The girl who spoke up next was not yet eight. Her face held a whisper of brown; a girl who might have been hers. And Raul’s.
“Do you have any children?” the girl said.
All of Nayima’s work, gone. No composure. No smile. A sharp pain in her belly.
“No, I’ve never had children,” she said. “None that survived.”
Nayima shot a pointed gaze at the minder, who did not contradict her. Maybe the minder didn’t know about Specimen 120. Maybe a bureaucrat had made up the story to tease Raul.
“Okay,” the girl said, shrugging, not yet schooled in the art of condolences. “What do you miss the most about the time before the Plague?”
An easy answer came right away, and it almost wasn’t a lie. “Halloween.”
When she explained what Halloween had been, the children sat literally open-mouthed. She wondered which part of her story most stupefied them. The ready access to sweets? The trust of strangers? The costumes?
The host looked relieved with the children’s enchantment and announced that the visit was over. A flurry of waving blue gloves. Nayima waved back. She even smiled again.
“Don’t forget my water credits,” Nayima said from behind her happy teeth.
But the minder’s image had already flashed away.
• • • •
Nayima lined up her contraband on the front table — the sawed-off, a box of shells, an old Colt she’d found in the attic with its full magazine, the baseball bat she kept at her bedside. She’d even found a gas mask she’d bartered for at market. When the marshals came, she would be prepared. In her younger years, she would have boarded up at least her front windows, but her weapons would have to do.
“Raul is the real child,” she told Tango and Buster while they watched her work. Buster swatted at a loose shell at the edge of the table, but Nayima caught it before it hit the floor. “He believes every word they say. ‘Things are changing,’ he says. Believing in miracles. Sending marshals here — to me!”
Tango mewed softly. A question.
“Of course they’re not bringing a child here,” she said. “A judge’s ruling? In favor of carriers? You know the lab-coats would fight to keep her.” She shook her head, angry with herself for her weakness. “Besides, there is no child. Babies with carrier genes don’t live.”
The crate was light enough to lift to the table with only slight pressure in her lower back, gone when she stretched. But she could only roll a barrel slowly, oh-so-slowly, across her threshold. How had Raul managed so easily? She left the second barrel outside. By the time she closed her door again, her lower back pulsed with pain and she felt aged by a decade.
“Lies,” Nayima said.
Tango and Buster agreed with frenzied mews.
She would have no Sunday dinner if she died tomorrow, Nayima reminded herself. So she got her cleaver from the kitchen, unwrapped the beef, and began chopping the meat on the table, not caring about dents in the wood. She chopped until she was perspiring and sweat stung her eyes.
Nayima held a chunk with both hands and sank in her teeth. She mostly did not bother with salt in her own cooking, so the taste was overwhelming at first. The cats gnawed at the meat beside her on the table with loud purrs.
“Could there be a child?”
Suppose they’d had a breakthrough, found a way to rewire the genes? But why go through that trouble and expense when other children were being born? The girl must be a failed experiment. A laboratory fluke. Did they need caretakers for a child born with half a brain — was that it? Nayima swore she’d be damned if she’d spend the years she had left tending the lab-coats’ mistakes.
“But there is no child,” she reminded Tango and Buster. “It’s all a lie.”
After dark, with her flashlight to guide her, Nayima set her traps for the thief cat with slices of meat and visited the wooden chicken coop Raul had helped her build, as big as her grandmother’s backyard shed. She checked the loose wires in the rear, but the hole was still secure. She hadn’t collected eggs earlier, so chickens had defecated on some. A few eggs lay entirely crushed, yolks seeping across the straw.
Nayima was exhausted by the time she’d cleaned the nestboxes, scrubbed the surviving eggs, and set them on a bowl in her kitchen for Raul to find later — but she couldn’t afford to sleep tonight. The marshals might come at any time.
Nayima fixed herself a cup of black tea from her new water — so fresh! — and sat vigil by her front window with her shotgun, watching the empty pathway. Sometimes her eyes played tricks, animating the darkness. A far-off cat’s cry sounded like a baby’s, waking Nayima when she dozed.
Just before dawn, bells jingled near the chicken coop. Heart clambering, Nayima ran outside. The food was gone from the first trap she reached, but the door had not properly sprung. Shit.
More frantic jingling came from the trap twenty yards farther. Nayima raced toward it, her light in one hand and her gun in the other.
A pair of eyes glared out at her from beyond the bars.
The cat scrambled to every corner of the cage, desperate to escape while bells mocked him. This was the one. Nayima recognized the monster tabby’s unusual size.
“Buddy, you stole the wrong chicken.”
Nayima could not remember the last time she had felt so giddy. She carefully lowered her flashlight to the ground, keeping it trained on the trap. Then she raised her shotgun, aiming. She’d blow a hole in her trap this way, but she had caught the one she was looking for.
The cat mewed — not angry, beseeching. With a clear understanding of his situation.
“You started it, not me,” Nayima said. “Don’t sit there begging now.”
The cat’s trapped eyes glowed in her bright beam. Another plaintive mew.
“Shut up, you hear me? This is your fault.” But her resolve was flagging.
The cat raised his paw, shaking the cage door. How many times had she done the very same thing? How many locks had she tested, searching for freedom?
Could there really be a child?
Nayima sobbed. Her throat was already raw from crying. Never again, she had said. No more tears. No more.
Nayima went to the trap’s door and flipped up the latch. The cat hissed at her and raced away like a jaguar, melting into the dark. She hoped he would run for miles, never looking back.
Is my little girl with those zookeepers without even a name?
“But it’s all lies,” she whispered at the window, as she stroked Tango in her lap. “Isn’t it?”
Dawn came and went with the roosters’ crowing. Nayima did not move to collect the morning eggs, or to eat any of the beef she and the cats had left, or to empty her bulging bladder. She watched the sky light up her empty pathway, her open gate.
Why hadn’t she closed the gate?
Based on the sun high above, it was nearly noon when Nayima finally stood up.
The metallic glint far down the roadway looked imaginary at first. To be sure, Nayima wiped away dust on her window pane with her shirt, although the spots outside still clouded it. The gleam seemed to vanish, but then it was back, this time with bright cobalt blue lights that looked out of place against the browns and grays of the road. Two sets of blue lights danced in regimented patterns, back and forth.
Nayima’s breath fogged her window as she leaned closer, so she wiped it again.
Hoverbikes!
Two large hoverbikes were speeding toward her house, one on each side of the road at a matching pace, blue lights snaking across their underbellies. At least it wasn’t an army, unless more were coming. Marshals’ hoverbikes were only big enough for two, at most.
“You damn fool, Raul,” she whispered again, but she already had forgiven him too.
Nayima was too exhausted to pick up her shotgun. She had failed the test with her cat thief, so what made her think she could fight marshals? Let them take what they wanted. As long as she had Tango and Buster, she could start again. She always did.
; As the hoverbikes flew past her gate, Nayima counted one front rider on each bike in the marshals’ uniform: black jackets with orange armbands. The second rider on the lead bike was only Raul — his face was hidden behind the black helmet, but she knew his red hickory shirt. His father had worn one just like it, Raul had told her until she wanted to scream.
“Nayima!” Raul called. He flung his helmet to the ground.
The hoverbike Raul was riding hadn’t quite slowed to a stop, floating six inches above the ground, so Raul stumbled when he leaped off in a hurry. The marshal grabbed his arm to help hold him steady while the bike bobbed obediently in place.
“Querida, it’s me,” Raul said. “Don’t worry about the marshals. Please open the door.”
Nayima stared as both marshals took off their helmets, almost in unison, and rested them in the crooks of their arms. One was a young man, one a woman, neither older than twenty-five. The man was fair-haired and ruddy. The woman’s skin was nearly as dark as her own, her hair also trimmed to fuzz. Had she seen this man during an earlier classroom visit? He looked familiar, and he was smiling. They both were. She had never seen a marshal smile.
The marshals wore no protective suits. No masks. They did not hide their faces or draw weapons. Even ten yards away, through a dirty window, Nayima saw their eyes.
Nayima jumped when Raul banged on her door. “Nayima, ella está aqui!”
“I don’t see her.” Nayima tried to shout, but her throat nearly strangled her breath.
Raul motioned to the woman marshal, and she dismounted her hoverbike. For the first time, Nayima saw her bike’s passenger — not standing, but in a backward facing seat. A child stirred as the woman unstrapped her.
It couldn’t be. Couldn’t be. Nayima closed her eyes. Had they drugged her meat? Was it a hallucination?
“Do you see, Nayima?” Raul said. “Ven afuera conmigo. Please come.”
Raul left her porch to run back to the hoverbike. Freed from her straps, a child reached out for a hand for Raul’s help from the seat. Raul made a game of it, lifting the child up high. Curly spirals of dark hair nestled her shoulders. For an instant, the child was silhouetted in the sunlight, larger than life in Raul’s sturdy upward grasp.
The girl giggled loudly enough for Nayima to hear her through the window pane. Raul was a good father. Nayima could see it already.
“Now you’re going to meet your mamí,” Raul said.
Nayima hid behind her faded draperies as Raul took the girl’s hand and walked to the porch with her. When she heard the twin footsteps on her wooden planks, Nayima’s world swayed. She ventured a peek and saw the girl’s inquisitive face turned toward the window — dear Jesus, this angel had Gram’s nose and plump, cheerful cheeks. Raul’s lips. Buried treasure was etched in her delicate features.
Jesus. Jesus. Thank you, Dear Lord.
Nayima opened her door.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors, received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.
IN THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF THE PROMISED LAND
Robin Wasserman
“So it was, and so it is written:
And fire rained from the sky, and Abraham died, and all his brethren, and all that generation of the world were burned away.”
Isaac had really thought writing the bible would be easier.
“And Isaac saved the children of Abraham and led them to the promised land.
And Isaac took Julia and Ellen for his wives and begat Joseph and Thomas.
And Joseph begat Simon who begat Noah and Reuben and Thomas begat Paul and Israel and Luke. And the children of Abraham were fruitful, and increased abundantly, and multiplied, and the land was bountiful, and the LORD was pleased and gave them his favor, and the children of Abraham filled the land.”
The scribe falls silent, waiting; Isaac keeps his eyes closed, lets the words echo. Steeples his gnarled hands, draws a rasping breath, hocks up the phlegm.
Life is phlegm, now. Most likely death will be, too, a slow drowning in his own bed, gurgling and frothing. A death unfit for a patriarch. A voice, now, unfit for a patriarch, this phlegmy croak, but the scribe is of no use either, his thin warble that of a boy still proud of the peach fuzz on his balls, trying to prove himself to the sovereign Father. Failing.
“Again,” Isaac snaps, and the boy, with his stuttering rhythm, reads back the morning’s work.
And Isaac saved the children of Abraham.
And the children of Abraham filled the land.
Isaac likes the sound of these words, the roll and crest of them. He likes the tense of them, the tide sweeping the children’s struggles into the past, smoothing its edges, blurring its sharp, painful lines. Between each verse, the fine-grained memories: brighter, for Isaac, than the details of his breakfast meal or his great-grandchildren’s names. The burn of frostbitten fingertips in an ashen winter, the paperwhite crinkle of skin preserved too long from the sun. No room, in this new bible, for the names of the traitors who chose death over the Lord’s command, the whores who stole away with their soft curves and gentle voices, the plump breasts and fertile wombs meant to belong to Isaac, leaving him to women like Julia and Ellen and Shirley and Kate, too fat or too old or too angry. Abandoning him to Kate’s womb, all dried up, and Shirley’s tongue so sharp no one could blame her hands for tying the noose, silencing it for good. Julia’s inability, for so many years and so many daughters, to finally give Isaac a deserved son.
Isaac took Julia and begat Joseph. He appreciates the tidiness of it. The act of taking, his spindly thirteen-year-old limbs crushed against Julia’s bulk, her meaty fingers on his spurting organ as he finally became a man — third try’s the charm, her tears and his, their murmurs overlapping, God’s will God’s will God’s will, let it be done, please God let it be done, and eventually, fifteen seconds later, seven years later, three daughters later, it was.
Isaac still thought, then, that the woman he’d loved would return from the wilderness, to save him as he had once saved her. He assumed the Lord would return her to the fold, because Isaac desired it.
It never happened. Isaac never found anyone worthy of replacing her, and the voice he’d once heard so clearly never spoke to him again. In body and spirit, Isaac was left alone.
Here is another bible he could write, testament of Isaac, son of Abraham.
And then the father abandoned the son, charged him to be a man before his time and lead his people through the dark times.
And then the son was left by those he loved, the father and the whore and the LORD his God.
And then the son led his people, and pretended at a voice he could no longer hear.
And the people were sheep and the son was a liar and they were fruitful and multiplied.
He will die soon, and his truth will die with him. His children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, all those born after the skyfall, too young to mourn electricity or indoor plumbing, too trusting to question his version of the past, these are the ones who will build a future Isaac will never see. This week he will mark his birthday, and his Children will ma
rk it for him, with pageants and jubilation, and Isaac will pretend to enjoy it, but he knows holidays are the present’s way of embalming the past. This celebration of the birth of their savior doubles as an invitation to the grave; it would perhaps be less embarrassing for all if Isaac did as his forefathers had done and recede into ink and memory.
He will not begrudge them for it. Every man is ultimately a Moses, denied access to the future’s promised land. Still: when the scribe finishes his reading, Isaac tells the bright-eyed young man that he’s done an abominable job, that he’s no longer of use in this task, that God has determined his place is in the pastures, where his back will knot and his skin will burn and the stink of cowshit will flavor every breath and bite, and once the boy has slunk away, pretending, pathetically, at gratitude for God’s will, Isaac allows himself a smile.
• • • •
“Well?” The strange man broadcasts impatience like a bad actor, stubby fingers tapping at tree trunk leg, lips pursed ducklike around rotting teeth. “What’s it going to be?”
“Give me a minute, I’m thinking,” Isaac says, hocking his phlegm, and Isaac is thinking, thinking who and where and well what?
Isaac is thinking that it’s happening ever more often now, the amnesiac fogs that settle over him, shrouding the passage from present to future.
Isaac is thinking that God has finally returned to him, that in these sunblind spaces, God is speaking to him once again, and Isaac need only learn to hear.
He has his tricks. He knows how to observe, where to find the clues. This room is his room, the main living space of the small cabin in which he’s dwelled ever since the children ventured out of their compound and back to the land. As they spread down the mountain, the children of Abraham reclaimed the homes left behind by a generation of dead. They buried rotting bodies in vegetable gardens and claimed brick split levels and ranch houses for their own. It was a temporary solution. The old world was tainted, Isaac taught them that. Living among its luxuries risked too much, and so as decades passed, they felled trees and cut beams and erected homes of their own.
The End Has Come Page 20
