There is a justice system with no judge. The victim pronounces judgment. Why shouldn’t the victim get to say what is to happen to their offender? All the justice system needs to do is bring the offender before the victim. This can happen at the victim’s door, or in the hospital where the victim may be recovering, or on the street at the crime scene. If the victim is dead, a group of people close to the victim gather to discuss what the victim would have decided, based on the victim’s personality and outlook on life.
Cole’s three victims stand before him. Two are the couple of the house he burglarized a month ago. The third is his current victim. They start speaking all at once, seemingly oblivious that they are talking over each other. Bits and pieces of their monologues rise out of the cacophony. They are each telling him exactly how they were hurt by him, not just because of his actions at the time but because of what it has done to them ever since.
“I don’t trust anyone anymore.”
“I wake up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, thinking there’s someone in the house. Every night.”
“I’m seeing a psychiatrist.”
“I’m on medication for my depression.”
As one of them speaks, tears of anger spring to her eyes. Fists and jaw clench.
As another talks, he seems to soften. There is a slump of defeat but also a hint of forgiveness, a resignation that people will behave badly, including himself.
As the third victim talks, Cole becomes increasingly disturbed by the person’s flat affect, and shivers. Is he about to be attacked, even tortured? Is that allowed in this system?
“Which victim gets to choose what happens to me?” he asks aloud. No one but the victims are present, and they do not seem to hear him. He sinks to his knees and squeezes his eyes shut, willing to be anywhere but here. There is a stark honesty of a system where the victim decides the offender’s fate. It is frighteningly simple. Yet there is a hint of horror at what might spring from it. Should one person have so much power over another? Even if they were wronged?
The thoughts swirl around and Cole is caught in the whirlpool. Down he goes through vivid worlds that last mere minutes. He feels splinters punching into his neck and arms as he stands locked into a stock. People pass by and spit. A young boy throws a small apple at him, clocking him in the cheek. The sting is nothing compared to the shooting pains in his legs from standing in place.
He is lying down staring up into beams and thatch. Hands force his jaws open. He screams as a man looms over him, holding a steaming bucket. There is an acrid, metallic odor that makes him choke even before the liquid is poured, burning his lips. He gags in his terror.
Now he sits with a forearm strapped onto a thick wooden table. A different man approaches, lifts a very large, curved sword. Cole screams.
A crowd is chasing him, throwing rocks. There is snow on the ground. His back and legs ache as he stumbles forward, toward a wooded area. He falls, staggers up in a panic. He doesn’t want to die like this. Before he reaches the trees, he realizes no one is throwing rocks anymore. Looking back, he sees the crowd has turned their backs on him, are heading back to the town he can see in the middle distance. He feels relief. Limping into the woods, he shivers. He isn’t dressed warmly, and he is alone.
He is sitting alone in a small cell. He owns a few books, a hot plate, and a small television, which is made of clear Lexan. It’s similar to the cell he left but for the belongings. He understands he has been in this cell a long time. He wonders if it’s visiting day. He wonders if anyone will come to visit. He hopes he hasn’t missed yard time. He wants to be around people.
Time speeds up. Cole watches the walls around him age and then grow brittle and crumble.
He finds himself in another place. It feels like he is seeing the future. Three people are seated at a table, staring at their tablet computers. They are not his victims, he notes with a sigh of deep relief. Instead of the older couple and his current victim, he is looking at a well-groomed man who is dressed in the manner of a lawyer or businessman. On one side of the man is an older woman with stylish gray hair and a beautiful manicure, and on his other side is a large black man whose glasses are pushed up onto his bald head.
The three are talking about someone who is in prison. Cole realizes these people are members of a parole board.
“This is one lifer I could be convinced to let out someday,” the businessman says. “But not today.” He touches the screen, recording his vote.
The woman nods. “Let’s not wait too long, though. We want him to be able to get out and still make something of his life. Before he gets too old.”
The black man looks across at the woman. “What are you thinking? Two more years? Five?”
The woman considers, then nods. “Sounds about right.”
The businessman makes a note. “Then next year we’ll recommend he start a gradual step-down. He’ll need to be introduced to a less secure setting, and then eventually receive some furloughs into the community.”
Cole is moved. Are they speaking about him? He hopes not. Surely his crimes are not so bad that he should be sentenced to life in prison. He doesn’t want to have been incarcerated for so long that people start to think in these terms. Yet that there exist people who do think this way about someone who has obviously spent so long in prison . . .
He weeps for the unknown lifer they are talking about. Here is a justice system that practices mercy.
It is as if Cole’s tears open a new doorway. He sees a justice system practiced as art. People come from far away to watch the most accomplished justice artists decide cases, crafting custom resolutions that the crowds discuss for days in terms akin to the raptures of sommeliers over the finest wines.
“That decision in the Hudson case was entirely satisfying,” a young woman is saying, “even as it held a bit of surprise at the end.”
“Agreed,” her male companion notes, smiling. “That type of sentence is well within the New Classical School, but with nuances that give a nod to Middle Way.”
The young woman nods. “I adore Middle Way decisions. They sit so lightly on the moral palate.”
“I get what you mean. There’s effervescence in its life-affirming qualities.”
And so forth. Cole wishes he could follow the conversation. He wants to experience what these people are talking about. He senses he is in the presence of true justice, or something very close to it. He longs to stand before one of these artist judges and hear his sentence pronounced. He thinks of the world where people turned themselves in and confessed because they wanted to be whole again. He understands now why they would do that.
This is my punishment, he thinks. To know there is a justice system that exemplifies what true justice is, and not understand it.
Cole becomes aware that he is kneeling in the middle of his cell. His knees protest as he rises. The scratchy blanket is around his shoulders. Cole peels it away and drops it on the mattress. Marco has fallen silent. Is he sleeping? Have they taken him away?
He hears his name called, and looks up to see the face of one of the officers. It’s not an unkind face. It’s a professional face, a trained face, wearing a neutral expression that does not judge, that is respectful, that has established appropriate boundaries.
The door opens, and he steps outside his cell. He sees that the first officer is accompanied by two other uniformed men. It’s time to go to the larger room, where his case will be disposed and judgment pronounced. They secure handcuffs, leg irons, and a belly chain. He performs the odd, humiliating shuffle-step down the hall toward the main door. As he passes what he’d envisioned was Marco’s cell, he glances to the side, only to find there is no room there at all, but a window that lets in weak light and a distorted view. He swings his head to the other side, but there is a jailer’s desk there. He stares at the woman behind the desk, who meets his gaze steadily and without conspiracy.
He pauses. “Which system is this?”
The woman behind the
desk squints at him and then looks at the officers accompanying him. One of them shrugs.
Cole is aware he sounds odd, but he cannot help himself. “What system are we in?”
“The only system there is,” one of the officers says carefully, and guides Cole down the hall.
Cadwell Turnbull
Loneliness Is in Your Blood
from Nightmare Magazine
This is how you live forever.
You cup your fingers under your chin, dig your nails into the soft meat, and peel your skin away. First up and over your head, letting it fall on your back like a hood, and then sliding your fingers beneath the skin on your clavicle and slipping the lifted layers of tissue over the curve of your shoulders.
You squirm and shimmy and writhe, curling your skin away from the sticky braids of muscle on your arms, your ribs, your stomach, your hips, your thighs. You let the wet membrane fall in a heap, stepping out of it like clothes. You hide it somewhere dark, somewhere difficult to find.
Your prey can’t see you without your skin, can’t hear you shuffle into their resting places. They sleep quietly as you unlatch your tongue and stab its tapered edge into the throbbing vein of their necks. They won’t make a sound as you gorge yourself on their blood. You float from house to house, drinking your fill, until your tongue is fat in your mouth and your puckered lips cannot close around it.
When you go home you slide into your expectant skin, careful to check for salt. You always check for salt. Others don’t want to see you live forever. Eternity is a coveted thing, even if it’s lonely.
This is what they know of you.
“She does suck blood,” they say. “We have stories from the old land.”
The slaves will see the bruised flesh on their necks and know what you are. Sukunyoa. Sukunyante. Old heg. They use many names.
“Nonsense,” the pale men say.
The pale men will not listen. They believe the cold continent invented monsters. You don’t mind their arrogance. You take your fill of them too.
As they sleep, you hide your sting among mosquito bites. They scratch at the little purple wound when you finish. You watch them through lidless eyes. You smile a lipless smile.
Sometimes you go into their nurseries and kiss the sleeping babies. You stab through their doughy flesh, find their spindly veins. You take just enough. No more.
It’s so sweet. Like sugarcane and tamarind stew. Like mango pulp. Rich enough to last you for days. When you fold your skin back over your tangle of muscle and fat you will see the glow. They are wrong about you, you think to yourself. You are beautiful. You will always be beautiful.
This is how you quell your hunger.
You keep lovers.
You enter their wattle-and-daub slave huts in the dark of night, and they are alarmed at first. But then they see you. They see how you glow. They see your full lips and roll their eyes along your curves as you stand naked before them, and they cannot help themselves. They are under your spell. They touch you, marvel at your smoothness, at how your body gives under their touch.
The men are easy. They are weak in this way. You see the blood move from their eyes straight to their groins. They allow you to have them right away. You straddle them until they cannot bear it. It is over too quickly.
The women are more difficult. But once you have them, they remember you. They wait for you to come to them and they unfold themselves at your pleasure. You kiss them, run your hands along their bodies, leave tongue trails on their flesh.
But you remain unfulfilled. The loneliness swells with each encounter.
“Where you from?” your lovers ask when they are lying peacefully in your arms.
“Same place as you,” you say. “I came ’cross the salt sea, smuggled away on a ship.”
“But you’re free,” they say. “How?”
You stroke their hair. “I escaped,” you say.
“How?” they ask again.
You don’t answer that question. You don’t tell them that you can remove your skin. “You can be free too,” you say instead. “The pale men so few. Ah-you so many.”
Later, when the slaves are freed, you find your lovers in downtown Charlotte Amalie, drinking rum until they cannot stand, and it will be even easier. The men will finish far too quickly and the single women will take you home with them. The married women will follow you down to the beach and they will make love to you on the rocks in the moonlight, the waves applauding like a million small hands.
As you leave one of your lovers on Emerald Beach, her body naked and trembling in ecstasy, you finally see it. Your glow is fading. Panic presses in quickly, making you gasp for breath. Has this always been happening, this quiet loss of light?
Time answers you.
One day you look at your hands and you see a blotch of aged skin. Over several years it spreads up your arm and crawls its way across you like a stain. When you undress your skin, you find that the defined ridges of your muscles are growing smooth, blending together. Strands of gray hair start falling out. Your skin becomes an ashen husk, stretched and sagging, its elasticity lost. The blacks of your eyes spread, swallowing everything.
No amount of baby’s blood helps.
The women abandon you first. They don’t like the feel of you, how you grate against them like sand. And then the men, their weakness gone. Not even the drunkards will touch you. Everyone looks upon you like a stranger.
“Old higue,” they say. “Succouyant.” “Wangla lady.” They have so many names.
You don’t need lovers, you tell yourself. Only the blood. You can still live forever. You retreat back to your shanty deep in the bush. You only come out for the blood. You gorge yourself on it, more than you ever did before. Because you are thirsty, so thirsty. And worse, the loneliness has taken you and won’t let go.
This is how you learn how you were born.
It happens over a century later. The houses are different, larger, harder to get into. People stay up all night staring at blinking screens, their faces aglow with shimmering light.
You wait for them to sleep and you slip through a window, your muscles smooth like glass. You find them, a man and a woman, lying in bed. They are beautiful and young. Their skin soft, so soft. You touch them and your envy is bitter in your mouth. You want them. You love them. When you kiss the man, he moans. When you stroke the woman’s hair, she eases into you. You unlatch your tongue and stab the man’s neck, and the blood is so sweet you have to steady yourself on your feet. Sweeter than cane juice. Than coconut tart. Than first love.
You start out slow, but then you lose yourself in the blood, in your loneliness. You’ve been alone for so long that your heart is a shriveled thing, and the only thing that will make it right is to fill it up with something fresh and powerful and alive.
When you realize what you’ve done, you are too blood-drunk to care. You straddle the woman and plunge your swollen tongue into her and you pull her into you, all of her, as ravenously as you once satisfied your lovers. When you are done, they are empty and you are full, your belly pregnant with their blood. They lie together like mummified remains, their skin clinging to their bones.
You leave through the front door, drunkenly fumbling with newfangled locks, and then you are out into the night air. You speed through the streets and through the bush, almost flying; the blood has made you terribly fast. When you reach your shanty, you drape your stretched skin over yourself, the gray husk hanging off you like rags.
In the morning, you find that your belly is still full—
And kicking.
This is how you become shed skin.
She is a normal girl as far as you can tell. Your ruined breasts produce milk for her, and she drinks from them. When she is old enough to eat real food, you hang your skin up and slip from house to house, gathering food and clothes. You don’t drink of the blood. Fear stays your tongue.
While you sleep, she slips through the bush, down winding roads and small alleyways. She r
eturns with scarred steel forks, worn copper keys, and glossy photographs of smiling people frozen in time. She tells you stories about big houses with windows—oh how she loves windows, and how they gleam in the sun and how she can see her glowing face in them.
“People call me bush girl,” she tells you. “They try to catch me.”
You’ve heard worse names. “Don’t go out on your own,” you tell her. “Stay here with me.”
She folds her arms and glares at you. “This place ugly,” she tells you. “You ugly.”
Your shanty is made of wattle and daub, like those old slave huts from the days when you were most beautiful. It is falling apart in places and the roof leaks.
You spend days repairing it, because this is all you can do, because you cannot repair yourself.
“It still ugly,” she says.
“What can I do, love?” You try to stroke her hair and she recoils.
“Live like other people.”
“I’m not like other people,” you tell her. She screams at you, hits you with her fists. Your skin crinkles like old paper, pieces of you flaking away.
“I am lonely,” she tells you, and you understand. That you are not human enough to be a companion. That loneliness is in your blood, and now in hers.
You remember a memory you’d chosen to forget: a woman from a long time ago, from across the wide ocean, who wore her skin like a withered cape, and you realize who she was and what you are and what eternity truly means.
One day the girl asks for the blood. She opens her mouth and her tongue uncoils like a snake, its edge needle-sharp.
“So this is where I eat myself,” you whisper to no one.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 9