Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

“Done,” Sam said.

  Malka’s father turned and walked toward the door, then turned back. “I apologize,” he said, shaking his head. “I am an idiot. David, your son, has been invited to my house for dinner tomorrow night, and I have not asked his father’s permission. And of course, you are also invited as well.”

  Sam stared at him. “You invited my son to your house for dinner?”

  Abe shrugged.

  “Hey, Sam,” called the well-dressed man, “you can’t go nowhere tomorrow night. We’ve got some business to take care of uptown at the Sugar Cane.”

  Sam ignored his friend and looked at Malka, who stood next to her father, scratching an itch on her leg and grinning at the success of her plan. “This your little girl?”

  It was Abe’s turn to stare. He looked down at Malka, who was nodding wildly, delighted at the idea of another guest at their Sabbath meal. He then looked back at Sam.

  “Okay,” said Sam. “What time?”

  “Around five p.m.,” Abe said, and gave the address.

  “We don’t have to be uptown until nine,” Sam said to his friend. “Plenty of time.”

  He turned back to Malka’s father. “Okay. I’ll bring the wine with me. But you make sure you have the money. Just because you’re feeding me—us—dinner don’t mean the drinks come free.”

  “Of course,” said Abe.

  * * *

  At five p.m. the next evening, everything was ready. The table had been pulled away from the window and decorated with a white tablecloth (from the same woman who’d sold Abe a boiled chicken and a carrot tsimmes), settings for four, two extra chairs (borrowed from the carpenter who lived across the hall), two candles, and, at Abe’s place, his father’s old prayer book.

  Abe, wearing his good jacket despite the heat, and with a borrowed yarmulke perched on his head, surveyed the scene. “Well, Malka?” he asked. “How does that look?”

  “It’s perfect!” said Malka, running from one end of the room to the other to admire the table from different perspectives.

  Almost on cue, somebody knocked on the door. “It’s David!” Malka yelled. “David, just a minute!”

  “I’m sure he heard you,” said Abe, smiling. “The super in the basement probably heard you.” He walked over and opened the door.

  Sam stood there, a small suitcase in his hand. He had obviously made some efforts toward improving his personal appearance: he was freshly shaven, wore a clean shirt, and had a spit-polish on his shoes.

  David dashed out from behind his father. “You see!” he told Malka. “Everything worked out. My daddy brought the wine like he said, and I made him dress up, because I said it was going to be religious, and Mama wouldn’t have let him come to church all messed up. Right, Daddy?”

  “You sure did, David,” said Sam, smiling. “Even made me wash behind my ears.” He then raised his eyes and looked hard at Abe, as if waiting to be challenged.

  But Abe only nodded.

  “Please sit down,” he said. “Be comfortable. Malka, stop dancing around like that; you’re making me dizzy.”

  Malka obediently stopped twirling, but she still bounced a bit in place. “David, guess what? There’s a lady who lives across the alley from us who, when it’s hot, walks around all day in a man’s T-shirt and shorts. You can see her when she’s in the kitchen. It’s really funny. You want to come out on the fire escape and watch?”

  David suddenly looked troubled and stared up at his father. “Is it okay, Daddy?” he asked. His lower lip trembled. “I don’t want to get anyone mad at me.”

  Sam took a breath and, with an obvious effort, smiled at his son. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be right here, keeping an eye on you. Nothing bad will happen.”

  David’s face brightened, and he turned to Malka. “Let’s go,” he said. The two children ran to the window and clambered noisily onto the fire escape.

  Sam put the suitcase on one of the chairs, opened it, and took out two bottles of wine. “Here they are,” he said. “Certified kosher, according to the man I got it from. You got the five bucks?”

  Abe handed Sam five crumpled dollars. “Here you are,” he said, “as promised. You want a drink before we start?”

  Sam nodded.

  Abe picked up one of the bottles, looked at it for a moment, and then shook his head, exasperated. “Look at me, the genius,” he said. “I never thought about a corkscrew.”

  Sam shrugged, took a small pocketknife out of his pocket, cut off the top of the cork, and pushed the rest into the bottle with his thumb. Abe took the bottle and poured generous helpings for both of them.

  They each took a drink and looked outside, where Malka and David sat on the edge of the fire escape, her legs dangling over the side, his legs folded. A dirty pigeon fluttered down onto the railing and stared at the children, obviously hoping for a stray crumb. When none came, it started to clean itself.

  David pointed to a window. “No, that’s not her,” said Malka. “That’s the man who lives next door to her. He has two dogs, and he’s not supposed to have any pets, so he’s always yelling at the dogs to stop barking, or he’ll get kicked out.” The children laughed. Startled, the bird flew away.

  “So,” said Abe.

  “Yeah,” said Sam.

  “What happened?”

  Sam took a breath, drained his glass, and poured another. “He had gone out to shoot rabbits,” he said slowly. “I had just got home from the trenches. We were living with my wife’s family in Alabama, and we were making plans to move up north to Chicago, where I could get work and David could get schooled better. He was sitting on the porch reading, and I got mad and told him not to be so lazy, get out there and shoot us some meat for dinner. When he wasn’t home by supper, I figured he got himself lost—he was always going off exploring and forgetting about what he was supposed to do.”

  He looked off into the distance. “After dark, the preacher from my wife’s church came by and said that there had been trouble. A white woman over in the next county had complained that somebody had looked in her window when she was undressed. A lynch mob went out, and David saw them, got scared and ran. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he was a Negro boy with a gun, and they caught him and . . .”

  He choked for a moment, then reached for his glass and swallowed the entire thing at a gulp. Wordlessly, Abe refilled it.

  “My wife and her sister and the other women, they went and took him down and brought him home. He was . . . They had cut him and burned him and . . . My boy. My baby.”

  A single tear slowly made its way down Sam’s cheek, tracing the path of the scar.

  “My wife and I—we didn’t get along so good after that. After a while I cut and run, came up here. And David, he came with me.”

  For a moment, they just sat.

  “We lived in Odessa,” said Abe, and, when Sam looked confused, added, “That’s a city in the Ukraine, near Russia. I moved there with the baby after my wife died. It was 1905, and there was a lot of unrest. Strikes, riots, people being shot down in the streets. Many people were angry. And when people get angry, they blame the Jews.”

  He smiled sourly. “I and my friends, we were young and strong and rebellious. We were different from the generations before us. We weren’t going to sit around like the old men and wait to be slaughtered. I sent Malka to the synagogue with other children. There were hiding places there; they would be safe. And I went to help defend our homes.”

  “At least you had that,” Sam said bitterly.

  Abe shook his head. “We were idiots. We had no idea how many there would be, how organized. Hundreds were hurt and killed, my neighbors, my friends. Somebody hit me, I don’t know who or with what. I don’t remember what happened after that. I . . .”

  He paused. “I do remember screaming and shouting all around me, houses burning, but it didn’t seem real, didn’t seem possible. I ran to the synagogue. I was going to get Malka, and we would leave this madness, go to America where people were sa
ne, and children were safe.”

  “Safe,” repeated Sam softly. The two men looked at each other with tired recognition.

  “But when I got there, they wouldn’t let me in. The rabbi had hidden the children behind the bima, the place where the Torah was kept, but . . . They said I shouldn’t see what had been done to her, that she had been . . . She was only nine years old.” Abe’s voice trailed away.

  The children out on the fire escape had become bored with the neighbors. “Do you know how to play Rock, Paper, Scissors?” David asked. “Here, we have to face each other. Now there are three ways you can hold your hand . . .”

  “Does she know?” asked Sam.

  “No,” said Abe. “And I don’t have the heart to tell her.”

  “David knows,” said Sam. “At least, I told him. I thought maybe if he knew, he’d be at rest. But I don’t think he believed me. And—well, I’m sort of glad. Because it means . . .”

  “He is still here. With you.”

  “Yes,” Sam whispered.

  The two men sat and drank while they watched their murdered children play in the fading sunlight.

  NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE

  BEST SHORT STORY

  THINGS WITH BEARDS

  SAM J. MILLER

  Sam J. Miller lives in New York City now, but grew up in a middle-of-nowhere town in upstate New York. He is the last in a long line of butchers. In no particular order, he has also been a film critic, a grocery bagger, a community organizer, a secretary, a painter’s assistant and model, and the guitarist in a punk rock band. His debut novel The Art of Starving was published by HarperCollins in 2017, followed by The Breaks from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and have appeared in over a dozen “best-of” anthologies. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. His husband of fifteen years is a nurse practitioner, and way smarter and handsomer than Sam is.

  MacReady has made it back to McDonald’s. He holds his coffee with both hands, breathing in the heat of it, still not 100% sure he isn’t actually asleep and dreaming in the snowdrifted rubble of McMurdo. The summer of 1983 is a mild one, but to MacReady it feels tropical, with 125th Street a bright beautiful sunlit oasis. He loosens the cord that ties his cowboy hat to his head. Here, he has no need of a disguise. People press past the glass, a surging crowd going into and out of the subway, rushing to catch the bus, doing deals, making out, cursing each other, and the suspicion he might be dreaming gets deeper. Spend enough time in the ice hell of Antarctica and your body starts to believe that frigid lifelessness is the true natural state of the universe. Which, when you think of the cold vastness of space, is probably correct.

  “Heard you died, man,” comes a sweet rough voice, and MacReady stands up to submit to the fierce hug that never fails to make him almost cry from how safe it makes him feel. But when he steps back to look Hugh in the eye, something is different. Something has changed. While he was away, Hugh became someone else.

  “You don’t look so hot yourself,” he says, and they sit, and Hugh takes the coffee that has been waiting for him.

  “Past few weeks I haven’t felt well,” Hugh says, which seems an understatement. Even after MacReady’s many months in Antarctica, how could so many lines have sprung up in his friend’s black skin? When had his hair and beard become so heavily peppered with salt? “It’s nothing. It’s going around.”

  Their hands clasp under the table.

  “You’re still fine as hell,” MacReady whispers.

  “You stop,” Hugh said. “I know you had a piece down there.”

  MacReady remembers Childs, the mechanic’s strong hands still greasy from the Ski-dozer, leaving prints on his back and hips. His teeth on the back of MacReady’s neck.

  “Course I did,” MacReady says. “But that’s over now.”

  “You still wearing that damn fool cowboy hat,” Hugh says, scoldingly. “Had those stupid centerfolds hung up all over your room I bet.”

  MacReady releases his hands. “So? We all pretend to be what we need to be.”

  “Not true. Not everybody has the luxury of passing.” One finger traces a circle on the black skin of his forearm.

  They sip coffee. McDonald’s coffee is not good but it is real. Honest.

  Childs and him; him and Childs. He remembers almost nothing about the final days at McMurdo. He remembers taking the helicopter up, with a storm coming, something about a dog . . . and then nothing. Waking up on board a U.S. supply and survey ship, staring at two baffled crewmen. Shredded clothing all around them. A metal desk bent almost in half and pushed halfway across the room. Broken glass and burned paper and none of them had even the faintest memory of what had just happened. Later, reviewing case files, he learned how the supply run that came in springtime found the whole camp burned down, mostly everyone dead and blown to bizarre bits, except for two handsome corpses frozen untouched at the edge of camp; how the corpses were brought back, identified, the condolence letters sent home, the bodies, probably by accident, thawed . . . but that couldn’t be real. That frozen corpse couldn’t have been him.

  “Your people still need me?” MacReady asks.

  “More than ever. Cops been wilding out on folks left and right. Past six months, eight people got killed by police. Not a single officer indicted. You still up for it?”

  “Course I am.”

  “Meeting in two weeks. Not afraid to mess with the Man? Because what we’ve got planned . . . they ain’t gonna like it. And they’re gonna hit back, hard.”

  MacReady nods. He smiles. He is home; he is needed. He is a rebel. “Let’s go back to your place.”

  * * *

  When MacReady is not MacReady, or when MacReady is simply not, he never remembers it after. The gaps in his memory are not mistakes, not accidents. The thing that wears his clothes, his body, his cowboy hat, it doesn’t want him to know it is there. So the moment when the supply ship crewman walked in and found formerly-frozen MacReady sitting up—and watched MacReady’s face split down the middle, saw a writhing nest of spaghetti tentacles explode in his direction, screamed as they enveloped him and swiftly started digesting—all of that is gone from MacReady’s mind.

  But when it is being MacReady, it is MacReady. Every opinion and memory and passion is intact.

  * * *

  “The fuck just happened?” Hugh asks, after, holding up a shredded sheet.

  “That good, I guess,” MacReady says, laughing, naked.

  “I honestly have no memory of us tearing this place up like that.”

  “Me either.”

  There is no blood, no tissue of any kind. Not-MacReady sucks all that up. Absorbs it, transforms it. As it transformed the meat that used to be Hugh, as soon as they were alone in his room and it perceived no threat, knew it was safe to come out. The struggle was short. In nineteen minutes the transformation was complete, and MacReady and Hugh were themselves again, as far as they knew, and they fell into each other’s arms, onto the ravaged bed, out of their clothes.

  “What’s that,” MacReady says, two worried fingers tracing down Hugh’s side. Purple blotches mar his lovely torso.

  “Comes with this weird new pneumonia thing that’s going around,” he says. “This year’s junky flu.”

  “But you’re not a junky.”

  “I’ve fucked a couple, lately.”

  MacReady laughs. “You have a thing for lost causes.”

  “The cause I’m fighting for isn’t lost,” Hugh says, frowning.

  “Course not. I didn’t mean that—”

  But Hugh has gone silent, vanishing into the ancient trauma MacReady has always known was there, and tried to ignore, ever since Hugh took him under his wing at the age of nineteen. Impossible to deny it, now, with their bare legs twined together, his skin corpse-pale beside Hugh’s rich dark brown. How different their lives had been, by virtue of the bod
ies they wore. How wide the gulf that lay between them, that love was powerless to bridge.

  * * *

  So many of the men at McMurdo wore beards. Winter, he thought, at first—for keeping our faces warm in Antarctica’s forever winter. But warmth at McMurdo was rarely an issue. Their warren of rectangular huts was kept at a balmy seventy-eight degrees. Massive stockpiles of gasoline specifically for that purpose. Aside from the occasional trip outside for research—and MacReady never had more than a hazy understanding of what, exactly, those scientists were sciencing down there, but they seemed to do precious little of it—the men of McMurdo stayed the hell inside.

  So. Not warmth.

  Beards were camouflage. A costume. Only Blair and Garry lacked one, both being too old to need to appear as anything other than what they were, and Childs, who never wanted to.

  He shivered. Remembering. The tough-guy act, the cowboy he became in uncertain situations. Same way in juvie; in lock-up. Same way in Vietnam. Hard, mean, masculine. Hard drinking; woman hating. Queer? Psssh. He hid so many things, buried them deep, because if men knew what he really was, he’d be in danger. When they learned he wasn’t one of them, they would want to destroy him.

  They all had their reasons, for choosing McMurdo. For choosing a life where there were no women. Supper time MacReady would look from face to bearded face and wonder how many were like him, under the all-man exterior they projected, but too afraid, like him, to let their true self show.

  Childs hadn’t been afraid. And Childs had seen what he was.

  MacReady shut his eyes against the McMurdo memories, bit his lip. Anything to keep from thinking about what went down, down there. Because how was it possible that he had absolutely no memory of any of it? Soviet attack, was the best theory he could come up with. Psychoactive gas leaked into the ventilation system by a double agent (Nauls, definitely), which caused catastrophic freak outs and homicidal arson rage, leaving only he and Childs unscathed, whereupon they promptly sat down in the snow to die . . . and this, of course, only made him more afraid, because if this insanity was the only narrative he could construct that made any sense at all, he whose imagination had never been his strong suit, then the real narrative was probably equally, differently, insane.