Flight

By Michelle West

A short story of a 7k words, original published in Return of the Dinosaurs, edited by Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg.

A fossil—a bone—arrives in Peter’s mail. He understands what this means: The father from whom he’s been estranged since childhood has died. He’s never understood why his father deserted his family, and attending to his inheritance is one way of attempting to understand it.

His wife is worried. His mother is very, very worried. Peter himself is not. He knows what his father did to his family, and he has no intention of ever doing the same thing to his own wife and child.

But what he finds is not what he expected, and he is caught—as his father was caught—by the compelling voice of a past he has never experienced until now...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rosdan Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781927094457

Book preview

Flight

Flight

Michelle West

Rosdan Press

Copyright © 1997, 2020 by Michelle Sagara

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Introduction

Flight

About the Author

Also by Michelle West

Also by Michelle Sagara

Other Short Stories

Introduction

This story involved a tuckerization, although I didn’t tell the people who were tuckerized, thinking that at least one of them would notice when the anthology—Return of the Dinosaurs, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Mike Resnick (we both wrote stories for it).

She did. We knew each other entirely through GEnie at that point, although we made a point of actually meeting in person at a Worldcon many years ago.

Flight

The first of the bones arrived in the mail — not an auspicious beginning. Not an expected one. Later, when he knew what they were, Peter Johnson would arrange for a safer method of delivery: He would rent a cube van from Hertz rentals and two young archaeology graduate students from the local University — who, he reasoned, knew how to pack fragile things with care — and he would drive all the way from Toronto to the house he had once shared with his mother and father, leaving his own wife and child in the safety of the house he had built for them.

But later came after the arrival of the first bone.

His wife brought it to him when he returned from his long day’s work, her dark eyes glistening with unsatisfied curiosity. The mail man brought you something, she said, and then smiled. I called you to see if I could open it, but you were in a meeting. Not returning calls anymore?

Nora always opened his mail, but she always phoned before she did it. After all, without permission it was an invasion of privacy, and if the permission was always perfunctory — what, in