Free Asimov's SF, February 2010 by Dell Magazine Authors

sisters? At length Jive stumbled to his feet, holding his brutalized right arm tenderly with his left hand against his breast. Now that he was home again, he could get it looked at by competent medical practitioners. After that terrible near-accident, escaping from it shakily, stumbling inside his apt, he found Aunt Tilly absent. Of course, she was staying for several days upstairs with those pleasant dykes. A nice couple, for all their gene-reproductive dysfunction. He walked through the house, and with increasing alarm found that his wife and children were also gone. Plaintively, he called their names. “Angelina, where are you, honeypie? Barack, you scamp? Come out, come out.” Silence, and the rustle of strangers inside his home. “Delphine, you bitch!” He found himself on the ground floor and wandered in the smoke-filled streets. Others were drifting along as if dazed, staring into windows, some in the middle of the streets. Why was the traffic stalled? Someone caught his sleeve, spoke urgently, but he couldn't seem to hear the man's voice. The man raised a crudely wrought sign, rendered in thick black marker pen ink on the back, evidently, of an advertising poster: SEND THE SEINTISTS OVER, THEY HAV 2 HELP US. A flicker of motion caught his eye, reflected in the side window of a motionless Hyundai sedan. Behind the curved window, half-seen, the driver sat, listening to his phone. Reflected in the glass, faces passed, jumbled and unfamiliar. Terrified, Jive shook his head in denial. He sat edgily in his favorite armchair, activated the HDTV to distract himself and settle his nerves. The machine wasn't working right. A new emetic virus attack? His daughter's monochrome face contorted in the wide frame of the image. He lumbered to his feet, went to the out-of-order plasma image. The child rushed away behind the screen and returned with his wife and son, who peered in apparent horror at the camera. When was this home movie shot? He couldn't recall. Where is Tilly? In the monochrome, silent background, he watched Delphine turn her head, walk with her head clasped in her hands like a mime doing an impression of Edvard Munch's The Scream. Gentle love, he thought absurdly, recalling Dowland, Draw forth thy wounding dart. She opened the front door. Upheaval in the background, black and white gouts of flame and smoke. People were running, striking each other. Two cops stood, hats in hand, unhappy, bearing bad news Jive Bolen could not bear to hear.
    —to Phil's memory, of course
    Copyright © 2010 Damien Broderick
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Novelette: THE WOMAN WHO WAITED FOREVER by Bruce McAllister
Bruce McAllister has just finished his first novel in twenty years. The book is tentatively titled The Village That Sang to the Sea: A Memoir of Magic and includes the haunting tale of “The Woman Who Waited Forever” as one of its episodes. The author gleefully tells us that he is almost done with a second novel as well, and that he has stories forthcoming in F&SF, Cemetery Dance, and Albedo One .
    * * * *
    Love is never finished.
    —Thomas Mann
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    The military, like every other world, has its social classes, with an impossible chasm between officer and enlisted—something that even a foxhole or military hospital has a hard time breaking down, and something that will always be haunted by the dead whispering of injustice. When you're the son of a Naval Academy graduate, you know that those crewcut, knockdown, book-avoiding kids on the school bus with you in the sunny port of San Diego are going to play rough touch football with their dads while you play a dignified game of tennis with yours, that their families will ride loud power boats on the bay while yours prefers the grace of sailboats, and that yours will belong to a sedate yacht club while theirs will throw rowdy barbecues on public beaches. Those kids wouldn't be caught dead doing what you're asked to do at the parties your father and mother have for the