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.
“Keep at it!” we say.
The crawfather brings its pincers in front of its head, shielding itself and still coming at us, its legs rising and falling in chitinous waves.
“You son of a bitch!” we cry. Those of us in the motorboats turn in slow-motion terror as we realize it’s heading for the pontoon.
“Get off the boat!”
“Swim here!”
Scottie aims for the softer bits between its tail plates, but Sarah tackles him into the water before he can shoot, and their son Ernest follows. Irene grabs Nancy’s hand and they, too, jump from one of the pontoon’s swollen flanks. Madeline and her fiancé, Brad, can’t reach the sides in time. They try to cower beneath the driver’s dash, but the lower sickle of the crawfather’s right pincer finds Madeline’s leg and drags her from Brad’s arms. She screams, Brad screams. Blood tip-taps politely atop the boat’s canvas awning.
“Madeline!” we call, over and over. We yell so that we won’t have to hear the crawfather eating, a delicate and probing process that we can’t stand to watch. We pray that the crawfather clipped her femoral artery when he lifted her aloft. We pray that it eats her headfirst.
Brad reverses the pontoon boat, sobbing. We lift those of us who are treading water into the motorboats, crowding them so that they sit low in the lake.
We’re out of ammo for the day. We can only bob like helpless, tear-streaked corks as the crawfather retreats backward into its hole, clutching its prize.
Dinner at the grown-ups’ table that night is strained.
“They won’t believe another boating accident,” says Winnifred. Once, she’d gone through a four-year phase during which she didn’t participate in the fight, citing the fact that the crawfather had to be some kind of ancient nature-spirit. But she’s been back with us for a decade since then.
“Hunting accident?” Irma May proposes.
“Kidnapping,” Hank says.
Nancy says nothing. She sculpts her potatoes into a mountain and hollows a hole into one side with her butter knife.
“She got cold feet before the wedding and ran off.” Grandpa Richie settles the matter. “Sorry, son.”
Brad nods, then shakes his head, then won’t stop shaking his head. “I wasn’t . . . I’m not even married to her. We didn’t get married. I’m not part of this.”
“Brad,” we say, cautiously.
“I never wanted to—”
“Hey,” we cut him off. Some of us get up and put our hands on his shoulders. We comfort him, and we keep him in his chair. He’s seen the crawfather now.
“Maybe change your name in her honor,” Hank suggests, and we nod.
“This means we’ll really get the bastard,” Scottie says, and we murmur in agreement. We move away when we’re sure that Brad has refocused. We make sure he has enough food. We know to watch them, after a death, to make sure that they eat and come out of their rooms regularly. It’s the hardest part, seeing one of us go through this. We all think so.
“Does this mean I can bring Carmen next year?” Archie asks. His twin, Nathan, attempts to shush him, but Archie swats his brother’s hands away. “We’ll need the help,” he says.
“That’s enough about it,” Judy snaps.
“She’s the best player on their softball team!” Archie says, and we can tell that this is the card he’s been breathlessly holding, waiting until he’s in front of all of us to play it. Judy’s chair screeches and her silverware falls on her plate as she stands up.
“Archibald,” she says.
“Why not?” Archie asks, and Nancy adds a soft echo: “Yeah, why not?”
“We have had this discussion—” Judy begins, but she doesn’t need to. We chime in, some of us gentle, others stern. They’re in college. They’ve been seeing each other for how long now? Five months? And the photos we’ve seen, her hair, the nose piercing—well, that doesn’t matter. She’s never folded a nightcrawler over a hook in her life.
“You haven’t told her anything, have you?” Harris the lawyer asks, his eyes flashing to each of us, eager for someone to run with his accusation.
“Fuck, no, you think I would—”
“Do not speak to your family that way—”
“Oh my god, Mom, I’m saying I wouldn’t tell her—”
We have to calm both Archie and Judy down, and then we notice that Brad is crying again, and probably has been crying again for a while. We sneak guilty bites of meatloaf in between his breaths and rack our brains for something new to say.
“Do you want to watch the little ones with Susanne tomorrow?” Grandpa Richie offers, finally. “You don’t have to come out on the boat again.”
Brad wipes his snot on his sleeve. He looks just as liable to collapse as he does to flip the table over. We’ll learn to read him, in time. We study his face.
“No,” he says. “No, I want to be there. I want to hurt that thing.”
We slam our fists on the table. We toast. We arrange for a supply run in the morning. We pace ourselves wisely as we rebuild our rage.
While Carl cleans his rifle, Winnifred double-checks the first-aid kits, and Archie refills the fuel tanks, Nancy readies more tennis balls. We’re worried about her. Her eyes are flinty and she won’t accept our help. Irene says that she was texting and researching crawdad anatomy for much of the night.
“Do you know what a ganglion is?” Irene asks us. “She kept talking about the ganglion.” We shake our heads, but we reassure her that Nancy is just trying to help, in her own way. Privately, we wonder if we’ll have to rein her in a bit.
We find ways to approach her as she works. We bring her lemonade, sit next to her and sigh, tell her that, obviously, this isn’t how the fight goes every year. Most years, in fact, we don’t lose anyone. She ignores us. She hammers nail after nail through the felt.
“Teenagers,” we say to one another. We’ve seen this before. We assume it’s an act of apology when she volunteers to clean the empty beer bottles out of the boats; we ruffle her hair and let her go.
A few minutes later, we hear the Evinrude sputter.
“Is Nancy starting the boat?” Hank asks, and we walk, then jog, then run toward the beach, where we see the widening stripes of the camo motorboat’s wake, the boat itself a brown wedge skating around the lake’s curve.
“Where’s Archie?” Judy yells. “Nathan! Where’s your brother?”
“He was refueling,” we say. “Is he on the boat?”
“They planned this,” Ben says, and he yells for the pontoon boat’s keys. Irene is pale, her fingers gouging into the skin of Ben’s shoulder.
We follow Ben and Irene and Judy and Carl into the two remaining boats, bringing what weapons we can. We move fluidly in our panic. There is no time for quarrels about seating or who will get the first shot. The motors rev and we zoom away from the dock, past the trampoline, around the curve.
The crawfather is already out of its hole, antennae whipping the air. Something crashes against its side, and we realize that Nancy and Archie are throwing beer bottles at it.
“What do they think they’re doing?” we ask each other.
“Why didn’t they wait?”
“Are they crazy?”
“They’re too close to it!”
Scottie readies his gun, but Irene screams at him to stop, not to shoot until we can be sure the children won’t be hit.
Shards of bottles litter the ground around the crawfather’s rust-colored legs, and now that we’re close enough to see them, we can also smell the gasoline. We see the fuel tank, normally stowed under the seat by the tiller, positioned at Archie’s feet. They’d filled the bottles before lobbing them.
“Oh my god,” we say.
We’re forced to slow our approach so that we don’t overshoot their boat. We watch Nancy hold a nail-studded tennis ball above the water, pour fuel from one of the remaining beer bottles on top of it, then balance it on the seat by the bow. Archie nocks an arrow. He painstakingly dips the tip of it into the fuel tank.