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 B

little rat. Give me the price of it or get the hell out of the store.
    But it
is
special treatment. It always has been.
Hunky. Polack. Little rat.
For a long time now he’s been used to it, but Big Mary is suggesting that he shouldn’t be, that he’s more than just some hunky rat crawling on his belly through the shafts. And there’s Baba Yaga, folding all the hunky rats into her arms, her hands black with the coal, giving them firesides and warm porridge with milk, chalky with powdered bones.
    There is something else that his saved scrip will buy. He stares at it for some long minutes the next time he goes to the company store to buy what little food he can. He stares at it for as long as he can, for as long as he thinks is safe, before he’s noticed. A pair of lady’s gloves, white and soft, very plain and, he knows, not fine. It seems strange to find them in a store that only stocks the necessities of the working people of Lattimer, but there they are, and to his weary eyes they seem to shine as if they were made of ivory. They are free of coal dust, pure, like the polished bones of someone long-dead. Of the stuff that Baba Yaga grinds for her porridge.
    Strange things are beautiful to him now.
    He wants to buy them. He wants them more than the razor. He imagines sliding his hands into them, the hair on his knuckles and the callouses on his palms and the black dust packed under his fingernails hidden by that elegant white. They would make his fingers look slender, he knows. Delicate. Before he turns away he reaches out and runs a fingertip along their backs.
    Hey, hunky.
He pulls his hand back as if he’s been burned; his face
is
burning, his neck and ears, and he’s praying that the big man behind the counter won’t see.
Buy something or get out. You here to browse like a fucking woman?
    Take me home,
he whispers to Baba Yaga as he slinks out of the place, feeling her heat and her glee at his side. In the shadows of the town he could swear he sees a
dacha
shuffling, out of the way like any other house but for its legs.
Take me back and bury me in the ground with the ashes of my family.
    No, dochka
,
she laughs.
Better for you, given that you’re mine. The things you want will be yours. They will have to be.

----
    She tells him stories about ordeals, in the shafts, in the lukewarm water he uses for his quick baths, in the doorway of the boarding house kitchen. She tells him stories of walking on hot coals to prove one’s innocence, of burning women as witches and trusting to God to care for their souls if they proved free of the influence of the devil.
They were all my daughters, Iwanka. They danced with me in the moonlight and the fire, as you do.
    I’m not a witch,
he insists. But he lifts his blackened hands and, as if they are someone else’s, his own fingers trace ancient symbols across his arms, his face. He smears coal over his lips, turning them dark and full. Baba Yaga nods in approval.
    Not a witch, no, maybe. But were
they
witches? I tell you truly, dochka, there have always been those of us who simply didn’t fit, and those ones tend to be of a kind. And you are my sweet little daughter, and you will never be one of them. The others.
    Why would you want to be?
    She places his burning hands against the seam and Lattimer fails its test in an orgy of flame.
----
    It comes in the fall, with the rain and the cold wind. The trees are aflame, red and gold, and as the strike is called, as the marches begin, he marches with them but his gaze is locked on those burning branches, each one like the embodiment of God sent to give him a message. Big Mary cries out to them, her arms lifted, praising them as if they are her children and newly learned to stand on their own. There is word that the company will shortly send in the strike-breakers, but there is fearlessness on the sharp wind, at least for the moment, and they tell each other to be strong. Even him, no longer just a hunky rat but, for a short and