An Alphabet of Embers - An Anthology of Unclassifiables

Outfitting the Restless Heart, or How the Sky Was Made by Emily Stoddard

The textile traveler does not ask about your destination. He pulls alongside your ship, feels for the pulse of moon-current until his hands make out your ragged hull. He does not ask what you want. There is no salesmanship, no negotiation. He felt the call of your need across the moon-current. He rode the ocean until his ship crossed paths with the vibration of your hope. He already knows you. So he does not ask; he only arrives.

You are trying to calibrate your compass when he startles you. He stares up from the black of ocean. You hold out your lantern to be sure—has your wanting grown so much, enough to reach across currents and pull him in? In the light, his orb-eyes flare with the fluorescence of the fish that swim inside them. He waits. You nod.

He sits on the deck of his boat and begins. The top of a box is removed to reveal a sewing machine. Waterlogged, it spits at him as he considers which spool of thread to choose. Shhhh, he says.

He chooses a thread the color of your grandmother’s eyes—watercolor blue and shifting toward gray. He winds the bobbin, and the sewing machine sighs. Water dribbles out along its sides. With a single fingertip, he traces the thread across the body of the machine and secures it as he moves. He introduces the thread to the bobbin, which yawns in the call to duty.

You are impatient to know which fabric he will choose. Your toes tick up and down as you shift your weight. Your hands form haphazard shadow puppets across the deck of your ship while you whisk them back and forth, across your body, up to scratch your neck—any occupation to distract the wanting mind. Your pupils dilate with the effort, as if hunting for light will speed the process.

At this range, the textile traveler feels the current of your eagerness pressing in like a crowded room. You are distracting him. Shhhh, he says.

He opens a massive trunk, withered from service across the world. A pile of fabrics lives inside in a shouting match of colors. He feels across them, seeking the one that yells or cries or sings in a certain tone. He stops and begins again at least three times. The longer you stare, the longer he must search the fabrics. You walk to the front of your boat, worried that you are making this harder than it has to be.

The ocean runs around you, a shadow repeating itself as a watery hall of mirrors. The world is black except for your lantern and a moon. Out here, everything lives far away or deep down. This is why you ventured out at all—to bring the moon closer, to test the space between lands, to walk in parallel to the creatures that hug the seabed. You brought your most precise compass, your maps in all their certitude, but you discovered that this wild would not be measured, not even by estimation. A vastness to be admired but never fully accounted for. The ocean often measures you instead. It has determined that you are barely the height or depth of even its calmer waves. Remembering this, you return to the textile traveler.

He is sewing at last. The machine parades under his hands. The spool swivels in the effort of becoming undone. You cannot tell which fabric was chosen. It swerves too fast under the press of the needle.

The edge of the fabric nears the machine. The task approaches its crescendo, and the bobbin starts to yodel in its overzealous way. The textile traveler keeps one hand on the machine and stretches the other first toward the moon and then into the ocean. He pulls his hand out of the water in a slow drip, and the space between his fingers vibrates—a moon-current plucked from your own wishing.

He braids the current into the last of the thread and guides the remaining fabric through the machine. With a satisfied sigh, he pinches the thread, and your cloak is separate and whole for the first time. He turns to you and presents it.

The cloak radiates in deep blues and purples and stripes of green. Flecks of gold gather across its width, forming clusters, shooting down and sparkling together at regular intervals. Even at a few feet away, you can tell the cloak is charged with something like magnets, or wind, or maybe lightning. It pulses toward you, alive and beating in a beautiful, violent way.

The textile traveler shakes the cloak at you. His work is done. The fish in his orb-eyes have stopped swimming and now stare at you, floating in anticipation.

You finally take the cloak, and your breath catches at how vast it feels in your hands—its unnerving resemblance to the ocean. You have to look two or three times to be sure: yes, here it is. The whole cloak held in your arms, a width that you understand. How will I know it has worked? you wonder.

Shhhh, the textile traveler says.

You unfurl the cloak and bring it your shoulders. The fabric expands around you. It dances itself across the deck of your ship. You hear it fall across the ship’s wheel and drape its way down the stairs, but you can no longer see where it ends.

It piles and pushes until there is no room on the deck. It climbs the mast, swallows the sails until they are refashioned in a wash of blue and purple. At the pinnacle of your ship, the cloak twirls itself around and around. It pulls away from the mast with each twirl until finally it shoots outward, like a charged arm lunging into its first stretch. As it does, your feet begin to lift from the deck.

Where will I go? you wonder.

Shhhh.

You dangle off the side of your ship as the cloak pulses upward. But you do not drop into the shadow of the ocean. Instead, the cloak holds you. It sweeps below your feet and pulls you into an orbit of purple and gold. It shakes the compass from your pocket, which spins downward, down to the textile traveler who is very far away now. You can measure him with just the tip of your index finger. The ocean now spans the width of your arms. Until the cloak strides upward again, and the ocean collapses to the space of one hand. All the lands and all the waters and all the people now assemble between your arms.

And the moon. She is closer than ever, watchful as a mother. For the first time, your pupils rest. You smile and stretch with the cloak. As you do, ribbons of green and blue light unleash across your body. The small world lights up beneath you. Even the ocean trades its shadows for a reflection of color.

Transfers to Connecting Flights by JY Yang

1.

In my new body I go to the airport to witness my client’s first take-off. I want to see her aerofoils cut through syrupy morning mist, to hear her blades swallow enough air to fill houses, to feel her engines shake bones as she hurtles towards sunlight.

My client asked for the gift of flight. I don’t want to be a bird, she told me. Birds have bodies and have to eat and get tired. They’re messy. I want to be neat and tidy. And see cities that way too, you know? Have you ever seen an industrial plant or rubbish dump from an airplane window? They look so pretty, so small and well-arranged.

She was so young the corners of her lips still dimpled even at rest, the remnants of a happier childhood. Commercial planes last maybe a few dozen years, I warned her.

That’s more than enough for me.

Her body feels loose and stringy, with ill-fitting hips and knees that ache when I walk or sit too long. It was a body well tended to, but no human effort could undo the disease eating it from the inside out. When the doctors chart possibilities for this body, they fall in the realm of months to a year.

But I never begrudge the flaws in the bodies I receive. Each one is precious, a gift. Each one papers over my loss and gives me new hope.

The roar of my client’s takeoff vibrates deeply in the chest she left behind. I hope the views she finds please her.

2.

What’s the biggest thing you’ve transferred someone into? I get this question often, but the answer is often difficult.

This city, for example, was once a small child, short-haired and stoop-shouldered, neither boy nor girl, not even back then. Dig deep enough in its centre and you might find a mud-stained jotter book, buried at a time when the city was still wet and mushy, half-formed plans fermenting in the chaos of postwar independence. From the ground that book was planted into first sprang stands of concrete-and-stone buildings, then cloud-scraping towers of glass and steel.

Cities are more than buildings, just like people are more the bodies they inhabit. Put me in the ground, the child said. I will find my way.

That child’s body was mine for over thirty years, and I dressed it in the style of women, as I preferred at that time. I sometimes wonder what they think of the megapolis they have grown into, but cities keep their own counsel, and very rarely give up their secrets.

3.

I want you to turn me into sea foam, the boy said. "You can do that, can’t you? Like in The Little Mermaid."

His mother died a week ago and they scattered her ashes off the edge of the beach, into green sun-stippled warmth. He had come in straight after school, with his oversized backpack and crumpled shirt and fresh knee scabs gone unkissed.

I can’t turn people into sea foam, I told him. Or the ocean, or clouds, anything like that.

Then what?

I considered nautical things, and the shape of nautical things. I could turn you into a boat. There are plenty moored in the harbour, of all sizes.

Boats make me seasick.

A lighthouse, then. Strong and sturdy against storms. Forever shining a light into the darkness. Would you like that?

I saw something catch in his eyes at the idea, but only briefly. Uncertainty set in: a lighthouse was too concrete, too solid for his tastes. "Will my mother be able to see my