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It’s happened to Splatterpunk and Cyberpunk and Gothic-Romance, and so on.
But if you use the label as a general guide, then so be it. If it makes you happy, I won’t kick. What you have here are stories that are created from many genres and non-genres. Add to this literary fiction, as well as cult writers, experimental writers, and the influence of film and radio shows and comic books and music, and you have…Well, you have these magnificent peculiarities.
I suppose I must step forward and own up to the fact that I have a story among them. I was one of the writers the publisher felt had opened these gates wider, behind the great writers mentioned previously, of course.
If that’s true, I didn’t know I was doing it, and if it bothers you that I’m also an editor and have a story in this grouping, then skip mine and read the others.
Like the cliché sports quote: “I’m just happy to be here.”
These stories are all trips into a world of strange magic, places where you have not been. Once you come back from your journey, you’re unlikely to forget the voyage any time soon.
Take photographs while you’re there, maybe a few notes.
No, better yet, just read the stories again when the mood hits you. They are worlds tha
t you can revisit, without need of luggage or plane fare.
Go visit them often.
They are way worth it, even if the terrain is a little weird and maybe even scary.
The White Man
Thomas M. Disch
If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the vampire.
“Carmilla”
—J. Sheridan Le Fanu
It was the general understanding that the world was falling apart in all directions. Bad things had happened and worse were on the way. Everyone understood that—the rich and the poor, old and young (although for the young it might be more dimly sensed, an intuition). But they also understood that there was nothing much anyone could do about it, and so you concentrated on having some fun while there was any left to have. Tawana chewed kwash, which the family grew in the backyard alongside the house, in among the big old rhubarb plants. Once they had tried to eat the rhubarb, but Tawana had to spit it out—and a lucky thing, too, because later on she learned that rhubarb is poison.
The kwash helped if you were hungry (and Tawana was hungry even when her stomach was full) but it could mess up your thinking at the same time. Once in the third grade when she was transferred to a different school closer to downtown and had missed the regular bus, she set off by herself on foot, chewing kwash, and the police picked her up, crying and shoeless, out near the old airport. She had no idea how she’d got there, or lost her shoes. That’s the sort of thing the kwash could do, especially if you were just a kid. You got lost without even knowing it.
Anyhow, she was in high school now and the whole system had changed. First when there was the Faith Initiative, she’d gone to a Catholic school, where boys and girls were in the same room all day and things were very strict. You couldn’t say a word without raising your hand, or wear your own clothes, only the same old blue uniform every day. But that lasted less than a year. Then the public schools got special teachers for the Somali kids with Intensive English programs, and Tawana and her sisters got vouchers to attend Diversitas, a charter school in what used to be a parking garage in downtown Minneapolis near the old football stadium that they were tearing down. Diversitas is the Latin word for Diversity, and all cultures were respected there. You could have your own prayer rug, or chant, or meditate. It was the complete opposite of Our Lady of Mercy, where everybody had to do everything at the same time, all together. How could you call that freedom of religion? Plus, you could wear pretty much anything you wanted at Diversitas, except for any kind of jewelry that was potentially dangerous. There were even prizes for the best outfits of the week, which Tawana won when she was in the sixth grade. The prize-winning outfit was a Swahili Ceremonial Robe with a matching turban that she’d designed herself with duct tape. Ms. McLeod asked her to wear it to the assembly when the prizes were given out, but that wasn’t possible since the towels had had to be returned to their container in the bathroom. She wasn’t in fact Swahili, but at that point not many people (including Tawana) knew the difference between Somalia and other parts of Africa. At the assembly, instead of Tawana wearing the actual robe, they had shown a picture from the video on the school’s surveillance camera. Up on the screen Tawana’s smile must have been six feet from side to side. She was self conscious about her teeth for the next week (kwash tends to darken teeth.)
Ms. McLeod had printed out a small picture from the same surveillance tape showing Tawana in her prize-winning outfit, all gleaming white with fuzzy pink flowers. But in the background of that picture there was another figure in white, a man. And no one who looked at the picture had any idea who he might have been. He wasn’t one of the teachers, he wasn’t in maintenance, and parents rarely visited the school in the daytime. At night there were remedial classes for adult refugees in the basement classrooms, and slams and concerts, sometimes, in the auditorium.
Tawana studied his face a lot, as though it were a puzzle to be solved. Who might he be, that white man, and why was he there at her ceremony? She taped the picture on the inside of the door of her hall locker, underneath the magnetic To Do list with its three immaculately empty categories: Shopping, School, Sports. Then one day it wasn’t there. The picture had been removed from her locker. Nothing else had been taken, just that picture of Tawana in her robe and the white man behind her.
That was the last year there were summer vacations, After that you had to go to school all the time. Everybody bitched about it, but Tawana wondered if the complainers weren’t secretly glad if only because of the breakfast and lunch programs. With the new year-round schedule there was also a new music and dance teacher, Mr. Furbush, with a beard that had bleached tips. He taught junior high how to do ancient Egyptian dances, a couple of them really exhausting, but he was cute. Some kids said he was having a love affair with Ms. McLeod, but others said no, he was gay.
On a Thursday afternoon late in August of that same summer, when Tawana had already been home from school for an hour or so, the doorbell rang. Then it rang a second time, and third time. Anyone who wanted to visit the family would usually just walk in the house, so the doorbell served mainly as a warning system. But Tawana was at home by herself and she thought what if it was a package and there had to be someone to sign for it?
So she went to the door, but it wasn’t a package, it was a man in a white shirt and a blue tie lugging a satchel full of papers. “Are you Miss Makwinja?” he asked Tawana. She should have known better than to admit that’s who she was, but she said, yes, that was her name. Then he showed her a badge that said he was an agent for the Census Bureau and he just barged into the house and took a seat in the middle of the twins’ futon and started asking her questions. He wanted to know the name of everyone in the family, and how it was spelled and how old they all were and where they were born and their religion and did they have a job. An endless stream of questions, and it was no use saying you didn’t know, cause then he would tell her to make a guess. He had a thermos bottle hanging off the side of his knapsack, all beaded with sweat the same as his forehead. The drops would run down the sides of the bottle and down his forehead and his cheeks in zig-zags like the mice trying to escape from the laboratory in her brother’s video game. “I have to do my homework now,” she told him. “That’s fine,” he said and just sat there. Then after they both sat there a while, not budging, he said, “Oh, I have some other questions here about the house itself. Is there a bathroom?” Tawana nodded. “More than one bathroom?” “I don’t know,” she said, and suddenly she needed to go to the bathroom herself. But the man wouldn’t leave, and wouldn’t stop asking his questions. It was like going to the emergency room and having to undress.
And then she realized that she had seen him before this. He was the man behind her in the picture. The picture someone had taken from her locker. The man she had dreamed of again and again.
She got up off the futon and went to stand on the other side of the wooden trunk with the twins’ clothes in it. “What did you say your name was?” she asked warily.
“I don’t think I did. We’re not required to give out our names, you know. My shield number is K-384.” He tapped the little plastic badge pinned to his white shirt.
“You know our names.”
“True. I do. But that’s what I’m paid for.” And then he smiled this terrible smile, the smile she’d seen in stores and offices and hospitals all her life, without every realizing what it meant. It was the smile of an enemy, of someone sworn to kill her. Not right this moment, but someday maybe years later, someday for sure. He didn’t know it yet himself, but Tawana did, because she sometimes had psychic powers. She could look into the future and know what other people were thinking. Not their ideas necessarily, but their feelings. Her mother had had the same gift before she died.
“Well,” the white man said, standing up, with a different smile, “thank you for your time.” He neatened his papers into a single sheaf and stuffed them back in his satchel.
