I know what Munna means, and Num, thought Sandrine, and for a moment experienced a spasm of stunning, utterly sexual warmth before she fully understood what had been given her: that she recognized the man in the photo. The roar of oceans, of storm-battered leaves, filled her ears and caused her head to spin and wobble. Her fingers parted, and the Polaroid floated off in an artificial, wind-machine breeze that spun it around a couple of times before lifting it high above the port and winking it out of sight, lost in the bright hard blue above the Sweet Delight.
Sandrine found herself moving down the yellow length of the long dock.
Tough love, Ballard had said. To be given and received, at the end perfectly repaid by that which she had perhaps glimpsed but never witnessed, the brutal, exalted, slow-moving force that had sometimes rustled a curtain, sometimes moved through this woman her hair and body now dark with mud, had touched her between her legs, Sandrine, poor profane lost deluded most marvelously fated Sandrine.
1997
From the galley they come, from behind the little dun-colored curtain in the dining room, from behind the bookcases in the handsome sitting room, from beneath the bed and the bloodstained metal table, through wood and fabric and the weight of years, We come, the Old Ones and Real People, the Cloud Huggers, We process slowly toward the center of the mystery We understand only by giving it unquestioning service. What remains of the clients and patrons lies, still breathing though without depth or force, upon the metal work-table. It was always going to end this way, it always does, it can no other. Speaking in the high-pitched, musical language of birds that We taught the Piraha at the beginning of time, We gather at the site of these ruined bodies, We worship their devotion to each other and the Great Task that grew and will grow on them, We treat them with grave tenderness as we separate what can and must be separated. Notes of the utmost liquid purity float upward from the mouths of We and print themselves upon the air. We know what they mean, though they have long since passed through the realm of words and gained again the transparency of music. We love and accept the weight and the weightlessness of music. When the process of separation is complete, through the old sacred inner channels We transport what the dear, still-living man and woman have each taken from the other’s body down down down to the galley and the ravening hunger that burns ever within it.
Then. Then. With the utmost tenderness, singing the deep tuneless music at the heart of the ancient world, We gather up what remains of Ballard and Sandrine, armless and legless trunks, faces without features, their breath clinging to their mouths like wisps, carry them (in our arms, in baskets, in once-pristine sheets) across the deck and permit them to roll from our care, as they had always longed to do, and into that of the flashing furious little river-monarchs. We watch the water boil in a magnificence of ecstasy, and We sing for as long as it lasts.
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Atkins, Peter “Dancing Like We’re Dumb,” Rumours of the Marvellous.
Ballingrud, Nathan “Sunbleached,” Teeth.
Barron, Laird “The Carrion Gods in Their Heaven,” Supernatural Noir.
Barron, Laird “The Men From Porlock,” (novella) The Book of Cthulhu.
Barron, Laird “The Siphon,” Blood and Other Cravings.
Baxter, Alan “Punishment of the Sun,” Dead Red Heart.
Bear, Elizabeth “Needles,” Blood and Other Cravings.
Bowes, Richard “Blood Yesterday, Blood Tomorrow,” Blood and Other Cravings.
Braunbeck, Gary A. “And Still you Wonder Why Our First Impulse is to Kill You,” The Monster’s Corner.
Carroll, Jonathan “East of Furious,” Conjunctions: 56, Terra Incognita.
Colangelo, Michael R. “Blacklight,” Chilling Tales.
Cowdrey, Albert E. “The Bogle,” F&SF January/February.
Davidson, Craig “The Burn,” The Cincinnati Review, April.
Dowling, Terry “The Shaddowesbox,” Ghosts by Gaslight.
Fowler, Christopher “An Injustice,” House of Fear.
Frost, Gregory “The Dingus,” Supernatural Noir.
Gresh, Lois “Wee Sweet Girlies,” Eldritch Evolutions.
Hand, Elizabeth “Near Zennor,” (novella) A Book of Horrors.
Hand, Elizabeth “Uncle Lou,” Conjunctions 57: Kin.
Harwood, John “Face to Face,” Ghosts by Gaslight.
Hirshberg, Glen “After-Words,” The Janus Tree and Other Stories.
Hodge, Brian “Hate the Sinner, Love the Sin,” Picking the Bones.
Hodge, Brian “Scars in Progress,” Demons.
Johnstone, Carole “Electric Dreams,” Black Static 23, July/August.
Jones, Stephen Graham “Little Monsters,” Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters.
Kiernan, Caitlín R. “The Maltese Unicorn,” Supernatural Noir.
King, Stephen “Under the Weather,” Full Dark, No Stars.
Langan, John “The Third Always Beside You,” Blood and Other Cravings.
Langan, John “The Unbearable Proximity of Mr. Dunn’s Balloons,” Ghosts by Gaslight.
Lees, Tim “Durgen’s Party,” Black Static 22, April/May.
McMahon, Gary “What They Hear in the Dark,” chapbook.
Miéville, China “Covehithe,” Guardian, May.
Nate Southard “The Blisters on My Heart,” Supernatural Noir.
Oliver, Reggie “A Child’s Problem,” (novella) A Book of Horrors.
Oliver, Reggie “Dancer in the Dark,” Mrs Midnight and Other Stories.
Oliver, Reggie “Hand to Mouth,” Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead.
Partridge, Norman “Vampire Lake,” Subterranean Tales of Dark Fantasy 2.
Piccirilli, Tom “But For Scars,” Supernatural Noir.
Pinborough, Sarah “The Screaming Room,” The Monster’s Corner.
Shearman, Robert “Alice Through the Plastic Sheet,” A Book of Horrors.
Shepard, Lucius “Ditch Witch,” Supernatural Noir.
Smith, Michael Marshall “Sad, Dark Thing,” A Book of Horrors.
Stalter, K. Harding “A Summer’s Day,” Black Static 24.
Tem, Melanie “Afraid of Snakes,” Portents.
Thomas, Lee “Comfortable in Her Skin,” Supernatural Noir.
Travis, Tia V. “Still,” Portents.
Tremblay, Paul G. “The Getaway,” Supernatural Noir.
Valentine, Genevieve “Bufonidae,” Phantasmagorium #1.
Wall, Alan “The Salt of Eliza,” Black Static 22, April/May.
Warren, Kaaron “All You Can Do is Breathe,” Blood and Other Cravings.