“Are you a grandchild?” she asked, in a stranger’s wheezing voice. “Are you Becky’s?” The baby squirmed in her lap, bright eyes staring up solemnly. “You are, aren’t you? And what a pretty one. Pick of the litter.” She rubbed the child’s belly with gnarled fingers and was rewarded with a giggle. This is a moment worth having, she thought. This is a moment to treasure. And this one is mine. Anna leaned down, ignoring the ache in her back, and planted a kiss on the child’s blonde head. An old woman’s tears wet those ruddy cheeks. Her last moments, before the other returned, were of exquisite joy.
Copyright © 2001 Daniel Goss
* * * *
Daniel Goss has written dozens of short stories and is now laboring melodramatically on a novel.
purified on the only visible moon
By T. Emmett Mueller
12/3/01
no wind with answers blowing,
no raiment, bread, nor breath of air…
our footprints,
pristine, eternal,
mark paths of to and from.
we lie here motionless,
our backs pressed into chalky dust,
reposed on slope of true tranquility.
no one owns this desert sea,
the only waves are shadows
stretching darkly.
interlaced fingers behind
two reflective heads….
in a silence
of vacuumed, black-space sky
one planet of pearl floats,
blue with stormy swirls of white
and worried gray—we’ll stay
in this, our place of calm,
no gusty violence,
the only hint of breeze,
the exhale of our solitary sighs.
Copyright © 2000 T. Emmett Mueller
* * * *
T. Emmett Mueller, an educator for 26 years in Michigan, retired to Florida seven years ago. He currently holds the position of Submissions Editor for This Hard Wind poetry magazine and is Associate Editor for PoetWorks Press. Recently, T. Emmett was a featured poet at the St. Petersburg Times Reading Festival and the Austin International Poetry Festival in Austin, Texas, where his work appears in the festival anthologies Di-Verse-City 2000, and 2001. For more about him, visit his Web site.
Threnody at Sea
By Mark Rudolph
12/10/01
Once a month
when her doctor visits,
my aunt asks when will she be healed,
believing a broken hip
must be the reason why she’s here.
Suspicious of the staff,
she hides her purse, refuses
to remove her watch,
and stows the brittle checks,
account closed years ago, in a hatbox.
She no longer bathes
herself, fearful of water
as if water were a sailor
with roving hands and a crooked smile.
Last night I dreamed
her young again, elegant and cultured—
twin pearls she envied
in others yet never had herself.
On an ocean liner
in the dark, she strolled the deck.
Fog from the cold Atlantic
feathered her shoulders and
swirled like tulle around her waist.
Some days a swell of reason
buoys her up, and she seems
to recognize us;
our arms and hands wave to her.
Most days in a filthy robe she roams
the halls, gray braid swaying
from side to side, and tells anyone
who’ll listen she’s been kidnapped,
forced to travel miles from home.
Today the cleanup of her home
began: old dresses to charity,
magazines and books to the library,
and on the sloping lawn,
her furniture scattered like debris.
While loading the van,
I tried not to think of how
the ocean steals anything it wants:
bridges, ships, even entire cities;
then throws it all back—warped
and bleached, battered beyond recognition.
Above the traffic, I heard
a keening, Circe-like, wavering
like the first note of a storm
calling us all out into the waves
where we will be stripped
of everything, even our names.
Copyright © 2001 Mark Rudolph
* * * *
Mark Rudolph lives in southern Indiana and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Chiaroscuro, Electric Wine, Star*Line, Magazine of Speculative Poetry, and other venues. His previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, see his Web site.
Oracle
By Kendall Evans
12/17/01
Listen to the rustling
of mutant oak leaves….
“Go,” said the Oracle
at Tau Eridani III,
“Where wormholes close and open
like anemone.”
Copyright © 2001 Kendall Evans
* * * *
Kendall Evans has had over sixty poems published in various SF/fantasy/horror magazines, including his story-length narrative poem “I Feel So Schizophrenic, the Starship’s Aft-Brain Said,” which appeared in a recent issue of Black Petals. His “The Keeper of the Lighthouse at Land’s End” received an honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
An Open Letter To Our Astronauts
By David C. Kopaska-Merkel
12/31/01
I wonder about them, those brave explorers,
Cocooned in their antiseptic habitats,
Sexually and temperamentally paired to a nicety,
With all the amenities the late 21st C has to offer.
When they return, eyes blazing with alien worlds
(The cities, the domed necropoli, wheeled plants and
Mile-long insects, weird new minerals and
Precisely measured constants),
When they return from their far adventuring,
What will they think, poking through the pestilential ash
Of our last and truly final war,
In which even the bones of the slain were devoured
In jig time by the worst the late 21st had to deploy?
And I write them notes, preserved in a wide variety of media,
And hide them in obscure places on several continents.
I try to tell them: don’t grieve, don’t feel guilt,
Turn away from this stupid dead thing and go back to the stars,
So that our suicide will not quite have been in vain.
Copyright © 2001 David C. Kopaska-Merkel
* * * *
David C. Kopaska-Merkel spent his formative years north of the Arctic Circle, where he spent his time counting polar bears. Chapped skin forced a return to warmer climes, and he now resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he studies rocks for the state and writes poetry for himself. David’s previous poem in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. Visit his Web site for more about him.
I Love Anthologies: A Review of the Year’s Best Science Fiction 2001, edited by Gardner Dozois
Reviewed by Danyel Fisher
12/03/01
I. Amor Anthologatis
I love anthologies.
In high school, my summer jobs couldn’t quite pay for the shiny new science fiction books that were coming out. So I’d forego the latest in the Dragonlance saga, and slip into the local used-book store. It was called “Tales Retold,” and it became my refuge after a long day at school. The room smelled marvelously musty, and I’d spend hours poring over the shelves.
I’d often come home with a short story collection. I’d start some choice story in the used-book store, and finish it on the bus ride home. A really good story would mean that I would miss my stop, and I managed that on a regular basis. Another story would be my break in the middle of my homework that evening, and I’d probably read some more on the bus ride in the morning.
All these books were bought used, and many had worn covers before I was born. It was wonderful for my economic sense, but terrible for my notion of contemporary fiction. In the science fiction I grew up on, man might someday reach the moon, Korea was a recent American overseas entanglement, and the next war would be fought with animatronic robots against with Soviet enemies.
Science fiction has changed since then, as has the rest of the world. Old SF (even from a few decades ago) always looks simultaneously retro and super-futuristic. The computers talk to humans, but not to each other. The cars fly and are piloted by computers, but the humans can’t talk until they’re on the ground. In the real 21st century, we’ve got computer networks with processors on every desk and in every phone. On the other hand, we’ve become less willing to predict radical changes in how people do things. The science-fiction writer of the 1950s would be perfectly comfortable making his way through the contemporary world—cars, stoplights, money, and telephones all act just like he’d expect—although he might be bitterly disappointed at the lack of commercial moon shuttles and talking refrigerators. When modern SF wants to predict massive change, we place our new worlds and new civilizations millennia in the future.
There was something important in common about those stories. As I’ve traveled through the history of the genre, Gardner Dozois seems to have been my reliable guide. He has stamped his name on every issue of Asimov’s since 1985, and the Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies for the same period. This year, I’ve been lucky enough to read a current anthology, one based on the works of 2000.
II. Quantitative Studies
Gardner Dozois kicks of this hefty volume with an extensive view of how the world looks in 2000 from his perspective, and from the perspective of published science fiction. His feelings are mixed: a few magazines are struggling, but the selection of web publications is growing. He loves the vibrancy in science fiction today—apparently, more has been published in the last few years than ever before, and readers are reading with growing appetites. He’s enthused about the wide variety of speculative fiction publishing venues now available. He lists off a number of web ‘zines—Strange Horizons makes the list. The introduction is worth leafing through for his painstaking work. He knows circulation figures for magazines that the rest of us can’t even find the subscription desk for.