Year’s Best Weird Fiction
VOLUME TWO
Guest Editor
KATHE KOJA
Series Editor
MICHAEL KELLY
Also by Kathe Koja
The Cipher
Bad Brains
Skin
Strange Angels
Kink
Extremities
straydog
Buddha Boy
The Blue Mirror
Talk
Going Under
Kissing the Bee
Headlong
Under the Poppy
The Mercury Waltz
Also by Michael Kelly
Songs From Dead Singers
Scratching the Surface
Ouroboros (With Carol Weekes)
Apparitions
Undertow & Other Laments
Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell, Lewd I Did Live
Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I
Shadows & Tall Trees
Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 (With Laird Barron)
Year’s Best Weird Fiction, VOL. 2
copyright © 2015 by Kathe Koja & Michael Kelly
Foreword © 2015 Michael Kelly
Introduction © 2015 Kathe Koja
Cover Art copyright © 2015 Tomasz Alen Kopera
Cover Design copyright © 2015 Vince Haig
Interior design and layout Alligator Tree Graphics
Story credits appear at the end of the volume.
First Edition
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events
or persons—living, dead, or undead—is entirely coincidental.
Undertow Publications
Pickering, ON Canada
[email protected] / www.undertowbooks.com
CONTENTS
Michael Kelly - Foreword
Kathe Koja - At Home With the Weird
Nathan Ballingrud - The Atlas of Hell
Siobhan Caroll - Wendigo Nights
Julio Cortázar - Headache
Amanda C. Davis - Loving Armageddon
K. M. Ferebee - The Earth and Everything Under
Karen Joy Fowler - Nanny Anne and the Christmas Story
Cat Hellisen - The Girls Who Go Below
Kima Jones - Nine
Caitlín R. Kiernan - Bus Fare
Rich Larson - The Air We Breathe is Stormy, Stormy
Carmen Maria Machado - The Husband Stitch
Carmen Maria Machado - Observations About Eggs From the Man Sitting Next to Me on a Flight from Chicago, Illinois to Cedar Rapids, Iowa
Usman T. Malik - Resurrection Points
Nick Mamatas - Exit Through the Gift Shop
Sunny Moraine - So Sharp That Blood Must Flow
Jean Muno - The Ghoul
Sarah Pinsker - A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide
Karin Tidbeck - Migration
Charles Wilkinson - Hidden in the Alphabet
Isabel Yap - A Cup of Salt Tears
Contributors
Story Credits
MICHAEL KELLY
–
Foreword
WELCOME TO THE second volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction.
Ah, weird fiction. What is weird fiction? It’s a question I am still asked. And if you asked a dozen proponents of The Weird that same question, you’d likely get a dozen different responses. I’ll not rehash what I said in my Foreword to last year’s inaugural volume—I implore you to seek out the book—but I’ll just note that to me weird fiction is speculative and often (but not always) works to subvert the Laws of Nature. More than any other mode or stream or genre of fiction, The Weird is a feeling. A kind of continuous distortion of ambient space. So, weird tales can be comprised of elements of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, but can also occupy those more sensate liminal areas. Hence, it is a diverse mode of literature that can claim work by Sheridan Le Fanu, Julio Cortázar (who is represented in this volume), Shirley Jackson, Kelly Link, and many more. In fact, this second volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction is proof of the diversity and breadth of the weird tale. Expertly curated by Kathe Koja, this volume is vastly different than Laird Barron’s excellent inaugural edition. Both volumes are, in my estimation, brilliant. Each has a unique flavour; a distinct voice. That, of course, is the idea.
The worldwide literary antecedents of the weird tale date as far back as 8th Century BC Greece (The Iliad), 1st Century AD Roman Empire (The Golden Ass), 3rd Century India (Panchtantra) through 10th Century Japan (The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter), to modern United Kingdom (The Cicerones).
Recently, Faber & Faber have reissued the work of Robert Aickman, and Tartarus Press has released The Strangers and Other Writings, featuring new short stories by Aickman. As well, my own imprint, Undertow Publications, published Aickman’s Heirs, a tribute anthology to the master of the strange, weird tale. These publications, along with publication of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction, The New Weird, and others, has rekindled interest in the strange tale and weird fiction. Some are calling it a Weird Renaissance. But, truthfully, the Weird tale didn’t go anywhere. So, call it that if you must, but I won’t. I find that once you name something and compartmentalize and categorize it, you rob it of its influence. And you make it exclusionary. Remember the New Wave? We want to be inclusive. It’s weird fiction. It’s here to stay.
I read a lot of fiction for this year’s volume—about 2,800 stories. In what I thought was a unique opportunity, I sent out a call for submissions and invited writers to personally submit to the project. About half the submissions came in this way. Some of those writers then accused me of not reading their submissions, which is patently false. I read everything. Why wouldn’t I? I did not want to leave a stone unturned. Then I heard grumblings about how our selections were too SF, as if weird fiction is consigned to one narrow genre. It amounts to sour grapes. And I address it here to make the point that this volume, with a policy of rotating guest editors, is going to feel refreshingly different each year. Part of the excitement comes from comparing and contrasting each year’s volume.
And we have a great volume for you this year. There is an impressive, eclectic, and diverse range of authors, voices, themes, style, etc. When I conceived the idea of rotating guest editors, Kathe Koja was at the forefront of my list. I love Kathe’s fiction. It’s sharp, incisive, and intense—just like Kathe. I knew she’d make a terrific guest editor, and I wasn’t wrong. She has put together a simply stunning collection of weird works. I am very grateful to her. She is the epitome of a professional. Herewith, my sincere thanks to Kathe for agreeing to edit this volume. Thank you for your patience.
The stories that make up this volume were culled from submissions directly from writers, anthologies, and magazines (both print and online). In fact, 60 percent of our choices were from online venues. Thank you to all the writers, editors, and publishers who sent in material.
Having put together the first two volumes in this series, and currently working on the third, I am disappointed that the European publishers mostly ignore my queries for material. It’s a particularly time-consuming and maddening endeavour. There is undoubtedly much good fiction that I am not seeing. It may be that it is just a by-product of being the new kid on the block; that we haven’t yet established ourselves. I do hope that these publishers will come around.
Volume 3 of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction will be guest edited by
Simon Strantzas. We are both busily assembling that volume. It’ll no doubt be another fresh take on the state of weird fiction
As always, I am happy to listen to your recommendations, questions, complaints, and even the odd word of encouragement. We cannot do this without you.
Stay weird!
—Michael Kelly
Pickering, Canada
August 16, 2015
KATHE KOJA
–
At Home With the Weird
THE TOWN OF Riddle has lived in my mind ever since I glimpsed it, an outskirt utopia conjured by Todd Haynes’ Dylan (Dylanish? Dylanesque?) film I’m Not There: sepia streets of stilt-walkers and costumed townsfolk, where a giraffe grazes like a horse; and in reference to which (is it?) another version of Dylan opines: “All these songs about roses growing out of people’s brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels…mystery is a traditional fact…it’s too unreal to die.”
The first time I saw Riddle, I thought: That’s where I’m from.
But you and I and all of us—we’re all from Riddle, really. We all know that there’s more to this world than what our senses combined can convey, though we use those hardworking senses (including the less-documented but no less real “sixth” sense, proprioception) to daily investigate our outer and inner geographies, and decide from the information we take in whether a thing is actual or not, able to give pleasure or cause danger, something to welcome, to flee or to watch.
So let’s call the sense of the strange our seventh sense: that deep compass of the mysterious and “unreal,” of, yes, the weird, formidably deployed by some of us—like the writers collected in this book—and by others as a corner-of-the-eye sense, a swift breathing-in, a light from nowhere that startles and sparks. Still others are too afraid ever to acknowledge, let alone directly exercise, that sense, because to do so would be to admit, what? That nothing is weird because everything—the sum total of all that inhabits space and all we think we see—already is? And we are, too?
Because if Riddle is where we really live and who we really are, then—What would you do, if you were weird? How would it cause you to act, what would you want, who would you run to, or from? If the past is not the past, if the ground beneath your feet were to turn suddenly to yellow velvet, if you peeled back the skin of your own throat and found inside a clean plastic mechanism, if, if, if…You could fall, and keep falling, having lost control (a control you never had to begin with); you could drift on the waves of what the universe really is.
And then what?
Religions have been founded on less. Wars, too.
Editing this book, I read the manuscripts Mike Kelly sent with my own lens of that seventh sense: it was how I made my choices, picked which of the stories were “best.” Recognizing the weird, and being able to share that recognition with economy and power, create a living fictive world, requires a complement of skills, so presume those skills as the cost of entry. The stories I received were all well-written; the stories I chose were the ones that spoke most surely and strongly of the truth of the weird, its presence, its power when revealed to unsettle or make an end; or a beginning. An egg, a grenade, a wet, articulate monster—these and others spoke to me in the language of Riddle, and I believed them; I was held in the telling until the telling was through—and afterwards, too.
And what all these stories share, at bedrock, is delight. Even if the news they bring is dark, even if the characters within them struggle or know pain—and lots of them do—still the delight, for this reader certainly, is the same I felt when I saw that meandering giraffe, those grease-painted townsfolk: it’s the shock of truth, the confirmation that yes, this is the world, this is the world, this is our world, to be navigated with both eyes open, with hands ready to give and to accept what gifts are offered, to work with the monsters and go where the silence is, to meet ourselves coming and going: to plunge into the strange and find it stranger than we can imagine†, and find ourselves at home in Riddle, as natives of the weird.
For those to whom this news is emphatically not a delight, all I can say is, Read this book. Not every story all at once; perhaps not even every story. But read it, with one hand on the doorknob if you must, ready to bug out if a mask falls from the ceiling or something winks at you from inside your mirror: read, and let the disquiet you feel be a beautiful symptom of something more beautifully disquieting in process: the way you see has now been altered, and nothing will ever look the same.
For the rest of you, plunge into and enjoy the varied scenarios created by each writer’s seventh sense—the participatory energy required of a reader (as opposed to a viewer) makes this method of meeting the weird maybe the most ideal. And if Mike Kelly’s and my own process of selection has introduced you to a writer whose voice you’ll begin to follow, whose byline you’ll seek, then we’re well rewarded for all the effort it took (and there was a fearful lot of it, nearly all of it Mike’s) to make this book come alive in your hands. Herewith my own thanks to Mike, for inviting me to be part of the process, and to all the writers whose work I met with pleasure, these mapped moments of that shared terrain, its boundaries and contours forever in flux and spin: welcome to Riddle. Welcome home.
† “My own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”—J.B.S. Haldane
NATHAN BALLINGRUD
–
The Atlas of Hell
“HE DIDN’T EVEN know he was dead. I had just shot this guy in the head and he’s still standing there giving me shit. Telling me what a big badass he works for, telling me I’m going to be sorry I was born. You know. Blood pouring down his face. He can’t even see anymore, it’s in his goddamn eyes. So I look down at the gun in my hand and I’m like, what the fuck, you know? Is this thing working or what? And I’m starting to think maybe this asshole is right, maybe I just stepped into something over my head. I mean, I feel a twinge of real fear. My hair is standing up like a cartoon. So I look at the dude and I say, ‘Lay down! You’re dead! I shot you!’”
There’s a bourbon and ice sitting on the end-table next to him. He takes a sip from it and puts it back down, placing it in its own wet ring. He’s very precise about it.
“I guess he just had to be told, because a soon as I say it? Boom. Drops like a fucking tree.”
I don’t know what he’s expecting from me here. My leg is jumping up and down with nerves. I can’t make it stop. I open my mouth to say something but a nervous laughs spills out instead.
He looks at me incredulously, and cocks his head. Patrick is a big guy; but not doughy, like me. There’s muscle packed beneath all that flesh. He looks like fists of meat sewn together and given a suit of clothes. “Why are you laughing?”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t know. I thought it was supposed to be a funny story.”
“No, you demented fuck. That’s not a funny story. What’s the matter with you?”
It’s pushing midnight, and we’re sitting on a coffee-stained couch in a darkened corner of the grubby little bookstore I own in New Orleans, about a block off Magazine Street. My name is Jack Oleander. I keep a small studio apartment overhead, but when Patrick started banging on my door half an hour ago I took him down here instead. I don’t want him in my home. That he’s here at all is a very bad sign.
The bookstore is called Oleander. I sell used books, for the most part, and I serve a very sparse clientele: mostly students and disaffected youth, their little hearts love-drunk on Kierkegaard or Salinger. That suits me just fine. Most of the books have been sitting on their shelves for years, and I feel like I’ve fostered a kind of relationship with them. A part of me is sorry whenever one of them leaves the nest.
The bookstore doesn’t pay the bills, of course. The books and documents I sell in the back room take care of that. Few people know about the back room, but those that do pay very well indeed. Patrick’s boss is one of those people. We parted under strained circumstances a ye
ar or so ago. I was never supposed to see him again. His presence here makes me afraid, and fear makes me reckless.
“Well if it’s not a funny story, then what kind of story is it? Because we’ve been drinking here for twenty minutes and you haven’t mentioned business even once. If you want to trade war stories it’s going to have to wait for another time.”
He gives me a sour look and picks up his glass, peering into it as he swirls the ice around. He’d always hated me, and I knew that his presence here pleased him no more than it did me.
“You don’t make it easy to be your friend,” he says.
“I didn’t know we were friends.”
The muscles in his jaw clench.
“You’re wasting my time, Patrick. I know you’re just the muscle, so maybe you don’t understand this, but the work I do in the back room takes up a lot of energy. So sleep is valuable to me. You’ve sat on my couch and drunk my whiskey and burned away almost half an hour beating around the bush. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
He looks at me. He has his work face on now, the one a lot of guys see just before the lights go out. That’s good; I want him in work mode. It makes him focus. The trick now, though, is to keep him on the shy side of violence. You have to play these guys like marionettes. I got pretty good at it back in the day.
“You want to watch that,” he says. “You want to watch that attitude.”
I put my hands out, palms forward. “Hey,” I say.
“I come to you in friendship. I come to you in respect.”
This is bullshit, but whatever. It’s time to settle him down. These guys are such fragile little flowers. “Hey. I’m sorry. Really. I haven’t been sleeping much. I’m tired, and it makes me stupid.”
“That’s a bad trait. So wake up and listen to me. I told you that story for two reasons. One, to stop you from saying dumb shit like you just did. Make you remember who you’re dealing with. I can see it didn’t work. I can see maybe I was being too subtle.”
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