Asteria Geisterblum - The Nightingale Ambassadors

If you’ve been following Nightingale Press & Publishing for a little while, you probably heard of our inaugural Brand Ambassadors. We chose them to represent the different voices we want to publish and to reflect the style we are going for.

If you happen to be unfamiliar with their work, don’t fret: we’ll introduce them properly in this four-part series of Introductions leading up to the winner announcement of our Flash Fiction Contest (this may or may not be a ruse to distract the nervous participants from the final countdown).

Introducing Asteria Geisterblum

First in the lineup is Asteria, who you might be familiar with from her cozy urban fantasy The 4:44 series, about a liminal magic shop that appears in unexpected and improbable places at exactly 4:44 a.m. every day. While most of this serial has been pulled from Substack (she’s currently editing it to publish it as a book), Asteria still has a wonderful library of imaginative short stories up on her publication, as well as her new serial The Unreliable Map Society for you to dig your teeth into.

Review

Today, we’ll talk about her short story Spillmannsgasser that sits at around 2500 words.

“A Spillmannsgasser is born twice.

The first birth is quick and red and loud.

The second is death.”

You can outgrow a place, or a place can outgrow you. On Spielmannsgasse, only one of those is survivable.

Asteria has a highly visual style, and the images she paints with her words are reminiscent of impressionistic artworks, but they’re so much more than that. The delightful little details are enchanting, sure, but they hide secrets eager to jump out for those curious enough to know where to look.

Light glints off a set of delicate mother-of-pearl button. In a small town, one particular street has vibrant, picturesque houses. Coils of ivy wrap around brickwork.

But the buttons take on a life of their own. The houses hide people who are just a little off. And the doorway you thought you could spot behind the ivy is no longer there.

Spillmannsgasser is exactly like this. What makes the story memorable is the unnerving feeling of a painfully beautiful place that is strange, off in a way that’s not outright dangerous but leaves one on edge regardless.

The reader is introduced to a beautiful town, with an especially charming street that stands out. Despite its undeniable beauty, people are wary of not only the residents, but seemingly of the street itself. Even attempting to cross it is a challenge:

Apprentices often dared each other to run its length at midnight and come back with a purchase: a few sugar fruits, a glass fish with real silver scales, anything for proof.

In this strange place, a child is born: our narrator. The innocence of this child, who, despite dying, still survives (because a Spillmannsgasser is born twice, and the second birth is death), reflects what we all think: what makes this street, Spielmannsgasse, so frightening? What attributes does it possess that make it so enchanting and so frightening?

Spielmannsgasse was warmth and colour and the clatter of bells. [...] Beyond the curve, the rest of the town seemed dead by comparison.

Because something is wrong indeed. When sent to deliver a plate of food to the mourning portrait painter, we see, through the eyes of the narrator, what everyone in town is afraid of:

It wasn’t that she looked sick but… wrong. Empty of the street. Her features had fallen apart from one another, as though what had held them in place had been taken away.

Telling you more would spoil the story, and we wouldn’t want to take away the opportunity to read it first.

Inspiration

Asteria was kind enough to share the inspiration behind the story with us:

“The title is a German word (my native language) and the story contains two or three other German words because it is about a street I played in a lot while visiting a distant family member one summer, I think when I was around 7 years old.

The Spielmannsgasse (a good English translation would be minstrel street) was a dead end street and it was not as pretty as in the story—actually rather shabby and gross—and it had no ocean or big body of water, just a small river pond. Most of all, it had a negative reputation because it was home to people who were with the circus and who did card tricks and illegal card game stalls at night on the sidewalk.

It’s not very personal, just a little blurry memory that makes more sense as an adult than it did as a kid but it sort of serves as the backdrop to this story. Running that street at night was indeed a dare, but not a fun magical one like in the story.

Asteria then recounts her favourite fragment of the memory, when her grandparents bought her a little knitting doll (a Strickliesel in German) after one of these visits.

I never got the hang of it and hated that doll and my grandmother was very adamant that I needed to learn it. I also remember the sugar fruits and chunky-shaped yellow anise candy, the latter I still keep on hand at home.

Giving the memory fragment a dark/slightly horror twist was really fun. In the end, I chucked that knitting wooden doll into the fireplace we had at home and to this day, I sometimes dream of it crawling out of the fire to drag me into the fireplace.”

Perhaps we’re due a story about a fiery knitting doll?

If you like what you’ve read here, we’ve linked some more of Asteria’s work below.

The next installment of the ambassador introductions will be up in four days. Look forward to meeting Edward.Marlo.Ruiz!

Asteria’s Work

You can read more of Asteria's stories on her profile: Asteria Geisterblum

Or over on her substack: Quiet Little Journeys