The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  Till we reach that blissful shore

  Where the angels wait to join us

  In that train

  Forevermore.

  I seize you, love, and you are raving in my embrace: What the fuck are you doing? Take your goddamn filthy hands off me cunt, gash, bitch, traitor. But oh, oh, oh I hold on, and I hold on tight for dear forsaken life, ’cause the land’s tilting teeter-totter under us as if on the Last Day of All, the day of Kingdom Come, and just don’t make me face the righteous fury of the Lion of Judah alone. In the corn, we rolled and wallowed like dust-bathing mares, while you growled, and foam flecked your bloody lips, and you spat and slashed at the gloaming with your dripping blade. A voyeuristic retinue of grasshoppers and field mice, crickets and a lone bullsnake took in our flailing, certainly comedic antics while I held you prisoner in my arms, holding you hostage against my shameful fear and self doubt. Finally, inevitably, your laughter died, and I only held you while you sobbed and Iowa sod turned to streaks of mud upon your mirthless face.

  4.

  I DRIVE WEST, then east again, then turn south onto I-55, Missouri, the County of Cape Girardeau. Meandering like the cottonmouth, silt-choked Mississippi, out across fertile floodplain fields all night-blanketed, semisweet darkness to hide river-gifted loam. You’re asleep in the backseat, your breath soft as velvet, soft as autumn rain. You never sleep more than an hour at a time, not ever, and so I never wake you. Not ever. Not even when you cry out from the secret nightmare countries behind your eyelids. We are moving along between the monotonous, barbarous topography and the overcast sky, overcast at sunset the sky looked dead, and now, well past midnight, there is still no sign of moon nor stars to guide me, and I have only the road signs and the tattered atlas lying open beside me as I weave and wend through the Indian ghosts of Ozark Bluff Dwellers, stalkers of shambling mastodon and mammoth phantoms along these crude asphalt corridors. I light cigarette after cigarette and wash Black Beauties down with peach Nehi. I do not often know loneliness, but I know it now, and I wish I were with you in your hard, hard dreams. The radio’s tuned to a gospel station out of Memphis, but the volume is down low, low, low so you’ll not be awakened by the Five Blind Boys of Alabama or the Dixie Hummingbirds. In your sleep, you’re muttering, and I try not to eavesdrop. But voices carry, as they say, and I hear enough to get the gist. You sleep a walking sleep, and in dreams, you’ve drifted back to Wichita, to that tow-headed boy with fish and starfish, an octopus and sea shells tattooed all up and down his arms, across his broad chest and shoulders. “Because I’ve never seen the ocean,” he said. “But that’s where I’m headed now. I’m going all the way to Florida. To Panama City or Pensacola.” “We’ve never seen the sea, either,” you tell him. “Can we go with you? We’ve really nowhere else to go, and you really have no notion how delightful it will be when they take us up and throw us with the lobsters out to sea.” The boy laughed. No, not a boy, not in truth, but a young man older than us, a scruffy beard growing unevenly on his suntanned cheeks. “Can we? Can we, please?” Hey, you’re the two with the car, not me, he replied, so I suppose you’re free to go anywhere you desire. And that is the gods’ honest truth of it all, ain’t it? We are free to drive anywhere we please, so long as we do not attempt to part this material plane of simply three dimensions. Alone in the night, in the now and not the then, I have to be careful. It would be too easy to slip into my own dreams, amphetamine insomnia helping hands or no, and I have so often imagined our Odyssey ending with the Impala wrapped around telephone pole or lying wheels-up turtlewise and steaming in a ditch or head-on folded back upon ourselves after making love to an oncoming semi. I shake my head and open my eyes wider. There’s a rest stop not too far up ahead, and I tell myself that I’ll pull over there. I’ll pull over to doze for a while in sodium-arc pools, until the sun rises bright and violent to burn away the clouds, until it’s too hot to sleep. The boy’s name was Philip – one L. The young man who was no longer a boy and who had been decorated with the cryptic nautical language of an ocean he’d never seen, and, as it came to pass, never would. But you’d keep all his teeth in a Mason jar, just in case we ever got around to the Gulf of Mexico or an Atlantic shoreline. You kept his teeth, promising him a burial in saltwater. Philip told us about visiting a museum at the university in Lawrence, where he saw the petrified skeletons of giant sea monsters that once had swum the vanished inland depths. He was only a child, ten or eleven, but he memorized names that, to my ears, sounded magical, forbidden, perilous Latin incantations to call down fish from the clear blue sky or summon bones burrowing upwards from yellow-gray chalky rocks. You sat with your arms draped shameless about his neck while he recited and elaborated – Tylosaurus proriger, Dolichorhynchops bonneri, Platecarpus tympaniticus, Elasmosaurus platyurus, Selmasaurus kiernanii, birds with teeth and giant turtles, flying reptiles and the fangs of ancient sharks undulled by eighty-five million years, give or take. Show off, you said and laughed. That’s what you are, a show off. And you said, Why aren’t you in college, bright boy? And Philip with one L said his parents couldn’t afford tuition, and his grades had not been good enough for a scholarship, and he wasn’t gonna join the army, because he had a cousin went off to Desert Storm, right, and did his duty in Iraq, and now he’s afraid to leave the house and sick all the time and constantly checks his shoes for scorpions and landmines. The military denies all responsibility. Maybe, said Philip with one L, I can get a job on a fishing boat, or a shrimping boat, and spend all my days on the water and all my nights drinking rum with mermaids. We could almost have fallen in love with him. Almost. You even whispered to me about driving him to Florida that he might lay eyes upon the Gulf of Mexico before he died. But I am a jealous bitch, and I said no, fuck that sentimental horseshit, and he died the next day in a landfill not far from Emporia. I did that one, cut his throat from ear to ear while he was busy screwing you. He looked up at me, his stark blue irises drowning in surprise and confusion, and then he came one last time, coaxed to orgasm, pumping blood from severed carotid and jugular and, too, pumping out an oyster stream of jizz. It seemed all but immaculate, the red and the silver gray, and you rode him even after there was no more of him left to ride but a cooling cadaver. You cried over Philip, and that was the first and only one you ever shed tears for, and Jesus I am sorry but I wanted to slap you. I wanted to do something worse than slap you for your mourning. I wanted to leave a scar. Instead, I gouged out his lifeless eyes with my thumbs and spat in his face. You wiped your nose on your shirt sleeve, pulled up your underwear and jeans, and went back to the car for the needle-nose pair of pliers in the glove compartment. It did not have to be that way, you said, you pouted, and I growled at you to shut up, and whatever it is you’re doing in his mouth, hurry because this place gives me the creeps. Those slumping, smoldering hills of refuse, Gehenna for rats and maggots and crows, coyotes, stray dogs and strayer cats. We could have taken him to the sea, you said. We could have done that much, and then you fell silent, sulking, taciturn, and not ever again waking have you spoken of him. Besides the teeth, you peeled off a patch of skin, big as the palm of your hand and inked with the image of a crab, because we were born in the sign of Cancer. The rest of him we concealed under heaps of garbage. Here you go, rats, here’s something fresh. Here’s a banquet, and we shall not even demand tribute in return. We will be benevolent rat gods, will we two, bringing plenty and then taking our leave, and you will spin prophecies of our return. Amen. Amen. Hossannah. Our work done, I followed you back to the Impala, stepping superstitiously in your footsteps, and that is what I am doing when – now – I snap awake to the dull, gritty noise of the tires bumping off the shoulder and spraying dry showers of breakdown-lane gravel, and me half awake and cursing myself for nodding off; fuck me, fuck me, I’m such an idiot, how I should have stopped way the hell back in Bonne Terre or Fredericktown. I cut the wheel left, and, just like that, all is right again. Doomsday set aside for now. In the backseat, you don’t even stir. I turn up
the radio for companionship. If I had toothpicks, I might prop open my eyes. My hands are red, love. Oh god, my hands are so red, and we have not ever looked upon the sea.

  5.

  BOREDOM, YOU HAVE said again and again, is the one demon might do you in, and the greatest of all our foes, the one demon, Mystery Babylon, the Great Harlot, who at the Valley of Josaphat, on the hill of Megiddo, wraps chains about our porcelain slender necks and drags us down to dust and comeuppance if we dare to turn our backs upon the motherfucker and give it free fucking reign. I might allow how this is the mantra that set us to traveling on the road we are on and has dictated our every action since that departure, your morbid fear of boredom. The consequence of this mantra has almost torn you in half, so that I bend low over my love, only my bare hands to keep your insides from spilling outside. Don’t you shut your eyes. You don’t get out half that easy. Simple boredom is as good as the flapping wings of butterflies to stir the birth throes of hurricanes. Tiresome recitations of childhood traumas and psychoses be damned. As are we; as are we.

  6.

  WE FOUND HER, or she was the one found us, another state, another county, the outskirts of another slumbering city. Another truck-stop diner. Because we were determined to become connoisseurs of everything that is fried and smothered in lumpy brown gravy, and you were sipping a flat Coke dissolute with melting ice. You were talking – I don’t know why – about the night back home when the Piggly Wiggly caught fire, so we climbed onto the roof and watched it go up. The air smelled like burning groceries. We contemplated cans of Del Monte string beans and pears and cans of Grapico reaching the boiling point and going off like grenades, and the smoke rose up and blotted out the moon, which that night was full. You’re talking about the fire, and suddenly she’s there, the coal-haired girl named Haddie in her too-large Lollapalooza T-shirt and black jeans and work boots. Her eyes are chipped jade and honey, that variegated hazel, and she smiles so disarming a smile and asks if, perhaps, we’re heading east towards Birmingham, because she’s trying to get to Birmingham, but – insert here a woeful tale of her douchebag boyfriend – and now she’s stranded high and dry, not enough money for bus fare, and if we’re headed that way, could she please, and would we please? You scoot over and pat the turquoise sparkle vinyl upholstery, inviting her to take a Naugahyde seat, said the spider to the fly. “Thank you,” she says. “Thank you very much,” and she sits and you share your link sausage and waffles with her, because she says she hasn’t any money for food, either. We’re heading for Atlanta, you tell her, and we’ll be going right straight through Birmingham, so sure, no problem, the more the goddamn merrier. We are lifesavers, she says. Never been called that before. You chat her up, sweet as cherry pie with whipped cream squirted from a can, and, me, I stare out the plate-glass partition at the gas pumps and the stark white lighting to hide the place where a Mississippi night should be. “Austin,” she says, when you ask from whence she’s come. “Austin, Texas,” she volunteers. “I was born and raised there.” Well, you can hear it, plain as tits on a sow, in her easy, drawling voice. I take in a mouthful of lukewarm Cheerwine, swallow, repeat, and do not let my attention drift from the window and an idling eighteen-wheeler parked out there with its cab all painted up like a Santería altar whore, gaudy and ominous and seductive. Smiling Madonna and cherubic child, merry skeletons dancing joyful round about a sorrowful, solemn Pietà, roses and carnations, crucifixions, half-pagan orichá and weeping bloody Catholic Jesus. Of a sudden, then, I feel a sick coldness spreading deep in my bowels, ice water heavy in my guts, and I want to tell this talkative Lone-Star transient that no, sorry, but you spoke too soon and, sorry, but we can’t give her a ride, after all, not to Birmingham or anywhere else, that she’ll have to bum one from another mark, which won’t be hard, because the night is filled with travelers. I want to say just that. But I don’t. Instead, I keep my mouth shut tight and watch as a man in dirty orange coveralls climbs into the cab of the truck, him and his goddamn enormous shaggy dog. That dog, it might almost pass for a midget grizzly. In the meanwhile, Ms. Austin is sitting there feeding you choice slivers of her life’s story, and you devour it, because I’ve never yet seen you not hungry for a sobby tale. This one, she’s got all the hallmarks of a banquet, doesn’t she? Easy pickings, if I only trust experience and ignore this inexplicable wash of instinct. Then you, love, give me a gentle, unseen kick beneath the table, hardly more than an emphatic nudge, your right foot insistently tapping, tap, tap, at my left ankle in a private Morse. I fake an unconcerned smile and turn my face away from the window and that strange truck, though I can still hear its impatient engines. “A painter,” says Ms. Austin. “See, I want to be a painter. I’ve got an aunt in Birmingham, and she knows my mom’s a total cunt, and she doesn’t mind if I stay with her while I try to get my shit together. It was supposed to be me and him both, but now it’s just gonna be me. See, I shut my eyes, and I see murals, and that’s what I want to paint one day. Wallscapes.” And she talks about murals in Mexico City and Belfast and East Berlin. “I need to piss,” I say, and you flash me a questioning glance that Ms. Austin does not appear to catch. I slide out of the turquoise booth and walk past other people eating other meals, past shelves grounded with motor oil, candy bars, and pornography. I’m lucky and there’s no one else in the restroom, no one to hear me vomit. What the fuck is this? Hunh? What the fuck is wrong with me now? When the retching is done, I sit on the dirty tile floor and drown in sweat and listen to my heart throwing a tantrum in my chest. Get up and get back out there. And you, don’t you even think of shutting your eyes again. The sun won’t rise for another two hours, another two hours at least, and we made a promise one to the other. Or have you forgotten in the gauzy veils of hurt and Santísima Muerte come to whisper in your ear? Always have you said you were hers, a demimondaine to the Bony Lady, la Huesuda. So, faithless, I have to suffer your devotions as well? I also shoulder your debt? The restroom stinks of cleaning fluid, shit and urine, my puke, deodorant cakes and antibacterial soap, filth and excessive cleanliness rubbing shoulders. I don’t recall getting to my feet. I don’t recall a number of things, truth be told, but then we’re paying the check, and then we’re out in the muggy Lee County night. You tow Ms. Austin behind you. She rides your wake, slipstreaming, and she seems to find every goddamn thing funny. You climb into the backseat with her, and the two of you giggle and titter over private jokes to which I have apparently not been invited. What all did I miss while I was on my knees, praying to my Toilet Gods? I put in a Patsy Cline tape, punch it into the deck as you would, and crank it up loud so I don’t have to listen to the two of you, not knowing what you (not her, just you) have planned, feeling like an outsider in your company, and I cannot ever recall that having happened. Before long, the lights of Tupelo are growing small and dim in the rearview, a diminishing sun as the Impala glides southeast along US 78. My foot feels heavy as a millstone on the gas pedal. So, I have “A Poor Man’s Roses” and “Back in Baby’s Arms” and “Sweet Dreams” and a fresh pack of Camel’s and you and Ms. Austin spooning at my back. And still that ice water in my bowels. She’s talking about barbeque, and you laugh, and what the fuck is funny about barbeque. “Dreamland,” she says, “just like what those UFO nuts call Area 51 in Nevada, where that dead Roswell alien and shit’s supposed to be hidden.” Me, I smoke and chew on bitter cherry-favored Tums tablets, grinding calcium carbonate and corn starch and talc between my teeth. “Those like you,” says Ms. Austin, “who’ve lost their way,” and I have no goddamn idea what she’s going on about. We cross a bridge, and if it’s a river below us, I do not see any indication that it’s been given a name. But we’re entering Itawamba County, says a sign, and that sounds like some mythological world serpent or someplace from a William Faulkner novel. Only about twenty miles now to the state line, and I’m thinking how I desire to be shed of the bitch, how I want her out of the car before Tuscaloosa, wondering how I can signal you without making Ms. Austin Texas Chatterb
ox suspicious. We pass a dozen exits to lonely country roads where we could take our time, do the job right, and at least I’d have something to show for my sour stomach. I’m thinking about the couple in Arkansas, how we made him watch while we took our own sweet time with her, and you telling him it wasn’t so different from skinning catfish, not really. A sharp knife and a pair of pliers, that’s all you really need, and he screamed and screamed and screamed. Hell, the pussy bastard sonofabitch screamed more than she did. In the end, I put a bullet in his brain just to shut him the fuck up, please. And we’d taken so long with her, hours and hours, well, there wasn’t time remaining to do him justice, anyway. After that we’ve made a point of avoiding couples. After that, it became a matter of policy. Also, I remember that girl we stuck in the trunk for a hundred miles, and how she was half dead of heat prostration by the time we got around to ring around the rosies, pockets full of posies time. And you sulked for days. Now, here, I watch you in the rearview, and if you notice that I am, you’re purposefully ignoring me. I have to take a piss, I say, and she giggles. Fuck you, Catfish. Fuck you, because on this road you’re traveling, is there hope for tomorrow? On this Glory Road you’re traveling, to that land of perfect peace and endless fucking day, that’s my twin sister you’ve got back there with you, my one and true and perfect love, and this train is bound for Glory, ain’t nobody ride it, Catfish, but the righteous and the holy, and if this train don’t turn around, well, I’m Alabama bound. You and me and she, only, we ain’t going that far together. Here’s why God and all his angels and the demons down under the sea made detours, Catfish. The headlights paint twin high-beam encouragement, luring me on down Appalachian Corridor X, and back there behind me you grumble something about how I’m never gonna find a place to piss here, not unless it’s in the bushes. I’m about to cut the wheel again, because there’s an unlit side road like the pitchy throat of evening wanting to swallow us whole, and right now, I’m all for that, but... Catfish, née Austin Girl, says that’s enough, turn right around and get back on the goddamn highway. And whatever I’m supposed to say, however I’m about to tell her to go fuck herself, I don’t. She’s got a gun, you say. Jesus, Bobbie, she’s got a gun, and you laugh a nervous, disbelieving laugh. You laugh a stunned laugh. She’s got a goddamn gun. What the fuck, I whisper, and again she instructs me to retrace my steps back to 78. Her voice is cold now as the Artic currents in my belly. I look in the rearview, and I can’t see a gun. I want to believe this is some goddamn idiot prank you and she have cooked up, pulling the wool for whatever reason known only to thee. What do you want? I ask, and she says we’ll get to that, in the sweet by and by, so don’t I go fretting my precious little head over what she wants, okay? Sure, sure. And five minutes later we’re back on the highway, and you’re starting to sound less surprised, surprise turning to fear, because this is not how the game is played. This is not the story. We don’t have shit, I tell her. We ain’t got any money, and we don’t have shit, so if you think – and she interrupts, Well, you got this car, don’t you? And that’s more than me, so how about you just shut up and drive, Little Bird. That’s what she calls me, Little Bird. So, someone’s rewriting the fairy tale all around us; I know that now, and I realize that’s the ice in the middle of me. How many warnings did we fail to heed? The Santería semi, that one for sure, as good as any caution sign planted at the side of any path. Once upon a time, pay attention, you and you who have assumed that no one’s out there hunting wolves, or that all the lost girls and boys and men and women on the bum are defenseless lambs to the slaughter. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong, and it’s too late now. But I push those thoughts down, and I try to focus on nothing but your face in the mirror, even though the sight of you scares the hell out of me. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen you like that, and I thought I never would again. You want the car? I ask Catfish. Is that it? Because if you want the car, fuck it, it’s yours. Just let me pull the fuck over, and I’ll hand you the goddamn keys. But no, she says. No, I think you should keep right on driving for a while. As for pulling over, I’ll say when. I’ll say when, on that you can be sure.