E-Book, Englisch, 408 Seiten
Huang / Clinton / Shvartsman Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders (Laksa Anthology Series: Speculative Fiction)
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-988140-06-3
Verlag: Laksa Media Groups Inc.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
E-Book, Englisch, 408 Seiten
Reihe: Laksa Anthology Series: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-988140-06-3
Verlag: Laksa Media Groups Inc.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)
Journey with twenty-one speculative fiction authors through
the fractured borders of human migration to examine the dreams,
struggles, and triumphs of those who choose-or are forced-to leave home
and familiar places.
Migration. A transformation of time, place, and being . . .
WHO ARE THE SHADES WITHIN US?
We
are called drifters, nomads. We are expatriates, evacuees, and
pilgrims. We are colonists, aliens, explorers; strangers,
visitors-intruders, conquerors-exiles, asylum seekers, and . . .
outsiders.
An American father shields his son from Irish
discrimination. A Chinese foreign student wrestles to safeguard her
family at the expense of her soul. A college graduate is displaced by
technology. A Nigerian high school student chooses between revenge and
redemption. A bureaucrat parses the mystery of Taiwanese time
travellers. A defeated alien struggles to assimilate into human culture.
A Czechoslovakian actress confronts the German WWII invasion. A child
crosses an invisible border wall. And many more.
Stories that
transcend borders, generations, and cultures. Each is a glimpse into our
human need in face of change: to hold fast to home, to tradition, to
family; and yet to reach out, to strive for a better life.
Featuring Original Stories by
Vanessa Cardui, Elsie Chapman, Kate Heartfield, S.L. Huang, Tyler
Keevil, Matthew Kressel, Rich Larson,Tonya Liburd, Karin Lowachee,
Seanan McGuire, Brent Nichols, Julie Nováková, Heather Osborne, Sarah
Raughley, Alex Shvartsman, Amanda Sun, Jeremy Szal, Hayden Trenholm, Liz
Westbrook-Trenholm, Christie Yant & Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
With An Introduction by Eric Choi & Gillian Clinton
Edited by Susan Forest & Lucas K. Law
Anthologies in this series (Strangers Among Us, The Sum of Us, Where the Stars Rise, Shades Within Us) have been recommended by Publishers Weekly, Booklist (American Library Association), Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, School Library Journal, Locus, Foreword Reviews, and Quill & Quire.
Praise for Shades Within Us
'.
. . addresses issues surrounding migration and borders at a very
poignant moment in history . . . despite being speculative, many of
these stories read like they were ripped from present-day headlines . . .
this collection do a great job of asking readers not only to reflect on
their own lives but also to consider the lives of others.' -Booklist (American Library Association)
'With
each story, the authors expand their settings and reality into a
universe of broader potential to make sense of the tensions that plague
the twenty-first century. Even as they represent foreign existences, the
problems remain the same-family, love, belonging, identity, survival . .
. take a fresh approach to their subjects and conjure terrifying
futures brought on by climate change, greed, and corruption of power.
Political and daring, this collection adds to the future imagined by
Philip K. Dick, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Aldous Huxley.' -Foreword Reviews
'.
. . Shades Within Us is a timely collection that invites us to ask
whether we still do (or still should) live in a space of national
borders and national definitions of identity. It invites us to use our
speculative imagination to think through new ways of understanding
selfhood in relation to the borders, boxes, and categories that are
placed around us.' -Speculating Canada (Derek Newman-Stille)
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
PORQUE EL GIRASOL SE LLAMA EL GIRASOL
Rich Larson
Girasol watches as her mother shakes the entanglers out onto the hotel bed. They are small and spiny. They remind her of the purple sea urchins she was hunting in the netgame she can’t play anymore, because they had to take the chips out of their phones and crush them with a metal rolling pin before they left Las Cruces. She is not sure she will be able to swallow one. It makes her nervous. Her mother plucks the first entangler off the bedspread and peers at it. Her mouth is all tight, how it was when they checked in and the clerk passed her the little plastic bag. “Peanut butter or grape jelly?” she asks, because she took a fistful of condiment packets from the breakfast room. “Jelly.” Her mother peels the packet open and rolls the entangler inside, globbing it in pale purple. Girasol takes it in her hand, getting her fingers sticky, and stares down at it. Ten points, she thinks. She puts it in her mouth. She gags it back up. It pokes in her throat and she thinks she can feel it squirming a little, like it is alive. Her eyes start to water. “Squeeze your thumb in your fist when you do it,” her mother says. “Squeeze hard.” It takes three tries, and when it finally stays down Girasol is gasping and trying not to sob. Her throat is scraped raw. Her mother rubs between her shoulder blades, then takes the second entangler and swallows it. Her face twitches just once. Then she goes back to rubbing Girasol’s back. “My brave girl,” she coos. “Brave girl, sunflower. Do you feel it?” “I don’t know. Yes.” For a few moments, Girasol feels only nausea. Then the entangler starts to prickle in her gut. Warmer, warmer. “You should feel it.” “I do. I feel it.” “It should feel like a little magnet inside your belly.” “I feel it.” Her mother’s voice is stretched out like it might snap. “Okay.” They test the entanglers outside, on the cracked and bubbled tarmac of the parking lot. Emptiness on all sides. Their motel is last in a ragged row of gas stations and stopovers, after which there is only the highway churning away to horizon. In the far far distance, they can see the Wall: a slouching beast of concrete and quickcrete latticed with swaying scaffold. Workers climb up and down it like ants; drones swarm overtop of it like flies. Girasol has never seen the Wall in real life before. It makes her feel giddy. Her teacher only showed them photos of the Wall in class, and had them draw a picture of it on their smeary-screened school tablets. While Girasol drew, the teacher stopped over her to ask, in a cheery voice, what her parents thought of the Wall. She gave the answer her mother told her always to give: their country was so good that bad people always wanted to come in and wreck it, because they were jealous, and the Wall was good because it kept them out. Then the teacher asked Fatima, and then Maria, but nobody else. Girasol is still staring off at the Wall when her mother’s charcoal-coloured scarf drops over her eyes. She feels her mother’s strong fingers knot it behind her head. “Count to ten, then try to walk to me.” “In English?” Girasol asks, because she knows the other way, too. She tried to teach it to Brock on the swings, but a supervisor heard and told her it was bad to be a show-off like that. “However you like.” Girasol plugs her ears so she won’t hear her mother’s footsteps, and she counts aloud, fast, unodostrescuatro, all the way to ten. When she stops counting, the world is very quiet. She can feel the sun soaking her hair and a breeze kicking up dust against her bare shins. “Mama?” she calls, even though she knows it is cheating. Her mother says nothing back; Girasol hears only the distant rumble of autotrucks on the highway. But in her belly, the entangler twitches. Tugs. Girasol thinks of the silly game they used to play in their apartment, where her mother asks ¿por qué el girasol se llama el girasol? and Girasol pretends not to know and asks why, why, why, and her mother lifts her up and says porque gira gira gira hacia el sol, and while she says it they spin in a dizzy circle, girando like a sunflower searching for the sun. Girasol turns on her heels, following the tug of the entangler. As she starts to walk, she remembers all the cracks in the tarmac and hopes she will not trip. Step, pause, step. She stretches out her hands as the tug grows stronger. Eventually she touches the rough fabric of her mother’s sleeve. She yanks the scarf down and beams. “Tag, you’re it.” Her mother nearly smiles. “They work,” she says. “Good.” They take turns with the scarf, practicing over and over, as the sun sinks, turning the dusty sky red and stretching their shadows long and spindly. They learn how to follow the entanglers’ subtle twists and turns so they can track each other even moving. Girasol is taking one last turn with the scarf over her eyes when the entangler in her stomach suddenly bucks and writhes. She thrusts out both hands, but instead of her mother’s shirt, she touches something slippery and caked with grime. Her nostrils fill with a smell like summer storms, but stronger and more chemical. She yanks the scarf down. The Cheshire Man is tall and pale and bony. His coat looks like it is made of moulting plastic, layers on dust-caked layers, and he wears a wide-brimmed hat. His eyes are set deep in shadows like bruises. “You lied,” he says, in a strange buzzing voice. “You said she was older. I don’t take children.” Girasol realizes her mother is behind her now, hands gripping her shoulders a little too tight. “She already swallowed the entangler,” she says. “I could take it back out,” the Cheshire Man says, and Girasol flinches away, as if he might plunge his long skeletal fingers right into her belly. He looks down at her, then back to her mother. “You understand the risks. She doesn’t.” “The risk is we die,” Girasol says. Her mother told her that, back before they left Las Cruces. The Cheshire Man crouches down, folding his long frame uncanny quick, and looks her in the eye. She can see the bones of his face almost poking out his skin. She tries not to be frightened. “And do you have an impeccable understanding of death, girl?” he asks, in that voice that sounds like he has wasps inside his mouth. Girasol inhales. “Auntie Maria is dead,” she says. “Papa is dead. Daniel and Juanita are dead. If we stay, we will be dead, or be in a build camp.” “What a good little loro you are.” The Cheshire Man straightens up, and slides his hands against each other, once, twice. Girasol sees his palms are crisscrossed with scars. “On your head be it,” he says, not to her but to her mother. “Come.” He turns and starts to walk, and Girasol sees an old dented van idling on the highway shoulder. She can just make out the moving silhouettes through the window. She walks hand-in-hand with her mother, whose grip is clenched slick, and remembers what loro means right as they arrive at the van. Parrot. The Cheshire Man hauls the door open, rust screeching on rust. There are men and women huddled inside. Some of the women have scarves around their heads. Some of the men have uncitizen brands on their brown forearms. They all look scared. Girasol pauses there. “I am not a parrot,” she tells the Cheshire Man. His mouth stretches out in a grin that seems too wide for his face, like it might split in two. “If only you were. You could fly instead of quantum walk.” Her mother nudges her from behind and she climbs inside. The van does not drive itself, which seems strange and dangerous to Girasol. The Cheshire Man steers it with the emergency wheel instead. At the same time, he swipes and jabs at the holo display on the dash, which shows swarms of red and green that make no sense to Girasol. He is skyping with three or four different people about windows and satspots and things she has never heard of before, his voice clipped tight as he switches between the calls. In the back of the van, nobody speaks. A very old woman is trying to swallow her entangler, even as they bounce and jolt along, and Girasol silently shows her to squeeze her thumb inside her fist while she does it. She gets it down before they leave the highway and carve out into the desert. The van’s tires plow up dust, and Girasol suspects this is how they are staying hidden from the drones, in this cloud of swirling sand. The sky outside is dark when they stop. Everyone troops out of the van to stand in a ragged semi-circle, blinking at each other in the gloom. The Wall is even closer now, close enough that Girasol can see the outer fence and the barracks and construction equipment. In all other directions she only sees desert. She can feel fear mixing up with excitement in her stomach, and she can feel the entanglers, too. Now that there are so many of them, it’s like being in a web of invisible cables, all of them stretched taut. She is glad she can still tell which one is her mother’s. It pulls a little stronger than the others. Girasol hears the sound of tearing circuitry and the glug-glug of something being poured; a moment later the sharp smell of gasoline makes her eyes water. The Cheshire Man emerges, wordlessly motioning them...
