Do Not Go Quietly

by Jason Sizemore

  When Raf wakes the next morning, she tells Nany she was always safe, always careful, but the man she was with willed the child into being, countering every measure she had taken. This is a kind of assault that cannot be new, but it makes Nany sick. In the alley, she retches herself empty, only realizing once the VW is back on the road that the alley was empty—there were no girls back there, eating garbage; no girls made of garbage, becoming garbage.

  She flattens her hands out of their customary fists, presses her palms together, and breathes. She doesn’t tell herself it’s going to be all right; this is a sentiment she saves for others, thinking they need it more than she does. She doesn’t tell herself anything, distancing herself from the memory of the whorehouse walls, putting herself once again in the world where too many terrible things are possible.

  They’re about an hour from the border when lights flash behind them. Lita doesn’t slow at first, not until Nany tells her to. There isn’t just one police car, there’s three, one circling around them to stop in front of them as another stops alongside. They’re surrounded. Deka pulls her hoodie up even as it’s on Nany’s tongue to tell her not to. Hoodies are their own danger, even as weird as the world has become.

  “Nany, what do we—”

  Nany hushes all of them. Ellen hasn’t moved from her position on the roof, but Ellen is only one woman. Invisible to the white men who get out of the police cars, but just one woman even so. No matter what they’ve made of her, she’s just one woman.

  Nine men—nine, and Nany can taste her heart like it’s in her mouth. It’s the officers in the rear car that get out; the others wait while the officers make their slow way toward the VW. One comes alongside the driver’s side, the other along the passenger’s. One stays in the back, resting a broad palm against the VW’s back window. Anything could go wrong—too many things for Nany to catalogue. She meets Lita’s gaze in the mirror and they both know this isn’t going to end well. Five women driving toward the border?

  “Ma’am,” the officer says through Lita’s rolled-down window.

  He doesn’t ask for license or registration—women don’t have those things. Women don’t drive because they’re meant to be home, tending the children and the meals, folding the laundry into perfectly crisp squares. He doesn’t ask for anything, just opens the door and silently invites Lita to get out of the vehicle.

  “Don’t,” Joyce says, but the officer on the passenger side of the bus is already opening the side doors.

  “Everyone out,” he says, and when Joyce doesn’t move, reaches in to help her out.

  It happens so quickly, it takes Nany’s breath away. One minute, Joyce is sliding out the edge of the van, and the next, the officer’s nightstick has gone through the oven door of her stomach.

  At first, Nany isn’t sure what she’s seeing, the back end of it sticking out of Joyce’s back, but when he drags her the rest of the way out, kicks her off the stick, and she lays unmoving in the gravel, it registers. Nany can’t get out of the van without stepping over Joyce. The officer reaches for her in turn, fingers digging into the labia that is still becoming her arm. Under his gaze, a little more of her arm withers away.

  “Don’t want no trouble,” the officer near Lita says, but then they all get a glimpse of Deka.

  Nany cannot move; the officer lets her go and moves toward Deka, and Nany feels frozen in place, above Joyce’s unmoving body.

  “Don’t you dare,” Lita says, and gets a fist across her jaw for it.

  Deka gets out of the passenger seat, moving into the back of the van. Smart girl, Nany thinks, because that puts Nany between Deka and the officer. The officer turns, laughing softly.

  “Don’t ever see glass girls this far south,” he says, and reaches for Nany again, meaning to push her aside.

  It happens so quickly—

  It happens so quickly.

  Nany doesn’t think, she only acts. She lunges for the officer. In his sunglasses, she can see her own reflection, just a cunt, a mindless cunt who had the audacity to be in a car with other women, headed for the border where no woman belongs.

  Unthinking, Nany lunges for him and swallows him. If he pictures her as a cunt, she pictures herself that way, too, a vast hole in need of filling. She fills herself with his body—takes his horrors and makes them real. She’s never done it before—it should terrify her—but there is no thought, only action. He pictures her as an endless void, so she becomes an endless void. He believes that the soft flesh of her cunt must be riddled with knives, with teeth, because otherwise why would a hard man go soft inside—so her cunt becomes a feasting mouth, chewing him to ribbons before spitting him out. Nany Mars runs red with blood.

  From the roof of the car, Ellen whispers, “Go.”

  There are eight more and Nany doesn’t think they’ll ever manage. The two already out of the car are easily handled, Ellen dropping onto the rear officer to snap his neck with silent grace. Lita smothers the other, wrapping him up in her belly, her thighs, until he cannot breathe. “Call me ma’am again,” she whispers as he collapses to the asphalt. He doesn’t call her ma’am or anything.

  They move onto the car beside them, toward the three officers inside, but the lead car pulls out, the officers refusing to enter the fray. It’s better short-term odds, but makes the long-term dicey. Nany doesn’t care. She tells Deka to stay put and launches herself toward the other men, toward her sisters who are already taking two of them down. There’s a photograph stuck to the dashboard, an officer’s mother wrapped in the garb of a Madonna, golden halo brightening her graying hair. A photograph flecked with bright blood that glistens with afternoon sun.

  It happens so quickly.

  They lift Joyce from the pavement and roll her into the van, and they’re back on the road. There’s no safe place now; Lita guides the VW off the main highway, into the scrub, and it’s all rocks and holes as they rattle their way toward a less-traveled path. When Nany finally turns her thoughts back to Deka, she finds Deka’s hands curled hard around the support bar that runs the length of the van’s wall. Women have held to it for all kinds of reasons, most recently while giving birth. Nany tells herself this is another kind of birth, and it is.

  “Deka,” she says.

  Deka looks up and Nany can see her actual eyes, beyond the glass encasing her. It takes Nany’s breath away because it’s so unexpected.

  “You have green eyes,” she whispers.

  Deka bursts into tears at that, and more of the glass cracks away from her, a woman becoming right before Nany’s own eyes.

  “It’s terrible, but it’s over, and we’ll get there. We’ll get you there.”

  Glass flakes from Deka as they drive on, tinkling to the floor of the van. It glitters across the blanket that covers Joyce, Deka’s bones visible beneath the collapsing exoskeleton. Nany refuses the destruction, though, taking hard hold of Deka’s crumbling hand, glass shards pricking her.

  “This isn’t you—this shell. You remember flesh.” Nany squeezes her hand hard, hastening the crackle of glass. “You are flesh and bone and muscle all knit together—always were, always will be.”

  For a long while, the glass runs red with blood, and Nany thinks Deka will simply collapse into a heap of bloodied glass, but the harder Nany squeezes the hand she holds, the less blood runs free. Muscle and skin knit themselves together across the bare bones, and the glass that comes free falls from normal arms, skin tender and pink, but skin all the same. Deka blows out a breath, salt water tears washing her cheeks clean.

  “Oh shit,” she says.

  Nany Mars laughs—despite everything, she laughs, and holds on to Deka as she sheds one skin for another.

  Closer to the border, Dante’s Inferno comes to life. There are no guards, no posts, no point of danger made crystal clear; everything that will hurt is hidden, the rings of Hell beneath the surface. Tunnels become mouths, become intestines, become a great worm endlessly shitting trespassers into inescapable swamp. Bear traps hi
de behind brush and scrub, the jaws of the great beasts hauling persons into the tunnels if they would not otherwise fall. Against the sky, the vultures are hollow, survey drones watching with glassy eyes as Lita parks the VW.

  There’s no wall made of stone or brick. There are no search lights, no razor wire, just the soft, mountainous hulk of Eugenia, rising against the sky. Eugenia lays where she fell, made monstrous by countless minds burrowing into her. Two thousand miles tall—tall enough that she could have reached into space, had they not kept her bowed and chained. When at last she broke free, she’d taken only two steps before collapsing under her own size, knees obliterating El Paso, breasts taking out Laredo. Tijuana was wrecked beneath her calves, shoulders and hair having spread into the Gulf where divers still dove for treasure. Nany stares, her fingers still wrapped with Deka’s as they walk toward Eugenia.

  “You knew her?” Deka whispers.

  “Know her,” Nany says, and pulls Deka closer.

  Eugenia’s body should have rotted, but hasn’t entirely. Her hip bone juts into the sky like the peak of a mountain range, belly soft and treacherous; her ribs fan out under dripping moss and muscle, clear points of entry. Most men venture farther south, to enter through Eugenia’s vagina—because they’re men—because the first men who dreamed Eugenia into a gentle giant wanted to find themselves wholly devoured by such a monster.

  “They weren’t seen again,” Ellen tells Deka when she relates the story.

  Nany gestures to the cage of ribs and they walk on, into the shadow of the body, into the strange caverns where never sun has shown, caverns that smell like salt water, and iron, and chalk. Pipevine and trumpet creeper seem to hold the body to the ground, the way chains once did, but as water sloshes into the lowest points of the caverns, the body seems to move, as if still alive. The vines do not bind, so much as decorate. Deeper in, Eugenia is lined with titan acorn barnacles, their plates bright pink, flushing the body with a constant blush. Deeper in than that is where you’ll find pockets of humanity—women who have become themselves again or are still yet becoming. No longer what men have made of them.

  “There’s someone here I can leave you with,” Nany tells Deka, who looks back in surprise. “Can leave you on your own, if you’d rather, but it’s better not to go alone. Mostly. Greeley’s good people.”

  Deka doesn’t flinch under Greeley’s gaze, when they’re introduced, because Deka sees that Greeley’s like her—born one thing when they’re another entirely; forced into the shape of a third thing, only to emerge from that at long last—their own whole being. Greeley Blayze is six feet tall, at least, tiny under the vault of Eugenia’s ribs, but large when Deka looks up at her. Large and impossibly alive. Born a man, but a woman after all, erased beneath the mindstorm of a thousand men who didn’t think her real, only to be real after all, real and warm and living still.

  “Oh,” Deka says.

  Nany leaves them to their business, more of Deka’s glass shell falling away as they stand there, gaping at each other like new loves. Nany walks the paths she remembers, the darkened trail that curls along Eugenia’s spine, and twists back before opening into the cathedral of her heart. The space is worn dark now, no longer flushed with blood and life, but when Nany presses her hand to the wall, the wall moves beneath her touch. Thrums with life, still.

  Coarser, Eugenia’s lungs whisper, and a low breath moves through the cavern. Nany leans into the wall and the wall takes her in, heart-muscle enfolding Nany’s tired body. Nany feels as though she’s never slept, or never will sleep. When she feels Eugenia’s fingers against the short curls across her skull, she draws in a shuddering breath. She could sleep here, now, forever.

  You cannot, Eugenia whispers, and if it is real or dream, Nany does not care. Now give me my treat.

  Nany does not know what Eugenia means—until she does. She draws out the locket, the one with her curl of hair, and presses the gold into the heart-muscle. The muscle flinches, then twitches as if cramping. The locket burns itself into Eugenia’s heart, blood welling before it, too, is burned away. Blood, still. A heart not beating, but alive.

  I could stay, Nany thinks. She wants to. Wants to lay her body down beside Eugenia. Little spoon, big spoon, it didn’t matter.

  You cannot, Eugenia thinks back.

  There is work yet to do—women to find and bring to the strange safety of Eugenia’s border wall. She bows her head to kiss the wall of Eugenia’s heart, and it is salt and warmth beneath Nany’s lips. When she leaves the chamber, her lips still tingle with it, and she touches her fingertips to them, astonished to find they are ordinary, every-day lips.

  Lips that guard teeth, tongue, throat.

  A mouth for eating, but also screaming.

  Hands for tearing the world apart—and assembling it once more.

  Plot Twist

  by Bianca Lynne Spriggs

  What are you fighting for?

  Your space?

  More space?

  Your territory?

  More territory?

  Your reputation?

  A better reputation?

  A better outcome?

  The best possible outcome?

  Your peace of mind?

  To be first?

  Or would runner up do if it means you still got a check?

  Do you want to be the manager?

  The assistant to the manager because it's less pressure?

  To be an original?

  The original?

  To make your own mold?

  To break your own mold?

  To make amends?

  To forget?

  To repair what was broken in someone else?

  Are you fighting for love?

  For revenge?

  ’Cause you’re scared of what will happen if you don’t fight?

  Or are you fighting to have the last word?

  How would you know when your word’s been the last?

  How would you know when your word’s been your last?

  Are you fighting for your rights?

  Which ones?

  In what order?

  Would you only know your rights were yours

  if someone else took them away from you first?

  Or threatened to?

  Or gave them back to you?

  Would they be your rights only if they’d been fought for?

  Are you fighting for your honor?

  Or theirs?

  Your legacy?

  Your testimony?

  Or someone else’s testimony?

  Are you fighting for the trees?

  For the rhinos?

  For the whales?

  Are you fighting against disease?

  Which one?

  The terminal one?

  Which one?

  Is it more important than what’s happening to the land?

  To the air? To the missing kids?

  To the bruised lips that have forgotten how to speak?

  Are you fighting for the correct terminology?

  The proper label?

  The appropriate pronoun?

  Are you fighting for prayer in schools?

  How about guns?

  Are you fighting for the promised land?

  How will you know when you’ve reached it?

  What does it look like?

  Who’s supposed to point it out?

  Are we taking the highway there or the backroads?

  Could you stand to let anyone else drive—

  even when you’re tired?

  Even full of shame?

  Even full of regret?

  Even when you don’t believe in the promised land anymore—

  but your passengers do?

  Or is anyone else invited to the kind of promised land

  you’d fight for?

  Is it members only?

  Does the promised land have VIP?

  Whose land was it promised to before you showed up?

  Do you have enough resources to go arou
nd

  once you get there?

  Who’d make the rules in the promised land?

  Who’d keep the rules?

  Who’d get a say?

  Or would you rather be all by yourself when you get there

  because no one else could keep up?

  No one else believes in it as much as you?

  But then, what’s the point of a promised land

  without anyone to fight for or alongside?

  Do you know why you’re fighting?

  Are you fighting to win?

  Against what odds?

  At what cost?

  Would you want to be recognized for your sacrifice?

  By whom?

  By how many?

  Would you want a medal?

  A trophy?

  Something to spruce up the display case?

  Or your father’s opinion of you?

  Or you children’s memory of you?

  To stand on a world stage with your fist in the air?

  To take a knee on a sideline?

  To burn the shoes of people who kneel on sidelines?

  To burn the flags of the people who burn shoes?

  Are you fighting for the lives that matter

  except the ones that don’t?

  The one’s who haven't paid their dues?

  Who haven’t pulled themselves up by their bootstraps?

  The screen jockeys?

  The trolls?

  The scapegoats?

  The one percent?

  The ones who don’t vote?

  Who don’t pay?

  Who can’t pay?

  The ones who don’t know what they are fighting for?

  Or the ones that only fight for red?

  Or was it blue?

  Or was it gold?

  Would you want people to be able to see you

  drop your microphone from a platform?

  From a mountain?

  From space?

  Are you fighting because someone told you to?