Read Online Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History by Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer
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can help you get tidied up?”
The frown is deepening into a proper scowl. “Hardly an invalid.”
“We have to do
something
with you, can’t go about looking as if – as if you’re about to run off to the hills to paint yourself
blue
.”
That’s got me a smile, at least. Both of us that proud streak all the way back to when it was the Romans we were wanting out of our country. When I come back in from fetching hot water from the bath Trevor’s sat himself in the chair at the dressing-table, gazing absently at the blank-faced oval of the missing mirror as he twirls in his fingers the white feather of cowardice that chit had handed him, when the shame ought to have been hers. “Suppose I ought to get on with learning, yeah. Blind men can do it, after all.”
I’m not going to tell him what I’d seen a blinded man do, in one swift moment when his nurse had set down the razor. I dampen the brush and draw it in sturdy swirls across the face of the cake of soap. How many times I’d watched my new husband do this in those few blissful months before the review-board and the letters from the ambulance-corps and the decision we’d made that even this service was still complicity in the act of war. Better to go to prison, than make it one bit easier for someone else to kill in our names.
(He’d come to see me in my sentence over the demonstration and when we were only stepping out, but I’d not been let to visit him. Barely given leave to write, he was. Should have been there to meet him – should have been there with our baby in my arms. Should, should, should. First casualty of war.)
Trevor closes his eyes as I touch the lathered brush to his face, as if he can’t bear to look at me. (No, he’s just imagining how to guide his own hand without a glass.) “Smells nicer than the barber’s soap,” he says.
“Keep yourself still, do you want to lose an ear?”
I have a go at pulling the safety-razor in a slow stroke down his cheek. At least he’s young enough never to have even tried to fuss with a cut-throat for himself, father a sensible enough man to have started his sons straight on the newest miracle of modern invention. Trevor reaches up to join his fingers to mine on the handle, easing the angle. “More like…”
And then it’s just the soft rasp of the blade against whiskers, his patient submission to a necessity he’d never have asked of me. Not a drop of blood spilt, when I’ve finished. I’m proud of that, I believe.
We’ll sort what’s to be done for his hair when it comes to it.
Trevor’s still not looking at me even as he wipes his chin with the flannel. “Can imagine Ned’s first go at shaving,” he says.
It had involved muttered words that I’m ashamed to admit I knew and Violet on her knees in the bath quietly sweeping up bits of the one mirror in the house that Iris wouldn’t get to break. (We try not to think badly of Ned, that if he’d felt led to run out and bloody
enlist
it was his to say. But I know we’ve all thought it. As well we’re not Ireland, I can only think what he’d be off about.) “Ned’s still Ned,” I say. “More’s the pity.”
“Least he can walk down the shops and go to a barber. Be happy to see
him
, call him a hero and all.” And at last he lifts those great slate-coloured eyes to mine, moody as a storm coming in over the water. “You deserve better than this, Helen, you should leave me.”
I’ve seen this look before, in Rouen and Cologne and the streets of my own city. Glaring limbless men feeling themselves useless, dangerous, unmanned. Women who only stared at nothing our innocent eyes could see. The children who’d given up hope of love or bread. “Stood up in front of Meeting and
promised
, we did. Not forgotten that?” I can’t but
tch
at him, the look dawning in those glorious eyes. “I love you, Trevor, always have, since you brought me the sandwiches. Though why you brought me a pot of tea when I was chained to
The frown is deepening into a proper scowl. “Hardly an invalid.”
“We have to do
something
with you, can’t go about looking as if – as if you’re about to run off to the hills to paint yourself
blue
.”
That’s got me a smile, at least. Both of us that proud streak all the way back to when it was the Romans we were wanting out of our country. When I come back in from fetching hot water from the bath Trevor’s sat himself in the chair at the dressing-table, gazing absently at the blank-faced oval of the missing mirror as he twirls in his fingers the white feather of cowardice that chit had handed him, when the shame ought to have been hers. “Suppose I ought to get on with learning, yeah. Blind men can do it, after all.”
I’m not going to tell him what I’d seen a blinded man do, in one swift moment when his nurse had set down the razor. I dampen the brush and draw it in sturdy swirls across the face of the cake of soap. How many times I’d watched my new husband do this in those few blissful months before the review-board and the letters from the ambulance-corps and the decision we’d made that even this service was still complicity in the act of war. Better to go to prison, than make it one bit easier for someone else to kill in our names.
(He’d come to see me in my sentence over the demonstration and when we were only stepping out, but I’d not been let to visit him. Barely given leave to write, he was. Should have been there to meet him – should have been there with our baby in my arms. Should, should, should. First casualty of war.)
Trevor closes his eyes as I touch the lathered brush to his face, as if he can’t bear to look at me. (No, he’s just imagining how to guide his own hand without a glass.) “Smells nicer than the barber’s soap,” he says.
“Keep yourself still, do you want to lose an ear?”
I have a go at pulling the safety-razor in a slow stroke down his cheek. At least he’s young enough never to have even tried to fuss with a cut-throat for himself, father a sensible enough man to have started his sons straight on the newest miracle of modern invention. Trevor reaches up to join his fingers to mine on the handle, easing the angle. “More like…”
And then it’s just the soft rasp of the blade against whiskers, his patient submission to a necessity he’d never have asked of me. Not a drop of blood spilt, when I’ve finished. I’m proud of that, I believe.
We’ll sort what’s to be done for his hair when it comes to it.
Trevor’s still not looking at me even as he wipes his chin with the flannel. “Can imagine Ned’s first go at shaving,” he says.
It had involved muttered words that I’m ashamed to admit I knew and Violet on her knees in the bath quietly sweeping up bits of the one mirror in the house that Iris wouldn’t get to break. (We try not to think badly of Ned, that if he’d felt led to run out and bloody
enlist
it was his to say. But I know we’ve all thought it. As well we’re not Ireland, I can only think what he’d be off about.) “Ned’s still Ned,” I say. “More’s the pity.”
“Least he can walk down the shops and go to a barber. Be happy to see
him
, call him a hero and all.” And at last he lifts those great slate-coloured eyes to mine, moody as a storm coming in over the water. “You deserve better than this, Helen, you should leave me.”
I’ve seen this look before, in Rouen and Cologne and the streets of my own city. Glaring limbless men feeling themselves useless, dangerous, unmanned. Women who only stared at nothing our innocent eyes could see. The children who’d given up hope of love or bread. “Stood up in front of Meeting and
promised
, we did. Not forgotten that?” I can’t but
tch
at him, the look dawning in those glorious eyes. “I love you, Trevor, always have, since you brought me the sandwiches. Though why you brought me a pot of tea when I was chained to
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