The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020

by John Joseph Adams

  The lagoon lost a sandbar near its mouth, opening into a dense mangrove swamp. In low tide, the tree roots were visible, with curious curves: too petted, too cultivated. Salmah waded past mudskippers and fish, until she found Mayang’s body, half-buried in the sand, shining in the dappling sunshine. Panicked, she ran along the trail of legs, screaming Mayang’s name.

  Mayang rolled over with a grumpy groan, and blinked sleepily at Salmah. She smiled. “Hello. How was work?”

  Salmah clung to Mayang tightly, shaky with relief. She kissed Mayang’s forehead, cheeks, and mouth. Mayang drew back, hissing, and Salmah saw the inside of Mayang’s mouth: the mandibles in her cheeks uncurling a little, the tiny teeth that looked disturbingly normal, and a looseness of skin behind them. “I’m sorry! Was I too rough?”

  “I just woke up.” Mayang stroked Salmah’s hair gently. “But I missed you, too.”

  Just like that, their friendship continued as before, but Salmah could not stop thinking of the inside of Mayang’s mouth, her soft cool skin, her vestigial breasts. Mayang’s eyes glittered with amusement when she caught Salmah staring, permitted the human woman’s hands to linger on her waist, shoulders, even the frond-like legs on the sides of her wormbody. Their arms entwined as they swam together, Mayang swimming on her back to kiss Salmah’s belly, knees, toes. Salmah would whine as they returned to Mayang’s grotto about unfairness, because Salmah couldn’t return the favor.

  “I’m not like you,” she groused, coming to rest under a mangrove tree.

  “You are not,” Mayang agreed, pointedly staring at Salmah’s fine-haired legs. “Not with those useless things anyway.”

  “I can do things with these that you can’t with yours.”

  Mayang tilted her head, raising an eyebrow.

  Carefully, Salmah hooked her legs around Mayang’s waist, drawing the wormwoman closer to her. Then she wrapped her arms under Mayang’s arms, determined to make sure the latter couldn’t slip away. She blushed, but grinned through it anyway.

  Mayang brushed a tendril of hair from Salmah’s face, kissed her temple.

  “Have you ever kissed a woman?” Salmah asked.

  “Many,” Mayang replied.

  “Who?” Salmah thought maybe she sounded too demanding.

  “Have you ever kissed a woman?” Mayang asked, not deigning to answer that question.

  Salmah nodded. Her school had been an all-girls’ school, although she now dated men. “But . . . not someone like you.”

  Mayang tasted like saltwater, like the sea. Salmah ran her fingers through Mayang’s hair and down her back. Mayang smelled like warm winds over the ocean. When Salmah pulled Mayang closer, she let her legs slide down, and resisted a giggle when the arches of her feet brushed against the bristles along Mayang’s sides.

  Mayang tasted Salmah, with what felt like multiple tongues down the length of Salmah’s neck, clavicle, chest. In horrified fascination, Salmah watched as Mayang’s jaw unhinged, pharynx extending a little to encompass the whole of one breast, and teeth at the back of Mayang’s gullet tickling her nipple. Hard nubs lined Mayang’s mouth, massaging, grazing. Oral membrane still extended, Mayang worked her way downwards, tickling Salmah’s belly, pausing right before the cleft between her legs.

  Mayang’s eyes shone with an inner light, ghostly and still, her arms curled around Salmah’s thighs. Salmah tried to breathe evenly, the thudding between her legs growing and growing, her alarm at the seams on Mayang’s cheeks coming apart also growing and growing. But Mayang’s mouth—the inside of it, Salmah reminded herself—pressed among the soft hairs there. Internally shrieking, Salmah nodded.

  The pharynx pressed in, rubbing itself all over trembling muscle within and labia without. Salmah gripped the tree roots above her head, staring up into the sky beyond the leaves but not focusing, feeling the tide coming in around her body, feeling a tide coming inside.

  Mayang curled her body underneath Salmah, keeping their torsos above water, for Salmah to catch her breath after. She held the human woman through the ragged breathing and occasional gasps—Salmah sat right on top of some of Mayang’s legs, that had to keep moving to steady them—and stroked Salmah’s hair, singing an ancient song.

  “You don’t—how do I—” Salmah frowned.

  Mayang laughed. “No, you can’t. Not now, anyway.”

  “This seems unfair.”

  “I have the freedom of these shifting seas in exchange for this small pleasure.”

  “I don’t think—” But Salmah’s thought was cut off as it began to rain.

  “You should go home,” Mayang told her.

  The season passed: thunderstorms and lightning displays crashing across the skies made it too dangerous to go to the beach to look for her lover. Salmah moved into the nearby town to work at her family’s behest. She thought about Mayang often, but like a dream, an unreal experience with an untrue creature, as her work as a clerk took up her days. University abroad seemed even more possible than before.

  Then there was the fact that Salmah could not speak of Mayang to anyone. What could she say? I am seeing a woman—to a family who would frown on the idea and assume she hadn’t met a nice man to marry yet. I am seeing a sea creature who is half a centipede—to whom? And if one could not speak of a love, was it real? Salmah thought about her aunts and friends involved with married men, and was vaguely envious: at least those men had identity cards to prove their existence.

  I will lose you too, someday. The pronouncement almost made Salmah angry to think about. By the time the monsoon season was over, Salmah had convinced herself not to go looking for Mayang again. She sent out her university and scholarship applications, received acceptances, and weighed her options carefully. Let Mayang be right if she wants to be.

  But she felt guilty. Perhaps she should at least say goodbye. This was harder than it looked, since as soon as she had made her decision, her family suddenly clamored for her attention: endless going-away dinners, visiting relatives, crying grandparents. When she finally found some time to look for Mayang, she worried that perhaps she had been gone too long.

  His name was Amir, she would find out later in the newspapers. She barely noticed him as she waded through the mangrove mid-tide looking for Mayang, dismissed the swishing of waters behind her as the waves coming in. She was about to give up, turn around, and head home, when he grabbed her hair at the nape of her neck and slapped a sandy, sweaty hand around her mouth.

  Oh God, not here, not now. Salmah thrashed. She was too young to die, had too much to do, she was here to say goodbye to Mayang, not the world. She wrenched away from him, screaming, and ran. He was too close behind, and Salmah turned to see his hand too close to her face—

  Then he yelped and disappeared under the water. There was a cloud of sand where he had been.

  Salmah screamed and cried and screamed and cried all the way home.

  Aphrodite

  E. aphroditois buries its long body in the ocean bed, where it waits to ambush its prey. It moves with such speed that sometimes it slices its prey in half, and drags its catch into the seabed to prevent it from escaping.

  —Predators of the Sea: The Worm Edition

  Simon saw her from a distance first, sitting pretty on boulders far from the beach where he had taken his daughter for a long walk. Eunice had pointed her out first, and he had to squint to really see the figure, looking to the shore forlornly, like Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid in Copenhagen. They had seen the Malay mermaid on occasion since, on their beach excursions.

  His wife refused to join them on their walks. Salmah had seen some crazy stuff that he wasn’t sure he believed. Mermaids? Cannibal mermaids? He loved her, but she was insane sometimes. He’d thought he was going to marry a nice moderate Muslim girl. If she’d turned out a fundie terrorist, that would at least be understandable, but no, he got weird confessions about some lesbian relationship with a mermaid. She probably made that shit up to make him jealous, get back at him. He couldn’t help
being a huge flirt; she’d liked that, way back when. And what was wrong with him flirting with other women? It was just flirting, and it wasn’t like he was divorcing her.

  In fact, Simon took really good care of her, all things considered: roof over her head, grocery money, and all the love a woman could ask for, even if sometimes she was fucking ungrateful. Unreasonable. He had to keep her in line at times. Luckily her father understood him. Some things are shared, even cross-culturally. He supposed that with some other family they would have interfered in the marriage by now, so he counted himself lucky, and put up with their mat salleh jokes.

  He kicked a seashell into the distance, still mad at the latest fight they’d had. Wasn’t she getting a trip home every year? It was expensive, flying over the Pacific every winter. She hated the idea, claimed that monsoon season was too dangerous for Eunice to be near the sea. That was the latest sticking point. He admitted that he’d been a little careless; he’d been so caught up talking to that really interesting musician on the beach he hadn’t noticed little Eunice getting lost. Salmah had screamed at him for hours while they lodged a police report, and then stormed out in a crying rage. He’d been too tired to keep her from going out. Let her complain to her neighbors or friends or whatever. He’d tell his side of the story eventually, and he would at least sound sane about it. He liked her friends. All of them pretty, like she’d been before bloating up like a whale.

  It was maybe a bit mean of him to hope that she would go missing too. That would take care of that craziness without the business of divorce, and maybe he could marry someone else who wouldn’t be so damn shrill. Nope, she’d come home with Eunice in her arms, both of them damp and stinking of rotting fish. He hadn’t asked Salmah where she’d found Eunice, but now Eunice was babbling about mermaids too, and that was two crazy women in his house.

  There she was again, arms resting on a shelf at the far end of a line of beach rocks. She stared at him with an intensity that made him wonder. She wasn’t that far out from shore. He waved at her, smiling. She ducked a little behind the rock, but bobbed up again, smiling back, he hoped, waving coyly.

  Simon waded into the water, a little experimentally. Monsoon weather made the sea cold at times, but it had been a hot day. But it wasn’t too bad, and besides, that woman on the rock looked lonely. As he approached, he realized, she also looked fine as hell: cheekbones like they’d been cut by diamonds, large dark liquid eyes, and her arms were toned, like she worked out regularly. And her hair! At first he thought it was black, just like basically everybody else here. But it seemed to have a rainbow sheen to it, as if she had an oil slick in her hair, or maybe as if her hair was an oil slick.

  “Oy,” he called.

  “Salaam,” she replied.

  “Mind if I hang out with you?”

  It took her a moment to answer, as if his accent was a problem. “You may.”

  She was in waist-deep water, and he counted himself lucky to be tall. Being a mat salleh had its advantages, he thought as he leaned over the rock to look down into those amazing eyes. Not only that, but clearly he’d lucked out with a freaky girl: she wasn’t even wearing a top. Women here wore T-shirts and sarongs at the beach out of modesty, and with the growing Arabization, more of them were buying those swimsuits that covered everything. It was a crying shame; that had never been the case when he visited Asia in his youth. Also a crying shame: the water was cloudy, so he couldn’t check out whether she was wearing a bottom. He thought he caught a glimpse of one, a scintillating waistband, but the water sloshed up and he lost sight of it.

  “So . . . you live around here?”

  “I move around a lot. You?” Her Malay had an odd accent. He’d heard that the northerners had a different dialect of Malay, but he’d never met anyone who spoke that way before. Still, it gratified him that his Malay was passable enough that a stranger thought he was local.

  “I’m from Amerika Syarikat.”

  “How interesting. Your Malay is very good.” Her hand reached up to touch his face. “Is your hair really that color?”

  He grinned, bending his head down for her to touch his curls. His naturally blond hair fascinated locals. Her fingers were tentative, and she wrapped a lock around her pinky. Now that her arms were away from her breasts, he could see that they were small, almost flat, but cute all the same.

  “So soft,” she cooed, letting her hand slip down the back of his head, his neck. “So nice.”

  “Thanks,” he said, about to share his shampoo-and-conditioning routine (women loved that sort of thing) when he noticed her hand dropping downwards even farther. Her fingertips drifted across his chest and even lower. “Oh, wow.” He didn’t protest as her hand tugged at his waistband, pulling him around the rock. He stepped around, let her guide his hips so he leaned back.

  She was fast in unbuttoning and unzipping. Some sort of freaky slut, he thought, aware that he had the same stupid grin from earlier on his face as she got to work on his erection. He gazed down at her rainbow-black hair, amazed at how fast she deep-throated him. And what the fuck was her tongue, even? It felt like it was swirling all around his cock, or that maybe she had multiple tongues. He’d have to investigate it after, because it felt so goddamn good.

  Thunder rolled across the sky, and the waves came in harder. He was impressed; she wasn’t stopping even though the tide was obviously coming in, lapping higher around his hips now, spraying her cheeks.

  “Water’s coming in,” he croaked, gently but regretfully pushing at her shoulders. She took his hands and put them on her head, on her dark hair, and pressed him against the rock even more firmly.

  She did not stop, even as the tide came in higher, but he was beyond caring, because this was the best blowjob of his goddamn life and he wasn’t going to let something like nature get in the way. At the back of his mind he was maybe worried that maybe she might drown if she kept on going, but he gripped her hair and kept thrusting into her throat. Who knows when he might ever meet her again—maybe he’d get her number.

  “I’m gonna come,” he gasped, out of courtesy. Vaguely, he realized that he was knee-deep in the sand. When had that happened? Maybe it wasn’t the tide coming in after all, but them sinking into the water. He’d ask Salmah about it later.

  He glanced down—what the fuck, she was underwater, dark eyes meeting his—and—no, what!—mandibles protruded—no, unfolded—from her cheeks and clamped down around his hips. He screamed.

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh God, oh God. He scrabbled at the rock behind him—the water was higher than before—pulled at the mandibles—sweet Jesus, mandibles—but they dug into his flesh deeper, and her arms were wrapped around his legs, and she was sinking into the sand—what the fuck—and pulling him with her. Every effort he made to get out of her grasp made her mandibles dig in farther.

  “Help!” he shrieked, drowned out by another clap of thunder.

  Water roared around his ears. She was pulling him underground underwater, he realized. What the fuck was she? He pushed at the seabed, gasped when she bit down hard—he yelled, oh shit, underwater—but he was still sinking, the sand was up to his chest now. His lungs burned, his hips were scalding.

  As the seabed came up about his ears, he swallowed. Water tickled his fingers. Rough sand engulfed them.

  Eunice

  Contrary to its popular name of “bobbitt worm,” named after the famous case in which Lorena Bobbitt cut off her husband’s penis with a scissors, E. aphroditois do not have penises, as they are broadcast spawners. Little is known of their mating habits, as very few individual specimens have been found.

  —Mysterious Marine Matings

  Eunice dreamed the same dream for a long time: she drifted in the waves, frightened and tired of swimming, and saw a long, large worm, swimming toward her. Then a human face, and human arms, grasping her tightly, lifting her to the surface, allowing her to gasp for air. Eunice rode on the wormwoman’s back toward shore, but not toward where she had lost her father. Sh
e’d dreamed of falling asleep, dreamed she’d awoken to her mother’s cries of relief. In these false awakenings, half-lucid with the awareness that she was not really awake, Eunice clung to the wormwoman tightly, trying to ask questions, impossible ones like “Why does Mom hate me?” or “Why didn’t I get Dad’s blue eyes?” or “How come the other kids look at me weird?” or “What are men even?”

  When she was older, she fought with her mother over the details: her mother insisted that she had found Eunice half-drowned and asleep on the beach; Eunice knew that the wormwoman was real, and she half-remembered a conversation between the woman and her mother. It was hard to forget that musical voice, almost like whistles in the dark. She didn’t know what the details were anymore, but someone had cried.

  Eunice plodded along the beach, squinting into the distance. It had taken years, but she was sure that she had finally found the right place. Her mother had tried to throw her off the trail several times: “Oh no, it was at Seberang Ris,” she’d say. “Maybe it was at Pulau Redang, very popular there.” After several fruitless road trips, as well as much rifling through her mother’s old documents, Eunice found a relative’s phone number that worked—one of many who had shunned her mother after the disappearance of Eunice’s father. She had to listen to a long religious screed about the pernicious effects of black magic and a roundabout accusation of her mother, but she finally got the information she wanted. The family had moved far and wide across the Peninsula, and no one would balik kampung to where her mother had grown up, but they still remembered the name of the town.

  There was an isolated lagoon, a tiny one, encroached on all sides with trees growing in the accumulated silt. They weren’t even mangrove trees, but evergreens, angsana, and saga, probably brought there by the ocean. Eunice sat down for a while, taking in the sight. There was an opening to the side, and a sandbar that blocked off the lagoon from the ocean. Rocks of all sizes were scattered here and there, beach rocks now obscured by the trees.