The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  Nothing here, she said.

  The burly one with the kite handed it to the girl like it was evidence to the contrary. The girl looked at me, snapped the wood of the kite. She ripped the cloth in a struggle of arms.

  Shoddy work, she said, tossing the flail of broken kite, the spine akimbo. She led them out of the store. I could hear them whooping on their way down the street to the next establishment.

  I picked up the broken kite and put it behind the counter. I spent a moment picking up the scatters of wooden yo-yos, just in case they changed their minds and came back.

  When I finally opened the door, Tove was under the giant hang-glider-sized kite that took up most of the ten-foot room. His shape under there flinched when he heard the door open.

  I’m sorry, I said. You can come out now.

  He moved the giant kite off and nodded.

  I held my hand out to help him, but he stood up slowly by himself, his legs curling heavily under his weight, the air pushed from the flutter of his wings tickling my hands. A breeze when there was none.

  This one, he said, pointing at the giant kite. This is the one I want.

  I had painted it with a mosaic that looked like stained glass, so when it flew, it was like we were inside some great cathedral where we were supposed to pray. Like we were stuck here, underneath its great glass, but our spirit was supposed to rise somehow anyway.

  How much? he asked.

  I understood Tove, wanting the biggest, best thing you couldn’t have. I wanted his unexhausted hope, that’s what I wanted. I wanted forgiveness without having to name my sins, I wanted tenderness to feel real to me again. Some part of me wanted to fly in the face of everything those skinheads represented, but another part of me wanted the world before the Dragonflies fell in, the world we couldn’t have. Were we tender before? Could we be tender again? Or did the Fallings only awaken the violence we’d always had? Benon had informed me that the Dragonflies were so fragile, all those hairs on their legs and arms and feelers, all those thin appendages, that they were so careful with each other when they loved that they barely ever touched. Lovemaking was mostly an act of foreplay, their wings manipulating the air around the loved like a cyclone sending all of their hairs and feelers singing with touch. It was like being loved by the air itself. Even this was left wanting from Earth’s atmosphere, their movements clumsier now, the work so much harder on them. But human lungs! We had always been clumsy, but we had more lung force than their wings had now. Instead of answering Tove, giving him the price of a simple kite, I pursed my lips and whistled air in his direction.

  Oh, he said, eyes closing. Oh hemena. His throat buzzed.

  I whistled again, pushing air across his face in the circular pattern Benon had described.

  Oh, I feel unarmored, he said. Oh hemenalala, I am defenseless.

  It was like I was pummeling the words out of him, he said them that painfully. I knew he wanted to say Stop. He wanted to say Desist. Were those nicknames he had given his fallen mate? Was he trying to call her ghost back across the years? But it was my name I wanted on his purple lips.

  I blew all the way around him to the back, where his four wings trembled, my breath blowing their wing-dust off until they shone translucent. Had he still been able to fly, stripping his wings of their powder would have been even more cruel. Benon had said that their wings were electric colors in the home atmosphere, but in this one they had turned a dusty brown. Now they were drab ghosts of what they used to be. Benon had never told me what came after, what consummation was for them. Had I known, I would have done it. I know I would have done it.

  Oh hemenalala, he said as I made my way back to his front, where his thorax armor glistened and tensed.

  Finally I stopped, held my breath.

  When Tove was finally able to compose himself, I couldn’t look at him. I said, The kite isn’t finished. Come back in a month.

  He didn’t answer me and he didn’t turn around. His eyes stayed closed the whole way out of the store.

  A few weeks later I went home to a Dragonfly in the backyard, the neighborhood kids around him with their electronic sticks. Even the older kids were out, excited by the new development. What’s going on? I said.

  Ask Benon. Aleo shrugged.

  He’s for my project, Benon said. I asked him to come home with us.

  Are you fine with this? I asked the Dragonfly kid.

  I’m cool, the Dragonfly said.

  The Dragonfly looked at me and popped gum from his tiny, pursed mouth. I waited for him to announce himself the way his kind did. It was hard to tell their ages, but this one must have been born here, was already starting to lose the customs of his parents.

  Finally I asked him, Who are you? more combatively than I would have liked.

  I am Yeshela Whisperer of Mist, the child said begrudgingly.

  Wonderful, I said, and I went back inside.

  I was not against the kids mixing, unlike other parents I knew, who were prying their blinds open to watch across the block. It’s just that I didn’t think the kids were ready. Not after I’d seen what we’d done as adults. But I was willing to bet against myself. I left them to it and pulled aside the curtain.

  They were reenacting the Fallings again, which the Dragonflies called the Arkfall Massacres but we did not. Benon sat atop our old swing set and was directing. It seemed like this time they were trying to get everything exactly right. They even had a giant hologram of one of the Arks cracked like an egg projected behind them in the sandbox. Benon was reading the history out loud.

  Thousands died. We didn’t know what they wanted. When they crawled out of their broken ships and picked themselves up out of the crashes, we were sure they were invading, they wanted our children, they wanted more than we could give. We defended our earth. We aimed for their thin legs, their eyes, their delicate fingers. In our city, a ship crashed into the main fiberoptic tower. It wiped out most communications, and city officials were too panicked to fix it. Other cities made other mistakes. We couldn’t call each other directly, and so everything we knew about the crash that boomed into the city at dusk, the other arkfalls across the world, was through a rumor mill. Was the National Guard coming? Were they too busy with other arkfalls? Were there too many of the ships to defend against? How many of us could they kill before we reacted? By sundown the next day, we were at the crash site with any weapon we could find.

  The neighborhood kids were making the Dragonfly kid crawl out of the hologram. Then they had a line of them stand off with their e-sticks. Benon knew I was watching. He couldn’t help but flick his eyes in my direction. That kid always had the uncanny ability to know when I was looking, unlike Aleo.

  Benon directed the neighborhood kids to approach and demand what the Dragonflies wanted. Tell us what you want. Hand over your weapons. Speak in our language. Give us everything. Benon kept pausing the action to ask the boy what he felt, what he would have done if he’d been there.

  The moment came I was dreading. The boy, as directed, stood up slowly, testing the thick, heavy atmosphere. He put up his thin arms to shield his eyes from the alien sun. Benon said, Look, he’s going to shoot us. The humans approached, sticks raised. The boy’s wings fluttered, an unconscious reaction, trying to fly away, even in a game, finding this atmosphere a noose to the ground—just like his parents did, then. Had he been like us, he would have yelled for the humans to stop. The e-sticks flew at him, whaled on him, and went for his legs. The e-sticks worked as they were supposed to, dissipating into gas upon contact. The blows weren’t hurting him. Aleo had once flung one at me in a childish rage, and the dissipation had only felt like the strangest whisper. The boy closed his eyes at the feeling of the sticks passing over him, his sensitive body hairs moving through the ghosts of a long-dead massacre. Benon looked at me, it seemed, for approval, his eyes asking, Is this right? Is this how you did it?

  I closed the curtains. A spray of police lights flashed past the window. Someone must have called t
he cops when they heard a Dragonfly boy was in the neighborhood.

  I opened the curtains again. Yeshela was cowering on the ground, trying not to move lest he hit the handles and fists holding the e-sticks, which would not dissipate. The humans were still going, their joy at having their game more lifelike than it had ever been before like a drug. How could they know what they were pretending to be? For them, it was just a story. They never got to the point of horror, the point where we were sorry, when the tide turned, after we wanted them to surrender in the human way, arms up, after we wanted them to fight back to absolve us, after we realized they could not be pushed to fight back, when we began to carry them into the hospitals and the morgue, the doctors trying as best as they could to understand our differences, how to get under their armor, how to splint antennae together, where the vital organs were.

  I burst through the screen door. Stop, I yelled.

  Mom, it’s a game, Aleo said.

  A game, I scoffed. Do you know where I saw your friend, that nice girl you brought over once?

  Aleo shrugged. I hadn’t told him.

  The cop car parked across the street.

  I’m taking you home, I said to the Dragonfly boy.

  I loaded Aleo and Benon and the Dragonfly into the car. The boy directed me to a side of town I’d avoided since the city had changed. The three were silent the whole way. The streets changed from suburbs and people walking their dogs after work to cheap construction warehouses in a maze of driveways, deserted. In our city they had been installed in old complexes of customer fulfillment warehouses. In other cities they had been pushed into condemned and rotten buildings at the center. In others they were given cloth FEMA tents. In others they were given nothing and wandered from public park to public park.

  The warehouse the boy pointed me to was almost as big as one of their own ships. A cluster of them gathered around the industrial complex. At the gates of the warehouse, I parked, pushed my boys out. You’re going to apologize to his mother, I said. Benon hung his head.

  History makes no apologies, Aleo said, repeating something he’d heard in a bad hologram, winking at Benon.

  The Dragonfly boy did not say, Please don’t come, please do not meet my mother, please do not tell them what you did. Instead he said, The warehouse is not a place you’ll like. My mother will not like this. We are far in the back.

  Which did not deter me in the least.

  A smaller door had been cut into the giant loading-dock door. Inside, the old product shelving stacks had been repurposed into bunks, layer upon layer of bed spaces where as many as four or five of them slept at a time. Whole families of Dragonflies curled into each other’s bodies. We stepped over standing water on the concrete floors, the smell of mold, flies swarming in clouds. There were dragonfly feeders hung up on the long scaffolding—I mean actual dragonflies, the tiny Earth kind, which the aliens hatched from eggs and studied. There was no electricity, no running water I could see. Just rows and rows of bunks, each bunk bed like a tiny home, some decorated with my own kites and wind catchers, wind chimes, feathers, mechanical fans.

  When we reached the bunk the boy said was his, his mother climbed down, buzzing. She didn’t announce her name because it was her turf, not mine, but I didn’t give her my name either. I pushed my boys in front of me.

  I’m sorry, they chimed in unison.

  For what? asked the mother.

  They— I said. We—

  He wasn’t hurt, I finally said.

  I don’t understand, she said. She chattered to her son in their own language, the hums and silences, and he sullenly responded, his legs curling and making him sink in stature.

  I wanted to run back the way we had come, past rows and rows of these broken families, but I made the three of us stand there in penance.

  The mother turned her head back to us. She said, I think forgiveness means different things in our language. We do not ask for it.

  We were silent, rebuked, our heads hung.

  I’m sorry we make you sleep here, Aleo said. It’s so horrible.

  For a moment I was proud. I would have pointed out every failure in the warehouses so my boys would learn how much we had.

  Then the mother said, It’s our home. She turned away from me, bundled her child’s legs up, and lifted him, laboring slowly up the ladder in the heavy atmosphere.

  That night I put my sons to bed for the first time in years, checking on them in the bedroom they shared before they turned out the lights.

  Benon was still chattering about his history report, how he could use what he’d learned.

  Please, I said, don’t do that again.

  Aleo rolled his eyes, turned over. Benon gave a large sigh. I was afraid for them, my kids, for what they would discover about themselves, for what they wanted to be but would soon discover they couldn’t. I tried to hold them both, one arm in each bed. Aleo shrugged me away, Benon stayed rigid.

  Mom, we don’t need you, Aleo said.

  Weeks passed. Tove did not come back. I wasn’t expecting him to. Where would he get the money? And after what I’d done. Benon got an A on his history report, the note from the teacher saying, May there be no judgment in truth. The skinheads came again into my store after another one of my customers, who was able to slip slowly out the back door. Benon was still spouting Dragonfly facts routinely, like, Their language doesn’t even have a grammar for commands, and Didja know they had prophecies about ending up here eventually? But this is only the third epoch in their religious texts, there’s still a fourth and a fifth about going to other places and saving us along with them. Apparently they too had stories about arks, wandering through deserts, how many of them would fall when they got to their new home. Aleo got another tattoo, this one a poor translation of a command which they had no word for, Remember.

  One afternoon, just before closing, I heard people yelling outside my store, saw the lighters flick on the other side of the frosted glass. I ran outside.

  What do you think you’re doing? I yelled to the group that had gathered, the same group of skinheads that had plagued me with Tove. I meant to distract them with words, I meant to drain the fervor out of what they were doing. I meant to inject them with the moment I had years before when I dropped my bat. But the aliens hadn’t fought back, had waited until we’d made a ruin of them.

  The leader said, Stay out of the way and you won’t get hurt.

  The lighters were licking strips of cardboard. I thought of how much money was inside that store in wood and cloth, what I would lose. I let my temper loose. I started yelling, calling them the curs of the world, disgusting creatures, more animal than the bugs, not fit to inherit the earth. I spat because I’d seen it done in holograms and at some point my words failed me.

  The girl who had been Aleo’s friend, now confident and grown into her role, said, Lady, I wasn’t even born when they got here, and I didn’t even have the chance to do anything. What did you do when they came? You’re just like us.

  That was before I knew, I said.

  And now we know what we are, the girl said. You’re just pretending.

  The rest of them chanted. More than one way. Bugs are bugs. The cardboard strips touched the storefront. They all stepped back.

  There is more than one way, I said. I rushed forward, trying to put out the flames with my shirt, but the flames seemed to glow and leap up brighter with every swing and fan of my shirt. I yanked open the door of the shop, burning my hand on the doorknob, and ran inside.

  Inside the shop, you could barely hear the crackle of the fire. I was panting. I stopped. I looked around at the shelves, the kite wall illuminated orange from the flames outside the window. Did I want to let it burn? To let everything I had done in conciliation disappear, burn up, leave no trace? For any guilt I had to disappear, to be forgiven by flames?

  And then I smelled smoke. I snapped out of it, ran in a craze pulling kites down off the walls, rushing back and forth to my car parked out back, dumping ever
ything I could and going back inside. One of the kites caught on the doorjamb, the cloth tearing like muscle, the frame snapping like bones, like legs, like antennae, a feeling I remembered. In my memory I stood over a Dragonfly, arms lifted to protect a small one. I left the baby, but I killed the mother. We were methodical in our frenzy. Dragonfly after Dragonfly, if they moved, if they didn’t move, if they made sound, if they were silent, we killed them. We were afraid. I was afraid.

  I pulled all the kites down off the wall before the flames reached inside. I pulled the giant kite out of the back room, the frame still heavy as a baseball bat, the cloth still fragile as skin.

  I started driving. What did I have left in the world? My sons, my kites. The certainty of moving forward and beginning again. My fear. I wanted to scream. For a moment I let go of the steering wheel and let the car drift over into the other lane. Another car was coming down the roadway like everything in our world was normal. Then I thought of Aleo and Benon and jerked my wheel back.

  I drove my car in circles. I was like a sleepwalker. I don’t even know how I got there; eventually I ended up at the Dragonfly warehouses.

  Inside, I asked, Please, does anyone know Tove Battler of Photons?

  They bristled, and too late I realized I’d said his name wrong. Long black antennae- like fingers pointed me to another warehouse, down corridors, up racks of bunks. Then I found him lying on a third-floor bunk, eyes closed, his sons chattering in their mother tongue beside him.

  Tove, I said.

  He sat up.

  I did not say, Come outside, or even please. I said, My store is burning. There is something outside. It is for you.

  He stared at me for a good while. Did he hate me? He could have lain back in his bunk. Instead he labored down slowly. He waved his antennae at his sons, and they followed at a distance.

  There were tears sliding down my face. Why didn’t you defend yourself? I asked. Why?

  He led the way outside, tiptoeing as if walking toward a dangerous secret. Finally he said, Wouldn’t you have killed us all if we had fought back and lost? You have books that say only the weak will inherit the earth. In our prophecies, the only way to stay was to not fight back.