Early evening a breeze picked up, drying the sweat on my body. That was nice. We played blackjack waiting for the sun to set. Splinter kicked my ass. I had just dealt a new hand when a gust of wind picked up the cards and blew them off the cliffs. Without a word, we watched hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades flutter to the west. The low sun transformed the ocean into a bright, orange mirror.
“You see that?” Splinter whispered. “That’s where we’re sailing tomorrow. I want to touch the sun as it sinks into the sea.”
I could have said something, but didn’t need to. There, where the playing cards were drifting away, was Splinter’s heart. You could see the magic lure of the sea reflected on his body. I think that moment I somehow knew that I wouldn’t be taking Splinter back home. Perhaps I’d known it all along. But then why did I keep thinking: what about me?
“See how it mirrors? That’s where I belong. There everything is just like me. There I won’t have to worry about what I can and can’t do.”
“Surely it’s not that bad,” I suggested, but I knew better.
“Everybody looks at me like I’m some kind of freak,” Splinter said. “I’ll never have a girlfriend. It’s too dangerous. I don’t even know what it feels like to be touched. A simple hug is too much, even for my parents. All they do is look at me. They never touch, afraid of breaking something.”
I didn’t say a word, wished he hadn’t told me that.
“I dream about it a lot, you know. I mean, about what it’s like to undress a girl. To have my arms around her and feel her skin against mine.”
“But I thought you didn’t feel anything, technically speaking?”
“I may not have nerves, I do have feelings,” Splinter said. He went quiet. “Maybe... no. Maybe I just want to know what it’s like to be incredibly close to someone.”
Then I did something that I had never thought of before. I did it on the spur of the moment, and maybe I wouldn’t have done it if I had given it some thought, but it was all I could do right then. I turned towards him and wrapped my arm around his waist. I pulled him towards me. He gasped but didn’t stop me when I rolled over on my back and carefully lifted him on top. The gap between our bodies closed. Splinter’s eyes widened, orange crystals in the setting sun. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to evoke the sensation of that glass body against mine. What struck me most was how infinitely fragile it felt.
My hands were on his back.
Splinter’s fingers were on my shoulders.
He was incredibly close.
“I didn’t realize...”
“If you tell anyone I’ll smash you to pieces.”
He grinned and said: “Faggot.”
I saw the ground where we lay reflected in his face, not me. But when I breathed out his lips misted up, proof of my existence.
While behind us the miracle of Espelho de Agua unfolded, he kissed me. Splinter was the second person to discover the legend was true. The legend of the sun and the sea. Our tongues found each other while my hands caressed his gleaming back, and when our teeth touched it sounded as the tinkling of a wine glass. Splinter cried, warm tears of molten glass that rolled down my cheeks. After they solidified I plucked them off. I still have them, cones of mirrored glass. I’m glad they’re tears of happiness, not of sorrow. I keep them as mementos.
And so the sun sank into the sea.
I can’t remember exactly how it happened. What I do recall is that we were both excited and that I felt his heart beat like mad in his chest. It pounded like a pestle in a glass mortar. Perhaps it pounded so hard that it split his back—I like to pretend it did. But I think I just held him too tight. My only consolation is that I can say in all honesty that I killed him with love, not anything else.
We just lay there, staring at each other in shock while the crack faded in our ears. It had sounded like a football smashing into safety glass: it didn’t shatter, but formed a spider’s web. A dent. I felt his back. It began on his shoulder blades and ran along the muscles of his spine all the way down to the small of his back.
“Oops,” Splinter said.
I carefully slid him off me. When I set eyes on the damage my gut tightened into a knot.
“No,” I said. “Fuck, no, no, no!”
I guess I panicked. I put my fingers on his back, withdrew them, ran my hands through my hair. Worst thing was that the spider’s web moved, up and down to the rhythm of his breathing. I could see the chunks of glass chafing together.
“How bad is it?” Splinter asked calmly. How could he be so calm? I jumped to my feet, told him to stay where he was, not to move, that I would go and get the glassblower, that I would be back in a flash. The more I said, the less sense I made.
Splinter grabbed my wrist. “There’s no point.”
I was stunned. “What the fuck, there’s no point?” But I knew and tears welled up.
“There’s nothing I don’t know about glass, Look. If the damage is any bigger than a large coin, replacement is the only option. And replacement is no option for me.”
“Of course it is, he could blow another layer on top of it, fuck if I know!”
I said more, a lot more, but what I said was blubbered out by my sobbing. Splinter tried to get up. A square of glass, less than half an inch across, fell in. We both heard it clink as it bounced off glass organs and slid down the hollow of his leg. There was no doubt about it. Splinter was damaged beyond repair and any movement would make it worse. He would break in two. Maybe he had twenty-four hours to live. Maybe less.
“It was bound to happen. Look,” he said, “you think I don’t know that? It’s not your fault. It could have happened anytime.”
But that’s not how it felt, not to me; it was my fault and tears poured down my cheeks. Splinter draped his glass arms around me and held me in a clumsy embrace while I burrowed my face in his neck.
“It’s okay,” he comforted. “I found out. It doesn’t matter when you die. What matters is that you live before you do.”
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, inconsolable. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to stay here with me tonight. I’d just like to be incredibly close for a bit longer.”
So we lay down and I held him in my arms as the last light faded in the west. I cried continuously, repeating over and how sorry I was. Splinter said I wasn’t to blame, that for the first time in his life he’d been genuinely happy. My eyes got all swollen and sticky and sore. In the end I guess I cried myself to sleep, a restless sleep, full of dreams I couldn’t remember. Did I say dreams? Yeah. I dreamt. Sometime in the middle of the night I woke up because Splinter blew his cooling breath on my eyelids. I think he sensed I was having nightmares.
When I woke up again it was getting light.
I jumped up. Splinter was gone. I looked around, called out his name, got no response. His things were still there, though. I scanned the beach below and was alarmed to see the tide coming in. Maybe I was afraid that he’d jumped, that somewhere down there I’d discover a heap of shards, but I didn’t see anything. I called his name again and then I heard him.
He staggered out of the forest, pulling a battered wooden cart covered with a ragged old blanket. I was shocked to see the state he was in. His skin had lost its lustre, was no longer reflective. He was worn out. No, dying.
“I did it,” he croaked. “If I walk very stiffly, hardly anything breaks off, and the glassblower put some bandage on my back. Now I’ll hold a bit longer.”
But when he took another step I heard the splinters rattling in the hollows of his feet. I rushed to his aid and took the cart from him. When I lifted the blanket, I saw it held a glass fishing boat, just big enough to fit it. I looked at Splinter.
“I’m finished, Look. I get sicker all the time. I wanna see if I can pull it off. I’ve got all day to row to the horizon. I wanna see if I can touch the sun when it sinks into the sea tonight.”
We looked at each other for a long time. I kept trying to say som
ething, don’t know what, but my voice had given out. Finally I managed to utter a single word. It was the only time I’ve ever begged someone.
“Please,” I said.
“But I’m the one to say please,” Splinter smiled. “I need you. To push me off.”
What went through my mind as I pulled him in the cart, over that narrow path winding down to the beach? About a million voices in my head were telling me to turn around, yelling that it wasn’t fair and why was this happening to me? But I buried it all inside, deep down where nobody could ever reach.
The sun wasn’t up yet, and save for a lone jogger it was quiet on the beach. Splinter showed me a video camera wrapped up in the blanket. “Give that to my parents. It has a message. For you too.”
Next I put him in the glass fishing boat and pulled him across the tide line. I was up to my waist in the water. The sea was smooth here, slick and oily, like a mirror. The boat was very well crafted, the work of an artist. Geppetto had even fitted it with glass oars.
I held him in my arms for a long time. Then I let go, I let him go. He took the oars and started rowing, slowly and with concentration, careful not to break his back. He looked back once. The first few rays of sunshine cast a faint glow on his body, and his lips formed a single word. That word was thanks.
I waded back to the beach and watched him disappear, saw him grow smaller, a glittering speck on a glittering ocean. Like this, I stared for hours. The beach filled with day-trippers. People squabbled over trivialities, children cried over nothing. I felt drained. Eventually I clambered back up the cliffs. When I reached our stuff, I thought I caught a few more glimpses of the boat, but it was probably just a trick of light. Still, I didn’t leave.
I wanted to see if he’d pull it off.
I wanted to see if he could touch the sun.
I was detained at Faro Airport. Not because they recognized me from some description, but because the X-rays at security fell right through me. Descriptions don’t come any better than that. They questioned me in a small holding cell. I wobbled in my chair, couldn’t find a comfortable position. I was pissed off because I missed my flight, which had cost me four hundred euros last-minute. The Portuguese official was pissed off because he had a lousy job. After he’d been in contact with the Dutch police, he asked me if I knew anything about Splinter Rozenberg’s disappearance. I tried not to cry and kept my mouth shut, said I wouldn’t say a word until I’d spoken to his parents. At that, he got all worked up and banged both fists on the table.
“Talk to me, you glass-eyed monkey!” he yelled in broken English.
I flew off the handle: “You don’t know shit about glass.”
“Did he die?”
“No,” I said. “He lived.”
They must have searched my luggage, but they didn’t find the tape or the glass cones. I’d wrapped them in something soft and hid them in a dark place; you guess where. And so I was escorted back to the Netherlands and reunited with my parents.
A lot more happened, none of which is really relevant. What is relevant is that watching Splinter’s video message made Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg realize that his dream had come true. Splinter told them not to be sad for him. I saw very little of it. Tears blurred my vision when I heard his voice. I thought about how I’d sat there on the beach that long afternoon, plagued by doubts about whether I’d done the right thing to let him go. Whether I should have joined him. But I also remembered how the sun had finally set, the ocean a brilliant mirror of orange light. Then I’d known. You make your final journey alone.
Afterwards Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg came to me and asked: “Did he do it? Was he happy, in the end?”
“Yes,” I said. “He touched the sun.”
I wish there were more, that I could give you a happier ending. But there isn’t one. Who am I? My name is Look.
Somewhere in Portugal, scanning the waves with his binoculars each night, there’s an old glassblower. And every so often, I believe, he espies a blue whale.
Thomas Olde Heuvelt was born in the Netherlands in 1983. He is the much praised Dutch author of four novels and many stories of the fantastic. His work contains elements of magic realism, fantasy, horror, and humour, and he is well known in Holland for evoking strong emotional responses in readers, whether it be laughter, tears, or terrible outbursts of violence. BBC Radio called him “One of Europe’s foremost talents in fantastic literature” (while failing to pronounce his last name).
His story The Boy Who Cast No Shadow won the prestigious Paul Harland Award for best Dutch story of the Fantastic in 2010, was a Hugo finalist, and was a nominee for the international SFFT-Awards, receiving an honorable mention. Olde Heuvelt says he wrote the story in a four-day rush, between two chapters of a novel that was giving him uncontrollable screaming fits at the time. “To me,” he says, “it’s a story about being different and coming to terms with the fact that that ain’t such a bad thing. With this story I humbly paid homage to Joe Hill’s Pop Art, which I think is the best short story of the 21st Century.”
Around the World
Nas Hedron
Around the World is a round-up of news, reviews, and other links from around the Internet that relate to ISF’s mandate: increasing the profile of speculative fiction that focuses on the international, or that comes from regions not normally associated with the speculative fiction mainstream. It also includes news regarding authors who have published in ISF.
Awesome Campaign for a Grant to Increase Diversity in SF
Ellen B. Wright and Faye Bi are both speculative fiction fans, they both work in book publishing, and they’re both runners. Last year the two joined forces for an awesome cause that’s close to the heart of the ISF community: a marathon to raise funds for a brand new writing grant (to be administered by the Speculative Literature Foundation) that will go toward supporting diversity in science fiction and fantasy.
As the pair noted on their fundraising page, science fiction and fantasy fans are a diverse group, but our beloved SF books, television, and movies don’t always reflect that diversity:
“...those of us who don’t fit into one particular box (and some who do) have noticed something. There’s one story that’s told in the genre over and over again. You’ve probably seen it. It’s about a straight white man, or often a bunch of straight white men, creating things with science, wielding magic, saving the world, blowing stuff up. If there are women or people of color involved, we’re probably love interests or sidekicks. We probably only talk to, or about, the white male lead. We probably die first, or to provide motivation for the protagonist.”
None of this is news to the staff and readers of ISF—after all, recognizing and enjoying diversity in speculative fiction is what this publication is all about. But it’s nice to see someone taking concrete steps to do something about it.
Ellen and Faye teamed up with the SLF, which already administers the Older Writers Grant and the Gulliver Travel Research Grant, to create the Diverse Worlds Grant, which will:
“...help writers from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in the genre to start and continue publishing. As good science fiction and fantasy worlds should, this grant will welcome all kinds of diversity: gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, ability level, religion, etc.”
The two women ran the 2013 NYC Marathon to raise funds for the new grant. Their efforts were a huge success, and the campaign exceeded its $2,500.00 goal, raising a total of $3,356.00, or 134% of their target amount.
On behalf of ISF, congratulations to Ellen and Faye, and congratulations to the speculative fiction community, which will be deepend and enriched by their efforts.
Rebooting the Original Robots: Classic Czech SF Revisited
The word “robot” came into the English language via a Czech play called R.U.R., written by Karel Čapek in 1920. R.U.R. also marked the first appearance of a theme that would be revisited more than once afterward, notably in the Terminator films: a robot uprising.
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sp; Now, R.U.R. is having a renaissance of sorts, having been adapted into the short film R.U.R. Genesis. The original play was set in the 1950s or 1960s—then far in the future. The film is set in the same time period, in an alternate version of 1969, but from the vantage point of 2013 the 1960s have become retro-futuristic.
The team at Helicon Arts Cooperative, who previously made the feature Yesterday Was A Lie (2008), hope to turn R.U.R. Genesis into a feature as well. The cast includes Chase Masterson, whom SF fans may know from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
You can watch the R.U.R. Genesis on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA8wy6nnYLs.
A behind-the-scenes featurette is also on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUZXV5F5yUk.
The film’s home page is http://www.heliconarts.com/rur/genesis.html.
You can read the original R.U.R., translated into English by David Wyllie, at http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/c/capek/karel/rur/.
You can also see a production of it on YouTube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFm3LG-eMHg (Act I), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTx5IWMdFQc (Act II), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQxtxr8kJpI (Act III).
SF News from Nigeria
Item One: Nigeria has a thriving film industry, often referred to as Nollywood. When Ficson Films (www.ficson.com)—a new Nigerian company providing film production, event coverage, documentaries, and commercials—wanted to announce their presence recently, they did it in an imaginative way: they released a short science fiction video on YouTube.
The Day They Came, Episode 1 doesn’t have a very expansive plot, but maybe it’ll be fleshed out in later episodes. A man comes out of a house to have a cigarette and clear his head. Everything is normal—a rooster crows somewhere nearby. Then he hears something and looks toward the horizon, which is when the aliens arrive and all hell breaks loose.
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