Fiction River: Editor's Choice: Fiction River: An Original Anthology Magazine, #23

By Annie Reed, Jamie McNabb, Dave Raines and 12 more

Editing an anthology can prove tricky business. Wonderful stories sometimes find themselves on the rejection pile simply because they do not fit in the editor's vision of that anthology. So, editor Mark Leslie decided to save some of those amazing stories for this latest volume of Fiction River: Editor's Choice. These tales run the gamut from YA fantasy to cozy crime to slipstream to horror. And they represent the incredible diversity of styles, voices, and genre that inspired Adventures Fantastic to call Fiction River "one of the best and most exciting publications in the field today."

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Jun 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781386430469

Book preview

Fiction River: Editor’s Choice

Fiction River: Editor’s Choice

An Original Anthology Magazine

Edited by Mark Leslie

Series Editors

Kristine Kathryn Rusch & DEan Wesley Smith

WMG Publishing

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Introduction to The Four Thirty-Five

The Four Thirty-Five

Introduction to Bertie’s Choice

Bertie’s Choice

Introduction to Mirror Skillz

Mirror Skillz

Introduction to Holding the Door

Holding the Door

Introduction to Trees

Trees

Introduction to The Blood is on the Wall

The Blood is on the Wall

Introduction to The Glass Girl

The Glass Girl

Introduction to Breaking Kayfabe

Breaking Kayfabe

Introduction to Lemonade and Larceny

Lemonade and Larceny

Introduction to First Day, Every Day

First Day, Every Day

Introduction to Touch

Touch

Introduction to The Rock of Ages

The Rock of Ages

Introduction to He Saw

He Saw

Introduction to Bad Dates Bite

Bad Dates Bite

Introduction to No Further

No Further

About The Editor

Acknowledgments

The Fiction River Series

Fiction River Presents

Copyright

Foreword

Impossible Things

Okay, I admit it: I’m the skeptical one. I’m the one who wonders Is that really possible? or thinks That can’t work. And then a little nagging voice in my head tacks on another question. That can’t work. Or can it?

I remember the day Mark Leslie and Dean Wesley Smith came up with the idea for this volume. We were already deep into our annual anthology workshop. That particular year, we had decided to make all of the anthologies the professional writers were writing for Fiction River anthologies. (Sometimes we use other anthologies that our editors are editing for.)

As the workshop got under way, Mark got antsy, as he had the year before, thinking that some good stories were going to have to be discarded for length, sometimes, or because they had the same theme as another story a different editor liked better.

So Mark pulled me and Dean aside and suggested this volume. Dean was all for it. Dean, the ultimate risk-taker. He thought it perfect.

Me, I wondered how this would work. After all, the Editor’s Choice anthology would have no unifying theme, no original vision.

What I had missed was that the idea of rescuing great stories was a theme, and Mark’s suggestion was the original vision. He had a list of stories he desperately wanted for this anthology, and as editor after editor picked those stories, he got quietly frustrated.

Because we hadn’t told the writers we were adding another anthology into the workshop, Mark couldn’t say in the moment that he wanted one of the stories the other editor didn’t want. Mark had to wait until the final day, a Saturday, to make his big reveal.

The shock and awe was fun. Then came the hard work of editing. Putting a story order together seemed particularly daunting to me, since he was combining horrific apocalyptic stories with stories that had a mandated happy ending, crime stories with science fiction stories.

I shouldn’t have worried. Mark Leslie does five impossible things before breakfast every day. He has three high-demand jobs: he’s the director of Kobo Writing Life as well as a writer himself. He edits for other publishers besides us. And he travels everywhere for all of those jobs. He receives more email in a day than I get in a month.

Yet somehow he found time to read the million-plus words for that anthology workshop, put a list of wants together, and then edit this volume. As I read through it, I marveled at how he handled the dark tales and the light tales, making a coherent whole. I came away from the anthology aware that the world can be bleak, but it also has a thousand rays of light.

When we designed Fiction River in 2012, we planned to conduct all kinds of experiments in editing. We try to do things no one has done before.

What Mark did here was something I couldn’t even have imagined five years ago. This experiment not only worked, it resulted in a volume I just love.

Welcome to Fiction River: Editor’s Choice. Read it front to back. I promise you’ll have a more rewarding experience that way.

I sure did.

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Lincoln City, Oregon

December 5, 2016

Introduction

Choosing Serendipity

The Editor’s Choice anthology in the Fiction River series came about almost the same way that every single anthology I have edited to date came about: An odd combination of being in the right place at the right time with the right idea and the right people.

For the first anthology I edited, North of Infinity II, I was a contributor who became frustrated with the delays when the original editor went missing in action. I raised my hand and suggested to the publisher that if he wanted the book to actually happen, I should simply take over. I did—dropping my own story from the collection, refining a few other stories and seeing the book through to completion in 2006.

In 2009, with a desire to draw foot-traffic into the University bookstores at McMaster (Hamilton, Ontario), Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario) and Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta) in order to see the Espresso Book Machines our stores had invested in (a large machine the size of about two or three large photocopiers that prints, binds and trims a trade paperback book in about 15 minutes right on the spot–see ondemandbooks.com), the directors of the other bookstores and I came up with a Halloween-themed anthology of horror stories set on our campuses and other Canadian colleges. I solicited stories directly from authors such as Kelley Armstrong, Julie E. Czerneda, Nancy Kilpatrick, Susie Moloney and Douglas Smith. Campus Chills debuted that October with multi-author book launches featuring all thirteen contributors at four different bookstore locations within a 48-hour time period.

Tesseracts Sixteen: Parnassus Unbound was published in the Edge Publications award-winning Tesseracts series in 2014, after I repeatedly pushed to find a new publisher for what was supposed to originally be North of Infinity III, the follow-up to the first anthology I had taken over.

And the book that you hold in your hands was the result of an evolution of a brain-child of sitting in the back of the amazing annual Fiction River workshops that Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch created and lead. In 2014, I had the pleasure of being one of the writer participants as Kris, Dean, John Helfers, Kerrie L. Hughes, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta walked a room of about sixty writers through the detailed complications as well as the highs and lows of the editorial decision process of a batch of stories they had all submitted to six themed anthologies.

In an America’s Got Talent game-show style fashion, each editor spent a few minutes providing their own reaction to the story, finishing with whether or not they would buy the story if they were editing that anthology. The final editor to speak on each story was the actual purchasing editor: the one who, if they actually said yes, would be paying pro rates for that particular piece.

Having been through the editorial process in seclusion and having been the subject of both rejections and acceptances, I found this transparent display to the writers of what an editor goes through to be both enlightening and inspirational. The bottom-line message, since all writers in the workshop were already pre-screened as high quality professional writers (you couldn’t get into the workshop unless your writing had already reached a particular level of professionalism), is that often it’s not that there’s anything wrong with a story that is rejected—it’s just not for that particular editor at that particular time for that particular anthology.

One of the most common elements of the workshop that continued to occur, however, was an editor, looking to fill a book with about 75,000 words of stories, ended up having a list of stories that would easily reach over 100,000 words. And, despite loving all the tales, they’d have to reveal the process by which great stories that they adored would have to be cut—again, not because they weren’t good enough, but because of budgetary and space constraints for that project.

That, to me, was both the magic and the ultimate frustration; because writers who made it so close to the final stage of acceptance only to be left on the cutting room floor knew they had written something solid, but hadn’t quite made it.

In 2014, in a quick and private consultation with Dean during one of the breaks, I offered up some of my budget money from Kobo Writing Life (Kobo’s platform for indie authors and small publishers to publish to Kobo’s global catalog of eBooks available in 190 countries) to a couple of the editors (Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Kevin J. Anderson) allowing them to purchase three extra stories each for a special digital-only and Kobo-only edition of that year’s Past Crime and Pulse Pounders anthologies.

So when I returned to the workshop in 2015, this time with my writer hat pushed aside and my Kobo hat more firmly placed atop my head, Dean and I brainstormed a fresh idea that would serve two purposes: it would allow me to continue to expand the experimental and collaborative publishing I was intending on doing via Kobo Writing Life, and it would benefit some of those writers who found their stories on the dreaded cutting room floor.

The idea was to create a special edition of Fiction River and include either stories that the original editor adored but had to cut due to space or thematic restraints, or a story that one or more of the non-buying editors felt strongly about and couldn’t believe the buying editor didn’t want. (And you have to admit, as a writer, seeing two or more editors passionately argue about your story is a pretty surreal experience.) From those tales, I would make my own final selection in an attempt to create a unique fresh anthology.

The special Editor’s Choice edition would ideally balance tales from among the themes for that year which were: Haunted, Visions of the Apocalypse, Superpowers, Last Stand, Hidden in Crime and Pulse Pounders: Adrenaline.

In 2015, during the workshops, I took to the stage as an additional editorial opinion. The writers (and most of the other editors) had no idea what Dean and I had conspired to do—we didn’t want the knowledge of what I was up to to affect their own raw and natural decisions. As each editor’s day finished, I would reveal (just to that editor) what I was doing and the stories from their short list that made it on to my own personal Editor’s Choice short list.

And, after six days of the regular anthology workshops, we revealed to the writers the special surprise: that there was an additional anthology they didn’t even know they were vying for. I presented a long list that, over the course of the day and with much debate and heated, yet fun, arguments from the editors of the other volumes, I ended up narrowing the list down to the stories you find in this volume.

I think it’s interesting and perhaps ironic that even with this particular anthology, I had far more great stories that I wanted to include, but wasn’t able to fit into the overall volume I was crafting in my mind, again, for most of the same reasons the original editors decided to pass on the tales. Just think about that for a moment, if you will. This means that, from the great stories I ended up not pulling in to my vision for Editor’s Choice, you might still fill an additional volume. That speaks to the quality of the writers attending these workshops.

The stories selected are what I feel display a beautiful representation of so many of the wonderful stories, styles, voices and genres that were read in the well over million and a half words of tales submitted at that year’s workshop. On the following pages you will find yourself falling into tales that involve paranormal mystery, military sci-fi, manga magic realism, YA fantasy, mainstream sports fiction, apocalyptic and dystopian tales, slipstream, cozy crime mystery, rock star superheroes and domestic horror.

In other words, they are typical of the thought-provoking and mind-expanding reads you’ve likely already come to expect from a Fiction River collection.

I hope that, like me, you choose to enjoy these spectacular tales.

—Mark Leslie

Hamilton, Ontario

June 2016

Introduction to The Four Thirty-Five

Fiction River series editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch calls Annie Reed one of the best writers I’ve come across in years. In addition to appearing frequently in Fiction River (most recently in the volumes Risk Takers, Recycled Pulp, Sparks and Last Stand), Annie’s short fiction also appears regularly in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and in The Uncollected Anthology, stories written quarterly on the same theme. Her story from Fiction River: Hidden in Crime went on to be selected for Year’s Best Crime and Mystery Stories 2016, edited by John Helfers and Kristine Kathryn Rusch alongside stories by Joyce Carol Oates and Mary Higgins Clark.

Annie’s longer works include the private eye novels Pretty Little Horses and Paper Bullets, the crime novels A Death in Cumberland and the upcoming Missing in Cumberland, and the suspense novel Shadow Life, written under the pen name Kris Sparks.

In Annie’s The Four Thirty-Five, which was originally written for Haunted, you are about to read a tale that wonderfully poked at so many elements of storytelling that I enjoy.

Several years ago, Annie and a friend spent a few days at Lake Pend Orielle in Northern Idaho. One afternoon while I was exploring (writers call this ‘researching’), Annie says, I came across an old railroad trestle nearly hidden by the thick pines that surround the lake. I jotted down a few notes about the trestle and an idea I had for a story, then promptly forgot about the whole thing. For years. Until I got the assignment that turned into ‘The Four Thirty-Five,’ which finally let the idea grow into a complete story.

Annie’s complete story brilliantly pulls together the best elements from an episode of The Twilight Zone, an M. Night Shyamalan film, and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

But enough from me. Let’s follow Annie on a walk down the tracks as she introduces us to Chet and his perceptions and observations of a tourist town from his hidden space beneath the trestle.

The Four Thirty-Five

Annie Reed

At first Chet thought the kid belonged to one of the tourist families down by the lake.

The mountain lake stretched clean and cold and crystal blue for miles beneath a cloudless Idaho sky. Chet couldn’t remember the name of the lake, if he’d ever known it in the first place. Hell, some days he couldn’t even remember what state he was in. His memory had been going for years, like little pieces of himself blowing away on the chill north wind that set the pines and cedars to whispering among themselves come nightfall.

Something about the lake had called to him the first time he’d seen it from the open doorway of the boxcar that brought him here. Rough mountains all around, and train tracks that circled the edge of all that clear blue water. After the wind died down at night and the mountains got quiet, he would swear he could hear the sweet mournful sound of a train whistle from the other side of the lake, but no night trains ever came his way.

The only train he saw anymore was the Four Thirty-Five, six days out of seven, regular as clockwork.

Chet had found a nice place to call his own near the base of the old stone bridge where the tracks crossed over a feeder stream. The trees grew tall near his place, and the undergrowth was thick enough to hide a man if he was the hiding kind.

The lake was less than a half mile away from the stone bridge as the crow flies, he reckoned, but he never went down the steep hill to the lake shore. He didn’t even go down to the water’s edge late at night after the tourists took their cars and motorcycles and went home.

He could have gone if he wanted to, he told himself. Gone right on down to the shallows where the tourists let their kids swim and plunged his hand in deep just to feel the bone-cold chill of the water; but the idea of doing that just didn’t feel right. His place up by the tracks—now, that was home, and he liked it just fine. He could watch the Four Thirty-Five go by and make up stories about where the train had been and where it were going, and imagine catching a ride in one of the empty boxcars like the ones he’d traveled the country in before he’d settled down.

Every once in a while one of the tourist kids would take to wandering and head up the narrow trail that ran by his place.

Chet always stayed in the deep shadows whenever the kids came around, keeping quiet behind the undergrowth or beneath the bridge. He watched them—he always watched them, couldn’t help himself—but they never knew he was there.

He thought sometimes how nice it would be if he could swap stories with some of the older ones. The tourist kids who’d been places, like he’d been places when he used to ride the rails, but even the older kids wouldn’t want to talk to someone like him. The few times he’d gathered up his nerve—it had been a long time since he’d had a conversation with anybody—the kids had gotten bored and wandered away before Chet could take a single step out in the open.

This kid, now he was different.

Chet couldn’t peg his age—six or seven, or maybe a small-boned eight. Tow-headed, far too thin for his shirt and jeans, his shoes scuffed and dusty, the kid stood at the far end of the trail at the spot where the narrow footpath branched off from the access road to the lake.

The kid stood there, arms hanging straight at his sides, not fidgeting, just staring straight up the trail like he could see Chet even though Chet knew that was damn near impossible.

He faded farther back into the shadows, but still the kid kept staring at him.

Time passed, and the kid didn’t wander away. Cars drove by slowly behind him, but the kid stuck to his spot. No one came to get him. No one seemed to miss him.

This was damn peculiar.

Chet rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and tried to think what he should do. He’d heard stories when he’d been riding the rails about how city folk treated people like him when they got scared, and people always got scared when they thought someone might hurt their kids.

He didn’t want to be rousted from his place. He didn’t know where he’d end up if he left.

Overhead, the rails began to sing their sweet song.

The Four Thirty-Five, right on time.

At the base of the trail, the kid finally looked away from Chet. He raised one thin arm and pointed at the oncoming train.

He opened his mouth and screamed.

The kid’s scream was sharp and piercing and seemed to explode inside Chet’s head. He clapped his hands over his ears, but the sound didn’t stop.

A tourist family—a sunburned mom and dad and their three sunburned teenagers—walked down the center of the access road, trekking out coolers and folding chairs and beach towels to wherever they’d parked their car. They passed behind the screaming boy without taking a single look at him or even breaking stride.

The Four Thirty-Five reached the old stone bridge and passed overhead, and even with the boy screaming in his head, Chet turned to watch the train just like he always did.

The ground trembled beneath Chet’s feet and dirt sifted down through the cracks between the stones in the bridge. A desperate yearning pulled at him—Come with me, come with me, come with me sung in time to the rhythm of the wheels on the rails—but Chet stood his ground.

Only after the caboose had passed over the old stone bridge did the boy stop screaming.

When Chet turned back toward the access road, the boy was gone.

---

Chet had started riding the rails when he was just a boy himself.

He’d been picking tomatoes that summer down in the Sacramento valley where the air hung hot and humid and so thick with the smell of dirt and tomato plants and the smoke from controlled burns he could almost taste it. Hard, tedious work with nothing to keep a young boy’s mind occupied for long.

Easy for someone with an imaginative bent to dream of better things.

Pickers like Chet migrated from farm to farm, this week picking tomatoes, the next squash or artichokes or sugar beets for the Spreckels plant. One of the men told Chet about catching rides to the next job in an empty boxcar. About riding the rails down to the plant to help unload the beets.

Next best thing to a ride at the county fair, the man had said, and the other pickers had laughed. But there’d been something in their expressions, a wistful look in their eyes, that told Chet maybe there was some truth to the story.

He’d watched the trains go by on the far side of the fields as he bent over, snatching ripe tomatoes from their vines. He’d never been on a ride at the county fair, but he’d seen the big Ferris wheel and the looping roller coaster, and he told himself he was gonna find out if what the man said about trains was true.

He managed to hitch a ride to the sugar plant one evening in the back of a rattletrap truck. While the men around the train were busy unloading beets, Chet scurried along the far side of the boxcars until he came to one that was open, and he hoisted himself inside.

He stayed in that boxcar until the train hit the rail yards in downtown Sacramento, and damn if that man weren’t right. No county fair ride could be better than this.

Chet sat near the open door of the boxcar, the wind hitting him in the face, and he didn’t care that the air still smelled like smoke and the boxcar smelled like old manure and older sweat. He felt like he was flying past fields still green with beans and corn, and fields burned black and ready for the next planting.