The Apex Book of World SF by Cristina Jurado & Lavie Tidhar

Author:Cristina Jurado & Lavie Tidhar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Apex Book Company

* * *

I shall live while you still can recall

The colours we made with our wings

Just shout if you find you are lost

I will search through the quantum strings

The citarel was my surprise gift for our seventieth wedding anniversary. Aurora was radiant in her silks, with all those lights floating around her, and the string quartet playing You Will See the Moon Rise in the University gardens, in Albotmilles. Yes, she was radiant. And there was I, trembling at the end of the walkway, not just because of the nervousness natural to the occasion, not just because nothing had changed and yet everything had changed in that place where I had kissed her for the first time, a hundred years before: I was also trembling because of the citarel, hidden under the amber-hued canopy where we would once again recite our vows, charged and ready to give her a huge surprise after we confirmed our mutual love.

What lovely eyes she had, what wonderful hair gathered-up and defying the breeze of that autumn evening, how young she was in my arms, and how much love there was brimming over despite so many years spinning round on the roller-coaster of days.

“It’s the Samisha!” she says when she sees the citarel, while the cameras float around us to immortalize our immortality. She cries—when we thought she had no more tears left after those shed during the renewal of our vows—and gazes at me with such tenderness that I weep, too. “It’s … Where did you get ahold of it?”

“I’m a resourceful man,” I say, and lean forward to kiss her again, but she stops me with a wink that suspends time, and raises the instrument to her breast. And she makes it sing. You Will See the Moon Rise, that’s what it intones, the iridescent piston rising and falling as if in a spiral, the quartet accompanies it, and she sings.

She sings to me.

In the shade of a single Idea

Like a song protecting the cradle

Gaze into my eyes that are your eyes

And then you will see the moon rise

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.