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.
Grecia’s eyes were milky with cataracts and her hair was pure silver, a braid coiled down the side of her neck. She wore all white and carried an old leather doctor’s satchel. She smelled like cinnamon. Behind her, Ignacio stood with his hands in his pockets, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. He avoided my eyes. I understood that this was a last attempt.
“I’m sorry for the state of the house,” I said, rushing toward Grecia and tripping lightly over my backward feet. “I didn’t expect company. Can I offer you a cafecito with a little milk?”
Her pearly eyes widened and she gasped. “Ciguapa,” she said, noticing my feet and taking a step back.
I froze.
“What?” my husband asked.
“She’s a ciguapa.” The old woman’s eyes remained fixed on my feet. “I didn’t know they were real.”
“Ciguapa,” I repeated.
Imagine hearing yourself named for the first time. My mind dredged up the word from the bog of my passive memory: an echo of the old folktale came to mind, but first, I thought of the cigua palmera, the national bird of the Dominican Republic. A bird that loves to perch in palm trees. In English, it’s called the palmchat.
“Fix her,” my husband said. “I’ll give you everything I have. I have money in the bank. I can borrow more.”
“Keep your money,” she said. She shook her head. “The change can’t be reversed.”
Can you imagine a more dangerous monster than one who reads?
Well, I have gotten into the books. Here’s what they say:
A ciguapa is a mysterious, savage, and mystical creature in the folklore of the Dominican Republic. The legend of the ciguapa appears to have originated among the indigenous Taino Indians, though it also appears to have been influenced by African folklore brought over by victims of the slave trade. The legend concerns a group of women who escaped enslavement during the Spanish colonial occupation of the Dominican Republic. The escapees took up residence in the wild, emerging only at night to forage for food.
Imagine a monster whose sole objective is survival. Imagine the bending and shrinking of bones, over generations, to achieve this one end.
The ciguapa’s distinguishing features include a diminutive size (about three feet in height) and reversed feet. Because of the reverse placement of their feet, ciguapas can walk backward and forward comfortably. They are nearly impossible to track.
Bodies designed to elude and confound. Imagine the loneliness.
My husband knelt before Grecia and touched his face to her feet. His voice was low and filled with rage. “Her family knew and they cheated me. My only son is half monster. Will he change, too?”
“It is inherited,” Grecia said slowly, “but I don’t think so. Ciguapas are always women.”
“So, what am I supposed to do,” he said, forehead still pressed to Grecia’s worn leather sandals. “I can’t live like this.”
Grecia looked at me again with something akin to pity. “Leave her.” She stepped back and gently freed her legs from Ignacio’s grasp. “Leave her alone.”
“I’m your wife,” I said, my anger finally welling up to answer his. “We were married before God. Do those vows mean nothing to you?”
“I was cheated. I didn’t set out to marry some sort of demon,” he said, rising heavily to his feet. At full height, he was nearly twice my size. “Some demon that could kill my only son.”
“She won’t hurt Javier,” Grecia said. But now that Ignacio knew she could not fix me, her opinion no longer mattered. Ignacio ushered her out of the house, folding a few crisp bills into her palm, even as she tried to reason with him. He told her to never speak of me again and slammed the door.
“I could kill you,” he said simply when he returned. “And no one would ask questions.”
“Our three-year-old son is in the next room,” I hissed, craning my neck to look up at him. The distance between us seemed infinite.
“So? He’ll grow up knowing the truth. His mother was a monster and I did what I needed to do to her to keep him safe. He’ll know his father is a brave man.”
“This is what you call brave?”
“You know your voice is changing, too, right?” He pushed me against the wall. In the other room, Javier began to gurgle in his crib.
“Go get him,” Ignacio said. “Go take him out of his crib.”
“I may not be able to carry him anymore, but Javier is as much my son as he is yours. This is my house and I’m not going anywhere.”
“Who paid for this house?”
“Where’s the money my parents left me when they died?”
“Your parents are charlatans. You can’t ever repay me for what your family has done to me.”
He picked me up, kicked open the back door, and hurled me out into the backyard, which extended out into the woods. I scraped my elbows as I landed in the dirt, unable to rely on my knees. I didn’t know how to fall yet.
He shivered. “Look at you, you’re terrifying,” he said. It infuriated him that I seemed content with this new body, even as I struggled to my feet. “You’re not the woman I married,” he said. “And you’re not welcome in my house anymore.”
He bolted the door behind him.
If fear is a currency, then those were extravagant times. The books acknowledge, at least, that this was the age of Trujillo. In awed, breathless lists, the books catalog the torture, the rapes, the mutilation. They say: this brutality is unprecedented.
Oh, but it’s only an echo of what came before. You know that, right?
We are the record. It’s etched into our bones. A million times.
The ciguapa has long, lustrous hair that covers her naked body. Because of the odd placement of her feet, the ciguapa is nearly impossible to capture. She lives in mountain caves, in the trees, and in underwater caves along the shores.
The ciguapa can capture a man with her dark, hypnotic eyes. She is known to find lone men on the road and lure them to her cave or to her alcove by the sea. The men are never seen again. It is assumed that she eats them.
I stood, shaking, and scanned the area for nosy onlookers.
You will unlearn shame, as I did, and you will be happier for it.
The woods loomed before me and I decided I would give Ignacio this temporary victory. I would take a walk.
The air was intoxicating: the perfume of Bayahíbe roses, a million petals curled in on themselves for the night, a self-embrace. I backpedaled, feeling a sudden urge to run far away, to plunge into the sea. I had never run so fast. Many miles passed in a light breeze. Without learning how, I climbed a palm tree near the shore and was suddenly aware of my altered clothes and how needlessly constricting they were. I jumped down and ran my hands through the wild dry grass, relished the cool soft sand beneath.
Night fell and a full moon emerged. Ciguapas dropped from the cradles of their palm trees. They emerged from behind bushes. They were all small like me and naked. They all walked backward, nimble on their feet. In this clearing there were a dozen or so, but I knew that there were many, many others.
The ciguapas gathered around me.
“We all already know each other,” a ciguapa named Diana told me, kissing me on both cheeks.
It was true. I had never met Diana before, but it was true.
“We don’t live together because it’s safest,” she said. “But the full moon is hard to resist.”
“Luna blanca, cobertor y manta,” said another ciguapa who called herself Yamila. “Fool moon. It’s when we yearn for our old lives the most. It makes us do stupid things. But most nights, we eat, we explore, and then we sleep.”