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

and find Oscar on the tenth level in the Garden with Anat. He will be saying her name. Anat. Anat. Anat. He will follow her, saying her name, until the Handmaids come to collect him again.
    Anat does the work that she knows how to do. She weeds. She prunes. She tends to the rice plants and the hemp and the little citrus trees. Like the Ship, she is content.
    Â 
    (
for Iain M. Banks
)

ADAM JOHNSON
Interesting Facts
    FROM
Harper’s Magazine
    Â 
    I NTERESTING FACT: TOUCAN cereal bedspread to my plunge and deliver.
    It’s okay if you can’t make sense of that. I’ve tried and tried, but I can’t grasp it either. The most vital things we hide even from ourselves.
    The topic of dead wives came up a few months ago. My husband and I talked about it while walking home from a literary reading. It was San Francisco, which means winter rains, and we’d just attended a reading by a local writer from her short-story collection. The local writer was twentysomething and sexy. Her arms were taut, her black hair shimmered. And just so you’re clear, I’m going to discuss the breasts of every woman who crosses my path. Neither hidden nor flaunted beneath white satin, her breasts were utterly, excruciatingly normal, and I hated her for that. The story she read was about a man who decides to date again after losing his wife. It’s always an aneurysm, a car accident, or a long battle with cancer. Cancer is the worst way for a fictional wife to die. Anyway, the man in the story waits an appropriate amount of time after losing his wife—sixteen months!—before deciding to date again. After so much grief, he is exuberant and endearing in his pursuit of a woman. The first chick he talks to is totally game. The man, after all this waiting, is positively frisky, and the sex is, like, wow. The fortysomething widower nails the twentysomething gal on the upturned hull of his fiberglass kayak. And there’s even a moral, subtle and implied: when love blossoms, it’s all the richer after a man has discovered, firsthand, the painful fragility of life. Well, secondhand.
    Applause, Q&A, more applause.
    Â 
    Like I said, it was raining. We had just left the Booksmith on Haight Street. “What’d you think of the story?” my husband asked.
    I could tell he liked it. He likes all stories.
    I said, “I sympathized with the dead wife.”
    To which my husband, the biggest lunkhead ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, said: “But . . . she wasn’t even a character.”
    This was a year after my diagnosis, surgery, chemo, and the various interventions, injections, indignities, and treatments. When I got sick, our youngest child turned herself into a horse; mute and untamable, our horse-child now only whinnies and neighs. Before that, though, she went through a phase we called Interesting Facts. “Interesting fact,” she would announce before sharing a wonder with us: A killer whale has never killed a person in the wild. Insects are high in protein. Hummingbirds have feelings and are often sad.
    So here are some of my interesting facts. Lupron halts ovulation and is used to chemically castrate sexual predators. Vinblastine interrupts cell division. It is a poisonous alkaloid made from the leaves of the periwinkle plant. Tamoxifen makes your hips creak. My eyebrows fell out a year after I finished chemo. And long after your tits are taken, their phantoms remain. They get cold, they ache when you exercise, they feel wet after you shower, and you can towel like a crazy woman but still they drip.
    Before my husband won a Pulitzer, we had a kind of deal. I would adore him, even though he’d packed on a few pounds. And he would adore me, even though I’d had a double mastectomy. Who else would want us? Now his readings are packed with young Dorothy Parkers who crowd around my man. The worst part is that the novel he wrote is set in North Korea, so he gets invited to all these