The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  But really, her mother would have known that Lyle wasn’t her sort of guy. “So what gives?” she finally asked, after Lyle had finished a tall beer and she’d gotten close to the bottom of her martini. “How do you know my mother? Why would she think we’d make a good pair?”

  “I’m her butcher.”

  Sheila almost spat out the vodka swirling in her mouth, but managed to swallow before saying, “Her butcher? Really? I didn’t know my mother had a butcher.”

  “She comes to the West Side Market every Saturday,” said Lyle. “I work at Doreen’s Meats. Your mother always buys her meat for the week there. As for why would she think we’d make a good pair? I don’t know.” Lyle shrugged and held his palms up in the air. “I guess maybe she thought we’d get along because of what we have in common.”

  Sheila snorted, then raised her hand to signal Corrine back over. “I’d like another martini,” she said, and smiled in the way some people do when they need to smother an uncivil reaction: lips firmly held together. She turned back to Lyle, who was cracking another peanut shell between his thick, hairy fingers, and said, “So what do we have in common, besides my mother?”

  “I’m a werewolf,” said Lyle. Then he flicked the peanut off his thumb and snatched it out of the air, midflight, in his mouth.

  Sheila watched as Lyle crunched the peanut, and noticed only after he’d swallowed and smiled across the table at her that he had a particularly large set of canines. “You’re kidding,” said Sheila. “Ha ha, very funny. You might as well start telling witch jokes at this point.”

  “Not kidding,” said Lyle. Corrine stopped at their table, halting the conversation as she placed another tall beer in front of Lyle, another martini in front of Sheila, and asked what they’d like to order.

  “I think we’re just here to drink tonight,” said Lyle, not taking his eyes off Sheila.

  Sheila nodded vigorously at Corrine, though, agreeing. And after she left, Sheila said, “Well, this is a new achievement for my mother. Set her daughter up with a werewolf.”

  “What? You don’t like werewolves?” Lyle asked. One corner of his mouth lifted into a 1970s drug dealer grin.

  Sheila blinked a lot for a while, took another sip of her martini, then shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve ever thought about, you know,” she said. “I mean, werewolves aren’t generally on my radar. I get a lot of people who come around with minor psychic powers, and they’re attracted to me because they can sense I’m something out of the ordinary but can’t quite place what exactly, and of course I know a decent amount of witches—we can spot each other on the street without knowing one another, really—but werewolves are generally outside of my experience. Especially my dating experience.”

  “From what I understand, your dating experience has been pretty non-existent in general.”

  Sheila decided it was time to take yet another drink. After swallowing a large gulp of vodka, she said, “My mother has a big mouth for someone who hasn’t gotten back in the saddle since my father left her nearly two decades ago. And you can tell her I said that next time she comes in to stock up on meat.”

  Lyle laughed. It was a full, throaty laugh that made heads turn in the steakhouse. When he realized this, he reined himself in, but Sheila could see that the laugh—the sheer volume of it when he’d let himself go—was beyond ordinary. It bordered on the wild. She could imagine him as a wolf in that moment, howling at a blood red moon.

  “So what is it? Once a month you get hairy and run around the city killing people?” Sheila asked.

  Lyle leaned back on his side of the booth and said, “Are you serious?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” said Sheila. “I hear it’s quite difficult to control bloodlust in times like that.”

  “I make arrangements for those times,” said Lyle.

  “Arrangements, huh,” said Sheila. “What sort of arrangements?”

  “I rent an underground garage, have it filled with plenty of raw steaks, and get locked in for the night.”

  “That’s responsible of you,” said Sheila.

  “What about you?” Lyle asked. “Any inclinations to doing evil? Casting hexes?”

  “No bloodlust for witches,” said Sheila, “and I gave up the vicious cycle of curse drama in college. Not worth it. That shit comes back on you sevenfold.”

  Lyle snickered. He ran his thumb and forefinger over his scraggly goatee, then took another drink of beer. “Looks like we’re a pair,” he said, “just like your mother imagined.”

  “Why?” Sheila asked. “Because you put yourself in a werewolf kennel on full moon nights and I don’t dabble in wreaking havoc in other people’s lives?”

  Lyle nodded, his lips rising into a grin that revealed his pointy, slightly yellowed canines.

  “I hardly think that constitutes being a pair,” said Sheila. “We certainly have that in common, but it’s a bit like saying we should start dating because we’re both single and living in Cleveland.”

  “Why are you so single?” Lyle asked. His nostrils flared several times.

  Oh my God, he is totally sniffing me! “I need to use the ladies’ room,” she said.

  In the restroom, Sheila leaned against the counter and stared at herself in the mirror. She was wearing a short black dress and had hung her favorite opal earrings on her earlobes. They glowed in the strange orange neon beer-sign light of the restroom. She shouldn’t have answered when he knocked. She should have kept things in order. Weekend BBQs with Trent and Gary, even with the obnoxious Snowman running between their legs and wanting to jump on her and lick her. Working a few hours a day with clients, helping them to love or be loved, to find love. Evening runs in the park. Grocery shopping on Wednesdays. That’s what she wanted, not a werewolf butcher/lover her mother had found in the West Side Market.

  The last time Sheila dated someone had been slightly less than underwhelming. He’d been an utterly normal man named Paul who worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland downtown, and he talked endlessly of bank capitalization and exchange-traded funds. Sheila had tried to love him, but it was as if all the bank talk was more powerful than any spell she might cast on herself, and so she’d had to add Paul to her long list of previous candidates for love.

  There had been Jim, a guy who owned a car dealership in Lakewood, but he always came off as a salesman, and Sheila wasn’t the consumer type. There had been Alexis, a law student at Case Western, but despite her girlish good looks and intelligence, Alexis had worried about Sheila’s under-the-table Paranormal Romance business—concerned that she was possibly defrauding the government of taxable income. There had been Mark, the CPA (say no more). There had been Lola, the karaoke DJ (say no more). And there had been a string of potentials before that, too, once Sheila began sorting through the memories of her twenties, a long line of cute young men and women whose faces faded a little more each day. She had tried—she had tried so hard—hoping one of them would take the weight of her existence and toss it into the air like a beach ball. The love line went back and back and back, so far back, but none of those boys or girls had been able to do this. None of them.

  Except Trent and Gary, of course. Not that they were romance for Sheila. But they did love her. They cared about her. They didn’t make her feel like she had to be anyone but who she wanted to be, even if who Sheila wanted to be wasn’t entirely who Sheila was.

  Sheila washed her hands under the faucet and dried them with the air dryer, appreciating the whir of the fan drowning out the voice in her head. She would walk out on Lyle, she decided. She’d go home and call her mother and tell her, “Never again,” then hang up on her. She would sit in front of the blank television screen, watching her shadowy reflection held within it, and maybe she would let herself cry, just a little bit, for being a love witch who couldn’t make love happen for herself.

  “Are you okay?” a voice said over the whir of the hand dryer. Sheila blinked and turned. Behind her, Corrine the server was coming out of
a stall. She came to stand beside Sheila at the sinks and quickly washed her hands.

  “You’re a witch,” Sheila said stupidly, and realized at that moment that two martinis were too many for her.

  Corrine laughed, but nodded and said, “Yes. I am. So are you.” Corrine reached for the paper towel to dry her hands, since Sheila was spellbound in front of the electric dryer. “What kind?” she asked Sheila as she wiped her hands.

  “Love,” said Sheila.

  “Love?” said Corrine, raising her thin eyebrows. “That’s pretty fancy.”

  “It’s okay,” said Sheila.

  “Just okay?” said Corrine. “I don’t know. Sounds nice to be able to do something like that with it. Me? I can’t do much but weird things.”

  “What do you mean?” Sheila asked.

  “You know,” said Corrine. “Odds and ends. Nothing so defined as love. Bad end of the magic stick, maybe. I can smell fear on people, or danger. And I can open doors. But that’s about it.”

  “Open doors?” said Sheila.

  “Yeah,” said Corrine. “Doors. I guess it does make a kind of sense when I think about it long enough. I smell danger coming, I can get out of just about anywhere if I want to. Open a door. Any old door. It might look like it leads into a broom closet or an office, but I can make it open onto other places I’ve been, or have at least seen in a picture.”

  “Wow,” said Sheila. “You should totally be a cat burglar.”

  Corrine laughed. Sheila laughed with her. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “It’s okay,” Corrine said. “It was funny. I think you said it because it was funny.”

  “I guess I better get back out there,” said Sheila.

  “Date?” said Corrine.

  “Blind date,” Sheila answered. “Bad date. Last date.”

  Corrine frowned in sympathy. “I knew it wasn’t going well.”

  “How?” Sheila asked.

  “I could smell it on you. Not quite fear, but anxiety and frustration. I figured that’s why you asked for the second martini. That guy comes in a lot. He seems okay, but yeah, I couldn’t imagine why you were here with him.”

  Sheila looked down at her hands, which were twitching a little, as if her fingers had minds of their own. They were twitching in Corrine’s direction, like they wanted to go to her. Sheila laughed. Her poor fingers. All of that love magic stored up inside them and nowhere to go.

  “You need help?” Corrine asked suddenly. She had just taken off her name badge and was now fluffing her hair in the mirror.

  “Help?” said Sheila.

  Corrine looked over and said, “If you want out, we can just go. You don’t even have to say goodbye to him. My shift’s over. A friend of mine will be closing out your table. We can leave by the bathroom door.”

  Sheila laughed. Her fingers twitched again. She took one hand and clamped it over the other.

  “What are you afraid of?” Corrine asked. Her eyes had started to narrow. “I’m getting a sense that you’re afraid of me now.”

  “You?” Sheila said. “No, no, not you.”

  “Well, you’re giving off the vibe,” said Corrine. She dropped her name badge into her purse and took out a tube of lipstick, applied some to her lips so that they were a shade of dark ruby. When she was done, she slipped the tube into her purse and turned to Sheila. “What’s wrong with your hands?” she asked.

  Sheila was still fidgeting. “I think,” she said. “I think they like you.”

  Corrine threw her head back and laughed. “Like?” she said, grinning. “That’s sweet of them. You can tell your hands I like them too.”

  Sheila said, “I’m so sorry. This is embarrassing. I’m usually not such a weirdo.” For a moment, Sheila heard her father’s voice come through—Creepy weirdoes. Whatever the hell else is out there—and she shivered.

  “You’re not weird,” said Corrine. “Just flustered. It happens.”

  It happens. Sheila blinked and blinked again. Actually, it didn’t happen. Not for her. Her fingers only twitched like this when she was working magic for other people. Anytime she had tried to work magic for herself, they were still and cold, as if she had bad circulation. “No,” Sheila said. “It doesn’t usually happen. Not for me. This is strange.”

  “Listen,” said Corrine. “You seem interesting. I’m off shift and you have a bad blind date happening. I’m about to leave by that door and go somewhere I know that has good music and way better food than this place. And it’s friendly to people like you and me. What do you say?”

  Sheila thought of her plans for the rest of the evening in a blinding flash.

  Awkward moment before she ditched Lyle.

  Awkward and angry moment on the phone while she told her mother off.

  The vague reflection of her body held in the screen of the television as she allowed herself to cry a little.

  Then she looked up at Corrine, who was pulling on a zippered hoody, and said, “I say yes.”

  “Yes?” Corrine said, smiling.

  “Yes,” said Sheila. “Yes, let’s go there, wherever it is you’re going.”

  Corrine held her hand out, and Sheila looked down at her own hands again, clamped together as if in prayer, holding each other back from the world. “You can let one of them go,” Corrine said, grinning. “Otherwise, I can’t take you with me.”

  Sheila laughed nervously and nodded. She released her hands from one another and cautiously put one into the palm of Corrine’s hand, where it settled in smoothly and turned warm in an instant. “This way,” Corrine said, and put her other hand on the bathroom doorknob, twisted, then opened it.

  For a moment, Sheila could see nothing but a bright light fill the space of the doorway—no Lyle or the sounds of rock and roll music spilled in from the dining area—and she worried that she’d made a mistake, not being able to see where she was going with this woman who was a complete stranger. Then Corrine looked back at her and said, “Don’t be afraid,” and Sheila heard the sound of jazz music suddenly float toward her, a soft saxophone, a piano melody, though the doorway was still filled with white light she couldn’t see through.

  “I’m not,” said Sheila suddenly, and was surprised to realize that she truly wasn’t.

  Corrine winked at her the way she had done at the table, as if they shared a secret, which, of course, they did. Then she tugged on Sheila’s hand and they stepped through the white light into somewhere different.

  Town’s End

  Yukimi Ogawa

  At the counter of a marriage agency at the end of the town, I felt my lip twitch in spite of myself. “Pardon me, ma’am?”

  “I need a male,” the woman in front of me repeated. “I badly need to bear a child.”

  I looked down at the PC and tapped the corner of my mouth, hoping it would stop twitching. It didn’t help. “Well, I see you’re a very straightforward person. But perhaps that sort of statement could wait until you are closer to the man.”

  “But why?”

  “It’d scare the man.”

  “Really? I didn’t know.”

  The woman looked nervous and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, behind the string that was holding her mask in place. The mask looked old-fashioned, made of cotton not unwoven cloth. “Do you have a cold? Or is that for an allergy?” I asked.

  She shook her head, her thick, long black hair almost unmoving.

  Below this old-fashioned hair style and mask, she wore a long, one-piece dress that was almost stark-white, which didn’t help her pale skin. I wondered if I would have to advise her on what to wear. “I think that would scare them, too. Never taking a mask off for some secret reason.”

  “Oh, really? Oh my . . . ”

  This woman, Saeko Kimura, claimed to be from a faraway region, which she had said was why she wouldn’t give me the name of the high school she’d graduated from. She gave me no information that would tell me about her life, not even her age, but she look
ed to be about the same age as I, mid-thirties or so. She was the first client since I started working here four months ago. I had come back from the city to this small town last year after I had split up with my boyfriend, and for a half year I couldn’t find a job. When I finally found the position at this marriage agency at the end of my hometown, I had no other choice but to take it.

  The firm stood adjacent to a house the boss had said he lived in but never seemed to be using. I had never seen the boss, except for the one time when I saw a shadow of a tall, lean figure reflected on the screen door of the house a few weeks back. Our communication had been solely through emails. Not even phone calls.

  “But me taking off the mask would scare them away, too,” Kimura was saying. Wrinkles formed between her downward-slanting brows, giving her the atmosphere of an unlucky woman. “I really need a man’s seed.”

  For five years in the city I worked as a receptionist at an English language school, where I had to deal with countless, groundless complaints and had developed a Noh-mask on my face devoid of any real expression. But even that was nothing to fight against this. “You just want to sleep with someone?”

  “Yes,” the answer came quick. “Without a condom.”

  I actually chuckled. “In that case you shouldn’t be here. This is where people who want to find a husband or wife come. You should sign up for an SNS that is famous for that sort of community.”

  “What’s an SNS?”

  “You know condom and don’t know SNS?”

  “I’ve seen couples using a condom and discarding the thing in the woods.”

  “Huh. You have a mobile, right?”

  “No.”

  “No?” I asked, incredulous. “What about a PC?”

  “No way.”