Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  I should note that if you had purchased the upgraded model of the XPRS99, it included an additional twenty-eight days worth of oxygen which probably would have lasted you for a free recovery (assuming you come from a country which includes social rescue and are up-to-date on your taxes).

  If you look at the settings for the oxygen mix, you should find that you can reduce it quite a bit under the minimum recommended settings and have enough oxygen to last a further few days.

  I have contacted the American consulate regarding your situation, but the US does not have a social space program and thus I am told that you are not eligible for emergency recovery.

  I have also forwarded your details to the British Spacefarers Charity which undertakes to support rescue missions across our solar system. They have stated that if you can fly the ship to high ground and set off space flares, then they will prioritize your request for aid and hopefully instigate their recovery procedure for you within a fortnight (whatever that is).

  Under the circumstances, it probably doesn't help to know that I have upgraded your software to the latest version. Unfortunately, I can't change policy and there's nothing else I can think of to do.

  Should you return to Earth, can I recommend you upgrade your Unforeseen Circumstances Policy Plan, which does offer protection from wild animals (although supernatural entities are specifically excluded)?

  I wish you the best of luck with this and future happiness using our product.

  Sincerely,

  Mae Bernice Parsons

  Customer Services

  Regarding your Position as our Third Year Teacher, by Sylvia Spruck Wrigley

  Dear Miss Vesta,

  The board has reviewed your current contract and regretfully has come to the conclusion that you are not right for the position teaching third year students at the School for Off-World Learning for Space Station Children.

  In order to help you understand the decision, we have drawn up a summary of the instances which were reported to the board as requiring investigation.

  * Your insistence upon a Thanksgiving celebration, despite warnings that the holiday, which is not celebrated on AS3745, might draw negative reactions from parents was not in itself an issue. However, you then engaged in arguments with the children and later their parents regarding the "proper" way to draw pumpkins, turkeys, and horns of plenty. Your students have never seen any of these items and do not have the background and cultural context required to create this imagery. A more successful creative endeavor would have been to allow the children to draw their local entertainment platforms, or perhaps a view of the dome. Your choice of coloring assignments however, especially the sunny day in a grassy field with an apple tree, speak to your own nostalgia and not at all to anything our students have ever experienced.

  * Your threat to take the class to the Triple X Entertainment Platform in zone 9 to show Miss Jade Martinez, age eight, "where you'll end up if you don't do your homework" was inappropriate and may lead to legal action against the school.

  * The day trip to the planetarium seemed like an excellent idea when you first broached it with the board. However, a number of parents have taken issue with your description of AS3745 as "just a fly-speck in the greater scheme of things, meaningless, just like our lives" in the letter accompanying the permission slip.

  * Disciplinary proceedings regarding the under-floor projector fire during the field trip are still in progress. However, the children are in clear agreement that when the planetarium fire alarm sounded, you did not follow the standard fire drill procedure. Instead, they say, you hissed that "this is what happens to children who don't respect their elders" and allegedly told little Nasir in particular that he deserved to "burn in starfire" for whispering during the display of the Milky Way.

  * Having taken the decision to allow you to continue with your classwork while the situation was investigated, we were then subjected to a wave of complaints over the writing exercise you assigned. Quite frankly, the essay question "How much would you give to be back on Earth and away from this insipid rock with an utter lack of modern amenities such as a decent Thai restaurant or even a half-way palatable cappuccino, for God's sake" is not appropriate for children in the eight to nine age range. Hope, in a mining operation, is the hope that the drill doesn't break, that the tunnels don't flood, that the sonic blasts are targeted well enough. Hope is not about escape from AS3745 because AS3745 is their home and all they've ever known.

  * Finally, we feel we have to ask whether you truly believe that telling the students that children are jettisoned from the launchpad when they do not sit still and listen to their teachers was truly the best way to deal with the situation. We understand that Tapti was repeatedly jumping up and down causing you much frustration but perhaps you can see that your response bordered on the excessive?

  We hope we have made the reasons clear as to why we have decided to terminate your contract immediately.

  When you agreed to come to the colony, it was with the understanding that you would stay a minimum of ten years. Under the circumstances, we think it wise to terminate this agreement early. The board has kindly agreed to fund your transfer back to Earth by fast shuttle and the remaining nine years and eight months of your contract have been struck.

  We wish you every success in your future endeavors.

  KELLY LINK

  Kelly Link (born 1969) is an American editor and author of short stories. While some of her fiction falls more clearly within genre categories, many of her stories might be described as slipstream or magic realism: a combination of science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and realism. Among other honors, she has won a Hugo award, three Nebula awards, and a World Fantasy Award for her fiction.

  The Faery Handbag, by Kelly Link

  Hugo for Best Novelette 2005

  I used to go to thrift stores with my friends. We’d take the train into Boston, and go to The Garment District, which is this huge vintage clothing warehouse. Everything is arranged by color, and somehow that makes all of the clothes beautiful. It’s kind of like if you went through the wardrobe in the Narnia books, only instead of finding Aslan and the White Witch and horrible Eustace, you found this magic clothing world–instead of talking animals, there were feather boas and wedding dresses and bowling shoes, and paisley shirts and Doc Martens and everything hung up on racks so that first you have black dresses, all together, like the world’s largest indoor funeral, and then blue dresses–all the blues you can imagine–and then red dresses and so on. Pink-reds and orangey reds and purple-reds and exit-light reds and candy reds. Sometimes I would close my eyes and Natasha and Natalie and Jake would drag me over to a rack, and rub a dress against my hand. "Guess what color this is."

  We had this theory that you could learn how to tell, just by feeling, what color something was. For example, if you’re sitting on a lawn, you can tell what color green the grass is, with your eyes closed, depending on how silky-rubbery it feels. With clothing, stretchy velvet stuff always feels red when your eyes are closed, even if it’s not red. Natasha was always best at guessing colors, but Natasha is also best at cheating at games and not getting caught.

  One time we were looking through kid’s t-shirts and we found a Muppets t-shirt that had belonged to Natalie in third grade. We knew it belonged to her, because it still had her name inside, where her mother had written it in permanent marker, when Natalie went to summer camp. Jake bought it back for her, because he was the only one who had money that weekend. He was the only one who had a job.

  Maybe you’re wondering what a guy like Jake is doing in The Garment District with a bunch of girls. The thing about Jake is that he always has a good time, no matter what he’s doing. He likes everything, and he likes everyone, but he likes me best of all. Wherever he is now, I bet he’s having a great time and wondering when I’m going to show up. I’m always running late. But he knows that.

  We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The
life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and t-shirts and shoes and handbags involves the Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they’re bad in an interesting way, the Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

  Down in the basement at the Garment Factory they sell clothing and beat-up suitcases and teacups by the pound. You can get eight pounds worth of prom dresses–a slinky black dress, a poufy lavender dress, a swirly pink dress, a silvery, starry lame dress so fine you could pass it through a key ring– for eight dollars. I go there every week, hunting for Grandmother Zofia’s faery handbag.

  The faery handbag: It’s huge and black and kind of hairy. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.

  Fairies live inside it. I know what that sounds like, but it’s true.

  Grandmother Zofia said it was a family heirloom. She said that it was over two hundred years old. She said that when she died, I had to look after it. Be its guardian. She said that it would be my responsibility.

  I said that it didn’t look that old, and that they didn’t have handbag two hundred years ago, but that just made her cross. She said, "So then tell me, Genevieve, darling, where do you think old ladies used to put their reading glasses and their heart medicine and their knitting needles?"

  I know that no one is going to believe any of this. That’s okay. If I thought you would, then I couldn’t tell you. Promise me that you won’t believe a word. That’s what Zofia used to say to me when she told me stories. At the funeral, my mother said, half-laughing and half-crying, that her mother was the world’s best liar. I think she thought maybe Zofia wasn’t really dead. But I went up to Zofia’s coffin, and I looked her right in the eyes. They were closed. The funeral parlor had made her up with blue eyeshadow, and blue eyeliner. She looked like she was going to be a news anchor on Fox television, instead of dead. It was creepy and it made me even sadder than I already was. But I didn’t let that distract me.

  "Okay, Zofia," I whispered. "I know you’re dead, but this is important. You know exactly how important this is. Where’s the handbag? What did you do with it? How do I find it? What am I supposed to do now?"

  Of course she didn’t say a word. She just lay there, this little smile on her face, as if she thought the whole thing–death, blue eyeshadow, Jake, the handbag, faeries, Scrabble, Baldeziwurlekistan, all of it–was a joke. She always did have a weird sense of humor. That’s why she and Jake got along so well.

  I grew up in a house next door to the house where my mother lived when she was a little girl. Her mother, Zofia Swink, my grandmother, babysat me while my mother and father were at work.

  Zofia never looked like a grandmother. She had long black hair which she wore up in little, braided, spiky towers and plaits. She had large blue eyes. She was taller than my father. She looked like a spy or ballerina or a lady pirate or a rock star. She acted like one too. For example, she never drove anywhere. She rode a bike. It drove my mother crazy. "Why can’t you act your age?" she’d say, and Zofia would just laugh.

  Zofia and I played Scrabble all the time. Zofia always won, even though her English wasn’t all that great, because we’d decided that she was allowed to use Baldeziwurleki vocabulary. Baldeziwurlekistan is where Zofia was born, over two hundred years ago. That’s what Zofia said. (My grandmother claimed to be over two hundred years old. Or maybe even older. Sometimes she claimed that she’d even met Ghenghis Khan. He was much shorter than her. I probably don’t have time to tell that story.) Baldeziwurlekistan is also an incredibly valuable word in Scrabble points, even though it doesn’t exactly fit on the board. Zofia put it down the first time we played. I was feeling pretty good because I’d gotten forty-one points for "zippery" on my turn.

  Zofia kept rearranging her letters on her tray. Then she looked over at me, as if daring me to stop her, and put down "eziwurlekistan", after "bald." She used "delicious," "zippery," "wishes," "kismet", and "needle," and made "to" into "toe". "Baldeziwurlekistan" went all the way across the board and then trailed off down the righthand side.

  I started laughing.

  "I used up all my letters," Zofia said. She licked her pencil and started adding up points.

  "That’s not a word," I said. "Baldeziwurlekistan is not a word. Besides, you can’t do that. You can’t put an eighteen letter word on a board that’s fifteen squares across."

  "Why not? It’s a country," Zofia said. "It’s where I was born, little darling."

  "Challenge," I said. I went and got the dictionary and looked it up. "There’s no such place."

  "Of course there isn’t nowadays," Zofia said. "It wasn’t a very big place, even when it was a place. But you’ve heard of Samarkand, and Uzbekistan and the Silk Road and Ghenghis Khan. Haven’t I told you about meeting Ghenghis Khan?"

  I looked up Samarkand. "Okay," I said. "Samarkand is a real place. A real word. But Baldeziwurlekistan isn’t."

  "They call it something else now," Zofia said. "But I think it’s important to remember where we come from. I think it’s only fair that I get to use Baldeziwurleki words. Your English is so much better than me. Promise me something, mouthful of dumpling, a small, small thing. You’ll remember its real name. Baldeziwurlekistan. Now when I add it up, I get three hundred and sixty-eight points. Could that be right?"

  If you called the faery handbag by its right name, it would be something like "orzipanikanikcz," which means the "bag of skin where the world lives," only Zofia never spelled that word the same way twice. She said you had to spell it a little differently each time. You never wanted to spell it exactly the right way, because that would be dangerous.

  I called it the faery handbag because I put "faery" down on the Scrabble board once. Zofia said that you spelled it with an "i," not an "e". She looked it up in the dictionary, and lost a turn.

  Zofia said that in Baldeziwurlekistan they used a board and tiles for divination, prognostication, and sometimes even just for fun. She said it was a little like playing Scrabble. That’s probably why she turned out to be so good at Scrabble. The Baldeziwurlekistanians used their tiles and board to communicate with the people who lived under the hill. The people who lived under the hill knew the future. The Baldeziwurlekistanians gave them fermented milk and honey, and the young women of the village used to go and lie out on the hill and sleep under the stars. Apparently the people under the hill were pretty cute. The important thing was that you never went down into the hill and spent the night there, no matter how cute the guy from under the hill was. If you did, even if you only spent a single night under the hill, when you came out again a hundred years might have passed. "Remember that," Zofia said to me. "It doesn’t matter how cute a guy is. If he wants you to come back to his place, it isn’t a good idea. It’s okay to fool around, but don’t spend the night."

  Every once in a while, a woman from under the hill would marry a man from the village, even though it never ended well. The problem was that the women under the hill were terrible cooks. They couldn’t get used to the way time worked in the village, which meant that supper always got burnt, or else it wasn’t cooked long enough. But they couldn’t stand to be criticized. It hurt their feelings. If their village husband complained, or even if he looked like he wanted to complain, that was it. The woman from under the hill went back to her home, and even if her husband went and begged and pleaded and apologized, it might be three years or thirty years or a few generations before she came back out.

  Even the best, happiest marriages between the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill fe
ll apart when the children got old enough to complain about dinner. But everyone in the village had some hill blood in them.

  "It’s in you," Zofia said, and kissed me on the nose. "Passed down from my grandmother and her mother. It’s why we’re so beautiful."

  When Zofia was nineteen, the shaman-priestess in her village threw the tiles and discovered that something bad was going to happen. A raiding party was coming. There was no point in fighting them. They would burn down everyone’s houses and take the young men and women for slaves. And it was even worse than that. There was going to be an earthquake as well, which was bad news because usually, when raiders showed up, the village went down under the hill for a night and when they came out again the raiders would have been gone for months or decades or even a hundred years. But this earthquake was going to split the hill right open.

  The people under the hill were in trouble. Their home would be destroyed, and they would be doomed to roam the face of the earth, weeping and lamenting their fate until the sun blew out and the sky cracked and the seas boiled and the people dried up and turned to dust and blew away. So the shaman-priestess went and divined some more, and the people under the hill told her to kill a black dog and skin it and use the skin to make a purse big enough to hold a chicken, an egg, and a cooking pot. So she did, and then the people under the hill made the inside of the purse big enough to hold all of the village and all of the people under the hill and mountains and forests and seas and rivers and lakes and orchards and a sky and stars and spirits and fabulous monsters and sirens and dragons and dryads and mermaids and beasties and all the little gods that the Baldeziwurlekistanians and the people under the hill worshipped.

  "Your purse is made out of dog skin?" I said. "That’s disgusting!"