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

its way past my parents’ home. Here, people take turns telling stories.
    My great-uncle tells a story about me as a little girl and my decision to wed the boy next door. My folks got a cake and flowers and had the judge down the street preside in robes over the ceremony. The whole neighborhood turned up, and everyone got a kick out of it. The next day brought the sobering moment when my folks had to tell me the marriage wasn’t real.
    My brother tells a story about my first Christmas home from college and how I brought a stack of canvases to show everyone the nudes I’d been letting the art-major boys paint of me.
    My mother tries to tell a story. I can tell it will be the one about the Christmas poodle. But she is overcome. It scares the children the way she folds up in slow motion, dropping to the ground like a garment bag. To distract them, my father decides on a canoe ride—that always was a treat for the kids. Tears run from their eyes as they don orange vests and shove off. Right away, the horse-child screams that she is afraid of the water. She strikes notes of terror we didn’t know existed. My son, in the bow, tries to hide his clutched breathing, and then I see the shuddering shoulders of our daughter. She swivels her head, looking everywhere, desperately, and I know she is looking for me. My father, stunned and bereft, is too inconsolable to lift the paddle. My father, who performed more than fifteen hundred field surgeries near Da Nang, my father, who didn’t flinch when the power went out at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, my father—he slowly closes his pearl-gray eyes. They float there, not twenty feet from us, the boat too unsteady for them to comfort one another, and we onshore can only wrench at the impossibility of reaching them.
    Back inside the New York party, I realized time had ceased to flow: my husband and the producer were laughing the exact same laugh, the lime zest of their breath still acrid in the air, and I saw this was in the future, too, all these chilly women with their iron-filing eyes and rice-paper hearts. They wanted something genuine, something real. They wanted what I had: a man who was willing to go off the cliff with you. They would come after him when he was weak, I suddenly understood, when I was no longer there to fend them off. This wasn’t hysteria. It wasn’t imagination. I was in the room with them. Here they were, perfect teeth forming brittle smiles, hips hollow as sake boxes.
    â€œThat story is too funny,” the producer said. “Stop it right there. Save it for the segment!”
    In a shrug of false modesty, my husband accidentally sloshed his soda water.
    â€œWell,” he said. “Only if you think it would be good for the show.”
    I suddenly put my hand on the producer’s arm. She turned, startled, discovering me.
    I used my grip to assess her soul—I felt the want of it, I calculated its lack, in the same way Lady Montagu mapped the microscopic world of smallpox pustules and Voltaire learned to weigh vapor.
    You tell me who the fucking ghost is.
    Â 
    There is a knock at the door. It’s Megumi!
    My husband answers, and the two of them regard each other, almost sadly, for a moment.
    They are clearly acknowledging the wrongness of whatever it is they’re up to.
    They head upstairs together, where I suddenly realize there are Costco-size boxes of condoms everywhere—under the sink, in the medicine cabinet, taped under the bedside table, hidden in the battery flap of a full-size talking Tigger doll!
    Megumi and my husband enter our bedroom. Right away, the worst possible thing happens—they move right past these birth-control depots. They do not collect any condoms at all.
    My kind of ghost mom would make it her job to stop hussies like Megumi from fucking grieving men, and if I were too late, it would be my job to go to Megumi late at night, to approach her as she slept on her shabby