Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear Page B

cat-gut and an iron needle and pulled a clean shirt on, and let the forge sit cold.
    He expected a visitor, and she arrived on time. He laid the heart before her, red as red, red blood in its red-gilt iron cage, and she lifted it on the tips of her fingers and held it to her ear to listen to it beat.
    And she smiled.
    When she was gone, he couldn’t face his forge, or the anvil with the vacant chain draped over the horn, or the chill in his fingertips. So he went to see the witch.
    She was sweeping the dooryard when he came up on her, and she laid the broom aside at once when she saw his face. “So it’s done,” she said, and brought him inside the door.
    The cup she brought him was warmer than his hands. He drank, and licked hot droplets from his moustache after.
    “It weren’t easy,” he said.
    She sat down opposite, elbows on the table, and nodded in sympathy. “It never is,” she said. “How do you feel?”
    “Frozen cold. Colder’n Hell. I should’ve gone with her.”
    “Or she should have stayed with you.”
    He hid his face in the cup. “She weren’t coming back.”
    “No,” the witch said. “She wasn’t.” She sliced bread, and buttered him a piece. It sat on the planks before him, and he didn’t touch it. “It’ll grow back, you know. Now that it’s cut out cleanly. It’ll heal in time.”
    He grunted, and finished the last of the ale. “And then?” he asked, as the cup clicked on the boards.
    “And then you’ll sooner or later most likely wish it hadn’t,” the witch said, and when he laughed and reached for the bread she got up to fetch him another ale.

In the House of Aryaman, a Lonely Signal Burns

    Police Sub-Inspector Ferron crouched over the object she assumed was the decedent, her hands sheathed in areactin, her elbows resting on uniformed knees. The body (presumed) lay in the middle of a jewel-toned rug like a flabby pink Klein bottle, its once-moist surfaces crusting in air. The rug was still fresh beneath it, fronds only a little dented by the weight and no sign of the browning that could indicate an improperly pheromonetreated object had been in contact with them for over twenty-four hours. Meandering brownish trails led out around the bodylike object; a good deal of the blood had already been assimilated by the rug, but enough remained that Ferron could pick out the outline of delicate paw-pads and the brush-marks of long hair.
    Ferron was going to be late visiting her mother after work tonight.
    She looked up at Senior Constable Indrapramit and said tiredly, “So this is the mortal remains of Dexter Coffin?”
    Indrapramit put his chin on his thumbs, fingers interlaced thoughtfully before lips that had dried and cracked in the summer heat. “We won’t know for sure until the DNA comes back.” One knee-tall spit-shined boot wrapped in a sterile bootie prodded forward, failing to come within fifteen centimeters of the corpse. Was he jumpy? Or just being careful about contamination?
    He said, “What do you make of that, Boss?”
    “Well.” Ferron stood, straightening a kinked spine. “If that is Dexter Coffin, he picked an apt handle, didn’t he?”
    Coffin’s luxurious private one-room flat had been sealed when patrol officers arrived, summoned on a welfare check after he did not respond to the flat’s minder. When police had broken down the door—the emergency overrides had been locked out—they had found this. This pink tube. This enormous sausage. This meaty object like a child’s toy “eel,” a long squashed torus full of fluid.
    If you had a hand big enough to pick it up, Ferron imagined it would squirt right out of your grasp again.
    Ferron was confident it represented sufficient mass for a full-grown adult. But how, exactly, did you manage to just . . . invert someone?
    The Sub-Inspector stepped back from the corpse to turn a slow, considering circle.
    The flat was set for entertaining. The bed, the appliances were folded away. The western-style table