John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

The mansions along our once-grand boulevards were falling apart, our children were roaming the streets with their pit bulls, and few of us had jobs—or at least not jobs we wanted. There were deserted retail spaces left over from the boom and also some ruined factories. It wasn’t just us. The whole world seemed to be in crisis, with riots and strange weather and war. You know how wars are, even if they’re far away: The fiery levels of alert. The panicked glow. The paranoia over everything.

Mrs. Madden got it into her head that she could predict the blues’ future. She met them in the dimly lit back room of her house, where she sat across from them at a card table. They believed whatever Mrs. Madden said. When she told a blue female, “You hide your pain behind a curtain, but somebody will lift up the curtain,” the blue said, “Yes, yes.” When Mrs. Madden said to a blue male, “Everything will be okay for you,” he nodded, even though things obviously were not okay. She traced the patterns on an older blue’s hand and said, “I see darkness up ahead for you, but in your darkness there is a light.” Who knew what that meant? We were impressed when Mrs. Madden touched their hands like that. Sometimes in return they gave her a bucket of forest greens or a bowl of ripe tomatoes.

Generally she met with a single blue at a time, but one day she brought a group of them into her back room and said, “I have good news. You thought you were alone here, but you aren’t.” She said that she saw their deceased loved ones roosting near the ceiling like happy birds, and the blues believed her, as always.

If Mrs. Madden said these things in order to be beloved by someone or something, it worked. She was beloved by the blues. They held her hands. They held each other. They fell onto her soft brown carpet, weeping and squawking. Why not? If believing something makes your life that much better, then by all means go ahead and believe.

Suzie Breton and Rita Oh began bicycling past the blues’ apartments before school. The girls stuck out their tongues at the buildings and spit on the blues’ lawn—all innocent enough, until one day Suzie and Rita climbed off their bikes and peeked into a first-floor window. (This is what we were reduced to, window peeping, because of what the blues had done to the cameras.) The girls were gazing into a bedroom, which was more nest than room—food scraps on the floor mixed with newspapers and old sheets. On the wall was a photograph of a grove of oak trees. Who knew why it was there?

“I dare you to knock,” Rita said.

“No,” said Suzie.

Rita made whimpering noises at her. “Are you afraid, you big baby?” She grabbed Suzie’s hand and slapped it against the window. Then a blue boy entered the room.

He didn’t see them at first. He removed his shirt and faced a mirror on the back of the door. The girls were awed by the deformities of his body: the too-long back, the emaciated legs, the severe angles of his bones. The boy licked the mirror with his tongue. This made Rita giggle.

Suzie jabbed her in the ribs. “He’ll hear you.”

Rita mimicked the blue boy, sticking her tongue to the window glass.

“Come on. Quit it.”

“Dare you to take off your shirt,” Rita said.

Suzie blushed and refused.

“God, I knew you wouldn’t.” Rita pushed Suzie into the window, and the blue boy heard and turned around. Suzie had no idea how to read the expression on his face. Was he sad? Angry? Curious? Pleased?

Rita unbuttoned her shirt to reveal the petite cotton bra her mom had bought her the week before.

“We’re late for school,” Suzie said.

“As if I care,” Rita said, and she flaunted her chest at the blue. The bra had stupid pink flowers along the seams, but Rita showed it off anyway. As the blue boy approached the window, Suzie studied his fingers and the narrow muscles of his shoulders. He raised his hand as if to press it gently to the glass, where she could see her reflection, but instead he slapped his palm against the pane. Both girls stumbled backward. He hit the glass again with his hand. Then he used his head. An animal sound—a goat? a horse?—came out of him as he stared at the girls. He pressed his open mouth against the window, exposing his terrible teeth.

The girls arrived at school that day shaken. They had thought—wrongly, as we all sometimes did—that because the blues had two arms, two legs, and a head, they would act like us. But they were not human. They were something else. So this assumption—we had to keep reminding ourselves—was untrue.

Such as: If something is not human, can we expect it to be bound by human laws? Do civil rights apply to these creatures? Do we need search warrants to enter their apartments? Can they be handcuffed and arrested for scaring our children? What does justice mean for a being who often appears more animal than human?

In the winter, when some of the blues began starving due to the continued shortage of food, there was the question of whether we were under any ethical obligation to feed them, especially the children. If something happened to the blue adults—and by this time things were happening to the adults—what were our obligations, exactly, to the children, and how long did these obligations go on? At what point were we allowed to wash our hands of them and focus on the needs of our own families?

They turned out to be trainable. They could wash dishes or drive a truck or clean our houses.

“You can’t just make them work; you need their permission,” Mrs. Gorski told us. “And they’ll need wages. They aren’t indentured servants. They didn’t come here to be our slaves.”

For that matter, nobody could think of any good reason why they had come.

They Are Even Entering Our Fantasies

Mrs. Lucas told Ms. Mueller over coffee and danishes that when she closed her eyes in front of that painting she’d bought, “it’s like I’m there.”

“Like you’re where?” Ms. Mueller asked.

“On their planet. And they’re all around me.”

In Mrs. Lucas’s mind, the blues’ planet was a desert, like the one in that painting—never mind what the blues had said about their moldy dwellings and their floodplains. And in this desert Mrs. Lucas stood barefoot on the sand, which was similar to the sand here on Earth, only light blue and softer. The sand went on all the way to the horizon, but the landscape didn’t feel barren or dead. There were huts to Mrs. Lucas’s right: charming and rustic, eight of them in a circle around a dwindling fire. Above hung lovely, fat clouds.

“Also there are two suns,” Mrs. Lucas continued. “You’d think it was this lonely place. I mean, I’m in the middle of a desert, all by myself, on a different planet. You’d think I would miss home, but I never miss anything when I’m there.”

Next she saw beings approaching in the distance. It was the blues. They were coming toward her carrying baskets of fruits and colorful cloths and flowers, kicking up sand with their feet and singing brightly.

“So you ran away from them, right?” Ms. Mueller said. “Tell me you ran away from them.”

“I didn’t run. Nobody was afraid.”

One of the blue females broke away from the group and brought a cloth to Mrs. Lucas, who touched the fabric—“It was softer than anything I’ve ever felt”—and the whole time the blue female chattered in her rough, throaty language. She must have been saying something about getting undressed, because she began to unbutton Mrs. Lucas’s shirt. The blue female helped Mrs. Lucas out of her clothing with no sense of shame. They laughed together at the scratchy fabrics of her old clothes. Then the blue woman wrapped Mrs. Lucas in the clean new cloth and tied the ends in a knot at her waist.