Glitter & Mayhem Read online

  This anthology is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in these stories are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  GLITTER & MAYHEM

  ISBN: 978–1–937009–19–9

  Cover Art © 2013 by Galen Dara

  Title Design © 2013 by Galen Dara

  Digital Formatting by Stephanie Jacob

  Introduction © 2013, Amber Benson; “Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster,” © 2013, Christopher Barzak; “Apex Jump,” © 2013, David J. Schwartz; “With Her Hundred Miles to Hell,” © 2013, Kat Howard; “Star Dancer,” © 2013, Jennifer Pelland; “Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane,” © 2013, Cat Rambo; “Sooner Than Gold,” © 2013, Cory Skerry; “Subterraneans,” © 2013, William Shunn & Laura Chavoen; “The Minotaur Girls,” © 2013, Tansy Rayner Roberts; “Unable to Reach You,” © 2013, Alan DeNiro; “Such & Such Said to So & So,” © 2013, Maria Dahvana Headley; “Revels in the Land of Ice,” © 2013, Tim Pratt; “Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl,” © 2013, Sofia Samatar; “Blood and Sequins,” © 2013, Diana Rowland; “Two–Minute Warning,” © 2013, Vylar Kaftan; “Inside Hides the Monster,” © 2013, Damien Walters Grintalis; “Bad Dream Girl,” © 2013, Seanan McGuire; “A Hollow Play,” © 2013, Amal El–Mohtar; “Just Another Future Song,” © 2013, Daryl Gregory; “The Electric Spanking of the War Babies,” © 2013, Maurice Broaddus & Kyle S. Johnson; “All That Fairy Tale Crap,” © 2013, Rachel Swirsky.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce the book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Published by Apex Publications, LLC

  PO Box 24323

  Lexington, KY 40524

  www.apexbookcompany.com

  This anthology is dedicated to Arachne Jericho and all of our glittery Kickstarter backers.

  This party is for you.

  — Table of Contents —

  Introduction

  Amber Benson

  Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster

  Christopher Barzak

  Apex Jump

  David J. Schwartz

  With Her Hundred Miles to Hell

  Kat Howard

  Star Dancer

  Jennifer Pelland

  Of Selkies, Disco Balls, and Anna Plane

  Cat Rambo

  Sooner Than Gold

  Cory Skerry

  Subterraneans

  William Shunn & Laura Chavoen

  The Minotaur Girls

  Tansy Rayner Roberts

  Unable to Reach You

  Alan DeNiro

  Such & Such Said to So & So

  Maria Dahvana Headley

  Revels in the Land of Ice

  Tim Pratt

  Bess, the Landlord’s Daughter, Goes for Drinks with the Green Girl

  Sofia Samatar

  Blood and Sequins

  Diana Rowland

  Two–Minute Warning

  Vylar Kaftan

  Inside Hides the Monster

  Damien Walters Grintalis

  Bad Dream Girl

  Seanan McGuire

  A Hollow Play

  Amal El–Mohtar

  Just Another Future Song

  Daryl Gregory

  The Electric Spanking of the War Babies

  Maurice Broaddus & Kyle S. Johnson

  All That Fairy Tale Crap

  Rachel Swirsky

  Glittery Authors & Artist

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Amber Benson

  “There will be Glitter/There will be Mayhem/We will drink your solid gold milkshake/Drink it down to the very last drop.”

  The Venue: Club Apex

  The Theme: Glitter and Mayhem

  In Attendance: Anyone Who Is Anyone

  RSVP: Be There or Be Square

  To the uninitiated, it may look as though you’re holding a book in your hands, but don’t be fooled by the pretty cover: there is a party in these here pages. What you’ve got, my friends, is an invitation to the bash of the epoch — an event that will go down in the annals of time as an occasion you don’t want to say you had the opportunity to go to and then somehow missed.

  If you decide to redeem your place at the bar, be prepared to have your body and soul sucked into the roller derby–disco ball–sex, drugs and glam rock ’n’ roll–alien–debauched–glitter–party monster–EXTRAVAGANZA of the ages. It’ll be a sensuous assemblage of lipstick–smeared kisses, cleavage, glittering costumes and sexy boys and girls all looking to hook it up as they twirl their glow sticks and roller skate past you.

  I know you might have some misgivings as you step inside: there is no “plus one” on this non–transferable ticket. So if you’re here, you’re going it alone — but then so is everyone else you’ll meet. Just ignore the red velvet rope and the bouncer from Hell. You’re one of the golden. You’re on the list.

  Come on in and have a drink. Lose yourself in the crowd. Let the music steal any thought as you rock your body to the stylin’ beat of an androgynous DJ in a shiny, silver lamé jumpsuit. Go mirror ball blind. Have another drink — once you’ve downed the first one, the rest come at a more modest price — and whatever you do, don’t keep your hands to yourself.

  Yes, it’s all so much easier if you go ahead and give in to the glitter and mayhem. One hell of a trip past the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, but more than worth it.

  With that said, you just have to remember one thing: you’ve entered this party at your own risk. Having your mind blown can lead to other, more permanent kinds of brain damage. Oh, and a rather robust and insatiable appetite for hardcore speculative fantasy.

  Not that that’s such a bad thing.

  We hope you have a bloody good time tonight… because even when you leave this party, well, the party never leaves you.

  — Amber Benson, April 2013

  Sister Twelve: Confessions of a Party Monster

  Christopher Barzak

  IT DIDN’T TAKE WITH ME, THE world and its rules, the things it expected of me. In the end, that’s the only reason why I find myself still here after all these countless years, and still I refuse to leave the scene. If you drop a beat, I’m on it. If I hear the slightest scratch, I’m ready to spin. If my shoes give out, if I split a sole or break a heel, it doesn’t matter. I kick them off and keep on dancing like the music and my body can’t be put on pause.

  We have a date — the music, the dance floor, and I. We’re going to move all night long if we have anything to say about it.

  If I gave a damn about the world, though, and what it wanted from me, I’d be sitting in a high–backed chair right now with my needlepoint in my lap, collecting a fine layer of dust as I concentrated on a difficult stitch. My father liked seeing us girls do things like that. “Nothing more beautiful than to see a young lady with her head bent over a hoop,” he used to say as he passed through our room, where my sisters would be sitting in that exact position. Then he’d notice me heaped in the corner chair, where I’d pulled my legs under me and sat hunched over the yellowed pages of a novel, and he would tsk. Seriously, he would tsk. Once, he told me, “You are quite fortunate to have been born last of all my daughters.”

  “Why is that?” I asked, placing my finger upon the sentence I was just then reading before looking up into his disappointed face, eyes blinking beneath their furry salt and pepper mantle. The gold crown on his head was tilted a little to the side, as if a beggar or a drunkard had just accosted him.

  “Because the youngest child always gets away with more than his or her older siblings,” was his answer. Then he turned to walk away.

  “Is that luck, Father,” I a
sked, “or is it just the intelligent observation of others going through life experiences before you have, and then analyzing the results of their conclusions, that leads to smarter decision–making?”

  “Tsk–tsk,” said my father. Looking over his shoulder, he shook his head as if I were a bitter pill his advisor forced him to swallow each night for the sake of his health.

  §

  The youngest child is also supposedly the one everyone likes (except the older siblings, of course, because they tend to feel jealous of all the attention diverted to the baby). But whether any of that is true or just psychoanalytical bullshit doesn’t really matter. What matters is that, somehow, that psychoanalytical bullshit sometimes maps on to your life in a real way; and at those times, if you’re a person who’s able to be honest with yourself, you have to sit around and think, Well, okay, maybe I should pay attention to what this is telling me?

  In my case, yes, almost everyone liked me, except for my sisters, who I always felt either hated or thought little of me, because of both my prolonged innocence and also because of the way I often stupidly pointed out the flaws in their thinking without realizing how embarrassing that might be for them. Really, my pointing out their flaws was a symptom of my innocence — back then I thought it was a good thing to be honest with people, no matter what — but that explanation doesn’t excuse the hurt I must have caused them. In the end, what matters is that I too often told the truth as if it were as ordinary as the air we breathe, and because of that I could sometimes make my sisters feel like the lowest creatures in existence.

  “I told you so.” Those were the words I often found myself using with my sisters in the year after my brother–in–law, the soldier who I’m sure has gone on by now to be king in place of my father, discovered our secret. “I told you so, I told you so,” I would tell my sisters in the eleven months that passed during the year after that man brought a halt to our dancing.

  I said this so often because I so often realized things that my sisters never noticed, and they always made me feel like a stupid little girl when I said things like, “Shouldn’t we wait to leave until we hear the guard snoring?” or “Shouldn’t we maybe tie him to his chair anyway, just in case he’s fooling? That way, he can’t follow us down into the clubs.”

  They laughed at me, my sisters. They said, “Oh child, you are always so afraid.” But I wasn’t afraid. I was never afraid. I was just observant and cautious. I knew that soldier had something on us, I just didn’t know what.

  Turns out, he had a cloak that could make him invisible, and he had some wisdom from an old crone he’d met in the woods on his way to our castle to solve the secret of our nightly disappearances for our father. The wisdom the old crone gave him was this: Don’t drink the cup of wine they’ll give you at the end of the night, but make them think that you did.

  It was good advice, really. Old crones know a lot. They’ve seen shit go down that most young people only hear about in songs and movies. The wine that we gave to our nightly guards, to our would–be saviors and suitors, was always drugged. It put them dead asleep within minutes of sipping it twice, and while they were nodding off in the corner, their minds growing black as a bog, my sisters and I — well, the twelve of us would go out dancing.

  §

  It started when I was sixteen, us all going out in the middle of the night like that, coming home in the wee hours of the morning with our shoes completely in tatters. It started after my oldest sister found the secret passage beneath her bed, while she was looking for an earring she’d dropped as she undressed from a particularly dreadful ball that evening. My father was trying to marry her off that year; at twenty–eight Sister One was far beyond the age by which most princesses would have already gotten hitched. Sister One didn’t really want to get married, though. She had nightmares about diamond rings and multi–tiered white cakes, and some mornings she’d wake up screaming. But she endured my father’s matchmaking because she had to. She was a dutiful princess, Sister One, even if she hated her duties.

  So we were all back in our room, exhausted after a night of “Pleased to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” and glad–handing every major royal who–de–who and every minor foreign ambassador my father introduced us to, when my oldest sister dropped her left earring and knelt down to look beneath her bed for it, only to alarm the rest of us when she said, “What’s this?” as if she’d found something either terrible or else terribly exciting. All of us stopped fiddling with our laces to look over our shoulders at her where she was crouched on the floor, her head stuffed under the bed. “What’s this then?” Sister One said again, and she scurried under the bed like a common rodent.

  She came out a few seconds later, gasping for air like she’d just come up from swimming underwater, and begged us to help her push the bed aside. None of us knew what was going on, but we were sisters — we did things for each other when one of us asked a favor — so we lined up on one side of the bed, all twelve of us, and gave it a good shove.

  All of us gasped, too, when we stepped back and saw the glowing silver outline of a door etched into the flagstones before us. “Look here,” Sister One said, and she put her hand upon the center of the outlined door. The floor began to shift, stone grinding on stone, and seemed to lower a little. Sister One looked up with a wicked grin cutting across her face; then she looked down and put her hand on the center of the stone door again, making it grind ever so dully as it moved lower and lower, until we could see nothing but a few of the top steps of a staircase leading down into thick darkness.

  “What is it?” one of my other sisters asked.

  And Sister One said, “A secret passage, clearly!”

  Just then, a soft sound flowed out of the passageway, like dandelion seeds blown upon a current.

  “What’s that?” one of my other sisters asked.

  And Sister One said, “That? That, my sisters, is music.”

  §

  I could tell you about what happened next: the stairwell that led us down to a forest of silver, and a forest of diamonds, and a forest of gold. I could tell you about the strange things we saw there, and how we stumbled in a wondrous unison, somehow balletic, all the way through those well–groomed woods until we reached a shore where twelve boats knocked against a dock that stretched out onto the water. But all of that is just precursor to what drew us further into that underground world where, in the distance, a castle stood upon an island, illuminated as if by a self–producing glow. Music poured from its high–arched windows like it was the very water that flowed up to the shore to crash upon the sand before us.

  It was only then, when the water–music crashed to foam in front of us, that we noticed the young men — our underground princes — waiting in the boats to ferry us across. They were all decked out in tight pants of dark crimson leather and white shirts that opened all the way down to their navels, with gray cloaks thrown over their shoulders like smoke. Their hair, ashen–colored from this distance, curled around their ears. I couldn’t help myself. The first thing I did when I saw them was to trace the bare skin at their necks down to their waistlines with my eyes and to swallow hard. The music swarmed around their bodies like sparks, bursting, snapping, and my feet began to twitch involuntarily, my hips to sway like the boats on the water.

  Each of us climbed aboard one of the twelve boats and sat at the opposite end from our underground princes, our hands folded in our laps like we were going to still make an attempt at a sense of decorum; and though it probably only took a few minutes to cross that narrow strip of water to the island, I thought I might rend my dress from my body in anticipation of our arrival. I was like a vampire, those creatures of myth I’d read about in the novels I’d read in my father’s library. I smelled blood on the air. It was really only the musical notes coming from inside the castle that made me so unnaturally thirsty, but I wanted to lap those notes up like a vampire laps up blood all the same.

  Our spooky princes took our hands and walked us
away from our boats up the wide stone steps to the front gate of the castle, where the music grew louder and our steps grew lighter, it seemed, the further in we went, as if we had begun to walk on air. We passed through sconce–lit passageways, their fires flickering gold–leaf upon our faces, until suddenly one of the princes stopped at a door that thrummed so hard, it seemed ready to fly off its hinges, and when he opened it, out burst an ear–shattering sound like I had never heard before.

  Light — pieces of light — broke into my eyes. On my skin, too, a moment later, light scurried over my flesh as I held my hands out in front of me. When I looked up again, I saw a room full of people, moving to the beat of the music. People of so many different colors wearing so many different strange styles of clothing: silver skirts that hugged their bottoms, earrings that brushed against their collar bones, black lace bras (!), sequined shirts (on men!). They were all dancing, and their movement was as strange as their fashion. They were all either too far apart, throwing their arms into the air or kicking their heels back, or else they were far too close, where no space could be seen between their bodies. Some even pushed their backsides against the waists of their dance partners and, seeing this in particular, I couldn’t help but raise my light–speckled hand to my mouth, which hung open like an untended gate.

  I laugh at this memory now. I laugh at how innocent I truly was. How little I knew of what the world had to offer beyond the confines of my father’s kingdom within its place in time and space. What a gas! What a lark! What a blast! What an epic evening! Even that — all of those bits of language — would have been limited to, “Quite enjoyable indeed!” prior to my underground dancehall experiences.

  Our spooky princes took our hands and drew us out into the crowded dance floor, where all of us began to move in unfamiliar ways. Our hips out, our hands in the air, our hands gripping those warm bare waistlines of our princes even. The song the DJ was playing kept repeating the phrase, Get down like you’re underground, and I backed up against my prince, like I’d seen a woman with pink frizzy hair and a face made up like a geisha do with another woman, who was dressed in a dark pinstriped suit and a bowler hat. My prince put his hands on my waist as I ground against him, slid his fingers down my thighs, and for the rest of the night we did not speak a word. We just danced. As one song slid into another, we just sighed.