It’s intriguing, almost eerie, where stories sometimes come from.
Newer stories can grow from fragments or earlier work—nothing is waste. I had finished writing a novella that held an archaeological dig. Just then, I received an invitation to an anthology on the nature of beasts, tales of fantastic fiends surrounding anthropologists, and exposure to the unexpected creature. I immediately thought of the story I’d just written about a mythical dingo infecting archeologists, and wondered if I could evolve the narrative by exploring the “before” story:
Death has joined the meeting. His grin is grim. I wish he wasn’t an avatar and that his mic was unmuted. Does he have friends? Not me. Some days silence is golden, but most days it’s leaden with the weight of monsters, brooding beasts with broad skulls and white markings on their feet.
In the worst of times, not the blue-grey ones, but the dark chocolate, sable and silvered ones, I see large canine teeth that can shred me to mince, black-rimmed yellow eyes that separate me from shadows, athletic limbs that can bound meters to reach me.
Thus, I found my epistolary prequel, “Anni’ka’s Story”, a new tale evolving itself out of fragments of a concept. This newer story unraveled through vignettes of archival data, news reports, mythologist blogs and personal interviews:
In another solicited submission for stories around New York, I thought of my publisher, Bloomsbury Academic, and the award-winning anthology Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction. I pictured myself going on a book tour and finding myself in New York on New Year’s Eve, just before the Times Square ball drop. In this concept of an international book tour with a detour, the darker idea emerged of an author confronted with their own manifestation of a “shadow twin” who wreaks havoc wherever they go. This became the basis for “Shadow-twin in Gotham” that will appear in Shards of Gotham edited by Jamal Hodge, published by Ruadán Books—here’s a tiny excerpt:
No one knew about Te-Na’sa, not even her own mother. How was Asantewa meant to explain it to anybody in a way they would understand? That there was, always, this feeling of someone pushing inside out. That sometimes she dreamt that she was pregnant, but the swell in her dream appeared at random on her cheek, below her breast, under her arm—anywhere but her belly.
In pop culture gone wrong, reality TV offered up its juicy tidbit. Married at First Sight’s Tyson’s insistence on a “submissive woman”, sparking immediate viewer backlash, juiced me up for a like-named titular story drawing on African folklore and superstition, thwarting the belief that getting exactly what you want is a blessing. In my story, the universe delivers it with a twist, although it doesn’t appear so from the onset:
He didn’t want girls with “daddy issues”, the type of women looking for a man to fix for them what their daddy couldn’t give. Ah, heck. Perhaps Juma was a man with his own “mummy issues”, but he had a right to choose his path, didn’t he? He updated his dating profile on the apps, heading from “In search of the city’s best taco, join the quest” to “Traditional man looking for a submissive woman”.
Even domestic nightmares can be creative capital. When a burst pipe flooded my walk-in closet, sodding boxes of books and leaving a wall of black mold, I twisted misery into “Currency of Ruin”, contemporary friction layered in the modern anxiety of traditional author angsts, including book events, where the author must compete with the effortless success of a viral “BookTok” author:
That author is Karen Blake, a TikTok-famer.
Let’s just chuck another gloomy, thinks Andi. Who picks that kind of text for a reading? It’s a total dust bath. But the clapping crowd in the Pagoda room of the fanfest convention is far from catching dirt. Still, Andi’s mind refuses to recollect Blake’s context for that stomach-dropping excerpt from her latest series, Snatched: Rites of Dujo… She smiles at someone in Blake’s queue avoiding eye contact, but would rather she click her fingers and stop seeing them.
The TikTok-famer’s words keep looping in Andikile’s head:
They won’t remember you were ever here.
It mirrored my own feelings of inadequacy, the imposter’s syndrome that strikes. But the muse doesn’t demand a grand gesture or profound silence in which to speak.
You have only to look and see. You have only to listen.
Eugen Bacon is an African Australian author. She is a Solstice, British Fantasy, Ignyte, Locus, Foreword Indies and BSFA Award winner. She’s also a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick Awards and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was announced on the honor list 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.
CRIMSON IN QUIETUS by Eugen Bacon
RELEASE DATE: September 1, 2026
GENRE: Science Fiction | Horror | Afrofuturism
BOOK PAGE: Crimson in Quietus – Meerkat Press
From the queen of genre-bending speculative fiction, comes the newest Sauútiverse offering, a mystery like no other, where the investigator is not a detective, but a sound scientist.
In a world where sound is a tangible force, Muso’mi is a maadiregi—an expert in the art of consuming it. At the prestigious Mahadum, she researches the language of silence, seeking to master the gift her mother calls theft. But academic intrigue turns to deadly peril when her friend vanishes after unearthing a hidden truth. Pursuing clues through pools of quietude across worlds, Muso’mi stumbles upon a horrifying discovery: a pattern of carnage left in fields of harvested silence. Now, the hunter becomes the hunted, as her unique expertise draws her into the orbit of a serial killer who understands the power of sound all too well.
Includes a glossary of Bantu, Afrocentric and made-up words from this cross-cultural tale written in gorgeous lyrical language packed with emotion.
BUY LINKS: Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org | Amazon
GIVEAWAY: $25 Meerkat Press Giftcard
MEERKAT PRESS GIFTCARD GIVEAWAY
EXCERPT from CRIMSON IN QUIETUS by Eugen Bacon
Prologue: Crossing to Eh’wauizo
The crossing to Eh’wauizo, the spirit realm, is in the backwaters of a black river. Put a pinch of shadow and blood salt in your pocket, or sew it in a hem. Slip a button, a tooth, a chicken bone, a crystal or a small, shiny thing under your tongue for Ze-ne to collect. The ear of a ghost orchid, or the twig of a dragon-no’s blood tree is also good. It will ward off omens.
Tie a blindfold with a spotless garment—ebony or crimson—and listen for light. You will see silver specters in nondescript shapes turning to wine colors. Don’t mind them. Tend away from echoes and negotiate towards ripples of gentler waters whose lick at your calf then your waist then your chest then your neck especially frightens you as you submerge. Keep treading underwater even as your lungs swell.
Resist an urge to scream. Don’t struggle or hold your breath, even as your arms and legs begin to feel laden with rocks. Relax your body, think of the potential. Your chest is tearing, everything inside burning, but it isn’t. Your head will feel light, lighter still as you recognize the approaching Ze-ne-nazala, dear Ze-ne—the demigoddess of death—who will float you to a place of no fear.
This is Eh’wauizo, the dimension of our ancestors.
PART I
A gift of the Meshe-Shekhiiyem
Muso’mi
the silence is an ocean, a whole one
it is silken and full of sky
see the bubbles in the wash
the bluest blue that licks the shore
a hint of shadow or mirage
it is a trick of light
it is what it is regardless
she is mindless to be mindful
her thoughts are oceanic
a blue, blue sway
that brings her falling
is falling, falling
She remembers.
It didn’t happen at a playpark when she was two and then some, an age when toddlers babbled, chattered, wailed. They clutched ragdolls, held a parent’s hand. Tottered over wobbly play bridges, giggled at this fun thing to do. They pushed burled-wood carts, the handcrafted timber of the best hardwood firm with twisted grain. When the weather opened its windows, they pressed faces to the mud, stomped barefoot in wet puddles.
Muso’mi did none of those things. She neither babbled nor chattered nor wailed. She had no ragdoll, and carts were not her thing. She loved rain for a whole different reason. If she stomped, it was to listen to the sound of splash! that was a synchrony of soil, wet and feet.
She saw sound.
Sound was supremacy. Being able to explore nature through sound was a power in itself. The timbre, the pitch, the duration and frequency of sound spoke music and language and culture and history. And so seeing sound elevated Muso’mi to a place above her peers and kin.
It was as if the whole universe was a snake charmer. She swayed to the whisper of leaves on an upside-down boa’oba tree. She could sit still for a long time heeding the trickle of a water stream.
Tap, tap.
The drumming of a woodchipper on the bark of a sapele tree entranced her almost to rigor mortis, and you could carry her motionless like that, dead weight as a boulder, her eyes drawn inwards to a place nobody knew.
That is what her maé said.
Muso’mi didn’t mind any of this. She forgot and forgot the rest of the world, as she mimicked the cuckoo’s trill, murmured with the hill mynah bird.
Ki kiki kiii.
She whistled with the bat hawk, the wind in her lips coming and going in a broken way, just like the bird. Even the street barkers were astonished when she snarled at them with such accuracy of mimicry. Bullfrogs went silent when she started her croak, and then rasped in a holler of mating calls.
At first, the older children had a good laugh at her expense, belly deep. They ridiculed how she hummed with the wind, whistled and whirred, hands out and floating, racing aground parallel with a shuttle powered silent on crystals high up in the sky. They ridiculed, ridiculed . . . until Shija—one of triplets—fisted them away on behalf of her friend. Sometimes the fight got rowdy, more children bunching up and playing dirty against the single Shija fighting as if she were a sum of many. That is when Kulwa and Dotto, the rest of the triplets, flew in and fisted their turn.
That is the safety Muso’mi knew. She didn’t have to war. She hated confrontation!
So the triplets fought her battles. She watched, almost out of body, as if she were a spectator in the clouds, how it happened in slow motion. Kulwa would be hopping up the ladder to a slide, sitting down at the top, squealing her way down on her back, then repeat, peeling all the way down, headfirst, on her stomach. Dotto would be holding up a kite and easing the string to let it fly from him a little, wooing it to find altitude and a good wind. Then, mid-flight, Kulwa would pause mid-scramble up the ladder of a slide. Dotto would halt mid-string with his kite. Each immobile, then whirring to action, turning as if indiscernibly bidden in telepathy toward Shija’s fight, a body of bullies overwhelming her. Then Kulwa leaping, Dotto letting go the string and bursting to action. Now Kulwa and Dotto peddling at speed and piling into the fleshy clash. Kulwa: quiet and intense, finding a bully, just one, committed to dying with the one, just one, that’s all she needed. Dotto: playful, full of laughter even as he was vicious, his full body weight behind a smash into this face, that face—him, he needed more than one.
Wham! Bang! Smash!
At night, when her maé slept, Muso’mi stayed awake, lapping up sound with her ears, and using no more than ears alone, because Our Mother, the Creator, forbid, if Maé were to find her daughter pushing sound from her mouth in the dead of the night. Soundless, inward, Muso’mi impersonated aloud the chonk chonk chonk of the nightjar until she fell asleep before the crack of dawn.
One day, something happened.
It stopped the children from laughing and they took to avoidance. They looked at her as if she was a tikolokolo, a spirit gremlin that was a beast to stay away from. What happened—
Muso’mi wasn’t looking for it, really. She wasn’t searching to see sound when she found a center in her mind, and she could pinpoint it just so. The center drew air and dew and made bubbles. The same center—turned out it was sound magic—showed her how to skim stones over a pond without touching them, and her pebbles whizzed and bounced twice, thrice, sometimes up to seven times on the water’s surface. This kind of sound magic led to a level of isolation from the others, until something bigger took place and any mingle with ordinary folk, except the triplets, altogether stopped.
A day is like any other day, but not really. She woke, she ate, she listened, she slept, repeat.
But this day was different.
It was the day Muso’mi gobbled sound. It didn’t happen at the playpark when she was two because by now she was, like, five. The thing inside her had waited until she was older. Her maé was talking to Kulwa, Dotto and Shija’s maé down by the slide or the seesaw. Shija was hopping up a ladder to reach a slide. Kulwa and Dotto were on either edge of a bright red seesaw, teetering up and down, stamping their feet as they took turns up, down, up, down, up down up down updownupdown.
Updownupdown . . . as if in slow motion. It was then, just then, that Muso’mi’s mind found a center in the horizon, and it was point-sharp as a needle. Her universe stopped for a moment, then it wobbled and bled. What surprised her was the sound: waves crackling and shimmering in a yell toward her. The rest of the world also went still, the parents and children frozen in motion. But the sound grew bigger. It was a shout then a bellow then, finally, a thunderous boom that threw her to the ground. Water pulled from her eyes. Blood fell from her nose.
She was aware of this, as she put hands to her ears to lock out that terrible sound, even as her maé scooped her, shook her, said, Stop it, just stop it.
It was then the thunder ebbed and Muso’mi heard anew the universe jumpstart. There was a burst of shrieks and howls, sound coming back. Acute wails around that told her she’d done something bad, and everyone had noticed. That she had upset the citizens of Stone Town, the parents and their children, and life would never be the same again.
Maé shook her one more time. You must learn to control it.
She said it in that toneless voice that didn’t tell one she was enraged.
Muso’mi blinked and looked at a mother who wore a mask of quiet strength, who withheld praise, and raised her single-handedly. Who encouraged her to think, feel or know that she was never good enough as a daughter, and that her maé was inwardly rageful or disdainful, even though Maé’s voice never changed and stayed colorless. Whose aura was colorless. Bland, bland, bland.
Yet here she was, shaking Muso’mi.
—You must contain it.
Maé spoke in that bland, bland way.
—Contain . . . what?
Muso’mi’s words came out in a stammer.
—The Meshe-Shekhiiyem inside you. It’s not a good thing to steal sound from other people.
That was how Muso’mi knew she was of the ocean. The Meshe-Shekhiiyem—its spiritual name. The ocean was inside her. It had gifted her with the sight of sound, and now she could steal it from other people. She saw the center of its pulsing heart in the horizon and she could take it, just like that, by pulling it with her mind. And, when she did, the center exploded and it swallowed every other sound around her, and people experienced an extreme silence that hurt, it hurt, while Muso’mi compressed and ignited their sound in her direction. Until there it was: skimming, whizzing, whirring, chittering, chattering, croaking, rasping, barking, murmuring, tapping, trickLING, WHISPERING, LAUGHING, SQUEALING, SHOUTING—
Sound compressed to a single point, then a chain reaction of it ignited then exploded into a monstrous smash toward Muso’mi. To her, it was both frightening and exhilarating! The universe alive with all the sound she had stolen!
To others, it was petrifying! Their world all at once painfully quiet.
It took several more incidents, and words spoken in her maé’s inward disdain, for Muso’mi to understand she was born on the ocean, and the roughness of its magical storms had gifted her with an ability to gobble sound.
She remembers.
~
If he didn’t understand, he wouldn’t know where to start. But he knows. He has his tools, doesn’t need them all. His fingers are enough. They press against her skin, feel where to cut. Here. His fingers and a blade are enough. She’s unaware and, if she woke now, she wouldn’t remember. He doesn’t raise his head or turn. It doesn’t matter what he knows, how he knows, because he feels the shape of destiny. It smells like oranges. And he wants to eat.
He wants it to be silent. An incision here will bring him her beating heart.