Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History by Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer Page A

fairy gold. This is his journey, from the green hills and forested mountains of his homeland to the coal and the black and the fire, and for once he feels that it is exactly as it should be.
    And here in the glittering dark anything might be possible.
    The line between truth and story is so thin,
Baba Yaga whispers.
Here, thinner still. You are a child of the story, dochka,
half in and half out of the world
.
No one will tell your tale, but I will keep you safe and tell it to myself within the walls of my house; I will feed it to my oven and bake it in my black bread.
    Now give the fire to the seam and dance with me in the ashes.
    Iwan, Iwanka, Janus-faced and true to herself at last, presses her hands against the coal and finds a hard stone that holds a spark within its cold heart. She lifts the razor and strikes, and gives what lies inside to the seam that has run through her life and her world. She turns them both to ash and dust.
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    Wagons carry the dead into the lands beyond like fallen heroes. There are cries for vengeance. There are ordeals that are failed and others that are passed, there is condemnation and a trial, and in the end there is memory of a kind, though no one tells the story of Iwan-who-was-not-Iwan and who was no fool, and how he vanished into the dark after death came to Lattimer.
    But there is fire. There is fire that burns forever in that dark, and in the flames Iwanka dances with Baba Yaga and eats her black bread and her porridge of powdered bone and sweet milk. She dances in the arms of her parents and the other dead, and she dances all the way back to the mountains, to the green and the trees, to the older fires and the memory that sits in the stones like glowing coals. She is with the scattered ones, even the ones who have been forgotten, and the great secret that Baba Yaga sings to those who can hear is that even they have a way of living forever, until, like wheat, they emerge from rich earth, green and new and reaching their arms toward a clear sky.

Art by Alice Meichi Li

Numbers
by Rion Amilcar Scott
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    1919
Maryland
1.
    Out in the middle of the Cross River there is an island. It appears during storms or when the river’s flooding or sometimes even on clear summer days. And sometimes it rises out the water and floats in the air. The ground turns to diamond and you can hear the women playing with the sparkling rocks. The skittery clatter of diamond on diamond and the high laughter of the women – I call them women, but they are not women. So many names for them: Kazzies. Shuantices. Water-Women. The Woes. I like that last name myself. The poet Roland Hudson came up with that one in the throes of madness. Dedicated his final volume,
The Firewater of Love,
to
    Gertrude, Water-Woman, my Woe who caused all the woe… even though, my dear, you are not real, I cannot accept that and will never stop believing in your existence and beautiful rise from the river into my arms.
    Drowned himself in the Cross River swimming after Gertrude and there’s something beautiful in that. Dredge the depths of the Cross River and how many bones of the heartsick will you find along the riverbed? So many poisoned by illusion. Don’t tell me there’s no island and no women rising naked from the depths, shifting forms to tantalize and then to crush. I’ve seen their island and I’ve seen them and gangsters love too; gangsters are allowed love, aren’t we? Sometimes there’s a fog and I know the island’s coming and I snap out of sleep all slicked with sweat and filled with the urge to swim out there to catch a water-woman and bring her back to my bed. If you pour sugar on their tails they can’t shift shapes on you and they have to show their true selves and obey you completely. If I had to do it all over again I’d dust her in a whole 5-pound bag and spend eternity licking the crystals from her nipples. And Amber, a man lost in delirium. Poor, poor Amber.
2.
    Last year, 1918, ended bad for me and for