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.
I switch on my phone: so many missed calls, and “are you okay?” texts. I see past them, my mind stuck on a thought. Could I have known?
How to know when someone is suicidal
Offered list by WebMD:
Excessive sadness or moodiness
Hopelessness
Sleep problems
Withdrawal . . .
Things I have now, things everyone has at some point. I can hear them whispering in the hallway. The main lights are off so they do not know I am in his room. Mum has been looking for every opportunity to pick a fight with anyone and everyone since Baraka . . .
I switch on the bedside lamp, look around the room, and feel the need to clean, to purge, to burn, everything reminds me of him. I notice the skirt I left on the dark brown carpet, tufts fraying in the corner of the fabric, a bottle peeking out—bluish with dark liquid—and I remember the old lady; Mum’s cousin, twice removed, or thrice? What have I to lose? I pick at the skirt, unfolding its fabric until I get to the bottle stuck in the pocket. It is a strange little thing, heavier than it should be. I try and decipher the inscrutable handwriting on the white label. One teaspoon? I think it says, but can’t be too sure. I open the lid, sniff it, and wrinkle my nose. The scent is thick, bitter; touching the sense that is in between taste and smell. All I can think is I am so very exhausted and I do not want to wake up tomorrow. Can I skip time? I throw my head back, taking down a gulp. Its consistency is thick like honey but it burns like pili-pili.
At first, nothing. I close the lid and drop the bottle. I should have known, probably nothing more than a crazy lady’s herbs. Could I have known? I should have known. I should have bloody known. I punch the pillow and fall into it, exhausted.
And this is how it went. On this day that Baraka came home from school with a dark eye and a face that told a thousand different versions of the same story, on this day that Mama Kabi burned pilau on the stove, on this day I begin again.
They wake up on different sides of the same house with different versions of time past. Kabi, with her head a little heavy, feeling somewhat detached from her body, hears singing in the shower and thinks she is imagining it. Her bed, her covers, her furniture. “Who moved me to my room?”
Smells wafting from the kitchen and Mum is shouting, “Baraka! You’re going to be late for school, get out of the shower!”
Has she finally gone mad? Hearing voices . . . a coping mechanism? Two minutes later the door is pushed in and there he is with a towel around his waist, hair wet, and the boyish lanky frame barely dried off.
“Sheesh, Kabi, you look like you’ve seen a ghost! It’s just eyeliner, what do you think?”
She cannot move and she thinks this is familiar, searching her mind for memory, and then she thinks this is a dream. Closing her eyes, she whispers, “not real, not real, not real, not real,”
“Kabi, you’re freaking me out. Are you okay?
Kabi?”
He smells like cocoa butter. A scent she would recognize a kilometer away, attached to him like water to plants on early mornings. She opens her eyes and he is still there, an orange hue finding its way through the windowsill, refracting off his skin where the sun made a love pact with melanin, beautiful light dancing, and she makes a noise that is somewhere between a gasp and a scream.
“Muuuuuuummmmmmmmmmm! Kabi is acting weird!”
“Baraka, stop disturbing your sister and get ready for school, if the bus leaves you ni shauri yako. I am not going to interrupt my morning to drop you!”
He walks toward the mirror in Kabi’s room and poses. “Sis, don’t make this a big deal, okay. I know you said not to touch your stuff but I don’t know, I’ve been feeling kinda weird lately, like low, you know? I just thought trying something different with my look today would make me feel better.”
She croaks, “Baraka?”
He looks at her, eyes big and brown, outlined by the black kohl, more precious than anything she has ever encountered, and she wants to run to him but she is scared she will reach for him and grab air, scared that he is not really there. So instead she stays still and says, “I love you.” Hoping the words will become tangible things that will keep this moment in continuum.
He laughs. Their “I love yous” are present but more unsaid than said. “I guess the new look does make me more likable.”
“BARAKA, if I have to call you one more time!”
“Yoh, gotta go, Mum’s about to break something, or someone.” When he reaches the doorway he turns around. “But just so you know, nakupenda pia.” And then he is gone.
Okay, she thinks, looks at her phone, notices I am different from what she expected. The thoughts running through her mind, okay, she thinks, hopes? Maybe Baraka dying was just a nightmare? And this is what’s real, but no, too many days went by.
She collects herself and moves, taking the steps down two by two; she almost trips, steadies herself on the railing and reaches the last step just in time to catch the conversation taking place in the kitchen.
“Not in my house!”
“Ayii, Mum, it’s not that big a deal!”
Mama Kabi, never one to consider her words before they come out, says, “What will you be wearing next? Ehh? Lipstick? Dresses? If God wanted me to have another girl he would not have put that soldier hanging between your legs.”
Baraka is mortified. “Muuum!”
“What? It is the truth.” She sees her daughter lurking. “Nyokabi, can you talk to this brother of yours. I do not understand what behavior he is trying.”
—And how small this detail is in the scheme of everything. Does she know he was dead?! Will be dead? But how can she know?—
“Sometimes I swear God gave me children to punish me. Mwathani, what did I do wrong?! Eeh?! Why do you want my blood pressure to finish?”
Baraka did not expect her reaction to be positive but he expected . . . well, he does not know what he expected, just not this, not the overwhelming despair this reaction brings up inside of him; if he had just slipped by unnoticed—but he didn’t slip by unnoticed and they are here now and he knows with his mother it is a battle of the will, so he tries to reflect strong will on his face but his eyes are glistening.
“Wipe it off.”
“But . . .”
“Now!”
Nyokabi takes the chance to intervene. “Mum, maybe . . .”
“Stay out of this, Nyokabi!”
Kabi works her jaw, measuring her words. “So you only want me to speak when I am on your side.”
Their mother gives her a look and she goes silent.
When he is gone, the black liner sufficiently cleared off his face, another tube stubbornly and comfortably tucked into his pocket, saved for the bathrooms at school, the unfinished conversation hangs in the air between the glances traded back and forth.
“Usiniangalia hivo, I do it for his own good.” Mama Kabi looks at her daughter, about to add something, but changes her mind, busies herself with clearing dishes, signaling she is done with the conversation.
Kabi thinks of the words to tell her, to explain what is happening, but they do not come. How to say, your son will die by his own hand and I know this because I found his body hanging from the ceiling in the future—
Something clicks. “Mum, there is a lady; your second or third cousin, I can’t remember her name but she has long dreadlocks and big arms.”
She is distracted. “What are you talking about? Kwanza don’t you also need to go to work, Kabi?”