Чарли Андерс - Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

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 sane, 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.

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.