Alicia makes eye contact as the front door clicks unlocked, and I wonder if what I’m thinking is plastered all over my face.
“I’m home,” her mom calls out, as if that weren’t obvious.
A moment later she passes by the open door. “Oh, hey, I didn’t realize you had somebody—” She blinks a couple times. “Oh. Hi, Jamie. Alicia, can I talk to you?”
Alicia follows her to the master bedroom and closes the door. I pad out to the hallway in my bare feet. Sound carries pretty clearly through the thin walls of a trailer, and I don’t have to put my ear up to the door or anything to listen to their conversation, even though her mom is obviously trying to keep it down.
“Honey, I know you like girls and not boys, and I know Jamie’s confused about his gender anyway, but I’m not comfortable with a boy playing dress-up in your bedroom.”
“Jamie’s not confused about a thing,” Alicia replies. “And anyway, they changed in the bathroom.”
I step back into her room and close the door behind me, because I really don’t want to hear the rest. I don’t want to hear Alicia reassure her mom that she doesn’t think of me “that way.” I don’t want to hear Alicia’s mom—who has always been cool to me—say something I won’t be able to forgive.
Some people have a hard time adjusting to me—I get that. I don’t care what their process of working things out looks like if in the end they treat me like a person. But I don’t want to test that resolution by knowing too much.
Alicia doesn’t ask me to leave when she returns; she doesn’t talk about the conversation at all. I don’t either. I figure everything’s fine until somebody tells me otherwise.
“We ought to buy you some shoes to go with that, instead of those flip-flops. I could drive you to the mall in Sebring. It would be fun.”
I meet her eyes, wondering where she’s coming from. Alicia’s not usually into shopping.
“It would,” I agree. “But I don’t think anybody’s going to be looking at my shoes where I’m going. Some other time?”
She smiles. “Definitely.” She raises both her eyebrows. “You gonna tell me what your plan is?”
If I did, I’d have to explain all sorts of things I’m not ready to. I shake my head. “You might try to talk me out of it.”
She chews her lip; I can’t tell if she’s suspicious or hurt.
“I really appreciate your help,” I say. When she doesn’t reply, I add, “I better get on with this.”
She finally meets my eye, and pulls me into a hug. “Be careful, whatever you’re planning.”
“I will,” I say, and then I head out the door.
I should have asked for a ride—it would make things easier than taking public transportation dressed like this. But riding the bus will give me time to get used to the way I’m presenting.
All the way to Larry’s street, I keep waiting for somebody to say or do something either because they’ve clocked me or because they think I am a girl. I wish I’d brought my ear buds, so I could block out the sounds of traffic and random conversation going on around me. That’s stupid, though—what it would actually do is make me less likely to hear trouble coming.
Somehow I manage both legs of the ride and the transfer between. Everybody’s too wrapped up in their own phones and music and worries to bother me.
At the hospice, I use the same story at the front desk that we used at the dealership. They give me directions to his room, and I walk past a courtyard garden, a nurse’s station, and about a dozen doors with patient names written next to them in dry-erase ink.
I almost pass the door with Larry’s name. I turn abruptly when I spot it, trying to project confidence, like I’ve been here before. I quietly close the door as I enter, and then blink as my eyes adjust to the darkness inside.
The curtains are drawn to block the low-hanging sun. Apart from the dim light slipping around the edges, the only illumination comes from a flat-screen television on the wall, bathing the room in a blueish glow. Flowers on a dresser cast sinister shadows that move with every flicker of the screen. In the center of the room, an oversized hospital bed dominates the space, undercutting the semblance of ordinary life somebody went through a lot of effort to create with the decor.
Larry lies on the bed, his head lolling to the side. I take in my first sight of him this lifetime. In my memories, he is a giant, angry and frightening, out of control. He appears so weak and emaciated here that I can almost pity him—until I think about the lives he’s destroyed. Mine. Benjamin’s. Who else? Somebody like Larry probably didn’t stop at one victim.
I walk up to the edge of the bed. I could take my revenge right now; nobody could stop me. I don’t think it would make me feel better, though, and it wouldn’t do anything for Benjamin.
And I didn’t come here for revenge.
A television remote and call device is tethered to his bedsheet with an alligator clip. I loosen it, turn the sound down, and place it on the floor.
“Larry,” I call out.
He makes a gross snot-clearing sound, but doesn’t wake up.
“Larry!”
He blinks awake and looks at me, wild-eyed.
“Who the hell are you?” he croaks, scratchy and barely intelligible. More memories come flooding back—Larry suspicious, Larry dismissive, Larry belligerent. I feel this weird contrast, like a double-exposed photograph. Part of me remembers that I’m supposed to be scared when Larry’s voice takes this dangerous tone, but he’s not scaring anyone anymore.
“You don’t remember me, Larry? I’m hurt. I remember you.”
“I’ve never met you in my life,” he says, and starts patting around where his controller used to be.
“I remember that night at Peace Creek. You, me, and Benjamin. I bet he remembers it, too.”
He pauses in his search and stares at me again. Shaking his head, he gasps. “You can’t be.”
I stand over the bed. “Look at me.”
“Janie,” he whispers. His gaze flicks between me and the edge of his bed. Probably still looking for his call button. Then he reaches for something on the other side of him, which I hadn’t noticed before. For a moment I think it’s some kind of back-up call device and my heart seizes, but it doesn’t have a speaker or anything that appears to be a microphone.
I pluck the object out of his reach; it looks like some kind of self-dosing painkiller.
“Nuh uh, Larry. I’m talking to you. It wouldn’t be very polite of you to check out.”
“You’re dead,” he croaks.
“That’s right. Soon you will be, too, and I’ll be waiting for you.”
He stiffens, and I have this momentary worry that I will inadvertently cause a fatal heart attack or something right here.
I lean in a little closer. “I promise you it won’t be pleasant. You let an innocent man pay the price for my death, but there’ll be nobody to pay for you in the afterlife.”
This seems to spark some fight back into him. “Benjamin wasn’t innocent! He betrayed me! He had an affair with you!”
“Benjamin and I never had an affair,” I say. I’m pretty sure that’s true. “He tried to convince me to go back to you on the day you killed me.” That part’s definitely not true.
He clutches the bed railing. “What are you talking about?”
“I hitched a ride to the Greyhound station in Winter Haven, because I was afraid of you, Larry. Then I had second thoughts, so I called Benjamin from a payphone. He told me you were a good man, that you were just going through a hard time. He told me I should give you another chance, and he drove all the way out there to bring me back.”
Larry sinks back in the bed and his face seems to cloud over.
“Listen to me!” I command. Then I remember that there are all sorts of nurses and other patients around, and lower my voice. “He wasn’t taking me away from you. He was bringing me back.”
Larry moans, his expression stricken.
“He was your friend right up unt
il the end, and you took his life for it, as surely as you took mine. He deserved better, Larry. So did I.”
He grips my wrist; his skin is soft as tissue paper, but his grip is hard and a little painful. “You look so beautiful, Janie. Please don’t leave me again!”
“I can’t stay. My time is past, and you can’t give me back what you took from me.” I glare, and he tries to edge back from me. “But you can give Benjamin back some of what you took from him. You can talk to the police and recant. Tell them Benjamin didn’t kill me. Tell them, Larry, or you’ll see me every night in hell. I’ll make you sorry. Believe me.”
He raises a hand in front of his face. “Stop! I’ll tell them! Please, Janie!”
I take the phone from the bedside table and dial. As soon as I navigate my way to a human being, I pass the handset over.
“Don’t let me down,” I say, “I’m watching you.”
He’s sobbing as I give it to him, but he’s coherent enough once he starts talking. When he does, I make my way from the room before anybody can show up and start asking me awkward questions.
• • • •
I’m walking Meetu a week later when I pass Benjamin out in front of his trailer with his little girl, planting flowers, of all things. He waves, and I wave back before realizing he’s actually calling me over.
“Damnedest thing happened,” he says, getting up and brushing his hands on his jeans. “I got a call from my parole officer today. Larry Dearborn recanted. One of those deathbed confession things. They say that’s how a lot of false convictions are overturned.”
I do my best to feign surprise. “That’s terrific!”
Meetu’s tail thumps like Benjamin’s a long lost friend.
“Yeah,” he says. He pets Meetu, but his eyes stay on me. Looking hard, like he’s trying to peer into me.
I’m not sure what to do, so I just shrug and say, “I’m glad you’re finally getting some justice.” The words feel stupid as they leave my mouth. He already served the sentence for this crime, and nothing can give that back to him.
As if he’s read my mind, Benjamin says, “It’ll make it easier to find work. Lot of people wouldn’t look beyond that one line on a job application, before. Once people get a word for you—like convict—they think that word is all there is to know.”
I nod.
His little girl makes mud pies in the dirt, and I think about how clearing her father’s name will affect her future.
“I could watch her for you,” I blurt out. “While you look for work.” My face heats up. He may treat me like a person, but that doesn’t mean he wants me watching his kid.
“That would be great.”
I scratch Meetu, trying to act like it’s no big deal.
“So.” He nods toward Alicia’s trailer. “You gonna ask that girl out? Don’t tell me you’re not interested.”
“I’m . . . not uninterested.” I take a slow breath. “I guess I’m afraid.”
“Afraid she sees you different from how you see yourself.”
I sag. “Yes.”
“I hear you,” he says. “But if you don’t take a chance on somebody disappointing you, you never give them a chance to surprise you either.”
When I don’t respond, he adds, “Will you stop being her friend if she says no?”
I shake my head.
“Then there’s no sense wanting something and not at least trying.”
I glance at the trailer. At the rainbow blinds that mark her bedroom window. “Maybe I will.”
He claps a hand on my shoulder. “Good luck.”
It feels more like a command than anything else, and I take a couple automatic steps toward her trailer. By the time my brain figures out what my feet have done, it seems more awkward to stop than to keep going.
Anyway, Benjamin’s right. He sees right through me, the same way I know the real him.
The same way Alicia has always seen the real me, I realize. My pace picks up a bit, and Meetu responds by bounding forward, dragging me along, like everybody’s figured out my destination before me.
She comes to the door as soon as I knock. “Hey,” she says.
“You doing anything?”
She shrugs. “Watching TV.”
“Wanna come for a walk?”
“Sure,” she says, stepping out onto the deck. “Did something happen? Is something wrong?”
“Nope,” I say, leading her down the steps. “Nothing’s wrong at all.”
We head down the street, quiet, like we don’t need to babble to fill the space between us. To anybody watching us, we probably look like we’re already a couple. Maybe by the time we come back, we will be. Maybe we won’t.
Either way, we’ll be okay.
* * *
José Pablo Iriarte is a Cuban-American writer, high school math teacher, and parent of two. Jose’s fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and long-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award, and can be found in magazines such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside Fiction. Learn more at www.labyrinthrat.com, or look for José on twitter @labyrinthrat.
No Flight Without the Shatter
By Brooke Bolander
Pretend you are the land. Pretend you are a place far away, the last vibrant V of green and gold and tessellated rock before the sea and sky slither south unchecked for three thousand lonesome turns of a tern’s wing. Once upon a time the waters rose to cut you off from your mother continent, better independence through drowning. Some day soon, when the ice across the ocean turns to hungry waves, all the rest will follow, sliding beneath an oil-slick surface as warm and empty as a mortician’s handshake.
But that does not concern us—yet. You are the land, and today you are here to bear witness to a story four million years in the telling as she closes her eyes for the final time, striped haunches slowing their rise and fall as entropy hoists another tattered victory flag.
Thylacinus: from the Greek thýlakos, meaning “pouch” or “sack.” You have made her into your own image, a unique beast neither wolf nor tiger but its own striped singularity. No one at the zoo is qualified to sex such a creature. They dub her Benjamin, short omnivorous ape jaws unequipped to pronounce her true name even if anyone ever thought to ask.
The cage is very hot. There is no shade. When night falls there will be no shelter against the unseasonable cold. She paces and pants, her shadow writing the future across concrete in angular calligraphy. Beyond and through the chicken wire bland faces peer, unable to make any sense of the warning in her trot, the glassiness in her staring eyes.
But you are the land, and you read the message loud and clear: a missive from the place between being and not; a signal from the space between the final breath and whatever comes after.
• • • •
Auntie Ben pats makeup over her stripes every morning. The last neighbors moved on years before, the only folks left to see are Martha and Doris and Linnea, but Auntie Ben, she has her habits. In the end, the only sense you have to make, she tells Linnea, is to yourself. And so: delicate little dabs along the lean, dusky line of her jaw, up the cheekbones sharp as taxidermy knives, all the way to her forehead, where hair the color of dirty sand dangles listless, fabric on barbed wire. Nobody knows where she found the powder. Nobody asks. Maybe it was waiting when the three arrived, like the vanity and the three beds and the yellow farmhouse itself.
“Every mammal’s got stripes,” she says. “Even you. Fella named Blaschko found ’em. Somewhere back along the line, your people took ’em off as easily as I shuck my own skin, buried them in a cigar box out back. If you could find that box again, you’d find your stripes, sure as fleas and fresh blood.”
Linnea asks Doris if this is true. Doris is stout and cheerful and most likely of the three aunties to give a true answer. She cooks, she straightens, she drives the pickup to what passes for a town these days to pick up supplies. She does not work on the ship. She lacks the imagination, she says; she was never that great
at flying to begin with. The little cedar chest at the foot of her bed more often than not stays closed.
“There’s no telling with Benny,” she says, scratching at her round, flat beak of a nose. “She’s always been a reader, that one. You don’t look like you got stripes to me, though. Humans come in all shapes and sizes—most of ’em hairy or hungry, terribly hungry, how can such skinny things gobble up so many?—but I never do believe I’ve seen a striped one. Then again, not a lot of them around to study anymore ’cept you, little chick.”
She doesn’t bother climbing to the roof gables to ask Auntie Martha, staring sadly up at an empty fading sky as bronze-and-violet as her hair. Instead, Linnea wanders back inside and stands alone in front of the vanity mirror, searching for invisible stripes. The light through the bedroom curtains is a washed-out yellow, like paper or preserved hide or the end of a long, hot day.
• • • •
They never say how they got together, Linnea’s three aunties, or where they hailed from before finding her and feeding her and fetching her home, lucky orphan among grubby roadside hundreds. She doesn’t remember faces before theirs. There was a gas station with busted windows. There was a little scratched spot in the dirt beneath the old pumps where she slept at night. There was potato crisp grease, tangled hair, and the occasional sandstorm. Beyond that, Linnea’s memory is a skull picked clean; shake it and hear leaves rattle inside.
That’s okay. Now is good. Back Then was probably not-so-good. And as to what lies ahead…No. Linnea keeps that lonesomeness locked down tight as any auntie’s chest. Now is good; the rest doesn’t matter.
Endlings make for strange bedfellows, Auntie Ben often says, pounding away at sheets of rusted tin atop the rickety rope ladder. She keeps a red bandana faded to the color of bared gums tied around her forehead. Her overalls are so stitched and crookety-patched (Doris does her best, but her fingers are too thick and strong and her eyesight too bad not to mangle such tiny work) they look like a quilt tossed over her long, lean self. She keeps all her tools in a denim pouch against her belly, saws and nails and a gone ghost forest worth of toothpicks forever tumble-scattering to the dusty ground far below. Auntie Ben has a lot of teeth to keep clean. When there were fresh bones to gnaw, she says, wistful, there was no need for toothpicks.
The Long List Anthology Volume 5 Page 27
