The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  “How do you know? You could’ve done what you did just now. It don’t take much, Minnie. Even if it’s just a bit of singing, that could be enough for a stump to do its thing.”

  “All right, all right,” Minnie grumbled. “I hear you.”

  “No, you need to get this through your head. You’re an exterminator now. Singing’s become too much of a liability. If that stump burst at the Alley Cat, think of how many people could’ve died. Maybe it wouldn’t be our fault, but still, we can’t take the risk. And maybe it’s a good thing it got shut down. What if someone who hasn’t been tested as an exterminator started singing and made the stump burst?”

  “So we just shut up and do our jobs and the SPC will use any excuse they can to shut down more clubs. What’ll happen after that? Think the SPC just gonna stop there? You do a lot of singing at church, don’tcha? The SPC could start shutting them down too. Pretty soon everyone’s gonna be too scared to sing. Think of it. No more songs, no more lullabies. Hell, no more jingles. That what you want?”

  Rosetta’s voice quavered. “Even the Bible says, ‘There is a time to speak and a time to be quiet—’”

  “Now that’s some bullshit right there. I’ve seen how you are at the Alley Cat. Your eyes all big and shiny, sitting at that table in the front, drinking all them songs in. Face it, honey, you need singing to live.”

  Rosetta slammed the skillet on the stove hard enough to make it rattle. “My momma died because of my singing!”

  In the sudden silence, the percolator let out a shrill burst of steam. Rosetta turned it off, then stood there, pressing her palms into the counter. “I was all set to go to New York to join the Cotton Club. The owner there had heard me sing and wanted me to be part of the act there. Momma said if I could make it at the Cotton Club, I could make it anywhere.

  “But my husband didn’t like it. We had been married for four years, and he wanted to settle down, have kids. But I wasn’t ready, Lord, I wasn’t ready. When I got offered the job at the Cotton Club, oh, we fought and fought. Finally he said fine, we’ll go to New York, but only if I let him be my manager. Momma had been managing my singing ever since I was born. She told me that if Thomas became my manager, I would never get any good gigs, so the both of us decided that I would divorce him.

  “I stayed behind in Chicago to start the paperwork while Momma went to New York with Thomas. She was gonna break the news to him there. Momma was always doing the hard things for me. ‘God’s given you a gift, Rosetta,’ she used to tell me all the time. ‘You can’t keep quiet. You need to let the world know! Those people in the club ain’t gonna hear gospel music otherwise.’ And I believed her. I believed her.”

  Understanding made Minnie sober. She sat up in her chair. “Let me guess. She died before telling him.”

  “They both died. A stump in an alley burst just as they were passing it, walking down a street in Harlem, looking at apartments.”

  “Sheeeeeit.”

  “It should have been me!” Rosetta cried as she turned to Minnie. “If I hadn’t accepted that gig, Momma would’ve never gone to New York. I couldn’t even bring her home because of the quarantine.”

  “What about your husband? You miss him?”

  Rosetta pressed her hands against her eyes. She then faced Minnie; her eyes were red but dry. “No,” she said. “I don’t miss Thomas. He was . . . a jealous man. He didn’t deserve death. But I married him, for better or for worse, and now I’m paying the price for putting my singing career above being a wife to him. Even if they hadn’t died, my career would’ve been over. The Cotton Club was one of the first clubs they shut down during the quarantine there. The stumps are a punishment from God.”

  Minnie snapped, “Look, I feel bad for ya, but I ain’t gonna let you talk like that. What happened was an accident. Could’ve happened to anyone. And it sure ain’t no punishment if you got different aspirations than your man. If’n he couldn’t deal, then you were right in walkin’ out the door. Ain’t no such thing as punishment.”

  “It’s still sin, though. Sin is the consequences you get for following false idols. Mine is putting my singing before everything else. Yours is thinking you can do whatever you want when you want. The Alley Cat closing is just one of the signs.”

  “Now hold on,” Minnie said, rising to her feet. “Finally showing that Holy Roller side, huh? You fuckin’ knew what you were getting into when you met me. Ain’t no angel wings on my shoulders.”

  The pot of grits on the stove bubbled fiercely as the bacon took on a sharp burnt smell. “You’re a sinner, Minnie. Being reckless. Flouting the rules. Drinking until you pass out. You need Jesus in your life. Only He can save you. Probably the only reason why He brought us together was to keep you from going to hell—”

  Minnie’s face twisted. “Get out.”

  “But—”

  Minnie swept her arm across the breakfast table. The dishes, the newspapers, all went crashing to the floor. “Get the hell out of my house! Go on! Get!”

  Rosetta hesitated, then turned her back on the ruined breakfast. She paused at the back door. “I’ll pray for you.”

  She then ran to avoid the pot of burnt grits crashing against the door.

  Minnie sat fuming and muttering to herself at the back of the No. 29 bus, her overcoat wrapped around the gray pink dress, her wet hair tied under a black scarf. When other riders came toward the back, she scowled hard enough for them to sit somewhere else.

  Rosetta saying she’d pray for her. Ain’t that rich. Minnie had had people praying at her all her life.

  “Lord, help Lizzie to stop runnin’ off so much. Lord, help Minnie to stop sleepin’ with so many men so the right man can come along an’ marry her. Lord, please make Lizzie just stay home and stay outta trouble.”

  Thing was, Minnie didn’t see how the alternative was any better. Just because you were saved and sanctified didn’t mean that life got automatically better for you. Good people still had to sit in the back of the bus, got chased from their homes for moving into the wrong neighborhood, lynched for looking at white people the wrong way. If God was supposed to make everything better for those who believed in Him, He was doing a shit job at it. People like Rosetta didn’t care just how hard a life Minnie lived. All they cared about was how “pure” and “holy” she was. Well, Minnie had lost her pureness long, long ago.

  Fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.

  Minnie looked out the window and saw that they were now in a different neighborhood. The signs on the storefronts were in a different language from English. “Hey, driver!” she called out. “What happened to Wentworth Avenue?”

  “We passed it ten minutes ago,” he called back. “We in Bridgeport now, lady.”

  A chill went through Minnie. Blacks never went into Bridgeport neighborhood. Lots of Polacks, Irish and Lithuanian folk, none who took too kindly to their black neighbors to the east. State Street was the dividing line; any black folk caught past that were sure to get chased back across, if they were so lucky. Common sense would be to stay on the bus, ride it to the end, then ride it back to Bronzeville. Tell the driver she fell asleep and missed her stop.

  Instead she pulled the cord to let her off at the next stop.

  Butcher shops and furniture stores glowered at her with their shabby storefronts. Old women with scarves tied around their chins stopped on the sidewalk, bushy eyebrows pulling down in disapproval as she passed by. Young children peered out of doorways, unsmiling. Hard faces. Pale faces. Unwelcome faces.

  Minnie shoved her hands deeper in the pockets of her coat and kept her pace steady but not dawdling. Yeah, I’m walking my black ass down the street. Watcha gonna do about it?

  She turned a corner into an empty lot and came across the largest patch of stumps Minnie had ever seen.

  About twenty of them, in odd clumps and bunches, as if someone dumped stump dust by the handful and allowed them to grow. All were in various stages of maturity: a formless mass here, a fuller formed torso and arm of
a man there. One stump of a black woman looked fully matured; Minnie could count the coils of her hair, the lines of her outstretched fingers, the other hand splayed over the full roundness of her stomach. Her mouth was stretched wide open in what was undoubtedly a scream.

  Minnie circled the patch, baffled. Standard SPC protocol was that discovered stumps would be secured with bags so they could at least be contained until an exterminator dealt with them. But none of these stumps were bagged. Why were so many stumps out in the open so close to people? And why so many?

  She reached up to make sure her filter mask was in place; her fingers touched bare skin. She had stormed out of her house without her filter mask. She was unprotected.

  “Well, well, what we got here?”

  Minnie turned to see about six to seven white men of various ages, dressed all in denim. For face masks they had tied handkerchiefs and strips of fabric from shirts and bed linen around their noses and mouths. Above their impromptu face masks, their eyes were hard and suspicious. They must’ve worked in the stockyards, for they all had a smell of butchered blood.

  As much as she hated the SPC, she used it as an excuse now. “I’m an exterminator. Just checking out these stumps. I’ll be gone before you know it.”

  “Is that so?” A burly man with a red handkerchief stepped forward. “Seems like we had all sorts of SPC types crawlin’ around here as of late. What happened? Did they abandon you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The men laughed. It wasn’t happy laughter. “Your yellow vans been crawling all over our neighborhood at all hours of the night. Next day there’s stumps all over the place. They don’t send no one to take care of them neither. We had to form brigades to keep stupid kids away.” Red Handkerchief’s eyes narrowed. “And you.”

  “Wait.” Minnie rubbed her head. The anger she had sustained up to now was beginning to ebb, leaving in its place a pounding headache that intensified the more she tried to think. “Where’s your exterminator? I know you have one for this area.”

  “Yeah, funny thing, that. He’s gone. Hasn’t been around for weeks.”

  “But still, they should have at least secured the area so the stumps don’t spread.”

  “You think they do that, but they haven’t. In fact, we’ve been doing it ourselves with sacks. But here’s the thing. When we come back later, our sacks are gone. Somebody’s been taking them off.”

  “But that makes no sense,” Minnie said. “Why leave the stumps exposed? At this rate, so many of them would spread, they’ll have to quarantine the city just like—”

  Minnie’s hangover vanished as her entire body went cold.

  What if that was what the SPC had wanted all along?

  “Go home,” she told the men, her mind racing. “Get your families and get out of the city, now. A whole lotta people gonna die.”

  “We ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Red Handkerchief said. The men behind him spoke.

  “For all we know, maybe it’s you who’ve been stealin’ our bags.”

  “Maybe she was sent here to see if the stumps done their work.”

  “I ain’t even sure she is an exterminator.”

  “Niggers always lie to get outta anything.”

  More ugly laughter. Minnie stepped back, beginning to regret ever saying she worked for the SPC. Used to be that she would carry a pistol for times like this, but like an idiot she had left it back at her house—

  Something hard poked her between her shoulder blades. And Minnie realized she had a weapon after all.

  “Back off,” she snarled, moving aside to show the stump of the black woman with her fingers outstretched. “I’ll sing.”

  Some of the men looked at Red Handkerchief, uncertain. He shook his head and scoffed, “She’s bluffin’. She’d get killed too.”

  It wasn’t the offhand way he said it but the way the other men nodded in agreement that filled Minnie with fear. She opened her mouth to sing: “You saayyy that’s life; there’s something wrong with me . . .”

  Red Handkerchief lunged toward her. “Stupid bitch! Stop!”

  Several things happened at once. The stump of the black woman burst into shining motes. The man’s fist punched into Minnie’s stomach, making her double over, her breath exploding from her. Her clawing hand raked his face, yanking down his handkerchief, exposing his face. As the motes floated around her, Minnie struggled, trying to ride out the ache in her abdomen and the instinct not to breathe in. But her lungs won over her abdomen, and when her stomach muscles unclenched enough, she made a ragged, involuntary, gasp—

  Rose Haskell is standing on the corner, waiting for the trolley to pass. Her son squirms in her arms. He’s a year old, and already so heavy. Or maybe it’s her belly, heavy with another child. Sweet Charlie is at his second job, cleaning offices. He’ll only have a few minutes to eat dinner before going to the stockyards. The workers were on strike, so the stockyards were paying him to cross the picket lines. He didn’t want to do it, but perhaps it could give him permanent work.

  She hears the shouting of the men before they round the corner of the street. Angry men, running so fast she doesn’t have time to move, to scream. They surround. They yell. They yank her boy from her arms. He shrieks so loud, so loud, until he stops abruptly. That red thing being bashed on the sidewalk. No, that couldn’t be. That’s not her son. That bloody thing, red matter flying, no . . .

  And then they’re tearing into her, ripping, grabbing, tearing, thrusting, why don’t they stop, animals, animals, so much pain, she can’t fight, it hurts, so much red, so much—

  Then Minnie found herself on her hands and knees back in the lot, staring at the ground.

  What the hell?

  Minnie rose gingerly to her feet and checked herself. Other than the dull ache of her abdomen, she seemed fine. No seizures, no foaming at the mouth, no coughing up blood. Red Handkerchief sat flat on his ass, staring pop-eyed into space. A couple of other men began to sit up from where they lay in various positions, groaning as they stared around them. The rest must’ve run off.

  She was fine. The men were fine. They were all fine.

  So what the hell happened?

  “Rose . . .”

  Minnie jerked her gaze back to Red Handkerchief. “What did you say?”

  “That woman. Rose Haskell.” He touched his face, then splayed his hands over his stomach and stared at it for a long time.

  Minnie shook her head, stunned. “You saw her too?”

  “Saw her? I was her. I lived her. I . . . was her. I know things about her. Those men . . . what they did . . . I could feel it . . . How do I know all this?”

  One of the men retched. Minnie whirled, heart hammering, but the man pulled off the cloth around his face and wiped his mouth with it. “I remember my pa telling me about that race riot. He never said he was part of it.” He spat. “I felt everything they did to her. She was pregnant. And that boy. How could they—”

  Minnie said slowly, “You were about to do the same to me.”

  Red Handkerchief jerked up his gaze, anguish in his face. He started to speak, but Minnie put up her hand to stop him. She was missing something, something she needed to look at right now.

  On the ground she could see the stump dust. She bent, touched a bit with her finger. She had never seen stump dust outside of a filter bag before. It was soft and powdery, like dull chalk dust. There was an almost sweetish smell to it, like dried rose petals.

  “How come we not dead?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Stumps burst, people die. That’s what’s supposed to happen. But we’re all alive, aren’t we? What changed? Why aren’t we dead?” She stopped, then said, incredulous, “All I did was sing . . .”

  In the distance she could hear the faint wail of sirens. Bending, she scooped up a handful of dust. Putting some distance between herself and the remaining stumps, she bent her head and hummed into her cupped hands, just barely under her breath. The dust in her hands di
dn’t shimmer or reform. It didn’t do anything.

  Those lying sons of bitches.

  The sirens grew nearer. Minnie ran over to Red Handkerchief. “Hey! You wanna do something about what you just saw?”

  He stared up at her as if still dazed. Minnie dug into her coat pocket, threw the business card at him. “Call that number on the card. Tell whoever answers to find Rosetta Tharpe. Tell her she needs to sing to the stumps. You got it? Don’t go to the SPC. You tell her Minnie said to sing to the stumps! Sing! Just like her momma told her to! Go! Go!”

  Red Handkerchief fumbled at the card. The other two men were already scrambling out of the lot. She pushed him to get him going, then stood with legs braced in front of the stumps. By the time the SPC roared into the lot with their yellow vans, Minnie was the only one left. She set her hands on her hips.

  “About time, boys. We got some talkin’ to do.”

  The black phone by Rosetta’s bed jangled. She put a hand out from the covers, groped for the receiver, and pulled it under the covers. “’Lo?”

  “Rosetta? Is that you?”

  “Marty? What—what time is it?”

  “Rosetta, it’s two in the afternoon. Are you in bed?”

  She grunted a garbled reply.

  “I take it that’s a yes. Listen. I need you to get dressed and come down to the Alley Cat right away. It’s important.”

  “The Alley Cat was closed.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the only place anymore. Rosetta, Chicago’s been quarantined!”

  Rosetta shot up from the covers. “What!”

  “You really don’t know, do you? Look, I’m sending a taxi to your place right now. Be ready in fifteen minutes.”

  Rosetta tried to say more, but Marty hung up. Annoyed, she set the receiver down, pulled the scarf off her head, and ran her fingers through her disheveled hair. She hadn’t gone to church that morning, a rare thing for her. She just hadn’t been in a worshipping mood, not after what happened at Minnie’s yesterday. But the SPC putting Chicago under a quarantine must’ve meant things had gotten bad. But why would Marty have her go to the Alley Cat instead of the SPC?