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.
I didn’t know anything back then.
Andrew made it to the stairs before I did, so I got to watch him jiggle and shuffle down them, filled with loathing and disgust. I couldn’t remember what bullshit diet we were supposed to be following that week, but I vowed to myself that no matter how small breakfast was, I would eat less of it than Andrew. I would leave something behind on the plate. Let Andrew be the one to lick his fingers and whine. I was above all that. Wheat toast and cut apples were waiting for us when we came into the kitchen.
And there was Mom at the coffeepot, fifty pounds lighter. Her pajamas hung off her like a hand-me-down from a much bigger sister. She turned, cup in hand, and I saw the dark circles beneath her eyes. She was beaming, however, with the biggest smile I’d seen on her face in years.
“It’s working,” she said, her voice still rough and edged with fatigue like she’d been to a rock concert or an all-night bonfire. “This thing is actually working.”
That was our life for two weeks. Dad did his best to soundproof their bathroom. He stapled carpets and foam and egg crate to the walls. He covered the floor in a dozen fluffy bath mats he bought cheaply on the internet. He told me later that he tried to put a rag in her mouth, just to muffle her a little more.
“But I’m worried she’ll pull it into her throat and choke on it,” he told me, his eyes wide with dread. “I can’t stand this much longer. I know she’s losing weight, but it’s like I’m living in a nightmare and I can’t wake up.”
That was a year before he decided to take the Pill, and back then he was more willing to talk about it. When it wasn’t his own privacy, only hers, he would tell me how gross it was. You can see videos of it online. It was the same in that first trial as it is now: you take the Pill and you shit out your fat cells. In huge, yellow, unmanageable flows at first. That’s why they scream so much. Imagine shitting fifty pounds of yourself at a go. Now, people go to special spas where they have crematoiletaries that burn the fat down. Dad said Mom screwed up our plumbing so bad that he had to buy a whole case of that lye-based stuff to break it all down and keep the toilet flushing. That was as gross as I thought things could get, but Dad said it got worse.
Toward the end, Mom (and everyone like her) shit out all their extra skin, too. The process that broke it down meant no stretch marks and no baggy leftovers, hanging on your body like overproofed dough on a hook and telling people you used to be fat.
That was some trick, and it was part of the reason it took so long for a generic to hit the market. It was a “trade secret,” they said on the news. They also said “miracle” and “breakthrough” and “historic.” The miracle of shitting out skin just looked like blood and collagen and rotten meat, it turns out. Not less gross, but different. More lye into the S bend. More and more of Mom gone at the breakfast table.
At the end of the trial, she was a person I didn’t recognize. She was 110 pounds soaking wet. The research doctor told her that she was at 18 percent body fat and would stay that way for the rest of her life. Her face was a whole new shape, with the underlying structure very prominent and her eyes huge and wide above it all. I could see her hip bones beneath her enormous drawstring pants, pulled tight as a laundry bag around her now-tiny waist. Her collarbones could have held up a taco each. The cords in her neck stood out like chicken bones caught under her skin. Even her feet were smaller—she went down one whole shoe size, and I inherited all her stretched-out sandals and sneakers.
I slid my feet into them, thinking how it was like my mom had died and some other woman had moved in. Late at night, I gathered up all the clothes she had given me and bundled them into the garbage. They were ugly, but they also felt somehow humiliating to wear. I couldn’t explain the impulse. Luckily, she never asked me where any of it went. She was very focused on herself in those days.
“It finally happened,” Mom told me with tears in her eyes. “They finally made a Pill that gives you the perfect body, no matter what.”
And yeah, she could eat anything she wanted and didn’t have to work out. As long as she kept taking the small maintenance dose of the Pill, she would stay this way for as long as she lived. Which she thought would be much longer, now that she didn’t have to carry around the threats of diabetes and heart disease everywhere she went.
I remember one day I walked in and found her and Dad sitting at the kitchen table, both of them obviously crying. They tried to hide it from me; Dad ducked his face into the shawl collar of his sweater, Mom swiping her eyes with quick fingers.
“What’s up with you guys?” I asked, trying not to look.
“Nothing, honey. There’s carrot and celery sticks cut fresh and sitting in water in the fridge, if you want a snack.”
Mom’s voice was thick in her throat; she’d really been sobbing.
I ignored both the sorrow and the content of what she’d said and fished around in the cabinet over the sink until I found one individually wrapped chocolate cupcake.
“I’m good,” I said and tried to leave the kitchen.
“Honey, do you think I lost all this weight so that I could leave you guys?”
I stopped and turned on the spot like something on a rotating plate, a pizza in a microwave. I couldn’t help it. I should have just kept walking.
“What?”
Dad buried his face some more. Mom just looked at me, her eyes all shiny. “Did you ever think that my desire to lose weight was about you? Like, do you feel like I’m trying to leave you behind?”
I stared at her. There wasn’t anything I could say. How could I feel any other way? How did she not know how obvious she was? Every diet, every scheme, every study was just her trying to find a way out of being what we are. Every time she tried to change who she was, who we all were, it was like betrayal.
I looked over at Dad and realized this wasn’t about me. He was worried she was going to physically leave him, now that she thought she was hot enough to hook up with somebody else. I saw it all at once: the way she was never worried about me being on birth control, the way Dad looked at other women in the supermarket. The way all of us were so focused on what we looked like, as if it mattered, as if being thin was the only kind of life worth living.
So I lied.
“No, Mom. I don’t think about it at all, I guess. It really has nothing to do with me.”
I left them alone and went to eat my cupcake in peace. I looked at the timer I’d had running on my phone since the beginning of junior year: the countdown to the day I’d leave for college. I wanted out even then, but I hadn’t sent out applications yet. Back then, two years seemed like forever.
Mom and Dad made up, I guess. They never told us anything that mattered. Anyway, that was when the deaths started to make the news.
The averages are still debated all the time, because preexisting conditions can’t be ruled out. But people seem to agree it’s about one in ten. In each group of thirty participants in the early studies, ten were control, ten got the placebo, and the final ten got the Pill. Nine out of ten shit themselves to perfection. That tenth one, though. They ended up slumped on a toilet, blood vessels burst in their eyes, hearts blown out by the strain of converting hundreds of pounds of body mass to waste.
I never thought it would get approved with a 10 percent fatality rate, but I guess I was really naive. The truth was it got fast-tracked and approved by the FDA within a year. Mom was in a commercial, talking about how it gave her her life back, but this was a life she had never had. It gave her someone else’s life entirely. Some life she had never even planned for. In the commercial, she wore a teal sports bra and a lot of makeup. I did not recognize her at all. She stood next to that celebrity, the one who did it first. What’s her name—Amy Blanton.