Lightspeed Magazine Issue 31

by Ted Chiang

  In the midst of our suffering, I explained to them that one of us must sacrifice himself for the others. I explained how I, as I had not yet finished my work, was unable to serve. To this they nodded sagely. And which of you, I asked, dare sacrifice himself, by so doing to become a type and shadow of your Jesus? There was among them one willing to step forward, and he was instantly shot dead. He smiteth, I could hear the men mumbling. What followed? Reader, we ate him.

  By winter’s end we had consumed two of his fellows, who stepped forward both times unprotesting, each as my apostle honored to become a type and shadow of their Jesus by a sacrifice of his own. Their bones we cracked open to eat the marrow, but the skulls of all three we preserved and enshrined, out of respect for their sacrifice—along with the skull of Finger which I had preserved and continue to carry with me to this day. Early in Spring, I urged them further into the hills until we had discovered a small valley whose soil seemed fertile and promising. In a cave, we discovered an unrefined salt. I taught them to fish and how as well to smoke their fish to preserve it, and this they described as becoming fishers of men (though to my mind it were more properly described as fishers of fish). We again set snares along game trails and left them undisturbed and this time caught rabbits and birds, and sometimes a squirrel, and this meat we ate or smoked and preserved as well. The hides they learned to strip and tan, and they bound them about their feet. I taught them as well how to cultivate those plants as were available to them, and to make them fruitful. When they realized it was my will that they fend for themselves, they were quick to learn. And thus we were not long into Summer when I called them together to inform them of my departure.

  At first they would not hear of this, and could not understand why their Jesus would leave them. Other sheep I have, I told them, that are not of this fold. Having spent the winter in converse with them and reading an old tattered copy of their Bible, I had become conversant in matters of faith, and though I never did feel a temptation to give myself over to it, I did know how to best employ it for my purposes. When even this statement did not seem sufficient for the most stubborn among them, who still threatened to accompany me, I told them, Go and spread my teachings.

  By this I meant what I had taught them of farming and clothing themselves and hunting but, just as with Barton, it would have served me well to be more specific. Indeed, this knowledge did spread, but with it came a ritual of the eating of human flesh throughout the winter months, a ritual I had not encouraged and had only resorted to in direst emergency. This they supported not only with glosses from the Bible, but words from a new Holy Book they had written on birchbark pounded flat, in which I recognized a twisted rendering of my own words.

  It was not until I had been discovered by my former compatriots and imprisoned briefly under suspicion and then returned to my own campsite that I heard any hint of this lamentable practice. It was enquired of me if I had seen any such thing in my travels in the Midwest. Perhaps it was wrong of me to feign ignorance. And I had long returned to my duties, despite the hard questions concerning dog and dogcart and provisions that I had been unable to answer, before there were rumors that the practice had begun, like a contagion, to spread, and had even crossed from the Midwest into our own territories. I had indeed lost nearly all sense of my days as a Midwestern Jesus before the authorities discovered my name circulating in Midwestern mouths, inscribed in their holy books. If, when I was again apprehended, I was indeed preparing to flee—and I do not admit to such—it is only because of a fear of becoming a scapegoat, a fear which is in the process of being realized.

  If I had intended to create this cult around my own figure, why then would I have ever left the Midwest? What purpose would I have had in abandoning a world in which I could have been a God? The insinuations that I have been spreading my own cult in our own territories are spurious. There is absolutely no proof.

  There is one other thing I shall say in my defense: What takes place beyond the borders of the known world is not to be judged against the standards of this world. Then, you may well inquire, what standard of judgment should be applied? I do not know the answer to this question. Unless the answer be no standard of judgment at all.

  I was ordered to write an honest accounting of how I became a Midwestern Jesus, and to the best of my ability I have done so. I regret to say that at the conclusion of my task, I now see for the first time my actions in a cold light. I have no faith in the clemency of my judges, nor faith that any regret for those events I unintentionally set in motion will lead to a pardon. I have no illusions: I shall be executed.

  Yet I have one last request. After my death, I ask that my body be torn asunder and given in pieces to my followers. Though I remain a heretic, I see no way of bringing my cult to an end otherwise. Let those who want to partake of me partake and then I will at least have rounded the circle, my skull joining a pile of skulls in the Midwest, my bones shattered and sucked free of marrow and left to bleach upon the plain. And then, if I do not arise from the dead, if I do not appear to them in a garment of white, Finger beside, then perhaps it all will end.

  And if I do arise, stripping the lineaments of death away to reveal renewed the raiment of the living? Permit me to say, then, that it is already too late for all of you, for I come not with an olive branch but a sword. He smiteth, and when he smiteth, ye shall surely die.

  © 2006 by Brian Evenson.

  Originally published in Paraspheres, edited by Rusty Morrison & Ken Keegan.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Brian Evenson is the author of twelve books of fiction, most recently the novel Immobility and the story collection Windeye (2012). His novel Last Days (2009) won the American Library Association’s Award for Best Horror Novel. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. His short story collection The Wavering Knife won the IHG Award. He lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

  Family Teeth (Part 5): American Jackal

  J.T. Petty

  One

  He watched her legs approach in the mirror and smiled down at the butter melting on his pancakes when she sat on the stool beside him.

  “You’re free to sit anywhere you like, but I can’t much promise to be good company,” he said.

  “Here we go,” she said.

  “My dad just won the lottery, nine thousand dollars. Probably be half that after taxes, but he wants me to come home and help him spend it. Shit. Take a lot more money than that to get me back East.”

  “He send you any of that money?” she asked.

  “I got money. Buy you breakfast? What do you want?”

  He waved at the cook until he came over and took the lady’s order. She plucked the ice from her water glass and piled it on a napkin and licked the moisture from her fingers.

  She asked him what happened to his hands and he told a story about a small bear coming after his horse while he was up greasing the gearbox on a wind pump.

  “Wasn’t that big a bear, but the horse was about ready to shit sideways and die and I liked that horse, so I climbed down before I even realized I was out there without a gun—which was damn stupid I know, but I’m not too proud to admit it when last night’s Em Gee Dee makes me stupid in the morning. Grabbed the closest thing at hand and swung it pretty hard and ended up beating that bear to death with a log chain.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Yeah. Swear to god.”

  She laughed and poked egg yolks with hard-fried bacon and dragged sulfur-yellow stripes through the red chile on her plate.

  “You’re a liar,” she said. Which was a true. David hadn’t talked to his father in three years, and the man played the lottery often but never won more than ten dollars. David had never seen a bear in the wild closer than half a mile and the only animal he killed on the ranch was a scrawny dog he shot in the haunches with a rifle and claimed to have mistook for a coyote. The dog’s owner misbelieved David and wouldn’t acce
pt a liar’s apology, so they fought until the man was unconscious and David’s knuckles were swollen beneath broken skin.

  “You never did,” she said. “It’s not possible.”

  “I swear. You can ask anybody.”

  “You beat a bear to death.”

  “She wasn’t that big a bear.”

  “With a lawn chair.”

  He whooped and laughed and pressed his forearm to his mouth to keep from spitting pancakes on the counter.

  “Log. Chain,” he said. “I killed her with a log chain.”

  She laughed.

  “That’s a hell of an accent you’ve got,” she said.

  David was born in inland Maine among flat-voiced Protestants, but soaked up accents like a mockingbird. He couldn’t talk to an Irishman for three minutes without catching a brogue, or to a black man from anywhere without embarrassing himself. Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado had all dragged his vowels in different directions, and now cowboying on a ranch in New Mexico had softened his consonants and slowed his cadence, made everything sound a little bit like a question that expected bad news in the answer.

  “Are you a cowboy?” she asked.

  “I was until last night. As of now, I am unemployed.”

  “You quit?”

  “Got fired,” he said, and: “I’m gonna miss that horse,” his only whole truth of the entire conversation. The man who owned the dog David shot was the son of the woman who owned the ranch.

  “What kind of accent is that?” he asked, “Indian?”

  “We’re from Mexico.”

  “We?”

  “My family.”

  “They with you here?”

  “Family’s always with you.”

  “Shit, mine weren’t. Even when they were around. Where in Mexico? I been to Mexico.”

  “All over. We’re gypsies. I’m on my own now.”

  “Where are you heading?”

  “The city, I guess.”

  “I could go to the city,” she said.

  She watched him and he couldn’t tell if she was smiling or not. “Do you want a beer?” he said. “I’m gonna get a beer.”

  “Okay.”

  He called out to the cook and ordered.

  “I need to piss,” she said, the final word soft and vulgar. He wanted to feel her ear between his teeth. He closed his hand into a fist so it wouldn’t reach out to touch her.

  She stepped off the stool and walked across the restaurant, knowing that he was watching her go. The midday sun made a glaring white sheet of the plate glass windows and outlined her dark body against the faded cotton of the shirt. David was glad he was sitting down.

  He stared carefully at the beaded condensation on the bottle of beer before him when she walked back a few minutes later.

  She said her name was Maribel, and David said his name was Jason.

  Two

  He told her he was allergic to latex and she said she couldn’t get pregnant anyway.

  Afterward, coyotes cried out in the desert. Maribel curled on the sweat-damp sheets and covered her ears.

  “Just dogs,” David said.

  Maribel shook her head, eyes closed.

  Bars of silver pierced the skin under her clavicles, joined by a chain that held a small amulet to the hollow of her throat, a hard-shriveled brown bead set in silver.

  “What is that?” David asked. “A piece of an animal?”

  “Don’t touch it.”

  “Looks like a spider egg.”

  She turned away from him and he lay listening to the coyotes yell at the sky.

  They found cash in an unlocked motel room and bought tickets on the Greyhound north to Taos to find her brother.

  “He needs to pay me back some money,” she said.

  They walked from the bus depot into the desert and to a few trailers parked in the lot of an abandoned gas station. Maribel pointed out her brother’s trailer and David knocked.

  A fat old woman in a slip too small for her opened the door and laughed and picked at her scalp and told Maribel that her brother was out drinking.

  “You send him back to me, all right?” the old woman said, scraping a nail on her tooth.

  When they found her brother, he was in a hat several sizes too small, drunk and insulting the bartender.

  He said, “Maribel!” and hugged her, and, “Who the fuck is this?”

  She introduced him as Jason and her brother ignored David’s offer of a handshake.

  “I’m Diego,” her brother said and tried to put his hat on David’s head. David ducked out of the way.

  “What are you doing, man?” David asked.

  “You need a hat, bro.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Diego,” Maribel said.

  “He’d look good in the hat, wouldn’t he?” Diego said, balancing it atop his head as he carefully tilted more Jim Beam down his throat.

  The bartender served David and Maribel and gave Diego a hard time. Diego wouldn’t let them pay for the drinks but wasn’t carrying any cash himself. He kept trying to put his tiny hat on David’s head.

  All three were drunk by the time they walked back to Diego’s trailer. They ate potato chips and watched Diego and the old woman smoke meth.

  David told an entirely false story from his teenage years about saving a boy’s life who’d stopped breathing after inhaling nitrous oxide.

  “You going to make my sister a mother?” Diego asked without looking at him.

  “Jesus Christ,” David said.

  “Shut up, Diego,” Maribel said.

  “Way of the world, man. You gonna do it?”

  “We met two days ago.”

  “But you gonna do it, right? Dear old mamma,” Diego said and smiled at his sister and poured a little beer on the floor.

  “What’s that mean?” David asked.

  They watched TV for a while. Maribel found an incomplete deck of cards and carefully assembled a tenuous house.

  Diego put his hat on David’s head and he let it rest there.

  “How I look?” David asked.

  “Like a cowboy,” Maribel said.

  “That’s my hat, motherfucker,” Diego said, and slapped David across the mouth. They fought inside the trailer until the fat woman pushed them out and kicked David in the throat where he landed.

  David hit the fat woman in the jaw and knocked her unconscious. She smiled obscenely, asleep with her eyes open.

  Diego knocked David down and stomped on his hand, breaking a finger. David kicked Diego in the knee and, when he fell, grabbed a folding lawn chair and beat him with it until he stopped struggling.

  They went back inside and Maribel taped David’s fingers together while the fat woman traded some cough medicine for beers from a neighbor.

  David gave Diego his hat back and they smoked meth together and Diego said, “I think he’ll do pretty good.”

  David and the fat woman laughed at each other while Diego and Maribel argued in Spanish.

  In the morning, her brother gave Maribel nearly three thousand dollars in dry cash.

  “I got twelve more I could give you,” Diego said.

  “I only want mine,” Maribel said.

  “I’d give you the twelve for that pacifier.”

  Diego touched the amulet at Maribel’s throat through her shirt.

  “Fuck yourself, Diego,” she said, and he laughed.

  “Twelve thousand?” David asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “No. We’re going,” Maribel said.

  “Give your man a say in the matter. Good as family now,” Diego said.

  “Shut up,” Maribel said.

  “You send me your address when you figure a place to live,” Diego said.

  “I’m not doing that,” Maribel said.

  David stretched and rubbed his knuckles against the small of his back. Meth always made his kidneys hurt the next day.

  They used a thousand dollars to buy a thoroughly used car and drove so
uth toward Albuquerque.

  Maribel said, “That’s the last you’re going to meet of my family.”

  “He seemed all right,” David said.

  “He’s got his problems.”

  “You got other brothers and sisters?”

  “Yeah. Lots.”

  “I got two brothers, both older,” David said.

  “I’m the baby of the family,” said Maribel.

  “Bastards, both of them.” David broke his left thighbone at the age of fourteen when his oldest brother, Jason, pushed him off the roof of the house.

  “You didn’t know your father?”

  “I did, he was around. He was a bastard, too. What was that business about your mom?” David asked.

  “Nothing,” Maribel said.

  “Is she dead?”

  “Yeah. I never knew her.”

  “Never really knew my mom either,” David said. “She got an infection from a bad tooth before I even learned to walk, got down into her heart. She was around for another dozen years or so, but never really matched up with the stories I’d hear about what she had been like before. She was all right though. If you could make her laugh she’d forget about being sick for a while.”

  “Coyotes killed my mother,” Maribel said.

  “Okay, you win,” David said, laughing.

  “I’m serious.”

  “Coyotes.”

  “Killed my mother.”

  “Like. Ate her?”

  “I was just a baby.”

  “Holy shit.”

  Liars don’t trust anybody and David had his doubts.

  Three

  They rented half a house in Albuquerque in David’s name alone. He got a cash-under-the-table job with a pest control company that he had to give up on account of how much the idea of steel traps upset Maribel.

  They drank prodigiously and fucked more often than David ever had in his life, even as a teenager. He got used to being called Jason.

  He learned to go back to sleep when Maribel woke screaming in the night. He learned to ignore the banging on the walls from the old woman who lived next door.