“Hey, Ike,” I say. That’s short for Ikenna.
“Ama, please,” Ike asks in his whiny voice. He wants me to end his day. He wants me to kill him. He didn’t used to be like this. He was six when the Flash hit, so his body can’t do all the things he wishes it could. He still has his small peanut head and cheeks you want to pinch. But I don’t pinch; he hates his cheek pinchies now. That’s another thing I have to think about as I’m being my new self. I am forever fourteen, and I can do more than anyone. I am blessed. But Ike’s blessed in his own way. “Ama, goddamn it. Just do it for me, please,” he says.
“Why? It’s a great day outside,” I joke. I’ve made that joke more times than—well, I’ve made it a lot of times.
“Do you hate me?” Ike asks. “You must truly hate me to deny me this.”
No matter how much he’s crammed in his head, when I see him, I still see my kid brother. Ike’s one of the ones who can’t do it themselves; he’s a softy.
“I love you,” I say. Ike screams a bunch of bad words, but still I won’t kill him, because even the old me never did that. Not him. He doesn’t leave his room much anymore. I let him be and go to the kitchen.
“Hello, Daddy,” I say in a singing voice that sometimes makes him smile. My father is in his old-man slippers and his pajama pants. He is fidgeting, swaying, like always. He can’t be still hardly ever. He’s getting ready to cook something. Am I nervous around him? Yes. But I try not to be. Now that I’m the new me, I try to be appreciative. Appreciative and definitely not afraid. If I get afraid, then I get angry. If I get too angry, I might go back to being the old me and be just like Carl on Kennedy, who is a monster. A war god. A breaker of men and women and children.
“Morning, ginger root,” he says. Then he turns to me, and he’s holding the knife he uses to cut meat.
“Daddy,” I say. Then he slashes at me with the butcher knife. I have enough time to think some real thoughts as his arm moves to my neck. I could open my pack, grab Mom’s knife before Dad’s blade reaches me. But I don’t. Instead I think, When will this ever stop? He’s quicker than most people. But I’m faster than everyone. Way faster. Much more lethal when I want to be. The old me would make him suffer greatly. Instead I try to say Daddy again but can’t—not with my gashed-up neck and all—so I bleed out watching him watch me die. Then I die.
I’m in a gym, still in my jersey. Sweaty and upset. I feel a strong hand on my head. My face is crammed into her stomach. I can smell her along with the pinewood and dust of the Ramapo Middle School gym. I can feel her. My mother rubs my neck. She says, “It’s okay.” Then pushes me off to the locker room, where my team is waiting.
You are safe. You are protected. Continue contributing to the efforts by living happily. I wake up. I look around and try to decide if what I think just happened really did happen. I decide it did. I had a dream. I saw my mother in a dream. It’s something new. New things never happen anymore. There are no dreams except the ones you had the morning of the Flash. I haven’t had a dream in forever. And still, I saw my mother. She was really there with me. I want to see her again. I want to feel her again. I pull out my knife. Her knife. I stare at the blade, and I tell myself it’s only this one time. It’s only this one time and then never again. Then I drag the knife through my arm. I bleed and bleed. Then I go.
No dream. No mom. Regular.
You are safe. You are protected. Continue contributing to the efforts by living happily.
I wake up in the usual. Blue sky, in bed, knowing everything will be the same. But still, after my father killed me, I saw something I’ve never seen before. I dreamed a dream. That never happens. It wasn’t there the next time, but still. I saw her. I jump out of bed.
“Ike!” I say, running up to his room.
“What?” he groans. “Are you going to help me or not?”
“I’m not going to kill you,” I say. “But something happened.” He knows me as well as anybody. Everybody knows everyone very well. We’ve all been together in the Loop longer than any group of people ever. But Ike knows me best. He gets out of bed and sits cross-legged on the floor. That’s how he sits when he’s thinking for real. That’s how he sits when he cares.
“What happened?” he asks. And now he sounds like the old Ike.
“I had a dream,” I say.
“So?”
“I mean I dreamed through the Flash. I didn’t wake up, then take a nap and dream. I saw it before I came back. That’s never happened before.”
“Are you sure?” he asks. He grabs a little flip notepad with a purple pig on the cover and a crayon. “What did you see?” he says, and starts scribbling. Nothing he writes will last through the Flash—everything goes back to how it was the day the bomb dropped—but writing in it helps him think.
“Well,” I say. “I saw Mom.”
Ike gets up, takes a breath, and then sits back down. “Ama, tell me what you saw, exactly.”
“I was with Mom. At Ramapo. I think it was just after the first game of the year. We’d lost, I guess. Even though in real life I think we won. All this was before; you probably can’t remember. But she hugged me, and it made me feel better.”
“I do remember,” Ike says, like I hurt his feelings.
“Is this an anomaly?” I ask, finally.
Ike’s crayon dances words down. “Perhaps,” he says. He bites his lip. I wish I could share the dream better for him. I know he’d give anything to see Mom that way.
“Ama,” my father calls. And my hands move toward where my fanny pack would be, but I’m still in my sleep shorts. “Sweetie?” he says. He’s in my room. He knows how good I am at hiding. How I might be anywhere. I don’t want to die yet. I’ll be the old me if I have to be.
“What do you wanna do?” I ask Ike while creeping toward the door and out of the room.
“We’ll definitely do something.” And that’s already the best, because he hasn’t wanted to do anything in a long time. “Let me think a little.”
“Okay, I’m going to see Daddy,” I say to warn him it might get bad.
“It’s unlikely he’ll be aggressive,” Ike says without looking up from his notebook. “He’ll want to apologize to you, I think.”
“Daddy,” I say. He’s standing in his shorts and a T-shirt and his flip-flops. He has a stack of pancakes and juice on a tray in his hands. He always makes pancakes, which are my favorite, or crepes or omelets the cycle after he kills me. No matter how used you are to getting a knife whipped through your neck or punched in the eye or in the chest over and over again, it hurts. It’s much better to end a cycle with the Flash, which doesn’t hurt at all. Plus, you never know for sure that the Flash is coming even though it always, always does. And wouldn’t that be a shame if your own father already had killed you the day the Loop broke and you actually would have had a tomorrow?
That’s how the Loop affects him. He’s basically a sad monster half the time. The other times he’s my daddy. I try to love him either way. After he kills me, when the cycle restarts, he feels guilty. You’d think he’d eventually feel so guilty that he’d stop doing it. One day he’ll be better, I hope. I know. The new me lets him do it most of the time. The old me made it a mission to end him way, way before the Horn came. But I’m the new me. And I’m trying to make him better. He wasn’t always like this. He only kills me because I remind him of Mommy. Sometimes he says her name while he does it. “Glory, Glory, Glory!” That’s the sound of him killing me most times. Mom killed herself with her knife. My knife now. If she’d waited two months, she would have been with us forever. There aren’t enough words for forever.
When he’s standing there holding pancakes and trying to be better, I love him. It’s not even that hard. “Thanks, Daddy,” I say as I walk toward the bed and Mom’s knife. I don’t tell him about the dream because I don’t know how it will make him act. If he’s having a good day, I like to leave it alone. He puts the tray on my bed.
“How are you feeling?” he ask
s. He knows I can cut him to pieces.
“I feel infinite and excited and ready to do anything and everything,” I say. I give him a hug.
“Great. I’m thinking maybe we watch the day end. Together. You know, on the wall.”
“Def,” I say. We don’t talk about him cutting my neck open. He never apologizes with words, but he’s always trying his best.
“Okay, Mama Ama,” he says. Then he touches the tray again. To tease me, he genuflects before he leaves the room and walks back downstairs. When he’s down there, he sits on the kitchen chair with the wobbly leg, and he starts to cry. I’m really good at telling where people are. I can almost see them just by paying attention to the sounds of a house. My senses are a blessing.
I take my tray of pancakes back to Ike’s room. He’s dressed in sneakers that light up when he steps and a blue T-shirt with a cloud that has a smiling face.
“I think this might be a legitimate anomaly, Ama,” Ike says. “I want you to be sure, though; was it a dream sustained before you restarted the Loop, not something you thought of when you woke up?”
I look at Ike all dressed up. “Yes!” I say. I’m almost sure.
It didn’t happen all at once. It was forever ago. I realized Ike was speaking like an adult. That was the first thing I noticed. That was the first thing that helped me put the days together. That’s when I started keeping through the Flash. It’s like realizing you’re in a dream except no matter what you do you can’t wake up. Daddy didn’t start remembering through the Flash until much later. By the time I started to keep through the Flash, Ike was already smarter than everybody. That was the first anomaly, asymmetrical retention through Loop expiration, that he explained to all of us. Which meant, for reasons we still don’t know, we each came to realize we were replaying the same thing over and over, and the realizing happened at different times for everyone. It was a pretty alarming thing. To see you’re trapped in infinity and know that no one can explain exactly how or why.
We tried running, like maybe if we ran far enough we could escape.
There is no escape.
So, to ease the transition, we’d throw a party each time somebody kept through. Those were good times on the grid, the space we live in as designated by war-effort planning. The last one to keep through the Flash on Grid SV-2 was Mr. Tuia. We had a big party the day he came through. There was barbecue and music, and Ike danced, and the Poples danced, I danced, and Mrs. Nagel waved her arms from a lawn chair, which was like dancing for her, and my father laughed and laughed. Mr. Tuia mostly cried. It’s very hard at first for some people. But then if you figure that you are infinite, you are supreme and therefore the master of all things, and it’s silly to be sad about things like how much your hip is always going to hurt or how you’re so old that the flu means life in a bed or how gone forever your mother is.
The second anomaly Ike and Robert, who was a marine biologist before the Flash, explained to us was how, individually, some of us were “developing and accruing attributes.” Accumulating, they’d said. Some people were accumulating differently. Ike’s brain was storing facts and stuff better than anybody’s. Lopez on Hark Street was all right on the clarinet before, but now we’re pretty sure he’s the greatest musician to have ever lived. I got strong, fast, precise. I became the Knife Queen. We have a pretty interesting grid.
I don’t know much about the other grids in our state block, because way before the Flash came, the soldier-police—the state-sponsored war-coordination authorities—took away everyone’s cars. Their slogan—“For us to serve and protect, you must conserve and respect”—is emblazoned on posters in the school, on the windows of some people’s homes. The Poples pretended they were proud when their son was shipped for service. The poster in their window shows the soldier-police slogan in big letters stamped below men with puffed-out chests proudly holding the flag and guns, their faces hidden by the black visors of their helmets. Back before the Flash ever came, a lot of people actually loved the SPs. They thought they were keeping us safe. People believe lies, believe anything when they are afraid. That’s another thing. Aren’t we lucky that before the Flash all the soldier-police were deployed elsewhere?
Still, even if you bike as hard as you can in any direction, only stopping to drink water, even if you pee and drink at the same time, you can only get so far before the Flash takes you. Even if you train for years and years. I’ve tried, and if anybody should have been able to do it, it’s me. I use my body better than anyone. I can jump Olympic. I can break grown men with my bare hands. When I have a knife, I’m basically the queen of the world. Or the old me was. Now I let everyone be their own royalty.
“I want to discuss this with Robert,” Ike says.
Then the Horn comes. Three hundred and sixty-seven drone birds all over the area screaming together. It’s like a bright light for your ears. It’s the right sound for what it is. It means defenses have been breached and the world is gonna end today. It lasts for two minutes. One hundred and twenty seconds. I close my eyes and wait. Ike does the same. Then it stops. The Horn is the exit point for many. It comes, and they just can’t take the sonic bleed. So they take whatever they have handy and jam it into their neck. But if you close your eyes and breathe, if you expect it and welcome it even, it’s still terrible, but the kind of terrible you can take.
The quiet after the Horn is sweet and lush. It’s something you don’t want to let go of. But we have work to do. “Okay,” I say after we appreciate a few moments of silence. “Let’s go see Robert.”
“I want to be inside before the rain,” Ike says.
“Maybe we’ll do that; maybe we won’t. We’re supreme and infinite,” I say, reminding him that rain is a small thing for infinite beings.
“Yes, so I’ve heard, Ama. I’d still like to be inside before the rain,” he says.
“I’ll go grab the stuff.”
“I’ll be waiting.” Ike pokes a fork into my pancakes.
I get ready in my room, then I jog downstairs and head outside. Two houses down I see Xander strangling his dog on their green lawn. It weeps and yelps, and its tail flaps around like a helicopter blade until it stops.
“Hello, Xander,” I say with a big wave. Before, he had been a friend of my father’s, and like my father, he was too old to fight. There aren’t any men left from age twenty to forty-five.
“Hi there, Ama.”
“What did poor Andy do today?”
“What do you mean?” Xander says, then he goes back in his house.
I knock once on the Poples’ door. The big window where they keep their soldier-police poster gets smashed every morning, so the poster is facedown, hanging in the shrubs, dressed and stabbed with glass. It’s the first thing the Poples do most days. Smash that window that reminds them of how gone their son is. When the door doesn’t open fast enough, I kick it open. Mr. Pople is naked on his couch, drinking a glass of something. His skin is flappy and foldy.
“Hey, Mr. Pople.”
“Ama Knife Queen Adusei,” he says slowly, smiling and raising his glass and bowing his head.
“Just Ama,” I say. Not in a way that’s threatening, but just to remind him I don’t make people say that anymore and haven’t for a while.
“Ama,” he says very slowly. He looks into his cup, then drinks from it. His hands head down toward his waist.
“See ya, Mr. Pople,” I say as I run up the stairs. I go to his bedroom and grab the small piercer gun from a drawer. It’s the first gun I ever shot. It’s a small black thing with a smooth kick. It makes almost no sound when you pull the trigger. It kills in whispers, which I like. Or used to like. There’s an extra clip in the same drawer. I grab both.
“Hello, Ama,” says Mrs. Pople, who’s still in bed, a cover up over her head.
“Hi, Mrs. Pople, gotta go,” I say.
“Tell your brother to come see me soon.”
“He’s a little caught up today,” I say, and I don’t mention that it’s been a v
ery long time since she and Ike were life partners.
“I see. He prefers Jen. Still?” Jen was a teacher at the school. But I don’t know if Ike prefers anyone right now.
“You’d have to ask him, Mrs. Pople. But maybe your husband is interested? Or maybe Xander is. I think I heard him say he thought you were interesting and physically very attractive.”
“You’re a nice girl, Ama,” Mrs. Pople says.
“We’re all supreme and infinite. We might as well act like it,” I say as I zip my fanny pack closed. I really am settling well into becoming a better person, I think. I’ve really come a long way from what I was, and I was once a true terror. The kind that probably never existed ever before. But now here I am, being called nice.
Kennedy Street is down on the other side of the grid, so it takes a little while on the bike. Days are short. Soon it will rain, and Ike wants to be inside before the rain. “Bye, Mr. Pople,” I say without looking at him doing whatever he’s doing.
“Goodbye, my liege,” he says.
My bike is on the side of our house. I run back in to tell Ike I’m ready, then wait for him outside. I do my kicks and my punches and some tumbles to get loose. I jump some jacks. I give the maple in our yard two good punches and a roundhouse kick to the trunk, and it crashes down. The sound of splitting wood excites me, I admit. It’s different from the sound of snapping bones, but it reminds me of that kind of breaking. Then my father comes outside and looks at me. He has a glass of water in his hands.
“Thirsty?” he asks.
“Yeah, a little bit,” I say. He extends his arm to me, and I walk toward him. I take the glass. It’s cold, nice.
“Where are you going?” he asks like he might have before the Flash. Like he wants to tag along.
“Just riding around on the bike,” I say. His eyes narrow a little, then he takes a deep breath and relaxes.
“Okay,” he says. He turns around, and Ike slides past him outside.
“You too, Ike? You’re out of bed? You’re going outside?”
“Yes, I’m looking forward to some fresh air,” Ike says.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 18
