Free Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History by Ken Liu, Tananarive Due, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, Sofia Samatar, Sabrina Vourvoulias, Thoraiya Dyer Page A

mountains. Fresh paskha and pirohi
with cheese. His father fixing prosfora and seed inside his pouch as he goes to plow the field, without which a good harvest will not be assured. Candlelit gilt and wood in the church, the knowing eyes of the saints in the ikonostas
.
Trying on his mother’s best dress alone in the house, the terror of being caught. A scatter of grain in the sunlight like little beads of gold. Ice silvering the trees.
    Screams. Fire – fire to consume a family that to others were always strangers, fire to consume the worrysome and the unwanted. Fire to consume the world.
    Baba Yaga hands him this fire, like a fist, like a little burning heart in his cupped palms, and he understands that he has carried it with him from the green hills and across the ocean, and it is part of him now.
    The seam, dochka
.
Give it to the seam.
    This place is almost ready to burn.

----
    Nights in the boarding house are becoming more interesting. Louder, more people, squeezing together in Big Mary’s kitchen, listening to her talk. Sometimes he stands in the doorway and listens too. What’s done to them. What might be done. Big Mary is offering fragments of another world, holes through which to glimpse it, like gold nestled in the coal. Something he has never imagined, let alone seen. Big Mary offers exhortations to the promise of America, to the rights of men, and the men nod and bang their mugs on the table and cry agreement. Some. Others sit silently, their arms folded, and he can tell that they have yet to be convinced. But they’re listening.
    Behind him, he can feel Baba Yaga folding the spindles of her fingers and grinning. She whispers,
This is also my dochka
.
She knows me, even if she doesn’t call me by name. Look at her: wouldn’t she make a tasty stew? But her spirit is too big for my pot, and I have other uses for her. She is also carrying the fire.
My
fire.
    You should watch her. You are sisters, you and she. Even if she can never know.
    More and more, Baba Yaga is coming to him in his waking hours.
    This should perhaps frighten him more than it does.
----
    Every night, now, the seam burns. The whole mountain runs with flame like a river. He watches it, and it seems to him that there are figures in the flames, bright and beautiful. They are not in pain. They are dancing, and they are holding out arms of cinder and glowing coal and beckoning to him to dance with them.
    His mother is there. His father. Their faces are alight with pride as they behold their only son. Only now they see him for what he truly is, and there is no blame and no shame and not a hint of rejection. They love him as he is.
Iwanka,
his mother sings, her fingers like sparks as she whirls through the dying trees.
I have a lovely little dress for you, and look, I made for you this scarf. Look how bright it is.
    If anyone touches you after this, to harm you, they will burn, and not with us.
    He wakes up with tears scalding his cheeks. They smoke and steam.
----

    Goddamn hunkies.
    When at last he has enough scrip saved to buy a razor, the man in the company store overcharges him. He expects it, would have even borne it as yet another in a long line of harsh treatments, except that the amount the man is demanding is more than he has. He’s been borrowing a razor from one of the other men in the boarding house, but it’s too blunt and it hurts him, and the shave it gives is nowhere clean enough. It’s a small thing, and he doesn’t even know why it should be so important to him, except that he does.
    Baba Yaga is teaching him to face hard truths. He’s not the quickest of learners when it comes to things like that but he does learn.
    Goddamn hunkies,
the man growls when Iwan tries, stuttering through the words, to explain, to try to convince the man to take what he has as sufficient for the blade.
You come here, think you don’t have to speak the language, think you’re special. Owed special treatment. You won’t get it from me, you