Laurel, an artist in the terminal stages of cancer, is obsessed with the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Jerry, her homecare nurse whose lover is dying of AIDS, gives her a surprising gift. A hummingbird feeder. As Laurel comes to grips with her impending death, she learns powerful lessons about Egyptian Magic from the hummingbirds that visit her.
This is a tough, angry novelette, I admit, first published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, chosen for Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror 5th Annual Collection (St. Martin’s Press), and nominated for the Nebula Award by the great fantasy author Roger Zelazny (I didn’t know it at the time, but he was battling cancer) among other authors.
Copyright © 2000--2013 by Lisa Mason. Art copyright © 2012--2013 by Tom Robinson. All rights reserved.
Terri Windling received the World Fantasy Award for her tremendous contributions to the fantasy field and her editing of anthologies, including Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, the Fifth Annual Collection (St. Martin’s Press). Here’s her introduction to Hummers.
“Ursula Le Guin has described fantasy as ‘a different approach to reality, an alternate technique for apprehending and coping with existence.’
Fantasy, like myth and legend, provides a means of storytelling that at its best goes beyond entertainment to travel the inner roads of the human soul. The following story does this beautifully, using the form of fantasy fiction and the symbols of Egyptian mythology to enter one of the most mysterious lands of all: the one that lies at the threshold of death. Readers who have experienced the loss of loved ones to cancer or AIDS will find this story cuts particularly close to the bone, but the fear of death is universal, and Mason’s exploration of this fear is both unsentimental and compassionate.”