Listen to our audio presentation of “Houdini’s Heart” by Thoraiya Dyer. Narrated by Lisa Shininger.
Thoraiya Dyer
Thoraiya Dyer is an award-winning Australian writer. Her short science fiction and fantasy stories have appeared in Clarkesworld, Apex, Analog, Nature, and Cosmos, among others (for a full list, see www.thoraiyadyer.com). Her collection of four original stories, Asymmetry, available from Twelfth Planet Press, was called “unsettling, poignant, marvellous” by Nancy Kress. A lapsed veterinarian, her other interests include bushwalking, archery, and travel.
Houdini’s Heart
Right now, at the end of his shift, the queue that floats in his segmented white tunnel is stalled by that stubborn multimedia magician. Again. Olwen has grown, over the past six Cat-Four months, to hate the sight of the woman; he loathes her gently fluorescent teeth and her short, otter-thick hair, her stupid purple cape with the silver stars that floats in zero gravity and gets stuck in the ventilation, and, last but not least, her ill-founded conviction that the heart she was born with can handle the repeated electrical discharges from the Continuous Storm into the Bright Plain.
The Second Card of the Major Arcana
He sits up against one of the altar stones.
I move in the long shadows of marble columns. A dry wind from across the valley tosses the dangling ties of my veil, bringing more knowledge to me.