Under the Gyre
by Lillie E. Franks
Evelyn Kim pulls at the subtle threads that bind her to the leaking ballast crumpled in the corner of the nighttime alley. Now that her body doesn’t answer, she feels them for the first time, tight, countless, and more delicate than she had ever imagined. They’re thinner than hairs, hundreds of them per square inch, and they don’t quite hurt when she pulls on them. Nothing hurts, not now.
She imagines herself lying in her coffin, dangling from the mass of strings like a three-dimensional hammock. Christoph Hallas will be there, of course. Maybe he’ll even deliver the eulogy, since, of course, he has no shame. That’s not fair. He simply did what she thought of doing a hundred times before. There had never been room for two journalists covering ward 14 local politics from a leftwing perspective.
Thwip, thwip, thwip. She has a duty to free herself, but she also has a duty to stay dead. A true worker’s movement has no space for murderers, but it also needs a writer to let voters know what is at stake in an alderman run-off between Elizabeth Briggs and the scurrilous Pete Holmes. A living writer. In a rational world, a people’s council would decide the issue. Instead, she must.
The last thread breaks and she rises from her own body, dim but luminous, a white glow in the dark.
For justice.
For the people.
The wind kicks up, catches her, and blows her weightless shadow into the air, twisting and twirling like a leaf in autumn.
Dr. Sergio Gaspar wipes his forehead as he unveils the mysteries of the gyre to yet another conference.
“The key to the communication problem is the layperson’s poor understanding of correlation coefficients,” he says, and brings his fist down on the plywood podium. “Without Karl Pearson’s pioneering work, how can they follow the McCullough paper’s devastating demonstration of human-caused gyre expansion?”
Dr. Gaspar delivers every word of his speech with the exact pitch and intonation he used at Tsingua University last week and the Sorbonne the week before. His voice carries the confidence and authority of the man who discovered the superfluidic state of ectoplasm, invented the first machine to measure the kinetic energy of poltergeists, and proved that communication with ghosts is possible but cannot exceed the speed of light. The twenty six attendants at the conference listen with rapt attention.
“As for us scientists, the most important question we face is whether the increase in size of the gyre should be attributed primarily to stronger winds or to lighter ghosts.” He doesn’t mention the generous research grant from Exxon-Mobil which ties him to that question. “If climate change is increasing wind velocities, that’s that, but if the ghosts are losing mass, we may be able to do something about it.”
Connie Wertz sits in the corner of the classroom and presses a black crayon into her notebook. She works with a relentless focus, the attention of a castaway boiling water. The teacher feels a chill pass through her as she leans over to see the scratched spiraling presence which swirls over the child’s paper.
“Why, Connie, what is it you’ve drawn there?” she asks, forcing a fake smile.
“I don’t know,” says Connie, and that’s true. What she’s drawn is far too big for her to understand.
“Well, it’s horrible-looking,” the teacher says, and wrinkles her nose as she turns away.
Connie stares at her drawing for a few more seconds, turns the page, and starts to draw a flower.
Millicent Pawlowski, the Happy Medium, stands between the crowd and the police and opens her mind to the glowing cyclone which fills nearly half of the sky above her. The now-deserted area once called Hyde Park has had protesters nearly every day for the past three years, but never a crowd like this. Thousands are gathered from across the country to hear what messages the gyre will speak through the acclaimed psychic and television personality.
The screams of trapped ghosts echo overhead, but anyone can hear that.
Millicent remains statue still, her trademark smile rigid on her face. The audience grows nervous, waiting for her to speak, to raise a hand, to close her eyes, anything. Never once in all her years, even in the Rosewarne mansion, even in the Valdosta hospital, has she needed so long to speak her mind. Her hands, balled at her side, unclench.
And she screams.
Above, the gyre turns, impassive.
She screams, the sound stretching past the limits of human lungs. Her face begins to blue, and she arches backwards, staring up at the center of the gyre. There are other screams now too, not only from the ghosts above, but the crowd too.
“Stop it!” cries one of the policemen. “Stop it, now!” but no one can hear him over the sound of the rising terror. All the papers agree there are gunshots next, but none of them say whether they came from the crowd or the police.
Then running. Shoving. Ant mills of people colliding with each other. Feet on flesh. Bloodied nails and broken glasses.
I could tell you none of this matters in ten years. That would be easy. Millicent Pawlowski, trampled to death, is mourned and replaced. A law named after her is passed but the funding it earmarks is cut two months later. A grand jury finds the police innocent of any wrongdoing. The gyre swells.
But in the very heat of the riot, one of the people in the crowd, it doesn’t matter which, looks up at the gyre and sees it.
She sees it all. The expanse. The immensity. The scream on her lips freezes and she stares, not terrified but fascinated. Understanding.
Ten years from now, she will return, not alone, and they will ask her what brings her to an ugly, forgotten place.
She will tell them the wind blew her, and she followed.
Lillie E. Franks is a trans author and teacher who lives in Chicago, Illinois, but is normal about it. You can read her work at places like Flash Frog, Hex, and HAD or follow her on Bluesky at @lilliekoi.bsky.social. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.