In celebration of the recently released THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY, Tachyon and editors Peter S. Beagle and Jacob Weisman present glimpses into the future of fantasy from several of the volume’s magnificent tales.

Tornado’s
Siren

by

Brooke
Bolander

Rhea
is nine years old when she first meets the tornado that will fall in
love with her. It comes late in the afternoon, after school and
graham crackers and the four o’clock showing of Jeopardy.
The sidewalks sweat like her father after a jog and the sky scums
over with bruised purple-black clouds. The muggy wind blows restless,
so unsettled she gets nervous even before the television starts
blaring warnings. She reads the names of the counties as they scroll
across the bottom of the screen, listening intently to everything the
weatherman says. Rhea doesn’t know what a lot of the words mean,
but she knows what fear sounds like, and his voice is chock full of
it.

“Folks,
we have a very serious situation here. If you are in the path of this
storm, I need you to go to an interior hall or bathroom right
now.” A wind hits the antenna outside and he
briefly fades to ghostly static before popping back in. “We’ve
got a debris ball on radar and confirmed sightings of a touchdown in
Lark County. This is big. If you’re in a mobile home, find a
low-lying area outside, like a ditch or culvert. If you’re
listening to this from a car radio—”

The
electricity cuts him off mid-sentence. Rhea is left alone in the dark
of her grandparents’ house, surrounded by shadows and the noise of
increasing rain.

For more info about THE NEW VOICES OF FANTASY, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover art by Camille André

Cover design by Elizabeth Story