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

by Annie Bellet

  She headed back to the house, Abel making pleased whuffing noises to indicate that he approved of their direction. She stopped on the porch to stamp the snow off of her feet. Abel shook himself, likewise, and Ruth quickly dusted off what he’d missed.

  She opened the door and Abel bounded in first, Ruth laughing and trying to keep her footing as he yanked on the leash. He was old and much weaker than he had been, but an excited burst of doggy energy could still make her rock. She stumbled in after him, the house dim after her cold hour outside.

  Abba was in the parlor, standing by the window from which he’d have been able to see them play. He must have heard them come in, but he didn’t look toward her until she tentatively called his name.

  He turned and looked her over, surveying her bare arms and hands, but he gave no reaction. She could see from his face that it was over.

  • • • •

  He wanted to bury her alone. She didn’t argue.

  He would plant Mara in the yard, perhaps under the bony tree, but more likely somewhere else in the lonely acreage, unmarked. She didn’t know how he planned to dig in the frozen ground, but he was a man of many contraptions. Mara would always be out there, lost in the snow.

  When he came back, he clutched her hand as he had clutched Mara’s. It was her turn to be what abba had been for Mara, the anchor that kept him away from the lip of the black hole, the one steady thing in a dissolving world.

  • • • •

  They packed the house without discussing it. Ruth understood what was happening as soon as she saw abba filling the first box with books. Probably she’d known for some time, on the fringe of her consciousness, that they would have to do this. As they wrapped dishes in tissue paper, and sorted through old papers, they shared silent grief at leaving the yellow house that abba had built with Meryem, and that both Mara and Ruth had lived in all their lives.

  Abba had enough money that he didn’t need to sell the property. The house would remain owned and abandoned in the coming years.

  It was terrible to go, but it also felt like a necessary marker, a border bisecting her life. It was one more way in which she was becoming Ruth.

  They stayed in town for one last Shabbat. The process of packing the house had altered their sense of time, making the hours seem foreshortened and stretched at turns.

  Thursday passed without their noticing, leaving them to buy their groceries on Friday. Abba wanted to drive into town on his own, but Ruth didn’t want him to be alone yet.

  Reluctantly, she agreed to stay in the truck when they got there. Though abba had begun to tell people that she was recovering, it would be best if no one got a chance to look at her up close. They might realize something was wrong. It would be easier wherever they moved next; strangers wouldn’t always be comparing her to a ghost.

  Abba was barely out of the truck before Gerry caught sight of them through the window and came barreling out of the door. Abba tried to get in his way. Rapidly, he stumbled out the excuse that he and Ruth had agreed on, that it was good for her to get out of the house, but she was still too tired to see anyone.

  “A minute won’t hurt,” said Gerry. He pushed past abba. With a huge grin, he knocked on Ruth’s window.

  Hesitantly, she rolled it down. Gerry crossed his arms on the sill, leaning his head into the vehicle. “Look at you!” he exclaimed. “Your daddy said you were getting better, but just look at you!”

  Ruth couldn’t help but grin. Abel’s tail began to thump as he pushed himself into the front seat to get a better look at his favorite snack provider.

  “I have to say, after you didn’t come the last few weeks…” Gerry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’m just glad to see you, Mara, I really am.”

  At the sound of the name, Ruth looked with involuntary shock at abba, who gave a sad little smile that Gerry couldn’t see. He took a step forward. “Please, Gerry. She needs to rest.”

  Gerry looked back at him, opened his mouth to argue, and then looked back at Ruth and nodded. “Okay then. But next week, I expect some free cashier work!” He leaned in to kiss her cheek. He smelled of beef and rosemary. “You get yourself back here, Mara. And you keep kicking that cancer in the rear end.”

  With a glance back at the truck to check that Mara was okay, abba followed Gerry into the store. Twenty minutes later, he returned with two bags of groceries, which he put in the bed of the truck. As he started the engine, he said, “Gerry is a good man. I will miss him.” He paused. “But it is better to have you, Mara.”

  Ruth looked at him with icy surprise, breath caught in her throat.

  Her name was her own again. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  • • • •

  The sky was bronzing when they arrived home.

  On the stove, cholent simmered, filling the house with its scent. Abba went to check on it before the sun set, and Ruth followed him into the kitchen, preparing to pull out the dishes and the silverware and the table cloth.

  He waved her away. “Next time. This week, let me.”

  Ruth went into ima’s studio. She’d hadn’t gone inside since the disaster in attic space, and her gaze lingered on the attic box, still lying dead on the floor.

  “I’d like to access a DVD of ima’s performances,” she told the AI. “Coppelia, please.”

  It whirred.

  The audience’s rumblings began and she instructed the AI to fast-forward until Coppelia was onstage. She held her eyes closed and tipped her head down until it was the moment to snap into life, to let her body flow, fluid and graceful, mimicking the dancer on the screen.

  She’d thought it would be cathartic to dance the part of the doll, and in a way it was, but once the moment was over, she surprised herself by selecting another disc instead of continuing. She tried to think of a comedy that she wanted to dance, and surprised herself further by realizing that she wanted to dance a tragedy instead. Mara had needed the comedies, but Ruth needed to feel the ache of grace and sorrow; she needed to feel the pull of the black hole even as she defied its gravity and danced, en pointe, on its edge.

  • • • •

  When the light turned violet, abba came to the door, and she followed him into the kitchen. Abba lit the candles, and she waited for him to begin the prayers, but instead he stood aside.

  It took her a moment to understand what he wanted.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Please, Marale,” he answered.

  Slowly, she moved into the space where he should have been standing. The candles burned on the table beneath her. She waved her hands through the heat and thickness of the smoke, and then lifted them to cover her eyes.

  She said, “Barukh atah Adonai, Elohaynu, melekh ha-olam, asher kid’shanu b’mitzvotav, v’tzivanu, l’had’lik neir shel Shabbat.”

  She breathed deeply, inhaling the scents of honey and figs and smoke.

  “Amein.”

  She opened her eyes again. Behind her, she heard abba’s breathing, and somewhere in the dark of the house, Abel’s snoring as he napped in preparation for after-dinner begging. The candles filled her vision as if she’d never seen them before. Bright white and gold flames trembled, shining against the black of the outside sky, so fragile they could be extinguished by a breath.

  * * *

  Rachel Swirsky holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop and graduated from Clarion West in 2005. She’s published seventy short stories in markets varying from Tor.com to The New Haven Review. Her work has been nominated for the Hugo, the Locus Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Sturgeon Award, and others, and twice won the Nebula Award. Her included work, “Grand Jete,” was originally printed in Subterranean Online’s final issue, has been reprinted in year’s best anthologies from Dozois, Strahan, and Horton, and was nominated for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She wrote it in the winter while she was working on her MFA and outside it was very cold and lonely.

  Acknowledgments

 
I would not have been able to put this project together without the grace of the authors who allowed me permission to reprint their work. Skyboat Media has been a delight to work with in the production of the audiobook. Galen Dara for her wonderful art, Polgarus Studios for their work on the interior layouts, and Pat R. Steiner for the cover layout.

  Alex Shvartsman was invaluable in the planning of the logistics of the Kickstarter project and the selfpublishing details. Tasha Turner Lennhoff shared valuable insight from her experience with Kickstarter. Others, including Christie Yant, John Joseph Adams, and Andi O’Connor were willing to field questions to help my first time at this go as smoothly as possible.

  My writer friends, especially those of Codex and of Dire Turtle, I could not have done this without your feedback and your support and most of all your enthusiasm. With a big project like this outside of my past experience, it would have been easy to be daunted and decide to just find something else to do with my time, but when I shared my ideas, that enthusiasm sustained me and drove me to make the project as big and as great as I could.

  There are so many who helped make the Kickstarter for this anthology a success. 416 backers who gave enough to not only produce the ebook and print edition, but also to fund the audiobook edition produced by Skyboat Media.

  Many wonderful and talented people offered rewards for the Kickstarter as well: Rachael K. Jones, Sam J. Miller, Ruthanna Emrys, Rachel Swirsky, Stefan Rudnicki, Gabrielle de Cuir, Sylvia Spruck Wrigley, Galen Dara, Wilson Fowlie, Graeme Dunlop, Anaea Lay, Cassie Alexander, Yoon Ha Lee, and Usman T. Malik.

  Many people helped spread the word, including Mike Glyer at File770, Andrew Liptak at IO9, Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing, James Aquilone at SF Signal, and Alasdair Stuart at Escape Artists.

  Thank you all, so much.

  —David Steffen—

  Backer Appreciation

  This is a partial list of those who backed the Kickstarter campaign. There were many others, and they all made this project possible.

  Aaron Feldman

  Aaron Pound

  Abital and Daryl

  Alain Fournier

  Allen Sale

  Alyssa Hillary

  Amanda N. H. Jacobson

  Andreas Matern

  Andrew Griffin

  Andrew Hatchell

  Andrew Neil Gray

  Andrew Scott

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  Brady Emmett

  Bran Heatherby

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  Chris Brant

  Chris Jones

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  Ted Logan

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  Wilson Fowlie

  Zach Weinberg

  About the Editor

  David Steffen is an editor, writer, publisher, and software engineer. He has edited and written for the Diabolical Plots zine since its launch in 2008, and which started publishing new fiction in 2015. He is most well-known for co-founding and administering The Submission Grinder, a free web tool that helps writers find markets for their fiction and to find response time statistics about those markets. His fiction has been published in many great venues, including Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, Drabblecast, Podcastle, AE, and Podcastle.

  The Long List is his first anthology project.