The Long List Anthology 2

by Aliette de Bodard

  She lies in bed, and Zeinab lies next to her, and Zeinab is a woman in her thirties, staring at her strangely, as if only now seeing her for the first time, and Madeleine starts to cry and Zeinab holds her tightly while Madeleine buries her face in Zeinab’s shoulder, and says she loves her and doesn’t want to lose her but she has to go, they won’t let her stay, she’s insane and she can’t keep living in the past but there is no one left here for her, no one.

  “I love you too,” says Zeinab, fierce, and wondering, and desperate. “I love you too. I’m here. I promise you, I’m here.”

  • • • •

  Madeleine is not sure she’s awake when she hears people arguing outside her door.

  She hears “serious bodily harm” and “what evidence” and “rights adviser,” then “very irregular” and “I assure you,” traded back and forth in low voices. She drifts in and out of wakefulness, wonders muzzily if she consented to being drugged or if she only dreamt that she did, turns over, falls back asleep.

  When she wakes again, Zeinab is sitting at the foot of her bed.

  Madeleine stares at her.

  “I figured out how we know each other,” says Zeinab, whose hair is waist-length now, straightened, who wears a white silk blouse and a sharp black jacket, high heels, and looks like she belongs in an action film. “How I know you, I guess. I mean,” she smiles, looks down, shy—Zeinab has never been shy, but there is the dimple where Madeleine expects it—“where I know you from. The clinical trial, for the Alzheimer’s drug—we were in the same group. I didn’t recognize you until I saw you as an adult. I remembered because of all the people there, I thought—you looked—” her voice drops a bit, as if remembering, suddenly, that she isn’t talking to herself, “lost. I wanted to talk to you, but it felt weird, like, hi, I guess we have family histories in common, want to get coffee?”

  She runs her hand through her hair, exhales, not quite able to look at Madeleine while Madeleine stares at her as if she’s a fairy turning into a hummingbird that could, any second, fly away.

  “So not long after the trial I start having these hallucinations, and there’s always this girl in them, and it freaks me out. But I keep it to myself, because—I don’t know, because I want to see what happens. Because it’s not more debilitating than a day dream, really, and I start to get the hang of it—feeling it come on, walking myself to a seat, letting it happen. Sometimes I can stop it, too, though that’s harder. I take time off work, I read about, I don’t know, mystic visions, shit like that, the kind of things I used to wish were real in high school. I figure even if you’re not real—”

  Zeinab looks at her now, and there are tears streaking Madeleine’s cheeks, and Zeinab’s smile is small and sad and hopeful, too, “—even if you’re not real, well, I’ll take an imaginary friend who’s pretty great over work friends who are mostly acquaintances, you know? Because you were always real to me.”

  Zeinab reaches out to take Madeleine’s hand. Madeleine squeezes it, swallows, shakes her head.

  “I—even if I’m not—if this isn’t a dream,” Madeleine half-chuckles through tears, wipes at her cheek, “I think I probably have to stay here for a while.”

  Zeinab grins, now, a twist of mischief in it. “Not at all. You’re being discharged today. Your rights adviser was very persuasive.”

  Madeleine blinks. Zeinab leans in closer, conspiratorial.

  “That’s me. I’m your rights adviser. Just don’t tell anyone I’m doing pro bono stuff, I’ll never hear the end of it at the office.”

  Madeleine feels something in her unclench and melt, and she hugs Zeinab to her and holds her and is held by her.

  “Whatever’s happening to us,” Zeinab says, quietly, “we’ll figure it out together, okay?”

  “Okay,” says Madeleine, and as she does Zeinab pulls back to kiss her forehead, and the scent of her is clear and clean, like grapefruit and salt, and as Zeinab’s lips brush her skin she—

  —is in precisely the same place, but someone’s with her in her head, remembering Zeinab’s kiss and her smell and for the first time in a very long time, Madeleine feels—knows, with irrevocable certainty—that she has a future.

  * * *

  Amal El-Mohtar has received the Locus Award, been a Nebula Award finalist for her short fiction, and won the Rhysling Award for poetry three times. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and contributes criticism to NPR Books and the LA Times. Her fiction has most recently appeared in magazines such as Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, Uncanny, and in anthologies such as The Starlit Wood: New Fairy Tales (Saga Press). She lives in Ottawa with her spouse and two cats. Find her online at amalelmohtar.com, or on Twitter @tithenai.

  Neat Things

  By Seanan McGuire

  (Editor’s note: this is a nonfiction entry from the book Letters to Tiptree)

  Dear Mr. Tiptree;

  I thought a lot about that salutation, because the discovery that you were a woman changed my world when I was fourteen years old. But I first “met” you as a man, and so it seemed appropriate to address you that way. You were one of the kindly uncles and beloved teachers of my childhood, back when I was a gawky, confused girl in glasses too big for my face, reading everything that I could get my hands on, soaking it all in like a sponge.

  I might have missed you if we hadn’t been so poor. My reading material was often a decade or more out of date, dictated by what people with disposable income decided to get rid of. My mother, a connoisseur of yard sales and flea markets, came home one day with several boxes of back issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Thousands of short stories, novelettes, and novellas were suddenly dropped into my hands, and I read them all with the unthinking voracity of the starving bookworm. I didn’t really keep track of authors, except to note whether the story was by a man or a woman—and almost always, when it was the sort of thing I wanted to write someday, the sort of thing that spoke to me on a level so deep that it was difficult to put into words, the story was written by a man. I couldn’t decide, at that age, whether women didn’t write science fiction, or whether science fiction by women just didn’t get published. At the same time, writing seemed like such a big, difficult, holy undertaking that I couldn’t imagine that many people did it. So women probably just didn’t write science fiction very often. That was too bad. I would have liked to do that someday.

  I kept reading. As so very often happens to children, various of my possessions disappeared every time we moved, until my entire precious run of F&SF vanished into the ether, never to be seen again. I cried. I complained. And one day, I realized that I didn’t have those stories anymore, and that I couldn’t remember the name of the author, only that they—like every other story I had ever loved—had been written by a man.

  I began describing them to other people I knew who liked science fiction. “It was about a little girl and an alien who lived in her brain and also there were cows,” I would say. (“The Only Really Neat Thing To Do.”)

  “It was about two spiders in love only they weren’t really spiders and maybe they weren’t really in love, I don’t know,” I would say. (“Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death.”)

  “It was about a man who loved a mermaid and then he realized that men were bad for mermaids and so he tried to go home,” I would say. (“The Color of Neanderthal Eyes.”)

  “It was about me,” I would say. (“Houston, Houston, Do You Read” and “My Sisters, Oh My Sisters, With Your Faces Filled With Light,” and so many others; so many, many others.)

  Eventually, someone knew what I was talking about. “That’s by James P. Tiptree,” they said, and “That was the penname of a writer named Alice Sheldon,” they said, and the world turned upside down.

  You were my superhero, Mr. Tiptree, because you were also Alice Sheldon, and that meant that a door I had always presumed was closed to me was open: girls could write science fic
tion, and sometimes when they did, they were so good that everyone believed them when they said that they were really boys. Maybe that’s a common story, and I think that’s a good thing. You weren’t just my superhero. You belonged to every girl I knew who aspired to someday be allowed to write science fiction, who thought that the words in her head were more important than her gender.

  Maybe that sounds silly now, but when I was fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, and all the names on my book covers were male, and all the boys I knew said “girls can’t write science fiction” and “A.C. Crispin and Janet Kagen don’t count, they’re exceptions, they’re not as good, this isn’t for you,” knowing that you were out there, that you were a girl like me…it meant the world, Mr. Tiptree. It meant that I had a chance. And then I learned that you were also Racoona Sheldon, and that changed everything all over again. I could write my stories without hiding behind a male name. I could be me, and I could still belong.

  You had your reasons for the pseudonym you chose. I wish I’d had the chance to know you, to ask what those reasons were, to hear them in your own words, but at the end of the day, your choices were your own. I am so very glad you made them. I am so glad you were a revelation, a surprise that couldn’t be dismissed as “girls writing science fiction for girls.” You paved the way for so many of us, and you did it one beautiful, surreal, world-changing story at a time. Maybe you didn’t mean to. I don’t think that most of the people who change the world for the better ever really mean to—they just do it. It just happened.

  So thank you, Mr. Tiptree. Thank you, Mrs. Sheldon. Thank you for showing me that there was a path to the mountain; thank you for pressing the rope into my hand and telling me that I was allowed to make the climb. I never met you, but I have spent my whole writing career trying to make sure that if we had met, you would have been proud of me and the things that I had achieved. You helped me find the strength to pursue science fiction. You were part of the reason that I shrugged and said “sure, that’s not too confusing” when I had the chance to become Mira Grant. You were, and are, and will remain, my hero.

  Yours always, thankfully,

  Seanan McGuire.

  * * *

  Seanan McGuire lives and works on the West Coast, where she does her best to bother all the frogs while avoiding all the weather. She is currently locked in a battle of wits (and talons) with the owl outside her bedroom window. When not writing, Seanan spends an unreasonable amount of time in haunted houses, haunted corn mazes, and the occasional haunted theme park. Her first book was released in 2009; since then, she has released more than twenty volumes through traditional publishers, thus proving that she doesn’t really sleep. You can keep up with Seanan at www.seananmcguire.com.

  Pocosin

  By Ursula Vernon

  Author’s Note: Pocosins are a type of raised peat wetland found almost exclusively in the Carolinas. The name derives from an Eastern Algonquian word meaning “swamp on a hill.” They are a rare and unique ecosystem, today widely threatened by development.

  This is the place of the carnivores, the pool ringed with sundews and the fat funnels of the pitcher plants.

  This is the place where the ground never dries out and the loblolly pines grow stunted, where the soil is poor and the plants turn to other means of feeding themselves.

  This is the place where the hairstreak butterflies flow sleekly through the air and you can hear insect feet drumming inside the bowl of the pitcher plants.

  This is the place where the old god came to die.

  He came in the shape of the least of all creatures, a possum. Sometimes he was a man with a long rat’s tail, and sometimes he was a possum with too–human hands. On two legs and four, staggering, with his hands full of mud, he came limping through the marsh and crawled up to the witchwoman’s porch.

  “Go back,” she said, not looking up. She had a rocking chair on the porch and the runners creaked as she rocked. There was a second chair, but she did not offer it to him. “Go back where you came from.”

  The old god laid his head on the lowest step. When he breathed, it hissed through his long possum teeth and sounded like he was dying.

  “I’m done with that sort of thing,” she said, still not looking up. She was tying flies, a pleasantly tricky bit of work, binding thread and chicken feathers to the wickedness of the hook. “You go find some other woman with witchblood in her.”

  The old god shuddered and then he was mostly a man. He crawled up two steps and sagged onto the porch.

  The woman sighed and set her work aside. “Don’t try to tell me you’re dying,” she said grimly. “I won’t believe it. Not from a possum.”

  Her name was Maggie Grey. She was not so very old, perhaps, but she had the kind of spirit that is born old and grows cynical. She looked down on the scruffy rat–tailed god with irritation and a growing sense of duty.

  His throat rasped as he swallowed. He reached out a hand with long yellow nails and pawed at the boards on the porch.

  “Shit,” Maggie said finally, and went inside to get some water.

  • • • •

  She poured it down his throat and most of it went down. He came a little bit more alive and looked at her with huge, dark eyes. His face was dirty pale, his hair iron gray.

  She knew perfectly well what he was. Witchblood isn’t the same as godblood, but they know each other when they meet in the street. The question was why a god had decided to die on her porch, and that was a lousy sort of question.

  “You ain’t been shot,” she said. “There’s not a hunter alive that could shoot the likes of you. What’s got you dragging your sorry ass up on my porch, old god?”

  The old god heaved himself farther up on the porch. He smelled rank. His fur was matted with urine when he was a possum and his pants were stained and crusted when he was a man.

  His left leg was swollen at the knee, a fat bent sausage, and the foot beneath it was black. There were puncture wounds in his skin. Maggie grunted.

  “Cottonmouth, was it?”

  The old god nodded.

  Maggie sat back down in the rocking chair and looked out over the sundew pool.

  There was a dense mat of shrubs all around the house, fetterbush and sheep laurel bound up together with greenbrier. She kept the path open with an axe, when she bothered to keep it open at all. There was no one to see her and the dying man who wasn’t quite a man.

  Mosquitos whined in the throats of the pitcher plants and circled the possum god’s head. Maggie could feel her shoulders starting to tense up. It was always her shoulders. On a bad day, they’d get so knotted that pain would shoot down her forearms in bright white lines.

  “Would’ve preferred a deer,” she said. “Or a bear, maybe. Got some dignity that way.” Then she laughed. “Should’ve figured I’d get a possum. It’d be a nasty, stinking sort of god that wanted anything to do with me.”

  She picked up a pair of scissors from where she’d been tying flies. “Hold still. No, I ain’t gonna cut you. I ain’t so far gone to try and suck the poison out of a god.”

  It had likely been another god that poisoned him, she thought—Old Lady Cottonmouth, with her gums as white as wedding veils. She saw them sometimes, big, heavy–bodied snakes, gliding easy through the water. Hadn’t ever seen the Old Lady, but she was out there, and it would be just like a possum to freeze up when those white gums came at him, sprouting up fangs.

  Even a witch might hesitate at that.

  She waited until he was a man, more or less, and cut his pant leg open with the scissors. The flesh underneath was angry red, scored with purple. He gasped in relief as the tight cloth fell away from the swollen flesh.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said grimly. “Probably took a few hours off your life with that. But they wouldn’t be anything worth hanging on for.”

  She brought him more water. The first frogs began to screek and squeal in the water.

  “You sure you want this?” she asked. “I can put a knife across
your throat, make it easy.”

  He shook his head.

  “You know who’s coming for you?”

  He nodded. Then he was a possum again and he gaped his mouth open and hissed in pain.

  She hesitated, still holding the scissors. “Ain’t sure I want to deal with ’em myself,” she muttered. “I’m done with all that. I came out here to get away, you hear me?”

  The possum closed his eyes, and whispered the only word he’d ever speak.

  “…sorry…”

  Maggie thrust the scissors into her pocket and scowled.

  “All right,” she said. “Let’s get you under the porch. You come to me and I’ll stand them off for you, right enough, but you better not be in plain sight.”

  She had to carry him down the steps. His bad leg would take no weight and he fell against her, smelling rank. There were long stains on her clothes before they were done.

  Under the porch, it was cool. The whole house was raised up, to save it from the spring floods, when the sundew pool reached out hungry arms. There was space enough, in the shadow under the stairs, for a dying god smaller than a man.

  She didn’t need to tell him to stay quiet.

  She went into the house and poured herself a drink. The alcohol was sharp and raw on her throat. She went down the steps again, to a low green stand of mountain mint, and yanked up a half dozen stems.

  They didn’t gentle the alcohol, but at least it gave her something else to taste. The frogs got louder and the shadows under the sheep laurel got thick. Maggie sat back in her rocking chair with her shoulders knotting up under her shirt and went back to tying flies.