Riley Tao (they/them) is a Californian college student who has been rejected by eighty-five literary agents while seeking representation for their YA fantasy novel, who turned to writing short stories after deciding that maybe they should walk before they run. They spent six months updating a creative writing blog with short stories on a weekly basis at rileyriles.wordpress.com before deciding to focus on a second novel. They also love computer science and mathematics, and in their free time they play homebrewed RPGs and hug their cat.
To celebrate the official print release of Our Beautiful Reward on March 16th (virtual release party Sunday the 19th, you’re invited!), I asked some of the contributors a few of the questions foremost on my mind. It’s been too long since we’ve run many interviews here, and I’ve missed it; getting to know writers and how they think and feel has been one of the most rewarding aspects of Reckoning for me since the beginning. I hope their answers prove as enlightening to you as they have been to me.
We’re posting one mini-interview a day til we run out.
Riley Tao’s “Hangs Heavy On Their Head” (which you can read online here) is a delightfully inventive flash story narrated by some human hair motivated to make both the attached body and the earth a healthier, more nurturing place.
Michael: How do the tools of speculative writing help you to think and communicate about what’s being done to personal freedoms around our bodies?
Riley: It’s painful to think about the specifics of how trans bodies (or bodies in general, but this is where my knowledge is most personal) are being policed, and wrapping that pain in the vehicle of fiction allows me to handle emotionally difficult topics in more depth and with more objectivity than I would otherwise.
Michael: What are you reading and thinking about that helps put this issue in perspective for you?
Riley: Strangely, it helps for me to read the actual text of laws that are being passed. Sometimes they are disturbingly short; other times their length exceeds my ability to care about. But either way, the bone-dry language in which they are written also helps me achieve that distance that I need in order to clearly think about the situation.
Michael: Tell us, if you’d like, about something you’re doing, outside of writing, to make the world a less hostile and dystopian place for human beings with bodies to exist in?
Riley: Some internet communities make the world better than they make it worse. I’ve tried to grow a couple of my own.
Later I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian Ocean. Before I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am loose and free, lax between the stylist’s comb and humming shears, as Lian meets their own eyes in the wall-length mirror.
“Just the left side,” they say.
The stylist winks. “I hear you,” he says.
And then he begins to trim.
It is nothing like when Lian first shaves themself. They don’t dare buy shaving cream. A razor could be slipped into a hoodie’s sleeve. A can of liquid could not. Instead they rub shampoo into their warm-soaked legs, like they do to me and my hundred thousand siblings on the occasions they could force themself to strip and shower and see themself, all of themself, even the parts they wish they could take a blade to and make disappear, like how with each pass of the razor the jungle sprouting from their skin thins and thins and thins. Until their skin is smooth and bare as farmland. They watch their hairs swirl down the drain and ask whose nightmares they are now. And I know that their body is theirs alone, its terrors only for them to see.
Then, they are lying in bed and watching Australia burn in the palm of their hand. They wonder if the world would heal faster without them in it. Their father throws open the door. He holds up a mass of tangled hairs in one hand, a plunger in the other.
“You can’t pass your classes, but you can waste your time and my money on vanity?” Lian flinches as their father hurls the evidence of their crimes in their face, and the tangled hairs are thick with sewage. “How dare you?”
Lian mumbles an apology, they’re sorry for hurting him, they didn’t mean to, they’ll clean up their mess, and their father isn’t there anymore, and Lian runs a thumb along my side, numbly, and I am greasy and tangled from weeks without washing, and if I had any more oil America would invade. Lian’s legs are prickly, they hurt them with every step, but as long as they eat their father’s food and sleep under their father’s roof, they daren’t hurt him by shaving again.
The stylist’s blade scythes through me, and I am free, dancing around Lian’s shoulders as I arc to the ground. Lian’s father is not here. Lian’s father is years and miles and memories away. But still he scoffs as the stylist’s nimble fingers work. “Twenty dollars for a sideshave? I could do that myself.” His eyes track each drifting hair as if he could count their costs. As if he could see the entirety of time from behind every eye, weigh the agonies and blessings of any choice, and with the confidence of eternity deem Lian’s haircut an injustice.
And Lian is filthy, scrubbing furiously at their tangled hair, feeling the muck of months wash free from their skin. Lian’s father is outside the bathroom door. Lian takes short showers. He appreciates that about them. Lian shakes the water from their hair, feeling the pleasant, soaked weight of it. Their hair could hold so much, they think. More than its weight in water. They wonder what else it could hold.
I land at Lian’s feet, and the stylist steps back. One half of Lian’s hair pours over their shoulder like black gold. The other is bare, stark, controlled, theirs. Very little is theirs, nowadays. A room they share, a job they hold, a form they own. Even their ideas are not their own. They wonder—if hair can cling to so much oil in water, could it perhaps soak oil from the dark-spilled seas? They search the Internet and are not sure whether to be disappointed that they are not the first, that a company in San Francisco has been making oil nets from human hair since before Lian knew their name.
I have known it all along, that Lian is neither the beginning nor the end. My long strands are swept aside, and Lian regards themself, the sleek and shimmer of their hair, while the stylist counts up the price.
Lian’s father is not here, but he spits, “Was it worth it? For you to feel better?”
Nobody is there to respond, but Lian’s lips still quirk up as they say, “Let’s find out.”
Later, I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian ocean. Before, I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am proud as Lian rises, thanks the stylist, and lives the strand of their life to its nowless end.
In ten thousand B.C.E., a family of three made shelter beneath my branches. My family watched through the wild winds as they shivered together against the winter fury. I waited for their cooling bodies to nourish my grasping roots.
But with a fallen branch and a magic spell, they brought a shard of summer into the heart of the frozen forest, and I began to wonder if they would survive.
On the first day, they picked the berries from the bushes beneath the snow. In the first week, a child dragged a struggling rabbit from its warren beneath the frost-hard earth. By the time the spring rains came and the ground sang green, the family was four, and there was always something good to eat in the hut around my trunk.
In six thousand B.C.E., a village of six hundred made shelter around my family. The breezes and the roots buzzed with our curiosity. My leaves would never stop prickling with the smoke of yams and deer and berries boiling down, and at the heart of every winter, a blazing campfire would blunt nature’s chill fangs.
It warmed me to my core.
Over the years, my leaves grew rich and thick, and ten thousand lovers wrote their faces on my skin. The children explored every inch of me, scaling my trunk, plucking my fruits, lounging in my branches, finding parts of me I never knew I had.
Each spring, a girl would climb as high as she could through my verdant, red-gold canopy, and each spring, she would fail to reach my crown. Her son never made it, and neither did her nine grandchildren. But I remember when a little boy proudly placed his hand on my head, and the echoes of his great-grandmother ran through him.
In three thousand B.C.E., the sky spat death upon our home. A shooting star fell to the earth, its heat swallowing us whole. The birds screamed and cried as they fled, and my shadow writhed and scrambled to flee the inferno. The bones of the villagers cracked and melted away, and my brethren tilted drunkenly, celebrating one last party before their fall. The wishes of all the lovers on my skin were torn from my bark, and the fires hollowed me out, leaving me ashen, scarred, empty.
My leaves would never stop prickling with the flesh of the children who had slept in my arms and the smell of the trees I’d grown up with.
In one thousand B.C.E., the bees had made their home in my heart, and even the humans stayed away. The fires had split me open, and in the crevice where my flesh once was, a hive was born. New-green seedlings, unmarred by ash, tried to grow around me—but I blotted out the sun with my drooping, swaying leaves, smothering them with my shadow. I was taller than them all, stronger than them all, fortified with the ashes of those who came before.
The little ones were not. They had no right to live on the graves of my family.
A few times, a child—always a child—walked up to me, wide-eyed. They’d run their enraptured gaze along my scars, or gape at my limp, dull branches. But when they got close enough to touch, the furious swarm I’d taken in would awake, and they’d back away—for a thousand stings would kill as surely as a meteor strike.
But children grow, and some remember.
In one C.E., a woman brought her family into the shadow of my trunk, and from my fallen limbs she drew a fire to feed her parents and sister. With a spit of roasted venison in one hand and a greenwood torch in the other, she walked towards me. The buzzing, pulsing insects inside me awoke, and venom and pain belched forth from my heart.
But she held her gift of fire out, and the smoke of the same deer that had walked here for millennia danced around my trunk, filling my hollowed body. Gradually, cautiously, she drew closer to my gnarled core, soothing the bees with her smoke.
Shadows lashed at her as the fire flickered, and through the haze the swarm blindly struck, stinging her neck, her arms, her face.
I waited for her body to nourish my roots.
But though the stings assaulted her, she stood immutable, determined, still. Gently blowing the bees from her lips, she whispered, “I’m here. That’s all.”
The torch she bore blazed down to her very fingertips, the bees wobbling in the air, until the fervent, pent-up buzzing quieted to nothing.
She laid a hand on my trunk, and the echoes of her ancestors sang through her.
In one thousand C.E., the humans hewed a grand town from the earth. The bees inside me had long since faded, and stray cats slept in the space the fires had carved. Spring graced my leaves with dew, and every slight breeze would send sparkling droplets dancing across my park. Fresh, young trees had arisen alongside me—far away enough that they would grow in their own right, but close enough that the children could laugh and play among our boughs with ease.
I shared my fruits with all who came, and they spread the seeds across the world.
Over the years, brick by brick, plot by plot, the town grew. The buildings quenched the sun, leeching the life from my leaves. The streets ran brown with refuse and offal, and their toxins seeped into the earth. The grass and dirt was paved over and built upon, eroding the hill I stood upon to a dim shadow of what once had been.
But the children still came.
In two thousand C.E., the city canceled the night. Neverending light spilled from every window. Rivers of people flowed around me, cloaked in gasoline and steel. The streets hummed and buzzed like the bees that lived inside me so long ago.
I wondered whose smoke could calm them.
I could tell when they were going to swarm. Whether in tree-hearts or city-hearts, bees are the same. Something had enraged the grandest hive in history, and the stingers were about to come out.
And come out they did. Humanity delivered the judgement of the stars.
The blasts were fire and darkness. Windows shattered. Lights vanished. People crisped into ash and shadow.
The city fell silent.
It pared me to my core.
In six thousand C.E., the lands had healed. Only crumbling ruins indicated that there had ever been anything but timeless forest here. The same berry-bushes still hid beneath the snow. The same deer still rested at my base. Even the trees around me were indistinguishable from me, for all the more years I held over them.
For a century after the city disappeared, a mournful winter consumed the world, the likes of which I had never seen before, and never would again. It tempered me. I rebuilt, rooting myself into the earth so firmly that it would be easier to move the mountains themselves than uproot me.
I saw the humans, from time to time—what was left of them, that is. They marveled at the single tree on a hill, ancient beyond their measuring, some touched with reverence, others with joy. They would reach out to touch my trunk, or pick the leaves I shed.
But I kept my fruits in the highest branches, and my lower limbs had grown too brittle to support humanity. The birds and the sky were the only visitors to my verdant canopy.
I swallowed my scars, one by one, with a patience that would outlive eternity.
In ten thousand C.E., a family of four took shelter beneath my trunk.
The winter had been rough, but I had seen ones a thousandfold worse. The weary family, nearly overwhelmed by nature’s wrath, shuddered in the cold and wondered what they could possibly do to survive.
The mother’s answer was the ancient city, and she left in hope of finding some intact cavern there. The father’s answer was the sticks and branches, and he raced against the winter cold to create a fire. The childrens’ answer was to rest and dream, for whatever time they had left.
