Clarkesworld Year Nine by Ken Liu

Author:Ken Liu [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: anthology, clarkesworld, novelette, science fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy, short fiction, short stories, short story, world sf
ISBN: 189046497X
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2018-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

5. Orange

This is what happened to me in the Orange Country: I didn’t see any cities even though there are really nice cities there, or drink any alcohol even though I’ve always heard clementine schnapps is really great, or talk to any animals even though in the Orange Country a poem means a kind of tiger that can’t talk but can sing, or people, even though there were probably some decent ones making a big bright orange life somewhere.

I came out of the door in the basin of The Jonquil Julep and I lay down on floor of a carrot-colored autumn jungle and cried until I didn’t have anything wet left to lose. Then I crawled under a papaya tree and clawed the orange clay until I made a hole big enough to climb inside if I curled up my whole body like a circle you draw with one smooth motion. The clay smelled like fire.

“I love you,” said my sorrow. She didn’t look well. Her fur was threadbare, translucent, her trunk dried out.

“I don’t know what ‘I love you’ means in the Orange Country,” sighed Jellyfish.

“I do,” said the Sparrowbone Mask of the Incarnadine Fisherwomen, who hadn’t had a damn thing to say in ages. “Here, if you love someone, you mean to keep them prisoner and never let them see the sun.”

“But then they’d be safe,” I whispered.

“I love you,” said my sorrow. She got down on her giant woolly knees beside my hole. “I love you. Your eyes are yellow.”

I began to claw into the orange clay my hole. I peeled it away and crammed it into my mouth. My teeth went through it easy as anything. It didn’t taste like dirt. It tasted like a lot of words, one after the other, with conflict and resolution and a beginning, middle, but no end. It tasted like Mummery showing me how to play the clarinet. It tasted like an Emperor who wasn’t an Emperor anymore. The earth stained my tongue orange forever.

“I love you,” said my sorrow.

“I heard you, dammit,” I said between bright mouthfuls.

Like she was putting an exclamation point on her favorite phrase, my sorrow opened up her cabinet doors in the sienna shadows of the orange jungle. Toucans and orioles and birds of paradise crowed and called and their crowing and calling caromed off the titian trunks until my ears hated birdsong more than any other thing. My sorrow opened up her cabinet doors and the wind whistled through the space inside her and it sounded like Premiére Rhapsodie in A Major through the holes of a fuel-efficient crystal clarinet.

Inside my sorrow hung a dress the color of garnets, with a long train trailing behind it and a neckline that plunged to the navel. It looked like it would be very hard to dance in.

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