Lightspeed Magazine Issue 23 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: science fiction, magazine, short story, fantasy
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2012-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Eric Gregory lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is working toward his MFA at North Carolina State University. His stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Interzone, Futurismic, Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction, and other publications. Find more at ericmg.com.

Forget You

Marc Laidlaw

She came into his life the way his cats crept into his lap. One day he was alone, had been alone for years, his life and his home empty of anyone but himself and a few friends who didn’t visit all that often anyway. And then at some point he realized she had been there for a while, in his house, in his bed, in every part of his life, having accomplished the transition so subtly that he could never say exactly when or how it had occurred.

He ran his hand along her cheek in a swift caress, brushing the line of her jaw as he tucked the one stray lock behind her left ear as he often did, and said, “How did we find each other?”

“Oh, you,” she said, with that look, as if the question were another of their habitual endearments. “You’re sweet.”

He traced her other cheek, looked deep into her right eye, then her left, having memorized the stained glass kaleidoscope pattern of her irises so clearly from this practice that he could see them easily when he closed his own eyes.

“No,” he said, “I’m serious. How?”

She laughed without a sound, just an exhalation, and mirrored the movement his hands were making, cupping his face in her own palms.

“Just lucky, I guess,” she said. “Me, I mean.”

“Of course, me too, I just . . .”

She kissed him, and he thought, Well, that’s one difference between her and the cats.

He asked his friends, when he thought of it, in the very infrequent moments when she was not with him. “How did we meet?” he asked. And they laughed because it was such an odd question that they knew he was setting them up for some kind of joke. And when he said, “No, I’m serious,” they grew serious too, and took on a puzzled, questioning tone. “Uh . . . you’re asking us? You guys have been together longer than we’ve been friends.”

He went through his photographs, the digital images first, looking farther and farther back through the files, and she was in them all, and he could remember now how she had been there at the time. Beyond a certain point there were no more photos, but that was because of a huge lightning storm, when they’d gone a week without power and his computer had been fried, with everything on it lost. So of course there were no digital photographs from the years before that. He found a box in the closet full of older prints and negatives, in envelopes date-stamped by the pharmacies and photobooths where he had dropped them off to be developed. And it was something of a relief to see that she was not in any of these. He

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