by John Klima
“No.”
He smiled. “He gets soft.”
The visitor said, “I could force you. Drug you. Ship you.”
“And you wonder why I’m not dying to hang with people again, aye?” Suddenly he was standing. He didn’t see him get up. “Watch carefully,” the small man said. “Your ancestors were stolen from their villages. Separated from their families.” He was washing dishes in the sink. How did he get there? “They were chained together. Branded. And stacked like firewood in the bellies of ships.” He was at the fridge taking a long slow drink of milk (Milk!) from a glass bottle. He swallowed. “They sailed for weeks. Many died. They landed and were sold to farms. Where they were worked, beaten and abused in every way possible.” He was bending over behind him, whispering in his ear. “Those were your people. What would they think of a man who puts creatures in cages?”
The dark man said, “I will buy this tech from you.”
The small man said, “It’s not tech and it’s not for sale.”
“Name your price.”
“Neither am I. Listen. You’re—what?” He looked him up and down, and the visitor had the unnerving feeling of being truly deeply read. “A scientist?”
He nodded.
“You can’t wait to study me on the way back. You’ll probably give a paper—finish it onboard while I sleep. Save your breath. Just tell them the oldest person on earth has no interest in leaving.”
The visitor went agog. That was the title of his paper: “The Oldest Person on Earth.”
“I’ll have that coffee now,” he said.
And immediately the small man got up to pour him a cup.
He thanked him, took a sip. It was dreadful.
After a time, he confessed. “We’re dying. We don’t know why. It’s sort of a slow plague. Everything is entropic. All the children are stopping at 300. That seems to be the limit—no matter what we do.”
“That’s a good life—three centuries.”
“Easy for you to say: That’s half of your life.”
“When I was born the life expectancy was 80. I’m a fluke, aye?”
“You don’t care? All of us are dying. All the best minds, the greatest artists . . .”
“Ordinary folk, too?”
The visitor was silent.
“We all die. That’s what humans do after they live.”
He sipped the coffee. He took a cool slab out of his pocket and cued the vid. It was the most beautiful blonde in the system. Silently, on the loop she smiled and broke into a laugh, smiled and broke into a laugh.
“I’m sorry,” the small man said.
“My wife . . .” He saw his face and got that he had already gotten it. “She’s sick. If we had—a sample . . .”
“Doesn’t it feel good? The truth? It’s like a warm shower after working in the cold mud all day.” He swallowed a snorted laugh. “‘Sample.’ That’s what they call it these days, aye?”
The visitor closed the slab and pocketed it.
The small man said, “Do me a favor: Don’t break up the pairs. The bereaved mates don’t last long.”
“Fuck you,” he said, standing, kicking away the chair from beneath him. “I traveled all this way . . .” He caught himself telling the truth and pulled up and substituted a graceful lie. “You haven’t seen the faces. The funerals.”
“Sonny, I have seen more death firsthand than you can imagine. It’s what you specialized in. When you were done here you just moved your act out of town.”
It was a tone he was unused to. The demarcations of power and class were more carefully observed off this rock. You just didn’t cross them. Not where you paid for your breathing air.
The buzzard squawked in the metal cage as he pulled away.
“Shutup,” he said.
The feathers would be priceless, he told himself and worth the stench of the trip.
Then he caught sight of the small man tossing a green apple to the Kodiak. Before the last turn he saw a truly bizarre sight in his rear-view mirror. The metal man in the straw hat ran around the corner and approached the small man who moved faster and aged slower than anybody in the known U. If he did not know better he would have sworn the robot fell into the arms of the oldest man on earth, weeping.
Notes on the Dissection of an Imaginary Beetle
Jonathan Wood
The graduates enter the examination theater a quarter phial after the zenith. A quarter phial subsequent, I take my place on the stage. The specimen Imaginary Beetle is laid out before me. My white hands, manicured to specification, grip the scalpel as tightly as the beetle’s pincers crush the life from its prey. Sweat spreads beneath my starched collar.
Behind me, an examiner stands rod-straight. His skin is stretched tight over his face, purple-thin below his eyes, his cheek bones poised as if to tear through the papery surface. His breath comes in staccato bursts from nostrils rimmed red by ether vapors, as is the approved style.
I grasp the beetle lightly on either side of its carapace, fingers placed so as not to disturb the position of its legs. It is the length of my middle digit. I turn it over. It feels full of paper: rustling, insubstantial.
My scalpel punctures the first layer of its exoskeleton, marks a line down its thorax. My movement is steady, controlled. I have practiced for days, curled up, fetal beneath my bed, marking lines in pen along pebbles of similar size and shape. I measured each line, punished myself for each fraction I was over or under the prescribed length. I practiced until I could no longer grip the pen, until, in desperation, I tried to reproduce the line with the blood from my open fingers.
Behind me, the examiner observes the cut I now make. Before me, a second examiner scrutinizes the movements of my eyes. I keep them fixed upon the cut. The movements I will make are etched into my memory, carved into my frontal lobes, they strobe through my dreams, appear to me in the conjunction of tram lines on the city’s maps, but I must not shift my eyes from the movements of my hands, from the body of the beetle.
As I peel back the right flange of the beetle’s outer shell like the cover of a book, I begin the litany.
“The Imaginary Beetle lives under stones and at the top of trees, though never both at once. It resides in solitude and upon meeting a fellow member of its species will proceed to perform a three-day ritual of movement, circling, and purging before the older beetle commits suicide through the voiding of an otherwise superfluous poison sac, colloquially referred to as the “Imagination” of the Imaginary Beetle, located at the junction between head and thorax. Its methods of procreation have yet to be elucidated.”
A third examiner stands to my right. He holds a stopwatch and counts each syllable and vowel in order to ensure that I obeyed the rules of syntactical correctitude when creating my speech, that I enslaved it to the appropriate dictums of meter. A fourth man lies beneath the dissecting table watching my legs, ensuring that I do not tap my feet to keep time, that I do not have a metronome taped to my thigh. I feel his exploratory hands even as I extract the first of the miniature organs.
“The Imaginary Beetle is prized by nations of the Violet Continent, due to the stories of Victor Mahoun, who, while under the influence of a local weed, declared it to be proof of the divine hand in creation. Mahoun was decried by domestic ministers and vilified by many reputable news sources. He died wealthy and in the company of many women, all intimate with his proclivities.”
I exerted myself more than most in the preparation of my litany. The library became my second home. I spent days there without eating or sleeping. When my strength failed I ate the pages of selected books, only to regurgitate them later. I took choice phrases from each master, made sure each canonical litany was represented. Tolbert merged with Quillert’s Epic of the Folorn, which, in turn, led into the opening lines of Troad’s Quintessential Essays. I struggled for days to find a place for Torrence, tearing at my hair and screaming at bookshelves before fitting it snugly into one (only one!) of Falwell’s classic statements
as a parenthetical clause. I am told I have whispered my litany in my sleep. Now I speak it loudly, adopting Mellick’s oratory style, tapes of which looped incessantly during my research.
“The beetle only leaves its nest to feed once a cycle. It clambers from under stone or down from treetop to tree root where it will fasten its mandibles around the neck of the Porcine Bird. The subsequent battle is predictable and long-winded. The flightless Porcine Bird is twice the size of the relatively weak Imaginary Beetle but lacks the ability to remove the beetle from its jugular and the foresight to prevent it from getting there. However, the Porcine Bird has great fortitude and little use for higher brain functions, and so it can take over three phases for the Imaginary Beetle to kill its prey.
“The beetle will then drag the bird’s body back to its nest. Due to both the wide-ranging nature of the Porcine Bird and its speed, as well as the lethargy of the already-starving beetle, this trip often takes over six phases. During this time, the beetle’s prize is subject to the voracities of many carrion creatures, as well as the detrimental processes of decay.
“Invariably the corpse collapses before the beetle achieves its domicile. In desperation, the beetle collects twigs, stones, and other surrounding detritus then binds it together with its dense, tacky spittle. It then hauls this simulacrum home, and proceeds to pick at it with disappointment and indifference until the Porcine Bird’s migratory patterns once more bring it close to the beetle’s nest, one complete cycle after the initial contact.”
The organs of the beetle are spread out on the blotting paper to my right, its most intimate juices seeping outwards in ever more suggestive patterns. I push the tip of my scalpel into the dark recesses of its neck space. My eyes do not waver. My hand twists in the practiced manner and I withdraw the scalpel.
A tiny, purple bead floats on the edge of the blade. It is approximately the size of a salt grain. While its contents are usually only encountered in a watered-down form, the poison sac of the Imaginary Beetle is potent enough to lay waste to cities.
I hold it there and wait.
It is not exactly a noise that gives me my clue, but a subtle shift in the air behind me. It is him. My examiners are adopting the third position.
I twist sideways and the scalpel blade of the rear examiner slices through the air where my neck was. Even as I move, the examiner exploring my thighs for temporal devices grips my particulars tightly, and twists. I do not let out a sound. There must be decorum.
Silently, fixed in my seat, I spar with the man behind me. The poison sac of the beetle spins in the air, hopping from blade to blade as our scalpels parry and thrust. It glistens, still wet, in the beams of the footlights.
The blade of the examiner flickers in quick, precise movements. He fights in the style of the Sheltered Guard. It is a complex technique, requiring minimal movement behind the wrist. My own style is a flawless reproduction of Parson’s fight of ’23. It is perfectly adapted to the needs of fighting over my own shoulder and of keeping my top hat—crafted at my request by the school’s haberdasher so as to be exactly one size too small (thereby promoting exemplary posture)—in place. I move carefully, trying to minimize the appearance of unsightly wrinkles.
I hear the rustle of the examiner’s cuff against the fabric of his suit jacket, the soft noise of his cufflink catching momentarily, and I recognize the first of the traditionally provided openings. I flick the poison sac high into the air. The examiner lunges with his hand, fingertips extending to the maximum allowed by their restraining joints. I let his blade come and parry at the last possible moment that I dare. His grip is at its weakest now, and his scalpel flies up, shifting suddenly from horizontal to vertical.
The flat of his blade slaps into the descending poison sac, sending it hurtling towards his own face. It impacts against the red, damaged, porous skin at the base of his nose and splits open like a week-old corpse. Its contents splash over him. Only an infinitesimal amount will be absorbed, but it will be enough.
My opponent lets his scalpel fall. The neurotoxin has not yet had time to reach the muscles of his arm, but there is no point in continuing our opposition. The examiner beneath the table releases me, the other two step back.
Trying to master my breathing, I turn to the graduates and await their judgment.
Silence echoes through the theater. The audience avoids my gaze. Gloved hands remain in neatly pressed laps. The only movement in the chamber seems to come from my own heaving chest. Nails biting into my palms, I calm even this, until everything hangs in stasis. And still there is nothing.
Nothing! I gave them everything. Every classic moment reproduced in exactness for them and they give me: nothing. I want to scream at them; claw at their skin; thrust their eyeballs back into their brains with wet, viscous explosions; gnaw their ears from their skulls and spit the ichors and gore back between their broken and bloody teeth. But I stay where I am, stock still, breathing slowly, as is required.
The apprentices appear from stage left to remove my opponent. My eyes follow them to their goal. As a final mockery, I see that the poison has taken him differently than is intended. His body is twitching, his face in spasm. There will be no quiet death for him, no silent slipping into the waters of the Fountain. Instead there is this other thing. This travesty.
In its demise, my opponent’s body has thrown off all its formalities and rituals in one monumental shrug. All ceremony has been abandoned and forgotten. His movements are uncultivated, feral. His tongue lolls and a stream of guttural inarticulations spill from him. His eyes roll sightless, uncaring. His body has become exploratory and inventive. It has become improvisational. It has become something I have never seen before. It is carefree. It is wild, unkempt, inexplicable, triumphant, celebratory, depraved, and fantastic. It is new beyond my imagining.
This shame on my examination stage.
As his form finally slumps into stillness, the audience raise their hands and begin to applaud.
The Death of Sugar Daddy
Toiya Kristen Finley
Laffy Taffy—July 7
Quit digging, girl!”
This was before all of the cryin, before that black hole started suckin me in, and my wrist wasn’t so bad back then, neither.
I didn’t mean to scratch that hard. Momma had her back to me, but she heard anyway. I pulled my sleeve over the bad spot on my wrist and went at it again. My nail wasn’t sharp enough through the dress, though.
“Keisha.” This time Momma turned all the way around. Folded her arms. Ms. Bentley’s boyfriend watched Momma shuffle her hips and scratched under his chin.
“You know how impetigo spreads?” Momma said. “Now stop picking at your wrist before it gets raw.”
This wasn’t no mosquito bite, though. I couldn’t leave it alone, neither. But there was nuthin wrong with my wrist, far as I could see. I rubbed it down with lotion and put Vaseline on top of that. All that did was give me greasy skin. My wrist still itched. I wanted to get home so I could try alcohol like Momma used when I got chiggers on my legs, but Momma liked to hang around after weddings, even for people she didn’t know. This girl was the niece or granddaughter of somebody Grandmommy used to go to church with. That didn’t mean Grandmommy thought she had to come and drag me along. At least Momma wasn’t makin me wear them real lacy dresses no more. All the other 11-year-olds—and some of the 10- year-olds, too—had relaxers, and they could run a comb through their hair without worryin about breakin any of it off. But I was stuck with twist ties and barrettes. Momma got the hint I wouldn’t bother with em no more at the last weddin when I kept shakin my head and clankin those dumb barrettes together. Today she finally pressed my hair.
“It’s not here,” Ms. Bentley said. Her and Momma and Ms. Waters went through the Guestbook. The bride and groom had left the church about twenty minutes ago, and the front doors were wide open lettin the sticky and humidity in. Me and Ms. Bentley’s boyfriend, I mean companion, as Momma called him in her voice to make stuf
f sound more important than it was, me and Ms. Bentley’s companion stood in the doorway of the north ex, or whatever it’s called, so Momma and Ms. Bentley’d get a clue. He fiddled with his keys in his pocket, tryin real hard not to frown. But he mumbled stuff to himself and smiled at me when he caught me watchin. Momma taught me how to act, though. I could stand there ladylike all day without buttin into grown people’s business.
“Well,” Ms. Waters said, “I guess not.” She raised her eyebrow cuz she didn’t believe it herself. Momma, Ms. Bentley, and Ms. Waters stood there and looked at each other for a second before Momma decided we could finally go.
Martin Hughes (r) scored 25 points in Fisk’s 65-63 victory over the Tennessee State Tigers.
I pushed the liver around on my plate so it wouldn’t touch the mashed potatoes. Then I wiped my fork on a napkin so the liver juice wouldn’t dirty my peas. I stuffed peas in my mouth, and Momma glared at me.
“You better eat some of that meat, Keisha.”
She didn’t expect me to eat all of it. She never expected me to eat all my liver, only a mouthful so I never got why she bothered to give it to me. Liver was all spongy, what brains might taste like, cept the liver holds all the stuff that makes puke, and that just makes it worse. Momma cut off a piece the size of my pinky. She shook the plate so hard my peas rolled into the brown streaks.
“There. You can handle that . . . .You know, we didn’t see Sugar Daddy today.”
Grandmommy sucked her teeth and snorted. “You probably missed that trifling, dirty old man. He must have slipped out.”
“No, Mom, his name wasn’t even in the Guestbook.”
“Maybe he’s out of town.”
“When did that fool ever miss a summer wedding?”
“Can I git some more mashed potatoes?”
Grandmommy looked at me sideways. “I don’t know. Can you git them? Who taught you to speak that way?”