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Science Fiction

Standards and

Practices

By Barry N. Malzberg

contemporary

Standards and Practices

by Barry N. Malzberg

Fictionwise Publications

www.fictionwise.com

This ebook is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any

resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely

coincidental.

Originally appeared in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction"

in April 1993

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COVER DESIGN BY CHRIS HARDWICK

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Standards and Practices

by Barry N. Malzberg

EMILY DICKINSON could sense her options winding down. The

biological clock in the first place, 37 years old now and no child, no

husband, not even a man about whom she could fantasize; then too

on all other fronts her life seemed to have become sallow, wasted.

The City University was cutting back now, even on the adjunct

positions; the building management had made specious

“improvements” to her studio and had socked her with a twenty-

eight-dollar-a-month increase. Everywhere she turned this sullen

October she felt the sense of her imprisonment ever more palpable.

Staring down 85th Street at the Hudson, looking at the fireball sun

collapse unevenly behind the monstrous buildings of Fort Lee, New

Jersey, Emily felt as if she herself were sinking, as if—

Standards and Practices

by Barry N. Malzberg

That enormous ball; unbuckled to its waist

Charmless, the suitor beckoning to his celestial hutch

As if not embrace but the stone grave without haste

Awaited those kissing—beckoning—unguent clutch.

And the poetry was not going well either; ever since Howard Moss

had died the New Yorker had been closed to her. Epoch , the

Massachusetts Review not even postage money and after the little

flurry surrounding her first book, a close runner-up for the Lamont

Moss had told her, and a one-thousand-dollar grant from the

Academy of Arts & Letters, she had been unable to attract any

interest in what she felt was her far stronger second collection, now

going the contest circuit after five years of failing to find even Capra

or Swallow Press. Of course the poetry had never been anything

which she could have taken seriously, it had been as her brother

Austin had told her so many years ago “a very nice outlet” and that

was about all but it was frustrating to find even this closed off to her

now. But the men situation was worse; after the little thing she had

Standards and Practices

by Barry N. Malzberg

had going with Oliver hit or miss for a couple of years, at least he

had been predictable and she could count on him to do nothing

crazy, after that had come to a quick truncation with Oliver's on-line

management shifting half the company, bang! Like that to Santa Fe,

she had had no man in her life at all. Not that she could gird herself

to the seeking. Where were they? They were all married or gay or

crazy or some combination of the three and then too there was the

lurking possibility of AIDS with anyone at any time, that—

Small bite, the grand and sweeping unbuttoning

In rorridozs far and dense, the swoon of gluttony

Unappeased by that darker fear; grave to grave

We travel and only that dreaming bite become our nave.

You perhaps reached that point, close to 40 or a little beyond,

where all of your plans and scuttling for possibility seem only to

have led to this West Side of replication and loss, the dropping of the

sun into the river prefiguring the fall of her own life. And yet Emily

Barry N. Malzberg - Standards and Practices.pdf

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