The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Best Horror of the Year Volume Eleven
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2019-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

From the way I talk about my mom sometimes, you’d assume I hate her, though the opposite is true. But I never write about the parts of my life where she and my dad were together, when I was untaintedly happy, or thought I was. I can barely remember what it was like to be that person.

I mean . . . in high school I fell in love with a boy, and every time we were together it felt as if we were wrapped so tight we lived inside each other, a strange knot of bliss, always tightening. The actual time we spent enmeshed was relatively brief, but it remade the world. And the minute we broke up it was like none of that ever happened—there was no point in remembering any of it, because all it meant was that at the time, I just hadn’t realized yet that it didn’t mean anything except how stupid I’d been not to see the end of it all coming, to think I’d actually been loved.

He was very upset when I told him that. “Well, it meant a lot to me,” he said. “Obviously not,” I replied. “Considering you broke my fucking heart.”

So that’s what it’s like, for me: my parents broke my heart, and after they divorced none of my “happy” childhood meant shit. I’ve enjoyed the adulthood I’ve eventually been able to have with my mom, and (to some extent) my dad. But that right there, the holidays, the photos, all those hugs and kisses, those goodnight stories? That was a lie. I just didn’t know it yet.

I know how that realization felt, how it hurt—but now, years later, a mother myself, I finally know how it must have hurt my own mother to see me suffer. Because that’s the other side of it, of course, the sting in the tail. So when I look at my daughter and think that I don’t want to break her heart, it isn’t just because I don’t fully understand what she might do, if I did. It’s because even if I don’t think there was ever a time when I believed she was fully human, I know there must have been a time when she did. When she didn’t know any better.

Is that just another trick, another lie? I don’t know. I can’t know.

I don’t think I ever will.

Will she search the rest of her kind out when she leaves me at last, one by one, wherever they’re buried? Will she teach them to snare humans of their own, playing on them the same sort of trick she played on me? I hope not, and not just for our sakes.

For hers, as well.

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.