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

The wind was wet and heavy. Jordyn shivered and looked down at the rippling gray water. She couldn’t see her grandparents’ house. The tide had swallowed it entirely.

Mia popped their bottles open on the low brick wall of the facade. They stood in the cold and looked at the city, at the full moon in the blue evening sky, at the waves. A trash barge puttered along the street below, pausing every half-block for building supers to add to its load. Jordyn could hear the siren of a fire boat, but couldn’t see the boat itself, nor the smoke.

Jordyn took a sip from her beer, which was warm and tasted of hops and cardamom. "The tide’s supposed to drop all the way down past Fourth Ave," she said. "I thought I might go for a walk."

Mia pursed her lips. "It’ll be dark."

"It hasn’t gone out this far in years,” Jordyn said.

"Still." Mia nursed her beer in silence for a while, time measured out in the swish-pop of her sips. "When was your last tetanus shot?"

"Couple years ago. Remember? I fell off Madison’s dock."

Mia sighed. "Wear your reef shoes, all right?"

The sirens faded. Jordyn stepped into the warm space beside Mia’s body and slid an arm around her thick waist, tucking her hand into the far pocket of Mia’s coat. "I’ll be fine," she said.

Anticipation kept Jordyn from sleeping soundly, and she woke before her alarm. She had dreamed about riding the old subway system her mother had told her about. She dressed by the amber light of street lamps, pulled a coat on over her wetsuit, slipped her feet into her reef shoes. Kissed Mia on the forehead and closed their bedroom door.

Mia had set the big flashlight to charge before they’d gone to bed. Jordyn took it and her set of keys, locked up the apartment, descended the stairway in rubber-soled silence, and stepped out onto the empty sidewalk. The water was gone, but the tree wells were stiff with frozen mud.

As Jordyn walked downhill toward Fourth Avenue, below the usual tideline, she had to pick her away around soggy timber, hunks of old insulation, rusted soda cans, tangled knots of plastic shopping bags—the usual trail of city detritus left behind by high tide. She passed under the elevated boardwalk running along the east side of the avenue, a tourist attraction some mayor had built when she was a little girl. The wreckage of a gull had caught on one of the pilings.

Beyond the boardwalk, asphalt crumbled into a sort of coarse black gravel, bits of the roadbed mixed in with the sand and soil and stones that had once supported it. In places, the steel tubes and concrete cylinders of the old infrastructure were exposed—gas lines, water mains, sewers, electricity. Round black holes gaped open, liquid noises echoing up from underground. Most of the old manhole covers had been stolen by trophy hunters years ago. Jordyn chose her steps carefully, eyes on the ground.

Once she reached the buildings on the far side of the avenue, she paused to look behind her. Only the foolish or the desperate would eat anything fished out of the Gowanus lagoon, but the boardwalk was crowded with seafood restaurants hoping to capitalize on the maritime atmosphere. Their neon signs still winked at her from above shuttered doors and windows, criss-crossed by the black silhouettes of utility lines.

She walked downhill. The canals of the lagoon were lit, but not well, and the low tide made the landscape unsettling and strange. Buildings were taller than she remembered; boats moored in shallow water now rested on the ground.

The lagoon had retreated to a few yards below the avenue. Jordyn switched on the flashlight and waded in one cautious step at a time, careful not to shift her weight forward until she was sure of her footing.

The water was cold. Her toes were numb within half a block, but that was fine. The soles of her shoes were tough enough for nails and glass, and she didn’t have far to go.

In the LED glow of her flashlight, the yellow brick house looked almost white. For a disoriented moment, she wondered if she’d gone down the wrong street, or misremembered which side of it the building was on. Someone—a thief, an interim owner, the tide—had taken the bars from the lower-story windows. And the brick was striped with stains, each line a marker of the lagoon’s creeping progress uphill.

But the black iron numbers hanging above the door were the same. This was the house, reclaimed from the tide, if only for tonight. From this stoop, her mother had watched the water come.

Jordyn was up to her waist in the lagoon. Her feet still had some feeling left, and she poked around with them under the night-black water, looking for the first step. Finding it, she climbed the uneven stairs, water running down the legs of her wetsuit and dripping from the saturated hem of her coat. She sat on the stoop, her back against the font door. Her feet were still in the water, and it tickled as it lapped around her ankles.

She dried her hands off on her hair, then tugged her phone out of a plastic pouch in her jacket. She held it up in front of her, looked into its little black eye, and smiled.

Originally published by Strange Horizons

I’m not an idiot. I don’t leave the house without at least one set of juiced-up double-As, two if I remember when I’m putting my purse together. A minute is enough time for a spell to fall apart, and if you think you can find a bodega and buy a pack of batteries and swap them in and get your tape running again in less than five, you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.

And that Saturday I’d been so good! I’d been a real responsibility champion, one set in my bag and another in the pocket of my coat, just in case I was mugged, though come to think of it a mugger would probably be enough of an asshole to take my walkman, too, so I’d be in kind of a tight spot either way.

Anyway I’m not an idiot, but I can’t really pay attention to more than a couple of things at once, either. I’ve got no problem with keeping one ear open to make sure the cloak Song’s running while I’m on the train or at the store or you know…doing normal things like an adult is supposed to. I can leave my apartment, I’m not one of those people.

But sometimes it’s three or four things. Sometimes a punk-ass kid wants to haggle with you over an unopened ten-pack of Type Two BASF Chrome Maximas and you’re on the phone with your goddamn choir director and your walkman runs down while both your earbuds are out. And you don’t notice right away. And then the Noise comes swooping down on you like a summer storm, and you’ve got problems a whole truckload of responsibility batteries isn’t gonna fish you out of.

I was late to choir, and look, I get why Lucille—she’s the director, been there for-fucking-ever, I think she remembers when the Gaslight was still open—anyway, I get why Lucille was so pissed at me for being late. She specifically asked me to join because they needed a contralto for the new antiviral arrangement, and now they were sitting there at church with a couple dozen kids who’d been dragged out of bed to come, waiting on me to scramble across town, and yes I kept a church full of sick children waiting, I’m awful, I know, sometimes a lady takes a few minutes to finish putting her face on and she misses the F train.

I took an earbud out as soon as I got above ground at Delancey and called Lucille to say I was only a few blocks away, because again, I’m an adult, the least I can do is let the woman know where my tardy ass is.

And she’s all like, "Cheryl, this is the kind of nonsense that got you dumped from the last choir," and "Don’t think a big voice is a first class ticket to the All About Me train!" and something about "community spirit," which I gotta say is pretty fair, I mean, it’s not like this was the first time I’d pulled this kind of bullshit and you know how things get around. Like, there’s more of us Musical folk than there used to be, sure, but we’re still pretty fucking few and far between and all up in each other’s business, and it’s not like you can blow off basic civic duties without everyone else hearing about it, not even if you move from Philly to New York. Me and Lucille, we met three days after I got off the bus at Port Authority, and she already knew my whole sorry-ass story in all the dissonant details.