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

wrapped in a light, tenuous mist. She reached for Anita with both hands, and now Anita saw that she was the one asking the question:

‘Who wants it? Who wants it?’

It wasn’t unexpected. Not to Anita, at least. Ever since she first read of the recluse writer Elizabeth Barbosa, she’d felt an affinity that was hard to put into words. It wasn’t physical attraction – although now she knew it was that too, and that it played a significant part in her fantasy all right – but it was enough of a pull to bring her here, and to this moment.

Then she answered.

‘I want it.’

And they embraced under the cover of the night.

*

Things happened fast but at the same time in slow motion. Time was an origami crane unfolding. Anita saw the mist covering them, now so thick she couldn’t see Elizabeth’s face anymore.

Desperately, she tried to put her gun down – the last thing she wanted to do now was to fire it – but she couldn’t feel her hands. Or her body. She couldn’t feel either of their bodies.

She started to feel afraid, but that bubble of time surrounding them didn’t let her go all the way to the end of the feeling. She just ceased feeling.

And she wasn’t Anita anymore. Not just Anita.

*

The next day, the driver stopped the jeep right at the beginning of the trail where he had left Anita. He searched for a while, but couldn’t find any message.

Unsure, he hesitated. After all, she might just be a bit late. On the other hand, the sun would set in an hour or so. He was armed, so fuck it. He entered the trail.

The house in the clearing was empty. The front door was open and the stove was cold. The chickens were all cooped up. There was only a huge black bird near the edge of the forest. When he saw it, he reached instinctively for the gun in his holster, but the bird (What was that, for crying out loud? An eagle? A vulture?) didn’t seem to mind him, so, after a few seconds, he left the beast alone.

The driver returned to the road in a foul mood. The news of another murder had just reached them at the station, and the captain wanted to know if Anita had something on it. What would the driver tell him? He hated when these things happened.

He hated it even more when he spotted the severed head riding shotgun in his jeep.

He whipped his .38 around, but nobody could be seen. After a few minutes, when his breathing had slowed down and his hands stopped trembling, the driver approached the head. It was male, apparently in his thirties (but you couldn’t know for sure, especially with the dead), eyes closed and mouth semi-opened. There was something stuck on the teeth.

It was a note.

DO NOT COME BACK, it said.

He didn’t. A full Federal Police squad would, but not now.

The Sun From Both Sides

R. S. A. Garcia

Trinidad and Tobago

We first published R. S. A. Garcia in The Apex Book of World SF 5, and I fell immediately for her writing. One of a growing number of speculative fiction writers from the Caribbean, I look forward to every new story, and ‘The Sun From Both Sides’ won me immediately as it starts off as one thing and turns into another…

Once, a woman loved a man, and a man loved a woman.

They lived in a forest, in a small stone-grey hut, set far enough back from a river to escape the seasonal floods. Every day, they woke on a too-soft mattress and turned their faces to each other before they opened their eyes. Her smile would curve her lips as she lay her hand on his cheek, and he would sigh and nuzzle her palm.

Then they would roll away and sit up on either side of the low bed and push their feet into their shoes.

Days were short and cool, or long and hot, but there was always something to do. Firewood to chop, the roof to repair, a garden to tend. They carried out their chores accompanied by his tuneless humming, and when she looked at him, he always knew. They would pause, gazes locked as they took a breath, hands wiping sweaty foreheads, or resting on bent knees, before they both went back to what they were doing.

Nights were for dinner, and fireside reading, and sitting with their shoulders touching on the wooden swing-bench outside the creaky front door as they stared up at the patches of sky visible between the swaying branches. He would use his legs to push them back and forth slowly while she sat with her knees drawn up. Sometimes she let her head rest against his neck, and sometimes he put his head in her lap. Other times, he would play his flute while she lay her hand on his chest and her head on his shoulder. If she fell asleep, he would carry her inside without waking her.

When they fought, with air sucked through teeth, hands on hips and narrowed eyes, it was usually over small things, like whose turn it was to clean up. But they made up quickly, with soft kisses, fingers interlaced as they walked, and bodies entwined at night.

Whatever surplus food they had, he would go into Town to sell or trade, and she would take that time to clear the traps, or fish, and then make something special for when he came home. She would swim in the river then sit on their bench, waiting for him to come down the path alongside the house, whistling to himself. Her skin would tingle like a young girl’s when he climbed the two shallow stone steps, stamped the dirt from his feet before he stepped onto the wooden porch, and looked down at her from under the brim of his battered hat.

Home again, husband? she would ask.

He would smile and say, Home again, wife. Tired of