by Paula Guran
To honor them, the blood and meat the dolls had been wrapped in to simulate the birth for Daniel, it had been left to dry on them.
I threw up, had to fall onto my hands to do it, it was so violent.
And then the scurrying again. In the hall.
I looked up just after something had crossed from one side of the doorway to the other. And where my ears told my eyes to look, it wasn’t up at head-level, at person-level, but at knee-level.
Instead of a possum now, what I saw in my head was the doll my dad had bought for Janine. The one we’d buried. Only, it was crawling around on all fours, its elbows cocked higher than its back, its face turned up, to keep its eyes opened.
And when she talked, it was going to be that same language she’d taught Daniel. That same dead tongue.
I stood, fell back, dizzy, not used to this kind of exertion, and my hand splashed into the insides of the girl on the table, and I felt two things in the same instant. The first was the warmth of this girl’s viscera, when I’d assumed she’d been dead for hours, long enough to have cooled down. The second thing I felt was what Daniel was always looking for: a hard plastic doll foot. From the doll inside each of us, if you know where to look. If you cut at the exact right instant, and reach in with confidence, with faith.
My hand closed on the smooth foot and the moment dilated, threatened to swallow me whole.
I brought my hand back gently, so as not to disturb. So as to pretend this hadn’t just happened.
Whatever was in the hall had seen, though. Or heard the girl’s insides, trying to suction my hand in place.
Save her, a hoarse voice whispered, from just past the doorway. Don’t let her drown.
I stared at the wall of dolls, none of their lips able to move. I stared into the black abyss of the doorway. I studied the front- and backside of my gore-smeared hand.
“Daniel?” I said. Because I’d recognized the voice. Because who else could it be.
“Save her,” the voice whispered again, from lower in the hallway than a person’s head would be.
Unless that person was crawling. Unless, in the privacy of his own home, that person flashed around from room to room like that. Because that was who he was. That was what he was.
“Please,” I said.
No answer.
I backed to the wall shaking my head no, shaking my head please, and, from this new angle, could see into the supply closet, the one Daniel had taken the door off of. Probably because his hands, in this room, didn’t want to be touching doorknobs.
The doll our father had buried in our childhood, she was standing between two stacks of foggy plastic containers.
She’d been dressed, was just staring, her eyelashes black and perfect, her expression so innocent, so waiting.
Janine.
I wanted to fall to my knees—to give up or in thanks, I wasn’t really sure. I put my hand to my face and didn’t just smear my cheek and open eyes with the black insides of this dead girl, but my lips as well. My tongue darted out like for a crumb, just instinct, and the breathing in the hall got raspier. Less patient. Like this was building to something for him.
It made me cough that kind of cough that comes right before throwing up.
Out in the hall, Daniel sighed from deep in his mania, and then there was sound like he’d fallen over. From my wall, I could see one of his bare feet through the doorway, toes-up.
It was trembling. Like something was feeding on his face. Like the possum had come for him after all these years.
I crashed to the doorway to protect him, my little brother, to kick away whatever had him by the face.
It was just Daniel, though. He was spasming, his whole body, his eyes closed. It was a seizure. It was ecstasy.
“Daniel, Daniel,” I said, on my knees now, taking his head in my lap.
He trembled and drew his arms in tight, his mouth frothing.
After a whole life of being alone with his task, with his compulsion, with his crusade, I’d finally joined him, I knew.
This wasn’t a seizure, it was an orgasm. A culmination of all his dreams. I was the only one who could possibly understand what he’d become. What he was doing. And I was here.
His breath, it smelled like soap, and I had to picture him flaking a bar into a pile then lining his gums with it.
I sat down farther, to better cradle his head, and, when I had to angle him up to an almost sitting position, his eyes rolled open and he looked over to me, then down to my stomach as well, for the gift he’d been denied. The miracle he’d trained himself to sense.
My stomach. My digestion.
It wasn’t nerves. What I was experiencing, what I was feeling, it was smoother than nerves. More plastic.
I unsnapped my shirt, looked down where Daniel was, and the vague outline of a tiny hand pressed against the backside of my skin when I breathed in, like it was stable, it was steady. It was me doing the moving.
I pushed away, into the hall wall, let Daniel’s head fall to the carpet and bounce, his eyes closing mechanically, his right foot still trembling.
I was breathing too fast and I was breathing not at all.
And I could hear it now too, the whispering.
From the shop.
A whispering, but a gurgling, too.
The doll in the dead girl’s still-warm entrails. The doll Daniel had wanted me to save.
The whole wall watched me cross the room on ghost feet. I looked to Janine for confirmation, and when she didn’t say this was wrong, I plunged my hand back into the remains on the table, found the foot I’d felt earlier, and birthed this smooth plastic body up into the light, the body’s corruption stringing off it.
When I turned the doll rightside up, its eyes rolled open to greet me, its lashes caked with blood.
I carried the doll by the leg to Daniel, and brought it up between us like a real fresh-born baby, but it only made him shake his head no, like I wasn’t getting it. Like I didn’t see.
“Over, over, over again,” he said, turning sideways to reach down the hall. He tried to stand to go down there but wasn’t recovered from his fit yet. He fell into the wall, slid down.
I looked where he’d meant to go, though.
The only light that way was the bathroom.
I drifted there, the doll upside-down by my leg again, its hard plastic fingers brushing my calf through my slacks.
The hair. The sedimentary tufts of hair.
That had to be what he meant. Over, over: start over. The traffic light goes red, then it cycles back to green again, and hovers on yellow, spilling back to red.
I carried the tufts of hair back, jewels of glass glittering on those dried strands.
When I knelt down by Daniel again, he opened his mouth like a baby bird and I knew I was right: this was part of his process. You save one doll from inside a woman, and you start over with hair from one of the other women. Like paying. Like trading. Like closing a thing you’d opened.
“Here, here,” I said, fingering the hair from the jar, packing his mouth with it. His eyes watered, spilled over with what I took to be joy. “It’ll be all right,” I whispered. “We’re saving her, Daniel. We’re saving her.”
He coughed once, hearing his name, then again from deeper, and, using two fingers, I shoved the wad of hair in deeper, so it could bathe in his stomach juice like a pearl. So it could become a soul for him again.
I kissed him once on the forehead when his body started jerking again, this time for air, and, when he bit the two fingers I was using to make him human again, I inserted the new doll’s hand instead.
It held the hair in place until Daniel calmed. Until he went to sleep. Until there was no more breath.
I moved his right foot, to get his tremble going again, but there was nothing left.
My little brother was dead. His mission was over.
I kissed Daniel’s closed eyes, my lips pressing into each thin eyelid for too long, like I could keep him here, at least un
til I removed my lips.
Behind those eyelids, though, the balls of his eyes were already turning hard like the yolks of boiled eggs.
This is how you say goodbye.
I stood, wiped that new doll’s ankle clean—plastic holds prints—and stepped back into the shop, used a scalpel to remove the patch of carpet I’d thrown up into. I rolled that carpet up like a burrito.
Without looking up to them, I nodded to the open-eyed dolls then turned the light off with my wrist, stepped over what was left of Daniel, and made my way through the living room, out the front door.
“He ever show up?” the super or maintenance man asked, suddenly pruning something in the flowerbed that didn’t need pruning. Meaning he’d had second thoughts about letting me in. He was standing guard, now. He was on alert.
In one hand I was clutching a small patch of rolled carpet I’d never be able to explain.
On my other hip, her cool face in my neck, was Janine.
I looked back to the door I’d just locked.
“No, never did,” I said, “but there’s water on the floor in his kitchen.”
The super or maintenance man stood, his brow furrowed.
“Sink?” he said.
“Refrigerator,” I said back, and followed him back in, pulled the door shut behind us, twisting the deadbolt.
Ten minutes later I stepped out again, my breathing back to normal, almost.
“Well that was different,” I said to Janine, and hitched her higher.
Walking along the side of the house back to the garage, to my car, I had to turn my head away from her to cough, and then place my hand on the wall to steady myself.
What is it? she asked
Her voice was perfect.
I spit a shiny conglomerate of segmented blackness up into my palm, and studied it.
“Nothing,” I told her, and somewhere between there and the car, I left my soul behind me on the ground.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of fifteen novels and six story collections. His most recent book is the novel Mongrels, from William Morrow. Jones lives in Boulder, CO.
When we introduce the heroic factor into the population, and give rise to a superhuman élite, let us not have forgotten the heart . . .
KAIJU MAXIMUS®: “SO VARIOUS, SO BEAUTIFUL, SO NEW”
Kai Ashante Wilson
It hadn’t come down since great-grandparent days, but as its last descent had left no stone on stone—nor man, woman, child alive—anywhere people had once dwelled aboveground on the continent, the hero would go up before it came down again, and kill the kaiju maximus. They would go too: the hero’s weakness, and her strength.
For long cool days, she led them up the old byways toward the specter of the mountains. Finally they reached the foothills. Here and there leaves of the deep green forest had just begun turning red or gold in the last days of summer. He and the children were all fit, all well, and so most days the hero could get about twenty kiloms out of them. She carried the food, that pack twice the weight of his, which was plenty heavy enough. She brought down game for them if he asked, a turkey, or ducks. They did just as that old sciencer in the last cavestead had counseled: every morning a drop of her blood under the children’s tongues and his, and indeed the heroic factor served to ward them all from sickness. No more fevers, not a cough. The scaled dry patches on the boy’s neck and hands cleared up, and he suffered no more frightening episodes of breathlessness. In little more than a month the baby, looking all the time more and more like poor Sofiya, shot up several centimets, five or six, and put on as many kilos. And him? That ankle he’d twisted back in the spring stopped aching during the first and last hours of a long day’s hike, stopped aching at all. You don’t really know, until it’s gone, how much the pain was wearing on you all along.
Come downhill one bright chill afternoon, he and the baby and boy were resting in the swale, eating apples, when the hero came down from the sky. She gave him the choice of the last hill they’d climb that day. “Which one?” she said. Just north of them two hills overlapped in east-west adjacency. “Where’s the good water?”
He thought about it and said, “That one,” holding out his apple toward where, unseen and unheard, a freshwater spring bubbled up from cloven rock, and ran down down the chosen hill’s farside. Though much higher, the other hill looked easy-hiking. The hill awaiting them was squat, not half so high: but they’d end up climbing its height four or five times, after all the switchbacks, its sides being steep and densely forested, interrupted by brief sheer bluffs. There never really was a chance, was there, the easy hill might have had the water?
“Saw some duck while I was up flying,” the hero said. (They only ever argued over the children—food for them, water for them, rest.) “But just those spoonies with orange fat.”
“That’s okay.”
“Kids won’t eat that kind, you said.” The hero’s latest eyes caught the light funny, as if prismatic oil were wetting them, not saltwater tears. “They taste too nasty.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “Really.”
“You gotta speak up if you want me to hunt.”
It was nice, he told himself, that she thought to offer. “Tonight I meant to finish up what we brung fresh from the last cavestead. So please don’t worry yourself.” He didn’t need some special solicitude that came out of the blue every once in a while. What he needed was not to be argued against, and never, ever overruled, when the hero wanted to wring a few more kiloms from the day—and so skip some meal, rest stop, or water break—and he said to her, “They can’t; the kids are tired. We need rest.”
I don’t think Sofiya should do that. I don’t think she’s ready.
“You hurting for water? I can take the canteens and fill em.”
“We’re okay. Early tomorrow morning we should hit the trickle, otherside of that west hill there. We got plenty till then.” He smiled up at her (irises glinting jewel-like in the oblique fall of light). “And you know I know my water.”
“Yeah.” She touched his head and ran fingers through his hair which, not easily, he kept washed and combed for her. “You do, don’t you?”
Now, his father: there had been a dowser, the old man able not just to find the water but call it from the ground, however dry. He himself could feel the water pumping or at rest in the earth well enough to say where the nearest creek or pond lay, and to judge at a glance whether this standing pool or that mineral-stained leak was poisonous or potable. And the boy could as well: grandson’s talent biding fair to rival his grandfather’s, for already son could often pinpoint what father could only be vague about.
The hero looked at her weary children half-eating, half-sleeping on their weary father’s lap. “We’ll rest here a bit longer, then head up when the sun touches the top of those trees there.”
Mouth full of apple, he nodded. On rare occasions the hero drank thirstily from a spring, or returned to camp with the haunch of some deer she’d devoured out of his and the children’s sight; and he’d roast it up for their supper and next-day’s eating. But she took neither food nor water more than once a month. All the good that a daily two leets of water, full night’s sleep, and three squares did for you, the hero got from a quiet half hour’s sit-down in the sun. She found a bright spot now and partook.
He unraveled a cocklebur from the boy’s head propped on his thigh. “What say you, buddy? How was your papa’s waterwitching that time?”
Eyes closed, the boy held an apple to his mouth, nibbling at it; he spoke with quiet dreaminess. “We’re gonna get to that water today, Papa—right as the sun’s going down. And the spring’s a good gushy one, not no little trickle like you said.”
Still with a couple nice bites on it, the baby chucked her apple-core to the mangy pup that had crept after them since midmorning. “I wanna’nother one, Papa,” she said. “I’m still hungry.”
“We ain’t got apples to waste, pumpkin.” He handed her the half left of his. “Now, just you g
et to eat this, okay? It’s yours, all by yourself.”
Dr. Anwar abu Hassan, psychogenomicist: To us who still flounder in the storms of the untamed heart, the awakened mystics have explained just what good, in the cosmic sense, is this folly called erotic love. Lust and passion are early doors, first steps away from pure self-concern; and later doors, further steps, lead even as far as the mystic arrives: to that love surpassing understanding, which may encompass a whole planet, and every living creature on it. And so, when we introduce the heroic factor into the population, and give rise to a superhuman élite, let us not have forgotten the heart. Predilection for the pretty face is a precursor of universal caritas. And in defense of one beloved earthling some hero may well save us all.
At the RITUAL BENISON before each boss-fight, a hero will temporarily advance +1000 XP for every point of comeliness their spouse possesses. But the hero must ensure that his or her spouse always has food, water and rest enough to maintain this attribute. And SUPERHEROES must consider the welfare of their children as well, for the sword and the wings can only . . .
Twilight was setting fire to the clouds as they reached the flat top of the hill. Up there was rocky, windswept and bush-covered; or, no—these were all trees, dwarfish kin to the lower forest, with not one gnarled cousin reaching even shoulder-height. All sense of accomplishment from so many steps taken thus far, from so much ground covered, can be voided by a single majestic vista. The prospect overlooked a broad and forested valley, compassed by distant hills, and marching thence to the very limits of sight: ever-higher mountains, some peaks snowtopped, a few piercing the clouds. Let it not be said that he knew even a moment’s despair—for he was loyal to the hero, and steadfast to her cause: humanity’s salvation—but neither could such a view hearten anyone so footsore. How far must they go? At his feet the children sat down together, stretched out side-by-side, and went to sleep: not a full minute passing between these progressions. The hero didn’t want your chatter, your second guesses, nor to be pestered with ten thousand questions. But he dared ask this one aloud, although quietly, and well softened up:
