The Best of World SF by Lavie Tidhar (children's ebooks free online .txt) 📕

few more years, who knows what it could have become? They came for us at night. Seven Warsangeli surrounded the house and tried to fight off the mob. They held it for hours, taking injuries and injuring the mob as well. Finally, a few slipped through and set fire to the house. The police arrived and it was all over. They arrested us. By the time we got out, the place had been looted. At least nobody died there. On Bute Street they killed Mahommed Abdullah. Six white men were charged with murder, and six white men were acquitted for lack of evidence.’

I did not understand everything he said, but he spoke slowly, and I felt happy listening to his deep voice. He gave me some money, then left me alone. I wanted to wipe away the polish from his shoes.

I still get the Morbus and I still shine shoes. I still wake up with blood in my mouth and a cut on my tongue every few days. When customers call me a shoeshine I tell them I am a bootblack.

I swear this is a true account of what happened.

[Thumbprint here as Master Carter has no signature]

The Emptiness in the Heart of All Things

Fabio Fernandes

Brazil

I’ve known Fabio for years, though I only met him once, briefly, in London. I got to publish him in The Apex Book of World SF 2, and he’s just recently published a new collection in English, the wonderful Love: An Archaeology. He is a writer (in both Portuguese and English), an editor and anthologist, and a prolific translator. Here he turns his attention on a mysterious sighting in the jungle…

The house in the middle of the forest was just that: a house. Neither a mansion nor a shack. Just a house. From a distance Anita could see two of the four walls, brickwork covered in plaster and what seemed to be a recently applied coat of white paint. Also a red roof made from simple baked clay tiles, just steep enough for the rainwater to slide down. It’s too hot for snow in the jungle, but it rains a lot.

No, scratch that, Anita thought to herself. It’s the sertão, not the jungle.

She should know better: she lived in Manaus, at the heart of the Brazilian rainforest. A huge city on the edge of the Amazon, pretty much surrounded by real jungle, a stifling hot mess of huge clumps of trees with thick vines entangled all over, so dense at some points that you couldn’t slash your way with a machete unless you were a native – and natives usually don’t need machetes. This was different: mostly sparse trees and ankle-deep shrubs, rather easier to walk through.

Now – after travelling four thousand kilometres by plane (from Manaus to Belo Horizonte, then from BH to Montes Claros, upstate Minas Gerais) and by boat up the river São Francisco (from Montes Claros to the small town of Buritizeiro, plus eighty-six kilometres), then forty minutes by jeep through a rough patch of dirt road. The driver dropped her at the edge of the forest and told her to walk westward for about ten minutes. The sun wouldn’t set for a couple of hours, but it wasn’t too hot for the tropical autumn. In fact, she could feel a light breeze, almost cold, touching her skin. She felt good.

After twenty minutes instead of the promised ten (be more specific, Anita made a mental note to tell the driver when she got back), she arrived at a clearing right in front of a wooden porch. Sitting at the top stair, an older woman smoked a cigarette.

Not very old, though. The few online sources about her weren’t accurate. Some gave her sixty-five, some seventy; one even gave her eighty, which, now she saw, was absurd. And definitely not ugly as Anita was given to understand. On the contrary, her tanned skin seemed that of a young person, but as she approached, Anita could see the small, half-hidden, almost apologetic folds of sagging flesh under the arms and chin. She had a glorious mane of white hair which contrasted beautifully with the brownish tone of her sun-drenched face.

But Anita was raised Catholic, and she understood that not every monster was necessarily repulsive to the eye.

In fact, the Devil was above all things a creature of seduction. And, even if she didn’t necessarily believe in God, she believed in the Adversary.

Anita armed herself with her best smile and approached, waving.

‘Miss Barbosa?’ she said, stepping out of the shrubs.

The older woman didn’t seem startled by the sudden appearance. She just stared silently at her and took a deep drag on her cigarette. Then, blowing the smoke, she nodded.

‘In the flesh.’ She gave a tired smile. She didn’t offer her hand; instead, she pointed with her cigarette – a shoddy handmade thing, exhaling an acrid smoke – for Anita to sit there beside her. Anita dropped her backpack at the bottom of the stairs and did that.

‘Was it hard to find the house?’

‘A bit longer than the driver told me, but no, it wasn’t.’

‘Distances can be deceptive here.’ She put out the cigarette on the wooden handrail at her side and stood up. ‘Come on in. I just brewed a pot of fresh coffee.’

*

Inside, everything was neat and tidy. Smack in the middle of the room, an old, black iron stove sat there, hot, with firewood smouldering in it. A huge black pipe darted from behind the stove, all the way through the roof. On the cooktop, an old, battered coffee pot. By the opposite wall, Anita saw a small Formica table cluttered with books, and two wooden stools, all set on top of a thin red rug. To the left, two doors. Between them, a bookshelf heavily laden with paperbacks.

‘Had a good trip?’ the old woman asked Anita as she poured coffee into an old, dark blue enamel mug. After a couple of days having atrocious coffee in airports and bus stations,