by Wayward
Jenny had left out our blocks. When he saw them he bent over, trying to pick up a block. He couldn’t. His body was too stiff. He didn’t have joints in the right places. He stared at the blocks and the step.
I picked up a block and gave it to him.
He held it in his hand. With some of the other blocks I went ahead and made a little building. He watched me do it. He tried to crouch down again, as if to play too. But he couldn’t. He gripped the block. Then he let it fall.
I got up and led him away from the step. He looked at it one more time, then turned away. We moved past the front window.
He looked outside.
He saw what was waiting for him.
He stopped and turned to me as if to ask for more time.
I told him he had time.
We went upstairs. I followed close. His husk body rustled and scraped in the darkness. Halfway up he had to hold onto the wall. He leaned on me. We went up the rest of the stairs together.
He creaked open Jenny’s door. We came in as quietly as he could. Jenny’s night light shone on her face. The man and I stood over her bed, watching her sleep. The seeds and bark and pine needles of his face did not change. Finally he turned away and went out the door. He shut it quietly, as though she was a baby he had just spent a long time lulling to sleep.
He opened the door to Mom’s room. He stood by her bedside too. In sleep she was beautiful the way I remembered her. He looked at her for a long time. His corn husk arms hung at his side. His face was unreadable.
I went out into the hallway.
After a while he joined me again. We opened the door to Grandma’s room. She was snoring, relaxed in her sleep. The man stared at Grandma too, as if trying to figure something out. When he turned away from her he was limping. Moving more slowly. He needed me to hold him up.
I took him to my room.
He looked around the room. He touched the desk, the bed, the wallpaper, the closet doors.
He looked out the window.
They were waiting for him.
He looked at me as if to say, I’m not ready.
I told him it was time.
He gave one last long stare around.
*
When we came outside the Christmas trees were waiting. My Christmas tree seemed to have brought them together. They were all there, brilliantly lit up, millions of colors standing in the creamy deep snow. There was a bright moon and no clouds. Nobody was out. The man stumbled out into the fresh cold night air like a man getting out of prison, staring around as if remembering again the world outside.
I had my coat and boots on. The Christmas trees began to move, leading us. I took the man by his hand. He kept looking back at the house. But after a while he stopped looking back.
He looked around the streets, at the other houses he seemed to recognize. He was holding my arm, holding it tighter. The Christmas trees closed in all around us. He was afraid. I held him. The seeds and glue and bark of his face did not move.
We went further.
He was coming apart. Bits of corn husk were unwinding, getting left behind in the snow. He didn’t look back. Seeds and pine cones fell. He was getting smaller. The Christmas trees guided us along. The snow piled up on either side of us. The roads were silent and the sky was black but the world was full of light. He stumbled but I caught him. More of him was gone, collapsing into ribbons of corn husk and crumbled bark. More of his body unwound, I had to carry him, he was a child, he was a baby, he was the doll again, moving in my arms. But even the baby was coming apart. I was trying to put him back together with my hands but I couldn’t. I was crying. He was almost gone.
The Christmas trees stopped. We were in the forest, in a quiet place.
The hole was there.
My Christmas tree was close by. As if to say, okay.
The thing in my hands looked at me, and was gone. All that was left was some corn husk, bark, pine needles, old seeds and acorns that had been packed up in the doll’s chest.
I put it all in the hole. I dug my hands into the tough cold soil and threw the dirt in, handful after handful, until the hole was filled.
*
On New Year’s Day we threw out the Christmas tree.
Christmas at Grandma’s was livelier than Thanksgiving had been. The aunts and uncles and cousins seemed like they were all waking up from a rough night, one by one. The furnace was still broken so Grandma had to put out space heaters in the various rooms and built up a big fire in the fireplace. Jenny and I would sit with our backs to the fire until our backs were too hot, and then run away and flop down on the couch and feel the warmth of the fire seep up through our entire bodies, again and again, and whenever I looked at the Christmas tree it seemed less and less like itself. By the end of the evening it was any other tree. Or maybe the tree was never anything special to begin with.
No, said Jenny, that Christmas tree had been itching to get out of here all along. It was just stopping in our living room on its way to some greater place. Jenny had a whole story worked out about the Christmas tree, a story that I only discovered years later, after even she had forgotten about it, pages and pages about our Christmas tree getting thrown into the alley, then getting picked up by the garbage men, then hijacking the garbage truck and driving it to a city of monsters, then gathering allies and fighting walking furnaces, and at the end flying into space to fight some great geometrical being that was going to swallow the world.
I don’t remember Jenny drawing it. But seeing it now, I remember her telling me that story, a few weeks after the tree had been thrown out, the two of us sitting at the step between the family room and the kitchen. We were getting ready to go back home. Mom was up and about.
They’d figured out what had broken the furnace when the repairman found my action figures in the air filter. Jenny and I were sitting at that step with the rescued action figures and the blocks and the soldier ornaments and a bunch of other toys, including a little pine tree she had made, and she was telling me her story. I told her that I liked her story.
I never told her mine.
But not long ago, my daughter and I went to the place in the forest where I remembered I had buried Dad’s doll. I don’t know if I found the exact place, because what had been empty before was now full of trees and bushes. I found the spot as best I could, and there was a tree, and my daughter ran up to the tree and wrapped her arms around it, shimmying up.
It’s strange when you watch a kid climb a tree. You have to hold yourself back, you want to rush in to help, you want to warn them, because you keep expecting the child to slip, or a branch to break. You forget how good you were at it back then. But the tree and the kid, they both know what they’re doing.
About The Contributors
RACHEL ARMSTRONG is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University. She is a Rising Waters II Fellow with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (April-May 2016), TWOTY futurist 2015, Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society and a 2010 Senior TED Fellow. Armstrong is the author of a number of academic books including Vibrant Architecture: Matter as a CoDesigner of Living Structures, Soft Living Architecture: An alternative view of bio-informed design practice (Bloomsbury Academic) and Liquid Life: Design in the era of hypercomplexity, uncertainty, incompleteness and change (in development with Punctum Books). In 2018, her novel, Origamy, will be published by NewCon Press.
CHERITH BALDRY was a teacher, including for a period in Sierra Leone, before becoming a full-time writer with the Saga of the Six Worlds series (1989-94). Her three fantasy novels for adults are Exiled from Camelot (2000), The Reliquary Ring (2002) and The Roses of Roazon (2004). Books for children include Drew’s Talents (1997) Mutiny in Space (1997), the Eaglesmount Trilogy (The Silver Horn, The Emerald Throne, The Lake of Darkness (2001-04)) and Abbey Mysteries (2004-06). Baldry is currently part of the team writing the Warriors and Seekers novel series under the name of Erin Hunter. Her Warriors n
ovel Midnight (2005) won the Golden Muse Award, while her most recent entry in the series is Shattered Sky (2017).
ERIC BROWN made his first fiction sale to Interzone in 1986 and since then has published more than 50 books. His novel Helix Wars (2012) was shortlisted for the Philip K. Dick Award and two of his short stories have been honoured with the British Science Fiction Association Award. Murder By The Book (2013) marked a departure, being the first Langham and Dupre Mystery, a crime novel set in the 1950s. His latest titles are Jani and the Great Pursuit, the second volume of a Steampunk series set at the height of the British Empire, and Murder Take Three, the fourth Langham and Dupre novel. He writes a regular SF review column for The Guardian.
GARY DALKIN’s editorial projects include the highly acclaimed Dead Leaves by Andrew David Barker, as well as the definitive biography of multi-Oscar-winning composer John Barry - The Man With The Midas Touch, by Geoff Leonard, Pete Walker & Gareth Bramley. Gary is a former judge of The Arthur C. Clarke Award, a former editor of Vector, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association, and has written extensively on genre for Amazing Stories, Interzone, SFX and many others. He contributed to Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created (2016), edited by Laura Miller.
JAMES KENNEDY is the author of the YA fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish (2010), from which the title Improbable Botany is derived: The Order of Odd-Fish features a knighthood of dilettante warrior-scholars, each of whom each dabble in a different field of useless study, such as Pointless Weaponry, or Unusual Smells, or the Science and Art of Dithering, and yes, Improbable Botany. Kennedy is the founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, a development of the Newbery Medal, the highest award in children’s literature in the US.
KEN MACLEOD has over the last two decades established himself as Scotland’s foremost proponent of politically-engaged science fiction. He burst onto the scene in the mid-nineties with a quartet of novels about the Fall Revolution, the first of which, The Star Fraction (1995) won the Prometheus Award for Libertarian Fiction and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. The second volume in the series, The Stone Canal, also won the Prometheus Award, while the concluding title, The Sky Road, was honoured with the British Science Fiction Association Award. MacLeod followed this quartet with the Engines of Light trilogy, while The Night Sessions (2008) again won the BSFA Award. His most recent novel’s are Intrusion (2012), nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Descent (2014), and The Corporation Wars trilogy, Dissidence (2016), Insurgence (2016) and Emergence (2017). In 2015 he published Poems with Iain Banks, which collected verse by both authors.
SIMON MORDEN is both an award-winning science fiction writer and a scientist with a PhD in Geophysics from Newcastle University. His debut novel, Heart, was published in 2002. The first three Metrozone novels, Equations of Life, Theories of Flight and Degrees of Freedom (all 2011) collectively won the Philip K. Dick Award (the series was re-titled The Samuil Petrovitch Trilogy in America). The story continued with The Curve of the Earth (2013), while other works include the collection Thy Kingdom Come (new edition 2013) and the fantasy Arcanum (2013). Most recently Morden has launched a new series so far comprising Down Station and The White City (both 2016) and this year published the acclaimed novella At The Speed of Light. He has been an editor of the British Science Fiction Association magazine Focus, a judge of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and is a regular speaker at the annual Greenbelt Festival.
STEPHEN PALMER made his debut with Memory Seed in 1996, quickly establishing himself as one of the UKs most surreally fantastical writers. Further novels include Glass (1997), Flowercrash (2002), Muezzinland (2003), Hallucinating (2004), The Rat & The Serpent (2005) and Urbis Morpheos (2010). Palmer’s recent story, ‘Palestinian Sweets’ (in the NewCon Press anthology La Femme) and novel, Hairy London (both 2014), a wild Steampunk comedy-adventure, both demonstrate a fascination with radically transforming England’s first city. Beginning with The Girl With Two Souls (2016), Palmer’s Factory Girl Trilogy, marks a successful move into Young Adult fiction.
ADAM ROBERTS made his debut with Silk and Potatoes: Contemporary Arthurian Fantasy (1998). Since then he has authored many novels, from Salt (2000) to The Thing Itself (2015) and his latest work, The Real-Town Murders (2017). In addition, Roberts has published six novellas and story collections, four further volumes of criticism, including The History of Science Fiction (as part of the Palgrave Histories of Literature) and eight comic spoofs. Jack Glass (2012) won both the John W Campbell Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel. Roberts has a PhD from Cambridge University (Robert Browning and the Classics) and is currently Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London.
JUSTINA ROBSON made her debut with Silver Screen (1999), which was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and British Science Fiction Association Awards. Her second novel, Mappa Mundi (2001) was shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, while her third, Natural History (2003) came second in the John W. Campbell Award. Living Next Door to the God of Love (2005) was nominated for the Campbell, Dick and BSFA Awards. Robson’s Quantum Gravity series comprises five novels, beginning with Keeping It Real (2006) and concluding with Down to the Bone (2011), published the same year as her first collection, Heliotrope. Her most recent novels are Glorious Angels (2015) and The Switch (2017).
TRICIA SULLIVAN moved to the UK from the US in 1995, making her publishing debut the same year with the ‘The Question Eaters’ and the novel Lethe. Someone to Watch Over Me followed in 1997, while her third novel, Dreaming in Smoke (1999), won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Further novels include Maul (2003), Double Vision (2005), Sound Mind (2007) and Lightborn (2010). Sullivan’s Everien fantasy trilogy, written as by Valery Leith, comprised The Company of Glass (1999), The Riddled Night (2000) and The Way of the Rose (2001). Occupy Me (2016) gained Sullivan her fourth Clarke Award nomination. Her latest novel is Sweet Dreams.
LISA TUTTLE received the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1974 and her first novel, Windhaven (1981), was written in collaboration with George R.R. Martin. Other novels include Lost Futures (1992), The Mysteries (2005) and The Silver Bough (2013). Her brand new novel is The Witch at Wayside Cross (2017), a second adventure for Victorian detectives Jesperson and Lane, introduced last year in The Somnambulist and the Psychic Thief. Stranger in the House, the first volume of Tuttle’s Collected Short Supernatural Fiction, was published in 2010. Her most recent collection is Objects in Dreams (2012). Of her short fiction, ‘In Translation’ won the British Science Fiction Association Award and ‘Closet Dreams’ the International Horror Guild Award. As Lucy Daniels, Tuttle has written novels for children and her non-fiction includes Children’s Literary Houses (1984), The Encyclopedia of Feminism (1986) and Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction (2002).
Thank You
With sincere thanks to our Kickstarter backers for helping to make this book happen!
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