“Soft” (1984)

I liked this story by F. Paul Wilson—another good one in The Weird, which may have its ups and downs, but the highs tend to be unusually high. Here the concept is a virus (and/or environmental toxin—they haven’t figured it out yet) which decomposes and liquefies bones, usually (but not always) from the feet up. The disaster is spreading widely. The story involves a father and daughter in a Manhattan apartment who have both mostly lost their legs. Like multiple sclerosis the progress of this thing is unpredictable. It can stop getting worse. Government-sponsored research is ongoing, but—eerily, as with Covid—people don’t trust the government, including the father in this story. There’s an interesting tension between the father and the daughter. She is a little worse off and wants to take advantage of the government programs. He thinks it will do them no good, at best they are experimenting on people with mixed results. A great detail here is that the bone deterioration is audible to the victim, “like someone gently crinkling cellophane inside your head.” The narrative arc is the father’s investigation into a neighbor across the street who has not been responding to his walkie-talkie for a few days. The journey there is an arduous one, walking on his knees. And really that’s about it. Brevity once again helps to make a story work. “Soft” freezes you and leaves you, establishing the condition and then the scope—worldwide, the entire human species, and moving fast. Prognosis negative, in other words. One thing that’s interesting here is that disintegration of bones does not appear to be painful. It just happens, and it is devastating, but there are few direct physical agonies associated with it, just that horrible crinkling sound. “Soft” is kind of like the Titanic story after the iceberg. Everything is ending—in relatively slow motion but ending certainly. Wilson does a good job of laying it out and a better one of letting it lay there: an apocalypse. It reminds me that way of Jerome Bixby’s “It’s a Good Life”—the same level of disaster as we enter. Strange and weird and horrible, science fiction but also horror because it is so utterly despairing in its implications. But its tone, by contrast, is more upbeat, plucky—the vibe of someone who wants to survive and means to but probably won’t but still wants to but won’t. Teetering right there. Good one.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.