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

Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
Год: 1992
Язык: английский
Год: St.Martin’s Press
Жанр: Ужасы

Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:

This acclaimed series, winner of numerous World Fantasy Awards, continues its tradition of excellence with scores of short stories from such writers as K. W. Jeter, Karl Edward Wagner, Terry Bisson, S. P. Somtow, Charles de Lint, Kobo Abe, Jane Yolen and many others. Supplementing the stories are the editors' invaluable overviews of the year in fantastic fiction, Edward Bryant's witty roundup of the year's fantasy films, and a long list of Honorable Mentions—all of which adds up to an invaluable reference source, and a font of fabulous reading.

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“I’m not his mother!” Screaming. She was losing it, maybe already had. Understandable. Less so his own lucidity, back calm against the seat; shock-free? Maybe he was crazier than she was. Crazier than Alex, though that would be pushing it. She was still screaming, waves of it that shook her breasts. He was getting an erection. Wasn’t that something.

“I'm sick of him being a monster. I can’t—”

“We have to look for him.”

“You look! You look! I’m tired of looking!” Snot on her lips. He grabbed her by the breasts, distant relish, and shoved her very hard against the door. She stopped screaming and started crying, a dry drone that did not indicate if she had actually given in or merely cracked. Huh-huh-huh. “Put your shirt on, he said, and remembered she didn’t have one, she had thrown it away. Stupid bitch. He gave her his shirt, rolled his window all the way down. Should they drive, or go on foot? How far? How long had they slept? He remembered telling her it was his turn to watch Alex. Staring out the window. Willows. Floodplain. Spanish moss. He had always hated Spanish moss. So hot, and Randle’s sudden screech, he hated that too, hated the way her lips stretched through mucus and old blood and new blood and her pointing finger, pointing at Alex. Walking toward them.

Waving, extravagant, exuberant, carrying something, something it took both hands to hold. Even from this distance Mitch could see that Alex’s shirt was soaked. Saturated. Beside him Randle’s screech had shrunk to a blubber that he was certain, this time, would not cease. Maybe ever. Nerves, it got on his nerves, mosquito with a dentist’s drill digging at your ear. At your brain. At his fingers on the car keys or maybe it was just the itch of blood as he started the car, started out slow, driving straight down the middle of the road to where he, and Randle, and Alex, slick and sticky to the hairline, would intersect. His foot on the gas pedal was gentle, and Alex’s gait rocked like a chair on the porch as he waved his arms again, his arms and the thing within.

Randle spoke, dull through a mouthful of snot. “Slow down,” and he shook his head without looking at her, he didn’t really want to see her at this particular moment.

“I don’t think so,” he said as his foot dipped, elegant, like the last step in a dance. Behind Alex, the diagonal shadows of willow trees, old ones; sturdy? Surely. There was hardly any gas left in the car, but he had just enough momentum for all of them.

THE LIFE OF A POET

Kobo Abe

Kobo Abe is a Japanese writer known for highly inventive stories that spin the reader sideways from the familiar into the surreal. His books include The Prize ofS. Karma, Secret Rendezvous, The Ruined Map, The Face of Another, and Inter Ice Age 4. The film version of his novel The Woman in the Dunes won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Abe was born in Tokyo, grew up in Manchuria, and now lives in Tokyo with his wife, an artist and stage designer. Translator Juliet Winters Carpenter has lived in Japan for eighteen years, and is now an associate professor at Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto. “The Life of a Poet” is part fable and part contemporary fairy tale; it comes from Abe’s collection Beyond the Curve, published in Winters’ English language translation in 1991. The story’s original Japanese language publication (as “Shijin no Shogai”) was in 1951.

—T.W.

Whir click clatter. Whir click clatter. From early morning until late at night, the thirty-nine-year-old crone went on pumping the shiny, oil-blackened spinning wheel, cutting back on her already scanty sleep and toiling like a machine in human guise. All so that twice a day she might fill her stomach-shaped oilpan with noodle-shaped oil, and keep the machinery inside her from ever stopping.

On and on and on she worked, until eventually, it came to her. She realized that the machine made of parched flesh and yellow bone was overflowing with the dust of her weariness. And she was seized with doubt.

What have my innards got to do with me?” she wondered. “Why have I got to go on working this spinning wheel for their sake, when they’re a mystery to me? If it’s only to feed the weariness inside me, there’s no point in going on, for Weariness, you’ve grown too large for me to hold.” Whir click clatter. “Ah me, I’m as tired as if I’d turned to cotton.” ’

Just as she was thinking this under the yellow, thirty-watt bulb in her tenement workroom, the crone ran out of fiber. She issued a command to the machinery inside her to stop. But strange to tell, the spinning wheel kept right on moving of its own accord, showing no sign of slowing.

Implacably, the wheel spun round and round, grasping with the last bit of thread for a loose fiber with which to continue its work. Realizing there was no such fiber to be found, the loose end stuck fast to the young crone’s skin, winding around her fingers. And so from the fingertips on, her body, so limp and bone-weary it resembled nothing so much as a wad of cotton, began to elongate, unravel, and wind onto the wheel. Only after she was completely turned to thread, and the thread was wrapped entirely around the bobbin, did the machine finally slow to a stop with a light, moist rattle rattle rattle.

“First you fired fifty workers and made us do their work in addition to our own. Then, with those people gone—the ones who had the courage and the conviction to speak out against your injustice—you forced us to work even harder, and earned a profit of fifty million yen! We demand a raise!”

The son of the thirty-nine-year-old crone had been fired for distributing handbills printed with such inflammatory words. For the sake of his unfortunate comrades left behind, he had spent one entire day stenciling words of purest oxygen with which to rekindle the dying flames in the furnaces of their hearts, and another turning them out on the mimeograph machine. Then, exhausted, he had lain down and fallen fast asleep at his mother’s feet, his bare midriff covered with old newspaper, as she pumped the foot-treadle of the spinning wheel with a whir click clatter.

With the final rattle rattle rattle he opened his eyes, just in time to see the tips of her toes slipping away, through her black, dirt-encrusted work clothes. He watched, horrified, as her toes stretched out longer and thinner, only to disappear through the narrow hole on the spinning wheel.

“Mother!” The old son of the young crone sat cross-legged with his arms around his knees and his fingers laced, tightening his grip until the nails turned purple. Whenever he encountered something too taxing for his mind to contemplate, or too overwhelming for his heart to feel, he unconsciously assumed this position. After a time, he cast aside the newspapers, laid his mother’s empty clothes across his midriff, and stretched out again, succumbing to the wave of exhaustion that swept over him—an inescapable law of physical existence. When this man who owned nothing but his cast-off bonds once gave himself over to sleep, nothing could deter him.

The next morning brought the footsteps of the woman next door, who was as poor as he was. She had come to collect the thread that her neighbor had spun the night before. She used it to weave jackets in order to stimulate the metabolism of her family of five, which tended to grow sluggish on her husband's meager salary.

—Where’s your mother, out? Now where could she have got off to so early in the morning? Oh no, just look at all this thread not rewound. What’ll I do? I’m in a hurry, so I’ll take it as is. But tell her I’ve got to add on a little service charge, will you?..

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