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

this nothingness. Vision is just a black vibration, and your mind has only that bottom-of-the-pool feeling when your air is spent. You see the insides of this woman’s body, something cancer teaches you to do. Here is a lumpy chain of dye-blue lymph nodes, there are the endometrial tendrils of a thirsty tumor. Everywhere are the scattered Pop Rocks of calcifications. Your best friend, Kitty, silently appears. She took leave of this world from cancer twelve years earlier. She lifts a finger to her lips.
Shh,
she says. Then it really hits you that you’re trapped inside a dying woman. You’re being buried alive.
Will be
turns to
is
turns to
was.
You can no longer make out the Republican red of your mother’s St. John jacket. You can no longer hear the tremors of your sisters’ breathing. Then there’s nothing but the
still,
the gathering, surrounding still of this woman you’re in.
    Then
pop!
—somehow, luckily, you make it out. You’re free again, back in the land of Starbucks cups and pay-by-the-hour parking.
    It was some brain-bending business, the illusion of being in that dead woman. But that’s how powerful cancer is, that’s how bad it can mess with your head. Even now, you cannot shake that sense of time. How will you ever know again the difference between what’s past and what’s to come, let alone what is?
    My husband and kids missed the entire nightmare. They are downstairs eating soup.
    Interesting facts: The Geary Boulevard Kaiser Permanente Hospital is where breasts are removed. The egg-noodle wonton soup in their cafeteria is divine. The wontons are handmade, filled with steamed cabbage and white pepper. The Kaiser on Turk Street is chemo central. This basement cafeteria specializes in huge bowls of Vietnamese pho, made with beef ankles and topped with purple basil. Don’t forget sriracha. The Kaiser on Divisadero is for when the end is near. Their
shio
ramen with pork cheeks is simply heaven. Open all night.
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    My Vulcan mind-meld with death has strange effects on our family. Strangest of all is how I find it suddenly hard to look at my children. The thought of them moving forward in life without me, the person whose sole mission is to guide them—it’s not tolerable. My arms tremble at how close they came to having their little spirits snuffed out. The idea of them making their way alone in this world makes me want to turn things into sticks, to wield a hatchet and make kindling of everything I see. I’ve never chopped a thing in my life, I’m not a competent person in general, so I would lift the blade in full knowledge that my aim would stray, that the evil and the innocent would fall together.
    Interesting fact: My best friend, Kitty, died of cancer. Over the years, the doctors took her left leg, her breasts, her throat, and her ovaries. In return, they gave her two free helpings of bone marrow. As the end came, I became afraid to go see her. What would I say? What does goodbye even mean? Finally, when she had only a few days left, I mustered the courage for a visit. To save money, I flew to Atlanta and then took a bus. But I got on the wrong one! I didn’t realize this until I got to North Carolina. Kitty died in Florida.
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    My husband soldiers up. He gives me space and starts getting up early to make the kids’ lunches and trek them off to school. The kids are rattled, too. They take to sleeping with their father in the big bed. With all those arms and legs, there’s no room for yours truly. They’re a pretty glum bunch, but I understand: it’s not easy to almost lose someone.
    I spend a lot of time in Golden Gate Park, where my senses are newly heightened. I can see a gull soaring past and know exactly where it will land. I develop an uncanny ability to predict the weather. Just by gazing at a plant, I can tell its effects upon the human body.
    Interesting fact: The blue cohosh plant grows in the botanical