AOIFE'S KISS

December 2009

 

Aoife is pronounced "EE-fah," and is Irish for "Eve."  Aoife's Kiss is a magazine of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.  We try to keep it at about 1/3 each genre.  Material includes short stories, flash fiction, poetry, illustrations, and occasionally an article or review. 

 

Aoife's Kiss is a good, solid, readable magazine.  We've sold thousands of copies.  Over 90% of our subscribers renew their subscriptions.  We must be doing something right--maybe you should come find out what it is.  We've left you a couple of items below from the magazine.  Go ahead:  scroll down and read them.  Then, hopefully, you'll be ready to click on the cover icon and treat yourself right with a subscription to Aoife's Kiss.

 

We'd also like to announce that one of our writers, Rachel Olivier, who has appeared several times in our publications, has a new ebook out, a novella titled The Holly and the Ivan.  It's available from Drollerie Press at www.drolleriepress.com.  It's a paranormal romance, very readable, and recommended.  You can find the cover in between the Aoife material below...but to order a copy you'll have to go to www.drolleriepress.com.  But finish Aoife's Kiss first.

 

And try the eggnog.

 

Tyree Campbell

Managing Editor

Sam's Dot Publishing

 

 

 

Sireni

by Maggie Desmond-O'Brien

 

 

haunting cries across the water

echoes from another world;

they are not like us

they do not see the harm they cause

the sea of bitter tears.

their name is a whisper that becomes a song:

amidst the flotsam

remnants of their unwitting prey

so sweetly lured to their doom.

amidst the jetsam

they pout when their new toys don’t want to play.

infants from a place beyond:

siren.

 

 

Full Circle

By Kate MacLeod

 

 

April wondered if the puppy wasn’t more trouble than he was worth.  It was a typical Mom gift, unasked for and exceedingly high maintenance.  She could have at least found one that was already housebroken.  This one had clearly been born somewhere with gravity.  He kept trying to squat in the corner, which only sent him flying across the cockpit, little golden globules streaming behind him.  Or worse.

“Come on, Boo.  I don’t want to stand here all day,” she grumbled.   At last the puppy’s wigglings quieted momentarily.  She could feel the muscles of his abdomen working under her hands.  Then the wiggling resumed and she switched off the suction and lifted him away from the vacuum hatch that served as his toilet.  High maintenance. But if she didn’t help him go now, he was sure to go on Tony and Rosa’s shuttle.  And Rosa was just as sure to have a fit. 

She was nervous enough about the trip.  Tony had asked her to stop by just to say hello, but she wasn’t fooled.  She knew he was going to ask her yet again to do a job for him.  She had done so many jobs for him while still living with her mother she couldn’t seem to make him see she wasn’t interested in that line of work anymore.

It had always been a sham.  How could he have such confidence in her abilities as an exorcist?  She had told him flat out she didn’t believe in ghosts.  Yet he kept calling.  And she owed him so much, she kept answering his calls. 

Tony’s home was an ever-changing amalgam of borderline spaceworthy vessels.  As members of his extended family came and went so did some of the ships, but there were never less than ten tethered together.  April saw a new acquisition, a Class III shuttle, the kind with the very latest in radiation shielding.  Very nice.  There didn’t seem to be any sign of damage, none of the hasty patches that the other ships had.  She wondered how it had come to be abandoned.

After donning her spacesuit and stuffing Boo into his pressurized carrier, she hooked her ship’s tether to her belt and jumped over to Tony’s ship.  Once, when she was a very young girl, before her mother’s life had fallen apart, she had been on a ship that had docked with another ship, and she had crossed from one to the other through the airlocks, just like floating down a hallway.  But that was for rich folks.  Poor folks just hopped through the blackness of space.

She landed with practiced ease on the hull of the largest ship, locking the end of her tether onto one of countless rungs.  She made her way to the cargo bay, towing Boo’s carrier behind her.  Someone must have been watching her approach, because as soon as she was inside the cargo bay the doors closed.  Through her helmet she could faintly hear the hiss of air filling the space.  She was just pulling off her helmet when Rosa sailed in to greet her.

“April!  It’s so good to see you!”

“Likewise.”

“Are you hungry?”  Always the first words out of Rosa’s mouth.

“I could eat.”

“You could eat!  Girl, you’re barely more than skin and bone.  When was the last time you had something to eat that wasn’t synthetic protein?”

“That would be the last time I was here,” April admitted.  She couldn’t help grinning.  Tony and Rosa’s shuttle was nicer than most - the original hull to slapdash patch-job ratio was very high – but putting a proper kitchen inside of a shuttle was generally regarded as insanity.  Living in space, one was always aware of the few inches of alloyed metal that held death at bay.  The damage a sudden explosion could do was never far from mind either.  But Rosa said a home wasn’t a home if there wasn’t a kitchen. One did not use the word “microwave” in her hearing.  There was a difference between heating up food and cooking it, she said.  April agreed with her.  
     “You let that puppy out to gambol and come inside.  Tony is waiting to see you.”
     “Yes, ma’am.”  April lifted the latch on the carrier and Boo bounded out, propelling across the cargo bay.  April caught him, his little legs doggy-paddling madly, and redirected him towards the door.

When they reached the dining area, Tony and another man were already eating.  Rosa put a “plate” together for her as Tony tried to squeeze the life out of her in a bear hug.  Then April buckled into a chair and Rosa passed her an enclosed tray of food.   Rosa had a dim view of people pecking food out of the air, eating like fish.  April tucked into her food with a gusto that bordered on the impolite.   Rosa’s words to the contrary it was still mostly synthetic protein, but it was hot and spicy synthetic protein with a generous helping of Rosa’s famous kimchee.  To April, it was ambrosia.
     “April, do you know Lee?” Tony asked.  “He’s married to my sister Yolanda.”

“We’ve never met,” Lee answered for her, as her mouth was full of food.  She swallowed, smiled, and reached across the table to shake the hand he was offering her.  

 “Lee just got back from a salvage mission out near the Belt,” Tony said.  “He picked up some corporate broadcasts on his way back to us.”

 “The rumors are true,” Lee said, picking up the story.  “They’ve found an Earth-like planet.”

 “Who found?” April asked. 

 “Some consortium of corporations,” Lee said, waving his hands in a vague gesture.  “All those acronyms blend for me.”

 “They’ve already staked their corporate flags,” Tony said as Rosa gathered up the trays before disappearing into the kitchen.  “They won’t let us into their orbiting space stations.  What makes you think they’ll share a planet with us?”

“It’s good news for mankind,” Lee said.  April, sensing some father-in-law/son-in-law tension about to spill over, scrambled for some way to change the subject.

“I saw a new shuttle as I was coming in,” she said.  “Any idea how it came to be abandoned?”

“That’s my salvage,” Lee said.  “The previous owners froze to death when their heaters failed.”

“The timing of your visit couldn’t be better.  Lee needs your help,” Tony said.

“Tony, I don’t do that anymore,” April said.

“Oh, I know you stopped for awhile, sure, but you’ve got that dog now,” Tony said.

“My dog?” April repeated, simultaneously wondering what he was talking about and where the dog in question had gone. 

“Your mother told us she sent you that dog to help you with your work,” Tony said.  “He’s sensitive to… what did she call it?”

“Psychic vibrations,” Rosa answered.

April sighed and scrubbed at her temples.  Of course that was why her mother had sent the dog.  She should have known there was a reason. 

“If you just go over there and do that thing you do, it will make Yolanda feel so much better,” Rosa said.

“I can’t,” April said.  “You know I love you guys.  I owe both of you more than I could ever repay.  But I just can’t do that anymore.  It makes me feel so…” she lifted her hands helplessly.  She couldn’t explain it, and it was plain from the way they were looking at her that they wouldn’t understand it even if she could.

“Is this why things didn’t work out for you on that derelict station?  All that work your mother did to get you a spot on it, and you blew it in only a month,” Tony said.

“You know about that?”  April had spent one blissful month on that station, a rather large piece of corporate trash that a crew of spacers had pounced on.  They had made all sorts of slapdash repairs, making do with what they could find.  It had only had half gravity, but it had been heaven.  Then one of the two air processors had had a critical failure and the spacers in charge had evicted half of the population without notice, including April. 

“They would have kept you if they’d known your skills,” Tony said.

“I was a welder.  They had lots of welders,” April said.

“Did they have lots of exorcists as well?” he asked.

“That station was abandoned after a catastrophic hull breach.  Many corporate workers died,” Rosa said.  “Many ghosts remain.”

“I never saw any.”

“You never do, dear.  But others did, didn’t they?” Rosa persisted. “And you turned away.”

“But I can’t actually do anything.  It’s just a story.  A scam, really.”

“I know a great many people who would disagree with you there,” Tony said.  “You don’t feel like you’re really doing anything.  Fine.  If it helps, think of it as giving Yolanda peace of mind.  That’s what we’re paying you for.”

“All right,” April said.  “I’ll do it.”  She started to unbuckle from her chair but Rosa stopped her.

“After coffee and desert, dear,” she said. “I’ll be back in a jiff.”

“I’ll find your dog while you eat,” Tony offered, drifting out of the room.  

“So how’d you come to be an exorcist if you don’t believe in ghosts?” Lee asked.

“My mother,” April said, “was a huge believer in ghosts.  She saw them everywhere.  Then one day she got it into her head that I could do something that made them go away.  And so a career was born.”  She didn’t add, when I was seven.

She couldn’t remember now how she had put it all together, what it was that had her mother sobbing in the middle of the night, sometimes even screaming.  Certainly the word “ghost” had never come up.  But one night it had all been just too much for April.

“Someone make it go away, someone make it go away!” her mother had been sobbing over and over, clutching that battered doll of hers, the one with the purple hood and cape.  Only there had been no one else in their little derelict, just the two of them.  Her mother’s eyes had been bulging, her hands up to ward off blows April couldn’t see.

And something in April’s head had just snapped.

“Go away!” she had shouted.  And apparently it had.  Or her mother believed it had, which to April amounted to the same thing.

The image of the doll suddenly held April’s attention.  She had forgotten that doll.  What had her mother called it?  She couldn’t recall.  Some sort of superhero; it had been a toy she had brought with her when she and her own parents had left Earth.  It had been a talisman for her mother.  It had kept the madness at bay.  April had never even been allowed to touch it.

She slowly realized Lee was still talking to her.  “It must be quite lucrative in space for someone in your line of work,” he was saying. “Everyone living in salvaged ships.  Junkers.  You know at least one person died in any ship you find.”

“Sometimes generations,” April said.  She resisted the urge to point out that the people taking ships where the prior occupants had all met nasty deaths weren’t exactly rich.  The rich lived in the big revolving space stations, the ones with artificial gravity, green plants, and real food. 

When April finally stepped inside the Class III shuttle, she was pleased to find that Lee had already gotten the basic life support systems up and running.  She wasn’t sure if Boo could do his job while confined to the carrier, and she particularly didn’t want to test it on his first mission solo.  If she had to do an exorcist job, she preferred to do it for a friend of Tony’s.  He always did an excellent job of convincing her clients that she worked better alone.  When she had done jobs for her mother she had often had to put on quite the show with various holy relics before the client would believe she had dispelled the spirit.  When she was alone, she could fall back on her original method of just shouting “Go away!”

“Well, go to it.  Show me the ghosty.”  She looked at the dog, and the dog looked back at her.  Then he pushed off the floor to sail up into her head, a mass of hair and slobber.

“Come on!” she protested, putting a hand between his mouth and her face.  “We’re on a job here.  Show me the ghosty!”  She pushed the dog away from her, towards the rest of the ship.  His paws caught on the doorframe and he gave himself another push, finally interested in exploring the ship.

April poked around the ship herself, not really expecting to find much.  She had been in so many supposedly haunted ships before and never seen anything.  She never heard funny noises or felt cold spots.  But her mother wasn’t the only to act like she saw something that April didn’t.

Boo suddenly started howling, insanely loud in the contained space.  April followed the sound to the back of the ship.  She could see fear and duty wrestling for control of the little dog’s mind as he barked then cowered then barked again.  The cowering was particularly ineffective in zero G; it was more of a full-body flinch.

April faced the direction that seemed to be bothering Boo the most and raised her hand.

“Go away!” she commanded.  As always she felt herself stretching out with her senses, trying to feel something but coming up dry.  Boo quieted and April held him close until the last little woofing noises stopped and his shaking limbs relaxed.

“Good work,” she murmured to him as she carried him back to the airlock.  “Good job, boy.”

She was about to seal her helmet when a flash of purple caught the corner of her eye.  Something in a crate tucked under a bench.  Curious, she reached in and pulled it out.

April felt her own limbs shaking as she saw what it was.  It was a doll, a doll she knew very well.  Her mother’s doll.

“Mom?”  She glanced back but of course saw nothing.  Even if there had been a ghost, it was gone now.  She looked at the doll in her hands.  Her mother would have put it in a place of honor, not left it in a crate in what appeared to be a storeroom.

Could there be two such dolls?  Or had her mother won the fight against her own madness and no longer needed her talisman?

April zipped the doll into a pocket on her suit and wiped her eyes before sealing her helmet.  She might never know for sure; her mother was constantly on the move, and what communications she sent were sporadic and seldom to the point.  Like gifts of ghost-hunting dogs.

Or jobs on space stations.

In the meantime, there was still the question of how she was going to get paid for this job.  She knew without asking that Lee didn’t have any money.  What would he offer in trade?  He seemed handy; maybe he could upgrade the air cleaners on her own nearly derelict shuttle.  With a puppy living with her now she was going to need it.   

 

Editor's Note:  btw, here's the cover for Rachel Olivier's The Holly and the Ivan

 

 

 

Heroes Fall by Dylan Brody

Reviewed by Edward Cox

 

 

Kelsey Darson is a Hero. His job is to arrive at precisely the right time to save anyone from anything. But this is not reality; this is the Game. And if he is not saving folks from peril, does Kelsey truly exist at all?

    Dylan Brody’s Heroes Fall is a tale which is as interesting in plot as it is in technique. Not quite Epic Fantasy, not quite Science Fiction, the book is formed by cutting and pasting different timeframes to give the storyline a seemingly random order. Kelsey Darson isn’t the only Hero within the mysterious ‘Game’; he has Mordak, a bitter enemy, to contend with. Both characters are frequently sucked in and out of ‘reality’, appearing and disappearing at varying points in time. Reminiscent of The Duellists, if Kelsey and Mordak ever cross paths in the same timeline, they fight. But why?

    Brody’s storytelling meets the mark, with strong descriptions and characterisations, but it is his planning of the plot that really makes this book work. As the protagonist, Kelsey is either confused by his predicament or knowing of it; and we, the readers, share in his clueless-ness as much as his revelations. With the frequent jaunts back and forward in time, Mordak’s aggression appears to be unwarranted at first, and Brody cleverly raises all the important questions: Why are Kelsey and Mordak such bitter enemies? What is the Game? How does it end?

    The answer – if there truly is an answer – might just come from the two Heroines. Salia is Kelsey’s lover; Chryslas is Mordak’s. Together they are companionship in the lonely Game. Each character follows his or her own timeline, and sometimes there are vast age differences between them. Salia is often at her lover’s side, and she occasionally knows much more than she tells Kelsey. The rules of the Game, perhaps, dictate that he cannot know what he has yet to experience, past or future. As for Mordak, he has somehow lost Chryslas, and he blames Kelsey for her departure from the Game, and he will have his revenge. They will fight until the end.

    The way Brody has pieced together this story creates nothing short of big fat hook with a juicy worm wriggling on the end. From the very first page it’s clear that this something a little different, something to make the reader think and interpret. Mysterious and intelligent, bright and alive, Heroes Fall is so much more than just another fantasy story.

 

Editor's Note:  You can order a copy of Heroes Fall by clicking on the cover icon below.