The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year - Volume Eight (59 page)

I don't believe she wasn't smart. She even tried to give her mom CPR, but her mom didn't wake up until later, in the hospital. They had to reach in and drag her out of death, she was so closed up in it. Death is skin-tight, Mona says. Gray in front and gray in back.

* * *

D
ear Mona: When I look at you, my skin hurts.

I
pull into her driveway to drop her off. The house is dark, the darkest house on her street, because Mona's mom doesn't like the porch light on. She says it shines in around the blinds and keeps her awake. Mona's mom has a beautiful bedroom upstairs, with lots of old photographs in gilt frames, but she sleeps on the living-room couch beside the aquarium. Looking at the fish helps her to sleep, although she also says this country has no real fish. That's what Mona calls one of her mom's "refrains."

Mona gets out, yanking the little piece of my heart that stays with her wherever she goes. She stands outside the car and leans in through the open door. I can hardly see her, but I can smell the lemon-scented stuff she puts on her hair, mixed up with the smells of sweat and weed. Mona smells like a forest, not the sea. "Oh my God," she says, "I forgot to tell you, tonight, you know table six? That big horde of Uncle Tad's friends?"

"Yeah."

"So they wanted the soup with the food, and I forgot, and you know what the old guy says to me? The little guy at the head of the table?"

"What?"

"He goes,
Vous êtes bête, mademoiselle!"

She says it in a rough, growly voice, and laughs. I can tell it's French, but that's all.

"What does it mean?"

"You're an idiot, miss!"

She ducks her head, stifling giggles.

"He called you an idiot?"

"Yeah,
bête
, it's like
beast
."

She lifts her head, then shakes it. A light from someone else's porch bounces off her nose. She puts on a fake Norwegian accent and says: "
My God awful day
."

I nod. "Awful day." And because we say it all the time, because it's the kind of silly, ordinary thing you could call one of our "refrains," or maybe because of the weed I've smoked, a whole bunch of days seem pressed together inside this moment, more than you could count. There's the time we all went out for New Year's Eve, and Uncle Tad drove me, and when he stopped and I opened the door he told me to close it, and I said "I will when I'm on the other side," and when I told Mona we laughed so hard we had to run away and hide in the bathroom. There's the day some people we know from school came in and we served them wine even though they were under age and Mona got nervous and spilled it all over the tablecloth, and the day her nice cousin came to visit and made us cheese-and-mint sandwiches in the microwave and got yelled at for wasting food. And the day of the party for Mona's mom's birthday, when Uncle Tad played music and made us all dance, and Mona's mom's eyes went jewelly with tears, and afterward Mona told me: "I should just run away. I'm the only thing keeping her here." My God, awful days. All the best days of my life.

B
ye," Mona whispers. I watch her until she disappears into the house.

M
y mom used to swim every morning at the YWCA. When I was little she took me along. I didn't like swimming. I'd sit in a chair with a book while she went up and down, up and down, a dim streak in the water. When I read
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH
, it seemed like Mom was a lab rat doing tasks, the way she kept touching one side of the pool and then the other. At last she climbed out and pulled off her bathing cap. In the locker room she hung up her suit, a thin gray rag dripping on the floor. Most people put the hook of their padlock through the straps of their suit, so the suits could hang outside the lockers without getting stolen, but my mom never did that. She just tied her suit loosely onto the lock. "No one's going to steal that stretchy old thing," she said. And no one did.

T
hat should have been the end of the story, but it wasn't. My dad says Mom was an elemental, a sort of stranger, not of our kind. It wasn't my fault she left, it was because she couldn't learn to breathe on land. That's the worst story I've ever heard. I'll never tell Mona, not ever, not even when we're leaving for Colorado with everything we need in the back of my car, and I meet her at the grocery store the way we've already planned, and she runs out smiling under her orange baseball cap. I won't tell her how dangerous attics are, or how some people can't start over, or how I still see my mom in shop windows with her long hair the same silver-gray as her coat, or how once when my little cousins came to visit we went to the zoo and the seals recognized me, they both stood up in the water and talked in a foreign language. I won't tell her. I'm too scared. I won't even tell her what she needs to know: that we've got to be tougher than our moms, that we've got to have different stories, that she'd better not change her mind and drop me in Colorado because I won't understand, I'll hate her forever and burn her stuff and stay up all night screaming at the woods, because it's stupid not to be able to breathe, who ever heard of somebody breathing in one place but not another, and we're not like that, Mona and me, and selkie stories are only for losers stuck on the wrong side of magic – people who drop things, who tell all, who leave keys around, who let go.

IN METAL, IN BONE

An Owomoyela

An Owomoyela (pronounced "On") is a neutrois author with a background in web development, linguistics, and weaving chainmail out of stainless steel fencing wire, whose fiction has appeared in a number of venues including
Clarkesworld
,
Asimov's
,
Lightspeed
, and a pair of Year's Bests. An's interests range from pulsars and Cepheid variables to gender studies and nonstandard pronouns, with a plethora of stops in-between. Se graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2008, attended the Launchpad Astronomy Workshop in 2011, and doesn't plan to stop learning as long as se can help it.

T
hat was the year the war got so bad in Mortova that the world took notice, after twenty years of a column inch here or there on the last pages of the international section. And that was the year Benine went to the front, to the dirt camp outside Junuus where Colonel Gabriel reigned.

Colonel Gabriel met him in a circle of canvas-topped trucks, in an army jacket despite the heat of the sun. He stood a head taller than Benine, with skin as dark as peat coal, with terrible scarring on one side of his jaw. When his gloved hand shook Benine's bare one, he closed his grip and said, "What do you see?"

Benine was startled, but the call to listen in on the memories of things was ever-present in the back of his mind. It took very little to let his senses fuzz, obscured by the vision curling up from the gloves like smoke.

He saw a room in a cottage with a thatched roof, the breeze coming in with the smell of a cooking fire outside, roasted cassava, a woman singing, off-tune. He had to smile. There was too much joy in the song to mind the sharp notes. This must have been before the war; it was hard to imagine that much joy in Mortova these days.

The singing had that rich, resonant pitch of a voice heard in the owner's head, and his vision swung down, to delicate hands with a needle and thread, stitching together the fabric of the gloves. Neat, even rows, and as the glove passed between the seamstress's fingers, he could see the patterns of embroidery on the back.

Benine banished the vision and pulled his hand back. "But these are women's gloves!"

Colonel Gabriel gave him an appraising look. "So you can do something," he said. "Not just superstition and witchcraft."

Benine coughed, and smoothed down his shirt. "Of course, sir."

"The President is a believer in witchcraft," the Colonel said. "And he feels strongly about pacifying the dead of this war. Do you know why you're out here?"

"It's because I can read the history of things," Benine said, and inhaled the smell of the sun-baked dirt to chase off the last vestiges of the cottage.

"Things like bones," the Colonel said. "Mountains of bones, from mass graves the rebels have piled up from here to the coast. Are you willing to do this for your country?"

"Bones," Benine repeated.

"What did you think the President would ask you to this place for?" Colonel Gabriel asked.

T
he rebels hadn't made it to Junuus yet, not in this iteration of the war. They had raided it back when it was called Morole, of course, and the President's people had burnt it down once before
that
, back when they had been the rebels. That was the kind of war it was: both sides called the other side the rebels, and who had control of the country shifted back and forth like an angry tide. Even the President was president more by accident than design.

Junuus was safe, mostly. The government had stationed Colonel Gabriel there with as many men as they could, because petrol came through Junuus. The fortifications made it the place to send people involved in the war who didn't need to be
too
involved in the war, like Benine, and a woman named Alvarez.

Alvarez was one of those international people who came into war zones for a living, Colonel Gabriel said. She had skin as pale as a cooked yam, and black hair that hung straight past her shoulders. She was also short, and plump, and had narrow eyes. From the way she bustled into the tent Benine knew that most of the people in the camp disliked her, so he made up his mind not to.

She was carrying a big plastic bin, the kind Benine's aunt stored rice in, and she set it on the card table and peered at him over it. "Have you ever handled human remains?" she asked.

Benine shook his head. That told him what was in the bin, and a shuddery, unsound feeling clung to the back of his sternum. "Never."

"They're only bones," Alvarez said. "Still, some people are afraid of them." She popped off the lid and peered into the bin, then adjusted her gloves and picked up a small plastic bag, then shook its contents out into her palm. "Here," she said. "Try this. We'll leave all the skulls for a while; those can be the hardest to touch. Hold your hands out."

Benine swallowed, cupped his hands, and held them out.

"You ready?" Alvarez asked. When Benine nodded, she placed something small and cool into his palms.

He looked at it. It was small as a pebble; could even be mistaken for one, but for the strangeness of its shape, its light weight. He held it, waiting to feel fear or revulsion, but instead felt an odd disconnect in the place those emotions should have been. "What is it?"

"A distal phalange," Alvarez said. "A fingertip bone. Are you all right?"

"I think I am," he said, and carried it to the card table, where he sat down. He breathed in, and turned the little white thing over in his palm. "I've never done this with remains before."

"You say everything else holds memory," Alvarez said. "Why not bone?"

Benine nodded. He exhaled and rested his eyes on the bone, then let them unfocus.

The bone was much more open – the reaction more immediate – than any of the old family heirlooms he had handled. Even before he had let his own vision grey out he was seeing the street of some other city, smelling the cigarette that a mixed-race hand, paler than his own, was raising to its mouth.

And then the tent flap flew open with a
snap!
, and Benine all but dropped the fingertip.

A man in army green walked in with a mug of coffee in one hand, a face like a foxbat, and a crazed look in his eyes. "I am Sgt. Conte," he said, and put the coffee down on the table. It was two-thirds-full. "You know, in this place, not even Colonel Gabriel has an aide-de-camp, but they sent me to work with you. Do you need anything? Cheers." He pulled a flask out of his pocket and filled up the mug of coffee to the brim; Benine hadn't drunk enough to realize from the smell that it was gin. He looked at the mug, then pushed it away.

"No, thank you."

The sergeant shrugged, then picked up the cup and drained it. His Adam's apple leapt, three, four times as he swallowed, then banged the empty mug on the table again.

"Well, go on," Conte said. "Don't let me stop you."

Benine took a breath, and tried to put the sergeant out of his mind. He closed his eyes, focused on the scrap of bone in his palms, and let himself sink into it.

I
t rained.

The rain was as grey as the cigarette smoke, as the exhaust from the rickety cars which shouldered past each other on the mud road. The rain was cold, and the man Benine was and saw gulped down the cigarette smoke hoping to catch the warmth in his lungs. He wore a leather jacket, but the rain had run down under his collar and his shirt was clinging to his skin.

Benine sunk into the smoke a little, then nudged the man in the memory just enough to make him shift his gaze. Across the way, in the curved window of a car, he caught a glimpse of reflection: maybe thirty years old but already haggard, with crisp-cut cheekbones and several days' beard. His eyes were like a jackal's eyes. Hunted.

The vision receded a little, and Benine let it. It seemed the man was alone, in a place where he was likely to stay alone – no friend would call out his name. "He was thirty, maybe thirty-five," Benine said, letting his eyes open again on Alvarez's curious face. "A smoker, dressed like a tinkerer, a mechanic." He thought back to his hands. "Mixed, and with calluses here." He indicated the tips of his fingers and the bases, where they connected to his palm. "Does that help?"

"Every little bit helps," Alvarez said, and opened a notebook. She flipped through the pages until she found an empty line, wrote a number on the line, then wrote the number on the bone. Then, in a hand so small and neat Benine had to lean over to read it, she summarized what he had said, in shorthand.

"Are you just making it up?" Conte asked.