by Irene Gallo
“But I thought I had more time,” I whispered into the phone. It was true, I was supposed to have a few more days to think of things, to fix them—
“No one knows when God will take us home,” said my mother. “He’s in the Lord’s hands. Always has been.”
In my grief, I’d nearly forgotten about my sister, and in my absence, my apocalypse had shifted course without me.
* * *
The world ended anew with a shuddering sob, and I hit the ground running. This time, I touched down two weeks, two agonizing weeks, before I would board my plane, and the first thing I did was book an immediate red-eye home, hoping that if I got there early, I wouldn’t be too late.
* * *
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
* * *
“What’s life like in the city?” Melanie had asked me when she’d come to visit me, the spring before she died. I’d holed up in my dorm room to practice monologues for my senior showcase until my lungs burned, which probably meant I hadn’t been breathing properly anyhow, and Melanie had demanded that we go outside. We’d gone downtown, where well-dressed students and decently-dressed visitors crawled the streets, looking for artisanal french fries. We’d settled in a donut shop about as big as Melanie’s closet back home and were crunched up, knees to chests, on the inside windowsill.
She’d looked good, wearing the pale pink sweater I’d secretly sent her for her birthday, fingernails painted the way they never could be at home. But she’d also looked so tired, sallow almost, her face lined with the weight of our parents’ words.
All the things that my friends expected me to say—the city’s great, it’s exciting, I’m so lucky to live here, I love it—flashed through my head. So did the things I’d never told anyone, that I couldn’t tell anyone, because they wouldn’t want to hear it. How the loneliness was crippling; how I’d been fired from three part-time jobs by now; how every day, on my way to class, I walked past the same madman in the tunnel moaning for Jesus, a mess of languages spilling from his bloody lips, past a banner ad that read: GET AWAY WITHOUT LEAVING NEW YORK.
“It’s different,” I’d said at last. I don’t know who I am without you, I didn’t say.
“I understand,” Melanie had replied. I could tell that she did.
* * *
I have followed the path back, again and again, to that first stream of possibility. The events lined up so neatly that I could do them in my sleep, and sometimes did. They always led back to the desert monsoon, slogging through the water, my sister disappearing in a pillar of flame.
Why didn’t you want me there to help you? I wanted to ask. If you were this far gone, why didn’t you ask me to come home? I never got close enough to reach her through the wet-dust wind that snarled and roared around us, snatching my voice away.
* * *
There are timelines I don’t think about.
There is a timeline where the power never touches me, where I make it home in time for the party at the neighbor’s house, where a college boy’s hands are around my throat, not my sister’s, my legs kicking around his waist. Melanie scorches him to pieces, blackens him, shatters the boulders in the wash, and howls until her voice bleeds. Her tears fall into my eyes, sizzling and evaporating on contact, as the sky yawns above us, hungry, broken.
There are others, too, reaching back further along the daisy chain, when we were younger: slipping on ice, light cracking hard through my head; the agonizing sting of a scorpion on my arm, the stiffening of limbs, sudden tightness in my chest; Melanie in a dress for the first time, sobbing as our father screamed at her.
And forward, along the lines that branch out, fuzzing the borders of the future’s shape: knives, dented, rejected by my gut; police sirens wailing, gunshots ringing into the crater where my city used to be, the scent of burnt sugar; a plane that never lands safely, erupting into flame on the runway.
I only remember these as faint echoes, like a story someone told me once but whose details I’ve forgotten. Did they happen? Yes. No. The chain frays, spreads out like roots, possibilities endless.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
* * *
When Melanie and I were little, we’d lie on the carpet in the winter and warm our soggy feet by the radiator. This was when we still had a bad habit of jumping into snowbanks, exasperating our mom to no end. Melanie had just begun to learn how to melt shapes in the snow, the finest spark at the end of her index finger.
“I wonder why we can do these things,” Melanie had said, closing her fist around the lightning glinting across her palm.
I grinned at her, reaching out to catch a bit of stray static dancing down her arm. “Dunno. Don’t you think it’s cool to be special? It’s the one thing no one else can do but us.”
She wagged a foot at the radiator. “It’s kind of lonely, though.”
“At least you have me.”
“I guess so,” she said. “That’s better than nothing.”
I tackled her to the ground and we spent the next ten minutes hitting each other with stuffed animals.
* * *
My sister always dies before the world ends.
The sky is marred with the scars of my efforts, and I am so, so tired. The storm hums in my veins, one more cycle in many. I can’t count them anymore, numbers constantly in flux, ticking higher with each potential breath.
I wonder if this is what Melanie felt like every day of her life, so ripe with power, always at the precipice, always afraid to push in fear of making things worse.
This time around, I’m on the floor of my apartment, staring at my cell phone in my hand. My roommate is out and I’ve already missed my flight home. I let it pass, money evaporating into the void, meaningless.
Somewhere in the southwest, Melanie is walking out of the house, or is about to, her heart roaring with wildfire, lonely, alone. The sparks dance purple in her hands, lightning like veins through her arms.
You can’t fix this. It was never yours to control.
But my hands fumble over the touch screen, thumbs sliding wet over her face on the contact screen. She’s programmed in the same stupid anime ringtone I have on my phone, and it jingles inanely, all synthetic voices and preordained sound.
I wait, mouth dry, my body shaking like the sky above the Mojave before it rains. Painted in brilliant, feverish strokes in my head, the daisy chain grows.
ALYSSA WONG lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and really, really likes crows. Her stories have won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story, the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction, and the Locus Award for Best Novelette. She was a finalist for the 2016 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her fiction has been short-listed for the Hugo Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Strange Horizons, Nightmare Magazine, Black Static, and Tor.com, among others.
A Kiss with Teeth
Max Gladstone
Vlad has grown distant from his wife. His son has trouble at school. And he has to keep his sharp teeth hidden. Edited by Marco Palmieri.
Vlad no longer shows his wife his sharp teeth. He keeps them secret in his gums, waiting for the quickened skip of hunger, for the blood-rush he almost never feels these days.
The teeth he wears instead are blunt as shovels. He coffee-stains them carefully, soaks them every night in a mug with “World’s Best Dad” written on the side. After eight years of staining, Vlad’s blunt teeth are the burnished yellow of the keys of an old unplayed piano. If not for the stain, they would be whiter than porcelain. Much, much whiter than bone.
White, almost, as the sharp teeth he keeps concealed.
His wife, Sarah, has not tried to kill him since they married. She stores her holy water in a kitchen cabinet behind the spice rack, the silver bullets in a safe with her gun. She smiles when they make love, the smile of a woman sinking into a feather bed, a smile of jigsaw puzzles and blankets over warm laps by the fire.
He smiles back, with his blunt teeth.
They have a son, a seven-year-old boy named Paul, straight and brown like his mother, a growing, springing, sapling boy. Paul plays catch, Paul plays basketball, Paul dreams of growing up to be a football star, or a tennis star, or a baseball star, depending on the season. Vlad takes him to games. Vlad wears a baseball cap, and smells the pitcher’s sweat and the ball’s leather from their seat far up in the stands. He sees ball strike bat, sees ball and bat deform, and knows whether the ball will stutter out between third and second, or arc beautiful and deadly to outfield, fly true or veer across the foul line. He would tell his son, but Paul cannot hear fast enough. After each play, Paul explains the action, slow, patient and content. Paul smiles like his mother, and the smile sets Vlad on edge and spinning.
Sometimes Vlad remembers his youth, sprinting ahead of a cavalry charge to break like lightning on a stand of pikers. Blood, he remembers, oceans of it. Screams of the impaled. There is a sound men’s breaking sterna make when you grab their ribs and pull them out and in, a bassy nightmare transposition of a wishbone’s snap. Vlad knows the plural forms of “sternum” and “trachea,” and all declensions and participles of “flense.”
* * *
“Talk to the teacher,” his wife says after dinner. Paul watches a cricket game on satellite in the other room, mountainous Fijians squared off against an Indian team. Vlad once was a death cult in Calcutta—the entire cult, British colonial paranoia being an excellent cover for his appetites—and in the sixties he met a traveling volcano god in Fiji, who’d given up sacrifices when he found virgins could be had more easily by learning to play guitar. Neither experience left Vlad with much appreciation for cricket.
“On what topic should we converse?” he asks. He can never end sentences with prepositions. He learned English in a proper age.
“Paul. You should talk to the teacher about Paul.”
“Paul is not troubled.”
“He’s not troubled. But he’s having trouble.” She shows him the report card. She never rips envelopes open, uses instead a thin knife she keeps beside the ink blotter. Vlad has calculated that in eight years he will be the only person left in the world who uses an ink blotter.
The report card is printed on thick stock, and lists letters that come low in the limited alphabet of grades. No notes, no handwritten explanations. Paul is not doing well. From the next room, he shouts at the cricket match: “Go go go go!”
The teacher’s name is a smudge, a dot-matrix mistake.
* * *
At work Vlad pretends to be an accountant. He pretends to use spreadsheets and formulas to deliver pretend assurances to a client who pretends to follow the law. In furtive conversations at breaks he pretends to care about baseball. Pretending this is easy: Paul cares about baseball, recites statistical rosaries, tells Dad his hopes for the season every night when he’s tucked into bed. Vlad repeats these numbers in the break room, though he does not know if he says the right numbers in the right context.
From his cellular telephone, outside, he calls the number on the report card, and communicates in short sentences with someone he presumes is human.
“I would like to schedule a conference with my son’s teacher.” He tells them his son’s name.
“Yes, I will wait.”
“Six-thirty will be acceptable.”
“Thank you.”
* * *
Afternoons, on weekends, he and Paul play catch in a park one block up and two blocks over from their apartment. They live in a crowded city of towers and stone, a city that calls itself new and thinks itself old. The people in this city have long since learned to unsee themselves. Vlad and his son throw a baseball, catch it, and throw it back in an empty park that, if Vlad were not by now so good at this game of unseeing, he would describe as full: of couples wheeling strollers, of rats and dogs and running children, strolling cops and bearded boys on roller blades.
They throw and catch the ball in this empty not-empty field. Vlad throws slow, and Paul catches, slower, humoring his dad. Vlad sees himself through his son’s eyes: sluggish and overly skinny, a man who walks and runs and throws and catches as if first rehearsing the movements in his mind.
Vlad does rehearse. He has practiced thousands of times in the last decade. It took him a year to slow down so a human eye could see him shift from one posture to the next. Another year to learn to drop things, to let his grip slip, to suppress the instinct to right tipped teacups before they spilled, to grab knives before they left the hands that let them fall. Five years to train himself not to look at images mortal eyes could not detect. Sometimes at night, Paul’s gaze darts up from his homework to strange corners of the room, and Vlad thinks he has failed, that the boy learned this nervous tic from him and will carry it through his life like a cross.
Vlad does not like the thought of crosses.
He throws the ball, and throws it back again: a white leather sphere oscillating through a haze of unseen ghosts.
* * *
The teacher waits, beautiful, blonde, and young. She smells like bruised mint and camellias. She rests against her classroom door, tired—she wakes at four-fifteen every morning to catch a bus from Queens, so she can sit at her desk grading papers as the sun rises through steel canyons.
When he sees her, Vlad knows he should turn and leave. No good can come of this meeting. They are doomed, both of them.
Too late. He’s walked the halls with steps heavy as a human’s, squeaking the soles of his oxblood shoes against the tiles every few steps—a trick he learned a year back and thinks lends him an authentic air. The teacher looks up and sees him: black-haired and pale and too, too thin, wearing blue slacks and a white shirt with faint blue checks.
“You’re Paul’s father,” she says, and smiles, damn her round white teeth. “Mister St. John.”
“Bazarab,” he corrects, paying close attention to his steps. Slow, as if walking through ankle-deep mud.
She turns to open the door, but stops with her hand on the knob. “I’m sorry?”
“Paul has his mother’s last name. Bazarab is mine. It is strange in this country. Please call me Vlad.” The nasal American “a,” too, he has practiced.
“Nice to meet you, Vlad. I’m so glad you could take this time for me, and for Paul.” She turns back to smile at him, and starts. Her pupils dilate a millimeter, and her heart rate spikes from a charming sixty-five beats per minute to seventy-four. Blood rises beneath the snow of her cheeks.
He stands a respectful three feet behind her. But, cursing himself, he realizes that seconds before he was halfway down the hall.
He smiles, covering his frustration, and ushers her ahead of him into the room. Her heart slows, her breath deepens: the mouse convincing itself that it mistook the tree’s shadow for a hawk’s. He could not have moved so fast, so silently. She must have heard his approach, and ignored it.
The room’s sparsely furnished. No posters on the walls. Row upon row of desks, forty children at least could study here. Blackboard, two days unwashed, a list of students’ names followed by checks in multicolored chalk. This, he likes: many schools no longer use slate.
She sits on a desk, facing him. Her legs swing.
“You have a large room.”
She laughs. “Not mine. We share the rooms.” Her smile is sad. “Anyway. I’m glad to see you here. Why did you call?”
“My son. My wife asked me to talk with you about him. He has trouble in school, I think. I know he is a bright boy. His mother, my wife, she wonders why his grades are not so good. I think he is a child, he will improve with time, but I do not know. So I come to ask you.”
“How can I help?”
Vlad shifts from foot to foot. Outside, the night deepens. Streetlights buzz on. The room smells of dust and sweat and camellias and mint. The teacher’s eyes are large and gray. She folds her lips into her mouth, bites them, and unfolds them again. Lines are growing from the corners of her mouth to the corners
of her nose—the first signs of age. They surface at twenty-five or so. Vlad has studied them. He looks away from her. To see her is to know her pulse.
“What is he like in class, my son?”
“He’s sweet. But he distracts easily. Sometimes he has trouble remembering a passage we’ve read a half hour after we’ve read it. In class he fidgets, and he often doesn’t turn in his homework.”
“I have seen him do the homework.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. I’m not saying that he doesn’t do it. He doesn’t turn it in, though.”
“Perhaps he is bored by your class.” Her brow furrows, and he would kill men to clear it. “I do not mean that the class is easy. I know you have a difficult job. But perhaps he needs more attention.”
“I wish I could give it to him. But any attention I give him comes from the other children in the class. We have forty. I don’t have a lot of attention left to go around.”
“I see.” He paces more. Good to let her see him move like a human being. Good to avert his eyes.
“Have you thought about testing him for ADHD? It’s a common condition.”
What kind of testing? And what would the testing of his son reveal? “Could I help somehow? Review his work with him?”
She stands. “That’s a great idea.” The alto weight has left her voice, excitement returning after a day of weeks. “If you have time, I mean. I know it would help. He looks up to you.”
Vlad laughs. Does his son admire the man, or the illusion? Or the monster, whom he has never seen? “I do not think so. But I will help if I can.”
He turns from the window, and she walks toward him, holding a bright red folder. “These are his assignments for the week. If it helps, come back and I’ll give you the next bunch.”
She smiles.
Vlad, cold, afraid, smiles back.
* * *
“Great,” his wife says when he tells her. She does not ask about the teacher, only the outcome. “Great. Thank you.” She folds him in her arms, and he feels her strength. In the bathroom mirror they remind him of chess pieces, alabaster and mahogany. “I hate that building. The classrooms scare me. So many bad memories.”
