Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  “Second point—don’t interrupt. I’m getting tired. I’ve had a great life. Despite our . . . tragedy. I don’t want to live anywhere but on my boat. If you do anything without my consent, I will never forgive you. I’m serious. And I don’t ever again want the kind of pain I’ve had the past six months.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you have that pain!” To her surprise, Ellie begins to cry. “You hid it from me. You didn’t want my help. What has my life been about if I can’t even help my own father? You’d rather die than have my help.” She drops to the bed, covers her face, and sobs.

  “Ellie, look at me.”

  She wipes her face on her sleeve. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I haven’t seen you cry since your mother died.”

  “You haven’t seen me much. Holidays. Birthdays.” She hears the 10-year-old in her voice, her two annual summer weeks at sea with her father ending once again.

  “Fair shot.” He pauses. “It’s over. The oceans are polluted beyond repair.”

  “You can help restore them! You—”

  “This place that seems so awful to you, this is what it’s like everywhere now. Even worse. I’ve been all around the world. I’ve done my part. I’m proud that a worm is named after me.” He draws a deep breath, coughs, looks at her squarely. “I’m proud of you. Your mother would be so proud of you.” Another long pause while she grabs a tissue, blows her nose, wipes her face. “You can do one thing for me.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s move this party to my boat. I was kidnapped. I don’t want to die here. Order somebody to bring a piano to the dock and you can play me out. I haven’t heard you play in a long, long time. It’s like heaven to me. It always reminds me of the first time I went diving.”

  “But—”

  “That’s all I want of you. We can’t get back the years I wasted. Do this for me, please.”

  She waits for the old anger, the old rage, to bubble up and spew out. Her hand moves toward her phone, then stops.

  You know how to improvise.

  Instead of the ambulance call, there is a memory, one of many she has hugged to herself all these years, refusing to release it. It’s the new infusion that allows it to surface, she knows, but that does not make it any less valuable.

  A winter day at her grandmother’s. The holidays. She is playing the piano. She begins with one learned set piece, Bach.

  Then there is a shift. She hears her mother as if she were music, Coltrane, jazz. She threads new notes to Bach, adjusts cadence, moves into new space. Improvises. Loses herself in sound, falling snow, her father, leaning on the piano as tears roll down his face.

  She remembers that she played for hours.

  She looks directly at him, seeing him as if for the first time: a person separate from herself, from her needs, from her ways of making her own life small and safe.

  She nods. “All right, Dad. Let’s go.”

  © 2012 Kathleen Ann Goonan.

  Originally published in Discover Magazine.

  Electric Rains, by Kathleen Ann Goonan

  Ella sat by Nana’s body for two days before she pushed it out the window.

  She had spent the first half-day realizing what death was, the next half-day grieving, the following morning waking and feeling reverent if somewhat nauseated, and trying to decide what to do.

  It was three in the morning when she finally did it, and it was almost the season of electric rains.

  There had been one already, fitful and slight, harbinger of spring and the season of avoidance. Once the weather warmed in Washington, D.C., thunderstorms boiled up almost every evening, preceded by the leaves in the park across the street turning up silver undersides. Ella was twelve, and had grown up knowing that she could not let the rains, or the rare snows, touch her.

  But Ella had to take Nana home. Besides, she was beginning to smell bad. Night was a good time, the time least likely to rain.

  In the end it was easy. There was no heat in the old lady’s three-room apartment with the toweringly high ceilings and the hole in the plaster that looked like South America, so she’d not gotten very warm. The old lady had an electrical setup but used it only for cooking and powering a space heater in the most bitterly cold weather, hooking up big sparking clamps, which scared Ella. There were people who kept the grid alive, down by Anacostia. Engineers, and those whom they taught, people who had escaped the first electric rains, like Ella and Nana.

  By now, the body was very stiff. Ella was not surprised to find that the tiny old lady was not terribly heavy. She wrapped the body in the sheet upon which she had died, which made her easy to pull over the shiny wood floor, through the sitting room with its yellowed lace doilies and once-valuable international knickknacks—the ancient Chinese vase, the intricately carved Vietnamese table, the rug from nineteenth century Baghdad—and managed to lift her to chairs and then push her onto an oval table of shiny hardwood, a table she herself had polished only days before, one of the unending chores the old lady had her do so they could “live with dignity in this shit-eating world.”

  She shoved the table on its clawed wheels to the window. Grunting, she pushed up the reluctant sash. Paint chips flurried in the moonlit air, and the gust of wind took Ella by surprise: It was warm.

  That was not good.

  She leaned out the window; sniffed the air. It smelled too warm, like sudden spring. Perhaps it was. And the stars were obscured by cloud.

  No matter. She had to do this, and soon.

  She looked up and down the length of the street, waited until a lone car stopped at the light and then moved past, low, prowling beams of light ahead. She leaned out further, saw a few ragged shapes curled on the sidewalk. She swallowed. The rain people, those who didn’t go down into the Metro but let the rain wash them countless times, could sometimes be normal, harmless. But sometimes . . .

  She looked back at Nana’s face, her delicately curved nose, her imp-like face overwhelmed by wrinkles, her high lacy collar always kept clean and white.

  A middle-aged man used to visit, and talked to Nana blusteringly, with wide frantic gestures. He always frowned at the sight of Ella and she knew that the man did not like her being there and couldn’t do a damned thing about it. She didn’t like him much either. “Little bitch,” he called her, the time he had squeezed her back in among Nana’s spicy-musty clothes, but she had kicked him hard and he hadn’t tried it again.

  She sat down in one of the high-backed chairs and watched Nana for a moment.

  Then, through the doubled wavy glass of the high windows, she saw a light streak through the heavens. A monitor plane, checking for contagion. Very rare. Nana laughed derisively whenever they saw one. “It won’t be safe in our lifetimes, missy. At least,” her voice gentled, “not in mine.”

  Ella knew, though, that the light was the spirit of Nana and that it was all right, that she did not have to tell anyone, that she could stay here as long as she wanted to. That was Nana’s plan. Nana had talked about papers she had signed, and showed her the key to the safety deposit box at the bank. That nasty old man would do something about it, she was sure. He blabbered about the apartment being a “gold mine,” and called Nana stupid all the time, even though he was her nephew.

  But because of the newspaper room, she knew that both of them might well be insane. In the back of the townhouse was a huge room filled with stacks of old Washington Posts, yellowed, crumbling, musty-smelling. Nana had her cut out the crossword puzzles from each day, right by the funnies, and put them into a box from which she drew; she did one a day.

  The newspapers were sorted roughly into years, but the year that Ella was most interested in was the year, the very day, that terrorists had run an Amtrak Silver Eagle from New York into Union Station in downtown Washington at full speed, crashing right into the lobby of the station.

  They had hoped that in the resulting confusion they would be able to get into the Capitol Building, a block away, and set off their dirty bomb.


  Their particular dirty bomb was not full of radioactive material. It was, instead, full of what became taken up by the atmosphere, rather than filling up the Capitol Building. That material was what had turned into electric rains.

  The Post headline for that day said TERRORISTS DECIMATE DIRTY BOMB.

  The terrorists had, apparently, been Ella’s parents. She deduced this by reading several month’s worth of Washington Posts, and hid them from Nana. That was not difficult in a room full of newspapers.

  There was probably no bank anymore with the important papers in it; or, if there was, there was no one to pay attention to them, anyway.

  ***

  Ella knew that Nana had lived here all her life and had seen her beloved city change and change and change and all the relatives and friends who really cared for her die until she was all alone, except for Ella, in the place she owned; the rest of the building she had divided into apartments when younger and rented them. Now, she kept the squatters out with fierce bars, preferring them to be empty rather than full of the “rain riffraff” which now inhabited Washington.

  Ella climbed onto the table, knelt, and pushed the woman’s shoulders. She leaned forward and grunted. It was harder than she thought it would be. Finally Nana’s legs and her hips were outside and Ella, with a shriek, let go.

  The window had a deep sill which overlooked 14th Street in Washington D.C., between R and S Streets. It was a place, Ella had been made to understand from listening to endless stories of hell and glory from Nana, burnished to mahogany smoothness by many tellings, which had felt the ebb and flow of time. When Nana’s grandfather had bought the building, the street was genteel, alive with a shop for each need, even if that need was for fresh flowers, a need which Nana and now Ella felt keenly as stomach-hunger: brilliant purple zinnias mixed with broad creamy spider chrysanthemums, studded with red baby rosebuds, ah! Set on the grand dining room table, they made one feel royal.

  But Nana, Ella often observed, had no problem feeling royal. She told Ella tales of the city lights being akin to blood for her, tales of being young and speeding about the city in a fine gray car, and then jolting on the farting buses when they still ran. Now, there were no buses, and the Metro entrances glowed. People had taken refuge underground when the electric rains had begun, but of course it had been too late: The rains, with their voices, had gotten them, had spread its contagion among them.

  Now, if they went anywhere, they had to walk, even after Nana was attacked and raped. After that she walked her same route, head held high, Ella in tow and terrified, a heavy gun in her pocket that she practiced with once a week in the back alley on bottles and cans, laughing every time she blew one to bits. Once she dropped a young woman gangster just like that, when the gangster walked toward them holding a knife, and then she became known and feared, even by the people who danced up and down the street singing, “What a glorious feeling, I’m happy again!” The electric-rain people sometimes had ragged parades, which marched beneath their window. They blew horns, and usually wore hats to hide their terrible deformities.

  A warm breeze stirred the curtains. Ella was filled with terrified reverence as she gazed down on Nana, who had landed spread-eagle, face-up. The sheet had caught on a ledge and fluttered just below Ella, so Nana gazed at the stars.

  Nana loved the stars, and had taught Ella their names; she had a formidable telescope she kept inside a little concrete room on the roof. On clear nights, cold or hot, they would go up, unlock the giant padlock, roll out the telescope onto the bumpy roof, and gaze all night, drunk on pulsing lights arranged with the precision of numbers. “If you got close they’d change position so you wouldn’t recognize them but of course you can’t get that close,” Nana told Ella. One night, as a great treat, she’d shot out the six remaining park lights so that the sky would be darker. “Ha!” she laughed. “Think the cops will show up? Not a chance.”

  Ella knew there was not a chance—she knew what cops were, but had never seen one. She only knew that now that park would be dark at night forever.

  “I used to go to lectures with my dad every Friday night at the Naval Observatory,” she told Ella in her deep, rough voice, sticking her gun back in her pocket. “Now that’s dark. Gentle man, so kind, too good for this world. Nothing like me.”

  But Ella saw gentleness everywhere in her, in the way she took care of Ella, how she took care to keep her in fine silk pajamas, how she made sure the linens were always clean, lowering the laundry down to Ella waiting nervously on the street with a red wagon that said Radio Flyer on the side, then trundling down to the Deep-Clean Laundro-Mat. “Shitty machines,” she always said, “and they cheat us on the drying time but what can you do?”—a litany Ella had grown quite used to. Once she asked if they could not just dry the clothes on a clothesline and had received a lecture about the possibility of electric rain polluting the clothes. The Deep-Clean was operated by an old man who wore very clean clothes, a fine and eccentric mix of clothes—thin wool suits in winter with vests and colorful silk ties and combat boots; beautiful, starched cotton dresses with aprons in the summer that he claimed he’d stolen from the Smithsonian Historic Collection. He ran his machines with a generator and spent most of his time gathering fuel.

  Well, now Nana had returned to the streets.

  Ella was very unhappy as she gazed down at her. She should have wrapped her more tightly, she thought now; she should have hidden her from the world; she should have cushioned the fall.

  Suddenly frantic, she ran for the linen closet. Every sheet was ironed and folded; Nana knew how to take up the time of day, that was certain. Ella pulled a chain and the closet lit up and she felt the neat but sparse row with her finger and lit on the smoothest, oldest one, white cotton limp with age and use, smooth as glass, and yanked it out.

  She paused to look around the apartment. She felt in her pocket for the key. She went to Nana’s bedroom; got her purse which she had never before violated, a shapeless black leather affair, and pulled out the wallet, stuck it next to the key in her pocket. The gun was already there. She stepped out into the hall holding the sheet, locked the door, and ran down five flights of stairs.

  At the foot of the stairs she pulled out the key chain and felt for the key to the closet beneath the stairs. Unlocking the storage closet, she pulled out the laundry wagon.

  Once outside, she felt exposed. She’d never been outside, alone, that she could remember. She took a deep breath and looked down at Nana.

  She expected blood but there was none. Maybe death had dried it; maybe it was frozen in Nana’s veins now that there was no heart to move it. She heard glass break a block away, and distant gunfire. She felt in her pocket Nana’s heavy gun, filled with bullets; she had checked as Nana had taught her.

  She hastily spread the sheet on the sidewalk next to Nana. Taking a deep breath, she knelt and shoved her hands beneath Nana’s shoulder and bony hip and pushed. Nana rolled on to the sheet, twice, there, now she was well on and Ella took the edge of the sheet, pulled it over her face, and felt better. Pushing with all her might, she rolled the woman up in the sheet like an egg roll, tucking the ends in.

  Now for the hard part. Nana was not tall; in fact, she was no taller than Ella and often complained of having shrunk.

  Ella tipped the wagon on its side and pulled it next to Nana. Now what? She set the wagon back up. She could do it. She had lifted her onto the chairs, the table, hadn’t she? But she was a lot more tired now.

  She heard shuffling footsteps behind her and whirled.

  A shape of rags was making its way toward her.

  The shape had a greasy silk scarf folded like a triangle and tied beneath the chin; probably a woman. She looked at Ella, the wagon, and the sheeted shape. Squatting, she shoved her arms beneath the body and lifted it into the wagon. Ella noticed that she had very large feet in dark untied boots. She stammered, “Thank you.”

  The . . . person said, “S’all right,” and shuffled along.


  Nana’s torso and thighs took up the wagon; her legs stuck out stiffly behind and her head was just a bump. Ella picked up the handle and paused.

  She looked out across the park, her only play yard for so long, and then only rarely. She remembered little before Nana: a beautiful face framed by smooth, sweet-smelling, pitch-black hair which swung forward and tickled Ella’s face; an older brother. Ella would always remember him, his baggy sweater hanging from wide shoulders; she never told these things to Nana, nor did she tell her about the special school she attended, and though she knew that her whole family had died, she no longer believed the story Nana told her, that they had been shot all of them by a thin white man for no reason at all as they left a restaurant in Georgetown while Nana watched from inside, then rushed out and grabbed her, then jumped into a taxi, when Ella was about four or five. She had no memory of such a thing, and she remembered things before.

  She knew who she was. She had been there. At the train crash. And now, she had seen the newspaper article.

  TERRORIST’S CHILD SAVED BY DECORATED ADMIRAL

  She took another deep breath of sharp air. The park benches across the street were filled with dark lumpy shapes. She and Nana planted tulips there every fall, which they got from the cold basement of a deserted nursery, and nothing delighted them so much as to see them come up every spring; they did not even mind when people picked them, for flowers are meant to be picked, Nana said. But for a precious two weeks they flamed gold and red and when the twisty old trees were darkened with rain the flowers took on deeper color and then everything was so absolutely beautiful.

  But now the blooms had come and gone. A match flared tiny across the street then went out. 14th Street stretched before her. She had a very long walk ahead of her. She picked up the wagon handle, glad that the street was level here.