Then Phoebe stood up and yelled, “EVERYBODY STOP!”
Everybody stopped yelling. Some shining miracle. They all turned to look at Phoebe, who was holding hands with both Jon and Zadie. Even with the racket outside, this room suddenly felt eerily, almost ceremonially, quiet.
“You should be ashamed,” Phoebe said. “We’re all scared and tired and hungry, and we’re probably stuck here all night, and you’re all acting like babies. This is not a place for yelling. It’s a bookstore. It’s a place for quiet browsing and reading, and if you can’t be quiet, you’re going to have to leave. I don’t care what you think you know about each other. You can darn well be polite, because . . . because . . .” Phoebe turned to Zadie and Jon, and then gazed at her mom. “Because we’re about to start the first meeting of our book club.”
Book club? Everybody looked at each other in confusion, like they’d skipped a track.
Molly stood up and clapped her hands. “That’s right. Book-club meeting in ten minutes. Attendance is mandatory.”
* * *
The noise from outside wasn’t just louder than ever but more bifurcated. One channel of noise came from directly underneath their feet, as if some desperate struggle for control over the water reserves was happening deep under the Earth’s crust, between teams of robots or tunneling war machines, and the very notion of solid ground seemed obsolete. And then over their heads, a struggle between aircraft, or metal titans, or perhaps a sky full of whirring autonomous craft, slinging fire back and forth until the sky turned red. Trapped inside this room, with no information other than words on brittle spines, everybody found themselves inventing horrors out of every stray noise.
Molly and Phoebe huddled in the corner, trying to figure out a book that everyone in the room would be familiar enough with but that they could have a real conversation about. Molly had actually hosted a few book clubs at the store over the years, and at least a few of the people now sheltering in the reading room had attended, but she couldn’t remember what any of those clubs had read. Molly kept pushing for this one literary coming-of-age book that had made a splash around the time of the Sundering, or maybe some good old Jane Austen, but Phoebe vetoed both of those ideas.
“We need to distract them”—Phoebe jerked her thumb at the mass of people in the reading room behind them—“not bore them to death.”
In the end, the first and maybe only book selection of the Great International Book Club had to be Million in One, a fantasy adventure about a teenage boy named Norman who rescues a million souls that an evil wizard has trapped in a globe and accidentally absorbs them into his own body. So Norman has a million souls in one body, and they give him magical powers but he can also feel all of their unfinished business, their longing to be free. And Norman has to fight the wizard, who wants all those souls back, plus Norman’s. This book was supposed to be for teenagers, but Molly knew for a fact that every single adult had read it, as well, on both sides of the border.
“Well, of course the premise suffers from huge inconsistencies,” Sander complained. “It’s established early on that souls can be stored and transferred, and yet Norman can’t simply unload his extra souls into the nearest vessel.”
“They explained that in book two.” Zadie only rolled her eyes a little. “The souls are locked inside Norman. Plus the wizard would get them if he put them anywhere else.”
“What I don’t get is why his so-called teacher, Maxine, doesn’t just tell him the whole story about the Pendragon Exchange right away,” Reggie said.
“Um, excuse me. No spoilers,” Jon muttered. “Not everybody has read book five already.”
“Can we talk about the themes of the book instead of nitpicking?” Teri crossed her arms. “Like, the whole notion that Norman can contain all these multitudes but still just be Norman is fascinating to me.”
“It’s a kind of Cartesian dualism on speed,” Jay Kagwa offered.
“Well, sort of. I mean, if you read Descartes, he says—”
“The real point is that the wizard wants to control all those souls, but—”
“Can we talk about the singing ax? What even was that?”
They argued peacefully until around three in the morning, when everyone finally wore themselves out. The sky and the ground still rumbled occasionally, but either everyone had gotten used to it or the most violent shatterings were over. Molly looked around at the dozen or so people slowly falling asleep, leaning on each other, all around the room, and felt a desperate protectiveness. Not just for the people, because of course she didn’t want any harm to come to any of them, or even for this building that she’d given the better part of her adult life to sustaining, but for something more abstract and confusing. What were the chances that the First and Last Page could continue to exist much longer, especially with one foot in either country? How would they even know if tonight was just another skirmish or the beginning of a proper war, something that could carry on for months and reduce both countries to fine ash?
Phoebe left Jon and Zadie behind and came over to sit with her mother, with her mouth still twisted upward in satisfaction. Phoebe was clutching a book in one hand, and Molly didn’t recognize the gold-embossed cover at first, but then she saw the spine. This was a small hardcover of fairy tales, illustrated with watercolors, that Molly had given to her daughter for her twelfth birthday, and she’d never seen it again. She’d assumed Phoebe had glanced at it for an hour and tossed it somewhere. Phoebe leaned against her mother, half-reading and half-gazing at the pictures, the blue streaks of sky and dark swipes of castles and mountains, until she fell asleep on Molly’s shoulder. Phoebe looked younger in her sleep, and Molly looked down at her until she, too, dozed off, and the entire bookstore was at rest. Every once in a while, the roaring and convulsions of the battle woke Molly, but then at last they subsided, and all Molly heard was the slow, sustained breathing of people inside a cocoon of books.
NIBEDITA SEN
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island
from Nightmare
1. Clifton, Astrid. “The Day the Sea Ran Red.” Uncontacted Peoples of the World. Routledge Press, 1965, pp. 71–98.
“There are few tales as tragic as that of the denizens of Ratnabar Island. When a British expedition made landfall on its shores in 1891, they did so armed to the teeth, braced for the same hostile reception other indigenous peoples of the Andamans had given them. What they found, instead, was a primitive hunter-gatherer community composed almost entirely of women and children. [. . .] The savage cultural clash that followed would transmute the natives’ offer of a welcoming meal into direst offense, triggering a massacre at the hands of the repulsed British . . .”
2. Feldwin, Hortensia. Roots of Evil: A Headmistress’ Account of What Would Come to Be Known as the Churchill Dinner. Westminster Press, 1943.
“Three girl-children were saved from Ratnabar. One would perish on the sea voyage, while two were conducted to England as Her Majesty’s wards. Of these, one would go on to be enrolled in Churchill Academy, where she was given a Christian name and the promise of a life far removed from the savagery of her homeland. [. . .] Regina proved herself an apt pupil, industrious, soaking up offered tutelage like a sponge does ink, if prone to intemperate moods and a tendency to attach herself with sudden fits of feverish fondness to one or more of the other girls [. . .] None of us could have foreseen what she and Emma Yates whispered into each other’s ears behind closed doors as they planned their foul feast.”
3. Schofield, Eleanor. “Eating the Other.” Word of Mouth. State University of New York, 2004, pp. 56–89.
“It’s not for no reason that women have, historically, been burdened with the duties of food preparation. Or that it is women, not men, who are called upon to limit their appetites, shrink themselves, rein in their ambitions. A hungry woman is dangerous. [. . .] Men are arbiters of discourse, women the dish to be consumed. And the Ratnabari, in the exercising of their
transgressive appetites, quite literally turn the tables on their oppressors.”
4. Morris, Victoria. “Memory, Mouth, Mother: Funerary Cannibalism Among the Ratnabari.” Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 2, no. 2, 1994, pp. 105–129. Jstor, doi: 10.2707/464631.
“We are all cannibals at birth, and our mother-tongue is the language of the mouth. When the Ratnabari eat of their dead, they embrace what Kristeva calls ‘the abject’—the visceral, the polluted, the blood and bile and placenta and the unclean flesh we associate with the female body. Return to us, they say to their dead, be with us always. [. . .] Science has yet to explain how it is that they almost never bear sons, only daughters, but it is scarce to be wondered at that their society is matriarchal in nature, for they spurn the clean, rational world of the patriarchal symbolic, remaining locked in a close, almost incestuous relationship with the maternal semiotic instead.”
5. Aspioti, Elli. “A Love That Devours: Emma Yates and Regina Gaur.” A History of Twentieth-Century Lesbians, edited by Jenna Atkinson. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, pp. 180–195.
“What is it about love that makes us take leave of our senses? What makes a girl of barely seventeen carve fillets of flesh from her ribs and, lacing her clothes back up over the bulk of soaked bandages, serve her own stewed flesh to a table of her classmates at her wealthy private school?”
6. Rainier, Richard. “A Rebuttal of Recent Rumours Heard Among the Populace.” The Times, 24 Apr. 1904, p. 14.
“Every rag barely worth the paper it is printed on has pounced on the regrettable happenings at Churchill Academy, and as such salacious reporting is wont to do, this has had an impact on the minds of impressionable youth. [. . .] [A] rash of imitative new fads in the area of courtship, such as presenting a lover with a hair from one’s head or a clipping of fingernail to consume, perhaps even a shaving of skin, or blood, sucked from a pricked finger [. . .] As to the rumours that the Ratnabari gain shapeshifting powers through the consumption of human flesh, or that they practice a form of virgin birth—I can say with certainty that these are pure exaggeration, and that their proponents are likely muddling real events with the mythological figure of the rakshasi, a female demon from the Orient.”
7. Gaur, Shalini. “The Subaltern Will Speak, If You’ll Shut Up and Listen.” Interviews in Intersectionality, by Shaafat Shahbandari and Harold Singh, 2012.
“[. . .] the problem is that we have everyone and their maiden aunt dropping critique on Ratnabar, but we’re not hearing from us, the Ratnabari diaspora ourselves. If I have to deal with one more white feminist quoting Kristeva at me . . . [. . .] No, the real problem is that our goals are fundamentally different. They want to wring significance from our lives, we just want to find a way to live. There’s not a lot of us, but we exist. We’re here. We don’t always quite see eye to eye with each other’s . . . ideology, but we’re not going anywhere, and we have to figure out what we are to each other, how we can live side by side. So why aren’t we getting published?”
8. Gaur, Roopkatha. A Daughter’s Confession: The Collected Letters of Roopkatha Gaur, edited by Mary Anolik. Archon Books, 2010, pp. 197–216.
“Mother didn’t know. What Emma was planning, what was in the food that night, any of it. I’ve kept this secret so many years, but now that she’s long gone, and I am old, I feel I can tell it at last, at least to you, my darling, and if only so I can pass beyond this world free of its weight. [. . .] Why did Emma do it? Does it matter? Love, foolishness, a hunger to believe in magic and power, a twisted obsession with Mother’s supposed exotic origins, what does it matter? She did it. The truth is, I’m grateful. Whatever her motives, that meal gave Mother what she needed to escape that place. And I wouldn’t have been born without it, though that’s another story altogether. You could say a little bit of Emma lives on in me, even after all this time.”
9. Gaur, Shalini. “We Can Never Go Home.” Hungry Diasporas: Annual Humanities Colloquium, May 2008, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
“We know Ratnabar’s coordinates. Aerial reconnaissance has confirmed people still live on the island. But how do I set foot on its shores, with my English accent and my English clothes, and not have them flee from me in the terror that was taught to them in 1891? Where do we go, descendants of stolen ones, trapped between two islands and belonging on neither—too brown for English sensibilities, too alien now for the home of our great-grandmothers? How shall we live, with Ratnabar in our blood but English on our tongues?”
10. Gaur, Ashanti. “Dead and Delicious II: Eat What You Want, and If People Don’t Like It, Eat Them Too.” Bitch Media, 2 Nov. 2016, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/eat-want-people-eat/2016. Accessed 8 Dec. 2017.
“My cousin Shalini is an optimist. She believes in keeping the peace, getting along, not rocking the boat. What do I believe in? I think—let’s be real, ladies, who among us hasn’t sometimes had a craving to eat the whole damn world? You know which of you I’m talking to. Yes you, out there. You’ve tried so hard to be good. To not be too greedy. You made yourself small and you hoped they’d like you better for it, but they didn’t, of course, because they’re the ones who’re insatiable. Who’ll take everything you have to give them and still hunger for more. It’s time to stop making ourselves small. And above all, remember . . . there may be more of them, but we don’t need them to make more of us.”
[Submitted for Professor Blackwood’s Sociology 402 class, by Ranita Gaur.]
JAYMEE GOH
The Freedom of the Shifting Sea
from New Suns
Superpredator
E. aphroditois is a polychaete marine worm that grows up to three meters or ten feet long and swims using bristle-like appendages, called parapodia, along the length of its body. It has a reversible pharynx and long mandibles with which it catches prey.
—An Introduction to the Deeper Sea
Salmah met Mayang on a sunny day in an isolated lagoon. Astonishing, as tourists had devoured the beaches near her coastal town. Even more astonishing: Mayang’s lower body. Salmah was repulsed by the waving legs at her sides, but drawn to the iridescence of the segments of her body, like a centipede’s, glinting rainbows in the midday sun.
Mayang had shrunk back underground—underwater underground, Salmah marveled—but her face was still uncovered, her hair drifting like seaweed. Salmah should have run away; instead she pulled on her goggles and got on her knees to investigate the sharp little face, broad nose, lush lips, beguiling eyes. Salmah’s hand hovered over Mayang’s face, wondering if she dared touch it, but decided she didn’t. Besides which, Mayang looked like she wanted to be left alone.
So Salmah left, and immediately went to the library to find out what the creature could be. Not a mermaid: mermaids were not half woman, half centipede like that. (Not even a centipede, but some sort of worm.) Not a spirit: she was too real. She went through a list of all the female monsters she knew and then some, but still came up with nothing.
She returned the very next day, to enjoy the quietness, and to find the stranger sitting on a rock, eating a fish. The stranger receded into the seabed a little when Salmah approached, but Salmah held out her hands as nonthreateningly as possible, with a gift: homemade kuih.
“Asalamualaikum,” she said, wondering if the creature was Muslim. “My name is Salmah.”
“Walaikumsalam,” came the cautious reply. A pause. “Mayang.”
With this firm introduction, Salmah made friends with the first nonhuman creature she had ever known. By the end of the dry season, Salmah had learned a great deal about Mayang, like Mayang’s age (Mayang could remember a time before British imperialism), Mayang’s favorite fish (stingray), Mayang’s length (twenty meters), and Mayang’s favorite hunting grounds (a beach off the coast of Thailand popularly considered haunted). They sometimes swam out into the ocean, Salmah with a precious snorkel and mask she’d saved up for, holding gently onto Mayang’s shoulders as they investigated reefs far from shore. Sal
mah watched Mayang hunt: swift movements too fast to see, mandibles slicing creatures in half. Salmah found herself unable to turn away from the sight.
In turn, Salmah told Mayang about changes in the human world, and the latter listened with a patient disinterest, expression flickering at odd moments that Salmah thought completely boring. She confided in Mayang: troubles at home, college applications, job seeking, boyfriends. Mayang was not always good at listening: she hated humans generally, men specifically.
“I don’t really see any problem,” Mayang replied for what sounded like the hundredth time to Salmah’s complaint about a recalcitrant boyfriend who refused to call. “If he doesn’t want to be with you, then you’re free.”
“But that’s not what I want. Have you ever liked anybody?”
The ensuing silence was punctuated by the sound of thunder in the distance. Mayang bobbed in the water, staring into the distance as the tide came in. Salmah began picking up her sarong to go when Mayang said, “I like you.”
Salmah almost slipped. She was about to respond when lightning crackled across the sky. Mayang reached out to shield her. Salmah hugged her in return, feeling the cold skin, the almost-human skin, slick-smooth.
“I’ve loved many,” Mayang said into Salmah’s ear. “Many many. I’ve lost them all, to men, to marriage, to murder. And I will lose you too, someday. You’re too full of this world, of life on land, for the sea.”
Salmah opened her eyes to find that Mayang had been bearing her closer to the shore, making sure she was in shallower waters. “Don’t say that. I will always come back.” Shyly, she kissed Mayang on the mouth, before running off, face hot in the cold wind.
The monsoon season beat down, flooding schoolyards and fields, blowing off roofs as it had done for generations. Salmah went out on the better days to look for Mayang, but with little luck. Mayang’s last words echoed in her ears like a portent, an omen.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 29
