The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  I don’t know how long it was before Holly came home. She said, “Maddy?”

  I just screamed. I let the bedspread fall out of my mouth and I screamed loud enough to bring my mom and dad down the stairs, and then there was this whole part where they got mad at Holly, and even though I was screaming and shit, I had to explain to them that she didn’t have nothing to do with it, and then my dad said he was going to get the car, and Holly was looking at my vagina and saying, “I don’t think so.”

  I heard it hurt a lot to have a baby, but nothing nobody said told me how much. I don’t even want to think about it.

  So Mom starts arguing with Holly, and then all of a sudden Holly says, “This baby is halfway here. If you want to take her all the way to Becksworth, you go ahead. But I sure hope you are prepared to deliver it.” Which, ha ha, got my mom to shut up.

  Okay, so like it hurt more than anything I ever imagined. It hurt more than when Billy got killed, and I didn’t think there would ever be nothing that hurt worse than that. Later, Holly told me it was not a usual birth. Still, I don’t think I’ll ever do it again. Like I could! Ha, stuck here with all these women.

  I was exhausted. I just wanted to go to sleep. Holly said, “What are you going to name him?” And I said, “JoJo.” And my mom said, “I knew it. I knew it was Joey Marin.” My mom was obsessed with trying to figure out who JoJo’s dad was. “It ain’t Joey Marin,” I said, but she just looked all superior. Holly cleaned him up and she said he was beautiful. And that’s coming from someone who delivered hundreds of babies, so that should tell you something. Then she gave him to me, wrapped up like a bratwurst in a bun. Everybody stood there, even my dad. Like I was going to breastfeed in front of him! I guess Holly figured that out, ’cause she said she had some things to talk to them about in private. When Mom and Dad were both out the door, I told Holly I was sorry I got her in trouble. “That’s all right,” she said. “I thought this room could use a birth.” I saw what she meant. Except for Holly’s clothes and a little glass jar on the dresser filled with some wildflowers, the room was just the way it was when Billy left to get killed in the war.

  So I took off my T-shirt and put JoJo up by my boob, and he started sucking.

  The next day, after I moved back upstairs and my mom cleaned all of Holly’s sheets and even baked her a tube of chocolate chip cookies to thank her for everything she did, I was undressing JoJo, and the next thing I knew, my finger was bleeding and JoJo was crying and my mom was standing there going, “What are you doing to him?”

  “I ain’t doing nothing to him,” I said. “I pricked my finger.”

  “This is no longer all about you,” she said, and, “You better make sure you keep one hand on him when he’s on the changing table, or it won’t be long before he’ll just roll off.” About as soon as JoJo was born, my mom started imagining all the horrible ways he could die.

  I looked at JoJo laying there with his face all scrunched up and all I could think was that I had a huge problem. I didn’t love him, all right? For the first time in my entire life I wondered if this is what was wrong with me and my mom, that she just didn’t love me and couldn’t do nothing about it. I felt real bad, and angry too. I decided that wasn’t going to happen with me and JoJo.

  I picked him up and took him with me to the bed, and that’s when I saw them sticking out. They were tiny, like his fingers and toes were tiny. They were tiny like that.

  “Holy shit, JoJo,” I said. “You’ve got wings.”

  Tamara

  When Tamara met Raj and found out he was Hindu, she didn’t think much about it. It wasn’t until she was already falling in love that she discovered how much his faith mattered to him. She told him she wasn’t sure she could convert, but he said she didn’t need to. It might have been easier if she could fool herself into believing that her infidelity had been Raj’s fault, but Tamara could not believe that. She had cheated on him for the worst reason of all: because she felt like it.

  There was justice in her pregnancy. It was a Catholic thought, she knew, but no matter how many years had passed since she’d gone to church, she could not escape the idea that God did things like this to Catholics. He punished them for being bad.

  Tamara knew it was not uncommon for pregnant woman to have horrible dreams, but she was sure hers were the worst. Several times, Raj died. Once, she drowned the baby. (How could she even dream that?) She had many dreams that featured birth defects. When she woke up crying, Raj held her, soothed her, made her tea, told her jokes. He was the perfect husband, which just made everything worse.

  Tamara thought of confessing. Being raised Catholic, how could she not think of that? But she couldn’t decide. Was she confessing to help their marriage, or just to relieve her guilt? What was the right thing to do? She no longer trusted her judgment. How could she, after she’d displayed such a colossal lack of any? (After it all came out and everything fell apart the way it did, she would decide she must have been put under some sort of spell, though the other women say things like, “Sure, if that’s what you wanna call it, honey.”)

  Tamara had passed the bar exam, so she was technically a lawyer, but hardly anyone knew that. She never practiced. She hated law school, but didn’t dare quit after her parents had put so much money into it. She hadn’t really mentioned, in any of her phone calls or emails to her parents, that she wasn’t doing anything with her degree, but instead was working part-time at the Voorhisville library while writing another novel. She’d never told them about the four previous novels she’d written (but not published) so it was difficult to tell them about the fifth. They wouldn’t approve. Her father used to make fun of her art major friends. He called them “the future poor of America.”

  She and Raj moved to Voorhisville because they had fantasies about small town life. Raj, who worked as a litigation attorney in Becksworth, and therefore wasn’t really in Voorhisville much, still believed it was a quaint community, a perfect place for children. Tamara wasn’t so sure. She’d seen things: the way Michael Baile (whose cousin was on the school board) got all the contracts for the school maintenance jobs, even though there were consistent complaints about the quality of his work. The way almost everyone talked about Maddy Malvern’s spiral into sexual promiscuity, but did nothing about it. The way Roddy Tyler flopped around in those duct-taped shoes even in the winter, despite the fact that he worked for the richest people in town. Tamara did not think Voorhisville was quaint, though it did have the annual Halloween parade with all the children dressed in costumes walking down Main Street. That was quaint. And Fourth of July in Fletcher’s Park, with Girl Scouts selling baked goods, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and Mr. Muller twisting balloons into animal shapes while the senior citizen band played God knows what . . . well, that was quaint too. But Tamara saw the looks Raj, with his dark skin, got. “Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked, but he just laughed. That’s just the way Raj was. He didn’t care. It had been harder for Tamara. She wasn’t used to being a victim of prejudice.

  “It would be like this in almost any small town in America,” Raj said. “You can’t let it upset you.”

  But it did. It upset Tamara very much. It confused her, too. She could never be sure. Had the man at the post office been rude because he knew she was married to someone with dark skin, or had he just been a rude man? What about the checkout girl at the supermarket, and the lady who cut her off at the corner of Henry Street and Wildwood?

  The novel Tamara was working on was called Underskin, about a nomadic tribe of tree dwellers and the consumers who ate them. It was a love story, a dark fantasy, a brutal indictment of prejudice, and her best work. But after her strange encounter with the blue-eyed man, it was contaminated. Also, Tamara would later note, wryly, she had to resist the urge to put in a band of avenging angels. They weren’t part of her plan for the book, and yet they kept appearing. She kept crossing them out.

  Essentially, the work that had been going so well before she cheated on her husband s
tarted going very badly. This, Tamara knew, was God’s way of getting her. This and her pregnancy; that’s how she thought of it. She thought God had made her pregnant just to prove a point—which, she reasoned, was unnecessary, because she already knew she shouldn’t have cheated, so why’d God have to make her pregnant as well?

  After Tamara took two home pregnancy tests, she called Planned Parenthood and made an appointment she never kept. Much later, when the bad things happened and she was stuck with all the other women chronicling their stories, she wondered if this decision had been a matter of enchantment.

  When she told Raj they were expecting, he kissed her all over. (Raj, thankfully, mistook her tears for joy.) They talked about names and the dreams they had for the child. “I just want her to be happy,” Tamara said, and Raj laughed and said, “That’s a big dream.”

  Over the next several months, Tamara found herself praying. She prayed to God, and she prayed to Krishna too. She prayed to everyone she could think of, like the Virgin Mary, and her Great-Uncle Cal (who would probably be embarrassed by all this, but was the only dead person Tamara had been close to.) Hi, Uncle Cal, she’d think. This is Tamara. I’m married now. And I made a mistake. Please, please make sure that this baby is Raj’s and not, well . . . I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done it. I know that. Thank you, Uncle Cal. She prayed to Kali, with her four arms and that mysterious smile of hers. She even prayed to that elephant—she could never remember his name, but Raj had a small statue of him in the living room, and she prayed to him because he looked nonjudgmental. For eight months, Tamara suffered in fear and anguish while her body blossomed, effortlessly. “I don’t know why women complain about being pregnant,” she told Holly.

  “Sometimes it’s more difficult to have an easy pregnancy,” Holly said, “because then you’re not really prepared for the birth.”

  At this, Tamara smiled.

  But when the pain arrived it was the worst feeling Tamara could ever imagine. One second she was sitting at her desk crossing out angels, and the next she was on the floor, screaming. She was in so much pain she couldn’t even move. It hurt to breathe. It was torture to get up or slide across the floor, which is how she tried to reach the phone, because Raj had gone into work even though her due date was approaching. (“I’ll just call if anything happens,” she said. “We’ll have plenty of time. All the books say so.”) Tamara screamed and writhed on the floor for hours before Raj found her there. During those hours, Tamara accepted that she was being punished. She also accepted that she was going to die. She even reached the point where she wanted to die.

  “I’ll call Holly,” Raj said.

  “I’m dying,” she said.

  “You’re not dying,” he said. Then she opened her mouth and screamed, and his eyes got round, and he called Holly.

  Later, Holly said it was not an ordinary birth. “I think something’s happening here,” she said, mysteriously. Tamara was studying her baby, trying to decide who the father was. After several minutes of intense scrutiny, she asked, “Who do you think he looks like?”

  Holly looked down at the baby, then at Tamara.

  She knows, Tamara thought. How could she?

  But Holly did not reach into her bag of birthing supplies to bring out a large scarlet letter. Instead, she left without addressing the question.

  He did have blue eyes, but lots of babies do. His hair was dark, his skin was pink, and his body was an amazing, intricate, perfect blessing. After all those horrible dreams, and the months of guilt, and most especially the horrible pain of birth, Tamara felt blessed. In the end it didn’t matter who the father was. Well, it mattered, of course, but also, it didn’t. The only thing that really mattered was the baby.

  Tamara thought she knew how she’d feel about her first child: protective, loving, proud. She had not been prepared to feel the way she did. In fact, she would say she had underestimated the power of the love she would feel for this little boy as much as she’d underestimated the pain of his birth.

  It was three days later, after Raj had gone to the Becksworth airport to pick up her parents, when Tamara discovered the tiny sharp wings protruding from her baby’s back. By then she already loved him more than she had ever loved anyone or anything else. Her love was monstrous. When she saw the wings, she turned him over and stared into those deep eyes of his and said, “Nobody is ever going to know, little one.”

  When Raj came home with her parents and their frightening amount of luggage, he kissed her on the cheek and said, “Everything okay?” She nodded. Later, when she had time to consider the disturbing events that followed, she pinned her ruin to that moment. The “thing she’d done with the stranger,” as she’d come to think of it, had been wrong, but she could no longer wish it away without wishing away her child.

  No, what had sealed her fate was that moment when she decided to lie to her husband about the baby’s wings. It was no longer the three of them against the world, but mother and child against everyone else.

  So many women were pregnant Shreve started a prenatal yoga class. “Something in the water,” they’d say, or “Who’s your milkman?”

  Emily and Shreve thought they shared the biggest joke of all. Emily liked to say that they were “fuck-related,” though Shreve found this crude. They could not agree on what had happened to them. Emily thought Jeffrey was a jerk, while Shreve thought he was some sort of holy man.

  “I can’t believe you think that,” Emily said. “Saints don’t have sex.”

  “Not a saint,” Shreve said. “A yogi. And they do.”

  “Oh, come on! He was just a man. He was just like other men.”

  Shreve sighed, apparently remembering something wonderful beyond words.

  This, of course, stressed Emily out. Did Shreve have better sex with him than Emily did? Was he gentler? Rougher? Had something profound happened between those two? Was he more attracted to Shreve? Was Shreve better at sex than Emily was?

  She suggested that, in the interest of peace, they stop talking about it, and Shreve agreed.

  Agreeing to disagree on the nature of what occurred with Jeffrey had been the first big test of their friendship. The next big test happened later.

  Emily discovered her baby’s small, sharp, featherless wings on June fifth, while changing Gabriel into one of his cute little baseball outfits (Red Sox, of course). She watched in amazement as the tiny wings unfolded and folded shut again, drawn into his back. She touched the spot, certain she’d imagined the wings, a weird hallucination. (Maybe she’d just never gotten to that point in the pregnancy books.) She almost convinced herself that was what had happened, when, with a burp, the wings appeared once more. Emily reached to touch one. The next thing she knew, she was walking down the street with Gabriel secured in his Snugli against her chest. She patted the baby’s back, but didn’t feel anything unusual.

  At that exact moment, Shreve was saying to her baby, Michael, “You’re going to meet your half brother today.” She believed Jeffrey had been some kind of an angel sent to her by her dead fiancé. She wasn’t sure why her dead fiancé had sent the angel to Emily also, except that it gave her son a brother . . . and that was a very good reason, the more she thought about it.

  Michael had blue eyes, a remarkable head of dark curls, and two dimples. His pink flesh was already filling out, losing that newborn look. He had a round face and a round body, round hands, almost round feet, and a little tiny round penis. When Shreve turned him over to admire the beautiful symmetry of his little round butt, she watched, in amazement, as two wings blossomed from his back.

  “I knew it,” she said.

  She wanted to investigate the wings, but Emily would be there any minute, so Shreve hurriedly dressed Michael in a pink romper (she didn’t believe in the certain-colors-for-certain-genders thing) and wrapped him in the yellow blanket Emily had given her. It was rather warm in the house for a blanket, but Shreve thought it the best protection against any revelation of his wings.

  Rig
ht then, the doorbell rang. “Hellooo,” Emily called, in a soft singsong voice. “Is there a mommy home?”

  “Come in,” Shreve singsonged back, walking to the door with Michael in her arms.

  “He’s beautiful,” Emily said. “He looks a lot like his brother.”

  “Oh, let me see.”

  “He just fell asleep. I don’t want to wake him.”

  “Okay,” Shreve said, realizing that she had no idea what kind of mother Emily would be. “Well, come in. I’ll make some tea.”

  The first time Emily had seen Shreve’s tiny kitchen—which was painted blue, yellow, and red—she thought it quite strange, but she had grown to like the cozy space. She sat at the small wooden table while Shreve prepared the teakettle and teapot, all while holding Michael.

  “You look completely comfortable,” Emily said. “You probably gave birth like it was nothing.”

  Shreve couldn’t even smile the memory away. She turned to her friend with an expression of horror. “No. It was terrible.”

  “Me too,” Emily said.

  “I mean, I expected pain, but it was—”

  “I know, I know,” Emily said, so loud she woke up Gabriel. She didn’t move towards unstrapping the Snugli; but remained seated, jiggling her knees while the baby cried harder.

  Shreve did not like to judge, but the thought occurred to her that Emily might not be very good at this mothering thing. “We could go in the living room,” Shreve said. “Lay them down on the blanket and introduce them to each other.”

  “Sometimes he cries like this,” Emily heard herself saying, stupidly.

  Shreve thought that even the way Emily tried to soothe her baby, like a police officer patting down a suspect, proved that not all women are natural mothers.

  The teakettle whistled and Michael joined in the crying. Shreve, laughing, turned to take the kettle off the burner.

  “Okay,” Emily said over her baby’s wailing. “Let’s go in the living room.”

  It was warm enough that Shreve had opened the windows. The chakra wind chimes hanging outside were silent in the still air. Shreve realized she wouldn’t be able to justify laying Michael down wrapped in a blanket. Instead, she got the little carrier seat one of her yoga students had given her.