“On the way out to Tempe I saw a dead jackal in the road. I was in the far left lane of Van Buren, ten lanes away from it, and its long legs were facing away from me, the squarish muzzle flat against the pavement so it looked narrower than it really was, and for a minute I thought it was a dog.”
Another story about holding onto the past, and a story about love. A photojournalist is on his way to profile the last road-legal RV in Arizona when he sees a dead animal on the highway… I don’t know how describe the way the pieces of this story come together without cheating the unaware reader out of first-hand experience of its genius. I hope it suffices to say they do. The result is a compassionate examination of how people hold on to the past.
First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in 1988. Collected in Time Is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis, Gollancz, 2013; and The Best of Connie Willis: Award-Winning Stories, Del Rey, 2014
A Personal Anthology 