Narrator / Storyteller (29:27)
The carrier cage lands with a thud on the ground. A hatch is opened and a wrinkled, gnarled hand pokes its way through to her. Protect the Virgin Queen. A cackling voice emits. The hand gently yanks Vonda out into the sun soaked world. She is the one who should be protecting us. She is the one who has spent her life in the king's glass house, fed the knowledge of the ancestors, she who has fought dragons in pits of living entrails since the age of two. Let her pass her sword through the bosom of our enemy with the might of Isis herself. The woman is frail, a small thing, hunchbacked. Her gown's heavier than she is. The old crone of a woman ambles over towards a small thatched quiver and pulls from it a small sword. She hands it to Vonda, staring deep into her eyes, past the eyes of the virgin princess that Krone perhaps once knew, and into the eyes of Vonda, the co op girl herself. It's time now, child, the old woman says calmer, knowingly, one bony hand atop Vonda's with her other hand holding the unsheathed bladed end of a sword. Vonda takes the sword. Reluctantly. She looks from it and then to the soldiers, to the woman, then finally to the gathering of large grotesque white men carrying horn shaped muskets across the horizon, edging violently ever closer, the hooves of horses and giraffes and elephants sounding through the veldt, getting louder until they're like jackhammers on the West Philly street at 6:30 in the morning. The white men's muskets crack the still quiet air and beside Vonda the men in war paint and loin cloth cloth fall. They are black drops of rain hitting the earth in death. Vonda faces the old crone who has gone into a smile even though her soldiers fall to an unknown magic with a sulfur discharge. Now, the crone whispers. Now she steps aside to let Vonda face the war as it swirls around them, a pale, ashen, snarling bush faced man on a harnessed lion right in her face, the beast sleeping, tongue licking her eyebrow. Strike now. Vonda the virgin princess swings her blade at the lion, catching it in the belly and with the same twist of the box cutter, one being in black falls down to the ground in a heap, blackness spewing out of him, once as thick blood like liquid, then as evaporating inky shadow stuff. A deafening scream emits from it as if it has never experienced harm before. Around the corner a stream of men on motorbikes blast up the street. A gaggle of frat boys drunkenly looking for a pub stumble up the sidewalks. An army of gay boys laughing at women loaded down with grocery bags and a few children shoulder past them, the perfect cover to get away. Vonda, on instinct, grabs the now a fine glass ghost woman eschewing the streets, cutting through backyards and over fences. Vonda races forward, eyes ahead, her one free hand on her box cutter now searching for her keys. We're going out. The vigil's tonight. But it's almost midnight. Oh my God, it's an all night vigil. Robot Squad is going to. They're doing a puppet show. Isn't? Wait, isn't this a peaceful vigil put on by Black Lives for Justice? What is that? An art project? Vonda forgot that she's holding a glass woman in her hands. Yeah, she says, looking past her nosy roommates to the stairs. An art project, sure. She beats a path up the stairs, leaving unspoken chides lodged in the agape mouths of her judgmental roommates and into the hallway, nearly knocking her room door off the hinges. She closes it behind her, tosses her bag on the floor and lays the ghost woman on her mattress. Vonda can see her now. The ghost woman's hips are wide, her chest ample, her lips lush. She seems quite large, almost 7ft tall. The cracks in her shell slowly close, sealed with dim thinning radiance. Vonda sits in the corner, murmuring to herself. Her roommates, they of the chore wheel, of the dumpstered vegan shrimp, of the combination organic cotton knitting circle China Mieville Book Club will never understand any of this. Hell, she thinks to herself, I don't even understand this. Yeah, what the fuck is any of this? She edges closer to the still frozen woman of ghost and glass. What are you? Vonda whispers to her. She gets a buzz on her cell phone. It snaps her out of her trance. Vonda scrambles for her phone. Digging through her bag, she finds it and on the screen is a glowing face. It's her. I am a ghoster. The phone speaks with pixelated digital lips, the crackle and buzz from before gone and replaced with a voice, warm and weighty. I know. I'm sorry. This is very startling. I had to warn you. They are here to erase you, to take your stories, to fold them into the secret tombs of the past and then toss them into the abyss of forgotten knowledge deep within the wells of nothingness of the no universe crap. Vonda snaps. She's suddenly angry at herself for not paying attention to her little sister's relentless meandering soliloquies about Star wars and hobbits and warp drives and other nonsense. It would help, she opines, if I had some kind of frame of reference for this shit. I what do you want from me? I'm just a girl who works at a co op. You are no mere girl, Vonda Alicia Ray of Western Philadelphia. You are the Steam Child, the Slave Liberator, the Two Spirit Warrior Woman, the the Planeswalker, the Death Dealer, the comedic memetic virgin princess who rides the dragon beasts from the East. Right, the virgin princess right back there behind the co op. It was like I was transported to another place, like I traded bodies with someone. And yes, you are all of those things, my child. And I am a Ghoster, the physical manifestation of the ephemera of the souls of the of lost guardians of ancestors, sent here to protect you by a powerful sorcerer, to guide you on a new journey. My new journey. Yes. You will save memory. You will save all of us. You will save the universe. A knock at the door. Hey, you in there? It's Chef. What's she doing here? One minute. Are you naaaked? Chef sings. Come on, I'm just playing. I came back here to check on you. You alright? I'm fine, vonda says, scrambling for a blanket or something to throw on the fragile lump of the ghoster. I'm fine. Just give me a minute. Her phone turns brighter and brighter until a burst of light plunges from it. Sparks fly out of it and light loops towards the Ghoster, coating it with living energy. Energy. God damn it. This thing is not subtle at all. Vonda yells as the Ghoster rises towards the ceiling. It is a swirl of cosmic brightness, of neon on fire. Vonda. What the fuck? I'm coming in. Chef barges in just as the Ghoster explodes. Its eruption is high, piercing the ceiling, blasting through the roof and into the night sky. Whoa. That's that thing from before. Not exactly, Vonda retorts, bracing against the shaking walls. It just fucking blew up. Yeah, Vonda affirms over the din. She. She does that. A swirl of energy beans pulse from the Ghoster's rising body as the roof shards crumble and burn in the afterglow. The Ghoster is sucked up into the vortex along with shoes and coats and pencils and records. Chef and Vonda cling to each other, tears streaming from their faces, and then vmp. The light disappears, the debris falls to the ground and they are surrounded by darkness. They sit on the bed, huddled together, whimpering, quivering. Chef pulls away and looks at Vonda, a loving, calming look, the kind of look that acknowledges that the life of the person in front of her will never be the same. Vonda looks at her co worker for a second and in Chef's deep, cigarette soaked visage she sees beauty. She sees the commonality between them dissipating by the second. And then, after a brief pang of dread remembering that she left a few containers of oat milk in an unopened box but by the dairy fridge, an act Vondo is sure she'd be written up for. Her eyes narrow in focus. As to all of this, she sees an ending. And that's the ending of the story. The story has ended. Welcome back, gentle listener. This is a rich story is bursting at the seams with characterization and scenery and metaphor. Hazel, who helps behind the scenes, says about this quote, I also have worked at multiple bougie food co ops, so Vonda struggles with the hypocrisy and just plain silliness of the food she's selling. And it's implicitly packaged politics really grabbed me. This was a time in my life that I was also being radicalized by grief. And I remember so firmly feeling that everyone who went out of their way to buy cage free eggs needed to also be a prison abolitionist. Still do. The Alice in Wonderland Stranger in a Strange Place format is a staple of short fiction, but the way that Alex uses this structure to describe, at least as I'm interpreting it, the feeling of being pulled into the movement, of being called into a struggle between the forces of justice and injustice. One so bigger than yourself and so far beyond your own control. Yeah, it's just fucking compelling. And Vonda's frustrations with her roommates, because they don't. And on some levels can't understand that even if they do have books about the situation or whatever. Because they're in it for the clout or the social aspect or for whatever. Yeah, Alex really just sticks the landing on that one. That's what Hazel has to say. What do I have to say about it? I liked the story even more on further readings. Right. Like, I liked it on the first reading. But on the first reading I kind of let it wash over me. And on the second reading I could kind of feel more what was happening. And yeah, it's just like. It's really well done. I really like this story. I like this idea of being called into this larger than life thing. Being called into, oh, I suddenly am responsible for memory against forgetting. Despite the fact that, oh, I'm just some girl from Philadelphia. But I like stories that infuse our normal, everyday world with the weight that they actually carry. The weight that we are all part of history. That we are part of this grand story that continues. And we're all on different sides of these struggles. And we're all just doing this thing. This idea of being like you of West Philadelphia, as if that's as amazing of a place to be from as some place in North Africa or some far off and distant place. Because it is right. Wherever we are from is something. And we can have this weight in our lives if we acknowledge it. I don't know. That's what it made me think about. It actually made me think about a bunch of other stuff too. But that's what I'm going to go with. Alex, the story's author, has this to say. The story Girls who Look Through Glass first appeared in a long out of print split scene I made with Kame Ayoia, also known as More Mother from Black Quantum Futurism, Irreversible Entanglements. We had been in a collective together called metropolarity. Metropolarity.net they used SCI fi and Afrofuturism as a form of activism, knowledge seeking, distributing and art practice. And we passed these out at events like More Mothers, Rockers and the readings I put together, like Laser Life and Chrome City. When it came time to do Arc Dust, which itself started as a zine, I knew this story would be one I wanted to refine a bit and include in the collection. It's definitely one of the weirder stories amongst a whole lot of weird lol. I had been doing a lot of spoken word when I wrote these stories 1015 years ago and I made a hard pivot to not only writing sci fi and fantasy, but reading it in public. It's been an interesting journey. This particular story is mostly me wanting to write about a woman who experiences strange future, past, ancestral shifts, some time displacement and just general atmospheric stuff. Like I wanted it to be about the fun SFF stuff, but I couldn't help but also talk about microaggressions and colonialism. It's difficult for me to shed politics, whatever that is, post Obama and just write pew pew zap zap. Especially because I write about marginalized people because politics are our lived experiences, the way we move through the world, the way we exist. Apparently all that is political. Also, this story was written in like 2012, but it shares some similarities to an episode of Lovecraft Country. I've never read the book book where there are similar elements. A black woman visited by a metallic, ethereal woman who enables her to shift into ancestral time in Africa. I love that episode, but the more I thought about it I was like, wow, that really reminds me of my story Girls. Maybe I'm doing something right. Ha. And then Alex Smith's Bio Alex Smith, AKA Alexo Tarek, is a writer, artist, curator and quote unquote musician, noisemaker living in the cosmically kinetic city of Philadelphia. His work reflects that dichotomy stark beautiful, wrought with Afrotopian tension, avant garde fashion and assemblage and dynamic visual presentation. He is a founding member of the Philadelphia based sci fi arts collective Metropolarity Essential Personnel in Philadelphia's early Afrofuturist community. Smith won the 2020 Pew Fellowship of the Arts, presenting works such as his short story collection Arc Dust, Rosarian Publishing, his experimental art punk bands Rainbow Crime, Solarized Spectral Forces, Glitch Proverbs, the cyberpunk superhero indie comic series Black Vans, among others. His work appears in anthologies such as Stories for Chip, A Tribute to Samuel R. Delaney from Rosarium Black, Quantum Futurism Volume 2, Black Punk now from Soft Skull and the Black Fantastic Library of America. He invites you to join him in the next chromatic exploration of the unknown, his art a visual portal to that liminal space. Find alex@patreon.com theyarebirds or theyarebirds on Instagram. All right, see you all next week.
