The Things We Carry is a novelette set in the Vale Megacosm. The full version is available here for subscribers or the ebook can be purchased here for folks that don’t want a subscription quite yet. A brief sample is available below for all.

For mom. And Ashley

“There are only two stories: a strange man comes to town or a man goes on an adventure.”

— Tolstoy

She groaned from the feeling welling up – audible proof of her knowing it welled, the claustrophobia of it all swelling inside of her as a sad, sad, song that would not leave her alone. Never alone? Never alone – that was the fear. Right? Surely that was it. She’d never been alone since before… since before. 

She couldn’t breathe so she sucked in some air in great wheezing sips  — wet, almost pneumonia sips — until she realized that yes, she really could breathe, so she did some more until she went all light-headed and woozy. The moaning lingered then, a literal echo of a thing or things to come – her sole sound of solitude in a world grown together, brambles and weeds. 

None could hear her then and had there been a one to hear her, she may have been mistaken for a nymph in heat. 

Which she was not. 

Which she was not, she reminded herself once more. Convinced herself. Poorly.

Besides, could be a rash conclusion. Probably wasn’t the case anyways. Now she thought of it, of course it wasn’t likely. She giggled. Hadn’t giggled like that in fifteen years. She missed giggling. She wanted to giggle again on the regular.

Her mind evaded the details of that night, would evade them now and evermore, but she couldn’t help but smile to herself as she walked. It’d been three months of walking ago. Maybe even more when she’d left. 

Why had she left again?

The city. And then the country. That was why. No, not why, but what. She didn’t really want to think about why she’d left. She’d made enough money, even alone: in a world of purple soils, it was the brown dye that came from the carapace of a specific type of turtle. Imagine an entire world where the color brown was rare. Rare because of a lack of springtails, pin worms, sure, but also certain decomposing fungi so that the microbiome that made the world fertile was natural and therefore turned it all purple. That plus the manganese oxide, garnet and amethyst sands, and the anthrocyanins in the plants and algae. Mostly the shrooms, let’s be honest.

In such a world, exports from other worlds and specifically brown dyers thrived. So she’d become a rather lucrative businesswoman late in life. The kids – her girls – had all moved on from Mostyn’s University One (paid in cash, thanks to the turtle dye) to their own lives, their own families and kids and hobbies and she, a veteran widow age fifty-five, had faced an empty nest, a hen forced to roost without her cock.

She liked it that way.

And hated it that way. 

The pain, the pain of a life inside the city… it almost felt like a damn womb and a woman shouldn’t have to wait until she was fifty-five to be good and truly born into the wide world, should she? No matter how hard she had tried to build her little safe nest, it had crumbled when he’d died — not even the Good Lord could build a garden so small that snakes couldn’t get inside. And they’d gotten into the city, into her district, into her house, killed her husband, scattered her girls. The pain, the pain of a life inside the city. She’d tried doing the safe thing and fielding strangers that came to town.

It had failed. 

Why not try an adventure as a widow with an empty nest?

So she’d sold everything – doily to dowry – and’d given away the rest. The storybooks — Hydrazite, Hydrazite, water wall — she gladly passed to her girls that they might read to their girls and the multi-volume sets she’d donated to the university. A stop by the last bookstore on the road out of town had, via barter, landed her a copy of this little fat manual called Country Lore and Know-How. Book in hand, pack backed, and walking stick-turned-knapsack shouldered, she’d set out from the megalopolis of her whole life into the great world beyond for the first time, wondering if half of those stories she’d read her girls about hydrazite monsters and dire bears and forbidden love held any measure of truth inside. The road had commanded her full attention for the first few days, as she drew from the manual a steady rhythm of fires and road cooking (which wasn’t much different from her normal cooking save the smoke and the balancing act and the lack of spices) and scavenging for wild vegetables and traps for wild game. 

The city was the microcosm of the world – everything they’d ever needed was either in Megameso or could be shipped into Megameso on the Great White Chickoa River that ran west of the city and met the sea. If she hadn’t seen it in Megameso in her fifty-some-odd years, she wouldn’t be seeing it out in the world, of that she was certain. Sure, rapists and murderers and tyrants and bigots and gluttons roamed the world – especially in certain slums in the great city Eastriver – but monsters were the way to explain those things to little kids. If she could handle the big city with wit and ingenuity and fresh lip, if she could handle busy streets, marrying amidst competitive weddings, losing her husband to the urban jungle’s flesh-eating diseases, and watching her girls leave one-by-one for similar fates, then she could handle whatever waited beyond the city’s limits.

She wanted to go beyond the city limits — not just the exurbs — for the first time in her life. 

Even though she’d never been further west than the river or east of than the hills that towered before that poison Naiplore sap overlooking the crevasse of the infamous last stand of the Dynams. 

Oh, and trains. Trollies and commuters, sure, but she’d never ridden a cross-country line. 

Or the big three-masted brigs or the windjammers. Or even a schooner, really.

Also the underwater elevators that went to the Antisian or Malcovian civilizations. 

Or camped with the natives of Soratego. She’d heard tale of the white wolves that haunted the lake. 

Or…

If you hear enough stories from libraries, you set out: urban had turned bland, even soured. Old woman, open road, pack on back, stick in hand, see what she would see away from her domestic haven.

She didn’t want to think about why she wanted to leave.

Despite hot flashes (which, let’s face it, would have bothered her in the city too and with whatever stranger came to town) and the shifting of things in her pack, she had enjoyed walking on the open road’s fresh coat of dust. She would become the stranger going to their towns. Maybe they’d think she was a witch. Or a traveling prostitute. Or a shapeshifting old crone. Or a virgin in disguise.

Or a man. 

Shortly after crossing Megameso’s city limits and near the end of those first few days when she’d learned to make fire from scratch, she’d come to a thickness in the trail – a town named for its hill crop: Melo. There she’d spent six wedge on a farm-to-table meal and the best glass of terbin (with water, no ice) she’d had since before… since before. She’d evaded drinking in front of her girls during their growing-up years from inflated hopes that they would end more sober-minded than their father, Good Lord rest his soul. (That they would end more sober than even their mother, to be honest). Still those fifteen years she’d nursed secret thoughts of the taste without letting the bottle suckle her, had hidden her thirst in a dungeon in her soul where, ravenous, it kept vigil. Now with that thirst set free – that thirst for damn. good. terbin. – she’d had another after dinner. And, pits and hell, how about another after the other after dinner? 

Men sitting at the bar, the ones watching her with her grilled chicken, seemed more and more… handsome. Is that a word she used still these days? But she focused on her meat and the wedge salad and her next glass of terbin and tried to never worry about whether they might have come from the Brigand’s Crowd or one of those mystic wizards or whatchmajigs like in the books. Or… you know… garden variety gangs for whom she knew no name or sigil or hand signal. She sipped, felt the burn on her lips, in her cheeks, down her gullet. Had she thought she’d had enough? Not yet. Not quite at that point. 

No, she had thought she’d have another.

Air in a pub full of regulars who have been there for hours can get stale.

A bit of cool wind as with a cold front.

Then’d come him.