Standing Room Only

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Asimov's - Standing Room Only

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Karen Joy Fowler: Standing Room Only

First appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction August 1997.

Nominated for Best Short Story

On Good Friday 1865, Washington, DC, was crowded with

tourists and revelers. Even Willard’s, which claimed to be the

largest hotel in the country, with room for 1200 guests, had

been booked to capacity. Its lobbies and sitting rooms were

hot with bodies. Gaslight hissed from golden chandeliers,

spilled over the doormen’s uniforms of black and maroon.

Many of the revelers were women. In 1865, women were

admired for their stoutness and went anywhere they could fit

their hoop skirts. The women at Willard’s wore garishly

colored dresses with enormous skirts and resembled great

inverted tulips. The men were in swallowtail coats.

Outside it was almost spring. The forsythia bloomed, dusting

the city with yellow. Weeds leapt up in the public parks; the

roads melted to mud. Pigs roamed like dogs about the city,

and dead cats by the dozens floated in the sewers and

perfumed the rooms of the White House itself.

The Metropolitan Hotel contained an especially rowdy group

of celebrants from Baltimore, who passed the night of April 13

toasting everything under the sun. They resurrected on the

morning of the 14th, pale and spent, surrounded by broken

glass and sporting bruises they couldn’t remember getting.

Read these

Nebula-

nominated

stories

From Asimov's

Echea, by

Kristine

Kathryn Rusch

Fortune and

Misfortune, by

Lisa Goldstein

Izzy and the

Father of

Terror, by

Eliot Fintushel

Lethe, by

Walter Jon

Williams

Standing

Room Only,

by Karen Joy

Fowler

Winter Fire,

by Geoffrey A.

Landis

From Analog

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Asimov's - Standing Room Only

It was the last day of Lent. The war was officially over, except

for Joseph Johnston’s Confederate army and some action out

west. The citizens of Washington, DC, still began each

morning reading the daily death list. If anything, this task had

taken on an added urgency. To lose someone you loved now,

with the rest of the city madly, if grimly, celebrating, would be

unendurable.

The guests in Mary Surratt’s boarding house began the day

with a breakfast of steak, eggs and ham, oysters, grits and

whiskey. Mary’s seventeen-year old daughter, Anna, was in

love with John Wilkes Booth. She had a picture of him hidden

in the sitting room, behind a lithograph entitled "Morning,

Noon, and Night." She helped her mother clear the table and

she noticed with a sharp and unreasonable disapproval that

one of the two new boarders, one of the men who only last

night had been given a room, was staring at her mother.

Mary Surratt was neither a pretty women, nor a clever one,

nor was she young. Anna was too much of a romantic, too

star- and stage-struck, to approve. It was one thing to lie

awake at night in her attic bedroom, thinking of JW. It was

another to imagine her mother playing any part in such

feelings.

Anna’s brother John once told her that five years ago a

woman named Henrietta Irving had tried to stab Booth with a

knife. Failing, she’d thrust the blade into her own chest

instead. He seemed to be under the impression that this story

would bring Anna to her senses. It had, as anyone could have

predicted, the opposite effect. Anna had also heard rumors

that Booth kept a woman in a house of prostitution near the

White House. And once she had seen a piece of paper on

which Booth had been composing a poem. You could make

out the final version:

Now in this hour that we part,

I will ask to be forgotten never

But, in thy pure and guileless heart,

Consider me thy friend dear Eva.

Anna would sit in the parlor while her mother dozed and

Aurora in Four

Voices, by

Catherine

Asaro

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"Standing

Room Only" by

Karen Joy

Fowler,

1997 by Karen

Joy Fowler,

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