Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction

by A. M. Dellamonica

  “Awesome,” I say, because it is.

  “Only there’s a problem with my meter. I couldn’t get much of anything in the house.” She pops the back off the little box, probes a fingertip at whatever’s inside.

  “Maybe the house just doesn’t have it. I mean, it wasn’t really a witch house at all. It was the home of one of the judges in the trials.”

  “Huh,” Maya says. “I knew I’d be happy I picked up a tour guide.”

  “Was that a pickup?” I can feel myself blushing. “You weren’t just feeling sorry for me?”

  “Bit of that too,” she says. “You still haven’t told me why you’re spending Thanksgiving alone.” She snaps the back on the meter and jiggles it.

  “It’s kind of a long story…” I start.

  “Holy shit!” Maya jumps. She points the box at me. Points it away toward the wall. Points it back. “Maybe that’s it…”

  “What? What’s what?”

  “Paige,” she says. “Paige. Want to be in some pictures?”

  MAYA SITS ME on a chair in front of the blank wall where the television would normally be. She sets up a light on a tripod near me, and gets me to turn my face half toward it. I can feel the heat of it on my cheek.

  All I have to do is follow Maya’s instructions, and if I don’t get it right, she just gently moves me into place, hands warm through my cotton blouse. Between that and the two pints I had at the pub, I’m as relaxed as I’ve been all week.

  I smile at her, easy.

  “Just like that,” she says, from behind the camera, and I hear the sliding click of an old-fashioned shutter, and then the whir of the film advancing.

  A lock of hair tickles my cheek. I raise my hand to brush it back.

  “Right there. Hold,” Maya says, and I do, pinned in place by her voice, her eyes.

  MAYA PROCESSES THE rolls of film in a canister of chemistry, each one wound onto a spindle so that none of the surfaces will touch. She does this in complete darkness, narrating it to me while I sit on her bed. It’s hypnotic, her voice and the crackle of the film and then the sharp smells of developer, stop bath, fixer.

  We each drink a bottled coffee from her bar fridge while we wait for the negatives to dry. Then she clips the negatives into a frame inserted in the enlarger, which casts an image onto the desktop a couple of feet below the lens.

  The red rectangular box by the sink glows dim red, throwing weird upward shadows on the contours of Maya’s face. The other lights are off, the blackout curtains pulled tight. I watch over Maya’s shoulder as she looks at each of the images in turn. My features are weird in reverse: bright white eyebrows, bright white bangs, black teeth showing between my parted grey lips.

  “How can you tell what it’s going to look like?” I say.

  “You get used to it after a while,” she says. “Here, this one.” She draws her finger through the beam from the enlarger, its shadow pointing to a crackle of darkness in the image.

  “What’s that, a flaw in the film?”

  “Nope,” she says. “That’s what we’re looking for.”

  She gets out her photo paper from a thick black plastic envelope, sets it in place and exposes it for a carefully chosen length of time. She does a few more at slightly different settings. Then she slides all the papers into a tray of chemistry.

  “Whoa—won’t they be wrecked by the wet?” I ask, and then I see, in the dull red light, the images begin to form.

  MAYA AND I Sprawl on our stomachs side by side on one of the beds, facing the array of still-damp photos spread out over the bedspread. They all show pretty much the same pose, me seated, half-turned, eyes looking right into the camera. I snicker a little at the look on my face; Maya doesn’t.

  In more than half of the images, I see something I’ve never seen before.

  “Why do I have a halo?” I ask. “How did you do that?”

  “I didn’t,” Maya says, rolling onto her side to look at me. “That’s all you.”

  It isn’t exactly a halo, because it’s all around me, stronger in some pictures than others, nearly obscuring my features in a couple of cases. Kind of crackly pale light, like aurora borealis.

  “Do I have a halo all the time?”

  Maya shakes her head. “I’m not about to go off my meds to find out.”

  I roll half onto my back to look at her face. I want her to tell me what happens next.

  She doesn’t hold my gaze, turns away and goes to the window, pulling the curtain open, showing an inch of pale early light.

  “Holy crap, have we been up all night?”

  “Come on,” Maya says. “Let’s walk.”

  THE SUN MUST be rising somewhere behind the fog, because I can see colours now: Maya’s purple jacket fuzzed over with tiny beads of mist, curling red leaves drifting at the edges of the street, a blue and white flag on one of the few yachts still in the harbour.

  Hands in jean pockets, I follow Maya downhill toward the water. She walks quickly, head down. I can’t quite see her face.

  Then she reaches the seawall and turns to me, flinging her hair back in the rising breeze. “Paige,” she says. “I really did it, right?”

  “Nah, it was all me. You said so.” I grin, and I watch the answering grin blossom on her face.

  “Witch,” she says. “Come here, come here.” And she wraps her arms around my ribs, squeezing tight.

  Behind Maya’s head, the sun is starting to burn through the harbour fog. Her eyes are puffy and red from being up all night in the reek of chemistry, and probably mine are too.

  “Hey,” I say. “It’s Thanksgiving.”

  “Which you’re spending with me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m going to buy you breakfast,” Maya says, “and we’re going to figure out where there’s witchcraft in your family tree.”

  “I had no idea—”

  “And then we’re going to take a nap,” Maya goes on. “And then we’re going out for pie.”

  “Yes,” I say, and as I say it I can feel the weight of my body settling heavier in her arms. It’s delicious.

  She looks up at me, squinting in the brightness. Seems like she’s looking for something in particular. Whatever it is, she smiles, satisfied, and slips her cold hands into mine.

  “I know a great little diner over by the Common, with a three-ninety-nine breakfast special,” she says.

  We walk away from the harbour, up past the House of Seven Gables, in the clearing mist. We pass wax museums and houses of horrors and purple-draped Magick Shoppes and palm-reading stands, but all of them are closed for now, and the streets of old Salem are ours alone.

  I haven’t told Maya the long story of my family’s estrangement. I’m pretty sure I will, if she tells me to. I’m starting to think I need a safeword with her; and somehow I can see she’ll know what I mean by that, and she’ll be careful with me.

  I can smell cinnamon and burning leaves on the morning air. The frost on the Common is melting into sparkling dew. I tug Maya to a stop for a moment, gesturing.

  She gazes. Takes in a breath. Then she’s on her tiptoes in her orange Chucks, hands wrapped around the back of my head, pulling me into a kiss.

  And I can feel it, the halo, bright with promise, crackling around me.

  THE STORY WAS that some people had learned to read again. Alice wanted to believe it, but Alice had always liked stories. The morning after, when she’d woken up to the police pounding on her door demanding that she surrender all print and digital text materials to them, she’d glanced at the bright blue cover of a favorite childhood novel and had traced her fingers over the embossed title without understanding. She’d thought she was tired, not yet awake, or in shock from the officer outside her door. But she’d flipped through the book and found tiny garbled markings on every page.

  That was the moment when she’d wanted to puke. She hadn’t been able to read her phone that morning either, but she’d thought something was wrong with the screen. But there could
n’t be anything wrong with Lily and the Dragon. She hadn’t read it since she was fourteen. It was just sitting on her shelf next to dozens of other novels like it, stories about other people and other worlds.

  But the police brought boxes and carted them all away. They swept her apartment for writing implements and paper, opening all her kitchen drawers and rifling through them with disapproval. They took her laptop and her phone too, and they magnanimously didn’t fine her for having expired permits on both. It was for the greater glory of the city and the people, they said. Text couldn’t be trusted. This way, we have all been purified, they said. We have all returned to our natural state. Now we can truly build the society we have always dreamed of, they said. Good will reign, they said.

  She knew they were taking measures against the insurgents. She also knew better than to say that out loud.

  Alice had cried in the bathroom after they’d left. She should have screamed at them. She should have kicked them or hit them or saved even one book. But she’d been numb. They’d done something to her. They’d been in her brain. What use was anything after that? And if she had fought them, they would have killed her. Still, she didn’t stop crying until her throat rasped and her eyes were sore.

  They hadn’t taken absolutely everything. She found a pen that had rolled under bed and a few paper napkins in the back of a drawer, shoved under her silverware. After she’d dried her eyes, she’d spent the rest of the afternoon trying to remember. It had been a Sunday, she remembered, because she hadn’t been at work. She’d had empty hours and blank spaces to fill, and it was easy enough to draw shapes and squiggles, even little animals marching across the paper. She’d drawn the view out her window. A cartoon self-portrait with clouds of black hair spiralling around her head. A winding map of the city from memory, all its neighborhoods unlabelled. Hours had passed and she’d delved into the depths of her brain trying to dredge up one word, even one letter, but they’d all been gone.

  Rustication, they called it. An airborne plague of nanobots. Within two days, most of the city had woken up illiterate. All those millions of neural connections, erased.

  There was a lot of high-minded talk about the inherently deceitful nature of representations. Art had been banned for years now, and no one liked it, but what could they do? The city had taken down all the public statues and murals, but they could only stop people after the fact. They couldn’t stop people from wanting. Even after Rustication, people still wanted to leave their mark on things.

  Alice’s neighbor Lani had been a middle-school language teacher before, and now she taught sewing and wood shop on alternate days of the week. Most of the other teachers had lost their jobs, but Lani had been one of the lucky ones. She was bent over and grey-haired and couldn’t go work on a farm, so they took pity and let her stay at the half-empty school. “Every time those kids get their hands on anything that even remotely resembles a writing implement,” she told Alice, “whether it’s a rusty nail or a sewing needle, they start scratching things into the table top. Do you know how many drawings of dicks I’ve found this week alone?” Lani had burst into laughter at that point. “It’s the triumph of the human spirit, Alice,” she said, still shaking and wiping at her eyes. Alice had laughed, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself from looking over her shoulder afterward. The city might not be able to arrest every tagger and bathroom graffiti artist, as hard as they tried, but if anybody ever overheard Lani laughing like that, they would come for her.

  Books had been getting scarcer even before Rustication, because if murals of sunny skies and flowering gardens were immoral illusions, and the sculpture of a boy feeding ducks in the public park was deceitful, then weren’t books even worse? But everyone knew someone who knew someone who could get you a novel if you were willing to pay for it. Alice had never imagined that the city would take such a drastic step. How had they even found the resources? She’d thought scientists were only barely finished mapping the human brain. It was some leap to go from making a map to digging up the entire landscape.

  She wondered, afterward, if the scientists who led the project had been rendered illiterate too. She wondered if they had been allowed to live.

  It had been six months now. Officially, Rustication was held to be a great success. Crime was down all over the city, and productivity was up. Everyone was happier this way. Unofficially, there were whispers of people forgetting much more than reading and writing. Some people had woken up the morning after Rustication unable to speak. Some people had woken up with no memory of their families, their lives, their names. Some people hadn’t woken up at all.

  No one could find any record of those people now, but no one outside the city government could read records, anyway.

  Alice worked at The Hearth, a restaurant two blocks from the capitol building. It used to say The Hearth in gold lettering on black paint above the door, before the city had made Mr. Park paint over it. Mr. Park was still on the waiting list to get approval for a sign with an image. The place looked strangely anonymous now, a wood door set in a building with black trim and big glass windows, showcasing the last literate people in the city out for a nice steak dinner. These were the people who’d had their permits in order to leave the city and spend a long weekend in their country homes six months ago. They all had excellent manners, and night after night, Alice gave them her sharpest smile.

  Still, it paid the bills. And the restaurant had adapted to the newly textless world more easily than some businesses. So many of Alice and Lani’s neighbors had been forced to leave their apartment complex to go work in the belt of farmland surrounding the city. Most of them had never picked a fruit or milked a cow in their life, but there was no other work left for them now. Her apartment building was eerie now, as empty as it was, but it was nothing compared to the whole sections of the city that had become ghost towns. The university campus was graveyard-quiet, its lawns still scorched from the book burnings. Alice tried not to walk that way any more. It was hard to look at the ruined library. The bricks of the west wall were toppled to the ground, and the three other walls had broken windows like missing teeth.

  But people still needed to eat in the city, and clerks in the capitol were still eating well at The Hearth. Alice hadn’t had to move out to the cornfields yet. All that had really changed at work was that the restaurant couldn’t print menus any more, so Alice had the whole thing memorized. She’d always had a good memory. She’d only forgotten a few things in her life, and one of those was because the city took a scalpel to her brain six months ago.

  Alice didn’t smoke, but she went out into the back alley on her break anyway. Juan was out there, and he knew people. She wanted to know people, too. She’d always wanted to, but before, she’d been afraid. Now she was angry. They had violated her. They had poisoned her. They had crept into the most secret part of her and excised something precious. They might do it again. They might kill her. It didn’t matter any more. She couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t try to fight back.

  The insurgents had gone underground, but the movement wasn’t over. It was illegal for more than two people to congregate in public, and before Rustication the insurgents had communicated mostly through short text messages over a wireless network created when their phones were in close physical proximity. The city had shut down the internet years ago, but they were always one update behind the insurgents and their network of communications. Technically, the phones themselves had been made illegal for anyone without a government permit last year, but they were so small and so easy to hide that it had been difficult to eradicate them completely. Besides, the insurgents had switched back to older technology: notes left behind loose bricks or crumpled and thrown carefully next to garbage cans around the city. Alice had eyed every pile of trash with cautious interest after hearing that, but it wasn’t so easy to join up. You had to prove yourself trustworthy. More than that, you had to prove yourself useful, and Alice was just a waitress. Her only skill was memorizing the daily s
pecials faster than everybody else, and she didn’t think the insurgents would be interested in hearing about grass-fed beef or heirloom tomatoes.

  But recently it had occurred to her that maybe she had something to offer after all. They couldn’t write things down any more. No more texts, no more crumpled-up notes in the garbage. They needed people like her who could memorize things. “I’m sentimental. I miss things from my childhood,” she told Juan.

  Juan kept the cigarette between his lips. “Don’t we all,” he said.

  “I’ve got a lot of good memories from back then,” Alice said. “They’re still so clear, you know? Every detail is there.”

  Juan looked bored, but she thought he might still be listening. That was how this worked, right? She couldn’t just say ‘sign me up to take those bastards down!’ or else he’d never talk to her again.

  “I’d like to make some new ones,” she said. “Memories, that is.”

  This had gone a lot smoother in her head. Juan looked her up and down and her heart dropped. Not like that, she thought. He was a friend. She supposed he was good-looking, with his warm brown eyes, and that he might be gentle, but she could never make herself imagine the rest. In a strange way, the feeling was reassuring. Maybe some day the city would make more nanobots to rewrite that part of her brain, but they hadn’t managed yet.

  He stubbed his cigarette out against the wall and pocketed the unsmoked end of it. “Break’s over,” he said. “You wanna get a drink after work?”

  Terrified that he might have misunderstood and elated that he might not have, Alice nodded.

  After work, Juan led her out of the restaurant and they zigzagged through the city for twenty minutes. She traced it in her mind’s eye, making a mental diagram of their angular path through the grid of city blocks. He stopped in front of a boarded-up antique shop, pulled a key out of his pocket, and unlocked the door. They passed through a dusty museum of furniture and creaking floorboards, into a stockroom in the back and then down a hidden stairway.