Free The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 by Karen Joy Fowler

father push his daughter high on a swing, admiring how he savored her delighted squeals in that weightless moment at the top of the arc.
    â€œIf my life was a novel,” Megumi suddenly said, “I would have to leave my husband. This is a rule in literature, isn’t it? That you must act on your heart. My husband is distant and unemotional. I didn’t know that until I came here. America has taught me this.”
    I was supposed to reassure her. I was supposed to remind her that her husband was logging long hours and that things would get better.
    Instead, I asked, “But what about your kids?”
    Megumi said nothing.
    And now here I find her, sitting on my couch, hand on my husband’s shoulder!
    I’m the one who introduced them. Can you believe that? I’m the one who got her a copy of his novel in Japanese. I watch Megumi open her large, dark eyes to take him in. And I know when my husband gives someone his full attention.
    I can’t make out what they are saying, but they are discussing more than fiction, I can tell you that.
    Something else catches my eye—arrows. There are quivers of arrows everywhere—red feathers, yellow feathers, white.
    In the kitchen is a casserole dish wrapped in aluminum foil. No, two casserole dishes.
    I discover a hospital band on my wrist. Have I left it on as a badge of honor? Or a darkly ironic accessory? Is the bracelet some kind of message to myself?
    Interesting fact: The kanji for “irrational,” I learned, is a combination of the elements “woman” and “death.”
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    There was an episode not long ago that must be placed in the waking-and-sleeping-reversed column. I was in the hospital. Nothing unusual there. The beautiful thing was the presence of my family—they were all around me as we stood beside some patient’s bed. The room was filled with Starbucks cups, and there was my brother, my sisters, and my parents, and so on, all of us chatting away like old times. The topic was war stories. My great-uncle talked about playing football in the dunes of North Africa after a tank battle with Rommel. My father told a sad story about trying to deliver a Vietcong baby near Cu Chi.
    Then my brother looked stricken. He said, “I think it’s happening.”
    We all turned toward the bed, and that’s when I saw the dying woman. There was a wheeze as her breathing slowed. She seemed to get lighter before our eyes. I’ll admit I bore a resemblance to her. But only a little—that woman was all emaciated and droop-eyed and bald.
    My sister asked, “Should we call the nurse?”
    I pictured the crash cart bursting in, with its needles and paddles and intubation kit. It was none of my business, but
Leave the poor woman be,
I thought.
Just let her go.
    We all looked to my father, a doctor who has seen death many times.
    He is from Georgia. His eyes are old and wet, permanently pearlescent.
    He turned to my mother, who was weeping. She shook her head no.
    Maybe you’ve heard of an out-of-body experience. Well, standing in that hospital room, I had an in-the-body experience, a profound sensation that I was leaving the real world and entering that strange woman, just as her eyes lost focus and her lips went slack. Right away, I felt the morphine inside her, the way it traced everything with halos of neon-tetra light. I entered the dark tunnel of morphine time, where the past, the present, and the future became simultaneously visible. I was a girl again, riding a yellow bicycle. I will soon be in Golden Gate Park, watching the archers shoot arrows through the fog. I see that all week long, my parents have been visiting this woman and reading her my favorite Nancy Drew books. Their yellow covers fill my vision.
The Hidden Staircase. The Whispering Statue. The Clue in the Diary.
    You know that between-pulse pause when, for a fraction of a second, your heart is stopped? You feel the resonating bass note of