ISSUE #14 | EXCERPT, "COME THE BANSHEE"
AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #14
Written by Maxine Sophia Wolff
Cover Illustration by Kelly Williams
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Maxine Sophia Wolff is a transgender writer from Virginia. Her work has appeared in Scum Mag, Fusion Fragment, and Bleed Error. She also writes interactive fiction.
Maria sits inside the chest of her previous body. Her spine curves upwards and out from where it used to sit, the expended flesh all but split into unrecognizable pieces. Her legs are still stuck—which annoys her—so with a violent snap she wrenches her knees skyward, popping them loose. With a single movement she pulls them out—out from the hollowed bones in which they grew, past paddings of fat and knotted bitter muscles. Maria likes to imagine herself as a crab when her body goes through this. It’s somehow calming. So, she fills her head with crustaceans, and then she slips herself out and steps free.
At her feet, her old body is a mess. The chest is shattered open, ribs broken and upright, torn flesh gaping like a basking shark in the shallows. She grimaces, and then sets to work with a broom.
She’s still sticky with blood when she steps into the kitchen. She does her stretches right there in front of the fridge, naked and filthy. Once done, she plucks an orange from the icebox and begins to peel and separate it. An ocean breeze flutters through the window behind her. It is barely morning, still dark, and the air carries with it a strange smell—a seething something not dissimilar to pollen. At the base of the city, wreathed in sheets of busy wind, sits the harbor and its ghostly light. And on one of the docks… there is a crowd. Maria’s eyes narrow and focus until the distance is made irrelevant. She sees the crowd clearly. It looks busy.
Maria is bored, and so Maria decides to go. Her schedule is clear anyways—the Priory hasn’t given her work in a while. She wreathes herself in a black cloak, pops the hood over her feathered head, and leaves.
Spot illustration by Maura McGonagle
“A horse?”
“A horse skeleton.”
Isaac sits on a barrel, sand in his hair, looking a little delirious. Behind him, holy men from the Priory are busy blasting the fishing boat with a massive hose pulling sand from a nearby tank. Atop the tank, another holy man repeats a short blessing, ordaining the substance with cleansing power. A sharp cone of backspray mists the oval-shaped prayer masks of these priests with fine layers of sediment. One of them—a woman—is trying her best to clear the crowd.
“Can you tell me anything else?” Maria asks Isaac, her face hidden by a prayer mask swiped from the Priory’s cart.
“I don’t know. It was on fire. I saw green. I already spoke to the Prior about this, I don’t know why I have to repeat it to you.”
A coffin full of eels… a flaming horse skeleton… Maria chews on these details, worry furrowing in her brow.
“Is there anything else you can tell me?”
“No. Like I said, I already told the Prior all of this. If you want to know more, you should ask Brick. He saw more than I did—knows more about this stuff too. He’s the one who opened it.”
Maria grimaces. This was Brick’s boat. His omen. Struck by realization, Maria’s hidden face flushes red, and she excuses herself, cursing her own recklessness as she flees. If the Priory had caught her speaking with Brick, she would have surely been punished. Such a thing is forbidden.
Her mind churns back to the omens. A coffin for death. Eels for secrecy. A horse for a bargain. This was Brick’s omen, and the Prior was here. It starts to make sense with a sudden and terrible swiftness. Maria moves like a wraith as she leaves, sticking to the shadows, nerves knotting in her stomach. When she gets home, she throws the stolen mask into the garbage and begins to prepare a frantic dinner. Three livers freshly delivered from the Priory, two oranges, and a glass of hot cider. She eats on her roof, basking in the dim green light of the city, wondering why the thread has finally decided to fray.
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Issue #14 is an A5” paperback book with a soft touch cover.