Forever Magazine Issue 106 by Robert Reed & Tom Green & Nick Wolven

Author:Robert Reed & Tom Green & Nick Wolven [Reed, Robert & Green, Tom & Wolven, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2023-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, March-April 2019.

Passion Summer

Nick Wolven

1

I’ve known kids who fell in love with a lot of weird stuff.

They fell in love with gladiolas, with river-smooth quartz, with the deer who browsed behind their houses.

They fell in love with trees, like the Romans, and with the sea, like the Greeks. Thalassa, thalassa! they wrote in their notebooks, drawing doodles of waves curled like hearts. No kidding.

I knew kids who fell in love with machines, of course. Art deco airships, airfoils and frills, prototype spacetrains with Tamara de Lempicka figureheads.

And then there’s that That Friend. Everybody has That Friend. Idiot goes and falls in love with the moon. All freshman year, he waits out the cycles, prays for clear nights, lingers at his bedroom window. Two AM, he’s out behind the forsythia, hand down his boxers, waiting for his teenage dreams to manifest above the gables of suburbia.

I swore I’d never be like that. When I fell in love, it would be pure, uncomplicated. I guess I was a typical teenage guy. I thought love was supposed to be unfrivolous and forever. I thought it was supposed to be universal.

“Why not a girl?” Laal said. “Why not a teacher? Why not an actor or actress or musician?”

“Why not a star,” Tara said, then added, “either kind.”

I sat back, squaring my shoulders, trying to seem a little mysterious. I was the kind of fourteen-year-old guy who hangs around a lot with girls. They mocked my inchoate manliness, squirmed at my sentimentality. They were way ahead of me, or anyway, they thought so. One time, during a truth-or-dare debacle, we all described our sexiest dreams. When I said, “silk sheets,” my friends looked at each other like: Oh, God, what do we say?

“Why not an artist?” Laal said. “Why not a writer?” I liked writers, didn’t I? I was weird that way.

Laal hadn’t gotten her first Passion, yet. She was thirteen going on totally innocent. When you went to her house, her parents were always hovering. They peeked around corners. They smiled behind their hands. You could tell what they were thinking. Our daughter has real friends!

“You don’t have to fall in love with a person.” Laal sounded like she was describing a wish come true. “I mean, it’s your Passion, right? What about a painting?”

I had friends who did that, too. In my first school it was all rich kids. In the upper grades they went gaga over art. Sargent’s Albert de Belleroche, pre-Raphealite dames tragiques, Gashin by Repin. One guy was way too into Toulouse Lautrec. He sat drooping over his phone like a flower, sighing for can-can dancers in image search results.

Tara put clawed hands to her scalp. Like, literally wracking her brains. She had that kind of cloudy black hair that looks burned, volcanic. Fatal deeds, abandoned lovers, young men with self-inflicted wounds: these were Tara’s romantic addictions. Her mom was nuts and her stepdad was abusive, but we tried not to read too much into it.

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