I doubt I could have appeared more beautiful to you as a woman than as a book.
. . . Too honest.
[[DECAY, SEVERAL LEAVES LOST]]
What else is in your library?
Easier to ask what isn’t! I am in pursuit of a book inlaid with mirrors—the text is so potent that it was written in reverse, and can only be read in reflection to prevent unwelcome effects.
Fascinating. Who wrote it?
I have a theory it was commissioned by a disgruntled professor, with a pun on “reflection” designed to shame his students into closer analyses of texts.
Hah! I hope that’s the case. What else?
Oh, there is a history of the Elephant War written by a captain on the losing side, a codex from the Chrysanthemum Year (Bold Did it Bloom) about the seven uses of bone that the Sisterhood would like me to find, and—
Cynthia I’m so sorry. Please, forgive me.
No matter. It isn’t as if I’ve forgotten how I came to you in the first place, though you seem to quite frequently.
Why
Think VERY carefully about whether you want to ask this question, Leuwin.
Why did they kill you? . . . How did they?
Forbidden questions from their pet librarian? The world does turn. Do you really want to know?
Yes.
So do I. Perhaps you could ask them for me.
[[DECAY, SEVERAL LEAVES LOST]]
If I could find a way to get you out . . .
You and your ellipses. Was that supposed to be a question?
I might make it a quest.
I am dead, Leuwin. I have no body but this.
You have a voice. A mind.
I am a voice, a mind. I have nothing else.
Cynthia . . . What happens when we reach the end of this? When we run out of pages?
Endings do not differ overmuch from each other, I expect. Happy or sad, they are still endings.
Your ending had a rather surprising sequel.
True. Though I see it more as intermission—an interminable intermission, during which the actors have wandered home to get drunk.
[[DECAY, SEVERAL LEAVES LOST]]
Cynthia, I think I love you.
Cynthia?
Why don’t you answer me?
Please, speak to me.
I’m tired, Leuwin.
I love you.
You love ink on a page. You don’t lack for that here.
I love you.
Only because I speak to you. Only because no one but you reads these words. Only because I am the only book to be written to you, for you. Only because I allow you, in this small way, to be a book yourself.
I love you.
Stop.
Don’t you love me?
Cynthia.
You can’t lie, can you?
You can’t lie, so you refuse to speak the truth.
I hate you.
Because you love me.
I hate you. Leave me alone.
I will write out Lady Aster’s plays for you to read. I will write you her poetry. I will fill this with all that is beautiful in the world, for you, that you might live it.
Leuwin. No.
I will stop a few pages from the end, and you can read it over and over again, all the loveliest things . . .
Leuwin. No.
But I
STOP. I WANT TO LIVE. I WANT TO HOLD YOU AND FUCK YOU AND MAKE YOU TEA AND READ YOU PLAYS. I WANT YOU TO TOUCH MY CHEEK AND MY HAIR AND LOOK ME IN THE EYES WHEN YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME. I WANT TO LIVE!
And you, you want a woman in a book. You want to tremble over my binding and ruffle my pages and spill ink into me. No, I can’t lie. Only the living can lie. I am dead. I am dead trees and dead horses boiled to glue. I hate you. Leave me alone.
[FINIS. Several blank pages remain]
You see he is mad.
I know he is looking for ways to extricate her from the book. I fear for him, in so deep with the Sisters—I fear for what he will ask them—
Sweet Stars, there’s more. I see it appearing as I write this—unnatural, chanty thing! I shall not reply. I must not reply, lest I fall into her trap as he did! But I will write this for you—I am committed to completeness.
Following immediately after the last, then:
Dominic, why are you doing this?
You won’t answer me? Fair enough.
I can feel when I am being read, Dominic. It’s a beautiful feeling, in some ways—have you ever felt beautiful? Sometimes I think only people who are not beautiful can feel so, can feel the shape of the exception settling on them like a mantle, like a morning mist.
Being read is like feeling beautiful, knowing your hair to be just-so and your clothing to be well-put-together and your color to be high and bright, and to feel, in the moment of beauty, that you are being observed.
The world shifts. You pretend not to see that you are being admired, desired. You think about whether or not to play the game of glances, and you smile to yourself, and you know the person has seen your smile, and it was beautiful, too. Slowly, you become aware of how they see you, and without looking, quite, you know that they are playing the game too, that they imagine you seeing them as beautiful, and it is a splendid game, truly.
Leuwin reads me quite often, without saying anything further to me. I ache when he does, to answer, to speak, but ours is a silence I cannot be the one to break. So he reads, and I am read, and this is all our love now.
I feel this troubles you. I do not feel particularly beautiful when you read me, Dominic. But I know it is happening.
Will you truly not answer? Only write me down into your own little book? Oh, Dominic. And you think you will run away? Find him help? You’re sweet enough to rot teeth.
You know, I always wanted someone to write me poetry.
If I weren’t dead, the irony would kill me.
I wonder who the Mistress of the Crossroads was. Hello, I suppose, if you ever read this—if Dominic ever shares.
I am going to try and sleep. Sorry my handwriting isn’t prettier. I never really was, myself.
I suppose Leuwin must have guessed, at some point. Just as he would have guessed you’d disobey him eventually. I am sorry he will find out about both, now. It isn’t as if I can cross things out.
No doubt he will be terribly angry. No doubt the Sisters will find out you know something more of them than they would permit, as I did.
It’s been a while since I’ve felt sorry for someone who wasn’t Leuwin, but I do feel sorry for you.
Good night.
That is all. Nothing else appears. Please, you must help him. I don’t know what to do. I cannot destroy the book—I cannot hide it from him, he seeks it every hour he is here—
I shall write more to you anon. He returns. I hear his feet upon the stair.
THE OTHER GRACES
ALICE SOLA KIM
See: I don’t even need to wake you up anymore. Maybe you’re exhausted, your eyeballs feeling tender and painful and peeled of their membranes, but when the alarm goes off at 6:00 AM, you jump out of bed and skitter across the chilly floor to the bathroom.
Every morning is thrilling; every morning you make an effort because this might be the day. It is April and you are a high school senior. Very soon you will be getting the letter that tells you that you’ve gotten into an Ivy League college. Any Ivy! Who gives a shit which one?
It wasn’t easy to get in. You’re all wrong for them. Your parents didn’t put on identical polo shirts and take you on winding car tours through the Northeast to check out Princeton and Yale. No, you’re part of the special category, species, family, genus, thing known as yellow trash. Yellow trash aren’t supposed to go Ivy League—you’ve fooled them all, you cheater, you fake! Get ready for your new life.
It’s all so thrilling. Too bad you thought you couldn’t write about that in your college application essays. All of the things that make you what you had decided should be called yellow trash—the shoutin
g matches in motel courtyards, the dirty hair, the histories of mental illness, the language barriers, the shoes, the silver fillings.
Grace, didn’t you know? They eat that shit up. But you wanted a real do-over. You didn’t want to be admitted only because they knew what you were. You like to think there’s some honor in that.
Even though you may or may not have cheated on the SAT.
Breakfast is last night’s dinner of chilly white rice and kimchi, which keeps your stomach full and your breath nasty, good things for a city girl on the go without a car. You like to think that this blast of prickly, fermented stink-breath might someday protect you from the next weirdo at the bus stop who sidles up to you to ask, “China or Japan?” So far, the most you’ve been able to do is flick up a middle finger in conjunction with a spat-out “America, asswipe!” And even that you’ve only been able to pull off once, but hey—good for you. If you were born unable to be pretty and quiet, then be loud and smelly. Own it.
When you leave the house for the day, your mother is gone and your brother is still at work. When you return, your brother will already be perched on the couch, watching TV. You pause at the door and rest your head on the jamb. The house is so quiet, all yours for now, and you will miss it.
Catch the bus, Grace! The bus!
It takes two city buses to get to your high school. You had started there right before your parents got divorced. You could walk seven blocks to go to a nearby, similarly shitty high school, but faced with the choice of shitty-familiar and shitty-new, you chose shitty-familiar.
Running across the street, you jam the hood of your sweatshirt over your damp head, creating tropical conditions under which your hair will steam and saran-wrap itself to your skull before giving up and drying itself. Why do people even use hair-dryers? They make you go deaf. You’re just happy to have shampoo. It was not that long ago when your family could not afford shampoo and so used soap. People—as in, other ten-year-old girls—noticed. Perhaps being poor either turns one into an animal or a classy ascetic with eye-popping cheekbones; it made you into an animal, the fur on your head as oily and felted as a grizzly’s.
The bus comes; you lunge inside, stepping tall; the doors slide shut like folding arms. On the sweating brown seat, you pull out a book to read—a charming little volume titled Science Fiction Terror Tales—but instead you wedge it under your thigh and close your eyes.
Last night you dreamed a familiar dream, so familiar that all you have to do is drift off in order to call it back. It’s a Grace convention up in there, populated with girls and women who look exactly like you. GraceCon always meets in a different location—in hammocks that don’t connect to anything you can see, a rainforest, the bottom of a swimming pool. Last night was the swimming pool. Graces were turning somersaults, sitting cross-legged on the bottom of the pool, knifing through the water. You just hung there, inhaling as if the heavy blue water was both fresh air and a nice cold drink.
Always, in the dreams, the Graces look at you and they go, “. .” You ask them, “?” Your accent is perfect. You sound like an ingénue on one of those K-dramas that your mother’s addicted to. “,” they answer. In the dreams, you understand every word.
On the bus, when you jerk awake, your face feels tired. It’s the same way your face always felt after elementary school slumber parties—your eyebrows were unused to being hoisted so high, and your mouth-corners felt as though they had been pushed wide and pinned. Back then, your face didn’t move much; when anyone in your family smiled, your pops got paranoid. He thought the joke was on him; now it is; it is.
Origin story. You first figured out that you were yellow trash when you were thirteen and attended a summer music day camp two hours away, in a nice neighborhood with a good school district. We both know that you’re not that good at the violin. But already you were thinking about college applications, and searching for cheap and easy ways to make yourself appealing to admissions officials.
Anyway, you were getting off the bus in that nice neighborhood when the handle of the violin case slipped out of your hand. You stopped to wipe your sweaty hand on your T-shirt. Someone pushed up behind you and said, “Out of my way, chink.”
Who does that? Surely the dickhead utterer of such words must have been green-skinned, a thousand feet tall, dragging a spiked club behind it as it picked and ate its own boogers. But, no, it was just some pretty white girl, a little older than you, high-ponytailed and tall. She didn’t even look at you as she walked past. It was all so very racist that you felt as though you were watching a movie of yourself. A movie about racism! Oh, but for you it was playing in Extreme Feel-O-Vision, in that you felt everything, all the hurt and shock, and that despite your best efforts to blend in, to embody a Whiter Shade of Asian, this thing just happened to you, it had happened before, and it would happen again.
It was unfair how everyone could look at her and not see a—let’s be blunt, Grace, a racist asshole—but just about anyone could look at you and see a chink.
You walked to the middle school where the music camp met, and spent a few minutes in quiet shock as everyone around you chattered and warmed up. Ann Li, who played the cello, asked you what was wrong.
“Someone called me a chink on the way over here,” you said.
Ann opened her mouth, so you felt encouraged to spill. You said, “I didn’t even do anything to her. I hate people.”
“Wow,” she said. She gave you a look of pity. “No one’s ever called me a chink before.”
At this, you crumpled like a soda can. Never? Bitch, please! You thought: if you believe that then I have a very lovely, like, pagoda to sell you. Admit it, you wondered how it could be that you got chinked about once a month but Ann never had in her entire life. Wasn’t there enough racism to go around?
It was then you realized that there are many different kinds of Asian girls. one kind is yellow trash; that is what you are. No matter how you brush your hair and wear Neutrogena lip shimmer and speak perfect English with nary a trace of fobbiness and play a string instrument like, say, Ann Li, you are not like her and you will never be like her, because you are yellow trash and people can tell. Even if it takes them a while.
Because at first they only see an Asian girl carrying a violin case, and if they think about you at all, it’s to wonder at what a dweeby little princess you must be. But then they realize that the violin is borrowed from the scanty school music equipment room, deep scratches next to the f-holes as if Wolverine himself had given classical music a brief try before roaring in frustration, that you can only ever understand about half of what your parents are saying (if that), that your father is a nutcase, that your mother—who, let it be known, is amazing at her job—periodically has clients who want to speak to her manager because does her manager know that this woman totally cannot speak English?, that your brother likes to spit on the floor inside the house, that you are trashy and weird and something is deeply wrong with you and it will never be right unless you do something drastic, like go away to an Ivy League college and return transmuted, if at all.
You like to think that the Ivy League is mystical, miraculous—that, in a biography, it erases everything that comes before it, or else imbues an ignoble childhood with a magical sense of purpose. And it goes without saying that it charms the life that comes after it.
Grace, you moron.
But I understand. Things were rough; you got single-minded.
Your high school is named after a Native American chief and is said to be one of the most ethnically diverse high schools in the state, which unfortunately gives ethnic diversity a terrible name because the high school is truly rubbish. They don’t offer AP classes, which is a big part of what drove you to cheat on the SAT, because the SAT is then the only objective measure by which admissions officials will be able to determine if your waving and withered cold hand is the one they want to catch and yank out of the sea.
(You’ve thought this through. You chew your nails, a lot, and spit
out keratin explosively like so many bitten-off ends of cigars. You like to think you fret in style.)
The school day is a long gray expanse. At lunch, you sit in the hallway with some friends. Tama is your best friend here. Tama’s half-black half-white, her skin paler than yours. She’s stupid-pretty. Not as in ridiculously pretty, but as in pretty in a way that initially makes people think she’s not smart, with her jutting upper lip and her lashes so thick they pass for eyeliner. You and Tama have an unequal friendship of the type where she is your best friend and you are probably not hers.
You break Fritos in your mouth and listen to Tama talk about her mother’s new painting. It is something sexually explicit involving satyrs and plums. Tama’s parents are both artists.
You pull out Science Fiction Terror Tales, an act that might be rude if you were there, but you are not there. They, your friends, like you when you’re there, but they don’t miss you when you’re not there. I don’t read science fiction anymore, but I like to watch you do it. You get so lost, Grace. You’re split in two: you’re immersed in a story about a man who is confused about if he’s really a man or a robot (truth: he’s a bomb), but you’re also dreamy for the better days to come.
Right now, you’re a weirdo in a hooded sweatshirt, a skinny girl shapeless but for a gigantic ass. Think of a boa constrictor that’s just eaten a goat. Stand the boa constrictor on its pointy end. The goat, sliding deeper into its body in one thick lump, is your ass. The rest of you, in this example, is the boa constrictor, which was chosen because obviously boa constrictors do not have tits.
But someday, far into the future, you will look fine. You will have money to spend on your clothes instead of going to the thrift store and pretending that the stuff there is cool but really everything’s been picked over by tattooed twenty-somethings and all that’s left are racks of sad tank tops with droopy armpits and flared stretch denim. Your hair will be washed with shampoo like the snot of unicorns and cruel hairstylists who are rude to everyone else but kind and complimentary to you will shear you into acceptability. Someday you’ll learn on your own the things that no one bothered to teach you. You’ll be a lovely young woman.
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Page 6