Someone in Time by Jonathan Strahan

Author:Jonathan Strahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Publisher: Rebellion Publishing Ltd

Unbashed, or: Jackson, Whose Cowardice Tore a Hole in the Chronoverse

Sam J. Miller

Sam J. Miller’s (samjmiller.com) books have been called ‘must reads’ and ‘bests of the year’ by USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and O: The Oprah Magazine, among others. He is the Nebula-Award-winning author of Blackfish City, which has been translated into six languages and won the hopefully-soon-to-be-renamed John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Sam’s short stories have won a Shirley Jackson Award and been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and have been reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He’s also the last in a long line of butchers. He lives in New York City.

Here you are. Different, now. Not the brooding boy in the back row of my precalc class, nor the state-finals-champion martial artist so aloof across the college dining hall. Not the untouchable crush. Not the boy so tough he couldn’t possibly be gay, so what’s the point of staring at him so? Not the boy I stared at anyway, knowing, as I did so, that it was the first truly adult thing I’d ever done. You are something else, now. Streetlamps bronze your glossy black hair, gild your broad broken nose. Love sets you ablaze.

You are here. You are not dead. You pass a cigarette, not asking if I want one, knowing I don’t, knowing I’ll do whatever you want. Knowing how your black-brown eyes melt me. You press your nose against mine, swivel your cigarette to kindle my own, grind your scratchy cheek against my smooth one. You are my boyfriend; my first; the feeling so new I can barely say it for what it does to me inside. You are tough and strong where I am weak and smart. Or so I think, now. Here. I am smart, I think. The world is mine. Autumn night air fills my lungs like helium, sends me soaring. I had never guessed, all those nights in my bed at home, alone with Kleenex and my imagination, what sex really was. Easy to imagine the physical; impossible to guess at the emotional. How free I felt. How powerful, even in submission. One big hand pinning both of mine back. Instead of helpless I felt magnified. Your strength was mine, for the moment.

I smoke sadly, not wanting it to wipe away the taste of you. The taste of all of you, every piece a different marvelous flavor. Your armpit, your belly button, your ear, your hair. Your ‘manhood’, or whatever other euphemism you like.

Here we are. Out in the open—smoking on the back steps. Hands clasped. October midnight dries the sweat on both our brows. My dorm room radiator was overzealous, as were we. “Jackson,” you say, for no reason, for the feel of my name in your mouth, for the shivers you know it sends through me. Jocks walk by in drunken gaggles, aim glares at us. And I am afraid. And I am ashamed. Boys have been bashed, lately, across campus. Panic makes

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