Nancy Kress (www.sff.net/people/nankress/) lives in Seattle, Washington, with her husband, Jack Skillingstead. She is the author of twenty-six books: sixteen science fiction novels, three fantasy novels, four short story collections, and three books on writing. Her stories are rich in texture and psychological insight, and have been collected in Trinity and Other Stories (1985), The Aliens of Earth (1993), and Beaker’s Dozen (1998). She has won two Nebulas and two Hugos for them, and been nominated for a dozen more of these awards. Published in 2010 were Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories, her fourth collection, and Dogs, a bio-thriller. She published several fine new stories in 2011, and her novella, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall, is out as a chapbook in 2012.
“Eliot Wrote” was published online at Lightspeed. It is a story about the powerlessness of a fiercely intelligent fifteen-year-old kid who has lost his mother and is now losing his hospitalized father, whom he loves and needs, and who uses revisions of his high-school writing assignment on metaphor to explore his feelings. It is a story that interrogates ageism.
Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.
J.B.S. HaldaneEliot wrote: Picture your brain as a room. The major functions are like furniture. Each in its own place, and you can move from sofa to chair to ottoman, or even lie across more than one piece of furniture at the same time. Memory is like air in the room, dispersed everywhere. Musical ability is a specific accessory, like a vase on the mantel. Anger is a Doberman pinscher halfway out of the door from the kitchen. Algebra just fell down the heat duct. Love of your sibling is a water spill that evaporated three weeks ago.
Well, maybe not accurate, Eliot thought, and hit DELETE. Or maybe too accurate for his asshole English class. What kind of writing assignment was “Explain something important using an extended metaphor”?
He closed his school tablet and paced around the room. Cold, cheerless, bereft—or was that his own fault? Partly his own fault, he admitted; Eliot prided himself on self-honesty. He could turn up the heat, pick up the pizza boxes, open the curtains to the May sunshine. He did none of these things. Cold and cheerless matched bereft, and there was nothing to do about bereft. Well, one thing. He went to the fireplace (cold ashes, months old) and from the mantel plucked the ceramic pig and threw it as hard as he could onto the stone hearth. It shattered into pink shards.
Then he left the apartment and caught the bus to the hospital.
Eliot’s father had been entered into Ononeida Psychiatric Hospital ten days ago, for a religious conversion in which he saw the clear image of Zeus on a strawberry toaster pastry.
