The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “It’s in the newspapers, if you look. The Gulf War, yeah? That’s when it started. Saddam Hussein is going to take revenge and send nukes, and then the U.S. will nuke back, and then Russia jumps in. And then there’ll be nukes everywhere, and we’re dead. Or we’ll die in the nuclear winter, ’cause they might not nuke Sweden, but there’ll be nothing left for us.” Sara’s eyes were a little too wide.

  “Okay,” Cilla said, slowly. “But how do you know all this is going to happen?”

  “I can see the signs. In the papers. And I just… know. Like someone told me. The twenty-third of February in ninety-six, that’s when the world ends. I mean, haven’t you noticed that something’s really really wrong?”

  Cilla dug her toe into the stones. “It’s the opposite.”

  “What?” There was no question mark to Sara’s tone.

  “Something wonderful,” Cilla said. Her cheeks were hot. She focused her eyes on her toe.

  “You’re a fucking idiot.” Sara turned her back, demonstratively, and lit a new cigarette.

  Cilla never could wait her out. She walked back home alone.

  On midsummer’s eve, they had a small feast. There was pickled herring and new potatoes, smoked salmon, fresh strawberries and cream, spiced schnapps for Mum and Hedvig. It was past ten when Cilla pulled on Sara’s sleeve.

  “We have to go pick seven kinds of flowers,” she said.

  Sara rolled her eyes. “That’s kid stuff. I have a headache,” she said, standing up. “I’m going to bed.”

  Cilla remained at the table with her mother and great-aunt, biting her lip.

  Mum slipped an arm around her shoulder. “Picking seven flowers is an old, old tradition,” she said. “There’s nothing silly about it.”

  “I don’t feel like it anymore,” Cilla mumbled.

  Mum chuckled gently. “Well, if you change your mind, tonight is when you can stay up for as long as you like.”

  “Just be careful,” said Hedvig. “The vittra might be out and about.” She winked conspiratorially at Cilla.

  At Hedvig’s dry joke, Cilla suddenly knew with absolute certainty what she had been pining for, that wonderful something waiting out there. She remained at the table, barely able to contain her impatience until Mum and Hedvig jointly decided to go to bed.

  Mum kissed Cilla’s forehead. “Have a nice little midsummer’s eve, love. I’ll leave the cookies out.”

  Cilla made herself smile at her mother’s patronizing remark, and waited for the house to go to sleep.

  She had put the dress on right this time, as well as she could, and clutched seven kinds of flowers in her left hand—buttercup, clover, geranium, catchfly, bluebells, chickweed, and daisies. She stood at the back of the house, on the slope facing the mountain. It was just past midnight, the sky a rich blue tinged with green and gold. The air had a sharp and herbal scent. It was very quiet.

  Cilla raised her arms. “I’m ready,” she whispered. In the silence that followed, she thought she could hear snatches of music. She closed her eyes and waited. When she opened them again, the vittra had arrived.

  They came out from between the pine trees, walking in pairs, all dressed in red and white: the women wore red skirts and shawls and the men long red coats. Two of them were playing the fiddle, a slow and eerie melody in a minor key.

  A tall man walked at the head of the train, dressed entirely in white. His hair was long and dark and very fine. There was something familiar about the shape of his face and the translucent blue of his eyes. For a moment, those eyes stared straight into Cilla’s. It was like receiving an electric shock; it reverberated down into her stomach. Then he shifted his gaze and looked beyond her to where Sara was standing wide-eyed by the corner of the house in her oversized sleeping t-shirt. He walked past Cilla without sparing her another glance.

  The beautiful man from the mountain approached Sara where she stood clutching the edge of the rain barrel. He put a hand on her arm and said something to her that Cilla couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it made Sara’s face flood with relief. She took his hand, and they walked past Cilla to the rest of the group. The fiddle players started up their slow wedding march, and the procession returned to the mountain. Sara never looked back.

  Cilla told them that Sara must have taken the dress, that she herself had gone to bed not long after the others. She told them of Sara’s doomsday vision and her belief that she could tell the future by decoding secret messages in the newspaper. When the search was finally abandoned, the general opinion was that Sara had had a bout of psychotic depression and gone into the wild, where she had either fallen into a body of water or died of exposure somewhere she couldn’t be found. Up there, you can die of hypothermia even in summer. Cilla said nothing of the procession, or of the plastic bag in her suitcase where Märet’s dress lay cut into tiny strips.

  She kept the bag for a long time.

  DOMESTIC MAGIC

  STEVE RASNIC TEM AND MELANIE TEM

  Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem’s [www.m-s-tem.com] collaborations include the multi-genre story collection In Concert and the award-winning novella and novel The Man on the Ceiling. They are past winners of the Bram Stoker, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. Melanie Tem is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and several of her plays have been produced. Steve Rasnic Tem’s latest books include the novel Deadfall Hotel, and the collections Ugly Behavior and Onion Songs

  Felix didn’t hate his mother, but got so mad at her so often she probably thought he did. Sometimes his anger scared him, that she might be right when she said thoughts could make things happen.

  That was what made him so mad—that she said and believed ridiculous stuff and she almost got him believing it, too. And she didn’t take care of Margaret right. Why’d they have to get a mother like her?

  He’d skipped school again today to run errands with her. She’d never ask him to miss school, she was worried he’d get behind like she had when she was a kid. But she just let him do it. What kind of mother let her son skip school? Wasn’t that against the law? What kind of mother made her son worry about her so much he didn’t want her leaving the house without him? At his age you were supposed to be thinking about friends and music and video games and sex, not whether your mother was capable of crossing the street by herself or taking care of your little sister. He was almost grown now; it was too late for him. But Margaret was little.

  He couldn’t remember his mom ever saying no. He was the good kid, which was kind of sickening but it was easier than doing stuff that made his mother cry and chant and cook weird stuff in the Crock-pot that stank up whatever crappy apartment or homeless shelter they were living in at the moment.

  Margaret was not a good kid. Felix tried to tell her what to do because somebody had to, but she just ignored him or laughed or threw a fit. When she was a baby she’d cried all the time because her world wasn’t perfect, and Mom had fussed and worried and chanted and rubbed goop on her chest and the soles of her feet.

  When Margaret had started crawling and toddling she got into everything, Mom’s stuff and Felix’s stuff, dangerous stuff and stuff you didn’t want ruined. One time because of a hunch he looked into the dirty playroom of the shelter and she was coloring in his school books, copying one of Mom’s so-called secret designs over and over again in the margins, crossing out words and underlining other ones, and he had to pay for the books. Another time when they lived in a studio apartment he had a feeling and found her on a chair reaching into a cabinet and dipping into Mom’s jars of herbs and tinctures and sticking her fingers into her mouth, and he grabbed her and yelled at her and she threw up all over everything.

  Mom would explain why she shouldn’t do whatever she’d just done, and Margaret listened and then did the same thing again or worse because now she had more information. Felix yelled at her but it didn’t make any difference. The minute she’d started talking she’d been whining, sassing, lying, chanting, telling you her dreams whether you wanted t
o hear about them or not, which he didn’t.

  So he had a crazy mother and a bratty sister who was probably crazy, too. It was like living with aliens. Everywhere else Felix felt like the alien, but he was the most normal one in this family, which was scary.

  Mom patted his shoulder and said in order for powers to be most efficacious we have to meet people where they are and not wish they were somebody else. What about somebody meeting him where he was for a change? The only thing Felix ever got from his mother’s advice was knowing what words like “efficacious” meant in case they showed up on some standardized test.

  Practically the minute Margaret could run she’d started running away. Not like she was going somewhere; more like she was just going. Mom would chant and throw cards and do divinations until she thought she knew where Margaret was. Then she’d send Felix to get her. Felix got mad when she was wrong because she’d wasted his time. He got mad when she was right because Margaret was such a pain and Mom wouldn’t punish her. She said it was Margaret’s nature and the rest of the world, including him, would just have to get used to it. Well, what about his “nature”?

  Wasn’t that child neglect? Was there somebody Felix could report it to without having to tell everything else about his nutso family? Like that Mom really was a witch? She preferred “seer” or “person of powers,” so he made a point of thinking “witch” in case she could maybe read his mind.

  So far today there’d been no calls or texts from the school that Margaret had escaped. So here Felix was with his mother in a thrift store doing his best to act as if he’d never seen this crazy lady before. Being anywhere in public with her sucked. The older she got the weirder she became, and if anything bad happened to her he’d be stuck with Margaret by himself.

  She talked to junk. Out loud. Who does that? Now she was holding up some old jar thing and speaking to it. “What have you held inside you? If I put some quarters for the laundromat into you, will you help me make them multiply?”

  Great. Felix had been saving quarters for a couple of weeks so he could wash his and Margaret’s clothes. He almost had enough. Maybe the jar would cough up a couple more. If they walked around much longer in dirty clothes somebody would surely call Social Services. Maybe that would be a good thing. Maybe not.

  When the tone of Mom’s voice told him she was about to start chanting, he walked over to the other end of the store and pretended to be looking at men’s shoes. He needed shoes. So did Margaret. But who knew where this stuff had been, who’d touched it, what they’d used it for? Felix didn’t believe in evil spirits but he did believe in germs. Donated clothes like from churches and clothing banks were safer but still embarrassing.

  His mother bought the jar for herself—for the family, she’d say—and a long curved knife for Margaret. A knife for an eight-year-old? One more thing he’d have to get rid of, preferably before Margaret saw it and thought it was cool. Nothing for him. He didn’t want anything, but it was another reason to be mad, along with the fact that she’d wasted $2.78 they didn’t have. Sometimes people paid Mom for tomatoes or rhubarb, spells or potions or readings, and she got food stamps and checks from the government, but it still seemed there was never enough money for good food. Nobody should live like this, especially a kid like Margaret who didn’t have a choice. But Felix was almost old enough to have a choice.

  Next stop was an organic grocery where everything cost a fortune. Mom had been sick a lot lately, and she said it was because she had to wait for money to come in before she could buy what she needed. But obviously it was the crap she ate from places like this and from her garden and the woods and streets. He wasn’t going to put any more of that crap into his body no matter how Mom tried to hide it in orange juice or disguise it as real food. Give him burgers and fries any day. “The government removes essential nutrients from our food,” she told him cheerily for like the thousandth time as they went into the store. “Who knows what they replace them with?”

  It was one thing to practice voodoo medicine and hoo-hoo eating on yourself. But not getting real food or health care for your kids made it other people’s business. What would’ve happened if he’d told the school counselor that time Margaret had a fever for days that made her blue eyes shine like wet lilacs and Mom had refused to take her to the ER but she’d made her dolls dance?

  When Felix came home from school that day every doll in Margaret’s room, every figurine, every picture of a human or beast, even stuff that only vaguely looked like it had a head and legs was gyrating, hopping, waving, dancing. Margaret was laughing, and then she was out of bed and trying to make them dance the old-fashioned kids’ way, moving them with her hands and pretending. She got frustrated and Mom wouldn’t do it again because she said it wasn’t right to be frivolous with your powers, and Margaret threw a fit. To shut her up, and because he was happy she wasn’t sick any more, Felix played puppets with her and showed her how to put life into them or pull it out of them or whatever. The puppets had tugged at his hand and Margaret’s hand, and she’d hugged him and said he was the best big brother in the world and he had to teach her how to do that, and he did his best but she never did learn.

  So maybe Mom had cured her, but maybe Mom had made her sick in the first place. Felix never got around to telling the school counselor and pretty soon they’d moved anyway.

  Margaret had the only clean, relatively nice room in their new house. Every other space, including half of his basement man-cave, was full of the witch’s projects. Her clay sculptures and things that looked like body parts floating in colored liquids had mingled with and seeped into his ships in bottles and crushed leaves and sketches of things he knew about but couldn’t name yet, couldn’t quite make move, and everything got ruined. He’d given up having projects after that.

  Seeing her plop another grape into her mouth, he whispered, “Mom!” She raised her eyebrows. The produce guy was heading their way (again) to tell her to quit shoplifting. What kind of role model was this for Margaret? Felix hurried around the corner and pretended to be interested in free-range eggs. More than once Mom had explained to him what “free-range” meant, but he refused to remember it and picturing the top of a stove full of brown eggs running around free like hamsters out of their cages made him laugh.

  Mom chatted away at the bored checkout clerk. Felix just wanted to get out of there before she did something else embarrassing, and he almost made it. He had picked up the grocery bags—why was it his job to carry the bags?—when Mom reached over, stroked the bananas, and sang out, “Thank you, my little curved friends, for letting us eat you.” The clerk stared at her, then stared at Felix, the poor kid with the crazy mother. Maybe somebody would call the authorities. Could you lose your kids for talking to bananas?

  Mom wouldn’t quit until she’d checked out at least one used bookstore. Felix wanted to tell her to carry her own damn groceries, but her back or shoulder or arm was giving her trouble. He thought about leaving her there and going to what they were calling home this week in order to be there when Margaret got out of school. Wasn’t it illegal to leave a little kid alone? But when he compared who was more likely to get into trouble on her own, Mom or Margaret, Mom won by a landslide. He thought about pulling a Margaret and walking away as far away as he could get.

  But he’d never do any of that because he was a wimp and a mama’s boy and her enabler, and somebody had to watch out for Margaret, which made him mad at both of them. Too bad he couldn’t just think Margaret into a safer place. Mom could probably do that, so why didn’t she? Personally, Felix didn’t have any magic.

  Mom and the bookstore guy said hi to each other like they were buds, except that Felix heard the OMG! in his voice. She got out her list, longer every time because nobody could ever find any of the books she wanted. The bookstore guy tried, or pretended to try, until a couple of actual customers came in. Then Mom wandered around. With the bags Felix couldn’t fit between the shelves unless he turned sideways. The plastic handles dug into
his hands. There were chairs but they all had books on them, and even though the bookstore people always said it was okay to move the books if you wanted to sit down, Felix couldn’t bring himself to do that, and it would be embarrassing to sit on the floor. He leaned against the end of a bookcase, willing it not to roll, and tried to think about things other than his mother or his sister.

  She’d be here for a while, looking up weirdness like the fourteenth word on the sixty-seventh page in twenty-one different books. She’d write those words down in a tattered notebook and study them for weeks. She never bought anything—on her way out she’d grab some random book out of the freebie bin. When he edged around the towering books crowding the apartment he’d pretend to cast a protective spell so they wouldn’t collapse on Margaret, but it was just making fun of Mom. Every time they moved there were more boxes of books to carry, except you couldn’t bring extraneous stuff like that to a shelter, which was the only good thing about being homeless.

  Feeling like a homeless person again with all the crap he was carrying, Felix almost wished for a grocery cart. The thrift store bag had the name of the store in enormous letters so there was no way to disguise where they’d been shopping, and the jar was heavy against his leg and who knew what would be released or destroyed or pissed off if he dropped it and it broke. Naturally the natural-foods store wouldn’t use plastic so he had to deal with a flimsy cloth bag, and something in it smelled weird. The not one but three books Mom had grabbed out of the free bin without even looking had slick dust jackets and kept sliding out of his grip. He couldn’t reach his phone to see what time it was, which at least meant he didn’t have to deal with Mom’s dumb comments about how cell phones introduced foreign energy into your brain.

  “You about done?” he asked her. “Margaret’ll be home soon.”

  But she was communing with the spirit of a piece of trash out of the gutter. Felix didn’t want to know what it was or what she thought she was doing, but as she gently deposited it into the bookstore bag he couldn’t help hearing its voice and seeing that it was a piece of broken pink plastic with sharp edges that would probably tear the plastic so everything would fall out and he’d be the one who had to retrieve it all and figure out how to carry it. “What is that?”