Clarkesworld Magazine - Issue 19

by www. clarkesworldmagazine. com

  When you go to see the doctor the following day, you lift up your shirt and he pinches you with cold metal on your stomach, your back, your thighs.

  He frowns. “This can’t be right,” he says. He looks confused. He stares at you. He helps you stand up and takes you over to the scales. He fiddles with the weights for a few minutes, but no matter what he does it still says the same thing. You smile your secret little smile, the one you smile sometimes when your face is too tired for the other one, the one others can see, and you know that the instrument is correct. You know it, but it’s just not official until a doctor says so. No — the Doctor. Capital D. You can’t wait to hear him say it. You can’t wait to hear him say it, you can’t wait to hear him say it. You can’t wait. What the hell is he waiting for?

  “Abigail,” he says, finally giving up on the scale, “I don’t understand it. How can you be six-two, weigh only fourteen pounds, and still be alive?”

  You smile at him with the other smile, the external one, even though the effort threatens to prematurely wear you out. “I know, doctor. I amaze even myself sometimes.”

  You strut a little as you walk out of the office.

  Six weeks later, you meet the man of your dreams: a multibillionaire prince in exile, who makes his home in Connecticut now that the royal family of — wherever, you were never good at geography — has fallen out of favor. What makes him so special, though, is that you like him for who he is, and he likes you for who you are. It’s not your body — so perfect now, after all of your hard work — or his money and his title. No, it’s the little things that make the two of you work so well together, like how each of you can’t help but smile when you see the other and how you never run out of things to talk about. You know, the important stuff.

  In fact, both of you were madly, wildly, truly in love (with the stars in your eyes and that warm glow in your hearts) well before it registered in your brains: it was the crotch-area that caught on first, you joke to all of your jealous friends.

  Someday, if they’re lucky, maybe they can find a catch half as good. The poor plain things.

  Two months after you meet him, the day finally arrives. The day, the one you both worked so hard to obtain: your wedding day. You have on a simple white dress, no train, with very little lace work around the top. It accentuates your augmented bosom, and the rail-thin, rock-hard abdomen you sweated blood and tears and money to earn. The one extravagance in the simple ensemble is the veil — so large, airy, and white it looks like a cloud-halo around your head. That’s why you bought it. He always calls you his little angel.

  You step out of the limo on the big day and begin walking up the steps to the church. You take your time, resting every few steps and swallowing caffeine pills for energy when necessary. It’s hard to do something so physical now that you’ve perfected your body, but the thought of your prince waiting for you at the top gives your blood all the strength and vigor it needs — until it happens.

  Damn the veil. It would never have happened without the veil. You’re so thin, so perfect! There would have been no purchase for the wind. But you are wearing the veil, and you can’t take it back now even though you scream as the gust of air slams into you from the side and lifts you up into the sky.

  The veil spreads out, all fifty thousand dollars of it, and it catches the wind almost as though it had been designed to do so from the very beginning, almost as though you really are an angel and the veil is your wings. You rise up into the air, higher and higher, and for a second your strained heart beats so fast that you are afraid it will burst. So you hold off on the caffeine pill you were about to swallow until it slows down again.

  Your prince sees it all happen from the chapel, and he races from the church to his car. His driver speeds off while he makes a call on his cell phone, and for two whole minutes you see nothing of him at all until — it comes. The private helicopter. You smile when you see that your prince himself is there within it, right beside the pilot, shouting orders and gesturing wildly at you, his love. His princess. His angel.

  The chopper closes in, but it doesn’t work. You’re far too light now, and the veil is far too efficient at catching the wind. Whenever the helicopter rises up to meet you, the gusts created by its whirling blades do nothing but send you higher and higher into the atmosphere.

  Eventually the air is too thin for the helicopter to follow. You watch as it recedes, shrinking beneath you, becoming smaller and smaller — a dot — until finally, it is gone. The whole of planet Earth takes its place in stretching out beneath your feet, and you wave hello.

  I’m queen of the world, you think. Smiling, you reach out with your arms and grab hold of the moon, pulling it to your bosom and snuggling close.

  You wish mom were alive to see you, but she isn’t and doesn’t, and in fact, no one ever sees you again. Not ever. But late at night, your many friends and the adoring public that fawned so jealously after your fairy tale wedding to the prince of—wherever — often look up into the sparkling sky. Up at your legend, to stare and silently wonder at which light above was added on that blustery, almost wedding day in March.

  All of them, you say in your secret voice. All of them.

  But they don’t hear you. And every time you think of using your other voice, the one they could hear, it hardly seems worth the effort.

  About the Author

  Jeremiah Sturgill lives and writes in Fredericksburg, Virginia. “Flight” is his second published story. The first, “Songbird,” was published by Baen’s Universe in late 2006. In 2005, he graduated from Mary Washington University and started Son and Foe, a fiction e-zine that crashed and burned a year later with spectacular predictability (but not before publishing a number of really great stories). In late 2007, he stopped talking at parties about this novel he planned on writing, and he began talking about this novel he’d finished. Sometime in the next twenty years, he hopes to actually sell the damn thing.

  Not Now, Sweetie, Daddy’s Worldbuilding

  Tim Pratt

  I’m not a full-time writer. It’s much worse than that: I’m a guy with a day job who also has enough freelance work to keep a full-time writer busy. In the past couple of years I’ve made more money from writing than I have in my job as an editor at a trade magazine, but in my attempts to pay down the credit card debt accrued in my misspent early twenties, I’ve kept the day job even as my writing workload increased. At this point, I do a couple thousand words of non-fiction a week, and I’m almost finished with my current book contract (which required me to write four novels in two years); add in the occasional short story, book review, and articles like this one, and, well, you can imagine, I spend a lot of time typing.

  All of which made me a little anxious when my wife (also a writer, Heather Shaw) and I started talking about having a kid back in 2006. The timing was right in a lot of ways; we weren’t quite as flat broke as usual, we weren’t getting any younger, and, more importantly, we wanted our own little bundle of pooping screaming joy. But I’m no stranger to kids. I knew having a baby would utterly transform our lives — mostly, but not entirely, in positive ways. The not-so-positive ways I imagined included sleep-deprivation and a general time-crunch, but I figured, hey, people have been having babies for a few hundred millennia, and it hasn’t spelled the doom of all art and culture and civilization, so I’m sure we’ll cope.

  But after my wife got pregnant and we began spreading the news, I started to get the comments. The knowing, nodding comments from other parents, some of whom were also writers. “That’s it for your writing career for a few years,” they’d say. Or, “Get ready to become an appendage to a tiny human,” they’d say. Or, “So long, sense of self!” Well, hell. Seriously? I could live without my sense of self, but having a kid would trash my ability to write? That was problematic, since the only way we could afford to have a kid, at least without switching to an all-macaroni-and-cheese diet, was with the extra money I made from writing. If parenthood and cranking out words w
ere incompatible, I was pretty well screwed.

  Fortunately I saw a few counterexamples. Creative parents who’d managed to keep producing work, while still enjoying their kids. Many of them used resources I didn’t expect to have, though — nannies, for instance. Or babysitters who came in to watch the kids for a couple of days a week. Or, and this seemed crucial, not working the equivalent of two full-time jobs. I knew writing and parenting an infant could be done — I just wasn’t sure how I, in particular, would do it.

  Our son River was born on November 8, 2007. The birth experience was harrowing and transformative, and once everything was settled down and mom and baby were okay, I was as happy as I’ve ever been. We spent the next few days in the hospital, where my wife slept in a hospital bed, my son slept in a little tiny baby bed, and I slept — or, rather, failed to sleep — on a cot that was essentially a large block of wood with a yoga mat stapled on top of it. At one point, having gone a day and a half without rest, but unable to sleep, I thought, “Okay, let’s do a proof of concept. Let’s write something.”

  I’d done that kind of ritual psych-yourself-out magic before. I went to the Clarion writing workshop in 1999, right after college (remember that debt I ran up in my misspent twenties? Spending six weeks at a workshop was one of the causes of that). At the workshop, I heard about the “post-Clarion slump” that afflicted many writers. After spending six weeks being hyper-critical, a switch got thrown in some people’s heads, and they couldn’t write a damn thing for six months or a year or two years or four, because they couldn’t turn off the internal editor. I was terrified of something like that happening to me, so immediately after returning from Clarion, I wrote a novel. In about 90 days. I didn’t sell the novel or anything, ever, but I proved to myself that I could still write, at least as well as I ever could.

  So while my wife slept, and my son slept, I sat in the hall outside the hospital room, and I wrote. When I finished the story, and my wife woke up, I read it to her, and to our son (he wasn’t much of an audience then, but I don’t hold it against him). The story was called “The River Boy,” and it appeared in this very magazine in January. I proved to myself that I could still write (salable!) fiction, even after not sleeping for 36 hours, in terrible conditions. That was an important moment. That got me over the psychological perils of writing as a new father.

  At the time, I thought, “Ha! I showed you, assorted naysayers!” Boy, was I dumb. Sure, I’d overcome any potential psychological block — but that didn’t help much with practical matters, did it?

  I am, by nature, a binge writer. I like sitting at my computer, cranking up iTunes, and tippy-tapping the keys for six or eight hours at a go. (With breaks to occasionally stare out the window or eat a cheeseburger.) A couple of years ago I finagled things at my day job to get a schedule that’s perfect for me. I work four days a week (nine-hour-days, no less), and get every Wednesday off. On those Wednesdays, I would write — freelance non-fiction stuff in the morning, then I’d take a walk (both an attempt to exercise my sedentary corpus and a chance to think about the afternoon’s work), and then I’d work on fiction for the rest of the day. I was crazy productive. I kept on top of my book-every-six-months deadlines, never turned in a review or column late, and even wrote the occasional short story, just to keep my hand in.

  But with a kid, everything changed. My wife was on maternity leave for a while, and when I got home from work, she was justifiably exhausted and ready to have me take over the kid for a while — something I was happy to do, having missed him all day. As a newborn, he didn’t have a sleep schedule so much as a series of randomly-occurring naps of no set duration, which made it tough for me to get enough sleep to function as a human being, let alone compose words of deathless (or even usably disposable) prose. I could usually scrounge a couple of hours each week to get work done, which was enough to stay on top of my freelance deadlines... but what about my novel, the fourth and final one on my contract, due shortly before my son turns six months old? And what about after my wife’s maternity leave ended and she went back to work, too? We wrangled our schedules such that we could avoid day care — I take the kid into the office with me a couple days a week (it’s a small office, and baby-friendly, which helps), and my wife works from home a few different days a week, so between us, the kid is always taken care of. But that means a distinct lack of what you childless types call “free time.” Where was I going to get seven or eight hours in a row, ever, to binge-write fiction?

  Well, nowhere. With a kid, long chunks of time to write is like perpetual motion or zero point energy. You just can’t get it, at least, not without putting more energy into the system than you get out. I was seriously contemplating hiring a babysitter for a few hours just so I could write — but with the kind of money fiction writing pays, that quickly becomes a losing proposition, economically speaking. So... I adjusted. Turns out, that’s what being a parent requires. Yes, I’m a natural binge writer. Yes, my preferred technique is to slip into that wonderful zen state of flow for several hours and emerge with twenty or thirty pages of prose. But you know what? Too bad.

  Let me tell you how I write now: in ten or fifteen minute increments. Sometimes a whole half hour on my lunch breaks at work. Or, when my kid wakes up at 4:30 a.m. and wants to eat, and I pour a bottle down him and know he’ll sleep for a couple more hours, I don’t go back to bed — I take advantage of that two hours, and sleep-dep be damned. We’ve got this toy — we call it the “sun spinner” — that’s basically a colorful mat with some toys dangling above, and big mirror, and it spins and sings and talks. Our kid loves it. Put him on his back under the mirror and he giggles and coos for ten minutes, or 20 minutes, or even 30 minutes. That’s when I write — hell, that’s when I wrote most of this. Now, at four months old, he’s finally getting into something resembling a sleep routine, with a morning nap and an afternoon nap. The naps don’t always happen, and they aren’t of dependable length, but on a good day he’ll snooze in the swing for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon, and if I’m home from work that day, I get into work-mode and I crank.

  I am no longer thrown off my game by interruptions, phone calls, knocks at the door. Such things, once enough to distract me and wreck my productivity, now don’t even rate notice. I can pick up a plot thread abandoned two weeks ago mid-sentence and make it work again. I can type one-handed with a baby hanging on my other arm, gnawing on my bicep and kicking my keyboard tray. I plot while I push him in the stroller. I read page proofs while bottle feeding. I check copyedits during tummy time. I put him in the baby harness on my chest and type while he hollers about how incredibly bored he is just watching black marks appear on a white screen.

  I just do it. It helps that I have no choice. Deadlines have a way of concentrating the mind. Is my writing as good now as it once was? I have no idea. It’s definitely different. I worry about the flow of the language, that it might have lost something since I’m producing prose in such short bursts. I worry about having less time to revise, and about having more typos and continuity errors than I used to, and producing generally rougher and more hideous first drafts. And it’s not like I’ve got this thing figured out for all time; I mean, my son is four months old right now. He’s tiny, he pretty much stays where we put him (flailing and early attempts at rolling aside), and he’s overall easygoing. What will I do when he can get out of the swing on his own and do himself bodily harm if I don’t keep a close eye on him? What happens when the terrible twos start and he begins testing limits? When he needs help with his spelling homework? When I’m trying to work and he comes in after school and says, hopefully, “Daddy, will you play with me?” Will I really be able to look at him and say, “Not now, kiddo, daddy’s plotting?” I don’t know. I don’t know how it’ll work. I just know it will, somehow. Learning that I’m capable of absorbing major disruptions to my beloved routines, that I can make adjustments to do what’s necessary, is the first thing my son taught me. (Beca
use I already knew how to change poop-filled diapers.)

  About the Author

  Tim Pratt lives in Oakland California with his wife Heather Shaw and their son River. His short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and last year his story “Impossible Dreams” won a Hugo Award. Just lately he’s been publishing a series of urban fantasy novels under the name T.A. Pratt, starting with Blood Engines in 2007, with Poison Sleep and Dead Reign to follow in 2008.

  Refusing to Be the Same: An Interview with K.J. Bishop

  Jeff VanderMeer

  K.J. Bishop’s first novel, The Etched City, was published by indie press Prime Books and then picked up by Bantam as well as Pan Macmillan, in addition to foreign language editions. It garnered excellent critical attention and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, in addition to winning the Crawford Award for best first novel. Bishop has also had stories in Leviathan 4, The New Weird, The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases, and several other publications.

  For those who aren’t familiar with Bishop’s fiction, she writes in a somewhat surrealist, almost Decadent vein, with The Etched City being a kind of dark urban fantasy. Her writing can be lush, but also sparse and minimalistic when she wants it to be. She, perhaps more than most others, strikes me as someone who could go in any direction as a writer.

  Bishop and her husband currently live in Bangkok, Thailand, after moving from Australia. From Bangkok, she keeps up a lively and sometimes controversial blog (http://kjbishop.net/). Since The Etched City, Bishop has been splitting her time between a variety of different projects. Although a new novel may be a year or more in the offing, she is working on short fiction. I decided to check in on Bishop and find out what she’d been up to...