Speaker 1: Cal Zone Media book Club, book Club, book Club, book Club,
Speaker 1: Solstice book.
Speaker 2: Club, that's what people always call this. It's a Solstale
Speaker 2: book Club.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Cool Zone Media book Club, the
Speaker 1: only podcast where you don't have to do the reading
Speaker 1: because I do it for you. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
Speaker 1: And this week and next week I have a story
Speaker 1: that I wrote. Happy Solstice, everyone, to honor the dark,
Speaker 1: to celebrate the return of the light, and to indulge
Speaker 1: yourselves in the legacy of storytelling and gift giving. I'm
Speaker 1: going to share first of two parts of one of
Speaker 1: my own stories. Next week you'll get the second half.
Speaker 1: And this story means a lot to me. This story
Speaker 1: is called Everything that Isn't Winter, which is a okay,
Speaker 1: look it takes place in Beltane, but it's called Everything
Speaker 1: that Isn't Winter and it's about how one relates to
Speaker 1: the season of winter. And I don't know this one.
Speaker 1: It means a lot to me because I wrote it
Speaker 1: at the end of the Clarion West Workshop for Short
Speaker 1: story Writing and it was kind of my like, I
Speaker 1: have learned so much about craft and I've been writing
Speaker 1: at a somewhat professional level for a little while before that,
Speaker 1: but this story was still, like on a craft level,
Speaker 1: really important to me. And also it was one of
Speaker 1: my first big short story sales. It sold to tour
Speaker 1: dot com in I think twenty fifteen and really kind
Speaker 1: of helped set my career up. So this is a
Speaker 1: different kind of Christmas story, But what are we here
Speaker 1: if non traditional? It's still got found family, It's got
Speaker 1: self actualization and enough winter to justify the choice, and
Speaker 1: I hope you all enjoy it. Everything that Isn't Winter
Speaker 1: by Margaret Kiljoy. The evening sky was a spring gray,
Speaker 1: which is different than a winter gray, and the soft
Speaker 1: light that came down through the clouds lit up the festival.
Speaker 1: Fires danced and people danced, and my boyfriend was dancing
Speaker 1: with a woman who was there to work the harvest.
Speaker 1: They were hitting it off. It looked like everything was
Speaker 1: perfect in what was left of the world. At the
Speaker 1: in Between Lodge, we picked most of our tea leaves
Speaker 1: on beltane. Traditionally, the first flush is in March and
Speaker 1: the second is in June. But traditionally tea was imported
Speaker 1: from Asia, and obviously we hadn't had contact with anywhere
Speaker 1: that far away in decades, so While we do a
Speaker 1: modest first flush and second flush, most of what we
Speaker 1: grow is what you'd call jarling in between. We grow
Speaker 1: it in the middle of what used to be called
Speaker 1: Washington State, so it's not really jarling at all. Just
Speaker 1: in between. I sipped from a ceramic cup of mushroom
Speaker 1: tea weak enough that it just sharpened me up, made
Speaker 1: me aware of patterns of bodies and light. I wasn't
Speaker 1: on duty, but I was on call, and my rifle
Speaker 1: was stacked at the guard post by the eastern gate,
Speaker 1: so I didn't get any further into another realm than
Speaker 1: just the one cup of tea. We'd adulterated the mushroom
Speaker 1: with oolong from the first flush, and the pleasant and
Speaker 1: revolting tastes fought in my throat a little war between
Speaker 1: caffeine and psilocybin. The band played war songs on guitars
Speaker 1: and fiddles and drums. The handsome men of the choir
Speaker 1: sang the songs I'd fought to, songs I relish, songs
Speaker 1: that transport us from the world of the living to
Speaker 1: that liminal space of both battle and sex where we
Speaker 1: make and take life. My bare feet were in earth,
Speaker 1: the mountain wind in my hair. My boyfriend's dance partner
Speaker 1: wandered to the edge of the crowd, and I went
Speaker 1: to stand beside her. You must be aiden, She turned
Speaker 1: toward me. I am, Khalil was just talking about you. You.
Speaker 1: Khalil was still dancing, now alone, thick legs kicking out
Speaker 1: as he spun. He was awkward and completely in his element.
Speaker 1: I love him, I said, I gathered as much.
Speaker 2: She said.
Speaker 1: She was watching him the same way I watched him.
Speaker 1: You should sleep with him, I said. She turned toward me.
Speaker 1: The spark's gone, I said, has been for years. I
Speaker 1: can get late easily enough, but it isn't as easy
Speaker 1: for him. She was just staring at me. I've never
Speaker 1: been good with reading faces. I saw myself and the
Speaker 1: firelight reflected and dancing in her green eyes. That's how
Speaker 1: it works for me, anyway, I went on. Whenever I
Speaker 1: sleep with someone else, it just makes me want him
Speaker 1: all the more. You should sleep with him. An autumnal
Speaker 1: smell broke my train of thought. Autumnal smells had no
Speaker 1: place during Beltane, but there it was, amidst the ambient
Speaker 1: scent of the tea fields, the iron sweat of the dancers,
Speaker 1: the pines smoke. A voice carried through the evening sense
Speaker 1: fire burning tea plants. The smell was burning tea plants.
Speaker 1: I ran for my rifle, snatched it up, and went
Speaker 1: into the rows toward the growing pillar of smoke. It
Speaker 1: started off as a Doric column, shifting to Atlas holding
Speaker 1: the world on his shoulders.
Speaker 2: By the time I reached it.
Speaker 1: It was yigdrassil, the world tree, thick and ropey and
Speaker 1: holding up every one of the worlds. There was no lightning,
Speaker 1: no likely cause, but arson. I ran toward the edge
Speaker 1: of the forest, beyond the fields, to search for culprits.
Speaker 1: At night we see movement. In the day, we see shape,
Speaker 1: but in the gloaming we see nothing. I saw nothing.
Speaker 1: It took fifty of us to cut a fire break
Speaker 1: to keep the blaze from spreading, tearing into tea plants
Speaker 1: with machetes while the fire tore into our livelihood. The
Speaker 1: band played because what else can you do? Of the
Speaker 1: hundred rooms in the lodge, ours was in the northeast corner,
Speaker 1: closest to the fields in the forest. The poster bed
Speaker 1: was ancient, had been ancient before the apocalypse. It had
Speaker 1: been through worse than we ever had. The tea had
Speaker 1: worn off, but spring nights of their own magic. I'll
Speaker 1: never understand or forgive. And there was no cell in
Speaker 1: my body that was feeling sober or responsible. Calil was
Speaker 1: on his side, staring out the window at the burned
Speaker 1: fields lit by the moon and the dark woods. The
Speaker 1: moon couldn't light. I stood in the door. I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: he said, it's fine. I said, it wasn't. It's just
Speaker 1: that it's bell tine, it's spring, sex and flowers and
Speaker 1: all that shit. I should want you. It's fine, I said,
Speaker 1: it wasn't. I've never much cared for spring.
Speaker 2: That part was true.
Speaker 1: You look beautiful tonight, he said, But he was looking
Speaker 1: at the forest. He didn't look at me much anymore.
Speaker 1: What about that woman, the one you were dancing with,
Speaker 1: I asked, the one who avoided me after you scared
Speaker 1: her off?
Speaker 2: That one?
Speaker 1: It's fine, he said. There wasn't much more to say.
Speaker 1: I left our room and I left him there, and
Speaker 1: I went to go sleep at the guard post. But
Speaker 1: do you know what won't leave you on a cold
Speaker 1: night to go to sleep alone in the barracks and
Speaker 1: deal with their attachment issues? Because they are loving and
Speaker 1: steadfast and forever.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: It's the goods and services advertised on this show, unless
Speaker 1: it's gambling. Please don't do that. Gambling does not love
Speaker 1: you back, and we're back. First light found me in
Speaker 1: the forest with Barley, our scout. Sword fern grew up
Speaker 1: from the ground. Maidenhair fern grew out of the rock
Speaker 1: walls of gullies, and Usnia hung from every limb of
Speaker 1: every tree in handsome gouts of green. We walked along
Speaker 1: down cedared trees in the wet fog. I didn't follow
Speaker 1: Bartley's footsteps, not exactly, because one person leaves tracks, but
Speaker 1: two people leave trails. The forest is something I know.
Speaker 1: A rifle is something I know. Violence I know. We
Speaker 1: stopped to break our fast under the boughs of an
Speaker 1: old growth black cottonwood that towered over much of the
Speaker 1: rest of the forest. We ate jerky, tough but fresh,
Speaker 1: and we passed a thermas of tea, just tea. You
Speaker 1: lost the trail, didn't you, I asked, Never was one,
Speaker 1: Bartley said. Bartley had a lazy eye, was always looking
Speaker 1: out to the side, like she was a prey animal.
Speaker 1: Gray and white ran through her. Otherwise black hair, and
Speaker 1: she was old enough that she should have remembered the
Speaker 1: old world. She always swore she didn't that. The first
Speaker 1: thing she remembered was being alone in the woods, barely
Speaker 1: post pupessant, as she cut up a deer. Her life
Speaker 1: had begun at the same time, so many lives had ended.
Speaker 1: A lot of people her age are like that. Khalil
Speaker 1: and I, our lives had begun with our berths. The
Speaker 1: next year, in the post collapse baby boom, a lot
Speaker 1: of danger meant a lot of kids got born. What
Speaker 1: are we doing, then, I asked, If I was going
Speaker 1: to raid us, i'd have camped up this hill. Bartley said,
Speaker 1: there's a spring up there, one you can drink from,
Speaker 1: and a few open cliff faces that let you spy
Speaker 1: on us. Why do you think they did it, I asked,
Speaker 1: Bartley shrugged. People don't like it when other people have
Speaker 1: nice things. The in Between Lodge was nice. There was
Speaker 1: no denying that we were a collective of fifty five adults,
Speaker 1: forty children, and another sixteen people half way between those
Speaker 1: two categories. We'd raised up the lodge ten years back,
Speaker 1: just as the New World settled into place and drew
Speaker 1: its political borders, just as I'd left my teenaged years.
Speaker 1: We grew tea, and we played our part in the
Speaker 1: New World's mutual aid network of a few interdependent city states, communes,
Speaker 1: and hamlets. We sold, gave or traded provisions to people
Speaker 1: passing through the old railway tunnel, and we guarded Stampede
Speaker 1: Pass the eastern edge of the New World. Well, mostly
Speaker 1: Bartley and I guarded Stampede Pass. Everyone could fight, everyone
Speaker 1: stood watch in rotation, but Bartley handled terrain and tracking
Speaker 1: while I ran tactics. Who made this jerky? Bartley asked,
Speaker 1: And what the hell kind of not tasty animal died.
Speaker 2: To make it?
Speaker 1: You grumpy? I asked, damn right? Bartley said, I'm hungover
Speaker 1: and I didn't even get to sleep between drunken. Now
Speaker 1: she shook the thermos and we're out of tea. We caught
Speaker 1: him with his dick in the wind. It wasn't luck.
Speaker 1: We'd been waiting around for almost an hour for him
Speaker 1: to do something like fall asleep or get up to piss.
Speaker 1: Bartley had been right. He'd been camped up on the ledge,
Speaker 1: camouflaged by a bush, watching the in between with glare
Speaker 1: free binoculars. He was under fed, or maybe he was
Speaker 1: just built that way, and he kept scratching at his
Speaker 1: scalp like he was lousy, younger than me, less than
Speaker 1: half Bartley's age, and he had all the bushcraft of
Speaker 1: a city kid. His clothes were wrong for the west
Speaker 1: side of the mountains, too urban, too old world. There
Speaker 1: he was pissing off the cliff when I walked out
Speaker 1: from behind the tree with a rifle leveled at him.
Speaker 1: I saw him think about dropping his dick and going
Speaker 1: for his rifle, and I saw him realize that wasn't
Speaker 1: going to work. He put his hands in the air.
Speaker 1: If he was smart and his gang could afford it,
Speaker 1: he had a radio set to automatic voice activated transmission,
Speaker 1: and there was someone listening on the other end, but
Speaker 1: he was too dumb to shave his lice infested hair.
Speaker 1: I was pretty sure we'd got him cold. You're going
Speaker 1: to tell me a lot of things, I said, You
Speaker 1: tell me those things and you'll get supplies and a
Speaker 1: one way trip on whatever caravan you want. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: tell you the color of the lips of your mother's cunt.
Speaker 1: I shot him. The rifle slammed into my shoulder. The
Speaker 1: report scattered birds and hurt my ears.
Speaker 2: The bullet hit.
Speaker 1: Him in the neck and sent him tumbling over the
Speaker 1: edge of the cliff. You kidding me, Bartley asked. Well,
Speaker 1: I wasn't going to torture the kid, and he didn't
Speaker 1: want to talk nice. Bartley shook her head. Now we've
Speaker 1: got to go find him, you know, she said, search
Speaker 1: his body. Maybe I'll have some tea. We eventually found
Speaker 1: the wreckage of the man at the base of the cliff,
Speaker 1: his ribs sprouting from his chest. The noon sun and
Speaker 1: I both kept watch over the forest while Bartley combed
Speaker 1: over the body. Help me lift him, Bartley said, I
Speaker 1: got my hands under what was left of the bandit's
Speaker 1: armpits and lifted his inside stripped down my leg. I'm
Speaker 1: getting too old for this. The New world is getting
Speaker 1: too old for this. I said it because it was
Speaker 1: what people were supposed to think, but I didn't really
Speaker 1: feel it. Peace didn't work for me. Battle is a
Speaker 1: thing that gets into my gut, makes me desperate to live.
Speaker 1: Love is a thing that gets into my gut makes
Speaker 1: me wish I were dead. Bartley went through his pockets.
Speaker 1: She pulled out a pack of cheap Naked Lady cards.
Speaker 1: Threw them off into the forest. In another pocket, she
Speaker 1: found a topo map. Last, she pulled out a radio.
Speaker 1: She clicked it off. Hell, I said, they heard all
Speaker 1: of that. Hell, indeed, what's the map? Tell us? I asked,
Speaker 1: nothing's marked on it, but it's pretty zoomed in. Doesn't
Speaker 1: cover more than a thirty five square kilometers. Since the
Speaker 1: in between isn't the center of it, I figure there
Speaker 1: camp might be. Puts it halfway between here and the tunnel.
Speaker 1: They know where we are, I said, but we don't
Speaker 1: know where they are. And do you know who else
Speaker 1: knows where you are? It's the third parties that sell
Speaker 1: ads on our podcast. And just a reminder, you can
Speaker 1: sign up for Coolers on media at any time for
Speaker 1: an ad free listening experience.
Speaker 2: Here's ads and we're back.
Speaker 1: They might hit us tonight. I bet the fire was
Speaker 1: just to flush us out.
Speaker 2: I said.
Speaker 1: They set this kid here to see how we organized
Speaker 1: our defense. What's the plan? You know, I'd hate for
Speaker 1: you to go out alone, but maybe I've got to
Speaker 1: go out alone. Bartley said, I'll go warn everyone, set patrols,
Speaker 1: get children to shelter, and I'll make it back up
Speaker 1: here and to range and call it in. Once I
Speaker 1: figured out where they are, we started down the hill.
Speaker 1: The sun was halfway to the horizon. It was cutting
Speaker 1: into my eyes and baking that kid's blood into my clothes.
Speaker 1: We stepped out from the trees and scrambled down to
Speaker 1: the railroad tracks about a kilometer east of the in between.
Speaker 1: Bartley came with me. The half a kilometer or so,
Speaker 1: our paths overlapped. I always liked walking tracks, Bartley said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I asked. I wasn't really curious, but I preferred to
Speaker 1: listen to her speak, then listen to my heart beat
Speaker 1: a rhythmically, like it always did after I shot somebody.
Speaker 1: Doc says it's just jitters what some of the old
Speaker 1: books called generalized anxiety.
Speaker 2: I say, it's me getting off light.
Speaker 1: Karmically speaking, Roads are hell, Bartley said, because they're easy.
Speaker 1: It's easy to make a road, right, You just get
Speaker 1: a bunch of people to walk somewhere a lot.
Speaker 2: That'll make a road. You walk a road, it's easy.
Speaker 1: Lulls you to sleep, and there's some asshole hiding with
Speaker 1: a gun, and you don't even notice it because you're
Speaker 1: lost in your head. Roads are hell. Sounds like me
Speaker 1: and Khalil. We fell into habit made a road railroads.
Speaker 1: Though railroads are great, Bartley went on, they're hard to make,
Speaker 1: they're hard to walk. They're so specialized, and the best
Speaker 1: part is that they're specialized for something that doesn't exist anymore.
Speaker 1: These things weren't made for our cow drawn box cars
Speaker 1: or our little rail bikes. They were made for kilometer
Speaker 1: long chains of cars pulled by the sheer strength of coal.
Speaker 1: When you're using something specialized and you're using it wrong,
Speaker 1: that's the beauty in life.
Speaker 2: I thought you were grumpy.
Speaker 1: I said, I was grumpy, and Bartley said, but now
Speaker 1: I'm walking on railroad tracks. We built the in between
Speaker 1: in the narrow valley below the pass. The Green River
Speaker 1: guarded our north, the mountains are south. A road from
Speaker 1: the west met its end at the door to the lodge,
Speaker 1: and a railroad ran the whole of our land. We
Speaker 1: were unwalled. We were unwalled for a thousand reasons. We
Speaker 1: were unwalled because we were peaceful. We were unwalled because,
Speaker 1: though increasingly rare, mortars and grenades and rockets were still
Speaker 1: a part of this world. Even some helicopters had survived
Speaker 1: the electromagnetic waves that had wiped so much technology from
Speaker 1: the earth, as I had heard it, and such vehicles
Speaker 1: have no respect for walls. We were unwalled, because a
Speaker 1: stone wall blinds the defender as much as the attacker.
Speaker 1: We gated the road and the railway, but those gates
Speaker 1: remained open during daylight. Khalil was waiting by the gate
Speaker 1: for me when I got back. He had that pick
Speaker 1: in his short afro. The one the trader had told
Speaker 1: me was tortoiseshell, and who was I to say it
Speaker 1: wasn't the one Khalil had told me it was lucky,
Speaker 1: And who was I to say it wasn't. He saw
Speaker 1: me coming, and a smile split across's beard. The smile
Speaker 1: got bigger the closer I got, until I was in
Speaker 1: his arms. We heard a shot, he said, hours ago,
Speaker 1: I shot somebody. I said, I was so small in
Speaker 1: his embrace, he was one of the only people in
Speaker 1: the world who was large enough to make me small.
Speaker 1: He kissed my forehead, and I tilted my neck up
Speaker 1: and looked in those black brown eyes behind his glasses,
Speaker 1: those eyes the same color as mine, And I kissed
Speaker 1: him on the mouth. You all right, he asked, at last,
Speaker 1: I'm all right. It took hours. I've been waiting for
Speaker 1: you for hours. I pulled away, set my rifle down
Speaker 1: at the guard post. The crows stood sentinel on the gate.
Speaker 1: I can't handle you worrying about me. I said it
Speaker 1: was the right thing to say, because it was true.
Speaker 1: It was the wrong thing to say, because I loved him.
Speaker 1: He lifted his glasses, rubbed at his eyes.
Speaker 2: I know, he said. He walked away.
Speaker 1: My eyes lingered on his back, and I still felt small.
Speaker 1: The wind wailed across the fields of Tea. I got
Speaker 1: the children and the infirm into the bomb shelter, a
Speaker 1: one hundred year old relic of a paranoid generation that
Speaker 1: had been right about the apocalypse, just wrong about its timing.
Speaker 1: Then set out organizing an all hands watch. Fifteen people
Speaker 1: were on at all times, no able bodied adults exempted
Speaker 1: from taking a shift. No one liked it, but no
Speaker 1: one complained. I don't tell the cooks what to feed us,
Speaker 1: and I don't tell Doc how to sew us up,
Speaker 1: and I don't tell Khalil or the other horticulturalists when
Speaker 1: to conscript us into the fields for a harvest. It
Speaker 1: was late enough in spring that the sun lingered low
Speaker 1: in the sky, and I found myself cleaning rifles and
Speaker 1: counting bullets, which left me with nothing to do with
Speaker 1: my brain but to run my conversation with Khalil over
Speaker 1: and over in my mind. Like I was locked in
Speaker 1: the computer room in the basement with a video running
Speaker 1: on an endless loop. I could turn my head away,
Speaker 1: but I could still hear everything watching a video. Though
Speaker 1: I could wait until the sun went down and the
Speaker 1: solar stopped and the computer died. There wasn't such an
Speaker 1: easy way out of my head.
Speaker 2: Done Dun, dun.
Speaker 1: What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen to the in between lodge?
Speaker 1: There's people who are maybe attacking it or was it
Speaker 1: just the one kid who knowss You'll know? In a
Speaker 1: week there were of you go and find this story
Speaker 1: and read it elsewhere, like for example, in my book
Speaker 1: we Won't Be Here Tomorrow and other stories available from
Speaker 1: ak Press, or honestly it's free on tour dot com,
Speaker 1: who first published it. But you could also wait for
Speaker 1: a week. And Hazel, who helps me pick out the stories,
Speaker 1: suggested we do this one this week because it's one
Speaker 1: of their favorites and they relate a lot to Aiden
Speaker 1: trying to navigate love and hypervigilance. Quote to quote, Hazel.
Speaker 1: I know this one is set during the springtime, but
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy the world building and that the
Speaker 1: story still feels on brand for the season, and tune
Speaker 1: back in next week for the second half of the
Speaker 1: story as we finish everything that isn't Winter by me,
Speaker 1: margor Kiljoy. You can find me online searching my name
Speaker 1: on Blue Sky and Instagram. Those are the only social
Speaker 1: media as I still have. I dream of the day
Speaker 1: where you go and look and I'm not there because
Speaker 1: I've quit, but I haven't yet. And you can also
Speaker 1: find me on substack. I have a newsletter there I
Speaker 1: post almost every week and almost all the posts are
Speaker 1: free and from all of us here at cool Zone.
Speaker 1: We hope you have a cool, good holiday season and
Speaker 1: that you stay warm, stay safe, and stay on your
Speaker 1: in laws, good sides. Happy Solstice, glad tidings and med
Speaker 1: the coming light find you with peace and solace for
Speaker 1: the new year. All right bye.
Speaker 2: It could happen here as a production of cool Zone
Speaker 2: Media podcast from cool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: Visit our website cool Zonemedia dot com or check us
Speaker 1: out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. You can find sources where it could
Speaker 1: happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening.