Except not empty, of course: there is Offie in her chair, quiet statue of maternity.
Hailo carries her backpack over to Offie, lays it on the floor at mama’s feet. “See what I do in school today, Mom?” Picks out folded paper shapes, a wheelie car, a whale, a crane. “I learn how to make all these.” She arranges them in a parade up Offie’s stomach. “I’m doing real good in all the subjects.” She sits on the floor with her knees twisted up and her back resting against Offie’s shins. Tilts her head gently to lay it in Offie’s lap. “I’m gonna get the fuck out of here.” In Hailo’s ear comes the murky tidal whisper of Offie’s pulse. Against Hailo’s cheek, mama’s thigh is warm.
At the kitchen table, Offie teaches Hailo to snap asparagus. She shows her how to grip the chunky white end and bow the green flower down. “Each stalk knows where to break. That’s how you make sure you get all of the sweet part, and none of the woody part.”
Hailo wrinkles her nose. “I don’t even like asparagus.” She continues to snap the stalks. “It makes my pee smell funny.”
Offie laughs. “It makes everyone’s pee smell funny. Some people even like the smell.”
Hailo is so repulsed by this that she has to cease her snapping and push the bowl away. Offie gives her sugar peas to shell instead. Hailo fills her mouth with sweet green beads and watches her mother thoughtfully.
“I got a question for you.”
Offie arranges the asparagus in a roasting pan. “Yes?”
“How come you go away sometimes?”
Offie doesn’t miss a beat as she pours olive oil. “What do you mean?”
“Ughhh. Come on. You know.”
She shuffles the asparagus spears in the oil. “Well. There’s just more than one place I have to be.”
“I miss you, when you go away.”
She slides the pan into the oven and goes back to where Hailo sits. With her thumbs, she smooths her daughter’s hair from her face and brushes a pea fragment from her lip. She kneels so she is eye level with the girl. “I know, sweetheart. I know. I would stay here forever if I could. Sometimes you can’t . . .” Uncertain where to go from here, she leans forward to envelop Hailo in her arms. The girl’s hair tickles her nose. “Can you remember this for me? It is possible for a person to love and be hungry at the same time. It doesn’t make either of them hurt any less.”
Hailo submits to the hug docilely, neither pulling away nor reciprocating.
They make it down the highway, Celado on the scooter barnacled to Bello’s back. They make it to the neighborhood, past the curliqued Colt’s Brook Estate sign. With every bum no one who Hey-yahs out as they pass, Celado tightens to a brittler and brittler knot. They make it into the sad identical house, through the foyer, halfway up the creaking stairs, Cece leading with Bello/Floro trailing her like an honor guard. Then she freezes. Her fingers redden around the banister. Chest starts heaving like she’s oxygenating a bonfire.
“I can’t.” Not going to do it. Nu-uh, sorry, no way no how. “She hates me.”
Quick, Floro/Bello, into damage-control mode. “No she doesn’t,” “Cece, come on,” “You’re so close!”
“Nnnn!” She makes a wild noise and flips around to face the two of them. Gutter growl: “She calls me garbage.” Fear churns hateful possibilities through her head. “You don’t care! You just want me there so she steps off you!”
The plan is slipping, it’s going wrong. They want to fix it but also they are angry at her for messing it up. Can’t ever admit it, princes of chaos that they are, but all they want is for things to be as they were. Both sisters safe-n-sound, Mom in the waking world. They see so clearly how the world could be righted. Why can’t someone, for once, do what they want? Why can’t she? Why does she have to be so stubborn, so vile?
Celado sees them coming up at her, grim-faced, hands outstretched. And in that second, Cece, you understand it in your bones: you are their sister, you are just one more thing they can seize. They can drop you down any chute they want.
Shrieking time is over, she just does a single quiet sob, clutches the bannister tighter, curls into the wall. And feels pain shaft through her abdomen. Her whole body shudders. Floro and Bello freeze. And then she is only rays of pain, filling her body like light, and she forgets to clutch anything. She is a star falling in slow-mo. Her brothers’ hands open, no longer to grab but to catch. Just in time. She tumbles against them and their knotty palms feel soft, soft as clouds.
Offie’s conversation with Hailo is interrupted by a storm of noise in the front hallway. The boys must be home. She calls to them to clean their shoes off but she cannot tell if it makes any impact. The yelling continues, and there is a clatter as though someone has stumbled on the stairway. She cannot imagine what the problem could be, but she is glad they are back because she needs help carrying plates to the table in the backyard. As she heads toward the door something in the game air tugs at her. It is as though a clammy hand has grazed her wrist. Or perhaps a spiderweb has caught along her jaw. She brushes her arms absently.
Without warning, Floro’s face appears right up against her own. He is yelling, but she cannot make out the words. It is as though he calls to her from under fathoms of water. Bello she sees also, slightly behind Floro, his arms flailing and his face in spasms, but he neither makes any sound. Just as quickly as they confronted her, both of her sons melt away. She pivots back to the kitchen in irritation. It would be so much better if they would just tell her what was going on. It was always a joke, keeping Mom in the dark. She will not rise to their bait; they can come to her if they wish. Right now she needs to put the corn on the grill.
Hailo is sunk in a doze when the door bangs open; she leaps away from Offie with a yelp. Her brothers, propping up something between them—someone—her sister. Hailo yelps again. Not sure whether to run to them or flatten herself against the wall. She trips on nothing and catches herself. Yelps again.
The boys ease Celado down on the futon. Her huge belly convulses, her legs jerk back and forth. Looks like she’s seizuring but actually she’s just shaking her head back and forth, denying the whole world with a barely there voice. “No, no, no, no, no.” Her skintight shorts are dark with liquid; it shines on her thighs and soaks into the couch.
“Shit,” Floro says. “Shit. Shit.”
Bello is silent. Wraps his arms around his abdomen then clutches his neck then runs hands through his hair then back to his stomach. He catches sight of Hailo.
“Wake Mom up!”
“What? But it’s danger—”
“Doesn’t matter.” He points to Celado. “She needs the hospital.”
Celado’s nos dissolve into moans now, rhythmic, warlike. Her eyes stare into the in-between.
Hailo gentle-pokes Offie in the neck. “Mom?”
No response.
Floro pushes her out of the way. “Let me do it.”
Offie’s face is serene. Her eyeballs scan and twitch under their lids. Floro slaps her hard across the face, WHACK. Like slapping raw meat. Her head snaps to the side. For a second her eyelids fly open and Hailo sees her whole irises, two gray orbs ringed with straining white. Gray like her children’s eyes. Her children who stand before her, fragmented with desperation. Savers of small things, remakers of the world. She sees them for a second, or she doesn’t.
Her eyes fall shut.
Floro loses it, up in her face, voice growing deranged: “Mom, Mom, wake the fuck up, Mom, Mom, Mom!”
Bello, kneeling by first-sister: “Hit her again.”
Hailo watches Floro raise his arm again and swing, hears the raw meat noise, feels her own flesh flash with pain. Nothing.
Floro inhales hard through his nose. Bello still bent prayer-style over Celado. Hailo clenches her face, squeezes back tears, feels the silent-winged approach of a moment that will leave nothing unchanged.
“Again.”
There! The patio table is set. The corn is grilling, and she has set out crumbled cheese, mayonnaise, and chili powder in which to roll the cobs. There is pasta salad, roasted asparagus, the swollen tomatoes sliced and layered with basil and mozzarella. Her sons are bearing chairs out from the kitchen. Hailo has a glittery hula hoop and is running in the grass, jerking her head like a starving bird to keep it rotating around her neck. Offie feels her brain turn yet again to her one absent daughter. Celado must be home in time. Then everything will be as it should.
The sun is halfway to setting and the air hints at the tang of autumn. Above the horizon there is a band of clear orange sky, and above that a single enormous cloud stretches overhead. Offie raises her eyes and is struck by the sensation of standing on the seafloor, looking up through the depths at the bottom of a ship as large as the whole Earth. Its hull curves from pole to pole, burning with the vanished sun, murky blue shot through with pink and purple.
Hailo gives a shout and tosses her hoop high in the air. Celado is home. Ofelie looks toward the edge of the yard and sees a slender silhouette at the top of the hill. Her older daughter, dark against the blazing sky, her outline bleeding into the sunset.
Joy floods through her. “Cece, look!” She points enthusiastically at the table. “Corn de elote!”
Celado starts down to the house. Ofelie watches her with a gentleness that condenses into a sting. Her vision blurs for a moment, and as it clears she notices motion on the hill behind her daughter. With a faint rippling of the grass, more silhouettes appear on the crest. They are smaller than Celado, with spindly legs and bobbing heads. First there are three, then seven, then their numbers grow too quickly to be counted. Celado, skipping forward, does not seem to notice. Around her the grass shifts. The hill is cracking like skin. More small figures emerge from the cracks, pulling themselves up with stick arms.
The air is perfect, barely felt, but Offie shivers. Celado is almost here; soon she will be close enough to discern her expression. The light shifts. Above them the huge cloud-ship begins to fragment. Electric pink scabs peel off the sky. Through the gaps spindly feet drop down, kicking wildly, searching for purchase on the air. The figures lower themselves through the cloud as though through a trapdoor, and let go.
Offie’s mouth has dropped open in a shape of helplessness and she pulls it back into a smile. There is no reason to despair. The table is set. The chairs will be full. Around her, wobbly figures drop from the air, heave themselves up from the earth, stumble toward her home. The ground is roiling, bubbling up. The sky is nearly gone. Her head spins; she feels like she is falling from a great height and yet not moving. She gasps and it comes out as laughter. Of course they would all make it in time. How ridiculous, the amount of relief she feels. She was so worried, but it is okay. Everything is coming back to her now.
Acknowledgments
For the immense effort of material and imaginative collaboration that any book represents, thanks go out:
To Small Beer Press—Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant—unparalleled examples of how to bring worlds onto the page, and pages into the world. Who saw what I most wanted to be seen and offered to make it real. And Paul Witcover and Te Chao for the gift of a breathtaking book object.
To my agent, Kristina Moore, who convinced me that this book could exist out in the world.
To my mentors at Oberlin: Sylvia Watanabe, Lynn Powell, and Dan Chaon, for the gifts of close scrutiny and generosity that extended far beyond the classroom.
To my faculty and cohort at the Clarion West Writers Workshop, with whom so many of these stories were born.
To my Michener teachers for your astonishing support—Jim Magnuson, Kirk Lynn, Steven Dietz. To Elizabeth McCracken for modelling art-making and teaching and living with a grace I can only hope to aspire to.
To my Michener family: David Semonchik who I’ll always be writing for, Sam Sax, Lydia Blaisdell, Rachel Kondo, Bing Li, Fatima Kola, Maya Perez, Sam Miller, Scott Guild, and everyone who lifted me through the grad school years and showed me what a writing community could be.
To my DC family of troublemakers and queers and teachers and organizers carving out vibrant life on the margins of a Dead City—API Resistance; the Full Moon Farmhouse; the DC Creative Writing Workshop, especially Nancy Schwalb, Renita Williams, and the students, before whose writing I will always be humbled.
To my Monkeywrench family for all the other worlds we made possible, late at night on the brink of ruin. For teaching me to trust chaos and move like water.
To everyone whose love and friendship have profoundly shaped me and so shaped the stories I have to tell. Paige Clifton-Steele, Hannah Weiss, Rachel Slezak, Anna Betzel, Sarah Hoops, Keithlee Spangler, Janet Fiskio, Lauren Dixon. Alex Vargo even though she doesn’t have a choice about being my friend because she’s also my cousin. Corinne Teed for being the first person to hold this book in her hands and read it all the way through.
To everyone unnamed or unseen whose labor has nevertheless helped carry me to this point. To the writers and scholars and revolutionaries who have helped me grapple with what it means to live this science fictional reality, as a mixed-race immigrant settler in the twilight of a colonial empire in the midst of a great extinction.
And to my actual family, who has been willing to share me with all these alien worlds and still always welcome me home. Jesse Bear, obnoxious little brother and the best human I know. My mom who has read everything I ever wrote and always looks up with concern at the end to ask, “But where did that come from?” Who taught me to take risks and get muddy and know the trees by name. My dad who spend endless nights reading aloud to me as a child. Who gave me the gifts of Earthsea and Middle-earth and Pern and Arrakis, and made me want to do it too.
Publication History
These stories were previously published as follows:
“Alien Virus Love Disaster,” StoryQuarterly 48, 2015
“Blood, Blood,” Strange Horizons, 2010
“If You Could Be God of Anything” as “Party Doll Surprise Attack,” Abundant Grace: A Collection of Fiction by Washington Area Women, 2016
“Moonkids,” Explosion Proof Magazine 5, 2012
“Rich People” (in a slightly different form), Tin House, 76, 2018
“Sex Dungeons for Sad People” as “All You Sad People Come Into My Dungeon,” Superficial Flesh, 2014
“Sweetheart,” Tor.com, 2010
“Teacher,” Barrelhouse 13, 2014
“I’m Sorry Your Daughter Got Eaten by a Cougar,” “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Evicted by Now,” “Not an Alien Story,” and “Ultimate Housekeeping Megathrill 4” are published here for the first time.
About the Author
Abbey Mei Otis is a writer, a teaching artist, a storyteller, and a firestarter raised in the woods of North Carolina. She loves people and art forms on the margins. She studied at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, TX, and the Clarion West Writers Workshop, and now teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio. Her stories have recently appeared in journals including Tin House, StoryQuarterly, Barrelhouse, and Tor.com.
Also Available from Small Beer Press
The first collection of short fiction from a rising star whose stories have been anthologized many times including in the first two volumes of the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy series and nominated for many awards. Some of Samatar’s weird and compassionate fabulations spring from her life and literary studies; some spring from the world, some from the void. Tender explores the fragility of bodies, emotions, and landscapes, in settings that range from medieval Egypt to colonial Kenya to the stars, and the voices of those who question: children, students, servants, researchers, writers.
Tender includes two new stories, “An Account of the Land of Witches” and an expansive novella, “Fallow.”
“These stories are windows into an impressively deep imagination guide
d by sensitivity, joyful intellect, and a graceful mastery of language.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review):
Hardcover · $24 · 9781618731265 | ebook · 9781618731272
Also Available from Small Beer Press
World Fantasy & Shirley Jackson Award finalist
Open this book to any page and find yourself enspelled by these lush, alchemical stories. Faced with the uncanny and the impossible, Rickert’s protagonists are as painfully, shockingly, complexly human as the readers who will encounter them. Mothers, daughters, witches, artists, strangers, winged babies, and others grapple with deception, loss, and moments of extraordinary joy.
“Short stories about people haunted by loss and transformed by grief. Ghosts walk through this collection. Witches are rumored. People collect bones, sprout wings, watch their feet turn into hooves. . . . The worlds Rickert creates are fantastical, but her work should appeal not just to fantasy fans, but to anyone who appreciates a well-told tale.” — Kirkus Reviews
trade paper $16 · 9781618731104 | ebook · 9781618731111
Also Available from Small Beer Press
Stella Prize finalist
Jacky was running. There was no thought in his head, only an intense drive to run. There was no sense he was getting anywhere, no plan, no destination, no future. All he had was a sense of what was behind, what he was running from.
The Natives of the Colony are restless. The Settlers are eager to have a nation of peace, and to bring the savages into line. Families are torn apart, reeducation is enforced. This rich land will provide for all.
This is not Australia as we know it. This is not the Australia of our history books. This Terra Nullius — shortlisted for the 2018 Stella Prize and Highly Commended for the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards — is something new, but all too familiar.
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