SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Coach Salter hugs us. “Are you depressed?” he whispers in the top’s ear.

We have never shown any sign of depression in the two years he’d trained us. But now…

Chris and Eva are going up. Chris meets the top’s eyes. We smile. He is afraid for us falling in the dynamic exercise again, not understanding what is going on.

Well, we cannot quit at this point. Not now. We still have something to show, something to prove just with that acrobatic skill that we have instead of a name. The world, and television, needs to record our blind forward somersaults.

Here we are, Kimalana, and this is our swan song in the dynamic exercise. And if that is so, we will tumble and leap as we never have before, drinking in the cameras and the floodlights and taunting every judge and secret keeper on the planet that we fly higher than they ever will.

Because we are one.

The audience goes wild, clapping along, rising in ovation for the end of our dynamic exercise, cheering and clapping and demanding our scores even as the officials have to tell them that no, please settle down, the next mixed pair must go on and do their job and they have nothing to do with this.

The video clip of our exercise will go viral within minutes. As it should. We want all cameras on us for the combined.

We walk out into the sprung floor for the last time, the tech waiting for our opening salute to the judges in order to start our music. But instead, we step forward and face the largest camera, the one that does the closeups on its swinging boom arm, that has a microphone transmitting live. Our faces come up on the giant digital screens above the arena.

In unison of pitch and rhythm that no one except a choir can achieve, even as we stumble and stutter over the words but stumble together , we say, “We want to say something.

“We are not Kim Tang and Alana Watson. We are two bodies with one mind, and we remember that two years ago I was the acrobat Jennifer Smith.

“We want to know what happened to us. Who did this to us and erased our past. We did a tremendous amount of work to be the best in the world, but we want to face the world honestly. We want to know what we are.”

Complete silence hangs for three seconds, and then the shouting nearly deafens us, as everyone, from the people in the audience, to our competition and their coaches, to even the security guards, and of course, the press—all start shouting, different things, all blending into one.

Within minutes, people around the world who had never even heard of acrobatic gymnastics know it too. And no one will remember who will actually end up winning the World Championships this year.

“Collar” originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Mar/Apr 2014.

TOM WAS NAKED, SKIN sparkling yellow-gray from the thick grease he’d been rubbing, almost seductively, into his short, meaty legs. He’d seen the young man walk up and down the beach at least four times. The kid was clearly nervous: with every pass he peered, uncomfortably, at the goods for sale in each stall, trying to figure out whom he could trust. The market centered around Beach 69th in Far Rockaway was an intimidating place if you’d never been there before. Tom decided to be nice and made eye contact. Once they locked eyes, the young man nodded, glanced furtively up and down the shoreline, then straightened up. He was just green. There was no need to be suspicious.

Tom went back to greasing himself and putting on his little show. After all, his clients needed to see that their money would be well spent, that the body on sale could handle the six hours safely, could get them where they needed to go.

“You available?” the young man asked. His voice cracked a little bit on the last syllable. This made Tom smile. “That is, you busy tonight?”

“First time?” he asked back, pointing to a pile of plastic crates behind him, deeper under the crumbling concrete and exposed rebar of the overhanging boardwalk.

Tom’s stall was cozy, like most of the other stalls in this ersatz grand bazaar. A fire, in a small steel-bucket-cum-brazier, gave each room a friendly, warm aura. All along the beach, underneath the rocky awning, the other merchants were starting their nightlong engagement in capitalism. Food stalls serving fried noodles and grilled meats. Supply stalls selling waterproof bags, goggles, wetsuits, and everything else a swimmer might need to last the long swim. The outlying stalls housed the prostitutes, providing sandy fucks to whoever wanted one. And then there were the bare stalls, dark except for their fires, empty but for their crates. Those belonged to Tom and the other navvies.

“Thanks,” the young man said. “What gave it away?”

He walked back into the darkness. Tom saw him wince and crinkle his nose at the condensed vapors of the synthfat he’d been massaging into his skin. It did not have a pleasant odor. One of his fellow guides described it as “dirty sex mixed with rotten meat, and a dash of acetone to cover it up.” It smelled rich and corrupt, but in all the wrong ways. Somehow both barnyard and factory, but with none of the wholesomeness of either. And its color was sickly, too: like cheap fluorescent light passing through a yellowed plastic sheet. But that’s what it took to stay warm out there. Better to stink and be stained than freeze to death miles offshore.

The kid sucked it up and returned with a purple crate which he shimmied into the sand across the fire from Tom.

“Jake,” he said, sticking his hand out.

Tom held up his greasy hand and shook his head. “Tom. Nice to meet you.”

Jake nodded. “Laid off a year now. Unemployment benefits just ran out. Can’t find work anywhere. Wife said it’s the ships or she’s leaving me.”

“She still working?” asked Tom.

“Yeah. Nurse for old folks,” he answered. “Recession-proof, I guess.”

“Unless people stop getting old.”

The men looked out toward the horizon. The sun was setting and they could see the running lights of the factory ships coming on, dipping into and out of view, now obscured, now visible, sprinkled along the edge of the ocean.

“You ever do factory work before?” Tom asked. “You ever been on one of the ships?”

“Nah,” Jake answered. “I was an office guy. IT, mostly. Worked and lived downtown for about five years. When the bridge started going up, me and the wife couldn’t afford Manhattan anymore so we moved to Brooklyn. Had kids, then…” He made a confused half-smile and shrugged.

It was the same “then” as every other person Tom ran into down at the market.

“All work is done in a factory,” Tom assured him, “no matter what color your collar is. You’ll figure it out.”

A little girl of eight or nine came up to the stall opening. “Empanada? Coke? Fries?” she called out. Tom waved her off, but he saw Jake eyeing the deep blue tubs covered with steamed-up plastic wrap, filled with meat pies.

“Did you eat?” Tom asked him. “Alice, over there three stalls down, she fries up some serious singapore noodles with squid. Blow your mind.”

“I’m too nervous to eat,” Jake confided.

“It’s a long swim, kid. You gotta eat something.”

A man and a woman walked by in bathing suits, dry-bags held high, the synthfat covering their heads in a caul which caught and threw the light from the many fires on the beach.

“Gonna drown another one, Tommy?” the woman called out.

“That’s the plan,” he yelled back. “The gods demand their sacrifice.”

The couple went down to the sea. Tom looked back at Jake.

“Friend of yours, I take it,” Jake said.