Under Glass

by Nalo Hopkinson

Genres: Short Stories; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Post-Apocalyptic sci-fi

Synopsis

Sheeny lives in a world scoured clean by the glass wind that comes roaring out of the empty space where a mountain used to be. A wind whose gusts can strip flesh from bone and whose breezes leave a dust of glass so fine it accumulates in the lungs with every sip of air. Delpha lives in an otherwhere, an otherwhen in which no glass wind blows. Her world is poised on the precipice of its reality, needing only the faintest push to fall. And if that should happen, there will be no picking up the pieces. Two women, two worlds, rush toward a shattering collision. Unless...

Release date: March 15, 2001

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 21

Sample

Also by Nalo Hopkinson

Brown Girl in the Ring
Midnight Robber
Skin Folk

Boston subway stops have the oddest names: Braintree. And Alewife (which, Bostonians will explain helpfully, is a fish). One day, traveling on the Toronto subway system, I could have sworn that the driver announced Saint Mare Wash as the next stop. The mundane Saint Clair West paled in comparison. In parts of Toronto, they wrap the trees with burlap in winter to protect them. And then, I’ve always liked Hans Christian Andersen’s fiction . . .

 

 

 

Lying on the chilly bank of the splinterswirling river, Sheeny shook the obsidian rectangle of the playscreen in her hands, then swiped her palm over its blankened surface. In response, its opalescent screen swarmed with vague, sluggish forms: something large and blocky, a building, maybe; smaller somethings moving around it; motes fluttering. Did that tiny shape in the foreground look like Kay? No, no; stop it. Create instead a new story in the masses on the screen. Cobble a fake story out of tales that Jeff used to tell, of worlds that used to might could be, places that she’d never seen, could only imagine.

The shapes were curdling into solid images. A tiny old woman stood inside the picture blossoming on the playscreen:



The cold morning light was the soft grey of a dove’s breast feathers. Old Delpha, old lady, stood on the wintry street corner, looking at the construction site that had been sprouting there for the past few months like a stop-motion film; of ice crystals, maybe, growing branch by angular branch upon eac. . .