The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be somebody's muh-thur. Be kind to your friends in the swa—"

  Jo stopped, holding a Lash LaRue card in mid-air.

  Whose nickel had turned that on?

  The arcade floor was dim, the only illumination a row of whitewashed windows high along one wall. The paint had flaked away in places, and in a finger of afternoon light, sparkling with dust motes, a copper-haired woman was dancing. She wore a loose green sweater that floated out from her body as she turned and spun, like a leaf before a hard spring rain. The melody echoed, a brass band in a tin box; the piano keys clicked under invisible fingers.

  John Philip Sousa ended with a flourish. A floorboard squeaked under Jo's shoe. The dancing woman looked up and waved, as if they were old friends, reunited after a long absence.

  "Do I know you?" Jo called. Possible. It was a small town.

  "I'm Aurora." She smiled. "Rory."

  The voice was soft, but strong; the name was unfamiliar, but its timbre fluttered the short hairs on the back of Jo's neck.

  "Uh, sorry. I think you've got the wrong—"

  "You grew up here. You had a tree house."

  Such a small town. Jo took a step closer, puzzled. The woman's face was smooth, unlined cream. She'd have been a baby when Jo left.

  "Yeah, I did. So?"

  "Your tree is dying."

  "What, are you from the county?"

  "No. Come and see."

  "Not now. I'm kind of busy and—"

  "Come and see." Rory stepped into another bit of sunlight. Her eyes were green too, flecked with gold. They tickled a fragment of memory with no context to anchor it, and Jo felt herself nod.

  Standing in the gravel driveway, she could see half a dozen sawed-off stubs of branches spiraling the oak's trunk. One long, silvered limb hung overhead at a precarious angle. The cluster of buds on the side nearest the building was the only sign of life.

  "I hadn't even noticed," Jo said, staring at the wide-ringed stub that had once held her tree house. A gust of wind came up off the lake, skittering trash across the gravel, and she hugged her arms to her chest. "Thanks. I'll—I'll call someone to take care of it."

  "Not yet." Rory shook her head and shouldered a knapsack, worn leather the color of walnuts. "You're shivering. Come upstairs," she said, as if it were her house. "I'll make tea." She held out her hand.

  For no reason that she could ever explain, Jo followed, slipping her palm into Rory's, like a child about to cross a busy street. Her fingers tingled with the contact.

  The summer that her mother left, Jo's favorite toy was a potato. An odd choice for the daughter of a machinist. No moving parts. But with a penny and a nail and a bit of wire, it became a battery, strong enough to elicit a faint incandescent glow from one of the tiniest bulbs.

  Jo climbed the back stairs, holding Rory's hand. And for the first time in decades she felt that same flicker of connection from an unexpected source.

  Rory made a face at the box of Lipton's. She produced a tin of lapsang souchong from her knapsack and put the battered kettle on to boil. The leather pack, she said, was everything she owned—notebooks and pens, a change of clothes, a toothbrush, and a small, lumpy drawstring sack. She held it up. "The rest of my trousseau."

  "What do you do?" Jo asked.

  "I'm a poet, a storyteller—fairy tales and fables, mostly. I've always liked this one."

  That made no sense. But nothing had, since Jo'd come back. Everything was as familiar as it was alien, and in that setting, in the early spring twilight, logic and Rory could not co-exist.

  Rory smiled, and logic lost.

  By the time they switched from tea to wine, rainy darkness had turned the kitchen windows to funhouse mirrors, reflecting the florid walls, wavy and indistinct.

  "Where do you live?" Jo asked an hour later. "I'll give you a ride home. It's pouring out there."

  "Hmm." Rory cocked her head, then held out her hands, palms up. "I don't know. I haven't gotten that far yet. I suppose I should stay with you." She stood to pour the last of the Merlot into Jo's glass.

  "I guess," Jo said. She wasn't sure if she was still okay to drive on slick country roads. "I'll see if I can find clean sheets, and make up my father's bed."

  "Oh, we can make up something better than that." Rory finished the last inch of wine in her glass. "I know how it starts," she said.

  "How?"

  "Once upon a time, you kissed me."

  Jo woke up the next morning curled around a still-warm pillow. Through the doorway she could see Rory at the kitchen table, her head bent and intent, silent but for the soft scritch of pen on paper. A flurry of motion, pen sweeping wide, crossing out unruly words. A small sigh. Rory bit the top of her pen and stared into space, as if an elusive phrase were etched into the wallpaper, hidden among the tea roses. Jo pulled on a pair of sweats and a t-shirt and padded out in her bare feet.

  She had been a quiet, solitary child, and in middle age considered herself a private person, practical and self-sufficient. Not a prude—she'd had some lovers—but not accustomed to awkward good-mornings after unlikely evenings. She cleared her throat as an introduction.

  Rory looked up. "Hi. There's coffee on the stove."

  "How? There wasn't any."

  "I made some." She waved a hand at her knapsack and the open bag of Starbucks French Roast on the counter.

  "Oh. Thanks." There wasn't a Starbucks within a hundred miles. And last night the knapsack hadn't had . . . But damn, it smelled good.

  Jo filled a mug and leaned against the table. "What are you working on?"

  "A new story." Rory turned and kissed Jo's hand, curled around the handle of the mug, just below the knuckles. "So many possibilities."

  The second time Jo got up that morning, she took a shower. When she came out of the bathroom, combing her fingers through her short, salt-and-pepper hair, Rory was back at the table, staring at a blank page.

  "I have to go to the Wal-Mart, out by the highway." Jo rested her hands on Rory's shoulders. "Boxes and tape and labels. Do you want to come along?"

  "I need to stay here. Be back for lunch," she answered, and picked up her pen.

  Jo left the packing supplies downstairs and walked into the kitchen expecting sandwiches. The table was covered with a bright, Indian-print bedspread identical to the one she'd had in her first apartment. Small bowls and plates held strawberries, a wedge of crumbly cheese, half a baguette, slices of avocado, green olives, pink curls of prosciutto—where had she gotten that?—a fan of shortbread wedges.

  "What's all this?"

  "Magpie lunch." Rory opened the fridge. "Sit. There's more coffee if you need to work this afternoon but—" She grinned and put a pitcher on the counter. "I made sangria, too."

  A thin orange slice floated in ruby liquid, colors that shouldn't work together. But they did, and Jo accepted the invitation. She feasted on a panoply of nibbles and let the edges of responsibility soften into a long, languid afternoon.

  April became May. The buds on the oak unfurled to celadon flags, and color crept back into the world. In the mornings, while Rory hummed and scribbled, Jo opened cupboards, filled boxes, made lists and phone calls. She emptied the workbench drawers into neatly labeled Ziploc bags, made two solo runs to the town dump. Lunch was sometimes a sandwich, but sometimes a magpie, and Jo grew quite fond of the way the afternoon light played through the bedroom window.

  They didn't talk about where they were from or what had come before. Their days were filled with laughter and small touches, like a cat bumping against a leg to reassure itself that the world was as it should be. Rory skipped and sang and made up holidays for them to celebrate.

  "It's the ninth. No work today."

  Jo raised an eyebrow.

  "The nines are for joy," Rory said. "For feasts and blue flowers and the connecting of hearts." She didn't always talk that way. If she ever went to the grocery, Jo doubted that she'd stand in the checkout line answe
ring, "Paper or plastic?" in iambic pentameter. But they were alone and, arm-in-arm or spooned around each other, Rory's words wove her into a place she could never have imagined—and never wanted to leave.

  The weather grew warmer. Jo opened the double doors downstairs to the endless blue sky, and Rory sat with her back against the wood, her hair like flame in the sunlight.

  The man from the circus museum in Baraboo was coming after the fourth of July to make an offer on some of the machines. Jo had her father's toolbox open on a stool next to a cast-iron peepshow called Through the Keyhole. Its risqué images skipped and stuttered, and she had opened the side, exposing the gears and wheels. Her father, a methodical packrat, had saved the tattered schematic, but she hadn't made much progress.

  "What's it supposed to do?" Rory asked.

  "It's a dirty movie—at least it was seventy years ago." Jo laughed. "The woman does the hootchy-cootchy and takes off some of her clothes. But right now she dances worse than I do."

  "You dance."

  "No, I don't."

  "Not ever?"

  "Nope, 'fraid not."

  "Liar. You dance with me in bed."

  Jo felt her face redden. "Not the same."

  Rory just smiled and shook her head. She peered into the machine. "Where's the film?"

  "There isn't any. It's like a big, round flipbook. Hundreds of photos. But when you see one after another after another, you get the illusion of motion. Persistence of vision." She dug a handful of nickels out of a small canvas bag in the toolbox. "Here. Go take a look at When the Lights Are Low."

  Rory spent an hour peering, fascinated, into the brass eyepieces of the other machines. Jo discovered the problem—a gear worn almost smooth, connecting only once every dozen turns of the wheel—and found a spare part that fit.

  She hadn't expected to come across anything of her own in the apartment—she'd been gone most of her life, and her father was not a sentimental man. But the next morning, on a shelf at the back of his closet, behind his Sunday hat and a framed medal from the war, she did: a manila folder with a handful of crayon drawings, leaf prints, and fat-lined kindergarten paper. She climbed down from the stepstool and took the folder into the kitchen, where the light was better.

  A flat black tin of watercolor lozenges and a sketchbook lay open on the table. Rory swirled a brush in a tumbler of pale orange water.

  "I didn't know you painted." Jo opened the folder.

  "This story needs color," Rory replied. She reached for one of the stiff pieces of construction paper, spatters of red and blue tempera outlining the spiky contours of a maple leaf. "You made this?"

  "Every fall until fourth grade. Then we just pressed leaves in the encyclopedia; there was a prize for collecting the most different kinds."

  "Have you ever seen the cave paintings in France?"

  It was a non sequitur, but Jo had gotten used to them. "Lascaux," she nodded. "Not in person, but I had a textbook, in college. Hunters' drawings: bison and spotted horses."

  "And hands. Your picture reminds me of the hands." Rory laid her left one flat on the table, its back spotted with freckles. "Ten thousand years ago, an artist put his hand on the cave wall and held the pigment in his mouth, then spit it through a hollow reed." She was silent for a minute, then asked, "Are there any blank peepshow cards downstairs?"

  "No, but the reel for Seeing Is Believing only has a handful left. The backs are blank."

  "That'll work. And I need one of your father's pipes."

  "Okay. Why?"

  "I want to paint your hand."

  When Jo returned, Rory removed the bowl of the pipe, then reached into her wonder-filled knapsack and produced a jar of rust-colored powder. "Red ochre," she said. "Put your hand on the card and hold very still."

  Rory tipped half the jar of powder into her mouth, and held the pipe stem in her teeth. She leaned over Jo's hand and puffed damp russet clouds around each splayed finger. Jo closed her eyes; Rory's breath defined the edges of her senses.

  "Done. Lift it straight up. Don't smear it."

  Jo did, and looked down at a red card with a perfect white hand shape at its center.

  "See. Lascaux. They knew." Rory nodded. "When we're gone, we leave a void where we used to be." She leaned over and began to lick the away the specks of pigment from Jo's knuckles.

  August arrived with humidity that made sweat drip off Jo's nose when she filled the last Goodwill box with her father's shirts and work boots. Too hot to be upstairs, even with all the windows open. There wasn't much left to do in the arcade—the man from Baraboo had written a nice check and taken everything but the nickelodeon and the broken peep show. But the space was cool and dim, and most afternoons a thunderstorm massed over the lake, and rain roared down from a pewter sky, making small rivers that snaked across the gravel.

  One evening, after, they sat out on the small balcony at the top of the back stairs with cold bottles of cider, two middle-aged women listening to the drips off the eaves, the world golden in the setting sun.

  "I used to love the woods this time of year," Jo said. "Everything's that deep, lush green."

  Rory laughed. "What do you mean, everything? There's a rainbow out there. Hickory leaves aren't the same green as a chestnut's, or a poplar's, or—" she took a long, slow swallow of her cider and scooched closer, leaning against Jo's shoulder. "Doesn't matter. In a couple of weeks, even someone as chlorophyll- challenged as you will be able to see the difference."

  "I know. Summer's almost over." Jo shook her head. "I never thought I'd still be here." She put her cider down on the weathered wood. "But I'm done. The Grange is going to store the nickelodeon for me, and the realtor said she can come by Monday to pick up the keys. We can hit the road any time you're ready."

  She felt Rory shift, tense, and grow still.

  "One more month," she said after a long time. "I need to finish the story."

  "If you've got your notebook, can't you do that anywhere?"

  "Not this one," Rory said.

  So they stayed. One after another, the supple green leaves of the oak were veined with yellow, and the view from the balcony turned calico, a patchwork of rusts and reds and browns among the green. Rory wrote while Jo ran errands, swept the arcade floor, thought about where they might go, tried not to be impatient.

  Every morning, she woke and watched another oak leaf glide past the window, drifting slowly down onto the gravel.

  "I've got a task for you," Rory said, her head on Jo's chest, her voice muffled.

  "What?"

  "There are only a few leaves left on the oak. Catch one for me this morning and make a spatter print."

  "How come?"

  "An illustration for the end of this chapter." She unfolded herself and leaned over the side of the bed for her knapsack. "Here. Yellow ochre." She handed Jo the jar. "Use the back of a peepshow card, and spit it."

  Jo made a face. "Can't I just use a toothbrush and a pencil to make the spatter, the way we did in school?"

  "No. Then there'd be none of you in it."

  "But—" Jo stared at the jar.

  "Don't worry. It's just ground-up clay. And after—" Rory grinned. "I'll think of some way to cleanse your palate."

  Later that night, Jo came in from the bathroom to find Rory sitting in bed, a pair of glasses perched on the end of her nose. Jo had never seen her wear them before. "Cuddle up with me," Rory said. "I need to read this to you. It's time."

  The carnival comes to every town

  for a month or two

  before the cold winds strike the set.

  Autumn is the festival of death.

  The chorus prepares for the season's curtain;

  only the most elaborate shrouds will do

  for the grand finale.

  Leaves don't fall—

  they just let go.

  One by one they pirouette,

  a curtsy so deep it touches the ground,

  no applause but silence.

  The car
nival comes every year;

  not all the cast returns.

  If you look, you can see

  the orphaned dryads

  passing among the humans.

  They are the old women,

  withering and flamboyant,

  sparse hair the color of persimmons,

  going out in a blaze of glory—

  too-bright scarves

  and spots of rouge that shout:

  Attention, please.

  Dance with me while you can;

  it's not that long a run.

  If you blink, you'll miss my closing number—

  and it's your loss, dearie.

  Silence filled the small bedroom. Jo sat stiff, unmoving against the headboard. "Tell me that's only a poem."

  Rory laid the pages on the bedside table and put her glasses on top of them. She slid under the covers and snuggled close. "I can't."

  Jo looked at her in the lamplight, fine lines around her eyes; white and silver twined amid the copper curls. "The tree is dying." Her voice sounded hollow. "That's the first thing you said to me."

  "You loved her. No one else ever cared."

  "I felt safe there."

  "I know. I remember." Rory tucked her arm through Jo's. "I was so afraid you wouldn't come back. The wheel turned and turned, then I only had one summer left."

  "What's going to—?" Jo asked.

  "Just love me tonight." Rory kissed her, both gentle and fierce. "Then love me again tomorrow."

  * * *

  Rory glowed as she shrank into herself, veins prominent under tissue-thin flesh. They stayed cuddled under the blanket for two days, touching more than talking. The last morning, Jo was awake before dawn. She lay facing the window, her head on Rory's chest, rising and falling with each shallow breath. A breeze whispered against the side of the house, and with no sound at all, the oak tree gave up its final leaf. As the yellow scrap drifted down, Jo felt a faint tremble under her cheek, then stillness.