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.
“Hold on!” we shout. “Stop!”
Nancy retrieves a lighter from somewhere in the bottom of the boat. She lights Archie’s arrow, then her tennis ball. He calibrates, looses the arrow, and nimbly steps out of her way so that she can complete a graceful underhand stroke with her racket. They both glance back at us to see how much time they have left.
We aren’t looking at them. Instead, we trace the paths of these two small, flaming projectiles as they descend on the crawfather. Both have been launched in high arcs, aim prioritized over speed and force. We will them to fizzle out, to skid harmlessly into sand. Some of us even reach for them. It looks like we are reaching for the kids, but we are reaching for the bombs, and either reach, it turns out, would be useless.
The arrow plants itself in the ground between two of the crawfather’s legs, and the ground suddenly looks as though it’s cracked onto hell. Fire spreads in veins around the crawfather and flares up inside its cave, where they must have pitched more bottles before we caught up with them.
Nancy’s burning tennis ball bounces off the crawfather’s shell like a quick kiss, and then the crawfather is alight. We can hear the heat and pressure build inside its exoskeleton, the whistle of steam released as it cooks. Its tail curls and uncurls in agony. Its legs scramble against the sand, and we think it may be trying to run for water, or for its hole, but it’s blind by now. It drags its pincers along its own back and head, desperate to clean itself of the fire. We watch it stumble and fall onto the beach with a succession of sharp cracking sounds. We smell it: the world’s largest and worst crawfish boil, meat dripping with mud and seaweed and goose shit, all the lake scents that the water buries.
The crawfather burns. We pull our shirt collars over our mouths as our eyes water. We’re in line with the third boat, and we stare at Nancy and Archie. They meet our eyes in defiance. We wonder where their parents went wrong; what we could have done; what we will do.
“That was fucking easy,” Nancy yells. Archie nods.
“You take that boat back right now!” Irene is the first of us to find her voice. “Right now! You turn around and go straight back!”
Nancy squints at her mother, confused. She spreads her hands, palms up: What did I do wrong?
None of us answers. Grandpa Richie has a coughing fit, and we motor in reverse to get out of the smoke. But we don’t turn around. The three boats waver with the chop, shoulder to shoulder, all of them still facing the burning beach. We’re breathing too fast. We nurse a quiet fury that we know is too ludicrous to name. We glare at the middle boat, its bottom bright with tennis balls.
“What?” Archie asks, young and mystified. “What is it? We killed it!”
Our hands are fists, our nails biting our palms. They wouldn’t understand. They thrive on instability and fractures. They can’t let anything be enough. We wipe our foreheads, square our shoulders.
“Let’s just go home,” we say.
TOCHI ONYEBUCHI
How to Pay Reparations: A Documentary
A city hall office, all wood paneling.
ROBERT (BOBBY) CAINE, AGE 52, MAYOR OF _____: He left us a mess. Frank and his reparations bill, he left us a mess, that’s what he did. I’ma have to be mayor a hundred more years to balance this budget. At least. [Laughing.] Imagine that. A white mayor. Spearheading a citywide reparations scheme? And you really can’t call it anything other than that. Because that’s what it is. Don’t get me wrong; as a Black man, I’m all for gettin’ paid for what I been through. But if that stack is just a steppin’ stone for some white boy on his way to the Governor’s Mansion? I’m good. I hope he’s doing well for himself. He must not have liked this job all that much if he was willin’ to throw it away so fast.
Sunlight cuts through the blinds of a tiny office. Bookshelves bend under the weight of monographs. More books cover the floor around a desk. Behind the desk sits a man with his glasses hanging around his neck, his mask pulled down. He wears a tweed jacket and periodically removes a handkerchief from his breast pocket to dab at his forehead.
PROFESSOR MARK HIGGINS, AGE 73, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR AT _____ STATE UNIVERSITY, FORMER MEMBER OF REPAIR PROJECT TEAM: It’s impossible. It’s actually impossible to pay reparations. You can look to other models across time and place—the recompense offered to slave owners, for instance, for their having been made bereft of their chattel; what Haiti has been forced to pay France for the temerity of having won its independence, etc.—but there’s no real analogue for reparations paid to the truly injured parties for the totality of slavery. Some people like to point to what Germany did after the Holocaust, but the injury being addressed was the extermination of a people. The “orbit of hurt”—which sounds like a callous way of putting it, granted—is somewhat fixed in that example. Let’s break down how exactly that plan, which looked so perfect and discrete on paper, truly unfolded.
You have the Luxembourg Agreement of 1952 and the Additional Federal Compensation Act of 1953. What did the Germans do? They paid the state of Israel for the cost of resettlement. Half a million Jewish refugees. That’s what they paid for. On top of that, however, was the requirement that the moneys be used only to purchase goods produced within Germany. It’s not until you get to the Federal Compensation Act of 1956 that moneys are being offered to German Jews who had suffered at the hands of the Nazi regime and their surviving dependents. There was a claim deadline of 1969. More groups became eligible in the interim with different pay schedules, but imagine the hundreds of lawyers and functionaries representing clients with divergent interests all vying for a piece of a finite pie trapped in red tape. By the time money gets to you, there’s a nonzero possibility you’re already dead.
Now, a governmental authority could recompense people for lost property. Or, and this is something people latched onto later on, they could compensate victims for their slave labor. A few years ago, the Claims Conference and the German government announced that they would pay an amount to each of the survivors of Kindertransport. Guess what they were paid. Well, the ones who hadn’t died by then. Guess. Two thousand and five hundred euros.
I wrote this and much more in a report I submitted to the team behind the REPAIR Project, and I’m sure they listened, because they decided to add something more structural to that asinine personal compensation model. But they let me go ultimately.
A burger restaurant. Former city councilman Richard Perkins (age 42) and corporate lawyer Tommy DiSanto (53) sit on the patio, a plate of fries in front of each of them. Their black face masks hang from one ear as they eat. DiSanto was an inaugural member of the REPAIR Project Team. Perkins was the team’s founder and leader.
DISANTO: How did it start? I joined after I heard about it, right? Or did you reach out to me—
PERKINS: I think we reached out to you. Well, I reached out to you. Nobody was supposed to know about this at first. I don’t think anyone was supposed to know about it, period. But, see, Tommy and I went to law school together and—
DISANTO: And while Richie turned into a hotshot city politician on his way to the Governor’s Mansion—hell, probably the White House with that jawline of yours—I was out here defending Halliburton. But, shit, this was easy pro bono for me.