The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 7

by Jonathan Strahan

  I think Dad became an archeologist because dead people didn’t talk back. Living people were far too troublesome.

  Johnny prefers to blame my father’s idiosyncrasies on Alzheimer’s. Johnny is a sweet guy who chooses to believe that people are inherently nice. But tonight, Johnny is facing a challenge. “Your father won’t stop talking,” he says.

  I can hear my father’s voice in the background, but I can’t make out the words.

  "He’s been at it for two hours. I’ve told him that it’s time for bed, but he won’t stop.” Johnny sounds very tired.

  "Let me talk to him,” I tell Johnny.

  I hear my father as Johnny approaches him. He is delivering a lecture on burial customs. “A barrow is a home for the dead,” he is saying. “In its chamber or chambers the tenant is surrounded with possessions from his life.”

  "Your daughter needs to talk to you,” Johnny says.

  Dad doesn’t even pause. “A shaman would be buried with his scrying mirror; a warrior with his weapons,” he continues. “A fence or trench separates the barrow from the surrounding world.”

  "It’s important,” Johnny says. “She really needs to talk to you.”

  "Yes?” my father growls into the phone. His tone is that of a busy man, needlessly interrupted. “I’m teaching just now.”

  "This is Jennifer, your daughter. I called to tell you that it’s late. Class is over.”

  "What are you talking about?”

  "This is your daughter. You’re running late. It’s time for class to be over.”

  "I was just wrapping up.”

  "You’d better let the students go.” Wrapping up could take hours. “They have to study for finals.”

  "They’d better study.” His voice is that of a demanding instructor. Then a pause. “I have to get ready myself,” he says, as if suddenly remembering something.

  "Get ready? For what?”

  "I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  Several times over the last few months, my father has mentioned that he is going on a trip. Sometimes he’s going to an important excavation. Sometimes he’s leaving because the conference he was attending is over. Sometimes he’s not sure where he’s going. I’ve learned not to ask.

  "You can pack in the morning,” I say. “You’ll have time then.”

  "All right,” he says. “In the morning.”

  In the morning, he will remember none of this.

  “While I’m waiting for the train at the 22nd Street Station, I walk along the tiny stream that’s just a few steps away from the concrete platform. It’s a muddy trickle, enclosed in a culvert for part of its length, then widening to shallow puddles that support clumps of wild iris surrounded by pigweed.

  Frogs live in that stream—I hear them croaking in the evening. But they’re hiding now. No matter how hard I look, I never catch a glimpse of them.

  The steep slope above me is covered with tall grasses and wild fennel, with a few blackberry bushes working their way up to becoming a thicket. Toward the end of the platform, some city workers have been clearing the brush. I glance down at the bare ground.

  It’s an old habit, developed over many summers spent at archeological digs. Out in the field, I’d be looking for shards of broken pots or chips of worked stone, indications of ancient settlements. Here in the city, I’m just looking, not expecting to see anything more than the glitter of broken beer bottles.

  But the morning light reflects from the edge of a pebble. I stop, pick up the stone, and examine it more closely. It’s very tiny worked flint—about a centimeter long. I can see miniscule circles, each just a couple of millimeters across, where someone has flaked away the stone to make a sharp edge.

  I hear a rumble in the distance. The train is coming. I put the tiny tool in my pocket, no time to examine it further. I hurry back to the platform.

  As the train pulls away, heading south, I look out the window at the brush-covered slope. The city is filled with wild things. I once saw a family of raccoons crossing a major thoroughfare on their way to check out the dumpster behind a fast food joint. A possum with a wicked grin (way too many teeth) and a naked, ratlike tail regularly strolled through my father’s backyard. Coyotes live in Golden Gate Park.

  If there are frogs and raccoons and opossums and coyotes, why not other creatures? Small, wild, living in the gaps, in the gullies, in the ravines, in the half-hidden places underneath.

  “At today’s meeting, Tiffany wants to establish the specifics of our particular fairies. Tiffany believes in fairies that fly on shimmering wings (made of child-safe Mylar, I think). Her fairies are similar to Tinker Bell, but not so similar that they’ll trigger a cease-and-desist order.

  Jane wants the fairies to hearken back to the classics. Think Midsummer Night’s Dream and Yeats. Her fairies wear elegant green dresses. They have a queen, of course. At fabulous parties, they dance all night. Like me, Jane lives alone. Unlike me, Jane seems to mind.

  Rocky’s fairies sleep late. They are dark-eyed and sultry, dressing in black and looking for trouble. I think some of them are transgender, which makes sense if you really know Peter Pan. When Wendy returns from Neverland, she tells her mother that new fairies live in nests on the tops of trees. “The mauve ones are boys and the white ones are girls,” she says. “And the blue ones are just little sillies who are not sure what they are.”

  That’s from the book, not the movie. I don’t think Disney believes in transgender fairies.

  The way I figure it, you can choose what kind of fairies you want to believe in. I finger the stone tool in my pocket. In the foggy chill of San Francisco’s summer, my fairies wear clothing made of tanned mouse leather. They are grimy, hardscrabble fairies that chip tools from stone and drink from the stream. They hunt in the marsh with stone blades and feed on frogs’ legs. They’d mug Victorian flower fairies and take their stuff.

  "What do you think? Forest or village?” Tiffany is polling the meeting, getting each member of the team to vote. Rocky says city; Jane says forest. It’s my turn.

  Wild or civilized. “Can’t we have it both ways?” I ask.

  Why not? Dirty little fairies, crouching in the litter by the stream, chipping stone into knives, strapping blades onto spear handles made of pencils and pens that commuters had dropped. My kind of fairy.

  “I spend the rest of the afternoon working on visual concepts for the fairy forest. For the fairy huts, I figure I should use all natural materials.

  The traditional Celtic huts have stone walls, and I just can’t see the fairies going to all that effort. After some online research, I settle on huts that looked like ones built in eastern Nigeria. The walls are made of bundles of straw, tied side by side. The roof is made of reeds.

  The shape of the huts reminds me of acorns—smooth sides, textured cap. I figure Tiffany will like that. And I think the fairies could manage to build huts with straw.

  In my sketch, the huts are tucked among wild blackberry brambles. Poison oak twines among the blackberry branches. I don’t think these fairies want company.

  “After work, I go to the board-and-care home to visit my dad. I stop by the grocery store on my way and buy a basket of fresh raspberries. These days, I always bring something to eat. Finger food is best. Grapes, raspberries, blueberries. Something he can pick up and eat, no utensils required.

  We sit in the living room, my father in a recliner and I in a straight-back chair. We eat raspberries.

  I’ve learned not to ask many questions. Questions are difficult. More often than not, he has no answers. Or his answers relate to the distant past. Or halfway through an answer, Dad forgets what he was saying.

  I tell my father many things these days. He likes to listen. When he listens, it does not matter that words are slippery and sentences betray him.

  "I found this on the path to the train station,” I tell him. I hold out the tiny stone tool. I’ve been carrying it in my pocket since I found it. “I can see tiny chips where someone has been working
the stone, flaking away bits to make an edge.”

  My father examines the blade. His hand shakes. The skin of his arm is marked with dark purple age spots. He gives the stone back. “Microlith,” he says. Basically, that’s a technical term for “tiny worked stone.” Not saying much I didn’t already know.

  "I found a mirror the other day,” I say.

  "That’s good,” he says. A complete sentence. Short enough that he can get through it without losing his way. Sentences are trickier than you realize, long and twisty. It’s easy to get lost.

  "I need….” he begins. He’s pushing his luck now, working on a longer sentence. What does he need? “I need a mirror.”

  "Really? I’ll bring you the one I found,” I tell him. Does he really need a mirror or is that just the word that came most quickly to mind?

  He nods. “Don’t forget.” Another easy sentence.

  I care about my father in a grudging sort of way. My mother died when I was nine. She committed suicide, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Even as a child, I recognized that she was a drama queen, a flamboyant woman given to grand gestures, to great joys and great depression. Today, she might be identified as bipolar.

  My father, on the other hand, is solid and unemotional. After my mother’s death, Dad took care of me in an awkward, casual, ham-handed sort of way. I never went hungry and I never got hugged. It was a balance, of sorts.

  I take after my mother. I understand drama, I understand depression, and I understand the appeal of the dark and foggy waters below the bridge.

  "Don’t forget,” my father says again.

  We eat raspberries in companionable silence.

  “Godzilla is sleeping on top of the mirror, which is lying flat on the bureau. He was there this morning when I left for work. He is there when I get home. Usually, he supervises when I open a can of cat food for him and his brother. But tonight he jumps down from the bureau only after I set the food on the floor. He eats quickly, then returns to the mirror, gazing into it intently, sniffing it carefully, and then lying down on top of it once again. Curled up, he completely covers the glass surface.

  When I sit down at my desk, I pat my lap and call to him. He lifts his head and regards me with that slit-eyed look that one of my friends says is how cats smile. He’s not about to leave his post.

  His brother, Flash, is prowling the apartment restlessly. Every once in a while, he walks past the bureau and looks up at his brother. Then he resumes his patrol.

  Cats have theories. Every cat owner knows that. The cats can’t and won’t tell you their theories. You must deduce the theories from their behavior. Then you have theories about the cats’ theories. If you modify your behavior in response to your theories about their theories, you may change their theories. It is an endlessly recursive loop. The viewer affects the system. It’s Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle with cats.

  I let Godzilla sleep.

  I am doing online research about fairy fashions. To draw convincing fairy clothes, I figure I’d better know what people think fairies wear. It’s edging up on ten PM, and I have to be up at six in the morning to catch the train, but I’m not sleepy at all. When I’m insomniac, I find doing research online very comforting. I used to walk on the Golden Gate Bridge at night—but doing research online is safer.

  I find information on Conan Doyle’s belief in fairies. I find a discussion of pygmy flints, blades of worked stone that some claim are made by the little people. I find hundreds of images of Victorian fairies—pretty ladies with delicate wings.

  Somewhere along the way, I find Rocky’s blog.

  Mostly it is one of those extremely tedious personal blogs that I am amazed that anyone writes and even more amazed that anyone reads. A description of an art opening he attended. Photos of his friends (all in black, of course). Discussion of his plans to attend Burning Man. And a long list of fairy links.

  Rocky, it turns out, has done a lot research that he has not shared with the rest of the team. He has links to fairy porn. (Yes, of course there is fairy porn.) He has links to sites considering the connections between fairies and alien abductions, as well as sites about the original Celtic fairies—amoral creatures that are capable of great malevolence. In Celtic tradition, when someone died people said that they went to be with the fairies. Being touched by a fairy, according to one site, was commonly recognized as the cause of a stroke.

  No sweet and beautiful fairies. No gossamer wings.

  “At the next meeting of the fairyland team, Tiffany gathers ideas for the portal to our fairy site. At Disney’s fairy site, the splash screen has a sprinkling of fairy dust and the words: “Believing is just the beginning.” Then pictures of fairies appear. Tiffany asks the group for an image and words that will capture the essence of our site.

  "A black mirror,” I say. “A portal to another world. And the words—clap if you believe in fairies.”

  I don’t see the need to specify the type of fairy you might believe in. Dark-eyed and sultry; sweet-faced and dressed in pink. That doesn’t matter to me. Clap if you believe.

  Rocky smiles a little. “That could work,” he says.

  After the meeting, Johnny calls to tell me that my dad is in the hospital. Apparently Dad forgot that he could not walk without a walker. He stood up, and then fell down, fracturing his hip.

  I go to the hospital after work. I bring the mirror and set it on one of the chairs in my father’s room. He won’t remember that he said he needed a mirror, but I do.

  Dad is sleeping. The nurse says that he was cursing all day. He said he was going to kick the doctor in the balls. “It’s the Alzheimer’s,” she says.

  I nod, letting her believe what she wants to believe. Clap your hands if you believe that my father doesn’t really want to kick the doctor in the balls.

  I am not clapping.

  I explain to the nurse that we have a DNR, a “do not resuscitate” order for my dad. No heroic measures, I explain. Just keep him comfortable.

  Clap your hands if you believe in death.

  Believing in fairies is much easier, I think. Death is an end, an emptiness, a darkness. People want to believe in the light. Go to the light, they say. We fear the darkness and the unknown, the fairies in the ravine, the world behind the mirror.

  I set the stone tool beside the mirror. I sit by my father’s bed and watch him breathe. His arms are loosely strapped to the rails of the hospital bed. The nurse had told me that they had to strap him down. He kept trying to get out of bed. His hip was broken and he couldn’t walk, but he was still trying to get out of bed.

  My father’s life has been shrinking over the past few years. After I went to college, he lived alone in his Victorian home. When he couldn’t get by on his own, I helped him move to an apartment in a senior residence. Then he moved from that apartment to his room in the board-and-care home. Then he moved from that room into this shared room in a hospital, where all he has is a bed and a table and a curtain that separates his space from that of another old man with a table and bed.

  My father is not conscious. He is lying on his side, his spine curved, his legs bent. A sheet covers him, but I can see the outline of his body through the fabric. He looks smaller than he ever has before. The tube that snakes from beneath the sheet is dripping a cocktail of painkillers into his veins.

  My father is dying. That’s clear.

  Here’s a question. Do I stay and keep watch? Sit by his bed and do what? Read a magazine? Think about his life? Not such a happy life, by my lights.

  What would I like, if I were the one lying on the bed?

  I would like to be left alone.

  So I go home, leaving the mirror and the stone tool on the table by the bed.

  Clap your hands if you believe in death. Clap your hands and my father will die.

  Actually, I’m kidding about that. My father will die no matter whether you clap your hands or not. My father will die, I will die, and someday you will die. You can applaud or remain silent an
d death won’t care. You can choose to speed up your death—by plunging from a balcony, from a bridge—but all the clapping in the world won’t put death off forever.

  Some discussions of death make it sound all soft and warm, like falling asleep in a feather bed. But falling asleep implies waking up again, and Death means not waking up.

  Not being here.

  Being with the fairies.

  An hour after I leave the hospital, a nurse calls to tell me my father has passed away.

  Here’s what I think happened: My father curled up into the fetal position. He curled up as small as he could. Then he curled up even smaller, then smaller, then smaller still. You might not think a person could shrink, but my father had been shrinking over the last year, growing shorter with each passing day. So he shrank until he was small enough to slip into the fairy mirror. When the time was right, the fairies came through the mirror and took him away with them.

  You see, new fairies are not born. They are transformed through the fairy mirror.

  Flash and Godzilla could see that the way was open. Cats notice that sort of thing. So they blocked the way—sleeping on top of the mirror to keep the fairies in and to keep me out. They were protecting me. They aren’t stupid. They know who opens those cans of cat food.

  My father left his worn out body behind, dressed in the unfortunate hospital gown. Like a snake abandoning its skin, my father slipped out of his body and emerged in the mirror. He felt better. All the life energy that remained in him was concentrated in his smaller form.

  Right now, he’s hunting for mice among the stalks of fennel and the blackberry brambles. He took the stone tool with him. He’ll scavenge a pencil dropped by a commuter, lash the stone blade to the end to make a spear, and go hunting for frogs.

  That’s what I choose to believe.