Asimov's SF, Feb 2002 by Dell Magazines

Author:Dell Magazines [Dell Magazines]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction/Fantasy
Publisher: www.Fictionwise.com
Published: 2001-09-24T21:00:00+00:00

Touch Pain by Cecilia Tan

Cecilia Tan is the author of The Velderet, Black Feathers, and Telepaths Don't Need Safewords, and has edited over thirty anthologies of erotic science fiction for Circlet Press. Her stories have appeared in Ms. magazine, Best American Erotica, and Absolute Magnitude. “Touch Pain” is her first tale for Asimov's.

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I met Lizette the summer after my mother died. I was doing that thing they call “keeping busy,” working afternoons at the Arts Coop shelving books and doing handiwork. Stuart Green introduced us, actually, ironic as that may seem what with Stuart having been the last man I attempted to date, what, twenty years ago? Maybe he felt like he was making up for it somehow. Anyway, it was Stuart, soft around the middle and gray around the edges, who tugged on my sleeve one late summer day and said, “There's somebody you should meet.”

I carried my box of used books to a wicker table in the corner and stood there holding them while he introduced Lizette Pierce, and then stood there shuffling his feet. Lizette rose after a moment and said “Nice to meet you,” and tried to shake my hand, whereupon I put the books down on a chair and Stuart said something about needing to get back to the store. He went to the coffee bar, asked for something to go, and then waved as he crossed the street to his place. Convenient, this little slice of culture in our upstate town. Clustered at one end of Main we've got Earthways—Stuart's new age health food place—a handmade furniture outlet, and the Arts Coop: part bookstore, part art gallery, part café in what used to be the old post office. The “new” post office wasn't new anymore, either; they'd built it when I was a child. But the old postwar building still reminded me of riding my father's shoulders to pick up Christmas packages from distant relatives. Whenever I walked into the place, I could almost hear the echoey sound of the clerks bantering and see Mr. Grimes, the postmaster, peering at me from under his visor.

I soon figured out why Stuart insisted Lizette and I meet. Stuart was one of the few who knew for sure that she and I did have one significant feature in common. Despite the obvious differences—she was ten years younger than me, a well-groomed flowery kind of woman, while I am a denim-jacketed lumberjack type ... I didn't ask how he knew about her. He only “knew” about me as a result of our ill-fated prom date and my radical change in appearance after my first semester of college. It was nosy of him, but I liked her; she had a nice smile and she liked books. It wasn't long before I had asked her out to the place for dinner.

The house had been empty of my mother for seven months then—eight if you counted the month she spent in the hospital—and now the house was mine, really mine.

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