Black Brane

by Michael Cisco

Genres: Literary Fiction; Visionary & Metaphysical; Occult & Supernatural; Horror

Synopsis

Weird fiction icon and award-winning author Michael Cisco's Black Brane, begins with the physical pain of a bad foot and later voyages into absurdity, mad science, occultism, and existential dread.

A man lying in a bed of pain flees from physical torment into his own memories, and into speculations about life and reality. He was, once, employed by the Temporary Institute for the Study of Holes, a think tank pursuing research that ranges from occult studies to advanced physics, including black holes—or, as they are known in string theory, black branes.

He meets and interacts with the various other members of the institute. Its founder, Dr. Marilyn Shitansky, a formerly homeless woman who claims to have a thinking hole in her brain; its resident occultist, the chain-smoking Daladara with his magic abacus; Ernie Allegre the engineer, who designed and built a decoherence reactor to power the institute; Dr. Liu, the string theorist; the linguist Dr. Corngholm, who can't sit still; and Dr. Shitansky's secretary, Renbrui, who seems to carry a mystery with her wherever she goes.

In memory, the speaker finds them again, in a story of physical and emotional pain, of social and quantum entanglement, that turns comic, speculative, and nightmarish. Echoing the work of Blake Crouch and Thomas Ligotti, Michael Cisco shows in Black Brane why he's beloved by weird fiction and horror readers.

Read more

Release date: July 22, 2025

Publisher: CLASH Books

Print pages: 177

Sample

My foot explodes.

My legs tremble inside their ghostly outlines, under the covers. The pain is pushing me out of moment-to-moment; I can’t follow it. The musical drone of voices and birdsongs keep reopening space, and screams begin and end on the black brane. Pain in my unblemished legs, the serene, momentless gaze pours out of my eyes and down my body again. Why does it ever stop?

Voices from the next room…a muffled metallic thudding…and one cricket, chirping listlessly.

No one comes in here. There’s nothing I can do—I can barely think. The pain is constant enough that there’s no point in trying. Even the pain is tired. Whenever, by chance, it intensifies again, it rises sluggishly and stops short, and I’m too worn out to stifle my feeble groaning. My legs hurt without any apparent cause; there’s no discoloration or swelling, no damage, no bullet hole, only shooting pains from hip to heel, and a left foot that might as well have a nail through it. An invisible nail in an invisible wound. Pain that nothing can touch, no matter what I’m given.

My life isn’t in danger—this will pass, but I don’t know that I believe it. Everything else is just everything else, a dream. I’ve been benched. I’m out. Life goes on without me. This damp, tangled bed is it. But the black brane is out there, humming. All the strings begin and end on the black brane. I don’t know if they all do. I just say that and think that because I can’t imagine anything different. The pain in my foot won’t let me.

As I lie here, I wonder—I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this place from the outside. I mean, I think I have. I think…but I’m not sure. I can’t really see it, imagine or remember it. Maybe it has no outside. Maybe it’s all inside.

The murmur still trembles in the wall. Filigree of bird song outside. I’ll cling to that, if I can. That happy sound, better than words. Even if they are screams of pain or fright, they are happy sounds to me. Pain doesn’t give me any rights, but it does put me beyond rights. No one can bicker with me about what a bird sounds like. I would turn the bickering into more song.

Now it’s time to confront the “great puzzle”: how to get out of bed to go to the bathroom when you can’t bend your knees. Roll over onto your stomach first. Turning to the left would hurt. Turn to the right and you’ll tumble onto the floor. Heave yourself to the left, and hurt, and then turn face down. Now, pivot around, stiff as a board, like the hands of a clock, until your legs project into space off the bed’s edge, and lower them. When your feet have some kind of purchase on the ice-cold floor, press yourself upright. Don’t throw yourself over backwards, though!

You’re standing.

Now the crutches. Make your way to the door. Pull it toward you. There’s a shard of glass impaling your left foot. That’s how it feels. Your right foot looks no different from your left. The door hits your crutch. Shift weight, move the crutch clear. The bathroom door is too narrow to pass through abreast, so you have to slide yourself through it sideways, get far enough inside to clear the door. Shut it. (I’m not an animal. Even if there’s no one around, I shut the door like a human.) Now turn. Lift the lid. Set aside the crutches so you can remove your robe. Don’t fall. Now drop your trousers, hold on to the sink and press your other hand against the wall. Collapse onto the frosty seat. Pray it doesn’t break!

I have to sit down to piss, I can’t manage it standing. It’s making its way out now, through all the kinks and cul de sacs. It’ll be a while. I stare at the hexagons. My mouth is open and I sway back and forth a little for wretchedness’ sake, my skin tearing with goosebumps in the draft from the open window. Frozen bathroom light, bathroom air, laced with the smell of industrial cleanser. 

glass. A faint odor of wood smoke. Children shouting somewhere far away, some afternoon fun, mingling with my own panting. A botanical smell, an herbal smell, something pungent, and buttery, and sweet. I keep sniffing for more of that one. What is it? It’s a flower. The kind of little white flowers, I think, that used to grow all over. Sitting on a cold white pot, meagerly piss, shiver, my legs stuck out in front of me, shake. Draw a breath that wavers. Sniff the air. That perfume, the flower I mean, no one ever envied or reproduced it, but that honey-like smell makes me think of something I never could entirely place in my memory.

I was a boy. I went to some performance outside. I was with a school group, I think. Had a crush, as always, and she was there. I never went to any such place, though—it’s as if my imagination is, with perfect goodwill, trying to assist my memory by making stuff up. Down a green slope toward a ring of hay bales, encircling a low, bare place where the performance will happen, maybe an Elizabethan play or something, and, on the far side, a palisade of slender green trees, and green gloom, somber and lovely, deepening back into something like a dream, and all the air filled with a fragrance of grass, sun-baked pine needles, peppery eucalyptus, sweetly musty hay, and those buttery, pungent, sour little white flowers.

I’m panting more. There’s another pain now. A kind of hope. My face is strained. I can feel it. There, the slope, my little self jogging there, down to the bales and the other children, see past them to the warm, deep green dimness of tall, white-trunked trees, and the grand canopies of lustrous, tiny leaves floating around sinuous black boughs. The fragrance meshed with the daylight. I breathed it, the light, and floated. Jogged—clumsily of course, but floated too. Sustained by the late afternoon like water. A life so different that it might as well not have been mine, but that memory guarantees is mine, and that I am that boy. But is that boy me? Would he have wanted to be? I see the dingy hexagons, my outstretched legs, the bathroom door, the pitilessly bright light in here, and I see the supple shade and luminous hay, oaks and poplars…I hear birdsong, sparrow and wrens, mourning doves and crows, blue jays…children shouting…the fragrance of sweet alyssum, wisteria, sage, and pines.

I can’t piss when I try and it tries to piss when I don’t want—this pissing’s full of shit!

Push down and try to draw your legs under you. Throw your weight to the left and lean on the wall. You can’t avoid stepping with the left foot and pain shoves a noise out of your throat, an inchoate yelp that doesn’t sound like me. Get your drawers up, quick! Then crutches, staggering back to give the door room to swing. You forgot to flush. Now, sideways. Out the door. Voices are following you. Lunge toward the bed, reach it, turn, drop on your ass, and just as lowering the legs forward while prone is a way to move without any additional pain, then, logically, raising the legs upward while throwing the body back onto the bed will hurt. So, get up again, whimpering with shame and frustration, turn, throw yourself down on your face, and raise the legs. Swing the upper body into alignment and so bring the legs around onto the mattress and drop them at last. The pressure on the knee is bad, but dull. Roll onto your back. Struggle up toward the head of the bed. Everything around me is falling and I am suspended. Sweating, panting.

I, you, I don’t know. Just the villain.

I hear voices. They aren’t the children’s, or not the same. Name? What name? Her name? No telling where I am, not like this. Sometimes it’s like home, but not always. Which home? I’m alone, but I can hear voices through the walls and…sort of in space? I’m breathing through my mouth, I feel filthy. The pain in my legs makes me sick, and the sickness oozes out of my pores in a thin paste. Wrens, and mourning doves, and crows. Those little white blossoms mixing their aroma with acrid wood smoke and wild mint, those voices singing out from the other side of my forgetfulness. Falling in time, to the sound of time’s own voice I guess. The other side of forgetting; that’s not death, and I’m not dying, but time does bring death. It’s hard not to think about it, at least a little. The pain won’t let me forget my body and that means vulnerable, that means mortal.

I don’t know why nothing works for this pain. Now it ebbs, because I’m at rest. It gathers its force for a new assault, and likes to give me a bit of respite, to sharpen the despair when it gets bad again. I want to think I’m getting better, and every time the pain comes back it feels as though it were starting all over again and I’m still at its beginning.

Stare at the blank white expanse of the ceiling, the merciless light there in the middle so ugly, here and there grey strands of clumped

 spider web wafting like—what? Like deep sea feelers. From the sea bottom. Upside down. The difference between the villain I am now and the villain I was, minus only this pain, is too large; it doesn’t make sense that such a small difference should make such a big difference. I’m no good now. I can’t even sit in a chair. All I can do is lie down or stagger around a little on my crutches. And I can’t read, can’t make any effort. I only want to be unconscious—or to move freely, in the impossible, ordinary way. I’m not going to stop living. I’m not going to end my life in a dream.

I watch the ceiling for a while. After I don’t know how long, it splits open, and my body has no feeling at all. I spring out and aloft, I see the open horizon from miles up in the air, a dull yellow ribbon separating banks of clouds, the powdery blue of the shadowed landscape down there. Skeins of cloud are banked around an expanse of blazing white, and right in front of me there’s a flat cloud like a wafer of semi-transparent ice sailing on a silver over black, indigo with white. Everything I see has a voice and sings, calling, and I feel I’m singing, though I never sing. The sun-billows fall on me in the way that I’m here in the sky, and I can see the gold of that afternoon through time to now, the smell of the flowers rips into me, the halo of filtered light in the dim trees and the bright shades of the other kids, she’s in there somewhere, one of them, she’s the heart of the dream, swift gossamers darting there in late afternoon shallows, swing on each other, bolt and vanish into clouds bright as furnaces, flash in among the hallowed pools of placid dusk, shouting in the street outside—someone’s angry—the crows are cawing. This isn’t remembering, is it? It could have been her, or it could have been her. Both are dead, and in heaven. Both are in death. Both are heaven.

The black brane is on the other side, beyond, eons in space but in touch just the same, like the black hole at the galactic center that holds the Milky Way together: the vast consumer, galactic arms swinging around the drain and our solar system moving right now with one of those arms. A supergiant black hole moving me all through the same time with the earth, the sun, and most of the innumerable fixed stars in a sky that never changes.

Pain growing again. For some people it’s always this way; I hope I can remember that. Not sure why.

Remember the black brane.

I can see myself walking, going nowhere special, and it looks like heaven.

I can’t get up and get out of here, but I can go away into a daydream. I can make things up in my imagination, fabricate people and situations. I can use my memories, scrambled. I can move adjectives to other nouns, transfer names, combine people, separate elements of one person into many. Places, times, everything up for grabs, whatever is best at keeping me from the pain here and now.

For the sake of telling a story, let’s say that this is something I’m remembering: up until very recently I was working for Dr. Marilyn Shitansky on her research project about holes. She didn’t know about the apostolic relationship I have with the black brane, NGC 1313 X-2. I never did tell her.

We’re on hiatus now, probably forever. Yes. Dr. Shitansky went away alone without telling anybody anything, and we all just sort of shrugged and started sorting out what to do next. ...