Fantasy Magazine Issue 34, January 2010 Table of Contents After the Dragon by Sarah Monette (fiction) my mother, the ghost by Willow Fagan (fiction) Above It All by Carol Emshwiller (fiction) The Wing Collection by Eilis O'Neal (fiction) Author Spotlight: Sarah Monette Author Spotlight: Willow Fagan Author Spotlight: Carol Emshwiller Author Spotlight: Eilis O’Neal About the Editor © 2010 Fantasy Magazine www.fantasy-magazine.com After the Dragon Sarah Monette After the dragon, she lay in the white on white hospital room and wanted to die. The counselor came and talked about stages of grief and group therapy, her speech so rehearsed Megan could hear the grooves in the vinyl; Megan turned the ruined side of her face toward her and said, “Do you have a group for this?” She felt the moment when the counselor dropped the ball, didn’t have a pre-processed answer, when just for a second she was a real person, and then she picked it up again and gave Megan an answer she didn’t even hear. The doctors talked about reconstructive surgery and skin grafts, and Megan agreed with them because it was easier than listening. It didn’t matter; they could not restore the hand that had seared and twisted and melted in the dragon’s heat. They could not restore the breast rent and ruined by the dragon’s claws. They couldn’t stop the fevers that racked her, one opportunistic infection after another like the aftershocks of an earthquake. Her risk of thirteen different kinds of cancer had skyrocketed, and osteoporosis had already started in the affected arm and shoulder. They could not erase the dragon from her body, and she hated them for it. *** In death, a dragon reverts to the minerals from which it rises into life. Rhyolite, iron, bright inclusions of quartz, and—stabbing through—the dragon’s terrible obsidian bones, every edge sharper than cruelty. No dragon can be moved from where it dies; the last profligate expense of heat welds it to the geology of its death. The dragon that died on that strip of beach in Oregon turned the sand to glass for fifty yards. Strange glass, black and purple and green, twisted in shapes no glassblower could imagine. The government brought their Geiger counters, but there, they were lucky. This dragon had not risen from Trinity or the Nevada Proving Ground or Pikinni Atoll. Its poisonous heat did not survive it. *** After the dragon, her mother would not look at her. She came, and she yanked the curtains back, dazzling Megan’s aching eyes. She turned her smile like a call-me- Nancy searchlight on nurses and orderlies and doctors and interns; no one could escape, least of all Megan. She gossiped ruthlessly about women Megan knew, women who were healthy and successful and happy, women who were not lying in a white on white on white hospital room, women who had never seen a dragon. She brought flowers, daffodils and gaudy tulips and vast red roses, and the hospital room took them in and made them look fake and shrill, like her voice. Nancy came in and out like a cyclone, and she never looked at Megan. Megan lay and tried to remember the last time Nancy had looked at her, had seen her, had known her, and the next time Nancy came, Megan got her answer. “I found this picture of you, sweetie, and I thought you might like it.” Megan squinted and managed to focus on the picture; she hadn’t lost the burned eye, but it had almost no vision. From the portrait frame, her eighteen-year-old self smiled at her as dazzlingly as sunlight, unharmed and unaware that harm could come to her. She still called her mother “Mom,” not knowing yet the protection of irony, of distance, of pretending not to care. There was no dragon in her flat glass-protected world. And of course that was the daughter Nancy wanted to see when she was not-quite-looking at Megan: eighteen and blonde and going to prom with the boy she’d dated for three years. Going to college. Surfing just for something to do on the weekends, a way to hang out with her boyfriend and his friends. Even then, it hadn’t been true—even then the boys called her “Surfer Girl” more as a warning than a joke—but Megan had believed she could make it be true just as much as Nancy had. And she’d worked so fucking hard at it. Even when she quit school, got a job as an instructor, as her hair went sunbleached on top and brown underneath, she hid her failure from her mother as much as she could. For fifteen years, she’d hidden it, from her mother, from herself, and now she knew just how well she’d succeeded. Nancy said, “I’ll just leave this here where you can look at it.” She was gone before Megan got her eyes open again. Her eighteen-year-old self smiled at her from the bedside table. Megan snarled back. *** The beach in Oregon had no name. There was no need; it was just another piece of coastline, a narrow strip of sand hedged about by rocks. Sandpipers and sea lions knew it but did not name it, and if the whales gave it a name, they told no one but their children. It still has no official name, but it has a designation: DI-2009-002-177. The 177th dragon incursion known to the Department of Defense to have occurred on American soil, the second such in the year 2009. There was a polite skirmish between the federal government and the state of Oregon, which the state of Oregon won; DI-2009-002- 177 remains public land. Inevitably, locals and tour books and websites begin to call it Dragon’s Beach. *** For a long time after the dragon, she hated in the same way that she breathed. She hated the doctors and the nurses. She hated everyone who visited her. She hated herself. Above all else, she hated the dragon, the smell of it that would not leave her nostrils, the bright lidless regard of its eyes. She hated it for not killing her, for leaving her trapped in this ruined mockery of a body. She hated it for dying and leaving her to face the world alone. *** Her physical therapist was a rangy blonde woman who looked like her name should be Astrid or Olga. Actually, it was Jenny, and she was a third generation Los Angelina who spoke Spanish on the phone with her husband. She insisted that Megan move her arm in ways it no longer moved, insisted that she walk the length of the hall outside her room, and when she finished and collapsed, sweating and dizzy and nauseated, Jenny said, “Good. Tomorrow we’ll do it twice.” Before the dragon, Megan could have kept up with Jenny easily—she could have run Jenny into the fucking ground. Now that was as far gone from her as picking up a water glass with the hand she no longer had. *** No one knows the total of the dragon’s devastation. Human beings can be counted: five dead. Domestic animals can be counted: one dead, a Labrador retriever who died in the same instant as her owner, neither of them with even a chance to understand the death that stooped for them on silicate wings. Trees large enough to be landmarks can be remembered, although there is nothing left of them, only ashes. But even the best photographs, the most careful computer-generated reconstructions, can only guess at the squirrels which might have lived in the trees the dragon burned, the insects which were in its path, the earthworms which died beneath the heat and weight of its feet. There are craters left where the dragon stood, and the earth in them is scorched and lifeless. *** After the dragon, after the surgery, after all the therapy, she still wasn’t whole. They let her go home to a musty, dark apartment she almost didn’t recognize as hers. It was like walking through the home of someone who had died. Me, she thought. I died. She went into the bathroom, stared, frowning and only half seeing at the brightly colored poppies on the shower curtain. A dead woman had chosen that curtain, and now she could not remember what being that woman had felt like. The woman in the mirror would never have chosen that shower curtain. The shiny skin along her jaw creased strangely when she tried to smile, and the eye looked as false as glass. Her hair was growing out again, though it was still not long enough to cover the warped cartilage of her ear. “At least you won’t frighten small children anymore,” she said, her voice strange and hoarse and deep. The dragon had dropped her voice from soprano almost to tenor, and she could not accustom herself to it. Could not abide with it. “This isn’t me!” she cried, harsh as a crow. “I died—I died! This isn’t me!” The mirror shattered, great pieces falling into the sink and onto the floor. Her hand was bleeding. She looked at it for several moments, watching the blood welling red and reproachful in the cup of her palm, before she remembered what to do next. *** Sightseers come to Dragon’s Beach, but they don’t stay long. The rough glass of the beach is too dangerous to walk on, the earth crumbles horribly beneath your feet, and besides, there isn’t anything to see.