The Long List Anthology: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List (The Long List Anthology Series Book 1)

by Annie Bellet

  “Baba wasn’t born here.” She felt a stinging in her throat and eyes, a pain of unfair. “Is that why he’s not here? Is he not allowed to come?”

  Anisa doesn’t remember what her mother said. She must have said something. Whatever it was, it was certainly not that she wouldn’t see her father in person for three years.

  • • • •

  The Welsh word for owl once meant “flower-face”.

  When Izzy said Blodeuwedd was made of flowers, Anisa had imagined roses and lilies, flowers she was forced to read about over and over in books of English literature. But as she reads, she finds that even Blodeuwedd’s flower names are strange to her—what kind of a flower is “broom”?—and she likes that, likes that no part of Blodeuwedd is familiar or expected.

  Anisa has started teaching herself Welsh, mostly because she wants to know how all the names in the Mabinogion are pronounced. She likes that there is a language that looks like English but sounds like Arabic; she likes that there is no one teaching it to her, or commenting on her accent, or asking her how to speak it for their amusement. She likes that a single “f” is pronounced “v”, that “w” is a vowel—likes that it’s an alphabet of secrets hidden in plain sight.

  She starts visiting the owl centre every weekend, feeling like she’s done her homework if she can share a new bit of Mabinogion trivia with Izzy and Blodeuwedd in exchange for a fact about owls.

  • • • •

  Owls are birds of the order Strigiformes, a word derived from the Latin for witch.

  During Anisa’s first year of school in England a girl with freckles and yellow hair leaned over to her while the teacher’s back was turned, and asked if her father was dead.

  “No!” Anisa stared at her.

  “My mum said your dad could be dead. Because of the war. Because there’s always war where you’re from.”

  “That’s not true.”

  The freckled girl narrowed her eyes. “My mum said so.”

  Anisa felt her pulse quicken, her hands tremble. She felt she had never hated anyone in her whole life so much as this idiot pastry of a girl. She watched as the girl shrugged and turned away.

  “Maybe you just don’t understand English.”

  She felt something uncoil inside her. Anisa stood up from her chair and shoved the girl out of hers, and felt, in the moment of skin touching skin, a startling shock of static electricity; the girl’s freckles vanished into the pink of her cheeks, and instead of protesting the push, she shouted “Ugh, she shocked me!”

  In her memory, the teacher’s reprimand, the consequences, the rest of that year all melt away to one viciously satisfying image: the freckled girl’s blue eyes looking at her, terrified, out of a pretty pink face.

  She learned to cultivate an appearance of danger, of threat; she learned that with an economy of look, of gesture, of insinuation, she could be feared and left alone. She was the Girl Who Came From War, the Girl Whose Father Was Dead, the Girl With Powers. One day a boy tried to kiss her; she pushed him away, looked him in the eye, and flung a fistful of nothing at him, a spray of air. He was absent from school for two days; when the boy came back claiming to have had a cold, everyone acknowledged Anisa as the cause. When some students asked her to make them sick on purpose, to miss an exam or assignment, she smirked, said nothing, and walked away.

  • • • •

  Owls have a narrow field of binocular vision; they compensate for this by rotating their heads up to two hundred and seventy degrees.

  Carefully, Izzy lowers her arm to Anisa’s gloved wrist, hooks her tether to the ring dangling from it, and watches as Blodeuwedd hops casually down on to her forearm. Anisa exhales, then grins. Izzy grins back.

  “I can’t believe how much she’s mellowed out. She’s really surprisingly comfortable with you.”

  “Maybe,” Anisa says, mischievous, “it’s because I’m really good at not asking anything of her.”

  “Sure,” says Izzy, “or maybe it’s because you keep talking about how much you hate Math, son of Mathonwy.”

  “Augh, that prick!”

  Izzy laughs, and Anisa loves to hear her, to see how she tosses her head back when she does. She loves how thick and wiry Izzy’s hair is, and the different things she does with it—today it’s half-wrapped in a white and purple scarf, fluffed out at the back like a bouquet. She continues,

  “He’s the worst. He takes flowers and tells them to be a woman; as soon as she acts in a way he doesn’t like, he turns her into an owl. It’s like—he needs to keep being in charge of her story, and the way to do that is to change her shape.”

  “Well. To be fair. She did try to kill his adopted son.”

  “He forced her into marriage with him! And he was a jerk too!”

  “You’re well into this, you are.”

  “It’s just—” Anisa bites her lip, looking at Blodeuwedd, raising her slightly to shift the weight on her forearm, watching her spread her magnificent wings, then settle, “—sometimes—I feel like I’m just a collection of bits of things that someone brought together at random and called girl, and then Anisa, and then—” she shrugs. “Whatever.”

  Izzy is quiet for a moment. Then she says, thoughtfully, “You know, there’s another word for that.”

  “For what?”

  “What you just described—an aggregation of disparate things. An anthology. That’s what The Mabinogion is, after all.”

  Anisa is unconvinced. “Blodeuwedd’s just one part of someone else’s story, she’s not an anthology herself.”

  Izzy smiles, gently, in a way that always makes Anisa feel she’s thinking of someone or something else, but allowing Anisa a window’s worth of view into her world. “You can look at it that way. But there’s another word for anthology, one we don’t really use any more: florilegium. Do you know what it means?”

  Anisa shakes her head, and blinks, startled, as Blodeuwedd does a side-wise walk up her arm to lean, gently, against her shoulder. Izzy smiles, a little more brightly, more for her, and says: “A gathering of flowers.”

  • • • •

  Owls fly more silently than any other bird.

  When her father joined them in London three years later, he found Anisa grown several inches taller and several sentences shorter. Her mother’s insistence on speaking Arabic together at all times—pushing her abilities as a heritage speaker to their limits—meant that Anisa often chose not to speak at all. This was to her advantage in the school yard, where her eyes, her looks, and rumors of her dark powers held her fellow students in awe; it did her no good with her father, who hugged her and held her until words and tears gushed out of her in gasps.

  The next few years were better; they moved to a different part of the city, and Anisa was able to make friends in a new school, to open up, to speak. She sometimes told stories about how afraid of her people used to be, how she’d convinced them of her powers like it was a joke on them, and not something she had ever believed herself.

  • • • •

  Owls purge from themselves the matter they cannot absorb: bones, fur, claws, teeth, feathers.

  “Is that for school?”

  Anisa looks up from her notebook to her mother, and shakes her head. “No. It’s Welsh stuff.”

  “Oh.” Her mother pauses, and Anisa can see her mentally donning the gloves with which to handle her. “Why Welsh?”

  She shrugs. “I like it.” Then, seeing her mother unsatisfied, adds, “I like the stories. I’d like to read them in the original language eventually.”

  Her mother hesitates. “You know, there’s a rich tradition of Arabic storytelling—”

  The power flexes inside her like a whip snapping, takes her by surprise, and she bites the inside of her lip until it bleeds to stop it, stop it.

  “—and I know I can’t share much myself but I’m sure your grandmother or your aunt would love to talk to you about it—”

  Anisa grabs her books and runs to her room as if she could o
utrun the power, locks the door, and buries her fingernails in the skin of her arms, dragging long, painful scratches down them, because the only way to let the power out is through pain, because if she doesn’t hurt herself she knows with absolute certainty that she will hurt someone else.

  • • • •

  Illness in owls is difficult to detect and diagnose until it is dangerously advanced.

  Anisa knows something is wrong before she sees the empty cage, from the way Izzy is pacing in front of it, as if waiting for her.

  “Blodeuwedd’s sick,” she says , and Anisa feels a rush of gravity inside her stomach. “She hasn’t eaten in a few days. I’m sorry, but you won’t be able to see her today—”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Anisa begins counting back the days to the last flare, to what she thought, and it wasn’t this, it was never anything like this, but she’d held The Mabinogion in her hands—

  “We don’t know yet. I’m so sorry you came out all this way—” Izzy hesitates while Anisa stands, frozen, feeling herself vanishing into misery, into a day one year and four hundred miles away.

  • • • •

  Owls do not mate for life, though death sometimes parts them.

  The memory is like a trap, a steel cage that falls over her head and severs her from reality. When the memory descends she can do nothing but see her father’s face, over and over, aghast, more hurt than she has ever seen him, and her own words like a bludgeon to beat in her own head: “Fine, go back and die, I don’t care, just stop coming back.”

  She feels, again, the power lashing out, confused, attempting both to tether and to push away; she remembers the shape of the door knob in her hand as she bolts out of the flat, down the stairs, out the building, into the night. She feels incandescent, too burnt up to cry, thinking of her father going back to a country every day in the news, every day a patchwork of explosions and body counts, every day a matter of someone else’s opinions.

  She thinks of how he wouldn’t take her with him.

  And she feels, irrevocably, as if she is breathing a stone when she sees him later that evening in hospital, eyes closed, ashen, and the words reaching her from a faraway dimness saying he has suffered a stroke, and died.

  • • • •

  “Anisa—Anisa!” Izzy has taken her hands, is holding them, and when Anisa focuses again she feels as if they’re submerged in water, and she wants to snatch them away because what if she hurts Izzy but she is disoriented and before she knows what she is doing she is crying while Izzy holds her hands and sinks down to the rain-wet floor with her. She feels gravel beneath her knees and grinds them further into it, to punish herself for this, this thing, the power, and she is trying to make Izzy understand and she is trying to say she is sorry but all that comes out is this violent, wrecking weeping.

  “It’s me,” she manages, “I made her sick, it’s my fault, I don’t mean to do it but I make bad things happen just by wanting them even a little, wanting them the wrong way, and I don’t want it anymore, I never wanted this but it keeps happening and now she’ll die—”

  Izzy looks at her, squeezes her hands, and says, calm and even, “Bullshit.”

  “It’s true—”

  “Anisa—if it’s true it should work both ways. Can you make good things happen by wanting them?”

  She looks into Izzy’s warm dark eyes, at a loss, and can’t frame a reply to such a ridiculous question.

  “Think, pet—what good things do you want to happen?”

  “I want—” she closes her eyes, and bites her lip, looking for pain to quash the power but feels it differently—feels, with Izzy holding her hands, Izzy facing her, grounded, as if draining something out into the gravel and the earth beneath it and leaving something else in its wake, something shining and slick as sunlight on wet streets. “I want Blodeuwedd to get better. I want her to have a good life, to … be whatever she wants to be and do whatever she wants to do. I want to learn Welsh. I want to—” Izzy’s face shimmers through her tears. “I want to be friends with you. I want—”

  She swallows them down, all of her good wants, how much she misses her father and how much she misses just talking, in any language, with her mother, and how she misses the light in Riyaq and the dry dusty air, the sheep and the goats and the warmth, always, of her grandmother and uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and she makes an anthology of them. She gathers the flowers of her wants all together in her throat, her heart, her belly, and trusts that they are good.

  • • • •

  The truth about owls—

  Anisa and her mother stand at the owl centre’s entrance, both casually studying a nearby freezer full of ice lollies while waiting for their tickets. Their eyes meet, and they grin at each other. Her mother is rummaging about for caramel cornettos when the sales attendant, Rachel, waves Anisa over.

  “Is that your mother, Anisa?” whispers Rachel. Anisa goes very still for a moment as she nods, and Rachel beams. “I thought so. You have precisely the same smile.”

  Anisa blushes, and looks down, suddenly shy. Her mother pays for their tickets and ice cream, and together they move towards the gift-shop and the aviaries beyond.

  Anisa pauses on her way through the gift-shop; she waves her mother on, says she’ll catch her up. Alone, she buys a twee notebook covered in shiny metallic owls and starts writing in it with an owl-topped pen.

  She writes “The truth about owls—” but pauses. She looks at the words, their shape, the taken-for-granted ease of their spilling from her. She frowns, bites her lip, and after a moment’s careful thought writes “Y gwir am tylluanod—”

  But she has run out of vocabulary, and this is not something she wants to look up. There is a warmth blossoming in her, a rightness, pushing up out of her chest where the power used to crouch, where something lives now that is different, better, and she wants to pour that out on the page. She rolls the pen between her thumb and forefinger, then shifts the journal’s weight against her palm.

  She writes “”, and smiles.

  * * *

  Amal El-Mohtar is an author, editor, and critic: her short fiction has received the Locus Award and been nominated for the Nebula Award, while her poetry has won the Rhysling Award three times. She is the author of The Honey Month, a collection of poetry and prose written to the taste of twenty-eight different kinds of honey, and her fiction has appeared most recently in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny Magazine. She contributes book reviews to NPR Books and the LA Times; edits Goblin Fruit, a quarterly journal of fantastical poetry; is a founding member of the Banjo Apocalypse Crinoline Troubadours; a contributor to Down and Safe: A Blake’s 7 Podcast; and divides her time and heart between Ottawa and Glasgow. Find her on Twitter @tithenai.

  A Kiss With Teeth

  By Max Gladstone

  Vlad no longer shows his wife his sharp teeth. He keeps them secret in his gums, waiting for the quickened skip of hunger, for the bloodrush he almost never feels these days.

  The teeth he wears instead are blunt as shovels. He coffee-stains them carefully, soaks them every night in a mug with ‘World’s Best Dad’ written on the side. After eight years of staining, Vlad’s blunt teeth are the burnished yellow of the keys of an old unplayed piano. If not for the stain they would be whiter than porcelain. Much, much whiter than bone.

  White, almost, as the sharp teeth he keeps concealed.

  His wife Sarah has not tried to kill him since they married. She stores her holy water in a kitchen cabinet behind the spice rack, the silver bullets in a safe with her gun. She smiles when they make love, the smile of a woman sinking into a feather bed, a smile of jigsaw puzzles and blankets over warm laps by the fire. He smiles back, with his blunt teeth.

  They have a son, a seven-year-old boy named Paul, straight and brown like his mother, a growing, springing sapling boy. Paul plays catch, Paul plays basketball, Paul dreams of growing up to be a football star, or a tennis star, or a baseball star, depending on the se
ason. Vlad takes him to games. Vlad wears a baseball cap, and smells the pitcher’s sweat and the ball’s leather from their seat far up in the stands. He sees ball strike bat, sees ball and bat deform, and knows whether the ball will stutter out between third and second, or arc beautiful and deadly to outfield, fly true or veer across the foul line. He would tell his son, but Paul cannot hear fast enough. After each play, Paul explains the action, slow, patient and content. Paul smiles like his mother, and the smile sets Vlad on edge and spinning.

  Sometimes Vlad remembers his youth, sprinting ahead of a cavalry charge to break like lightning on a stand of pikers. Blood, he remembers, oceans of it. Screams of the impaled. There is a sound men’s breaking sterna make when you grab their ribs and pull them out and in, a bassy nightmare transposition of a wishbone’s snap. Vlad knows the plural forms of ‘sternum’ and ‘trachea,’ and all declensions and participles of ‘flense.’

  • • • •

  “Talk to the teacher,” his wife says after dinner. Paul watches a cricket game on satellite in the other room, mountainous Fijians squared off against an Indian team. Vlad once was a death cult in Calcutta—the entire cult, British colonial paranoia being an excellent cover for his appetites—and in the sixties he met a traveling volcano god in Fiji, who’d given up sacrifices when he found virgins could be had more easily by learning to play guitar. Neither experience left Vlad with much appreciation for cricket.

  “On what topic should we converse,” he asks. He can never end sentences with prepositions. He learned English in a proper age.