They Do the Same Things Different There
Page 41
“Listen,” she mouthed, and he nodded happily. She held his hand tightly. It was smaller than his, but strong, stronger. He saw that she was crying too. He saw what she’d put upon the table. He saw that she too had come with a gun.
He didn’t know what he could ever say to her, whether he could ever find the right words. But for that moment he was in love, and it was the fullest and richest love he’d ever felt. He gazed at her, and she gazed at him, and they listened. They listened. And hoped that the love song would never end.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
“Luxembourg.” First published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Issue 39, edited by Andrew Finch, and subsequently collected in Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical.
“Restoration.” First published in Everyone’s Just So So Special, and subsequently collected in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Six, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
“A Joke in Four Panels.” First published in The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven, edited by Jonathan Strahan.
“That Tiny Flutter of the Heart I Used to Call Love.” First published in Psycho Mania, edited by Stephen Jones, and subsequently collected in The Best Horror of the Year Volume Six, edited by Ellen Datlow, and in Best British Horror 2014, edited by Johnny Mains.
“Taboo.” First published in Everyone’s Just So So Special.
“Peckish.” First published in Fearie Tales, edited by Stephen Jones.
“Dumb Lucy.” First published in Magic, edited by Jonathan Oliver.
“Static.” First collected in Tiny Deaths, and subsequently adapted into a short film directed by Tanya Lemke.
“The Constantinople Archives.” First published in The Cutting Room, edited by Ellen Datlow.
“Your Long, Loving Arms.” First published in Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical.
“Brand New Shiny Shiny.” First published in Flotsam Fantastique, edited by Stephen Jones.
“Patches.” First published in Wild Stacks 1, edited by Peter Coleborn, and subsequently collected in Everyone’s Just So So Special.
“The Sixteenth Step.” First published in The Burning Circus, edited by Johnny Mains, and subsequently collected in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 25, edited by Stephen Jones.
“It Flows From the Mouth.” First published in Shadows and Tall Trees, Issue 6, edited by Michael Kelly.
“History Becomes You.” First published by the Sunday Times when it was nominated for the Sunday Times EPB Private Banking Award, and subsequently collected in Everyone’s Just So So Special.
“One Last Love Song.” First published in Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It’s hard enough to know whom to thank when you’ve just written a single story. It’s nigh on impossible with a book like this one, where the oldest story dates back nearly a decade. (I see photographs of that younger me sometimes. He looks weird. I suppose that accounts for a lot.)
So, let me start at the beginning, by thanking my family. Dennis (my father) and Vicky (my sister) have put up with my sense of humour for years—and the best jokes I’ve stolen from them.
I’m very proud to be a ChiZine writer. I stumbled across their books at a horror convention a few years ago, and I was so struck by their beauty I had to buy them all. Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi, thanks for making me part of the family. We had fun with the first book, didn’t we? Here we go again! Erik Mohr, your covers are both terrifying and gorgeous, thank you. Thanks to my editor, Andrew Wilmot, who pored over these stories, the old and the new, and showed me fresh things in all of them. And to all my editors of the past who’ve tackled these stories beforehand, but especially Xanna Eve Chown, who worked on three entire books of mine and managed to preserve her sanity.
Many of these stories were written whilst enjoying a year’s residency at Edinburgh Napier University, attached to the Creative Writing MA course. I was inspired by the work of the hardest working students I’ve ever known, and by the extraordinary staff: Sam and Stuart Kelly, and David Bishop. I began a project there to write one hundred stories, and one hundred foolhardy people volunteered to let me use their names for characters in any way I saw fit—thanks then, to Julia Loecherbach, Madalyn Morgan, Raphael Klein, Karen Davison, Lizbeth Myles, David Allan, Sieglinde von Zieten, Lucy Zinkiewicz, Ian Mond, Matthew Bell, Richard Marklew, Matthew Tozer, Nathalie Gallagher, Paul Hiscock, and Ian Wheeler. I have plans for what to do with all hundred of these stories; watch this space.
One of those hundred, but one in a million, is Helen Marshall. Helen is the greatest of friends and the greatest of writers. So many of these stories started life as the two of us swapped crazy ideas back and forth in art galleries and pubs. Her own work makes me want to be a better writer. Thanks also to her wonderful sister Laura, who has been like a sister to me too.
Suzanne Milligan is not just my agent, she’s my pal. Unfailingly supportive, she’s encouraged me whenever I’ve needed it, and made me feel I can take on the world. Apologies to her, though, for all the icky stuff in this book that makes her flesh crawl. I can’t help it. Sometimes the stories just come out that way.
And lastly, as always, thanks to my wife Janie. Now, I’m not the easiest of writers to live with. Some days the words don’t come out right, so I get grumpy. Other days the words come out just fine, so I get smug. Still other days I’m lazy and don’t write at all and make the house dirty and get under her feet. In a very real sense, the fact these stories exist is down to her. She’s patient and kind, and knows when to ignore me, and when to flatter. And at any point during the last twenty years she could have killed me in my sleep, and she didn’t. It wouldn’t have taken much. Just a pillow over the face, I wouldn’t have known a thing. She could still do it too. Sometimes she gets that look in her eyes. She could do it whenever she pleases.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Shearman has worked as writer for television, radio and the stage. He was appointed resident dramatist at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter and has received several international awards for his theatrical work, including the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the World Drama Trust Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in Association with the Royal National Theatre. His plays have been regularly produced by Alan Ayckbourn, and on BBC Radio by Martin Jarvis. His three series of The Chain Gang, an interactive short story and drama project for BBC Radio, has won two Sony Awards. A selection of his plays have been collected in book form as Caustic Comedies.
However, he is probably best known as a writer for Doctor Who, reintroducing the Daleks for its BAFTA-winning first series in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award. He has also written many popular audio dramas for Big Finish.
His first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It won the World Fantasy Award for best collection, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. “No Looking Back” was selected by the National Library Board of Singapore as part of the annual Read! Singapore campaign.
His second collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, was published by Big Finish in 2009. It won the British Fantasy Award for best collection, the Edge Hill Short Story Readers Prize and the Shirley Jackson Award, celebrating outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. His third collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, won the British Fantasy Award, and his story “History Becomes You” was nominated for the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award.
Most recently, his best dark fiction was collected in Remember Why You Fear Me by ChiZine Publications; the collection won the British Fantasy Award, was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award, and received nominations for Best Novella and Best Collection at the World Fantasy Awards.
COPYRIGHT
They Do the Same Things Different There © 2014 by Robert Shearman
Cover artwork © 2014 by Erik Mohr
Cover and interior design by © 2014 by Samantha Beiko
All rights reserved.
Published by ChiZine Publications
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
EPub Edition AUGUST 2014 ISBN: 978-1-77148-301-8
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen.
No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
CHIZINE PUBLICATIONS
Toronto, Canada
www.chizinepub.com
info@chizinepub.com
Edited by Andrew Wilmot
Proofread by Stephen Michell
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
Published with the generous assistance of the Ontario Arts Council.
REMEMBER WHY YOU FEAR ME
ROBERT SHEARMAN
A woman rejects her husband's heart—and gives it back to him, still beating, in a plastic box. A little boy betrays his father to the harsh mercies of Santa Claus. A widower suspects his dead wife's face is growing over his own. A man goes to Hell, and finds he's roommate to the ghost of Hitler's pet dog. Giant spiders, killer angels, ghost cat photography, and the haunted house right at the centre of the Garden of Eden.
Deliciously frightening, darkly satirical, and always unexpected, Robert Shearman has won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the Edge Hill Reader's Prize. Remember Why You Fear Me gathers together his best dark fiction, the most celebrated stories from his acclaimed books, and ten new tales that have never been collected before.
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Ghost thumbs. Miniature dogs. One very sad can of tomato soup . . . British Fantasy Award-winner Helen Marshall’s second collection offers a series of twisted surrealities that explore the legacies we pass on to our children. A son seeks to reconnect with his father through a telescope that sees into the past. A young girl discovers what lies on the other side of her mother’s bellybutton. Death’s wife prepares for a very special funeral. In Gifts for the One Who Comes After, Marshall delivers eighteen tales of love and loss that cement her as a powerful voice in dark fantasy and the New Weird. Dazzling, disturbing, and deeply moving.
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FEARFUL SYMMETRIES
EDITED BY ELLEN DATLOW
From Ellen Datlow, award-winning and genre-shaping editor of more than fifty anthologies, and twenty of horror’s established masters and rising stars, comes an all-original look into the beautiful, terrible, tragic, and terrifying.
Wander through visions of the most terrible of angels, the Seven who would undo the world. Venture through Hell and back, and lands more terrestrial and darker still. Linger a while in childhoods, and seasons of change by turns tragic and monstrously transformative. Lose yourself amongst the haunted and those who can’t let go, in relationships that might have been and never were. Witness in dreams and reflections, hungers and horrors, the shadows cast upon the wall, and linger in forests deep.
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LAURENCE KLAVAN
The Family Unit and Other Fantasies is the debut collection of acclaimed Edgar Award-winning author Laurence Klavan. A superb group of darkly comic, deeply compassionate, largely fantastical stories set in our jittery, polarized, increasingly impersonal age. Whether it’s the tale of a corporation that buys a man’s family; two supposed survivors of a super-storm who are given shelter by a gullible couple; an erotic adventure set during an urban terrorist alert; or a nightmare in which a man sees his neighbourhood developed and disappearing at a truly alarming speed, these stories are by turn funny and frightening, odd and arousing, uncanny and unnerving.
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. . . where a boy named Icarus tries, and fails, to fly . . .
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This is the story of a girl who sees a boy float away one fine day. This is the story of the girl who reaches up for that boy with her hand and with her heart. This is the story of a girl who takes on the army to save a town, who goes toe-to-toe with a mad scientist, who has to fight a plague to save her family. This is the story of a girl who would give anything to get to babysit her baby brother one more time. If she could just find him.
It’s all up in the air for now, though, and falling fast. . . .
Fun, breathlessly exciting, and full of heart, Floating Boy and the Girl Who Couldn’t Fly is an unforgettable ride.
AVAILABLE NOW IN CANADA/OCTOBER 2014 IN U.S.
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