Stories for Chip by Nisi Shawl Read Free Book Online

cave I fashioned before you came. Bury you in layers of snow. How I have waited for the right season and for a man small enough that I could manage it. How I have waited for one young enough to be vulnerable to my touch. How I have dreamed that you would come. And I am sorry I did not have time to have sex with you. I would have enjoyed the release. But I cannot spare the energy.
    Did you know I begged to go on a sled ride? Lied and said that it was one of my favorite childhood memories. Cried that winters were so hard, if only I could go on a sled. And here you come. How wonderful, how perfect.
    So now that you are trussed and bound I see you are stirring. Yes, a bit awake, not fully. Do you dream? If so, perhaps you think this conversation is a dream, an invention. Well, let me tell you then. You see, I am a woman of my word. Hear me breathing in your ear, softly, so, so softly. Softly, but not silently. You, my attractive gremlin, have no sounds between your words. You are silent. There is a way we humans breathe and whistle between our words, pause and grunt or stumble and click. They are almost musical, the sounds between our words. When you remove the words, more than breath, there is a cadence almost like a fingerprint, individual and unique. I can even recognize different people without hearing them speak, just by hearing the sounds between the words.
    But your kind, your kind are nothing but words and silence. For humans, it is the soul that fills the spaces between our words, it is more than breath, it is soul. And you, my alien compadre, are without that breath, without that soul. So, I have always told you all. It is your silences that tell me. I have always told you the secret. Umm. Always.
    Foolish boy pretending to be human man. Such a foolish one. When they find you your legs and feet will be bound, your mouth tied shut. And you will be frozen in the snow. They tried everything. I knew one day they would slip. I have waited these years for them to slip and they did. In your terms, I too do not kill, my sweet pretender. But I know the truth, it is my hand that leads you to death.
    Before your dreams turn gray and then black I will have packed what stores I built up over the past year, along with the new stores you have brought, set out on the sled and escaped. It was not easy rationing my food and burying it a mile away from the hut so no one would suspect. It was not easy, although it was fun, teaching myself how to make rice wine to cover the tea’s bitter taste. Years of planning, my dear. Years of patience. Years of sighs and tears and so much patience. Things you would know little about, my alien breeder.
    If I am lucky I will find a human outpost and be given sanctuary. I heard a human yodel last winter. I had always found yodeling most irritating, but I tell you when I heard the breath in between each phrase I was so excited. I laughed and laughed. I knew it was coming off of a mountain miles away. Who knows? It may have come from another captive. What do I care? Then there will be two of us. Two to struggle, to survive.
    Yes, I could be recaptured and returned to a cage. But I will have some days of freedom. And I will take my freedom. And while I am free I will sing, and in between each note there will be the peaks and gullies of my spirit punctuating my breath. Always I am sound, even in my silences. Always you are silent even while you speak. So you have your glory, if only just before death, you have the secret. And I have my victory if only to be recaptured. Of course, there is always the chance that I will stay free. I take that chance. Ah. I will savor that chance. Ahhh.

Delany Encounters: Or, Another Reason Why I Study Race and Racism in Science Fiction
    Isiah Lavender III
    â€œWhy study race in science fiction?” I have answered that deeply personal question a couple of times now without including the influence of Samuel R. Delany’s work on me as a science fiction scholar. 1 My