The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

Laurel sits on her deck and watches the world slide by. Mr. Oake jogs past her vista; he even has the nerve to wave. Mr. Oake must be eighty-two years old and he jogs like a cartoon in slow motion: his skinny-flabby arms swing back and forth, his skinny-bony legs pump up and down, sweat rolls into his red terry cloth headband. But he hardly gets anywhere, he practically jogs in place. He moves down East Blithedale at an absurd snail’s pace.

Laurel doesn’t wave back. Mr. Oake is useless to society. He is probably living off the public dole. He will never do anything else with his mediocre old life except jog by her deck and drive her crazy with the uselessness of it all.

Why her? Why not a useless old man nearly double her age? She is talented, she is forty-five, she has so much left to give. She has a whole life left. Why her?

She sees the Collins girl stride by, too. The girl doesn’t wave. If she sees Laurel sitting there, she doesn’t give a damn, but Laurel suspects she doesn’t notice her at all. The girl must be sixteen or seventeen, a lean little oblivious bitch oozing with hormones and hostility. She has the kind of thick, wavy, below-the-shoulder hair Laurel had before chemo stripped that from her, too.

Only forty-five. Not young; but not old, either, damn it. Until six months ago, she was doing okay. Packaging, ad agency work, shit work really, hustle hustle hustle. But she was waiting, saving up a bit, dreaming of the day she could chuck it all and do what she wanted to do. Go back to her art. Electric-blue tears were only the beginning. Why did she never go past the tears?

It is her own damn fault, her own procrastination.

They told her she had ovarian cancer.

So stupid. She’d smoked for twenty, twenty-five years. The lungs ought to be the first to go, but no. There is this stupid statistic about women who smoke. The lungs go, certainly, but these women also have a high incidence of cervical and ovarian cancer. Something about concentration of nicotine on the fingers, touching, for one purpose or another, there.

Humiliating. She’d started to bleed off and on; yes, she denied it. She’d been bleeding for two months straight and aching with the worst cramps she’d ever felt when she broke down and went to the doctors.

Fucking doctors. They couldn’t tell that her father had a blockage until a heart attack killed him while he was driving to the office on a sunny Monday morning. They couldn’t save her mother when a stroke knifed her brain. They couldn’t help her make a baby with Christopher before he bailed out of their marriage.

She has had enough grief in the last five, six years.

So she could not believe it. So she smoked; take her at seventy-five when she’s a crazy old Nevelson or an O’Keeffe stashed away in her Mill Valley chalet. A Lillian Heilman type with withered scarlet lipstick and mascaraed crow’s-feet, a full life of drinking and smoking and man-chasing behind her, and a masterpiece or two to her credit.

Would you believe there is nothing more they can do for you, and you’re only forty-five?

When her father died, she cried because she never really knew him. When her mother died, she cried because she knew her only too well. When her fetuses miscarried, she cried because she would never have the chance to know or not know them.

Her past, her present, her future; she can’t cry for them anymore. There are no tears left for Laurel.