The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010

by Elizabeth Bear

  I come over and sit down in my work clothes on the metal chair with the cracked vinyl seat.

  “Bad news?”

  Mama Alice shakes her head, but her eyes are shiny. I reach out and grab her hand. The folded up paper in her fingers crinkles.

  “What is it, then?”

  She pushes the paper at me. “Desiree. You got the scholarship.”

  I don’t hear her right the first time. I look at her, at our hands, and the rumply paper. She shoves the letter into my hand and I unfold it, open in, read it three times as if the words will change like crawly worms when I’m not looking at it.

  The words are crawly worms, all watery, but I can see hardship and merit and State. I fold it up carefully, smoothing out the crinkles with my fingertips. It says I can be anything at all.

  I’m going to college on a scholarship. Just state school.

  I’m going to college because I worked hard. And because the State knows I’m full of poison, and they feel bad for me.

  The harpy never lies to me, and neither does Mama Alice.

  She comes into my room later that night and sits down on the edge of my bed, with is just a folded-out sofa with springs that poke me, but it’s mine and better than nothing. I hide the letter under the pillow before she turns on the light, so she won’t catch on that I was hugging it.

  “Desiree,” she says.

  I nod and wait for the rest of it.

  “You know,” she says, “I might be able to get the State to pay for liposuction. Doctor Morales will say it’s medically necessary.”

  “Liposuction?” I grope my ugly plastic glasses off the end table, because I need to see her. I’m frowning so hard they pinch my nose.

  “For the hump,” she says, and touches her neck, like she had one too. “So you could stand up straight again. Like you did when you were little.”

  Now I wish I hadn’t put the glasses on. I have to look down at my hands. The fingertips are all smudged from the toner on the letter. “Mama Alice,” I say, and then something comes out I never meant to ask her. “How come you never adopted me?”

  She jerks like I stuck her with a fork. “Because I thought . . . ” She stops, shakes her head, and spreads her hands.

  I nod. I asked, but I know. Because the state pays for my medicine. Because Mama Alice thought I would be dead by now.

  We were all supposed to be dead by now. All the HIV babies. Two years, maybe five. AIDS kills little kids really quick, because their immune systems haven’t really happened yet. But the drugs got better as our lives got longer, and now we might live forever. Nearly forever.

  Forty. Fifty.

  I’m dying. Just not fast enough. If it were faster, I’d have nothing to worry about. As it is, I’m going to have to figure out what I’m going to do with my life.

  I touch the squishy pad of fat on my neck with my fingers, push it in until it dimples. It feels like it should keep the mark of my fingers, like Moon Mud, but when I stop touching it, it springs back like nothing happened at all.

  I don’t want to get to go to college because somebody feels bad for me. I don’t want anybody’s pity.

  The next day, I go down to talk to the harpy.

  I get up early and wash quick, pull on my tights and skirt and blouse and sweater. I don’t have to work after school today, so I leave my uniform on the hanger behind the door.

  But when I get outside, the first thing I hear is barking. Loud barking, lots of it, from the alley. And that hiss, the harpy’s hiss. Like the biggest maddest cat you ever heard.

  There’s junk all over the street, but nothing that looks like I could fight with it. I grab up some hunks of ice. My school shoes skip on the frozen sidewalk and I tear my tights when I fall down.

  It’s dark in the alley, but it’s city dark, not real dark, and I can see the dogs okay. There’s three of them, dancing around the Dumpster on their hind legs. One’s light colored enough that even in the dark I can see she’s all scarred up from fighting, and the other two are dark.

  The harpy leans forward on the edge of the Dumpster, wings fanned out like a cartoon eagle, head stuck out and jabbing at the dogs.

  Silly thing doesn’t know it doesn’t have a beak, I think, and whip one of the ice rocks at the big light-colored dog. She yelps. Just then, the harpy sicks up over all three of the dogs.

  Oh, God, the smell.

  I guess it doesn’t need a beak after all, because the dogs go from growling and snapping to yelping and running just like that. I slide my backpack off one shoulder and grab it by the strap in the hand that’s not full of ice.

  It’s heavy and I could hit something, but I don’t swing it in time to stop one of the dogs knocking into me as it bolts away. The puke splashes on my leg. It burns like scalding water through my tights.

  I stop myself just before I slap at the burn. Because getting the puke on my glove and burning my hand too would just be smart like that. Instead, I scrub at it with the dirty ice in my other hand and run limping towards the harpy.

  The harpy hears my steps and turns to hiss, eyes glaring like green torches, but when it sees who’s there it pulls its head back. It settles its wings like a nun settling her skirts on a park bench, and gives me the same fishy glare.

  Wash that leg with snow, the harpy says. Or with lots of water. It will help the burning.

  “It’s acid.”

  With what harpies eat, the harpy says, don’t you think it would have to be?

  I mean to say something clever back, but what gets out instead is, “Can you fly?”

  As if in answer, the harpy spreads its vast bronze wings again. They stretch from one end of the Dumpster to the other, and overlap its length a little.

  The harpy says, Do these look like flightless wings to you?

  Why does it always answer a question with a question? I know kids like that, and it drives me crazy when they do it, too.

  “No,” I say. “But I’ve never seen you. Fly. I’ve never seen you fly.”

  The harpy closes its wings, very carefully. A wind still stirs my hair where it sticks out under my hat.

  The harpy says, There’s no wind in my kingdom. But I’m light now, I’m empty. If there were wind, if I could get higher—

  I drop my pack beside the Dumpster. It has harpy puke on it now anyway. I’m not putting it on my back. “What if I carried you up?”

  The harpy’s wings flicker, as if it meant to spread them again. And then it settles back with narrowed eyes and shows me its snaggled teeth in a suspicious grin.

  The harpy says, What’s in it for you?

  I say to the harpy, “You’ve been my friend.”

  The harpy stares at me, straight on like a person, not side to side like a bird. It stays quiet so long I think it wants me to leave, but a second before I step back it nods.

  The harpy says, Carry me up the fire escape, then.

  I have to clamber up on the Dumpster and pick the harpy up over my head to put it on the fire escape. It’s heavy, all right, especially when I’m holding it up over my head so it can hop onto the railing. Then I have to jump up and catch the ladder, then swing my feet up like on the uneven bars in gym class.

  That’s the end of these tights. I’ll have to find something to tell Mama Alice. Something that isn’t exactly a lie.

  Then we’re both up on the landing, and I duck down so the stinking, heavy harpy can step onto my shoulder with her broken, filthy claws. I don’t want to think about the infection I’ll get if she scratches me. Hospital stay. IV antibiotics. But she balances there like riding shoulders is all she does for a living, her big scaly toes sinking into my fat pads so she’s not pushing down on my bones.

  I have to use both hands to pull myself up the fire escape, even though I left my backpack at the bottom. The harpy weighs more, and it seems to get heavier with every step. It’s not any easier because I’m trying to tiptoe and not wake up the whole building.

  I stop to rest on the landings, but by the ti
me I get to the top one my calves shake like the mufflers on a Harley. I imagine them booming like that too, which makes me laugh. Kind of, as much as I can. I double over with my hands on the railing and the harpy hops off.

  “Is this high enough?”

  The harpy doesn’t look at me. It faces out over the empty dark street. It spreads its wings. The harpy is right: I’m alone, I’ve always been alone. Alone and lonely.

  And now it’s also leaving me.

  “I’m dying,” I yell, just as it starts the downstroke. I’d never told anybody. Mama Alice had to tell me, when I was five, but I never told anybody.

  The harpy rocks forward, beats its wings hard, and settles back on the railing. It cranks its head around on its twisty neck to stare at me.

  “I have HIV,” I say. I press my glove against the scar under my coat where I used to have a G-tube. When I was little.

  The harpy nods and turns away again. The harpy says, I know.

  It should surprise me that the harpy knows, but it doesn’t. Harpies know things. Now that I think about it, I wonder if the harpy only loves me because I’m garbage. If it only wants me because my blood is poison. My scarf’s come undone, and a button’s broken on my new old winter coat.

  It feels weird to say what I just said out loud, so I say it again. Trying to get used to the way the words feel in my mouth. “Harpy, I’m dying. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But probably before I should.”

  The harpy says, That’s because you’re not immortal.

  I spread my hands, cold in the gloves. Well duh. “Take me with you.”

  The harpy says, I don’t think you’re strong enough to be a harpy.

  “I’m strong enough for this.” I take off my new old winter coat from the fire department and drop it on the fire escape. “I don’t want to be alone any more.”

  The harpy says, If you come with me, you have to stop dying. And you have to stop living. And it won’t make you less alone. You are human, and if you stay human your loneliness will pass, one way or the other. If you come with me, it’s yours. Forever.

  It’s not just empty lungs making my head spin. I say, “I got into college.”

  The harpy says, It’s a career path.

  I say, “You’re lonely too. At least I decided to be alone, because it was better.”

  The harpy says, I am a harpy.

  “Mama Alice would say that God never gives us any burdens we can’t carry.”

  The harpy says, Does she look you in the eye when she says that?

  I say, “Take me with you.”

  The harpy smiles. A harpy’s smile is an ugly thing, even seen edge-on. The harpy says, You do not have the power to make me not alone, Desiree.

  It’s the first time it’s ever said my name. I didn’t know it knew it. “You have sons and sisters and a lover, Celaeno. In the halls of the West Wind. How can you be lonely?”

  The harpy turns over its shoulder and stares with green, green eyes. The harpy says, I never told you my name.

  “Your name is Darkness. You told me it. You said you wanted me, Celaeno.”

  The cold hurts so much I can hardly talk. I step back and hug myself tight. Without the coat I’m cold, so cold my teeth buzz together like gears stripping, and hugging myself doesn’t help.

  I don’t want to be like the harpy. The harpy is disgusting. It’s awful.

  The harpy says, And underneath the filth, I shine. I salvage. You choose to be alone? Here’s your chance to prove yourself no liar.

  I don’t want to be like the harpy. But I don’t want to be me any more, either. I’m stuck living with myself.

  If I go with the harpy, I will be stuck living with myself forever.

  The sky brightens. When the sunlight strikes the harpy, its filthy feathers will shine like metal. I can already see fingers of cloud rising across the horizon, black like cut paper against the paleness that will be dawn, not that you can ever see dawn behind the buildings. There’s no rain or snow in the forecast, but the storm is coming.

  I say, “You only want me because my blood is rotten. You only want me because I got thrown away.”

  I turn garbage into bronze, the harpy says. I turn rot into strength. If you came with me, you would have to be like me.

  “Tell me it won’t always be this hard.”

  I do not lie, child. What do you want?

  I don’t know my answer until I open my mouth and say it, but it’s something I can’t get from Mama Alice, and I can’t get from a scholarship. “Magic.”

  The harpy rocks from foot to foot. I can’t give you that, she says. You have to make it.

  Downstairs, under my pillow, is a letter. Across town, behind brick walls, is a doctor who would write me another letter.

  Just down the block in the church beside my school is a promise of maybe heaven, if I’m a good girl and I die.

  Out there is the storm and the sunrise.

  Mama Alice will worry, and I’m sorry. She doesn’t deserve that. When I’m a harpy will I care? Will I care forever?

  Under the humps and pads of fat across my shoulders, I imagine I can already feel the prickle of feathers.

  I use my fingers to lift myself onto the railing and balance there in my school shoes on the rust and tricky ice, six stories up, looking down on the streetlights. I stretch out my arms.

  And so what if I fall?

  About the Author

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She lives in Connecticut, and her hobbies include rock climbing, cooking, kayaking, taking her giant ridiculous dog for long walks, playing some of the worst guitar ever heard, neglecting her garden, annoying her cat, and finding all sorts of things to do besides write. She is a recipient of several genre awards, including two Hugos and the Sturgeon. Her most recent novels are Chill (2010) and By the Mountain Bound (2009), and she is involved in an awesome ongoing narrative experiment at www.shadowunit.org.

  Story Notes

  It’s a very real story, isn’t it?

  Now, tell me again about how fantasy is about escapism . . .

  LOWLAND SEA

  SUZY MCKEE CHARNAS

  Miriam had been to Cannes twice before. The rush and glamour of the film festival had not long held her attention (she did not care for movies and knew the real nature of the people who made them too well for that magic to work), but from the windows of their festival hotel she could look out over the sea and daydream about sailing home, one boat against the inbound tide from northern Africa.

  This was a foolish dream; no one went to Africa now—no one could be paid enough to go, not while the Red Sweat raged there (the film festival itself had been postponed this year till the end of summer on account of the epidemic). She’d read that vessels wallowing in from the south laden with refugees were regularly shot apart well offshore by European military boats, and the beaches were not only still closed but were closely patrolled for lucky swimmers, who were also disposed of on the spot.

  Just foolish, really, not even a dream that her imagination could support beyond its opening scene. Supposing that she could survive long enough to actually make it home (and she knew she was a champion survivor), nothing would be left of her village, just as nothing, or very close to nothing, was left to her of her childhood self. It was eight years since she had been taken.

  Bad years; until Victor had bought her. Her clan tattoos had caught his attention. Later, he had had them reproduced, in make-up, for his film, Hearts of Light (it was about African child-soldiers rallied by a brave, warmhearted American adventurer—played by Victor himself—against Islamic terrorists).

  She understood that he had been seduced by the righteous outlawry of buying a slave in the modern world—to free her, of course; it made him feel bold and virtuous. In fact, Victor was accustomed to buying people. Just since Miriam had known him, he had paid two Russian women to carry babies for him because his fourth wife was barren. He already had children but, edging toward
sixty, he wanted new evidence of his potency.

  Miriam was not surprised. Her own father had no doubt used the money he had been paid for her to buy yet another young wife to warm his cooling bed; that was a man’s way. He was probably dead now or living in a refugee camp somewhere, along with all the sisters and brothers and aunties from his compound: wars, the Red Sweat, and fighting over the scraps would leave little behind.

  She held no grudge: she had come to realize that her father had done her a favor by selling her. She had seen a young cousin driven away for witchcraft by his own father, after a newborn baby brother had sickened and died. A desperate family could thus be quickly rid of a mouth they could not feed.

  Better still, Miriam had not yet undergone the ordeal of female circumcision when she was taken away. At first she had feared that it was for this reason that the men who bought her kept selling her on to others. But she had learned that this was just luck, in all its perverse strangeness, pressing her life into some sort of shape. Not a very good shape after her departure from home, but then good luck came again in the person of Victor, whose bed she had warmed till he grew tired of her. Then he hired her to care for his new babies, Kevin and Leif.

  Twins were unlucky back home: there, one or both would immediately have been put out in the bush to die. But this, like so many other things, was different for all but the poorest of whites.

  They were pretty babies; Kevin was a little fussy but full of lively energy and alertness that Miriam rejoiced to see. Victor’s actress wife, Cameron, had no use for the boys (they were not hers, after all, not as these people reckoned such things). She had gladly left to Miriam the job of tending to them.

  Not long afterward Victor had bought Krista, an Eastern European girl, who doted extravagantly on the two little boys and quickly took over their care. Victor hated to turn people out of his household (he thought of himself as a magnanimous man), so his chief assistant, Bulgarian Bob found a way to keep Miriam on. He gave her a neat little digital camera with which to keep a snapshot record of Victor’s home life: she was to be a sort of documentarian of the domestic. It was Bulgarian Bob (as opposed to French Bob, Victor’s head driver) who had noticed her interest in taking pictures during an early shoot of the twins.