The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

I’ll spin your corpses through the air and dash them against the cliffs.

But no, I am helpless again, always and ever a hostage to someone else’s desires. With ease, Artemis imposes her will on my wild fury. I feel the tension of her hands drawing me back like a bowstring. With one strong, smooth motion, she aims me at your fleet. Fiercely, implacably, I blow you to Troy.

Rachel Swirsky is on Destination Two of her bad-weather tour of the United States — Bakersfield, California, where the summer days regularly heat up to one hundred and fifteen degrees of desert sun.

Before moving west, she lived in Iowa City, where ice storms and blizzards provided a chilly background to her MFA studies at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Who knows where her next destination will be? Lava fields? The center of a black hole? An Alaskan shanty? She will sit, wrapped in synthetics and faux fur, shivering while she bangs out stories that appear in Tor.com, Subterranean Magazine, Weird Tales, and other venues, including year’s best collections from Strahan, Horton, and the VanderMeers. A slim volume of her fiction and poetry, Through the Drowsy Dark, was published by Aqueduct Press in May and her second collection, How the World Became Quiet: Myths of the Past, Present, and Future, is forthcoming from Subterranean Press.

NEBULA AWARD WINNER »» SINNER, BAKER, FABULIST, PRIEST; RED MASK, BLACK MASK, GENTLEMAN, BEAST Eugie Foster

FROM THE AUTHOR: Like every writer, I’m keenly interested to hear readers’ responses to my work, and “Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast” has garnered quite a bit of commentary online. I find it fascinating, the different impressions and messages that people have come away with from it, and I’ve been tempted more than once to chime in at various forums or blogs to say, “I meant to show this when I wrote this passage”; or, “It’s not gratuitous! I was foreshadowing that when I included scene X”; or, “no, no, the point I meant to convey was this.” But I’ve refrained because I’ve always held that once a story is published, it must resonate with, captivate, and provoke thought (or fail to) on its own merits, without me hovering over it like some anxious helicopter parent. Now that I’ve been invited to discuss “Sinner” on a public platform, I find myself trying to find and keep to that line between authorial autocracy and abstruse rambling. No illusions that I’ll succeed, but just wanted to let y’all know where I was coming from.

Some of my all-time most formative books — the ones that I read when I was in middle school and high school that made a lasting impression on me — are dystopias: George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. But “Sinner” is the first dystopian story I’ve written, and it didn’t come about from some poignant sociological or societal message that I wanted to convey, but rather from a wish to explore the more personal themes of identity and self. While I do regard the dystopian setting as integral, I consider the true theme to revolve around an examination of identity: the choices we make or don’t make, how our actions exemplify who we are against a backdrop of cultural roles and societal expectations, and the daily decisions that comprise our fundamental sense of self, as well as the external and internal influences that affect these decisions.

The individual has always interested me far more as both a writer and a reader — and as a person, really — than large group movements or overarching societal manifestos. As such, I think “Sinner” resonates the most with readers who come to it from a more intimate, psychological perspective rather than a world-building or sociopolitical outlook. In many respects, I think calling my novelette a dystopia is like calling the Diary of Anne Frank a war story. Neither classification is inaccurate, but the stories are more cogent as illustrations of an individual’s introspection and reflection and their inner journeys rather than the strife and dysfunction of a ravaged or broken society. Although, having said that, if folks consider “Sinner” a good dystopia, I’m happy with that too.

EACH MORNING IS a decision. Should I put on the brown mask or the blue? Should I be a tradesman or an assassin today?

Whatever the queen demands, of course, I am. But so often she ignores me, and I am left to figure out for myself who to be.

Dozens upon dozens of faces to choose from.

1. Marigold is for Murder

The yellow mask draws me, the one made from the pelt of a mute animal with neither fangs nor claws — better for the workers to collect its skin. It can only glare at its keepers through the wires of its cage, and when the knives cut and the harvesters rip away its skin, no one is troubled by its screams.

I tie the tawny ribbons under my chin. The mask is so light, almost weightless. But when I inhale, a charnel stench redolent of out houses, opened intestines, and dried blood floods my nose.

My wife’s mask is so pretty, pink flower lips and magenta eyelashes that flutter like feathers when she talks. But her body is pasty and soft, the flesh of her thighs mottled with black veins and puckered fat.

Still, I want her.

“Darling, I’m sorry,” I say. “They didn’t have the kind you wanted. I bought what they had. There’s Citrus Nectar, Iolite Bronze, and Creamy Illusion.”

“Might as well bring me pus in a jar,” she snaps. “Did you look on all the shelves?”

“N-no. But the shop girl said they were out.”

“The slut was probably hoarding it for herself. You know they all skim the stuff. Open the pots and scoop out a spoonful here, a dollop there. They use it themselves or stick it in tawdry urns to sell at those independent markets.”

“The shop girl looked honest enough.” Her mask had been carved onyx with a brush of gold at temples and chin. She had been slim, her flesh taut where my wife’s sagged, her skin flawless and golden. And she had moved with a delicate grace, totally unlike the lumbering woman before me.

“Looked honest?” My wife’s eyes roll in the sockets of her mask. “Like you could tell Queen’s Honey from shit.”

“My love, I know you’re disappointed, but won’t you try one of these other ones? For me?” I pull a jar of Iolite Bronze from the sack and unscrew the lid.

Although hostility bristles from her — her scent, her stance, the glare of fury from the eyeholes of her mask — I dip a finger into the solution. It’s true it doesn’t have the same consistency, and the perfume is more musk than honey, but the tingle is the same.

With my Iolite Bronzed finger, I reach for the cleft between her doughy thighs.

“Don’t touch me with that filth,” she snarls, backing away.

If only she weren’t so stubborn. I grease all the fingers of my hand with Iolite Bronze. The musk scent has roused me faster than Queen’s Honey.

“Get away!”