Zen Solaris and the God-Child

A 5000-word queer SFF short story about the end of the world and the start of a new one.

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Zen shared his shoebox apartment with a girl named Ratter, who ate vision-pills for breakfast and tattooed her dreams on her skin. She had grown up in the Wastes and was missing her dominant arm from the elbow down. Versatile as flesh and blood, her tattoo gun was a whirring prosthetic she had built herself, configured to strap on at the shoulder. The needlepoint twitched like a fingertip, and she drew her designs with bold, exact marks.

“What do they say?” Zen asked, as she etched lines of prophecy from unknown alphabets over her ribs.

“That the world isn’t really ending.”

It was the plant tattoos Zen liked best, all roots and tendrils.

“I see them in my dreams.” The gun buzzed as she dug the needle into unmarked skin. “Everything’s getting green again.”

“When?”

“Prophecy’s not a science. Some god or angel—They’ll bring the green back when they’re ready.” She wiped away the excess ink and the shape of a child emerged, blotted with blood like something being born.

The Citadel didn’t know about her. She’d never even seen it, never been recorded in their files. “They wouldn’t want me anyway,” she always said. “Waste-living fucked up my insides; I can’t grow a thing in here. You can put whatever you want into me, but nothing’s ever coming out.”

She was invisible to the Citadel’s roving eye, but Zen wasn’t, and when the military stomp of boots sounded outside their door, they both knew it was him the mercs were after.

“You could jump,” Ratter offered.

They were thirty storeys up, nothing waiting below but the wet splatter of insides coming out to paint the dirty concrete red. Zen’s smile was a slash as he opened the door.

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Zen Solaris and the God-Child was first published in Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 145, June 2022.

Content warnings: discussions of infertility and systemic, government-approved medical violence including nonconsensual surgical operations on intersex infants, reproductive coercion, and forced impregnation. 

Notes on representation: featuring a protagonist who is intersex, trans masc, and nonbinary, a secondary character with a tattoo-gun prosthesis for a missing arm, and a secondary character who is agender and mute.