The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

Salon.com. It has been anthologized in various Year’s Best collections, nominated for three Nebula and four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best SF short story of the year. His short story collection, Pump Six and Other Stories, was a 2008 Locus Award winner for Best Collection, and his debut novel, The Windup Girl, was named by Time magazine as one of the ten best novels of 2009. Ship Breaker, his first young adult novel, was released in May 2010 from Little, Brown.

VINEGAR PEACE (or, The Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage) Michael Bishop

FROM THE AUTHOR: I wrote “Vinegar Peace” — in August of 2007 — because I had to. Our thirty-five- year-old son, Jamie, died on the morning of April 16, 2007, as one of thirty-two victims of a disturbed shooter on the campus of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Jamie, an accomplished digital artist who did lovely covers for four or five of my books, was holding forth in Room 2007 of Norris Hall in his German class more than two hours after his eventual murderer had slain two students in a dormitory on another part of campus. The administration failed to issue a warning — a warning that might well have saved many lives — in a timely fashion. However, some of its members secured their own offices and notified family members of this initial event; and so the worst school shooting in the history of the United States claimed our son, four other faculty members (including a man, Dr. Librescu, who had survived the Holocaust and who held a table against his classroom door until all his own students could escape), four of Jamie’s students, and twenty-one other young people in Norris Hall, not to mention the first two victims in West Ambler-Johnston dorm. Another twenty-eight students were wounded by bullets or injured leaping from upper-story windows. Some of them will live with their injuries the rest of their lives.

“Vinegar Peace” grew from this disaster and from a grief that I cannot imagine ever laying totally aside. Jeri and I mourn Jamie’s loss every day in some private way, and we think continually of all the other parents and loved ones of the slain and injured who will carry a similar burden with them until they die. We think, too, of the parents and loved ones of the dead and wounded from the United States’ optional war in Iraq, who long for their dead and who pray for their injured with an intensity not a whit different from our own. How ironic that our son died on American soil. How sad the wasted potential and the disfigured lives resulting from violence everywhere. And forgive me the inadequacy of these remarks. Clearly, I wrote this story because I could not address either my outrage or my grief in any other way. Finally, allow me to thank Sheila Williams for accepting the story for Asimov’s, Tony Smith for featuring it both on a podcast on StarShipSofa and in an anthology of StarShipSofa stories, and Diane Severson for a moving, heartfelt reading of the piece.

ON THURSDAY EVENING, your doorbell rings. Two small men in off-white shirts and black trousers, like missionaries of a dubious religious sect, stand outside your threshold giving you scary pitying looks.

Are you Ms. K—? they ask.

When you assent, they say they’ve come to transport you to the Vinegar Peace Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage thirty minutes north of your current residence in a life-help cottage of the Sour Thicket Sanatorium, where your father died seven years ago. But you don’t wish to be transported anywhere.

The smaller of the two small men, seizing your arm above the elbow, says that an order has come down and that they must establish you, before 8:30 P.M., in a used-adult orphanage — upon penalty of demotion for them and unappealable eviction for you. If you don’t cooperate, they will ransack your cottage and throw you out on the street with your musty belongings.

Why now? you ask. Neither stooge manifests a glimmer of humanity. After all, you’ve been an orphan — as they insist on terming your condition — since you were a vigorous fifty-nine. They should show some respect.

The man holding your bicep smirks. That’s why they call it a Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, he says. You get into one not because you’ve lost a parent. Your last living child has to die.

Jesus! blurts the other man. That goes against all our training.

You say nothing. You feel as if someone has opened a trap in your stomach and shoved in a package of wet cement. You sink to your knees, but not all the way because the smaller small man refuses to release your arm.

You feel you’ve just climbed twelve sets of stairs. Someone has injected stale helium into your head, inflating it to beach-ball size.

O God, you cry. O God, O God.

Even to yourself you sound like a scared puppy, not a woman. Your only living offspring, one of only two who bore your genes, has just died in the interminable War on Worldwide Wickedness, probably in a snowy province of R—.

Because Elise and her earlier-lost brother died childless years after Mick, your husband, passed away, you have passed from a state of natural, late-life orphanhood to the sad, wrong-way orphancy of the issue-shorn. Only someone similarly bereft can know your devastation.

Put your stuff in two plastic duffels, the cruel stooge says: Only two.

Please don’t make me leave my home, you beg of him. Just give me a knock-me-out so I can die.

Your lightheadedness persists: your dead daughter swims before your eyes like a lovely human swan, but the rock in your stomach keeps you from taking pleasure in her shock-generated image.

Against your will, you must say goodbye to Elise forever, as you once did to Mick and later to your darling son Brice.

Eventually, despite your protests, you cram clothing and toiletries into a duffel bag, and some file discs and image cubes into another. Then the cruel stooge and his only slightly kinder partner escort you out to the van for transport to Vinegar Peace.

Mr. Weevil, director of this Wrong-Way, Used-Adult Orphanage, looks maybe twenty-six, with slicked-back hair you’ve seen before on leading men in old motion pictures, but he greets you personally in the rotunda-like foyer, points you to a chair, and triggers a video introduction to the place. His head, projected on a colossal screen at gallery level, spiels in a monotone:

The death of your last surviving child (good riddance) in the War on Worldwide Wickedness makes you too valuable (unfit) to continue residing among the elder denizens (constipated old fools) of your life-help cottage (costly codger dump). So we’ve brought you here to shelter (ware house) you until our Creator calls you to an even more glorious transcendent residency above (blah-blah, blah- blah).

The talking head of Mr. Weevil — whose living self watches with you, his hands clasped above his coccyx — remarks that you can stroll inside the orphanage anywhere, but that you can never leave — on pain of solo confinement (for a first violation) or instant annihilation (for any later misstep).

The building has many mansions (rooms), viz., 1) Cold Room, 2) Arboretum, 3) Mail Room, 4) Guest Suite, 5) Chantry, 6) Sleep Bay, 7) Refectory, 8) Furnace Room, and 9) Melancholarium.