by Doug Draa
“Your Majesty,” I coughed. “I beg your forgiveness.” Yet the net in my heart constricted, and I knew that I did not want his forgiveness or companionship.
He sat in state with Chi and Ro perched on either side, their heads down. I understood that they had made their peace with him by renouncing me. The rings that once had adorned our branch lay scattered on the snowy ground. The claws of a thousand assembled ravens glimmered in the sunset.
The Raven King held my eye for a moment, then slowly turned his back on me.
The claws and beaks of those thousand ravens fell on me—stabbing, tearing, piercing. I felt my wing torn away, my twisted leg broken off, my wet eyes torn tenderly from their sockets. The release of death never came. Even once I lay as a wet heap seeping blood onto the fresh snow, I could feel the twitching and then the freezing of my flesh. It was worse than pain: it was a nullification. Yet the net around my heart kept me awake.
Through my frozen flesh grew sharp barbs, piercing like frosty breath drawn into a warm chest on a winter’s day. The white flowers pushed their heads up through my body. As they blossomed, I drew breath again, and stretched my tattered wings. All had regrown except my eyes. I could smell the work we ravens had wrought: the eyes had the moist scent of hope and decay. I wretched and choked.
“Learn loyalty,” she had said. “Return what you have stolen.”
And so I lifted my tattered wings each day, and, flying as best I could, I plucked eyes from the twisted tree that I and my brothers had stolen. Often I careened into trees or fell into the mouths of predators, but still I managed to travel to simple graves and to mighty mausoleums, to palaces and to hovels. I knew the world by sound and smell. I lay my treasures on the warming earth, and the magic subsumed the jewels. Each night, the Raven King’s guard tore me to shreds with beak and claw, and overnight his court replenished the supply. Caught in the net of my own pity, I struggled in vain through lives and deaths for decades.
Now the new generations tire of the Raven King’s games. They replenish his stores with less relish, enchanted more by the vistas of far-off skies than by the comfort of court. They circle and play in the daytime air. Man has forgotten that we ravens once foretold misfortune. Each season, I make more progress towards clearing the jewels from the Raven King’s nest. Man has not grown less warlike, but we have grown less cruel, less likely to trick or harm, less likely to steal. The younger ones tell my story among themselves not as a caution against defying the King, but as a caution against disloyalty. I turn my face to the sun when I hear their stories and smile to myself.
Someday, if I return all the jewels that were their eyes, my own bright eyes will return, and I can take one last look into the sun before dissolving into a permanent burst of white flowers.
THE TWINS, by Kevin Strange
Treyvon gets the twins out of the car and leads them up to the front doors of the funeral home. He’s dressed them both in black suits, white shirts, black ties. He’s tied their afros into tight corn rows. The more the five-year-olds look the part, the easier it is to convince the funeral director that they’re the step-sons of the deceased. That it’s their step mom laying in there inside the casket.
The funeral director’s name is Bob. Old flop of shit white guy. Ex cop. They’re always the easiest to convince.
Bob meets them at the front door. Good sign.
White guilt is always the safest bet. Two little black boys the family doesn’t want to see their estranged step mommy? Spin him a yarn about their real mom dying in child birth. That the deceased is all they’ve ever known as family. That her white family disowned them as soon as they had the chance. That’s why they’re not listed as kin. Why they’re not on the visitation list.
Easy peasy.
Treyvon used to go inside with them. Now he stands by the car. Bob thinks it’s a show of respect to the new family. The truth is, Treyvon just gets tired of seeing all that death.
Bob walks the twins inside. The doors close behind him. It doesn’t take long for the screaming to start. He’s seen it so many times, he can picture exactly what’s happening just based on the muffled noise.
First, the family asks Bob who the kids are. There’s confusion. Shouting. While distraught mom and dad of the deceased argue with Bob, tell him they’re going to have his job and whatnot, the twins slip passed and walk up to the casket.
It has to be an open casket. Treyvon made the mistake of bringing the twins to a closed casket once. It’s why he wears a patch over his right eye and a leather glove over his left hand at all times.
Once those fleshy blue sacks covered in writhing tubes fall out of their mouths, there’s no stopping them till they’re satisfied.
* * * *
Treyvon never wanted this. When grief overtook him. When all sense was gone. When all that remained inside him was an empty pit, he turned to nonsense.
Church. Fuck that. Why pay money for someone to lie and say you’ll see your dead son in another life when you can pay money to someone who says you can bring him back from the grave?
Treyvon’s wife, Tamara. She tried to hang on. Tried to be strong. She was a survivor. But she ran over Trey Jr. in the driveway. She’d been on her phone. Didn’t see him. Heard the crunch, thought it was his bike.
It was his skull.
Tamara was a shell of herself. Empty eyes. Her fighting spirit left her body long before Treyvon slit her throat on the kitchen floor. Long before he accessed the Dark Net. The hidden internet. Before he pulled his savings, 401k and cashed in his IRAs to pay a stranger he met online to give him access to Vatican secrets. To black magic.
Slashing Tamara’s neck was cake. She presented it for him. She’d have probably done it herself if he’d asked her to. No. The hard part? The hard part was digging up Trey Jr.’s body. Pulling the little casket out of the ground.
They’d cornrowed his hair. Dressed him in a nice suit. But his head was three times its normal size and his left eye was stuffed with cotton balls and covered in corpse makeup to fill in the hole where his brains had squirted out onto the driveway.
Treyvon was near hysterical the night he tried to bring Trey Jr. back from the dead, his tears of dread mingling with the murder blood which he applied liberally all over his son’s corpse, as instructed by the internet. He drew the symbols, chanted the words and finished the instructions mechanically, as if only driven by the perverse need to defy God. To reverse what had happened. To cheat fate. He was, even after all the money, the murder, the exhumation, startled when Tamara’s blood coalesced and formed a thick, hard crust around Trey Jr.’s body.
When they were small, when the sacks and tubes were always outside their bodies, Treyvon had tired to kill them. The things that cracked the shell around Trey Jr.’s corpse. The things that came out of him.
He’d waited too long for that, of course. But he didn’t know that back then. Didn’t understand the rules.
He tried to drown them. No luck. Fire. Not even a singe mark. Poison. That’s how he figured out how to slow them down. To put them to sleep.
Stasis.
He’d made them drink embalming fluid to kill them. That’s why he takes them to funerals now. They go after the death fluid first, then go to sleep and reproduce slower.
It took a long time training them to do it that way. Long time. Lots of death.
But if he didn’t. If they drank pure blood from those tubes before embalming fluid, then they multiplied instantly.
That’s why there were two of them. Identical twins. Identical to Trey Jr.
They’d fed from Tamara’s corpse first, when there was still one of them inside the dead body of his son. Before he could grab a shovel and beat the tubes off his dead wife, the thing in Trey Jr. was two things. Just like that.
The next time they fed. When he brought a stray dog in the house, he stomped out the little wiggling things that pu
shed their way out of the twins’ bodies as they fed.
That’s when they’re at their weakest. That’s the only time they’re weak. Just moments after they’re…born?
* * * *
Treyvon takes the fire ax from the trunk and walks inside the funeral home.
Bob’s dead. Mom and Dad are dead. Everyone’s dead. Killed before they understood what was happening. Their bodies covered in sucker marks from where the tubes drained the panicked, grief stricken life from their bodies. The wounds dripped green.
The twins had followed the rules. Good boys.
They’d gone after the dead white woman first. Her corpse was Swiss cheese. The tubes entered through one hole, drank the precious death nectar from her veins, then existed through another before attacking the confused mourners.
In his mind’s eye, Treyvon imagined her corpse lifting up out of the coffin, dancing like a marionette on wires. He imagined the shocked look on the family’s faces as the movement caught their eyes. Their poor dead girl jittering around three feet above her coffin like she’s being electrocuted.
Here, now, he looks at their dumbfounded corpses with a sneer and a smirk.
People parading in to see death, never expect it to touch them so soon. Their selfish grief. Their loved ones ripped from them so abruptly, so unfairly.
Not while I’m eating my TV dinner.
Not during my Oprah marathon.
They’re blind to the danger. They fall like cattle.
They die easier than the stray dogs.
Treyvon steps over the dead bodies. The twins are in embalming fluid stasis. Wrapped in their hard shells. Even slowed down like this, Treyvon only has moments before the squirmy things solidify, take shape, and refuse to die.
He’d missed them when he made the closed casket mistake. When the twins didn’t feed on the green stuff first.
When he’d lost the eye and hand.
Those squirmy things ended up in the funeral home’s fire safe. Dragged down to the bottom of the ocean when Treyvon dumped them off the coast.
The last thing he’d heard as he tipped the safe off the side of the pier were the sounds of the little boys inside scratching the nails off their finger tips screaming, “No, daddy! Don’t leave us! Don’t let us die!”
They didn’t die. They never die.
Maybe they fed on fish. Maybe they outgrew the safe and swam free. Multiplying. Eating giant squid and killer whales in schools of dozens of little Trey Jr.s. Their blue sacs and tubes trailing behind them, gobbling up shrimp and tuna.
He didn’t care. He didn’t care about any of it. Not anymore.
He was a custodian. A janitor. His job was to clean up Tamara’s mess. His mess. Every third moon cycle.
Kill the people. Feed the twins. Kill the squirmers. Repeat.
For how long? What happened when age took him? The twins didn’t age. They grew from those squirming things with the sacks and tubes outside their bodies into perfect copies of Trey Jr. and then stopped.
Twelve years on. They should be teenagers. They should be tall. Athletic. Like Treyvon’s father. A basket ball player. Scholarships.
What happens when he lays down and quits? Who will stop them? Who will know how to stop them?
Treyvon swings the ax. The first twin’s shell shatters. The squirmers are already digging out of Trey Jr.’s little face. He swings the ax again, breaking through the second twin’s shell.
He stares at the squirmers coming out of the boys. He lets them thump out onto the hardwood floor of the funeral home.
He lets the ax fall from his hands.
He sits on the floor and he waits. Watches.
What happens when the squirmers take first blood? What happens when they grow Trey Jr.’s handsome face? What happens when every dark corner, every mountain peak, every deep ravine in the whole wide world is infested with his beautiful little man?
What happens?
Treyvon lights a cigarette and kicks a squirmer away from him. Its tubes are already growing, trying to suck the life out of the sole of his shoe. He takes a long drag from his smoke as half a dozen more squirmers fall out of the twins’ faces.
He smiles at the growing legion of little Trey Jr.s.
“Let’s find out.”
PRINCESS OR WARRIOR?, by S.W. Lauden
Mark checked his reflection in the liquor store window. The new clothes he had shoplifted earlier that day made for the perfect disguise. He held out his left forearm to check out his new tattoo. The pistol shoved into the stiff jeans was cold against his skin.
“Got any change?”
There was a different vagrant sitting on this stretch of sidewalk almost every night. Mark usually just ignored them, but this old man looked familiar. He flipped him a quarter and turned to leave. The coin skipped across the cement and rolled to a slow stop.
“Happy nineteenth birthday, Marky.”
That was his mom’s nickname for him. And how did he know it’s my birthday?
“What’d you call me?”
“Take a seat, tough guy.”
“No thanks, gramps. I gotta bounce.”
“Knock it off with the street lingo. We both know you’re a rich kid who’s been to one too many rehabs.”
“Who the fuck are you?”
“If I were you I’d be more worried about who those guys over there are.”
Mark turned to look. Two middle-aged men were talking in the glow of a streetlight. Both were stocky and had trimmed mustaches.
“Are they cops?”
“Shut up and sit.”
Mark dropped down beside him, trying to fight the creeping paranoia. He was starting to think that last blunt was a bad idea. The old man leaned in to study his bloodshot eyes. Mark thought to hold his breath, but there was no odor at all.
“Nice jumpsuit. You just escape from somewhere?”
“It’s a long story. Where’s the weed?”
“I, uh, smoked it.”
“That explains why you can see me, but you’re the only one. It must have been laced.”
“With what?!”
“Nanophetamine. They’re little microscopic robots that fry your synapses for an hour or so. Pretty good stuff, the first couple of times.”
“Bullshit.”
“Oh, it’s real all right. One of the time troopers must have smuggled it back.”
“Time troopers? Give me a break, dude. You must be more faded than I am.”
“I know it’s hard to believe, but I’ll try to explain it. What I’m doing is called ‘bouncing’. It’s sort of like visiting your own memories. But the troopers? That’s good old fashioned time travel.”
“You’re kinda freakin’ me out.”
“Show me your arm.”
The old man leaned forward to study the puffy new ink. Mark waved his hand right through him.
“No way!”
“Keep your voice down. Is it Tuesday or Wednesday?”
“Wednesday.”
“Christ. That explains it.”
He was muttering to himself, but Mark tried to follow along.
“…I told that hacker exactly when to bounce me, down to the second. What a god damned rip off. I take it you haven’t robbed the liquor store yet?”
“How do you know about that?”
“Oh, right. I should probably explain all of that. I’m you. You’re me. Ta da.”
He flashed a mostly toothless grin and shrugged.
“Come on, man. Get real.”
“Fine. Let’s get this over with. Ask me a question that only you know the answer to.”
“What’s my favorite color?”
“Blue.”
“Favorite number.”
“Eight. Give me something harder this time.”
�
�What’s my pet iguana’s name?”
“Good old Fred. I really miss him.”
“Damn. There’s no way this is real.”
“Suspicious is good, but we’re running out of time. Tell me when I start flickering.”
“Huh?”
“Your pupils aren’t as big as they were. We probably only have a few minutes left.”
“And then you just go back to wherever you came from?”
“No, I’ll still be here for another couple of hours. You just won’t be able to see me.”
“Just get me some more nano-whatever then.”
“I wouldn’t, even if I could. Those little bastards can pile up until your skull starts bulging. I’ve seen heads explode on the transport ships. God awful mess.”
“Man, I can’t believe this. Tell me some more about what happens.”
“Good news or bad news?”
“Good first.”
“Ha. Why am I not surprised? Let’s see—okay. You become a chemist.”
“Really? I suck at science. But I can deal with that, I guess.”
“Bad news is you get your degree in prison.”
“Prison?!”
“What did you think would happen when you decided to start robbing liquor stores? Besides, prison is about the only place you can get a college degree after the collapse. Would have worked out perfectly if I was eligible for parole.”
“Shit! You’re flickering.”
“Oh, before I forget.”
The old man rolled up the sleeve of his jacket to reveal his own faded tattoo.
“This is one of the reasons I wanted to come back yesterday.”
“Why?
“So you could pick a different tattoo. The guy at the parlor told me—you—it was the Chinese symbol for ‘warrior’, right?”
“Uh huh.”
“I found out the hard way that it actually means ‘princess’.”
The old man watched carefully as recognition dawned across the boy’s face.
“Don’t tell me you went through all of this just to get the tattoo changed.”
