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.
She stood up straighter and uncrossed her arms. She forced her lips to lift at the corners.
I kissed her on the cheek. “Bendición, Mamá,” I said. In our culture, it is customary to ask our relatives for a blessing every time we greet them. We are trained to careen through the world begging for blessings.
I have learned to make my own blessings. You will, too.
“Celi,” she said. Her voice was stilted, as if she had been practicing. “I couldn’t wait to tell you the good news.”
I trailed her into my bedroom.
“Don’t change yet,” she said, as I began to unbutton my blouse. Don’t change yet. I sat on the rose-covered blanket on my bed instead. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“You’re getting married,” she said, smile sepulchral, eyes fixed somewhere along my hairline.
“What? To who? Mamá, I’m fourteen.” In this era, it was not uncommon for country girls my age to marry, but there were usually—how do I put it—other considerations.
“I know, mi amor. But there are things you don’t know, even about yourself.”
I wondered if I had, like the Virgin Mary, become pregnant without knowing it. We are taught so young to be suspicious of our own bodies. In our case, perhaps, not suspicious enough.
My mother took a long breath and sat next to me. She faced the wall and kept her face blank. “You’re different. I need you to trust me. I’m trying to give you a full life.”
“How am I different?”
“You’ll know when you need to know,” she said.
“Doesn’t it sound like I need to know now?”
“You’re too young to understand.”
Isn’t that one of the worst sentences you’ve ever heard? I won’t teach it to you in Spanish.
“What’s a full life, then?” I had started to cry. “What do you mean?”
“Children, security, family.” She tucked my hair behind my ear. She whispered, “It’s complicated, Celi, but I promise you, on the Virgin herself, that I’m trying.”
It would be ironic, I suppose, for the history books to document how stubbornly we avoid our own stories.
The day after I turned fifteen, I was married to a man named Ignacio at the church near the school. I wore a new white, white dress. My mother hugged me so hard I feared my bones might break. My best friends, Laryssa and Benigna, wept in a pew. We were all grateful that our sobs were mistaken for tears of happiness.
I met Ignacio once before the wedding. He was a pleasant, if uninteresting, man in his midtwenties who wore short-sleeved button-down shirts in pastel colors. He was an accountant for a company in Higüey. He agreed to commute to work so that we could live in my parents’ village, by the woods.
The ceremony was short and the night: very long.
Ciguapas are always women. This is true, though no one asks why. I think it has something to do with our powers of escaping. And because we are women, the literature has much to say about the way we look. The ciguapas are very beautiful, some books say. The ciguapas are hideous, say others.
I do not think the books are wrong. My problem is with what the books do not say.
The books say that the first ciguapas were magic born of necessity, pressurized alchemy. The colonists came, they say, and some island women escaped to the caves and to the sea. Terror morphed our bodies into something monstrous and untraceable. It took less than three years for the colonists to kill everyone else.
Then new generations of ciguapas came in on the ocean waves. We are a nation’s wounds made flesh.
By the time I turned sixteen, I had a son named Javier and my parents had died in a car accident. Ignacio was a good man. He did all the right things. He held my hand at my parents’ funeral and pressed a cool towel against my forehead as I gave birth.
It’s certainly not the sort of thing worth putting in a book: Ignacio made good money and managed the house. I followed orders and kept everything clean. I focused my quiet desperation and love on my son. It’s boring, really, in its normalcy.
The trouble began when I realized that I was getting smaller.
Every day, I became a little bit shorter. The changes were almost imperceptible at first. I would cook dinner and the pot of rice would feel a bit heavier than it had the day before, the shelf that held the plates a bit higher. My skirts seemed longer than I remembered; my shoes wider.
Shorter and shorter and shorter until I was table height. My husband complained. I was becoming hard to find.
By the time I turned seventeen, Javier was two years old and we were practically the same height.
That wasn’t the only change. My skin seemed lit from within, like pure ámbar. Do you know about Dominican amber? Dominican amber is resin from an extinct tree called Hymenaea protera. Wondrous, isn’t it? How nature keeps a record, even when we cannot, of species that no longer walk the earth. The honey-colored resin is nearly transparent and carries an extremely high number of fossil inclusions, small lives trapped for twenty million years, to be studied under loupes, sold to tourists, worn on pendants.
My eyes seemed larger in my shrinking face. My hair grew faster, coming in shiny, long, and thick. Several times, I cut my hair myself, huddled over the sink in the dead of night, with a sharp pair of kitchen shears. By the next morning, it had grown to cover my knees again.
And then there was the puzzle of what happened to my feet.
They shrank—along with the rest of my body—and they realigned. My knees began to ache as if someone were twisting them to the point of breaking. They began to turn outward, to pivot.
The change was slight, at first: I waddled like a pregnant woman, my toes facing out. But soon I was walking like a ballerina in the second position. People began to notice. The little boys at the market began to trail me home, imitating my walk.
At first, my husband brushed off the jibes and made dirty jokes to his friends over beers—but then the jokes were laced with something acidic. I could not find the words to say I felt betrayed, but I suppose he felt the same.
By the following year, my knees, my calves, and my feet had rotated completely to align themselves with my back. Ignacio loathed the sight of me. I had become something he didn’t understand.
I stopped leaving the house. Try keeping a secret in Higüey; it’s impossible.
When I stand facing a mirror here’s what I see: A woman, about thirty-six inches tall. Proportionally small, with short limbs. Eyes large, dark, and clear. Hair long, down to the area where my knees should be, except that what I see there now is the tender backs of my knees, slender Achilles tendons, calloused heels.
I see Celimena, trying her best. And for reasons that never make it into the books, my deformity doesn’t upset me the way it should. It feels true.
I had to learn how to move in my new body, but I’m adaptable. It did not take me long to learn to backpedal, to look over my shoulder constantly.
Ignacio didn’t know what I was and he resented me for it. Have you seen his picture? He was a big man, nearly six feet tall, and solidly built besides, with a thick waist. He would come home from a night out with his friends, heavy-limbed with drink, and slam me against the walls.
When he realized that my bones seemed impervious to breakage, he tried harder.
He seemed resolved to tear me limb from limb, if he had to, to crack me open and release the secret I was hiding.
One night, he came home with Grecia, a local widow who practiced Santeria. You should know that we Dominicans say we’re God-fearing Catholics, but when confronted with a stubborn problem, we’ll try anything.