Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2015

by Nino Cipri

  Cynthia’s gaze lingered on my youngest brother. He’s only fourteen, and he looks it. “You sure?” she said, and she spoke kindly, for her. “You sure you want to stay with him?”

  My youngest brother looked at the door, looked at me, and didn’t say anything—but he didn’t move, either.

  Cynthia nodded. She went back behind the bar and turned the music back on and I thought I’d won. And she acted like nothing was wrong, like I hadn’t beat a kid maybe to death in front of her, like I hadn’t flung her authority back in her face. She set out rounds for us and even smiled so sweetly at me that I thought I had a shot with her.

  When I woke up that first morning and saw her behind the bar setting up for the night, I just thought I’d passed out and she’d left me there. I felt beat to shit, but I’d woken up feeling that way before, and not remembering why. Then I tried to leave.

  As soon as I tried to set foot outside the door I curled up in agony. The air felt like knife blades skinning me alive, the rising sun seemed to pour molten metal down on my skin, and the ground, ah, the ground seemed to swarm up around me like a mountain of stinging beetles. Every inch of my body blistered and burned.

  I crawled back into the bar on my hands and knees, gulping the stinking air. I couldn’t feel anything but pain and rage.

  I woke up my brothers, and when my second brother realized what had happened to us, he actually went for Cynthia and she broke his collarbone with the Louisville Slugger. He fell down and she stood over him—she seemed to tower over all of us.

  “What did you do to us? What are you?” I asked her hoarsely.

  “I’m the bartender,” she said. “And don’t you ever fuck with me. Not in my bar.”

  Cynthia’s always here, and I don’t think she sleeps.

  * * *

  So every morning, I told this girl, we wake up in the same beaten shape I put that kid in, and every day we do everything Cynthia tells us and we can’t set foot outside the bar. But it could end, I told her, Cynthia promised, if there are girls, if there’s dancing, 101 nights straight, we could leave. Maybe even go home again. If we still have a home. Maybe we could find a home.

  All the time I told her our story, she drank whiskey and nodded in the right places.

  “Home’s overrated,” she said.

  I thought about asking why, but didn’t. “Look,” I said. “I’m not like that anymore. I don’t do that. I just … I don’t. I mean, if somebody gives you trouble, I’ll lay him out. But I don’t … I don’t let the rage take over anymore.”

  She nodded. “How long has it been?”

  I shrugged. “Dunno. Years. Things don’t change here. People come and go. We don’t age, but the circles under my eyes get darker.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “First thing I noticed about you. Under your eyes, the skin looks like charcoal.”

  She put her hand on my thigh, leaned over, and kissed me. I put my arms around her, and she broke it off and pulled away. While I caught my breath, she put the whiskey bottle in my hand and slid off the barstool, her purple miniskirt riding up to the very bottom of her ass. She tugged it back into place.

  “I’ll see you,” she said.

  “You coming back tomorrow night?” I asked, as her sisters began filing out. I tried to keep the desperation from my voice.

  She grinned. Her dark lipstick was smeared from our kiss and her black eyeliner cat eyes were long gone, sweated off while we danced. The rips in her stockings had gotten bigger. “Yeah. We’ll be back.”

  “And the night after that?”

  “Could be,” she said. “You never know.”

  “Wait,” I said. “You know about me now. I’m Jake. What’s your name?”

  “Isabel,” she said.

  “What’s your story?”

  “I don’t have one yet,” she said.

  “Come on,” I persisted. “What brings you here?”

  She grinned again, but this time it looked a lot more brittle. “Nothing.” She shrugged. “Hey—anything you want? From outside?”

  I thought about pushing her harder for a minute, about trying to find out what it was she wanted to get away from, and decided against it. I couldn’t risk pissing her off, not when I still barely knew her.

  “A clean T-shirt,” I said. “Maybe a peach? I kind of miss peaches. They used to be my favorite.”

  “Wrong season,” she said. “Peaches won’t be any good for months.”

  “An apple, then?”

  “Okay.” She smiled at me, and then she walked out. The door slammed and bolted, locking my brothers and me in for the day.

  Our first few weeks in there, we’d torn the place apart every night, wrenched the stools up and used them to smash up the bottles and the mirror behind the bar. But the club just rebuilt itself around us. It didn’t heal completely—the mirror was still shattered like a mosaic and walls were charred in places. But the place didn’t look much different from the run-down punk dive it was when we’d first walked in. The cuts on our fists took a lot longer to heal.

  After the girls and the other patrons—the ones who came and went as they pleased—had left, my brothers and I settled in for the day, contorting ourselves on benches and against walls.

  “It’s gonna happen,” I said.

  “I don’t like them,” my youngest brother said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t like them?” I asked. “They’re our girls, the ones who are going to set us free. You can’t not like them.”

  “The one I was dancing with was boring,” he said.

  “And mine didn’t like it here, I could tell,” said my fifth brother.

  “We want to get out of here, don’t we?” I said reasonably.

  “You’re just cheery because you and your girl were making out on the dance floor,” snarled my second brother. He’s always been the worst of us.

  “Look, guys,” I said. “There’re twelve of them. Twelve of us. They’re the ones. Just go to sleep.”

  My second brother was right about one thing. I was deliriously happy. I haven’t felt that way since.

  They came back the next night and the night after that, and I danced with her all night, till our boots were worn through and our heads were caved in with the beats. And we drank so much that when we fell down we bounced, and when we got hurt we roared with laughter instead of pain. We were wrecks, me trying to shuck what was left of the bullying asshole I had been, and her running from … whatever she was running from. Two drunken, dancing banshees. Twenty-four, really.

  She told me about the weather, which I liked. The bar was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but I’d almost forgotten about the beating sun and gray pinpricks of rain. She told me about her calculus class, which made me feel stupid, but I didn’t really care. She smelled like parks and asphalt and street fairs and the outside that I missed. Every few nights she’d come in morose and rageful. She wouldn’t talk and wouldn’t smile. All she would do was knock back shots of bourbon and dance. By the end of the night I was holding her hair out of her face while she vomited into the toilet. I didn’t mind. I guess I was falling in love. I think she was just falling. She’d do that for a night or two, and then come in back to normal, chirping about her cousin’s new baby and showing me pictures. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a baby.

  We both had our hands full taking care of the others. I’d laid down the law to my brothers: no bitching about the girls to me. I didn’t want to hear it. But they didn’t get along with them any better, and it was just as clear that the girls didn’t like my brothers. The oldest was the only one who bothered to dress up; the others slouched around in jeans and T-shirts, which was fair enough, because that’s what we were wearing. My second brother pissed off one sister so much that she threw her drink at him. I shoved him up against the cracked wall of the bar.

  “What the fuck did you do?” I shouted at him.

  “Go fuck yourself,” he spat at me.

  I banged his head ag
ainst the wall. “I swear to God, Max, if you screw this up for us—”

  “Then what?” he shouted. “I’ll get the shit kicked out of me? That’s how I wake up every goddamn morning, thanks to you!”

  We stared at each other for a couple minutes. Finally I turned away. “Just don’t, Max,” I said.

  Isabel had been talking her sister down. “Please don’t go,” I heard her saying. “C’mon, don’t go. Tomorrow’ll be better. I promise. I promise.”

  The next night Isabel brought in a bag of weed and some rolling papers. “I think this might help,” she told me, and it did. It helped Max, anyway, who stopped pummeling the walls if we saved enough for him to smoke up during the days. Every night after that she brought something in. I didn’t know where she got the drugs or the money for them, but she was able to hold them over us and enforce good behavior.

  Sometimes I think the only things that united her sisters and my brothers were the desire for the drugs and their resentment of the two of us. But we took care of them, and we kept them in line.

  There was nobody to keep us in line.

  A couple weeks after I first met her, she pulled me into the bar’s back room, pressed me into one of the darker corners, and kissed me. My arms went around her and I found the gap between her T-shirt and her purple skirt.

  “Better not stop dancing,” I whispered to her, and she nodded. But she tasted like cider and cigarettes and sweat, so I kissed her again and ran my hand down the side of her breast.

  “I know another dance,” she whispered back, and slid her hands into the back pockets of my jeans.

  We had ended up in a heap at the foot of the wall, and I held her half-on, half-off my lap. I didn’t care if we had to start the 101 nights over, honestly, it had been that good, and I leaned over and kissed her hair.

  “I love you,” I told her.

  “You need me,” she corrected me, pretty bleakly.

  “No,” I said. “I love you.”

  “You barely know me,” she replied.

  * * *

  So we danced and screwed our way through one hundred nights. My brothers and I never knew where the girls went during the days; we never found out where they lived. At night they lived with us, amid the smoky, alcoholic squalor of the bar. My T-shirt and her fishnets were in shreds and tatters but my boots and my brothers’ boots miraculously healed each day while we slept, curled up in the dark corners. Sometimes I would have sworn that I could still smell her hair in my sleep.

  The hundredth night, Isabel came in one of her poison moods. She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t talk to me no matter what I did or said. By the end of the night my nerves were spitting wires. I never knew what to do with her when she was like this. Nothing worked, nothing felt right, and I was tense, straining for that 101st night like a dog at the end of a leash. It was all I could see. I tried to talk to her, but her averted eyes and monosyllabic answers reduced me to silence as well. At the end of the night I stared moodily into space while she knocked back shots of Irish whiskey. My tension and mounting excitement curdled into frustration and I began to seethe. Why was she being like this when we were so close? When she paid for her fifth shot, I finally spoke.

  “You can’t handle that much whiskey and you know it,” I said.

  She shrugged halfheartedly. “Fuck you, Jake,” she said, but without any real malice behind it. No feeling at all, really, not love or anger.

  “Seriously, Isabel. Stop drinking. You’ll just puke it back up.”

  “So? Who are you, my mother?”

  “Not your mother,” I said. “I’m the person who cleans you up afterwards, remember?” My voice had turned ugly and I knew it would be a mistake to keep talking. But I was aching with tension for the next night and her mood had turned that tension sour. I guess I thought a fight might be the next best thing to fucking, which she certainly wasn’t in the mood for. “Me, not your sisters.” I kept going, trying to goad her into paying attention to me. “Your sisters, they don’t give a shit. They leave you here as soon as the dancing’s done.”

  It worked. Her head snapped around. “Don’t you say one word about my sisters. You’re sick of cleaning me up? What have I been doing since I got here but cleaning up after your mess? You think it’s easy getting my sisters here every night? They practically hate your brothers. You think I want to be here when I feel like this?”

  I’d actually … never thought about what Isabel’s black moods would be like from the inside. I guess I’d just thought about them as part of her mystique. Where did she come from? How did she feel? She was here for me, and that had been enough. For me, anyway.

  “Then why do you bother to come?” I snarled at her, to cover up the shame beginning to slink through my guts.

  She stared at me for a minute and turned back to her drink. “You’re an asshole.” She drank down the fifth shot of whiskey and blinked a little in the low light. For the first time I noticed the dark circles under her eyes. “I come here,” she began, and then stopped. “I come here,” she said again, with some difficulty, “because it’s the only time I really feel alive. It’s the only time I feel like I want to be alive. I can’t stop sleeping, Jake. I sleep twelve or fifteen hours a day. Most days showering is too hard and my arms and legs feel like they’re filled with lead. I—I feel like I’m not really there most of the time, just looking through the cut-out eyes of a portrait, like in a bad movie. Everything hurts, all the time, even when there’s nothing wrong with me. I cry every day. I can’t keep my mind together; my thoughts bounce and clatter like a bag of marbles emptied out onto the floor. And everything looks gray to me, like there’s a screen of smoke in front of my eyes. And I hate myself for being like this, so weak. Weak and useless.

  “And when I come here, Jake, I’m not useless. I come here because sometimes when I’m here, the music and the smoke and the drink drives that away, and I feel okay. Just okay, and that’s a fucking miracle. And sometimes I feel better than that. Sometimes I feel bubbles like champagne in my blood and I can see neon light trails in the air and everything just—just sparks, like burning metal and fireworks. But most of the time, most of the time, Jake, I feel like crap.”

  I didn’t know what to say to her. I drank her fifth shot of whiskey. “I didn’t know,” I said. “I never knew. You always seem so … alive.”

  She looked at me bitterly until I heard exactly how stupid I sounded. “Yeah. I’m good at that. And I’m good at calculus, so nothing really bad could be happening, could it? You never noticed, you never took it seriously because you needed me to be the girl who would save you. You don’t love me and you don’t know me. You need me. And you never once thought about what I needed, or even noticed me counting ceiling tiles while you were fucking me.”

  “That’s mean,” I breathed. “That’s mean, and it’s not true. I did think about what you needed, why you were here, I asked—”

  “Oh, shut up, Jake,” she said, and slid off the barstool. “I’m going to go throw up, and I’ll hold my own fucking hair back, and then I am leaving.”

  After she left, I put my head down on the bar. It was aching already. I could tell Cynthia was standing over me, tapping her foot. After a long silence, I heard her say “You get one chance, Jake. You know that, right? Just one.”

  “I figured,” I said, pressing my fingers against my eyelids.

  “You haven’t learned anything, have you?” she said. “You’re an idiot.”

  “I know,” I said. I sat there and waited to fall asleep, waited to wake up in misery.

  The next night, the 101st night, we were waiting from the moment the sun went down, but the girls didn’t come. And the time ticked by.

  “Where are they?” asked my youngest brother.

  I shrugged.

  “They’re not coming, are they?” he whimpered.

  “They’re coming,” I said.

  And we waited, not even tapping our feet to the music. I could hear the sound of each second falling t
o the floor.

  “They’re not coming,” said my youngest brother again a few minutes before midnight.

  “And it’s your fault,” snarled my second brother. “All your bullshit threats to me, and you go and fuck everything up at the end. What’s wrong with you, anyway? Too many fucking blow jobs scramble your brains?”

  “Shut up, Max,” I said quietly. “I swear to God if you don’t shut up, I’ll break your fucking jaw.”

  My other brothers slowly cleared away while Max stepped up close. I could hear him breathing. “You couldn’t take me when were kids, Jake, and you can’t take me now.”

  “Not in my bar, boys.” Cynthia’s warning voice seemed to come from miles away.

  The door slammed open and the girls staggered in. Isabel wasn’t wearing much makeup and she wasn’t dressed up. She was wearing a pair of hot pink jeans and a black cotton tank top.

  * * *

  Her eyes were swollen, like she’d been crying.

  She grabbed my hand.

  That night my feet felt like lead and the music sounded like so much static. Each beat felt like a hammer blow to the head and every step was like pulling teeth. But we ground it out, nothing if not determined, and by the end of the night there were holes in the soles of my boots as big as nickels.

  There was a silent pause for a minute while my brothers and I stared at each other. Then my youngest brother walked tentatively toward the door, licked his lips, and stepped outside. More silence, and then we could hear his scream of joy, sharp as an arrow in my heart. Nine of my other brothers stampeded for the door.

  Max waited uncertainly and then came over and put his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Jake.” His voice sounded almost affectionate.

  I shook him off me and he shrugged, cast one last look at me, and left. He closed the door gently behind him.

  “You’re free,” she said.

  I didn’t feel it.

  “So go on,” she said. “Get out of here.”

  “I didn’t think you were coming back,” I said.