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  SHADES WITHIN US

  Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders

  LAKSA ANTHOLOGY SERIES: SPECULATIVE FICTION

  EDITED BY SUSAN FOREST & LUCAS K. LAW

  LAKSA MEDIA GROUPS INC.

  www.laksamedia.com

  Laksa Anthology Series: Speculative Fiction

  EDITED BY SUSAN FOREST AND LUCAS K. LAW

  Strangers Among Us: Tales of the Underdogs and Outcasts

  The Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound

  Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders

  Seasons Between Us: Tales of Identities and Memories (forthcoming)

  EDITED BY LUCAS K. LAW AND DERWIN MAK

  Where The Stars Rise: Asian Science Fiction and Fantasy

  Shades Within Us: Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders

  Laksa Anthology Series: Speculative Fiction

  Copyright © 2018 by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, organizations, places and incidents portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously, and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual situations, events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Laksa Media Groups supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Laksa Media Groups to continue to publish books for every reader.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Shades within us : tales of migrations and fractured borders / edited by

  Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law.

  (Laksa anthology series: speculative fiction)

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988140-05-6 (softcover).—ISBN 978-1-988140-08-7 (hardcover).—

  ISBN 978-1-988140-09-4 (PDF).—ISBN 978-1-988140-06-3 (EPUB).—

  ISBN 978-1-988140-07-0 (Kindle)

  1. Science fiction, Canadian (English). 2. Fantasy fiction, Canadian

  (English). 3. Speculative fiction, Canadian (English). 4. Immigrants—Fiction.

  5. Mental health—Fiction. 6. Mental illness—Fiction. I. Forest, Susan, editor

  II. Law, Lucas K., editor

  PS8323.S3S52 2018 C813’.0876208352691 C2017-906854-7

  C2017-906855-5

  LAKSA MEDIA GROUPS INC.

  Calgary, Alberta, Canada

  www.laksamedia.com

  [email protected]

  Edited by Susan Forest and Lucas K. Law

  Cover and Interior Design by Samantha M. Beiko

  FIRST EDITION

  Susan Forest

  To Isabel,

  Who gave me new understanding of pride in one’s homeland, and of the accepted and the exotic.

  To Heather,

  Who helped me to see how the concerns of migration are close to home.

  Lucas K. Law

  To everyone going through a transition,

  Choice or no choice,

  Have faith in yourself, seek help if needed, and remain optimistic.

  In memory of those who came before us

  and

  made this world a better place for us to strive and be “us”.

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  Lucas K. Law

  INTRODUCTION

  Eric Choi & Gillian Clinton

  PORQUE EL GIRASOL SE LLAMA EL GIRASOL

  Rich Larson

  INKSKINNED

  Jeremy Szal

  DEFENDER OF MOGADUN

  Alex Shvartsman

  GILBERT TONG’S LIFE LIST

  Kate Heartfield

  THE MARSH OF CAMARINA

  Matthew Kressel

  INVASIO

  Karin Lowachee

  HABITAT

  Christie Yant

  THE TRAVELLERS

  Amanda Sun

  CRITICAL MASS

  Liz Westbrook-Trenholm

  SCREEN IN SILVER, LOVE IN COLOUR, MIRROR IN BLACK-AND-WHITE

  Julie Nováková

  HOW MY LIFE WILL END

  Vanessa Cardui

  FROM THE SHOALS OF BROKEN CITIES

  Heather Osborne

  IN A BAR BY THE OCEAN, THE WORLD WAITS

  Hayden Trenholm

  IMAGO

  Elsie Chapman

  SHADES OF VOID

  Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

  SUPERFREAK

  Tonya Liburd

  THE VAGABOND OF TRUDEAU HIGH

  Sarah Raughley

  THE SWORDMASTER OF RAVENPEAK

  Brent Nichols

  REMEMBER THE GREEN

  Seanan McGuire

  DEVOURING TONGUES

  S.L. Huang

  VOICES

  Tyler Keevil

  AFTERWORD

  Susan Forest

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  ABOUT THE EDITORS

  COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  APPENDIX: MENTAL HEALTH RESOURCES & ANTI-DISCRIMINATION RESOURCES

  FOREWORD

  Lucas K. Law

  Each of us has our own idea and vision of migrations and fractured borders. Often, our first thought is of migrations on the physical plane, though with consideration we might recognize emotional or even spiritual migrations. These days, there is a tendency to associate migrations with refugees and illegal immigrants. There are dangers in such assumptions.

  My maternal grandfather and his brother left China with their father in 1916. They left their sister and family behind. Later, during the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s, my grandfather lost contact with his sister. Though he gained opportunities in Malaysia, his adopted country, he lost all family ties in China, the country he left behind.

  My grandfather spent most of his life in rural plantations and fishing villages, as a shopkeeper, a farmer, and a small business owner, before he retired. When he could no longer care for himself, he moved again, to the city, to live with his son and family.

  So often, physical movement is the focus of a migration story when it first unfolds. But each move is more than a simple relocation. It is a transformation of time, place, and being. Each decision affects a multiplicity of others.

  It is difficult for those who have never faced such decisions to truly comprehend the complexity and conflict that takes place in body, mind, and spirit—what my grandfather and so many others had gone through in such transitions, responding to economic challenges, employment and new opportunities, and finally, to failing health. And these are only a few of the myriad factors affecting the reasons people migrate.

  Migrants are much more than refugees and illegal immigrants. We might name “them” in many different ways, and cast them in new lights: explorers, drifters, nomads, expatriates, evacuees, pilgrims, colonists, aliens, strangers, visitors, intruders, conquerors, exiles, asylum seekers, outsiders.

  Within such complexity, what are the commonalities? Transition and change. Boundaries, visible or invisible, voluntary or involuntary, internal or external. The price paid. And the attainment of a new life, a new world, a new reality, for good or ill.

  The genesis of this anthology comes from my family history, but it also comes as an outgrowth of the first two anthologies in the ‘social causes’ series, Strangers Among Us: Tales of the Underdogs and Outcasts—the fine balance between mental health and mental illness—and The Sum of Us: Tales of the Bonded and Bound—the w
orld of caregiving and caregivers.

  In Shades Within Us, Eric Choi, Gillian Clinton, and twenty-one authors capture the displacement of the migrating body, mind, and spirit to explore struggles and sacrifices, survival and redemption, losses and gains, in their Tales of Migrations and Fractured Borders. They ask us to open our eyes to see, our ears to hear, and our hearts to understand, that each of us may be impacted somewhere along our journeys. And they also ask us to face those adversities and challenges with equal determination, resiliency, and humility—and not to hide behind the shades within us.

  Please support your local charitable organizations and do take care of your own health. Be kind and generous to yourself and to others. Be ready to give back and pay forward. A portion of this anthology’s net revenue goes to support Mood Disorders Association and the Alex Community Food Centre.

  —Lucas K. Law, Calgary and Qualicum Beach, Canada, 2018

  INTRODUCTION

  Eric Choi & Gillian Clinton

  One of our favourite things in Toronto is a bronze sculpture at the foot of Yonge Street called “Immigrant Family” by Tom Otterness. A man holding two small suitcases, likely containing all the family’s worldly possessions, looks tenderly at a woman cradling a small child in her arms. Their round, larger-than-life faces poignantly express all the fears for the present—and hopes for the future—that have been the experience of newcomers for centuries.

  Sadly, the warmth and optimism expressed by “Immigrant Family” is sometimes lacking in discussions of migration and borders. Dangerous political persuasions, usually based on a malignant mix of xenophobia and nostalgia, have taken hold in many places. Those who fear the very notion of new people and new ideas coming together often look backward for comfort. “We always look to the past and wish we could return,” says a character in “The Travellers” by Amanda Sun. “We always think things were better in that imagined golden age.”

  This is what makes the theme of Shades Within Us so incredibly relevant. Here, you will find twenty-one stories that explore the complex world (and worlds) of migration and newcomers through the unique lens of speculative fiction. The existential threat of climate change is the driver for displacement in “Remembering the Green” by Seanan McGuire, “Habitat” by Christie Yant and “In a Bar by the Ocean, the World Waits” by Hayden Trenholm, while economic upheavals caused by new technology compel the protagonist in “The Marsh of Camarina” by Matthew Kressel to relocate. “From the Shoals of Broken Cities” by Heather Osborne and “Gilbert Tong’s Life List” by Kate Heartfield remind us of the emotional toll that migration can exact upon families. “Devouring Tongues” by S.L. Huang is a parable for newcomers trying to preserve their heritage, while “Porque el girasol se llama el girasol” by Rich Larson could have been ripped from today’s headlines.

  Both of us are immigrants to Canada. Coming respectively from Britain and a former British colony, we were privileged newcomers. We never had to cross the ocean in a small, overcrowded makeshift boat. Our lives were never in danger. Over the years, we have occasionally encountered prejudice and discrimination. Sometimes we were called names, or people would make fun of the way we talked, or the clothes we wore, or the shape of our eyes.

  But far more often, we experienced and continue to appreciate the generosity and friendship of our fellow Canadians, old and new, and of all backgrounds and ethnicities. Canada has given both of us opportunities that would not have been possible had our parents not made the courageous decision for us to become Immigrant Families. “They leave because they desire to,” writes a character in “Imago” by Elsie Chapman. “They migrate . . . because it is simply their choice.”

  Much has been written about the social, economic and cultural (and culinary!) benefits of migration and open frontiers (a term we prefer to “fractured” borders), but nobody needs to convince us. We see it every day, just by looking at each other.

  As writers and readers of speculative fiction, we have an opportunity to help resist nostalgia-based fears. Fiction, and particularly speculative fiction, can do this because it is not just about what is and what was, but what could be. It is more important than ever to try and imagine futures that are optimistic and beautiful. To paraphrase novelist Mohsin Hamid, why must it be called a migrant “crisis” when it could really be a migrant opportunity? The coming together of people from all places and backgrounds could bring a new world into existence in the next fifty or a hundred years that will be magnificent. By being open to new possibilities and not clinging to the past, we may finally embrace all the different shades within us.

  —Eric Choi & Gillian Clinton, Toronto, Canada, 2018

  PORQUE EL GIRASOL SE LLAMA EL GIRASOL

  Rich Larson

  Girasol watches as her mother shakes the entanglers out onto the hotel bed. They are small and spiny. They remind her of the purple sea urchins she was hunting in the netgame she can’t play anymore, because they had to take the chips out of their phones and crush them with a metal rolling pin before they left Las Cruces.

  She is not sure she will be able to swallow one. It makes her nervous.

  Her mother plucks the first entangler off the bedspread and peers at it. Her mouth is all tight, how it was when they checked in and the clerk passed her the little plastic bag.

  “Peanut butter or grape jelly?” she asks, because she took a fistful of condiment packets from the breakfast room.

  “Jelly.”

  Her mother peels the packet open and rolls the entangler inside, globbing it in pale purple. Girasol takes it in her hand, getting her fingers sticky, and stares down at it. Ten points, she thinks. She puts it in her mouth.

  She gags it back up. It pokes in her throat and she thinks she can feel it squirming a little, like it is alive. Her eyes start to water.

  “Squeeze your thumb in your fist when you do it,” her mother says. “Squeeze hard.”

  It takes three tries, and when it finally stays down Girasol is gasping and trying not to sob. Her throat is scraped raw. Her mother rubs between her shoulder blades, then takes the second entangler and swallows it. Her face twitches just once. Then she goes back to rubbing Girasol’s back.

  “My brave girl,” she coos. “Brave girl, sunflower. Do you feel it?”

  “I don’t know. Yes.”

  For a few moments, Girasol feels only nausea. Then the entangler starts to prickle in her gut. Warmer, warmer.

  “You should feel it.”

  “I do. I feel it.”

  “It should feel like a little magnet inside your belly.”

  “I feel it.”

  Her mother’s voice is stretched out like it might snap. “Okay.”

  They test the entanglers outside, on the cracked and bubbled tarmac of the parking lot. Emptiness on all sides. Their motel is last in a ragged row of gas stations and stopovers, after which there is only the highway churning away to horizon. In the far far distance, they can see the Wall: a slouching beast of concrete and quickcrete latticed with swaying scaffold. Workers climb up and down it like ants; drones swarm overtop of it like flies.

  Girasol has never seen the Wall in real life before. It makes her feel giddy. Her teacher only showed them photos of the Wall in class, and had them draw a picture of it on their smeary-screened school tablets.

  While Girasol drew, the teacher stopped over her to ask, in a cheery voice, what her parents thought of the Wall. She gave the answer her mother told her always to give: their country was so good that bad people always wanted to come in and wreck it, because they were jealous, and the Wall was good because it kept them out. Then the teacher asked Fatima, and then Maria, but nobody else.

  Girasol is still staring off at the Wall when her mother’s charcoal-coloured scarf drops over her eyes. She feels her mother’s strong fingers knot it behind her head.

  “Count to ten, then try to walk to me.”

  “In English?” Girasol asks, because she knows the other way, too. She tried to teach it to Brock on the swings
, but a supervisor heard and told her it was bad to be a show-off like that.

  “However you like.”

  Girasol plugs her ears so she won’t hear her mother’s footsteps, and she counts aloud, fast, unodostrescuatro, all the way to ten. When she stops counting, the world is very quiet. She can feel the sun soaking her hair and a breeze kicking up dust against her bare shins.

  “Mama?” she calls, even though she knows it is cheating.

  Her mother says nothing back; Girasol hears only the distant rumble of autotrucks on the highway.

  But in her belly, the entangler twitches. Tugs. Girasol thinks of the silly game they used to play in their apartment, where her mother asks ¿por qué el girasol se llama el girasol? and Girasol pretends not to know and asks why, why, why, and her mother lifts her up and says porque gira gira gira hacia el sol, and while she says it they spin in a dizzy circle, girando like a sunflower searching for the sun.

  Girasol turns on her heels, following the tug of the entangler. As she starts to walk, she remembers all the cracks in the tarmac and hopes she will not trip. Step, pause, step. She stretches out her hands as the tug grows stronger. Eventually she touches the rough fabric of her mother’s sleeve.

  She yanks the scarf down and beams. “Tag, you’re it.”

  Her mother nearly smiles. “They work,” she says. “Good.”

  They take turns with the scarf, practicing over and over, as the sun sinks, turning the dusty sky red and stretching their shadows long and spindly. They learn how to follow the entanglers’ subtle twists and turns so they can track each other even moving.

  Girasol is taking one last turn with the scarf over her eyes when the entangler in her stomach suddenly bucks and writhes. She thrusts out both hands, but instead of her mother’s shirt, she touches something slippery and caked with grime. Her nostrils fill with a smell like summer storms, but stronger and more chemical.