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

by Various

  Ellie turned her head to look at the pillow beside her. “Not yet.”

  “If you go to the heat spectrum?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Later then, when your star rises.”

  Her door opened. “Time to get up,” Ellie’s mother told her. “Get up and get dressed, honey. Pancakes ’n’ bacon this mornin’.”

  “I have to go to school,” Ellie told the small voice.

  “And I, with you,” it replied.

  Ellie giggled. “You’ll be gone when I get there.”

  “Not hope I.”

  The small voice said nothing while Ellie dressed. When she was cutting up her pancakes, she told her mother, “I had an imaginary friend this morning.”

  “Really? You haven’t had one of those for quite a time.”

  “Well, I had one this morning. She came in a dream, only after I woke up—sort of woke up, anyway—she was still there. I’ve been trying to think of a name for an imaginary friend that comes when you’re asleep. Can you think of one?”

  “Hmmm,” said her mother.

  “I thought of Sleepy and Dreamy, but they sound like those little men that found Snow White.”

  “Sleepy is one of the Seven Dwarfs,” Ellie’s mother said.

  “So I don’t like those very much. You think of one.”

  “Dorma,” Ellie’s mother said after a sip of coffee.

  “That’s not Anna enough.” Anna was Ellie’s favorite doll.

  “Dormanna then. Do you like that?”

  Ellie rolled the name around in her mouth, tasting it. “Yes. I do. She’s Dormanna, if she ever comes back.”

  A tiny voice chirped, “I am ungone, Isn’t She A Caution. I watch, I taste, I listen.”

  “That’s good,” Ellie said.

  Her mother smiled. “I’m glad you like it so much, Ellie.”

  “Ellie’s my real name.” Ellie felt she ought to straighten that out. “Not Isn’t She A Caution. That’s more of a nickname.”

  “I know, Ellie,” her mother said. “I guess I use nicknames too much, but that’s only because I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mom.” Ellie paused, struck by a sudden thought. “I guess that’s a nickname, too. I ought to call you Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth is a fine name,” Ellie’s mother said, “but Mom and Momma are the finest, most honorable, names in the whole world. I’m hugely proud of them.”

  There was a knock at the kitchen door, a knock Ellie recognized. “Mr. Broadwick’s here.”

  Ellie’s mother nodded. There was something in her eyes that Ellie could not have put a name to. “Let him in, please.”

  He was tall and lean, and there was something in his face that made Ellie think of Lincoln’s picture—not the one on the penny, but the one on the wall in Mrs. Smith’s schoolroom. “I brought over some scrapple,” he told Ellie’s mother.

  He cleared his throat. “I made it last night, only by the time I got done I figured you ’n’ Ellie’d be asleep.” He held out an old enameled pan with a lid and a handle.

  “Why thank you, Don. I’m afraid it comes too late for Ellie and me this morning, but I’d be proud to cook some up for you and Betsy.”

  Ellie collected her lunch and her books, and slipped quietly out the door; neither her mother nor Mr. Broadwick appeared to notice.

  “If you want to see me, put your finger in your ear,” Dormanna told Ellie as she was walking down Windhill Road to the place where it crossed Ledbetter and the school bus stopped.

  Ellie did.

  “Now pull it out.”

  Ellie did that, too.

  “Do you see me now?”

  Ellie looked, squinting in the sunlight. “There’s this little white blob on the end of my finger.” She squinted again. “Sort of hairy.”

  “It is I, Ellie. You see me now. Did I pronounce your name correctly?”

  “Sure. You ought to comb it.”

  “Those are my arms. With them I walk and swim and fly and do many other things. Now I hold on to your finger. Would you wish to see me fly?”

  “Sure,” Ellie said again. She herself had stopped walking and was standing in the dust at the edge of the road, staring at the tiny blob.

  The tiny blob rose and seemed to float in the air an inch above the end of her finger. “Gosh!” Ellie exclaimed.

  “Indeed, white is an impressive color. Do you like it?”

  “I like it a lot,” Ellie confessed. “White and pink and rose. Rose is my number-one favorite.”

  Dormanna promptly blushed rose. After that Ellie tried to return her to her ear, but got her into her hair instead. Dormanna said that was perfectly fine, and she would explore Ellie’s hair and have an adventure.

  On the bus Ellie decided that an adventure in hair would be an interesting thing to have, but she herself needed to be at her desk before the bell rang. As soon as she got off the bus, she put her lunch in her locker and opened her backpack to put her civics book on her desk. Class always started with civics this year.

  “Today I’m going to begin with two hard questions,” Mrs. Smith told the class. “They are questions I won’t answer for you. You must answer them for yourselves. I know what my answers would be. Your answers don’t have to be the same as mine to be right, and I want to emphasize that. They must be yours, however. You must believe them and be prepared to defend them.”

  Ellie could feel the tension in the room. She felt tense herself.

  “Here’s my first question. From the assignment you read last night, you know that nations are formed when tribes—whether they are called tribes or not—come together to form a larger political unit. You know that mutual defense is often given as the reason for this coming together. My question is, what reason ought to be given?”

  In front of Ellie, Doug Hopkins squirmed in his seat.

  “And here’s my second question. Why are some nations so much richer than others? Raise your hand if you think you have a good answer to either question.”

  Mrs. Smith waited expectantly. “Come on, class! I’m sure all of you read the assignment, and many of you must have thought about it. Maybe all of you did. I certainly hope so.”

  Somewhere behind Ellie a hand went up. Ellie knew one had because Mrs. Smith smiled. “Yes, Richard. What’s your answer?”

  Dick Hickman said, “They should come together so that everybody will be happier. That’s what I think.”

  Betsy Broadwick said, “Sometimes a lot of work takes more people.”

  Ellie whispered, “What is it, Dormanna?”

  Mrs. Smith smiled again. “I can see you’re thinking, Ellie. Tell the rest of us, please. Stand up.”

  Ellie stood. “I think the best reason for people coming together like that is so they won’t fight each other. Only sometimes they come together but they fight anyway. That’s the worst kind of fighting, because when anybody fights like that she’s really fighting herself.”

  Softly, Mrs. Smith’s hands met over and over again, applauding a dozen times or more. “Wonderful, Ellie. That’s a perfectly wonderful answer. Don’t sit down yet.”

  Ellie had begun to.

  “Do you have answer for our other question, too? I’d love to hear it.”

  Ellie hesitated, gnawing her lip. “I guess sometimes it’s oil wells or gold mines or something. Only lots of rich countries don’t have any of those. Then it’s mostly the people, good people who work really hard.” She paused, listening and longing to sit. “It’s freedom, too. People who are free can do the kind of work they want to, mostly, like if they want to farm they can do it if they can get some land. It’s people who want to farm who make the best farmers. So freedom and good laws.” She sat.

  She remained seated that afternoon, when school was over. When the last of her classmates had trooped out, Mrs. Smith said, “I believe you want to talk to me. Am I right, Ellie? What do you want to talk about?”

  “I cheated, Mrs. Smith.” It was said very softly. At
Mrs. Smith’s gesture, Ellie rose and came to stand beside Mrs. Smith’s desk. “Those answers you liked so much? I—I…Well, I’ve got this imaginary playmate today and she told me.”

  Mrs. Smith smiled. “You have an imaginary playmate?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I dreamed about her, only when I woke up she was still there. Still here, I mean. She wanted to go to school with me. I think she’s still with me right now.”

  “I see. You don’t know?”

  Miserably, Ellie shook her head.

  “Can I see her?” Mrs. Smith was still smiling.

  “I don’t think so.” Ellie sounded doubtful and felt the same way. “She’s real little and rose-colored, and she’s in my hair. Her name’s Dormanna.”

  “You don’t have head lice, do you, Ellie? Are you telling me you have head lice?”

  Ellie shook her head. “No, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Smith got a comb from her purse and parted Ellie’s hair several times anyway.

  “Did you find Dormanna?” Ellie wanted to know.

  “No. No, I didn’t. I didn’t find any head lice, either. I’m glad of that. Now listen to me, Ellie. Are you listening?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You didn’t cheat. Answers you get from an imaginary playmate count as yours. You said we needed good laws.”

  Tentatively, Ellie nodded.

  “That’s one of them. Suppose I were to say that Paris is a beautiful city with wonderful churches and museums, and someone were to say, ‘You cheated, Mrs. Smith. You’ve never been to Paris. You got that out of a book.’”

  “That’s not cheating,” Ellie protested. “We learn things from books. That’s what books are for.”

  “Exactly.” Mrs. Smith nodded. “Learning from an imaginary playmate isn’t cheating either. What you learn is coming from a hidden part of your mind. So it’s yours, just as a fact I learn from a book becomes mine.”

  Betsy Broadwick had been picking wildflowers outside while she waited. “You’re smiling,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” Ellie told her. Ellie’s smile became a grin. “Everything’s all right.”

  “We missed the bus.”

  “We can walk home,” Ellie said. “The snow’s gone, and everything’s beautiful.”

  A tiny voice in Ellie’s ear chirped, “Try to remember this, Ellie. Even when you are grown-up like your mother and Mrs. Smith, you will want to remember this.”

  “I won’t forget,” Ellie said.

  Betsy stopped picking to look around at her. “Remember what?”

  “To pick flowers for Mom,” Ellie said hurriedly. “You’re picking those for your dad, aren’t you?”

  Betsy nodded.

  “Well, I think my mom would like some, too.”

  Betsy gestured at the patch of wildflowers.

  “You found those,” Ellie said, “and you were picking them. I didn’t want to make you mad.”

  “You can pick too. I won’t be mad.”

  Ellie picked. They were blue cornflowers and white-and-yellow daisies for the most part. When she got home, she put them in a mason jar with plenty of water before she presented them to her mother.

  When supper was over and the washing-up was done, Ellie went upstairs to do her homework at the little table in front of her window.

  That was when Dormanna, who had been quiet for a long, long while, spoke again. “Will you do me a favor, Ellie? It will only take you a brief time, but it will be a very big favor for someone as small as I am. Please? Isn’t that what you say?”

  “When we want a favor?” Ellie nodded vigorously. “Sure, Dormanna. Anything you want.”

  “Open the window? Please?”

  “I’m supposed to keep it closed at night,” Ellie said as she opened it, “but it’s not night yet. Pretty soon it will be.”

  “I will be gone long before your star sets.” For a moment, Dormanna was silent. “Will you remember this day, Ellie? The flowers and the sunshine, and me riding in your ear?”

  “Forever and ever,” Ellie promised.

  “And I will remember you, Isn’t She A Caution. Is it all right if I call you that again? Here, at the end? Already it has made me feel better.”

  Ellie nodded. There was something the matter in her throat. “There won’t be any more imaginary friends, will there? You’re the last, and when you’re gone that will be over.”

  “I must rejoin all the other parts that make up our whole. Each of us returns with new data, Ellie, and the data I bear will be good for all your kind.”

  Ellie was not entirely sure she understood, but she nodded anyway.

  “You spoke to Mrs. Smith of people coming together, many tribes uniting to create a great and powerful nation. We do that, too. We come together to make a great and powerful us. It is because we do it that I was able to tell you what I did. Look to the sky and you may see us, all of us as one.”

  Quite suddenly, there was a rose-colored Dormanna with many tiny limbs hanging in the air before Ellie’s eyes. It said something more then, but though Ellie had good ears, she could not quite make out the words.

  Very swiftly, Dormanna sailed out the window. Ellie had just time enough to wave before Dormanna vanished into the twilight. Ellie was still looking for her when she saw her mother. Her mother had come out of the house carrying a flower, and it was one of the daisies Ellie had picked, not one of the wild roses Mr. Broadwick had brought that evening.

  While Ellie watched, she pulled off a petal and let it fall. Then another; and it seemed to Ellie that her lips were moving, though Ellie could hear no words.

  Another petal…Then she froze, staring up into the darkling sky.

  Ellie looked, too, and saw a thing impossibly huge with a thousand writhing arms, a thing darker than the clouds that for half a breath blushed rose as if dyed by the setting sun.

  Ellie’s mother never forgot the vast sky-thing as long as she lived. Neither has Ellie, who for some reason recalls it each time she kisses one of her granddaughters.

  Copyright (C) 2011 by Gene Wolfe

  Thanatos Beach

  James Morrow

  When Inez Montaugh first saw the magnetic-resonance image of her brain tumor, she marveled at its resemblance to Idaho, the state where she was born and raised. The contours of her birthplace and her neoplasm were practically identical: a surmounting obelisk, a ragged eastern edge, a vast southern mass. Inez immediately remarked on the coincidence, whereupon her twin sister, Alexis, likewise contemplating the ominous blob, said, “Jesus, sweetie, how can you be thinking of Idaho at a time like this?”

  “How can I not be thinking of Idaho?” Inez replied. “Back home in Boise, I was never sick.”

  “It’s where we expected to find it, the motor cortex,” said the neurologist, Dr. Goncourt. The three of them were standing in his consulting room, huddled around the backlit MRI like art students appreciating a Vermeer. “Hence your difficulties with gait and coordination.”

  The smart and photogenic Montaugh sisters had come a long way since Idaho—to different but comparable East Coast liberal arts colleges, followed by failed marriages in Boston, successful psychoanalyses on the Upper East Side, and brilliant careers as, arguably, America’s premier women of letters. No less a figure than Noam Chomsky had once dubbed Inez and Alexis “the Pauline Phillips and Eppie Lederer of public intellectuals,” but whereas the sisterhood of Pauline and Eppie comprised two liberal Jews who answered poignant questions addressed to “Dear Abby” and “Ask Ann Landers,” Inez and Alexis were radical Brooklyn-based WASPs who staged plays, wrote novels, and routinely published essays dense with Continental philosophy and recondite cultural criticism (though at times it seemed to Inez that she was indeed managing a kind of advice column: “Dear Inez, My father-in-law consistently misreads Kierkegaard”). Earlier in the year, the committee in charge of MacArthur Fellowships had decided that both Montaugh sisters were equally deserving, Inez in the category of scholar (though she was no less a journalist) an
d Alexis in the category of journalist (though she was no less a scholar), and so arrangements were made for the sum of $500,000 to be transferred in installments to each of their respective bank accounts.

  “Do you think it’s malignant?” asked Inez, her normally contralto voice entering a soprano register.

  “When we speak of brain tumors, ‘malignant’ can mean two different things,” Dr. Goncourt replied in a tone both Inez and Alexis thought impossibly pedantic under the circumstances. “The term may indicate a cancerous mass that destroys healthy tissue through metastasis, but it can also mean a benign growth that threatens vital neurological functions.”

  “So in either case, Inez would be well advised to have the thing removed,” said Alexis.

  “May I speak candidly?” said Dr. Goncourt.

  “Yes,” said Inez with fake bravery.

  “I’m not a surgeon, but it appears that this neoplasm is poorly situated for excision.”

  “Location, location, location,” said Inez, shivering as if standing naked in Nome, through the temperature in the room was surely no less than sixty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

  Correctly sensing that Dr. Goncourt was not amused by Inez’s sardonic remark, Alexis made the appropriate snickering noises.

  “The next step is to get a biopsy,” the neurologist said.

  “I need to visit the ladies’ room,” said Inez, uncertain whether she was about to endure an episode of vomiting or an attack of incontinence.

  As it happened: both.

  Forty-eight hours later, Inez submitted herself to a diagnostic procedure at the Maimonides Medical Center. The surgeon drilled a burr hole the size of a dime in her skull, inserted his hollow needle, siphoned up a sample of the tumor, and delivered the tissue to a pathologist. Inez returned home to her Flatbush Avenue apartment, a mere two blocks from Prospect Park. Later that day, Alexis moved in, explaining that she intended to cleave to Inez’s side “until you’re out of the woods.” Now came the ordeal of awaiting the pathologist’s verdict: two sisters from the same egg, incarcerated by the clock, glued to its lugubrious hands, each sticky minute taking an hour to pass, each hour a day. Against their better judgment, they visited the most prominent Internet cancer sites, becoming fluent in the language of dread. When at long last Dr. Goncourt summoned Inez back to his consulting room, she was prepared for him to do his Latinate worst.