“I think you’ve done a fine job. People come visit me so often since you changed. And it’s true that in the past you were a terrible witch.”
“Exactly.”
“But I think there’s only one Ama. And I think I’m talking to her.”
“I’m sorry. For all of it,” I say.
“You should be.” Mrs. Nagel points to the bathroom, which means she wants me to give her a towel with warm water for her head. I do it. Then we’re quiet for a long time. I sit with her through the Horn. Then she falls back asleep. I sit with her for a while more. When I jump back home, the sky is already gray and the hot rain is already falling. Also, a bike I know belongs to Carl is set down on the grass. All the bikes on Kennedy belong to Carl. I pull my knife out. I climb up and slide inside my bedroom window and creep downstairs. Carl is sitting at the table. My father is making pancakes, swaying at the stove. And Ike is at the table too, with his legs crossed in his chair and his back to me.
“There she is,” my father says. I’m thinking I have the angle: I can leap across the kitchen table and get to Carl.
“Why is he here!” I say. “Ikenna, I’m sorry, I tried.”
“Don’t worry, I was fine,” Ike says.
“You got to the gun? You got out?” I ask.
“No, I told Carl I had some info for Robert and he let me go see him.”
“Udon Rosher Carl jilo plam,” Carl says. It means “Carl, the great destroyer, spared the weakling.” He is in his robe with the shirt over his head. His one exposed eye stares at me and only me.
“Oh,” I say.
“It’s been so long. I asked Carl if he wants to watch the Flash with us. Remember when we used to do that? Remember, we would watch on the wall?” my father asks.
“Why are you here now?” I ask. I’ve gotten close enough that I know I have a good shot at him.
“I’m here to kill you and make your family watch,” Carl says. I can see his hunting piercer is at his feet. My father turns and stares at Carl.
“Carl,” my father says. “You used to be an okay kid. If I could, you know what I would do to you?”
“Yes, sir,” Carl says.
“Okay,” my father says. It’s true. With me and Carl, it’s better not to try to stop us when we want to do something. Everyone knows that by now. I smile because my father defended me and has been killing me less and less lately.
“What did Robert say?” I ask while I still can.
“Whatever happened with you,” Ike says. “Whatever happened—you’re the first it’s happened to, so we’ll see. Maybe it’s a domino in an eventual collapse.” We’re all pretty quiet. “Nothing new, really. But we think we can say for sure that this isn’t going to last forever. Unless it does.”
“Okay,” I say. And I leap. I lunge with my knife, and nobody else in the history of the world would even flinch, but Carl is Carl, so he grabs the table and flips it up like a shield. I use my elbow to blow through it pretty easily. The table is in pieces, and Ike runs back. My father stops cooking and swings a hot, pancakey pan at Carl. Carl ducks it, and as he does, I swing my knife at his neck. He dodges two good slashes, then kicks me hard in the ribs. I crash back into the dishwasher. Rib broken for sure. I get up and focus. I smile because I, Ama Grace Knife Queen Adusei, am a fighter, the greatest ever. Lately I don’t get to fight much. Or now I fight differently. But these fights, with fists and knives, I have more practice in. I jump forward again. Carl grabs my wrist and twists so I drop my knife.
“You are supreme and infinite, Carl, and I am very sorry for all that I have done,” I say as I knee him in the ribs, and before even bringing my leg back down, I’m in a backflip and kicking into his chin. He stumbles back.
“BITCH!” Carl screams, and makes to grab the gun out of the rubble that’s forming out of the kitchen. I kick him in the gut and throw him out toward the living room.
“Sorry, Udon Rosher,” I say while charging. He punches me in the mouth, and I see black, then the world comes back to me. “I meant no disrespect. I know you’re strong. I just want you to know I am sorry for the things I did to you.”
“Fuck you,” Carl says, and he’s coming at me with his flurry of heavy punches. He misses with a big right, and his fist goes through the wall. As he tries to pull his arm out, I get behind him and punch down on his neck in a way I know will make him crumble. Then I rip off the shirt on his head, and it’s like I hit the master switch. “Hellio YUPRA! Ki Udon Rosher! TRENT!” Carl screams as he holds his eye. Weeping on his knees. “Okay! Okay! Hellio yupra.” Even when I’m not touching him, he screams and claws at his own eye. He becomes a little bit of the old Carl. I hit him another time, hard at the base of his neck, to keep him from moving. His paralyzed body does nothing, and his face keeps doing so much.
“Udon Rosher, ki love, okay,” I say.
“End it!” Carl screams, keeping one eye open. Outside, the hot rain has stopped. I drag Carl upstairs and make sure he’s comfortable in my bed. He screams and screams in Carama, and I understand him very well. He spits and cries. I sit with him. “I know you’re going to get through all this,” I say. When his voice is coarse and he can’t scream anymore, I leave him.
My father and brother are in Ike’s room. Ike is writing something. My father is coloring in a coloring book. “Ama!” my father says.
“Ama,” Ike says.
“We’re good,” I say. My rib is broken, and I’m kinda bleeding out of my ear. “Still want to go watch?” I ask. These are my guys. I’m blessed knowing I can protect them.
Outside, the hot rain makes the air smell like burning rubber, but you can still smell the fresh wet earth underneath so it’s not all bad. Once we were all keeping things through the Flash, it became a tradition for everyone on our street to watch it together, to disappear all at once. Then we stopped doing that.
We press ourselves to the side of our house facing west. I’m dizzy and happy. Breathing hurts, but still I feel as infinite as ever. Still supreme. We get on the wall. Our wall. I lean my back against it, and I feel the wet seep through. A long time ago, Ike explained to us how nuclear radiation, besides destroying stuff, bleached everything it didn’t make disappear and that our bodies, if they were right up against something, would leave shadows that would last forever. For a long time we tried to use our bodies to send messages to the future. Hoping that after we were gone, if the Loop broke, the future would see us and know. I’d make little hearts with my hands, or sometimes we’d all hug each other to show them, like, love was a thing even for all of us who lived through the wars that ended everything. Now when we do it, it’s mostly for fun.
“What are you going to do?” my father says.
“I think I’m going to do this,” Ike says, looking up at us. He does a thing where he spreads his legs a little wider and acts like he’s flexing both arms above his head. That’s my brother. He’s not too smart to be fun sometimes.
“Okay,” my father says. “I’m going to do the animal man.” He grabs a branch from the maple I snapped and puts it on his head so he’ll look like he has feathers. The future will think he’s an alien. Me, I’ve already picked one leg up and tucked it into my knee. It’s pretty hard to breathe, but it’s not that hard.
“Dancer,” I say before he asks. That’s kind of my signature. I’ve done different versions of it, but this one is the best I can do with a broken rib and a knocked-around head. I have one leg on the ground, and then I bring one arm and crane it above my head. We only have to wait a minute.
There’s a faraway light. Then a roar like long, slow thunder. The roar doesn’t stop; it gets louder, and then it’s so loud you can’t hear anything. The faraway light grows, and it’s yellowish at first, and in the beginning it looks like something that’s meant to help you, like another sun. Then it grows taller than any building, greater than a mountain. You can see it’s eating the world, and no matter what, it is coming for you. Rushing toward you. And by the time it’s blinding, you a
re terrified and humbled. Watching it, you know it’s the kind of thing you should only get to see once. Something that happens once and then never again. We’ve all seen it so many times, but I still cry, because when it comes, I know for sure we are infinite. All you feel is infinite, knowing all the falls and leaps and sweet and death that’s ever been will be trumped by the wall of nuclear flying at you. You of all people. Then, before you’re gone, you know that all that’s ever been will still be, even if there are no tomorrows. Even the apocalypse isn’t the end. That, you could only know when you’re standing before a light so bright it obliterates you. And if you are alone, posed like a dancer, when it comes, you feel silly and scared. And if you are with your family, or anyone at all, when it comes, you feel silly and scared, but at least not alone.
LaShawn M. Wanak
Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie Sing the Stumps Down Good
from FIYAH
Rosetta knelt to look at the stump in the corner of her client’s bedroom. It had the likeness of a ten-year-old boy: four feet tall, dressed in an oversized shirt and suspenders. And its features were flawless, from the newsboy’s cap cocked on its tight curls to its pupil-less eyes fringed with long eyelashes. The only oddity was that the stump’s hands were unformed, shapeless blobs. It was easy to believe that a sculptor had chiseled a boy out of wood and had stepped away just before finishing its hands.
Rosetta sucked in her breath through her cloth face mask. The SPC hadn’t told her that her first stump extermination would look like a child.
“Why did it take you so long to report this?” she asked the woman who rented the apartment.
“Went to visit my sister in St. Louis last week. When we got back, there it was.” The bedroom door opened, revealing a gaggle of gawking kids. The woman shooed them back, then frowned at the white man maneuvering a medium-sized crate into the bedroom. She sidled up to Rosetta and whispered, “He gotta be here too?”
“It’s all right; he’s my handler. Set the vacuum up over there, Marty.”
Marty Houchen winked a blue eye at the woman. “I do all the heavy lifting, ma’am. Sister Tharpe got the harder job.” Rosetta could tell he was smiling behind his own face mask.
The woman hmphed. Her mask, the cheap paper sort usually sold at the SPC, dangled from her neck above her plain cotton blue maid uniform. It made Rosetta feel overdressed in her faux fur and white kid gloves. To cover up the awkwardness, Rosetta went to look out the window.
The woman’s apartment was on the tenth floor of the Ida Wells Projects, the newest housing development touted as affordable for those with low incomes. The woman’s apartment was sparse, but everything was neat and clean, albeit it smelled of oxtail stew and shoe polish. It was also stifling hot in the apartment. Sheets of thick, opaque filters lined most of the windows in the main rooms. In the bedroom there were no filters, but the woman had hung up bedsheets across the windows—a cheaper alternative.
If the woman had just returned from a trip, she probably had opened the window without thinking to let in the cold, fresh February air. Just enough for a spore to float in and take root.
“What’s this made outta, anyway?” Rosetta turned around to see the woman prodding the stump’s cheek with her finger. “Don’t feel like wood. Feels spongy.”
“Don’t do that!” Rosetta rushed over to grab the woman’s wrists. The slight indent the woman made in the stump’s cheek was already molding itself back into shape. Rosetta glanced down to the stump’s formless hands. Was that the hint of fingers? “Marty, hurry!”
“I’m working as fast as I can.”
Still holding the woman by her wrist, Rosetta steered her into the kitchenette and scrubbed her hands with Ivory soap. “You need to be careful. Stumps can grow anywhere. These things can start growing on you and you don’t even know it. You might think it’s a boil or a pimple between your shoulder blades, behind your knee. If it bursts, you’re as good as dead.”
“Just wanted to see why they call ’em stumps,” the woman grumbled. “They don’t feel like wood.”
“They’re not wood. And they’re not people. No matter how much they look like them. You should wear your face mask at all times. Or at least put up filters on your windows in your bedroom.”
The woman glanced at her children piled on the sofa. “Those window filters cost the same as my rent. It takes ages to save up for them. And the face masks don’t do nothing. My kids tear through them before they even get out the door. How am I supposed to keep this place from getting infected if I can’t even buy what I need?”
Rosetta gave the answer that she had been trained to give. “Go talk to the SPC. They can work something out.”
The woman pursed her lips but didn’t say anything.
Marty emerged from the bedroom. “Get ready, Rosetta. I’m almost done.”
Rosetta went back into the bedroom and reached into the opened crate. She pulled out her guitar case, laid it on the bed, took a deep breath to prepare herself, and opened it. Her Gibson L-5 greeted her with its tan finish and gold-plated turning keys. She slipped the strap over her head and its weight settled, heavy and comforting like a baby in a sling.
It had been almost a year and a half since she had played it. People used to make fun of it, saying it was nothing but a glorified mandolin, but Rosetta never took it as an insult. She strummed a G chord, and she was no longer in the woman’s apartment but in a crowded church somewhere in Tennessee. The pounding of feet on the wooden floorboards, the wafting of cardboard fans with pictures of funeral directors advertising their services, the heat and the sweat in the air, voices raised in song while hands and tambourines beat out rhythm . . .
. . . and Momma’s comforting presence as she swayed and plucked at her mandolin.
A twinge of emotion in her chest deepened into full-on heartache.
Rosetta lifted the guitar off her and put it back in the case. Marty glanced at her, but he didn’t say anything.
“What are you doing?” the woman asked. Rosetta quickly closed the case, but the woman had directed her question to Marty as he slipped a thick transparent bag over the stump’s head.
“This is so that no spores get out during the extermination.” He adjusted the bag so that it fully covered the stump and secured the bottom with weighted lead rings. “There has to be no gaps or else one spore slips through and—kekkkkk!” He drew a finger across his neck.
“Stop scaring her, Marty.”
“Just stating the facts. Better get your mask on.”
Rosetta hated this part. From the crate she took out a larger mask with thick plastic goggles and a long hose dangling from the circular breathing plate, which contained a specialized filter made of the same material as the filters in the woman’s windows. Rosetta slipped the mask over her head and adjusted the straps so it fit snugly around the back of her head and ears. Marty took the end of the hose and attached it to another one that was connected on top of the stump bag.
“All set?”
“Yeah,” Rosetta said, hating how the mask stripped her voice of depth and timbre, rendering it flat and lifeless. Nothing for it but to do what she was supposed to do. She closed her eyes and began to sing.
“Up above my head, I hear music in the air. Up above my—”
A muffled whump came from the bag. Marty flapped his hands at Rosetta to stop. The bag billowed briefly, then slumped to the floor as if empty. Marty flicked a switch, and the vacuum inside the crate began sucking the remnants of the stump, shimmering particles larger than dust.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” the woman declared.
“God doesn’t damn anybody,” Rosetta said as she pulled off the mask. She felt tired, very tired, and this was just her first extermination. It wasn’t real singing, though. Anything that lasted only a few seconds long couldn’t be considered real singing.
Which was fine. She didn’t deserve to do any real singing anyway.
Minnie hated the SPC.
T
he walls were too white. The lights were too bright. The air was too dry. The constant whoosh, whoosh, whoosh of the air purifiers, filtering out every ounce of dust in the air, was too damn loud. Every time Minnie came here with her handler to drop off her quota of stump dust, the boogers in her nose turned to hard pebbles and set her head to throbbing. The SPC was a miserable, stupid place.
“I have the numbers from what you’ve brought in,” the weighing attendant said, referring to her clipboard. “It’s only forty percent of your quota.”
“It’s been rough, ya know?”
The weighing attendant frowned. Her eyebrows had been penciled in a thick, high arch, as if perpetually astonished at Minnie’s presence in the SPC. “It also says here your handler has requested to be transferred to another department. Says you’re too ‘belligerent and uncooperative to work with,’ and you show up late to your exterminations—when you bother to show up at all. That’s the third handler now who refuses to work with you.”
Minnie gave a shrug. She hadn’t even bothered to learn his name.
“Now, Lizzie,” the attendant said, drawing out the z in a condescending buzz. “Being an exterminator is a very rare calling. There are many people out there who would love to have that same ability as you. We’ve already had several exterminators pulled to help at the war front in Europe. That brings the total licensed exterminators in Chicago down to six.” The eyebrows rose until they nearly disappeared into the attendant’s red hair, pinned in a victory roll, the latest fad in the white folks’ world. “You don’t want Chicago to be quarantined just like New York, do you, Lizzie?”
Minnie didn’t answer. As far as she was concerned, the SPC quarantined her the day they showed up on her doorstep.
Nonplussed, the attendant referred to her clipboard. “Now, I do have some good news. A new exterminator just started working today. Between you and her, you should be able to contain the stumps in the Bronzeville district, which current count is . . . twenty-three as of today. If you continue not to meet your quota”—here she gave Minnie a stern look—“we’ll have to find some other way for you to serve in Stump Prevention Control.” It was always “Stump Prevention Control” with these people, never the “SPC.” Like them uppity folks who go around insisting you call them Mister So-and-such, Esquire. Like the attendant insisting on always calling her Lizzie.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 20