by Paula Guran
“Why does fire burn the hand that holds it?”
I whispered, “Your son isn’t fire.”
Sudden as delight, I saw his real smile, hair and eyes and scars all the same swift leap, flaring up like cinnabar, in their afterimages all the shapes he had once taken and the ones he never would, even at world’s end. “Megir mínir,” he said softly. I expected to hear a salmon’s slick flip in it, a mare’s whinny or the snapping stems of mistletoe. The roar of the volcano was only the stutter of blood in my ears; the plumbing in that ward-white room on Kirkjustræti had been louder. I heard his son, asking me nothing in the middle of the night.
“All of you are.”
I woke in the winter dawn that silvered rather than warmed, ash-gilding book-spines, jewel cases, a saltgrass-streaked set of sake cups. The clock radio on the floor by the chipped green dresser was playing Radiohead, so appositely I knew it had been seeping into my dreams. I wanted sex with someone. I settled for gunpowder tea, drunk scalding in the poured-out, brightening air as the studio’s raddled heating whistled and pinged to life around me. We are accidents waiting, waiting to happen. . . A little before New Year’s, Rohit called me from the last payphone in D.C. with two suitcases, no gloves, and enough change for cab fare; still the same chapter and a half from the end of his dissertation, broken up with a bunraku puppeteer, he slept on my fold-out couch with the last four volumes of the OED until he could get hold of the conservationist at the Freer and Sackler who had once offered him an internship, digitizing kabuki playbills. Ásta e-mailed me weekly until suddenly she stopped, and then in early February I checked my departmental mail in Gilman and found a postcard of the harbor at Höfn, Prussian blue under brightly painted sailboats and a lyme-grass fringe, the clouds plumed like Eyjafjallajökull. I sent my mother photographs from the trip. Ragnarök is always coming. How else could we get on with our lives? One day, I will hold my hands out to be burned, and burn back. And I do not dream of either of them, anymore.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Steven Barnes is a New York Times- bestselling, award-winning novelist and screenwriter who is the creator of the Lifewriting™ writing course, which he has taught nationwide. He recently won an NAACP Image Award as co-author of the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series with actor Blair Underwood and his wife, Tananarive Due.
Aliette de Bodard writes speculative fiction: her short stories have garnered her two Nebula Awards, a Locus Award and two British Science Fiction Association Awards. She is the author of the Dominion of the Fallen series, set in a turn-of-the-century Paris devastated by a magical war, which comprises The House of Shattered Wings (British Science Fiction Association Award, Locus Award finalist), and its standalone sequel The House of Binding Thorns (European Science Fiction Society Achievement Award, Locus award finalist). She lives in Paris.
Brooke Bolander writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily towards fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, the Theodore Sturgeon, and the World Fantasy awards, much to her unending bafflement. Her debut novella with Tor.com Publishing, The Only Harmless Great Thing, was published in 2018.
Anya Johanna DeNiro lives and writes in Minnesota. Her short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, One Story, Strange Horizons, Persistent Visions, and elsewhere, and she’s been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award. DeNiro is the author of the collections Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead and Tyrannia and Other Renditions and the novel Total Oblivion, More or Less.
Tananarive Due is the recipient of the American Book Award and NAACP Image Award. She is the author or co-author of twelve novels, a British Fantasy Award-winning collection, and a civil rights memoir. Due has a BS in journalism from Northwestern University and an MA in English literature from the University of Leeds, England, where she specialized in Nigerian literature. Due currently teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. She lives in Southern California with her husband, novelist, and screenwriter Steven Barnes.
Bestselling author Neil Gaiman writes books for readers of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers and is a prolific creator of works of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. His fairy tale Stardust was turned into a 2007 movie while the layered novel Coraline became an Oscar-nominated, BAFTA award-winning animated film. In 2017, Gaiman’s novel American Gods was also adapted into a television series on the Starz network. Good Omens, a miniseries, based on the novel of the same name he wrote with Terry Pratchett, will debut on Amazon Prime and air on the BBC in the UK in 2019.
Elizabeth Hand is the author of fourteen cross-genre novels and four collections of short fiction. Her work has received the World Fantasy Award (four times), the Nebula Award (twice), the Shirley Jackson Award (twice), and the James M. Tiptree Jr. and Mythopoeic Society Awards. She’s also a longtime critic and contributor of essays for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the Village Voice, among many others. She divides her time between the Maine coast and North London.
Lisa L. Hannett has had over seventy short stories appear in venues including Clarkesworld, Fantasy, Weird Tales, Apex, The Dark, and Year’s Best anthologies in Australia, Canada, and the US. She has won four Aurealis Awards, including Best Collection for her first book, Bluegrass Symphony, which was also nominated for a World Fantasy Award. Her debut novel, Lament for the Afterlife, was published in 2015. A new collection of short stories, Little Digs, is coming out in 2019.
Maria Dahvana Headley is a New York Times-bestselling author and editor, playwright, and screenwriter, most recently of The Mere Wife, a twenty-first century update of the epic poem Beowulf. She is the author of young adult fantasy novels Magonia and Aerie, the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings, and the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes. With Neil Gaiman, she is the #1 New York Times-bestselling editor of the anthology Unnatural Creatures, benefitting 826DC. With Kat Howard, she is the author of the novella The End of the Sentence—one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. Her Nebula, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Award-shortlisted fiction has been anthologized in many year’s bests, and appeared in Lightspeed, Uncanny, Nightmare, Tor.com, Shimmer, Apex, Clarkesworld, The Journal of Unlikely Entomology, Subterranean Online, The Toast, as well as many anthologies and “year’s bests.”
Ann Leckie is the author of the Hugo, Nebula, and Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Ancillary Justice, Ancillary Sword (British Fantasy Society Award-winner), and Ancillary Mercy. Each novel won the Locus Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award. Her novel Provenance is set in the Imperial Radch universe of her trilogy, but is not a sequel. The Raven Tower will be published in 2019. She has also published short stories in Subterranean, Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and Realms of Fantasy. Her story “Hesperia and Glory” was reprinted in Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007, edited by Rich Horton. Ann has worked as a waitress, a receptionist, a rodman on a land-surveying crew, and a recording engineer. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri.
Tanith Lee was born in London in 1947. She died peacefully after a long illness in Hastings, East Sussex in 2015. After grammar school, she worked at a number of jobs, and at age twenty-five had one year at art college. Then DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave. Since then she was a professional full-time writer. Publications include approximately ninety novels and collections and well over three hundred short stories. She has also written for television and radio. Lee has won several awards including two World Fantasy awards for short fiction. In 2009 she was made a Grand Master of Horror and was honored with the World Fantasy Convention Lifetime Achievement Award in
2013. She was married to the writer/artist John Kaiine.
Yoon Ha Lee is a Korean-American writer who received a BA in Math from Cornell University and an MA in Math Education from Stanford University. Yoon finds it a source of continual delight that math can be mined for story ideas. Yoon’s fiction has appeared in publications such as The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, and Clarkesworld, as well as several year’s best anthologies. Some short stories have been collected in Conservation of Shadows, and The Foxes Tower and Other Shadows collects some flash fiction. The space opera trilogy, The Machineries of Empire (Ninefox Gambit, Raven Stratagem, and Revenant Gun), will be followed by The Hexarchate Stories in June 2019; the middle-grade Korean mythology space opera, Dragon Pearl, was published in January 2019.
Charles de Lint is a full-time writer and musician who makes his home in Ottawa, Canada. He was named as a Lifetime Achievement Award recipient by the 2018 World Fantasy Convention. The author of more than seventy adult, young adult, and children’s books, he has won the World Fantasy, Aurora, Sunburst, and White Pine Awards, among others. Modern Library’s Top 100 Books of the 20th Century poll, voted on by readers, put eight of de Lint’s books among the top hundred. De Lint is also a poet, artist, songwriter, performer, and folklorist. He writes a monthly book-review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache geoscientist and writer. Her short fiction, nonfiction, and comics have appeared in multiple publications, including Love Beyond Body, Space, and Time, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed, and Deer Woman: An Anthology. She also contributed to Moonshot: The Indigenous Comics Collection Volume 2. She currently lives on both coasts but will always be home along the Kuné Tsé.
Ken Liu is an author of speculative fiction, as well as a translator, lawyer, and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings, The Wall of Storms, and a forthcoming third volume), and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, a collection. He also wrote the Star Wars novel The Legends of Luke Skywalker.
Rachel Pollack is the author of forty-one books, including two award-winning novels, Unquenchable Fire, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Godmother Night, winner of the World Fantasy Award. She has also written a series of books about Tarot cards known around the world, a book of poetry (Fortune’s Lover), and has translated, with scholar David Vine, Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (Oedipus Rex) under the title Tyrant Oidipous. She designed and drew her own Tarot deck, The Shining Tribe Tarot. With artist Robert Place she has created two more decks, The Burning Serpent Oracle, and The Raziel Tarot. She has taught and lectured on four continents. For eleven years she taught in Goddard College’s MFA writing program. Rachel lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, balloon vendor at Disneyland, and in the personnel department of Sequoia National Park where she spent her time off hiking the wilderness. She now lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, a small city of candy shops and beautiful gardens. She has published numerous short stories and two collections: Map of Dreams, Holiday, and, most recently, You Have Never Been Here. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, was published in 2014, and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her first collection, Map of Dreams, was honored with both the World Fantasy and Crawford Awards.
Tansy Rayner Roberts is an award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, feminist essays, and humor. She lives in Tasmania, Australia, with her husband and two superhero daughters. She is a co-host of Galactic Suburbia and Verity, and also has her own weekly fiction podcast, Sheep Might Fly, where you can listen to her reading fiction serials. She has a PhD in Classics, and still obsesses about ancient literature when she isn’t busy obsessing about superheroes, musketeers, and fictional hockey.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novels A Stranger in Olondria and The Winged Histories, the short story collection Tender, and Monster Portraits, a collaboration with her brother, the artist Del Samatar. Her work has won several awards, including the John W. Campbell Award and the World Fantasy Award. She teaches African literature, Arabic literature, and speculative fiction at James Madison University.
Ekaterina Sedia resides in the Pinelands of New Jersey. She has written four critically acclaimed and award-nominated novels: The Secret History of Moscow, The Alchemy of Stone, The House of Discarded Dreams, and Heart of Iron. Her short stories have appeared in Analog, Baen’s Universe, Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, as well as numerous anthologies, including Haunted Legends and Magic in the Mirrorstone. Some of her short fiction has been collected in her short-story collection, Moscow But Dreaming. Sedia is the editor of the anthologies Paper Cities (World Fantasy Award winner), Running with the Pack, Bewere the Night, Bloody Fabulous, and The Mammoth Book of Gaslit Romance and Wilful Impropriety. She also co-wrote a script for Yamasong: March of the Hollows, a fantasy feature-length puppet film voiced by Nathan Fillion, George Takei, Abigail Breslin, and Whoopi Goldberg, to be released by Dark Dunes Productions.
Priya Sharma’s fiction has appeared in venues such as Interzone, Black Static, Nightmare, The Dark, and Tor. She’s been anthologized in several of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year series, Paula Guran’s Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror series, Jonathan Strahan’s The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014, Steve Haynes’ Best British Fantasy 2014, and Johnny Main’s Best British Horror 2015. She’s also been on many Locus Recommended Reading Lists. “Fabulous Beasts” was a Shirley Jackson Award finalist and won a British Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. A collection of some of Sharma’s work, All the Fabulous Beasts, was released in 2018.
Nisi Shawl’s collection Filter House was a James Tiptree, Jr. Award winner. Her stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Uncanny, Lightspeed, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and both volumes of the Dark Matter series. She co-authored the renowned Writing the Other: A Practical Approach with Cynthia Ward and co-edited the nonfiction anthology Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, and Octavia E. Butler. Shawl’s Belgian Congo steampunk novel Everfair came out in 2016. She also edited the anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color, which was published earlier this year.
Author, screenwriter, and musician John Shirley is the author of more than forty novels including the classic cyberpunk Song Called Youth trilogy; the horror novels Cellars, Wetbones, and Demons; and the Western historical novel Wyatt in Wichita. Many of his numerous shorter works have been gathered in nine collections, including the Bram Stoker Award-winning Black Butterflies. He resides in Washington state near Portland, Oregon, where he performs and records with his band, the Screaming Geezers.
Angela Slatter is the author of the supernatural crime novels Vigil, Corpselight, and Restoration, as well as eight short story collections. She has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, an Australian Shadows Award, and six Aurealis Awards. Angela’s short stories have appeared in Australian, UK, and US “best of” anthologies. She has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, and is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006.
Emma Straub is from New York City. She is the New York Times- bestselling author of the novels Modern Lovers, The Vacationers, and Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and the short story collection Other People We Married. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Vogue, New York Magazine, Tin House, The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, and the The Paris Review Daily. She is a contributing writer to Rookie. Straub lives with her husband and two sons in Brooklyn.
Peter Straub is the author of nineteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. They include Ghost Story, Koko, Mr. X, In the Night Room, and two collaborations with Stephen King, The Talisman and Black House. He has written two volumes of poetry and six co
llections of short fiction, and he edited the Library of America’s edition of H. P. Lovecraft’s Tales and the Library of America’s two-volume anthology, American Fantastic Tales. He has won the British Fantasy Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, two International Horror Guild Awards, and three World Fantasy Awards. He was named as a Grand Master at the World Horror Convention, is a recipient of the HWA’s Life Achievement Award and the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award by Poets & Writers. The World Fantasy Convention has honored Straub with a Life Achievement Award.
Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she, a California native, learned about both writing and snow. Last year, she traded the snow for the rain of Portland, Oregon, where she roams happily under overcast skies with the hipsters. Her fiction has appeared in venues including Tor.com, Asimov’s, and The Year’s Best Non-Required Reading. She’s published two collections: Through the Drowsy Dark and How the World Became Quiet. Her fiction has been nominated for the Hugo Award and the World Fantasy Award, and twice won the Nebula.