It makes me think that none of the rest of us will get the flu.
It makes me believe we will hang on.
We sit in our bed in the big main building of the coast guard station—no one lives in the houses because they are too hard to defend. Our home is a mattress and box spring sitting on the floor of an office, next to a desk. I feed Kate a yellow M&M and eat a brown one.
“Don’t eat all the brown ones,” she says.
“Oh, do you like them best?”
“No, you’re giving me all the pretty ones and eating all the broken and brown ones.”
“I ate yesterday,” I say.
“I ate today.” She picks up a red one and holds it out to me on the palm of her hand.
I take it.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry I ate.” I wish they had surrendered before.
“I want you to eat,” she says.
“You’re not.”
“I am,” she says, and pops an M&M in her mouth. “Now I am again.”
I sigh and settle on my side.
“Promise me you’ll eat me,” she says. “If it happens.”
I don’t say anything.
“You’re so brave,” she whispers. “I would if I could, but I can’t. I can’t be like you.”
I smell the M&M’s and the dusty carpet. I feel the bones of my hips on the mattress.
“Eat me because I love you,” she says. “Because you love me. Because you have to. Promise me.”
Maria Dahvana Headley
Black Powder
from The Djinn Falls in Love
The rifle in this story is a rifle full of wishes. Maybe all rifles seem to be that, at least for a moment, when they’re new, before any finger has touched any trigger. Maybe all rifles seem as though they might grant a person the only thing they’ve ever wanted.
At the beginning of this story, there are no bullets. At the end of this story, there are no more bullets left. In the middle of this story, there are enough bullets to change the world into something entirely different.
This rifle is full of anything anyone could want, each bullet a captive infinity, each an ever after.
Bullets may be made, in the old way, of a thin cylinder of any animal’s gut packed full of black powder and attached to the back of the projectile with glue. They may be made of bronze points, of buckshot, with tiny arrows—fléchettes—embedded in them to maximize damage on entry. Rifles may shoot anything from orbs to thorns, which may be propelled, in antique weapons, by a mixture of charcoal, potassium nitrate, and sulfur, or, in certain situations, by the motions of something else entirely.
Thus may one fire a wish. Thus may one shoot a star.
That’s a story people tell, in any case. Like all stories, this one contains lies, and like all old rifles, this one contains the dust of its history.
Perhaps the story begins with a kid behind the wheel of a truck, this same stolen rifle beside him.
This kid—call him the Kid, why not?—has big plans. Here at the base of the mountains, he’s been looking up too long, seeing only girls who want nothing to do with him. He stole the rifle from the dumb old man at the pawnshop, who never even saw him coming.
The Kid shot the rifle once, and then—
The Kid’s nothing special. He’s gangle, denim, pustule, and pouch. Back pocket of his jeans is full of stolen chew, and his hands are covered in corn-chip ashes like he’s been elbow deep in a Dorito crematorium.
Something weird happened when he pulled the trigger, something he’s not thinking about.
Something asked him a question.
The something is in the back of the Kid’s pickup truck now, on the dog’s blanket. Maybe real, maybe imagined, maybe a flashback to some cartoon reality seen when he was little. He’s decided not to think about it.
Out here, near the remnants of the reactor, there’s a marker for a massacre of trappers, and there’s a historical designation for the place, their possessions enough to identify them.
In the summer, poison mushrooms leap from the shadows, shape of skulls. The spot is surrounded by cliffs that glow green at sunset, and the hollow in the center feels seen. It’s been declared safe enough, the radiation dispersed, though most people would never come here. It’s a bad place.
The Kid imagines the fire flooding up from it; pictures the pale blue sky when the meltdown happened, tree branches shaking, studded with black squirrels. The way ash fell from the heavens, and his mother walked out from the trailer and filled her hands with it, filled her mouth with it, rolled in it like a dog in snow.
“I didn’t know no better,” she says. “Lot of people didn’t. We thought it was some kinda miracle.”
Then she was pregnant, and she swears she doesn’t know how it happened, doesn’t know who the Kid’s father ever was.
He veers left on the highway and drives on the wrong side a while, singing along with the hum inside him. In the seat, the rifle sings too, bullets rattling, each a distinct tone.
The Kid feels stars inside his chest, burning novas, sparks flitting through his body. He’s a man on a mission, to spread the word of the dead.
He thinks about his future: a hero’s journey through the flat earth of high school. He’s readying himself to graduate from childhood and into legend.
Drop back in time to another part of the story, a hundred and fifty years ago, long before the Kid’s even born.
Out here in these woods, at that time, there’s a notorious freetrapper who takes all the pelts and all the women. He pays in plague as well as in trade goods, taking the beaver, the mink, the wolves, taking the daughters of chieftains and the wives of warriors.
He’s a bringer of disaster, and in the years he walks the woods, he takes wife after wife, never for long. Some die in childbirth, and some die in rapids, and some die by bear. One leaps from a cliff. They walk ahead of him and ride behind him. They are the starwatchers he uses when he can’t see a way out of the wild and the warmth he relies upon in winter. The animals hate him, and the wives hate him, and he carries a black-powder rifle, an ax, and a bottle of whiskey. Anything else he needs, he steals. Every time he takes a new wife, he’s cursed by all the inhabitants of the places he passes through. There are babies left behind after each wife dies, and he gives some to the animals and puts others out to be collected by anyone who lives in the trees. The trapper wants only wives, not children.
The rifle in this story is the one that once belonged to this trapper.
Downwind and upriver of the trapper’s territory, there’s a pack of company men with a bag of sugar and a bag of tea, a pile of pelts tied to horseback, the riders chewed over by the tilted teeth of the mountains. Each green cliff glints with ghosts, and each new place is written on a map of the men’s making.
Silk has not yet taken over the world. It’s the trappers’ mission to bring back fur and carry it into drawing rooms where the pianos are made of wood from other conquered places. At night the men circle, make their fire, boil the river, steep tea leaves, drink it hot and sweet, the only rightness, their ragged remnant of civilization. It’s a strange civilizer, the drinking of brackish water.
They write journals of their expedition into forbidden country: caverns narrow and full of black wings, pine trees sharp as knives pressed into soft bellies. Each man has his spoon. Each man has something gold hanging under his shirt. If they chisel into the stone they find only dark muddy green, stone the color of swamp, no emeralds. Above them, mountain lions stalk the white bone knobs at the back of each man’s neck.
One of the men’s got a monkey with him, the only source of comedy, brought from his lady at home, and he sets his monkey off into the woods. The monkey chitters high and holy, telling him where the beavers are building their dams. That trapper comes back rich in oily pelts, the decapitated heads of beaver strewn on the path behind him, ghost tails slapping the water while the men sleep.
One day a woman appears at the edge of their camp. She carries two
pistols and wears trousers made of leather. Her eyes have tattoos of treelines along the lids.
Call her the Hunter.
With her is the French Canadian freetrapper, whose legend the men all know. He’s the Bluebeard of the Rocky Mountains, and his tales travel, but something’s wrong with him. He rides on the back of her horse, sidesaddle. He sucks at the insides of his cheeks, spits in the dirt, and bows his head. He wears a brilliant blue blanket around his shoulders and shivers, even when he’s near the fire. His beard’s gone half white.
The trappers decide he’s no longer a man. Something’s gone wrong, and whatever it is, they won’t ask. They decide never to speak of him again. Bad luck.
“What are you doing here?” the leader of the company men asks the woman. “What are you hunting?”
He’s already given her all the tobacco they’ve brought, though he doesn’t know why.
“What do you think I’m hunting?” she asks. “Don’t you know where you are? What do you call these mountains?”
They tell her their name for them, and she laughs. “That’s not their name. I’ve been following them around the center of the world. I’ve been hunting a long time.
“Let me tell you a story,” she says.
The men carefully fail to listen. The only stories to tell nine months into a trapping are about women, not by them. Girls on their backs, girls on horseback, girls in horsehair. No man wants to risk drawing the attention of his own ghosts, not this far in. The longer they travel in this country, the more fear travels with them. The women in these mountains are dangerous if they exist at all, and the men pretend they don’t, in favor of the few women working up in the gold veins and silver valleys outside the tourmaline range. The men make progress toward them, gathering pelts for payment at bars and brothels.
The story the Hunter tells them is something about a magical creature in the trees, left here by an earlier expedition, offloaded from a wagon, and chained in a room made of metal out in the woods, all alone.
“I ran up on the last man from that expedition, and he told me they put their monster where nobody would ever find it,” she says, and the men shudder.
“Next time I saw him, he was turned innards out,” she says, “and hanging from a tree. He was missing all his mains. So I guess they didn’t cage it well enough, now, did they? You haven’t seen it?”
They haven’t seen it.
When she rides away, the freetrapper looks back at them, and they pretend not to notice. All is well. Pelts and then home.
One morning, though, the men come upon a gathering of the dead, skeletons sitting in a circle, drinking tea. Cups shattered in the snow, gilt-edged smiles, brown stains in the ice. All the dead are dressed in furs, layer after layer of them, beaver, bear, and wolf. The skeletons are wearing the claws of the animals, the teeth of the animals, the tails of the animals.
The monkey leaps from its man’s shoulder and runs to one of the dead. It shrieks in recognition.
One of the living men kneels beside one of the skeletons and touches the skull with his fingernail, tapping it. With that touch the skeleton blooms, regaining all its lost flesh, young and strong and fat with feasting. It is a body full of brilliant blood. It is a familiar body. Each man sees himself there, and shudders in time, himself living, himself dead, all in the same moment.
There’s a whipping wind now, and hailstones. The fire rekindles in green flames, and there is a voice, and the voice tells them to eat.
There is the Hunter with the trees tattooed on her eyelids too, but she doesn’t arrive until somewhat later, and by then the thing she’s hunting is gone.
What do we hunt but each other? A hunter might go on an expedition, might map the forest and mountains, but what they’re truly looking for is their own broken heart hidden inside an elk, their own lost lover hidden inside a wolf, their own dead child hidden inside a bear. A hunter is always looking for wishes to come true, and if it takes blood and rending to get them, then it does. There is a magic in the explosion, in the black smoke cloud, in the way whatever one is hunting runs off, the way the hunter is left standing there, inhaling powder.
All most people wish for is more, wishing forever until tongues are parched and hearts are tired of beating. Love is a kind of wish.
Wishing for love is the same as wishing for more wishes.
Snap forward in time again, a hundred and fifty years. Now there’s a pawnshop down a dirt trail, deep in the woods, near the spot where the trappers died.
There’s a man named Yoth Begail behind the counter, scraggle jaw and white yellow beard, tin of chew in his front pocket and stretched tendons in his neck giving him the look of a scarecrow gone sentient. There’s pawned-off precious in the glass cases, dust on everything thick enough to epic it. These are the gun hoards of suicides from the local police repo, snuck out by janitors looking to buy other things, trading them over to Yoth Begail for the time being, taking his cash off to dealers and alimonies.
Yoth’s been out here sixty-five years, give or take. Pawnshops are robber beacons, and people come in a couple times a year to gunpoint Yoth, who pulls his own weapon from undercounter, no hesitation. Yoth’s got no town rules to live by. He sells things no one else can sell.
Got a case of stones brought in by the woman out near the reactor. Bunch of folks that way went to heaven and left their blood behind, crystalized into little geodes, and the woman, only one still out there, has been selling them for years. They left bones that look like milk opal too, centered with garnet marrow, and Yoth’s got some of those as well. The woman tried to sell him a skull, but he didn’t want that glittering thing around, the stony brain visible inside the opal casing. All of it was like to get him sick. Rest of the stones out here are hunks of green tourmaline, but the muddy kind, and tourmaline is rough luck.
Oh, Yoth’s got the usual pawn glories too. All the things people come to him to forget. He’s like a confessor in that way. Bingo-bought prizes and family heirlooms, forlorn valuables traded for canned-good grocery dollars. Pearl necklaces bought in Tahiti on the only vacation, engagement rings wrung off arthritic fingers. Televisions and trophies, couple of gold bars somebody brought in from a hoard, pennies on the dollar, ’cause you can’t spend gold at the Walmart. He’s got a gun-shop license, and he can sell whatever he wants to anybody he likes. These guns have been used to kill all kinds of things: animals, trespassers, ownselves.
Up high on the wall there’s a glass case containing Yoth’s best rifle. It’s a black-powder model, so in federal terms it’s not even a firearm. It can be sold to anyone, held by anyone. Black powder doesn’t need a license. When Yoth’s in the mood, he turns out the lights in the pawn, drinks a beer, and lets the rifle shine. Under the fluorescents it looks like any old firearm, dents and pits, but it came with weird copper-cased bullets, and the bullets are hot to the touch, even now, unfired since the 1800s.
Or rather, fired only once, by Yoth himself, and he got what he needed.
It’s not for sale, but the pawn ticket’s out there still. Brought in by a young woman with tattoos on her eyelids, who said there was no place out far enough that she could be sure people wouldn’t find it, so she was entrusting it to Yoth Begail and his pawn palace for the time being.
“Welp,” said Yoth, who was familiar with people trying to keep their fingers on their valuables from afar. “I’ll take it off your hands then, ma’am.”
“You have to keep it safe,” she said. “It’s a damned old thing and it’s been in some trouble.”
“Nothing’s damned without it’s had human hands on it,” Yoth said. “That’s just a black-powder rifle. It’s the man with bad aim that’s the problem.”
“So you say,” she said. “But you’d be wrong. I’ll be back for it. I haven’t slept in a while, and it’s that thing’s fault. Every so often I need a rest bad. There has to be a bargain made.”
Yoth considered that. He was a young man then, and he thought for a moment he could conside
r a wife like her, if he’d consider any wife, but in her stare he saw nothing he liked. Woman looked like a wild dog, and when she shut her eyes she looked like a rattler. She was wearing clothes so old you’d have thought she lived in a cave, and she had white fur draped around her shoulders, fur of some animal he didn’t know. Leather pants so filthy she might’ve been an animal from the waist down.
“You a hunter, then?” he asked.
“Am that,” she said. “Been hunting in these woods years now. Trapping too.”
“Why haven’t I seen you before?” asked Yoth. She couldn’t have been much older than he was.
“I was out a long time, this last one,” she said. “Years. Got any tobacco? Can’t smoke when I’m hunting these.”
“Animals don’t care,” said Yoth, passing her a cigarette, lighting it for her. This was before he took to chewing, safer in a pawnshop.
She looked at him and laughed. “What I’m hunting likes the smoke. If I smoked, it’d find me before I’m ready to be found.”
The tattoos on her eyelids were faint enough to be scars, but Yoth could tell someone had inked them in. Treelines on top of the mountains out here, recognizable peaks. A map. He looked at them secretly as he wrote out her pawn ticket.
“You keep that rifle for me,” she said. “I’ll be back. Don’t fire it unless you want to call up trouble.”
He peered out the window to watch her go. She was on horseback, the horse draped in an unlikely blanket the color of bluebells, a piebald black-and-white mane. Her mount moved like someone dragged up out of an armchair to dance to a song he’d never heard before. There was a little monkey in a vest sitting on the back of the saddle. The woman, the horse, and the monkey disappeared into the trees, and not long after that, snow piled up against his windows. Time he managed to dig himself out, Yoth Begail had decided to forget about the strange tracks her horse had left, nothing like hooves.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 38
