She tried counting down from a thousand. She tried reciting her French vocabulary list. She listened to a true crime podcast about serial killers while she lay in bed with her eyes closed, and barely woke up in time for the bus.
You weren’t allowed at school barehanded. If you didn’t have gloves at home, you could pick a pair out from the bin in the main office, but those were bulky and unfashionable, and smelled like wet dog.
Elodie’s grandmother had sent her a whole pack three years ago, delicately patchworked from silk hanbok scraps. The vibrant colors made Elodie self-conscious, and of course Kamryn noticed immediately.
“El-o-die,” they squealed so loudly that Elodie winced. They turned her wrist to admire the elaborate embroidery at the cuff. “You got your hand? Why didn’t you text me?”
Elodie felt like everyone in the hall was staring. She pulled away and mumbled a vague excuse, but Kamryn had stopped listening.
“Have you seen the Mother Mayhem challenge yet? The group chat’s been blowing up about it all morning.”
She hadn’t. She’d turned off the notifications a while ago, unable to keep up.
Kamryn shoved a phone in Elodie’s face. The video was dark, grainy, the focus trained on somebody’s skeleton hand as it dangled off the edge of their bed in an unlit room.
It felt oddly transgressive to see a stranger’s hand ungloved. As though she had glimpsed someone naked. Elodie tried to imagine filming herself like that, uploading it for the world to watch, and her cheeks burned.
A boy’s voice murmured, “Mother Mayhem, grant me a boon.” The pale, twig-like fingers closed.
The view distorted, jagged edges of static lancing across the frame.
When the boy opened his hand, a spiral shell lay cupped in the cage of his metacarpals.
“It’s just a camera trick,” Elodie said, but her voice was uncertain even to her own ears.
“It’s not,” Kamryn insisted. Anyway, now you can try it.”
Last year, in the boys’ locker room, some of the varsity football players had held down a couple of the JV kids, bone to skin. One fought free and ran for the assistant coach, but it was already too late.
Usually, it took a while for the effect to kick in, but with so many of them, only a few seconds of direct contact had made the other kid pass out. And then he’d dropped into a coma.
Someone from the student council had passed around a get-well card for him in homeroom, which Elodie had dutifully signed. The other guys were expelled. There had been a huge deal about it in the local papers, though it didn’t make the national news; things like that happened too often for most of the major networks to care.
The kid woke up a couple months later, but never returned to school. Word was that he’d come back funny, that he saw things that weren’t there.
Word was that he’d started the Mother Mayhem challenge.
Here are the rules: at the stroke of midnight, reach your skeleton hand into wherever the dark seems deepest. Common candidates are under the bed, in your closet—classic childhood monster haunts. Then you say the words, close your hand, and hold your breath until 12:01.
(There are variations. You must be the only person awake in your house. You must have a full-length mirror behind you. You must be wearing the same clothes, down to your underwear, for three days before the challenge.)
When you relax your fist, you’ll find inside it a clue to how or when or where you’ll die.
Elodie lost track of how many times she replayed that first video. She wondered what she’d do if she opened her hand to find a seashell resting there. Avoid beaches for the rest of her life? Skip out on post prom, which always took place on a yacht? She’d rather die.
At lunch, in study hall, behind the stairwell during passing period, her classmates traded their deaths. Drowning was preferred to burning. Falling was the crowd favorite for a while, until Shivam from Elodie’s forensics club pulled an uncut emerald that got everyone guessing. A collapsed mine? A botched heist? At the end, he swapped it for a lipstick that he insisted meant assassination by femme fatale, which they all agreed would be a pretty hot way to go. Way better than sticking around for the end of the world.
Elodie did the Mother Mayhem challenge, of course. It was inevitable, from the first time she punched in the hashtag on her own phone and watched dozens of skeleton hands unfurl like bony flowers in bloom around shell casings and car keys and the plastic caps to syringes.
She did the challenge—repeatedly.
Night after night, Elodie called on Mother Mayhem and plucked from the air and darkness ticket stubs and ball bearings and, once, a spool of thread. These she threw into a tea tin that she shoved underneath her bed. She thought she could hear them sometimes, all her little deaths rattling gently below her pillow like her own personal white noise machine, lulling her to sleep.
Leg
BRIAN EVENSON
The captain of the vessel was named Hekla, a name that in the language of her ancestors meant “cloak,” though she had never worn a cloak. One of her legs was not a leg at all but a separate creature that had learned to act like a leg. When she needed to walk about her vessel this served as a leg for her, but once she was alone in her quarters she would unstrap it and it would unfurl to become a separate being, something she could converse with, a trusted advisor, a secret friend. Nobody knew it to be other than an artificial leg except for her.
Hekla had found the leg before she became captain, a few moments after she lost her flesh-and-blood leg, severed cleanly mid-thigh in a freak accident. Hekla had the presence of mind to tourniquet what was left of her thigh. She was fading from consciousness, having lost too much blood, when it appeared.
It was bipedal but strange and glittering, made of angles and light. Each time Hekla looked at it, it seemed subtly different.
“What is that?” asked the creature.
“What?” Hekla managed.
“The dark substance puddling around you.”
“That is my blood,” said Hekla. “I will soon die.”
“Ah,” said the creature.
“You don’t exist,” claimed Hekla. “I’m hallucinating you.”
The creature ignored this. Instead it said, “Would you not prefer to live?”
And with this began a relationship that bound Hekla and leg tightly together.
“I’m bored,” she told the leg one day many years later, once she was captain of a vessel. “We do nothing but float. I want something exciting to do.”
The leg told her this: “On the winds of the darkness is a creature as long as this vessel, and which moves in a slow undulating pattern across the currents of space. Its back is quivered with spines and it is long and thin like a snake but has the head and metal-breaking bill of a bony fish. With a swipe of its tail it could destroy this vessel.”
“Why do you tell me this, leg?” she asked.
Leg shrugged. “It is a worthy foe. I thought you might like to hunt it.”
At first Hekla dismissed leg’s suggestion out of hand. It made no sense to endanger her crew and the passengers sleeping in the storage pods for her own amusement. But as the days dragged slowly past, she began to favor the idea.
Eventually she listened to the leg with interest. When it told her where such a creature was most likely to be found, she directed the navigator to change course.
“Why should I change course?” he asked. His name was Michael.
“Because I am your captain,” said Hekla. “And I tell you to do so.”
“We have a destination,” said Michael. “A new life awaits us.”
“Change course,” said Hekla.
“I will not change my course without a reason,” said Michael.
So Hekla explained.
“This is not a worthy reason,” said Michael once she was finished. “If you do this thing, many of us will die, perhaps even all of us. No, I will not alter our course. We shall continue to our intended destination.”
&nbs
p; The captain asked again, and again he refused. In the end he made it clear that she would have her way only if she killed him first.
She returned to her quarters muttering to herself, “What use is it to be captain if I cannot have my way?”
Once back in her quarters, she released her leg. It unfurled and revealed itself.
“Did you hear him, leg?” she asked.
The leg simply inclined its head—for as curious as it seems, the leg, when unfurled, had a head—to indicate that it had.
“Who is the captain?” asked the leg in its strange voice. “Is it not you?”
“It is indeed me,” said Hekla.
“Then force him to do it,” the leg said.
“He claims he would rather die first,” said Hekla.
“Then kill him.”
But the captain did not want to kill Michael herself. She knew it was wrong and that she would feel guilty doing so. And yet, perhaps if she were not the one to do the actual killing, it would not be as wrong and she would be able to live with what had been done. The only one she could trust to kill Michael and keep her involvement a secret was leg.
“Leg,” she said.
“Hekla,” said leg, and bowed deeply.
“Will you kill Michael for me?”
“Yes,” said leg. “Here is what we will do. You will go to the navigation center when he is alone and you will secure the door from within. When he asks you what you are doing, you will ignore him and release me and I will unfurl and kill him.”
“I do not want to be there when he dies,” said Hekla. “I do not want to see it or for anyone to guess I am involved. Find another way.”
Leg thought.
“Take me off in your room. Then I will unfurl, walk down the corridor, enter the navigation center, and kill him.”
“People will see you walking and see what you are and they will shriek and scream. No one must know I have you, leg. If they realize you are more than a leg, they will destroy you, and perhaps me as well. Think again, leg.”
Leg thought long.
“I will change myself,” said leg finally. “I will take on your countenance and in that guise I will kill him.”
“Can you do this?” said Hekla, amazed. “Can you become just like me?”
“Yes, and act like you, too. But only if you grant me permission.”
And so Hekla did.
As she watched, leg underwent a transformation, taking on first her height and figure and then the specifics of her features. In the end there was nothing to tell the two of them apart except that the captain was missing her prosthetic, and leg, in becoming captain, had thought to give itself what seemed an artificial leg.
When Hekla looked upon this perfect replication of herself, she felt a shiver run through her.
“Go,” she said. “Kill him.”
“I go,” said leg, and left.
Leg went through the door and out into the passageway. It walked slowly toward the navigation center, where Michael was. This was the first time it had been out of the captain’s quarters on its own. This was the first time it had been away from the captain since leg had found her. Leg enjoyed how this felt.
Leg arrived at the navigation center. Michael was there, and alone.
“It’s no use trying to convince me,” said Michael. “I won’t change my mind.”
“I’m not going to try to convince you,” said leg, and killed him. To do this, leg turned itself inside out and engulfed him, so that the blood, when it came spattering forth, would be hidden inside. Then leg released the exsanguinated body and turned itself right side out again. Inside, it was spattered with Michael’s blood. On the outside, the false Hekla looked clean and untouched.
And so leg killed Michael and left his body on the floor. Then it bent over the body and stared at it long and hard. Slowly it took on the shape and form of Michael, for once someone was dead, leg did not need their permission to become them.
Leg went back to the captain. At first she thought it to be Michael, since Michael was who it resembled. The captain drew back as leg came closer, afraid, until the moment when Michael’s features began to smooth out and leg became itself again. Then it folded up tightly and became her leg again, though now it was aslosh inside with a dead man’s blood. Wherever the captain walked, she heard it.
And after? Some believe that, once Michael was dead, leg was satisfied to remain as it was, hidden, the captain’s confidant. Others believe that leg acquired a taste for being human and did not want to give this up. At night, while the captain slept, it would take on her form or that of Michael and wander the ship. Occasionally, as a special treat, it would turn itself inside out and kill someone, and then it would dispose of the body, sometimes jettisoning it into space, other times incinerating it with a mechanism incorporated into its body. There are those who say that by the time the vessel reached the vast creature Hekla intended to hunt, leg had destroyed the crew manning the vessel and had begun on the passengers suspended in the storage pods. Only the captain and leg were left awake and alive, and soon the ship was destroyed and the captain killed.
And leg? Soon it reached its mature form and became snake-bodied with the head of a bony fish, as it had always been meant to do. It is no doubt out there still, swimming alone along a current of darkness.
4
Veins, Like a System
ESHANI SURYA
The doctor stands at the sink, filling a syringe with oil, viscous and strangely red-black. Finally, the liquid reaches the appropriate milliliter mark—a number Lane isn’t privy to—and the doctor tips the needle back and forth, watching the oil slosh a little and settle. Lane tightens his fist, trying to coax the veins there to grow starker. This procedure, early petrochemical therapy, is a benefit, not yet available to the public, offered to employees of the oil company where Lane is a manager. He massages the skin at his inner elbow.
Are you sure about this? Lane’s wife, Katherine, asks from her chair. She still has her coat on, and she twists a loose thread around her pointer finger.
It’s perfectly safe, the doctor says, even though Katherine might have been asking Lane. He sterilizes Lane’s skin. It’ll stimulate everything, keep it all running. Especially the organs.
Which organs? Lane asks.
Deep breath, the doctor instructs, and the needle jabs through the flesh. Heart, lungs, eyes. You’ll be able to see when you’re saturated.
Not in your eyes, Katherine says. Lane, not eyes.
It’s part of the procedure, Lane says.
Oil is where the money comes from. It’s how they buy their son, Ev, a new backpack when the old one is frayed, how they keep cut flowers on the dining room table instead of leaving the centerpiece empty. If there are lawsuits, the pelicans shaking their slick black feathers with despair, the whispers of colleagues in different states suffering from nausea, memory loss, Lane chooses not to play the poor fool cynic, too bitter and missing out.
A few months later, Lane and Ev play basketball in the cracked driveway, weak spring sun traversing their spines. Ev dribbles through his legs and swishes past his father to score a layup, but Lane thinks of a recent pipeline fracture around Lubbock. A gelding took off by leaping across a fence, and when they found him in the long corridor of a corn field, they pried his teeth open for the bit and found his tongue all inky shine, an ominous rainbow in black from drinking water at the stream. No choice, they put the poisoned horse down, and Lane wonders how much the creature could’ve ingested, if it was any more than the milliliters the doctor slips into his bloodstream every week.
Just then, Ev barrels at him, elbow flailing, but Lane sidesteps and dodges the blow. His body locks, tensing for disaster, and doesn’t relax.
Idiot, Lane cries out, grabbing Ev’s collar and shaking him with fury.
Dad, Ev says, slowly wedging his fingers in the tight spaces between his father’s digits. He looks away from Lane’s gaze—he has been nervous ever since the veins in Lane’s eyes
turned black from the oil treatments. What are you doing?
Lane isn’t usually prone to anger, but he understands his body as weaker now, even if it thrums with energy. What runs through him is volatile, not meant to spill out of the web into the rest of the cells. The safety he believed in before is tenuous. Slowly, he steps back, straightens his son’s shirt at the shoulder blade, and retreats to the house.
It takes less than purposeful violence to empty a vein, just him dressing for church, while Ev complains about hating the preacher. It’s then, as Lane agitatedly pulls clothes from his closet, that a belt buckle smacks into his eye. Searing pain blacking out his vision, and then he realizes that it’s not just that, but oil leaking out, dripping down his cheek. He touches it again and again, smearing it around in his soft under-eye region. Someone pulls him along urgently.
Don’t look, Ev, Katherine says, closing the bathroom door. She positions Lane under the light and tries to open his lids wider, but he winces. The half of his face covered in oil is burning, like the skin is freckling into a thousand sores.
Katherine wets the cloth under some water and presses it to his face, but it doesn’t help. His eye is hot and somehow it doesn’t seem as solid. Like pudding on a stove, like jelly mixed hard with a spoon. He can’t see right, his vision teeters, unbalanced.
You should look at yourself, Katherine says. You should see what you let them do.
In the mirror, he has only one eye. The other is a dark, empty space, the inside burned away. He is raw, he is forever changed. When he looks back at Katherine, he sees that Ev has come inside anyway, though he hides his face in his mother’s blouse. She is crying.
No one told him about these close-up consequences of a leak. Maybe the Lubbock ground aches too, the gelding just the visible harm. Lane wonders if they’ll have to put him down now. When he looks at his family’s faces, fighting the dizziness latched on like a mask over his mouth and nose, he understands what Katherine meant that first day when she begged him to spare his eyes. Once the three of them owned the looks between them; no longer.
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