The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (14 page)

Your hooded quilliot has lived in better places than this, with nicer people who made more money and they all adored,
adored
it. It had its own room. It ate oysters flown in from the coast and bruschetta. A professional groomer came every two weeks to trim its nails.
This
—the cute teak coffee table you got for fifteen bucks at an
amazing
garage sale last year, and the rest of it, too: your friends bringing homemade salsa and crab dip for card parties that last till four, and the shoes piled by the back door because everyone here goes barefoot—
this
is not what your quilliot is used to and, to be frank, it is all very, very disappointing.

But then, you're not the one that was in a little steel cage back at the shelter, with a yellow sheet of paper clipped to the bars that said “Abandoned.”

The Ravock

There's all sorts of information about it online, postmortem predation. First they eat your lips, your ears, the end of your nose. Your eyelids. The flare of your nostrils. Fingertips. All the places a girlfriend would kiss you first.

Their weak paws and small teeth cannot make a way into your body until you are already dissolving. When is that, like a week after death? Would someone find you before then, and why? Would your absence be noted? When your friend Jason got dumped by his boyfriend, it was almost a week before you realized you hadn't seen any texts from him lately. You assumed he was talking to other people and, anyway, you're always getting busy or distracted, and so is everyone else.

You imagine it: a stroke, maybe, since you're not the overdose type; you, slumped over your dead laptop. Would there be shit? You look down at your ravock, curled into a tight ball on the rug by your feet where it's sleeping off dinner. It's making that little dreaming growling noise it does sometimes. How long would it wait?

The Gray Regia

Your regia hated your old boyfriend, the one who came over after you had your surgery to read children's books to you when you couldn't sleep. He used funny voices for the different animals and you would start laughing and then it would start hurting and you would tell him to stop. And he
would
stop, that was the amazing part. Most guys would have kept on reading, just for a moment or two, teasing maybe or just that little streak of meanness that all men have. He was even really nice to your regia, though it was pretty obvious what it thought of him.

But it didn't work out. You talked about moving in together but then there was an amicable sort of breakup, neither of you quite sure what was happening but both pretty sure it was the right thing. Maybe one of you just lost interest? Anyway, you have the new boyfriend.
He
would have kept reading, but your regia likes him better and maybe your regia knows what you deserve.

The Sandnes Garn

You knew you had a Sandnes garn at your old place, but it didn't bug you or anything. It's a pest, sure, but you learned to make some noise as you walked into your bedroom to give it time to hide. Under the bed? In the closet? The occasional glimpses were kind of cute, little furry horns and beady eyes peeping from behind the dresser you got from IKEA.

When you decided to move in with your girlfriend, your friends offered to help with the lifting. “Does your apartment still have that Sandnes garn?” one said. You nodded. “You need to set some traps or fumigate or something, 'cause otherwise you'll spread them to her place and she'll be pretty pissed. I'll take that dresser if you're not going to want it,” he added.

He did take the dresser but you didn't fumigate, and when you got settled in, you realize he was right. You see it sometimes, when she's fallen asleep, half spooned against you, her hair a grapefruit-scented tickle in your face. The Sandnes garn sits on the chest of drawers that came from her mother's house, next to the picture of all her brothers. Its eyes gleam in the hall light. Your Sandnes garn is patient. It can wait. You'll fuck this one up, too.

The Skacel

There are close to a hundred species of skacel. While some can be easily distinguished by the casual observer, others may only be differentiated behaviorally or through DNA analysis. People, it seems, make a hobby of identifying their skacels, and a surprising number get the test, which costs between sixty-nine and just under two hundred dollars.

You're not willing to go that far, but you have spent some Friday nights clicking through the Internet looking for your skacel, which is small, short-beaked, and rose-colored. The short-beaked skacel is a sandy-olive color with a burgundy head and green eye markings. The roseate skacel has a narrow beak with a slightly hooked tip. The lesser skacel eats roaches, spiders, and other vermin but is neither roseate nor short-beaked; plus, your skacel tends not to eat them so much as kill them and leave them in the bathtub.

The eastern skacel drinks cold coffee from a saucer on the floor, which your skacel does not. The Kansas skacel can eat and digest Styrofoam take-out containers. The blue-faced skacel nests most often in linen closets, especially among the guest towels. Given short walks outside and plenty of toys, the Norway skacel can live happily in even the smallest apartment. The king skacel can be trained to retrieve items but resents neglect. Burney's skacel would prefer it if you stopped bringing girls over. So would the noro (a variety of skacel), plus it has some feelings about postmodernism.

Your old girlfriend probably wishes you had spent this sort of time on her. She has a skacel too, with an unmemorable beak but vivid yellow markings along the wingtips. You haven't been able to find that one, either.

The Smerle

You could take your smerle outside and people were always very impressed—an actual smerle, with the long feet and the outrageous tail and everything. Where did you get it? Was it imported? If you didn't mind telling, how much did it cost? It was like baking your own bagels or driving a 1960s car: a lot of work, but generally worth it.

But then things changed. It started to droop and its colors faded. “Get another smerle,” one of your friends advised. “Smerles love company.”

“
I'm
company,” you said, but you got another one anyway, this one chestnut-colored. Your smerle perked up and now you had
two
to walk on matching leashes: two smerles that played together, twined about one another; a pair that pretty much ignored you.

The Tatamy

“One tatamy grows lonely,” your grandmother always says, like, “Troubles come in threes,” and you figure that's about right. You started with the one. You were getting dressed for work one morning and there it was, curled tight into a gladiator sandal you'd almost forgotten you had. A week later, there was one in the other sandal, and then a few days later, two more peeked from your Uggs from college, and then there were what seemed like dozens, tucked into all the pairs of out-of-date shoes and boots you'd meant to take to Goodwill. They leave your sensible shoes, the work pumps and trainers, alone. You're not sure whether this is a judgment.

You have no idea what they eat, and you're not sure what they do with themselves when they are not tucked into your shoes like hermit crabs. All night you hear them rustling in your closet, often making small rhythmic bumps, as if they're mating or dancing to house. You don't mind that you are the only one in the apartment who is going to bed early or sleeping alone. But there are times when you imagine turning on the light, stepping into your old shoes, and dancing.

The Wolle

It's hard to pull the trigger on an apartment. The one-bedroom on Massachusetts Street has a southern exposure and tall windows that look down onto cute shops and busy sidewalks, though you wonder whether that would get on your nerves. It's small. If someone came, they wouldn't have anywhere to stay. There's no pet deposit if you get a begitte. Maybe later; right now you can't see making a commitment like that.

On the other hand, the two-bedroom out on California is cool and shady. It's a beautiful neighborhood, right next to a park with a really good disc-golf course. There is nothing on the hardwood floors and no curtains in the windows, so the rooms echo. Guests could stay in the second bedroom, if you bought a bed—but the rest of the time? You think you'll have a hard time filling that space. There are probably lopi.

Or you could just keep sleeping on the couch in Cortney's living room in her place on Vermont Street, and then you don't have to choose anything at all. It's a comfortable couch. She says she doesn't mind, says you're a great houseguest, says you're not a pain in the ass the way some people are. You take out the trash. If you borrow her car, you fill the tank. The two of you order takeout and watch television shows a season at a time. Her wolle curls up between you, dozing.

It occurs to you that in another life,
you
might very well be the begitte, the lopi, the quilliot.

S. L. HUANG

FROM
Strange Horizons

“O
N THE BRIGHT
side,” said Zara, poking at his glasses a week before, “this means you get new eyes.”

But I don't want new eyes,
he thought.

The surgery isn't bad, as surgeries go. The one he had when he busted his knee ten years ago, as a teen, was much worse. Or maybe it was worse because of what it had meant: that he'd never go out on the ice again.

That had been his identity, and he'd had to forge a new one from the fractured shards of cold and steel and sharpness. It had taken years, and he still wasn't sure the new version of himself wasn't brittle in places—the fault lines barely below the surface, just waiting for one tiny tap by a ball-peen hammer to make the whole construct shatter.

His eyes, his eyes have never been his identity. It won't matter to lose them.

He tells himself that over and over. Through the days following his diagnosis. On the night before the procedure, as he stares at himself in the mirror one last time, and the image blurs. In the hospital just before, as his surgeon squeezes his hand with her gloved one, and the broad white lights of the OR fade out, the last visual he will ever truly see.

He's told everyone else the same thing.
It's not the worst thing in the world, Ma. It's not like I'm an artist. Dad, don't worry—at least we have all the options we do these days, right? It's not that big of a deal.

He tells himself one more time as he lies in bed following the operation, his world swallowed in darkness behind the bandages, a dull ache prickling through his face like it doesn't know where it wants to hurt. This is just a bump in the road.

In a year it won't even matter.

Cancer.

His doctor said it gently. It was part of a full sentence, even. “We found cancer cells.” Later he wondered if she sat there and practiced her delivery before she made calls like this, pronouncing the words with such gravity and care, like she knew how fast he was about to fall and wanted her voice alone to reassure him she could catch him.

Cancer.

The word stalled out in his brain, and his world went sharp and too-bright—the gold tiles of the kitchen, the bright blue ceramic of the fat penguin saltshaker, a drooping rose Zara had laughingly given him when they'd walked the gardens the week before. He wasn't sure what he said back into the phone, only that his doctor must have asked him to come down to the clinic and talk to her in person, because he had. She talked to him and talked some more and kept talking, and then gave him a lot of pamphlets. Diagnosis, treatment options, recommendations. Everything in that same comforting voice, that gentle-calm-grave-understanding one.

After the operation he's blind for three and a half weeks. His parents offered to fly in and take care of him, but the thought of being waited on was worse than the fear of being helpless, and he said no. He's stacked food and water by his bed and run a string to the bathroom. Zara's on speed dial, and she checks in on him twice a day on her way to and from work.

He's too tired to be much company, but she stays longer than she has to anyway, sitting on the floor against his bed and watching TV while crunching popcorn. She translates anything visual with the snark of someone who's turned media cynicism into an art form: “Now they're turning down the dark alleyway! Ooo, I wonder what's going to happen
now.
”

The shows she picks are the type of awfully written crime shows where they narrate almost everything they're doing anyway—“Look, boss.” “What is this?” “It's the DNA results. It says the suspect is his father”—and he finds he doesn't mind, for once. The white noise of the television and Zara's voice wash over him and the smell of buttered popcorn fills his nostrils, and he drifts in and out of sleep without ever closing eyes that no longer exist.

Zara's response was the best one, when he told her his diagnosis. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry we as scientists haven't fixed this yet. That we haven't fucking solved it. We should have a cure.”

She was so angry. At the world. At her scientific brethren. At human progress.

With anyone else he might have said, “It's not your fault,” but he'd known her too many years not to know what she meant.

“See? This is why science is
amazing,
” she'd effused to him through high school, as she helped tutor him through chemistry and physics. “Look what we understand, look what we can build! How freakin' cool is that? This is why I want to do this forever. It'll be like diving into the greatest unexplored frontier.”