An Unkindness of Ghosts

by Rivers Solomon

She was used to the style of her own deck where all children were referred to with feminine pronouns.

This close to the end of the day, she lost the ability to modulate her naturally abrupt manner for the comfort of others.

“Your sarcasm reveals clear disregard for the sanctity of the Sovereign’s Guard, which I appreciate,”

Aster was always memorizing new ways of being with people.

Tarlander bodies did not always present as clearly male and female as the Guard supposed they ought. This explained Aster’s hairiness and muscular build despite being born without the external organs that produced testosterone.)

Aster carried that knowledge inside her. These men had the means and opportunity to destroy evidence, to protect their legacy, but not one of them thought earnest discussion of reanimating a person’s limbs for the purpose of manual labor warranted deletion from their official record. Forget the horrifying cruelty—the incompetent science of it all.

“You’re one of those who has to tune the world out and focus on one thing at a time. We have a word for that down here, women like you. Insiwa. Inside one. It means you live inside your head and to step out of it hurts like a caning.”

No one but ghosts is here, child. Do what you want with it.

Maybe Aster’s meema hadn’t meant for the device to sense normal types of radiation, the ones from the natural world, but rather the types from the other world. Ghosts.

“Please don’t doubt that if I could get rid of the cold, I would, or that if it was in my power to kill each and every upperdecker, I’d do that as well.”

“His irises have become jagged. Misshapen,” he said, suppressing a shiver. “Like the blade of a serrated knife but more irregular. It’s twisted, polygonal.”

“God save the Sovereign,” she called out, then let the hatch door slam shut.

Once upon a time, Theo removed Aster’s uterus. He made her breathe air that wasn’t air. When she awoke, all that remained of her womb was a ghost. This was what she’d prayed to the Ancestors for.

she was one of the few females of “this poorly racial stock” capable of carrying offspring. Next to her name in Matilda’s manifest was a stamp that read, Fit to Breed.

“The point is what you do when you don’t have the details. Do you interrogate? Do you examine? Or do you settle for the obvious answer?”

History wanted to be remembered. Evidence hated having to live in dark, hidden places and devoted itself to resurfacing. Truth was messy.

There’s no such thing as creation, merely a shuffling of parts. All birth is rebirth in disguise.

I was already prone to an unnatural girlishness, and, Heavens, don’t encourage the boy, Ms. Melusine.

Whaaaaaaat?!

My sissyness and my sickliness were two sides of the same coin to my father. I was weak and didn’t belong.

Aster tells me she thinks I was hurt so badly that the only way I could go on was to pretend so hard that it didn’t exist until it was true, but what happened still lives in my body, like a witch’s curse. It is neither here nor there.

“None of them are harmless, Theo. They are animals, and if it weren’t for us bending them into some kind of shape, they’d live in complete chaos and sin.”

Like a child, I marvel at the moving parts. A little girl dissecting her first radio.

I don’t think I’m a man at all.

On Q deck, all children are referred to as girls. All people—all Q-deckers at least—are assumed women unless there’s a statement or obvious sign otherwise, such as the fashions they wear or the trade they choose.

That was the state of things, everyone disappointed because they all had too many needs, and no one could ever satisfy them.

don’t have children. That was part of the reason she’d had Theo remove her uterus. It was a rejection of motherhood in general, and tangentially, a rejection of her own mother.

People were so often mean that when they weren’t, there was a tendency to bestow sainthood upon them. Aster did not reward common decency with her affection.

Aster was obsessed with bifurcation. Wholes were foreign to her. Halves made more sense. A split nucleus could end Matilda’s tiny universe. She wanted to be the knife. She wanted to be knived.

I don’t have romantic feelings. I never fell in love with a person the way princesses falls in love with princes. I never wanted to be with nobody in bed. Aster, though, my love for her is—it’s malignant. And if I try to chop it off, all the bits of love will spread everywhere else and infect me worse.

Poor, poor books. Lonely pages bound in lonely leather, their only company the occasional louse. They exist only to be read, and yet with no one there to read them, they might as well not have been bornt at all.

Memories could not be unmemoried, only shuffled so as not to be in the forefront of things. Surrounded by men, they all resurfaced at once.