Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

  —If we can afford your art, why can’t we afford mine?

  The house rustles the homemade tapestries that line its walls, drapings heavy with dust and guilt.

  Downstairs master bedroom for maximum privacy.

  The walls shout louder and louder, the house hating every resonant echo, until the only way the kids can sleep is by pressing palms deep into their ears. As if to compensate for the increase in noise, both parents have begun to fade from view. Their mother flickers in and out like TV static, as if she’s trying to switch to a different channel. Their father’s skin has become glass, behind which amber alcohol roils.

  Bird catches his father getting dressed one morning, the flab of Glass’s belly hanging translucent over his belt-buckle. He watches his father remove a fifth of Jack from its sock-drawer hideaway and down a few quick swigs. Through his father’s transparent flesh, Bird can see the liquor slide slow down Glass’s throat until it joins the tawny liquid sloshing waist-high. Tiny waves break against his bellybutton. The immediate difference is imperceptible, but as the days rush by, Bird watches the amber tide rise from bellybutton to chest to clavicle, until Glass has filled himself up nearly to the brim, his eyes shiny as bottle caps.

  Carpeted staircase with banister leads down to the lower level.

  The house wakes in the middle of the night to a boot kicking through the safety wall of the stairwell landing. It groans through every vertical beam. Glass stands on the stairs, lamplight refracted through him casting whiskey-colored cracks across the house’s interior. Needle’s splayed against the banister, eyes rimmed red with crying, her lip split bloody.

  The next morning, Glass spackles over the hole. The house, wounded, shrinks ever smaller. Does your room seem tinier than usual? Paper asks Bird one day. Bird nods, but they’ve gotten older and taller; they aren’t children anymore. The house is grateful for these excuses.

  All bedrooms have walk-in closets

  Paper folds a dollhouse. The first piece of butcher paper she cuts is massive. It creases down into an eleven-room suburban ranch home identical to her own. Then small squares for all the furnishings. She sets it up like a diorama on top of her chest-of-drawers, back in the deepest recesses of her closet where no one else goes. Its white picket fence spills off into darkness, disappearing behind her winter coats. She folds up father, mother, brother, sister, and stuffs them inside. The house notices that a streak of red mars the mother-doll’s face. Once her parents have gone to bed, Paper steals matches from the pantry and sets the folded father on fire; he crumbles to ash in her metal waste-bin.

  Within the hour, Glass slams out the front door. In his wake, a heavy silken thread lies twitching like a coral snake on the lawn, one crimson end severed and fraying. Needle moves methodically from room to room, packing Glass’s belongings into boxes. Gasping cries push past her lips, her sorrow the crackle and shush of a blown speaker, a low rasp on repeat. The house howls wind through its eaves in mourning.

  Bird seeks out Paper. Pushing open the door to her bedroom, he finds her sitting inside her closet, folding. She’s trying not to cry, the hitch in each inhale synched in time to her mother. Bird catches Paper’s hands in his to still their darting movements and flutters his wingtips across her fingers. She begins to comb through his feathers in long, even strokes and her breathing steadies long enough for her to confess her crime. Bird assures her that it couldn’t possibly have been her fault, that she had nothing to do with Glass leaving, then helps her dispose of the small pile of new-made origami fathers that litter the floor.

  Low ceiling in the living room makes for a cozy living space.

  Every piece of furniture stands halved. Of the dining table, only two legs remain, its lacquered surface leaning out over empty space. Half a filament glows dimly within the halved light bulbs inside every light fixture, each under a halved lampshade. The rug is halved, and the refrigerator is definitely halved, as suddenly there’s a lot less food in the house. Glass sends money, and so far they’ve managed to save the house, but Needle struggles to get dinner on the table.

  Bird cycles from bedroom to kitchen, twice a day stopping before the half-fridge only to slam it closed in disappointment. The house remembers when it was just a wooden frame, before the contractor had installed its drywall; it imagines Bird must feel something similar: hollowed out and vulnerable.

  Paper begins to watch her weight as if she hopes to become parchment, as transparent as her mother. Only the house counts how many times each day Paper locks herself in the bathroom and steps onto the scale. It dislikes the purple veins running so close to the surface of her skin, the curve of her lungs as they contract and expand within her ribcage, her bones visible like an abandoned building exposed to years of bad weather. If Bird notices his sister thinning, he says nothing.

  Since Glass left, Bird sleeps on the floor of Paper’s room most nights, and they lie awake talking until all hours, imagining the futures they’ll have when they finally escape. Bird jokes that together they’re a paper bird, one of his sister’s folded cranes but with the power of flight. By their powers combined, they could fly far away from home. His broad wings span the room, a comfort. The house worries that the two teens will be divided next—half a Paper, half a Bird. It vows to keep them safe as houses.

  Carpeted upstairs hallway means children can run and play in safety.

  Paper grooms her brother’s wings every day, and they grow in strength, though their pristine blackness is occasionally marred by molt. One morning, while finger-combing near his spine, she notices what the house has known for weeks: that several of his primary feathers have been cut about a third of the way down, at sharp angles.

  That night, she pulls down all thousand of the cranes that roost against her ceiling, littering her floor with their rainbow corpses. The house admires her ingenuity, the trap she’s laid to catch the wing-clipper.

  Crunch, crunch in the dark and Paper leaps up to flick the light-switch. Needle’s outline is a staticky blur, but her sewing shears, poised over one black wing, glisten in the sudden brightness.

  Bird wakes in a rage. Before his sister’s eyes, Bird’s features morph into something else, someone the house doesn’t recognize. Surely this nightmare beast can’t be its own winged son? Bird’s face twists into a black beak, his fingers curl into talons, and his feathers beat a furious whirlwind. He lunges at his mother, but she vanishes into white noise.

  Downstairs half-bath for guests.

  Their mother drifts through the hallways, visible only as a human-shaped distortion in space. Paper watches her mother pace, white-gray ants suffusing the outline of a woman. The house wonders why Needle has not yet returned to her textiles. Bins of crewel, quilting and lace clutter the craft room floor, gathering dust. The house finds this odd, as the craft room is the only space that has yet to be plagued by black holes.

  Glass’s exit left holes strewn everywhere—by the work bench in the garage, in front of the refrigerator, hovering over the couch in the den—and Needle keeps falling into them, a phenomenon that concerns the house. The teens generally avoid the holes, though they’ve accidentally created a few: Their dad has hidden bottles everywhere, and whenever they find one, it implodes into a new hole, reality warping around an empty center.

  One day, while playing find-the-bottle, Paper catches Bird drinking deep from a fifth of whiskey they’d discovered not a week earlier, one she’d thought had burst into the usual hole. She snatches the bottle from his hand and shatters it against the porcelain sink. Bird’s face begins to elongate into that horrible beak, skin shifting to barbed feathers, hands to scaled talons, as if he’s swallowed a black hole and it’s consuming him from the inside.

  From the empty silence surrounding them comes the susurrus of their mother’s presence. Then mother and son are wrestling on the bathroom floor, him a winged, clawed monster, her a disembodied hush and ten fingernails that rake deep red furrows down his biceps. Paper squeezes her eyes shut tight as fists.
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  The house knows the three of them can’t go on like this, wants to help, and does what it can, battening down the insulation to keep in warmth against oncoming winter.

  Master bathroom features two sinks and a separate shower area.

  Paper arrives home from school to find the dim outline of her mother seated on the bathroom floor, the under-sink cabinet open and a whiskey bottle next to her. Eyes unseeing, Needle’s hands clutch at empty air. A black hole shimmers unreality beneath her. Paper wants to grab her hands and pull her away from the danger, but she’s been here before: If she’s not terribly careful—the house has watched it happen too many times—she’ll be sucked in as well.

  Paper sifts through her mother’s sundry crafting bins until she finds something she thinks will work: a long skein of heavy cord in pale blue. She makes a lasso of cord and loops it over her mother’s shoulders, grips the end, and tugs. Needle tumbles free and the hole blinks out into memory.

  Her mother lies comatose, her outline shimmering, a needle held up to light and turned this way and that so its eye flickers into and out of existence. Needle stares through her daughter, and Paper feels as invisible as she’d ever wished to be. She takes her mother’s cold hand in hers. Gently she loops blue cord around Needle’s bloodless fingers. Round and round it ravels. Paper is painstaking; she threads the skein about her mother’s every limb in ever-tightening circles, tugging the cord taut against her mother’s incorporeal corpus.

  It takes all day and late into the night for Paper to wind cord, thread, yarn, and string—two full bins of material—around her mother’s body, a body shaped just like her own will be someday. Wrapped up like a spindle or a mummy, Needle can once again be seen. She meets her daughter’s eyes, pupils contracting and expanding in bewilderment.

  Needle moves around the house more freely after rejoining the land of the visible, stacking boxes of their father’s things in the garage and out of sight, returning to her crafting, even hugging Paper every so often, though Bird still won’t go near her. The house, thrilled to have Needle back, stretches happily through the long wires inside its walls, solid in the surety of their connection to the outside world. The house can appreciate ties that bind.

  Small attic for extra storage.

  Bird’s slept in the attic since his mother’s attempted pinioning. He tugs the pull-down ladder up behind him each night, just to be sure. Skin mottled with brown tufts of downy feather, face craggy with shadow, he hunches his back under the weight of the full-grown wings arcing over his head. Bird has been working, saving up for his great escape, and he’s finally made enough, just six days shy of eighteen.

  Paper’s stolen her mother’s shears; with them, she cuts Bird free of the silvery blue cord binding him to Needle. She holds out a loose twist of yellow embroidery thread, one end attached to the attic furnace. He recoils, hissing, but she pats his arm to reassure him: he’s tied only to his childhood home, not to Needle. His eyes are falcon-hooded; nevertheless, he allows her to encircle his wrist with the thread. It glimmers in sunlight, golden bright and joyful. He stands to his full height, aware that he’s taller now than their father had been. Stretching dark wings, he’s poised to swoop down from the attic window.

  The house is having none of this. It bares paned-glass teeth and snaps a sill shut on Bird’s boot heel. Bird and Paper cry out, and then she braces herself against the window-frame and yanks upward, and Bird loosens his shoelaces and dives downward, and there’s just his black boot stuck in the house’s craw as he swoops low, then speeds sky-high. Windows rove wild-eyed; doors slam open and shut, enraged. Their father’s frayed red thread is still out on the lawn, its color faded to pink. Paper stares after her brother until the black dot of him winks out against the horizon, yellow thread pulled taut as it spools out thinner and thinner.

  All through the night, the house growls and shudders like earthquake, terrified that soon it will be plunged into darkness. It’s grown too much like Needle, in her desperation and possessiveness, and too much like Glass, wanting only to be filled. The house’s fears form a yawning black hole that encompasses its plot entirely, as if the earth planned to open like a cellar door and suck the neighborhood underground like a hundred birdhouses perched atop quicksand. The house is immobile and has no means of escape, but it’s seen the family deal with enough such holes to understand their operations.

  The dog is in a state of advanced decomposition when the house coughs Lucky up from its bowels. It’s swaddled the body in insulation, but that doesn’t much contain the stench; Paper finds the corpse almost immediately. Tugging a sleeve over her nose, she rolls it into the garden with a rusted shovel and leaves it to mulch. By summertime, the remains will be skin and bones and the hydrangea blooms nearby especially lovely.

  Paper walks upstairs to stand before her mirror, turning sideways as if reveling in the acute angles she’s made of her body. Taking one hand in the other, she folds herself in half, then does it again and again and again. By the time the house realizes, long before it can formulate a plan to stop her, she’s disappeared. Her mother finds her that evening, a single sheet of translucent paper, a note explaining what she’s done. Needle and the house are left alone.

  Large manicured front lawn with mature trees. Please call Arbor Realty to schedule an appointment to view this property.

  A mess of bishop’s weed obscures the walkway. A lattice trestle covered in ivy creeps upward toward the roof’s edge. The house’s eyes are shut, mouth closed and locked up tight. Neighbors who walk past keep on moving; dogs pull their owners across to the other side of the street. The house mutters, settles into its cracked foundation. It monitors the single bright yellow thread that arcs into the distance, waiting for any movement on the line, any sign that its winged boy will soon fly home.

  About the Author

  Brooke Wonders writes fiction that thinks it’s true and memoir that thinks it’s fabulism. Despite these oxymora, her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Monkeybicycle, Daily Science Fiction, and Brevity: A Journal of Concise Nonfiction, among others. She is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. A graduate of Clarion UCSD 2011, she shares an urban shoebox with fellow writer and partner in crime James Will Brady.

  Foundation and Reality: Asimov’s Psychohistory and Its Real-World Parallels

  Mark Cole

  “Psychohistory dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of a rebound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.”

  —Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

  Robots. That’s what most people think of first when they think of Isaac Asimov—and certainly, his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics are among the best he wrote. But he also came up with another unique and equally memorable science fiction concept: psychohistory.

  Psychohistory (originally hyphenated as “psycho-history”) first appeared in the short stories Asimov would later collect in his episodic novel Foundation. Set in a distant future, the book details a vast, galactic empire which has controlled thousands of inhabited worlds for 12,000 years. The empire is on the verge of breakdown. However, very few people have realized this, primarily those working with the great mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon’s mathematical models have shown conclusively that the Empire will collapse within a few hundred years, followed by a 30,000 year dark age before civilization is rebuilt.

  Seldon’s great accomplishment was his reinvention of the discipline of psychohistory. What had been little more than a set of vague axioms became, under his leadership, a profound statistical science, capable of charting the rise and fall of civilizations—and even, Seldon argued, of guiding the course of civilization so that the 30,000 years of darkness could be reduced to a mere millennium.

 
The underlying logic of psychohistory resembles Boyle’s gas law: The molecules in a gas move in a purely random way, and yet, collectively, that random behavior become predictable. So if you get enough people together (and Asimov very carefully avoided any suggestion of just how many), you could reduce the apparently random actions of billions of human beings to a set of physical laws describing the behavior of civilizations. That number, the Seldon constant, was extremely high—high enough that it could only be found in the vastness of the Galactic Empire.

  On the surface this sounds fairly plausible, even if the degree of accuracy Seldon claimed for his work doesn’t. Yet it is far from clear that Asimov believes in his own invention. As in his stories about the Three Laws of Robotics, Foundation works because of the tension between the turn of events in the plot and whether they will lead to the next scheduled “Seldon Crisis.” Will the plan succeed, or will it fail?

  In fact, the plan does fail by the end of the second novel, although this happens only because of an event which no one could have predicted: the rise of a mutant leader with enormous mental powers.

  Whether he believed in psychohistory or not, Asimov was not alone in suggesting that a scientific approach to history would allow us to predict future trends.

  Karl Marx’s notion of historical materialism was one of the first attempts at a scientific approach to history. In his view, the motor driving all of history was the means of production. As new technologies and methods changed how people produced the things they needed, he argued, this changed all of society. This historical progression would lead inevitably through a series of necessary steps towards the ultimate goal of history: socialism.

  While many socialist thinkers have tinkered with Marx’s basic formulation, most versions start with what is called “primitive communism” (in prehistoric tribal societies), followed by ancient society, feudalism, and finally capitalism. Each one of these stages represents a different way in which people produced the goods they needed to survive—and a different way of living.