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 knew nothing more about the man who called himself Uncle Bob, but as she walked into the grass she realized this must be the hill from his stories, the stories he told when he wasn’t telling stories about the children. How did they go? She thought back to that first episode she’d watched in Denny’s basement.
Once upon a time, there was a boy whose family planted him in a hillside, so that he took over the entire hillside, like a weed. They dug me out of the hillside on my thirteenth birthday. It’s good to divide rhizomes to give them room to grow.
That story made her remember the notebook she’d taken from Denny’s house, and she rummaged for it in her purse. The notebook was alphabetical, printed in a nearly microscopic hand other than the page headings, dense. She found one for Dan Heller. She couldn’t decipher the whole story, but the first line was obviously Once upon a time, there was a little boy who wanted to go fast. She knew the rest. In blue pen, it said what she had said to Jeff the archivist: motorcycle wreck, alongside the date. That one was easy since she knew enough to fill in the parts she struggled to read. The others were trickier. There was no page for Marco, but Denny had made one for himself. It had Uncle Bob’s shadow-brother story but no update at the bottom. Nothing at all for the years between.
Who else had been on the show? Lee Pool had a page. So did Addie Chapel, who as far as Stella knew had followed in her mother’s footsteps and become a doctor. Chris Bethel, and beside him, Tina Bevins, the other dinosaur lover. If she spent enough time staring, maybe Denny’s handwriting would decipher itself.
She was afraid to turn to her own page. She knew it had to be there, on the page before Dan Heller, but she couldn’t bring herself to look, until she did. She expected this one, like Dan’s, like Denny’s own, to be easier to decipher because she knew how it would go.
October 30, 1982. Once upon a time, there was a little girl who didn’t know who she was. Many children don’t know who they will be, and that’s not unusual, but what was unusual in this case was that the girl was willing to trade who she was for who she could be, so she began to do just that. Little by little, she replaced herself with parts of other people she liked better. Parts of stories she wanted to live. Nobody lied like this girl. She believed her own stories so completely, she forgot which ones were true and which were false.
If you’ve ever heard of a cuckoo bird, they lay their eggs in other birds’ nests, so those birds are forced to raise them for their own. This girl was her own cuckoo, laying stories in her own head, and the heads of those around her, until even she couldn’t remember which ones were true, or if there was anything left of her.
There was more. Another episode, maybe? She had no idea how many she’d been on, and her research had been shoddy. Maybe every story was serialized like the boy in the hill. It took her a while to make out the next bit.
November 20, 1982. Our cuckoo girl left the nest one day to spread her wings. When she returned, she didn’t notice that nobody had missed her. She named a place where she had been, and they accepted it as truth. She made herself up, as she had always done, convincing even herself in the process. Everything was true, or true enough.
Below that, in blue pen, a strange assortment of updates from her life, as observed by Denny. Marco’s eleventh birthday party, when she’d given him juggling balls. Graduation from middle school. The summer they’d both worked at the pool, and Marco’d gotten heatstroke and thrown up all the Kool-Aid they tried to put in him, Kool-Aid red, straight into the pool like a shark attack. The time she and Marco had tried making out on his bed, only he had started giggling, and she had gotten offended, and when she stood she tripped over a juggling ball and broke her toe. All the games their friends had played in Marco’s basement: I’ve Never, even though they all knew what everyone else had done; Two Truths and a Lie, though they had all grown up together and knew everything about each other; Truth or Dare, though everyone was tired of truth, truth was terrifying, everyone chose dare, always. The Batman premiere. The prom amoeba, the friends who went together, all of whom she’d lost touch with. High school graduation. Concrete memories, things she knew were as real as anything that had ever happened in her life. Denny shouldn’t have known about some of these things, but now she pictured him there, somewhere, holding this notebook, watching them, taking notes, always looking like he had something to say but he couldn’t say it.
Below those stories he’d written: Once there was a girl who got lost and when she found her way home she realized she’d arrived back without herself, and her parents didn’t even notice the difference. Which couldn’t be her story at all; she hadn’t been on the episodes he’d been on.
After graduation, he had no more updates on her. She paged forward, looking at the blue ink. Everyone had updates within the last year, everyone except for Denny, everyone who was still alive; the ones who weren’t had death dates. Everyone except her. She tried to imagine what from her adult life she would have added, given the chance, or what an internet search on her name would provide, or what her parents would tell someone who asked what she was doing. Surely there was something. Parents were supposed to be your built-in hype machines.
She pulled out her phone to call Marco, but the battery was dead. Just as well, since she was suddenly afraid to try talking to anyone at all. She returned to the notebook and flipped toward the back. U for Uncle Bob.
Once upon a time, there was a boy whose family planted him in a hillside, so that he took over the entire hillside, like a weed. They dug me out of the hillside on my thirteenth birthday. It’s good to divide rhizomes to give them room to grow.
This story was long, eight full pages in tiny script, with episode dates interspersed. At the end, in red ink, this address. She pictured Denny driving out here, exploring the cottage, looking up at the hill. If she ever talked to Marco again, she’d tell him that what he’d found in Denny’s closet wasn’t a shrine; it was Denny’s attempt to conjure answers to something unanswerable.
She put the notebook back in her purse and kept walking. Three-quarters of the way up the hill she came to a large patch where the grass had been churned up. She put her hand in the soil and it felt like the soil grasped her hand back.
Her parents said she didn’t visit often enough, but now she couldn’t remember ever having visited them before, or them visiting her. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever left this town at all. She lived in Chicago, or did she? She’d told Marco as much, told him other things she knew not to be true, but what was true, then? What did she do for a living? If she left this hill and went to the airport, would she even have a reservation? If she caught her plane, would she find she had anything or anyone there at all? Where was there? She pulled her hand free and put it to her mouth: the soil tasted familiar.
“I walked down to the cottage that would be mine someday”—that felt nice, even if she wasn’t sure she believed it—“and then past the cottage, through the town, and into my parents’ house. They believed me when I said where I’d been. They fit me into their lives and only occasionally looked at me like they didn’t quite know how I’d gotten there.” That felt good. True. She sat in the dirt and leaned back on her hands, and felt the hill pressing back on them.
She could still leave: walk back to her rental car, drive to the airport, take the plane to the place where she surely had a career, a life, even if she couldn’t quite recall it. She thought that until she looked back at where the rental car should have been and realized it wasn’t there. She had no shoes on, and her feet were black with dirt, pebbled, scratched. She dug them into the soil, rooting with her toes.