Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

A FIST OF PERMUTATIONS IN LIGHTNING AND WILDFLOWERS ^{ALYSSA WONG}

Alyssa Wong lives in Chapel Hill, NC, and really, really likes crows. Her stories have won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and the Locus Award for Best Novelette. She was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others. Alyssa can be found on Twitter as @crashwong.

There was nothing phoenix-like in my sister’s immolation. Just the scent of charred skin, unbearable heat, the inharmonious sound of her last, grief-raw scream as she evaporated, leaving glass footprints seared into the desert sand.

If my parents were still alive—although they are, probably, in some iteration of the universe; maybe even this one—they would tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that no one could have seen it coming. That she did this to herself. But that kind of blame doesn’t suit me. Besides, they had always been exceptionally blind to matters regarding Melanie. They didn’t even notice when the two of us would take to the sky together, Melanie blowing currents back and forth beneath our bodies, weaving thermals like daisy chains. We used to make sparks dance at the table, and our mom never said a word about it, except that it was rude to do things that other people couldn’t in front of them, and also that we needed to learn to talk to people other than each other.

Melanie was better at everything than I was, the stormy bit and the talking bit both. She could split the horizon in two if she wanted, opening it at the seams as deftly as a tailor, and make the lightning curl catlike at her wrist and purr for her. She could do that with people too; Mel glowed, soft, luminescent. It was hard to look away from her, and so easy to disappear into her shadow.

But when things got too bad to ignore, the air in the house dark and crackling with ugly energy like the sky before a monsoon, she dug in and refused to leave. I was the one who abandoned our coast for another, promising I’d be back soon. And then I was the one who stayed away.

The day my sister ended the world, the sky opened up in rain for the first time in years, flooding the desert wash behind our house. The snakes drowned in their holes and the javelinas stampeded downstream, but the water overtook them, and the air filled with their screaming as they were swept away.

I’d tried to take a taxi home, but the roads disappeared in the flash flood, so I struggled out of the swamped cab and slogged the last two miles.

Melanie was outside, a small, dry figure in front of the ruined shell of our parents’ house. She wore the only dress she had left—the rest our mother had burned when she’d found them. The rain bent around my sister in a bell shape, and electricity danced in her hands, growing bigger and bigger like a ravenous cat’s cradle. Some time ago, lightning had shattered the cacti in the yard, splitting them in two and searing them bone-bare. Only their blackened skeletons were left, clawing upward out of the water like accusing fingers.

I know she felt me coming. Maybe it was a tremble in the dry ground beneath her feet, or a ripple of energy through the water that crashed around my waist. She glanced up, her eyes wide, bruised circles.

I remember that I yelled something at her. That time around, it could have been her name. It could have been a plea, begging her not to do what I could see was about to happen. Or maybe it was just “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The world hiccupped, warping violet, legs of electricity touching down around me, biting at my hair, singeing anything still alive beneath the water. I barely felt it.

“Why did you come back?” were the last words she said to me before she went up in flames, taking the rest of the universe with her.

It was simple, Melanie had once told me. “Here, Hannah. Pay attention, and I’ll teach you how the future works.”

She drew the picture for me in the air, a map of sparkling futures, constants, and variables; closed circuits of possibilities looped together, arcing from one timeline to another. I saw and understood; but more than that, for the first time, I saw her power as a single, mutable shape.

“That’s beautiful,” I said.

“Isn’t it?” Melanie traced the air with her finger, tapping a single glowing point. “Look, that’s us. And here’s what could happen, depending on… well, depending on a lot of things.”

Options chained like lightning strikes before my eyes, possibilities growing legs like sentient things. “If it’s that easy, why don’t you change it?” I blurted out. “Shape it to make it better for us, I mean.”

Her eyes slid away from me. “It’s not that easy to get it right,” she said.

The day my sister ended the world, I was on a plane home for the first time in years. I’d managed to sleep most of the way, which was unusual, and I woke up as the plane was descending, a faint popping in my ears. It was sunset, and the flat, highway-veined city was just beginning to glimmer with electric light, civilization pulsing across the ground in arteries, in fractals.

But the beauty was lost on me. The clouds outside felt heavy, and my heart wouldn’t stop drumming in my chest. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.

I felt like I’d seen this before.

Time stuttered, and outside, it began to rain.

If I could knit you a crown of potential futures like the daisies you braided together for me when we were young, I would.

None of them would end with you burning to death at the edge of our property, beaten senseless in the wash behind the house by drunken college boys, slowly cut to pieces at home by parents who wanted you only in one shape, the one crafted in their image.

I would give you only the best things. The kindness you deserved, the body you wanted, a way out that didn’t end with the horizon line ripped open, possibilities pouring out like loose stuffing, my world shrieking to a halt.

I would have fixed everything.

The day my sister—

No.

The day I ended the world, the very first time, my plane touched down early and I sprinted to catch a cab before the impending monsoon swept the city. This time around, I made it four miles from the house before a six-car pileup—tires slick, drivers panicked in the storm—stopped traffic entirely. It took everything in me not to shunt the water aside in front of everyone else, to stumble into neck-deep currents and anchor my feet to the asphalt below. It took forever to get home, and when I did, Melanie was not there.

An hour later, my sister’s body floated up in the new river behind our house, covered in bruises, red plastic cups bumping at her bare feet, and lightning spiked white-hot through my chest, searing the ground of my heart into a desert. All I could see were cities burning, houses shelled, every regret and act of cowardice twisting through me into blinding rage.

And in that moment, perfect power was bright in front of me, a seam in space, in time, across myriad axes. I stretched out and grabbed it, and split the world in two. Its ribs reached out to me, and I reached back.

“You can’t change this, Hannah,” my sister’s ghost said as I tore the sky apart, shredding the fabric of air, of cloud, of matter and possibility. The lightning danced for me now, bent and buckled for me the way it had only done for Melanie before.

I will, I will. I will fix this.

“You can’t,” my sister said. “It’ll end the same way. Differently, but the same.”

“Why?” I screamed.

The world crashed, bowed like wet rice paper, spilled inward. Our parents’ house a crater, the flame that was Melanie nowhere on the brightly lit grid of eventualities. No, no, no. Wrong again.

“I never meant to hurt you.” Her ghost sighed as my hands blindly rearranged the components of reality. “I didn’t mean for you to see it. This was never about you, Hannah. I wish you’d realize that.”

The week before my sister ended the world, I didn’t go home. I stayed in the theater and broke every plate, every mug in the green room, hurling the shards in the faces of every person who’d come to court me. I blinded my agent, I crippled my director, I hamstrung the rest of the actors with porcelain shrapnel. Gale-force winds whipped around me, a crushing power at my back, the storm building behind my pulsing temples, and I blew out into the city, heading downtown.

At Melanie’s favorite bakery, where we’d ordered donuts as big as our heads the last time she’d come to visit, I ripped the boards out of the floor one by one, sending them flying through shattered windows. Icing splattered, electricity scorched wood and sugar alike; the scent of ozone was ripe and acrid in the air.

“Hannah,” said my sister’s reflection in the glass pieces on the floor. The gentle weight of her phantom hand on my shoulder burned, and time tugged at me again. “That’s enough.”

The blame circles back, hungry, and I recognize my own voice hissing from its mouth. Your fault, Hannah. All your fault. You could have stopped this, but you were blinded by your own ambition, your own selfishness; you let the haze of the city—the toxic glamour and crystalline cold—seduce you away from the people you love. And it was true. Even once in flight, the taste of glory lingered on my tongue the whole way home, sharp in the stale cabin air.

But Melanie and I had talked, we’d Skyped. Even if it had been through the computer screen, why hadn’t I seen the storms at home crackling on the horizon, their dying sparks reflected in my sister’s eyes?

“You’re being selfish,” my sister’s latest iteration said as I whipped the storm into a dark frenzy over the barren mountains. I couldn’t remember if the body in the wash this time was hers, or if that was a memory by now. “Hurting yourself over this is just a way of trying to get control over something that was never in your—”

Shut up. Shut

“—something that was never yours to control—”

up. Shut up.

The world ended with a bang, folding in on itself, the lines of the horizon collapsing like soaked origami. Our parents’ house turned to glass, to fire, to energy sparking ripe and rich for the taking. I drained it, pulling it deep into myself until the house was empty, our parents gone. And then there was nothing but me and my sister, her imprint, her echo.

Melanie’s ghost sighed. “I expected better of you,” she said.

The void roared back to life, and tossed me out again.

So back to the city again, rewound further this time. Back, past the donut shop, windows never scorched, pastries never eaten. This time I didn’t break anything. I went to auditions, cooked rice and fried eggs for dinner, and worked until my muscles screamed for me to stop, then worked more. For a week, I didn’t speak unless I was using someone else’s words.

The night before boarding the plane, I found myself whispering my secrets into the frigid night air, combing the space between skyscrapers with my tongue.

The city madness was getting to me.

I passed through the same airports like a shade, the route now familiar as the curve of my sleeping cheek in my weary palm.

I did everything right that time, and arrived home to find that the thunderstorm had demolished the airport, preventing anyone from landing.

The next time, I ended the world by myself, during a power outage. Life blinked out, softly, and screamed back into being.

The void spit the kitchen knife out at my feet, onto the floor of my Bushwick apartment, a taunt echoed in my perfect, intact wrists.

You selfish bitch.

The cycle remained unbroken. Gentle sparks kissed my hands in the dark, glinting off of the blade. My blood roared in my ears.

Again, then.

I reoriented the knife.

“Hannah. How many people are you going to destroy before you give up on me?”

Five times, five lines, lead and edges and crushed pills all yanked out of me, spit back further and further each time. I lined them up on my windowsill like the rejected possibilities they were, and let time spool itself out.

Not my fault, not my fault. I’d tried so hard, first to knit the cycle closed and then to slash it to pieces. But still the end danced away from me, the world bleeding into its next cycle.

“What the hell are you doing?” said my roommate for the fifth time, leaning against the doorframe as he did in every iteration. My sullen eyes saw his every possibility splayed out before me like a fall of cards: roommate disappearing into the bathroom to find his medications gone; roommate leaving for work and returning too late; roommate blackened and burned as the apartment went up in smoke; roommate helping me into bed and turning the light off before heading back into the kitchen to bundle up all of the knives.

“Thinking,” I croaked. My hands itched with electricity, sparks I couldn’t control dancing across my fingers.

“You and your weird sleight of hand shit.” He sighed and tossed me my iPhone. “Your phone is ringing.”

It took me a second to realize that the stupid anime song filtering out of the speakers was the one that Melanie liked, my ringtone for the home landline. But it wasn’t her on the phone. It was my mother, who told me that Melanie had drowned in the pool in the backyard during a freak rainstorm, one that had ruptured from an empty sky. My heartbeat slowed, each second syrup-thick.

“But I thought I had more time,” I whispered into the phone. It was true, I was supposed to have a few more days to think of things, to fix them—

“No one knows when God will take us home,” said my mother. “He’s in the Lord’s hands. Always has been.”

In my grief, I’d nearly forgotten about my sister, and in my absence, my apocalypse had shifted course without me.

The world ended anew with a shuddering sob, and I hit the ground running. This time, I touched down two weeks, two agonizing weeks, before I would board my plane, and the first thing I did was book an immediate red-eye home, hoping that if I got there early, I wouldn’t be too late.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

“What’s life like in the city?” Melanie had asked me when she’d come to visit me, the spring before she died. I’d holed up in my dorm room to practice monologues for my senior showcase until my lungs burned, which probably meant I hadn’t been breathing properly anyhow, and Melanie had demanded that we go outside. We’d gone downtown, where well-dressed students and decently-dressed visitors crawled the streets, looking for artisanal french fries. We’d settled in a donut shop about as big as Melanie’s closet back home and were crunched up, knees to chests, on the inside windowsill.

She’d looked good, wearing the pale pink sweater I’d secretly sent her for her birthday, fingernails painted the way they never could be at home. But she’d also looked so tired, sallow almost, her face lined with the weight of our parents’ words.

All the things that my friends expected me to say—the city’s great, it’s exciting, I’m so lucky to live here, I love it—flashed through my head. So did the things I’d never told anyone, that I couldn’t tell anyone, because they wouldn’t want to hear it. How the loneliness was crippling; how I’d been fired from three part-time jobs by now; how every day, on my way to class, I walked past the same madman in the tunnel moaning for Jesus, a mess of languages spilling from his bloody lips, past a banner ad that read: GET A WAY WITHOUT LEAVING NEW YORK.

“It’s different,” I’d said at last. I don’t know who I am without you, I didn’t say.

“I understand,” Melanie had replied. I could tell that she did.

I have followed the path back, again and again, to that first stream of possibility. The events lined up so neatly that I could do them in my sleep, and sometimes did. They always led back to the desert monsoon, slogging through the water, my sister disappearing in a pillar of flame.

Why didn’t you want me there to help you? I wanted to ask. If you were this far gone, why didn’t you ask me to come home? I never got close enough to reach her through the wet-dust wind that snarled and roared around us, snatching my voice away.

There are timelines I don’t think about.

There is a timeline where the power never touches me, where I make it home in time for the party at the neighbor’s house, where a college boy’s hands are around my throat, not my sister’s, my legs kicking around his waist. Melanie scorches him to pieces, blackens him, shatters the boulders in the wash, and howls until her voice bleeds. Her tears fall into my eyes, sizzling and evaporating on contact, as the sky yawns above us, hungry, broken.

There are others, too, reaching back further along the daisy chain, when we were younger: slipping on ice, light cracking hard through my head; the agonizing sting of a scorpion on my arm, the stiffening of limbs, sudden tightness in my chest; Melanie in a dress for the first time, sobbing as our father screamed at her.

And forward, along the lines that branch out, fuzzing the borders of the future’s shape: knives, dented, rejected by my gut; police sirens wailing, gunshots ringing into the crater where my city used to be, the scent of burnt sugar; a plane that never lands safely, erupting into flame on the runway.

I only remember these as faint echoes, like a story someone told me once but whose details I’ve forgotten. Did they happen? Yes. No. The chain frays, spreads out like roots, possibilities endless.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

When Melanie and I were little, we’d lie on the carpet in the winter and warm our soggy feet by the radiator. This was when we still had a bad habit of jumping into snowbanks, exasperating our mom to no end. Melanie had just begun to learn how to melt shapes in the snow, the finest spark at the end of her index finger.

“I wonder why we can do these things,” Melanie had said, closing her fist around the lightning glinting across her palm.

I grinned at her, reaching out to catch a bit of stray static dancing down her arm. “Dunno. Don’t you think it’s cool to be special? It’s the one thing no one else can do but us.”

She wagged a foot at the radiator. “It’s kind of lonely, though.”

“At least you have me.”

“I guess so,” she said. “That’s better than nothing.”

I tackled her to the ground and we spent the next ten minutes hitting each other with stuffed animals.

My sister always dies before the world ends.

The sky is marred with the scars of my efforts, and I am so, so tired. The storm hums in my veins, one more cycle in many. I can’t count them anymore, numbers constantly in flux, ticking higher with each potential breath.

I wonder if this is what Melanie felt like every day of her life, so ripe with power, always at the precipice, always afraid to push in fear of making things worse.

This time around, I’m on the floor of my apartment, staring at my cell phone in my hand. My roommate is out and I’ve already missed my flight home. I let it pass, money evaporating into the void, meaningless.

Somewhere in the southwest, Melanie is walking out of the house, or is about to, her heart roaring with wildfire, lonely, alone. The sparks dance purple in her hands, lightning like veins through her arms.

You can’t fix this. It was never yours to control.

But my hands fumble over the touch screen, thumbs sliding wet over her face on the contact screen. She’s programmed in the same stupid anime ringtone I have on my phone, and it jingles inanely, all synthetic voices and pre-ordained sound.

I wait, mouth dry, my body shaking like the sky above the Mojave before it rains. Painted in brilliant, feverish strokes in my head, the daisy chain grows.

SABBATH WINE ^{BARBARA KRASNOFF}

Barbara Krasnoff divides her time between writing short speculative fiction and working as a freelance writer for a number of tech publications.

She is a member of the NYC writers group Tabula Rasa, and her short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Space & Time Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, Doorways, Sybil’s Garage, Behind the Wainscot, Escape Velocity, Weird Tales, Descant, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Amazing Stories, and the anthologies Fat Girl in a Strange Land, Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s, Crossed Genres Year Two, Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol. I, Clockwork Phoenix 2, Such a Pretty Face: Tales of Power & Abundance, and Memories and Visions: Women’s Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Barbara is also the author of a nonfiction book for young adults, Robots: Reel to Real (Arco Publishing, 1982).

“My name’s Malka Hirsch,” the girl said. “I’m nine.”

“I’m David Richards,” the boy said. “I’m almost thirteen.”

The two kids were sitting on the bottom step of a run-down brownstone at the edge of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. It was late on a hot summer afternoon, and people were just starting to drift home from work, lingering on stoops and fire escapes to catch any hint of a breeze before going up to their stifling flats.

Malka and David had been sitting there companionably for a while, listening to a chorus of gospel singers practicing in the first-floor front apartment at the top of the stairs. Occasionally, the music paused as a male voice offered instructions and encouragement; it was during one of those pauses that the kids introduced themselves to each other.

Malka looked up at her new friend doubtfully. “You don’t mind talking to me?” she asked. “Most big boys don’t like talking to girls my age. My cousin Shlomo, he only wanted to talk to the older girl who lived down the street and who wore short skirts and a scarf around her neck.”

“I don’t mind,” said David. “I like kids. And anyway, I’m dead, so I guess that makes a difference.”

Above them, the enthusiastic chorus started again. As a soprano wailed a high lament, she shivered in delight. “I wish I could sing like that.”

“It’s called ‘Ride Up in the Chariot,’” said David. “When I was little, my mama used to sing it when she washed the white folks’ laundry. She told me my great-grandma sang it when she stole away from slavery.”

“It’s nice,” Malka said. She had short, dark brown hair that just reached her shoulders and straight bangs that touched her eyebrows. She had pulled her rather dirty knees up and was resting her chin on them, her arms wrapped around her legs. “I’ve heard that one before, but I didn’t know what it was called. They practice every Thursday, and I come here to listen.”

“Why don’t you go in?” asked David. He was just at that stage of adolescence where the body seemed to be growing too fast; his long legs stretched out in front of him while he leaned back on his elbows. He had a thin, cheerful face set off by bright, intelligent eyes and hair cropped so close to his skull that it looked almost painted on. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, and you could hear better.”

Malka grinned and pointed to the sign just above the front-door bell that read Cornerstone Baptist Church. “My papa would mind,” she said. “He’d mind plenty. He’d think I was going to get converted or something.”

“No wonder I never seen you before,” said the boy. “I usually just come on Sundays. Other days, I…” He paused. “Well, I usually just come on Sundays.”

The music continued against a background of voices from the people around them. A couple of floors above, a baby cried, and two men argued in sharp, dangerous tones; down on the ground, a gang of boys ran past, laughing, ignoring the two kids sitting outside the brownstone. A man sat on a cart laden with what looked like a family’s possessions. Obviously in no hurry, he let the horse take its time as it proceeded down the cobblestone street.

The song ended, and a sudden clatter of chairs and conversation indicated that the rehearsal was over. The two kids stood and moved to a nearby streetlamp so they wouldn’t get in the way of the congregation leaving the brownstone in twos and threes.

Malka looked at David. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Did you say you were dead?”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Well, at least, that’s what my daddy told me.”

She frowned. “You ain’t,” she said and then, when he didn’t say anything, “Really?”

He nodded affably. She reached out and poked him in the arm. “You ain’t,” she repeated. “If you were a ghost or something, I couldn’t touch you.” He shrugged and stared down at the street. Unwilling to lose her new friend, Malka quickly added, “It don’t matter. If you wanna be dead, that’s okay with me.”

“I don’t want to be dead,” said David. “I don’t even know if I really am. It’s just what Daddy told me.”

“Okay,” Malka said.

She swung slowly around the pole, holding on with one hand, while David stood patiently, his hands in the pockets of his worn pants.

Something caught his attention and he grinned. “Bet I know what he’s got under his coat,” he said, and pointed at a tall man hurrying down the street, his jacket carefully covering a package.

“It’s a bottle!” said Malka scornfully. “That’s obvious.”

“It’s moonshine,” said David, laughing.

“How do you know?” asked Malka, peering at the man.

“My daddy sells the stuff,” said David. “Out of a candy store over on Dumont Street.”

Malka was impressed. “Is he a gangster? I saw a movie about a gangster once.”

David grinned again. “Naw,” he said. “Just a low-rent bootlegger. If my mama ever heard about it, she’d come back here and make him stop in a hurry, you bet.”

“My mama’s dead,” Malka said. “Where is yours?”

David shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “She left one day and never came back.” He paused, then asked curiously, “You all don’t go to church, right?”

“Nope.”

“Well, what do you do?”

Malka smiled and tossed her hair back. “I’ll show you,” she said. “Would you like to come to a Sabbath dinner?”

Malka and her father lived in the top floor of a modern five-story apartment building about six blocks from the brownstone church. Somewhere between there and home, David had gone his own way, Malka didn’t quite remember when. It didn’t matter much, she decided. She had a plan, and she could tell David about it later.

She stood in the main room that acted as parlor, dining room, and kitchen. It was sparsely but comfortably furnished: besides a small wooden table that sat by the open window, there was a coal oven, a sink with cold running water, a cupboard over against one wall, and an overloaded bookcase against another. A faded flower-print rug covered the floor; it had obviously seen several tenants come and go.

Malka’s father sat at the table reading a newspaper by the slowly waning light, his elbow on the windowsill, his head leaning on his hand. A small plate with the remains of his supper sat nearby. He hadn’t shaved for a while; a short, dark beard covered his face.

“Papa,” said Malka.

Her father winced as though something hurt him, but he didn’t take his eyes from the book. “Yes, Malka?” he asked.

“Papa, today is Thursday, isn’t it?”

He raised his head and looked at her. Perhaps it was the beard, or because he worked so hard at the furrier’s where he spent his days curing animal pelts, but his face seemed more worn and sad than ever.

“Yes, daughter,” he said quietly. “Today is Thursday.”

She sat opposite him and folded her hands neatly in front of her. “Which means that tomorrow is Friday. And tomorrow night is the Sabbath.”

He smiled. “Now, Malka, when was the last time you saw your papa in a synagogue, rocking and mumbling useless prayers with the old men? This isn’t how I brought you up. You know I won’t participate in any—”

“—bourgeois religious ceremonies,” she finished with him. “Yes, I know. But I was thinking, Papa, that I would like to have a real Sabbath. The kind that you used to have with Mama. Just once. As…” Her face brightened. “As an educational experience.”

Her father sighed and closed his book. “An educational experience, hah?” he asked. “I see. How about this: If you want, on Saturday, we can go to Prospect Park. We’ll sit by the lake and feed the swans. Would you like that?”

“That would be nice,” said Malka. “But it’s not the same thing, is it?”

He shrugged. “No, Malka. You’re right. It isn’t.”

Across the alley, a clothesline squeaked as somebody pulled on it, an infant cried, and somebody cursed in a loud combination of Russian and Yiddish.

“And what brought on this sudden religious fervor?” her father asked. “You’re not going to start demanding I grow my beard to my knees and read nothing but holy books, are you?”

“Oh, Papa,” Malka said, exasperated. “Nothing like that. I made friends with this boy today, named David. He’s older than I am—over twelve—and his father also doesn’t approve of religion, but his mama used to sing the same songs they sing in the church down the street. We listened to them today, and I thought maybe I could invite him here and show him what we do…” Her voice trailed off as she saw her father’s face.

“You were at a church?” her father asked, a little tensely. “And you went in and listened?”

“No, of course not. We sat outside. It’s the church on the first floor of that house on Remsen Avenue. The one where they sing all those wonderful songs.”

“Ah!” her father said, enlightened, and shook his head. “Well, and I shouldn’t be pigheaded about this. Your mama always said I could be very pigheaded about my political convictions. You are a separate individual, and deserve to make up your own mind.”

“And it’s really for educating David,” said Malka eagerly.

Her father smiled. “Would that make you happy, Malka?” he asked. “To have a Sabbath dinner for you and your friend? Just this once?”

“Yes, just this once,” she said, bouncing on her toes. “With everything that goes with it.”

“Of course,” her father said. “I did a little overtime this week. I can ask Sarah who works over at the delicatessen for a couple pieces chicken, a loaf of bread, and maybe some soup and noodles, and I know we have some candles put by.”

“And you have Grandpa’s old prayer book,” she encouraged.

“Yes, I have that.”

“So, all we need is the wine!” Malka said triumphantly.

Her father’s face fell. “So, all we need is the wine.” He thought for a moment, then nodded. “Moshe will know. He knows everybody in the neighborhood; if anyone has any wine to sell, he’ll know about it.”

“It’s going to get dark soon,” said Malka. “Is it too late to ask?”

Her father smiled and stood. “Not too late at all. He’s probably in the park.”

“So, Abe,” Moshe said to Malka’s father, frowning, “you are going to betray your ideals and kowtow to the religious authorities? You, who were nearly sent to Siberia for writing articles linking religion to the consistent poverty of the masses? You, who were carried bodily out of your father’s synagogue for refusing to wear a hat at your brother’s wedding?”

Abe had immediately spotted Moshe, an older, slightly overweight man with thinning hair, on the well-worn bench where he habitually spent each summer evening. But after trying to explain what he needed only to be interrupted by Moshe’s irritable rant, Abe finally shrugged and walked a few steps away. Malka followed.

“There are some boys playing baseball over there,” he told her. “Why don’t you go enjoy the game and let me talk to Moshe by myself?”

“Okay, Papa,” Malka said, and ran off. Abe watched her for a moment, and then looked around. The small city park was full of people driven out of their apartments by the heat. Kids ran through screaming, taking advantage of the fact that their mothers were still cleaning up after dinner and therefore not looking out for misbehavior. Occasionally, one of the men who occupied the benches near the small plot of brown grass would stand and yell, “Sammy! Stop fighting with that boy!” Then, content to have done his duty by his offspring, he would sit down, and the kids would proceed as though nothing had happened.

Abe walked back to the bench and sat next to his friend, who now sat disconsolately batting a newspaper against his knee. “Moshe, just listen for a minute—”

But before he could finish, Moshe handed him his newspaper, climbed onto the bench, and pointed an accusing finger at a thin man who had just lit a cigarette two benches over.

“You!” Moshe yelled. “Harry! I have a bone to pick with you! What the hell were you doing writing that drek about the Pennsylvania steel strike? How dare you use racialism to try to cover up the crimes of the AFL in subverting the strike?”

“They were scabs!” the little man yelled back, gesturing with his cigarette. “The fact that they were Negroes is not an excuse!”

“They were workers who were trying to feed their families in the face of overwhelming oppression!” Moshe called back. “If the AFL had any respect for the people they were trying to organize, they could have brought all the workers into the union, and the bosses wouldn’t have been able to break the strike!”

“You ignore the social and cultural problems!” yelled Harry.

“You ignore the fact that you’re a schmuck!” roared Moshe.

“Will you get down and act like a human being for a minute?” asked Abe, hitting his friend with the newspaper. “I have a problem!”

Moshe shrugged and climbed down. At the other bench, Harry made an obscene gesture and went back to dourly sucking on his cigarette.

“Okay, I’m down,” said Moshe. “So, tell me, what’s your problem?”

“Like I was saying,” said Abe, “I’m going to have a Sabbath meal.”

Moshe squinted at him. “Nu?” he asked. “You’ve got yourself a girlfriend finally?”

Abe shook his head irritably. “No, I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Too bad,” his friend said, crossing his legs and surveying the park around him. “You can only mourn so long, you know. A young man like you, he shouldn’t be alone like some alter kocker like me.”

Abe smiled despite himself. “No, I just…” He looked for a moment to where Malka stood with a boy just a little taller than her, both watching the baseball game. That must be her new friend, he thought, probably from the next neighborhood over. His clothes seemed a bit too small for his growing frame; Abe wondered whether he had parents and, if so, whether they couldn’t afford to dress their child properly.

“It’s just this once,” he finally said. “A gift for a child.”

“Okay,” said Moshe. “So, what do you want from me? Absolution for abrogating your political ideals?”

“I want wine.”

“Ah.” Moshe turned and looked at Abe. “I see. You’ve got the prayer book, you’ve got the candles, you’ve got the challah. But the alcohol, that’s another thing. You couldn’t have come up with this idea last year, before the geniuses in Washington gave us the gift of Prohibition?”

“I want to do it right,” said Abe. “No grape juice and nothing made in somebody’s bathtub. And nothing illegal—I don’t want to make the gangsters any richer than they are.”

“Well…” Moshe shrugged. “If you’re going to make this an ethical issue, then I can’t help.”

“Oh, come on,” Abe said impatiently. “It’s only been a few months since Prohibition went into effect. I’m sure somebody’s got to have a few bottles of wine stashed away.”

“I’m sure they do,” Moshe said. “But they’re not going to give them to you. And don’t look at me,” he added quickly. “What I got stashed away isn’t what you drink at the Sabbath table.”

“Hell.” Abe stood and shook his head. “I made a promise. You got a cigarette?”

Moshe handed him one and then, as Abe lit a match, said, “Hey, why don’t you go find a rabbi?”

Abe blew out some smoke. “I said I wanted to make one Sabbath meal. I didn’t say I wanted to attend services.”

Moshe laughed. “No, I mean for your wine. When Congress passed Prohibition, the rabbis and priests and other religious big shots, they put up a fuss, so now they get to buy a certain amount for their congregations. You want some booze? Go to a rabbi.”

Abe stared at him. “You’re joking, right?”

Moshe continued to grin. “Truth. I heard it from a Chassidic friend of mine. We get together, play a little chess, argue. He told me that he had to go with his reb to the authorities because the old man can’t speak English, so they could sign the papers and prove he was a real rabbi. Now he’s got the right to buy a few cases a year so the families can say the blessing on the Sabbath and get drunk on Passover.”

Abe nodded, amused. “Figures.” He thought for a moment. “There’s a shul over on Livonia Avenue where my friend’s son had his bar mitzvah. Maybe I should try there.”

“If you’ve got a friend who goes there,” Moshe suggested, “why not simply get the wine from him?”

Abe took a long drag on his cigarette and shook his head. “No, I don’t want to get him in trouble with his rabbi. I’ll go ask myself. Thanks, Moshe.”

“Think nothing of it.” Suddenly Moshe’s eyes narrowed, and he jumped up onto the bench again, yelling to a man entering the park, “Joe, you capitalist sonovabitch! I saw that letter you wrote in the Daily Forward…”

Abe walked over to his daughter. “You heard?” he asked quietly. “We’ll go over to the synagogue right now and see what the rabbi can do for us.”

“Yes, Papa,” Malka said, and added, “This is David. He’s my new friend that I told you about. David, this is my father.”

“How do you do, Mr. Hirsch?” asked David politely.

“How do you do, David?” replied Abe. “It’s nice to meet you. I’m glad Malka has made a new friend.”

“Mr. Hirsch,” said David, “you don’t have to go to that rabbi if you don’t want to. I heard my father say that he and his business partners got some Jewish wine that he bought from a rabbi who didn’t need it all, and I’m sure he could sell you a bottle.”

Abe smiled. “Thank you, David. But as I told my friend, I’d rather not get involved in something illegal. You understand,” he added, “I do not mean to insult your father.”

“That’s okay,” David said. He turned and whispered to Malka, “You go ahead with your daddy. I’ll go find mine; you come get me if you need me for anything. He’s usually at the candy store on the corner of Dumont and Saratoga.”

“Okay,” Malka whispered back. “And if we do get wine, I’ll come get you, and you can come to our Sabbath dinner.”

Abe stared at the two children for a moment, then pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, tossed it away, and began walking. Malka waved at David and followed her father out of the park.

The synagogue was located in a small storefront; the large glass windows had been papered over for privacy. CONGREGATION ANSHE EMET was painted in careful Hebrew lettering on the front door. Evening services were obviously over; two elderly men were hobbling out of the store, arguing loudly in Yiddish. Abe waited until they had passed, took a deep breath, and walked in, followed by Malka.

The whitewashed room was taken up by several rows of folding chairs, some wooden bookcases at the back, and a large cabinet covered by a beautifully embroidered cloth. A powerfully built man with a long, white-streaked black beard was collecting books from some of the chairs.

While Malka went to the front to admire the embroidery, Abe walked over to the man. “Rabbi,” he said tentatively.

The rabbi turned and straightened. He stared at Abe doubtfully. “Do I know you?”

“I was here for Jacob Bernstein’s son Maxie’s bar mitzvah two months ago,” said Abe. “You probably don’t remember me.”

The rabbi examined him for a minute or two more, then nodded. “No, I do remember you. You sat in a corner with your arms folded and glowered like the Angel of Death when the boy sang his Torah portion.”

Abe shrugged. “I promised his father I’d attend. I didn’t promise I’d participate.”

“So,” said the rabbi, “you are one of those new radicals. The ones who are too smart to believe in the Almighty.”

“I simply believe that we have to save ourselves rather than wait for the Almighty to do it for us,” Abe rejoined.

“And so,” said the rabbi, “since you obviously have no respect for the beliefs of your fathers, why are you here?”

Abe bit his lip, ready to turn and leave.

A small voice next to him asked, “Papa? Is it safe here?”

He looked down. Malka was standing next to him, looking troubled and a little frightened. “One moment,” he said to the rabbi and walked to the door, which was open to let the little available air in.

“Of course it’s safe, daughter,” he said quietly. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Well,” she began, “it’s just… there isn’t a good place to hide. I thought synagogues had to have good hiding places.”

His hand went out to touch her hair, to reassure her, but then stopped. “Malkele,” he whispered, “you run outside and play. You let your papa take care of this. Don’t worry about anything—it will all turn out fine.”

Her face cleared, as though whatever evil thoughts had troubled her had completely disappeared. “Okay, Papa!” she said, and left.

Abe took a breath and went back into the room, where the rabbi was waiting. “This is the story,” he said. “My little girl is… Well, she wants a Sabbath meal.”

The rabbi cocked his head. “So, nu? Your child has more sense than you do. So have the Sabbath meal.”

“For a Sabbath meal,” said Abe. “I need wine.” He paused and added. “I would be… grateful if you would help me with this.”

“I see.” The rabbi smiled ironically. “In other words, you want to make a party, maybe, for a few of your radical friends, and you thought, ‘The rabbi is allowed to get wine for his congregation for the Sabbath and for the Holy Days, and if I tell him I want it for my little girl…’”

Abe took a step forward, furious.

“You have the gall to call me a liar?” he growled. “You religious fanatics are all alike. I come to you with a simple request, a little wine so that I can make a Friday night blessing for my little girl, and what do you do? You spit in my face!”

“You spit on your people and your religion,” said the rabbi, his voice rising as well. “You come here because you can’t get drunk legally anymore, so you think you’ll maybe come and take advantage of the stupid, unworldly rabbi?” He also took a step forward, so that he was almost nose-to-nose with Abe. “You think I am some kind of idiot?”

Abe didn’t retreat. “I know you get more wine than you need,” he shouted. “I know how this goes. The authorities give you so much per person, so maybe you exaggerate the size of your congregation just a bit, hah? And sell the rest?”

The rabbi shrugged. “And what if I do?” he said. “Does this look like the shul of a rich bootlegger? I have greenhorns fresh off the boat who are trying to support large families, men who are trying to get their wives and children here, boys whose families can’t afford to buy them a prayer book for their bar mitzvah. And you, the radical, somebody who makes speeches about the rights of poor people, you would criticize me for selling a few extra bottles of wine?”

“And so if you’re willing to sell wine,” yelled Abe, “why not sell it to me, a fellow Jew, rather than some goyishe bootlegger?”

There was a pause, and both men stared at each other, breathing hard. “Because he doesn’t know any better,” the rabbi finally said. “You should. Now get out of my shul.”

Abe strode out, muttering, and headed down the block. After about five blocks, he had walked off his anger, and he slowed down, finally sitting heavily on the steps of a nearby stoop. “I’m sorry, Malka,” he said. “Maybe I can go find the people that the rabbi sells to…”

“But David said his father could get us the wine,” said Malka, sitting next to him. “David said that his father and his friends, they have a drugstore where they sell hooch to people who want it. Lots of hooch,” she repeated the word, seeming pleased at its grown-up sound.

Abe grinned. “Malka, my sweet little girl,” he said, “do you know what your mother would have done to me had she known that her baby was dealing in illegal alcohol? And by the way, I like your friend David. Very polite child.”

“He’s not a child,” Malka objected. “He’s almost thirteen!”

“Ah. Practically a man,” said Abe, stroking his chin. “So. And his father, the bootlegger—he would sell to someone not of his race?”

“Well, of course,” said Malka, a little unsure herself. The question hadn’t occurred to her. “David said that they were looking for somebody to buy the kosher wine, and who else to sell it to but somebody who can really use it?”

Even from the outside, the candy store didn’t look promising—or even open. The windows were pasted over with ads, some of which were peeling off; when Malka and her father looked through the glass, shading their eyes with one hand, it was too dark inside to see much.

“You stay out here,” her father finally said. “This is not a place for little girls.” He took a breath and pushed the door open. A tiny bell tinkled as he stepped through; Malka, too curious to obey, quietly went in after him and stood by the door, trying to make herself as small as possible.

The store looked as unfriendly inside as it did out. A long counter, which had obviously once been used to serve sodas and ice cream, ran along the right wall of the store; it was empty and streaked with dust, and the shelves behind it were bare except for a few glasses. At the back of the store, there was a display case in which a few cans and dry-looking cakes sat.

The rest of the small space was taken up by several round tables. Only one was occupied, and it was partially obscured by a haze of cigarette smoke. Malka squinted: Three men sat there, playing cards. One was short and fat, with the darkest skin Malka had ever seen; he scowled at the cards while a cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. A second, much younger and slimmer, was carefully dressed in a brown suit with a red tie; he had a thin mustache, and his hair was slicked back so that it looked, Malka thought, like it was always wet.

The third man, she decided, must be David’s father. He had David’s long, thin face and slight build, but the humor that was always dancing in David’s wide eyes had long ago disappeared from his. A long, pale scar ran from his left eye to the corner of his mouth, intensifying his look of a man who wasn’t to be trifled with. As she watched, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small flask. He took a pull and replaced it without taking his eyes off his cards.

Malka’s father waited for a minute or two, and then cleared his throat.

None of the three looked up. “I think you’re in the wrong store, white man,” the fat man said.

Malka’s father put his hands in his pockets. “I was told that I could purchase a bottle or two of wine here.”

“You a Fed?” asked the man with slicked-back hair. “Only a Fed would be stupid enough to walk in here by himself.”

“Ain’t no Fed,” the fat man said. “Listen to him. He’s a Jew. Ain’t no Fed Jews.”

“There’s Izzy Einstein,” said the man with the hair. “He arrested three guys in Coney just yesterday. I read it in the paper.”

“Too skinny to be Izzy Einstein,” said the fat man. “Nah, he’s just your everyday, ordinary white man who’s looking for some cheap booze.”

“I was told I could buy wine here,” repeated Malka’s father calmly, although Malka could see that his hands, which he kept in his pockets, were trembling. “I was told you had kosher wine.”

The man with the scar stood and came over as the other two watched. Now Malka could see that his suit was worn and not as clean as it could be; he walked slowly, carefully, as though he knew he wasn’t sober and didn’t want to give it away. When he reached Malka’s father, he stopped and waited. He didn’t acknowledge the boy who followed him solicitously, as though ready to catch his father should he fall.

Malka grinned and waved. “Hi, David,” she said, and then, aware that she might be calling attention to herself, whispered, “I didn’t see you before.”

David put his finger to his lips and shook his head. “So?” Malka’s father asked. “You have wine for sale?”

“My landlord is a Jew,” said David’s father, challenging.

“So’s mine. And I’ll bet they’re both sons of bitches.”

There was a moment of silence. Malka held her breath. And then one corner of the man’s mouth twitched. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe we can do business.” His two colleagues relaxed; the man with the hair swept up the cards and began shuffling them. “Where did you hear about me?”

“Your son David, here,” said Malka’s father. “He suggested I contact you.”

“My son David told you,” the man repeated, his eyes narrowing.

“Yes,” Malka’s father said, sounding puzzled. “Earlier today. Is there a problem?”

There was a pause, and then the man shook his head. “No, no problem. Yeah, I’ve got some of that kosher wine you were talking about. I can give you two bottles for three dollars each.”

Malka’s father took a breath. “That’s expensive.”

“Those are the prices.” The man shrugged. “Hard to get specialized product these days.”

David stood on his toes and whispered up at his father. The man didn’t look down at the boy, but bit his lip, then said, “Okay. I can give you the two bottles for five dollars. And that’s because you come with a—a family recommendation.”

“Done,” said Malka’s father. He put out a hand. “Abe Hirsch.”

David’s father took his hand. “Sam Richards,” he said. “You want to pick your merchandise up in the morning?”

Abe shook his head. “I’ve got to work early,” he said. “Can I pick it up after work?”

“Done,” Sam said.

Malka’s father turned and walked toward the door, then turned back. “I apologize,” he said, shaking his head. “I am an idiot. David, your son, has been invited to my house for dinner tomorrow night, and I have not asked his father’s permission. And of course, you are also invited as well.”

Sam stared at him. “You invited my son to your house for dinner?”

Abe shrugged.

“Hey, Sam,” called the well-dressed man, “you can’t go nowhere tomorrow night. We’ve got some business to take care of uptown at the Sugar Cane.”

Sam ignored his friend and looked at Malka, who stood next to her father, scratching an itch on her leg and grinning at the success of her plan. “This your little girl?”

It was Abe’s turn to stare. He looked down at Malka, who was nodding wildly, delighted at the idea of another guest at their Sabbath meal. He then looked back at Sam.

“Okay,” said Sam. “What time?”

“Around five p.m.,” Abe said, and gave the address.

“We don’t have to be uptown until nine,” Sam said to his friend. “Plenty of time.”

He turned back to Malka’s father. “Okay. I’ll bring the wine with me. But you make sure you have the money. Just because you’re feeding me—us—dinner don’t mean the drinks come free.”

“Of course,” said Abe.

At five p.m. the next evening, everything was ready. The table had been pulled away from the window and decorated with a white tablecloth (from the same woman who’d sold Abe a boiled chicken and a carrot tsimmes), settings for four, two extra chairs (borrowed from the carpenter who lived across the hall), two candles, and, at Abe’s place, his father’s old prayer book.

Abe, wearing his good jacket despite the heat, and with a borrowed yarmulke perched on his head, surveyed the scene. “Well, Malka?” he asked. “How does that look?”

“It’s perfect!” said Malka, running from one end of the room to the other to admire the table from different perspectives.

Almost on cue, somebody knocked on the door. “It’s David!” Malka yelled. “David, just a minute!”

“I’m sure he heard you,” said Abe, smiling. “The super in the basement probably heard you.” He walked over and opened the door.

Sam stood there, a small suitcase in his hand. He had obviously made some efforts toward improving his personal appearance: he was freshly shaven, wore a clean shirt, and had a spit-polish on his shoes.

David dashed out from behind his father. “You see!” he told Malka. “Everything worked out. My daddy brought the wine like he said, and I made him dress up, because I said it was going to be religious, and Mama wouldn’t have let him come to church all messed up. Right, Daddy?”

“You sure did, David,” said Sam, smiling. “Even made me wash behind my ears.” He then raised his eyes and looked hard at Abe, as if waiting to be challenged.

But Abe only nodded.

“Please sit down,” he said. “Be comfortable. Malka, stop dancing around like that; you’re making me dizzy.”

Malka obediently stopped twirling, but she still bounced a bit in place. “David, guess what? There’s a lady who lives across the alley from us who, when it’s hot, walks around all day in a man’s T-shirt and shorts. You can see her when she’s in the kitchen. It’s really funny. You want to come out on the fire escape and watch?”

David suddenly looked troubled and stared up at his father. “Is it okay, Daddy?” he asked. His lower lip trembled. “I don’t want to get anyone mad at me.”

Sam took a breath and, with an obvious effort, smiled at his son. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll be right here, keeping an eye on you. Nothing bad will happen.”

David’s face brightened, and he turned to Malka. “Let’s go,” he said. The two children ran to the window and clambered noisily onto the fire escape.

Sam put the suitcase on one of the chairs, opened it, and took out two bottles of wine. “Here they are,” he said. “Certified kosher, according to the man I got it from. You got the five bucks?”

Abe handed Sam five crumpled dollars. “Here you are,” he said, “as promised. You want a drink before we start?”

Sam nodded.

Abe picked up one of the bottles, looked at it for a moment, and then shook his head, exasperated. “Look at me, the genius,” he said. “I never thought about a corkscrew.”

Sam shrugged, took a small pocketknife out of his pocket, cut off the top of the cork, and pushed the rest into the bottle with his thumb. Abe took the bottle and poured generous helpings for both of them.

They each took a drink and looked outside, where Malka and David sat on the edge of the fire escape, her legs dangling over the side, his legs folded. A dirty pigeon fluttered down onto the railing and stared at the children, obviously hoping for a stray crumb. When none came, it started to clean itself.

David pointed to a window. “No, that’s not her,” said Malka. “That’s the man who lives next door to her. He has two dogs, and he’s not supposed to have any pets, so he’s always yelling at the dogs to stop barking, or he’ll get kicked out.” The children laughed. Startled, the bird flew away.

“So,” said Abe.

“Yeah,” said Sam.

“What happened?”

Sam took a breath, drained his glass, and poured another. “He had gone out to shoot rabbits,” he said slowly. “I had just got home from the trenches. We were living with my wife’s family in Alabama, and we were making plans to move up north to Chicago, where I could get work and David could get schooled better. He was sitting on the porch reading, and I got mad and told him not to be so lazy, get out there and shoot us some meat for dinner. When he wasn’t home by supper, I figured he got himself lost—he was always going off exploring and forgetting about what he was supposed to do.”

He looked off into the distance. “After dark, the preacher from my wife’s church came by and said that there had been trouble. A white woman over in the next county had complained that somebody had looked in her window when she was undressed. A lynch mob went out, and David saw them, got scared and ran. He wasn’t doing anything wrong, but he was a Negro boy with a gun, and they caught him and…”

He choked for a moment, then reached for his glass and swallowed the entire thing at a gulp. Wordlessly, Abe refilled it.

“My wife and her sister and the other women, they went and took him down and brought him home. He was… They had cut him and burned him and… My boy. My baby.”

A single tear slowly made its way down Sam’s cheek, tracing the path of the scar.

“My wife and I—we didn’t get along so good after that. After a while I cut and run, came up here. And David, he came with me.”

For a moment, they just sat.

“We lived in Odessa,” said Abe, and, when Sam looked confused, added, “That’s a city in the Ukraine, near Russia. I moved there with the baby after my wife died. It was 1905, and there was a lot of unrest. Strikes, riots, people being shot down in the streets. Many people were angry. And when people get angry, they blame the Jews.”

He smiled sourly. “I and my friends, we were young and strong and rebellious. We were different from the generations before us. We weren’t going to sit around like the old men and wait to be slaughtered. I sent Malka to the synagogue with other children. There were hiding places there; they would be safe. And I went to help defend our homes.”

“At least you had that,” Sam said bitterly.

Abe shook his head. “We were idiots. We had no idea how many there would be, how organized. Hundreds were hurt and killed, my neighbors, my friends. Somebody hit me, I don’t know who or with what. I don’t remember what happened after that. I…”

He paused. “I do remember screaming and shouting all around me, houses burning, but it didn’t seem real, didn’t seem possible. I ran to the synagogue. I was going to get Malka, and we would leave this madness, go to America where people were sane, and children were safe.”

“Safe,” repeated Sam softly. The two men looked at each other with tired recognition.

“But when I got there, they wouldn’t let me in. The rabbi had hidden the children behind the bima, the place where the Torah was kept, but… They said I shouldn’t see what had been done to her, that she had been… She was only nine years old.” Abe’s voice trailed away.

The children out on the fire escape had become bored with the neighbors. “Do you know how to play Rock, Paper, Scissors?” David asked. “Here, we have to face each other. Now there are three ways you can hold your hand…”

“Does she know?” asked Sam.

“No,” said Abe. “And I don’t have the heart to tell her.”

“David knows,” said Sam. “At least, I told him. I thought maybe if he knew, he’d be at rest. But I don’t think he believed me. And—well, I’m sort of glad. Because it means…”

“He is still here. With you.”

“Yes,” Sam whispered.

The two men sat and drank while they watched their murdered children play in the fading sunlight.

THINGS WITH BEARDS ^{SAM J. MILLER}

Sam J. Miller lives in New York City now, but grew up in a middle-of-nowhere town in upstate New York. He is the last in a long line of butchers. In no particular order, he has also been a film critic, a grocery bagger, a community organizer, a secretary, a painter’s assistant and model, and the guitarist in a punk rock band. His debut novel The Art of Starving was published by HarperCollins in 2017, followed by The Breaks from Ecco Press in 2018. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and have appeared in over a dozen “best-of” anthologies. He’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Workshop, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. His husband of fifteen years is a nurse practitioner, and way smarter and handsomer than Sam is.

MacReady has made it back to McDonald’s. He holds his coffee with both hands, breathing in the heat of it, still not 100% sure he isn’t actually asleep and dreaming in the snowdrifted rubble of McMurdo. The summer of 1983 is a mild one, but to MacReady it feels tropical, with 125th Street a bright beautiful sunlit oasis. He loosens the cord that ties his cowboy hat to his head. Here, he has no need of a disguise. People press past the glass, a surging crowd going into and out of the subway, rushing to catch the bus, doing deals, making out, cursing each other, and the suspicion he might be dreaming gets deeper. Spend enough time in the ice hell of Antarctica and your body starts to believe that frigid lifelessness is the true natural state of the universe. Which, when you think of the cold vastness of space, is probably correct.

“Heard you died, man,” comes a sweet rough voice, and MacReady stands up to submit to the fierce hug that never fails to make him almost cry from how safe it makes him feel. But when he steps back to look Hugh in the eye, something is different. Something has changed. While he was away, Hugh became someone else.

“You don’t look so hot yourself,” he says, and they sit, and Hugh takes the coffee that has been waiting for him.

“Past few weeks I haven’t felt well,” Hugh says, which seems an understatement. Even after MacReady’s many months in Antarctica, how could so many lines have sprung up in his friend’s black skin? When had his hair and beard become so heavily peppered with salt? “It’s nothing. It’s going around.”

Their hands clasp under the table.

“You’re still fine as hell,” MacReady whispers.

“You stop,” Hugh said. “I know you had a piece down there.”

MacReady remembers Childs, the mechanic’s strong hands still greasy from the Ski-dozer, leaving prints on his back and hips. His teeth on the back of MacReady’s neck.

“Course I did,” MacReady says. “But that’s over now.”

“You still wearing that damn fool cowboy hat,” Hugh says, scoldingly. “Had those stupid centerfolds hung up all over your room I bet.”

MacReady releases his hands. “So? We all pretend to be what we need to be.”

“Not true. Not everybody has the luxury of passing.” One finger traces a circle on the black skin of his forearm.

They sip coffee. McDonald’s coffee is not good but it is real. Honest.

Childs and him; him and Childs. He remembers almost nothing about the final days at McMurdo. He remembers taking the helicopter up, with a storm coming, something about a dog… and then nothing. Waking up on board a U.S. supply and survey ship, staring at two baffled crewmen. Shredded clothing all around them. A metal desk bent almost in half and pushed halfway across the room. Broken glass and burned paper and none of them had even the faintest memory of what had just happened. Later, reviewing case files, he learned how the supply run that came in springtime found the whole camp burned down, mostly everyone dead and blown to bizarre bits, except for two handsome corpses frozen untouched at the edge of camp; how the corpses were brought back, identified, the condolence letters sent home, the bodies, probably by accident, thawed… but that couldn’t be real. That frozen corpse couldn’t have been him.

“Your people still need me?” MacReady asks.

“More than ever. Cops been wilding out on folks left and right. Past six months, eight people got killed by police. Not a single officer indicted. You still up for it?”

“Course I am.”

“Meeting in two weeks. Not afraid to mess with the Man? Because what we’ve got planned… they ain’t gonna like it. And they’re gonna hit back, hard.”

MacReady nods. He smiles. He is home; he is needed. He is a rebel. “Let’s go back to your place.”

When MacReady is not MacReady, or when MacReady is simply not, he never remembers it after. The gaps in his memory are not mistakes, not accidents. The thing that wears his clothes, his body, his cowboy hat, it doesn’t want him to know it is there. So the moment when the supply ship crewman walked in and found formerly-frozen MacReady sitting up—and watched MacReady’s face split down the middle, saw a writhing nest of spaghetti tentacles explode in his direction, screamed as they enveloped him and swiftly started digesting—all of that is gone from MacReady’s mind.

But when it is being MacReady, it is MacReady. Every opinion and memory and passion is intact.

“The fuck just happened?” Hugh asks, after, holding up a shredded sheet.

“That good, I guess,” MacReady says, laughing, naked.

“I honestly have no memory of us tearing this place up like that.”

“Me either.”

There is no blood, no tissue of any kind. Not-MacReady sucks all that up. Absorbs it, transforms it. As it transformed the meat that used to be Hugh, as soon as they were alone in his room and it perceived no threat, knew it was safe to come out. The struggle was short. In nineteen minutes the transformation was complete, and MacReady and Hugh were themselves again, as far as they knew, and they fell into each other’s arms, onto the ravaged bed, out of their clothes.

“What’s that,” MacReady says, two worried fingers tracing down Hugh’s side. Purple blotches mar his lovely torso.

“Comes with this weird new pneumonia thing that’s going around,” he says. “This year’s junky flu.”

“But you’re not a junky.”

“I’ve fucked a couple, lately.”

MacReady laughs. “You have a thing for lost causes.”

“The cause I’m fighting for isn’t lost,” Hugh says, frowning.

“Course not. I didn’t mean that—”

But Hugh has gone silent, vanishing into the ancient trauma MacReady has always known was there, and tried to ignore, ever since Hugh took him under his wing at the age of nineteen. Impossible to deny it, now, with their bare legs twined together, his skin corpse-pale beside Hugh’s rich dark brown. How different their lives had been, by virtue of the bodies they wore. How wide the gulf that lay between them, that love was powerless to bridge.

So many of the men at McMurdo wore beards. Winter, he thought, at first—for keeping our faces warm in Antarctica’s forever winter. But warmth at McMurdo was rarely an issue. Their warren of rectangular huts was kept at a balmy seventy-eight degrees. Massive stockpiles of gasoline specifically for that purpose. Aside from the occasional trip outside for research—and MacReady never had more than a hazy understanding of what, exactly, those scientists were sciencing down there, but they seemed to do precious little of it—the men of McMurdo stayed the hell inside.

So. Not warmth.

Beards were camouflage. A costume. Only Blair and Garry lacked one, both being too old to need to appear as anything other than what they were, and Childs, who never wanted to.

He shivered. Remembering. The tough-guy act, the cowboy he became in uncertain situations. Same way in juvie; in lock-up. Same way in Vietnam. Hard, mean, masculine. Hard drinking; woman hating. Queer? Psssh. He hid so many things, buried them deep, because if men knew what he really was, he’d be in danger. When they learned he wasn’t one of them, they would want to destroy him.

They all had their reasons, for choosing McMurdo. For choosing a life where there were no women. Supper time MacReady would look from face to bearded face and wonder how many were like him, under the all-man exterior they projected, but too afraid, like him, to let their true self show.

Childs hadn’t been afraid. And Childs had seen what he was.

MacReady shut his eyes against the McMurdo memories, bit his lip. Anything to keep from thinking about what went down, down there. Because how was it possible that he had absolutely no memory of any of it? Soviet attack, was the best theory he could come up with. Psychoactive gas leaked into the ventilation system by a double agent (Nauls, definitely), which caused catastrophic freak outs and homicidal arson rage, leaving only he and Childs unscathed, whereupon they promptly sat down in the snow to die… and this, of course, only made him more afraid, because if this insanity was the only narrative he could construct that made any sense at all, he whose imagination had never been his strong suit, then the real narrative was probably equally, differently, insane.

Not-MacReady has an exceptional knack for assessing external threats. It stays hidden when MacReady is alone, and when he is in a crowd, and even when he is alone but still potentially vulnerable. Once, past four in the morning, when a drunken MacReady had the 145th Street bus all to himself, alone with the small woman behind the wheel, Not-MacReady could easily have emerged. Claimed her. But it knew, somehow, gauging who-knew-what quirk of pheromones or optic nerve signals, the risk of exposure, the chance someone might see through the tinted windows, or the driver’s foot, in the spasms of dying, slam down hard on the brake and bring the bus crashing into something.

If confronted, if threatened, it might risk emerging. But no one is there to confront it. No one suspects it is there. Not even MacReady, who has nothing but the barest, most irrational anxieties. Protean fragments; nightmare glitch glimpses and snatches of horrific sound. Feedback, bleedthrough from the thing that hides inside him.

“Fifth building burned down this week,” said the Black man with the Spanish accent. MacReady sees his hands, sees how hard he’s working to keep them from shaking. His anger is intoxicating. “Twenty families, out on the street. Cops don’t care. They know it was the landlord. It’s always the landlord. Insurance company might kick up a stink, but worst thing that happens is dude catches a civil suit. Pays a fine. That shit is terrorism, and they oughta give those motherfuckers the chair.”

Everyone agrees. Eleven people in the circle; all of them Black except for MacReady and an older white lady. All of them men except for her, and a stout Black woman with an Afro of astonishing proportions.

“It’s not terrorism when they do it to us,” she said. “It’s just the way things are supposed to be.”

The meeting is over. Coffee is sipped; cigarettes are lit. No one is in a hurry to go back outside. An affinity group, mostly Black Panthers who somehow survived a couple decades of attempts by the FBI to exterminate every last one of them, but older folks too, trade unionists, commies, a minister who came up from the South back when it looked like the Movement was going to spread everywhere, change everything.

MacReady wonders how many of them are cops. Three, he guesses, though not because any of them make him suspicious. Just because he knows what they’re up against, what staggering resources the government has invested in destroying this work over the past forty years. Infiltrators tended to be isolated, immersed in the lie they were living, reporting only to one person, whom they might never meet.

Hugh comes over, hands him two cookies.

“You sure this is such a good idea?” MacReady says. “They’ll hit back hard, for this. Things will get a whole lot worse.”

“Help us or don’t,” Hugh said, frowning. “That’s your decision. But you don’t set the agenda here. We know what we’re up against, way better than you do. We know the consequences.”

MacReady ate one cookie, and held the other up for inspection. Oreo knock-offs, though he’d never have guessed from the taste. The pattern was different, the seal on the chocolate exterior distinctly stamped.

“I understand if you’re scared,” Hugh says, gentler now.

“Shit yes I’m scared,” MacReady says, and laughs. “Anybody who’s not scared of what we’re about to do is probably… well, I don’t know, crazy or stupid or a fucking pod person.”

Hugh laughs. His laugh becomes a cough. His cough goes on for a long time.

Would he or she know it, if one of the undercovers made eye contact with another? Would they look across the circle and see something, recognize some deeply-hidden kinship? And if they were all cops, all deep undercover, each one simply impersonating an activist so as to target actual activists, what would happen then? Would they be able to see that, and set the ruse aside, step into the light, reveal what they really were? Or would they persist in the imitation game, awaiting instructions from above? Undercovers didn’t make decisions, MacReady knew; they didn’t even do things. They fed information upstairs, and upstairs did with it what they would. So if a whole bunch of undercovers were operating on their own, how would they ever know when to stop?

MacReady knows that something is wrong. He keeps seeing it out of the corner of his mind’s eye, hearing its echoes in the distance. Lost time, random wreckage.

MacReady suspects he is criminally, monstrously insane. That during his black-outs he carries out horrific crimes, and then hides all the evidence. This would explain what went down at McMurdo. In a terrifying way, the explanation is appealing. He could deal with knowing that he murdered all his friends and then blew up the building. It would frighten him less than the yawning gulf of empty time, the barely-remembered slither and scuttle of something inhuman, the flashes of blood and screaming that leak into his daylight hours now.

MacReady rents a cabin. Upstate: uninsulated and inexpensive. Ten miles from the nearest neighbor. The hard-faced old woman who he rents from picks him up at the train station. Her truck is full of grocery bags, all the things he requested.

“No car out here,” she says, driving through town. “Not even a bicycle. No phone, either. You get yourself into trouble and there’ll be no way of getting out of here in a hurry.”

He wonders what they use it for, the people she normally rents to, and decides he doesn’t want to know.

“Let me out up here,” he says, when they approach the edge of town.

“You crazy?” she asks. “It’d take you two hours to walk the rest of the way. Maybe more.”

“I said pull over,” he says, hardening his voice, because if she goes much further, out of sight of prying protective eyes, around the next bend, maybe, or even before that, the insane thing inside him may emerge. It knows these things, somehow.

“Have fun carrying those two big bags of groceries all that way,” she says, when he gets out. “Asshole.”

“Meet me here in a week,” he says. “Same time.”

“You must be a Jehovah’s Witness or something,” she says, and he is relieved when she is gone.

The first two days pass in a pleasant enough blur. He reads books, engages in desultory masturbation to a cheaply-printed paperback of gay erotic stories Hugh had lent him. Only one symptom: hunger. Low and rumbling, and not sated no matter how much he eats.

And then: lost time. He comes to on his knees, in the cool midnight dirt behind a bar.

“Thanks, man,” says the sturdy bearded trucker type standing over him, pulling back on a shirt. Puzzled by how it suddenly sports a spray of holes, each fringed with what look like chemical burns. “I needed that.”

He strides off. MacReady settles back into a squat. Leans against the building.

What did I do to him? He seems unharmed. But I’ve done something. Something terrible.

He wonders how he got into town. Walked? Hitchhiked? And how the hell he’ll get back.

The phone rings, his first night back. He’d been sitting on his fire escape, looking down at the city, debating jumping, though not particularly seriously. Hugh’s words echoing in his head. Help us or don’t. He is still not sure which one he’ll choose.

He picks up the phone.

“Mac,” says the voice, rich and deep and unmistakable.

“Childs.”

“Been trying to call you.” Cars honk, through the wire. Childs is from Detroit, he dimly remembers, or maybe Minneapolis.

“I was away. Had to get out of town, clear my head.”

“You too, huh?”

MacReady lets out his breath, once he realizes he’s been holding it. “You?”

“Yup.”

“What the hell, man? What the fuck is going on?”

Childs chuckles. “Was hoping you’d have all the answers. Don’t know why. I already knew what a dumbass you are.”

A lump of longing forms in MacReady’s throat. But his body fits him wrong, suddenly. Whatever crazy mental illness he was imagining he had, Childs sharing it was inconceivable. Something else is wrong, something his mind rejects but his body already knows. “Have you been to a doctor?”

“Tried,” Childs says. “I remember driving halfway there, and the next thing I knew I was home again.” A siren rises then slowly fades, in Detroit or Minneapolis.

MacReady inspects his own reflection in the window, where the lights of his bedroom bounce back against the darkness. “What are we?” he whispers.

“Hellbound,” Childs says, “but we knew that already.”

The duffel bag says Astoria Little League. Two crossed baseball bats emblazoned on the outside. Dirty bright-blue blazer sleeves reaching out. A flawless facsimile of something harmless, wholesome. No one would see it and suspect. The explosives are well-hidden, small, sewn into a pair of sweat pants, the timer already ticking down to some unknown hour, some unforeseeable fallout.

“Jimmy,” his father says, hugging him, hard. His beard brushes MacReady’s neck, abrasive and unyielding as his love.

The man is immense, dwarfing the cluttered kitchen table. Uncles lurk in the background. Cigars and scotch sour the air. Where are the aunts and wives? MacReady has always wondered, these manly Sundays.

“They told me this fucker died,” his father says to someone.

“Can’t kill one of ours that easy,” someone says. Eleven men in the little house, which has never failed to feel massive.

Here his father pauses. Frowns. No one but MacReady sees. No one here but MacReady knows the man well enough to suspect that the frown means he knows something new on the subject of MacReady mortality. Something that frightens him. Something he feels he has to shelter his family from.

“Fucking madness, going down there,” his father says, snapping back with the unstoppable positivity MacReady lacks, and envies. “I’d lose my mind inside of five minutes out in Alaska.”

“Antarctica,” he chuckles.

“That too!”

Here, home, safe, among friends, the immigrant in his father emerges. Born here to brand-new arrivals from Ireland, never saw the place but it’s branded on his speech, the slight Gaelic curling of his consonants he keeps hidden when he’s driving the subway car but lets rip on weekends. His father’s father is who MacReady hears now, the big glorious drunk they brought over as soon as they got themselves settled, the immense shadow over MacReady’s own early years, and who, when he died, took some crucial piece of his son away with him. MacReady wonders how his own father has marked him, how much of him he carries around, and what kind of new terrible creature he will be when his father dies.

An uncle is in another room, complaining about an impending Congressional hearing into police brutality against Blacks; the flood of reporters bothering his beat cops. The uncle uses ugly words to describe the people he polices out in Brooklyn; the whole room laughs. His father laughs. MacReady slips upstairs unnoticed. Laments, in silence, the horror of human hatred—how such marvelous people, whom he loves so dearly, contain such monstrosity inside of them.

In the bathroom, standing before the toilet where he first learned to pee, MacReady sees smooth purple lesions across his stomach.

Midnight, and MacReady stands at the center of the George Washington Bridge. The monstrous creature groans and whines with the wind, with the heavy traffic that never stops. New York City’s most popular suicide spot. He can’t remember where he heard that, but he’s grateful that he did. Astride the safety railing, looking down at deep black water, he stops to breathe.

Once, MacReady was angry. He is not angry anymore. This disturbs him. The things that angered him are still true, are still out there; are, in most cases, even worse.

His childhood best friend, shot by cops at fourteen for “matching a description” of someone Black. His mother’s hands, at the end of a fourteen hour laundry shift. Hugh, and Childs, and every other man he’s loved, and the burning glorious joy he had to smother and hide and keep secret. He presses against these memories, traces along his torso where they’ve marked him, much like the cutaneous lesions along Hugh’s sides. And yet, like those purple blotches, they cause no pain. Not anymore.

A train’s whistle blows, far beneath him. Wind stings his eyes when he tries to look. He can see the warm dim lights of the passenger cars; imagines the seats where late-night travelers doze or read or stare up in awe at the lights of the bridge. At him.

Something is missing, inside of MacReady. He can’t figure out what. He wonders when it started. McMurdo? Maybe. But probably not. Something drew him to McMurdo, after all. The money, but not just the money. He wanted to flee from the human world. He was tired of fighting it and wanted to take himself out. Whatever was in him, changing, already, McMurdo fed it.

He tries to put his finger on it, the thing that is gone, and the best he can do is a feeling he once felt, often, and feels no longer. Trying to recall the last time he felt it he fails, though he can remember plenty of times before that. Leaving his first concert; gulping down cold November night air and knowing every star overhead belonged to him. Bus rides back from away baseball games, back when the Majors still felt possible. The first time he followed a boy onto the West Side Piers. A feeling at once frenzied and calm, energetic yet restive. Like he had saddled himself, however briefly, onto something impossibly powerful, and primal, sacred, almost, connected to the flow of things, moving along the path meant only for him. They had always been rare, those moments—life worked so hard to come between him and his path—but lately they did not happen at all.

He is a monster. He knows this now. So is Childs. So are countless others, people like Hugh who he did something terrible to, however unintentionally it was. He doesn’t know the details, what he is or how it works, or why, but he knows it.

Maybe he’d have been strong enough, before. Maybe that other MacReady would have been brave enough to jump. But that MacReady had no reason to. This MacReady climbs back to the safe side of the guardrail, and walks back to solid ground.

MacReady strides up the precinct steps, trying not to cry. Smiling, wide-eyed, white, and harmless.

When Hugh handed off the duffel bag, something was clearly wrong. He’d lost fifty pounds, looked like. All his hair. Half of the light in his eyes. By then MacReady’d been hearing the rumors, seeing the stories. Gay cancer, said the Times. Dudes dropping like mayflies.

And that morning: the call. Hugh in Harlem Hospital. From Hugh’s mother, whose remembered Christmas ham had no equal on this earth. When she said everything was going to be fine, MacReady knew she was lying. Not to spare his feelings, but to protect her own. To keep from having a conversation she couldn’t have.

He pauses, one hand on the precinct door. Panic rises.

Blair built a spaceship.

The image comes back to him suddenly, complete with the smell of burning petrol. Something he saw, in real life? Or a photo he was shown, from the wreckage? A cavern dug into the snow and ice under McMurdo. Scavenged pieces of the helicopter and the snowmobiles and the Ski-dozer assembled into… a spaceship. How did he know that’s what it was? Because it was round, yes, and nothing any human knew how to make, but there’s more information here, something he’s missing, something he knew once but doesn’t know now. But where did it come from, this memory?

Panic. Being threatened, trapped. Having no way out. It triggers something inside of him. Like it did in Blair, which is how an assistant biologist could assemble a spacefaring vessel. Suddenly MacReady can tap into so much more. He sees things. Stars, streaking past him, somehow. Shapes he can take. Things he can be. Repulsive, fascinating. Beings without immune systems to attack; creatures whose core body temperatures are so low any virus or other invading organism would die.

A cuttlefish contains so many colors, even when it isn’t wearing them.

His hands and neck feel tight. Like they’re trying to break free from the rest of him. Had someone been able to see under his clothes, just then, they’d have seen mouths opening and closing all up and down his torso.

“Help you?” a policewoman asks, opening the door for him, and this is bad, super bad, because he—like all the other smiling white harmless allies who are at this exact moment sauntering into every one of the NYPD’s 150 precincts and command centers—is supposed to not be noticed.

“Thank you,” he says, smiling the Fearless Man Smile, powering through the panic. She smiles back, reassured by what she sees, but what she sees isn’t what he is. He doffs the cowboy hat and steps inside.

He can’t do anything about what he is. All he can do is try to minimize the harm, and do his best to counterbalance it.

What’s the endgame here, he wonders, waiting at the desk. What next? A brilliant assault, assuming all goes well—simultaneous attacks on every NYPD precinct, chaos without bloodshed, but what victory scenario are his handlers aiming for? What is the plan? Is there a plan? Does someone, upstairs, at Black Liberation Secret Headquarters, have it all mapped out? There will be a backlash, and it will be bloody, for all the effort they put into a casualty-free military strike. They will continue to make progress, person by person, heart by heart, and mind by mind, but what then? How will they know they have reached the end of their work? Changing minds means nothing if those changed minds don’t then change actual things. It’s not enough for everyone to carry justice inside their hearts like a secret. Justice must be spoken. Must be embodied.

“Sound permit for a block party?” he asks the clerk, who slides him a form without even looking up. All over the city, sound permits for block parties that will never come to pass are being slid across ancient well-worn soon-to-be-incinerated desks.

Walking out, he hears the precinct phone ring. Knows it’s The Call. The same one every other precinct is getting. Encouraging everyone to evacuate in the next five minutes if they’d rather not die screaming; flagging that the bomb is set to detonate immediately if tampered with, or moved (this is a bluff, but one the organizers felt fairly certain hardly anyone would feel like calling, and, in fact, no one does).

And that night, in a city at war, he stands on the subway platform. Drunk, exhilarated, frightened. A train pulls in. He stands too close to the door, steps forward as it swings open, walks right into a woman getting off. Her eyes go wide and she makes a terrified sound. “Sorry,” he mumbles, cupping his beard and feeling bad for looking like the kind of man who frightens women, but she is already sprinting away. He frowns, and then sits, and then smiles. A smile of shame, at frightening someone, but also of something else, of a hard-earned, impossible-to-communicate knowledge. MacReady knows, in that moment, that maturity means making peace with how we are monsters.

WELCOME TO THE MEDICAL CLINIC AT THE INTERPLANETARY RELAY STATION | HOURS SINCE THE LAST PATIENT DEATH: 0 ^{CAROLINE M. YOACHIM}

Caroline M. Yoachim is the author of over a hundred published short stories, appearing in Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Lightspeed, among other places. A Hugo and three-time Nebula Award finalist, her work has been reprinted in Year’s Best anthologies and translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Czech. Caroline’s debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories, came out in 2016. For more about Caroline, check out her website at http://carolineyoachim.com.

A. You take a shortcut through the hydroponics bay on your way to work, and notice that the tomato plants are covered in tiny crawling insects that look like miniature beetles. One of the insects skitters up your leg, so you reach down and brush it off. It bites your hand. The area around the bite turns purple and swollen.

You run down a long metal hallway to the Medical Clinic, grateful for the artificially generated gravity that defies the laws of physics and yet is surprisingly common in fictional space stations. The sign on the clinic door says “hours since the last patient death:” The number currently posted on the sign is zero. If you enter the clinic anyway, go to C. If you seek medical care elsewhere, go to B.

B. You are in a relay station in orbit halfway between Saturn and Uranus. There is no other medical care available. Proceed to C.

Why are you still reading this? You’re supposed to go to C. Are you sure you won’t go into the clinic? No? Fine. You return to your quarters and search the station’s database to find a cure for the raised purple scabs that are now spreading up your arm. Most of the database entries recommend amputation. The rash looks pretty serious, and you probably ought to go to C, but if you absolutely refuse to go to the clinic, go to Z and die a horrible, painful death.

C. Inside the clinic, a message plays over the loudspeakers: “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station, please sign your name on the clipboard. Patients will be seen in the order that they arrive. If this is an emergency, we’re sorry—you’re probably screwed. The current wait time is six hours.” The message is on endless repeat, cycling through dozens of different languages.

The clipboard is covered in green mucus, probably from a Saturnian slug-monkey. They are exceedingly rude creatures, always hungry and extremely temperamental. You wipe away the slime with the sleeve of your shirt and enter your information. The clipboard chirps in a cheerful voice, “You are number 283. If you leave the waiting room, you will be moved to the end of the queue. If your physiology is incompatible with long waiting room stays, you may request a mobile tracker and wait in one of our satellite rooms. The current wait for a mobile tracker is four hours.”

If you decide to wait in the waiting room, go to D. If you request a mobile tracker, go to D anyway, because there is no chance you will get one.

D. You hand the clipboard to the patient behind you, a Tarmandian Spacemite from the mining colonies. As you hand it off, you realize the clipboard is printing a receipt. The sound of the printer triggers the spacemite’s predatory response, and it eats the clipboard.

“Attention patients, the clipboard has been lost. Patients will be seen in the order they arrived. Please line up using the number listed on your receipt. If you do not have a receipt, you will need to wait and sign in when a new clipboard is assembled.”

If you wait for the new clipboard, go back to C. If you are smart enough to recognize that going back to C will result in a loop that does not advance the story, proceed to E.

E. Instead of waiting in line, you take advantage of the waiting room chaos to go to the nurses’ station and demand treatment. There are two nurses at the station, a tired-looking human and a Uranian Doodoo. The Doodoo is approximately twice your size, covered in dark brown fur, and speaks a language that only contains the letters, d, t, b, p, and o. If you talk to the human nurse, go to F. If you talk to the big brown Doodoo from Uranus, go to G. Also, stop snickering. The planet is pronounced “urine iss” not “your anus.”

F. The human nurse sees the nasty purple rash on your arm and demands that you quarantine yourself in your quarters. If you accept this advice, go back to B. Have you noticed all the loops in this story? The loops simulate the ultimate futility of attempting to get medical care. What are you still doing here? Go back to B. Next time you get to the nurses’ station, remember to pick the non-human nurse.

G. You approach the Uranian nurse and babble a bunch of words that end in “oo” which is your best approximation of Doodoo language. Honestly, the attempt is kind of offensive. The Doodoos are a civilization older than humankind with a nuanced language steeped in a complex alien culture. Why would you expect a random assortment of words ending in “oo” to communicate something meaningful?

Thankfully, the nurse does not respond to your blatant mockery of its language, so you hold out your arm and point to the purple rash. In a single bite, it eats your entire arm, cauterizing the wound with its highly acidic saliva. The rash is gone. If you consider yourself cured, proceed to Y. If you stay at the clinic in hopes of getting a prosthetic arm, go to H.

H. You approach the human nurse and ask about the availability of prosthetic limbs. He hands you a stack of twenty-four forms to fill out. The Doodoo nurse has eaten the hand you usually write with. If you fill out all the forms with your remaining hand, go to I. If you fill out only the top form and leave the rest blank, hoping that no one will notice, go to I.

I. The nurse takes your paperwork and shoves it into a folder. He leads you down a hallway to an exam room filled with an assortment of syringes and dissection tools. “Take off all your clothes and put on this gown,” the nurse instructs, “and someone will be in to see you soon.” If you do what the nurse says, go to J. If you keep your clothes on, go to K.

J. The exam room is cold and the gown is three sizes too small and paper thin. You sit down, only to notice that the tissue paper that covers the exam table hasn’t been changed and is covered in tiny crawling insects that look like miniature beetles. Sitting down is a decision that has literally come back to bite you in the ass. If you leap up screaming and brush the insects off your bare skin, go to L. If you calmly brush the insects away and then yell for someone to come in and clean the room, go to L.

K. Three hours later, the doctor arrives. You are relieved to see that she is human. You ask her if she can issue you a prosthetic limb. She says no, mumbles something about resource allocation forms, and leaves. If you accept her refusal and decide to consider yourself cured, go to Y. If you scream down the hall at the departing doctor that you must have a new arm, go to L.

L. A security officer comes, attracted by the sound of your screams. Clinic security is handled by a six-foot-tall Tarmandian Spacemite with poisonous venom, sharp teeth, and a fondness for US tax law. If you run, go to M. If you are secretly a trained warrior and decide to kill the Tarmandian Spacemite with your bare hands so you can eat its head, go to N. If you sit very still and hope the Tarmandian Spacemite goes away, go to O.

M. Running triggers the predatory instincts of the Tarmandian Spacemite. Go to Z.

N. You use your completely unforeshadowed (but useful!) fighting skills to overpower the security officer. The head of the Tarmandian Spacemite is a delicious delicacy, salty and crunchy and full of delightful worms that squiggle all the way down your throat. Unfortunately, you forgot to remove the venomous fangs. Go to Z.

O. You sit perfectly still on the exam table, and tiny insects that resemble miniature beetles crawl into your pants and bite you repeatedly, leaving a clump of purple bumps that look suspiciously similar to the scabby rash you had on your arm when you arrived at the clinic. When you’re sure the Tarmandian Spacemite is gone, go to P.

P. You have lost an arm and the lower half of your torso is covered in a purple rash. If you decide to cut your losses and consider yourself cured, go to R. If you rummage through the cabinets in the exam room, go to S.

Q. There is nothing in the story that directs you to this section, so if you are reading this, you have failed to follow instructions. Go directly to Z and die your horrible, painful death. Or skip to somewhere else, since you clearly aren’t playing by the rules anyway.

R. You sneak out of the clinic and return to your quarters. You search the station database for treatments for your beetle-induced purple rash. There is no known cure, although some patients have had luck with amputation of the affected areas. Sadly, you are incapable of amputating your own ass. Even if you go back to the clinic, the rash is now too widespread to be treated. Go to Z. Or, if you want to see what would have happened if you’d opted to search through the exam room cabinets, go to S. But remember, going to S is only to see what hypothetically would have happened. Your true fate is Z.

S. You rummage through the cabinets and find an assortment of ointments and lotions. If you read the instructions on all the bottles, go to T. If you select a few bottles at random and slather them on your rash, go to T. Have you noticed how often you end up in the same place no matter what you chose? In the clinic, as in life, decisions that seem important are often ultimately meaningless. In the end, all of us will die and none of this will matter. Now seriously, go to T.

T. None of the ointments or lotions do anything for your rash. The Uranian nurse comes in to clean the room and discovers you. If you pretend to work at the clinic, go to U. If you ask for help with your rash, go to V. If you run away, go to W.

(There is no U, much as there is no hope for patients of the clinic. The nurse would have recognized you anyway. Go to V.)

V. The Doodoo from Uranus (seriously, are you in third grade? Stop pronouncing the planet as “your anus”) examines your rash and amputates the affected areas by eating them, neatly cauterizing the wound with the acid in its saliva. You are now a head with approximately half a torso. If you consider yourself cured, go to X. Otherwise, go to Z.

W. You flee from the Uranian nurse but slip on a puddle of slimy green mucus excreted by another patient, probably that idiot slug-monkey that slimed the clipboard. You crash into the wall, and before you can get back up, the Uranian nurse amputates the areas affected by the rash by eating them, neatly cauterizing the wound with the acid in its saliva. You are now a head with approximately half a torso. If you consider yourself cured, go to X. Otherwise go to Z.

X. You are not cured. You are a head with half a torso, and missing several internal organs. Go to Z.

Y. Congratulations, you have survived your trip to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station! All you have to do now is fill out your discharge papers. You start filling out the forms with your one remaining hand, but you accidentally drop the pen onto the oozing foot of the Saturnian slug-monkey waiting in line behind you. This is undoubtedly the idiot that slimed the sign-in clipboard. You cuss the slug-monkey out with some choice words in French. Choice words because it was rude to leave slime all over the clipboard. French because you know better than to make a slug-monkey angry. You’ve watched enough education vids to know that slug-monkeys are always hungry, which makes them temperamental.

Unfortunately for you, Saturnian slug-monkeys are far better educated than arrogant humans give them credit for. This one is fluent in several languages, including French. It eats you. Go to Z.

Z. You die a horrible, painful death. But at least you won’t have to deal with your insurance company!

THIS IS NOT A WARDROBE DOOR ^{A. MERC RUSTAD}

A. Merc Rustad is a queer non-binary writer who likes dinosaurs, robots, monsters, and cookies. Their fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Cicada, Uncanny, Escape Pod, Fireside, IGMS, Flash Fiction Online, Apex, Shimmer, and others. “How to Become a Robot in 12 Easy Steps” was included in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015, edited by Joe Hill and John Joseph Adams. “This Is Not a Wardrobe Door” has been reproduced on PodCastle (audio), and reprinted in Cicada (2018) and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017, edited by Charles Wu and John Joseph Adams, and has been translated into Chinese and Portuguese.

Merc is mostly found on Twitter @Merc_Rustad, and sometimes playing in cardboard boxes.

Dear Gatekeeper,

Hi my name is Ellie and I’m six years old and my closet door is broken. My best friend Zera lives in your world and I visited her all the time, and sometimes I got older but turned six again when I came back, but that’s okay. Can you please fix the door so I can play with Zera?

Love,

Ellie

Zera packs lightly for her journey: rose-petal rope and dewdrop boots, a jacket spun from bee song and buttoned with industrial-strength cricket clicks. She secures her belt (spun from the cloud memories, of course) and picks up her satchel. It has food for her and oil for Misu.

Her best friend is missing and she must find out why.

Misu, the palm-sized mechanical microraptor, perches on her seaweed braids, its glossy raindrop-colored feathers ruffled in concern.

Misu says, But what if the door is locked?

Zera smiles. “I’ll find a key.”

But secretly, she’s worried. What if there isn’t one?

Dear Gatekeeper,

I hope you got my last couple letters. I haven’t heard back from you yet, and the closet door still doesn’t work. Mommy says I’m wasting paper when I use too much crayon, so I’m using markers this time. Is Zera okay? Tell her I miss playing with the sea monsters and flying to the moon on the dragons most of all.

Please open the door again.

—Ellie, age 7

Zera leaves the treehouse and climbs up the one-thousand-five-hundred-three rungs of the polka-dot ladder, each step a perfect note in a symphony. When she reaches the falcon aerie above, she bows to the Falcon Queen and asks if she may have a ride to the Land of Doors.

The Falcon Queen tilts her magnificent head. “Have you not heard?” the queen asks in a voice like spring lightning and winter calm. “All the doors have gone quiet. There is a disease rotting wood and rusting hinges, and no one can find a cure.”

Misu shivers on Zera’s shoulder. It is like the dreams, Misu says. When everything is silent.

Zera frowns. “Hasn’t the empress sent scientists to investigate?”

The Falcon Queen nods. “They haven’t returned. I dare not send my people into the cursed air until we know what is happening.”

Zera squares her shoulders. She needs answers, and quickly. Time passes differently (faster) on Ellie’s home planet, because their worlds are so far apart, and a lag develops in the space-time continuum.

“Then I will speak to the Forgotten Book,” Zera says, hiding the tremor in her voice.

The falcons ruffle their feathers in anxiety. Not even the empress sends envoys without the Forgotten Book’s approval.

“You are always brave,” says the Falcon Queen. “Very well then, I will take you as far as the Island of Stars.”

Hi Gatekeeper,

Are you even there? It’s been almost a year for me and still nothing. Did the ice elves get you? I hope not. Zera and I trapped them in the core of the passing comet so they’d go away, but you never know.

Why can’t I get through anymore? I’m not too old, I promise. That was those Narnia books that had that rule (and they were stupid, we read them in class).

Please say something,

—Ellie, age 8

Zera hops off the Falcon Queen’s back and looks at the Island of Stars. It glows from the dim silver bubbles that thick in the air like tapioca pudding.

She sets off through the jungle of broken wire bedframes and abandoned armchairs; she steps around rusting toys and rotting books. There are memories curled everywhere—sad and lonely things, falling to pieces at the seams.

She looks around in horror. “What happened?”

Misu points with a tiny claw. Look.

In the middle of the island stands the Forgotten Book, its glass case shattered and anger radiating off its pages.

LEAVE, says the book. BEFORE MY CURSE DEVOURS YOU.

Gatekeeper,

I tried to tell Mom we can’t move, but she won’t listen. So now I’m three hundred miles away and I don’t know anybody and all I want to do is scream and punch things, but I don’t want Mom to get upset. This isn’t the same closet door. Zera explained that the physical location wasn’t as fixed like normal doors in our world, but I’m still freaking out.

I found my other letters. Stacks of notebook paper scribbled in crayon and marker and finger-paint—all stacked in a box in Mom’s bedroom.

“What are you doing with this?” I screamed at Mom, and she had tears in her eyes. “Why did you take the letters? They were supposed to get to Zera!”

Mom said she was sorry, she didn’t want to tell me to stop since it seemed so important, but she kept finding them in her closet.

I said I’d never put them there, but she didn’t believe me.

“We can’t go there again,” Mom said, “no one ever gets to go back!” and she stomped out of the kitchen and into the rain.

Has my mom been there? Why didn’t she ever tell me? Why did you banish her too?

What did we do so wrong we can’t come back?

—Ellie

Zera’s knees feel about to shatter.

“Why are you doing this?” Zera grips an old, warped rocking chair. “You’ve blacked out the Land of Doors, haven’t you?”

YES, says the Book. ALL WHO GO THERE WILL SLEEP, UNDREAMING, UNTIL THE END.

Zera blinks hard, her head dizzy from the pressure in the air. “You can’t take away everyone’s happiness like this.”

NO? says the Book. WHY NOT? NO ONE EVER REMEMBERS US THERE. THEY FORGET AND GROW OLD AND ABANDON US.

“That’s not true,” Zera says. “Ellie remembers. There are others.”

Misu nods.

Zera pushes through the heavy air, reaching out a hand to the Book. “They tell stories of us there,” Zera says, because Ellie used to bring stacks of novels with her instead of PBJ sandwiches in her backpack. “There are people who believe. But there won’t be if we close all the doors. Stories in their world will dry up. We’ll start to forget them, too.”

WE MEAN NOTHING TO THEM.

Zera shakes her head. “That’s not true. I don’t want my best friend to disappear forever.”

Gatekeeper,

I don’t know why I bother anymore. You’re not listening. I don’t even know if you exist.

It’s been awhile, huh? Life got busy for me. High school, mostly. Mom got a better job and now we won’t have to move again. Also I met this awesome girl named LaShawna and we’ve been dating for a month. God, I’m so in love with her. She’s funny and smart and tough and kind—and she really gets me.

Sometimes she reminds me of Zera.

I asked Mom why she kept my letters.

She didn’t avoid me this time. “I had a door when I was younger,” she said, and she looked so awfully sad. “I was your age. I met the person I wanted to stay with forever.” She let out her breath in a whoosh. “But then the door just… it broke, or something. I tried dating here. Met your father, but it just wasn’t the same. Then he ran off and it was like losing it all again.”

I told LaShawna about Zera’s world. She said she didn’t want to talk about it. I think maybe she had a door, too.

I was so angry growing up, feeling trapped. You know the best thing about Zera? She got me. I could be a girl, I could be a boy, and I could be neither—because that’s how I feel a lot of the time. Shifting around between genders. I want that to be OK, but here? I don’t know.

The thing is, I don’t want to live in Zera’s world forever. I love things here, too. I want to be able to go back and forth and have friends everywhere, and date LaShawna and get my degree and just live.

This will be my last letter to you, Gatekeeper.

If there was one thing Zera and I learned, it’s that you have to build your own doors sometimes.

So I’m going to make my own. I’ll construct it out of salvaged lumber; I’ll take a metalworking class and forge my own hinges. I’ll paper it with all my letters and all my memories. I’ll set it up somewhere safe, and here’s the thing—I’ll make sure it never locks.

My door will be open for anyone who needs it: my mom, LaShawna, myself.

—Ell

The Book is silent.

“Please,” Zera says. “Remove the curse. Let us all try again.”

And she lays her hand gently on the Forgotten Book and lets the Book see all the happy memories she shared with Ellie, once, and how Ellie’s mom Loraine once came here and met Vasha, who has waited by the door since the curse fell, and Misu, who befriended the lonely girl LaShawna and longs to see her again—and so many, many others that Zera has collected, her heart overfilled with joy and loss and grief and hope.

In return, she sees through space and time, right into Ell’s world, where Ell has built a door and has her hand on the knob.

“Ell,” Zera calls.

Ell looks up, eyes wide. “Zera?”

“Yes,” Zera says, and knows her voice will sound dull behind the door. “I’m here.”

Ell grins. “I can see your reflection in the door! Is that the Book with you?”

The Book trembles. SHE REMEMBERS.

Zera nods. The air is thinning, easing in her lungs. “I told you. Not everyone forgets.”

I would like to see LaShawna again, says Misu.

VERY WELL, says the book. THE CURSE WILL BE REMOVED.

Ell turns the handle.

Bright lights beams into the Island of Stars, and Ell stands there in a doorway, arms spread wide. Zera leaps forward and hugs her best friend.

“You came back,” Zera says.

“I brought some people with me, too,” Ell says, and waves behind her, where two other women wait.

Loraine steps through the light with tears in her eyes. “I never thought I could come back…”

Misu squeaks in delight and flies to LaShawna.

Zera smiles at her friends. Things will be all right.

“We have a lot of work to do to repair this place,” Zera says. She clasps Ell’s hands. “The curse is gone, but we have to fix the doors and wake the sleepers. Are you ready?”

Ell grins and waves her mom and girlfriend to join her. “Yes. Let’s do this.”

OUR TALONS CAN CRUSH GALAXIES ^{BROOKE BOLANDER}

Brooke Bolander writes weird things of indeterminate genre, most of them leaning rather heavily toward fantasy or general all-around weirdness. She attended the University of Leicester from 2004 to 2007 studying History and Archaeology and is an alum of the 2011 Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UCSD. Her stories have been featured in Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Uncanny, and various other fine purveyors of the fantastic. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, the Hugo, the Locus, and the Theodore Sturgeon awards, much to her unending bafflement. Her debut book, The Only Harmless Great Thing, was published in 2018 by Tor.com.

This is not the story of how he killed me, thank fuck.

You want that kind of horseshit, you don’t have to look far; half of modern human media revolves around it, lovingly detailed descriptions of sobbing women violated, victimized, left for the loam to cradle. Rippers, rapists, stalkers, serial killers. Real or imagined, their names get printed ten feet high on movie marquees and subway ads, the dead convenient narrative rungs for villains to climb. Heroes get names; killers get names; victims get close-ups of their opened ribcages mid-autopsy, the bloodied stumps where their wings once attached, baffled coroners making baffled phone calls to even more baffled curators at local museums. They get dissected, they get discussed, but they don’t get names or stories the audience remembers.

So, no. You don’t get a description of how he surprised me, where he did it, who may have fucked him up when he was a boy to lead to such horrors (no-one), or the increasingly unhinged behavior the cops had previously filed away as the mostly harmless eccentricities of a nice young man from a good family. No fighting in the woods, no blood under the fingernails, no rivers or locked trunks or calling cards in the throat. It was dark and it was bad and I called for my sisters in a language dead when the lion-brides of Babylon still padded outside the city gates. There. That’s all you get, and that’s me being generous. You’re fuckin’ welcome.

However, here is what I will tell you. I’ll be quick.

He did not know what I was until after. He felt no regret or curiosity, because he should have been drowned at birth. I was nothing but a commodity to him before, and nothing but an anomaly to him after.

My copper feathers cut his fingertips and palms as he pared my wings away.

I was playing at being mortal this century because I love cigarettes and shawarma, and it’s easier to order shawarma if your piercing shriek doesn’t drive the delivery boy mad. Mortality is fun in small doses. It’s very authentic, very down-in-the-dirt nitty-gritty. There are lullabies and lily pads and summer rainstorms and hardly anyone ever tries to cut your head off out of some moronic heroic obligation to the gods. If you want to sit on your ass and read a book, nobody judges you. Also, shawarma.

My spirit was already fled before the deed was done, back to the Nest, back to the Egg. My sisters clucked and cooed and gently scolded. They incubated me with their great feathery bottoms as they had many times before, as I had done many times before for them. Sisters have to look out for one another. We’re all we’ve got, and forever is a long, slow slog without love.

I hatched anew. I flapped my wings and hurricanes flattened cities in six different realities. I was a tee-ninsy bit motherfuckin’ pissed, maybe.

I may have cried. You don’t get to know that either, though.

We swept back onto the mortal plane with a sound of a 1967 Mercury Cougar roaring to life on an empty country road, one sister in the front seat and three in the back and me at the wheel with a cigarette clenched between my pointed teeth. You can fit a lot of wingspan in those old cars, provided you know how to fold reality the right way.

It’s easy to get lost on those backroads, but my old wings called to us from his attic. We did not get lost.

He was alone when we pulled into his driveway, gravel crunching beneath our wheels like bone. He had a gun. He bolted his doors. The tumblers turned for us; we took his gun.

Did he cry? Oh yeah. Like a fuckin’ baby.

I didn’t know what you were, he said. I didn’t know. I just wanted to get your attention, and you wouldn’t even look at me. I tried everything.

Well, kid, I says, putting my cigarette out on his family’s floral carpet, you’ve sure as hell got it now.

Our talons can crush galaxies. Our songs give black holes nightmares. The edges of our feathers fracture moonlight into silver spiderwebs and universes into parallels. Did we take him apart? C’mon. Don’t ask stupid questions.

Did we kill him? Ehh. In a manner of speaking. In another manner of speaking, his matter is speaking across a large swathe of space and time, begging for an ending to his smeared roadkill existence that never quite reaches the rest stop. Semantics, right? I don’t care to quibble or think about it anymore than I have to.

Anyway. Like I said way back at the start, this is not the story of how he killed me. It’s the story of how a freak tornado wrecked a single solitary home and disappeared a promising young man from a good family, leaving a mystery for the locals to scratch their heads over for the next twenty years. It’s the story of how a Jane Doe showed up in the nearby morgue with what looked like wing stubs sticking out of her back, never to be claimed or named. It’s the story of how my sisters and I acquired a 1967 Mercury Cougar we still go cruising in occasionally when we’re on the mortal side of the pike.

You may not remember my name, seeing as how I don’t have one you could pronounce or comprehend. The important thing is always the stories—which ones get told, which ones get co-opted, which ones get left in a ditch, overlooked and neglected. This is my story, not his. It belongs to me and is mine alone. I will sing it from the last withered tree on the last star-blasted planet when entropy has wound down all the worlds and all the wheres, and nothing is left but faded candy wrappers. My sisters and I will sing it—all at once, all together, a sound like a righteous scream from all the forgotten, talked-over throats in Eternity’s halls—and it will be the last story in all of Creation before the lights finally blink out and the shutters go bang.