Fall Into Water, Become Someone New
Flash Fiction
StokerCon was amazing, overwhelming, and more fun than I had imagined. Many have recapped it, and I recapped it a bit on Twitter myself, so I thought that instead of doing that here in Noglesque, I would use this opportunity to share a weird flash piece that recently became unavailable in its original publication, The Antihumanist.
As always, I end Noglesque with recent news, and this time there is more news than usual, so make sure to read on after the story—and thank you for reading Noglesque!
Fall Into Water, Become Someone New
Lines after lines of picnic tables are set on the plain, and the men seated at them drink dark beer and swill cups of stew made from meat and fowl and fish and mollusks, tubers, and powdered milk. It's chalky stuff, but there's plenty to wash it down.
They like to sing, the men. A young-seeming one looks into the stew and tries to start, Fish heads, rolling in the stew, he sings, but his voice is high and thin and no one follows.
A man jumps on the table, a handsome one, though honestly they all look much the same with their wavy brown hair and large, wide ears.
He begins to stomp and to sing: Oh, There's no one who knows you the way that we do.
The men begin to hum. The handsome one is standing tall, but the tank stands taller behind him. Apple-size snails scrape the sides of it, their obscene mouths moving behind him, seeming to answer him in song.
Again he calls,
Oh, there's no one who knows you the way that we do.
And the men answer,
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
The man is stomping, dancing. He stops still, points into the distance where two others are taking the prisoner out of the shackles. The prisoner resists, digs his heels into the cracked earth, cries out until more men hurry over and grasp him under the knees.
The man on the table kicks and stomps and sings.
What is it coming? What's swallowing you?
And the men,
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
They're clomping tin cups on the table, stew and beer sloshing out. More of them climb up onto the tables. They dance and stomp and jump to click their heels. Some are so tipsy now that they slip in the stew and slide to the ground and crawl back up with the slime on their fronts to keep dancing and laughing.
The prisoner has been dragged all the way to the stairs now. He's not laughing; he's begging and screaming. He is hideous, with rough gray hair all over his head and his face, tiny ears. Four identical men are pushing him up the stairs, but he's struggling hard, and it's not enough. Others come down from the tables to help.
Calls the handsome one,
What does it feel like, becoming a stew?
And the men laugh. That's a line never heard before. He’s only ribbing, but the prisoner doesn't know that.
The prisoner screams more lustily now; he's fighting them, but there are too many.
And the men, all off-key, off-time,
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
Fall into water, become someone new.
The prisoner balances on the tank's edge. Now he's fallen into the dark water. The men go silent, listening to the splashing, watching the flailing. A snail detaches from the glass and falls slowly to the bottom.
The murky thing at the back of the tank comes awake. It grasps out to the prisoner, who pushes away, presses his face to the glass. His face is gray and formless, bubbles streaming out of it. The men seem to hold their breath as the murky thing gently enfolds the prisoner. There are two pulses, and it's over. The thing falls away from him like a robe tossed aside, like a towel, and the man pushes off from the bottom and comes gasping to the top. His hands hold the tank's edge. His handsome face emerges. The water streams down over glorious new ears.
A cheer rises up from the men. A blanket is brought, a cup of stew, a cup of beer. Soon this new man will sing and stomp with the rest, and he will be the happiest among them.
And as always in Noglesque, recent news:
Beulah took home the Bram Stoker Award® for Superior Achievement in a First Novel!
Beulah was also nominated for a Shirley Jackson Award in the Novel category, the full list here. Incredibly honored to hear that.
My novelette “A Chronicle of the Mole-Year” appeared in the excellent SFF publication Strange Horizons. I fear that with all the convention news, people missed hearing about this, so I hope some of you might read it!
The anthology I co-edited with Willow Dawn Becker, Mother: Tales of Love and Terror, was also nominated, but the winner was Screams from the Dark: 29 Tales of Monsters and the Monstrous. It was a privilege for us to even be nominated alongside Ellen Datlow! Though our anthology did not win, “Fracture,” one of the stories from Mother, did win in the Short Fiction category. Big congratulations to Mercedes M. Yardley!
That’s all for now. Thank you for reading!
Ooh, this was so creepy! (And congrats again on the Stoker win and the Jackson nomination!)
What a great surreal tale! An interesting kind of baptism.