For our twenty-first annual roundup of the summer’s best debut fiction, we asked six writers to introduce this year’s group of debut authors. Read the July/August 2021 issue of the magazine for interviews between Eric Nguyen and Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, Lee Lai and Jillian Tamaki, Zakiya Dalila Harris and Maurice Carlos Ruffin, Joss Lake and Jeanne Thornton, and Pik-Shuen Fung and Catherine Chung, as well as Alex Torres’s introduction to the late Anthony Veasna So. But first, check out these exclusive readings and excerpts from their debut books.

Things We Lost to the Water (Knopf, May) by Eric Nguyen
Stone Fruit (Fantagraphics, May) by Lee Lai
The Other Black Girl (Atria Books, June) by Zakiya Dalila Harris
Future Feeling (Soft Skull Press, June) by Joss Lake
Ghost Forest (One World, July) by Pik-Shuen Fung
Afterparties (Ecco, August) by Anthony Veasna So

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Things We Lost to the Water
Eric Nguyen

August 1979 

New Orleans is at war. The long howl in the sky; what else can it mean?
 
Hương drops the dishes into the sink and grabs the baby before he starts crying. She begins running toward the door—but then remembers: this time, another son. She forgets his name temporarily, the howl is so loud. What’s important is to find him.
 
Is he under the bed? No, he is not under the bed. Is he hiding in the closet? No, he is not in the closet. Is he in the bathroom, then, behind the plastic curtains, sitting scared in the tub? He is not in the bathroom, behind the plastic curtains, sitting scared in the tub. And as she turns around he’s at the door, holding on to the frame, his eyes watering, his cheeks red.
 
“Mẹ,” he cries. Mom. The word reminds Hương of everything she needs to know. In the next moment she grabs his hand and pulls him toward her chest.
 
With this precious cargo, these two sons, she darts across the apartment, an arrow flying away from its bow, a bullet away from its gun. She’s racing toward the door and leaping down the steps—but she can’t move fast enough. The air is like water, it’s like running through water. Through an ocean. She feels the wetness on her legs and the water rising. And the sky, the early evening sky, with its spotting of stars already, is streaked red and orange like a fire, like an explosion suspended midair in that moment before the crush, the shattering, the death she’s always imagined until someone yells Stop, someone tells her to Stop.
 
And just like that, the sirens hush and the silence is violent: it slices, it cuts.
 
“Hurricane alarm,” Bà Giang says. The old woman drops her cigarette. “Just a hurricane alarm. A test. Nothing to be afraid of.” She reaches over and cups Hương’s cheek.
 
“What do you mean?” Hương asks.
 
“A test. They’re doing a test. In case something happens,” Bà Giang says. “Go home now, cưng ơi. Go home. Get some rest. It’s getting late.”
 
Home.
 
Late.
 
Getting.
 
There.
 
“Late.” Hương understands, or maybe she does not. A thousand thoughts are still settling in her mind. Where were the sounds from before? Not the alarm, but the grating calls of the grackles in the trees, the whistling breeze, a car speeding past—where are they now?

She notices Tuấn at the gates. Her eyes light up.
 
“Tuấn ơi,” she calls.
 
Tuấn holds on to the bars of the gate and watches three boys riding past on bicycles. One stands on his pedals. Another rides without hands but only for a second before grabbing—in a panicked motion—the handlebars. A younger one tries to keep up on training wheels. Three boys. Three brothers.
 
“Tuấn ơi,” Hương calls again.
 
Tuấn waves as the boys ride leisurely past. When they’re gone, he returns, and Hương feels a mixture of pure happiness, comfort, and relief.
 
Up the dirt road. A mother and her sons. Hand in hand.

From Things We Lost to the Water. Copyright © 2021 by Eric Nguyen. Published by arrangement with Knopf, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. 

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Stone Fruit
Lee Lai

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Copyright © Lee Lai. Courtesy of Fantagraphics Books [13]. 

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The Other Black Girl
Zakiya Dalila Harris

July 23, 2018
Wagner Books
Midtown, Manhattan

The first sign was the smell of cocoa butter.

When it initially crept around the wall of her cubicle, Nella was too busy filing a stack of pages at her desk, aligning each and every one so that the manuscript was perfectly flush. She was so intent on completing this task—Vera Parini needed everything to be flush, always—that she had the nerve to ignore the smell. Only when it inched up her nostrils and latched onto a deep part of her brain did she stop what she was doing and lift her head with sudden interest.

It wasn’t the scent alone that gave her pause. Nella Rogers was used to all kinds of uninvited smells creeping into her cubicle—usually terrible ones. Since she was merely an editorial assistant at Wagner Books, she had no private office, and therefore no walls or windows. She and the other open-space assistants were at the mercy of a hard- boiled egg or the passing of gas; they were often left to suffer the consequences for what felt like an hour afterward.

Adjusting to such close proximity had been so difficult for Nella during her first few weeks at Wagner that she’d practiced breathing through her mouth even when it wasn’t called for, like when she was deciding between granolas at the grocery store, or when she was hav­ing sex with her boyfriend, Owen. After about three months of failed self-training, she had broken down and purchased a lavender reed diffuser that had the words JUST BREATHE scrawled across its front in gold cursive letters. Its home was the far corner of her desk, where it sat just beneath the first edition of Kindred that Owen had given her shortly after they started dating.

Nella eyed the gold foil letters and frowned. Could it have been the lavender diffuser she smelled? She inhaled again, craning her neck upward so that all she could see were the gray and white tiles that lined the ceiling. No. She’d been correct—that was cocoa butter, alright. And it wasn’t just any cocoa butter. It was Brown Buttah, her favorite brand of hair grease.

Nella looked around. Once she was sure the coast was clear, she stuck her hand into her thick black hair and pulled a piece of it as close to her nose as she could. She’d been proudly growing an afro over the last three years, but the strand still landed unsatisfyingly between her nose and her cheek. Nonetheless, it fell close enough to tell her that the Brown Buttah smell wasn’t coming from her own hair. What she was smelling was fresh, a coat applied within the last hour or so, she guessed.

This meant one of two things: One of her white colleagues had started using Brown Buttah. Or—more likely, since she was pretty sure none of them had accidentally stumbled into the natural hair care aisle—there was another Black girl on the thirteenth floor.

Neila’s heart fluttered as she felt something she supposed resem­bled a hot flash. Had it finally happened? Had all of her campaigning for more diversity at Wagner finally paid off?

Her thoughts were cut short by the loud, familiar cackle of Maisy Glendower, a squirrelly editor who appreciated modulation only when someone else was practicing it. Nella combed through the bray, lis­tening hard for the hushed voice that had made Maisy laugh. Did it belong to a person of a darker hue?

“Hay-girl-hay!”

Startled, Nella looked up from her desk. But it was just Sophie standing above her, arms wrapped snugly around the side of her cu­bicle wall, eyes as wide and green as cucumbers.

Nella groaned inwardly and clenched a fist beneath her desk. “So­phie,” she mumbled, “hi.”

“Haaaay! What’s up? How are you? How’s your Tuesday going?” 

“I’m fine,” Nella said, keeping her voice low in case any more au­dible clues floated her way. Sophie had tamed her eyes down a bit, thank goodness, but she was still staring at Nella as though there was something she wanted to say, but couldn’t.

This wasn’t unusual for a Cubicle Floater like Sophie. As Cubicle Floaters went, she wasn’t the worst. She didn’t play favorites, which meant that your chances of seeing her more than once a week were slim. She was usually too busy hovering beside the cubicle of another assistant, her lazy smile reminding you of how good you didn’t have it. By the luck of the draw, Sophie worked for Kimberly, an editor who’d been at Wagner Books for forty-one years. Kimberly had edited her first and last bestseller in 1986, but because this bestseller had not been just a bestseller—it had been adapted into a television show, a blockbuster film, a graphic novel, an adult film, a musical, a podcast, a miniseries, and another blockbuster film (in 4DX)—she was granted a pass on every non-bestseller that followed. Royalties were nothing to laugh at.

Now nearing the end of her long career, Kimberly spent most of her time out of the office, and Nella suspected Sophie spent most of her time waiting for Kimberly to kindly retire already so that she could take her place. In a year, maybe less, it would dawn on Sophie that her boss wasn’t going anywhere unless someone told her to, and no one ever would. But for now, Sophie hung on naively, just as every single one of her predecessors had.

“Kim’s still out,” Sophie explained, even though Nella hadn’t asked. “She sounded awful on the phone yesterday.”

“Which procedure is she getting done this time?”

Sophie grabbed the taut bit of flesh between her chin and her clav­icle and wiggled it around.

“Ah. The crucial one.”

Sophie rolled her eyes. “Yep. She probably dropped more on that than we make here in a month. By the way, did you see . . . ?” She cocked her head in the direction of Maisy’s voice.

“Did I see what?”

“I think Maisy’s got another potential candidate in.” Sophie tossed her head again, this time adding in a suggestive, wiggling eyebrow. “And I don’t know for certain, but she seems like she might be ... you know.”

Nella tried to keep from grinning. “No, I don’t,” she said innocently. “Might be what?”

Sophie lowered her voice. “I think she’s . . . Black.”

“You don’t have to whisper the word ‘Black,’” Nella chided, even though she knew why Sophie did: Sounds, like smells, carried over cubicle walls. “Last time I checked, that was a socially acceptable word to use. I even use it sometimes.”

Sophie either ignored her joke or didn’t feel comfortable laughing at it. She leaned over and whispered, “This is so great for you, right? Another Black girl at Wagner? You must be so excited!”

Nella withheld eye contact, turned off by the girl’s intensity. Yes, it would be great to have another Black girl working at Wagner, but she was hesitant to do a celebratory Electric Slide sequence just yet. She’d only believe that the higher-ups at Wagner had finally consid­ered interviewing more diverse people when she saw it. Over the last two years, the only people who’d been interviewed or hired were Very Specific People who came from a Very Specific Box.

Nella looked up from her desktop at Sophie, who happened to be one of these Very Specific People, and who was still chattering on. Over the course of just a few minutes, Sophie’d managed to talk her­self onto a train of social awareness, and it was clear she had no inten­tion of getting off anytime soon. “It reminds me of that anonymous op-ed BookCenter article I sent you last week—the one I swore you had to have written, because it just sounded so you—about being Black in a white workplace. Remember that piece?”

“Yeah, I do . . . and for the tenth time, I definitely didn’t write that article,” Nella reminded her, “even though I can obviously relate to a lot of the stuff that was in it.”

“Maybe Richard saw it and decided to do something about the lack of diversity here? I mean, that would be something. Remember how hard it was just to get people talking about diversity in one place? Those meetings were painful.”

To call them meetings seemed gratuitous, but Nella wasn’t in the mood to go down that slippery slope. She had more important things to pursue. Like how to get rid of Sophie.

Nella reached for her phone, let out a small groan, and said, “Whoa! Is it already ten fifteen? I actually need to make a very important phone call.”

“Aw. Darn.” Sophie looked visibly disappointed. “Okay.” 

“Sorry. But I’ll report back!”

Nella would not report back, but she’d learned that punctuating too-long interactions with this promise made parting much easier.

Sophie smiled. “No prob. Later, girl!” she said, and off she went, as quickly as she’d come.

Nella sighed and looked around aimlessly, her eyes skipping over the stack of papers she still hadn’t delivered to her boss. In the grand scheme of things, the speed with which one could bring something from point A to point B should have zero effect upon whether that person deserved to be an assistant editor—especially since she’d worked for Vera, one of Wagner’s most exalted editors, for two years now. But things between them lately had been, for the lack of a better word, weird. Their anniversary check-in a few days earlier had ended on a less-than-savory note. When Nella had asked for a promotion, Vera had listed at least a dozen surprise grievances she’d had with Nella’s performance as her assistant, the last being the most unsettling of all: “I wish you’d put half the effort you put into those extracurricu­lar diversity meetings into working on the core requirements.”

The word “extracurricular” had hit Nella hard and fast in the eye, like a piece of shrapnel. The company basketball team, the paper-making club—those were extracurriculars. Her endeavors to develop a diversity committee were not. But she’d smiled and said thank you to her boss, who’d started working at Wagner years before Nella was even born, and tucked this piece of information into her back pocket for safekeeping. That was where she believed any dreams of letting her Black Girl Flag fly free would have to remain.

But now the smell of Brown Buttah was hitting her nose again, and this time, there were telltale sounds: First, Maisy’s practiced joke about Wagner’s zany floor plan (“It makes about as much sense as the science in Back to the Future”); then, a laugh—deep, a bit husky around the edges, but still cocoa butter smooth at its core. Genuine, Nella could tell, as brief as it was.

“. . . impossible. I swear, once you find where one person sits, you’ll never find them a second time!” Maisy cackled again, her voice growing louder as she led her companion closer to her office.

Realizing that they would have to walk by her own cube to get there, Nella looked up. Through the small crack in her partition, she spotted the swath of dark locs, the flash of a brown hand.

There was another Black person on her floor. And given Maisy’s spiel, this Black person was here for an interview.

Which meant in the next few weeks, a Black person could quite possibly be sitting in the cube directly across from Nella. Breathing the same air. Helping her fend off all the Sophies of the Wagner office. Nella wanted to put a victorious fist in the air, 1968 Olympics­–style. Instead, she made a mental note to text Malaika this latest Wag­ner update the earliest chance she got.

“I hope your trip wasn’t too long,” Maisy was saying. “You took the train from Harlem, right?”

“Actually, I’m living in Clinton Hill right now,” the Black girl re­sponded, “but I was born and raised on One Thirty-Fifth and ACP for a while.”

Nella sat up straighter. The girl’s words, which sounded warmer and huskier than the laugh that had fallen easily from her mouth, evoked a sense of Harlem cool that Nella had always wished she possessed. She also noted—with reverence and not a little bit of envy­—how confident the girl sounded, especially when Nella recalled her own anxiety-inducing interview with Vera.

The footsteps were only inches away now. Nella realized she’d be able to get a good glimpse at the newcomer if she slid over to the far right of her cube, so she did exactly that, pretending to leaf through the manuscript Vera was waiting on while keeping one eye trained on the strip of hallway that led to Maisy’s office. Almost instantly, Maisy and her prospective dreadlocked assistant made their way into her pe­riphery, and the full picture came into view.

The girl had a wide, symmetrical face, and two almond-colored eyes perfectly spaced between a Lena Horne nose and a generous forehead. Her skin was a shade or two darker than Nelia’s chestnut complexion, falling somewhere between hickory and umber. And her locs—every one as thick as a bubble-tea straw and longer than her arms—started out as a deep brown, then turned honey-blonde as they continued past her ears. She’d gathered a bunch and piled them on top of her head in a bun; the locs that hadn’t made it hung loosely around the nape of her neck.

And then there was the girl’s pantsuit: a smart-looking ensemble composed of a single-button marigold jacket and a matching pair of oversized slacks that hit a couple of inches above the ankle. Below that, a pair of red patent leather high-heeled ankle boots that Nella would have broken her neck just trying to get into.

It was all very Erykah-meets-Issa, another detail Nella was filing away for Malaika, when she heard Maisy ask the girl to explain what “ACP” meant. And it was a good thing she had, because Nella hadn’t known, either.

“Oh, sorry—that’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard,” the girl said, “but that’s kind of a mouthful.”

“Oh! Of course. A mouthful indeed. Harlem is such a great neigh­borhood. Its history is just so rich. Wagner held an event at the Schomburg earlier this year—February I think it was—for one of our authors. It was very well received.”

Nella fought back a snort. Maisy hadn’t attended this aforemen­tioned event; what’s more, Nella was willing to bet her middle name that the Museum of Natural History was as far north as Maisy had ever traveled in Manhattan. Maisy was a kind enough woman—she made bathroom small talk as well as the next senior-level employee­ but she was fairly limited in her sense of what “the city” entailed. Just the mention of Williamsburg, despite its Apple Store, Whole Foods, and devastating selection of designer boutiques, caused Maisy to re­coil as though someone had just asked to see the inside of her vagina. Surely this dreadlocked girl could sense that Maisy had no true sense of Harlem’s “culture.”

Nella wished she could see the look on the Black girl’s face, but they’d already started to enter Maisy’s office, so she had to settle for a chuckle in its place. It was subtle, but in the milliseconds that passed before Maisy shut her door, Nella was able to detect amusement at the end of that chuckle—an exasperated kind of amusement that asked, without asking, You don’t spend time with Black people often, do you?

Nella crossed her fingers. The girl probably didn’t need it, but she wished her luck, anyway.

From The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris. Copyright © 2021 by Zakiya Dalila Harris. Reprinted by permission of Atria Books, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio, read by Aja Naomi King, Joniece Abbott-Pratt, Heather Alicia Simms and Bahni Turpin. 

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Future Feeling
Joss Lake

I walked Oggie, Starburst, and Palm Tree together without incident. As Buford took a shit on someone’s lawn, a guy in a tank top came flying out the front door and screamed from the top of the stairs. I waved my poop bag at him like a flag, but he was still yelling in Polish, saying something along the lines of, “Make that dog shit in the street,” which was impossible.

I smiled and gave him a thumb’s up. 

My first summer dog-walking, as Lola the Havanese was kicking up dirt to bury the poop that I had already picked up, a small stone hit a dude’s Mercedes. He had been washing the other side, and poked his head up to give an unbelievable monologue about how he had worked his way up from nothing to buy this car, how it was his baby, having no other family or close relations, and how denting it was analogous to stoning an infant.

Lola’s parents ended up paying him $500 to stop harassing me, and I realized just how little I could control in the world. Assholes (human and canine) aside, walking dogs helped me to recreate the suburban village I had grown up in. During restless Midwestern summers, as my friend Jillian and I would walk past people on the street, or, later, drive past their homes or the site of their DUIs, we would create a little map of our town, the divorces and the family secrets and the infamous soup party that went awry, the density of our stories vacillating between gossip and tales of biblical proportions. We never tired of embellishing the story about the high school science teachers who slept together in the chemistry closet and both developed lung problems. When we were thirsty for the epic, we’d say, “Remember when Mr. Redderick and Mrs. had sex in the chemistry storage closet?”

“And Mrs. kid Talon walked in?”

“And then he went to rehab and her husband blamed her?”

“And then she was sent to a sanatorium because she developed lung problems?”

“And then she fell in love with the janitor, who made minced pies for all the patients?”

“And then Mr. Redderick moved away to Alaska to study salmon hatcheries, but not before carving her name into the big oak tree by the football field, as if they had role-reversed with their students?”

From walking my dogs, I could tell which humans were making more money, or had broken up, or had a detoxing relative on their couch, or had decided to move back from whence they came.

I took Buford home, envying the fact that he had no clue about the screamer’s insults and the general pettiness of human emotion. I walked Harris. Back at his apartment, an airy Bushwick loft with huge, vacuumed rugs covering the paint-splattered wood, I sprawled out on the ground and Harris laid down next to me. I checked my phone.

The S-H had come through! 

He’d sent me a link to a basic html page with photos of Aiden, some selfies and some taken by the plethora of cameras in every modern city, along with timestamps and map coordinates. The latest, from 6:02 p.m., was at 40°44’28.4”N 74°00’29.3”W, blurry Aiden in an elevator. I fumbled around trying to figure out how to read the coordinates and there it was, his hotel. 

Once I possessed the key, I had to go through the door.

I patted Harris goodbye and he looked up at me over his long Italian greyhound nose, bemused.

I was dressed in my dog-walking joggers and T-shirt, conveying casual elegance. Two lions guarded the front of the Juniper Ash Hotel. I rubbed their heads for luck and stamina.

The lobby was strange because I’d been living in city subsistence mode, without extravagance or leisure. I did have a trust fund from the hoarding of my grandparents, but I never liked to use it with my future prospects still unknown. They passed on money, and they also passed on a belief in scarcity. In the city of hideous wealth, I was not rich at all. I simply had a cushion against despair; I could afford to take sick days from dog-walking and pay Sophie, who did not accept insurance.

Art collector moms in athleisure, tech bros wearing silver visors to easily identify each other, women in their flowing prairie-goth gowns, a famous pianist with his fingertips encased in silver regenerating pods: they all moved across the room in varying states of disregard for my gaze.

I ordered sparkling water with shrub and sipped slowly.

After an hour of trying to classify all the types of people who had the time and money to be trailing through a hotel lobby at 6 p.m. on a Wednesday, I saw the body I knew so well coming out of the elevator.

My plan was to observe any flaws from a safe distance, but once I saw him, a trans-magnetic field pulled me closer. I went over.

I stepped in front of him before he could cross through the lobby.

“Hey, not to be stalkerish but can I talk to you?” 

There it was, the face I’d loved and hated from afar. His cheeks blushed in an Abercrombie-model kind of way. Wow, I was pretty into queer women, but I was crushing on him hard. Damn the fluidity of queer desire. 

“I—” his voice came out with a preadolescent crack—“don’t do interviews.”

Was that wariness on his face?

“Well, I’m not a journalist, I walk dogs. How about if we just talk trans to trans?”

“Aight,” he said, a little nervous, which made me grow enormous and potent.

“Great. I’m Penfield, but don’t infer from that that I’m a WASP. My parents were Jewish,” I said as I led him back to my seat.

Somehow I’d started asserting the upper hand. Damn, was I topping him in this convo? For once, it was my city.

“Aiden, obvs,” he said.

I was getting a bioaffective spike as we settled into the velvet lobby chairs; inside my giddiness, the lobby colors sharpened and bloomed.

“I’m going to be direct here, which is not my usual tactic. This will sound naive for someone such as myself, but you must know how we trans are often furiously spinning through various life stages at once, so pretend it’s coming from a fifteen-year-old trying to talk to a cool, older sixteen-year-old.”

“K.” 

“Are you really perfect?”

“Wha?” 

His blankness was a door slammed. 

“Never mind.” 

He looked down at his phone. 

I wanted to pour my shrub on him. And his gadget. 

What had I expected from this advertisement of a human? A dense encounter?

TBH, I wanted to absorb his otherworldly perfection, which was still intact across the low lobby table. And punch him.

For so many mornings, I had given his bod my rapt and self-disgusted attention, and now all he could return was generic, glazed-over, limp distraction that any cis adolescent teen could have offered.

“I must know what is up with your goose,” I said, my voice getting louder and higher. “You just leave her behind on the other coast?” My distrust of California was evident.

“Say again?” He was still looking down at his phone. 

“I . . . I asked you about your goose.”

 “That’s personal,” he said shortly. “I should be going.”

He stood up and I caught his scent. Laundry with April Fresh-scented dryer sheets, the heady b.o. of trans anxiety, and pine-based cologne.

“Cya,” I said, hoping to sound aloof. 

For a moment, I was a crushed child. Then the swell of rage returned, though arguably it had never receded.

I called an apartment meeting. This was highly unusual, and the roomies must have thought we were getting evicted.

We sat in our tiny living room, a few feet between the entrance to the Witch’s room, my room, and the start of the kitchen. S-H was cross-legged on the floor and the Witch and I sat too close together on two sectional pieces that had once belonged to a longer, nicer couch. 

“I need to curse someone, in both the old ways and the new.”

The Witch gave me the same look she’d given when I suggested a chore wheel. “This is not child’s play,” she said.

“Exactly. That’s why I need a professional Witch and a professional . . . hacker.”

“You remember what I told you about this man?” she asked.

“Yes, that our conflict is purely astrological. His Jupiter-blessed Leo sun conflicts with my strident, truth-seeking Sagittarius sun, vindictive Scorpio rising, and watery Pisces moon. But he has slighted me! He has lied. He has tried to attain perfection, and someone needs to punish him!”

She did not look convinced. I had to use her language.

“This person resides inside his devices, devices made from leeching the earth’s minerals. He watches neither sun nor moon nor Californian wildflower blooms. His message is facile, though his body is hard.”

The Witch hated technology that did not involve an intention, ancient rites, and smelly ingredients. 

“What sort of hex are you considering?”

“He needs to visit the Shadowlands.” 

“You do know that when one is sent to the Shadowlands, one is cellularly rearranged, beset by mind-spiders, and on occasion destroyed?”

“I know this quite well. Remember when I moved in and you said you smelled the ‘brine of the Shadowlands’ on me? I’m just now emerging from the darkness and this guy is frolicking in the sunlight, offering harmful advice to young people.” 

“You did not travel to the Shadowlands due to a hex. Your entry was natural, brought about by the state of your own evolution.”

Still, she tilted her head, which meant she was considering it.

“What do you want me to do? I already found him for you,” the S-H whined.

“I want you to hack into his Gram, where I shall place a photo of Alice that will at least temporarily disrupt his flow.”Sure, I thought about posting a photo of the inside of my butthole, with some caption about the abyss and the abject, but it was really Alice—that tender extension of my being—that could counter his bullshit.

“Hm, maybe I could use the aloe as well,” the Witch said. She refused to call her by her name.

To get him to help me, I had to promise the S-H that I would write his online dating profile (leaving out many key details), help him track his dread on a Crisis Chart to determine his baseline, and call the landlord about the leak in the bathroom. The Witch required that I bring her a demiard of fired comfrey oil.

I ordered pizza to celebrate our fragile teamwork and Aiden’s impending doom.

That night, in bed, wrapped in the smell of burnt yarrow bundles, I made my gratitude list: 

1.    For the Witch’s powers
2.    For S-H’s powers
3.    For my own trans powers
4.    For mushrooms on pizza
5.    For the insane hope that I can take back some of what I’d lost

Two days later, the Witch, the S-H, and I gathered on the back steps before the sun rose. The Witch had decreed that the first spring sunrise would be the most potent. The S-H was in his pajamas, ready for bed. I cradled Alice in my arms. I promised her that the sacrifice would be worth it.

The Witch lit two person-tall incense sticks stuck into the dirt. I inhaled, imagining us hooded, out on some heath, performing ancient and twisted rites. The Witch took Alice from me and placed her on a piece of velvet. She removed a blade from a leather holster—my paring knife that had gone missing months prior! I looked away as she sliced off one of Alice’s tendrils, then pressed down the arm in her mortar, forcing out the aloe. She sprinkled crushed insect shells on top of the gel and chanted under her breath. The S-H was more attentive than I’d ever seen him, perhaps because he thought we had entered a VR pagan biome and were about to fight off marauding bandits.

As the Witch chanted, the S-H hacked into Aiden’s Gram. This was less dramatic. I had given him the photo and the caption already and all he had to do was post it to @Aiden-ChasesTruth. We sealed the hex, in both new and old form, circling Alice thrice on the scraggly lawn.

The Hex: “Whosoever beholds the aloe will sink into the Shadowlands.” 

Each morning, I awoke, made coffee, took Alice outside for air, and watched Aiden prancing around the city. I was too scared to scroll back and see if Alice was still there, with the caption: I want to splay like her, throw my limbs, full of juice, over ceramic sides of pots, and persist no matter how dark, dry, hot, barren. She is a medicine. She knows that trans is more than suicide or iced coffee on someone’s Oakland patio with mid-century modern teak furniture and a story that goes, First I was a miserable girl, then I was a happy man. That’s a special kind of bullshit, with this aloe plant as my witness. Penfield here. At least until Aiden deletes this in about five seconds. @fieldsofpen.

No one could blame me for wanting to be internet-famous. The entire fractured country agreed on one premise: Only fame carried anything like substance across socioeconomic/racial/gendered boundaries.

I got a few new followers from my short-lived coup, walked dogs, tolerated the roomies, and wondered what exactly was missing in my life.

One afternoon, I walked Gwenivière, the obese bulldog. She moved slowly, shaking her little butt, smelling every clover. Instead of pulling her, I grazed on my phone. When my timer buzzed, I scooped her up in my arms and carried her back to the apartment. I’d have to report that she did not go #2, which often prompted dog parents to send humiliating follow-up texts, insinuating that I had not tried hard enough.

I set Gwen down and unlocked the apartment. She waddled in and threw herself onto the bright orange orthopedic dog bed. 

I tried to catalogue the smell of each habitat that I visited. This one had notes of vetiver, gentle cleaning products, and scented trash bags. I opened the fridge to pour a glass of well water that Gwen’s parents brought back from their upstate cabin. When I closed it, a throat cleared. I peered around the corner into the long living room.

Lounging on the slatted modernist bench was a tall being in a long, silk dressing gown. Short hair. White. Piercings. A hybrid ghost of Kathy Acker and a 1920’s “new” femme.

I hadn’t met all my clients in person, but I knew this was not one of them.

“Penfield R. Henderson?”

This person knew my corrected my name before I’d legally changed it.

“Yes.”

“I’m the Operatrix.”

“You’ve been summoned,” The Operatrix put down a mug on a stone coaster.

“Am I in trouble?” My voice cracked.

“We received a signal from a young trans man whose bio-affective levels rapidly deteriorated after he looked at a photo of your aloe plant. He was the first viewer.” 

“I—”

“Let me finish. Aside from noting that you have sent a vulnerable trans man into the Shadowlands, we have measured your bioaffective aggro levels toward Aiden Chase. We think that having you and Aiden help pull this person back toward his baseline would be a healing process for all involved.”

“Wait. The person in the Shadowlands isn’t Aiden?”

An almost imperceptible smile-line across the Operatrix’s face. “No.” 

Sparkling Sacks of Shungite! 

We’d fucked up.

“We need you and Aiden to fly to California and retrieve Blithe from Joshua Tree National Park, which is where he entered total darkness.”

“I didn’t have a whole extraction team when I was in the Shadowlands,” I pouted. 

“We sent you to Sophie, didn’t we?”

“True. So what happens after we pick Blithe up?”

“You’ll decide on a stable place to bring him back to health. You must ask the Witch how long her hex will last. And Pen?”

“Yes?”

“You must find something to do with all your rage.”

“What if Aiden doesn’t want to come with me?”

“He must.”

I stared as the Operatrix rose, trying to connect the person before me to my idea of a shape-shifting autonomous being who roved around the world connecting queer people through a subaltern, mycorrhizae-modeled network. In the recent past, the queer child of a billionaire had started funding the Rhiz and so the network could jet Operatrixes around and pay for surgeries and offer health insurance. My friend Minna’s sister was part of the Rhiz, and I was always pestering her for gossip, but it remained coiled in mystery. While I was in my Shadowlands, I tried to placate myself by imagining their in-fighting, toxicity, ill-advised hook-ups, and illicit use of data.

I could not imagine queerness leading ultimately to any-thing more than ruin.

The Operatrix moved toward the door, carrying a small pouch that glowed in ever-shifting colors. Damn, a Biometer. Gwen had no reaction to this stranger in her home. It was as if she didn’t even sense the Operatrix’s presence.

“I will have a portfolio of Blithe’s data sent over to prepare you. The Rhiz will also provide your airfare, accommodation, and transportation.”

I stopped myself from saying, I remember back in 20—when the Rhiz had full integrity and no money.

“Goodbye,” the Operatrix said, and extended a ringed hand.

“Bye,” I said, and took it.

I was tempted to run home and tell the Witch that she erred, but that would only inflame my aggro levels. What to do, what to do. 

I called Sid.

“Bra!”

“Hey, bra!” We forever pinged back and forth between mocking masculinity and dipping into it.

“You’re not going to believe this but the Operatrix came over.”

“Shit, dude, are you having another major crisis that you neglected to tell me about?”

“Not exactly. Are you still on your Gram cleanse?”

“Yep.”

I filled him in about Aiden in the city and the dual hexing.

“Gawd, Pen. What did the Operatrix want?” 

“Well, apparently, the person who first looked at my post of Alice got hexed, and now this other trans guy is totally in the Shadowlands in Joshua Tree. And Aiden and I have to go find him.”

“Whoa. What form did the Operatrix take? Because one of the people I’m dating met the Operatrix in the form of a self-described Afro-Caribbean trans goddess named Anubia. My pal Ochre talked to a computer engineer named Milton. And you had that other person back when you—”

I cut him off so I didn’t have to think about my early Shadowland days. “The Operatrix was in a flowy dressing gown and also reminded me of Kathy Acker. Hard to place.”

“Well, I’m starting to believe there is something like divine symmetry in the world if after all this time, the universe has finally forced you to deal with Aiden in a real way.”

“Thanks. I’m sure Sophie will agree with you.” 

My therapist had banned me from talking about Aiden because I turned into a totally devolved baby whenever I mentioned him.

I let Sid know that I’d meet up with him in LA if I wasn’t too busy wrangling Blithe, and then I headed out of Gwen’s apartment. My stomach lurched as I thought about what I’d done to Blithe.

By the time I got home, I was in a total spiral. Labeling it spiraling was not enough to stop the looping images of some young trans dude strangled by sadness and hatred of himself. I held down on the Rhiz-shaped icon on the back of my phone. 

The projector raised up. 

“Yes, Penfield,” the Operatrix said, now wearing corduroy overall-shorts. 

“Blithe is going to be okay, right?” I asked shakily.

“Now is not the time for remorse,” the Operatrix said. I sighed. 

“He would have gone to the Shadowlands either way. But you’ve accelerated the process and that harm is your responsibility.”

I was a child receiving absolution, giddy with the lightness that comes after rooting around in catastrophic thoughts. “I’ll help him.” 

The Operatrix nodded and faded out. 

Copyright © 2021 by Joss Lake, from Future Feeling. Excerpted by permission of Soft Skull Press. 

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Ghost Forest
Pik-Shuen Fung

Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain

After class, I walked to a teahouse by the West Lake. A layer of mist hovered above the water, and among the dangling weeping willows, peach blossoms began to bloom. I sat down by the window and ordered osmanthus tea, which I had never tried before. In the glass teapot, hundreds of tiny yellow flowers floated in hot water. I lifted the lid and the steam smelled of apricots and honey.

As I sipped the tea, I searched for Chinese women artists on my laptop, and began reading about the poet and painter Guan Daosheng. Born in 1262, she was considered to be the greatest female painter in Chinese history, known for her paintings of ink bamboo, which was an unusual genre for women artists at the time. Bamboo was thought to embody strong and gentlemanly qualities—the ability to stay green through the winter, and to bend without breaking. Guan’s bamboo paintings were widely praised. Critics said her confident and vigorous brushstrokes showed no signs that they came from a woman.

My research on Guan Daosheng led me to another artist, active around 925, known as Lady Li. In one account, Lady Li sat outside one evening and noticed the swaying shadows of bamboo under the moonlight. In a moment of inspiration, she picked up her brush, dipped it in ink, and traced the shadows on her paper window pane. From then on, more and more artists imitated Lady Li’s technique, and that was how the genre of ink bamboo was born.

Guan was married to the artist and calligrapher Zhao Mengfu. In her husband’s studio, nine years before her death, she wrote an inscription on one of her paintings:

To play with brush and ink is a masculine sort of thing to do, yet I made this painting. Wouldn’t someone say that I have transgressed? How despicable, how despicable.

This inscription survived, but the painting itself is now lost. Even though Guan Daosheng was seen as the greatest female painter in all of Chinese history, she has only one authenticated painting surviving today. Titled Bamboo Groves in Mist and Rain, the beautiful paper scroll shows feathery groves of bamboo growing along the edge of a riverbank.

This artwork is an example of Guan’s lasting contribution to the genre: she took the technique of ink bamboo and integrated it into landscape painting.

Out of curiosity, I looked up how many of Zhao Mengfu’s paintings remain. It turns out there are countless. His works are collected around the world.

Ghost Forest

A month later, my dad came to Hangzhou. I suggested he visit during the hundredth anniversary of the China Academy of Art, since there would be celebrations. The night before he arrived, I couldn’t sleep. I realized he had never visited me anywhere before, and we hadn’t spent any time alone since I interned in Hong Kong two summers back. I read every tourist guide to Hangzhou, and made a spreadsheet of itineraries.

It was sunny the day my dad arrived. We watched the opening ceremony, which began with firecrackers and a lion dance. Several famous artists attended, and many of them signed the school guestbook with beautiful calligraphy. We stared as an old man with long gray hair and a long gray beard dressed in long gray clothes signed the guestbook. We listened to a woman play pipa in the lobby.

Then I gave my dad a tour of the school campus, and led him to the international student exhibition. For weeks, I crumpled painting after painting before submitting one to the jury. Unlike oil painting, ink painting was unforgiving, and I couldn’t cover up mistakes with more paint.

Whenever I hesitated, holding the brush still for a second too long, the ink flooded the delicate paper. I didn’t tell my dad that my painting had been accepted. I wanted it to be a surprise.

We walked up the pale wood stairs to the top floor. The room was bright, and on the white wall across from the stairs, my painting hung in a dark wood frame under a track of lights.

In the painting, I am riding a brown bird. We are soaring above tree after tree, and each one is white and translucent. I washed white watercolor on gray rice paper to create that effect.

I titled the painting Ghost Forest.

My dad stood in front of the painting for a long time, holding his hands behind his back.

Without looking at me he said, I think there is something wrong with you that you’re making art like this.

I stood there and watched as he walked away, still holding his hands behind his back. As he paced through the rest of the gallery, I stayed a few steps behind him.

Afterward, we went to Lingyin Temple, a Buddhist monastery. The word Lingyin translates to the place where one’s soul retreats. Founded in 326, it is one of the largest Buddhist temples in China, with numerous halls, statues, and grottoes within.

At the entrance, framed by deep green foliage, peaceful gray rock reliefs of Buddhas watched over the long line of people waiting to go inside. They say the temple is famous because people who pray there often see their wishes come true. We walked around in silence, entering the halls together, kneeling before different statues of Buddhas, putting our palms together to pray.

When we took a taxi back to the city center, I asked my dad what he wanted to do next.

Shouldn’t you be the one taking me around? he said.

We could go to the flower garden, I said.

Would that be your top recommendation?

I don’t know, I haven’t been there yet.

You’ve been in Hangzhou for over a month. You’re not very ambitious, are you?

I watched the West Lake pass by outside the taxi window. Mist began to collect on the glass, and soon, tadpoles of rain raced across the windows.

My ankle hurts, I said. I don’t feel like walking anymore.

I asked the taxi driver to drop me off at my dormitory instead. When we arrived, I got out of the car and went up the stairs without looking back. I walked down the dim hallway and knocked on my classmate’s door. She was cooking tomato soup on a hot plate in her bathroom.

I thought you were showing your dad around, she said.

Can I have some? I said, staring at the bubbles on the surface of the soup.

I sat down on her bed and ate two bowls. 

Excerpted from Ghost Forest by Pik-Shuen Fung, Copyright © 2021 by Pik-Shuen Fung. Excerpted by permission of One World, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.