I had to whack off before I could get on my bike. As I came on the sidewalk, I imagined those fat shiny lips closing around me again, and I started to cry. I couldn't get the nasty thoughts out of my head, things I'd never thought about before: the smell of dank sea coves and fish markets, the soft squish of a body encased in a layer of fat, with big floppy globes of it stuck on the chest and rear like cancers. And the thoughts were like a cancer in me.
As fast as my feet could pedal, I rode home to Uncle Edna. But I had a feeling I could never really go home again.
When Gretchen Was Human
Mary A. Turzillo
Mary A. Turzillo won the 1999 Nebula Award for Best Science Fiction Novelette for her story 'Mars is No Place for Children'. She was placed second in the 1997 Rhysling Awards for Speculative Poetry and was a finalist for the British Science Fiction Association Award.
She has published stories in Asimov's, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Science Fiction Age, Weird Tales, and anthologies in the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy and Japan, as well as two volumes of criticism and two chapbooks of poetry .
When not fending off the affectionate attentions of her cats, she is working on a novel about the future adventures of Kapera Smythe, a Martian girl who has a blood disease. She has a son, Jack Brizzi, Jr, and lives in Berea with her husband, writer Geoffrey A. Landis.
'Not everyone has a victim or a vampire inside them,' explains the author, 'but even those whose vampire-self is weak understand that the inner monster is lonely and craves love, while also fearing it. The passion that the vampire seeks and that the victim wants to give is an appalling and consecrated gift. Is it a metaphor for the love between the tyrant and willingly oppressed, or between the child and the parent who bleeds for the child's anguish?
'It is more. It is the deep core of ardour. We are afraid, and we desire.'
You're only human,' said Nick Scuroforno, fanning the pages of a tattered first edition of Image of the Beast . The conversation had degenerated from half-hearted sales pitch, Gretchen trying to sell Nick Scuroforno an early Pang-born imprint. Now they sat cross-legged on the scarred wooden floor of Miss Trilby's Tomes, watching dust motes dance in August four o'clock sun. Gretchen was wallowing in self-disclosure and voluptuous self-pity.
'Sometimes I don't even feel human.' Gretchen settled her back against the soft, dusty-smelling spines of a leather-bound 1910 imprint Book of Knowledge .
'I can identify.'
'And given the choice, who'd really want to be?' asked Gretchen, tracing the grain of the wooden floor with chapped fingers.
'You have a choice?' asked Scuroforno.
'See, after Ashley was diagnosed, my ex got custody of her. Just as well.' She rummaged her smock for a tissue. 'I didn't have hospitalization after we split. And his would cover her, but only if she goes to a hospital way off in Seattle.' Unbidden, a memory rose: Ashley's warm little body, wriggly as a puppy's, settling in her lap, opening Where the Wild Things Are , striking the page with her tiny pink index finger. Mommy, read !
Scuroforno nodded. 'But can't they cure leukaemia now?'
'Sometimes. She's in remission at the moment. But how long will that last?' Gretchen kept sneaking looks at Scuroforno. Amazingly, she found him attractive. She thought depression had killed the sexual impulse in her. He was a big man, chunky but not actually fat, with evasive amber eyes and shaggy hair. Not bad looking, but not handsome either, in grey sweat pants, a brown T-shirt and beach sandals. He had a habit of twisting the band of his watch, revealing a strip of pale skin from which the fine hairs of his wrist had been worn.
'And yet cancer itself is immortal,' he mused. 'Why can't it make its host immortal too?'
'Cancer is immortal?' But of course cancer would be immortal. It was the ultimate predator. Why shouldn't it hold all the high cards?
'The cells are. There's some pancreatic cancer cells that have been growing in a lab fifty years since the man with the cancer died. And yet, cancer cells are not even as intelligent as a virus. A virus knows not to kill its host.'
'But viruses do kill!'
He smiled. 'That's true, lots do kill. Bacteria, too. But there are bacteria that millennia ago decided to infect every cell in our bodies. Turned into let me think of the word. Organelles? Like the mitochondrion.'
'What's a mitochondrion?'
He shrugged, slyly basking in his superior knowledge. 'It's an energy-converting organ in animal cells. Different DNA from the host. You'd think you could design a mitochondrion that would make the host live for ever.'
She stared at him. 'No. I certainly wouldn't think that.'
'Why not?'
'It would be horrible. A zombie. A vampire.'
He was silent, a smile playing around his eyes.
She shuddered. 'You get these ideas from Miss Trilby's Tomes?'
'The wisdom of the ages.' He gestured at the high shelves, then stood. 'And of course the world wide web. Here comes Madame Trilby herself. Does she like you lounging on the floor with customers?'
Gretchen flushed. 'Oh, she never minds anything. My grandpa was friends with her father, and I've worked here off and on since I was little.' She took Scuroforno's proffered hand and pulled herself to her feet.
Miss Trilby, frail and spry, wafting a fragrance of face powder and mouldy paper, lugged in a milk crate of pamphlets. She frowned at Gretchen. Strange, thought Gretchen. Yesterday she said I should find a new man, but
