Sisters of the Revolution Read online

  I watched it, sitting under my rock. It didn’t move much. It sort of bent over and picked up something, leaves or twigs, I couldn’t see. Then it did something with them around its middle, like putting them into an invisible sample pocket.

  Let me repeat—it was there. Barney, if you’re reading this, there are things here. And I think they’ve done whatever it is to us. Made us kill ourselves off.

  Why?

  Well, it’s a nice place, if it wasn’t for the people. How do you get rid of people? Bombs, death rays—all very primitive. Leave a big mess. Destroy everything, craters, radioactivity, ruin the place.

  This way there’s no muss, no fuss. just like what we did to the screwfly. Pinpoint the weak link, wait a bit while we do it for them. Then only a few bones around; make good fertilizer.

  Barney dear, good-bye. I saw it. It was there.

  But it wasn’t an angel.

  I think I saw a real estate agent.

  ROSE LEMBERG

  Seven Losses of na Re

  Rose Lemberg is a writer, poet, and editor originally from Ukraine but currently living in the U.S. She is passionate about diversity in SFF and elsewhere, and advocates for diversity through her essays and editorial work. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Fantasy Magazine, Apex, Goblin Fruit, and other places. She is the founder and coeditor of Stone Telling, a magazine of boundary-crossing speculative poetry. “Seven Losses of Na Re” tells the story of a young woman and the importance and power of her name. It was first published in Daily Science Fiction in 2012.

  1.

  My life is described by the music of mute violins. When my parents married, my great-grandfather, may the earth be as a feather, ascended the special-guests podium, cradling the old fiddle to his chest. “And now the zeide will play the wedding melody,” they said. “A special blessing,” they said, a sgule, a royal blessing. But the bow fell from his fingers.

  2.

  When I was born, my parents couldn’t name me. They wanted a name na Re, which means “beginning with the letter R,” after my great-grandmother. She was born Rukhl, the brilliant daughter of a penniless shlimazl cobbler. As the revolution fumbled all archetypes, they called her Rakhil’ka; a kind of ironed, bronze-buttoned, bright-Soviet-future Rukhl. Later even Rakhil’ka became too bourgeois, and my great-grandmother changed her name to Roza, Roza like the beautiful Jewish communist in the propaganda film Seekers of Happiness. They banned that film long before I was born. And by the time I was born, Rakhil’—or worse yet, Rukhl—was a name never to be uttered in polite company. Roza was reserved for aging fat Odessan fish peddlers with a mole on their upper lip.

  In addition to Roza, my parents rejected Regina (pretentious), Renata (pretentious), Rimma (low-brow), Rita (uncultured), Raisa (worse than Rita), Rina (too Jewish), Roxana (too Ukrainian), Rostislava (too Russian), and Raya (“I just don’t like it”).

  Na Re bypasses names—bypasses the rest of the sounds that would make me too pretentious, too low-brow, too bourgeois, too communist, too Jewish, too goyish. The letter R doesn’t have a history. The letter R does not remember Stalin.

  3.

  All letters of the alphabet remember Stalin. The repressions started before 1937, and lasted long after. They took my grandfather because he was an historian.

  History and memory are not the same. History must be written, made, organized. Memory is herded on trans-Siberian trains, memory disappears in labor camps, memory pines and withers from hunger, memory freezes under fallen lumber, memory thaws and erases all traces. My grandfather remembers. He was composing a dictionary of Russian synonyms in his head, and this is what kept him alive. He couldn’t compose history there. Or since.

  Snow: blizzard, frost, permafrost, firn, cold shower naked on the snow (see also under punishment), snowstorm, graupel, rime, ice, névé, gale, absence, my little girl is safe elsewhere, whiteout.

  Whiteout.

  4.

  They let my grandfather go in 1965. Stalin was dead, and so was Beria. My grandmother, Roza’s daughter, had prostituted herself, so grandfather believed, because he no longer remembered their little girl. And after the shouting was done, my grandmother became opaque to him, thawing like absence over timber, buried under Siberia, gone. History is events and processes, history is rustling archives, it’s oral interviews conducted inside the safety of the future, protected by course assignments and gleaming recording hardware. Memory compacts the permafrost under skin. When skin thaws, we are left with nothing.

  My grandfather is leaving—forever leaving, taken away by people who come at night. They say only four words. Always the same. S vesh’ami na vykhod. Roughly, it means, “get your things and get out.” One small bag. They always come for you at night. In 1937, they came for me, and missed by some seventy years. I keep a small bag with basics under my bed at all times, just in case. Cigarettes—although I’ve never smoked—the labor camp currency to trade for food or paper.

  My grandfather is leaving—forever leaving. In 1965 he is taken away by people in ghost overcoats, so familiar they have become his family. He has no family. He is an orphan of snow in which to bury himself, to find a way back to the packed bag under the bed and the sleepless fear and my grandmother’s breathing warmth by his side.

  History is not like this.

  5.

  My mother left when I was five. She is an architect of permafrost. They dig deep—to bury the foundations, she says, so strong under the snow they will persist even when the earth sheds all water, that great thaw that will make past pain run in rivulets and be absorbed into the newly pliant earth.

  She is digging for her father.

  She doesn’t want us to mention his name. I have a letter at least. He has nothing, only the concrete foundations hammered into permafrost, the night people who forever come for you.

  6.

  When the Germans came, my grandmother sewed all her jewelry into the underside of a white comforter cover. She had a dozen of those, embroidered white on white with snowflakes, flowers, little stars. She packed her bag—before the evacuation. She left with the bag, clutching her treasures—her mother’s, aunt’s, grandmother’s—baubles bought by sweethearts, husbands, mothers who starved to save for a sliver of a diamond, a scrap of a golden watch. Back then I love you meant a little piece of herring to last all week, it meant enduring cold and staying up all night to sew an extra pair of pants for sale. My grandmother stitched the family I love you’s into the comforter cover.

  She didn’t want to talk about how it got lost.

  Sometimes I imagine her running after the ghost guards in her nightgown at night, crying take it! take it! for that’s how the story takes shape, that you must exchange your treasures for life—and if they bypass your treasures they will take your life, perhaps to return it later, mangled, memory-less; and it will leave again then, leave for good, that life-shaped emptiness that gnaws and cusses at its tormentors: the wife, the child. The should-have-never-beens.

  Or perhaps my grandmother exchanged the comforter for bread on the long flight away from the war, from where the sirens wailed; or perhaps she simply took the wrong comforter, her I love you’s trampled into the earth under the growing heap of bodies.

  When my grandmother died, she left me her wedding ring, the only thing that didn’t go into the comforter. She left a little paper scrap attached to it. “For my na Re,” it said.

  I do not want to talk about it.

  7.

  My grandmother wanted to protect me. She spoke Russian to me—purer than permafrost, rigid like her husband’s dictionary of salvation. But her father the fiddler taught Yiddish to me in secret. Gedenk! he would say. Remember! He had his heart packed in the violin case and ready to go, but they never did come for him.

  Grandmother found us one day, huddled in the corner of the sofa, whispering forbidden warmth, stitching each other to life with thin threads of memory.

  The next day my grandmother too
k me to the speech pathologist. A woman named Rimma, another never-be-Rukhl like me. “Open your mouth,” she said kindly. With anonymous instruments gleaming silver and frost, she scraped my language out.

  Afterloss

  Everything goes. Rings and languages. Grandparents and bedding. Parents and selves. Names. Even the memory of loss is lost at last. Even snow. Even skin.

  We are careless and fumbling. We slide through life—bypassing history, curling memory into smoke from the cigarettes packed for emergency visits from ghosts in the night. S vesh’ami na vyhod. Get your things and get out. When the guards came, they could not find me on the list. Na Re is not a name. So they took my little bag, carried my I love you’s away to starve, to freeze, to lose their minds, their speech, to work away the years. And only the ancient fiddler stays behind, a patriarch of loss, fingers numb and weeping in the cold.

  Everything thaws. Even my mother’s earth-deep construction.

  Only that which isn’t remembered can never be lost.

  OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

  The Evening and the Morning and the Night

  Octavia E. Butler was an American writer. As a multiple recipient of both the Hugo and Nebula awards, Butler was one of the best-known women in the field and has often been credited with inspiring many other writers both in and out of genre fiction. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Fellowship. At the time, Butler was also one of the only African-American women in the science fiction field. In 2010, she was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. Butler’s novels include Kindred (1979) and Parable of the Sower (1993). In “The Evening and the Morning and the Night” Butler creates a fictional disease and uses this story to explore how society deals with issues of illness and stigma. It was first published in OMNI magazine in 1987.

  When I was fifteen and trying to show my independence by getting careless with my diet, my parents took me to a Duryea-Gode disease ward. They wanted me to see, they said, where I was headed if I wasn’t careful. In fact, it was where I was headed no matter what. It was only a matter of when: now or later. My parents were putting in their vote for later.

  I won’t describe the ward. It’s enough to say that when they brought me home, I cut my wrists. I did a thorough job of it, old Roman style in a bathtub of warm water. Almost made it. My father dislocated his shoulder breaking down the bathroom door. He and I never forgave each other for that day.

  The disease got him almost three years later—just before I went off to college. It was sudden. It doesn’t happen that way often. Most people notice themselves beginning to drift—or their relatives notice—and they make arrangements with their chosen institution. People who are noticed and who resist going in can be locked up for a week’s observation. I don’t doubt that that observation period breaks up a few families. Sending someone away for what turns out to be a false alarm … Well, it isn’t the sort of thing the victim is likely to forgive or forget. On the other hand, not sending someone away in time—missing the signs or having a person go off suddenly without signs—is inevitably dangerous for the victim. I’ve never heard of it going as badly, though, as it did in my family. People normally injure only themselves when their time comes—unless someone is stupid enough to try to handle them without the necessary drugs or restraints.

  My father had killed my mother, then killed himself. I wasn’t home when it happened. I had stayed at school later than usual, rehearsing graduation exercises. By the time I got home, there were cops everywhere. There was an ambulance, and two attendants were wheeling someone out on a stretcher—someone covered. More than covered. Almost … bagged.

  The cops wouldn’t let me in. I didn’t find out until later exactly what had happened. I wish I’d never found out. Dad had killed Mom, then skinned her completely. At least that’s how I hope it happened. I mean I hope he killed her first. He broke some of her ribs, damaged her heart. Digging.

  Then he began tearing at himself, through skin and bone, digging. He had managed to reach his own heart before he died. It was an especially bad example of the kind of thing that makes people afraid of us. It gets some of us into trouble for picking at a pimple or even for daydreaming. It has inspired restrictive laws, created problems with jobs, housing, schools … The Duryea-Gode Disease Foundation has spent millions telling the world that people like my father don’t exist.

  A long time later, when I had gotten myself together as best I could, I went to college—to the University of Southern California—on a Dilg scholarship. Dilg is the retreat you try to send your out-of-control DGD relatives to. It’s run by controlled DGDs like me, like my parents while they lived. God knows how any controlled DGD stands it. Anyway, the place has a waiting list miles long. My parents put me on it after my suicide attempt, but chances were, I’d be dead by the time my name came up.

  I can’t say why I went to college—except that I had been going to school all my life and didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t go with any particular hope. Hell, I knew what I was in for eventually. I was just marking time. Whatever I did was just marking time. If people were willing to pay me to go to school and mark time, why not do it?

  The weird part was, I worked hard, got top grades. If you work hard enough at something that doesn’t matter, you can forget for a while about the things that do.

  Sometimes I thought about trying suicide again. How was it I’d had the courage when I was fifteen but didn’t have it now? Two DGD parents both religious, both as opposed to abortion as they were to suicide. So they had trusted God and the promises of modern medicine and had a child. But how could I look at what had happened to them and trust anything?

  I majored in biology. Non-DGDs say something about our disease makes us good at the sciences—genetics, molecular biology, biochemistry … That something was terror. Terror and a kind of driving hopelessness. Some of us went bad and became destructive before we had to—yes, we did produce more than our share of criminals. And some of us went good—spectacularly—and made scientific and medical history. These last kept the doors at least partly open for the rest of us. They made discoveries in genetics, found cures for a couple of rare diseases, made advances against other diseases that weren’t so rare—including, ironically, some forms of cancer. But they’d found nothing to help themselves. There had been nothing since the latest improvements in the diet, and those came just before I was born. They, like the original diet, gave more DGDs the courage to have children. They were supposed to do for DGDs what insulin had done for diabetics—give us a normal or nearly normal life span. Maybe they had worked for someone somewhere. They hadn’t worked for anyone I knew.

  Biology school was a pain in the usual ways. I didn’t eat in public anymore, didn’t like the way people stared at my biscuits—cleverly dubbed “dog biscuits” in every school I’d ever attended. You’d think university students would be more creative. I didn’t like the way people edged away from me when they caught sight of my emblem. I’d begun wearing it on a chain around my neck and putting it down inside my blouse, but people managed to notice it anyway. People who don’t eat in public, who drink nothing more interesting than water, who smoke nothing at all—people like that are suspicious. Or rather, they make others suspicious. Sooner or later, one of those others, finding my fingers and wrists bare, would fake an interest in my chain. That would be that. I couldn’t hide the emblem in my purse. If anything happened to me, medical people had to see it in time to avoid giving me the medications they might use on a normal person. It isn’t just ordinary food we have to avoid, but about a quarter of a Physicians’ Desk Reference of widely used drugs. Every now and then there are news stories about people who stopped carrying their emblems—probably trying to pass as normal. Then they have an accident. By the time anyone realizes there is anything wrong, it’s too late. So I wore my emblem. And one way or another, people got a look at it or got the word from someone who had. “She is!” Yeah.

  At the beginning of my third ye
ar, four other DGDs and I decided to rent a house together. We’d all had enough of being lepers twenty-four hours a day. There was an English major. He wanted to be a writer and tell our story from the inside—which had only been done thirty or forty times before. There was a special-education major who hoped the handicapped would accept her more readily than the able-bodied, a premed who planned to go into research, and a chemistry major who didn’t really know what she wanted to do.

  Two men and three women. All we had in common was our disease, plus a weird combination of stubborn intensity about whatever we happened to be doing and hopeless cynicism about everything else. Healthy people say no one can concentrate like a DGD. Healthy people have all the time in the world for stupid generalizations and short attention spans.

  We did our work, came up for air now and then, ate our biscuits, and attended classes. Our only problem was housecleaning. We worked out a schedule of who would clean what when, who would deal with the yard, whatever. We all agreed on it; then, except for me, everyone seemed to forget about it. I found myself going around reminding people to vacuum, clean the bathroom, mow the lawn … I figured they’d all hate me in no time, but I wasn’t going to be their maid, and I wasn’t going to live in filth. Nobody complained. Nobody even seemed annoyed. They just came up out of their academic daze, cleaned, mopped, mowed, and went back to it. I got into the habit of running around in the evening reminding people. It didn’t bother me if it didn’t bother them.

  “How’d you get to be housemother?” a visiting DGD asked.