The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  Abba had enough money that he didn’t need to sell the property. The house would remain owned and abandoned in the coming years.

  It was terrible to go, but it also felt like a necessary marker, a border bisecting her life. It was one more way in which she was becoming Ruth.

  They stayed in town for one last Shabbat. The process of packing the house had altered their sense of time, making the hours seem foreshortened and stretched at turns.

  Thursday passed without their noticing, leaving them to buy their groceries on Friday. Abba wanted to drive into town on his own, but Ruth didn’t want him to be alone yet.

  Reluctantly, she agreed to stay in the truck when they got there. Though Abba had begun to tell people that she was recovering, it would be best if no one got a chance to look at her up close. They might realize something was wrong. It would be easier wherever they moved next; strangers wouldn’t always be comparing her to a ghost.

  Abba was barely out of the truck before Gerry caught sight of them through the window and came barreling out of the door. Abba tried to get in his way. Rapidly, he stumbled out the excuse that he and Ruth had agreed on, that it was good for her to get out of the house, but she was still too tired to see anyone.

  “A minute won’t hurt,” said Gerry. He pushed past Abba. With a huge grin, he knocked on Ruth’s window.

  Hesitantly, she rolled it down. Gerry crossed his arms on the sill, leaning his head into the vehicle. “Look at you!” he exclaimed. “Your daddy said you were getting better, but just look at you!”

  Ruth couldn’t help but grin. Abel’s tail began to thump as he pushed himself into the front seat to get a better look at his favorite snack provider.

  “I have to say, after you didn’t come the last few weeks…” Gerry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m just glad to see you, Mara, I really am.”

  At the sound of the name, Ruth looked with involuntary shock at Abba, who gave a sad little smile that Gerry couldn’t see. He took a step forward. “Please, Gerry. She needs to rest.”

  Gerry looked back at him, opened his mouth to argue, and then looked back at Ruth and nodded. “Okay then. But next week, I expect some free cashier work!” He leaned in to kiss her cheek. He smelled of beef and rosemary. “You get yourself back here, Mara. And you keep kicking that cancer in the rear end.”

  With a glance back at the truck to check that Mara was okay, Abba followed Gerry into the store. Twenty minutes later, he returned with two bags of groceries, which he put in the bed of the truck. As he started the engine, he said, “Gerry is a good man. I will miss him.” He paused. “But it is better to have you, Mara.”

  Ruth looked at him with icy surprise, breath caught in her throat.

  Her name was her own again. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  THE SKY WAS bronzing when they arrived home.

  On the stove, cholent simmered, filling the house with its scent. Abba went to check on it before the sun set, and Ruth followed him into the kitchen, preparing to pull out the dishes and the silverware and the table cloth.

  He waved her away. “Next time. This week, let me.”

  Ruth went into Ima’s studio. She’d hadn’t gone inside since the disaster in attic space, and her gaze lingered on the attic box, still lying dead on the floor.

  “I’d like to access a DVD of Ima’s performances,” she told the AI. “Coppélia, please.”

  It whirred.

  The audience’s rumblings began and she instructed the AI to fast-forward until Coppelia was onstage. She held her eyes closed and tipped her head down until it was the moment to snap into life, to let her body flow, fluid and graceful, mimicking the dancer on the screen.

  She’d thought it would be cathartic to dance the part of the doll, and in a way it was, but once the moment was over, she surprised herself by selecting another disc instead of continuing. She tried to think of a comedy that she wanted to dance, and surprised herself further by realizing that she wanted to dance a tragedy instead. Mara had needed the comedies, but Ruth needed to feel the ache of grace and sorrow; she needed to feel the pull of the black hole even as she defied its gravity and danced, en pointe, on its edge.

  WHEN THE LIGHT turned violet, Abba came to the door, and she followed him into the kitchen. Abba lit the candles, and she waited for him to begin the prayers, but instead he stood aside.

  It took her a moment to understand what he wanted.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Please, Marale,” he answered.

  Slowly, she moved into the space where he should have been standing. The candles burned on the table beneath her. She waved her hands through the heat and thickness of the smoke, and then lifted them to cover her eyes.

  She said, “ Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu, l’had’lik neir shel Shabbat.”

  She breathed deeply, inhaling the scents of honey and figs and smoke.

  “Amein.”

  She opened her eyes again. Behind her, she heard Abba’s breathing, and somewhere in the dark of the house, Abel’s snoring as he napped in preparation for after-dinner begging. The candles filled her vision as if she’d never seen them before. Bright white and gold flames trembled, shining against the black of the outside sky, so fragile they could be extinguished by a breath.

  MOTHERS, LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS BECAUSE THEY ARE TERRIFYING

  Alice Sola Kim

  Alice Sola Kim (alicesolakim.com) is a writer living in New York who has had stories published in Writer, NY, stories in or forthcoming in Tin House, McSweeney’s, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, among others.

  AT MIDNIGHT WE parked by a Staples and tried some seriously dark fucking magic. We had been discussing it for weeks and could have stayed in that Wouldn’t it be funny if groove forever, zipping between Yes, we should and No, we shouldn’t until it became a joke so dumb that we would never. But that night Mini had said, “If we don’t do it right now, I’m going to be so mad at you guys, and I’ll know from now on that all you chickenheads can do is talk and not do,” and the whole way she ranted at us like that, even though we were already doing and not talking, or at least about to. (We always let her do that, get all shirty and sharp with us, because she had the car, but perhaps we should have said something. Perhaps once everyone had cars, Mini would have to figure out how to live in the world as not a total bitch, and she would be leagues behind everyone else.)

  The parking lot at night looked like the ocean, the black Atlantic, as we imagined it, and in Mini’s car we brought up the spell on our phones and Caroline read it first. She always had to be first to do anything, because she had the most to prove, being scared of everything. We couldn’t help but tease her about that, even though we knew it wasn’t her fault – her parents made her that way, but then again, if someone didn’t get told off for being a pill just because we could trace said pill-ness back to their parents, then where would it ever end?

  We had an X-Acto knife and a lighter and antibacterial ointment and lard and a fat red candle still shrink-wrapped. A chipped saucer from Ronnie’s dad’s grandmother’s wedding set, made of china that glowed even in dim light and sang when you rubbed your thumb along it, which she took because it was chipped and thought they wouldn’t miss it, but we thought that was dumb because they would definitely miss the chipped one. The different one. We could have wrapped it all up and sold it as a Satanism starter kit.

  Those were the things. What we did with them we’ll never tell. For a moment, it seemed like it would work. The moment stayed the same, even though it should have changed. A real staring contest of a moment: Ronnie’s face shining in the lunar light of her phone, the slow tick of the blood into the saucer, like a radiator settling. But Mini ruined it. “Do you feel anything?” asked Mini, too soon and too loudly.

  We glanced at one another, dismayed. We thought, Perhaps if she had just waited a little longer – “I don’t think so,” said Ronnie.


  “I knew this was a dumb idea,” said Mini. “Let’s clean up this blood before it gets all over my car. So if one of you got murdered, they wouldn’t blame me.” Caroline handed out the Band-Aids. She put hers on and saw the blood well up instantly against the Band-Aid, not red or black or any color in particular, only a dark splotch like a shape under ice.

  So much for that, everyone thought, wrong.

  Mini dropped Caroline off first, even though she lived closer to Mini, then Ronnie after. It had been this way always. At first Caroline had been hurt by this, had imagined that we were talking about her in the fifteen extra minutes of alone time that we shared. The truth was both a relief and an even greater insult. There was nothing to say about Caroline, no shit we would talk that wasn’t right to her face. We loved Caroline, but her best jokes were unintentional. We loved Caroline, but she didn’t know how to pretend to be cool and at home in strange places like we did; she was the one who always seemed like a pie-faced country girleen wearing a straw hat and holding a suitcase, asking obvious questions, like, “Wait, which hand do you want to stamp?” or “Is that illegal?” Not that the answers were always obvious to us, but we knew what not to ask about. We knew how to be cool, so why didn’t Caroline?

  Usually, we liked to take a moment at the end of the night without Caroline, to discuss the events of the night without someone to remind us how young we were and how little we knew. But tonight we didn’t really talk. We didn’t talk about how we believed, and how our belief had been shattered. We didn’t talk about the next time we would hang out. Ronnie snuck into her house. Her brother, Alex, had left the window open for her. Caroline was already in bed, wearing an ugly quilted headband that kept her bangs off her face so she wouldn’t get forehead zits. Mini’s mom wasn’t home yet, so she microwaved some egg rolls. She put her feet up on the kitchen table, next to her homework, which had been completed hours ago. The egg rolls exploded tiny scalding droplets of water when she bit into them. She soothed her seared lips on a beer. This is the life, Mini thought.

  We didn’t go to the same school, and we wouldn’t have been friends if we had. We met at an event for Korean adoptees, a party at a low-ceilinged community center catered with the stinkiest food possible. Koreans, amirite?! That’s how we/they roll.

  Mini and Caroline were having fun. Ronnie was not having fun. Mini’s fun was different from Caroline’s fun, being a fake-jolly fun in which she was imagining telling her real friends about this doofus loser event later, although due to the fact that she was reminding them that she was adopted, they would either squirm with discomfort or stay very still and serious and stare her in the pupils with great intensity, nodding all the while. Caroline was having fun – the pure uncut stuff, nothing ironic about it. She liked talking earnestly with people her age about basic biographical details, because there was a safety in conversational topics that no one cared about all that much. Talking about which high school you go to? Great! Which activities you did at aforementioned school? Raaaad. Talking about the neighborhood where you live? How was it possible that they weren’t all dead of fun! Caroline already knew and liked the K-pop sound-tracking the evening, the taste of the marinated beef and the clear noodles, dishes that her family re-created on a regular basis.

  Ronnie rooted herself by a giant cut-glass bowl full of kimchi, which looked exactly like a big wet pile of fresh guts. She soon realized that (1) the area by the kimchi was very high traffic and (2) the kimchi emitted a powerful vinegar-poop-death stench. As Ronnie edged away from the food table, Mini and Caroline were walking toward it. Caroline saw a lost and lonely soul and immediately said, “Hi! Is this your first time at a meet-up?”

  At this Ronnie experienced split consciousness, feeling annoyed that she was about to be sucked into wearying small talk in addition to a nearly sacramental sense of gratitude about being saved from standing alone at a gathering. You could even say that Ronnie was experiencing quadruple consciousness if you counted the fact that she was both judging and admiring Mini and Caroline – Mini for being the kind of girl who tries to look ugly on purpose and thinks it looks so great (ooh, except it did look kinda great), her torn sneakers and one thousand silver earrings and chewed-up hair, and Caroline of the sweetly tilted eyes and cashmere sweater dress and ballet flats like she was some pampered cat turned human.

  Mini had a stainless-steel water bottle full of ice and vodka cut with the minimal amount of orange juice. She shared it with Ronnie and Caroline. And Caroline drank it. Caroline ate and drank like she was a laughing twodimensional cutout and everything she consumed just went through her face and evaporated behind her, affecting her not at all.

  Ronnie could not stop staring at Caroline, who was a one-woman band of laughing and drinking and ferrying food to her mouth and nodding and asking skin-rippingly boring questions that nevertheless got them talking. Ronnie went from laughing at Caroline to being incredibly envious of her. People got drunk just to be like Caroline!

  Crap, Ronnie thought. Social graces are actually worth something.

  But Caroline was getting drunk, and since she was already Caroline, she went too far with the whole being-Caroline thing and asked if she could tell us a joke. Only if we promised not to get offended!

  Mini threw her head back, smiled condescendingly at an imaginary person to her left, and said, “Of course.” She frowned to hide a burp that was, if not exactly a solid, still alarmingly substantial, and passed the water bottle to Ronnie.

  Caroline wound up. This had the potential to be long. “So, you know how – oh wait, no, okay, this is how it starts. Okay, so white people play the violin like this.” She made some movements. “Black people play it like this.” She made some more movements. “And then Korean people play it like th –” and she began to bend at the waist but suddenly farted so loudly that it was like the fart had bent her, had then jet-packed her into the air and crumpled her to the ground.

  She tried to talk over it, but Ronnie and Mini were ended by their laughter. They fell out of themselves. They were puking laughter, the laughter was a thick brambly painful rope being pulled out of their faces, but they couldn’t stop it, and finally Caroline stopped trying to finish the joke and we were all laughing.

  Consequences: For days after, we would think that we had exhausted the joke and sanded off all the funniness rubbing it so often with our sweaty fingers, but then we would remember again and, whoa, there we went again, off to the races.

  Consequences: Summer arrived. Decoupled from school, we were free to see one another, to feel happy misfitting with one another because we knew we were peas from different pods – we delighted in being such different kinds of girls from one another.

  Consequences: For weeks after, we’d end sentences with, “Korean people do it like ppppbbbbbbbttth.”

  There are so many ways to miss your mother. Your real mother – the one who looks like you, the one who has to love you because she grew you from her own body, the one who hates you so much that she dumped you in the garbage for white people to pick up and dust off. In Mini’s case, it manifested as some weird gothy shit. She had been engaging in a shady flirtation with a clerk at an antiquarian bookshop. We did not approve. We thought this clerk wore thick-rimmed hipster glasses to hide his crow’s feet and hoodies to hide his man boobs so that weird highschool chicks would still want to flirt with him. We hoped that Mini mostly liked him only because he was willing to trade clammy glances with her and go no further. Unlike us, Mini was not a fan of going far. When the manager wasn’t around, this guy let her go into the room with the padlock on it, where all of the really expensive stuff was. That’s where she found the book with the spell. That’s were she took a photo of the spell with her phone. That’s where she immediately texted it to us without any explanation attached, confident that the symbols were so powerful they would tentacle through our screens and into our hearts, and that we would know it for what it was.

  Each of us had had that same moment where we saw ourselves
in a photo, caught one of those wonky glances in the mirror that tricks you into thinking that you’re seeing someone else, and it’s electric. Kapow boom sizzle, you got slapped upside the head with the Korean wand, and now you feel weird at family gatherings that veer blond, you feel weird when your friends replace their Facebook profile photos with pictures of the celebrities they look like and all you have is, say, Mulan or Jackie Chan, ha-ha-ha, hahahahaha.

  You feel like you could do one thing wrong, one stupid thing, and the sight of you would become a terrible taste in your parents’ mouths.

  “I’ll tell you this,” Mini had said. “None of us actually knows what happened to our mothers. None of our parents tell us anything. We don’t have the cool parents who’ll tell us about our backgrounds and shit like that.”

  For Mini, this extended to everything else. When her parents decided to get a divorce, Mini felt like she had a hive of bees in her head (her brain was both the bees and the brain that the bees were stinging). She searched online for articles about adoptees with divorced parents. The gist of the articles was that she would be going through an awfully hard time, as in, chick already felt kind of weird and dislocated when it came to family and belonging and now it was just going to be worse. Internet, you asshole, thought Mini. I already knew that. The articles for the parents told them to reassure their children. Make them feel secure and safe. She waited for the parents to try so she could flame-throw scorn all over them. They did not try. She waited longer.

  And she had given up on them long before Mom finally arrived.

  We were hanging out in Mini’s room, not talking about our unsuccessful attempt at magic. Caroline was painting Ronnie’s nails with a color called Balsamic.

  “I love this color,” said Caroline. “I wish my parents would let me wear it.”