Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  Dr. Blake looks at me kindly. “You said you’d experienced no new symptoms of note, but you failed to mention the hallucinations.”

  “The hallucinations?” I repeat, baffled. “What hallucinations?”

  “I realize this must be very difficult for you. It’s hard to admit when—“

  “What hallucinations are you talking about?”

  He looks sheepish. “I overheard you talking with your daughter about her grandmother’s death. I know it must have been traumatic for you. I need to ask what medications you are on. We might need to adjust their dosages.”

  Realization sinks in. He had overheard Lily and me talk about Gray-Granna turning into butterflies, and he had assumed that I couldn’t have seen that, I must’ve been hallucinating. Lily, of course, was only a child. Prone to flights of fancy, or maybe she’d been humoring me. That’s what he’d think.

  “You seem to have misheard the context,” I explain stiffly. “I assure you I’m not hallucinating.”

  A frown tugs at the corners of his mouth, but he pushes it back to cheerfully assure me that I may not think I’ve been hallucinating but…

  “There are no buts. I’ve been perfectly lucid. You misunderstood.” I stand up to indicate that this visit is over.

  His eyes narrow. He isn’t done examining me, although I’m done being examined. Dr. Waterhouse would know, I think resentfully. Dr. Waterhouse has been the family physician his whole life. He writes the death certificates for the family. He’s never once asked to see the bodies. He knows, I expect, what he’d find … or not find.

  I push past Dr. Blake and collect Lily from the waiting room. She pockets a pamphlet on iron deficiency when she thinks I’m not looking.

  * * *

  Dash and I argue that evening. I tell him we need to tell Lily.

  “Do you know what I found between One Fish Two Fish and Hop on Pop?” I ask him. “‘The Ten Warning Signs of Heart Disease Women Most Ignore.’ She knows something is wrong. Just not what.”

  Dash runs his hands through his hair. “I don’t want to tell her anything until I know what I can tell her to expect. You’ve got to make a decision, Viv.”

  I cross my arms over my chest. “I made a decision. You just refuse to accept it.”

  “That was not a decision,” Dash says. “That was you blindly accepting tradition, embracing the status quo.”

  “Whose status quo?” I ask. “Your family’s ways are…”

  “They’re a gift,” Dash says.

  “You think they’re better than what regular folks do.”

  “Aren’t they?” By now, his hands have raked his hair up in tufts. “Nobody dies to be forgotten. Nobody gets pumped full of chemicals and dumped into a cement tomb in the ground. Nobody dies in hideous pain.”

  “But they still die,” I point out. “I’m still going to die too. I’ll still be gone.”

  Dash blinks hard against this statement. “Not if you become family.”

  Here is the Gordian knot that rubs between us when we hold each other. I am not a Karner. I love Dash, he loves me, we have a daughter binding us together. We are family but not. I’m on the outside. By choice, I remind myself.

  “I won’t.” Can’t. Shouldn’t. What are the words that will explain this to him? I have no idea.

  He flinches. “Fine. I’ll let you explain it to Lily. It’s your choice after all.”

  “Why do you always pretend like it’s Lily I’ll be hurting most? Why not just say that you want it for you, and acknowledge it’s for your own selfish reasons?”

  Dash exhales long and slow before making a reply. “I thought I had. That wasn’t good enough. And Lily isn’t good enough either.” He turns on his heel and walks out of the room, leaving me to wonder why I’ve held my ground on this for so long.

  * * *

  We hold a memorial service for Gray-Granna two weeks after her death. Two weeks gives the Karner cousins time to all wend their way back to the family estate. Two weeks for Janet to stage-manage the expectations of the town. Litchfield is small, and it’s not every day a Karner dies. They showed up in force for Opa’s service, and that seems to have only sharpened their curiosity. Dr. Waterhouse is discreet, but it’s obvious that rumors still leak out.

  The pastor delivers the same sermon for Gray-Granna that he did for Opa. Something about Jesus coming forth on the third day, returning to Mary in the garden. He does not add, “As a wheelbarrow.” No, that’s Lily, sotto voce. She looks up at me and adds softly, “Or a watering can.”

  After the service, people come to the house one or two at a time, bearing cold, foil-wrapped pans. I take the pans, and Dash leads them away into the sitting room to offer condolences to Janet and Carl and a small cortege of Karner cousins. After each terminal visitor departs, Janet wonders aloud what each of them would turn into, if they weren’t terminal, poor things. (Does Janet conveniently forget that she’d be terminal too, but for Carl?)

  “She’s too solid,” says Janet, offering analysis on the latest visitor. “Inanimate for sure. Wood possibly. She’d make a lovely wardrobe. Or a desk. Very practical.”

  I blink. You’d think after nearly a decade of life with Dash, I’d be used to Janet. In a way, I’m relieved that she still has the power to startle me. It means I’m not growing like her.

  I eye her over the top of Lily’s head and Dash’s shoulders. She is not a bad person. She loves Carl, loves Dash, loves Lily. Tolerates me. She wants me in the family because it will please Dash. Another Karner to catalog and care for.

  If you are Janet, the only thing that matters is how you die.

  Funny thing, that’s what matters most to me as well.

  The parade of visitors eventually swells to claustrophobic proportions. The smell of white waxy flowers chokes the air and everyone speaks in that soft voice common to funerals. As if they’d rather not breathe in the mortality that still lingers. Janet reigns over this panoply of grief like a queen. She is in her element, inclining her head just so as each curious townsperson trundles through. I grudgingly admit that she fields their inanities far better than I ever could.

  Back in the kitchen, surrounded by casseroles, I spend my time plotting my escape. And Lily’s. Is it possible? I need out, even if Dash can’t see it. I can’t handle it much longer. If I only have a few years left to me, then I don’t want to spend them living in Litchfield. All I want is to die in my own manner, to be held by my love, and to set my daughter free to live a life instead of shackled to the family heritage.

  But I might settle for being free and away from Janet.

  Dash sidles into the kitchen. “Hiding, Viv?” He doesn’t wait for an answer but produces a small snifter and pours himself some brandy.

  “As much as you are,” I say.

  He smiles wryly to admit the truth of that. “I hate this part of things. Everybody pretending that they knew Gray-Granna to speak to. Everybody wearing black when they’re only curious.”

  “It’s exactly like my grandmother’s funeral,” I say. “Terminal folks face the same social hazards in grief, I guess.”

  “It smells in there,” Dash mutters. He tosses back the brandy and makes a face. “This tastes like funeral flowers.”

  “Let’s go outside,” I suggest. “Get some air.”

  He hesitates.

  I take the brandy glass from his hand, put it down on the counter, give it a pat. “Janet and Carl are holding down the fort. Your cousin Sandra is fielding the funeral meats for a moment.”

  As if to prove this point, Sandra backs into the kitchen, bearing a Tupperware dish and a bouquet of irises. She pops the seal on the Tupperware and says, “Mmmmmm, ambrosia salad. My favorite. The pastor’s wife makes it special. It’s my favorite thing about a passage.”

  Dash nods solemnly. “Go ahead and start without us. I won’t tell anyone.”

  Sandra licks her lips in anticipation. “Well, maybe just a nibble. After I find a vase for these beauties. Georgie, do you think?�
��

  Cousin Georgie is a cut glass decanter with art nouveau swirls. The irises match perfectly. Sandra bears off Georgie and the flowers to be shown to Janet.

  “Let’s go,” I say again to Dash.

  We collect Lily from the front stairs where she has been watching grown-ups say grown-up things. She informs me that too many people are touching her, ruffling her curls, patting her head. Lily hates to be touched by strangers.

  “They keep telling me to not be sad, Mom,” she says. “Am I supposed to be sad?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know,” I tell her, softly. Conspiratorially.

  Dash looks at us. “I’m sad.”

  We look at him.

  “Well, I am,” he says, stuffing his fists into his pockets. He kicks the gravel in the driveway and it flies up in a satisfying spray. He kicks it again. Harder. The tiny patter of falling pebbles sounds like the first drops of rain before a sudden downpour. “I’m. Sad.”

  “I know,” I say to him, taking his hand. “Butterflies aren’t the same.”

  His fingers tighten on mine and we start walking down the gravel, all three of us kicking it up together. Kicking because it feels really good to kick something. And then we run out of gravel where the drive empties onto the paved road leading to and from Litchfield. I hold my breath.

  Dash breathes deep and repeats his heresy. “I’m sad.” But this time he’s not saying it for Gray-Granna. He’s saying it because he’s never been allowed to be sad before. Because being a Karner means being happy at passage.

  Lily pats his hand. “It’s okay, Dad.”

  We step onto the asphalt together and start walking westward. I decide that it’s time to tell my daughter how I intend to die.

  About the Author

  Lis Mitchell has been reading speculative and fantasy fiction since she was three and half years old, and believed that Gollum lived in her toilet. She previously lived in Utah, Arizona, Northern and Southern California, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Alberta. She finally fetched up in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, John, and firstborn child, Doombringer. When she isn’t writing or reading, she photographs nature and sketches in museums. She is the author of Blue Morphos in the Garden, A Tor.com Original.

  Copyright © 2019 by Lis Mitchell

  Art copyright © 2019 by Mary Haasdyk

  His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light

  Mimi Mondal

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  I am not a fighter. I am a trapeze master.

  At the Majestic Oriental Circus, which had been my home for two years, I had climbed the ropes deft and fast, till I was the leader of a team of about fifteen aerial performers. It was in my genes.

  There were others rewards, too, of the circus life. It had brought me into the grace of Shehzad Marid. A trapeze master has no lack of duties, training and overseeing his team, but I continued to perform with Shehzad in his grand stage illusion show—“Alladdin and His Magic Lamp.” I took great pride in my own trapeze act, and the team that I trained from scratch, but I have to admit that “Alladin” was the crowds’ favorite.

  None of the credit for that popularity was owed to me. I am a genius at the ropes overhead, flinging myself from grip to grip so gracefully you would believe I could fly; but on earth, up close, I am a man entirely devoid of charm. Before I joined the circus, I did not even speak a language that could be understood in polite society. Even now, I fumble for the right word at the right moment; I occasionally slip into an accent that makes the city people sneer.

  But as Alladin, all I had to do was to put on a pair of satin pants and a skullcap, and parrot a series of memorized lines. I had never met an Arab street urchin, nor had an inkling what all the words meant, but neither had anyone in the audience. I bellowed, “Ya Allah!” and “Shukr hai!” and “Dafa ho ja, shaitaan!” at my cues. The girl who trained the parakeets doubled as the princess in a shiny ghagra and choli, adorned with tawdry sequins. Johuree, our proprietor and ringmaster, completed the cast as the villainous Zafar, dressed in a moth-eaten velvet cloak.

  It was an almost ridiculous performance, but it turned into the most renowned act of the Majestic Oriental Circus, all at the touch of Shehzad Marid. As the three of us hemmed and hawed through our scripted gibberish, the jinni would emerge from his lamp in clouds of curling smoke. Illuminated by our cheap stage lights, the clouds would take the shape of a magnificent palace, the gaping maw of a cave, raging armies on horseback that crashed into the audience until our entire circus tent would erupt with gasps, applause, and cries of horror and disbelief. A small child could hold open his palm and receive a dancing houree, crafted immaculately of ice as the clouds condensed. Then they billowed up again—into monsters never heard of; swooping rocs; clerics whose voices soared in prayer across minarets that pierced the sky above a faraway, mythical city; hundreds of jinn, and back to the only one. It was a show unlike anything offered by any rival circus company in our land.

  I was assigned to this act four months after I joined the Majestic Oriental Circus—a naïve, illiterate, village young man who had been given a job by Dayaram, the former trapeze master, almost out of pity. It turned out that I climbed better than anyone else on the team, but I had never seen a circus before, could hardly follow the shimmering line between illusion and truth. Before I took over, Johuree would play both Alladin and Zafar, disappearing behind the clouds and reappearing in changed costume with a lightness of foot you would not expect from a fat, middle-aged man like him. But then, no one at the Majestic Oriental Circus was merely what met the eye. The circus life is not for the mundane.

  Johuree had been happy to delegate Alladin to me. An agile young man was more suited to the role than himself, he had said with a wink in front of the entire company. I nodded along, though both of us knew that was just the cover. A circus troupe had no dearth of agile young men. No—we both knew it was because I was the only other person at the Majestic Oriental Circus that Shehzad Marid had entrusted with his lamp.

  I was a hack Alladin, awkward and bombarding, nothing like my fluid, almost lyrical performance on the trapeze ropes. It made the entire act of “Alladin and His Magic Lamp” come across as gaudy, over-the-top. That was just the effect Johuree was going for.

  We were a traveling circus, never spending more than a week or two in the same city, town, or village fair. So the day Johuree declared that we would travel to Thripuram to perform at the wedding of the raja’s daughter, we packed up our tents and bags and set out on the journey.

  * * *

  There is little power left in the hands of the rajas of yore, but you wouldn’t think so if you were at the palace of the Thripuram raja on the day we arrived. Accustomed though we were to the illusory palaces of Arabia that Shehzad conjured up three shows a day, our entire troupe gazed awestruck at the vibrantly painted temples, spires, courtly residences, and finally, looming over them all, resplendent in its intricate balconies and mythological frescos adorning the walls, pillars, and steps—the palace itself.

  The palace grounds teemed with musicians, poets, storytellers, snake charmers, tawaifs, nautankis—entertainers from all over the land. Those traditional artists had been assigned living quarters inside the buildings. A circus was a foreign entertainment—our troupe an unrestrained mingling of men and women of indistinct lineage, sharing space with monkeys, elephants, birds, tigers. Though we had been invited to perform on the night of the wedding, we were allowed to sleep only in our own trucks and tents. We set them up within the palace grounds, under the sky.

  The grounds were thrumming with activity as we rolled into our spots. The hot afternoon air was cloying with the aroma of outdoor cooking, for all the poor people of the city were to eat two meals at the raja’s generosity every day of the festivities. There were two queues of revelers waiting to be fed—one for Brahmins, another for the infidels and the untouchables—winding as long as the eye could see. Wedding guests wandered within the premises
, trailed by servants holding umbrellas, fans, and jugs of water. Massive electricity generators growled along the palace walls, powering thousands of lanterns and strings of light. It was a spectacle more modern and grandiose than anything Shehzad could pull up from the myths of a distant past.

  If the circus was a novelty to the raja’s palace, it was no less a novelty to us—our entire troupe was comprised of people who had grown up poor. We dealt in glitter and illusion, but all our clothes were cheap synthetics and sequins, often threadbare and sewn together in places; our jewelry made of glass, tinfoil, and paint. We had never seen so many varieties of silk, so many diamonds, rubies, and emeralds casually glittering under daylight as the royal guests wandered by. At lunch, my trapeze team would not stop eating until I threatened them with immediate unemployment if any of them disgraced me at the night’s performance.

  As the busy day waned toward sunset, conch shells were sounded, and there was instant silence within the palace grounds. A procession of young women emerged from the doorway of the palace, led by a priest. Each of them carried a holy tray of prayer offerings.

  The women were indescribably beautiful, more so in their dazzling, elegant attire, reminding me of the sculptures of apsaras—heavenly dancers—that I had only seen before on temple walls. These women were not dressed like the wives or daughters of the royalty, yet they were too demure, too distant from us. They did not speak with, or even look at, any of the other performers, who stepped back to make way for them to pass.

  “Devadasis,” whispered a girl from my trapeze team, her voice nearly choking in awe.

  “What are they?” I whispered back. I was completely ignorant of the customs of royalty, but even Shehzad, who was less so, stared uncomprehendingly at these women.

  “I have never seen one of them before,” the girl explained under her breath, never once taking her eyes off the fascinating trail. “You never see a devadasi—no commoner does, except on occasions like this. Devadasis are holy courtesans, bequeathed at birth to the patron deity of a kingdom, maintained by its king. They are trained as dancers, but not like any of us. They will never perform before a commoner, or in exchange for money. Their dance is an act of worship. They are divine.” The girl’s words swung gently between envy and faith. “The devadasis will now go to the town’s main temple to seek blessings for the raja’s daughter. Offer themselves up in performance. The wedding can only take place after the kuldevi—the patron goddess of the kingdom—has bestowed her blessings.”