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 says, “That’s not very kingly,” feeling hurt, and more vulnerable than she wants to be, and probably a little foolish.
He says, “Well, you don’t look especially queenly,” and drops the scrolls in a heap. She despairs at her reflection in the window.
“The gossip magazines are going to love this look,” she says.
“Easy fix,” he says. “Here.” He sweeps up to the balcony’s edge, blotting her from view of the courtyard. So close that she’s immediately on high alert. She steps back. Every muscle clamped.
“You need more width,” she says, with all the calm she can summon.
He begins to windmill his arms like a complete fool. He doesn’t say a word, just churns his arms up and down with intense concentration. And to her own surprise, she starts to laugh. She can’t help it. He does his best deadpan, smile uncracked, but it’s there in the twitch of his eyebrows, the twinkle in his eye.
“What’s your plan here?” she says.
“Trickery,” he says, not missing a step. “Misdirection. Excellent upper-arm strength.”
You may be thinking that this would be an opportune time to push him off the balcony, make it look like an accident, and maybe you wouldn’t be wrong. But he’s still the size of a world-class heavyweight boxer, and she is still most decidedly not. And yes, she’s eager to please, and yes, even now, he can find ways to disarm her utterly. And yes, this moment, precious as it is, has a kind of power on its own, a force, and the ache of laughter in her abdomen will sustain her a few days longer. Do you really want to take that away from her?
It’s easy to say that it becomes a game for him, and a game for her. In Anne’s case, if it’s a game, the game is Monopoly, her game piece is a pewter chicken décapité, the banker is a scoundrel and a cheat, the properties disintegrate every time she lands on them, and the dice are made of fire. What game is this to him? If he’s winning, does it even matter?
But for her, how’s this for an alternative: On a spectral day in autumn, a cockroach tumbles across Anne’s writing desk like a very squirmy, very small shooting star. It is swift, intrepid. In its wayward progress, it hemorrhages anxiety.
Its clumsy, heroic journey plucks the tenderest meat inside her. Is it any surprise that she sees something in the cockroach that hums on the same frequency as she does? She builds tranquil highways with her hands, one at a time, and is rewarded when the roach travels safely through. Her triumph is no small thing.
She hopes it is a girl cockroach, that the baseboards and the cracks in the wall are seething with her unhatched eggs, that beneath the floors the concrete is bulging with her magnificent cockroach babies. She hopes they are abundant and hungry. That every day, each year, the cockroaches and their cockroach babies encroach in an ever-expanding circle from their nest. That when civilization crumbles into the ground, and textbooks get chucked en masse into the sea, and all of this is done and gone—and it will be done, it will be gone, she’s got to believe that the universe has a long memory and a short temper and that this, this is nothing—they will still be here, in the walls, under the floors, teeming, multiplying, ravenous, devouring, surviving.
He has his body servant stuff handkerchiefs down her throat. What you might call a reverse magic trick. Silk handkerchiefs, floral handkerchiefs, designer ones, handkerchiefs dipped in eau de cologne, ones that carry the perfume of another woman, while Henry lurks in the doorway, exultant.
It is such an absurd way to die that she begins to laugh, and once she starts laughing, it’s too late, she can’t stop. She even helps the servant stuff them down her throat. It is not pleasurable, by any means, but it bewilders him and leaves Henry stunned.
“Um, should I keep going?” the body servant is asking Henry, the last thing she remembers before she dies.
Sometimes he is fuzzy on the details. Sometimes he will forget and call her by the names of his other wives and she will have to correct him. He might leave her alone if she were somebody else, it’s true. But she is unwilling to be forgotten.
“I’m Anne,” she says impatiently. “Anne. Remember? Not Jane or Other Anne or Catherine. You haven’t killed those ones yet.”
He lines up everyone she has known, her mother and father, her dead brothers, her childhood friends, her nursemaid, her tutors, her grandmother, her priests, the snooty cousin she almost married, all the kids in high school who made fun of her. One by one, they tell her every mean thing they have ever thought about her.
“You’re such a needy person,” her grandmother says. “I often dread the sound of your approach.”
“You’re much less attractive than you think,” says her snooty cousin.
“We always thought your jokes were kind of repetitive,” her dead brothers confess.
“You probably shouldn’t have started the English Reformation,” one of the priests says.
“I didn’t want another daughter,” her mother admits.
“You still smell like farts,” says one of the kids from school.
“I always thought you had so much potential,” says a childhood friend. “I wish I could take more pride in having known you.”
It goes on like this for hours. In the center, Anne, lovely Anne, poor Anne, with her hands over her face, bawling, full-on ugly-crying. Shoulders shuddering, snot-nosed, basically a mess. At some point, probably during her father’s seven-minute monologue about everything they could’ve spent their fortune on if she hadn’t been born, she will faint with grief and maybe dehydration, and the court physicians will not be able to revive her. Everyone goes home: her mother, father, dead brothers, and so on. She passes later in the evening, with little fanfare, most likely of a broken heart.
There is a version of her story where she doesn’t die again and again and again.
There is a version of her story where she shivs him in his sleep.
There is a version where she is born in the future, and when she meets Henry at one of those rickety self-serious parties at Oxford, his discount-aristocracy vibes, prickly disposition, and fixation with his own poetry are clanging alarm bells. She walks away and never looks back.
There is a version where she gives birth to a daughter. In this version of the story, Anne still dies in the most ignoble and depressing of fashions: a sword, a Frenchman, a chopping block, gawking ministers, a wordless husband. It is her daughter who will avenge her mother—with the throne she takes by force, the wars she wages, the playwrights she patronizes, the papacies she outwits, the rebellions she crushes, the cults she accidentally spawns, the people she forgives, through all the many men she meets and never marries.
She wakes up one morning and the whole castle is closed for renovations. The imperial estates are empty and eerie. Set painters are giving the outer walls a fresh coat. A few crew members crawl on their hands and knees in the chapel, swabbing delicate graining details into the marble flagstones so they don’t look like plastic. In the state room, a prop maker wheels away a vase, completely oblivious to her presence. He replaces it a few minutes later with an almost identical, slightly more era-appropriate vase.
When she passes Henry in the hallway, he’s just as perplexed as she is.
But later that day, on instinct, he swipes a can of paint from the art department. He composes a sprawling landscape. A canyon, right in front of Anne’s apartments. He’s not the best artist, but what he lacks in talent, he makes up for in cruelty. When she steps out of her room, she plunges right in, all the way to the bottom of the canyon, where she breaks her leg.