Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  From his hiding place, Tangmoo watched as the generally respected Puu Yaybaan and the monks Sûa and Mongkut appeared. The threesome stopped beside the wooden construction of the river goddess, not two feet from where Tangmoo was concealed. He was afraid to breathe. The men were engrossed in a heated argument, of which only snippets reached Tangmoo’s ears: “. . . mustn’t raise suspicion . . .” and “. . . didn’t dive myself silly for nothing, dammit . . .” and “. . . six wishes granted, that’s more than . . .” and “Fine! But it’s going to come out of your share . . .”

  Is the twig to blame for the fact that it chose to snap at that precise moment and play such a pivotal role in the destruction and creation of so many lives in northern Thailand? Be that as it may, it happened, and the echo reverberated in Tangmoo’s ringing ears.

  “What was that!” the Puu Yaybaan cried.

  “Here!” Sûa said, triumphant. Two strong hands, quick as snakes, darted into the bushes and grabbed Tangmoo by the scruff of his neck, dragging him out. “An eavesdropper! What’re you doing here, you little fraud?”

  “I . . . nothing,” Tangmoo stammered. “I was just . . . thinking.”

  “In the bushes?” the Puu Yaybaan said dubiously.

  Mongkut glanced around nervously. “How long has he been here?”

  “He heard everything,” the village chief hissed.

  “I . . . no, really, I have no idea what you were talking about,” Tangmoo said. He tried to free his arm. “I think I should go back to the temple square now, or my mom will . . .”

  “He’s going to tell them everything,” Sûa said, tightening his hold on the boy’s arm. “We need to do something.”

  “No, I truly don’t know what you . . .”

  “Liar! Traitor!” Sûa fumed suddenly, spraying Tangmoo’s face with foul strings of saliva.

  “We can’t give him a chance to ruin everything,” the Puu Yaybaan decided in a whisper. Even more than Sûa’s uncontrolled outburst, this was a signal for Tangmoo to yank himself free with a rip and a twist, and to start running like mad.

  “Hey!” Sûa shouted.

  “After him!” Mongkut yelled.

  “Take care of this,” the Puu Yaybaan barked at Sûa. “Am I making myself clear? Mongkut and I will begin the ceremony, before people start wondering what’s keeping us.”

  Fumbling blind, Tangmoo ran through the darkness. Sûa ran after him. They sped across the winding path away from the temple, through the woods, across the thickets. Sûa was right behind him, growling like a feral cat, while not four hundred yards away from them in the temple square all the wish balloons had been lit and were starting to fill up with hot air. Loud cheers rose up as the wooden Phra Mae Khongkha was rolled out into the square, and no one heard Sûa’s insane roars: “GET BACK HERE, YOU MISERABLE LIAR! HAVEN’T YOU DONE ENOUGH?”

  Finally, the moonlit path opened out. Feet splashed through water. Dismayed, Tangmoo realized he had reached the river. He turned to his assailant at the same time that his little sister Noi turned around on the podium outside the temple. She had been chosen to play the role of Neng Tanapong this year, beaming proudly in her beautiful costume. Undoubtedly Noi was thinking of her big brother, somewhere out there in the frenzied crowd.

  “Now I’ve got you.” Sûa grinned, wading into the shallow riverbed.

  “Listen,” Tangmoo wept, stumbling backward, up to his thighs in the water now. “I have no idea what you were talking about. How could I talk about something I don’t know?”

  “Little boy,” the tiger said, “it doesn’t matter what you know.”

  Snarling, he threw himself at Tangmoo, his saffron robes billowing on the water like a cloud of blood: no, no, no, no, the gigantic wooden arm of the river goddess descended on little Noi and she looked up with a gasp, the crowd cheered with so much excitement and so little restraint that they seemed to be going mad; yes, yes, yes, yes, the river foamed over Tangmoo, flashes lit up the night, fireworks crackled, spattered, whirled, feet kicked desperately, dislodging starfish from the riverbed, smothered cries rose in bubbles to the surface, popping soundlessly; help, help, help, help, little Neng Tanapong drowned in satin fabric as thousands of khom loi all rose up simultaneously, the crowd fell to their knees, looking up in tears toward the fiery miracle, wishes filled the night, the stone phallus shrank in shame, and Tangmoo drowned in the river.

  But not without a witness.

  Because from the shadows by the riverbank one shade extricated itself, bigger than all the others. This was, of course, Phra Mae Khongkha who, after bestowing life on the river a long time ago, had stopped for a breather in the riverbed. And so it happened that Sûa the monk, dripping wet and flushed with exertion, glanced over his shoulder and saw his fondest wish fulfilled, even though he did not believe what he was seeing. His body was found downstream the next day, but not his ripped-off hands. They were never found.

  And Tangmoo?

  I’m sure that if you had looked closely, you could have seen a tiny speck of light rise from the river. It fluttered up into the night sky, hastily climbing past a swarm of surprised purple swamp hens, and then joined the khom loi. That’s where the little light found peace. In Tangmoo’s dead eyes on the bottom of the river you could see a starry sky full of wishes reflected. Around him whirled running tendrils of ink, and he read them all.

  Next day around noon there was a crack when the dead branch on the teng-rang tree sagged, but there was no one to prop it back up. Two days later it finally snapped off and destroyed besides the house also the part of Tangmoo’s father’s brain that was responsible for redirecting grief. From then on Gaew, who had been inconsolable after the death of his son, devoted his deliriously happy life to his remaining children, aided by his wife who admitted to herself sadly: Thinking that life is good is better than not living at all.

  The collapse of the damnable branch had the added consequence that now, every morning, a particularly bothersome ray of sunlight tormented the eye of the philosophical and always death-wishing irrigator Daeng, causing uncontrollable screaming fits and severe sleep deprivation. It was not long, therefore, before Daeng nodded off behind the wheel while driving along the main road. He rammed a truck full of pigs on their way to the slaughterhouse, rolled fourteen times, and found new joy in life when he realized he had survived the crash without a scratch. Contrary to the pigs. So lugubrious was the scene of the accident—chunks of bloody pork all over the place—that it made the news broadcasts all over Southeast Asia. Even in Singapore, where Om had been working at a Thai restaurant for six years and sending a monthly email to his mourning grandmother Isra, who had no email address. Om then wrote her a letter, saying: I’m doing fine, Grandmother. I have a PhD in computer and I’m making lots of money now. Here, have some—and added his tips to the envelope. When Isra found the letter in her mailbox a week later, she died of happiness.

  Wishes, wishes, wishes everywhere. The well-mannered crab huntress Kulap found some scrap metal from Daeng’s wrecked truck in the rice field and used it to forge a gong. When she sounded it one night, she touched such a probing frequency that every man in Doi Saket was enchanted and lured toward her little house. As soon as the well-bellied weed exterminator Uan saw her, he fell head over heels in love. Kulap, not a bad sort, gave him a cursory embrace, and at least the idea of love.

  Wishes, like pearls on a string of cause and effect. Kulap’s gong kept chiming across the rice fields for nights on end, finally resonating in the blood supply to Somchai’s husband’s failing manhood and dislodging something in the veins. He immediately ravaged her with all the lust that had been denied him all these years, and Somchai was engulfed in waves of coital energy that were tangible for miles around—even as far as Chiang Mai, where legs were spread, thighs were kneaded, and orgasms were shrieked out. All over northern Thailand wishes came true. Bonds of love were forged. Children were being born. Kemkhaeng broke his leg.

  And maybe this was all coincidence, like so much in l
ife.

  But let me tell you that, somewhere, a tiny little light had found its swarm. It let itself drift along on the winds toward the west. All the while, it wished and wished and wished. And so, wishing, the light and its wishes flew toward the edge of the universe and beyond.

  [1]Uan means “hugely fat” in Thai—not necessarily an insult

  [2]“Turtle”

  [3]“Real woman”

  [4]“Red”

  [5]“Wild goat”

  [6]“Beanpole”

  [7]The Thai custom of addressing one another by nicknames is meant to remember oneself better and to fool the spirits into forgetting people’s real names. As do the Thai themselves, for that matter. Irrespective of how unflattering the nickname may be, it is freely used in everyday life and no longer necessarily has a traditional origin. The wayward harvester driver Sungkaew, for instance, named his daughter Loli, after Marlboro Lights, and the unemployed mushroom picker Pakpao named her son Ham, after David Beckham. (Until his classmates discovered that in the mountain dialect “Ham” means “sack full of testicles,” causing his well-meaning mother, unable to resist his ceaseless badgering, to rename him Porn.)

  [8]“Tiger”

  [9]“Watermelon”

  [10]Wish lanterns made of rice paper with a burning firelighter underneath

  [11]About 650 dollars

  [12]“Mighty warrior;” the Abbot is the head monk of the temple

  [13]Small lizards intelligent enough to articulate their own name

  The Boy Who Cast No Shadow

  “The Boy Who Cast No Shadow” won the prestigious Paul Harland Award for best Dutch story of the Fantastic in 2010. Mr. Olde Heuvelt tells us he wrote it in a four-day rush in between two chapters of a novel which was giving him uncontrollable screaming fits at the time. “To me,” he adds, “it’s a story about being different and coming to terms with the fact that that ain’t such a bad thing. With this story I humbly paid homage to Joe Hill’s ‘Pop Art’, which I think is the best short story of the 21st Century.”

  Born in 1983, Mr. Olde Heuvelt is the much praised Dutch author of four novels and many stories of the fantastic. His work contains elements of magic-realism, fantasy, and humour, and he is well-known in Holland for evoking strong emotional responses in readers either laughter, crying, or terrible outbursts of violence. BBC Radio called Thomas (they couldn’t pronounce his last name) “One of Europe’s foremost talents in fantastic literature.” His latest novel, Sarah Hearts, is currently being translated into English.

  MY NAME IS LOOK. You’ve probably heard about me in the papers or on TV. I’m the boy without a shadow. You can shine spotlights at me all you like, but it won’t do you good. Physicists say I’m an evolutionary miracle. The Americans said I was a secret weapon, by the Russians that is, because they figured Al-Qaeda would be too dumb.

  Christians say I’m divine. Mom calls me an angel, but of the earthly variety. But I’m not. I’m just Look. I wish I knew what that meant.

  It’s something to do with my genes, they say, but they don’t know what. Molecular structures and the effects of light, blah-blah-blah. I don’t give a shit, ’cause they can’t fix it anyway. You won’t find shadow under my chin, armpits or ribs, no matter how you illuminate me. They say it makes me look two-dimensional. I don’t know what I look like because I have no reflection. My left hip bears a scar in the shape of a question mark. I got it when the midwife dropped me as she held me up in front of the mirror. Mom told me that only a floating umbilical cord was visible and that the midwife screamed and fled the room. The photos of the delivery showed a lot of aaaw and coochie-coochie but no baby. The only images ever captured of me are Mom’s sonograms. They use sound, not light.

  ‘You should be proud of your genes,’ Mom and Dad always say. They’re the founders of the Progressive Parish, a local political party that worships being different. Get-together: ‘We just adopted a little Filipino.’ ‘No kidding! Our son is gay.’ ‘Really? Well, ours has no shadow.’ Three-nil, nobody beats that. Mom does yoga and is Zen, and Dad would rather cook for the homeless than for us. Like a lot of bleeding hearts, their charity ends at home.

  Until I was seven, they managed to keep me under wraps. But you don’t have to be Einstein to figure it was bound to come out. One day two men in dark sunglasses snatched me from the class-room, bundled me into an armoured car and stuck a needle into my arm. When I woke up I found myself at an army base in the United States, where a team of scientists and agents spent four months examining me. The first three weeks I claimed I was from Mars and that my goal was complete world domination, then they got extremely rude and started threatening me. I raged when I woke up one morning to find that they had sliced a piece of skin from my butt to grow a culture. I told them to go fuck themselves, but that same week I was told I was of no use to them and got reunited with my parents. To compensate for our inconvenience we were offered a feature in National Geographic. First my parents flipped and considered legal action, but when they discovered that the men who had kidnapped me were in fact above the law and that the following media hype was a goldmine for the Progressive Parish’s coffers they soon came round.

  And me? I became a celebrity, thanks a bunch. On Oprah they wouldn’t let me wear make-up ‘cause they figured a floating, painted mask with no eyes or mouth would look too freaky on TV. Practical upshot: a completely invisible boy, which meant that everybody who wasn’t actually in the studio just saw clothes moving and me picking up objects and standing behind an infrared machine to prove my existence. When Oprah asked how the scientists had treated me I responded: ‘I think the government has no right to experiment with my ass.’ That cost them three million in hush money, and still the accusations of sexual abuse came pouring in. Suckers.

  One-all, you’d think.Not by a long shot. In the years that followed, our front yard was overrun by camera crews eager to catch a glimpse of me. Which is technically impossible. Twelve circuses and twenty-three freak shows including Ripley’s offered astronomic amounts to exhibit me. I’ve been called a Saint 268 times and have 29,000,000 hits on Google, as many as Brad Pitt. Cool, Mom and Dad, being different. Until it’s you who’s different. Everybody knows who I am. Everybody, except me.

  Splinter once said your dreams make you who you are. But I don’t dream. Loads of people say this, but I really don’t dream. To tell the truth, I don’t even know what dreams are. The countless EEGs that I’ve had suggest that my brain shows absolutely zilch activity during REM sleep. They never found a link with my condition, but duh. I suppose that’s why I have no friends, no feelings and no imagination. I lack a goal. I lack depth. Like I care.

  I guess my only wish is to find my reflection. If I have no idea what my face looks like, how will I ever know who I am? And you know how saints and celebrities go. They get pinned on a cross, and while they watch them die people piss on their shadows.

  The arrival of Splinter Rozenberg changed everything.

  I was fourteen by then and living a relatively quiet life. The hype had died down, as hypes do. We had moved a couple of times within our shit-hole town, and in exchange for a statement that I had not been abused during my stay in the US, two men in dark sunglasses were stationed in front of our house for a year, removing pilgrims and other freaks from our front yard.

  Obviously all this had an effect on my reputation in school. I’ve got no friends, and because I’m tall I have a lot of nerve where others don’t. They avoid me, which is exactly how I like it. Sometimes I beat someone up, not because I like it, but I’m helping an image along here. And come on, it’s not all that obvious, unless I’m in front of a mirror. I wear long sleeves. Only my face is a dead give-away. With the sun on my right, I look luminous on the left. Mom tried to hide the effect with make-up, but then I look like a drag-queen, so I don’t think so.

  Even Jord Hendriks lets me off the hook, confining to trash talk. On a good day I’m ‘See-Thru’. On a bad day, it’s ‘Zero’ or just ‘Freak’. He
says without a reflection I don’t actually exist, except that my fuck-face hasn’t figured it out yet.

  He exaggerates, if you ask me. If I’m supposed to believe the stories I’m no oil painting, but it’s not as bad as all that. Lots of artists, including my grandpa, have made impressions of what I look like. None of the drawings really look alike, and none of them really suit me. The charcoal drawing on the cover of People I can’t take seriously for starters, because it creates the illusion of shadow. Some show a boy with a broad, roughly hewn face. Mom says Grandpa’s is the best likeness. But Grandpa also did a portrait of Mom that makes her look like a man instead of a woman—so much for Mom’s opinion.

  Too bad that Jord Hendriks is such an incredible dick. The other kids are afraid of him. I think he’s hot. I mean, just look at that body in the locker room before P.E., holy fuck!

  Of course that’s about the last thing you’d say to him, if you know what’s good for you. One disorder is more than enough, trust me. Mom and Dad would love it, and that’s exactly why I won’t tell them. They’d drag me to lunatic parades and conferences on tolerance by the Progressive Parish, and then the whole media circus would start all over again, so no. The Internet is no good either. It’s easy to click Yes, I am 18 or over, but chat-rooms kick me ‘cause I’m supposedly too scared to show myself on webcam.

  Oh, well. The thought of Jord Hendriks putting his mouth to better use and my right hand offer plenty of release for a healthy boy like me, exclamation mark smiley face.

  Splinter was new in class, so I was old news. Thanks in part to his mom, Mrs. Rozenberg, who had made the unforgivable mistake of accompanying him to school the first day to explain all about his condition. I remember them standing there, side by side, Mrs. Rozenberg like she was lecturing some rugrats and Splinter staring glassy-eyed into the room. Splinter always stared at things glassy-eyed. That’s because his eyes were made of glass. As was the rest of his body. It’s one of those funny little accidents you get in certain gene pools. Polished, he was a perfect mirror. He had some flexibility and was able to move his limbs, but slo-mo, like Neil Armstrong on the moon. Facial expressions were a different story.