The Death and Rebirth of Anne Bonny

By Nancy Fulda

Award-winning author Nancy Fulda presents six stories of love, heartbreak, humor and dignity. Within these pages, curses transmute into blessings, friends become enemies, possible futures collide with nonexistent pasts, and imaginary friends take on corporeal form. From invisible pets to magical islands, from a child with autism to a dying multimillionaire, these stories will touch your heart and leave your thoughts spinning long after the last page has been read.

Nancy Fulda is a Phobos Award winner, a Jim Baen Memorial Award recipient, and a past Hugo and Nebula nominee. During her graduate work at Brigham Young University she studied artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing. In the years since, she has grappled with the far more complex process of raising three small children. All of these experiences sometimes infiltrate her writing.

Stories included in this collection: The Death and Rebirth of Anne Bonny, Saving Sammy, All or Nothing, In the Fading Light of Sundown, The Cyborg and the Cemetery, First Steps

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Fulda
• Release date: Sep 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781516312801

Nancy Fulda

Nancy Fulda is a Phobos Award Winner, a Vera Hickley Mayhew Award Recipient, and has been honored by Baen Books and the National Space Society for her writing. She studied artificial intelligence at Brigham Young University and is the mother of three children.

Book preview

THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF ANNE BONNY

When I was twelve my father used to take me hunting for buried treasure. We’d rove the coast near his beach house looking for devil-fingered trees and rocks shaped like dragons’ heads.

I felt close to him, out there between the sun and the sea, dreaming of studded chests and golden doubloons that pressed with the weight of history against your fingers. Waving goodbye and climbing in the taxi to head home; to Mom and winter life and the city... it always felt like yanking out a piece of my heart.

Maybe that’s why I started taking Aye with me.

Aye was a Macaw with bright eyes and scruffy feathers, and he didn’t really exist. Dad and I made him up one afternoon out on the pier, when I was pretending to be Anne Bonny and needed help escaping the law. Aye burst out of the palms and tugged Dad’s hat over his eyes while Anne Bonny, the bravest and noblest of all female pirates, jumped from the pier and fled into the underbrush.

The parrot showed up again the next day, and I named him Aye, as in Aye, Matie. Because he was a pirate’s bird.

I don’t think Dad could really see Aye, although he pretended pretty well.

Mom had no tolerance for imaginary pets. I still recall the morning she lectured me for half an hour on the importance of mature conduct while Aye hung upside-down from the chandelier, nibbling the iron links that supported the crystals and sending down occasional teardrops of sculpted glass.

When Mom found the broken pieces on the floor later that day, she fired the cleaning lady.

Aye spent the winters clawing my bed posts and nibbling at the corners of my books. He roved the beaches with Dad and me in the summers, searching for the scratches in the rocks where dying pirates had marked the way to secret treasure. We never found anything, but I believed – really, truly, in the way only children can – that some day we’d unearth a rich pile of doubloons.

And then one day I barged uninvited into Dad’s private den.

It was late. I’d been reading a biography of Anne Bonny; a scholarly work that didn’t shy from dirty details. Turned out she was just a plain old thief, not the selfless defender of justice I’d always believed in. I threw the door open without knocking and slammed the book down on Dad’s desk. Why’d you tell me all that stuff about Anne? I demanded. None of it’s true.

My Dad pulled off his spectacles, startled. If he’d had a chance to speak, maybe he would have found the words to soothe my anger. But just then my gaze dropped to the half-drawn treasure map on his desk.

Aye squawked and flew over and paced along the inked lines. He raised his head to look at me in that funny, sideways way parrots have.

I don’t know why it took me so long to realize that Dad’s weather-beaten treasure maps were fabrications. But that night, watching Aye’s tail sweep across the parchment, it was obvious. Dad had drawn the coastlines himself. The blood spatters were ink from an old fountain pen. The corners had been burned off in the flame from his desk candle.

It’s all a lie, isn’t it? I asked. It was all always a lie!

Stop shouting, Dad said. You’ll frighten Aye.

Aye doesn’t exist! I yelled. I felt bad afterwards, because Aye cocked his head and looked at me with the strangest, saddest expression in his bright eyes. But I was fuming, and I told myself I didn’t care.

My summers with Dad were the most important part