Today, Mish is going to heaven.
She stands high up on the bank, the wreckage of the city at her back. Trying to see through the fog across the river. Listening for the otherside voices amid whitewater thunder.
“Go ahead,” says the Garbage King, sprawled on his splintered throne. He uses his voice like he uses the rusty knives with which he protects his holdings. It doesn’t matter. When she wades into the river at last, all the old wounds will wash away. “All you have to do is set it down. Set it all down. ‘Less you want to sink.”
This is the third time Mish has tried to make the crossing. Threes are lucky. It took Nana Irondebt three times to cross. Coll the Mudfish, too. Both of them were older though, and Nana was old. Mish might be fourteen, sixteen, she thinks. She has lots of time. Ages. She can make it yet.
Mish doesn’t know anyone who’s come back to the Garbage King more than four times.
The water’s chill bites when she wades out, and it steals the feeling from her flesh. Before long she’s walking on the merest memory of feet, picking her way over stone-slick riverbed. Her balance is good, and her arms are strong. She takes a deep breath, preparing to slide under, to pull her body one arm’s-length at a time to its salvation.
A folly of the current slams her sideways. She goes under, mouth open, eyes burning. She reaches heavenward, but she’s heavy, so heavy, and the nameless weight bears her under, and there’s no sky nor river but an impossible spinning void that steals the last sputtering air from Mish’s lungs.
Her fists lock into knotted weeds. If there is a down, there must be an up. She flings her body skyward and breaks the surface. She’s not far out from shore and she sobs as she drags herself up, then out. A puddle spreads out from her body as she collapses in the Garbage King’s shadow and retches cold water onto his floor.
She started too early, she thinks, lying in a pool of refuse and the King’s raucous laugh. Too young by far, her soul already churning for something better from the day her feet struck the ground and she started running through the city’s crooked streets.
Around her, the Garbage King’s fiefdom rises from the waterfront: manmade mountains shaped by years of passage from here to otherside. Things unloved and unlovely, except to those who had to leave them behind. And to the Garbage King, who trades silken scraps of passion and pretense for whatever will sate his appetite for more substantial stuff. Other people’s discarded wishes roll like marbles beneath Mish’s hands and knees as she shudders to a stand. Dreams are sharp-edged where they’ve shattered in the fall. The anger burns if you stay too long in one spot.
How can Mish let go of her burdens, if she doesn’t know what it is that she’s carrying?
The Garbage King chuckles once more and reclines, kicking his feet up atop a soft pile of desire. “River-corpses float,” he says, and his ragged mouth is shaped almost like a smile. “You’ll be mine, in the end, one way or the other. Now. Will we be having another go?”
Mish’s head turns, chin to shoulder, shoulders hunched. She backs away from the river. A treasury of forgotten mistakes bite at her ankles, driving her to a trot, then a run.
The city ignores Mish as she trudges down its stagnant streets. Wet footprints show the way she’s come; too much moisture in the stifling air for her clothes to dry out. Folk are faceless behind their camphor veils and broad hats, to keep out the stench and the sun, or at least to try. Dose-wives crowd the sidewalks, selling their brews: is it not easier to go to heaven, if you can’t remember your own name, let alone the dear burdens that you must cast down by your feet? The mendicants are out too, threading their whips and offering to burn away doubt and desire alike beneath the cleansing fire of pain. Mish skips between them, leaping over the rivulets of filth that run downhill from the Garbage King’s property, and holds her breath.
She’s hungry. The people of the city are always hungry, though none ever starve. Sometimes folk just waste away, though, for want of something-more. Those bodies, with their burdens still attached, they belong to the Garbage King’s domain, too.
The shallow waters just south of the city are crowded with hopeful fishers. It’s Mish’s lucky day–a blessing breaches the surface before she’s even waded as deep as her knees. She tears it from the water and sinks her teeth deep. It wriggles once, its warm heaven-sent juices sluicing out the corners of her mouth; she sucks deeply to drain every drop she can, to keep them from disappearing back into the water. Other fishers watch, brows heavy with jealousy, and one keens faintly.
When the blessing is nothing more than a warm feeling in her palms and a tingle on her tongue, Mish returns ashore. She’s still hungry–the people of the city are always hungry–but a blessing is enough to trick her heart into feeling full, for a spell.
Daddy Sawsong is telling stories to the little ones outside the sleep-shop. Mish hasn’t got a spare blessing to trade for a bed and a tune, so that she can close her eyes and forget where she is (and where she isn’t). She has an old rust-knife in her pocket, but only so that she can stop someone who tries to take from her, not so she can take from another. She pats it once, to check it’s still there–not having a blessing isn’t enough to keep someone from cutting you in hopes of finding one–and then settles in among the new ones, all still fresh-faced and sweet-smelling, to listen.
“In heaven,” he says, and his voice polishes the old words to a bright shine, “in heaven, you get a new name because you are new too, and your old name tears when you try to stretch it to fit.” A baby giggles, but Daddy Sawsong shakes his head, serious as river-rot. “Your new self might seem strange, but you’ll soon grow into it.” His finger stroked the side of his nose. “And if you figure you don’t like it all that much after all, you can cut a new shape right out of the world and pull yourself inside it.”
“How do you know?” Mish says, too loud. The little ones go still all around her, statues waiting to see which way the storm of her temper will blow. “You can’t, because you’ve never been. No one ever comes back from heaven.”
Daddy Sawsong’s head rocks from side to side. “I hear it in my bones, when I look away across that river. Don’t you, girl-child? It echoes inside so hard it might shake me to pieces, and I want it to carry me away, and I’m scared of it, too. Of that new name somewhere inside me, and what it’ll want.”
Mish stares. Daddy Sawsong smiles sadly. There’s grey in his beard and at the top of his head, like a crown. They’ll start calling him a Papa soon, not a Daddy anymore. He’s still got time to set things down. If no one knifes him for a blessing or a dream-bottle. If the river-rot doesn’t take him, or the wasting sadness.
“It’s not right,” she says, and that word, it, nearly chokes her, so big as to bend the curve of the world. How dare heaven invite Daddy Sawsong in, and not lay bare the way? How dare they ask him to fill himself up on a sliver of nothing and call it a blessing? “It’s not right it should be this way.”
“It’s all we’ve got.” Daddy Sawsong’s huge hand rests upon her head. His palm is heavy, but she bears up under it, refusing to be bent. He laughs softly and wrings out her braid, so that a tiny river runs between her feet. “Madness to dream of something else that just can’t be. Dreams like that will only drag you under, when your time comes to cross.”
Madness is not the name of the thing that weighs Mish down, but it’s close, so close that it gives her a frame to fix to her silent, sullen burden. Its recognition snaps her shoulder blades taut together, lifts her chin from her chest. She slides Daddy Sawsong’s hand from her hair and stands. When she looks riverward, the Garbage King’s mountains fill her sight, and her feet follow her head.
No one here’s ever been to heaven; they just trust it can be done. Even if no one’s ever dreamed of something different, either, who are they to say it can’t be so?
The Garbage King lifts his face from the perfumed, feathery tendrils of lust when Mish strides past. “Up for another go already? The more you try, the heavier your load grows, you know.” The ragged slash across his face splits wider, with a tearing sound. “More for me, in the end, either way.”
Mish ignores him. She squares off with the river, staring once again across the unknowable space. When she closes her eyes, the dim glow through the mist lingers, its afterimage affixed inside her.
Then she stoops amid the Garbage King’s treasures, and tears free a hot, squirming strip of hope. She slings it around her shoulders, and it clasps her tight.
“Stop!” the Garbage King orders. He sits upright, crushing fragrant lust beneath his heavy boots. He grabs his knife and nearly fumbles it. When anyone’s ever trespassed like this before, it’s been for his treasures, for passion and pride and prurience. Not for the darker things, what lies moldering by the water’s edge. Not for the things that ask something back of the taker. “That’s not yours,” he squalls. “Put it back!”
She doesn’t. She grabs again, her fingernails tearing the filmy shrouds around forgotten dreams, and the soft pulp inside yields when she spreads it across her cheeks and down through the tangled length of her hair.
The Garbage King seizes her arm and his knife is coming to bear, but Mish grabs one last fistful. Shards of rage slash her fingers and open screaming mouths in her tongue as she crushes them to powder. They grind within her, fill her, and she’s still hungry but now she’s hungry. When the Garbage King’s blade tickles her chin, she laughs, bright and clear and high, and the pockmarked knife crumbles into blood-colored dust. “Let go,” she says, with vicious optimism, and he does, the wound of his mouth sewn up tight.
Mish puts her back to the river and walks away from the Garbage King and his lot. At the top of the hill, she stops. The city below waits, reeking, ravenous, cruel. She can smell it through the sheen of cooling blood on her lips. She can hear its cries.
Mish smiles. It will be a better place. It will be a new thing. What burdens there are, they will all take up together. She starts walking down toward it.
Today, Mish is going to heaven.
| Aimee Ogden is an American werewolf in the Netherlands. Her debut novella Sun-Daughters, Sea-Daughters was a Nebula Award finalist, and her newest novella, Emergent Properties, arrives in July 2023. Her short fiction has appeared in publications such as Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, as well as four previous appearances in Kaleidotrope. She also co-edits Translunar Travelers Lounge, a magazine of fun and optimistic speculative fiction. |  |