Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #2 Read online

  Fantasy Scroll Magazine

  Speculative Fiction — Issue #2 — June 2014

  Featuring works by Andrew Kozma, Brandon Barrows, Brittany Foster, Ferrett Steinmetz, J.W. Alden,

  J. Kenneth Sargeant, Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Kate O'Connor, Michelle Ann King, Mike Resnick,

  Patrick G. Jameson, Rebecca A. Demarest, Savannah Hendricks, Tony Peak

  This collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Editorial Team

  Iulian Ionescu, Editor-in-Chief

  Frederick Doot, Managing Editor

  Alexandra Zamorski, Editor

  First Readers: M.E. Garber, Day Jamison, Katherine Price, Samantha King, Rachel Aronov

  Cover Art: Sabbas Apterus

  Published by Fantasy Scroll Press, LLC

  New York, NY

  © Copyright 2014. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN #978-0-9916619-1-6

  ISSN #2333-4932

  www.FantasyScrollMag.com

  Fantasy Scroll Magazine Issue #2

  June, 2014

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Fiction

  "Winter Solstice" — Mike Resnick

  "Da Capo al Fine" — Patrick Jameson

  "The Reanimators" — J. Kenneth Sargeant

  "A Concert of Flowers" — Kate O'Connor

  "These Are The Things Our Hands Have Made" — Andrew Kozma

  "A Trade of Tears" — Tony Peak

  "Four Scenes From Wieczniak’s Whisk-U-Away, And One Not" — Ferrett Steinmetz

  "The Unworthy" — J.W. Alden

  "Verdure" — Brandon Barrows

  "Million Hearts in the Valley of Death" — Savannah Hendricks

  "The Fine Art of Fortune-Telling" — Michelle Ann King

  "Marshmallow Walls" — Brittany Foster

  "Grimm's Home for Geriatrics" — Rebecca A. Demarest

  "JC the Ski Bum" — Joyce Reynolds-Ward

  Departments

  Interview With Award Winning Author Mike Resnick

  Interview With Author Tim Pratt

  Interview With The Editors of Strange Horizons

  Artist Spotlight: Sabbas Apterus

  Book Review: Warbreaker (Brandon Sanderson)

  Movie Review: Godzilla (2014) (Gareth Edwards)

  Our Supporters

  Editorial, June 2014

  Iulian Ionescu

  Welcome to Issue #2 of Fantasy Scroll Magazine.

  Issue #1 has come and gone. Since then we've had a lot of good feedback about it. We also got some constructive criticism from our readers, for which we thank you. One particular thing that people asked for is the ability to purchase subscriptions on a discounted basis. We heard you and we did our best to accommodate — we are now working with Magzter and Weightless Books to provide you simple, easy to get subscriptions at a discounted price. Check us out on those sites and you can have all the stories we issue in one year for a fraction of the price.

  Now, let's focus on the issue at hand. While we plan on having 12 stories in each quarterly issue, we just had to bump it up to 14 stories in Issue #2. We have included the two stories we featured as teasers during our Kickstarter campaign — "Da Capo al Fine," by Patrick G. Jameson, and "A Trade of Tears," by Tony Peak. I love both stories and I wanted to give them the benefit of being a part of a full issue and of our e-books.

  Now, let's move to the rest of the issue.

  We are leading with Mike Resnick's "Winter Solstice." There's little we need to say about Mike Resnick, the front runner in awards for short fiction, author of multiple novels, and editor extraordinaire. If you want to know more, read the interview in this issue's non-fiction section. " Winter Solstice" was a Hugo Nominee in 1992 and it tackles a difficult, earthly problem, set in a fantastic setting.

  Following we have "Reanimators" by J. Kenneth Sargeant and, hold on to your horses and watch people roll their eyes — it's a zombie story. Before you judge, read it; it's different, fresh, and highly entertaining.

  Next is a reprint from Kate O'Connor, "Concert of Flowers," followed by an apocalyptic story with an unusual premise by Andrew Kozma, " These Are the Things Our Hands Have Made."

  Then we have Ferret Steinmentz with "Four Scenes From Wieczniak's Whisk-U-Away, And One Not," and J.W. Alden with "The Unworthy."

  We didn't forget about very short pieces in this issue either. We know a lot of people love them. In this category, we feature "Million Hearts in the Valley of Death," by Savannah Hendricks, "Marshmallow Walls," by Brittany Foster, and " Grimm's Home for Geriatrics," by Rebecca Demarest.

  Brandon Barrows entertains us in his war story "Verdure," and Michelle Ann King talks about "The Fine Art of Fortune-Telling," two stories that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

  Last but not least, we are closing the fiction section with "JC The Ski Bum," a fun, humorous piece by Joyce Reynolds-Ward.

  In the non-fiction section we have interviews with Mike Resnick and Tim Pratt, as well as the editorial team of Strange Horizons.

  Sabbas Apterus, the artist who designed this issue's cover, gets his own artist spotlight. We then conclude this issue with a book review for Brandon Sanderson's "Warbreaker" and a movie review for "Godzilla (2014)," by Mark Leeper.

  I hope you enjoy reading this issue as much as we enjoyed creating it. If you like what you read, please purchase the issue or subscriptions, spread the word, and give us reviews.

  Find us on the web:

  Magazine site: http://www.fantasyscrollmag.com

  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FantasyScroll

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/FantasyScroll

  Winter Solstice

  Mike Resnick

  It is not easy to live backwards in time, even when you are Merlin the Magnificent. You would think it would be otherwise, that you would remember all the wonders of the future, but those memories grow dim and fade more quickly than you might suppose. I know that Galahad will win his duel tomorrow, but already the name of his son has left me. In fact, does he even have a son? Will he live long enough to pass on his noble blood? I think perhaps he may, I think that I have held his grandchild upon my knee, but I am not sure. It is all slipping away from me.

  Once I knew all the secrets of the universe. With no more than a thought I could bring Time to a stop, reverse it in its course, twist it around my finger like a piece of string. By force of will alone I could pass among the stars and the galaxies. I could create life out of nothingness, and turn living, breathing worlds into dust.

  Time passed — though not the way it passes for you — and I could no longer do these things. But I could isolate a DNA molecule and perform microsurgery on it, and I could produce the equations that allowed us to traverse the wormholes in space, and I could plot the orbit of an electron.

  Still more time slipped away, and although these gifts deserted me, I could create penicillin out of bread mold, and comprehend both the General and Special Theories of Relativity, and I could fly between the continents.

  But all that has gone, and I remember it as one remembers a dream, on those occasions I can remember it at all. There was — there someday will be, there may come to you — a disease of the aged, in which you lose portions of your mind, pieces of your past, thoughts you've thought and feelings you've felt, until all that's left is the primal id, screaming silently for warmth and nourishment. You see parts of yourself vanishing, you try to pull them back from oblivion, you fail, and all the while you realize what is happenin
g to you until even that perception, that realization, is lost. I will weep for you in another millennia, but now your lost faces fade from my memory, your desperation recedes from the stage of my mind, and soon I will remember nothing of you. Everything is drifting away on the wind, eluding my frantic efforts to clutch it and bring it back to me.

  I am writing this down so that someday someone — possibly even you — will read it and will know that I was a good and moral man, that I did my best under circumstances that a more compassionate God might not have forced upon me, that even as events and places slipped away from me, I did not shirk my duties, I served my people as best I could.

  They come to me, my people, and they say, It hurts, Merlin. They say, Cast a spell and make the pain go away. They say, My baby burns with fever, and my milk has dried up. Do something, Merlin, they say; you are the greatest wizard in the kingdom, the greatest wizard who has ever lived. Surely you can do something.

  Even Arthur seeks me out. The war goes badly, he confides to me; the heathen fight against baptism, the knights have fallen to battling amongst themselves, he distrusts his queen. He reminds me that I am his personal wizard, that I am his most trusted friend, that it was I who taught him the secret of Excalibur (but that was many years ago, and of course I know nothing of it yet). I look at him thoughtfully, and though I know an Arthur who is bent with age and beaten down by the caprices of Fate, an Arthur who has lost his Guinevere and his Round Table and all his dreams of Camelot, I can summon no compassion, no sympathy for this young man who is speaking to me. He is a stranger, as he will be yesterday, as he will be last week.

  An old woman comes to see me in the early afternoon. Her arm is torn and miscolored, the stench of it makes my eyes water, the flies are thick around her.

  I cannot stand the pain any longer, Merlin, she weeps. It is like childbirth, but it does not go away. You are my only hope, Merlin. Cast your mystic spell, charge me what you will, but make the pain cease.

  I look at her arm, where the badger has ripped it with his claws, and I want to turn my head away and retch. I finally force myself to examine it. I have a sense that I need something, I am not sure what, something to attach to the front of my face, or if not my whole face then at least across my nose and mouth, but I cannot recall what it is.

  The arm is swollen to almost twice its normal size, and although the wound is halfway between her elbow and her shoulder, she shrieks in agony when I gently manipulate her fingers. I want to give her something for her pain. Vague visions come to mind, images of something long and slender and needlelike flash briefly before my eyes. There must be something I can do, I think, something I can give her, some miracle that I employed when I was younger and the world was older, but I can no longer remember what it is.

  I must do more than mask her pain, this much I still know, for infection has set in. The smell becomes stronger as I probe and she screams. Gang, I think suddenly: the word for her condition begins with gang — but there is another syllable and I cannot recall it, and even if I could recall it I can no longer cure it.

  But she must have some surcease from her agony, she believes in my powers and she is suffering and my heart goes out to her. I mumble a chant, half-whispering and half-singing. She thinks I am calling up my ethereal servants from the Netherworld, that I am bringing my magic to bear on the problem, and because she needs to believe in something, in anything, because she is suffering such agony, I do not tell her that what I am really saying is God, just this one time, let me remember. Once, years, eons from now, I could have cured her; give me back the knowledge just for an hour, even for a minute. I did not ask to live backward in Time, but it is my curse and I have willingly borne it — but don't let this poor old woman die because of it. Let me cure her, and then You can ransack my mind and take back my memories.

  But God does not answer, and the woman keeps screaming, and finally I gently plaster mud on the wound to keep the flies away. There should be medicine too, it comes in bottles — (bottles? Is that the right word?) — but I don't know how to make it, I don't even remember its color or shape or texture, and I give the woman a root, and mutter a spell over it, and tell her to sleep with it between her breasts and to believe in its healing powers and soon the pain will subside.

  She believes me — there is no earthly reason why she should, but I can see in her eyes that she does — and then she kisses my hands and presses the root to her bosom and wanders off, and somehow, for some reason, she does seem to be in less discomfort, though the stench of the wound lingers long after she has gone.

  Then it is Lancelot's turn. Next week or next month he will slay the Black Knight, but first I must bless his sword. He talks of things we said to each other yesterday, things of which I have no recollection, and I think of things we will say to each other tomorrow.

  I stare into his dark brown eyes, for I alone know his secret, and I wonder if I should tell Arthur. I know they will fight a war over it, but I do not remember if I am the catalyst or if Guenivere herself confesses her infidelities, and I can no longer recall the outcome. I concentrate and try to see the future, but all I see is a city of towering steel and glass structures, and I cannot see Arthur or Lancelot anywhere, and then the image vanishes, and I still do not know whether I am to go to Arthur with my secret knowledge or keep my silence.

  I realize that it has all happened, that the Round Table and the knights and even Arthur will soon be dust no matter what I say or do, but they are living forward in Time and this is of momentous import to them, even though I have watched it all pass and vanish before my eyes.

  Lancelot is speaking now, wondering about the strength of his faith, the purity of his virtue, filled with self-doubt. He is not afraid to die at the hands of the Black Knight, but he is afraid to face his God if the reason for his death lies within himself. I continue to stare at him, this man who daily feels the bond of our friendship growing stronger while I daily find that I know him less and less, and finally I lay a hand on his shoulder and assure him that he will be victorious, that I have had a vision of the Black Knight lying dead upon the field of battle as Lancelot raises his bloody sword in victorious triumph.

  Are you sure, Merlin, he asks doubtfully.

  I tell him that I am sure. I could tell him more, tell him that I have seen the future, that I am losing it as quickly as I am learning the past, but he has problems of his own — and so, I realize, have I, for as I know less and less I must pave the way for that youthful Merlin who will remember nothing at all. It is he that I must consider — I speak of him in the third person, for I know nothing of him, and he can barely remember me, nor will he know Arthur or Lancelot or even the dark and twisted Modred — for as each of my days passes and Time continues to unwind, he will be less able to cope, less able to define even the problems he will face, let alone the solutions. I must give him a weapon with which to defend himself, a weapon that he can use and manipulate no matter how little he remembers of me, and the weapon I choose is superstition. Where once I worked miracles that were codified in books and natural law, now as their secrets vanish one by one, I must replace them with miracles that bedazzle the eye and terrify the heart, for only by securing the past can I guarantee the future, and I have already lived the future. I hope I was a good man, I would like to think I was, but I do not know. I examine my mind, I try to probe for weaknesses as I probe my patients' bodies, searching for sources of infection, but I am only the sum of my experience, and my experience has vanished and I will have to settle for hoping that I disgraced neither myself nor my God.

  After Lancelot leaves I get to my feet and walk around the castle, my mind filled with strange images, fleeting pictures that seem to make sense until I concentrate on them and then I find them incomprehensible. There are enormous armies clashing, armies larger than the entire populace of Arthur's kingdom, and I know that I have seen them, I have actually stood on the battlefield, perhaps I even fought for one side or the other, but I do not recognize the color
s they are wearing, and they use weaponry that seems like magic, true magic, to me.

  I remember huge spacefaring ships, ships that sail the starways with neither canvas nor masts, and for a moment I think that this must surely be a dream, and then I seem to find myself standing at a small window, gazing out at the stars as we rush by them, and I see the rocky surfaces and swirling colors of distant worlds, and then I am back in the castle, and I feel a tremendous sense of poignancy and loss, as if I know that even the dream will never visit me again.

  I decide to concentrate, to force myself to remember, but no images come to me, and I begin to feel like a foolish old man. Why am I doing this, I wonder. It was a dream and not a memory, for everyone knows that the stars are nothing but lights that God uses to illuminate the night sky, and they are tacked onto a cloak of black velvet, and the moment I realize this, I can no longer even recall what the starfaring ships looked like, and I know that soon I will not even remember that I once dreamed of them.

  I continued to wander the castle, touching familiar objects to reassure myself: this pillar was here yesterday, it will be here tomorrow, it is eternal, it will be here forever. I find comfort in the constancy of physical things, things that are not as ephemeral as my memories, things that cannot be ripped from the Earth as easily as my past has been ripped from me. I stop before the church and read a small plaque. It is written in French, and it says that This Church was something by Arthur, King of the Britains. The fourth word makes no sense to me, and this distresses me, because I have always been able to read the plaque before, and then I remember that tomorrow morning I will ask Sir Hector whether the word means built or constructed, and he will reply that it means dedicated, and I will know that for the rest of my life.

  But now I feel a sense of panic, because I am not only losing images and memories, I am actually losing words, and I wonder if the day will come when people will speak to me and I will understand nothing of what they are saying and will merely stare at them in mute confusion, my eyes as large and gentle and devoid of intelligence as a cow's. I know that all I have lost so far is a single French word, but it distresses me, because in the future I will speak French fluently, as well as German, and Italian, and… and I know there is another language, I will be able to speak it and read it and write it, but suddenly it eludes me, and I realize that another ability, another memory, yet another integral piece of myself has fallen into the abyss, never to be retrieved.