There are many forms of addiction, and one of the most insidious is a helpless devotion to the pain of memory, a self-imposed punishment to be chained to a jagged shoal made up of one moment in time. Her memory of Julie on that night—grief, betrayal, rage, guilt—dominated her life. It was a scar that consumed everything, one that she couldn’t help but pick at again and again.
Oblivion isn’t solace, but sometimes healing does require erasure, as does forgiveness.
Zoe
Alexander thinks that the dragons came to Mannaport first because of our pain.
I don’t think that’s true. Like I said, there’s nothing special about Mannaport. We have an average amount of heartache and grief, of abandonment and betrayal, no more and no less.
But the little dragons are special. They can’t be harnessed to do useful work, at least not the way the adults want. But just because a scalpel can’t be used to chop down a tree doesn’t mean that it can’t help.
I made this bowl of cranberry sauce for Yegong, and I’ll bring it over later. See how I put blueberries in it? Not quite the same shade as its eyes, but it’s the best I can do. Blue is such a pretty color.
Author’s note: For more on Maxwell’s demon and the thermodynamic properties of information erasure, see Charles H. Bennett, “The thermodynamics of computation—a review,” International Journal of Theoretical Physics 21, no. 12 (1982): 905–40.
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Nidhog
Jo Walton
First of all and last of all
And gnawing at the root
Beside the wall, beneath the hall,
In darkness absolute.
Far below feasts and fighting
Far from the folk of Earth
Relentless in her biting
At courage, love, and mirth.
The deepest dragon coils and curls
Nose twitches, ears flick
Through all the noise of all the worlds
She hears the mistle trick.
Light and the gods are far away
Bound fire will never bend
So broken promises today
Mean worlds and trees will end.
She learned the lore so long ago,
She silently keeps score,
The dragon in the shadow,
The worm at the world-tree’s core.
For when the new world comes to be
She’ll spread her wings and rise
And fill the world with dragons free
It is her promised prize.
Then dragon wings will crease the sky
Humans and gods will learn
That dragons speak, and dragons fly,
And dragonfire will burn!
Deep down impatient Nidhog toils
Until the tree shall fall
Around the root she curls and coils,
First of all, last of all.
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Where the River Turns to Concrete
Brooke Bolander
Brooke Bolander’s (www.brookebolander.com) fiction has won the Nebula and Locus awards and been shortlisted for the Hugo, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and British Fantasy awards. Her work has been featured on Tor.com and in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, and the New York Times, among other venues. She currently resides in New York City.
As one of Raymond Sturges’s hired goons finally forced his muscle car off the road—as the Dodge Super Bee jounced through the weeds, rolled over the high bank, and did a final handstand on its high beams—the rest of Joe’s memory came roaring back, and he knew himself.
The smell of sage and sewage. Shopping trolleys, dirty diapers. Styrofoam takeout clamshells bobbing along in the current, jaws flapping. The gleaming eyes of a roadrunner, herky-jerking down to the water’s edge for a drink.
Feathers like a gasoline spill. Ripple and rush from snout to tail tip. Oily fur. A girl’s kind eyes as she reached out, brave as anything, and—
Joe’s big hands clenched the steering wheel so hard there was an audible snap. The Super Bee landed nose first. The desert night splintered into shards.
The Super Bee had been a gift from Raymond, as if fishing Joe out of the gutter and giving him a name and a job hadn’t been gift enough. Most big important fellas, they came across a confused guy huddled in the farthest corner of a parking garage, naked as the day God made him, they didn’t stop until a valet, a bodyguard, and the shining black shell of a limo door were between them and the Public Disturbance. Raymond was not most big important fellas. The way he told the story, he’d done a mid-stride double take, said something along the lines of “Holy Jesus God, you’re a big son of a bitch,” and hustled a couple of his boys over to get the big son of a bitch in question covered up before anybody else more inclined to call a security guard happened along. Raymond Sturges knew an opportunity when he saw one. Any man planning on building a condo across a damn riverbed, mostly dry or otherwise, had to have some kinda damn vision. Either that or a screw loose.
Joe couldn’t remember any of it. Everything before the moment he woke up in Raymond’s clubhouse squeezed into a too-small dressing gown was the darkness beyond headlights on a two-lane mountain road. No clothes, no ID, no memory. No name. The rest of it hadn’t bothered him too much, but the lack of a name had felt important in a way he couldn’t quite pinpoint. He needed that. Not so much for other people, but as a way of grounding himself.
“Too scary-looking to be a Chaz or a Don,” Raymond had pronounced loftily. “Not blond enough to be a Brad, too pretty for a Vince. You got honest eyes, though. Weird color, but honest. Good square jaw. We’ll just call you . . . Joe. Had a dog named that when I was a kid. Very all-American. You got any problem with that?”
No, he didn’t have a problem with that. Something way back in his skull had rattled the blinds and hissed, but he ignored it and he was Joe. Easy as that. Big Joe Gabriel, one of Raymond Sturges’s boys. The one quietly summoning you to court above the nightclub downtown. The one stepping out of the darkness to Raymond’s left with a ballpeen hammer clutched in one long-fingered hand, mitts so big they made the tool look like a toy, a joke. Until it wasn’t a joke.
Nothing personal, his eyes always said. They were the color of a starling’s feathers, iridescent. One of Raymond’s ex-wives had sported a ring with a black opal inset as big as a quarter. That’s what Joe’s eyes looked like, he said, that gaudy piece-of-shit ring of Tina’s. Girls must go gaga when you flash those at ’em.
Joe didn’t get a lot of opportunity to flash his eyes at anybody. Mostly he just did as Raymond told him to do. He loomed. He punched. He broke what needed breaking, picked up whatever needed picking up, and dumped whatever required sawing apart and dumping in the farthest dusty canyons of Out East. Raymond got him set up in a little fleabag apartment property he owned called the Riverview and only took 10 percent out of Joe’s wages each month to make up the rent. The cheap doorknobs and drawer handles came off in Joe’s hands so regularly he learned other uses for a toolbox besides the ones his boss occasionally set him.