by IGMS
I nodded and she spread out the cards. Again I made her wait while I lovingly destroyed all but one. Alec sat silently in his dark corner.
"Is that the ace?" she asked again, leaning forward, her eyes intense and locked onto mine. "I'm pretty sure it is this time."
I picked up the card. Please, I'll help.
She was serious. Did she really think we could defeat him? Her destructive abilities were no better than my creations. Her efforts would be like a breath in a hurricane.
I sighed and the card boiled away into a fine mist. "No," I said. "You aren't very good at this."
"One more try." She spread the cards out again. "Not like we have anything else we can do." She looked right at me as she said it, determination in her voice.
I worked quickly this time, curiosity gripping me. I pulled a card away and ignited the rest in a flare as bright as burning magnesium, leaving a charred black line across the table.
I looked at the card. This time there were more, smaller words: We can do it together, we have to try. What else are we doing here?
I held the card loosely in my fingers, staring. Could we actually succeed? And if we could, would I even want to? I knew that my purpose was to destroy, but in a sense I had already succeeded at destroying everything in existence. This eternal stalemate could be seen as a victory for me.
But then what was left to do? I'd considered trying to destroy Tessa lifetimes ago. The idea of ending such a potential for creation -- in essence, destroying an infinity of worlds -- held some appeal to me. But my passion was in the details, the precise and intimate destruction of individual creations. And even if I did someday get tired of it and want to destroy Alec and Tessa both -- and then myself, effectively destroying existence all together -- I would still have to destroy Alec first. Else he would hold me down for eternity, satisfied in his everlasting nothingness.
I locked eyes with Tessa and gave a barely perceptible nod. Then I stood and threw the card at Alec in one motion, attempting to change it into a sword as it flew toward his amorphous body.
The creation of the sword was, of course, just a distraction. He easily stopped me from making it, and the card flapped harmlessly against him. But while his attention was on the sword, I struck at his brain, pulling it apart at the atomic level. He blocked me and pushed back. I struck at his heart, trying to pickle it, his lungs, trying to shatter them into crystal. He blocked me each time.
I could sense Tessa's attacks. They were much more elusive than I'd expected, but Alec still deflected them with little effort.
"Even our own existences cause nothing but suffering," Alec said flatly.
Tessa still struck at him, her blows sudden -- unpredictable even for me. Then a great barren landscape stretched out below us; a flat expanse of grey rubble. I almost lost my concentration in shock. She'd created while trying to destroy Alec at the same time. I'd never tried to use both sides at once.
"Even we cannot peaceably exist," Alec droned. "What right have we to use this power at all?"
"We were existing just fine till you stopped us!" cried Tessa, attacking him with careless passion.
Alec blocked her from creating anything more, and I sensed how thinly he was stretched. All his strength was spread between stopping mine and Tessa's destructive powers, and Tessa's creative power.
My creative power was still unblocked.
I reached out toward the landscape Tessa had built and began to form something of my own.
I pieced together a brain, as intricate and advanced as I could manage -- perhaps the mental capacity of a child. It floated above the rocky terrain, spinning slowly as I worked.
"What do you think you are doing?" demanded Alec, but he did not move against me yet. I felt him quivering, wanting to reach out and stop me, but afraid to test his limits.
I covered the brain in flesh and blood, giving it a heart and lungs and creating some air for it to breathe. Then I began to design the nervous system.
"No, what are you -- stop that!" Alec's voice strained, breaking from its normal even tone.
A final tweak and the nervous system was completely hooked up -- but flawed. Alec could see that flaw; indeed I made it as obvious as I could. All the nerves in the creature's small body fired constantly, sending a steady flow of pain signals to the brain. I let it fall to the ground and roll to a stop against a crumbled rock. It sat there, immobile, tortured by its own existence.
I began to build a second one.
"No!" Alec stopped me, and his hold on my destructive powers weakened. I struck, and he defended, but in so doing he just slightly released his grip on Tessa's creative power. She made several hundred of the creatures in a tenth of the time it took me to make that one.
Alec cried out again, a wordless screech at all the torture before him. He let go of me completely and reached for the creatures, using his creative powers in an attempt to turn off their pain.
"You'll be happier in oblivion, my friend," I said.
In an instant I reduced Alec to a cloud of atoms.
A moment later, much more casually, I also destroyed the creatures and our table and chairs, then floated down to stand with Tessa on the rocky soil. We stared, breathless, each waiting for the other to act.
"I told you we could do it," she said.
I could sense her buzzing with barely contained power. She watched me closely, and I gathered that the only thing keeping her from releasing it was her uncertainty of how I would react.
"Give me a head start?" she asked with a sly grin.
"I'll count to three."
"Thank you," she said. "For . . . you know." She laughed, and I could see the twinkle of infinite possibilities in her eyes.
"One," I said, and she was gone, a sonic boom echoing through the air above the crumbled landscape. Countless planets and stars and galaxies appeared in her wake. Pulsars spun away from her like tops, and nebulae of all colors spread out in waves where she passed.
"Two." A wall as thick as a star slammed into existence in front of me, stretching as far as I could sense in all directions, blocking me from the worlds she'd created. It was made of a carbon lattice, arranged at the atomic scale in such a way that made it the hardest substance I'd ever encountered.
"Three." Forms appeared above me. Great tentacled monsters, giant fanged birds, starships with mounted weapons, thousand-ton molten rocks -- all converging on me.
I laughed. She'd been planning this for a while. I raised a hand and vaporized several meteors before they could crash into me, truly stretching and flexing my destructive powers for the first time in aeons.
It felt good.
"I'm right behind you, Tessa," I said, and hurled myself at the wall.
Oyster Beach
by Sophie Wereley
Artwork by Scott Altmann
* * *
The day they found Joey Takamoto's body washed up on Oyster Beach, Yuan and I had been drinking up by the bridge to the mainland. We didn't know what was happening until the sirens went off.
"Someone died," Yuan said. Her beer slipped from her fingers and exploded in foam on the sand.
We started running, all clumsy arms and legs, toward the sound of the sirens. I had this feeling in my chest like I'd swallowed a fistful of smooth pebbles, and they were clogging up my throat and stomach.
We came around the bridge and I saw Mrs. Takamoto's car in the parking lot. That's when I knew it was him. Joey was dead.
Mrs. Takamoto held me and cried. Yuan covered her mouth with her hands. Her head swiveled back and forth. No, not again.
And the police didn't even say, "Have you girls been drinking?" They just took our shaking bodies and led us to the parking lot of Marsh Bro's Seafood, into the arms of parents and siblings and tourists who pointed from underneath their floppy hats. People without important faces patted my back and told me everything was going to be all right.
It was the two of us, drunk in a sea of liars.
Two weeks after they f
ound the body, Joey's brother Jordin came back from the University of Virginia with a secondhand revolver in his luggage. He bought a motorboat and fifteen yards of trammel net, which he weighed down along the edges with copper washers. He went out on the water every day. Even though there were lots of stories about what happened to Joey, Jordin had already made up his mind.
"He thinks Joey got killed by the mermaid," I said.
"He's also an idiot," Yuan said. We watched him from the kitchen window. Marsh Bro's Seafood backed up onto Oyster Beach - the little blue crab statue on the roof sometimes looked like it was scuttling out of the water, if you came at it from the right angle - and we'd been watching him boat up and down the channel between the island and mainland for hours.
"Jordin's going to get himself killed out there, too," she said.
"Yeah," I said.
"He's not going to find it."
"It hides during the day," I said. Yuan kept her face still. She didn't talk about the mermaid at all, not even during tourist season, when the fishermen put away their traps and pretended to hunt her instead. She hated when I talked like the mermaid existed.
"Why's he got a gun for, anyway? A harpoon would make more sense."
I snorted.
"Who's going to sell a harpoon to some nineteen-year-old kid?"
"Who's going to sell a gun to a psycho who believes in mermaids?" she said, and leaned away from the window. "It's all ridiculous."
I had doubts. You didn't grow up on the island and end up totally rational. It was something about the constant white noise from the ocean and how the faces you saw changed with the seasons. Especially at Marsh Bro's. One minute you're talking to the regulars and the next some really white lady from California is asking if you have Alaskan king crab and whether there will be any mermaid sightings today.
All tourists are idiots. They want Alaskan king crab in Maryland, and they want mermaid sightings at noon when all the stories say she only comes out at night.
Yuan walked to the front counter, her flats tapping against the checkerboard floors. I liked to watch her go. When she turned fifteen years old, Mr. Marsh hired her for two dollars more per hour than minimum wage. He gave her a dollar raise every year, too, because he said her legs sold crab cakes.
It was true that Marsh Bro's did better business when Yuan was at the counter. She tossed her hair over her shoulder and grinned and it was like the sun. I'd seen grown men walk in and stare. Most days, I rinsed dishes in the back and felt satisfied that they wanted her, but she was mine.
There were no customers today. With the dead bodies, the tourists were divided into idiots who thought it was mermaids and idiots who thought it was sharks. Either way, they were all migrating to the mainland beaches.
Yuan locked the cash register.
"No one's coming in today," she said. "Do you want to go to the beach?"
I thought for a second. I didn't care that Mr. Marsh might find out and fire us both, or that Jordin might see us on the beach and decide to talk to me, which I wouldn't be able to handle. I thought this meant Yuan had forgiven me.
"Yeah," I said.
Jordin and I had last talked at his brother's funeral. They had it on a Sunday, so there would be fresh flowers in the church. The church was doing funerals for free now, even the catering. Before the service started, I saw Jordin by the cubed cheese, walked over and said something polite. He cracked a joke about me being the only one to show up without a date, then went to find his seat.
I sat two rows behind him. He cried for the entire service.
The casket wasn't open. Joey was too disfigured. Bloated from the water. Rips all up and down his back and stomach. Bite marks on his legs and arms and neck. His face was beaten in, unrecognizable. Two of his fingers were missing. His hair was ripped out of his scalp. He'd been bleeding, but he couldn't bleed anymore.
They found all the boys like this - broken apart. Like they'd been attacked by animals and dragged along the sea floor.
Lots of people said it wasn't the mermaid. Actually, everyone but Jordin, me, and the fishermen thought it definitely wasn't the mermaid.
I don't know if Jordin saw something that made him think she was real. I figured he must have. The only reason the fishermen thought she might exist was that they were drunk all the time. Maybe that's why I believed. I'd been drunk the day we saw her.
Yuan and I were walking on the bridge to the mainland. We liked to drink by the tower that controlled the drawbridge, because you could see the houses lit up on both sides of the channel.
We stopped at the beach on the way back. The night was blurry because of the fog and the beer we'd been drinking. We waded out into the ocean. The water foamed around my ankles, then my calves, then my thighs. We got sticky with salt.
Eventually we stopped making out long enough for me to hear something.
It's hard to remember what happened next.
I remember the look on Yuan's face as something crashed into my waist and dragged me under. I remember breathing in water and trying to grab onto the seafloor. I kicked and scratched and got sand in my eyes.
Whatever it was let me go, and I thrashed my way back to shore.
"Are you okay?" Yuan said. She held my shoulders while I threw up. Her hands were all sandy and rough.
"Yeah. I'm okay," I said, even though there was water running out of me everywhere. My eyes, nose, mouth, ears. I rubbed my stomach, because it felt sore, and saw blood on my fingertips. I'd gotten three deep scratches on my hipbone.
"You dumbass," Yuan said. Her voice was this cracking, watery-thin sound. "I thought you were going to die."
We made it back home okay. I limped, but I was still alive.
At the funeral, I wondered why I got to be alive when Joey was dead.
Yuan threw a pack of cigarettes and two cans of Fanta into her backpack and we headed out. It's a ten-minute walk from Marsh Bro's to the beach. The dunes out there are tall enough that you can't see over them, and the beach turns in on itself. It gets lower, too, like a bowl in the earth. High tide, it fills with water. Low tide, it's invisible. You'd get lost if you didn't know where you were going.
We called it the sex pit.
Yuan threw a towel down on the damp sand and sat down. Her orange dress stopped mid-thigh, showing off her leg freckles.
I sat next to her. She glanced at my dress, but then she was staring out at the channel, her mouth a little line. Yuan seemed to think I'd done it on purpose - wear a black dress to work so she'd get upset. But I wasn't trying to make a statement.
"Sorry. I wasn't thinking," I said.
Yuan shrugged.
"It's fine. You should take it off, anyway."
It was a test. Sleep with me and I'll know you still love me, Lyra. I wanted to make up, of course. I didn't want to keep fighting over my stupid clothes and my stupid ex-boyfriend. I wanted her back. I just wanted us to be okay before we started boning.
"I don't think that's a good idea," I said.
Yuan looked at the ground. "Sure."
We heard a motorboat come around from the south side of the beach. Jordin was bringing the boat down the channel. He waved when he got close enough to see us.
Yuan stood up.
"I wonder what he wants," I said.
"Have you talked to him since the funeral?" Yuan asked.
"No."
Jordin came to a stop about five feet out, anchored, and started wading toward us. He stumbled over to our beach towel and sprawled out, his revolver held loosely to one side.
"Afternoon, ladies," he said.
"How've you been?" I asked.
"I got heatstroke." Jordin pulled the corners of the beach towel over his face. "I'm just shitting sunburns at this point."
Yuan offered him a can of Fanta.
"Thanks." Jordin nursed the can like it was the last beer at a bad party. "You should be jealous, Yuan. Your girlfriend's been watching me all morning. I was shirtless."
"Yeah, that's
why you got yourself heatstroke," I said.
"Probably."
Yuan sat next to him and dug her toes into the sand. Jordin was grinning up at me, and Yuan watched him grin. She wasn't thrilled, but she couldn't say anything. It was Jordin Takamoto. The Takamoto brothers were golden boys, even if they did sleep with mainland girls during the on-season. And of the two, Jordin was smarter, more athletic. Better-looking, too, I guess.
The island's token lesbians couldn't afford to be rude to him.
"Do you ever see her?" he asked.
"She only comes out at night," Yuan said.
"You guys are being careful, though, right?" he said. He handed me the empty can. "She gets you into the water because you're stupid and horny, and then she pulls you under and you drown. That's how it works in stories."
"I don't think the mermaid's gay, Jordin," I said.
"You're probably right." He laughed and collapsed back onto the towel. Yuan and I glanced at each other. There was no reason to laugh.
Joey had been the third to die. The other two, Colin Polenski and Serafino Gaiba, I'd known, but not like I knew Joey. We'd been dating for a year when I told him I didn't think I was interested in his bits. He didn't care that I liked girls. He held me together when coming out meant everyone hated me for hurting him. He got me the job at Marsh Bro's with Yuan, her smile, and her crab cake selling legs.
"So why aren't you on your little boat right now, anyway?" Yuan asked. "Looking for us?"
"Obviously." Jordin paused long enough for me to wonder if things were going to get really uncomfortable.
"We do actually have work --" I started to say.
"Do you want to come hunting with me?" Jordin asked.
I snorted. Couldn't help it. He called it hunting, like he knew what he was doing. Yuan's face was the same as when people talked about the mermaid -- impassive and perfect.
"Why would we do that?" she asked.
Jordin stared at the ground. His ears were red, and I stopped smiling because I remembered that Joey's ears used to do that, too.