“That’s spectacular,” my father says. It’s been a long time since Ike has been outside. “You riding with Ama?” my father asks. He sounds so excited that it’s almost like he’s the father I had when I had a mother—that person I only sort of remember. The one who would hold me by my feet and tickle me until I couldn’t breathe. I remember that fun, breathless struggle. I also remember, always, that he didn’t treat my mother well. He used to yell and scream. I used to hide in my room with Ike, and to distract him we’d play hide and seek. Back before Ike was a genius. Before I was a murderer. That I remember.
“See ya, Daddy,” I say, and give him a hug. I keep my eyes open all through it.
“Have fun, ginger root,” he says as he touches my hair. And I close my eyes for a half second to feel the simple good of his hands on my head. Then I’m on the bike, and Ike is sitting in front on the handlebars, and we’re riding in the wind like we’re unstoppable beings who truly have all anyone could ever hope for.
Our street is Harper, and then we ride down Flint to get onto Conduit AB-14, which we stay on for a while. Conduit AB-14 is framed by trees full of drone birds and dirt. It’s four lanes of empty road. Naked road for miles and miles, and if it didn’t mean the end of the world, all that empty might be beautiful, maybe.
On the way we see a group of men and women beating down some other man. When I ride by, they stop to look at me. I smile and wave. When they see me, their eyes go wide, then the group of them run off in the opposite direction. “I’m not gonna hurt you,” I call out. They don’t believe me. They don’t stop running. The one who was getting beat on gets up. His face is mashed pretty good. “You’re still magnificent and supreme. Nothing can change that,” I tell him. He picks up a rock. Turns from me, unbuckles his pants, and shows me his butt cheeks. Then, when his pants are back on, he goes running after the group.
“Meatheads,” Ike says, trying to keep me from feeling bad.
“Yeah,” I say.
It takes us almost an hour to get there. I stop two streets before Kennedy to catch my breath, and we walk the rest of the way. Carl’s cluster looks pretty much like ours, but it’s quieter. People mostly stay inside here because of Carl.
“I think the furthering of variance might truly suggest the dissolving of consistency we’ve always expected,” says Ike.
“Hope so,” I say. And we walk more.
When we finally do get to Kennedy, the heads of two women, Patricia Samuel and Lesly Arcor, are stuck onto the street sign. Carl’s set the two heads up to look like they’re kissing. Patricia Samuel is Carl’s mother.
“I guess Carl is still Carl,” Ike says. Looking around, curious, kind of scared, almost like how I imagine a real little kid might look. There are no more real little kids. Even the babies know they’re stuck. Most of them don’t cry at all. Some of them never stop crying ever.
It always looks like World War VI over on Kennedy because of Carl. Two houses are on fire. There are dark spots that show where Carl’s victims bled out on the streets. He’s a real terror. Still. It’s easy to judge him because, I mean, he does the absolute worst stuff to people. I once saw him use his body and various household objects to physically violate eight people, who were all tied up at once. He was fourteen when the Flash came, like me.
It’s super-easy to think he is the Devil himself because of all the things he does and because sometimes he screams, “In this hell, the Devil, the Lord, and everything in between is named Carl,” but I’ve been there. Being strong can make you like that. Carl is my protégé. He’ll never admit it, but it’s true. He’s the protégé of Knife Queen Ama. The Ama who started with one knife and ended with three blades and two guns, who could kill all 116 people on my cluster in one hour and twenty-two minutes. I’d take a shower and change halfway through because my clothes got so heavy. Every inch of my black skin painted the maroon of life. The old Ama would murder everyone because when everyone was gone, she got to feel like she was the only one in the world and there was no one who might ever do her wrong again. Sometimes she’d just sit in the grass and feel supreme and infinite. She’d try to stare at a single blade of grass, or dance in the empty streets, or sing at the top of her lungs, until the Flash came. Sometimes she’d cry and cry as she washed the blood from her hair and eyes. Sometimes she wouldn’t wash it off at all.
Imagine the worst thing anyone has ever done. I promise, I’ve done it to everyone. More than once.
When I realized I was faster and stronger, at first I didn’t know what to do. I thought that maybe I was supposed to be on top now. I thought I was getting rewarded. And so I did what I wanted. Before the Flash, Carl was not nice to me. He liked to call me “nappy-headed bitch,” or “dumb-ass cunt.” He liked to make me cry back when we still had school. Then, when my mother left us, when I saw him, he said, “Guess your mother didn’t want to be alive, knowing she made you.” That, well, I know he regrets saying that. Because after the Flash, once I realized what I could do, I hunted him. He was the first person I ever killed. He was the first person I’d kill every day. The hurt I’ve pulled out of that boy could fill the universe twice over.
I’d rush over to his house and find different ways to ruin him. There is nothing—nothing—I haven’t done to Carl Samuel. I know well-done Carl from medium-rare Carl. I made sure his mother knew the difference too. Even made her choose a favorite. It was a good day for me when she admitted her preference.
“Tell me, Patricia, which do you prefer?” I laughed. She was tied to the posts on the side of the stairs. I grabbed her cheeks. Her son’s blood was crusting beneath my fingernails. I pulled her face down to the two strips of meat I’d cooked just a few minutes before. I fried the boy’s arm pieces in olive oil. I even added salt, pepper, and adobo. Carl was writhing and crying behind me. His arm severed and the wound cauterized. I didn’t even have to tie him up.
“Hey, baby. You are supreme and—” Mrs. Samuel started, and then I snapped one of her fingers. She screamed. By then I was immune to the sound of humans screaming. Or the thing I think others felt when they heard someone hurt, I felt the exact opposite. It was music for me: the way people scream when they’re just afraid versus when they know their life is going to end. The unrelenting throaty sobs a man makes when you dangle his life in front of him, the shouts a child makes as you remove their arm. The sharp harshness that comes from a mother who can’t save her son and can’t stop trying. But that day Patricia Samuel swallowed up her scream and stared past me to her son. “You are infinite; this is nothing. I love you, Carl. You are perfect. You are supreme. You are infinite. We are forever.”
“Very sweet. Now tell me, Mrs. Samuel.” I smiled and made my voice soft. “Do you prefer the well-done or the medium?” Patricia Samuel wept as I turned my back to her.
“Please, Queen Ama, I beg you, please spare him today.”
“Knife Queen Ama,” I corrected. “If you tell me which you prefer, I may find some mercy for you.” I took the knife out of my fanny pack.
“Please, Knife Queen.” She wept, just as desperate as a person can be.
I shook my head. “Carl, your mother did this to you,” and then I pressed my knee on his neck. It’s not that hard to remove someone’s eye.
Carl’s screams: yippy and small, and then they grow. They’re wordy and pathetic. “Ah! Hey! Okay! Okay!” like I was giving him a wedgie. Then they grow and pull and stretch. “Nooooo, nooooooo!”
“I love you, baby; it’s okay,” Mrs. Samuel said.
“Yeah, Carl, it’s okay,” I said, stabbing deeper, shucking the blade into the boy’s skull. Laughing at how easy it was.
Carl was silent. He wasn’t dead. His body shook.
“Please, Knife Queen!” She screamed for her son.
“Which do you prefer?”
“Ama, please!”
“Medium or well-done?”
So much misery in that room.
“Neither!”
“You have to pick,” I said
, looking up at her, smiling with her boy and so much of his blood in my hands.
“I—”
“In a second there’ll be a very rare option on that plate,” I said.
“Baby, I promi—”
“You have to pick,” I repeated. It was like holding down a fresh-caught fish.
“Mom!” Carl screamed.
“Well-done,” she finally said.
I stopped. “Take another bite to make sure.” She followed my command immediately. Bending down, almost breaking her own arm to eat the meat with her mouth as her hands were tied to the posts behind her.
“Well-done, Knife Queen Ama.”
“Good to know,” I said. “That’s how you’ll have your Carl next cycle.”
Then I got up and left.
I forced Carl and Patricia to live similar nightmares hundreds of times. What’s surprising is how it never got easier for them. Carl was always terrified; his mother was always desperate, destroyed, and ready to be destroyed for him.
I hunted Carl for so long that even though I still hated him I got bored. I started hurting other people. At first I only bullied the bullies. The people who tried to hurt. And then I started hurting everybody. The way I felt about Carl sort of leached out. I was a real terror. People accumulate differently. When Carl’s body started accumulating like mine, when he got as strong as I was, as fast as me, as good with sharp things, then he became a real genuine terror too.
There’s dark red streaked everywhere on Kennedy. It’s like walking into an old room you haven’t lived in for a long time.
“Maybe let’s get back on the bike,” I say.
“Wise,” Ike says, and then, as he’s climbing up onto the handlebars, there’s a bang. I look down and I don’t have a knee anymore. It’s just a shattered bloody thing. I eat back the screams I feel because I’m not the kind of person who screams anymore.
“Dammit!” Ike says. “We have to go.”
“Sheesh,” I say. “Okay, we’re okay. We are—”
“Ama, I know, we have to go!”
Then Carl screams from above us. “How dare you! Sliht baree ki lopper TRENT.”
When I realized that Carl was also accumulating in his body, that he was becoming like me and maybe had been like me the whole time but wasn’t smart enough to realize it, I let him be my friend. Here in the forever Loop anything can happen. You can make a friend of the Devil. You can pretend everything was a dream. Carl was my only friend for a while. We did what we wanted to other people. We hurt them together. We even invented our own language: Carama. There are a lot of bad words in Carama. It’s a language for war gods, so it’s pretty aggressive. We’ve sat on rooftops and watched without fear as entire communities joined together to try to bring us down. “Sliht baree ki lopper trent,” he screams again. It means something like “Prepare for a violent death, you lowly creature.”
“Just checking in,” I say. “We’re leaving.”
“Ama!” Ike screams. I can see he’s afraid, and he should be. But I haven’t seen Carl in such a long time, and there’s a chance that even he is different now.
“Checking out, actually,” Carl says. And I hear him laugh at what he thinks is clever. He flips down from the roof of a house to the street. He’s holding his piercer rifle. That’s one thing. When he starts his day, Carl has some pretty serious stuff ready in his house. His father, before he died, was some kind of Aqua Nazi. Even before the Water Wars started, he was preparing against Black people, Middle Eastern people, Christians, and Jews because he thought they were going to steal from the water reservoirs or something. He was a pretty mean guy, I guess. Carl used to come to school black-eyed and bruised. Kids used to laugh at how crazy his pops was. He wasn’t a happy boy. He’s still not a happy boy. He wears a T-shirt on his head with the neck hole slanted to cover his left eye, and the shirt’s arms are tied back in a knot behind his head. He uses an elastic band he cuts from a pair of underwear like a headband over the shirt to keep it in place even better. It’s the first thing he does every day. His eye, his eye. Some pain lasts through a hundred deaths.
The hot rain starts falling. Blue sky, Horn, hot rain, Flash. Those are the totems. Those are the things that come no matter what you say, think, pray, do, or die. The hot rain feels like a warm shower. Ike says the rain is a thermonuclear by-product of all the bombing that was going on during the time the Flash first hit. He says that even if the Flash didn’t come the rain would give us all cancer. But I like it. Every day it comes and it’s warm and it reminds you like, hey, wasn’t that pretty good when you were dry earlier?
“Kia Udon Rosher, ki twlever plumme sun,” I scream, which means, like, “Oh great destroyer, you are supreme.” The feeling in my mangled leg is disappearing, and the world starts flickering out.
Carl laughs. He wears a purple bathrobe that belonged to his father like the gun he raises.
“You’re a stupid cunt,” Carl says in plain old language. I feel my old self in my fingers as I reach for my pack. He skips toward me as my knee bleeds and bleeds. It hurts very badly. I’ve felt much worse, but it’s so hard to remember anything other than what’s now when you’re hurt now.
After Carl and I broke our war-god pact and our friendship, we became sworn enemies. It happened because Carl didn’t like how I acted like I was stronger than he was. Also, I think, because he was bored. One day he caught me off-guard and knocked me out with a shovel. When I woke up, I was chained to a tree and I didn’t have any fingers on my left hand. I was, like, “Sheesh.” That was the beginning of a very, very long day. It had been lifetimes since anyone had been able to hurt me like that, and I realized how bad I had been, and for how long, and how I wasn’t going to do anything like that ever again.
But now, with my knee exploded, I’m thinking about how I want to make Carl sip broth made from his own bones. I point the gun at my brother. Even after all this forever, it’s something I do not like to do. Even if it’s to save him from Carl, who will do things so, so much worse. Even the old me didn’t kill Ike. Which is probably why he had such a hard time for a while. It was lonely for him: a boy in a dead town and his sister the bringer of all pain.
“No you don’t!” Carl says, and I try to pull the trigger. There’s a bang and it’s not from my hands and then the world disappears and I leave my brother in the hands of the worst person on the planet.
You are safe. You are protected. Continue contributing to the efforts by living happily.
I wake up. I grab Mom’s knife and hold it in my hands.
Good torture feels like it will never end. You never forget it. I wonder what happened to Ike as I brush my teeth and shower and stuff my knife into my fanny pack. Carl is great at torture. Carl knows what he’s doing because Carl learned from me, and I might be the best ever at that stuff. I imagine what Carl did to Ike, and I know he’s been through the kind of pain that will never leave him.
I go to Mrs. Nagel’s place. She’s just so fragile and weak. Still. Always. Her breathing sounds like struggle, and even though she’s sleeping, there are lines around her eyes like she’s concentrating hard on something. I open my fanny pack and take out the knife. I put the blade against Mrs. Nagel’s neck. The metal reflects a sliver of light against her skin as her throat grows and shrinks, carrying air in and out of her body badly. It’d be so easy even if she weren’t so sick. She was the easiest out of everyone. She only woke up when the old me wanted her to. When I wanted her to know what was happening to her, which was a lot of the time. I take my knife back, tuck it into my pack, and go downstairs.
I squeeze lemon into elderflower tea. When I climb back up the stairs, Mrs. Nagel is awake, and she looks at me with eyes that are tired and warm. I put the hot mug on her nightstand.
“Ama,” she says, and she scoots up in her bed. She tries to take a deep breath but can’t. She smiles and motions for the box of tissues that is always on the floor. Such a big difference it would make if it was just on her nightstand, if she could j
ust have that one thing be easy and simple. Instead that little thing, it’s magnified by a million, and it makes you just want to cut your own head off that she can’t just have that one thing be right for once.
“Hey, Mrs. Nagel,” I say.
“What’s wrong?” she says. It chills me to hear her ask. Even though it’s been a long time, not a lot of people say things like that to me. Most people are afraid of me. A lot of them hate me and they should.
I climb up on the bed behind Mrs. Nagel so she can lean back into me and I can massage her temples to help with the headaches. I say, “I feel like maybe I liked the old me better. The old Ama. It was easier. And maybe the new Ama isn’t doing anything.”
Mrs. Nagel blows her nose. “New Ama?”
“Yeah, you know. Me now,” I say. “Like how I’m not killing everybody or torturing anyone or whatever.”
“And that was the old Ama who did that?”
“Yeah.”
“And what’s the difference between the two?”
“The old me did everything one way. And only thought about one person. Now I try to help everybody instead of killing them.”
“I see, but what changed?”
“I used to be afraid,” I say. I watch her breathe and listen to see if her heart is beating faster, if she is afraid. She is not. “I know I can’t take it back. I know I’m the worst person who ever lived. I know that. I’m not afraid anymore. I’m only scared of me.”
“I see, and that means you’ve been two people?”
“I’m better now. And I’m sorry. But sometimes something in me—like right now, it’d be so easy.” I continue to rub softly, but it’s true. I can’t stop imagining how easy it would be to crush Mrs. Nagel’s neck. Like crumpling a piece of paper. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean that,” I say. “I want everyone to feel happy and supreme and infinite. That’s the new me.”
“Hmm,” Mrs. Nagel says.
“How can you not see the difference?” I say, trying to keep my voice down. “I’m so much better now. I am.”
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 19
