The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List (The Long List Anthology Series Book 1)

by Annie Bellet

  “How does it feel to have a functional amygdala?” she asked.

  “Lousy,” I said.

  She smiled absently and stood up to shake my hand—for the first time. To offer me closure. It’s something they’re supposed to do.

  “Thank you for all the lives you’ve saved,” I told her.

  “But not for yours?” she said.

  I gave her fingers a gentle squeeze and shook my head.

  • • • •

  My other self waits in the dark with me. I wish I had his physical strength, his invulnerability. His conviction that everybody else in the world is slower, stupider, weaker.

  In the courtroom, while I was still my other self, he looked out from the stand into the faces of the living mothers and fathers of the girls he killed. I remember the 11 women and seven men, how they focused on him. How they sat, their stillness, their attention.

  He thought about the girls while he gave his testimony. The only individuality they had for him was what was necessary to sort out which parents went with which corpse; important, because it told him whom to watch for the best response.

  I wish I didn’t know what it feels like to be prey. I tell myself it’s just the cold that makes my teeth chatter. Just the cold that’s killing me.

  Prey can fight back, though. People have gotten killed by something as timid and inoffensive as a white-tailed deer.

  I wish I had a weapon. Even a cracked piece of brick. But the cellar is clean.

  I do jumping jacks, landing on my toes for silence. I swing my arms. I think about doing burpees, but I’m worried that I might scrape my hands on the floor. I think about taking my shoes off. Running shoes are soft for kicking with, but if I get outside, my feet will freeze without them.

  When. When I get outside.

  My hands and teeth are the only weapons I have.

  An interminable time later, I hear a creak through the ceiling. A footstep, muffled, and then the thud of something dropped. More footsteps, louder, approaching the top of a stair beyond the door.

  I crouch beside the door, on the hinge side, far enough away that it won’t quite strike me if he swings it violently. I wish for a weapon—I am a weapon—and I wait.

  A metallic tang in my mouth now. Now I am really, truly scared.

  His feet thump on the stairs. He’s not little. There’s no light beneath the door—it must be weather-stripped for soundproofing. The lock thuds. A bar scrapes. The knob rattles, and then there’s a bar of light as it swings open. He turns the flashlight to the right, where he left me lying. It picks out the puddle of vomit. I hear his intake of breath.

  I think about the mothers of the girls I killed. I think, Would they want me to die like this?

  My old self would relish it. It’d be his revenge for what I did to him.

  My goal is just to get past him—my captor, my old self; they blur together—to get away, run. Get outside. Hope for a road, neighbors, bright daylight.

  My captor’s silhouette is dim, scatter-lit. He doesn’t look armed, except for the flashlight, one of those archaic long heavy metal ones that doubles as a club. I can’t be sure that’s all he has. He wavers. He might slam the door and leave me down here to starve—

  I lunge.

  I grab for the wrist holding the light, and I half catch it, but he’s stronger. I knew he would be. He rips the wrist out of my grip, swings the flashlight. Shouts. I lurch back, and it catches me on the shoulder instead of across the throat. My arm sparks pain and numbs. I don’t hear my collarbone snap. Would I, if it has?

  I try to knee him in the crotch and hit his thigh instead. I mostly elude his grip. He grabs my jacket; cloth stretches and rips. He swings the light once more. It thuds into the stair wall and punches through drywall. I’m half past him and I use his own grip as an anchor as I lean back and kick him right in the center of the nose. Soft shoes or no soft shoes.

  He lets go, then. Falls back. I go up the stairs on all fours, scrambling, sure he’s right behind me. Waiting for the grab at my ankle. Halfway up I realize I should have locked him in. Hit the door at the top of the stairs and find myself in a perfectly ordinary hallway, in need of a good sweep. The door ahead is closed. I fumble the lock, yank it open, tumble down steps into the snow as something fouls my ankles.

  It’s twilight. I get my feet under me and stagger back to the path. The shovel I fell over is tangled with my feet. I grab it, use it as a crutch, lever myself up and stagger-run-limp down the walk to a long driveway.

  I glance over my shoulder, sure I hear breathing.

  Nobody. The door swings open in the wind.

  Oh. The road. No traffic. I know where I am. Out past the graveyard and the bridge. I run through here every couple of days, but the house is set far enough back that it was never more than a dim white outline behind trees. It’s a Craftsman bungalow, surrounded by winter-sere oaks.

  Maybe it wasn’t an attack of opportunity, then. Maybe he saw me and decided to lie in wait.

  I pelt toward town—pelt, limping, the air so cold in my lungs that they cramp and wheeze. I’m cold, so cold. The wind is a knife. I yank my sleeves down over my hands. My body tries to draw itself into a huddled comma even as I run. The sun’s at the horizon.

  I think, I should just let the winter have me.

  Justice for those 11 mothers and seven fathers. Justice for those 13 women who still seem too alike. It’s only that their interchangeability bothers me now.

  At the bridge I stumble to a dragging walk, then turn into the wind off the river, clutch the rail, and stop. I turn right and don’t see him coming. My wet fingers freeze to the railing.

  The state police are half a mile on, right around the curve at the top of the hill. If I run, I won’t freeze before I get there. If I run.

  My fingers stung when I touched the rail. Now they’re numb, my ears past hurting. If I stand here, I’ll lose the feeling in my feet.

  The sunset glazes the ice below with crimson. I turn and glance the other way; in a pewter sky, the rising moon bleaches the clouds to moth-wing iridescence.

  I’m wet to the skin. Even if I start running now, I might not make it to the station house. Even if I started running now, the man in the bungalow might be right behind me. I don’t think I hit him hard enough to knock him out. Just knock him down.

  If I stay, it won’t take long at all until the cold stops hurting.

  If I stay here, I wouldn’t have to remember being my other self again. I could put him down. At last, at last, I could put those women down. Amelie, unless her name was Jessica. The others.

  It seems easy. Sweet.

  But if I stay here, I won’t be the last person to wake up in the bricked-up basement of that little white bungalow.

  The wind is rising. Every breath I take is a wheeze. A crow blows across the road like a tattered shirt, vanishing into the twilight cemetery.

  I can carry this a little farther. It’s not so heavy. Thirteen corpses, plus one. After all, I carried every one of them before.

  I leave skin behind on the railing when I peel my fingers free. Staggering at first, then stronger, I sprint back into town.

  * * *

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award winning author of 27 novels (The most recent is Karen Memory, a Weird West adventure from Tor) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts.

  The Truth About Owls

  By Amal El-Mohtar

  Owls have eyes that match the skies they hunt through. Amber-eyed owls hunt at dawn or dusk; golden-eyed owls hunt during the day; black-eyed owls hunt at night.

  No one knows why this is.

  Anisa’s eyes are black, and she no longer hates them. She used to wish for eyes the color of her father’s, the beautiful pale green-blue that people were always startled to see in a brown face. But she likes, now, having eyes and hair of a color those same people find frightenin
g.

  Even her teachers are disconcerted, she’s found—they don’t try to herd her as they do the other students. She sees them casting uncertain glances towards her before ushering their group from one owl exhibit to another, following the guide. She turns to go in the opposite direction.

  “Annie-sa! Annie, this way!”

  She turns, teeth clenching. Mrs. Roberts, whose pale powdered face, upswept yellow hair, and bright red lips make Anisa think of Victoria sponge, is smiling encouragingly.

  “My name is A-NEE-sa, actually,” she replies, and feels the power twitching out from her chest and into her arms, which she crosses quickly, and her hands, which she makes into fists, digging nails into her palms. The power recedes, but she can still feel it pouring out from her eyes like a swarm of bees while Mrs. Roberts looks at her in perplexed confusion. Mrs. Roberts’ eyes are a delicate, ceramic sort of blue.

  Anisa watches another teacher, Ms. Grewar, lean over to murmur something into Mrs. Roberts’ ear. Mrs. Roberts only looks more confused, but renews her smile uncertainly, nods, and turns back to her group. Anisa closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and counts to ten before walking away.

  • • • •

  Owls are predators. There are owls that would tear you apart if you gave them half a chance.

  The Scottish Owl Centre is a popular destination for school trips: a short bus ride from Glasgow, an educational component, lots of opportunities for photographs to show the parents, and who doesn’t like owls nowadays? Anisa has found herself staring, more than once, at owl-print bags and shirts, owl-shaped earrings and belt buckles, plush owl toys and wire statues in bright, friendly colors. She finds it all desperately strange.

  Anisa remembers the first time she saw an owl. She was seven years old. She lived in Riyaq with her father and her grandparents, and that morning she had thrown a tantrum about having to feed the chickens, which she hated, because of their smell and the way they pecked at her when she went to gather their eggs, and also because of the rooster, who was fierce and sharp-spurred. She hated the chickens, she shouted, why didn’t they just make them into soup.

  She was given more chores to do, which she did, fumingly, stomping her feet and banging cupboard doors and sometimes crying about how unfair it was. “Are you brooding over the chickens,” her father would joke, trying to get her to laugh, which only made her more furious, because she did want to laugh but she didn’t want him to think she wasn’t still mad, because she was.

  She had calmed down by lunch, and forgotten about it by supper. But while helping her grandmother with the washing up she heard a scream from the yard. Her grandmother darted out, and Anisa followed, her hands dripping soap.

  An owl—enormous, tall as a lamb, taller than any bird she had ever seen—perched in the orange tree, the rooster a tangle of blood and feathers in its talons. As Anisa stared, the owl bent its head to the rooster’s throat and tore out a long strip of flesh.

  When Anisa thinks about this—and she does, often, whenever her hands are wet and soapy in just the right way, fingertips on the brink of wrinkling—she remembers the guilt. She remembers listening to her grandmother cross herself and speak her words of protection against harm, warding them against death in the family, against troubled times. She remembers the fear, staring at the red and pink and green of the rooster, its broken, dangling head.

  But she can’t remember—though she often tries—whether she felt, for the first time, the awful electric prickle of the power in her chest, flooding out to her palms.

  • • • •

  There are owls that sail through the air like great ships. There are owls that flit like finches from branch to branch. There are owls that look at you with disdain and owls that sway on the perch of your arm like a reed in the wind.

  Anisa is not afraid of owls. She thinks they’re interesting enough, when people aren’t cooing over them or embroidering them onto cushions. From walking around the sanctuary she thinks the owl she saw as a child was probably a Eurasian Eagle Owl.

  She wanders from cage to cage, environment to environment, looking at owls that bear no resemblance to the pretty patterns lining the hems of skirts and dresses—owls that lack a facial disk, owls with bulging eyes and fuzzy heads, owls the size of her palm.

  Some of the owls have names distinct from their species: Hosking, Broo, Sarabi. Anisa pauses in front of a barn owl and frowns at the name. Blodeuwedd?

  “Blow-due-wed,” she sounds out beneath her breath, while the owl watches her.

  “It’s Bloh-DA-weth, actually,” says a friendly voice behind her. Anisa turns to see one of the owl handlers from the flying display, a black woman named Izzy, hair wrapped up in a brightly colored scarf, moving into one of the aviaries, gloved hands clutching a feed bucket. “It means ‘flower-face’ in Welsh.”

  Anisa flushes. She looks at the owl again. She has never seen a barn owl up close, and does not think it looks like flowers; she thinks, all at the same time, that the heart-shaped face is alien and eerie and beautiful and like when you can see the moon while the sun is setting, and that there should be a single word for the color of the wings that’s like the sheen of a pearl but not the pearl itself.

  She asks, “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “Do you not know the story of Blodeuwedd?” Izzy smiles. “She was a beautiful woman, made of flowers, who was turned into an owl.”

  Anisa frowns. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s from a book of fairytales called The Mabinogion—not big on sense-making.” Izzy chuckles. “I don’t think she likes it either, to be honest. She’s one of our most difficult birds. But she came to us from Wales, so we gave her a Welsh name.”

  Anisa looks into Blodeuwedd’s eyes. They are blacker than her own.

  “I like her,” she declares.

  • • • •

  A group of owls is called a Parliament.

  Owls are bad luck.

  The summer Anisa saw the owl kill the rooster was the summer Israel bombed the country. She always thinks of it that way, not as a war—she doesn’t remember a war. She never saw anyone fighting. She remembers a sound she felt more than heard, a thud that shook the earth and rattled up through her bones—then another—then a smell like chalk—before being swept into her father’s arms and taken down into shelter.

  She remembers feeling cold; she remembers, afterwards, anger, weeping, conversations half-heard from her bed, her mother’s voice reaching them in sobs from London, robotic and strangled over a poor internet connection, a mixing of English and Arabic, accents swapping places. Her father’s voice always calm, measured, but with a tension running through it like when her cousin put a wire through a dead frog’s leg to make it twitch.

  She remembers asking her grandmother if Israel attacked because of the owl. Her grandmother laughed in a way that made Anisa feel hollow and lost.

  “Shh, shh, don’t tell Israel! An owl killed a rooster—that’s more reason to attack! An owl killed a rooster in Lebanon and the government let it happen! Quick, get off the bridges!”

  The whole family laughed. Anisa was terrified, and told no one.

  • • • •

  Why did the owl not go courting in the rain? Because it was too wet to woo.

  “What makes her ‘difficult’?” asks Anisa, watching Blodeuwedd sway on her perch. Izzy looks fondly at the owl.

  “Well, we acquired her as a potential display bird, but she just doesn’t take well to training—she hisses at most of the handlers when they pass by, tries to bite. She’s also very territorial, and won’t tolerate the presence of male birds, so we can’t use her for breeding.” Izzy offers Blodeuwedd a strip of raw chicken, which she gulps down serenely.

  “But she likes you,” Anisa observes. Izzy smiles ruefully.

  “I’m not one of her trainers. It’s easy to like people who ask nothing of you.” Izzy pauses, eyes Blodeuwedd with exaggerated care. “Or at least, it’s easy to not hate them.”

/>   Before Anisa leaves with the rest of her class, Izzy writes down Mabinogion for her on a piece of paper, a rather deft doodle of an owl’s face inside a five-petaled flower, and an invitation to come again.

  • • • •

  Most owls are sexually dimorphic: the female is usually larger, stronger, and more brightly colored than the male.

  Anisa’s mother is tall, and fair, and Anisa looks nothing like her. Her mother’s brown hair is light and thin and straight; her mother’s skin is pale. Anisa is used to people making assumptions—are you adopted? Is that your stepmother?—when they see them together, but her mother’s new job at the university has made outings together rare. In fact, since moving to Glasgow, Anisa hardly sees her at home anymore, since she has evening classes and departmental responsibilities.

  “What are you reading?” asks her mother, shrugging on her coat after a hurried dinner together.

  Anisa, legs folded up underneath her on the couch, holds up a library copy of The Mabinogion. Her mother looks confused, but nods, wishes her a good night, and leaves.

  Anisa reads about how Math, son of Mathonwy, gathered the blossoms of oak, of broom, of meadowsweet, and shaped them into a woman. She wonders, idly, what kind of flowers could be combined to make her.

  • • • •

  There are owls on every continent in the world except Antarctica.

  The so-called war lasted just over a month; Anisa learned the word “ceasefire” in August. Her father put her on a plane to London the moment the airports were repaired.

  Before she started going to school, Anisa’s mother took her aside. “When people ask you where you’re from,” she told her, “you say ‘England,’ all right? You were born here. You have every bit as much right to be here as anyone else.”