Today, we’re pleased to present an excerpt from Eugen Bacon’s new collection A Place Between Waking and Forgetting, set to be published later this month. Its publisher, Raw Dog Screaming Press, describes it as “dark speculative fiction, an Afro-Irreal collection in which transformative stories of culture, diversity, climate change, unlimited futures, collisions of worlds, mythology, and more, inhabit.”
Naked Earth, an excerpt
NAEEMA’S SKY is falling. Her universe is split into embracing and unshackling, and everywhere is scorching. Privilege is synonymous with who leads or who sponsors. And, right now, with the lefties and right wingers disconcerting the undecided with formation/misinformation, the world is more than random.
She once learnt to tell embracers from the unshackled by the bracelets they wear or don’t. Embracers brandish luminescent bracelets shimmering with kilojoules from yoga, sexual intercourse or the simple act of walking home from an embrace-friendly workplace. Each bracelet transmits kilowatts to a recycling tower that helps save the planet.
The unshackled eat as they like, and wave bare arms as they jog on treadmills or in parks, dripping sweat on rubber mats, naked earth or non-embrace towels.
The undecideds wear blank amulets that sell dear and state nothing, but they incur hefty insurance premiums that are compulsory to renew.
But nothing is black or white because, in the midst of all this dichotomy, are conservatives, moderates and progressives.
#
The undecideds make things difficult, for instance on matters of jury selection, especially in trials where the alleged victim and perpetrator are on either side of belief. The O. Nucks case was one such conundrum—people still brawl about the not guilty verdict where guilt stood right there in the jury’s faces.
Turns out it’s a frequent occurrence that some undecideds firm their belief towards embracement or unshacklement mid-trial, swinging verdicts, or leading to mis-trials.
Naeema’s indecision is not out of choice but from necessity.
#
As a child, she never questioned when Ma recycled Brian’s nappies in embrace bins that a swirly ball in the sky—all clean energy—fortnightly collected. Naeema wished every birthday that she’d unwrap an embrace bracelet that put her on par with her parents, but it never happened.
“We want you to decide for yourself when you’re older,” Pa said the one time Naeema threw a tantrum over the matter.
Ma glowered in the way she did to say the matter was not closed.
Naeema learned as early as kinder that being undecided was not safe. Both embracers and the unshackled bullied the heck out of her because she was seemingly the only undecided kid in the whole class. The teacher divvied up seating in columns of embracers and unshackled, and Naeema sat alone and shunned at a corner in the back.
At primary school, still undecided, she discovered that, no matter how hard she worked, her grades got no better than a C minus. If the teacher was an embracer, students that were embracers scored distinctions. If the teacher was unshackled, students that were unshackled scored distinctions. Not a single teacher was undecided, so Naeema was pretty much fucked.
#
Jezza was Naeema’s first kiss at high school. Jezza walked loose and relaxed, smoked ciggies and said, “Too easy,” to everything. She rolled hand-made tobacco, not clean energy vapes from embrace franchises. Jezza was the kind of girl Naeema thought of as a hippie. They were washing hands in the girls’ toilet at recess when Jezza locked eyes with Naeema across the mirror.
Their kiss put custard in Naeema’s knees. She felt safe and lost.
The affection and euphoria she felt inside the wintergreen taste of Jezza’s tobacco on her tongue was enough for Naeema to declare herself capable of decision-making.
She was thinking about the crazy tantric shit with Jezza—it was like bees making honey on her body and she buzzed and stung all over for days on end—when she firmly declared at the dinner table, “I’m unshackled.”
Brian burst out into an annoying chortling laugh.
“I don’t know what’s the big deal,” said Naeema. “I’m a free spirit.”
“Tell that to your kids when you murder their world,” said Brian.
Ma and Pa never stopped eating. They never looked at her once. It was as if she’d never spoken. But in the kitchen as she topped the recycler, Pa laid a hand on her shoulder, and it spoke volumes. For the first time in her life, Naeema wondered, truly wondered, how much of an embracer Pa was, and whether he was secretly unshackled or something moderate.
Derive, Moderately, an excerpt
Sabi screams angrily, and it wakes Fudge. “Cuddo! Cuddo! Momom!”
She rescues him from the harness. Floats with him in her arms to the hygiene station. They do the wee pump, the pooper. She dry washes him with disinfectant wipes. He sucks on a puree of honey yam, opens his mouth to catch a floating chocolate—misses and cries. There’s only so many times you can entertain a toddler with floating chocolate. She looks at the sachets of liquid seasoning: all spice, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, tamarind. Wonders if they might work as paint. She looks at Fudge. He’s small and messy, a late developer still working on his motor skills. Pepper in the eyes—a godawful din.
She breaks a vacuum-sealed pouch and eats a cube of goat steam-dried with paprika. She does the treadmill on harness, Fudge strapped to her back. She rides the bike, her feet clipped to the pedals. Fudge is pressed close and asleep against her.
After exercise, she wants to get into bustle, but holds herself back. She tries not to worry about radar, range, propellor, heating… She shakes off the dread tucked in her belly, her fear about Mali. It doesn’t take away the axe through her heart. But she’s working through it, reconstructing. Today her head is silent, no hum.
They sleep together, Sabi and Fudge strapped upright. She does not cry her fear.
She wakes up rejuvenated, even though the oxygen filter reading is at 17%.
Will it hold until the mushroom planet? And if it does, what then? But she’s less anxious, more connected with her plight as a refugee.
#
Oxygen filter reading: 9%.
Fudge’s motor skills are improving. He feeds on his own with a real knife and fork, and a plate taped to his swing-out chair. They play hide and seek, Fudge bobbing and floating by himself under the cockpit, in the hygiene corner, flat against the wall alongside Sabi’s upright sleeper. Sometimes he swims on air around her in silence until he can’t help giggling, as she pretends to look for him. They cuddle, and she smells the lemongrass in his unkempt curls. She presses against the softness of his velvet skin.
She looks about the rocket capsule. Nothing is broken. She should have trusted Mali. She didn’t need to worry about the engine, the power, the propulsion or steering systems. She praises whichever gods for not having encountered space debris, solar flares or micrometeorites. As for human error, she has survived herself. She looks at Fudge. He has survived her too.
Time and space are teaching her to be a slightly better mom with him. Calmer, sometimes euphoric especially when she and Fudge press their faces against the triple-paned windows, looking out at nothingness.
She doesn’t question that they haven’t seen the dwarf host stars that Mali talked about from her previous travels. No mudflats, raining diamonds or anything like that.
She smiles. At times like now she feels as if she’s breathing laughing gas.
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She’s a British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy Award finalist, and a finalist in other awards, including the Shirley Jackson, Philip K. Dick and Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, as well as the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen was announced in the honor list of the Otherwise Fellowships for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.
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