Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Read online

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction

  Volume Five

  Guest Editor

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  Series Editor

  MICHAEL KELLY

  Also by Robert Shearman

  Tiny Deaths Wanting to Believe (non-fiction)

  Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical

  Roadkill (novella)

  Running Through Corridors (non-fiction)

  Caustic Comedies (Plays)

  Everyone’s Just So So Special

  Remember Why You Fear Me

  They Do the Same Things Different There

  Also by Michael Kelly

  Songs From Dead Singers

  Scratching the Surface

  Ouroboros (With Carol Weekes)

  Apparitions

  Undertow & Other Laments

  Chilling Tales: Evil Did I Dwell, Lewd I Did Live

  Chilling Tales: In Words, Alas, Drown I

  Shadows & Tall Trees (Vols. 1–7)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 1 (With Laird Barron)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 2 (With Kathe Koja)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 3 (With Simon Strantzas)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 (With Helen Marshall)

  Year’s Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 5 copyright © 2018 Robert Shearman & Michael Kelly

  Cover Art (trade) copyright © 2018 Aron Wiesenfeld

  Cover Art (hardcover) copyright © 2018 Vince Haig

  Cover Design copyright © 2018 Vince Haig (barquing.com)

  Foreword © 2018 Michael Kelly

  Introduction © 2018 Robert Shearman

  “The Convexity of Our Youth” © 2017 Kurt Fawver

  “The Rock Eater” © 2017 Ben Loory

  “Corzo” by Brenna Gomez © 2017 The University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission of The University of Nebraska Press

  “You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych” © 2017 Kathleen Kayembe

  “Flotsam” © 2017 Daniel Carpenter

  “The Possession” © 2017 Michael Mirolla

  “Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango” © 2017 Ian Muneshwar

  “The Unwish” © 2017 Claire Dean

  “Worship Only What She Bleeds” © 2017 Kristi DeMeester

  “House of Abjection” © 2017 David Peak

  “The Way She is With Strangers” © 2017 Helen Marshall

  “The Anteater” © 2017 Joshua King

  “When Words Change the Molecular Composition of Water” © 2017 Jenni Fagan

  “The Entertainment Arrives” © 2017 Alison Littlewood

  “Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street” © 2017 Chavisa Woods

  “Eight Bites” © 2017 Carmen Maria Machado

  “Red Hood” © 2017 Eric Schaller

  “Curb Day” © 2017 Rebecca Kuder

  “The Narrow Escape of Zipper-Girl” © 2017 Adam-Troy Castro

  “Disappearer” © 2017 K.L. Pereira

  “The Mouse Queen” © 2017 Camilla Grudova

  “The Second Door” © 2017 Brian Evenson

  “Live Through This” © 2017 Nadia Bulkin

  “Something About Birds” © 2017 Paul Tremblay

  Interior design and layout Alligator Tree Graphics

  Proofreader: Carolyn Macdonell-Kelly

  First Edition

  All Rights Reserved

  Trade ISBN: 978-1-988964-06-5 / Hardback ISBN: 978-1-988964-07-2

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons—living, dead, or undead—is entirely coincidental.

  Undertow Publications, Pickering, ON Canada

  [email protected] / www.undertowbooks.com

  Contents

  Michael Kelly

  Foreword

  Robert Shearman

  Introduction

  Kurt Fawver

  The Convexity of Our Youth

  Ben Loory

  The Rock Eater

  Brenna Gomez

  Corzo

  Kathleen Kayembe

  You Will Always Have Family: A Triptych

  Daniel Carpenter

  Flotsam

  Michael Mirolla

  The Possession

  Ian Muneshwar

  Skins Smooth as Plantain, Hearts Soft as Mango

  Claire Dean

  The Unwish

  Kristi DeMeester

  Worship Only What She Bleeds

  David Peak

  House of Abjection

  Helen Marshall

  The Way She is With Strangers

  Joshua King

  The Anteater

  Jenni Fagan

  When Words Change the Molecular Composition of Water

  Alison Littlewood

  The Entertainment Arrives

  Chavisa Woods

  Take the Way Home That Leads Back to Sullivan Street

  Carmen Maria Machado

  Eight Bites

  Eric Schaller

  Red Hood

  Rebecca Kuder

  Curb Day

  Adam-Troy Castro

  The Narrow Escape of Zipper-Girl

  K.L. Pereira

  Disappearer

  Camilla Grudova

  The Mouse Queen

  Brian Evenson

  The Second Door

  Nadia Bulkin

  Live Through This

  Paul Tremblay

  Something About Birds

  Contributors’ Notes

  Michael Kelly

  Foreword

  Welcome to the fifth, and final, volume of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction!

  Indeed, this will be the final volume of this anthology series. When I started the series, I told myself I would give it five volumes, then reassess. There are many underlying reasons as to why I am shuttering the series, but the main factor is simply the lack of sales. Not enough people are buying the books to keep it viable. In terms of time and money, it is an extremely costly book to assemble. And, as publisher and series editor, I bear all the costs myself.

  It would be fair to say that I am sad and disappointed at this development. The series, to me, was unique in that each volume had a different guest editor, thus ensuring the book was fresh and distinctive each year. In my opinion, no other genre ‘Year’s Best’ anthology was as broad and diverse in range and scope. The Year’s Best Weird Fiction rarely had any overlap with the other anthologies. In fact, I felt it did an admirable job of filling in the gaps of the other ‘Year’s Best’ anthologies with stories that fell between genre cracks. Which was part of our mandate. I did make numerous attempts at placing the series at another publishing house, and there was little to no interest. ‘Best Of’ fatigue, I suppose.

  For the past five years the Year’s Best Weird Fiction has unearthed a number of exceptionable and inimitable voices, redefining and broadening genre distinctions and labels, bringing a diverse new group to the forefront of speculative fiction. But what exactly is Weird Fiction? It’s something I’ve addressed in the previous volumes, to be sure. And that’s part of the problem. It’s not easily defined, yet we still attempt to slot it into particular genre niches. Weird fiction, in my opinion, has a much broader scope than that. And, as with anything that is trending or is “hot,” Weird Fiction (or weird fiction), has been co-opted. Ask any spec-fic writer what they write these days and they’ll answer, ‘weird fiction.’ Unfortunately, the term is becoming redundant. Very few are strictly writing horror, or fantasy, or slipstream, or science fiction. And while I believe that weird fiction is a genre unto itself that can and does encompass other genres, a genre that does deserve its own standalone ‘Year’s Best’ volume, the lines have become bl
urry and there does not appear to be a market for the continuation of the Year’s Best Weird Fiction.

  I am very proud of all 5 volumes. They were a lot of hard work, but they were worth it. Robert Shearman has done an exceptional job assembling this final volume, and it’s a fitting coda to the series. I can think of no finer guest editor to helm this last volume in the series. Thank you Rob for your dedication, hard work, and friendship. Thanks are due, as well, to all the previous guest editors—Laird Barron, Kathe Koja, Simon Strantzas, and Helen Marshall—for not only their tireless efforts, but also for their belief in the series, and the concept. You’ve each made an indelible mark on the field, and I thank you.

  Thank you, the readers, for allowing us the privilege to sit on your bookshelves and to take up some of your precious, hard-earned time and money. I have appreciated all your notes, comments, and advice.

  Lastly, thanks to the Undertow Publications staff and my family for trusting in me and the books.

  It’s been a fun ride. Time for a new adventure.

  —Michael Kelly

  Pickering, Canada

  July 23, 2018

  Robert Shearman

  Introduction

  When I was a little boy, I read a short story that has haunted me to this day. I found it disconcerting on a level I had never really considered before, and it’s no exaggeration to say that it helped determine my choice to be a writer, and the sort of stuff I’d choose to write. I found it in a magazine of my mother’s, one of those old-fashioned things full of beauty tips and cookery suggestions and whatnot, and it wasn’t very long, maybe only a couple of thousand words? And it came with pictures, just like the stories I read in books for my own age, and that’s probably what drew me in.

  This is, roughly, what it was about.

  It is the story of a woman. I dare say she has a name, but I don’t remember what it is, and the pictures take such pains to make her seem as blandly generic as possible, she is Everywoman. Everywoman has a dilemma. Her husband has called from work to tell her that he is bringing some of his colleagues home that night to dinner. Everywoman is in a panic, because she looks in the mirror, and her hair is a disgrace. She calls her local hairdresser to make an emergency appointment, but they’re all booked up. So she has to venture all the way to the other side of town to entrust her locks to an entirely unproven stylist. She’s wary of the new stylist’s methods, and at several points during the operation she wants to call the whole thing to a halt, but Everywoman is very brave and she toughs it out. And that bravery pays off; it turns out well; the hairdo is spectacular. But here’s an obstacle. As she leaves the shop and begins her long journey back home the clouds open and there’s a downpour. Everywoman tries her best to keep dry, but it’s a disaster—her glorious new hair is ruined. Her husband will be so disappointed in her; these people coming to dinner are important!

  Yet there’s a twist. When the guests arrive, they all bring their wives. And the wives have all been caught in the same downpour, and their hair has been ruined too. Much hilarity ensues, and that breaks the ice, and it ensures the success of the whole party. The end.

  I’d love to pretend it was the gender politics that bothered me, but to be fair, I was a kid. What troubled me was the lack of consequence. I asked my mother, but what happens next? Are there any other stories featuring this woman with the hairdo? No, of course not. It’s just a funny little story, what’s the problem? It’s just a funny little story, and it’s her funny little story, and it’s the only funny little story she’ll ever get. This is a character that has been brought to life, and for this sole purpose only—for needing to get her hair done. This is the only thing that ever happened to her that was worth recording, this anecdote is the single defining moment of her entire life.

  I couldn’t articulate it properly at the time, but to me that went beyond unconscious satire. That bordered upon the genuinely surreal. And from that point on I became almost too aware that the people I met, my teachers at school, the friends of my parents, my parents themselves, may all one day be summed up in a couple of thousand words doing something achingly trivial. (And years later, as I sat through the funerals of both my parents, and I heard a vicar who had never met either of them give inaccurate précis of their lives, I felt much the same thing.) Other stories I read were so much more normal in comparison. Yes, that whole episode with Jack and his magic beans had odd things about it, but it was that very obvious oddness that, paradoxically enough, made it seem strangely understandable and safe. I could easily see why someone had bothered to write it down in the first place. If our Everywoman had ever had an adventure with a giant up a beanstalk that’s the tale of hers we’d be reading—instead, that madcap day at the hairdresser’s was the best it would ever get.

  I am not, of course, suggesting that ‘The Mysterious Adventures of Hairdo Woman’ was a genuine tale of the Weird. But it opened up a door to me to the uncanny power of fiction to distort reality—and suggests also why I think the short story is Weird’s natural voice. It isn’t necessarily the action of the tale that is off balance, it’s the bizarre emphasis placed upon that action. Because for all the characters in this volume too, these tales are the limits of their existence. These are the only moments of significance they will ever get, and it’s a reader even tacitly knowing this which gives their narratives such strange dissonance. You feel that a lead character in a novel, no matter what he or she is put through, is at least being granted the dignity of a full length manuscript. The minutiae don’t need to be examined in such detail—there are more important incidents to attract the attention of the reader.

  But in the short story, the minutiae are often all we get. Every hanging thread of conversation, every little movement—there has to be a reason the writer bothered to include it. We stare at these moments a little longer than we’re used to, and they get stretched and distorted. And it’s within these minutiae that it seems to me the whole world gets shuffled off its axis.

  Put something familiar under the magnifying glass and watch it become new and unrecognisable. And we turn up the resolution tighter, then tighter still—until, at last, the lens cracks. The thousand and one images your brain takes in and discards in everyday life suddenly have new meanings, subtle hints at other stories that are fathomless and unknowable. There must be a reason why the writer shines a light on the things we train ourselves to see as irrelevant. Why does the woman alone on the beach dig so intently in the sand? Why in the heatwave won’t that old man take off his overcoat? And why, dear God, why, in this huge crowd, is only the baby smiling?

  There’s always debate about why it is the short story is considered as so less commercial than the novel. But the answer, surely, is apparent: the novel is a reassuring form, and the short story is not. Even if the subject matter of a novel is designed to provoke unease, its structure isn’t—the way that, by and large, it promises you a beginning, a middle and an end, and usually in that order, and will find the space in the luxury of its length to give definite clarity and meaning into the bargain. The short story, in contrast, never allows the reader to relax, never wants the reader to relax, and all the time you’re reading one you’re asking yourself at what point it might betray you. If a novel is a trustworthy tour guide, a short story is the unauthorised taxi driver who will take you into the darkness far from where you wanted to go and beat you up. Short stories are nasty, paranoid little things—and the best of them distort the minutiae of what you trust so acutely that you’re left reeling at the implications outside their own confines.

  I think it’s why the Weird leans so often towards horror, although its eagerness to wrongfoot the reader is why it’s such a great comic form as well. The stories gathered in this collection are the weirdest I could find. Some of them are deliberately written to be horror—and others feel like jokes that go profoundly, savagely, wrong. All of them made me feel just that little bit more paranoid, and less certain about the rules that pretend to govern our world, and they
made me excited about the wild potential that the weird short story offers. (All of them, too, are stories that I wish I had the wit or insight to have written myself, but that’s my own problem—I will say, though, I do not offer them to you with love but with seething jealousy.) I want to offer a huge thank you to all the authors who’ve let themselves be a movement in this paranoid symphony.

  And I want to thank Michael Kelly too. For the past four years the annual edition of Year’s Best Weird Fiction has been a highlight of my reading year, and his dedication to the form has inspired me and kept me writing whenever I was going adrift. One of the great joys of the Weird is that there is no single definition of what it is—you’ve just read mine, but it runs counter to four other wonderful guest editors who have come before me and whose own choices of story have challenged me and enthralled me. I can’t tell you how genuinely bereft I felt to discover that this will be the last volume—our community will be so much poorer without the series—but also how honoured and lucky I feel that I was invited to contribute my own take on it. The Weird itself, of course, will go on, in all its fractured glory.

  And thanks too, to the writer of Hairdo Woman, whomever he or she may have been.

  KURT FAWVER

  The Convexity of Our Youth

  A DISCLAIMER

  The children of Burke’s Point Elementary can’t be blamed. When the orange ball rolled onto their playground, they couldn’t have known what it was. We didn’t discuss the orange ball with them, didn’t explain to them its importance, its danger. We didn’t even tell them it existed, though some of them had undoubtedly heard vague rumors about it from sadistic older siblings and precocious cousins with little parental supervision. We wanted to turn a blind eye to the orange ball, hoping that what we didn’t acknowledge couldn’t touch our lives. If we didn’t speak of it then surely it would have no reason to seek us out; it would roll past our town and work its horrors somewhere else, somewhere far away. Though it might bounce against the concavities of our skulls, tinting every thought orange, orange, orange, we feared to let its name roll off our tongues. We believed in the prophylactic power of ignorance, that if we provided no magnetic pole of recognition, the ball’s compass would never point in our direction. So the children of Burke’s Point Elementary—our children—couldn’t have guessed that when the orange ball spun its way onto their blacktop and they began kicking it back and forth, shoes slapping rubber, rubber throwing up pebbles and dust, laughter spilling over the schoolyard as the ball seemed to zig and zag of its own volition, it would, for all intents and purposes, kill them all.