My Real Children

by Jo Walton

In 2015, Patricia is 89 years old and living in a nursing home, with two mutually-exclusive sets of memories: one of a world where 1964 after an escalated Cuban Missile Crisis led to the nuclear obliteration of Miami and Kiev—and, on a more personal level, one in which she went by "Trish", married a man and had four children before she was able to escape an unhappy marriage and become involved in politics, and one in which, as "Pat", she was a successful travel writer raising three children with her lesbian partner. Both feel completely real, but both cannot be – even though both sets of children visit her.