Our World Between Their Lines

by Jenna Hanchey

When the strangers arrived on our shores, we knew their magic was powerful. But we didn’t realize it could be so unintentionally wielded. Their crystalline ships shone brightly in the summer sun, shielding them from scrutiny. Yet we could feel the impossible weight displacing the waters, hear the waves cutting themselves on the ships’ sharp edges, taste the fear of the gulls in the air. We understood their magic as disruption.

We studied it to protect our world. We learned both too much and too little.

At first, we learned too little. Stuffed into classrooms, hands clenching the keen quills that made us flinch every time they tore through our soft parchments, we were distracted by the anxious odor tinging our usually clean sweat. We didn’t pay enough attention to how they taught us to draw lines: straight and commanding. We didn’t protest that the world cannot be separated into neat parcels to be bought and sold. That the sea cannot be contained, that it lives within us as much as it lives at the shoreline and beyond the horizon. They saw the trails upon our cheeks; surely they knew.

We copied their maps and reoriented our senses. We looked for what they saw. They bandied their magic carelessly. Lighting torches with a snap of their fingers, hefting stone with rising hands, calming monsoons with tightening fists. We started to grasp how they understood their magic: as control.

Rumors spread of regions disappearing, but we had stopped up our ears to focus on sight. Tendrils of horror wove through the city, but we had become thick-skinned by interpreting the hands smacked onto our shoulders as praise. A coppery tang adulterated the air, but we could no longer breathe through the mucus that filled our noses: the last barrier against harm.

It finally hit us when dwellings in the nearby forest vanished, knocking the air from our lungs. Siblings enamored of dappled light, cousins who ran with the birds in flight, friends who listened to the wind through the treetops—all gone. Panicked, we examined the maps the strangers had trained us to mimic. Their lines were confident but hasty. Their knowledge incomplete. We had focused so intently on what they planned that we failed to notice unforeseen implications. Their maps did not reflect our senses, collapsing them into two dimensions. The vast forest and myriad facets of its being had been bound by the limits of their perception. Shrunk to fit within neat lines. 

With a slash of ink, they had erased a whole city from the face of our world.

 We tore down all the maps, spreading them across every surface. We ran our fingers over the lines, trying in vain to see the absences. To find what had been written out of existence. But we could no longer envision the cities of shell and branch and stone, the whirling currents of the deep, the stretches of the sky. We could not even hear our own screams.

By the time we left the schoolrooms, we knew too much. We could see the lines they drew no matter where we went. Fences rose between fields. Deep trenches cut through the city, separating the merchants in the east from the seafarers in the west. The lines even sliced through us, slaps and slashes of misplaced rage cleaving us from one another.

For the first time, each of us was alone.

We saw the control, a twitch within our limbs.

We spent varying amounts of time attempting to unlearn. Some of us remembered the pull of the ocean drawing sand from beneath bare feet. Others, the delight of woodsmoke mingled with lavender perfume. Or the whirring of a hummingbird’s wings. But some could not remember, losing themselves to the pits that opened between sharp lines. Others chose not to remember. Embracing the strangers’ knowledge, they scored their own marks onto the world.

 When we finally found each other again, we were fewer but stronger. We could see their world and perceive the absences it created: the presence of nothing where something used to be.

Together we found ways to slip through the spaces between lines, to travel between the world they commanded into being and the one we still felt in every beat of our hearts. For all of what they wrought upon our world, for all their control and disruption, they couldn’t erase us. 

What we knew shattered the line between too much and too little.

When we burned the maps, we didn’t wait for the strangers’ magic to react. We pulled back the veil of absence and slipped into our world between their lines. 

Jenna Hanchey has been an actress, particle physicist, Peace Corps volunteer, and afterschool-space-program teacher. She is currently a professor of critical/cultural studies whose research looks at how speculative fiction can imagine decolonization and bring it into being. Her own writing tries to support this project of creating better futures for us all. Her stories appear in Nature:Futures, Daily Science Fiction, Medusa Tales, Wyngraf, and Martian Magazine, among other venues. Having once been called a "badass fairy," she attempts to live up to the title. Follow her adventures on Twitter (@jennahanchey) or at www.jennahanchey.com.

(Note that this story was edited by our former Fiction Editor Rhonda Schlumpberger, who helped edit Orion’s Belt in 2022.)