by Mike Allen
She stood by the front door smiling, wrapped in an old knit sweater-coat with multi-colored squares on a chocolate-colored background. “My mother knitted it for me in high school. It was all I could find intact, but I’ve always wanted to wear it again.”
“Something to drink?” I asked.
“Two bottles of water. Did you get what you needed?”
“Everything I need,” I replied. And we left that house where we’d lived almost forty years, raised children and more or less kept our peace, for the final time. Out on the street we felt the wind coming up, and turned back around.
What began as a few scattered bits leaving the roof, caught by the wind and drifting over the neighbor’s trees, gathered into a tide that reduced the roof to nothing, leaving the chimney exposed, until the chimney fell into itself, leaving a chimney-shaped hole in the sky. We held onto each other, then, as the walls appeared to detach themselves at the corners, flap like birds in pain, then twist and flutter, shaking, as the dry house chaff scattered, making a cloud so thick we couldn’t really see what was going on inside it, including what was happening to all our possessions, and then the cloud thinned, and the tiny bits drifted down, disappearing into the shrubbery which once hugged the sides of our home, and now hugged nothing.
We held hands for miles and for some parts of days thereafter, until our arthritic hands cramped, and we couldn’t hold on any more no matter how hard we tried. We drank the water and ate the crackers and I wrote nothing down, and after weeks of writing nothing I simply tore the sheets out of the notebook one by one and started pressing them against ground, and stone, the rough bark on trees, the back of a dog’s head, the unanchored sky one rainy afternoon. Some of that caused a mark to be made, much did not, but to me that was a satisfactory record of where we had been, and who we had been.
Eventually, our fingers no longer touched, and we lost the eyes we’d used to gaze at one another, and the tongues for telling each other, and the lips for tasting each other.
But we are not nothing. She is that faint smell in the air, that nonsensical whisper. I am the dust that settles into your clothes, that keeps your footprints as you wander across the world.
PINIONS
The Authors
Claude Lalumière (http://lostmyths.net/claude/) is a Montreal writer and editor. His first collection, Objects of Worship, is a 2009 release from ChiZine Publications. Claude has edited eight anthologies, including Island Dreams: Montreal Writers of the Fantastic, Open Space: New Canadian Fantastic Fiction, and Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction. His fiction has been featured in the “year’s best” series Year’s Best Fantasy, Year’s Best SF, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica.
About “Three Friends,” Claude writes: “Being an editor as well as a writer (and, as many writers will tell you, a nitpicky editor who often makes his writers work through multiple drafts), I’m always a bit wary when a story of mine is accepted but then simply published as is, with no editing. Surely, my stories can’t be as perfect as I think they are. It’s the editor’s job to correct me of that self-satisfied assumption and highlight all those blemishes that I was too close to see. Any good editor should do at least that. Sometimes, it’s only a question of careful copyediting. But sometimes . . .
“For me, it’s always a thrill when I find an editor who truly gets, at a gut level, what I’m trying to do. Such an editor is not merely a glorified copyeditor but, rather, a collaborator. Such an editor will lead me to push my stories as far as they really need to go, will spot when I—despite my best efforts—took a shortcut but shouldn’t have, will not let me get away with anything, will show me where I faltered and did not do my story justice, will say exactly the right thing to make me understand my own work better.
“I was fortunate enough that ‘Three Friends’—a story I’d been struggling with for many years—found such an editor in the talented and keenly insightful Mike Allen, whose perspicacious comments and steadfast enthusiasm allowed me to finally mold my long-suffering ‘Three Friends’ into a satisfying shape.”
To which the editor shuffles his feet, grins and says:
“Aw, shucks.”
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Leah Bobet lives and works in a little apartment in Toronto built on consecrated ground. Her fiction has appeared in Interzone, The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy, and Realms of Fantasy, and her poetry has been nominated for the Rhysling and Pushcart Prizes. Other information, miscellany, and trivia can be found at http://www.leahbobet.com.
Talking about “Six,” Leah says the story “was started mostly to play with one of my favourite apocalypse plans: how, after the fall of civilization, I might turn my apartment building into a vertical farm. The idea of sixes—drawn from a themed writing challenge run with friends every spring—brought in what life would be like for the sixth child of a seventh son and, with it, what life might be for children in the usually adult fantasy-of-competence genre of apocalyptic fiction.”
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Marie Brennan is the author of four novels, including the Onyx Court series of historical faerie fantasies. The most recent book, In Ashes Lie, came out from Orbit in June, and features the destruction of most of seventeenth-century London. She has also published nearly two dozen short stories, in magazines such as Talebones, On Spec, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. More information can be found on her website, www.swantower.com.
Here’s how she describes the origins of “Once a Goddess”:
“I’ve said before that I pillage my academic fields (anthropology and folklore) for material; this is a more direct example than most. In the summer of 2001, while cataloguing articles for the index Anthropological Literature, I came across a piece by an Indian scholar, regarding the living goddess Kumari. There are a number of Kumaris in Nepal, of which the Kathmandu one is the most prominent, but I can’t tell you a lot about them; what stuck with me was not the specifics of that religious situation, but the problem of what happens to those girls after they cease to be Kumari. You grow up as the living avatar of a goddess, and then one day, you’re a normal person again—with no idea how to live as one. That loss, and the question of what one does afterward, lodged powerfully in my brain. I had the title almost immediately , but it took me seven years (and five aborted drafts) to get from that to a working story.”
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Ian McHugh lives in Canberra, Australia, but would rather be closer to the beach. He is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion West writers’ workshop and the 2008 grand prize winner in the Writers of the Future contest. A list of his fiction publications is available at ianmchugh.wordpress.com, including links to stories available free online. His big writing projects for 2009 are a graphic novel of his Writers of the Future story with Bob Hall (hallhammer.deviantart.com), who illustrated it in the Writers of the Future 24 anthology, and a novel set in the same fantastical alternate Australia.
Of “Angel Dust” he says: “The story is set in a fantasy universe I’ve been kicking around for a while. Early iterations of it can be found in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine and the All Star Stories anthology Twenty Epics. ‘Angel Dust’ had its genesis after a friend told me that Korean fairy tales sometimes begin with the line ‘Back in the days when tigers smoked cigarettes,’ and trying to think of my own version of ‘Once upon a time.’ The line I came up with didn’t survive redrafting, but maybe I’ll find a story for it one day.”
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Ann Leckie is a graduate of Clarion West. Her fiction has appeared in Subterranean Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. She has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Asked for a note on “The Endangered Camp,” she replied: “Back in 2004, I read an interview with John Joseph Adams, the notorious Slush God of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The interviewer asked him what kinds of stories did he wish he saw more of in the slushpile, and he said he wished h
e saw more dinosaur fic, more stories about Mars exploration, and more post-apocalyptic stories. I said, entirely in jest, ‘Who’ll be the first to send in a post-apocalyptic dinosaurs on Mars story?’
“About a week later it dawned on me—dinosaurs had an apocalypse! All I had to do was get them to Mars! It took me a while to figure that bit out, and by the time I wrote the first draft, during Week 4 of Clarion West, I read another interview with Mr. Adams in which he added skyhooks to the list. It was too late to add a skyhook to the story, but if I’d known I’d have tried to cram one in there. I think, ultimately, it’s better without the skyhook.”
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Mary Robinette Kowal is the 2008 recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Cosmos and Asimov’s. Mary, a professional puppeteer and voice actor, lives in NYC with her husband Rob and nine manual typewriters. Her first novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, will be published by Tor in 2010.
Here’s how she says “At the Edge of Dying” came about: “While I was living in Iceland, I was talking with a friend of mine who told a story about her upstairs neighbor. The woman apparently claimed to be a psychic but was always on the verge of death. We speculated that the reason she was a psychic was because she was so close to the other side. Bing! The idea of magic that was tied to how close you were to dying popped into my head.
“The setting is very loosely based on Hawaii, where my husband grew up. He often talks about how the more obviously volcanic parts of Iceland remind him of the Big Island and it seemed natural to translate the story there.”
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Saladin Ahmed was born in Detroit. His fiction has appeared in Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. His poems have appeared in journals including The Brooklyn Review and in anthologies such as Abandon Automobile: Detroit City Poetry, and Inclined To Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the songwriter Hayley Thompson.
Saladin says that “Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela” is “actually a prosification of a very short poem I’d written years before. The poem consisted entirely of a single image—an old man somewhere in the medieval Islamic world defying the narrow-minded by declaring his love for a hooved woman. Translating this image into a story, of course, introduced deeper demands in terms of plot and character. These demands eventually led to the story that appears here. The characters’ names, by the way, are vaguely allegorical—‘Abdel Jameela,’ for instance, might be roughly translated as ‘servant (or slave) of beauty.’”
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Tanith Lee was born in North London (UK) in 1947. She didn’t learn to read—she is also dyslectic—until almost age 8, and by 9 she was writing. After grammar school, Lee went on to work in a library. This was followed by various other jobs. In 1974, DAW Books of America, under the leadership of Donald A. Wollheim, bought and published Lee’s The Birthgrave, and thereafter 26 of her novels and collections.
Since then Lee has written around 90 books, and approaching 300 short stories. Four of her radio plays have been broadcast by the BBC; she also wrote two episodes for the TV series Blake’s 7.
Lee writes across many genres, including Horror, SF and Fantasy, Historical, Detective, Contemporary-Psychological, Children and Young Adult. Her preoccupation, though, is always people.
In 1992 she married the writer-artist-photographer John Kaiine, her companion since 1987. They live near the sea, in a house full of books and plants, ruled over by two Tuxedo cats.
Here’s what caused her to write “The Pain of Glass,” a new tale set in her famous Flat Earth milieu: “A conversation between my husband, myself and a friend of ours which involved a broken window, brought forth the phrase ‘a pane of glass.’ Given my sort of mind I instantly visualized the pain of the pane—and then the flat earth drifted through the back of my thoughts, a beckoning mirage . . . the rest is the story.”
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Joanna Galbraith grew up in Brisbane, Australia, but now spends her time writing and teaching English in Basel, Switzerland. Her stories have appeared in a number of print and electronic journals including the first Clockwork Phoenix anthology. Her first novel The Uncanny Abilities of Philomena Philpott is scheduled for release in 2010.
Joanna says “The Fish of Al-Kawthar’s Fountain” came to her while sitting beside the courtyard fountain of the Al-Haramein hotel, Damascus, Syria. Mesmerised by the water and the fish reeling round in it, she distinctly remembers thinking she saw a couple of fish exchange pleasantries or at the very least a few bars of an old madrigal in perfect harmony. Of course, in hindsight, she realises it was probably just the intense heat and overwhelming fragrance of apple nargileh but she still relishes that idea that fish can hold a tune.
She wrote this story for the Majnun who took her camel riding at three o’clock in the morning. For more information on Joanna’s writing go to www.joannagalbraith.com.
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Born in the Pacific Northwest in 1979, Catherynne M. Valente is the author of Palimpsest and the Orphan’s Tales series, as well as The Labyrinth, Yume no Hon: The Book of Dreams, The Grass-Cutting Sword, and five books of poetry. She is the winner of the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Spectrum Award and was a World Fantasy Award finalist in 2007. She currently lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner and two dogs.
Here’s what Cat says about the origins of “The Secret History of Mirrors”: “I had the idea for this title three years ago, springing from a conversation with Sonya Taaffe, and have been struggling to write a story to go with it ever since. Ultimately, it was learning a little about how to make mirrors that triggered the right tale. I wanted to talk about fairy tales and how their mirrors are so terribly similar, but also about what a mirror is, both physically and spiritually, what it can be, and how learning one thing can change your understanding of everything else. One of the best things fiction does is allow us to see plain objects differently, to see their resonance, to see them as a connection from the real world to the world of magic. I wanted to do that for the mirror in my hall.
“Also: lesbian nuns. Go with what you know, right?”
* * *
Forrest Aguirre’s fiction has recently appeared in such venues as Asimov’s, Farrago’s Wainscot, Hatter Bones, and Avant-Garde for the New Millenium. He has received a World Fantasy Award for his editorial work, and has most recently edited Polyphony 7 with Deborah Layne. He is currently completing work on his second novel, Archangel Morpheus, and is working through his third novel, Panoptica.
He writes that “Never nor Ever” was “a reaction to the realization that I am, now, genuinely middle-aged. In this tale, I harked back to two characters from my childhood, filtering my view of their growing older and facing death through the lens of Derrida’s deconstruction and the fractal analysis of chaotic systems. I also recently began fencing again (in order to find my youth again, no doubt), and have done some in-depth study of dueling. Honestly, I just plain wanted to finish the sibling challenge that was begun, but never concluded, so long ago, in Wonderland.”
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Gemma Files won the 1999 International Horror Guild award for Best Short Fiction with her short story “The Emperor’s Old Bones.” Since then, five of her stories were adapted into episodes of Showtime’s The Hunger TV series, she spent ten years teaching people how to write screenplays, published two collections of fiction (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart, both Prime Books) and two collections of poetry (Bent Under Night, from Sinnersphere Productions, and Dust Radio, from Kelp Queen Press). Her novella Words Written Backwards is available from Burning Effigy Press, and her short story “Marya Nox” will appear later this year as part of Lovecraft Unbound, a Lovecraft-themed anthology edited by Ellen Datlow.
Stephen J. Barringer’s first publication was the SF
short story “Restoration” in On Spec; he has since won first and second prizes in the short story competition for the long-running Toronto Trek/Polaris media convention, and has written several gaming products for various RPG systems, as well as a radio play adaptation of E.F. Benson’s “The Room in the Tower” that’s supposed to be seeing production Real Soon Now. He also does a lot of business proposals and copywriting, but that isn’t nearly as much fun.
(In case you’re wondering, Barringer and Files are married, with one son.)
When they were interrogated about “each thing i show you is a piece of my death,” the following transcript was the result:
STEVE: The secret to a successful collaboration, especially for two writers who each have their own voice, is either (A) to create a third voice that’s a seamless fusion of both separate voices, or (B) take advantage of the differences by juxtaposing them. “each thing,” as an essentially epistolary story, was a perfect candidate for approach B, with each of us trading off different viewpoints and sections as inspiration and familiarity suggested. We’re both huge fans of the read-between-the-lines, corner-of-your-eye school of dread seen in films like SESSION 9, or the stories of Ramsey Campbell, and of finding the creeps in a story’s implications rather than its depictions, so the actual process of writing was remarkably straightforward: each of us could stand at a different angle and take various shots at an agreed-upon target, then fit them all together afterwards for optimum effect.
