The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019

by John Joseph Adams

  Spear took a step back then. She smiled down at him, pity in her eyes. “That doesn’t make you mad, just petty. And that makes you worse than me, Hark. You’re far worse.”

  And then she laughed. It pierced Hark’s heart as surely as an arrow. And she kept laughing. And her laughter followed her across the Wild World as she left the manor.

  It lingered, wrapped itself around Hark like a noose, and pulled tight.

  Hark’s manor was in the seaport town of Awrant, just off the Spidered Sea, and with Spear’s laughter echoing after him, he found himself bursting out into the bright spring day and lurching toward the water.

  He would do this as a boy, fresh bruises from his aunt and uncle shivering into existence on his stomach, his shoulders, the back of the legs, where no one would think to look. And now, as then, Hark’s feet stepped staccato, his whole body quaking with the aftermath of a beating, unseen, but his soul was already bruising over.

  His manor nestled in a patch of gardens, tucked away from the main road but only a short distance from his once greatest triumph. Now, as he came upon the ruined shell of his old restaurant, he could barely look at it. Even passing it brought noxious memories to the surface like cold apples in water, bobbing and demanding attention. And just like the taxes he didn’t pay, and like the codes he chose not to follow, and the workers whose plights he passed by, he chose not to see those memories. The restaurant died because not enough people loved it, he had reasoned to himself; it had not been his fault.

  So he staggered past, ignoring the dark interior, the graffiti, and the smell of garbage that stroked his cheek. Fuck the restaurant, he thought desperately. It didn’t want to live, so let it die. It wouldn’t matter, not as long as he did his work.

  He walked down Main Street, composing himself in front of the men and women and children going about their day. His chef whites gleamed in the late-afternoon sun, looking like raiment compared to the drab wear of the Awranti. His uncle was a naval scorpion, his aunt a jungle weaver, his parents unknown to him and better off that way. He would never wear anything to remind him of any of them again, and so he pushed himself forward with pride in standing out. Better to gleam like a bright blade than be smothered in the burlap crowd.

  Children sang for alms on Viscounts Way, and he ignored them all. Let them work, if they were to earn a living. Through Dishra’s Gift, the wide, sweeping park green and lush, ignoring the families as they ran and played, doing his best to ignore the longing for what he could’ve built with Fenli and never had the time for. If Hark looked closely, he could almost see Fenli waiting for him under the cherry trees, his poet’s face long and sad. Hark shook his head then, sweat forming on his upper lip; Fenli wasn’t here. He had moved on, to take up a fisherman’s life with his husband in Albercari. Hark was alone.

  Huffing, almost out of breath, his heart racing, he turned onto Sandrazi Road and made his way through the fashion district, scenting for the cologne of the sea on the wind. Salt, wet wood, and gull feathers. He was close; he had to hurry, his ghosts were gaining on him.

  And then, past the stalls of crafts, textiles, and coffee shops before the port, he turned and saw the ocean. Something in him finally gave way. Endless, blue and green, the sun a dazzling orange lance thrown across the horizon, Hark forgot his age and ran, ran for the water. Down past the docks, past the Endless Empire war galleys and the Julaywi song ships, he ran out and past them, into the sand, past the sand, into the surf, past the surf, and into the water proper.

  He pushed out, farther, farther. The water rose from ankles to knees to waist to chest, to nose. Hark, harried by Spear’s laughter, the ghosts of his failures, the anger and arrogance of his youth, found himself up to his nose in the sea he had once loved and given up for the kitchen. The ocean did not let him live, and so he had been ordered to stop swimming. He felt it coming, a great peace that the sea always offered and which he had been aching for, for many years.

  Except the sea-salt sting in his nose offended him, and the endless blur of water in his eyes brought him back to the Sea Mother, that godbeast he had as surely helped kill as Spear, and too quickly the water was too close and he was too deep, and it seemed at the thought that the entire sea lifted him up and away, and Hark’s gut churned, and he retched into the water, emptying himself, sobbing.

  As he stood there in the water, floating in the sea that was the home of his youth, standing amid his ruined lunch, gasping for air, he saw something slice through the sky. A flash of white against the bright blue, then gone. He blinked, rubbing at the saltwater tickling his eyes.

  Again, a glimpse of white, then gone. Hark blinked, turned, tried to push himself on his toes, back toward land.

  A third time he saw it, and then heard a string of curses in a high-pitched squeak. He followed the sound, the absurdity of it distracting him from his despair long enough to see a small girl on the shore, uttering every curse known across the Spider Coast and farther, holding in her delicate brown fingers a broken kite. White sailcloth bunched up in her hands, straddled by beams of thin wood, as she cursed at it for not working. Her mother stood behind her, laughing, but doing it quietly enough for the girl not to notice. All Hark could do was watch as, after a moment’s chuckle, the mother came forward, knelt by her daughter, and slowly pointed out where things had gone wrong and how to make it better.

  Hark’s heart ached, knowing that in a few short days the Hollowed would be freed by his hand, and there would never be any chance to make it better.

  It would be all his fault, just like everything in his life.

  If he were not too stubborn to give up, he would have floated out to sea. But Hark was not one to give up, even his life. He had only given up on the world being good to him.

  So he hurled himself out of the water and walked dripping wet back to his manor, to consign the world to death.

  Salt. Pepper. A little butter. Sear both sides, and then let it cook in the oven for thirty minutes. Hark even prepared a small salad to be served with it, to keep his mind from the impending destruction of the world.

  Spear never told him what the Messenger had looked like. A week and a half after she left to hunt, she reappeared, reached into her bag, and pulled out a dark, hot lump, fixing him with a cold fury in her eyes. “Go on, then,” she had whispered. “Show the cruel world how great you are. Make a fillet of death.”

  She walked with him through psychic space until they reached the Hollowed’s banquet table, where each of the nine soon-to-be-gods sat with slavering impatience. Hark made them wait as long as possible, though he couldn’t articulate why. He poured a blood-red wine, a Trevaldi 491, aged on butterfly smoke and white chocolate. He served his salad, laden with berries, arugula, goat cheese, almond slices, and a dusting of volcanic ash. Finally he served out the portions of the Messenger’s heart, small on the wide plates, encircled with a sauce of dark chocolate, coffee, and orange bitters.

  The Golden King raised a glass of wine. The other Hollowed followed suit. “To Hark and Spear,” the Golden King purred, a smile splitting his cracked lips. “Thanks to them, we’ll soon walk the world. And in doing so, break it for our revenge. To the end of the Wild World and the start of a new one!”

  The Hollowed cheered.

  The Hollowed drank.

  The Hollowed ate.

  Hark stood with his feet together, his hands behind his back, and his eyes full of tears. Beside him, Spear did the same. He had to do something. He couldn’t let them out into the world. He couldn’t do anything, but he had to do something.

  As one, they finished their plates, and Hark felt the edges of psychic space break open, unfurling like a languid rose. The Hollowed stood in the Wild World now, the Messenger acting as the final anchor to true reality. They stood in an antechamber just off the kitchen, and Hark yearned to go there, to hide from what he’d done. Already he could feel the tangle of power the Hollowed gave off, a massive surge of dominance over the laws of reality once held by the Great Beast
s. He could taste war on the wind, feel the thrum of collapse in the soles of his feet, hear a hot sickness flooding through his blood.

  But before he could do anything, the Golden King stepped forward, smiling, with a look of knowing in his empty eyes, those hollow sockets that had not filled for any of them, even in life anew.

  “We thank you, chef. Your despondence, your dedication, and your own small cruelties made you the perfect vessel for our return. Like you, we were failed by the world we hoped to lead. Like you, we were cast out in the pursuit of our perfection. Like you, we hungered to fill the emptiness within us and show those in the world we were not what they thought we were. And now we have that chance to revenge upon them, to move in a way you have only wished to for so many years.”

  Hark’s eyes went wide as the words sunk in.

  They had not sought him for his talent.

  They had chosen him because he was just like them: hollow.

  The wall around his heart shattered then, with the roaring strength of a pounding tide. Hark fell to his aged knees and raised beseeching hands over his head.

  “Wait! My lords! My ladies! My lieges, all, please hear me!” He could feel their searing gaze on him, but he dared not meet them. “To commemorate such a momentous occasion, I have . . . prepared something for you all; a small trifle, something special to cleanse your palates with before striding out into the Wild World. Please grant me a short time to prepare it and bring it to you all.”

  “Rise.” Hark looked up.

  Numbered nine and radiant all, the Hollowed watched him, smiling with a wicked edge.

  The Golden King nodded. “There is the obeisance we’ve been waiting for. Go and bring us your treat, chef. You’ve earned some slight patience.”

  Hark bowed and turned on his heel. He felt Spear right behind him.

  “What in the Myriad Hells are you doing?” she whispered, both of them pushing into the kitchen. Hark’s heart pounded, though for the first time in four years he was utterly calm.

  Hark looked around his kitchen, his kingdom, and smiled. It had been so good to him; in a world that had hurt him, his kitchen was an oasis he’d retreated to so many times. He ran his hands along the black-and-white marble counter, picking at small nicks in the cutting boards. He gazed out through the bay window by the fireplace and, there in the distance, the sea he so loved. He found himself walking toward the pantry and opening it with reverence.

  Spear watched him in silence. She stood motionless as his hands glided along his wall of tools and found an ivory knife handle and, drawing it from its guard, a shining white blade.

  It was a knife to be used only in certain procedures. Butterflying the heart of a cosmic whale. Slicing off shavings of psychotropic dark-matter mushrooms from the underverse. Cracking the shell of a Dwarf Star Turtle to consume the radiation inside.

  It was a precise tool meant for precise actions.

  Hark handed the hilt to Spear.

  She took it, her face slack, her eyes dead. “What am I doing with this?”

  He pursed his lips, thinking, and then wiped the corners of his eyes as the answer took hold of him and sudden tears threatened to fall. “It is too late to stop them, Spear. They are free, and I freed them. Every part of me is screaming to curl up and die, to let them run rampant. But . . .” Here he paused, the memory of his failed restaurant, his failed career, his failed family, ruin after ruin flashing before him. Then, a young girl on the beach, and learning that you can always try again, if you work to fix what went wrong. “That wouldn’t be right.”

  He smiled at Spear, a genuine thing, and found he quite liked it. “Should this fail, then let it fail. But I’ll not give up the world to die, even though I gave up on it long ago.”

  Spear spun the ivory knife back and forth, testing its weight, hefting its handle. She didn’t offer an argument, just as Hark knew she wouldn’t. She looked up at him, her eyes as cold and clear as a forest spring. “Where, then?”

  Hark took her hand in his own. He lifted the knife’s tip up to his right eye. All he could see through one eye was steel; through the other, Spear, steady as a stone and waiting. “Both, Spear. Please, make it quick.”

  She said nothing. Only nodded.

  The pain that shattered through him was unlike anything he had ever felt. It demanded his full attention, and Hark writhed on the ground, screaming with all his broken heart. And when he thought he couldn’t scream anymore, some new part of him discovered he could.

  It was some time before he found consciousness, and when he did, it was a world of touch and taste and sound and patience. He found his feet, and a hand under his arm. Spear’s husky, harsh voice was right next to him. “I have them, Hark. What am I doing with them?”

  His voice was a whisper. “In my hand, please. I have it from here.”

  It was slower than he thought it would be, but the more than fifty years in his kitchen, his kingdom, had not left him. Sliding his hands along the counters, he inched his way to the cabinet of glasses. He found nine champagne flutes. There was an angry, thumping pain at the front of his skull, and there was wetness slipping down his face, and though it demanded all of his attention, Hark denied it.

  He had work to do.

  With Spear’s assistance, he went to his old chopping block and, holding each eye just so, sliced them thinly, arraying them in the bottom of the flutes. She helped him pour a thick port wine into each glass, only guessing that the liquid was mulberry and pomegranate in color. And with Spear’s guidance adorned a serving tray with the flutes and walked them toward the Hollowed.

  They did not ask questions, because gods do not ask questions. They said nothing, only taking the flutes and toasting each other, the crystalline tinkling of glass on glass a strange music to Hark’s ears. If they saw his ruined eyes, they did not care. They simply drank, and swallowed.

  It was only a few moments before they began to scream.

  Spear will tell him later that the looks on their faces made it worthwhile, as matter began to boil into their hollow sockets and eyes began to grow, eyes that looked so much like Hark’s own. She will tell him of the dumbfounded looks on their faces, the way that rage battled with confusion, of how doubt, ever elusive in the face of such power, began to creep in.

  At that moment, though, the Golden King screamed, “Chef! What is the meaning of this? What have you done to us?”

  Hark’s voice was knife-thin but cut through the newborn gods’ screaming all the same. “You were right, my lord. We are the same. I have felt hollow myself for some time, and I would do anything to fill myself up with some purpose, even if it was destruction, pride, or power. I thought the world was evil because it did not understand me or work to make me happy. But I was also stubborn, arrogant, and foolish too, to think the world would come to my door and give itself to me. I did not learn from my mistakes, and so I lost it all. I blamed the world for that too. But the world doesn’t deserve to die because of my small heart. And it doesn’t deserve to wither under your gaze either, simply because you once tried to fix it and it rejected you. You all have a chance to make things right. If you may see things more clearly because of my eyes, see the joys or lessons or hopes I have witnessed, then I am happy to give them to you, and give this world a small chance at living on.”

  Silence, and the weight of nine pairs of his own eyes looked down upon him from thrones of wood, bone, and glass.

  “We will remember this transgression, chef,” the Golden King said, in a voice that could splinter mountains and freeze stars.

  Hark chuckled, and found he liked it. “I should hope you do. I hope you never forget this day, or this meal. I hope it lingers in your hearts for centuries to come.” Hark paused, lifted his chin, and stared up at the Hollowed with empty eyes. “We can do better. All of us.”

  Spear will tell him later how they all looked down on him, scowling, furious, righteous, and powerful. And then how, after a moment, their faces softened, their new eyes creased with
concern, and how they all looked to each other, seeing each other truly for the first time in millennia, and how like smoke on the wind they faded from sight.

  But all Hark heard in that moment was silence, and it wasn’t until Spear took his elbow and whispered, “They’re gone, Hark,” that he collapsed to his knees, hyperventilating. His body wracked with sobs, and he didn’t fight it. The world still spun on, and so he hoped beyond hope that he got through to them.

  And when Spear asked him where he’d like to go, he didn’t hesitate.

  “To the sea, I think,” he said, knowing he would be seen in his chef whites, his face a ruin, and not caring. “I think I crave some time by the sea, for as long as it’s there.”

  Spear took him by the elbow, and together they made their way to the water, enjoying in silence every moment the world had not yet ended.

  Adam R. Shannon

  On the Day You Spend Forever with Your Dog

  from Apex Magazine

  When the dog dies, she doesn’t know she is dying. You shouldn’t feel sorry for her. To her, life lasts forever.

  Infants and dogs recognize the flow of time, but not their presence in it. Psychologists show two films to a child so young it cannot comprehend the difference between itself and the universe. In the first film, water pours from a pitcher into a glass. In the second, time is reversed: water spirals out of the glass to replenish the pitcher. The child will stare longer at the film that violates the rules of causality. She believes, without knowing she believes, that time goes one way.

  She doesn’t know that time pervades her very flesh, a dimension of her physical existence. She doesn’t know that it will require her to die. She believes that time is progress. For a while you believe it too, and the mistake damages all your equations. It isn’t until Jane dies that you reach the solution.