Cal Zone Media book Club, book Club, book Club, book Club, Solstice book.

Club, that's what people always call this.

It's a Solstale book Club.

Hello and welcome to Cool Zone Media book Club, the only podcast where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you.

I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.

And this week and next week I have a story that I wrote.

Happy Solstice, everyone, to honor the dark, to celebrate the return of the light, and to indulge yourselves in the legacy of storytelling and gift giving.

I'm going to share first of two parts of one of my own stories.

Next week you'll get the second half.

And this story means a lot to me.

This story is called Everything that Isn't Winter, which is a okay, look it takes place in Beltane, but it's called Everything that Isn't Winter and it's about how one relates to the season of winter.

And I don't know this one.

It means a lot to me because I wrote it at the end of the Clarion West Workshop for Short story Writing and it was kind of my like, I have learned so much about craft and I've been writing at a somewhat professional level for a little while before that, but this story was still, like on a craft level, really important to me.

And also it was one of my first big short story sales.

It sold to tour dot com in I think twenty fifteen and really kind of helped set my career up.

So this is a different kind of Christmas story, But what are we here if non traditional?

It's still got found family, It's got self actualization and enough winter to justify the choice, and I hope you all enjoy it.

Everything that Isn't Winter by Margaret Kiljoy.

The evening sky was a spring gray, which is different than a winter gray, and the soft light that came down through the clouds lit up the festival.

Fires danced and people danced, and my boyfriend was dancing with a woman who was there to work the harvest.

They were hitting it off.

It looked like everything was perfect in what was left of the world.

At the in Between Lodge, we picked most of our tea leaves on beltane.

Traditionally, the first flush is in March and the second is in June.

But traditionally tea was imported from Asia, and obviously we hadn't had contact with anywhere that far away in decades, so While we do a modest first flush and second flush, most of what we grow is what you'd call jarling in between.

We grow it in the middle of what used to be called Washington State, so it's not really jarling at all.

Just in between.

I sipped from a ceramic cup of mushroom tea weak enough that it just sharpened me up, made me aware of patterns of bodies and light.

I wasn't on duty, but I was on call, and my rifle was stacked at the guard post by the eastern gate, so I didn't get any further into another realm than just the one cup of tea.

We'd adulterated the mushroom with oolong from the first flush, and the pleasant and revolting tastes fought in my throat a little war between caffeine and psilocybin.

The band played war songs on guitars and fiddles and drums.

The handsome men of the choir sang the songs I'd fought to, songs I relish, songs that transport us from the world of the living to that liminal space of both battle and sex where we make and take life.

My bare feet were in earth, the mountain wind in my hair.

My boyfriend's dance partner wandered to the edge of the crowd, and I went to stand beside her.

You must be aiden, She turned toward me.

I am, Khalil was just talking about you.

You.

Khalil was still dancing, now alone, thick legs kicking out as he spun.

He was awkward and completely in his element.

I love him, I said, I gathered as much.

She said.

She was watching him the same way I watched him.

You should sleep with him, I said.

She turned toward me.

The spark's gone, I said, has been for years.

I can get late easily enough, but it isn't as easy for him.

She was just staring at me.

I've never been good with reading faces.

I saw myself and the firelight reflected and dancing in her green eyes.

That's how it works for me, anyway, I went on.

Whenever I sleep with someone else, it just makes me want him all the more.

You should sleep with him.

An autumnal smell broke my train of thought.

Autumnal smells had no place during Beltane, but there it was, amidst the ambient scent of the tea fields, the iron sweat of the dancers, the pines smoke.

A voice carried through the evening sense fire burning tea plants.

The smell was burning tea plants.

I ran for my rifle, snatched it up, and went into the rows toward the growing pillar of smoke.

It started off as a Doric column, shifting to Atlas holding the world on his shoulders.

By the time I reached it.

It was yigdrassil, the world tree, thick and ropey and holding up every one of the worlds.

There was no lightning, no likely cause, but arson.

I ran toward the edge of the forest, beyond the fields, to search for culprits.

At night we see movement.

In the day, we see shape, but in the gloaming we see nothing.

I saw nothing.

It took fifty of us to cut a fire break to keep the blaze from spreading, tearing into tea plants with machetes while the fire tore into our livelihood.

The band played because what else can you do?

Of the hundred rooms in the lodge, ours was in the northeast corner, closest to the fields in the forest.

The poster bed was ancient, had been ancient before the apocalypse.

It had been through worse than we ever had.

The tea had worn off, but spring nights of their own magic.

I'll never understand or forgive.

And there was no cell in my body that was feeling sober or responsible.

Calil was on his side, staring out the window at the burned fields lit by the moon and the dark woods.

The moon couldn't light.

I stood in the door.

I'm sorry, he said, it's fine.

I said, it wasn't.

It's just that it's bell tine, it's spring, sex and flowers and all that shit.

I should want you.

It's fine, I said, it wasn't.

I've never much cared for spring.

That part was true.

You look beautiful tonight, he said, But he was looking at the forest.

He didn't look at me much anymore.

What about that woman, the one you were dancing with, I asked, the one who avoided me after you scared her off?

That one?

It's fine, he said.

There wasn't much more to say.

I left our room and I left him there, and I went to go sleep at the guard post.

But do you know what won't leave you on a cold night to go to sleep alone in the barracks and deal with their attachment issues?

Because they are loving and steadfast and forever.

That's right.

It's the goods and services advertised on this show, unless it's gambling.

Please don't do that.

Gambling does not love you back, and we're back.

First light found me in the forest with Barley, our scout.

Sword fern grew up from the ground.

Maidenhair fern grew out of the rock walls of gullies, and Usnia hung from every limb of every tree in handsome gouts of green.

We walked along down cedared trees in the wet fog.

I didn't follow Bartley's footsteps, not exactly, because one person leaves tracks, but two people leave trails.

The forest is something I know.

A rifle is something I know.

Violence I know.

We stopped to break our fast under the boughs of an old growth black cottonwood that towered over much of the rest of the forest.

We ate jerky, tough but fresh, and we passed a thermas of tea, just tea.

You lost the trail, didn't you, I asked, Never was one, Bartley said.

Bartley had a lazy eye, was always looking out to the side, like she was a prey animal.

Gray and white ran through her.

Otherwise black hair, and she was old enough that she should have remembered the old world.

She always swore she didn't that.

The first thing she remembered was being alone in the woods, barely post pupessant, as she cut up a deer.

Her life had begun at the same time, so many lives had ended.

A lot of people her age are like that.

Khalil and I, our lives had begun with our berths.

The next year, in the post collapse baby boom, a lot of danger meant a lot of kids got born.

What are we doing, then, I asked, If I was going to raid us, i'd have camped up this hill.

Bartley said, there's a spring up there, one you can drink from, and a few open cliff faces that let you spy on us.

Why do you think they did it, I asked, Bartley shrugged.

People don't like it when other people have nice things.

The in Between Lodge was nice.

There was no denying that we were a collective of fifty five adults, forty children, and another sixteen people half way between those two categories.

We'd raised up the lodge ten years back, just as the New World settled into place and drew its political borders, just as I'd left my teenaged years.

We grew tea, and we played our part in the New World's mutual aid network of a few interdependent city states, communes, and hamlets.

We sold, gave or traded provisions to people passing through the old railway tunnel, and we guarded Stampede Pass the eastern edge of the New World.

Well, mostly Bartley and I guarded Stampede Pass.

Everyone could fight, everyone stood watch in rotation, but Bartley handled terrain and tracking while I ran tactics.

Who made this jerky?

Bartley asked, And what the hell kind of not tasty animal died.

To make it?

You grumpy?

I asked, damn right?

Bartley said, I'm hungover and I didn't even get to sleep between drunken.

Now she shook the thermos and we're out of tea.

We caught him with his dick in the wind.

It wasn't luck.

We'd been waiting around for almost an hour for him to do something like fall asleep or get up to piss.

Bartley had been right.

He'd been camped up on the ledge, camouflaged by a bush, watching the in between with glare free binoculars.

He was under fed, or maybe he was just built that way, and he kept scratching at his scalp like he was lousy, younger than me, less than half Bartley's age, and he had all the bushcraft of a city kid.

His clothes were wrong for the west side of the mountains, too urban, too old world.

There he was pissing off the cliff when I walked out from behind the tree with a rifle leveled at him.

I saw him think about dropping his dick and going for his rifle, and I saw him realize that wasn't going to work.

He put his hands in the air.

If he was smart and his gang could afford it, he had a radio set to automatic voice activated transmission, and there was someone listening on the other end, but he was too dumb to shave his lice infested hair.

I was pretty sure we'd got him cold.

You're going to tell me a lot of things, I said, You tell me those things and you'll get supplies and a one way trip on whatever caravan you want.

I wouldn't tell you the color of the lips of your mother's cunt.

I shot him.

The rifle slammed into my shoulder.

The report scattered birds and hurt my ears.

The bullet hit.

Him in the neck and sent him tumbling over the edge of the cliff.

You kidding me, Bartley asked.

Well, I wasn't going to torture the kid, and he didn't want to talk nice.

Bartley shook her head.

Now we've got to go find him, you know, she said, search his body.

Maybe I'll have some tea.

We eventually found the wreckage of the man at the base of the cliff, his ribs sprouting from his chest.

The noon sun and I both kept watch over the forest while Bartley combed over the body.

Help me lift him, Bartley said, I got my hands under what was left of the bandit's armpits and lifted his inside stripped down my leg.

I'm getting too old for this.

The New world is getting too old for this.

I said it because it was what people were supposed to think, but I didn't really feel it.

Peace didn't work for me.

Battle is a thing that gets into my gut, makes me desperate to live.

Love is a thing that gets into my gut makes me wish I were dead.

Bartley went through his pockets.

She pulled out a pack of cheap Naked Lady cards.

Threw them off into the forest.

In another pocket, she found a topo map.

Last, she pulled out a radio.

She clicked it off.

Hell, I said, they heard all of that.

Hell, indeed, what's the map?

Tell us?

I asked, nothing's marked on it, but it's pretty zoomed in.

Doesn't cover more than a thirty five square kilometers.

Since the in between isn't the center of it, I figure there camp might be.

Puts it halfway between here and the tunnel.

They know where we are, I said, but we don't know where they are.

And do you know who else knows where you are?

It's the third parties that sell ads on our podcast.

And just a reminder, you can sign up for Coolers on media at any time for an ad free listening experience.

Here's ads and we're back.

They might hit us tonight.

I bet the fire was just to flush us out.

I said.

They set this kid here to see how we organized our defense.

What's the plan?

You know, I'd hate for you to go out alone, but maybe I've got to go out alone.

Bartley said, I'll go warn everyone, set patrols, get children to shelter, and I'll make it back up here and to range and call it in.

Once I figured out where they are, we started down the hill.

The sun was halfway to the horizon.

It was cutting into my eyes and baking that kid's blood into my clothes.

We stepped out from the trees and scrambled down to the railroad tracks about a kilometer east of the in between.

Bartley came with me.

The half a kilometer or so, our paths overlapped.

I always liked walking tracks, Bartley said, yeah, I asked.

I wasn't really curious, but I preferred to listen to her speak, then listen to my heart beat a rhythmically, like it always did after I shot somebody.

Doc says it's just jitters what some of the old books called generalized anxiety.

I say, it's me getting off light.

Karmically speaking, Roads are hell, Bartley said, because they're easy.

It's easy to make a road, right, You just get a bunch of people to walk somewhere a lot.

That'll make a road.

You walk a road, it's easy.

Lulls you to sleep, and there's some asshole hiding with a gun, and you don't even notice it because you're lost in your head.

Roads are hell.

Sounds like me and Khalil.

We fell into habit made a road railroads.

Though railroads are great, Bartley went on, they're hard to make, they're hard to walk.

They're so specialized, and the best part is that they're specialized for something that doesn't exist anymore.

These things weren't made for our cow drawn box cars or our little rail bikes.

They were made for kilometer long chains of cars pulled by the sheer strength of coal.

When you're using something specialized and you're using it wrong, that's the beauty in life.

I thought you were grumpy.

I said, I was grumpy, and Bartley said, but now I'm walking on railroad tracks.

We built the in between in the narrow valley below the pass.

The Green River guarded our north, the mountains are south.

A road from the west met its end at the door to the lodge, and a railroad ran the whole of our land.

We were unwalled.

We were unwalled for a thousand reasons.

We were unwalled because we were peaceful.

We were unwalled because, though increasingly rare, mortars and grenades and rockets were still a part of this world.

Even some helicopters had survived the electromagnetic waves that had wiped so much technology from the earth, as I had heard it, and such vehicles have no respect for walls.

We were unwalled, because a stone wall blinds the defender as much as the attacker.

We gated the road and the railway, but those gates remained open during daylight.

Khalil was waiting by the gate for me when I got back.

He had that pick in his short afro.

The one the trader had told me was tortoiseshell, and who was I to say it wasn't the one Khalil had told me it was lucky, And who was I to say it wasn't.

He saw me coming, and a smile split across's beard.

The smile got bigger the closer I got, until I was in his arms.

We heard a shot, he said, hours ago, I shot somebody.

I said, I was so small in his embrace, he was one of the only people in the world who was large enough to make me small.

He kissed my forehead, and I tilted my neck up and looked in those black brown eyes behind his glasses, those eyes the same color as mine, And I kissed him on the mouth.

You all right, he asked, at last, I'm all right.

It took hours.

I've been waiting for you for hours.

I pulled away, set my rifle down at the guard post.

The crows stood sentinel on the gate.

I can't handle you worrying about me.

I said it was the right thing to say, because it was true.

It was the wrong thing to say, because I loved him.

He lifted his glasses, rubbed at his eyes.

I know, he said.

He walked away.

My eyes lingered on his back, and I still felt small.

The wind wailed across the fields of Tea.

I got the children and the infirm into the bomb shelter, a one hundred year old relic of a paranoid generation that had been right about the apocalypse, just wrong about its timing.

Then set out organizing an all hands watch.

Fifteen people were on at all times, no able bodied adults exempted from taking a shift.

No one liked it, but no one complained.

I don't tell the cooks what to feed us, and I don't tell Doc how to sew us up, and I don't tell Khalil or the other horticulturalists when to conscript us into the fields for a harvest.

It was late enough in spring that the sun lingered low in the sky, and I found myself cleaning rifles and counting bullets, which left me with nothing to do with my brain but to run my conversation with Khalil over and over in my mind.

Like I was locked in the computer room in the basement with a video running on an endless loop.

I could turn my head away, but I could still hear everything watching a video.

Though I could wait until the sun went down and the solar stopped and the computer died.

There wasn't such an easy way out of my head.

Done Dun, dun.

What's gonna happen?

What's gonna happen to the in between lodge?

There's people who are maybe attacking it or was it just the one kid who knowss You'll know?

In a week there were of you go and find this story and read it elsewhere, like for example, in my book we Won't Be Here Tomorrow and other stories available from ak Press, or honestly it's free on tour dot com, who first published it.

But you could also wait for a week.

And Hazel, who helps me pick out the stories, suggested we do this one this week because it's one of their favorites and they relate a lot to Aiden trying to navigate love and hypervigilance.

Quote to quote, Hazel.

I know this one is set during the springtime, but I hope you enjoy the world building and that the story still feels on brand for the season, and tune back in next week for the second half of the story as we finish everything that isn't Winter by me, margor Kiljoy.

You can find me online searching my name on Blue Sky and Instagram.

Those are the only social media as I still have.

I dream of the day where you go and look and I'm not there because I've quit, but I haven't yet.

And you can also find me on substack.

I have a newsletter there I post almost every week and almost all the posts are free and from all of us here at cool Zone.

We hope you have a cool, good holiday season and that you stay warm, stay safe, and stay on your in laws, good sides.

Happy Solstice, glad tidings and med the coming light find you with peace and solace for the new year.

All right bye.

It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media podcast from cool Zone Media.

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Thanks for listening.