Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Millie leaned over to kiss George's stubbled cheek. She whispered in his ear. "Maybe you did it, old man. Maybe you gave them a chance."

  #

  Jane spent the drive home updating her mother on her own work and the escapades of various children and grandchildren. Millie lost track, but appreciated the diversion. When they got to the house, her daughter headed straight for the kitchen.

  "Tea?" Jane was already picking up the kettle.

  "Tea would be wonderful," Millie agreed, before excusing herself to the bedroom.

  She crossed the room in the dark and opened the French doors, letting the winter air inside. She had never tired of this view, not in any season. Tonight, the light of the full moon reflected off the snow and disappeared in Raymond's footprints. The naked branches of the sycamore were long white fingers outlined in light; they performed benedictions over the empty platforms of the tree house.

  Millie stepped through the doorway and onto the patio. The drifts were nearly up to her knees. She took two more steps, toward the tree. The cold made her eyes water.

  She wished she could go back to that night in 1951, ask George what he had done and how she might share his burden. She was too late for so much. She allowed herself to grieve it all for a moment: her husband, their life together, the things they had shared and the things they had held back. It surrounded her like the cold, filling up the space expelled by her breath, until she fixed her eyes again on the treehouse. Everything missing from the body in the hospital was still here. The Georgeness.

  "Oh," she whispered, as the day hit her.

  "I won't leave," she said to the tree. Raymond would help her, maybe, or she would hire someone who would. The lights continued to dance after she had made her way back inside. They danced behind her eyelids when she closed her eyes.

  Millie remembered the dream house that George used to promise her, back when this was a passing-through place, not their home. She was suddenly glad he had never gotten the chance to build it, that he had instead devoted himself to countless iterations of one mad project. Even the best plans get revised.

  ***

  In the morning, there were pamphlets for a retirement village on the kitchen table.

  Jane looked apologetic. "Charlie says we should talk about your options."

  "I know my options," Millie said, setting a mug down on one of the smiling silver-haired faces.

  She refused to let Jane help with the briefcase she carried with her to the hospital. When they got to George's room, she sent Charlie and Jane to get breakfast.

  "I'd like some time with my husband," she said.

  Then they were alone again, alone except for the noisy machines by the bedside and the ticking clock and the television and the nurses' station outside the door. None of that was hard to tune out.

  "We're going to draw again, old man."

  She opened the briefcase and pulled out a drawing board, a piece of paper, and a handful of pencils. She managed to angle a chair so that she was leaning half on the bed. George's hand closed around the pencil when she placed it against his palm. All the phantom energy of two days previous was gone. Her movement now led his, both of her hands clasped around his left.

  He was the draftsman, but she knew plants. They started with the roots. She guided him through the shape of the tree, through the shape of his penance. Through every branch they both knew by heart, through every platform she had seen from her vantage point in the garden. The firehouse pole, the puppet theater, the Rapunzel tower. The crow's nest, which had kept his secret. Finally, around the treehouse, they started on her plans for the spring's gardens. All that mattered was his hand pressed in hers: long enough to feel like always, long enough to feel like everything trapped had been set free.

  ***

  Copyright © 2013 Sarah Pinsker

  Twenty Ways the Desert Could Kill You, by Sarah Pinske

  1. A poisonous snake could bite you, and you could die.

  2. You could prick your finger on a previously undiscovered poisonous cactus.

  3. The cactus isn't poisonous, and neither is the snake, but the snake's venom is a powerful anti-coagulant. You could bleed to death from the place you were bitten and/or pricked.

  My mother says that English gardens don't belong in New Mexico. Whenever we drive into town for supplies she throws dirty looks at all the houses with grass and flowers and automatic sprinklers. She spends a lot of time working on her rock gardens and moisture collection systems. "Cacti are just as beautiful as lawns," she tells me each time we buy another one. The English gardens remind me of home, even though home is Baltimore, not England. The sun is more intense here. Mom says it's a dry heat, but it just feels hot to me.

  4. You could wander into a deserted town, but it turns out to be a nuclear testing facility. I saw that one in a movie.

  5. There is an entrance to an old mine shaft hidden under the sand, and you could fall through the hole and break your neck and die.

  6. You could survive the fall into the mineshaft, but then the ghost of a forty-niner kills you with a pickax.

  We left Baltimore five weeks ago. Mom came home early from her job at the space telescope. She said, "Pack your summer clothes and your five favorite things, Allie. We're leaving on an adventure." If I had known her idea of an adventure I might have packed better. I would have said goodbye to my friends.

  7. You could see a lake, but it is only a mirage. You drink it, thinking the sand is water, and you choke on the sand and die.

  To be fair, she didn't bring more than five things either. She brought: a picture of the three of us when Dad was still alive; a book called Living Off the Grid; her biggest home telescope; and probably a couple of things I haven't seen, since that's only three. I assume she's not counting stuff like sheets and pots and pans and her gardening hat.

  I brought: my favorite stuffed animal, Charley the Sea Lion; my photo album; my eReader and my iPod (the only electronic things Mom let me take) and a solar charger for both, which didn't count as a separate thing; and the cat, Gandalf the Gray.

  We fought about Gandy. She said we should just ask the neighbors to watch him while we were gone. I said favorites are favorites, and she had already vetoed my laptop and my DS. She said cats aren't things. I said no, but cat carriers are, and she would feel guilty if I took an empty cat carrier as one of my favorite things. I am so glad I fought for Gandy, now that I know where we were headed. I don't know why I thought to bring him when I didn't know we'd be gone for a long time. Maybe that's what happens when you have to narrow your life down to five favorite things. Does it get easier or harder when you're as old as Mom? She's lived long enough to find more favorite things, but also had more time to figure out which ones are more important than others. I wonder if I'm one of her five things.

  If I had known how long we would be gone, I would have pushed her on a couple of other things. Instead of just bringing the electronic books, I would have argued that a home library is a single thing. I think she would have gone for that. This notebook was a secret sixth thing, smuggled in my clothing. If Mom noticed, she didn't say anything.

  8. One word: Roswell. This applies if you are an alien, but possibly also if you saw an alien land.

  9. The canyon you are walking in could be overtaken by a flash flood, and you drown.

  10. You could step on a fire ant hill, and they swarm your legs and your body and your arms, and you die.

  If I had siblings maybe this wouldn't be so difficult. Maybe I wouldn't mind that there are no other kids around, or that I'm not allowed off our property on my own. We have to drive everywhere, which means we never get to go anywhere I want. Mom says gas is too expensive to waste on frivolous trips. "This whole move was a frivolous trip," I told her last week. She made me go to my room, but my room is right next to hers, so I heard her crying a little while later.

  If I had siblings maybe I wouldn't mind that everything outside the front door burns, bites, stabs, or stings. We would play b
oard games. We could pool our allowances to buy a television even though Mom doesn't want us to have one. We could buy a tablet or a game console or a computer with satellite Internet access.

  "What's wrong with reading?" Mom would ask us, just like she asks me now.

  "Nothing," my sassy older sister would say. "We love reading. But we could use some new books. Ones we haven't read a thousand times. We just want a little something to break up the evening. You know, since we don't have any other friends here."

  I don't know who would win the argument. Some days I imagine it going one way, some days the other. If I had an older sister she would take some of the pressure off me, so I wouldn't feel like such a jerk every time I ask for something. I don't think I'm being unreasonable. I really don't.

  11. You could wander for years, eating only cactus and the occasional jackrabbit. The rabbit tends to be old and gamey since you can only catch the slow ones. You starve in increments, but you die.

  12. You could die of exposure; your fair skin is not cut out for the unrelenting, gradual poison of the sun.

  13. You could find a real oasis and you are so thirsty you just keep drinking water. You drink too much, like that woman who tried to win a radio contest for a game console, and then you die. That may be irony, to die of drinking too much water in the desert.

  14. You could find a shack that turns out to belong to a deranged serial killer who had purposefully removed himself from society. Now that you are there, he can't help himself.

  I get more of what's going on than she thinks. This isn't just an adventure. That might have worked on six-year-old me, but it doesn't work now that I'm eleven. You don't leave in the middle of the night and just start driving west. You don't just get rid of the phone, the TV, the radio, the computer. You don't insist that your kid go everywhere with you, even on the tiniest errands, when she is perfectly capable of staying home alone. What I don't know is whether we are running to something or away from something. I don't know how much I want to know. I ask if I'm going to go to school here, and she says, "We'll see."

  15. You could accidentally wander onto the property of a trigger-happy rancher, and he shoots you, and you die.

  I opened her book on Living Off the Grid, so now I know what that means. It explains some of what she's trying to do here, and why we're fixing up this house in the middle of nowhere. It talks about all the things she's installing, like the solar panels and the moisture collection systems. We still have electricity, but maybe she's anticipating a time when we won't. She bought three goats. That's my favorite part of any of this so far. She let me name them, so I picked Hermione for the cute little one and Mrs. Whatsis for the older one. The boy goat is Tumnus, for now, but I have a feeling he's a balrog, not a faun. I checked that we weren't going to kill and eat them before I gave them names.

  Living off the grid apparently involves growing your own food too. I'm not sure how New Mexico is a better place to do that than Baltimore. It would make more sense to me to be somewhere that has rain. If we have to grow our own food for real, she's going to have to lock up the goats. Nothing is safe from them.

  16. Your horse could spook and throw you off, and you hit your head on a rock, and he stands there waiting for you to get up, but you die.

  At night, sometimes we lie on our backs on the back deck. Mom holds my hand and tells me the names of constellations. There's one bright star that keeps getting bigger, which isn't a star-like thing to do. I pretend not to notice it, and she never points at that area of the sky. Her telescope is set up in that direction.

  17. Your campfire could jump to your sleeping bag while you sleep. Sleeping bags are highly flammable.

  I have a separate list for everything that the bright star might be: a meteor, a satellite, a shuttle, a UFO, a superhero, a God. That list crosses this one. If you're in New Mexico when any of those things hit you, I guess that's another thing that could kill you. Those aren't location specific. I'm leaving the lists separate for now.

  I have another list of reasons why we moved here:

  i) Mom knows that the speeding thing is going to hit Baltimore and moved us to where it is safer.

  ii) Mom knows the speeding thing is going to hit New Mexico, and she has a death wish.

  iii) Mom knows the speeding thing is a spaceship full of friendly aliens and she wants to be here to greet them.

  iv) Mom knows there is no place that will be safe, but she has always wanted to live in the desert so she came here to do that before it wouldn't be possible anymore.

  Any of those would explain the crying, even (iii), though those would have to be tears of joy. I may make another list of clues for each of those options. I could just ask, but I'm afraid she might answer and then I'd have to stop making lists.

  18. You could be set upon by wild animals: a cougar, maybe, or coyotes. Possibly both.

  19. You could stumble to the border and get caught in a gunfight between the minutemen and the coyotes. These coyotes are actually people.

  Most of the possibilities on my list assume that the person writing the list (me) is human. There might be a whole other list of ways the desert could kill you if you were a cougar or a coyote or a cactus or an alien or a jackrabbit.

  There is precedent for all of this. I know that she moved everything once before, taking us from Boston to Baltimore after my father died. I was too young to help, and too young to have favorite things. I know that my grandmother objected to that move, but she's dead now. I've only just realized how few ties we have compared to other people. I wonder if that's on purpose?

  Really it should mean that the tie between the two of us is that much stronger. She should rely on me and confide in me. I would be much more helpful if she would just explain. Last week I finally got fed up. I said to her, "If you're afraid I'll tell something to somebody you don't need to worry, since I have no access to the outside world." I meant it to sound grown up, but as it came out it felt snarky. Still, she answered the way I had meant it.

  "Oh, honey, it's not that," she said.

  I didn't budge. "If that's not it, then you're afraid for me, like you're protecting me from something. I deserve to know."

  Her face twisted a bit, like it does when she's trying to hide that she's sad, but she just pulled me into a hug and didn't let go for a while. It was the hard-to-breathe kind of hug, but I let it go on as long as she needed. I wished I could go back to the moment before I had asked. Now she knows that I know that she's protecting me from something. I think she liked it better when she thought she had kept it from me completely. She seemed happier. What could be so bad that she'd keep it from me? I'm starting to think that one of the points on my list of reasons we moved here might actually be right. Number (v), which I added later. I wrote it in code, in case she reads my lists:

  (v) Mom knows there is no place that will be safe, but she doesn't want me to be around people when the panic starts. We can live happily in our off-the-grid house until the very last moment, without hearing the newscasters or seeing the cities go crazy.

  The bright star is about an eighth of the size of the moon now.

  I'm trying to be more understanding and patient. We made one more trip into town a few days ago, and then she said that was the last one for a while. She let me buy five new books at a garage sale on the way home. I said I would help more with the goats and the cooking. I've stopped asking questions, in the hopes that she'll stop guarding the answers so closely. It's not possible for me to forgive her entirely while we still have these giant secrets between us: hers that she knows what's going on, and mine that I think I do, too.

  20. You could die of loneliness. All the more tragic for being avoidable.

  I've picked out one cactus that I water whenever she isn't looking. I think that it is drowning, slowly.

  The End

  Join Our Team of Time Travel Professionals, by Sarah Pinsker

  The sounds of half-tuned electric guitars blasted from the doorways of Manny's and Sam A
sh, dueling across the grimy patch of 48th St known as Music Row. Magda waited until the group of time tourists she was following had turned the corner, then plunged her arm into the nearest garbage can. Her hand encountered something slimy.

  "Ugh," she said, not for the first time that day. She wished she could wear gloves, but they weren't part of her new uniform.

  "Are you complaining, Magda?" asked her supervisor, Lwazi, through her jawbone implant. "In your first hour on the job?"

  The nice thing about her cover identity was that Magda could respond freely. Manhattan in 1985 didn't have jawbone communication, but it did have plenty of bag ladies who talked to themselves. Magda was temporarily one of them.

  "No sir," she responded. "Not complaining."

  "Good. There are plenty of people who would jump at this job if you don't want it."

  Magda returned to her task. Her search of the garbage can yielded two Fauxcolate wrappers and an empty hydration pod. She wondered why they bothered bringing Fauxcolate to a time when they could buy the real thing; from what she had heard there was no comparison. She stuffed the trash into one of the bags in her shopping cart and shuffled after the tourists. A job is a job, she said to herself.

  She turned left on 7th Avenue, as the tourists had. She checked each garbage can they had passed, and kept her eyes open for future-refuse that hadn't quite made it to the cans, just as the training vids had instructed. Halfway down the next block she spotted a discarded box of MaryJane cigarettes. Had those been around in 1985? "When in doubt, take it out," the training had said. She grabbed it just in case, realizing too late that it was lying in a pile of dog feces.