Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction • C. C. Rayne

The Archivist of Endless Days • David Anson Lee
Name: a lie by omission • Vesper Grove
The Last Orchard • Saroj Kumar Senapati
The Elf-Queen’s Mortal Warder • Vera Nekrasovsky
Watch Without Hands • Fendy S. Tulodo
Rehearsals • PS Cottier
Reanimation Unit • M. Frost
Becoming • Barbara Barry
A Festival for Anything but Chicken and Strawberries • Chris Clemens
Peter, in rainbow mourning • Marisca Pichette
Dracula’s Daughter • Amelia Gorman
Portrait In Glass • Wendy A. Howe
Parallel Parking • Carter Lappin
Phoenix • L. A. Hyland
monument • Sharisa Aidukaitis
Grave Goods • Elis Montgomery
Appetite • Norazha Paiman
A Final Song • AP Ritchey
Maintenance log of the undying • Khayelihle Benghu
Reincarnation Studies, Vol. 2 • Bibhushan Khadka
My Seventh Life • Cailín Frankland
The Archivist Learns to Forget • Abraham Aondoana

The Archivist of Endless Days

I found him in the library no one enters twice:
the one where daylight sleeps on the upper shelves
and dust rises like faint applause at each turning page.

He was cataloging hours:
the minute a child sighed into sleep,
the second a glacier finally admitted defeat.
Each entry shimmered as he wrote,
as if resisting the ink that pinned it down.

“Immortality isn’t living forever,” he muttered,
“it’s being unable to forget.”
He handed me a slip of paper
bearing my earliest recurring dream:
the one with the river that braided itself
around my terrified ankles.

I asked him how the story ends.
He closed the ledger gently, almost tenderly.
“It doesn’t,” he said. “That’s what makes remembering
so heavy.”

When I left, he was still writing my footsteps
into the margins,
refusing to let them fade.

—David Anson Lee

Name: a lie by omission

i know a man who’s had the same dog for generations
a black lab named Pearl who he’s cloned
and cloned again and
you can tell because the white spot on her
chest keeps shifting like fingerprints on the window or
the floaters in your eye each
dog has known no other life than their own and he
knows none but the first
he says he loves them all equally because he loves her
and i suppose my parents too make due with the dust in my room
and the hair in my brush collected dead skin and nostalgia like
bacteria in one's gut
i go home every holiday a different shadow and feel
The Pearl of their affection prickle beneath my skin as
if i’ve got fur still to shed but identity calcifies
or like a dog it grows too much
and too weak to carry itself
and is instead carried out
of its dying place
on and
on

—Vesper Grove

The Last Orchard

In the orchard beyond time,
trees bloom without seasons.
Apples hang forever,
their skins unwrinkled,
their sweetness unspoiled.

I bite one,
and the taste lingers
for centuries,
a flavour that refuses to fade.

Immortality is hunger
without end,
a banquet where nothing rots,
yet no guest ever leaves.

—Saroj Kumar Senapati

The Elf-Queen’s Mortal Warder

He had a vision of her suddenly,
as a pillar of uncarved marble on a lonely shore,
tall and white and stretching skywards.

The world around her rotted;
armies surged past; dark waves ate at the earth
around her bare feet until naught was left.

And still,
there she remained,
alone,
but always uplifting
her fair head towards the heavens,
and catching beads of sunlight in her hands.

It saddened him.
He would have spared her that cup if he could.

—Vera Nekrasovsky

Watch Without Hands

The watch ticks on a stranger’s wrist.
I know the scratch along the glass,
made while running late
to my first job.

The man wearing it is younger
than my son would have been.
He checks the time impatiently,
as if time ever answered anyone.

I cannot warn him.
Immortality arrives without instructions,
like property inherited from the dead.

When his pulse stops,
the watch will move again,
seeking another body
willing to carry it forward.

I remain behind the shop window,
reflected faintly in the glass,
counting seconds that do not belong to me,
still perfectly on time for nothing.

—Fendy S. Tulodo

Rehearsals

Dying isn’t easy, the teacher said –
It needs a choreography, a method.
Either ritual, or a strange variation
on what we have seen before.
So, we practise, drill down,
dying several times a day,
resurrected each time
until we know we are ready
for the real, unedited death,
where no implanted Lazarus chip
will shake us rudely awake,
and we can finally drift away
from our erstwhile immortality.
Renée chose to perfect drowning,
half Ophelia and half Woolf,
and she finally got the gurgles right,
on her two hundredth attempt.
Kenneth chose a sparky demise,
thumb in the power point,
like Little Jack Horner but with a plum
formed of purest electricity.
(Inward curling hands of agony
must have an energetic elegance.)
I have chosen my death,
and enact it avidly,
strapping myself to an anthill,
wrapped in a brown girdle of snake.
Teacher thinks it is over-the-top,
but I say a death should be memorable.
A thousand wee bites, before
the final fangs that will whisk me away –
sweet sharp piercings of mortality.

—PS Cottier

Reanimation Unit

Position Announcement | Second Level
Position: Lead, Reanimation Unit Three
Qualifications: Sorcery IV Certification
Compensation: Military Grade 18, with hazard pay
Position Description: Provide surge support
for high-casualty platoon at warfront with {redacted}

You are on the line of fire
and those who fall—they fall
to you to reanimate, the corps of
their being fresh, easy enchantment,
this measure of immortality simple gift,
at least at the beginning, their frontal lobes
still firing with adrenaline, their loaded guns
blazing, but then there is the pause on the warfront,
the thrilling game of strategic decisions past the pump
of the rifle handle, the grind of the blade, the flash of bombs,
and you are left holding half a platoon of dead bodies, as you wait
to invigorate them, but with no known orders or trajectory for the response

What falls to you is to suspend the corpses from their rot, to bind
their empty bodies with power from your own limbs, to hold
them as if they were a part of your being, to carry
them to the edge of the battle through the work
of your own energy, to carry them gently
in your heart because there
is no other way to use
magic except
completely

—M. Frost

Becoming

Big hello from my millionth awakening
I know you are so very busy
for even telepathic email
but thought you’d like an anniversary update

Coming back is always a pain in the ass
Skin itches over new bone
Laughter punches out a breath
Atmosphere stings my deepest inner knot
waiting for you to materialize

I get too distracted
by the loud acceleration of becoming
for a simple action
like a decaf request forgotten on my order
before revisit one hundred thousand one
a jittery landing
a buzz shakes me into forgetting
a thousand lives at a time

If you see Avux, tell them hello from me
don’t mention my bursts of insensitivity
exact apologies hover beyond me
risk reoffending
by mixing details of all pasts
into faulty checklists of regret

Do you still have the tracking dashboard
you built for me?
I’m not sure where I am
knowing could help
but don’t worry about me
I will be

okay just a second
a disturbance glimmers
in the distance
maybe hematite reflecting
its lumbering determined pursuit

these short lives are my least favorite
hungry beams chase me
with no polite hello
or offer of kind passage
to my next arrival

This was all sold to me
as a never ending
bird soaring in flight
gull able to glide anywhere
low-cost connection
across all lives with decent bandwidth

Are you there?
Do you see me?
If so, send a ping?
If not, I’ll reach out after
I swallow this next blazing light

—Barbara Barry

A Festival for Anything but Chicken and Strawberries

Each cycle people gather in 
Humble Hamlet to feast on 
exotic items they’ve grown 
crafted and scavenged from rare 
monsters. Every Festival is marked 
with a howl of desperation because 
it all tastes the same.

With asteroid Everything-Ender 
rapidly descending many 
concessions were made 
as we rushed to complete 
deep dive VR.
Lifelike visuals and sound were 
high priority. Flavour was not. 
And so thousands of refugees 
in their first year of simulated 
living came with great horror 
to find that everything tasted 
like chicken and strawberries.

After who-knows-how-long 
in Escaepae players had delved 
every dungeon mastered every 
skill reached the bottom of the 
Ever
         Descending 
                             Staircase 
customized and re-customized the 
tint of their greaves many times over. 
The graphics were great but end-game 
humanity faced stagnation. Then the 
Festival: a zealous quest for new 
sensation an endless search through the dark 
and hidden places of this prison for
anything but chicken and strawberries. 

Can we remember how to taste? 
A crunching of carapace and ice-crocus. 
A rising and dashing of dreams. Yet 
hope still squirms 
with every fresh bite 
deep in some forgotten cave or glitch-
   ed-out temple 
one of the Original Programmers 
must have hidden their incomplete code 
knowing the human value
of flavour. People did that 
   you know? 
back in the old world.

They left things behind.

—Chris Clemens

Peter, in rainbow mourning

On the outskirts of never-neverland
a cemetery hosts all our departed friends.

No boys, no bodies slumber here
under headstones whittled from
bunk beds and toy boats.

Instead, ranks and ranks of graves
house polyfill, sandbags, plastic beads
that refuse to dwindle after sun recedes.

On the edges of eternity
we gather, hand in calloused hand.

Another falls—another casualty
of our immortality.

We kneel together, laying the latest to rest:
a teddy bear, absent an eye, two legs,
a nose.

She’ll slumber silently here,
between broken hobby horse
and tuneless xylophone.

For us, we’ll make new games—
more complex, brighter, loud.

Skipping away, we know
each companion served us well

and we will never, never forget
their names.

—Marisca Pichette

Dracula’s Daughter

And when I thought I buried him, he came back
patchy around his eyes and nose and jaw, seeping,
I think they burned him a little, waved torches,
bravado is torture and a monster's grief.

We used to walk by the river at twilight
but even the lilac clouds singe him now
and cause that red pus to re-emerge
like depression at a sunrise.

It wasn’t long until a second funeral,
endless glasses and plates passed,
all the old dark lace dug out of steamer trunks
and all the relatives touching my face.

When I walked in on him reading again
in the library even I resented it a little,
how many times memory would be rubbed
raw on my skin, how the house was never mine.

The third time was freakish, we were hiking
in the woods late one night and a tree just fell,
branch through his heart. “You couldn’t have seen it coming’
the stepmothers said. I almost believe them.

The fourth time was me, I was sick of his cigars
and the blood on his boots and the waves
and waves and waves of grief and the red tide
of nightmare every day in my sleep.

I was lost again on the fifth, and ruined
on the sixth. By the seventh my heart
was too heavy to stake. Another, another,
I accept there is no end to this hallway.

—Amelia Gorman

Portrait In Glass

If it were I who was to be always young,
and the picture that was to grow old,
for that I’d give my soul.…
          —Oscar Wilde

I’m told not to turn away
but swim through the glare
toward my reflection—plunging
into a long gaze
as the waviness
of an old looking glass
absorbs my age and sins.

I’m told I will live
in eternal youth—always
appearing twenty five
and feeling the same

while that mirror confesses
my true face and form
letting others deceive
within their deco frames—
(hand-held, hung or standing.)

I’m told there are no
loopholes or bargains
just the joy

of staying beautiful
and becoming immortal :
an Odalisque, a Mona Lisa
or that Girl With A Pearl Earring…
yet I fear the oncoming tides
of boredom.

The spirit of my conscience
draw-stringed in her two
piece suit, drifting miles out
with water echoing
through a stone accordion
of cliffs—as the moon pulls her
toward oblivion—soon
drowning in the distance

while a sandpiper digs
along the shore
where she’s left her footprints
trailing into the sea.

—Wendy A. Howe

Parallel Parking

We forgot how to die, and so we lived forever
endlessly circling the parking lot
hoping that one day the car would remember how to run out of gas.

—Carter Lappin

Phoenix

They call it beautiful,
but each time it hurts more.

Generation after generation
keep my blasted tale alive.

They gather to witness
my magnificent death.

There is luck, they say,
in my bale shrieks / fine song.

One day, when I am only
scar tissue and scorched pearls

they won't applaud any more
as I cascade into ashes.

They will build a secret temple
to shield the world from my garish

torture / rapture
of living, and living again.

—L. A. Hyland

monument

“these black pixels are my
desperate attempt
to live forever”
I wrote millennia ago
naively
brashly
back when
words were the most permanence
I could hope for,
that or perhaps a bronze statue—
or like Horace and Pushkin, maybe a
combination of the two—
and now I shudder
and I burn the paper I wrote that on—
or rather one of the papers
it was printed on
decades after I first typed it
on a blinking screen
(when we still had those)
and I wish words and bronze
were all that was left of me
because now
these cyrojuices have kept
my heart pumping
for two thousand years
after hers stopped
and the anguish has
yet to diminish

—Sharisa Aidukaitis

Grave Goods

rob me. slip rings from stuck finger bones,
stack bronze bowls abreast clever cups,
scurry up coins lovers left,
long adding to your lot—
ring my pearls around
your neck, choke thanks
when I help
tug them
taut

—Elis Montgomery

Appetite

Eternity has no hunger.
This is the cruelty:
a mouth that cannot starve
is a mouth that cannot feast.

I have tasted joy and grief
until they became synonyms,
until the tongue surrendered
its jurisdiction over flavour.

Now everything tastes
of the inside of my own skull.

The self digests the self
when there is nothing else to eat.

I swallow my own history
and excrete it as myth,
then swallow the myth,
then excrete it as silence.

The silence is still hungry.
The silence will outlive even this.

—Norazha Paiman

A Final Song

01 | This life is no more than a day longer,
02 | A wider morning that would not run out.
03 | I did not know it asked me what to keep
04 | When every ending quietly fell away.
05 | goto line 14
06 | I held each love like something I could save,
07 | But love grows tired of standing still so long.
08 | It wants a closing door, a final song,
09 | Not endless light,
10 | not years that overstay.
11 | If this is life that never lets me leave,
12 | Then death is not the thing I most would grieve, since
13 | goto line 01
14 | At first, I learned the weight of watching change:
15 | The way a voice thins, or a house goes bare.
16 | You stay. The world moves on without your care,
17 | Only endings teach what mattered.
18 | The pattern holds; the reason fades.
19 | goto line 06

—AP Ritchey

Maintenance log of the undying

Each morning I check myself
for faults. A loosened joint.
A bruise that forgot how to fade.

The manual was written for a body
that ends. It cannot tell me
what to do with surplus days.

I oil the hinges of my knees.
I catalogue the scars
none of them remember the knife.

Outside, generations practice dying.
Inside, I practice upkeep.

Immortality, it turns out,
is not a fire
but a schedule.

I have lived long enough
to become equipment.

—Khayelihle Benghu

Reincarnation Studies, Vol. 2
(A Study in the Logic of Salvation)

I woke with the patch notes carved in light—
no lag, no loss, no broken file.
Every lesson pre-installed,
every failure debugged before birth.

The world unfolded smooth as code.
Mountains rendered themselves at my wish.
I spoke, and rivers bowed.
I was the god they promised.

But mastery grows lonely.
The game forgets to fight back.
When every strike lands perfect,
you stop hearing the music of risk.

So I tried unlearning—
missed a step on purpose,
let the blade rust,
let hunger stay an hour longer.

Soon I heard the world stutter again—
a crow with a glitch in its caw,
a child’s shoe stuck in wet clay,
a wind that didn’t obey the script.

I thanked the error.
It felt like prayer.
And for a moment—
I almost believed
I’d been reborn.

—Bibhushan Khadka

My Seventh Life

I spent my seventh life
with my sister, aboard the starship
our mother carved from stone. She was
older than me by then—relativity,
the bane of all birth orders—
and wore deep grooves
along her smile lines, silver
streaking through her hair
like the lightning bolts
of our home-world’s sky. She had
a bum hip on her left side, walked
with a cane as she led me
from the airlock to the kitchen.
It suited her, the way she carried
time—her shoulders stooped but strong,
her skin dotted with sunspots
from gods know how many stars.

I was seventeen years young—again,
or perhaps still.

She made me pancakes,
the batter hissing as it hit
the greasy skillet. You know
the first time I died, how the cabin
depressurized? I said, fetching the syrup
from the cupboard, That’s the sound
the ship made, just before the walls
gave in—it was like the air was sizzling.
She rolled her eyes, flipping the pancake
with a spatula. It happened in a microsecond,
babes. You can’t possibly remember.

My seventh was my shortest life—
a smattering of stories
slurred across the cockpit, the ghosts
of burnt pizza and boxed wine
heavy on our tongues. We slept in bunks
and traded clothes, took turns spacewalking
by the light of a near sun until
our bodies’ degradation precluded it.
I cannot tell you how long we lived that way,
in days or years or seconds—only that we died
hand in hand, in her bed.

We did something together.

—Cailín Frankland

The Archivist Learns to Forget

In the ninth millennium,
I keep the weather.

I spool each century of wind
onto copper wire,
press the storms flat
as in glass plates, like flowers;
and stack them in the vault
beneath the glacier that
is not melting any more on my account.

I do not age—
a clerical mistake of the universe,
a misfiled soul
lost between “temporary”
and “permanent record.”
So I became an archivist.

I have inhaled the breath of the first human being.
and the last human scream.
I have been taught the tones of dead oceans,
their salt and gravitude syllables.
I am able to memorize the exact coordinates.
of every abandoned city,
though I no longer remember
the color of my mother's eyes.

That's the cost—
there is no forgetting nothing but yours.
Immortality is a library
at the place where the lights remain put.
and the books never close,
yet somehow
you lose the bookmark
that makes you know your way home.

Tonight, a new storm gathers—
wild, impossible, the magnitude of an age.
It calls my name
(or the name I used to have)
and asks whether I wish
to record it
or finally
be erased.

I stand in the doorway,
pen trembling,
and—for the first time in ages—
I forget to choose.

—Abraham Aondoana