BLACK STATIC #42
Page 4
“God, no, why would I dream about that?” But his face grays.
“Guilt,” Michael mutters. It’s the first thing he’s said today. He’s always been a quiet, intense kid, even in kindergarten, but never this silent. “Residual guilt.”
You glance around at your three closest friends. Each has told a similar story to yours, displaying the same pinfeathers and body distortion as you. Each has been plagued with nightmares involving crows and falling.
“So what the hell do we do?” Randy slams his hand down on the table, rattling the napkin-holder, but he can’t hide his trembling. “Is this one of those freak diseases, like the one where people turn into trees or rocks or shit?”
“Maybe it’s God,” whispers Michael. “Maybe he’s punishing us for what happened to Jon.”
“Bullshit. Jon didn’t even believe in God.”
“What, you think Jon cursed us or something?” Brett demands.
“No,” Michael retorts. “I think God cursed us.” He’s pale, the dark, sleepless circles around his eyes pressed into his skin. “It’s been known to happen. And Jon was the pastor’s son.”
“Randy’s the one who beat the shit out of him,” you say.
“Yeah, but you pushed him off the roof,” Brett says. “What do you think’s gonna happen to you?”
The straw wrapper crumples in your hands. “That was an accident,” you mutter weakly. “I didn’t mean to do it.” You were just gonna scare him. That was all.
“We all know you were sweet on him,” Randy sneers. “Was it nice to finally get your hands on his candy ass?”
Fury flares hot and white across your vision and you swing at him across the table, clipping his jaw. He snarls and lunges for you, but there’s a loud thunk against the window and you both turn.
A single crow has landed on the sill, beady eyes gleaming. It’s small, barely a fledgling. It doesn’t seem afraid of you, despite how close you all are through the eighth-inch of glass.
Suddenly, it slams its head into the window. Michael shrieks. You recoil, the ghost of your face transposed over the network of blood where the bird keeps hammering against the glass. Its beak splinters, but it doesn’t stop, pounding its skull into the window until it’s a bloody pulp.
“Fuck,” Randy moans, the last of his tough façade melting away. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“It can’t get us in here,” Brett says, trying to reassure you, but his voice is shaking. “It’s going to be okay. It can’t get us.” He glances at you, but you’re watching the crow ram its ruined head into the glass over, and over, and over, until the pulp of its eyes are smears on the window. You think you can hear Jon laughing.
***
That night you can’t breathe. You dream that you are drowning in your own flesh, becoming smaller and smaller until you are a tiny bird, struggling under the weight of thick, melting folds of a human body.
When you wake, it is raining outside. Jon is sitting on your chest, bruises feathering across his face in the mottled light. “Hello, Eli my love,” he says. “Miss me?”
You wrap your arms around him and pull him toward you. Your world is hazy and disorienting; you need something, someone familiar to anchor you.
He leans down and kisses you, sweet and gentle, slipping his hands up your shirt. Your tongue slides over his split lip, and the sudden tang of iron – of blood – jolts you back into reality. His lips are soft, but his mouth isn’t warm any more. His chest doesn’t rise and fall against yours; it doesn’t move at all. You are kissing a dead boy.
You shove him off of you. “Don’t touch me,” you slur. Your tongue is thick with sleep, growing to a crow’s hard point. “Get away from me, you freak.”
He tips back, laughing, in a fall of black feathers. There’s an alien coldness in his voice, the dark tinge of contempt. “Gee, Eli. A guy dies and his boyfriend—” your stomach twists “—just up and forgets about him—”
“I’m not your boyfriend,” you say, words falling from your lips as heavy as stones. “I never wanted you.”
“You made that very clear to your friends on Friday afternoon.” His smile is a razor’s edge. “You’re a shit liar, Eli. Kissing me two weeks ago was the second biggest mistake of your life, right after pushing me off the roof.”
You were the one who kissed him that first day, up against the chain link fence on the roof of the school. He was talking about something – biology? theology? you can’t remember – and you pressed him back, and he dropped his books, and you covered his mouth with yours to shut him up.
“You were asking for it,” you say weakly, and he barks out a laugh.
“Bullshit. You kissed me because you wanted me.” He grinds down on you, and to your shame, your erection presses painfully against his jeans. “And you still want me, don’t you?”
“Stop,” you moan. This has to be a dream. His fingers brush you through your pajama pants, teasing you with touches too light. You arch under him.
“Do you want me to?” he whispers, biting down on your earlobe. You can hear feathers rustling.
If you could stay locked in this dream forever, with this ghost boy in your arms, you would. “Don’t you fucking dare,” you say, and he rewards you with a squeeze down low. He begins to pump his hand up and down, running his thumb over your tip. A spike of pleasure chased by immediate shame threatens to turn your limbs to jelly, and you moan again. Every feather on your body prickles.
His hand works you over and the kisses he peppers down your neck and chest feel like tiny fireballs, feeding your guilt. But they can’t sear your conscience clean.
“I came here to give you something,” he breathes in your ear, sliding his hands up your body, and you don’t think to resist until he presses his thumbs into your eyes.
You jolt awake, screaming into the darkness. There is only darkness now, no stars outside your window, not even the glowing blue window of your cellphone screen. Your eyes are open, but there’s nowhere left to hide from the nightmares.
You’ve gone blind.
***
Your cellphone’s harsh buzz cuts through the crows howling in your head. They have started speaking in tongues, in fiery words you don’t understand. You fumble across your dresser, claws scratching the wood. Your hands are hardening, growing thin and scaled. You’ve lost so much weight, you feel like you could float away at any moment. Somehow, you find and press the call button.
“Randy fell down the stairs last night,” Michael says tonelessly. “He broke every bone in his body. Every finger. He even broke his fucking toes.”
You don’t say anything. All of your words are gone, evaporated dream by dream. Your father has barricaded your bedroom door shut and hidden himself away in his study, combing the internet for a cure, a clue, anything; your mom’s constant sobbing is the only human noise your household has heard over the past week.
Your harsh breathing echoes through the cellphone’s mouthpiece, whistling from your elongating beak.
“His mom called me from the hospital,” Michael says. “Brett’s there, too. All of his teeth are falling out.” A sob crackles through the phone. “Oh God, I think we’re gonna die. Everything hurts. My face is bulging, all my bones are stretching—”
He screams then, and a sharp crack! snaps across the receiver. The crows are no longer in your ears; they are on the other end of the line, with Michael, whose cellphone has hit the ground.
You listen until the screams die away. Then you end the call.
You’re pretty sure you know what you need to do.
You open the window and wait, arms extended. When the wings come rushing in, air battering your face, you don’t move. You don’t scream. You don’t fight. “Take me to him,” you croak, using the last of the words left in you.
The crows cackle, whirling about you. They buoy you up, and the loss of the ground beneath your feet is at once terrifying and exhilarating. You are almost flying. Almost, as the wind threatens to tear you to pieces.
You’re at the base of a fire escape. You recognize the scent of roses, lilies, chrysanthemums, now heavy with decay. The church. You wonder if Jon’s casket is still around, if it’s empty, if it’s ever been full at all.
The grating scratches underfoot as you haul yourself upward, arms flapping ineffectually. It’s hard to balance on the metal stairs, but you soldier on, even when you slip and crack your beak against the railing. Bright explosions of pain blossom in your head, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters now is the climb to sky sKY SKY. You have to get to the roof.
You scrabble onto the shingles, scraping lines into the tiles. Crows wheel above you, their cacophony almost drowning out your friends’ sobs and curses. Though you can’t see them, you can feel them. Brett is screaming. Michael is praying aloud, words mangled by the shape of his own changing face. Randy’s ragged breathing and the squeak of a wheelchair are the only way you know he’s there. But of course he’s here; you all have to be present for the finale.
“Jon,” you try to say, but your beak clacks dumbly. No words. You think it instead, like a prayer. Jon. Jon. Jon.
If you had your words back, you would tell him how sorry you are – for hurting him, for pushing him from the roof. For being too weak to stand up for yourself, and for him. Maybe you would tell him that you loved him. Maybe you would stop lying.
You don’t need convincing, not like your friends do. When the crows rush downward in a tornado of beaks and wings, you are ready. Bunching up your legs, you leap from the edge of the roof. Jon is waiting for you, waiting in the open air.
There is a breath, an intake of pure, cathartic bliss, and you wonder what sound you will make when you hit the ground because you cannot fly.
That’s when you feel a pair of arms wrap around you from behind, wiry and strong. A mouth brushes your ear, whisper reverberating through the flock.
The crows shriek around you, the sheer mass of them crushing you. The noise of them almost swallows up your friends’ screams, the desperate scrabble of claws on tile as they fall, the splintering of Randy’s wheelchair on the pavement below.
You hover in the air, held tight to the chest of a dead boy. You grip back, claws digging into his dead skin-not-skin. After an eternity, you drift back to the roof, and when your feet touch the tiles, they are human feet. Your spine has straightened, bones no longer hollow. You feel a pair of lips touch your eyelids, one at a time, and when you open them again, there is the ghost with black hair standing in front of you, wearing the same black hoodie and dark jeans as he was when he died.
I loved you, you know, says Jonathan Chin. He’s radiant in the light of early dawn, his bruised face streaked with tears, an angel, a corpse. You fucker. I loved you so much. You sob and reach out for him, but he dissolves into a shower of black feathers that burn where they touch your skin.
You scream and scream and scream, clutching fistfuls of them in your ruined human hands. On the ground, the crows begin to feed in a mass flurry of rippling wings, ignoring the creaking of a lone, spinning wheel. “I loved you, too,” you cry. Finally, everything out in the open. But your friends make no sound at all.
***
Alyssa Wong is a 2013 graduate of Duke University and the Clarion Writers’ Workshop for Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her first publication, ‘The Fisher Queen’, appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction this past June. She lives in New York City.
WHAT HAPPENED TO MARLY AND LANNA
NOAH WARENESS
Illustrated by Ben Baldwin
Es increíble que nada pasa. Un poder grande se mueve.
The real Salvation Army set up behind Sam Long Park last night, on a bunch of nappy flannel blankets spread out on the grass. Dry glue sticks, unwound pieces of chainlink, broken wineglass stems. They have everything, really everything, so almost none of it has any point. I start crying sometimes when I notice signs for the ordinary Salvation Army stores, or even the sign over the shelter. Even stop signs look like their red badges, and I have to remind myself we’re all volunteers too. Nobody knows what they’re doing.
What happened is mostly about Marly but it comes back to my sister Lanna too, and I’m saying this at all because I saw some of her from the bus window last night, laid out on their yellow blankets. She used to tie all this gray yarn in her hair so it’d be longer and she’d look more like a Raggedy Ann, and what they did with it was wind it two ways around some roof shingles in a gray X with her gold earring in the center where the bundles of yarn crossed over. I don’t know why they think anyone would want something like that. This is still about Marly the sick dog who we buried in the garden last summer but when I got off the bus and ran, they were gone.
I remember Marly’s hair was yarn the same way, but black. Like a stuffed dog, actual yarn. Mom would always say he felt like a sheep. You could run a hand through and barely see your fingers, but sometimes that would pull his yarn and hurt him. I can’t do it anymore but I used to put my face up close to him in a sunbeam and watch all these thin little colored threads come clear against the black. Dusty gold flaring in the sun, roan red and whiskey and horn. I’d be down on my side, watching him sleep and trying to follow the colors, the threads splitting into their own threads. One color went deeper than black but that would mean I was sleeping too.
Lanna spent that whole summer going back and forth between the Salvation Army and the blanket fort on the back porch. The day school got out she found a record player on a planter in front of the thrift store, and two albums by a Mexican band named Corrupted. It hadn’t rained for a month but somebody must have left them out once, the pictures were all flaked off the covers. Neither one of us knew any Spanish. Those were two reasons why I didn’t like them, I think, and why she did. But Lanna kept going back because she said she’d find the rest of the records.
It was really hot, even at night, and Marly kept sleeping more. He could hardly walk and the fishpond in the back yard grew out with algae the color of dirty glass. I’d go out to throw sticks at it and say I was aiming for the heart of canine leukemia. We had this beige plastic statue of Pan standing in the middle of the pond and the heart would be at its base, just under the curdy green water. I thought it would look like a drowned wasp nest full of leeches. But one time the stick hit right where I aimed and I couldn’t handle going back to the house to check, so I just gave myself three thousand points like Duck Hunt. After that I was aiming to miss and saying the God Pan was putting curses on my arm.
Marly was half poodle but pretty small. Ever since the letter of diagnosis he had to stay on the back porch. Our mom might have thought you can catch cancer from a dog. We built a big blanket fort around his bed and brought the fan inside it with an extension cord. I held the flashlight for Lanna while she read to him about the Land of Oz, and a few times every hour he’d whine in his sleep and wake up. We’d feed him cold wieners from the fridge. That summer we were running the washing machine so much the well got low, and Mom started having us get thrift store blankets we could just throw away. She had piles of old blankets in the downstairs bathroom, but she said those were too antique to use on a dog.
Lanna pushed the dresser against her bedroom door and listened to one side of one album over and over. She said she was burning candles to make Puppy okay. I got to remember every tick in the vinyl, and sometimes I’d walk around the side of the house and see her leaning out the window smoking. Yarn hanging down her face like the smoke was sticking there, building a gray chrysalis around her.
One time Mom left for a week and it took us two days to find the note on the back door corkboard. She didn’t leave any numbers to call, just some five and fifty dollar bills on a pin. Her car wasn’t gone but there was a big gap in her closet of dresses. We couldn’t get Marly to stand so we each took a side of his laundry hamper bed
and carried him into the living room. He didn’t bring his head up at first and then his lips peeled back and a little wormshape of blood fell through his teeth, like it broke off from inside him. That was when we thought he would die.
“I have to go look things up,” said Lanna. After she shut her bedroom door I could hear her pushing clothes around in her closet. She only had one single book about magic and she kept it under her mattress, not in her clothes closet. It was illustrated with green drawings of crowns and these rows and columns of numbers it said were important. The other thing she kept there was a Spanish dictionary, both of them wrinkled from the same spill of tea.
She came out an hour later in a navy-colored rayon kimono that smelled like burning incense. A few minutes before that Marly’s eyes stopped moving under the lids. He wasn’t breathing and I pinched his side because I thought it might wake him up. Lanna yelled at me for not coming to get her. Then she said she prophesied the death. But she had to turn away and look out the window first, before she said it.
What happened to Marly is we carried him outside in his laundry hamper bed. The kimono was too long so we went slow down the stairs while she hiked it up on one side. He looked so small curled in his blankets and towels, like a stuffed black otter, and when I turned my head I saw three boxes on the dryer for delivery pizza we never ate. We walked him to the juniper tree in the side garden, pushing through overgrown pampas grass, and Lanna took out a blue candle tied on a leather string. She lit it and started spinning it in a circle. It would go out but she kept lighting it. “We have to baptize the room with candle wax.” She kept calling it a room. The record player was going really loud with both speakers balanced on her windowsill and I don’t remember her going back to do that so I think it’s a thing they got wrong, like Marly’s yarn.
A spot of wax hit me in the cheek. Not really hot but I brought my hand up anyway. Her back was turned and I sat down on the flagstones. It hadn’t rained for weeks and between the flagstone joins brushes of dead thyme were colored like water drying on sand. A few days before, Lanna was saying if someone’s headed to the Great and Only, the duty’s on their loved ones to prepare the way. She always said the Great and Only when she talked about death. The record ended right when she finished lighting and spinning the candle, and she said something in Spanish. She got on her knees and lit the wick again and poured blue wax right on him.