Asimov's Science Fiction 2010-08 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors [Authors, Dell Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magazine, 2012
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2011-08-21T18:13:04+00:00

Novelette: THE WITCH, THE TINMAN, THE FLIES by J.M. Sidorova

Julia Sidorova has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and works as a biomedical scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, studying the many things that can go wrong with human cells. The rest of the time she writes fiction. Julia began writing and selling stories in Russian (her first language) in the late nineties. Since then, she has been switching to English. The author attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2009 and her English short fiction has appeared in Eclectica, an online publication. Her new story about adaptation in a hostile environment is her first professional sale in her adopted language.

Once upon a time long ago, Nina used to be an eight-year-old girl who lived with her mother and stepfather in a house that stood in the middle of the Red-City, the capital of the Hammer-and-Sickle Empire. The house—an old aristocratic edifice that had been sliced and spliced into a tenement—looked onto a small dusty park of poplars and lindens with a pond in the middle. There was a tablet by the pond that said it was The Pond of Pioneers (i.e., Communist boy- and girl-scouts) but everyone called it The Pond of Patriarchs (i.e., Church Fathers). That's why Nina used to think that there were occasions when the word pioneer had to mean patriarch. Words were mysterious, after all. For example, why did they always say Hail to comrade Stalin? Did they think it was good for comrade Stalin to stand under a downpour of ice pellets?

Nina liked the pond of Pioneer-Patriarchs in winter when there was skating and in late spring when the air was ticklish with poplar cotton and honey-sweet with linden flowers, and the pond-water smelled of rain and not of rotting duckweed. She did not like the pond in summer because that's when they brought chain gangs of German POWs to lay pipes along the street nearby, and Germans were confusing. On the one hand they were scary and bad. On the other hand they begged for food and when she threw them her fried egg-on-rye sandwich they fell on their knees to pick it up from the mud, and it was very, very sad.

German POWs or not, Nina could not spend as much time out by the pond as she wanted because she could not run and play with other kids. She would get short of breath and blue-lipped—she had a heart murmur, and kids did not like kids with murmurs and blue lips. Nina found it hard to understand why anyone's blood would murmur when it sneaked through the heart the wrong way. Maybe there was something sinister about her blood, as if it was muttering under its breath like those villains on radio shows for children. Why else did Nina's mother say that Nina's heart was bad when she was upset with Nina?

Nina's mother was a geography teacher. Nina's mother said she hated teaching and she hated the children whose empty heads

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.