Nebula Awards Showcase 2019

by Rebecca Roanhorse

“Do you understand?”

  “Oui.”

  “I don’t think you do. You let Peter go—every time. You don’t even try to stop him. Why don’t you care for him? He’s just a child.”

  The boy watched them, hands folded between cheek and pillow. Mimi stared at the floor. A tear streaked down her cheek.

  “We have to keep Peter safe, you and I, so he can grow up healthy and strong like his uncle. And then like his parents, out in the lake.” Helen sighed. “I wish we could talk properly, you and I.”

  “Oui.”

  “Wait here,” she said.

  Helen ran to fetch a pencil and paper. When she returned, Peter was asleep.

  “Tell me why you let him go.”

  Mimi fumbled with the pencil. She couldn’t even hold it properly, and the only mark she could make on the paper was a toppling cross inside a crude shape like a gravestone.

  Mimi’s lower lip quivered. A tear dropped onto the paper. Helen took the pencil from Mimi’s shaking fingers. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

  Mimi climbed onto the bed and lay beside Peter.

  Helen pulled a heavy chair in from the hallway and slid it in front of the door. It might not keep him from getting out, but if he tried to drag it away the noise would wake her. Then she kicked off her shoes and climbed onto the bed, reaching around Mimi to rest her palm on Peter’s arm.

  The girl was crying. Her back quivered against Helen’s chest.

  “It’s all right,” Helen whispered, holding her close. “Everything is going to be all right.”

  Mimi cried harder.

  Helen expected to be awake all night, but Peter was safe, the room was warm, the bed cozy, and Mimi’s sobs were rhythmic and soothing. Helen slipped into sleep and tumbled through slippery dreams of inky shapes that writhed and grasped and tore at her skin. When she woke, the moon shone through the window, throwing the crossed shadows of the windowpanes over the rug. Her leg throbbed. The clock struck four. And Peter and Mimi were both gone.

  On the pillow lay two bright pieces of copper wire, six inches long, worried and kinked, their ends jagged. The pillow was spotted with blood.

  Helen ran down to the kitchen and fumbled with a candle, nearly setting her sleeve on fire as she lit it on the oven’s banked coals. She plunged downstairs, bare feet on the freezing steps, and when the smell hit her she stumbled. She slipped on a bone and nearly sent herself toppling headfirst.

  She panted, leaning on the wall. The smell pierced her. It coiled and drifted and wove through her, conjuring the last drip of whiskey in her father’s crystal decanter, the first strawberries of summer, the last scrap of Christmas pudding smeared over gold-chased bone china and licked off with lazy tongue swipes. It smelled like a sticky wetness on her fingers, coaxed out of a pretty girl in the cloak room at a Mayfair ball, slipped into a pair of silk gloves and placed on a young colonel’s scarlet shoulder during the waltz.

  The smell was so intense, so bright it lit the stairwell. The air brimmed with scents so vast and uncontainable they poured from one sense to the next, banishing every shadow and filling the world with music.

  Helen fell from one step to the next, knees weak, each footstep jarring her hips and spine. Her vision spun. The cellar brimmed with haloes and rainbows, a million suns concentrated and focused through a galaxy of lenses, dancing and skipping and brimming with life.

  The only point of darkness in the whole cellar was Mimi.

  The nursemaid crouched in front of the crypt door. She humped and hunched, ramming her face into the wood as if trying to chew through it. The threshold puddled with blood.

  Mimi’s jaw hung loose. It swung against her throat with every thrust. Her nose was pulped, upper lip shredded, the skin of her cheeks sloughed away.

  The remains of her teeth were scattered at her feet.

  Helen grabbed her foot with both hands and heaved, dragging her away. Mimi clawed at the floor, clinging to the edges of the stones with her shredded fingernails.

  “Miss York?”

  At the sound of Peter’s voice, the air cottoned with rainbows.

  Peter stood at the head of the stairs, lit by a euphoria of lights. It cast patterns across his face and framed his head in a halo of sparks.

  Mimi threw her head back and screamed, her tongue a bleeding live thing trying to escape from a gaping throat, a cavitied maw that was once the face of a girl.

  Mimi lunged up the stairwell. Helen chased her.

  “Peter, run!” Helen howled.

  Mimi threw her arms around the boy. The huff of breath through her open throat spattered the walls with blood. She lunged down the hall, dangling Peter like a rag doll. Helen pitched after her, grabbing at the nursemaid’s hair, skirt, sleeves. In the foyer she caught hold of Peter’s leg and yanked the boy away.

  Mimi dug her fingernails into the heavy chest and pulled. It scraped over the floor, throwing splinters across the foyer. She yanked the door open and turned. Blood puddled at her feet. Her tongue wagged from deep in her throat. She raised her arms, as if yearning for Peter to enter her embrace.

  Helen clutched Peter to her chest. She forced his head against her neck so he couldn’t see his nursemaid’s pulped face.

  Mimi yowled. Then she plunged out the door and clattered across the terrace. At the edge of the water she teetered for a moment, arms wheeling. In the moment before she fell, an inky shape welled up from the water. Its jaws welcomed her with barely a splash.

  ◉ ◉ ◉

  The boy knelt on the nursery window seat beside Helen, his nose pressed to the window pane. Two sinuous forms floated in the lake, lit by the pale rays of dawn poaching over the mountaintops.

  “Come sit over here.” Helen patted the stool in front of her.

  When the sun broke over the peaks, Peter’s mother and father were gone, sleeping the day away at the bottom of the lake, perhaps, or in the crypt pool, keeping watch over their precious, delicious children.

  Helen kept Peter by her day and night. She barely took her eyes off him, never left his side. To him she devoted all her care and attention, until her lashes scraped over dry and pitted eyeballs, her tongue swelled with thirst, and her ears pounded with the call from below.

  The scent slipped into her like welcome promises. Lights spun at the edge of her vision, calling, guiding her down to the cavern.

  At night, the serpents tossed back and forth in the waves, dancing to the rhythm shuddering through the house. She didn’t have to look out the window to see them; every time she blinked they were behind her eyelids. Beckoning.

  Helen made it three days before she broke. When her pen turned clumsy, when her handwriting dissolved into crude scratches, she was past caring. The crypt was all she could think of. Hunger gushed through her, overflowing and carrying her down each flight of stairs as if floating on a warm river to the source of everything left in the world worth wanting.

  Her hands were too clumsy to open the door, but it didn’t matter. She could eat her way through it. The scent itself was nourishment enough. Every bite was a blessing. She drowned herself in it. Gave herself over until her mind hung by a thread.

  Her world collapsed into pain when Peter pulled her out of the cellar. She resisted, a little, but she couldn’t fight him. Not if it might hurt him. When he got the wires through what was left of her teeth and jaw and twisted them tight, the light abandoned her, the call receded, the house darkened.

  “Will you be all right now, Miss York?” Peter asked.

  “Oui,” she said.

  END-

  Biographies

  Richard Bowes has published six novels, four story collections and over 70 short stories. He has won World Fantasy, Lambda, Million Writer and IHG Awards. A new edition of his 2005 Nebula shortlisted novel From The Files of the Time Rangers will appear later this year from Lethe Press. His 9/11
story “There’s a Hole in the City” got a very nice review in the New Yorker and is online at Nightmare Magazine. He’s currently writing chapters for a fix-up novel about a gay kid in 1950s Boston. Recent and forthcoming appearances include: Queers Destroy Fantasy, The Doll Collection and Black Feathers.

  Jonathan Brazee is a retired Marine infantry colonel, now a full-time writer living in North Las Vegas with his wife, two cats, and twin baby girls. He published his first short story in 1978, then switched to non-fiction until writing his first novel in 2006 while deployed to Iraq.

  He started writing in earnest in 2012 and now has 68 titles, 43 being novels. He writes primarily military fiction, military SF, and paranormal. In addition to his Nebula finalist novelette, his novel Integration was a 2018 Dragon Award finalist.

  Jonathan can be reached via jonathanbrazee.com.

  Matthew Kressel is a coder and speculative-fiction writer whose work has been a multiple-finalist for the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Eugie Award. His fiction has or will appear in Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Tor.com, Analog, The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Edition, edited by Rich Horton, and The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume Three, edited by Neil Clarke, as well as many other print and online publications. His stories have also been translated into six languages. As a software developer, Matthew created the Moksha submissions system, which is in use by many of the largest speculative-fiction publishers today. And he is the co-host of the Fantastic Fiction at KGB reading series in Manhattan alongside veteran editor Ellen Datlow. Find him at matthewkressel.net or @mattkressel.

  Sarah Pinsker’s stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards. Small Beer Press published her collection Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea in early 2019, and her first novel, Song For A New Day, will be published by Ace in late 2019. She’s also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various labels. She and her wife live in Baltimore in a hundred year old house surrounded by sentient vines.

  Vina Jie-Min Prasad is a Singaporean writer working against the world-machine. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Hugo, Campbell, and Sturgeon Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Uncanny Magazine, and Fireside Fiction, and you can find links to her work at

  vinaprasad.com.

  Rebecca Roanhorse is a Nebula and Hugo Award-winning speculative fiction writer and the recipient of the 2018 Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer. Her novel Trail of Lightning, Book #1 in the Sixth World Series (Saga Press), is available now. Book #2, Storm of Locusts, is out April 2019. Her epic fantasy Between Earth and Sky drops in 2020. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her husband, daughter, and pug. Find more at

  rebeccaroanhorse.com and on Twitter at @RoanhorseBex.

  Kelly Robson is an award-winning short fiction writer. In 2018, her story “A Human Stain” won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, and in 2016, her novella “Waters of Versailles” won the Prix Aurora Award. She has also been a finalist for the Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, John W. Campbell, and Sunburst awards. In 2018, her time travel adventure Gods, Monsters and the Lucky Peach debuted to high critical praise. After 22 years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow SF writer A.M. Dellamonica, now live in downtown Toronto.

  Hugo and Nebula finalist K.M. Szpara is a queer and trans author who lives in Baltimore, MD. His debut novel, Docile, is coming from Tor.com Publishing in Spring 2020; his short fiction and essays appear in Uncanny, Lightspeed, Strange

  Horizons, and more. Kellan has a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, which he totally uses at his day job as a paralegal. You can find him on the Internet at kmszpara.com and on Twitter at @kmszpara.

  Hugo and three-time Nebula Award finalist Caroline M. Yoachim is a prolific author of short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. Her work has been reprinted in multiple year’s best anthologies and translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Czech. Yoachim’s debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out in 2016. For more, check out her website at

  carolineyoachim.com

  Jamie Wahls started writing stories about his friends at the age of 9. He once named a character by looking at the keyboard until inspiration struck; her name was Tab. His brutally minimalist website can be found at jamiewahls.com and he technically has a Twitter, @JamieWahls.

  Martha Wells has written many fantasy novels, including The Books of the Raksura series (beginning with The Cloud Roads), the Ile-Rien series (including The Death of the Necromancer) as well as YA fantasy novels, short stories, media tie-ins (for Star Wars and Stargate: Atlantis), and non-fiction. Her most recent fantasy novel is The Harbors of the Sun in 2017, the final novel in The Books of the Raksura series. She has a new series of SF novellas, The Murderbot Diaries, published by Tor.com in 2017 and 2018. She was also the lead writer for the story team of Magic: the Gathering’s Dominaria expansion in 2018. She has won a Nebula Award, a Hugo Award, an ALA/YALSA Alex Award, a Locus Award, and her work has appeared on the Philip K. Dick Award ballot, the USA Today Bestseller List, and the New York Times Bestseller List. Her books have been published in eleven languages.

  Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been finalists for three Nebula awards, two Hugos, and a World Fantasy Award, and include her Andre Norton- and Compton-Crook-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor 2015), its sequels, Cloudbound (2016) and Horizon (2017); Riverland (Abrams 2019); and the novelette “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” (Tor.com Publishing 2016). Her short stories appear in Asimov’s, Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Shimmer,

  Nature, and the 2017 Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror. She holds an MFA in poetry, an MA in information architecture and interaction design, and writes for publications including The Washington Post, Tor.com, Clarkesworld,

  io9.com, and GeekMom.com. You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, and at franwilde.net.

  About the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA )

  The purpose of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America is to promote, advance, and support science fiction and fantasy writing in the United States and elsewhere, by educating and informing the general public and supporting and empowering science fiction and fantasy writers.

  We are genre writers fostering a diverse professional community committed to inclusion, empowerment, and outreach.

  We host the prestigious Nebula Awards® at our annual SFWA Nebula Conference, assist members in various legal disputes, offer the Speakers Bureau, administer grants to SFF community organizations and members facing medical or legal expenses. Novice authors benefit from our Information Center and well-known Writer Beware. Between online discussion boards, private convention suites, and a host of less formal gatherings, SFWA is a source of information, education, support, and fellowship.

  SFWA Membership is open to authors, artists, editors, and other industry professionals who meet our eligibility requirements which can be found at SFWA.org.

  About the Nebula Awards®

  The Nebula Awards® are voted on, and presented by, active members of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

  Since 1965, the Nebula Awards® have been given each year for the best novel, novella, novelette, and short story eligible for that year’s award. The Nebula Awards® are presented each spring as part of the Nebula Conference, a four day conference for working writers, editors, and other industry professionals which focuses on skills and career development.

  You can learn more about the Nebula Conference and the Nebula Awards® at nebulas.sfwa.org

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