The Girl With All the Ghosts

by Alex Yuschik

It’s her second-to-last Friday night at Six Resplendent Suns Funeral Palace and House of the Dead, and Go-Eun is getting terrible reception on her cell.

Part of it’s because everyone’s on the network, but mostly it’s the ghosts, garden variety specters who unfold themselves into nine-story menaces, shadow-thin and barbed with carcinogens. Go-Eun would not have thought they could bring this many cell phone towers down running from fox mechs, but then again, she never thought she’d end up working the night shift at an inner-city funeral palace either.

Episode 70 is a GLITTERSHIP ORIGINAL and part of the Summer 2018 issue!

Support GlitterShip by picking up your copy here: http://www.glittership.com/buy/

Hello! Welcome to GlitterShip episode 70 for April 11, 2019. This is your host, Keffy, and I'm super excited to share this story and poem with you. Today we have a GlitterShip original by Alex Yuschik, "The Girl With All the Ghosts" and a poem, "Chrysalis" by Kendall Evans.

Before we get started, a reminder that there's still a Tiptree Honor Book sale going on for the GlitterShip Year One and Year Two anthologies on gumroad! Just go to gumroad.com/keffy and use the coupon code “tiptree,” that’s t-i-p-t-r-e-e to get the ebooks for $5 each.

Just as an aside, I apologize for all—[Finn barking loudly] Finn. I apologize for the dog noises—[More loud barking]—dog noises—[barking]—in this episode. If I put them outside of my room, they cry. If I put them in the backyard, they bark at the neighbor. And if I let them in my room [dog rustling and grumble barks] they don't understand why I'm not paying attention to them.

Stories and poems by Kendall Evans have appeared in most of the major SF and fantasy magazines, including Asimov’s, Analog, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium Amazing Stories, Dreams & Nightmares, Weird Tales, Alien Worlds, Nebula Award Showcase, and numerous other magazines and anthologies. His novel in verse, The Rings of Ganymede, and his novella Bring me the Head of Philip K. Dick’s Simulacrum are both available from Alban Lake Books.

Chrysalis

by Kendall Evans

The newborn starship
Bathed in sunlight & starlight
Dries its gossamer wings
Preparing for the far reach
To the stars

II.

Festive-colored ribbons
Spiral. You and I
Dance around the Maypole
At dusk
Circling
Eying one another
While we discuss
Darwinian logic

III.

Recombinant forms emerge
From interstellar dust
Mutate & shift & merge
Ruled by the coldest equations
And analogs of lust

IV.

I have watched
Exotic robots hatch
From ovoid metal shells
& Peck at nuts & bolts
Upon my parquet floors

And our story is "The Girl With All the Ghosts" by Alex Yuschik, read by Faylita Hicks.

Alex Yuschik is a PhD candidate in Mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh. Besides math and writing, Alex enjoys traveling, hanging out in as many cat cafes as humanly possible, and waking up before dawn to lift heavy things and then put them back down. Their short fiction has also appeared in Escape Pod and Luna Station Quarterly.

Faylita Hicks (pronouns: she/her/they) is a black queer writer. She was a finalist in the 2018 PEN American Writing for Justice Fellowship and the 2018 Cosmonauts Avenue Annual Poetry Prize. Her debut book, HoodWitch, is forthcoming October 2019 with Acre Books.

Her poetry and essays have appeared in or are forthcoming in Slate, Huffington Post, POETRY magazine, Kweli Journal, The Rumpus, The Cincinnati Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Lunch Ticket, Matador Review, Glass Poetry, Pidgeonholes, Yes Poetry, American Poetry Journal, Ink and Nebula and others.

She received her MFA in creative writing from Sierra Nevada College’s low-residency program and lives in San Marcos, Texas. She is at work on a memoir.

The Girl With All the Ghosts

by Alex Yuschik

It’s her second-to-last Friday night at Six Resplendent Suns Funeral Palace and House of the Dead, and Go-Eun is getting terrible reception on her cell.

“Load.” Go-Eun taps her phone screen again.

Honestly, most of it’s not so bad, the shelves of urns and silent hallways, the familiar and calculated snake of her path through the dim ossuary. The thirtieth through fiftieth floors make up her soon-to-be-former territory, and the clamor of light pollution keeps anywhere from getting too dark. Neapolitan swipes of pink-gold-cyan bleed through from neon nightclub signs and adorn the shelves in glimmer and flash, and aisle lights frame every niche in respectful and seemingly infinite ellipses, dot-dot-dots sealing in the city’s sleeping dead.

Before one gets into the mechanics of proof, it is necessary to state a few definitions that will be useful later.

The building is a magpie. Listen, and it carries noises up its sides, slipping them into windows like jewels: revelers from a nearby bar stumble loudly through the ladder of numbers in Baskin Robbins 31, a TGX-Mauve/F stretches its tiger mech joints in a hiss of pneumatics, and a couple breaks up or makes love or both too near an open window somewhere in the apartment complex next door.

The building is covetous. Go-Eun never needed the Six Resplendent Suns employee pamphlet to know this, but it’s listed there as well.

She taps her phone again. There’s an email from her boss, asking her to reconsider quitting. Go-Eun deletes it. That’s what breaking up is, another number that won’t reply, one more open question that their system of deduction isn’t complete enough to answer.

It’s exactly why Jae-Yeon won’t text her back either.

Finally, the page she’s been trying to refresh comes up.

YES SO AWESOME I can’t believe they kissed!!! YOU ARE A LITERAL GODDESS UPDATE SOON

“There was no edge without an end, and if this was their end, he thought, then so be it.” holy shit be still my brigadier-loving heart

THIS FIC I AM RUINED best Brigie/SJ ever

One thousand reviews. She high-fives an urn. For an eighty thousand word slash masterpiece she’s written in the small pauses of her life, not too shabby.

And it’s almost enough to make her forget about the ghosts, the hallways that stretch on and on and on, the now-empty shelves where relatives used to leave flowers and other small offerings, until Six Resplendent Suns and every other Numerical Family in charge of an ossuary mandated mourning training. Most of the time it’s beautiful and silent, a second, stiller universe to mirror the riot outside.

Sometimes it’s not.

Go-Eun bows and enters, bows and leaves, thumb-typing a drabble about Seo-Joon waking up as she heads to FF, the twice-cursed floor, those two unspoken hungers grating against each other like teeth in gears that don’t line up. It’s a pity her new job at the construction company probably won’t let her be on her phone as much. She’s almost finished with the scene when she pauses.

In the middle of the rows, a pale shape, unsteady, picks itself up from the wreckage of an urn.

Most ghosts understand they’re dead. The body gives its two weeks’ notice to the soul and the connection is gradually severed, a proof ending in a neat white box, QED, or even that infuriating the rest is left as an exercise for the reader. Only the violent ends do this: the wide gaze of the war dead, the slow unraveling of conditional and consequent, and then a soft and tremulous oh.

It’s a young man, maybe Go-Eun’s age, maybe a little more. He’s wearing pilot’s fatigues, but before her mind can race to pin a mech animal to him, he spots her.

The first time she saw a ghost that was not in a training video, pamphlet, or out of control and tall as a building being subdued by a mech, it was in the F2nd bathroom and something kept playing with her hair. A girl dressed in white rose behind her in the mirror like a dark star, cracked lips daring Go-Eun to look at me.

The boy’...