I had a dream the other night where I’m standing near a lake, when all of a sudden this old VW bus comes rumbling across the grass and – SPLASH – drills straight into the water. How I could tell that my old buddy Chan was driving was one of those dream mysteries, so, worried for his safety, I ran along the bank shouting his name, until I finally spotted him, casually backstroking away from the now submerging vehcile. 

     “Are you OK!?” I hollered.

     “Yeah,” he said, waving me away. “Just had to get rid of this old thing, is all.”

     Chan moved out of state about a decade ago, and I haven’t seen him in years, so why he would suddenly make an absurd cameo appearance in a dream is beyond me. But it gets even stranger, because later the next morning, I’m working in my office when I hear a tap on the window. I turn.

     Hunched over is no other than Chan himself, grinning like he just drove a VW bus into a lake.

     Don’t ask me how to explain this. Sure, you could chalk it up to coincidence, but I think Gandalf put it nicely: “There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo.”

     The years since his departure haven’t been easy for either of us; more recently came Chan's leukemia. I don’t know why disasters strike, no more than I know why people randomly pop into dreams and then show up on doorsteps while passing through town. Life is a grind. And it doesn’t always end the way we want.

     But sometimes, things work out. Sometimes, our lives are changed. Sometimes, even the dragons are driven back into their lair.

     Remission, I think, is the word for it.

     

    Driving to work recently on a Tuesday morning, our editor-in-chief was promptly pulled over and fined $400. Why? Catch the full story in our latest podcast episode HERE (or anywhere you listen). Further inspired, Dan also wrote a song about (or to?) officer Peter Owen. Have a listen!

By Dana Wall

 

The ladybugs arrived on a Tuesday, the same day Dr. Foster told me the cells in my left breast were dividing with purposeful fury. I came home to find them gathering on my bedroom windowsill—first dozens, then hundreds, their lacquered backs gleaming like drops of blood beading on white gauze.

     “It’s a hibernation,” my neighbor explained when I called in a panic. “They cluster before winter. Happens every few years. Harmless.”

     But Mrs. Abernathy hadn’t seen how they arranged themselves on my window: a perfect outline of a breast, complete with a dark center where they clustered most densely. I took it as a sign, though of what I couldn’t say. The universe acknowledging the betrayal happening beneath my skin?

     I didn’t tell my daughter about the diagnosis when she called that night. Lily was in her first semester at Berkeley, voice bright with discovery, unaware that her mother was becoming a landscape of invasion. Instead, I asked her about ladybugs.

     “They’re coleoptera,” she said, biology major already showing. “They secrete a yellow fluid when threatened. Smells awful, stains everything. It’s called reflex bleeding.”

     Reflex bleeding. The phrase followed me to bed, where I dreamed of yellow fluid seeping from between my fingers as I pressed them against my chest, trying to hold something essential inside.

     By morning, the ladybugs had moved. They covered the bathroom mirror in a constellation that resembled my latest mammogram—white background, dark masses where no darkness should be. I was thirty minutes late to work, unable to brush my teeth or apply makeup while they watched with their blank, obsidian eyes.

     “You need an exterminator,” my sister said over lunch, after I confessed about both the diagnosis and the insects. Rachel had survived her own battle three years earlier, had the reconstructed chest and chemo-induced platinum hair to prove it. “Or stay with me until they’re gone.”

     “I can’t leave them,” I said, surprising us both. “They feel...significant.”

     Rachel’s eyes softened with familiar pity. “The mind creates meaning when the body betrays us. Don’t read too much into the bugs, Helen.”

     But that afternoon, I declined the exterminator’s services. Something about the ladybugs’ perfect red shells—so intact, so symmetrical, so unlike what was happening inside me—felt necessary, like their presence was a counterpoint to my dissolution.

     They continued their occupation as autumn deepened. I became accustomed to their rustling movements, the faint smell of something sweet and bitter beneath the chemical aroma of their defensive secretions. I named the largest one Sylvia, after the poet whose words suddenly made visceral sense: dying is an art, like everything else.

     My treatment plan took shape: surgery before Thanksgiving, radiation after New Year’s. The ladybugs formed new patterns each day, arranging themselves in shapes that mimicked my medical diagrams—the outline of a tumor, the tract of lymph nodes, the radiation field mapped onto my chest wall.

     “Mom, that’s not normal,” Lily insisted during her weekend visit home. “It’s like they’re... communicating.”

     “Perhaps they are,” I said, watching how they parted around her finger when she touched the mirror, reforming the pattern seconds later. Perfect symmetry. Perfect order. Everything my body now lacked.

     The night before surgery, I couldn’t sleep. The ladybugs had gathered on my bedside table, surrounding the orange vials of pre-operative medications. In the moonlight filtering through my curtains, they seemed to pulse with a collective heartbeat.

     “Are you here to witness?” I whispered. “Or to carry something away?”

     One detached from the group, crawled onto my hand, its tiny feet tickling my skin as it explored the blue veins at my wrist. I felt an unexpected kinship with this creature—both of us housing something vital inside fragile shells.

     When I returned from the hospital, breast excised and replaced with surgical packing, the ladybugs had migrated to my recovery chair. They formed a cushion of living insects, their collective warmth somehow soothing against my bandaged chest. The pain medications made their movements seem deliberate, choreographed—a scarlet ballet performed for an audience of one.

     “This isn’t right,” Rachel said when she came to check on me. “You’re not thinking clearly. Let me call someone.”

     “They’re helping,” I insisted, watching them crawl along the edge of my surgical drain, seeming to measure the fluid’s daily decrease. “They understand something about transformation.”

     I learned to live with their presence through recovery. They followed me from room to room, a crimson shadow that arranged itself into meaningful patterns: the signature line on medical forms, the arc of the radiation beam, the jagged peaks of my pain scale diary.

     Lily flew home for Christmas, brought me a gift of a vintage etymology book with beautiful hand-colored plates. “So you can identify your roommates,” she said, trying for lightness but watching with concern as a ladybug crawled from my cardigan sleeve.

     I didn’t tell her I’d stopped seeing them as insects weeks ago. They had become something else—cellular, interior. Not invaders but witnesses, marking each progress, each setback. When I vomited from the medications, they formed a circle around the toilet bowl. When I cried from frustration, they gathered my tears into their bodies, turning the droplets from clear to amber.

     Radiation began in January, five days a week of lying beneath machines that hummed with invisible intent. I returned home each day to find the ladybugs arranged in new configurations that mapped my treatment field, their bodies concentrated where the burn ached the worst.

     “Ladybugs hibernate in winter,” my radiologist commented when I mentioned them. “They’re attracted to warmth. Perhaps they sense the heat from the radiation in your skin.”

     I didn’t correct her misconception. How could I explain that these creatures were not following ordinary insect logic? That their movements corresponded to my cellular changes, to the death of malignant tissue, to the slow reclamation of my body?

     On the final day of treatment, I dragged myself home to find them gathered on my kitchen table, arranged in a perfect mandala. At its center lay a single molted shell, transparent and empty. I placed it in a small box lined with cotton, tucked it into my nightstand drawer beside the fentanyl I hadn’t needed.

     That night, the ladybugs began to leave. Not all at once, but in organized groups, their departure as methodical as their arrival had been. Through the open window they flew—red confetti against the February sky, carrying something invisible but essential with them.

     By morning, only Sylvia remained, perched on my pillow as I woke from the first dreamless sleep I’d had in months.

     “Thank you,” I whispered, though for what exactly, I couldn’t articulate.

     She opened her wings, revealing the intricate black architecture beneath the red dome. For a moment, she seemed suspended between staying and going, between bearing witness and granting solitude.

     Then she was gone, a final cardinal point vanishing into the winter light.

     The house felt cavernous without them. I ran my fingers over the windowsills, the mirror edges, the picture frames where they had clustered—seeking evidence of their occupation. Nothing remained except faint yellow stains, the reflex bleeding Lily had mentioned months earlier. In sunlight, the stains formed patterns like star charts, mapping territories both traversed and still to come.

     Six months later, the scans showed no evidence of disease. “Unremarkable,” the radiologist called my images—the highest praise in medical parlance. I sent Lily a text with the news, added a ladybug emoji. She responded with a string of hearts.

     That night, I dreamt of red shells opening to reveal wings transparent as newly healed skin. I woke with the certainty of being watched, though by what, I couldn’t say. The bedroom was empty of insects, the air still. But on my chest, directly above the surgical scar, I found a single yellow stain—proof that some transformations, once witnessed, leave their mark forever.

 

~~~

About the author:

     Dana Wall traded balance sheets for prose sheets after years of keeping Hollywood's agents and lawyers in perfect order. Armed with a Psychology degree that finally proved useful when creating complex characters and an MBA/CPA that helps her track plot points with spreadsheet precision, she ventured into the haunted halls of Goddard College's MFA program. Her work, which has appeared or is forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Fabula Argentea, and Columbia Journal Online confirms that words are more reliable than numbers, though occasionally harder to balance.

 

By R. F. Marazas

 

Letter to General Harrison from Oliver Hazard Perry, United States Brig Niagara, off the Western Sisters :

“We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

 

Beyond my window, the sands of Mars shift like some great restless beast disturbed in sleep. Something undefined nags at me. Not the whiplash storm that greeted us at touchdown, keeping us prisoners for twenty-six hours listening to the sand pound in sheets against the hull. Not the eerie, deathlike, non-movement after the storm that makes a silence you don’t need to hear because you can see it. This is something else, unreal. Something. How can you define it when you have no reference? I’d never heard anything like the sand pounding the hull, never heard a silence like this one that followed. So how am I supposed to define this other something?

     My eyes are gritty, leaking tears a dull gray color. My nose and mouth leak too, a steady drip. I’ve been staring at the patches of coppery sand. One minute the sand builds a chain of hills miles away, the next it reappears within twenty yards of the ship in grotesque shapes that seem alive. Staring is useless. The sand keeps changing, but I only see the result.

     My skin is clammy, with a shiny slickness that no amount of wiping will stop. My clothes cling to me like damp tissue paper. Touching surfaces leave my splotched oily fingerprints in strange pop-art patterns. I can’t wipe those away either.

     So there it is, simple enough: my life is slowly draining away. When it stops, I’ll be dead….

About the author:

     R.F. Marazas won first place and tied for first in two novel contests for his unpublished novel, Legend Blues, and published short fiction and flash fiction in ten Anthologies and online and print venues.

 

Isn’t this the perennial question?

 

I spent decades writing “on the side,” “as a labor of love,” and all the other clichés that indicated I didn’t believe it was possible to make a respectable living as a writer. Journalist, marketer, technical writer, teacher of writing, yes. But creative writer? I didn’t believe it.

Until I did.

 

Call it a midlife crisis if you want, but in my mid-40s, I started wondering when I would take myself seriously. I mean, I’ve always identified as a writer first and foremost, but it was the thing I did “whenever I had free time.” Which wasn’t often.

 

I wrote books and they got published, but none made any money. I wrote articles and essays on the side of my lucrative marketing career. And I dreamed of being an author who lived on the fat of my earnings from book sales and author talks.

 

When I decided to take myself seriously, I shifted my life to make it actually happen. Just like I did with my two businesses, I created a strategy and a timeline and I committed to the outcome I wanted.

 

I began writing every day. I submitted finished pieces far and wide. I hired a writing coach to fast-track my essays and get them out in the world. I reconnected with editors I’d met through marketing and public relations channels, told them what I was doing, and asked if there was room for me to write for them.

 

I approached my author career just like I did my “real” career—planning, researching, committing to a schedule, networking and finding mentors who’d succeeded at what I wanted to succeed at.

 

One day about two years later, I realized, “wow, I’ve done it!” Shifted my schedule, yes, and generated some income from writing. I was focusing my most creative time of each day on what I love to do—write!—and I had a book in the publication pipeline.

 

In fact, while I had eight books traditionally published through small presses between 1996 and 2013, I made the leap to creating my own publishing imprint and self-publishing my books for many reasons, not the least of which was that I wanted to earn as much as possible from my book sales and not give up earnings to gatekeepers.

 

So if you want to make a living writing, here’s what you need to know…

 

Sign up for my weekly newsletter on writing

Buy WOMAN OF VALOR
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Listen to the Make Meaning Podcast

     In 1989 Jim Baen signed me to a contract for a novel, to be named, Cyberpunk…Actually, I signed two contracts. One was for Cyberpunk, and the other was to develop a three-book shared-world anthology series. Of the shared-world clusterf*** there is much that could be said, but perhaps it is best to leave it with these simple words from Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun, chapter 11, page 74:

 

    If you're not familiar with Bruce Bethke, you probably should be. Aside from being the guy who wrote (and coined the word) Cyberpunk, he also runs a magazine and has a pretty storied history in and out of the writing world. And when he writes about those storied histories, we like to pay attention. So read the next installment of Bruce (reminiscing, recounting, lamenting?) The Saga of Cyberpunk by CLICKING HERE.

Listen on:

Dear Story Unlikely,

     I get that literary journals are largely a labor of love, aren't exactly cash cows these days, but there's some shady stuff out there: outrageous contest submission fees, and venues that almost seem to DISLIKE in advance the writers trying to get into their pages. I wish "breath of fresh air" wasn't such a cliche, because that's really what you folks feel like.

     I love what you wrote about good stories coming in all types. I have a problem with "genre," if that isn't obvious =) As in, I can't seem to stay in one. I consider my stuff to be literary fiction, first and foremost about the characters, but a horror or sci-fi element always seems to find its way into every story I want to tell. Which makes it a little difficult with some of the more, ahem, "erudite" and "sophisticated"-type places. 

     Anyway, here's hoping you like [my story]. And I would LOVE to see what an illustrator would do [with it]. That would be so cool. Whether or not you choose my story, I think I can speak for all submitting writers when I say thank you. And no submission fee to boot? Well, look at you!

 

Sincerely,

Raymond Arcangel 

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