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.
Stella nodded. “I promise.”
He handed her a pair of latex gloves and a paper mask to cover her mouth and nose; she considered for the first time how bad it might be. She hadn’t even really registered that he had squeezed through a cracked door and greeted her outside. The lawn was manicured, the flower beds mulched and weeded and ready for the spring that promised to erupt at any moment, if winter ever agreed to depart. The shutters sported fresh white paint.
Which was why she was surprised when Marco cracked the door again to enter, leaving only enough room for her to squeeze through as she followed. Something was piled behind the door. Also beside the door, in front of the door, and in every available space in the entranceway. A narrow path led forward to the kitchen, another into the living room, another upstairs.
“Oh,” she said.
He glanced back at her. “It’s not too late to back out. You didn’t know what you were signing up for.”
“I didn’t,” she admitted. “But it’s okay. Do you have a game plan?”
“Dining room, living room, rec room, bedrooms, in that order. I have no clue how long any room will take, so whatever we get done is fine. Most of what you’ll find is garbage, which can go into bags I’ll take to the dumpster in the yard. Let me know if you see anything you think I might care about. We should probably work in the same room, anyhow, since I don’t want either of us dying under a pile. That was all I thought about while I cleaned a path through the kitchen to get to the dumpster: if I get buried working in here alone, nobody will ever find me.”
“Dining room it is, then.” She tried to inject enthusiasm into her voice, or at least moral support.
It was strange seeing a house where she had spent so much time reduced to such a fallen state. She didn’t think she’d have been able to say where a side table or a bookcase had stood, but there they were, in the deepest stratum, and she remembered.
They’d met here to go to prom, ten of them. Marco’s father had photographed the whole group together, only saying once, “In my day, people went to prom with dates,” and promptly getting shushed by Marco’s mother. Denny had sat on the stairs and watched them, omnipresent notebook in his hands. It hadn’t felt weird until Marco told him to go upstairs, and then suddenly it had gone from just another family member watching the festivities to something more unsettling.
She and Marco went through the living room to the dining room. A massive table still dominated the room, though it was covered with glue sticks and paintbrushes and other art supplies. Every other surface in the room held towering piles, but the section demarcated by paint-smeared newspaper suggested Denny had actually used the table.
She smelled the kitchen from ten feet away. Her face must have shown it, because Marco said, “I’m serious. Don’t go in there unless you have to. I’ve got all the windows open and three fans blowing but it’s not enough. I thought we could start in here because it might actually be easiest. You can do the sideboard and the china cabinets and I’ll work on clearing the table. Two categories: garbage and maybe-not-garbage, which includes personal stuff and anything you think might be valuable. Dying is shockingly expensive.”
Stella didn’t know if that referred to Denny’s death—she didn’t know how he’d died—or to the funeral, and she didn’t want to ask. She wondered why Marco had chosen the impersonal job with no decisions involved, but when she came to one of his grandmother’s porcelain teacups, broken by the weight of everything layered on top of it, she thought she understood. He didn’t necessarily remember what was under here, but seeing it damaged would be harder than if Stella just threw it in a big black bag. The items would jog memories; their absence would not.
She also came to understand the purpose of the latex gloves. The piles held surprises. Papers layered on papers layered on toys and antiques, then, suddenly, mouse turds or a cat’s hairball or the flattened tendril of some once-green plant or something moldering and indefinable. Denny had apparently smoked, too; every few layers, a full ashtray made an appearance. The papers were for the most part easy discards: the news and obituary sections of the local weekly newspaper, going back ten, fifteen, thirty-five years, some with articles cut out.
Here and there, she came across something that had survived: a silver platter, a resilient teapot, a framed photo. She placed those on the table in the space Marco had cleared. For a while it felt like she was just shifting the mess sideways, but eventually she began to recognize progress in the form of the furniture under the piles. When Marco finished, he dragged her garbage bags through the kitchen and out to the dumpster, then started sifting through the stuff she’d set aside. He labeled three boxes: “keep,” “donate,” and “sell.” Some items took him longer than others; she decided not to ask how he made the choices. If he wanted to talk, he’d talk.
“Stop for lunch?” Marco asked when the table at last held only filled boxes.
Stella’s stomach had started grumbling an hour before; she was more than happy to take a break. She reached instinctively for her phone to check the time, then stopped herself and peeled the gloves off the way she’d learned in first aid in high school, avoiding contamination. “I need to wash my hands.”
“Do it at the deli on the corner. You don’t want to get near any of these sinks.”
The deli on the corner hadn’t been there when they were kids. What had been? A real estate office or something else that hadn’t registered in her teenage mind. Now it was a hipster re-creation of a deli, really, complete with order numbers from a wall dispenser. A butcher with a waxed mustache took their order.
“Did he go to school with us?” Stella whispered to Marco, watching the butcher.
He nodded. “Chris Bethel. He was in the class between us and Denny, except he had a different name back then.”
In that moment, she remembered a Chris Bethel, pretransition, playing Viola in Twelfth Night like a person who knew what it was to be shipwrecked on a strange shore. Good for him.
While they waited, she ducked into the bathroom to scrub her hands. She smelled like the house now, and hoped nobody else noticed.
Marco had already claimed their sandwiches, in plastic baskets and waxed paper, and chosen a corner table away from the other customers. They took their first few bites without speaking. Marco hadn’t said much all morning, and Stella had managed not to give in to her usual need to fill silences, but now she couldn’t help it.
“Where do you live? And how long have you and Justin been together?”
“Outside Boston,” he said. “And fifteen years. How about you?”
“Chicago. Divorced. One son, Cooper. I travel a lot. I work sales for a coffee distributor.”
Even as she spoke, she hated that she’d said it. None of it was true. She had always done that, inventing things when she had no reason to lie, just because they sounded interesting, or because it gave her a thrill. If he had asked to see pictures of her nonexistent son Cooper, she’d have nothing to show. Not to mention she had no idea what a coffee distributor did.
Marco didn’t seem to notice, or else he knew it wasn’t true and filed it away as proof they had drifted apart for a reason. They finished their sandwiches in silence.
“Tackle the living room next?” Marco asked. “Or the rec room?”
“Rec room,” she said. It was farther from the kitchen.
Farther from the kitchen, but the basement litter pans lent a different odor and trapped it in the windowless space. She sighed and tugged the mask up.