Year's Best SF 17

Judith Moffett (www.judithmoffett.com) lives in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. She is an English professor (retired), a poet, a Swedish translator, a science-fiction writer, and the author of eleven books in five genres. Two of her novels were New York Times Notable Books. Her most recent novel is The Bird Shaman (2008), the third in her Holy Ground Trilogy, after The Ragged World (1991) and Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream (1992). She spent most of 2010 and half of 2011 writing a memoir of her long friendship with the poet James Merrill, who died in 1995. In 2013 Greywolf Press will bring out Air Mail, the correspondence between American poet Robert Bly and the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year; Moffett translated Tranströmer’s early letters to Bly for that book. This is her first short fiction in several years.

“The Middle of Somewhere” was published in Welcome to the Greenhouse, an excellent anthology of stories about climate change, edited by Gordon Van Gelder. A teenaged girl helps a seventy-year old woman collect data on bird hatching, that demonstrates the veracity of climate change. It is very clearly within the framework of science fiction, very science oriented, and also a revelation of character.

Kaylee is entering data on Jane’s clunky old desktop computer, and texting with a few friends while she does it, when the weather alarm goes off for the second time.

Cornell University’s NestWatch Citizen Scientist program runs this website where you have a different chart for each nest site you’re monitoring. You’re supposed to fill in the data after each visit to the site. Jane’s got a zillion different kinds of birds nesting on her property, and she knows where a lot of them are doing it, so Kaylee’s biology teacher fixed it up with Jane, who’s a friend of hers, for Kaylee to do this NestWatch project for class. Twice a week all spring she’s been coming out to Jane’s place to monitor seven pairs of nesting birds. The place used to be a farm but is all grown up now in trees and bushes except for five or ten acres around the house, which Jane keeps mowed. Bluebirds like short grass and open space.

Jane is nice, but seriously weird. All Kaylee’s friends think so, and to be honest Kaylee kind of slants what she tells people to exaggerate that side of Jane, who lives a lot like people did way before Kaylee was born, in this little log house with only three small rooms and no dishwasher or clothes dryer, and solar panels on the roof. She has beehives—well, that’s not so weird, though for an old lady maybe it is—but all her water is pumped from a cistern, plus she has two rain barrels out in the garden. Rain barrels! Kaylee knows for a fact that a few years back, when they brought city water out this far from town, Jane just said, Oh well, I can always hook up later if I think I need to. So you have to watch every drop of water you use at Jane’s house, like only flushing the toilet every so often, unless they’re getting plenty of rain. There’s a little sign taped to the bathroom wall that you can’t avoid reading when you’re sitting on the toilet: IF IT’S YELLOW / LET IT MELLOW / IF IT’S BROWN / FLUSH IT DOWN. Sometimes Kaylee flushes it down even when it isn’t brown, out of embarrassment.