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

by Jonathan Strahan

  There are a hundred breeds of madness, one of them called curiosity. Her naming of it has roused mine, and where before it lay dormant, now it is a frenzied thing, stirring in my skull, a thousand wing-beats in time with the cicadas and owls singing the moon up through pale clouds.

  A hundred breeds of madness, and I haven't been sane for a long time.

  I resist it. I look at her face in the light as we draw nearer to my home, and become desperate that her taunt was truth – that I was a man, that the possibility she offered in jest could grow to actuality. But in Prachinburi I may not remain behind this garb. I must step out of it and return to pha-sbai that bares my shoulders, pha-nung that must have some gleaming thread to it. I must catch a man's eye and hope he will find me worthy of dowry. And Ploy, being without kin to give her station and place, will remarry.

  This is only pretense: my hand in hers, and sometimes lying face to face as evening cools and dark comes, it is all make-believe. She wishes I were a man so I might provide her security and a roof; beyond that there is nothing.

  This terrible knowledge – that this is all we will ever have – it tears at me, it claws. Even the distraction of ghost elephants and ghost queens only I can see proves unequal to it. My monstrous desire eats; my curiosity waxes.

  Five days from Prachinburi and I give in.

  She makes no secret of leaving my side now. Always it takes the better part of the night, and her outing brings meat more often than not. Perhaps it embarrasses her to be good at the hunt; I convince myself this is her secret, and if so what injury can come out of my confirming it?

  Ploy is not difficult to follow. In those first evenings she might have been, when she stole away on light and cautious feet. Now her tracks are clear, as though she's giving me a test of trust. My failing of it pricks at me, and I would have turned back if not for the sight of her prone by the river.

  She lies among weeds and roots, fainted or snake-bitten. I've never known myself for such quickness – even on the battlefield I was not so fast. Mouth parched with fear I kneel by her, straining to see under a moon just half-bright.

  Bright enough to see her neck empty.

  Not a wound but a bloodless hole where her windpipe should have been. I dare not touch or probe, for who knows whether she will feel? But I've learned the fright-tales of krasue at elders' feet; cut her open now and I will find the shell of Ploy hollowed of organs. Those have gone with her head.

  I lack the courage to stay and confront; I lack the courage even to flee. For she knows me, would recognize my scent.

  Ploy returns empty-handed this time, and I watch her mouth, her teeth, for flecks of gore and shreds of viscera. None to be seen; she may believe me gullible, but she is not entirely careless.

  The army taught me to put on a mask, and I do that now. The slightest change in my regard and she will realize; I address her much as before. Still some hint must have slipped through, for she asks me why I seem to dread homecoming so.

  "It's been some time since I last saw them, and of my parents' dreams for me I failed every one."

  "Were you a son they would have been proud." She puts her fingers to my jaw. "I say this not to taunt or mock you, but to say: it is not fair. It is not just. With what you've earned you should be entitled to anything, and in your place a man would've had applause, honor, his pick of a bride."

  My betraying body leaps to her touch, longs to lean into her arm. "The world is what it is. The army paid me well, so I'll have something to show for it, something to give Mother and Father."

  In Ayutthaya they would have me stay on, to advance from captain to lieutenant, and that's what I would have done if Her Majesty survived. I would have been there simply for her, to protect her even if she would never have glanced my way. I would not have been here, with this creature, this krasue.

  Elders' wisdom has it that they inherit the curse, generation to generation. And that may be. It may be true; Ploy could just be the victim of her aunt, uncle, parent. She gobbles up what she must – chicken's blood, Phma innards. She may be as virtuous a woman as any other.

  But I cannot bring her to Prachinburi. There will be pigs butchered and she'll hunger. There will be women in childbirth and the blood will summon her to consume mother's insides and infant freshly born. So many things a krasue may not resist, so much evil just one may commit.

  Ploy's mood grows tense as we approach Prachinburi, pendulating between elated and anxious. She wants to know if people will be kind to her, a strange widow with no origins; she wants to know if they will disdain her for knowing no letters. I tell her nothing and everything.

  Twice I crouch by her headless body, shaking. Twice I fail to kill it and kill her.

  "After tomorrow we should be in Prachinburi."

  She is combing out her hair. It isn't as long as most women's, and uncharitably I think that she must keep it short so it won't tangle up with her intestines when she goes hunting. "Strange," she murmurs, "I'll miss this."

  "Sleeping on the ground? Having no roof over your head?"

  Ploy swats me on the arm. I should flinch – I should clench my teeth on disgust. "I will miss your company. Just being with you, talking to you."

  "We can do that there."

  "That's not what I mean and you know it." Ploy ties her hair back. "I wasn't entirely kidding when I said I would have liked to go as your wife."

  "I doubt I could've kept up this deception for the rest of my days. Leastwise before my family."

  "Not what I mean either." Her brows knit. Oh, she has a way of frowning; before learning the truth of her nature that look would have made me do anything to ease it. "Do you mean to shame me by driving me to say plainly what no woman should?"

  Wanting, wanting, that's all flesh is good for. Her hand remains cradling my cheek and I cannot make myself dislodge it. This close I thought she would smell of offal, but there's only a scent of sweat, of her. "What might that be?"

  She lets her hand fall; my heart falls with it, to steep and ferment in the bitterness of my stomach. "Nothing. It was only a fancy. It'd profit us both to forget."

  "If you like," I say easily, as though none of this has meaning.

  I remain at her insensate shell longer that night. I've heard a krasue's glow is sickly and jaundiced, but what I see is soft, candlelight amber. Innards drift behind her as though the tails of a kite.

  Even having seen that my decision congeals slow, like blood thinned by lymph. Even having seen that I cannot think –

  A krasue in Prachinburi, and me its harbinger. She might have children there, and one of them will receive her legacy whether or not they wish, whether or not she wishes.

  It may be mercy as well as defense.

  So I gather wood, as dry as may be found in this weather, until I have more than I need. I gather dead leaves, though some are so damp they are nearly mulch. I moor my thoughts to the pier of Prachinburi; I think of what I will eat there, sweet and sour things, and of greeting friends long unseen. Above the sky lightens.

  The lamp oil Ploy and I collected is spent to the last drop. My hands are guided not by thought but by the reflexive process of fire-making, of burying her in branches and detritus. A mound of compost.

  It all crackles. Fire is a sound. It all leaps. Fire is an animal. It bursts with smells all pungent. Fire is a feast.

  It brings her, as I knew it must. I stand with feet braced and blade bared.

  Heart and lungs, liver and intestines, limned in that exquisite golden light the same precise hue of dawn. I would say she is unhuman, but are those not the most human parts of anyone freed from skin, while I hide myself behind the artifice of fabric and armor?

  Ploy's face remains her own. There is no bestial rictus that reveals her for what she is. There is only a gaze piercing me like arrows, there is only a mouth parting around words like knives.

  "I desired you," she says and her voice is not the hag's croak that I was told would emerge from a krasue's mouth. "I wanted to be
with you – and there'd have been no children; I would have been the last."

  "You would have killed and eaten." My muscles tremble. My throat is shut and my breath comes fast.

  "Wild animals. Pigs. Invaders." Her laughter rings pure and clear while her guts undulate, eelish and glistening. "I've long learned control, Thidakesorn. The Phma cut my nieces apart. There will be no more of us. This would've been the end."

  "A krasue would say this." My voice splinters. Beside us the fire grows loud, hungry, the heat and brilliance of it bringing sweat and radiance to us both. "A krasue would say anything to escape death."

  "A krasue who wants survival would not give you her trust. A krasue who courts life would kill one who's murdered her." Tears on her cheeks, salt on my tongue. "I despise you."

  I kick apart the pyre, plunge my hands into the flames. It is too late; it has always been too late. Beneath the kindling she is limbs gone to roast, flesh gone to broil, her breast bared and red-raw.

  Pressing blistered hands to my face I scream, and it's hardly a human sound.

  She presses her mouth to my temple, and her guts move against me, coolly wet. I expect them to seek my neck and cord into a noose. But they slide across my shoulders and arms until I understand this is her last remaining means of comfort. "I despise you," she whispers. "I love you."

  We are no kin – her spit will not force her fate upon me – but she could still bite, could still kill. I wrap my arms around her, around a heart that pumps so strong it jolts my bones. My face in her hair and her lips at my ear, she tells me of how an aunt died when she was eleven and passed her this inheritance. Four years later she became mistress of the hunger; four years later she began to dream that she may not have to be her aunt, may live like any other girl save for her forays in the dark. In a prosperous place, a prosperous time, she could fill her belly full by the day, and so need not venture forth every night.

  I do not speak. This is her time to be heard. Her words come slower as the sun climbs higher, even though I keep us in the shade and shield her from the day. Her eyelids droop, heavy, and her head lowers to my shoulder as if to doze off.

  She crumbles in my arms. It seems unthinkable that she could turn from flesh to husk in a moment; it seems unthinkable that her face should collapse upon itself, her hair drying to twigs, her lips and eyes to sun-baked fruit.

  She is dust.

  The buzzing of flies grows in my head and I turn to the rising sun, toward home. My arms are full of her, dry flecks collecting in the creases of my clothes and skin.

  In the distance I hear war drums. The horizon shines gold with the beginning of fire.

  SELKIE STORIES ARE FOR LOSERS

  Sofia Samatar

  Sofia Samatar (www.sofiasamatar.com) is the author of fantasy novel A Stranger in Olondria, winner of the 2014 Crawford Award. Her short fiction has appeared in We See a Different Frontier, Glitter & Mayhem, Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. She is nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts.

  I hate selkie stories. They're always about how you went up to the attic to look for a book, and you found a disgusting old coat and brought it downstairs between finger and thumb and said "What's this?", and you never saw your mom again.

  I work at a restaurant called Le Pacha. I got the job after my mom left, to help with the bills. On my first night at work I got yelled at twice by the head server, burnt my fingers on a hot dish, spilled lentil-parsley soup all over my apron, and left my keys in the kitchen.

  I didn't realize at first I'd forgotten my keys. I stood in the parking lot, breathing slowly and letting the oil-smell lift away from my hair, and when all the other cars had started up and driven away I put my hand in my jacket pocket. Then I knew.

  I ran back to the restaurant and banged on the door. Of course no one came. I smelled cigarette smoke an instant before I heard the voice.

  "Hey."

  I turned, and Mona was standing there, smoke rising white from between her fingers. "I left my keys inside," I said.

  * * *

  Mona is the only other server at Le Pacha who's a girl. She's related to everybody at the restaurant except me. The owner, who goes by "Uncle Tad," is really her uncle, her mom's brother. "Don't talk to him unless you have to," Mona advised me. "He's a creeper." That was after she'd sighed and dropped her cigarette and crushed it out with her shoe and stepped into my clasped hands so I could boost her up to the window, after she'd wriggled through into the kitchen and opened the door for me. She said, "Madame," in a dry voice, and bowed. At least, I think she said "Madame." She might have said "My lady." I don't remember that night too well, because we drank a lot of wine. Mona said that as long as we were breaking and entering we might as well steal something, and she lined up all the bottles of red wine that had already been opened. I shone the light from my phone on her while she took out the special rubber corks and poured some of each bottle into a plastic pitcher. She called it "The House Wine." I was surprised she was being so nice to me, since she'd hardly spoken to me while we were working. Later she told me she hates everybody the first time she meets them. I called home, but Dad didn't pick up; he was probably in the basement. I left him a message and turned off my phone.

  "Do you know what this guy said to me tonight?" Mona asked. "He wanted beef couscous and he said, 'I'll have the beef conscious.'"

  Mona's mom doesn't work at Le Pacha, but sometimes she comes in around three o'clock and sits in Mona's section and cries. Then Mona jams on her orange baseball cap and goes out through the back and smokes a cigarette, and I take over her section. Mona's mom won't order anything from me. She's got Mona's eyes, or Mona's got hers: huge, angry eyes with lashes that curl up at the ends. She shakes her head and says: "Nothing! Nothing!" Finally Uncle Tad comes over, and Mona's mom hugs and kisses him, sobbing in Arabic.

  * * *

  After work mona says, "Got the keys?"

  We get in my car and I drive us through town to the Bone Zone, a giant cemetery on a hill. I pull into the empty parking lot and Mona rolls a joint. There's only one lamp, burning high and cold in the middle of the lot. Mona pushes her shoes off and puts her feet up on the dashboard and cries. She warned me about that the night we met: I said something stupid to her like "You're so funny" and she said, "Actually I cry a lot. That's something you should know." I was so happy she thought I should know things about her, I didn't care. I still don't care, but it's true that Mona cries a lot. She cries because she's scared her mom will take her away to Egypt, where the family used to live, and where Mona has never been. "What would I do there? I don't even speak Arabic." She wipes her mascara on her sleeve, and I tell her to look at the lamp outside and pretend that its glassy brightness is a bonfire, and that she and I are personally throwing every selkie story ever written onto it and watching them burn up.

  "You and your selkie stories," she says. I tell her they're not my selkie stories, not ever, and I'll never tell one, which is true, I never will, and I don't tell her how I went up to the attic that day or that what I was looking for was a book I used to read when I was little, Beauty and the Beast, which is a really decent story about an animal who gets turned into a human and stays that way, the way it's supposed to be. I don't tell Mona that Beauty's black hair coiled to the edge of the page, or that the Beast had yellow horns and a smoking jacket, or that instead of finding the book I found the coat, and my mom put it on and went out the kitchen door and started up her car.

  One selkie story tells about a man from Mýrdalur. He was on the cliffs one day and heard people singing and dancing inside a cave, and he noticed a bunch of skins piled on the rocks. He took one of the skins home and locked it in a chest, and when he went back a girl was sitting there alone, crying. She was naked, and he gave her some clothes and took her home. They got married and had kids. You know how this goes. One day the man changed his clothes and forgot to take the key to the chest out of his pocket, and when his wife washed the clothes
, she found it.

  * * *

  "You're not going to Egypt," I tell Mona. "We're going to Colorado. Remember?"

  That's our big dream, to go to Colorado. It's where Mona was born. She lived there until she was four. She still remembers the rocks and the pines and the cold, cold air. She says the clouds of Colorado are bright, like pieces of mirror. In Colorado, Mona's parents got divorced, and Mona's mom tried to kill herself for the first time. She tried it once here, too. She put her head in the oven, resting on a pillow. Mona was in seventh grade.

  Selkies go back to the sea in a flash, like they've never been away. That's one of the ways they're different from human beings. Once, my dad tried to go back somewhere: he was in the army, stationed in Germany, and he went to Norway to look up the town my great-grandmother came from. He actually found the place, and even an old farm with the same name as us. In the town, he went into a restaurant and ordered lutefisk, a disgusting fish thing my grandmother makes. The cook came out of the kitchen and looked at him like he was nuts. She said they only eat lutefisk at Christmas.

  There went Dad's plan of bringing back the original flavor of lutefisk. Now all he's got from Norway is my great-grandmother's Bible. There's also the diary she wrote on the farm up north, but we can't read it. There's only four English words in the whole book: My God awful day.

  You might suspect my dad picked my mom up in Norway, where they have seals. He didn't, though. He met her at the pool.

  As for mom, she never talked about her relatives. I asked her once if she had any, and she said they were "no kind of people." At the time I thought she meant they were druggies or murderers, maybe in prison somewhere. Now I wish that was true.