remarkable occasions when one appears during daylight. The Ghyel stood calm, unchanging, in the vestibule. Their crests did not move, and their snouts betrayed no feeling, and I told myself the ceremony progressed only as it needed to, like the movements of objects in the heavens, each in the appointed place at the appointed time.

~

Though the Ghyel has sat in our parlour often, I saw its lodging for the first time that day, when I invited it to receive our child. The Ghyel’s dark form had filled the door defensively, but it stepped back when I explained the reason for this visit, and took its headpiece from a peg on the wall. Though I grieved, I satisfied my curiosity regarding the place. One might expect to find more ornamentation in a cave, more colour in a cabinet. The room smelled of fungus and Ghyel-snout.

Below, on the main floor, Athalie sat and called in soft cries. Sometimes she stroked the body.

~

The cleric completed the familiar recitation. Athalie rose from her mat and joined me to receive our babe which had been swaddled in cloths of three colors. We moved to the door at the side and offered our dead silently to the Ghyel who stood in the vestibule. Bony limbs reached across, one side to the other. The Ghyel stood for a brief moment, as required by decorum. I do not know if Ghyel pray. I suppose they might.

Athalie, devote and prayerful a mate as I could want, avoids contact with Ghyel-kind. I suspect this was the closest she’d ever stood to one, and the occasion could not have improved her feelings about them. And yet she has carried a child, and must understand better than I do, life unfolds as it must. She is polite, of course, when such encounters cannot be avoided, but she does not speak of them—like certain foolish Corboran, she’ll say, who think acquaintanceship with Ghyel puts them in touch with strange exotic wisdom. She knows what we have all been told: the Creator made the world for both kinds, and allotted to one the day and to the other the night, and it was not for either to traverse that boundary more than needful.

Athalie grew in the countryside, of course. To the rural young the Ghyel remain the mysterious figure of lore, close at hand but rarely seen, a phantom glimpsed at twilight. They speak only to the clergy and those undertaking funerary matters and other shared concerns. They are shadows who hide on the edges of battlefields in tales of ancient times and faraway lands. There Ghyel stay aloof from Corboran conflicts, and feast on the rotting aftermath.

Like all children I listened enrapt to old tales: the hero Telrac, armed with metal spear and blade, who faced down a giant Ghyel in the Mountains of Selin. Ghyel seemed to have grown far larger in days of yore, if old lore is to be believed. Telrac should have lost, for all his bravery, but the cunning hero feigned flight and the Ghyel pursued. Some contrivance of rope caused a fall of rocks, which missed the Ghyel, but trapped him outside his cave and in the valley at sunrise, to which Ghyel eyes do not easily adjust. The masculine crest of Telrac and the massive crest of the Ghyel both flattened in the morning light as they faced each other. Telrac’s metal weapons swung and clashed against the Ghyel’s sharpened stone.

Telrac returned home with the Ghyel’s outsized head. He left its body to its fellows.

The tale stirs some part of me yet, though I cannot connect Telrac’s adversary to our Ghyel. History and clear thinking tell me that battles are never so cleanly heroic and simple. Wars and heroes belong to history and to exotic places, savage lands good for fantastic tales and trade. For time far beyond living memory in the Midlands, Corboran and Ghyel have cooperated in a thousand small ways that keep city and farmland secure, and society running as it should.

~

We thank you for the honour you bestow, said the Ghyel who lives in our attic. The old Ghyel from the ossuary closed the door. I caught one last glimpse of its face, looking aged despite the lack of familiar signs, the fading of the down. We turned and then walked to the main entrance of the Sanctorum. Without, a small group awaited us. A messenger had been dispatched after the birth. Athalie’s Sire and Dam had arrived instead to this solemn ceremony. They are a fine, old couple, with all the sociability one expects of Corboran whose brood has moved on. They show their age in their eyes, though Elspet still has a fine down of dull blue and gray. Aronle’s masculine hues have lost their youthful brilliance, but he remains strong and he walked the streets with cocksure pride, even on this sombre occasion.

Unlike Elspet, he met the Ghyel’s eyes. I caught a flare in them, something not quite anger, a feeling redolent of old tales told near sunset and rural chatter over chores.

~

A young Corb walked before us with a lantern. We passed several dark-draped Ghyel on the street but saw only one other Corb, a brightly-garbed youth of gold and green down who led a tired sumpter home. The beast sniffed the air, Ghyel-like, as we passed. Elspet allowed a disapproving look to cross her snout. He was clearly no funeral-goer, and a Corb who walks by moonlight once too often acquires an unsavory reputation.

The sumpter started. Two Ghyel on the street turned their heads, and a moment later, I heard it, too. The construction rolled in, its wheels and pipes clothed in shadow, at the far end of the street. Elspet looked most shocked, but we city-dwellers know that the building, once a cloak-maker’s, had for the last year housed the steam-carriage. Something must have delayed it on its route, to be arriving after sunset. It would soon disgorge passengers, tired and frantic to return home. We heard them a moment later, much too loud for the hour. Aronle patted Elspet’s arm. The two Ghyel passed them. I felt a charge of darkness, a strike of pain.

Elsewhere, two other Ghyel were breaking fast on the corpse of our child. Then the Ghyel from the attic would attend to its own work, while the older one would inter the bones in the ossuary.

The females retired after we arrived home. Aronle, usually a garrulous sort, said little. On happier occasions he’d joked about my twilight friendship. You’d not be catching me sharing broth with a Ghyel, he’d said. Move your eyes off ’em and he maybe tries to take a nip off your arm. A piece for dipping. Maybe not you, Lem, but a Corby my age cannot be too careful.

~

The light dawned some days after Athalie had dispensed finally with her cap of mourning, and shortly after she had retired to our chamber. Aronle would no doubt have imbued the timing with some greater significance, the workings of the Creator, but I’ve learned to doubt such interpretations, even if I would not say so to Athalie’s Sire. The Creator, I grant, has set the world in motion, but I see no signs as the rural folk do of preternatural involvement with the daily affairs of Corboran—or of Ghyel, for that matter. The world progresses as it must.

Still, I felt something wondrous when it happened, and I shrieked with quiet joy.

I felt a shadow across the moon. I turned to the open window and observed the Ghyel looking in, its big eyes peering with curiosity over its distended snout. It had held its distance in recent nights, waiting for time to pass. I invited it in, and then shuttered the window.

I’d prepared no broth that night. I apologized to the Ghyel, and assured myself I had not intended to be inhospitable. The Ghyel accepted this without hesitation; it was more interested in the cause of my excitement. With less caution than I might have, I hooked the wire to the power cell. The current ran through the glass tube, which I’d had blown and shaped especially for my purposes. I reached back and closed one of the lantern’s doors, to show the results in their best light.

The tube began to glow, flickering and then infusing the room with luminescence. My eyes looked to the Ghyel’s and back. This was no spark of bottled lightning. This lit a room.

It flickered and dimmed and faded to a cinder.

I opened the lantern’s door to let the fire burn brighter. It’s gone now, I said, examining but not touching the hot tube. It’s gone. But I can make it happen again.

A lantern burns less bright than this you’ve made.

It doesn’t burn like a lantern. I tried to explain the difference, the importance this might have in a day to come, once we could get the light to last. A simple spark, and we could light our homes without fire or tending. Or the new factories. The thought took me to the time of children yet unborn, when we could light the streets (the major ones, at least) and take the day where we would. This was inevitable now, and I cannot quarrel with the inevitable.

The Ghyel’s eyes had widened again, with the lessening of the light. I see, it said. Its crest had flattened back, and its large eyes looked sad, and knowing.

*

Sometimes a character and a concept enter your mind and take you somewhere. In this case, I wrote the story over a short period. It sold quickly and saw print almost immediately.

My inspirations include an old photo of a kid with a creepy clown, circa 1970, and memories of Dwarf Village, a long-closed and largely-forgotten roadside attraction in northern Ontario.

Foundling

Originally published in:

Not One of Us #53, April 2015

Humpty Dumpty sat on a painted wall near the main gates, still smiling, red bowler hat atop his hardboiled head. The police were putting up that new yellow tape, which almost looked festive. The revolving lights of their cars could have flashed from kiddie rides; the cops themselves might have been costumed greeters. Certainly, they were keeping it together better than the teenaged elf, who had been taken away, crying hysterically. They had to use the tape because there were so few officers to interview the crowd, to see if anyone had seen anything, in those woods behind the Crooked Mile. People ended up waiting for hours. The concession stand did fine business, once stomachs settled. Kids still need to eat.

Parts of the body would look desiccated, Brenda knew, like peelings left in the afternoon sun. Tears fell, though she tried to retain them. He’d been opened the way a cat would open a bird and leave the feathers and wings and beak. Sometimes they cracked the skull and munch the brains. Back home alone in her room she’d have rocked and cried but she couldn’t go home again and she knew she would have to keep her wits and her face, like she did at Woolco.

She could still see the clown in her head. Christopher would turn his little face and Brenda would follow along and there the clown would be, his smile as crooked as the Crooked Man’s house. They’d painted his face like Humpty Dumpty’s, red mouth on ghostly skin. The clown twisted balloons into animals. Christopher had smiled at this and Brenda had smiled, because that’s what a mommy would do.

Someone nearby had a transistor radio. She could hear, very faintly, the Peppermint Rainbow singing Will You Be Staying After Sunday? Every once in a while, a voice would crackle on the police radio. She cursed herself for losing track of Christopher, taking her eyes away that one moment.

The detective wrote something in his notebook. She tried to imagine herself, behind the checkout, or at the lunch counter, smile on a calm face, and the store camera spinning around and around above her like a merry-go-round. She trembled. The police made Brenda so very nervous.

~

She didn’t know exactly when she first took the notion of running away with Christopher. That had been before the blood, and bodies opened like birds. The thoughts grew after her father’s first attack. He could look after himself well enough, but she still did the cleaning and, on days Woolco didn’t need her for the evening shift, the cooking. After his attack he’d lost his streak of independence, and relied on her more and more.

The desire went back further, of course. Brenda often visited playgrounds, lingered near elementary schools if she passed them near recess time. The park drew her during the warmer weather. She walked by it on the way to work, but it was too far for her lunch break. Instead she ate at the lunch counter, if crowds were thin that day, but mostly, in the break room at the back of the store. She would pass through the small pet department and Charlie the Monkey in his too-small cage, looking out with fading hope in his soulful brown eyes. Otherwise that corner consisted of hamsters and finches and goldfish. You could smell the birds and beasts from the break room. Janine once pretended the smell was Brenda, with crude insinuations.

After rain the park smelled of wildflowers and thistles and wet grass. From the sidewalk near the park she could watch baseball, because teams with uniforms played here at times, and groups of kids at others. The other side held the children’s play area, enshrouded by trees. They had taken down the old slide that she remembered and removed the go-round that kids worked with their feet—some kid always got thrown off and injured every summer—and they’d filled that space with a jungle gym, a monkey bars sort of thing with two slides at the front. Four benches spread out along the perimeter. She would sit there, pretending to read a paperback, and watch the little boys and girls over the tops of the pages.

She wished the go-round was still there. It had made her feel so free, years earlier. If it were still there, she thought, some unsupervised kid might be injured. She imagined the kid crying in the sand and she would step forward and offer to take him home.

A girl might be nice, but she preferred a little boy. She imagined she would get to know a little boy and become a sort of aunt. Or perhaps she’d learn the parents were neglectful, and then, really, wouldn’t she be doing the boy a favour if she took him to live with her? Her fantasies sometimes grew labyrinthine, with the little boy being the child of wanted criminals who had no known relatives.

Her thoughts, she told herself, were not serious. She likened them to the feelings she had when she drove on the highway. Brenda sometimes imagined she might cross into the oncoming traffic; other times she thought she’d stay on her side and just keep driving, driving far away, from her job and her father’s house, and she would never return.

When she worked the lunch counter, she might mix the milkshakes for the teens, the young couples, smiling girls like Janine. Janine got to be Miss Credit that summer, and would try to sign people up for Woolco Credit Cards. When she was Miss Credit she got to wear the pink princess dress and get paid to be friendly, smile and get them interested, and Brenda thought, grimacing, Janine certainly knew how to do that.

No one asked Brenda to be Miss Credit.

And so she sat in the park after work, that Thursday. She told her father she might have to work late because even at her age he asked such things and expected to know where she was. And if he didn’t ask then when she got home he would assume she’d been at Woolco and if he did, she’d say she didn’t have to stay after all but she’d sat in the park and watched the ball game, since he was already taking care