by Annie Bellet
“I’ve never heard of any strange disease like that.”
The discussions led nowhere, and they couldn’t find Ye. The reunion came to an end without a conclusion.
• • • •
After dinner and some drinks, Yang drove home by himself. The fog was still heavy, and the passing, varicolored lights dissolved in the fog like pigment. He fell asleep as soon as he was in bed, but he woke up around midnight.
He was seized by a nameless terror, and he was sure that he would not see the sun rise again, that he would die during his sleep. He recalled his life, thinking about the ten years since high school that had passed far too quickly. He had once thought life rather good, like a flowery, splendid scroll, but now a rip had been torn in it, and inside was darkness, a bottomless darkness. He had fallen into a chasm from the sky, and inside the chasm was only a lightless fog. All he could see was the nothingness behind the scroll.
He curled up in the fetal position and sobbed, and he vomited his dinner onto his pillow.
• • • •
The fog was gone in the morning. Yang got up and looked at the clear sky outside.
He felt refreshed, and the unpleasantness of the previous day was forgotten.
• • • •
The Birthday
Grandma Zhou was almost ninety-nine, and the family planned a big celebration. But just as everything was about ready, Grandma Zhou slipped and fell in the bathroom, fracturing her foot. Although she was rushed to the hospital right away and the injury wasn’t serious, it still made it hard for her to get about. She had to stay in a wheelchair all day, and she felt depressed.
The evening sky was overcast, and Grandma Zhou napped in her room by herself. Knocking noises woke her up. Raising her sleepy eyes, she saw a figure in a white dress floating in midair, indistinct, like an immortal.
“Is something happening, Young Lady?”
Young Lady wasn’t a person, but the nursing home’s service program. Grandma’s eyesight was no longer so good, and she couldn’t tell what Young Lady looked like. But she always thought she sounded like her granddaughter.
“Grandma Zhou,” said Young Lady, “your family is here to celebrate your birthday!”
“What’s there to celebrate? The older you grow, the more you suffer.”
“Please don’t say that. The young people are here because they love you. They want you to live beyond a hundred!”
Grandma Zhou was still in a bad mood, but Young Lady said, “If you keep on frowning like that, your children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren will think I haven’t been taking good care of you.”
Grandma Zhou thought Young Lady had taken very good care of her—in fact, she did it about as well as her real granddaughter. Her heart softened, and a smile appeared on her face.
“There we go,” said a grinning Young Lady. “All right, get ready to celebrate!”
• • • •
Bright lights came out of the floor and transformed the room. Grandma Zhou found herself inside a hall decorated in an antique style with red paper lanterns and red paper Longevity characters pasted on the walls. She was dressed in a red jacket and red pants custom made for her and sat in a carved purpleheart longevity chair, while all the guests around her also wore red. Grandma Zhou couldn’t see their faces clearly, but she could hear the laughter and joyous conversations, and the noise of firecrackers going off outside was constant.
Her oldest son approached first with his family to wish her a happy birthday. There were more than a dozen people, and, after sorting themselves by generation and age, they knelt to kowtow. Grandma Zhou smiled at the children: boys, girls, some dark skinned, some fair skinned, and she had trouble saying some of their names. A few of the children were shy, and hid behind their parents to peek at her without speaking. Others were bolder, and they spoke to her in some foreign language instead of Chinese, making the adults laugh. There was also a little child curled up asleep in her mother’s lap, and the mother smiled, saying, “Grandma, I’m really sorry. It’s about five in the morning in our time zone.”
“That’s all right,” said Grandma Zhou. “Children need their rest.”
It took almost a quarter of an hour for the members of her oldest son’s family to offer her their good wishes one by one.
Then came the family of her second son, her older daughter, her younger daughter … then the friends who had gone to school with her, friends from the army, the students she had taught over the years, in-laws, distant relatives …
Grandma Zhou had been sitting up for a long while, and her eyes were feeling tired and her throat parched. But she knew it was difficult for so many people to make time to attend her party, and so she forced herself to keep on nodding and smiling. Advanced technology is really wonderful; it would be so much harder for them to do this in person.
As she watched all the guests milling about the hall, she felt very moved. So many people around the globe, divided by thousands of miles, were here because of her. After all the miles she had walked and all the things she had experienced and done, she had connected all these people, many of them strangers to each other, into a web. She felt fortunate to be ninety-nine; not many people made it this far.
A figure dressed in white drifted over to her. At first she thought it was Young Lady again, but the figure knelt down and held her hand.
“Grandma, sorry I’m late. The traffic was bad.”
Grandma Zhou squeezed the hands; the skin felt a bit cold, but the hands were solid. She squinted to get a closer look. It was her granddaughter who was studying overseas.
“What are you doing here?”
“To wish you a happy birthday, of course.”
“You’re actually here? Really here?”
“I wanted to see you.”
“That’s a long jouney,” said Grandma Zhou.
Her granddaughter smiled. “Not that far. Not even a full day by plane.”
Grandma Zhou looked her granddaughter up and down. She looked tired, but seemed to be in good spirits. Grandma Zhou smiled.
“Is it cold outside?”
“Not at all,” said the granddaughter. “The moon is lovely tonight. Would you like to see it?”
“But there are still so many people here.”
“Oh, that’s easy to take care of,” said the granddaughter.
She waved her hands, and a replica of Grandma Zhou appeared. The replica was dressed in the same red jacket and red pants, and sat in the carved purpleheart longevity chair. The guests in the hall continued to come up in waves, wishing her many years of long life and happiness.
“All right, Grandma, let’s go.”
The granddaughter pushed the wheelchair through the empty corridor of the nursing home until they were in the yard. There was a vigorous shantao tree in the middle of the yard, and to the side were a few wintersweet bushes, whose fragrance wafted on the breeze. The sky had cleared, revealing the full moon. Grandma Zhou looked at the plants in the garden and then at her granddaughter, standing tall and lovely next to her like a young poplar. Nothing makes you realize how old you are as seeing your children’s children all grown up.
A few other residents of the nursing home were sitting under the tree, playing erhu and singing folk operas. They saw Grandma Zhou and invited her to join them.
Grandma Zhou blushed like a little girl. “I have no talent for this sort of thing at all! I’ve never learned to play an instrument, and I can’t sing.”
Lao Hu, who was playing the erhu, said, “It’s just a few of us old timers trying to entertain ourselves, not the Spring Festival Gala! Lao Zhou, just perform anything you like, and we’ll cheer you on. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to celebrate your birthday?”
Grandma Zhou pondered this for a while, and said, “All right, I’ll chant a poem for you.”
Her father had taught her how to chant poems when she was little, and her father had learned from his tutor, back before the founding of the People’s Republi
c. Back then, when children studied poetry, they didn’t read it or recite it, but learned to chant along with the teacher. This was how they learned the rhythm and meter of poetry, the patterns of rhyme and tone. It was closer to singing than reading, and it sounded better.
The others quieted to listen. The moonlight was gentle like water, and everything around them seemed fresh and warm. Grandma slowed her breathing, thinking of fragments of history and tradition connected with the moon and all that is old and new around her, and began to chant:
As firecrackers send away the old year,
The spring breeze feels as warm as New Year’s wine.
All houses welcome fresh sun and good cheer,
While new couplets take the place of old signs.
• • • •
[Author’s Note: While I was at my parents’ home over Spring Festival break, I wanted to write some stories about ordinary lives. I don’t particularly care about predicting the future, but I do think that deep changes are happening around us almost undetectably. These changes are the most real, and also the most science fictional.
The future is full of uncertainties, and it is as hard to say it will be better as it is to say it will be worse. In a few decades, I don’t know if anyone will still remember how to chant ancient poems, but I do know that in every passing moment, the people in every house—men, women, old, young—are living lives as meaningful as they’re ordinary.]
As an undergraduate, Xia Jia majored in Atmospheric Sciences at Peking University. She then entered the Film Studies Program at the Communication University of China, where she completed her Master’s thesis: “A Study on Female Figures in Science Fiction Films.” Recently, she obtained a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and World Literature at Peking University, with “Chinese Science Fiction and Its Cultural Politics Since 1990” as the topic of her dissertation. She now teaches at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
She has been publishing fiction since college in a variety of venues, including Science Fiction World and Jiuzhou Fantasy. Several of her stories have won the Galaxy Award, China’s most prestigious science fiction award. In English translation, she has been published in Clarkesworld and Upgraded.
* * *
Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in April 2015. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, in March 2016. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
The Husband Stitch
By Carmen Maria Machado
(If you read this story out loud, please use the following voices:
Me: as a child, high-pitched, forgettable; as a woman, the same.
The boy who will grow into a man, and be my spouse: robust with his own good fortune.
My father: Like your father, or the man you wish was your father.
My son: as a small child, gentle, rounded with the faintest of lisps; as a man, like my husband.
All other women: interchangeable with my own.)
In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a neighbor’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago, with the neighbor’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.
The boy is not facing me. I see the muscles of his neck and upper back, how he fairly strains out of his button-down shirts. I run slick. It isn’t that I don’t have choices. I am beautiful. I have a pretty mouth. I have a breast that heaves out of my dresses in a way that seems innocent and perverse all at the same time. I am a good girl, from a good family. But he is a little craggy, in that way that men sometimes are, and I want.
I once heard a story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanitarium. I don’t know what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known world for wanting it?
The boy notices me. He seems sweet, flustered. He says, hello. He asks my name.
I have always wanted to choose my moment, and this is the moment I choose.
On the deck, I kiss him. He kisses me back, gently at first, but then harder, and even pushes open my mouth a little with his tongue. When he pulls away, he seems startled. His eyes dart around for a moment, and then settle on my throat.
– What’s that? he asks.
– Oh, this? I touch my ribbon at the back of my neck. It’s just my ribbon. I run my fingers halfway around its green and glossy length, and bring them to rest on the tight bow that sits in the front. He reaches out his hand, and I seize it and push it away.
– You shouldn’t touch it, I say. You can’t touch it.
Before we go inside, he asks if he can see me again. I tell him I would like that. That night, before I sleep, I imagine him again, his tongue pushing open my mouth, and my fingers slide over myself and I imagine him there, all muscle and desire to please, and I know that we are going to marry.
• • • •
We do. I mean, we will. But first, he takes me in his car, in the dark, to a lake with a marshy edge. He kisses me and clasps his hand around my breast, my nipple knotting beneath his fingers.
I am not truly sure what he is going to do before he does it. He is hard and hot and dry and smells like bread, and when he breaks me I scream and cling to him like I am lost at sea. His body locks onto mine and he is pushing, pushing, and before the end he pulls himself out and finishes with my blood slicking him down. I am fascinated and aroused by the rhythm, the concrete sense of his need, the clarity of his release. Afterwards, he slumps in the seat, and I can hear the sounds of the pond: loons and crickets, and something that sounds like a banjo being plucked. The wind picks up off the water and cools my body down.
I don’t know what to do now. I can feel my heart beating between my legs. It hurts, but I imagine it could feel good. I run my hand over myself and feel strains of pleasure from somewhere far off. His breathing becomes quieter and I realize that he is watching me. My skin is glowing beneath the moonlight coming through the window. When I see him looking, I know I can seize that pleasure like my fingertips tickling the end of a balloon’s string that has almost drifted out of reach. I pull and moan and ride out the crest of sensation slowly and evenly, biting my tongue all the while.
– I need more, he says, but he does not rise to do anything.
He looks out the window, and so do I. Anything could move out there in the darkness, I think. A hook-handed man. A ghostly hitch-hiker repeating her journey. An old woman summoned from the rest of her mirror by the chants of children. Everyone knows these stories – that is, everyone tells them – but no one ever believes them.
His eyes drift over the water, and then land on my neck.
– Tell me about your ribbon, he says.
– There is nothing to tell. It’s my ribbon.
– May I touch it?
– No.
– I want to touch it, he says.
– No.
Something in the lake muscles and writhes out of the water, and then lands with a splash. He turns at the sound.
– A fish, he says.
– Sometime, I tell him, I will tell you the stories about this lake and her creatures.
He smiles at me, and rubs his jaw. A little of my blood smears across his skin, but he doesn’t notice, and
I don’t say anything.
– I would like that very much, he says.
– Take me home, I tell him.
And like a gentleman, he does.
That night, I wash myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I am newer than I have ever been.
• • • •
My parents are very fond of him. He is a nice boy, they say. He will be a good man. They ask him about his occupation, his hobbies, his family. He comes around twice a week, sometimes thrice. My mother invites him in for supper, and while we eat I dig my nails into the meat of his leg. After the ice cream puddles in the bowl, I tell my parents that I am going to walk with him down the lane. We strike off through the night, holding hands sweetly until we are out of sight of the house. I pull him through the trees, and when we find a patch of clear ground I shimmy off my pantyhose, and on my hands and knees offer myself up to him.
I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them. There are two rules: he cannot finish inside of me, and he cannot touch my green ribbon. He spends into the dirt, pat-pat-patting like the beginning of rain. I go to touch myself, but my fingers, which had been curling in the dirt beneath me, are filthy. I pull up my underwear and stockings. He makes a sound and points, and I realize that beneath the nylon, my knees are also caked in dirt. I pull them down and brush, and then up again. I smooth my skirt and repin my hair. A single lock has escaped his slicked-back curls, and I tuck it up with the others. We walk down to the stream and I run my hands in the current until they are clean again.
We stroll back to the house, arms linked chastely. Inside, my mother has made coffee, and we all sit around while my father asks him about business.
(If you read this story out loud, the sounds of the clearing can be best reproduced by taking a deep breath and holding it for a long moment. Then release the air all at once, permitting your chest to collapse like a block tower knocked to the ground. Do this again, and again, shortening the time between the held breath and the release.)
