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

by Various

  The tub is almost halfway full. More ladles of hot water send streams of soap rushing off my body, little rivers disappearing beneath the floor slats. Something in me pulls loose with them—a thousand worries coursing down and vanishing somewhere unknown.

  Steam curls off of the still surface of the tub’s water after I twist the spigot shut. Heat folds itself around me as I step in and settle myself down onto the bottom, soft little waves lapping at my shoulders. Wrapped in the embrace of the water’s heat and the heady smell of the aged wood, with only the darkness and an occasional calm chirp of a cricket outside, it’s as if—for this one moment—nothing is actually wrong.

  But so much is wrong. And the illusion that everything might be okay lets all the wrongs in.

  Joe Liebowitz. Valerie. Ben. Natsu. Grandmother’s fitful hands, wrapped in flame.

  My skin burns first. It starts low, under the water, but then it’s rushing up into my face, down to my hands. I thrash in the water, trying to shake it out, but there’s nowhere for it to go. My palms, under the water, are red as ripe tomatoes, strawberry red, blood red.

  White light blooms behind my eyes, and just as it dims, there’s a crash, a phenomenal crash, the loudest noise I’ve ever heard, then a long rushing hiss.

  Everything is dark for a split second. Then Grandmother is there, wrapping me in a towel. Night air streams in from the furnace wall, where there is no furnace. My skin is still aflame, stinging wherever the soft cloth touches it.

  Her dark eyes are intense, pensive. “You have to be careful” is all she says. “I have told you about your temper.”

  She has.

  Later she tells Uncle Mamoru that the furnace got blocked up and burned me with the hot water before it busted. He is very sympathetic and says he’ll fix it for us right away, but she tells him not to worry.

  * * *

  The rows of faces on the train bleed into one another: dark hair and small, worried eyes that stare into nowhere. I have never seen so many Japanese in one place before. At home there was one other Japanese girl in my class, Martha Taniguchi. Her father was a dentist who drove her to school in a Ford Super Deluxe. They lived in town in a nice house, further from my life than Joe or Valerie. But now, because of our last names, we are the same.

  A voice from up the aisle, an old woman scolding in Japanese. I assume it is my grandmother; I straighten up before realizing it is not—the third time this has happened just this morning. A boy Natsu’s age is crying about having left his new umbrella at home. The other children mostly leave me alone—my burns have healed, but left scars in misshapen stripes—so the ride is otherwise quiet.

  Natsu stares, riveted, out the window, looking for Red Indians or wild horses. It is more country than we have ever seen. They are taking us to a place called Gila River, Arizona. I am grateful that the thought of horses, for a time, has made her forget Shinji the teddy bear.

  * * *

  Natsu does get her real desert, with rattlesnakes and circling birds, but no wild horses. There are Indians, and they own this land, but they don’t want us here any more than the people of Los Angeles did.

  Now it is July and the summer is deep. The air itself feels like water, so heavy with sun, soaking our barbed-wire village, but it tastes of dust and dry sorrow. At night we shake out our blankets, checking for scorpions. The boys, Ben among them, set up demonstrations in the public square, marching with the American flag to show their loyalty.

  Each day is like the other. A young woman who had been studying to be a pharmacist is tasked with setting up the elementary school. Later they bring in a woman from the outside to teach.

  The camp takes shape around us. Someone brings in a newspaper from Phoenix reporting that the Gila River War Relocation Center is the fifth largest city in Arizona. Poston, the other Arizona camp, is the third.

  There are so many things to do, problems to solve, that it’s easy to forget what things were like at home. In the beginning I think of Joe and Valerie often. They do write, like they promised, but their letters become harder to answer as our lives drift apart like continents. I don’t really know what home is anymore. At first, with the water shortages and the rattlesnakes, we were just grateful when we got to move from one of the ironing rooms to real barracks. Our address is Block B-4, Butte Camp, Rivers, AZ.

  The boys continue their demonstrations. The girls participate, too, on holidays. Then one day the army recruiters arrive.

  * * *

  The farms that we left behind in California now live again in Gila River, converted from some of the Indians’ alfalfa fields. We have cattle and chickens and cucumbers, surviving on once-stubborn loam, baking in the desert. Uncle Mamoru’s strawberries are from another life, from a dream. This is waking.

  I work in the packing shed after school every Wednesday. The shed isn’t refrigerated, but it’s cooler than most other places, including the barracks, and I don’t mind the packing.

  The war’s getting worse, heating up, which was why they made the four-four-two in the first place. But we’re proud of them anyway, proud as hell. Ben and his friends give us a reason to stand up straight again, to pick cucumbers and sing in the Thanksgiving talent show and ride the produce truck into Phoenix with a day pass. The stories of their heroism are a priceless gift, and as long as we don’t think of home, at least there is the quiet affirmation that we are what we claimed. A hope that maybe they will believe us now.

  I’m sorting castor beans into wooden crates when Yukio, my new friend from school, runs in, knocking right into my table. A scolding command to watch out dies on my lips when I see her stricken expression. What comes out of her mouth is a terrible sound that echoes in my head long after it is gone, echoes even after her anguished shout: “They got Ben!” The handful of beans falls from my hands, which start burning, and suddenly won’t work.

  I had almost forgotten the furnace, convinced myself that it really had busted. But now, as the familiar racing thoughts set upon me, I remember.

  It comes upon me faster this time, and I can’t stop it. The thunderclap is louder than before, the light brighter, and the destruction wider than a water heater—but smaller, far smaller, than it could be, than the fire inside me could demand. The flash of heat on my skin is worse, too: white blisters bubble up along my arms just before everything goes dark. There is only enough room for a few stray regrets.

  Pastor Katagawa’s words come to me unbidden: none of this is real. All life is a dream.

  * * *

  “‘Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’”

  —J. Robert Oppenheimer, Trinity Test, Socorro, New Mexico, July 16, 1945

  * * *

  Voices over my head. Behind me.

  “She’s moving.”

  I am, but I immediately regret it. Everything hurts.

  The wooden walls of the room slowly come into focus, along with a face—a girl, young and pretty, her hair red like a sunset. The sight of her pale skin and eyes sends a pulse of shock through me. For a moment I’m quite sure that I am dead, but then I remember there isn’t supposed to be pain after death.

  The pretty young nurse is adjusting a bandage dislodged by my waking movement. Her mother is the schoolteacher, one of very few hakujin—white people—at the camp.

  A tall, thin man in a loose-fitting wool suit approaches the cot, and I lift my head just a little. A cigarette dangles from his right hand, leaving a ribbon of smoke as he walks. There is another man, uniformed, very official, in the back of the room, and a third, clearly his assistant, beside him with a clipboard. I have never seen so many hakujin in one room at Gila River before.

  The assistant says something I can’t quite hear and the second man shakes his head vehemently. As the man with the cigarette comes closer, I can make out his face: dark circles, and his suit is too big for him not because it is poorly made, but because he is thin, hollow-cheeked—almost a ghost. He kneels by the cot. His face reminds me of the canyons we saw from the train
when the windows weren’t blocked.

  He looks at the uniformed man as if expecting him to say something, then back at me. The cigarette flies, as if of its own volition, to his pursed lips, and he takes a long drag; the sudden, brilliant bloom of its ember stirs my aching veins. The smoke dances briefly in a halo about his head.

  “I’m Dr. Oppenheimer,” he says. I get the impression his voice is usually much louder, but has been lowered for my benefit, as if his words themselves will be weights on my raw skin. “This here is Brigadier General Leslie Groves.” He gestures to the man behind him, trailing smoke. The man maybe nods—I can’t quite see—but I sense that I’m supposed to be impressed. “We need your help.”

  I’d like to speak with my grandmother, I want to say. The polite responses queue up behind my lips. Please bring her here.

  “This thing you do,” the smoking doctor says, “it isn’t unnatural. A little boy helped us, too, so we already know the effects.”

  How old was he?, I want to ask. I try to remember the day they rushed my mother to the hospital. I was five. What have you done with my brother? Heat flares in my hands, crawling up my arms.

  “Nurse!” Doctor Oppenheimer barks, standing and turning away. The red-haired nurse rushes forward, making soothing noises. She soaks a strip of linen in a bucket of water and drapes it over my forehead. The cool is a shock, and I fight to breathe steadily.

  “We’ve been looking for them for two years,” General Groves says to the thin doctor from across the room. The general is muttering, a big man’s version of a low whisper, but I can hear him quite clearly. “Now isn’t the time for cold feet, damn it.” He turns on the assistant, who almost shrinks away. “And you. Is your data ready?”

  The assistant’s voice is softer, and though I twist toward him despite the clucking of the nurse, I can only make out scattered words. “…Analysts have…multiplied the recorded effect by the maximum load…capable of sustaining before…results are quite satisfactory…”

  The doctor nods and fills his chest with a deep breath. He comes back to the side of my cot and the nurse backs away again.

  “This thing,” he says. “We can do it already, scientifically.” He looks at me with guarded seriousness, as if I won’t understand. “My people have it figured out. They’re great scientists. It’s just a matter of time.” Then his serious eyes are hard, glancing quickly, agitatedly, at me, then away. He takes another draw on the cigarette, blows another trail of smoke that drifts and dissipates. “But time is what we don’t have. You have the opportunity to save millions of American lives. Soldiers’ lives.” He leans in close. “This is your chance,” he says, “to prove your patriotism.”

  “And her sister’s, too,” the general says. His voice is a smooth, reassuring baritone—not what I’d expect from his bleak expression.

  The doctor draws again on his cigarette. The fire makes its little roar, consuming the last of the tobacco, smoking fitfully.

  “We all have difficult decisions here,” he says, and his hollow eyes are on me with what sympathy he has, and what urgency. “These times of war are terrible. But we have our obligations to the greater good, to the great men and women of this country.”

  Great men, like Ben. Like Joe. Oh, Joe.

  “We calculate ninety-seven percent odds that the younger one has the ability as well,” the assistant adds.

  In my mind, Natsu is clutching Maisie, my blonde-haired doll. I remember her hands growing hot, her face pink, the electricity that pulsed between us when I took Shinji from her arms. I think of us high above the world, and we are falling onto a place we have never known, and the light is blinding, the world is burning.

  “She does,” I say. The heads all turn toward me.

  I am an American. We are Americans.

  * * *

  “He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you.”

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

  Books by Erin Hoffman

  Sword of Fire and Sea

  Lance of Earth and Sky

  Shield of Sea and Space (forthcoming)

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  Contents

  Begin Reading

  It’s like I got spikes on my back, and every ghost who wants to stick around on Earth grabs one and hangs on.

  Mrs. Jernigan, my fifth-grade teacher, was the first ghost who hooked on to me.

  My best friend Mike and I were sitting in the back corner of the classroom like always, near the window and a little beyond the range of Mrs. Jernigan’s chalk-throwing accuracy. We were sitting behind tall girls, so we could duck, too. The old radiator ticked beside me without letting out much heat, and the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered. Mrs. Jernigan, a brown mountain behind her desk up front, stood and read to us from an account of the Battle of Concord; her voice droned. Spring was waiting just outside the window, but the day was rainy, so I wasn’t totally longing to be outside the way I usually did.

  Three shades lingered in our classroom, but they were really old and faded and easy to ignore. Better than my kindergarten classroom had been, where a kid had died from a fall the year before.

  Mike leaned over and muttered, “Gah, Jack. How can she make this boring? It’s about a fight!”

  Mrs. Jernigan stopped class by slapping her yardstick down on her desk, a tactic she used often. Her face got red. She laid into Mike for talking, but she left me alone, even though I was the one he’d been talking to. Mike was always the one who got in trouble. My superpower was going unnoticed, a skill I had developed as a reaction to getting noticed too much by the wrong people when I was little.

  One minute Mrs. Jernigan was this big woman in brown clothes with a wide-open mouth and all kinds of mean words coming out, and the next she sagged sideways and thumped to the floor.

  While all the girls were screaming except Laurie Hartnett, who whipped out her cell phone (strictly forbidden and confiscatable in Mrs. Jernigan’s class) and called 911, and all the guys were going, “Oh, gross,” something smoked up out of Mrs. Jernigan’s body and dived right for me. I felt this cold tingle in my back that just got worse.

  It wasn’t until I looked in a mirror in the boys’ bathroom later that day that I realized I had a new shadow hanging over me, with Mrs. Jernigan’s ominous outline.

  My dad said Mrs. Jernigan died of an excess of meanness—she had taught his fifth-grade class, too, and he still remembered her after he turned into a grown-up.

  Two days later, I was in the cafeteria when Mrs. Jernigan’s ghost woke up. Everybody in my class was there, our backpacks at our feet as we sat around three of the long brown tables, having our first group session with a counselor, who was supposed to stop us from being traumatized by Mrs. Jernigan’s death. The beige linoleum stank of disinfectant, and the lunch ladies were busy clanking behind the counter, putting together the vats of stuff they called food.

  Mrs. Jernigan woke up and argued with the counselor.

  “No, I’m not in a better place,” she yelled. “I’m in the same place, except everybody ignores me!”

  I hunched my shoulders.

  “Except you, Jack. What good is that? You’re such a spineless mouse!” She paced around, yelling so much I couldn’t hear what the counselor said. Mike told me later I hadn’t missed anything.

  Mrs. Jernigan was my constant companion. She hu
ng on to my back and heard all the things people said about her after she died, and she saw and heard everything else that went on in my life, which was terminally embarrassing, but you can’t stop yourself from going to the bathroom or taking a shower. Well, not forever, anyway.

  So I had Mrs. Jernigan hanging on to my back, and that was a total nightmare, until the night I had a real nightmare.

  Six bony monsters twice my height dragged me toward a hole in the ground that was full of fire and wails and screams. I knew I was going down there to be burnt and tortured, and I was struggling without in any way affecting the monsters, when up popped Mrs. Jernigan, wielding a battle-ax. She looked wild, her hair loose from her bun and boiling around her head, and she was huge, even huger than she’d been in life. She was wearing a wild red dress and long red fingernails. Her eyes glowed with green fire, and her mouth was so red I wondered if she’d been drinking blood.

  Whack, whack, whack! Mrs. Jernigan swung her ax. Off went the monsters’ arms. They shrieked and fled down into the burning hole. I lay on the dark ground, monster hands still gripping my arms and legs, and me all scraped up from being dragged over rocks. Mrs. Jernigan dropped the ax and knelt beside me, and all the red on her toned down to orange. “Jack, are you all right?” she asked, prying monster hands off me and tossing them over her shoulder.

  I caught my breath and managed not to cry. “Yes, Mrs. Jernigan. Thanks for saving me.”

  “Yes, well,” she said. She sounded grumpy, the way she used to when a kid in her class sassed her. She pulled the last monster hand off me with a jerk that joggled my elbow. “You better wake up now, or you’ll be late for school.”