Aisa didn’t hesitate now, flinging herself into the air, her body arched, giving herself over with complete abandon.
It was like flying—the moment stretching to infinity, suspended in the limbo space between earth and weightless freedom. No fear, no hunger, no pain, nothing but this perfect moment.
Dying now, like this, it wouldn’t be so bad. If Balege didn’t catch her, she might fall poorly enough to snap her own neck. That wouldn’t be so bad. Quick and fast.
Where had that thought come from?
The world’s weight found her. Aisa fell.
And Balege caught her.
The silent music ended. Aisa curtsied. Balege bowed. The illusory audience applauded. The phantom curtain came down.
Facing each other, their arms dropped away, no longer speaking the language of bodies and movement, relegated to the far less elegant communication of words and speech.
“You always catch me,” Aisa said.
“Yes,” Balege replied, softly almost a whisper.
“I had a thought, this time. What would happen if you didn’t?”
He straightened and stepped back, his eerie, undead eyes shifting sidelong. “You always forget. No matter how often we dance and I remind you, you forget.”
Aisa frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“One time, I didn’t catch you.”
Sudden outrage and disbelief, disproportionately livid and irrational. “Don’t be ridiculous. You always catch me.”
“Our first night on this stage. Remember again, Aisa.”
She wanted to stomp her foot. “This is our first night.” Lightning flash images skittered and popped behind her eyes. “Isn’t it—?” Her words faltered, taking her indignation with it. Hunger. So much hunger.
“You came here, why?” Balege asked, his voice gentle, coaxing.
She shivered, suddenly chilled. “After the theaters closed down, I–I sold myself into slavery. Better to be a fed slave in the upper city than starving and free in the slums.” Bruises and humiliation. “But the man I sold myself to, he wanted me to do such unspeakable things.” The instrument of her art desecrated. Blood on the walls. “I ran away. Found this place, this stage.”
“And I found you here, dancing.”
Aisa lifted her head. “How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was the light of your candle, or the shifting shadows through the cracked walls. I was drawn to you as those who have succumbed to the death plague are drawn to ravage and devour the still-living. But when I saw you dancing Snowbird’s Lament, it was like an awakening. Mesmerized, I watched and remembered you and me, and us. You were afraid of me at first. But in the end, we did as we always do.”
“We danced,” she said.
“Yes.”
“And then?”
“At the end, right before Makira’s final vault off the stage, you called to me, ‘Don’t catch me! Let me go!’“
Hunger. Ceaseless, ravenous hunger.
“I still tried to catch you,” Balege said.
Juxtaposed images of pale flesh transposed with gray, splattered bursts of crimson across faded posters in the sunlight. “But I didn’t let you,” Aisa murmured. “I twisted away at the last moment.”
“Yes.”
“I fell.” Aisa lifted her hands to her face, noted the dead flatness of her skin, the black, broken nails. She listened to the still-quiet in her chest where her heart should beat, inhaled the scent of rotting flesh, her own. Her once fine dress, not just ragged and grimy, but grave-worn with filth and gore.
“We hunt and feed together,” he said. “You don’t remember who I am, who you are except when we’re dancing. But I do. Somehow, I do. I remind you.”
Aisa smoothed the soiled creases of her skirt, tucked a wisp of matted hair back into its unraveling chignon. All dancers knew their springtime was short. A dancer’s fate was to break or fade away, a short season of glory, if they were lucky. And Aisa had been lucky, very lucky. Until all the luck went away, for everyone. But this was a new kind of luck.
It would do.
“Remind me again, Balege,” she said and lifted her arm, fingers outstretched. Dance with me.
He bowed. “From the top. One-two, one-two-three-four.”
The tarnished moon spilled through the cracked and rent ceiling of the dilapidated theater, the only audience to the two dancers as they leaped and twirled together in matchless harmony. Dead flesh moved together with graceful elegance, lithe and nimble and strong, his and hers. An eternal performance.
And when it ends, he catches her.
“THE FISHER QUEEN”
ALYSSA WONG
Besides this Nebula Award nomination, Alyssa Wong has been nominated for Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, British Science Fiction Association, and World Fantasy Awards. “The Fisher Queen” was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction.
My mother was a fish. That’s why I can swim so well, according to my father, who is a plain fisherman with a fisherman’s plain logic, but uncanny flair for the dramatic. And while it’s true I can cut through the water like a minnow, or a hand dipped over the edge of a speedboat, I personally think it’s because no one can grow up along the Mekong without learning two things: how to swim, and how to avoid the mermaids.
Mermaids, like my father’s favorite storytale version of my mother, are fish. They aren’t people. They are stupid like fish, they eat your garbage like fish, they sell on the open market like fish. Keep your kids out of the water, keep your trash locked up, and if they come close to land, scream a lot and bang pots together until they startle away. They’re pretty basic.
My sisters tried to talk to a mermaid once. It was caught up in one of Dad’s trammel nets, and when they went to check the net out back behind the house, they found this mermaid tangled in it. It was a freshwater one, a bottom-feeder, with long, sparse hair whose color my sisters still argue about to this day. Iris, the oldest, felt bad for it and made May splash some water on its fluttery gills with her red plastic pail. She asked the mermaid if it was okay, what its name was. But it just stared at her with its stupid sideways fish eyes, mouth gaping open and closed with mud trickling out over its whiskers. Then Dad came home and yelled at Iris and May for bringing in the nets too early and touching the mermaid, which probably had sea lice and all kinds of other diseases.
I was just a kid then, but my sisters tell that story all the time. Iris is a marine biologist wannabe, almost done with high school but too dumb to go to university, who lectures us on fishes like we haven’t been around them our whole lives. She sleeps with the biology textbook I stole from the senior honor kids’ classroom under her pillow. May doesn’t give a shit about school and will probably get married to one of the boys living along the dock so she doesn’t have to repeat tenth grade again. The mermaid is one of those shared childhood memories they have, a little spark of magic from a time when they still believed that our mom really was a fish and maybe that mermaid was a cousin or something.
But I’m fifteen now, a full-fledged deckhand on a trawler and too old to be duped by some story Dad made up so he wouldn’t have to explain why our very human mom took off and dumped the three of us with him. I don’t care about stories of kids touching a glorified catfish either. It actually makes me sad, to think that my sisters really believed that our mom could be a dumb animal like that mermaid.