The Long List Anthology 2

by Aliette de Bodard

  There’s a crash, and Seo-yun screams as a porcelain lamp shatters against the back of her head. Aiko’s on her feet, swaying unsteadily, face grim. “Back the fuck away from her,” she growls, her voice barely above a whisper.

  “You little bitch—” snarls Seo-yun.

  But I seize my chance and pounce, fastening my teeth into the hollow of Seo-yun’s throat, right where her mantle of thoughts gathers and folds inward. I chew and swallow, chew and swallow, gorging myself on this woman. Her thoughts are mine now, thrashing as I seize them from her, and I catch glimpses of myself, of Aiko, and of many others just like us, in various states of disarray, of preparation.

  Ma once told me that this was how Baba went; she’d accidentally drained him until he’d faded completely out of existence. For the first time in my life, I understand her completely.

  Seo-yun’s bracelets clatter to the floor, her empty gown fluttering soundlessly after. Aiko collapses too, folding like paper.

  It hurts to take in that much. My stomach hurts so bad, my entire body swollen with hideous thoughts. At the same time, I’ve never felt so alive, abuzz with possibility and untamable rage.

  I lurch over to Aiko on the floor, malice leaking from her mouth, staining the carpet. “Aiko, wake up!” But she feels hollow, lighter, empty. She doesn’t even smell like herself any more.

  A knock at the door jolts me. “Ma’am,” says a voice I recognize as the head caterer. “The first of the main courses is ready. Mr. Goldberg wants to know if you’ll come down and give a toast.”

  Fuck.”I—” I start to say, but the voice isn’t mine. I glance over at the mirror; sure enough, it’s Seo-yun staring back at me, her dark, terrible dreams tangled around her body in a knotted mess. “I’ll be right there,” I say, and lay Aiko gently on the bed. Then I dress and leave, my heart pounding in my mouth.

  I walk Seo-yun’s shape down the stairs to the dining room, where guests are milling about, plates in hand, and smile Seo-yun’s smile. And if I look a little too much like myself, well—according to what I’d seen while swallowing Seo-yun’s thoughts, I wouldn’t be the first would-be inductee to disappear at a party like this. Someone hands me a glass of wine, and when I take it, my hand doesn’t tremble, even though I’m screaming inside.

  Fifty pairs of eyes on me, the caterers’ glittering cold in the shadows. Do any of them know? Can any of them tell?

  “To your continued health, and to a fabulous dinner,” I say, raising my glass. As one, they drink.

  • • • •

  Seo-yun’s apartment is dark, cleared of guests and wait staff alike. Every door is locked, every curtain yanked closed.

  I’ve pulled every jar, every container, every pot and pan out of the kitchen, and now they cover the floor of the bedroom, trailing into the hallway, down the stairs. Many are full, their malignant contents hissing and whispering hideous promises at me as I stuff my hand in my mouth, retching into the pot in my lap.

  Aiko lies on the bed, pale and still. There’s flour and bile on the front of her jacket. “Hang in there,” I whisper, but she doesn’t respond. I swirl the pot, searching its contents for any hint of Aiko, but Seo-yun’s face grins out at me from the patterns of light glimmering across the liquid’s surface. I shove it away from me, spilling some on the carpet.

  I grab another one of the myriad crawling thoughts tangled about me, sinking my teeth into its body, tearing it into pieces as it screams and howls terrible promises, promises it won’t be able to keep. I eat it raw, its scales scraping the roof of my mouth, chewing it thoroughly. The more broken down it is, the easier it will be to sort through the pieces that are left when it comes back up.

  How long did you know? Did you always know?

  I’ll find her, I think as viscous black liquid pours from my mouth, over my hands, burning my throat. The field of containers pools around me like a storm of malicious stars, all whispering my name. She’s in here somewhere, I can see her reflection darting across their surfaces. If I have to rip through every piece of Seo-yun I have, from her dreams to the soft, freckled skin wrapped around my body, I will. I’ll wring every vile drop of Seo-yun out of me until I find Aiko, and then I’ll fill her back up, pour her mouth full of herself.

  How could I ever forget her? How could I forget her taste, her scent, something as awful and beautiful as home?

  * * *

  Alyssa Wong studies fiction in Raleigh, NC, and really, really likes crows. She was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her story, “Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers,” won the 2015 Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the 2016 World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Locus Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. Alyssa can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.

  So Much Cooking

  By Naomi Kritzer

  Carole’s Roast Chicken

  This is a food blog, not a disease blog, but of course the rumors all over about bird flu are making me nervous. I don’t know about you, but I deal with anxiety by cooking. So much cooking. But, I’m trying to stick to that New Year’s resolution to share four healthy recipes (entrées, salads, sides…) for every dessert recipe I post, and I just wrote about those lemon meringue bars last week. So even though I dealt with my anxiety yesterday by baking another batch of those bars, and possibly by eating half of them in one sitting, I am not going to bake that new recipe I found for pecan bars today. No! Instead, I’m going to make my friend Carole’s amazing roast chicken. Because how better to deal with fears of bird flu than by eating a bird, am I right?

  Here’s how you can make it yourself. You’ll need a chicken, first of all. Carole cuts it up herself but I’m lazy, so I buy a cut-up chicken at the store. You’ll need at least two pounds of potatoes. You’ll need a lemon and a garlic bulb. You’ll need a big wide roasting pan. I use a Cuisinart heavy-duty lasagna pan, but you can get by with a 13x9 cake pan.

  Cut up the potatoes into little cubes (use good potatoes! The yellow ones or maybe the red ones. In the summer I buy them at the Farmer’s Market.) Spray your pan with some cooking spray and toss in the potatoes. Peel all the garlic (really, all of it!) and scatter the whole cloves all through with the potatoes. If you’re thinking, “all that garlic?” just trust me on this. Roasted garlic gets all mild and melty and you can eat it like the potato chunks. Really. You’ll thank me later. Finally, lay out the chicken on top, skin-down. You’ll turn it halfway through cooking. Shake some oregano over all the meat and also some sea salt and a few twists of pepper.

  Squeeze the lemon, or maybe even two lemons if you really like lemon, and mix it in with 1/4 cup of olive oil. Pour that over everything and use your hands to mix it in, make sure it’s all over the chicken and the potatoes. Then pour just a tiny bit of water down the side of the pan — you don’t want to get it on the chicken — so the potatoes don’t burn and stick. Pop it into a 425-degree oven and roast for an hour. Flip your chicken a half hour in so the skin gets nice and crispy.

  Guys, it is SO GOOD. Half the time I swear Dominic doesn’t even notice what he’s eating, but he always likes this dish, and so do I. If you make this much for two people, you’ll have leftovers for lunch. But we’re having guests over tonight, my brother and his wife and kids. So, I’m actually using two chickens and four pounds of potatoes, because teenagers eat a lot.

  And chicken has magical healing properties if you make it into soup, so surely some of them stick around when you roast it? And so does garlic, so eat some and stay healthy.

  xxoo, Natalie

  Substitute Chip Cookies

  So, we have some unexpected long-term house guests.

  My sister-in-law Kathleen is a nurse at Regions Hospital. She’s not in the ER or the infectious diseases floor but let’s face it, it’s not like you
can corral a bunch of airborne viruses and tell them they’re banned from OBGYN. Leo and Kat are worried that if this bird flu thing is the real deal, she could bring it home. Leo’s willing to take his chances but when I said, “would you like to have the kids stay with me for a while,” Kat said, “That would make us both feel so much better,” so voila, here I am, hosting an 11-year-old and a 13-year-old. Monika is 13, Jo is 11.

  We have a guest room and a sofa bed. Monika got the guest room, Jo’s on the sofa bed, although we promised to renegotiate this in a few days if they’re still here. (It’s actually a double bed in the guest room but trust me, you don’t want to make my nieces share a bed if you don’t absolutely have to.)

  I went to the store today to stock up just in case we want to minimize the “leaving the house” stuff for a while. Apparently I wasn’t the only person who had that thought because (a) the lines were unbelievable and (b) I tried four stores and they were all completely out of milk and eggs. I did manage to get an enormous jumbo package of toilet paper plus a huge sack of rat food (did I mention that Jo has a pet rat named Jerry Springer? I didn’t? Well, my younger niece Jo has a pet rat named Jerry Springer. The rat was not actually invited along for the family dinner, but Dominic ran over today to pick the rat up because he thought Jo would feel better about the whole situation if she had her pet staying here, too.)

  The freezer section was also incredibly picked over but at the Asian grocery (store #4) I bought some enormous sacks of rice and also about fifteen pounds of frozen dumplings and you know what, I’m not going to try to list what I came home with as it would be too embarrassing. I’ll just stick to the essentials, which is, no milk and no eggs. I did manage to get some butter, but it was the super-fancy organic kind that’s $10 per pound so I was also a little worried about using up our butter reserve on one batch of cookies. And Jo really wanted chocolate chip cookies.

  Okay, actually: I really wanted chocolate chip cookies. But Jo was very willing to agree that she wanted some, too.

  You can substitute mayo for eggs, in cookies, and you can substitute oil for the butter. They’ll be better cookies if you happen to have some sesame oil to put in for part of the oil (or any other nut-related oil) and we did, in fact, have sesame oil. And as it happens, those four grocery stores were not out of chocolate chips.

  Here’s the recipe in case you are also improvising today:

  2 1/2 cups flour

  1 tsp baking soda

  1 tsp salt

  1 cup of vegetable oils (preferable 2 T sesame oil + canola oil to equal 1 cup.)

  3/4 cup white sugar

  3/4 cup brown sugar

  1 tsp vanilla extract

  6 tablespoons of mayonnaise

  12 ounces of whatever sort of chips you have in the house, or chopped up chocolate

  Cream the sugar and the oil, then beat in the mayonnaise. I promise the cookies will turn out fine, no matter how gross the mayo smells and looks while you’re beating it in. Mix the baking soda, salt, and flour together, then gradually beat in the mayo mixture, and stir in your chips.

  Drop by rounded spoonfuls — oh, you know how to make cookies. You don’t have to grease your cookie sheets. Bake at 375F for about ten minutes and if you want them to stay chewy and soft, put them away in an airtight container before they’re all the way cool. If you like your cookies crunchy, well, what’s wrong with you? But in that case cool them before you put them away, and in fact you’ll probably be happier storing them in something that’s not airtight, like a classic cookie jar.

  I gave Dominic the first batch and he said, “you didn’t use up all the butter on this, did you?” I told him we’re not about to run out of butter. We are, however, about to run out of coffee. I may die. Even if I don’t get bird flu. Excuse me, h4N1.

  xxoo, Natalie

  Homemade Pizza

  So, how are things where you live?

  Where I live (Minneapolis) there have been 83 confirmed cases of h4N1. The good news (!!!) is that it’s apparently not as lethal in the human-to-human variant as it was back when it was just birds-to-human, but since it was 60% lethal in the old form that’s not really what I think of as good good news. The bad news is that there’s a four-day incubation period so those 83 people all infected others and this is only the tiny, tiny tip of a giant, lethal iceberg.

  Probably wherever you live you’re hearing about “social distancing,” which in most places means “we’re going to shut down the schools and movie theaters and other places where folks might gather, stagger work hours to minimize crowding, and instruct everyone to wear face masks and not stand too close to each other when they’re waiting in lines.” In Minneapolis, they’re already worried enough that they’re saying that anyone who can just stay home should go ahead and do that. Since Dominic works in IT and can telecommute, that’s us. I’d planned to go to the store today again to maybe get milk and eggs. If it had been just me and Dominic … I still wouldn’t have risked it. But I definitely wasn’t going to risk it with Jo and Monika in the house.

  I made homemade pizza for lunch. The same recipe I made last December right after I got the pizza stone for Christmas — but, no fresh mushrooms. We had a can of pineapple tidbits and some pepperoni so that’s what we topped it with. I thought about trying some of the dried shitake mushrooms on the pizza but on thinking about it I didn’t think the texture would work.

  We are now completely out of milk, which makes breakfast kind of a problem, and we’re also out of coffee, which makes everything about my day kind of a problem. Fortunately, we still have some Lipton tea bags (intended for iced tea in the summer) and that’s what I used for my caffeine fix.

  (Running out of coffee was pure stupidity on my part. I even remember seeing it on the shelf at the grocery store, but I’m picky about my coffee and I was planning to go to my coffee shop for fresh beans today. Ha ha ha! Folgers and Maxwell House sound pretty good to me now!)

  xxoo, Natalie

  Eggless Pancakes and Homemade Syrup

  In the comments on my last post, someone wanted to know about grocery delivery. We do have grocery delivery in the Twin Cities, but every single store that offers it is currently saying that they are only providing it to current customers. I did register an account with all the places that do it, and I’ve put in an Amazon order for a bunch of items you can have delivered (like more TP) and I’m hoping they don’t e-mail me back to say they ran out and cancelled my order… anyway, I don’t know if I’ll be able to order anything grocery-like anytime soon.

  Some of the restaurants in town are still delivering food and I don’t know how I feel about that. Dominic and I are very lucky in that we do have the option of staying home. That makes me feel a little guilty, but in fact, me going out would not make the people who still have to go out, for their jobs, even one tiny bit safer. Quite the opposite. If I got infected, I’d be one more person spreading the virus. (Including to my nieces.) Anyway, Kat has to go out because she’s a labor and delivery nurse, and people are depending on her. But I don’t know if a pizza delivery guy should really be considered essential personnel.

  In any case, no one delivers breakfast (which was what I sat down to write about) and no one’s going to bring me milk, so I made milk-less, egg-less, butter-less pancakes, and so can you. Here’s what you need:

  2 cups of flour

  4 tsp baking powder

  1 tsp salt

  Blend that together and then add:

  1/2 cup of pureed banana OR pureed pumpkin OR applesauce OR any other pureed fruit you’ve got around. I used banana because I have some bananas in my freezer.

  1 1/2 cups of water

  1 tsp vanilla extract

  1/2 tsp cinnamon

  1/2 cup sugar

  Whisk it all together. You’ll need to grease your skillet a little bit extra because this sticks more than pancakes that were made with butter or oil.

  We’re out of maple syrup, but it turned out we still had a bottle of blueberr
y syrup in the back of a cabinet and that’s what we had with them. There are recipes online for homemade pancake syrup but I haven’t tried them yet. Monika hated the blueberry syrup and just ate them with sugar and cinnamon. Jo thought the blueberry syrup was fine but agreed that maple (or even fake maple) would be better. (I’m with Monika, for the record.)

  xxoo, Natalie

  Miscellaneous Soup

  So, before we get to the recipe today, I was wondering if people could do a favor for one of my friends. Melissa is a waitress, and so far thank God she is still healthy but her restaurant has shut down for the duration. So, it’s good that she’s not going to be fired for not coming in to work, and she’s glad to stay home where she’s safe, but she really needs that job to pay for things like her rent. Anyway, I talked her into setting up a GoFundMe and if you could throw in even a dollar, that would be a big help. Also, to sweeten the pot a little, if you donate anything (even just a dollar!) I’ll throw your name into a hat and draw one reader and that lucky reader will get to have me make, and eat, and blog, anything you want, although if you want me to do that before the pandemic is over you’ll be stuck choosing from the stuff I can make with the ingredients that are in my house. And, I just drove a carload of groceries over to Melissa because she and her daughter were basically out of food, and the food shelves are not running, either. (So, if you were thinking that blueberry-glazed carrots or something would be good, you’re already too late, because she is now the proud owner of that bottle of blueberry syrup. Also, I’m out of carrots.)

  Anyway, go donate! If you’ve ever wanted me to try again with the Baked Alaska, or experiment with dishwasher salmon, now’s your chance.