Magazine - Asimov's Science Fiction - 2004 - Issue 12 - December (v1.0) [txt] by December (v1.0)

Author:December (v1.0) [txt] [December (v1.0) [txt]]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Copyright (C) 2004 by Elizabeth Counihan.

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CH006 *A Princess of Earth* by Mike Resnick A Short Story When Mike Resnick's "Robots Don't Cry" made this year's Hugo ballot, it was his seventeenth Asimov's story to be so honored. His novel, _The Return of Santiago_, is out in paperback from Tor, and _A Gathering of Widowmakers _will appear sometime next year.

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When Lisa died I felt like my soul had been ripped out of my body, and what was left wasn't worth the powder to blow it to hell. To this day I don't even know what she died of; the doctors tried to tell me why she had collapsed and what had killed her, but I just tuned them out. She was dead and I would never talk to her or touch her again, never share a million unimportant things with her, and that was the only fact that mattered. I didn't even go to the funeral; I couldn't bear to look at her in her coffin. I quit my job -- we'd been counting the days to my retirement so we could finally spend all our time together -- and I considered selling the house and moving to a smaller place, but in the end I couldn't do it. There was too much of her there, things I'd lose forever if I moved away. I left her clothes in the closet, just the way they'd always been. Her hairbrush and her perfume and her lipstick remained on the vanity where she'd kept them neatly lined up. There was a painting of a New England landscape that I'd never liked much, but since she had loved it I left it hanging where it was. I had my favorite photos of her blown up and framed, and put them on every table and counter and shelf in the house. I had no desire to be with other people, so I spent most of my days catching up on my reading. Well, let me amend that. I started a lot of books; I finished almost none of them. It was the same thing with movies: I'd rent a few, begin playing them, and usually turn them off within fifteen or twenty minutes. Friends would invite me out, I'd refuse, and after awhile they stopped calling. I barely noticed. Winter came, a seemingly endless series of bleak days and frigid nights. It was the first time since I'd married Lisa that I didn't bring a Christmas tree home to decorate. There just didn't seem much sense to it. We'd never had any children, she wasn't there to share it, and I wasn't going to have any visitors. As it turned out, I was wrong about the visitor: I spotted him maybe an hour before midnight, wandering naked across my backyard during the worst blizzard of the season. At first I thought I was hallucinating. Five inches of snow had fallen, and the wind chill was something like ten below zero.

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