The Long List Anthology 2

by Aliette de Bodard

  [4] https://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2006/eh0610.htm (accessed 4/30/2015)

  [5]”How many times in one’s life does a door open to total escape, utter newness? I was so profoundly dispirited, alienated […] And suddenly I was in the middle of a different light, a new me, first having a good joke of being someone else, and then as the stories went on and out, having started genuine friendships among delightful people whose native language—crude, childish, humorous—rational—was mine…” http://jamestiptreejr.com/asawriter.htm (accessed 4/30/2015)

  [6]”… in the rain, under the flag, the sound of the band, far-off, close, then away again; the immortal fanny of our guide, leading on the right, moved and moving to the music—the flag again—first time I ever felt free enough to be proud of it; the band, our band, playing reveille that morning, with me on KP since 0430 hours, coming to the mess-hall porch to see it pass in the cold streets, under that flaming middle-western dawn; KP itself, and the conviction that one is going to die; the wild ducks flying over that day going to PT after a fifteen-mile drill, and me so moved I saluted them…” http://jamestiptreejr.com/army.htm (accessed 4/30/2015)

  [7] This makes me glad—though every now and again my gladness is bittersweet. This is something anyone from any traditionally downtrodden minority understands: the new generation has no clue how hard it was. We are happy for that. Mostly.

  [8]”Wife,” June 23, 2014, https://nicolagriffith.com/2014/06/23/wife/ (accessed 4/30/2015)

  * * *

  Nicola Griffith is a British novelist, now dual US/UK citizen. In Yorkshire, England, she earned her beer money teaching women’s self-defence, fronting a band, and arm-wrestling in bars, before discovering writing and moving to the US. She was diagnosed with MS the same month her first novel Ammonite was published. Her other novels are Slow River, The Blue Place, Stay, Always and Hild. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in an assortment of academic texts and a variety of journals, including Nature, New Scientist, Los Angeles Review of Books and Out. Among other honours she’s won the Washington State Book Award, the Tiptree, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards, the Premio Italia, and six Lambda Literary Awards. She is married to writer Kelley Eskridge and lives in Seattle where she emerges occasionally from work on her seventh novel to drink just the right amount of beer and take enormous delight in everything. You can find her on Twitter (@Nicolaz) or her blog (https://nicolagriffith.com/blog/).

  Tuesdays With Molakesh the Destroyer

  By Megan Grey

  Molakesh the Destroyer moved into the house next door the summer I turned fifteen. There was the expected neighborhood gossip at first, with Mom and her friends worrying about what having a demon on our street might do for property values and with one particularly zealous neighbor lining her property with crosses, but it died down after a few months. Destroyer he may be called, but he kept his yard tidy and pulled in his trash cans at night, so the Homeowners Association turned their scowls on other targets.

  For my part, I didn’t care who we shared a fence line with and pretty much forgot he existed. Until two days after the first winter snowstorm.

  “You should shovel Molakesh’s driveway,” Mom said, peering out through the blinds of the kitchen window.

  I looked up from my phone. “What?”

  “There’s at least two feet of snow out there.”

  “He’s a demon, Mom.”

  Mom turned away from the window and opened the fridge. She rustled through produce bags and pulled out two large bell peppers. “Yes, but he’s old and there’s no way he’ll be able to get out of his driveway. I’m sure he doesn’t have snow tires.”

  “Seriously? I just got home from school and now you want me to go to the demon’s house and—”

  “It’s called service, Sarah Jean.” She set the peppers down on a wooden cutting board. She’d sauté them with onions, the only way she ever cooked bell peppers. I hated them, but my opinion was never taken into account in meal planning.

  “It’s called insanity.”

  Mom raised an eyebrow, the knife hovering above the pepper, and I knew what was coming next. “You can either practice service by shoveling our neighbor’s driveway, or you can spend tonight writing an essay on ten reasons why service is important.”

  I groaned. “Fine. I’ll shovel his stupid driveway.”

  Mom smiled and began chopping. “I knew you’d come around.”

  I bundled up in my thick coat and gloves, then pulled on snowboots still coated in slush from my walk home from school. She didn’t even notice my parting glare as I stomped out of the house.

  I grabbed our snow shovel and crunched through the yard toward Molakesh’s driveway, all the while composing an essay in my head titled “Ten Reasons Why Parents Suck.”

  I paused just past his front window. The ever-present dark green curtains hung perfectly still, but I could have sworn I saw them shift out of the corner of my eye.

  The snow on the driveway was pristine white and powdery, without a single set of tire-tracks marring the surface. I didn’t know if Mom was right about him not having snow tires — if a demon could buy groceries at Hal’s like the rest of us, I didn’t see why he couldn’t hit up an auto shop — but it was obvious he hadn’t left his house since the storm.

  My shovel scraped along the concrete as I worked, pushing the snow into huge piles framing the driveway. I had done about a quarter of it when the front door opened and Molakesh poked his horned head out.

  “What do you think you’re doing out there?” he demanded.

  I only barely managed to keep from gaping. I’d seen Molakesh a couple times before around town, but the sight wasn’t exactly one you get used to. His face was every bit as wrinkled and patchy as my eighty-seven-year-old grandpa, and his steel-gray eyebrows almost as long, but the resemblance didn’t go much further. Curved horns about six inches long sprouted from a pockmarked head lined with wispy white hairs. Large red eyes blazed contempt from deep sockets, and his mouth hung far lower on his face than any human’s did, making it look like his jaw might snap off in a stiff breeze.

  “Well? Answer me!” he said.

  “I’m, uh… I’m shoveling.”

  Those red eyes didn’t so much as blink.

  “Your driveway. For you,” I continued, speaking slower. I hadn’t heard he was an idiot as well as a fiend of hell.

  He stepped out from behind the doorway. He wore brown old man pants — “slacks,” my grandpa called them — and a threadbare navy-blue cardigan with sleeves ending far short of his claws. Those claws wrapped around themselves in what appeared to be the demon approximation of clenched fists.

  “Do you think I have no powers left? Do you think Molakesh the Destroyer cannot burn the snow from his own driveway? Do you think I cannot rain fire upon this entire worthless town?”

  I looked around at the snow-covered houses, at the thick icicles hanging from every eave and the piles of slush that sprayed from the wheels of a passing car. I doubted Satan himself could burn Winslow, Minnesota, down.

  “Whatever,” I said, and started back to my house. The essay was sounding better and better.

  Those red eyes followed me in silence as I made my way around the piles I’d created and back the way I’d come. I was just about to cross onto our property when Molakesh spoke again.

  “Wait! Stop!”

  I sighed. It misted out in front of me. “What? I was just trying to help, you know. Service.”

  Molakesh continued to stare. Then: “I believe you humans offer your servants hot chocolate on cold days.”

  “I said ‘service’. That doesn’t make me your servant.”

  Molakesh made a growling noise in his throat like the rumble of the morning school bus. “You served me, so I’m going to make you hot chocolate. Come here.”

  I looked back to my house. I couldn’t see my mom through the blinds. Would she be more upset if I went in the demon’s house or if I refused his offer of hot chocolate? Either way, it could mea
n incurring her wrath, and now that I was only months away from getting my drivers’ license, she had a more potent threat than essays to lord over me.

  “Fine,” I said after a minute. “But on your porch, not in your house. I don’t know what you do in there, but I’m not going to be your child bride or virgin sacrifice or anything. I’m not even a virgin.” That was a lie, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  He blinked and went back into his house, slamming the door behind him. I crunched back through the snow yet again to his porch. I waited for several minutes, stamping snow from my boots and debating whether a particularly wicked-looking icicle could be used as a demon-slaying weapon if necessary.

  The door swung open and Molakesh emerged with two steaming mismatched mugs in his claws. One had the University of Minnesota logo on it and the other a picture of Tweety Bird. He handed me the Tweety Bird one.

  I sniffed it, eyeing him warily over the rim of the cup for sudden movements. The drink looked and smelled like hot chocolate. One lone marshmallow floated on top.

  “Hal’s store brand,” Molakesh said.

  I took a sip. So it was.

  “Uh, thanks.”

  Molakesh did not drink his. “You would never do as a sacrifice anyway.”

  I frowned. “Why not?”

  He pointed at my face with one of his claws. “Your blemish. I like my sacrifices unstained.”

  “It’s a birthmark,” I snapped. I got enough crap from kids at school about the dark patch extending from my left cheekbone to the corner of my mouth. I sure as hell didn’t need to take any from some ancient demon.

  “I was referring to your acne.”

  “Oh.” This probably shouldn’t have made me feel better, but it did.

  “You don’t like your birthmark?”

  “I don’t have a problem with it. But some of the kids at school do.”

  “What do they say about it?”

  I scowled down at the hot chocolate. The marshmallow bobbed forlornly on top. “They call me Shit-face.”

  Molakesh made an odd noise, which I realized was a chuckle. It turned into a cough, though, and he doubled over against the wooden porch railing, hacking his lungs out. Possibly literally. Something pink and gross flew from his mouth and landed in the snow.

  “Are you… are you alright?” My thoughts on icicles as weapons aside, Mom definitely wouldn’t let me get my drivers’ license if Molakesh died as a result of my shoddy conversational skills.

  “Yes, yes,” he wheezed. He set his half-spilled mug of hot chocolate on the railing. “I may not have the powers and vigor I once had, but a single laugh at another’s misfortune won’t be the end of me.”

  I kind of doubted it. For all his previous ranting on how he would burn down the whole town, just then he looked about as fragile as my grandpa, who Mom kept saying wouldn’t last until the next holiday.

  And yet somehow, he always did.

  “So you think that’s funny?” I asked.

  “What I find amusing is the sheer lack of creativity in children today. I would have taunted you with something so vile, so inescapable, you would have ripped that birthmark from your face with your own hands.” He looked wistful. “But that was in another time.”

  I tried to imagine what would possibly inspire that kind of reaction in a person. I supposed Shit-face was rather pedestrian compared to what an actual demon could come up with.

  “Maybe you can use that creativity of yours on Katelyn Sams.” She was the worst of them. I wouldn’t mind seeing her rip some of that pretty blonde hair out of her head.

  Those too-low lips twisted into a sneer. “I don’t take requests. Especially not from teenagers.” He made the last word sound like a worse epithet than Shit-face.

  “It’s not like I was serious,” I muttered. “So do you want me to finish the driveway or not?”

  Molakesh regarded me for a moment, then waved a claw dismissively. “If you must.” He picked up the barely-touched mugs of hot chocolate and went back inside, slamming the door behind him.

  I hefted my shovel and returned to the driveway, doing the bare minimum needed for that rusty old Cadillac of his to be able to make it to the street. The curtains stirred again as I worked, and I flipped him off before returning home.

  • • • •

  Another snowstorm blew in that weekend, and the next Tuesday I was over at Molakesh’s house again with a snow shovel, cursing the icy wind and my mom’s service kick and Katelyn Sams for good measure.

  This time Molakesh stood on the porch and glared at me while I worked. He held the University of Minnesota mug. The Tweety Bird mug sat on the railing, the steam tugged away from it by the wind.

  I finished and set the shovel against the ice-slick porch steps. “I thought you said you had powers. Rain of fire and all that. So why don’t you ever take care of your own damn driveway?” Mom would kill me if she heard me talk this way to any adult, even a demonic one, but the guy wasn’t exactly bursting with politeness himself.

  “You doubt my powers?”

  I drank the hot chocolate too fast; it burned my tongue, but warmed my throat nicely. “I guess.”

  He stared out over the white landscape. The wind gusted more snow back to where I had just shoveled, but I would write ten essays on service before I was going to shovel his driveway twice in the same day.

  Then he held out his right claw, with the sharp points I couldn’t help but think of as fingers curved upwards. A ball of fire appeared, floating inches above in the air. His eyes glowed as bright orange as the fire, though of their own accord or due to the reflected light, I couldn’t say. Even his horns seemed sharper, deadlier.

  I took a step back, my eyes wide, as he tossed the fire at the yard with the smooth, practiced motion of a major league pitcher. A trail of flames streaked across the yard as the ball hit, leaving behind a long, deep rut of exposed dirt and blackened grass as the fire died down.

  “Whoa,” I said. “That was—”

  Molakesh began coughing again like before, only worse. His long-limbed body, which had appeared unnaturally tall and strong only thirty seconds before, sagged in on itself. He collapsed to his knees.

  I reached for his arm instinctively, trying to hold him up, but he shoved me back. Hot chocolate splashed out of my mug and melted through the snow on the porch.

  “Get away from me,” he growled. Another piece of that disgusting fleshy pink hung from his lips.

  “Fine.” I set the mug on the porch next to him and grabbed my shovel.

  He pulled himself up to the railing, leaning against it as if that was the only thing holding him up. He stared out at the trail of burned snow. I wasn’t particularly good at reading normal people’s expressions, let alone demons’, but he looked weary. And not just physically.

  “That was cool, though,” I called when I reached my own front porch, my gloved hand on the doorknob.

  He didn’t make any indication he’d heard me. He just kept staring.

  • • • •

  Three gray weeks passed, the snow on the sidewalks and streets packing harder and harder until sheets of treacherous ice slicked over everything. When snow fell once more, bringing a welcome traction on my walk back from school, I passed Molakesh’s house with only a single glance. The snow had filled that burned-out rut in the front yard.

  Mom told me to go shovel his driveway again, but I wrote the stupid essay instead. Then I made the mistake of going online. Katelyn and her cronies had created a fake profile for me, where they posted badly spelled rants about how ugly I was, along with photoshopped pictures of me with a steaming turd on my cheek. Half the school had joined in, it seemed, leaving post after vicious post. I wanted to rip up my useless essay on service. Instead, I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and imagined the heat in my hand was an orb of fire.

  I imagined the faces of the kids at school who called me Shit-face and left bags of dog poop in my locker. I imagined their terror as the school burned down ar
ound them.

  • • • •

  “So you’re, like, retired, right? Why did you pick here?” I folded my legs up under me, sitting cross-legged as best as possible in the wicker chair Molakesh had dragged out onto the porch when he saw me walking to school. I would be late, but even hanging out with a creepy old demon was better than first period German. And Frau Witner was so blind, she wouldn’t even notice I wasn’t there. The chair creaked under me as I shifted.

  Molakesh glowered at me. “Why can’t you sit like a normal person?”

  “What? This is normal. And why can’t you answer a simple question?”

  He leaned back in his own wicker chair, his legs crossed almost daintily at the ankles. His cloven goat hooves no longer looked so odd to me, but old man or not, he really needed to do something about those lame brown pants.

  “I didn’t pick here. I was sent here. A joke, I suppose. He always had a particularly vile sense of humor.” Molakesh’s claws clinked against the ceramic mug.

  I didn’t bother asking who “he” was. Some higher-level demon or Satan himself, it didn’t really matter.

  “A joke?”

  “I am — was — a fire demon, formed from the fiery pits of hell. Born in flame, to die in… this.” He gestured to the bleak snowy landscape. His red eyes glowed dimly, like the last embers twitching under banked coal.

  “Winslow’s not so bad.”

  “Says Shit-face herself.”

  He was right. I hated it here. I shrugged. “I only have a few more years left and then I can leave for college. Maybe go to Arizona. Or Florida, where my dad lives.”

  “Your dad who sends you a card for your birthday and Christmas, but otherwise pretends you don’t exist?”

  “What, are you going through our mail now?”