"This is getting eerie,” Sonya says as they creep around the accident in the farthest lane.
"A bit monotonous, too,” Toby says, and that realization is apparently enough to reset the universal “fun” control. They get all the way to the tuba concert without witnessing another accident, but they do see a meter maid putting a ticket on a double-parked BMW.
The concert is amusing, and surprisingly good, but one person right up front keeps talking on a cell phone. Toby is about to ask her to put it away when a gust of wind catches her hat, and when she throws her arm upward to grab it, her cell phone slips free and continues along a high arc into the bell of a tuba. The audience's laughter brings “O Little Town of Bethlehem” to a halt, and there's a great deal of confusion before the band director figures out what has happened. He retrieves the cell phone and hands it back to its owner, who slinks away, her cheeks redder than the band director's Santa hat.
The rest of the concert goes smoothly. Despite the caffeine jitters that have kept Toby quivering like a plucked string all through it, he and Sonya are both cold by the time it's over, so they decide to have lunch next and go to the movie afterward. Sonya surprises him by suggesting they go to Hooters.
"You're kidding,” he says.
"Merry Christmas,” she says. “Besides, I've never eaten there before. What if the food is actually good, and I've been missing out all this time?"
The food is good, they discover, although Toby has a hard time paying attention to it. Their waitress is flirting with a table full of college kids, and she's very good at it. The college kids are clearly embarrassed and trying not to show it, but the waitress is merciless.
"Hey,” she says in a voice that fills the restaurant, “did you hear we're gonna open up a home-delivery service? We're gonna call it Knockers.” Sonya laughs, and the waitress winks at her. Toby is suddenly certain that they're in collusion, that Sonya has arranged something with her. He has fantasized about just that sort of thing before, but it has always been just fantasy, and that's how he likes it. The idea of it actually happening scares the daylights out of him, and not just because of performance anxiety. He isn't the world's most sensitive man, but he does actually use the word “relationship” once in a while, and he doesn't think a roll in the hay with a Hooters waitress will improve his and Sonya's any.
He's trying to figure out how to say this to her when she waves a hand in front of his face and says, “Earth to Toby. Man, you dropped out like a hippie on acid. I didn't think anything could take your eyes off her boobs, but you were gone."
"I think I just saw my life flash before my eyes,” he says.
"That's an interesting reaction to a pair of antigravity chest nodules."
"Yes,” he says. “And that's about all the fun I think I can stand here. Let's go see a movie."
On the drive to the theater, they see someone blowing leaves into the street with a backpack blower. As they approach, the engine belches a blue cloud of smoke and the cylinder head or the piston or something flies straight into the air, to come down on top of the astonished operator's head, knocking him to the ground. Toby slows the car, thinking he'd better stop and help if the guy is injured, but when the man rolls to his feet and begins cursing a blue streak, Toby drives on by.
A little farther on, a boomcar roars past, its subwoofers turned up to 11. The windows on Toby's car rattle, but the windows on the boomcar do them one better: they shatter in a spectacular spray of glistening fragments. The boomcar pulls to the curb and goes silent.
Toby didn't realize that his idea of fun was quite so sadistic. Not that people who force their noise on everyone else don't deserve some comeuppance, but this seems a little extreme. He has to admit, though, that he enjoys their misfortune.
The movie is Ringworld, and it stars a bunch of actors that Toby has never heard of before, but he expects he'll see them everywhere after this. It's a blowout production, the first science fiction film to live up to the book. The special effects are so seamless he can't tell where they start or stop; everything seems so real, it's two hours of total immersion in an alien world without a single false step. When the titles start to roll, Toby is surprised to find himself in a theater, and he has to unlock his fingers from their grip on the arms of his chair.
He and Sonya recount their favorite scenes on the drive home. As they pass Wal-Mart, Toby notices a big banner hanging from the top of the building: “Going Out of Business Sale.” A couple blocks beyond, the windows of Emile's Eclectic Emporium glitter with renewed luster.
At home, the neighbor's cocker spaniel is barking, as it always does when they drive in, but Toby and Sonya are barely inside the house when they hear a yowl and a screech and yips of mortal terror, then silence. Toby looks out the window to see a mountain lion leap the fence with the dog in its jaws.
He should be shocked. He wants to be shocked, and he wants to feel at least a little sympathy for the neighbor, who will no doubt feel terrible when he finds out what happened to his dog—and on Christmas day, to boot—but he can't suppress his wild grin. A mountain lion ate the neighbor's yappy dog!
He catches Sonya grinning, too, and suddenly they're laughing out loud. The strangeness of the day can't be held back any longer, and they fall into each other's arms, laughing so hard the tears run down their cheeks. They wind up pulling each other's clothes off and making love right there in the living room, and when Sonya asks him if he's thinking about the Hooters waitress, he laughs again and says, “Well, if I wasn't before, I am now.” But in truth, he can't even remember what she looks like.
They spend the evening puttering around the house, playing the new music that they have given each other and preparing dinner. They usually fix a big meal on Christmas, but by mutual consent they decide just to make soup and sandwiches this time. They read during dinner, and for a while afterward. Toby would have sworn he'd read every book Robert Heinlein had ever published, including the awful ones he'd written near the end of his life, but Sonya has given him one he's never seen before, and it's from the early days. It's as good as his memories of the other ones, which means it's at least an order of magnitude better than they really were.
When they go to bed, he discovers that his toothpaste tastes like chocolate. They crawl under the covers and turn out the light, and he snuggles in against Sonya, marveling as he often does at how well they fit together.
As he drifts off to sleep, he wonders what the morning will bring. What if his “fun” was just for a day?
He shivers. What if it lasts all year?
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Rising Waters by Patricia Ferrara
Perhaps it was the extensive flooding in the U.S. midwest in 2008 that brought this story to mind, or maybe simply the fact that its eeriness is memorable. Whatever the reason, when I was asked to choose a story for the anniversary, “Rising Waters” was an obvious pick. In many ways the story typifies what I have always admired about F&SF. When I worked for the magazine under the editorship of Ed Ferman, a hard and fast rule was that “slush” (unsolicited manuscripts) was always read. “Who knows,” Ed said, “the next Asimov or Bradbury might be in those piles of manuscripts.” Sure enough, many outstanding stories emerged from the slush pile. Patricia Ferrara's “Rising Waters” was one such tale.
"Rising Waters” was first published in the July 1987 issue of F&SF, and later anthologized in The Best Horror Stories from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and it also represents yet another admirable trait of the magazine: throughout F&SF's history, it has published and continues to publish the best in fantasy, science fiction—and horror. “Rising Waters” is a simple, elegant—and horrifying—story that is among this “best.”
—Anne Devereaux Jordan
And eventually what had been the flood plain of the river became part of the river itself, as age changed the Ohana from a thin, angry sluice into a flat ribbon that rippled in the sunlight, still as a lake. But Rory had not yet been born when his
grandparents had deserted their house by the old riverbank and moved far up into the gentle hills to a broad swell of land safe from the runoff of a hundred snowy winters. To him, the river existed with the same reliable constancy as the school bus. Every morning in the summer, he woke up to the river; and every night he slept beside it, thinking it of only average interest. Mostly he wondered how he could get a ride into town to play the video games at the supermarket. Space Invaders had been his favorite, and he was startled when, in rapid succession, a Pac-Man game displaced it, and then a Millipede game. The constant change was irritating, because his quarter bought more time on a familiar game. His wrist had never got the trick of slipping the gobbling button around the corners, and then the bouncy spiders had proved more than he could handle. The two quarters Grandma allotted per trip bought maybe five minutes of Millipede. Grandma took him to the supermarket only once a week to help with the groceries, unless she forgot something; and since she never forgot anything, he never got any better at the games. Once they had to go back because the milk was sour, and he had to stand with her at the manager's high window while she talked bitterly about out-of-state milk and a sweet-tempered cow that had been dead and gone for fifty years. She'd held on to his arm tightly, grasping at something other than her grandson. Afterward she wouldn't let him play even one game, although he'd come all that way with her. She wanted to go straight home, and she drove there silently, her lips forming a mushy rosebud as she pouted and trembled.
Then the great boiling heat of August came, and the water of the river retreated from its banks, leaving several feet of unpleasantly sharp stones embedded in dank clay between the clipped grass and the flood. Then he was glad to be near the river. It was something to do to go down to the riverbank with his lunch in a box and spend the day cooling off in the water and getting hot in the sun. The process tired him out pretty much if he stayed until dinnertime, and the sweltering heat kept it from being boring.
He was lying on the bank one day in August, with a whiff of evening breeze reminding him that it was almost time to go in for dinner. And while he was lying there, thinking about nothing in particular, a peculiar noise drew his attention to the river. The river had never made a noise like that before. He looked west, his hands cupped over his eyes against the sun, and saw that a dark triangular streak lay motionless far out on the waves, jutting hard-edged above the line of the water, but blurry where it merged into the shining ripples. He stood up to get a closer look, but it remained a sharp outline, its details lost in the backlight of the round red sun directly behind it. He stared at it until the setting sun made his eyes water and slit closed; in the meantime, he lost track of the vitally important timing that would land him at the dinner table just as the food came onto it. His grandma was angry with him when he finally came home, and he ate his dinner lukewarm and alone.
The thing was gone when he came back the next day. Yet it had been so odd, not like a log, but geometric, like something someone had made. He let it pass until, a few days later, he flopped down on his towel, fairly winded from a swim, and breathed in great whooshes of air for a few minutes before turning over. As he sighed and vainly rolled west against the glare of the sun, the dark streak reemerged so suddenly that he jumped. The sun was just past meridian, and he could see the object clearly. It was not a triangle at all, but a quadrangle that sort of tilted in the water, and out of it thrust another flat geometric form at an angle to the first. He brooded on the puzzle for a bit until he noticed two pillars or posts propping up the second plane from beneath. The object was a roof, then, sloping down to the overhang of a porch. He debated the probability of this guess being true. He had seen pictures of houses in floods, but the river was bone-dry. He looked down to check his facts. The water stood limpid and still, and three feet back from its banks. And the roof wasn't moving, not even rocking on the water. After a bit of brooding, he concluded that if it couldn't have floated down the river, then the river must have uncovered it. The physics of the matter troubled him, but he dismissed the improbabilities. After all, the thing was there.
He watched it from the bank for a while longer, wondering what house it was, when he remembered Grandma's often-repeated story of the old house, and how they had had to desert it after the last flood had wrecked it, when the federal government had made one last payment and refused to insure the place again. No one had ever heard such a thing, Grandma said. That was always the last line of her house chant. He had heard it so often, and he had paid so little attention, that the upshot was, he defined insurance vaguely as something no one had ever heard of. But the appearance of the house in the river made the story interesting, and he pieced odd bits of the tale together from memory and rolled it over in his mind while he looked. This might be the house. He wondered whether he should tell Grandma. But that would mean having to leave it behind while he ran up the hill, and the last time he left the thing alone, it had gone under. After a while he struck on the idea that he might swim out to it. It was a long way out, over half a mile maybe, but the porch roof was flat enough to serve as a pier. He could rest once he was out there, and with a safe haven halfway in the round trip, it was no farther than he had swum before. And so he plunged in.
The water seemed cooler than it should have been this time of day; after he'd gotten over the shock of the first swim of the morning, the river should feel like bathwater. But this was an adventure, and adventures always made things seem different. He pushed on through the clear water, stopping now and again to look up and correct his course. The house seemed to get no nearer, not for a long time, and he did not look back to see that nonetheless the shore was getting smaller behind him.
He was far out when his efforts were finally repaid by a better look at the house. As he paused and trod water, he could see the weathered shingles making a shaggy web of the roof, and only a great ragged gap in the grid remained impenetrably black in the distance. This encouragement had to last him a good while longer, for his neck was aching too much for him to keep on looking as he swam. His breathing was getting uncoordinated, too, and occasionally he choked and snorted out an inadvertent gulp of water. But there was nothing for it; he had to keep on paddling to the resting place on top of the porch. When the water suddenly turned tan and thick with churned-up mud from the river bottom, he stopped and looked up again for the first time in a long time. The house rose up less than twenty feet from where he swam. It seemed to stand higher out of the water now, and he could see the top of a third pillar holding up the porch roof, and the pediment over a doorway that gaped empty beneath.
He swam through the dirty water to grasp the post closest to him, but it was slick with moss, and his hands slipped. His heart thumped fearfully in his ears. He might be too tired to climb up. His enervated fingers scratched at the rotting wood, but it flaked and splintered in his hands. He pushed his feet up around the pillar, and shimmied and hopped and scrambled until his belly creased up over the edge of the roof. And there he lay for a moment, exhausted, until a creak and a slight tilt indicated the house was listing, and he pushed himself frantically, spread-eagle, out onto the smooth grid of shingles. The creaking stopped, and he tried to rest. But his heart pounded and his nerves sang, and he could not rest.
He was not familiar with the stink of things long buried coming into the air again. It was not a comfortable smell, and as soon as he could catch his breath, he lifted his head up away from the reeking shingles, slick with mud and fungus. His body was covered with patches of the stuff in front. He tried wiping the smears off his face, away from his nose. But he only complicated the stink with a perpetual itch of red clay that clung to him from the water, and the stink and the itch together exasperated him. If he scratched or wriggled, the house creaked and moved; and when he scraped a foot on the roof to ease the itch, down he stepped, dangling into the attic. He pulled his leg back with the frantic delicacy necessary on thin ice, flattening his body out belly-up on the slimy shingles. The warmth of the sun encouraged the f
oul odor of the house to spread itself around and made black spots flicker in front of his eyes. He closed the lids over his eyes tightly, but the sun shone through each individual cell, and he risked lifting up a forearm over the sockets. This brought the itch to his eyes, but he kept the cool forearm aloft anyway until the red fire died down behind his eyelids and he could breathe regularly.
When he cautiously removed the arm and blinked, he saw that the sun had gone far west of the meridian. He raised himself up slowly, and eased away from the hole he'd made in the roof. He'd have to start swimming back pretty soon. It was getting late. But the tan pool spread out widely, and he felt a certain revulsion toward jumping through its opaque surface.
His cautious movements again irritated the delicate balance of the house, and he lay back down quickly to soothe it. From inside came a slight scuffling sound and then a thump that made the thin membrane of the roof quiver. The noise was startling, for Rory had assumed the house had been washed clean by the current of the river. But of course, something could have drifted in through an empty windowframe and rattled around like a fly trying to find its way back out through a screen. The house kept shifting restively despite his stillness as he thought, and he crept carefully over to the end opposite the tilt to appease it.
This maneuver left him only inches from the original hole in the roof, and he could hear quite clearly the rattle and bump as the contents of the house wove from wall to wall. But there was no splashing noise involved, and that was odd. He looked down into the hole, something of his original curiosity rekindling. A sort of drier smell came up, equally as foul as the wet smell outside. He leaned in farther, and still nothing was visible, for little light came in through the two holes in the roof. It looked like some sort of attic or loft.
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