His father said, They do work, son. Your legs are just fine.
And the son said, Then why do I feel stuck?
His father said, We will get you unstuck. Those are nice legs, good legs. Don’t be mad at your legs. Look at me. Look at Mommy. We will figure this out. We gave you those legs. We are sorry. I am sorry. But it is not your fault. And you will get to run.
The boy eventually did run. Sort of. It looked funny, and other boys laughed at him. So after a few tries the boy stopped running.
WAS THE MAN O.K.? Did he need a moment?
The man was fine.
A glass of water, perhaps?
No, the man said. I’m fine.
Deep breath, O.K.?
In other ways, things were going pretty well. As it turned out, the man did have a talent for blacksmithing. Not a great talent. He would not make swords for knights and princes. But he had something. And people noticed. They started to bring him stuff to smith, and he could smith the heck out of that stuff. He hammered stuff and flattened other stuff and made stuff, stuck stuff in the fire, and stuff. What had started out as a thing on the side turned into a little bit of a cottage industry.
He had time to do this because he had quit his job at the firm and now worked as a lawyer in local government. No bonus, but good benefits. And the hours were so much better. Now the man was home most nights for dinner. He and his wife and son moved to a slightly bigger cottage, just outside the village. The lawyer-blacksmith was still no knight or lord, of course, but he could provide for his family. They were never hungry. Things were fine, mostly, although sometimes when they went down to the village for a harvest festival, other families would look at them, and they hated the way they were looked at. Sympathy, mixed with something else. Something like, I admire you, but don’t touch me or I might catch your plague of misfortune. Sympathy, as in, I sympathize, my heart goes outward to you— outward to you, as in, You over there, stay over there, don’t come any closer. I will admire you from a distance. The man knew that look well. The man’s wife said, Don’t be so hard on people. They mean well. But the man said, Meaning well is for shit. Oh, he knew that look and how he hated that look. The presumptuousness of it. Those other families didn’t say anything. That was the worst part. Except when they did say something. And that was even worse: So inspiring. You must be so strong, selfless. Now, that was a fairy tale. The idea of selfless people. As if their lives were somehow different, as if they didn’t have flaws and urges, didn’t ever want to have a couple of drinks, or three, or ten. As if having a kid like theirs made them into some kind of charmed species, some imaginary fairytale type of nonhuman humans, people who never got bored or tired or horny. But the blacksmith-lawyer, as much as he resented these strangers with their heartfelt looks, couldn’t blame them. So he ignored them.
He was up for a promotion to managing attorney of his department. By now his son was eight. No, closer to ten. Now fifteen. The years were getting away from him. The boy still had no friends, and though it hurt the man every time his son asked why not, it hurt more on the day that his son stopped asking. That was years ago now. Things were still fine. The cottage felt small, so they bought another one. Not great timing, because a month later the blacksmith-lawyer was passed over for the better job. Something about his not having the right attitude. He’d heard back-channel whispers throughout the village that the higher-ups in the department all liked him, but they wondered if he could commit to the additional responsibility. Given, well, his circumstances. They knew he had a kid at home who required extra care. That was all maybe a nice way for them to not say what the problem really was. Maybe that they found it kind of depressing to be around him. They all felt for him, though. His lovely wife, his special-needs kid or whatever. They would never fire him, he knew. He could have a job there for as long as he wanted, doing land surveys on local fiefdoms. Dividing up the realm for lesser lords and vassals, assessing taxes on men far richer than he could ever dream of being. Drawing a steady stream of copper into his accounts. A stable life, a life for his family. That was the right thing to do.
So he did it. He was angry at his wife, even though she had never asked him to do it. He began staying out late, for work, at first, and then not for work. His wife made ever more frequent trips to the apothecary. Began to learn the trade. Soon she had perfected a potion of her own. An elixir for relaxation, she called it. Just to get through the day.
Their son continued to grow. His body did, anyway. The rest of him, it was harder to tell. At times, he seemed like a soul trapped inside a mind trapped inside a brain trapped inside a body. A body that turned into a man’s body, while somewhere in there, flitting around like a moth, without any direction or understanding, was a child. A baby. Their baby.
FUCK, MAN, DO I have to do this? I don’t know if I can keep doing this. Keep going. This is good.
What’s good?
The therapist said that this was serious progress. The man was finally getting somewhere.
The man didn’t know what else to say. His armpits were sweaty, his back hurt, his ass was sore from the therapist’s lumpy couch. He had to take a piss. He was tired of narrating.
O.K., then. He could have a break, drink some water, and then, whenever he was ready, start again.
The man didn’t want to start again. But the therapist cast a meaningful gaze at the clock and the man understood that his time was almost up, and so he started again. Once upon a time, there was a therapist who had no idea what she was doing.
The man waited for a reaction, but the therapist didn’t take the bait. She didn’t say anything. She nodded, and leaned forward, and waited for him to continue.
Once upon a time, there was a therapist who wasn’t going to do any good and cost too much, and it’s not like the man was made of money. He did all right, but this was not exactly in the budget, and, anyway, they weren’t the kind of people who hired therapists. That was for rich people. It was his wife’s idea, soon to be ex-wife, maybe, and what kind of crap was this, imposing conditions on him, to save his marriage, like he deserved this, after all he had done—conditions. Conditions! Like he was the only one who was broken. Like he was the only one who had maybe got a little too angry at the kid, the man-child, never violent but just a little mean. But, God damn it, he didn’t know where the meanness came from. He couldn’t help it, really, when it started rising up in him, the blood and heat, climbing into his face, and he could feel it—he was going to say something that he couldn’t take back, he was going to say something that was the opposite of what he wanted to say, when all he wanted to do was stroke the boy’s cheek and say—
SORRY. sHIT. sORRY. I’m all over the place.
It’s O.K. Take a moment. Take as long as you need.
I don’t know.
What don’t you know?
I don’t know if I can do this.
Have a sip of water.
The man took a sip of ice-cold water.
Once upon a time, there was an angry guy, who hated the story he was in. All right? He was angry, O.K.? Once upon a time, there was a guy who wasn’t allowed to start a story with ‘once upon a time.’ Because it wasn’t once upon a time. It was a specific time. And he wasn’t a blacksmith—he was just a regular guy who lived in the forest. He waited maybe too long to get married, but the thing was, he had his mom to take care of, never felt it was time, all those years, watching her body shrivel up. His mom, who deserved better. He worked days, and at night he looked after her, and then, when she was gone, he got married. A little later in life. Maybe too late. But he’d wanted his own story. Just a simple one. That was all he and his wife wanted, and the obgyn told them about the elevated risks, the witch’s curse and all that. But whatever. They had the boy anyway. The man and his wife and the boy who laughed and clapped but didn’t talk or run. It was a family. His family. His wife—she was good, she was a better person than he was. She showed him how to love the boy. He loved the hell out of the boy.
And they moved even deeper into the forest. They wanted to be far from everything else. They didn’t want to see other people anymore. Wanted to find another forest, another village, another once upon a time, where they’d be safe from potions, and spells, and anything else. Dragons. Werewolves. Curses. A place without magic. Wherever that might be.
The guy and his wife built their house to be strong, fortifying it with wood, sticks, mud, stones, whatever they could find. They lived carefully, quietly, didn’t even look at each other most days. They’d had enough of living in a half-assed fairy tale. Enough bloodshed, enough potions and elixirs, enough of that for a lifetime. They figured if they didn’t talk, didn’t try to understand it all, then the story would just go away. Would stop trying to mean something, would stop trying to break their broken hearts.
So they stopped thinking. At night, they stopped dreaming. From their heads, they carved out the parts that had made dreams and fed them to wild animals. Scattered their dream-stuff on the ground, to be pecked at, gnawed at, chewed up. Waking, sleeping without dreams, working. Like this, they passed many days. Years.
The boy grew. But he didn’t, really. Then one day the man looked at his wife across the breakfast table. She was putting a strawberry into their son’s mouth. Their son was smiling. Dumb, unknowing, a grown man’s face with the eyes of a child. The smile of an idiot.
This was the most beautiful thing the man had ever seen.
For a moment, he was happy.
He went out to gather wood and, in his happiness, walked much farther from his home than he had in a long time. He came upon a stream, over which there had once been a bridge, whose wooden planks had now rotted away. And there he discovered a curious sight.
On the other side of the ruined bridge, sitting there alone, was his son. What are you doing out here? He asked. How did you get here?
The boy said he didn’t know. He started to moan. A horrid sound. A grown man crying like a baby. I’m sorry, he said, I’m so sorry.
O.K., the man said. O.K. Don’t cry. Tell me, sorry for what, little dude? What are you sorry for?
For all the trouble. For messing up your life.
Oh, God, the man said. No.
The man was the one who should apologize. How could he possibly explain that he wasn’t strong enough, or good enough, to be the boy’s father?
The boy said that he was trapped, wasn’t he? Trapped over here, on this side of the bridge. He started to cry again.
From across the distance, the man tried to soothe his son. Hummed to him, a song from when he was a baby. The boy stopped sobbing for a moment, long enough to say, Dad, tell me a story.
But what kind of story could the man tell? The man wasn’t a good enough storyteller. He’d had a kind of allegorical thing going for him once, but he’d lost the trail. No map, no legend. He no longer knew what stood for what.
He looked around. He was in the darkest part of the forest. He didn’t know this area. The cottage, the clearing in the woods, it was all so small, and so far from everything. The sounds coming from the trees were frightening. The man realized now what he had done. He had tried to ignore the story. He and his wife had tried to go on with their days, not speaking or thinking too hard. But the story had never gone away. Neglect and time had done their work. While the man wasn’t looking, this place had fallen apart.
He turned to see where he had come from and saw that the trail back to the cottage led nowhere. A few yards from him, it just sort of faded into the surroundings. Behind him, no way to retrace his steps. In front of him, a bridge to his son that had long since rotted. If he tried to cross, it wouldn’t hold his weight. He couldn’t get from here to there.
So, instead, he turned away from both, away from home and from his son. And he just ran. He ran as fast as he could, flat out running through the unknown forest. And then his wife was running beside him. And every ghoul, every beast, every horrible thing, corporeal, immaterial, every thing that had ever hunted or haunted the man and the woman, was now right behind them, pressing. And leading them all was their son, their son, asking, Don’t you want to be my parents? Why not? Why not? Soon they couldn’t remember if they’d ever done anything but run. Their lives had been one long chase.
No, the man said, this isn’t fair.
And his wife said, We have no time for fair.
And the man said, Why are we running? We’re in our own story. We don’t have to run.
Then he looked down at his body, and he saw that he was not a hero, not a blacksmith, or anything else. He looked over at his wife and saw that she was not a damsel in distress, not a candlemaker’s daughter. He barely knew her anymore. But he knew that she was Rachel. She was whoever was inside of Rachel. She was the mother of their child. Their boy. He looked at the boy. A grownup man now. Still a boy. A lovable boy trapped inside a smelly man, and he knew that he would wipe the boy’s nose and ass and anything else for as long as he needed to, because that’s what blacksmiths do. That’s what fairy-tale heroes do. They become government lawyers. They buy groceries. They shave their son three times a week, and feed him pudding, and sing to him once in a while.
This was not a dream, not a fairy tale. This was all there was, all there would be.
Once upon a time, there was a fable, and maybe at one point things corresponded, one for one, or close enough, but somewhere along the way it had twisted, and now he wasn’t sure what it was.
THE MAN WAS out of ideas. He heard the clock ticking: tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick tick. He looked at his therapist, wondering if he was already overtime. The therapist didn’t say anything. The man understood that he was in a new territory. He’d reached the edge of the forest. There was nowhere left to run.
He took a breath, realized that he was still sweating. Was this what the therapist had wanted? A lawyer-blacksmith in her office, sweating all over her couch, slowly losing his grip? Did she know how to help him? Could she help him remember how to get from here to there?
Time’s up, she said. It’s a start.
A start?
Yes.
The man looked at his therapist. Wondering if she could possibly be serious.
His lunch hour was over. The man got up to leave. On his way out the door, he said, See you next week, and the therapist said, Maybe. He turned to look at her. She said, Let’s see where you go from here.
The man went down the hall, relieved himself, washed his hands, splashed water on his face. As he stepped back out into the hallway, that was when he saw it. It looked like—but come on, no way. He was just seeing things now. But. Could it be?
In the carpet, the faintest outline.
A trail.
Where did it lead? Was it a way out? Or a way in?
And the man said to himself, All right, then, maybe she’s right. If this is where your story starts, then so be it.
HONOURABLE MENTIONS: 2016
“Rager in Space”, Charlie Jane Anders ( Bridging Infinity)
“Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived By Her Mercy”, Charlie Jane Anders (Drowned Worlds)
“Panic City”, Madeline Ashby (CyberWorld)
“Fifty Shades of Grays”, Steven Barnes (Lightspeed, 06/16)
“Mars Abides”, Stephen Baxter (Obelisk)
“The Story of Kao Yu”, Peter S. Beagle (Tor.com)
“Waking in Winter”, Deborah Biancotti (PS Publishing)
“The Voice in the Cornfield, the Word Made Flesh”, Desirina Boskovich (F&SF, 9-10/16)
“Martian Triptych”, James Bradley (Dreaming in the Dark)
“The House That Jessica Built”, Nadia Bulkin (The Dark, 11/16)
“Six Degrees of Separation Freedom”, Pat Cadigan (Bridging Infinity)
“Nesters”, Siobhan Carroll (Children of Lovecraft)
“A Dead Djinn in Cairo”, P. Djeli Clark (Tor.com, 10/05/16)
“The Lost Child of Lychford”, Paul Cornell (Tor.com Publishing)
“Pearl”, Aliette de Bodard (The St
arlit Wood)
“The Life and Times of Angel Evans”, Meredith Debonnaire (Booksmugglers, 9/13/16)
“The Sound That Grief Makes”, Kristi DeMeester (The Dark #17 10/16)
“Breadcrumbs”, Malcolm Devlin (Interzone 264, 5-6/16)
“The Adventure of the Extraordinary Rendition”, Cory Doctorow (Echoes of Holmes)
“Induction”, Thoraiya Dyer (Bridging Infinity)
“Where the Pelican Builds Her Nest”, Thoraiya Dyer (In Your Face)
“The Bridge of Dreams”, Gregory Feeley (Clarkesworld 114, 3/16)
“Not Without Mercy”, Jeffrey Ford (Conjunctions 69: Other Aliens)
“Lazarus and the Amazing Kid Phoenix”, Jennifer Giesbrecht (Apex, 7/16)
“Tower of the Rosewater Goblet”, Nin Harris (Strange Horizons)
“Little Widow”, Maria Dahvana Headley (What the #@&% Is That?)
“Origins”, Carlos Hernandez (The Grim Future)
“The Magical Properties of Unicorn Ivory”, Carlos Hernandez (The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria)
“Snapshot, 1988”, Joe Hill (Cemetery Dance #74/75)
“The City Born Great”, N.K. Jemisin (Tor.com, 09/28/16)
“The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe”, Kij Johnson (Tor.com Publishing)
“The Seventh Gamer”, Gwyneth Jones (To Shape the Dark)
“Empty Planets”, Rahul Kanakia (Interzone 262, 1-2/16)
“Breathe”, Cassandra Khaw (Clarkesworld 116, 5/16)
“Hammers on Bone”, Cassandra Khaw (Tor.com Publishing)
“Excerpts for an Eschatology Quadrille”, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Children of Lovecraft)
“The Line Between the Devil’s Teeth (Murder Ballad No. 10)”, Caitlín R. Kiernan (Sirenia Digest 130, 12/16)
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eleven Page 67