The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  Out, out, brief candle!

  McGill entered the shop the next day with a long lock of orange-red hair, like a streamer, clutched between his forefinger and thumb. As he passed the tress across the glass countertop and Eloise received it gingerly, he began waxing rhapsodic.

  “I feel her, Miss Browne. I hear the soft intake of her breath as I turn the lamps. Fire needs to breathe. Fire is so human, really.”

  Eloise only nodded and thought again of Shakespeare.

  It took a few days to complete the piece; Eloise rushed nothing and used fine wire, thread, and paste to keep every delicate strand in place. She began weaving the locks into an elaborate Celtic knot. McGill stopped in to check the progress and was pleased with what he saw.

  “Yes, yes, the unending knot…A knot of eternal love…” His green gaze was far away, glassy. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. “Miss Browne, tell me again that the soul lives on after death.”

  “With all my heart I know it to be true,” she replied, tying a few coppery strands together.

  “Not only do I feel her but I see her. There in the gas flame, in its small blue sliver, I see her face. You don’t suppose that in blowing out that flame, her soul simply transferred, slipped into those quiet jets? When I turn the key and the flame grows taller and hotter in the lamp, I swear I see her whole head, her hair all afire, just like it always was in the sunlight.” McGill was staring at Eloise too long and too hard again and she had to shift her focus to the very hair in question.

  “I…I suppose if you see her, some part of her is there,” Eloise murmured, “though I do believe the remaining presence of a soul might have more to do with the living than the dead.”

  “Meaning those who remain are the soul’s tether?”

  “Yes.”

  That night, Eloise noticed the lamps on the top floor of McGill’s townhouse were burning bright. Very bright. Too bright.

  The following afternoon, as McGill entered to pick up the finished pendant, wearied as if years had elapsed in a day, Eloise stopped him when he slid pound notes across the glass.

  “No, Mr. McGill, I’ll not accept your money. This is in sympathy,” she said, and bit her lip as he leaned over the counter so that she could clasp the chain about his neck. Close. Their cheeks so close.

  He stared down at the orange-red strands so gracefully braided and knotted. “You’ve a gift, of that there is no doubt, Miss Browne.”

  “Be…careful,” Eloise cautioned. “With the lamps. Don’t look so hard for something you’re desperate to see. There are other things your eyes might miss.” She wished she could more pointedly beg him to see her instead.

  “But I see her, Miss Browne. I see my bride…”

  “Staring into fire won’t bring her back, Mr. McGill. Won’t you…Can’t you let her go?” Eloise asked in barely more than a whisper.

  Mr. McGill stared at her, those gleaming green eyes going dim. “I can’t. I am too fond.”

  He turned and left the shop.

  Eloise awoke in the middle of the night to the clang of a fireman’s bell. Shooting bolt upright in her rooms above the shop, she was first on the block to be dressed and out the door. The upper floor of the townhouse across the street was black and smoldering.

  “Someone had his lamp far too high,” muttered a fireman as he and his crew passed, two of them carrying a stretcher. A motionless form lay concealed by a sheet; spreading dark patches—Eloise shuddered to think of what—marred the fabric’s pristine whiteness.

  “Oh my God,” Eloise murmured, breaking through the small crowd that had begun to gather, elbowing past onlookers as the firefighters placed the stretcher on the sidewalk. The smell of burnt flesh turned Eloise’s stomach yet she still pressed forward.

  “Miss—” One fireman blocked her with his ash-dusted arm.

  “I have to see him, please—” Eloise gasped.

  “Miss, you don’t want to—”

  “Please.”

  The fireman stepped aside.

  She threw back the sheet. In the dim yellow glow of the flickering streetlamps, the shocking horror of a charred face was barely recognizable as McGill’s. A fine dark suit had blended with the charcoal of his skin, the glass of a small reflective disc had melted and fused to his sternum. His wife’s locket.

  One patch of his unmistakable russet hair sprang wildly from his flaking scalp. The tress danced faintly in the breeze. Eloise rejoiced. Plucking a small scissors she kept always in her coat pocket—a necessity of her work—she sheared the lock, replaced the sheet over McGill’s blackened face, and walked calmly away.

  Eloise worked through the night, molding McGill’s hair into the shape of a heart, tying it in place with strands plucked from her own blond tresses. Setting the piece behind brass-framed glass, clasping it firmly shut, slipping the pendant onto a delicate golden chain, she let its gentle weight fall between her breasts to nestle against her heart. There, the pulse of her own blood would keep a part of him alive.

  The next morning, she was seated alone in the empty shop when she heard the sound of the bells at the door, but faint, as though they came from very far away. She glanced up.

  There was Mr. McGill.

  Transparent. Wavering and grey. Floating about a foot off the floor.

  His ghost stared at her, confused. Then vanished.

  Every day he returned, for weeks, months, a year, and Eloise’s pulse quickened every time at the dreamlike sound of the bells, her skittering heartbeat reminding her she was alive though she held tokens of death in her hands.

  “Won’t you…let me go?” he murmured, his voice an echo, glancing distantly off her ear. But not so distant that she could not hear the desperation therein.

  She stared at him, through him. Her eyes watered. Her lips pursed into a small bow; she could feel her cheeks dimple in that expression her father declared demure but in reality was his daughter clamping down upon a scream, a shriek, a plea for a life more loudly and thoroughly lived.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered then. “I can’t. I am too fond.”

  Copyright (C) 2012 by Leanna Renee Hieber

  Art copyright (C) 2012 by Sam Wolfe Connelly

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  Books by Erin Hoffman

  “The second generation Japanese can only be evacuated either as part of a total evacuation [or] on the ground that their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or even trust the citizen Japanese. This latter is the fact but I am afraid it will make a tremendous hole in our constitutional system to apply it.”

  —Secretary of War Henry Stimson, personal diary, February 10, 1942

  * * *

  Uncle Mamoru told us to burn everything from home. It was never a home that I knew, so I suppose I didn’t mind so much. The few things I had—a book of poetry my father brought back from Yokohama when I was eight, a paper fan painted with cherry trees, a tiny porcelain cat with one paw raised—I wouldn’t have taken with me anyway. I never even understood as much of the poetry as I said I did to make Father happy. They took him and Pastor Katagawa and the editor of the community newsletter to a camp in New Mexico six weeks ago. He writes to us once a month about the weather.

  Grandmother has much to burn. Her own books of poetry go into the woodstove first. Its heat pours wastefully into the balmy Los Angeles December. Next into the hungry flames go stacks of let
ters bound with twine. Some, etched with delicate characters rendered by a child’s hand, she used to teach me hiragana many years ago.

  Her spotted hands hesitate over the last packet of letters. A drop of sweat from the fire’s heat courses down a path carved by others across her cheek. The dark characters on aged yellow paper could only be letters from my grandfather. The edge of a brittle photograph, their first introduction, peeks out from a thick envelope.

  Her face is tranquil. The flames reach out from the stove, searching, angry, and her tired eyes lift, reflecting orange light. “Shh, shh,” she soothes, and raises one palm, flat and dry like paper, toward them. She breathes deeply, her thin chest rising and falling. The flames are soothed, and settle back into their metal house.

  For a few more moments she just breathes, urging still, still. At last she throws her younger self into the stove and quickly picks up another item, casting it in after, as if to bury the memory of the last. But the next object, a box of hanafuda cards, stops her again. She extracts a small card from the carved container and tucks it into her belt without looking at it. The tendons in her hand are tight like the claws of a sparrow clenched around a morsel of bread. Then the box follows the letters, which are already blackened throughout and quickly melting to ash.

  I have whittled my doll collection down to two. The one in my right hand I know I should keep, but the one in my left I love. Her blue-printed cotton dress, picked from a catalog to match her eyes, cost me three months of pennies earned by watering Mrs. Sakagawara’s small vegetable garden. I’m getting too big for dolls, but Natsu isn’t, so I will take one for her.

  Grandmother is done with the stove, and she sees me deliberating. She calls me Aki-san, and now is not the time to remind her that I’m called Amy.

  “Take that one; it has such beautiful hair,” she says in Japanese—totemo kirei desu—pointing to the long raven tresses of the right-hand doll. I wait until she has shuffled out of the kitchen to drop the doll into the donation box. She will go to the Salvation Army, though with her brown eyes and skin, even the poor girls will not want her now.

  * * *

  “You go on and go home to your mothers!” Valerie shrieks. She picks up the rock that has just skidded by my foot and hurls it back at the Williams boys. “Go on, get out of here! Go sign up if you want to kill Japs!” Valerie can do this because Irish girls have a fighting spirit, or so she says. I saw her father scold her once for kicking one of the Hatchfield boys, but she did not listen. I think she is magnificent.

  The boys don’t really let up until Joe Liebowitz hears the commotion and marches over to Valerie’s side. They start to disperse before he even says anything.

  “They’re a bunch of trash,” Joe says loudly. “They voted you Head of Hospitality for the class ship last month like everybody else. They’re just hateful because they can get away with it.” The fervor in his voice makes my stomach go watery.

  “I still don’t understand,” Valerie says when the Williams boys are gone. “You were born here, weren’t you?”

  “I’ve never even been to Japan,” I say. “My mother went once when she was a girl.”

  “Does Natalie have to go, too?” Valerie asks, her brow scrunching. “She’s so little.”

  “Who would watch her?” I ask, and they nod reluctantly.

  “It’s damn hypocrisy,” Joe swears, the set of his jaw daring us to reprimand him for cursing. “Bob Williams is all bought into it because of his union. My dad says they’ve been stirring up this bunk since ’23.”

  “My cousin tried to sign up with the army,” I offer—or, rather, it escapes from me—“but they wouldn’t take him.” Ben, my tall, strong cousin who used to carry me on his shoulders. The memory of his stony face streaked with tears that his eyes would not admit were there fills me with an uncontrollable ache, like falling. My hands grow hot and red, but before I can “shh, shh” them, I feel Joe’s eyes on me, and the heat goes to my cheeks.

  Silence lands between the three of us, and then Valerie says, “I’ll leave you two to it.” Her saucy wink makes me smile in spite of myself, like it’s meant to. She gives me a hug, so tight that I can’t breathe, but it’s something else that stings my eyes with sudden water. She is also blinking when she finally pulls away, but her smile is big and Irish, and I love her so much it lands on me like the world.

  Then there’s Joe. He looks at the ground and neither of us can think of anything to say.

  “I hope you don’t forget about me,” I venture at last.

  “We’ll see you back here soon,” he promises, but I see the way he looks after Valerie, not yet out of sight. I don’t blame him. “We’ll write, me and Valerie at least. I’ll make sure.”

  My cheeks have cooled down, the strange, vivid heat dying away, and my gumption with it. Joe looks like he wants to say something else, but I say a goodbye that isn’t goodbye and turn off down the street in a hurry. After three steps I stop, instinctively feeling like my hands are too empty, then remembering that there’s no reason to bring home schoolbooks.

  At the edge of town, the paved road turns to dirt, and the sun blasts down upon my shoulders. It isn’t full summer sun yet, but it’s hot enough that I’m sweating after the first mile, halfway home. Usually Uncle Mamoru can pick me up from the dirt road, but now there is too much to do. I wonder how much hotter the sun in Arizona will be—I have never seen a desert. Even though I’m sweating, I want the sun to pour into me, flood through my arms and face, burn away everything. Maybe I will burn to nothing. Maybe I will become a skeleton walking down the dry road and everything will just be sun and dirt and horizon.

  I close my eyes and keep walking into the red sea of nothing, sensing the sunlight through my eyelids. The ground seems to swerve, first in one direction and then the other, and only the scuff of my feet on the dirt reminds me that I’m still in the world at all.

  * * *

  “We’re charged with wanting to get rid of the Japs for selfish reasons…. We do. It’s a question of whether the white man lives on the Pacific Coast or the brown man…. If all the Japs were removed tomorrow, we’d never miss them in two weeks, because the white farmers can take over and produce everything the Jap grows. And we do not want them back when the war ends, either.”

  —Austin E. Anson, Managing Secretary, Salinas Vegetable Grower-Shipper Association, Saturday Evening Post, May 9, 1942

  * * *

  My uncle’s packing tables are loaded with strawberries, more than I’ve ever seen in one place, even before a county fair. People from all around the area are passing through and picking up baskets or taking the berries away in bowls or plates, or wrapped in linen towels.

  Ben toils for his parents under the sun, bringing in more bushels for the neighbors to pick over. Two weeks ago, before the evacuation order, the Shimata Farm’s bank account was frozen, so there’s no use selling the early harvest. The berries move like the arms of fireworks through the neighboring farm communities, like a last fleeting wish for goodwill that burns out fast and confused.

  As he sets down the last bushel, Ben shakes sweat out of his short-cropped hair, brushes it back with a muscular hand. Grandmother compliments the strawberries, and Ben gives her a double handful from the top of the bushel with a respectful bow and a smile. She bites one, pausing to exclaim over its flavor, and finishes it slowly, savoring it.

  Ben’s thoughts are written in his intelligent eyes. I know them from my own. He watches my grandmother, scrutinizing, as if to ask: What is it that is so dangerous about these people? Where did we come from, to be so tainted? What is so poisonous about this place we never knew? Aren’t we American?

  Grandmother was born in a fishing village north of Shizuoka. Even some of our neighbors think that she’s a foreign national, but she got her citizenship in 1923, right before they passed the Oriental Exclusion Act. Two years ago, they made her report to the town hall. She came back with her fingertips black from the Custodial Detention Index. Days after the
ink was gone, she would rub her hands against her woolen housecoat when she thought no one was looking.

  The strawberries are sweet and wild like meadow grass; sweeter than they’ve ever been. Sweeter, I think, than they will ever be again.

  * * *

  In the shade of the entryway, it takes a few moments for my eyes to adjust, during which everything seems normal. Then the piles of things strewn everywhere come into focus—neat little collections of what we will take tomorrow, and the scattered remains of everything else.

  Atop Grandmother’s pile is a photograph of my mother, taken just a couple of months before she died giving birth to what would have been my little brother. Boys, Grandmother says, have never had good luck in the Sugawa family. Too much fire in them. Too much anger. My brother burned up my mother before he was even born.

  “Onee-san.” Natsu appears in the hallway—well, I call her Natsu, before remembering to call her Natalie. She staggers into the entryway, laboring under the weight of a large brown teddy bear.

  “You can’t take that, Natsu. It’s too big,” I tell her, and lift it from her arms. She flails after it, and I scoop her up in my other arm and balance her against my hip. She’s almost too big to do this anymore, but being picked up calms her down. “Too big. See?” I use the bear’s paw to point at the size of the existing piles. Her face screws up with frustration, growing pink with heat, but loosens when I hand the bear back to her. I set her down so she can toddle back into our room.

  Grandmother has heard me come in and calls something from the back room about dinner preparations. I yell that I’m going to take a bath. After checking that Natsu is well occupied with her remaining toys, I go out the side door and cross the yard to the bathhouse.

  My clothes are stiff with sweat in places and still smell of strawberries in others. I almost drop them into the laundry basket, then remember to set them aside instead. The furnace is already stoked and the wood-slatted floor is wet from an earlier bath. A few yanks on the stiff spigot start hot water flowing into the large wooden tub. While it fills, I dump several ladlefuls over my head. Our soap smells of English flowers—Pears Soap all the way from England, one of Grandmother’s few indulgences—and the familiar scent fills the bathhouse as I scrub down.