Asimov's Science Fiction: December 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page B

route several times since then, that had been their last substantive conversation on the matter.
    In her standard goodbye gesture, Karen flapped her hand like a clam's mouth.
    The copilot stood in the cabin door watching the captain's back. He turned as Karen approached. "All good?"
    "All good," she said, loud enough to make the captain turn.
    She resisted the impulse to hurry, steadily leading her wheeled suitcase up the ramp, her other hand on the shoulder strap of the tote. She imagined the face with in, then tried to not see it. Once away from the gate, she studied every aspect of the concourse—the bookstore, the restaurants, the children nearly her height—as if everything except for her were worth someone's interest.
    In the parking garage, she hefted her suitcase into the hatchback's trunk, but the other bag she kept up front, snugging it against the passenger's seat back. She'd bought this car when she started college, before she'd known Chris. He'd gone off in their beige sedan, which smelled of cigarettes from a previous owner.
    It must have rained at some point. The highway shone violet in the twilight. On her twenty-minute drive home, she sang songs she hadn't thought of since high school, her reed-thin voice sounding loud in the car. She pulled up to her house's kitchen entrance, under the carport roof.
    The sack felt altered, heavier, more alive and alert, tensed like a bomb, so once in the house, urgency led her to deposit it on the closet floor of her former bedroom, where she hadn't slept since Chris's departure. Suddenly mired in exhaustion, she staggered to the spare room and shoved the blankets aside, her black shoes still on her feet and her legs dangling from the bed when she fell asleep.
    When she opened her eyes next, the glowing curtains told her it was morning, but she couldn't think what that meant. She knocked off her shoes, then pulled the covers over her; she breathed in her own hot air and felt she was a child again. Shortly, she came fully awake and, realizing she hadn't yet been called for another flight, dug down deeper under the blankets, hunting more sleep.
    When at last Karen uncovered her head, in the late morning, she lay still and wondered what she had done and why she had done it. She saw again Brenda waving from the rear of the plane. This time, Brenda pointed one well-manicured purple nail in the direction of her tote bag. "What'd you do?" Brenda asked this time. "What you got in there?"
    To avoid inspecting the sack was to sequester her actions in an unreachable, imaginary realm—in a past that might have no connection to the present. She made the bed, opened the living room curtains, started coffee, and showered. The head's presence dragged at her like a phone distantly ringing, but she let it ring. Uninspected, it might not exist.
    Eventually, having breakfasted and run out of tasks, she wandered into the other bedroom without plan. She pressed her top lip between her tongue and her teeth. What was she frightened of? She opened the closet door, but only extracted her purse and the airline magazine from her bag before making a disapproving face at the other shape within and quitting the room.
    Afternoon television no longer delivered the expected pleasures of mild surprises and comforts. Nevertheless, she turned it on just in case, flipping between a local all-news station and repeats of crime dramas. Throughout, she stood. Then restlessness drove her to fill the sink with sudsy water for the few soiled dishes and the coffee pot.
    She shut off the sink faucet and listened. The doorbell rang. Now they would arrest her. Unable to face the door, she blinked slowly and repeatedly into the suds. A bird's whistle pierced the window over the sink, and she thought how, in prison, there might be a single window through which came light and air and the sound of birds. She counted backwards from ten, but when she reached zero, she'd forgotten her purpose and began counting forward. Around