Nebula Awards Showcase 55 by Catherynne M. Valente

Author:Catherynne M. Valente
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Anthology, Science Fiction, Nebula Awards
Publisher: SFWA, Inc.
Published: 2021-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

Carpe Glitter

By Cat Rambo

Carpe glitter, my grandmother always said. Seize the glitter.

And that was what I remembered best about her: the glitter. A dazzle of rhinestone, a waft of Patou Joy, lipstick like a red banner across her mouth. Underneath all that, a wiry little old lady with silver hair and vampire-pale skin.

Not that she was a vampire, of course. But grandmother hung with everyone during her days in the Vegas crowd. Celebrities, presidents, they all came to her show at the Sparkle Dome, watched her strut her stuff in a black top hat and fishnet stockings, conjuring flames and doves (never card tricks, which she hated), making ghosts speak to loved ones in the audience and when she stepped off the stage, she left in a scintillating dazzle, like a fairy queen stepping off her throne.

All that shine. And at home?

She was a grubby hoarder.

I mopped sweat off my forehead with the hem of my t-shirt and attacked another pile of magazines. Dust wafted up to fill my nostrils and make me sneeze, drifted down to coat the hairs on my forearms with grit. Something had rotted in the corner; I was doing that once I’d cleared a path to it and breathing through my mouth in the meantime.

This had once been intended as a guest room, but it had been taken over by a troupe of china-headed dolls, and then newspapers and magazines. No cat pee—I’d been spared that in these back rooms, closed off for at least a couple of decades. Grandmother had bought the house when she was at the height of her first fortune, just burst onto the stage magician scene, a woman from Brooklyn who’d trained herself in sleight of hand and studied under the most famous female stage of her time, Susan Day.

This pile of magazines, in fact, so brittle that they flaked away as I touched them, showed Grandmother and her mentor on the cover, a poster from their brief tour together, just after World War II: the glamorous older Day, blonde-hair worn in a sleek chignon and eyes blue as turquoise, and Grandmother bright and shiny not just with the rhinestones glittering across her chest, but her starry eyes and grin so wide it stretched her mouth.

The stack held dozens of copies of the same issue, no matter how far down in the stack I went, ending with a swarm of silverfish scurrying away as I lifted the last one. I’d get the room cleared before bringing out my arsenal of bug spray for an onslaught.

Confetti bits of yellowing paper fell away as I put it on the heap to be bagged up and trashed. By now I’d learned that paper that flaked that way meant the appraiser’s regretful headshake and the murmur, “Too badly eroded, Miss Aim.”

As with each of the seven rooms I’d managed so far, I sorted it into piles. Throw away was by far the largest. To be appraised had interesting things in it beyond the scads of dolls Grandmother had collected.

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