Nebula Awards Showcase 2019

by Rebecca Roanhorse

  “Practice too much and you sound like you’re remembering it instead of feeling it,” my grandmother used to say. This was a new room to my fiddle; even the old variations felt new within it. My fingers danced light and quick.

  I tried to make the song sound like something more than wind. What did any of us know of wind? Nothing but words on a screen. I willed our entire ship into the new song I created. We were the wind. We were the wind and borne by the wind, transmitted. I played a ship travelling through the vacuum. I played life on the ship, footsteps on familiar streets, people, goats, frustration, movement while standing still.

  The students sat silent at the end. Only one was an OldTimer, Emily Redhorse, who had been one of the three who actually turned in their assignments; Nelson grew up hearing this music, I know. I was pretty sure the rest had no clue what they heard. One look at Nelson said he’d already formulated a response, so I didn’t let him open his mouth.

  I settled my fiddle back into its case and left.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  There are so many stories about my grandmother. I don’t imagine there’ll ever be many about me. Maybe one of the kids in this class will tell a story about the day their teacher cracked up. Maybe Emily Redhorse will take a seat in the OldTime one day and light into my tune. Maybe history and story will combine to birth something larger than both, and you, Teyla, you and your brother will take the time to investigate where anecdote deviates from truth. If you wonder which of these stories are true, well, they all are in their way, even if some happened and some didn’t.

  I’ve recorded my song variation into the new database, in the “other” section to keep from offending Harriet, for now. I call it “We Will Rove.” I think my grandmother would approve. I’ve included a history, too, starting with “Windy Grove” and “Wind Will Rove,” tracing through my grandmother’s apocryphal spacewalk and my mother’s attempt to find meaning for herself and my daughter’s unrecorded song, on the way to my own adaptation. It’s all one story, at its core.

  I’m working more changes into the song, making it more and more my own. I close my eyes when I play it, picturing a through-line, picturing how one day, long after I’m gone, a door will open. Children will spill from the ship and into the bright sun of a new place, and somebody will lift my old fiddle, my grandmother’s fiddle, and will put a new tune to the wind.

  END

  Dirty Old Town

  Richard Bowes

  Part One: Dream and Memory

  At my age, long-gone friends and family, lovers and enemies, old hits and old flops, parade through my dreams. Sometimes that means a jolt of wonder, others a nip of terror. Mostly these are natural dreams, concocted in my subconscious.

  Dreams made from magic are rare. A recent one had a familiar setting and time. It was South Boston, which meant that I was five or six, this was 1949/50, and I was in first grade. I walked across a deserted, tar-surfaced D Street Housing Projects playground.

  In a classic Boston drizzle, I wore, like a million other American kids, a yellow raincoat and floppy fisherman’s hat. Saint Peter’s Lithuanian Catholic School in the distance got no closer no matter how I hurried.

  Then out of nowhere, coming right at me from that direction, was a somewhat bigger kid. Slit-eyed and with a scary blank face, he was a few strategic months older.

  His name back then was Eddie Mackey. Because of how his family was, he wore no raincoat or hat. That gave me a clear view of the bloody cut on his forehead.

  Eddie walked right up to me with his eyes empty of expression and an open mouth that got bigger with every step until it filled my vision like an onrushing railroad tunnel.

  Before being swallowed, I wondered why the bloody cut I’d given Eddie didn’t make him afraid of me.

  Hit with this enigma, the dream wobbled and dissolved like the contrivance it was. Opening my eyes, I found myself in a Greenwich Village late-winter dawn.

  Sleep-addled, I remembered my grandmother telling me that even a trained sorcerer couldn’t send a dream from far away. Eddie Mackey calls himself Ed Mack now. In the grey morning hour, he had passed near enough to my apartment to plant that dream in my head.

  Staggering around the kitchen, I made toast and brewed the same dark, longleaf tea my grandmother once did. The scent evoked a thin, white-haired figure, a seeming wisp of a woman. Only God knows all the tea she must have brewed.

  Whenever I think of her, I hear the crowd at Fenway Park roar as Ted Williams lines one into the stands.

  Knowing I wouldn’t get back to sleep, I turned to the story I was writing for an anthology. It concerned a man in late middle age who hears Time’s Winged Chariot clattering behind him as he jogs, climbs stairs, or peddles a stationary bike in his relentless attempt to stay one step ahead of Death.

  This story had gone through all the writer’s preliminary stages: inspiration, wonder, disappointment, and the decision to retire from writing and live in a remote cabin.

  That morning I found a plot twist. My character turned expecting to see bearded Chronos with an hourglass in one hand and chariot reins in the other. Instead, he found a guy wearing a suit and badge. With eyes cold blue and amused, an Irish cop offered him a chance to sign away a chunk of his worldly wealth in return for a decade more of life.

  The adult Eddie Mackey was the model for the cop. I’ve used him in stories and scripts as characters ranging from amusingly dishonest to satanic. It bothers him a bit.

  He, in turn, knows it bothers me that he’s approached on the street by people asking for his autograph. Mostly, my life hasn’t been bad. But I’m asked for autographs only at my book signings. He chose the actor’s life and shortened his name to Ed Mack while I chose to be a writer.

  Intruding on these thoughts was an email from Eddie/Ed reminding me of an appointment that evening.

  He had worshipped my grandmother and thinking of her made me remember

  that Red Sox spring training was under way. My mother’s mother was mad about the sport. She gave me a bat blessed by a baseball-loving priest when we moved to D Street Housing Project. Smaller even than a little league model, it was a perfect fit for a five-year-old.

  She adored every aspect of baseball. I remember us stopping at a corner lot to watch a dozen kids play on a crude diamond adjoining an outfield paved with broken bricks.

  Her sons all played for their schools and in the Twilight Leagues when they were young. I’ve wondered if she got them involved so she could watch. My uncles gave her a TV, one of the first I ever saw. She followed the ever-failing Red Sox with a fanatic’s devotion, even taking out her rosary beads to pray for Johnny Pesky to lay down a bunt or Mel Parnell to toss a double-play pitch.

  Some said they’d seen her pray for the Yankee’s plane to crash on its way to Boston. I don’t believe that. Not even her magic couldn’t help the Sox.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  A few days before Eddie’s dream, I’d been a guest on a fiction podcast where the hostess asked about old St. Patrick’s Days in Boston. And I let a fine McGabber flow right out of me.

  “McGabber” is the name I gave early on to my tales told with full Celtic twists and turns. From schoolyards to bars, the storyteller was still welcome in Celtic Boston. It began:

  “I remember as a little kid—it was maybe 1950—being on the third-floor porch of a three-decker watching the Parade in South Boston with all my mother’s family, the aunts and uncles and cousins and relatives visiting from Ireland. And most of all, my grandparents!

  “I remember my uncles shouting greetings down to people in the street and people on the ground shouting back. The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade only passes through South Boston, the traditional Irish neighborhood.

  “At the head of the parade as it wound through the streets were these amazing old steam-powered fire engines that kept breaking down on the hills. So the bands and marching
contingents would come to a halt and march in place until somewhere in the distance the engines started up again.

  “Politicians were thick on the ground. I saw James Michael Curley, a Boston legend who had lately been elected mayor while in jail. His open car stopped down the street from us; and a little girl in a white communion dress came out, curtsied, and presented him with a bouquet of roses.

  “He doffed his high silk hat, bowed low, and in his great, rolling Shakespearean actor voice said something like, ‘It’s an honor and a privilege to accept these flowers from so lovely a young child of Ireland.’

  “The parade started up again and Curley’s car rolled forward only to stop right below us when a barefoot woman with a kerchief on her head ran out to sweep the street in front of his honor’s vehicle. Curley rose again, bowed, and presented her with the bouquet. Holding it aloft, she danced a jig.

  “My grandfather walked to the railing and raised his glass to the mayor who waved back.

  My grandmother, her arm around me shook her head and murmured, “He’s been carrying on like this for much too long.” And I wasn’t sure if she meant the mayor, her husband, or both.

  “Curley rolled on and the barefoot woman disappeared somewhere and maybe put on her shoes. A brass band marched by. And right behind it was a bunch of kids from the Boys’ Club wearing baseball sweaters and caps and kind of marching in step. Tagging behind this formation were kids who had joined along the parade route and who marched in no order whatsoever.

  “Right then, the parade halted again and looking down I found two familiar faces, practically the same face twice. Staring up at me were Eddie and Joe Mackey.”

  The podcast hostess looked concerned. The anecdote appeared to be going out of control. “I mention the Mackey Brothers,” I found myself explaining, “Because Eddie Mackey became Ed Mack whom you may know as Jack Scanty on Dirty Old Town.”

  And the hostess, wide-eyed, said, “You grew up with him?”

  It’s a sad age, but a cable TV crime show with an actor who’s just won an award gets recognition no writer ever will. I closed my interview by inventing a childhood friendship for Eddie and me.

  There was more to that distant St. Patrick’s Day. The Mackeys and I stared at each other but none of us waved or smiled, or shouted over the noise.

  Eddie was in first grade with me and a constant torment. Also, I’d been pushed around more than once by his brother, Joey, who was five years older and a head or two taller than I was.

  My grandmother’s blue eyes missed none of this.

  She looked over the railing. The Mackeys backed off, broke eye contact, and melted into the crowd as the parade started up again.

  “Your friends?” my grandmother asked.

  I shook my head. “They’re in my school.” I wasn’t going to say that if I had any school friends, it wouldn’t be them.

  But then she ran her hand along the top of my crew cut as if she was stroking a cat. Something unlocked inside me and words rushed out.

  “Eddie always follows me home and tries to trip me and makes fun of me. Joey’s even worse. He kicks kids, steals stuff. I have to hide from them after school. Once they chased me right up the stairs in my building, tried to push their way into the apartment. Joey got his head in and looked around and said I was weird because we had so many books. Then they heard my mother asking who was there and he ducked out.”

  Telling my grandmother about my troubles and fears broke the first law I’d learned after I was allowed out to play with other kids: you never told adults stuff like this.

  But it felt like just seeing us had revealed to her everything there was to know about the Mackeys and me.

  When I said, “He gives me bad dreams,” she nodded and I knew she understood. That evening in a quiet corner of her living room, she taught me a short invocation. She said it was like a prayer and it began, “Open and open the door that is locked,” then used words in the old language. I was to recite this only if I was in danger. She told me what would happen after I did.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  When we moved to D Street my parents maybe decided the local public elementary school wasn’t good or wasn’t near enough. Or maybe as former actors, left-wing Catholics, and proud eccentrics determined not to raise an ordinary child, they thought it too mundane.

  So while most of the kids in the Projects went there, I was sent to Saint Peter’s, a Lithuanian Catholic school on the fringes of the neighborhood.

  The nuns were bilingual. Lots of kids were recent refugees from Europe and still learning English, so classes were taught in both languages. My parents were amused when I came home knowing Lithuanian words and even a song or two. I spoke so easily and so well that the fact I had trouble writing my own name didn’t seem to them a big deal.

  School was a path I traveled on my own. My parents read me New Yorker stories from The Thurber Carnival at bedtime, but I had to live my life in a place where few other families had a book.

  Among the Projects kids at St. Peters were Eddie Mackey and his brother Joey. Later I learned Joey had been thrown out of public school and their mother wanted to keep them together.

  Life was excitement tinged with terror. Kids were always fighting; sometimes rocks got thrown. Eventually D Street became a famous hellhole. But briefly it was shinier and newer than anything else in the city.

  I was a kid who saw or imagined magic. The eyes on the statues in the church followed me when I walked past them. I told my teacher this in class one day. The nun just smiled but other kids laughed.

  Eddie Mackey stood in my way after school. “You seeing statues looking at you?” he asked. He seemed serious. But when I said, “yes,” he followed me home telling everyone that statues looked at me.

  Part Two: The Song of the Bat

  I remembered all this and knew I’d be seeing Eddie that evening. Suze, with whom I’ve been close since back when she was Steve and we were an item, stopped by around noon and we went to Caffe Reggio for lunch. Suze knows Eddie Mackey/Ed Mack. She told me, “He called last night and said things were coming together for a movie about your grandfather.”

  “He’s talked about that for decades,” I said.

  “What was your grandfather like?” Suze asked. “You must have a McGabber about him.”

  And out it came.

  “I believe I could be the last person left on Earth who will be able to say he voted for Harry Truman for President. I was four in 1948 when my grandfather brought me to a polling place in South Boston, took my hand, guided it over a ballot, and made the letters of my name on it.

  “His friends, the ward heelers who ran the polls, were amused’ said, things like, “Ah, you’re doing a fine deed, Michael! Raising the boy right!’

  “So I cast my vote for Truman, a Democrat loyal to friends no matter what trouble they got into, and not a New York aristocrat looking down his nose at Irishmen sullied by their work in the sootier aspects of Democratic politics.

  “My grandfather’s magic in all its variety is hard to capture. I stayed with my grandparents a lot as a child when my mother and father had theatrical gigs, when my brother was born, and sometimes for reasons that weren’t explained, so I knew them well.

  “My grandfather hadn’t been the best of fathers by any means. After he was gone, I heard tales of how, not once but on two separate occasions when my mother and her siblings were kids, he came home drunk on Christmas Eve and threw the tree, with all its decorations, out the window.

  “But for me he was wondrous, taking me shopping once when I’d had a bad day at school and buying me a hat that was a small version of the one he himself wore.

  “A mercurial soul, he was a motorman on streetcars (but seemingly not all the time) from the 1920’s on. At one point back then he somehow was well-to-do, had six houses and several cars. It was then they called him ‘The Millionaire Motorm
an.’

  “The money appeared out of nowhere, to hear his children tell it. Then, like the fairy gold it may have been, everything was gone and he was broke with nothing left but a taste for drink and a rollicking bad temper. Only his wife’s charm and her magic saved his life when debts came due and he couldn’t pay.

  “By the time I knew him, in the years when I thought he was a god, he had moderated his drinking and in the way of Irish men was a wonderful father to any boy who was not actually his son.

  “A walk to the corner store could be like something out of a tale. ‘Irene, the Queen of Shopkeepers,’ he’d tell the mean little woman who owned the variety store on the corner. Years later, I found out she ran the numbers in that neighborhood. And only his magic made her smile.

  “All I knew was that he’d say about me, ‘He’s a remarkable boy. There’s nothing in the world that he cannot do.’ And she’d give me a Popsicle.

  “One time on the sidewalk, he waved his hand and seemingly out of the very cement popped a tall, drooping shambles of a man. ‘Peter Maguire, as honest and fit as any who has ever breathed,’ said my grandfather, ‘what do you think of my grandson, Pete?’

  “‘Looks like he could be a fine young man unless you’re raising him to be a hellion like yourself.’

  “‘He favors my wife and his mother, for which I hope he’s as thankful as he should be. Now, might I ask you what you make of the doings yesterday in that fifth race at Suffolk Downs?’ Then they both stepped away from me and whispered for a moment.

  “Before I could get impatient, he’d be back at my side, gesturing at an elf-like man in a suit. ‘There he is, Spencer MacGriffin, a lawyer no bigger than yourself and rich. But you’ll outreach him. There’s nothing in the world at which you won’t succeed.’

  “And he’d pop into a shop and buy me a clip-on tie with shamrocks on it. Part of his magic was his ability to see the world at an angle no other mortal knew.”