The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Five by Ellen Datlow (ed.)

Author:Ellen Datlow (ed.) [Datlow, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

Don’s good at a party, better than Su. He goes from group to group filling glasses. You could mingle for Australia, says Su, anchored to the beach with a bunch of women he knows she doesn’t like. He fills her glass, kisses her ear just to hear the women say awww, floats on by. He was born to circulate this way, two-fifths full himself, greeting, offering, accepting thanks. The afternoon turns blue and the stars start, hardly noticeable; then he gets enmeshed in a conversation with Terry and Denise, and the next time he looks up the black sky is thick, thick with them, the Milky Way properly milky this far from town.

The ship that is the party sails on. The fireworks come and go, the oohs and aahs at those, and after the last explosion he’s marooned for a moment, smiling, by the fire, at the edge of a resumed conversation about Zumba classes. He waits for a chance to step in with his joke about things going off with a bang for the birthday boy.

She comes up to him then. Her name’s Bel—she gives it to him, spells it for him, straight off. Is that a bit aggressive, or should he like her for her straightforwardness?

She’s one of the very few singles here. She’s pretending to be cool about it, but he can almost smell that she’s feeling it. Tightly bound, she is, into a dress made of some stretchy cloth, big dark-bright flowers splashed onto a white background. She’s got a waist, too, though not Su’s sort. This one’s a statement, held in with a big broad belt. Everything springs out above and below it, cunningly smoothed and sculpted by some magical undergarment. Her breasts push towards him at her neckline like a bum-crack offered on a silver tray; he feels kind and honourable, watching her eyes and animation as she talks, never letting his gaze stray down there or his finger itch to run its tip along the crack, or his palms hunger to grasp the whole, slippery-elasticised size of her bosom, the bolster of her bottom. She’d be the same age as Su, but full-faced she looks younger. Her thick hair curls to her shoulders, dark—with red glints, he thinks, but that might be firelight. It might not even be dyed. She’s painted her face, but not so much that he’s repelled; she’s refreshed her lips since the buffet, and the glisten along the edge of them, well, it does what it’s supposed to do. He’s flattered that she’s taken so much trouble, and that she laughs so willingly at everything he says. She does that thing women sometimes do when they first meet him, of asking more and more personal questions as if they’ve got a perfect right to know, then laughing when he hedges and squirms. She smells great, despite his dislike of most perfumes—or perhaps it’s that the wafts take turns with gusts of bitter campfire smoke and the smell of several thousand bucks’ worth of spent fireworks.

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