Smoke And Mirrors

The Sweeper of Dreams

This one began with a Lisa Snellings statue of a man leaning on a broom. He was obviously some kind of janitor. I wondered what kind, and that was where this story came from.

This is another early story. I wrote it in 1984, and I did the final draft (a hasty coat of paint and some grouting in the nastiest cracks) in 1989. In 1984 I couldn't sell it (the SF mags didn't like the sex, the sex mags didn't like the disease). In 1987 I was asked if I would sell it to an anthology of sexual SF stories, but I declined. In 1984 I had written a story about a venereal disease. The same story seemed to say different things in 1987. The story itself might not have changed, but the landscape around it had altered mightily: I'm talking about AIDS here, and so, whether I had intended it or not, was the story. If I was going to rewrite the story I was going to have to take AIDS into account, and I couldn't. It was too big, too unknown, too hard to get a grip on. But by 1989 the cultural landscape had shifted once more, shifted to the point where I felt, if not comfortable, then less uncomfortable about taking the story out of the cabinet, brushing it down, wiping the smudges off its face, and sending it out to meet the nice people. So when editor Steve Niles asked if I had anything unpublished for his anthology Words Without Pictures, I gave him this.

I could say that it wasn't a story about AIDS. But I'd be lying, at least in part. And these days AIDS seems to have become, for good or evil, just another disease in Venus's armoury.

Really, I think it's mostly about loneliness, and identity, and, perhaps, it's about the joys of making your own way in the world.