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.
The tiger washes its whiskers, waiting.
Emmy slips a hand under her shirt. Her fingernail rests on the band of her training bra. Slowly, smoothly, she drags her nail between her ribs, carving a red line to her belly button. She presses until it hurts. Then she opens herself like fruit.
Badness gushes out: hot, coiled, viscous. It steams on the dirt like a pile of black-red guts, quivering and thick-veined. It reeks of boiled garbage and the basement drain. Emmy keeps her eyes squeezed shut. Sightlessly, she gropes around her insides like she’s cleaning out a pumpkin, scraping the last chunks free. Then she shoves herself back together.
Still not looking, she scoops everything in two hands and tosses it to the tiger. It burns. It sears. She keeps going, faster and faster, until her palms grind against bare earth.
The tiger licks its chops. Everything’s gone. Everything’s vanished. Emmy’s shoulders relax. She feels like the church after lunch. Settled, cool, echoes fading to stillness. Wobbly, she stands. “I’m not coming tomorrow,” she says. “So you better catch a squirrel or something.”
The tiger never blinks. Its blistered tongue jabs into its own nostril.
Her heart thumps. “I mean it.”
A thick rumble comes from its chest. Laughter. Without another glance, it crawls into its den. Emmy leans over the hole and yells into the darkness, “You be good!”
But even as she steps back onto the paved path, her stomach twists. She’s coming back tomorrow. Already, heat prickles under her skin, crying to break free.
Emmy doesn’t talk much at school. Whenever she puts her hand up, Jessica rolls her eyes at her friends. Really big, like a teenager on Saved by the Bell. Emmy’s sin bristles at that. It coils under her skin, lightning-hot and stabbing. It makes her fists clench, it makes her imagine socking Jessica in the jaw.
So Emmy mostly slouches down and stares at her running shoes under her desk. She counts to ten over and over. Mom says that if she was good, she’d turn the other cheek the way Jesus did, but she isn’t, so she can’t. “The wise turn away wrath,” Mom says. Emmy has pretty much accepted that she’s a fool.
There’s no such thing as a good day at school, but Swim Days are the worst. The class troops to the basement and lines up outside the boiler room before splitting off to change. It smells like chlorine and damp; bare feet slap grimy tile.
The water looks gray; echoed shouts ricochet loud enough to hurt. Emmy’s teeth chatter as they practice front crawl, breaststroke, scissor kick. Gobs of snot drift like jellyfish. When they have free time, Haley bobs on a pool noodle nearby. Not beside Emmy, but closer than anyone else.
Haley sits with Jessica’s friends at lunch, but she kept wolf stickers on her agenda even after Jessica said they were dumb and Spice Girls stickers were cooler. Emmy knows lots of facts about wolves, but when Haley’s around, she can’t unstick her tongue long enough to share them. Instead, she scuttles along the pool’s bottom. The longer she stays down there, the longer she can pretend she’s dead.
But the whistle blows. Once in the change room, Emmy heads straight to her cubby. She’s laying her clothes on the bench when Jessica comes up to her. “You have to change in the washroom,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because . . .” Jessica leans in. The other girls circle. “You’re a lesbo.”
The word falls into Emmy’s gut, and it lies there, and it burns.
“And . . .” A triumphant smirk dances on her face, daring Emmy’s sin to punch it. “We don’t want you watching.”
Her skin goes hot. Blood booms in her ears. But she won’t cry, she won’t. Gathering her clothes, Emmy scurries into the single-stall washroom around the corner. Balancing her stuff on the toilet paper dispenser, she gulps silent sobs. But as she stops her shirt from falling in the toilet, she realizes: Haley wasn’t smirking. Not even a bit.
As her hair dries to chlorinated straw, her sin smolders. She wants to flip over the desks. Snap Jessica’s pencil in half. Throw textbooks out the window and smash the glass. After school, her badness keeps bubbling until it boils over and she yells at Mom.
Mom’s face goes cold. “Good girls don’t yell.”
No, they don’t. They don’t sit there, seething, until they want to throw up. They don’t want to punch themselves, just so they can punch something. They don’t hurt their moms’ feelings. But Emmy’s not a good girl. The badness flares too hot and it loops too thick around her guts.
“Did something happen at school?”
She nods.
“Oh, Emmy.” The coldness dissolves to tiredness; Mom rubs the bridge of her nose. “This is basic. Do unto others . . .”
She does exactly unto others as she wishes they’d do unto her. She hides in the corner and doesn’t talk. Why doesn’t that work?
“Don’t scowl at me. Go play outside if you have steam to burn off.”
When she gets to the park, she rips her belly open and the tiger feasts and feasts. Its fur smells like burning and roadkill, but she hugs it anyway, burying her face in its neck. A low rumbling judders from the tiger’s chest. Not purring. A mean growl that envelops her like a hug. By the time she trudges home, the streetlights hum white and dusk spreads like a bruise.
She doesn’t sleep a wink that night. Hidden under her comforter, she pretends she’s curled up in the tiger’s den. Roots for blankets and the tiger’s flank for a pillow. Bad things belong in the dark.
At lunchtime, Andrew M. yells about tigers. “Me and my brother saw it in the park.” He stabs a sticky finger at the cinder-block wall. “It was that big. From here to there.”
Emmy’s stomach knots and she slips her unopened Fruit Roll-Up back in her lunch bag. She sits at the table’s far end, beside the garbage can. Jessica glances her way and whispers, but Andrew M. is so loud that Emmy keeps getting distracted. She shifts in her chair. It squeaks.
“Oh my God,” says Jessica. “Did you fart?”
She shakes her head, but it’s too late. The girls spring back from the table, holding their noses and fanning her with their napkins. “She who denied it, supplied it!”
Emmy grips the table with white-knuckled fingers. She’s supposed to show forgiveness and mercy. So she looks inside her heart for a speck of either. Please, she prays. Please let me be good.
“One-cheek sneak! One-cheek sneak!”
There’s nothing inside her but roiling red heat. Unseeing, Emmy shoves her chair back. She needs to get out, or she’ll explode and the badness and sin will drown them all like lava.
She makes it to the washroom before realizing she left her lunch bag behind. Tears spring to her eyes like she’s a baby. Nothing ever goes right, and she reaches under her shirt to split herself open even though the tiger isn’t there, and—
The door squeals open. Haley peeks in. There’s a wolf patch sewn on her coat. “Um,” she says. “I have your lunch bag.”
“Oh.” Emmy lowers her shirt. “Thanks.”
“What are you doing?”
“Spider bite,” she lies. “I had to scratch it.”