The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
She took the notebook and the DVD, and squeezed Marco’s arm, unsure whether he would want or accept a hug.
Her parents were out when she got back to their house, so she slipped the DVD into their machine. It didn’t work. She took it upstairs and tried it in her mother’s old desktop computer instead. The computer made a sound like a jet plane taking off, and opened a menu with one episode listed: March 13, 1980.
It started the same way all the other episodes had started. The kids, Uncle Bob. Denny was in this one; Stella had an easier time spotting him now that she knew who to look for. He went for the train set again, laying out wooden tracks alongside a kid Stella didn’t recognize.
Uncle Bob started a story. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew very big very quickly. He felt like a giant when he stood next to his classmates. People stopped him in hallways and told him he was going to the wrong grade’s room. His mother complained that she had to buy him new clothes constantly, and even though she did it with affection, he was too young to realize she didn’t blame him. He felt terrible about it. Tried to hide that his shoes squeezed his toes or his pants were too short again.
“His parents’ friends said, ‘Somebody’s going to be quite an athlete,’ but he didn’t feel like an athlete. More than that, he felt like he had grown so fast his head had been pushed out of his body, so he was constantly watching it from someplace just above. Messages he sent to his arms and legs took ages to get there. Everything felt small and breakable in his hands, so that when his best friend’s dog had puppies he refused to hold them, though he loved when they climbed all over him.
“The boy had a little brother. His brother was everything he wasn’t. Small, lithe, fearless. His mother told him to protect his brother, and he took that responsibility seriously. That was something that didn’t take finesse. He could do that.
“Both boys got older, but their roles didn’t change. The older brother watched his younger brother. When the smaller boy was bullied, his brother pummeled the bullies. When the younger brother made the high school varsity basketball team as a point guard his freshman year, his older brother made the team as center, even though he hated sports.
“Time passed. The older brother realized something strange. Every time he thought he had something of his own, it turned out it was his brother’s. He blinked one day and lost two entire years. How was he the older brother, the one who got new clothes, who reached new grades first, and yet still always following? Even his own story had spun out to describe him in relation to his sibling.
“And then, one day, the boy realized he had nothing at all. He was his brother’s giant shadow. He was a forward echo, a void. Nothing was his. All he could do was watch the world try to catch up with him, but he was always looking backward at it. All he could do—”
“No,” said Denny.
Stella had forgotten the kids were there, even though they were on camera the entire time. Denny had stood and walked over to where Uncle Bob was telling the story. With Uncle Bob sitting, Denny was tall enough to look him in the eye.
For the first time, Uncle Bob turned away from the camera. He assessed Denny with an unsettling smile.
“No,” Denny said again.
Now Uncle Bob glanced around as if he was no longer amused, as if someone needed to pull this child off his set. It wasn’t a tantrum, though. Denny wasn’t misbehaving, unless interrupting a story violated the rules.
Uncle Bob turned back to him. “How would you tell it?”
Denny looked less sure now.
“I didn’t think so,” said the host. “But maybe that’s enough of that story. Unless you want to tell me how you think it ends?” Denny shook his head.
“But you know?”
Denny didn’t move.
“Maybe that’s enough. We’ll see. In any case, I have other stories to tell. We haven’t checked in on my hill today.”
Uncle Bob began to catch his audience up on the continuing adventure of the boy who’d been dug out of the hillside. The other children kept playing, and Denny? Denny looked straight into the camera, then walked off the set. He never came back. Stella didn’t have any proof, but she was pretty sure this must have been the last episode Denny took part in. He looked like a kid who was done. His expression was remarkably similar to the one she’d just seen on Marco’s face.
And what was that story? Unlike Dan Heller’s driving story, unlike the one she’d started thinking of as her own, this one wasn’t close to true. Sure, Denny had been a big kid, but neither he nor Marco played basketball. He never protected Marco from bullies. “Nothing was his” hardly fit the man whose house she’d cleaned.
Except that night, falling asleep, Stella couldn’t help but think that when she compared what she knew of Denny with that story, it seemed like Denny had set out to prove the story untrue. What would a person do if told as a child that nothing was his? Collect all the things. Leave his little brother to fend for himself. Fight it on every level possible.
Was it a freak occurrence that Denny happened to be listening when Uncle Bob told that story? Why was she assuming the story was about him at all? Maybe it was coincidence. There was nothing connecting the children to the stories except her own sense that they were connected, and Denny’s reaction on the day he quit.
She hadn’t heard hers when Uncle Bob told it, but she’d internalized it nonetheless. How much was true? She wasn’t a cuckoo bird. Her reinventions had never hurt anyone.
Marco called that night to ask if she wanted to grab one more meal before she left town, but she said she had too much to do before her flight. That was true, as was the fact that she didn’t want to see him again. Didn’t want to ask him if he’d watched the March 13 show. Didn’t want to tell him his brother had consciously refused him protection.
She should have gone straight to the airport in the morning, but the fan mail address she’d written down was in the same direction, if she took the back way instead of the highway. Why a show like that might get fan mail was a question for another time. This was strictly a trip to satisfy her curiosity. She drove through town, then a couple of miles past, into the network of county roads.
The mailbox stood full, overflowing, a mat of moldering envelopes around its cement base. A weather-worn FOR SALE sign had sunk into the soft ground closer to the drainage ditch. Stella turned onto the long driveway, and only after she’d almost reached the house did it occur to her that if she’d looked at the mail, she might have found his surname.
The fields on either side of the lane were tangled with weeds that didn’t look like they cared what season it was. The house, a tiny stone cottage, was equally weed-choked, but strangely familiar. If she owned this house, she’d never let it get like this, but it didn’t look like it belonged to anyone anymore. She tried a story on for size: “While I was visiting my parents, I went for a drive in the country, and I found the most darling cottage. My parents are getting older, and I had the thought that I should move closer to them. The place needed a little work, so I got it for a song.”
She liked that one.
Nobody answered when she knocked. The door was locked, and the windows were too dirty to see through, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that if she looked through he’d be sitting there, staring straight at her, waiting.
She walked around back and found the hill.
It was a funny little hill, not entirely natural looking, but what did she know? The land behind the house sloped gently upward, then steeper, hard beneath the grass but not rocky. From the slope, the cottage looked even smaller, the fields wilder, tangled, like something from a fairy tale. The view, too, felt strangely familiar.