Honored Guest

by Ellen Kushner

I have met very few evil people in my life, but my grandmother is one of them.  When my mother died, Omama told my father that she would support him and my brother and me, but only if he gave up all his and my mother’s friends, her family and his work in their studio, to return to Omama’s family compound.

There was no reason for this.  She already had other sons and cousins working for her.  There had been one more, but my Uncle Great Light had taken his own life right before the Harvest Festival.  Maybe she needed father back to make up a propitious number.  That’s not what he says.  When I asked why we could not visit my weaver grandmother and all the cousins anymore, he sighed, “Omama has never learned to share.”

“She’s so rich she never had to.”

“Wealth is not a disease, Bright Phoenix,” my father said sternly.  “You may be rich yourself some day, so I want you to remember that.”

That may be so, but I think being rich can make you selfish. It’s like a cold: you have to fight it off by wrapping up warm and keeping your head covered.  I don’t care so much about being rich, but I might like to be famous.  I think I have a pretty good shot at it, because since I was five I have played the kchin, and even my brother Great Joy, who is good at games and doesn’t like to lose, knows that I play better than he does.  I like to practice.  When I kneel before my instrument, and my fingers bend and dance on the strings, I feel as if I know things no one has every known before.  It isn’t just pretty sounds, it’s like entering another world.  Some of the great kchin players played for years in solitude before letting anyone else hear them, but I don’t mind playing for others. I like their admiration well enough, but even better I like to think that somehow my music has changed them, as it changes me.

Attar of Roses

by Sharon Mock

They say that when I was born, blossoms spread on the rose bushes outside my mother’s birthing chamber. They say that where I step, blood-red petals spring from the earth. The first, my father tells me, is a legend. The second has been known to happen on occasion, though only by my design.

I was born deep in the northern mountains, far from the great confederacies, where my father nurtured his magic without interference. His was the power of earth, roots of stone and springs of water. My gifts, on the other hand, were merely decorative—grace and beauty and youth forever born anew in spring. Sorcerers traveled from the tradelands to court me, Rosalaia, Blossom of the North. I would have none of them. My father sent them all away. Far better for me to grant my grace at my father’s side, take my consorts from the young men of the city, make our land a well-defended paradise.

For centuries I believed that this was the life for which I was intended.

Hooves and the Hovel of Abdel Jameela

by Saladin Ahmed

I should not be so hard on Beit Zujaaj and its bumpkins. But when I look at the gray rock-heap houses, the withered gray vegetable-yards, and the stuporous gray lives that fill this village, I want to weep for the lost color of Baghdad.

Instead I sit and listen to the Shaykh.

“Abdel Jameela is not of Assad blood, O learned Professor. My grandfather took mercy, as God tells us we must, on the old man’s mother. Seventy-and-some years ago she showed up in Beit Zujaaj, half-dead from traveling and big with child, telling tales – God alone knows if they were true – of her Assad-clan husband, supposedly slain by highwaymen. Abdel Jameela was birthed and raised here, but he has never been of this village.” Shaykh Hajjar scowls. “For decades now – since I was a boy – he has lived up on the hilltop rather than among us. More of a hermit than a villager. And not of Assad blood,” he says again.

I stand up. I can take no more of the man’s unctuous voice and, praise God, I don’t have to.

“Of course, O Shaykh, of course. I understand. Now, if you will excuse me?”

Shaykh Hajjar blinks. He wishes to say more but doesn’t dare. For I have come from the Caliph’s court.

Kristin, with Caprice

by Alan Smale

“I came for my things,” he said.

“If you’d called, I could have been out.” She stood aside to let him in. Reluctantly.

“That’s not necessary,” said Paul. “You don’t have to do that. You look great.”

“Yes, it is,” she replied. “Yes, I do. No, I really don’t. Your stuff’s in the spare.” She walked into the kitchen and he heard the strange squeal again. Perhaps the sound of a sponge against the inside of the oven?

Remembrance Is Something Like a House

by Will Ludwigsen

Every day for three decades, the abandoned house strains against its galling anchors, hoping to pull free. It has waited thirty years for its pipes and pilings to finally decay so it can leave for Florida to find whatever is left of the Macek family.

Nobody in its Milford neighborhood will likely miss the house or even notice its absence; it has hidden for decades behind overgrown bushes, weeds, and legends. When they talk about the house at all, the neighbors whisper about the child killer who lived there long ago with his family: a wife and five children who never knew their father kept his rotting playmate in the crawlspace until the police came.

The house, however, knows the truth and wants to confess it, even if  it has to crawl eight hundred miles.