Read Online Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History by Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer
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a
bloody
railing–”
He’s laughing in a way could have been sobs, only the flash of those dear crooked eyeteeth as his mouth turns up with every breath tells me which. “Ought to have known you’d be that stubborn.”
His lips taste of soap when I lean forward, soap and old iron and the promises we’d made to one another in that naive conviction that the world couldn’t really be so mad as all that. Bother being proper anyway, his cool hands warming against my skin as we sort our way out of suddenly too many clothes (could have been my Nain’s old corsets, catch
me
outside of a shirtwaist ever again) until at last at last we lie tangled in touch, the old bedstead singing our joy to the rest of the house and half the bloody street for all that we’re minding it. Thinking only,
this. I want this. I want
you.
And, in the sudden breathless quiet after, somewhere from down below a voice sounds like Iris shouting that we can bloody well shut it. Trevor rumbles a chuckle and buries his face in my neck. Barest hint of teeth brushing my skin, before he sighs, and tucks his head against me, with a murmur: “
Wi wedi golli di
.”
I have missed you
.
O, Lord, I have my husband back, and he is himself. Whatever else he may also be, he is himself, and we shall relearn what that means, to us both, together.
Art by Eric Orchard
Across the Seam
by Sunny Moraine
----
1897
Lattimer, Pennsylvania
So I might forget time, forget the world
My native land
My beloved land
I might find again, as in a blessed dream
– Petro Trokhanovskii
trans. from the Russian by Elaine Rusinko
It was not a battle because they were not aggressive, nor were they on the defensive because they had no weapons of any kind and were simply shot down like so many worthless objects; each of the licensed life takers trying to outdo the others in the butchery.
– Inscription on monument erected at Lattimer, 1972
In his dreams, Baba Yaga sets fire to the seam and dances with him as it burns.
This is the last thing she does, after the rest of the show she puts on for him – a show, she has always given him to understand, that she does not organize for his entertainment but hers. That first night, cold and alone and curled against a stoop with black dust choking his nostrils and coating his throat, without even yet the hard bed at the boarding house to make sleep a less terrible thing, she had come to him in her chicken-legged dacha, waving her spoon and laughing as if he was the funniest thing she had ever seen.
Well, look at this. All curled up like a cat – except no cat would ever put up with such cold. You’re a long way from home, little dochka
.
I’m not your daughter,
he would have said, but one didn’t argue with Baba Yaga, not even in dreams, unless one wanted to find oneself up to the neck in a soup pot. Instead he kept silent, then, and looked at the knobby chicken knees of her house and not at her crouching on her porch like a hunched black bird, pointing at him with her spoon.
The streets of the coal camp are muddy now and they were muddy then, only then the mud was half ice and somehow sucked and pulled even worse than when it was merely waterlogged. Men lost shoes. But the house of Baba Yaga seemed entirely unconcerned as it stood there.
But of course, it was a dream.
Don’t you turn your gaze away from me, dochka
.
Don’t sulk. I came a long way for you, and bad manners make a good supper. Look up at me, curtsy, and pay me a proper thank-you when you meet my eyes.
It was as if the spoon had become a sword and pierced him through. She knew. Her eyes were like brittle knives when she laughed at him again. Every part of her was sharp. Every part of her might carve, slice, alter.
So now he looks forward to his dreams.
----
Every day is much the same.
Out of bed before the sun; cold coffee and bread so dry it crumbles in his mouth. The boarding house smells like unwashed socks and stale drink, but he no longer notices it.
bloody
railing–”
He’s laughing in a way could have been sobs, only the flash of those dear crooked eyeteeth as his mouth turns up with every breath tells me which. “Ought to have known you’d be that stubborn.”
His lips taste of soap when I lean forward, soap and old iron and the promises we’d made to one another in that naive conviction that the world couldn’t really be so mad as all that. Bother being proper anyway, his cool hands warming against my skin as we sort our way out of suddenly too many clothes (could have been my Nain’s old corsets, catch
me
outside of a shirtwaist ever again) until at last at last we lie tangled in touch, the old bedstead singing our joy to the rest of the house and half the bloody street for all that we’re minding it. Thinking only,
this. I want this. I want
you.
And, in the sudden breathless quiet after, somewhere from down below a voice sounds like Iris shouting that we can bloody well shut it. Trevor rumbles a chuckle and buries his face in my neck. Barest hint of teeth brushing my skin, before he sighs, and tucks his head against me, with a murmur: “
Wi wedi golli di
.”
I have missed you
.
O, Lord, I have my husband back, and he is himself. Whatever else he may also be, he is himself, and we shall relearn what that means, to us both, together.
Art by Eric Orchard
Across the Seam
by Sunny Moraine
----
1897
Lattimer, Pennsylvania
So I might forget time, forget the world
My native land
My beloved land
I might find again, as in a blessed dream
– Petro Trokhanovskii
trans. from the Russian by Elaine Rusinko
It was not a battle because they were not aggressive, nor were they on the defensive because they had no weapons of any kind and were simply shot down like so many worthless objects; each of the licensed life takers trying to outdo the others in the butchery.
– Inscription on monument erected at Lattimer, 1972
In his dreams, Baba Yaga sets fire to the seam and dances with him as it burns.
This is the last thing she does, after the rest of the show she puts on for him – a show, she has always given him to understand, that she does not organize for his entertainment but hers. That first night, cold and alone and curled against a stoop with black dust choking his nostrils and coating his throat, without even yet the hard bed at the boarding house to make sleep a less terrible thing, she had come to him in her chicken-legged dacha, waving her spoon and laughing as if he was the funniest thing she had ever seen.
Well, look at this. All curled up like a cat – except no cat would ever put up with such cold. You’re a long way from home, little dochka
.
I’m not your daughter,
he would have said, but one didn’t argue with Baba Yaga, not even in dreams, unless one wanted to find oneself up to the neck in a soup pot. Instead he kept silent, then, and looked at the knobby chicken knees of her house and not at her crouching on her porch like a hunched black bird, pointing at him with her spoon.
The streets of the coal camp are muddy now and they were muddy then, only then the mud was half ice and somehow sucked and pulled even worse than when it was merely waterlogged. Men lost shoes. But the house of Baba Yaga seemed entirely unconcerned as it stood there.
But of course, it was a dream.
Don’t you turn your gaze away from me, dochka
.
Don’t sulk. I came a long way for you, and bad manners make a good supper. Look up at me, curtsy, and pay me a proper thank-you when you meet my eyes.
It was as if the spoon had become a sword and pierced him through. She knew. Her eyes were like brittle knives when she laughed at him again. Every part of her was sharp. Every part of her might carve, slice, alter.
So now he looks forward to his dreams.
----
Every day is much the same.
Out of bed before the sun; cold coffee and bread so dry it crumbles in his mouth. The boarding house smells like unwashed socks and stale drink, but he no longer notices it.
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