“Why?!” I shouted as I stood. “Why do this to me? To them?”
“Well now that’s enough,” a man said, rising from his seat. He looked like he would’ve intimidated nearly anyone else. Big as a refrigerator and just as solid. He wore a sport coat that fit him more like a Lycra top. A man in his sixties but still plenty strong. Anyone else would’ve sat right back down. But the man in the baggy suit only wagged a finger at the big guy, as you would at a misbehaving child. A gesture so far outside this man’s experience that he just barked out a laugh. Not like he thought this was funny, but more like he couldn’t believe what a beatdown the man in the baggy suit had just requested.
Then two others in the car rose from their seats, a man and a woman, traveling together, outfitted for business in bad-fitting suits. The man looked down the length of the train and began shouting for the conductor. The woman had taken out her phone. Was she calling the police? Or planning to shoot video?
The man in the baggy suit looked at me. “I get that question a fair bit. Why do I interfere as much as I do? Why do I get involved with affairs of the mud?”
He stepped into the aisle and the big man, thirty feet down, did the same.
“I’m bored. I can admit it. Do you know how dull my family is? They’re either sleeping or they sit around gibbering in a haze of madness. Meanwhile I’m out here looking good and with a full tank of mischief. What the fuck else am I going to do, but give these things a hard time?”
With that he pointed at the big man who then began to disassemble. The man in the baggy suit took him apart, piece by piece, separating the legs from the pelvis and the arms tore free from the torso. He looked like a marionette, but with veins holding his parts together instead of string. The big man gasped as this happened. A pain so immediate, so overwhelming that he passed out. The ones to scream were the man and woman who were traveling on business. They hadn’t anticipated any of this when they boarded.
The man in the baggy suit waggled his head. “Well what’s the point of being that big if you’re just going to faint?” He looked to me, as if I might sympathize.
“How about you?” he said, moving toward the couple. Meanwhile the big man still floated there as if held by strings. His extremities dangled and his suit darkened as blood soaked the fabric. Then his whole torso shivered and his eyes opened again and he screamed and we all realized he wasn’t dead.
The man in the baggy suit clapped. “Now I’ve been surprised twice in one day!”
He walked closer to the big man whose scream seemed closer to an automatic reaction. His eyes darted left and right, up and down. He wasn’t there, not the man who inhabited this body only minutes ago. This new version had much less sense. He’d been rendered senseless.
“Going mad?” the man in the baggy suit said. “Kind of a cliché.”
I’m going to tell you what I thought of next. Something from my childhood, presuming I actually did have one. I thought of Play-Doh.
I remembered taking some big gob of the stuff and sitting around in the group homes trying to amuse myself. If you were quiet and self-contained you could be left alone by nearly everyone. Sometimes—in certain kind of lives—invisibility is a better option than attention. So I might take some gob of Play-Doh, a mass made up of the blue and the red and gray and more. A hideous heap of the stuff, the kind of shit most kids treat like a spoiled toy. To me, it was a playland. I could sit for hours tearing the big thing into littler ones, making a whole herd of buffalo out of the big blob, or designing a train—ten cars long—out of the thing. Was I really just drawn to the malleable stuff or had I intuited something about myself? Wasn’t I exactly the same thing? A ball of material, that could be shaped in any way I liked? So I thought of Play-Doh and realized how I might battle the man in the baggy suit. I tore myself apart.
Instead of one of me there were five. Five Black men bum-rushing the aisle.
The couple on the business trip didn’t know what the fuck to do. They saw the big man torn apart as if he’d been on the rack. He’d died by now, his eyes open but lifeless.
They saw the man in the baggy suit acting as if he’d actually caused this to happen. And then they saw a basketball squad attack him. Who would they root for? The answer is no one. As I—we—piled on top of the man in the baggy suit those two, smartly, ran for the exits. But the woman never lowered her phone. She’d taped the whole thing.
Meanwhile the man in the baggy suit began to shout. I knew he was doing it because I could feel the vibrations of his voice against me. But I couldn’t hear what he was saying. This is because I knew what he was saying. The magic word. He shouted and shouted and we tore away at him. Did to him what he’d done to the big man. He looked bewildered but then one of us caught his eye and pointed toward our heads. The place where our ears should have been. I’d reshaped myself into five men, why couldn’t I do away with them. What better way to resist a command than be unable to hear it?
It took him no time to understand what I’d done. Made ourselves invulnerable. At least this is what I thought. But then, alone in the car, the man in the baggy suit decided to do away with the illusions. He peeled away the costume and showed me his true face.
I can’t tell you what I saw, but I can tell you how it felt to see it. My skin felt pierced everywhere, all over. I remembered Booker T. Washington’s flax shirt, the torture he was forced to endure as a boy. This helped me when I looked at him.
Washington explained the torture of the shirt, but also said that with time the flax softened until it could be worn. Or maybe it was that the boy’s skin toughened because it had to. If it didn’t he would die.
“I know you,” I said. We all said it. All five of me. Shouting in his face. “Crawling Chaos! Haunter of the Dark! The Crawling Mist!”
We hacked and attacked. He tried to kill us, but when he grabbed one’s head it simply softened and oozed through his fingers, only to re-form again. The more he tried to tear us apart the less he could hold. Meanwhile even his true face—his true form—was no defense against me. Had this creature ever faced a true adversary in all his centuries here on Earth? Pitting himself against human beings, where was the sport in that? He’d grown soft, as all masters do.
“This is just the start,” I shouted. “I will do more to you! Hear me, slaver.”
All this played havoc with the train. It jumped and jostled on the tracks. At the front of the train the engineer wrestled with his controls, but the calamity was beyond his control. He was thrown and knocked unconscious. When the train went off the tracks we were traveling at 106 miles per hour.
* * *
My next memory is of me sitting in a seat, in a different car than the one I’d been in, and being caught by surprise when the Amtrak took flight. I’d been planning to make it to Syracuse so I could sign some papers, sell my father’s home, wasn’t that right?
As the wreck occurred I looked across the aisle and saw a pregnant woman there.
Me and every other passenger—the ones still alive at least—never expected the derailment. But she did. She had her head down in the crash position. How did she know what was coming?
After the crash she lay there talking to her baby. At least that’s what I’d imagined at first. But that’s only because I’d still had my ears sealed tight and couldn’t hear. I helped her climb out and she looked down at me and for a moment her face changed. I was looking up at myself. Myself looked back down at me. No doubt the authorities would be on the scene quickly. Passersby stopping to try and help. Meanwhile that businesswoman had captured me on video. Would I escape or be detained? I’d realized the need to disappear, to escape. If I could make five versions of my body, why couldn’t I make a pregnant woman as well?
She slipped away and then I traveled through the wrecked cars trying to help whomever I could. I had no grudge against the mudbound. There were reports, in the next day’s news, about a Black man who’d helped so many others get out of the wreckage safely. I felt proud of that
. Though of course, that man was never found.
Instead I made my way outside and together five versions of me watched the rescue efforts begin: a pregnant woman, two children, an old man, and a large dog. I’d become my own family. We were less conspicuous this way though I must admit there were some allegiances I just couldn’t quit. All of us were still Black, even the dog.
Now I’ve found that it’s simplest if I travel as the pregnant woman. You’d think everyone is kind to pregnant women, but that’s only if you’ve never been one. In fact, people can be quite cruel to pregnant women, a pregnant Black woman is especially vulnerable. But that’s only sometimes. Most people treat pregnant women as if they’re invisible. Maybe we seem like a bother—going slow, taking up more space—so people often look away from us. Easier to pretend we aren’t there. And of course, that’s helpful to me. That woman’s video did eventually go viral, though what you see in it is blurry at best. Still, there’s a capture of the face I used to wear. I will never be Simon Dust again. I’ll miss him.
My name is Simone now. Though of course that, too, may change. I am still becoming. I am headed south. I will travel through Mexico and Central America, eventually I will reach Argentina and in the town of Ushuaia I will be closer to Antarctica than I have been in a very long time. The sale of the Dyer home went through without me. The lawyer could sign for me, I hadn’t realized. This means they’ve deposited money into the bank account of a man who no longer exists. I wonder if I would ever need it.
Maybe someday there will be a reason to go back for it.
For now I am moving, but it’s occurred to me that if I’d escaped Antarctica then I might not be the only one of my kind. As I come to understand myself better I can almost feel them, see them, in my mind’s eye. Maybe I could do for them what the man in the baggy suit did for me. But instead of trying to enslave them again, each one of them could become truly free. I admit though that I have an ulterior motive. The man in the baggy suit isn’t dead. I can feel that this is true. But I do believe that it could’ve been done. Five of me weren’t enough. But what about five hundred?
I am going to find my people and tell them what was done to us. Then, together, we are going to seek out those beings who had been worshipped and feared. Maybe they too have gone soft, as all masters eventually do. We will find out. If they have then we are going to kill the gods.
My name is Simone. I was once a slave. I will never be one again.
Contributors’ Notes
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy coming in April 2021, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future,” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.
■ I was asked to contribute to an anthology co-edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams called A People’s Future of the United States and really struggled to come up with a story that extrapolates all of the USA’s contradictions and antagonisms into the future. I came up with a future world where the United States has split into two countries, basically representing red and blue states (and there’s been a ton of flooding and other disasters, so the coastal cities are gone). And I really liked the idea of a bookstore located on the exact border between these two Americas, probably because it provided a metaphor for the process of trying to find a story that could bring these two separate nations together. This became a vehicle to try and explore the culture clash between the cyberpunk California and the prison-dominated America—and to reveal that the cultural schisms between these two versions of the United States were really a smokescreen for economic battles over control over natural resources. I had a lot of fun writing Molly and her daughter, and their friendships with people from both sides of the divide, but the main character of this story really ended up being the First and Last Page itself. This story ended up being a bit of a love letter to bookstores, showing how they’re not just repositories of words but a gathering place for diverse communities. I increasingly believe that bookstores are the canary in our national coal mine—if they die, we’re all doomed.
Matthew Baker is the author of the story collections Why Visit America and Hybrid Creatures, and of the children’s novel If You Find This. His fiction has appeared in publications such as The Paris Review, American Short Fiction, One Story, Electric Literature, and Best of the Net. Born in the Great Lakes region of the United States, he currently lives in New York City.
■ It’s an issue at the heart of my family. My great-grandfather was a cop; one of my grandfathers was a police captain; one of my grandfathers was a deputy sheriff; my father worked in law enforcement as a federal agent. Law and order, crime and punishment. One of my great-grandfathers was a felon; one of my great-grandfathers had connections to organized crime; one of my cousins was convicted on larceny charges but got off with community service; one of my cousins is in prison today and will be for decades to come. Probably no surprise that from a very young age, I was obsessed with the history of the justice system. At family get-togethers, I could play catch with a retired cop and then go drink Cokes with a convicted felon. A classic American story. I have to imagine it’s an issue at the heart of every family in the United States. A nation that employs over one million law enforcement personnel. The nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Who are we? I was in first grade the year that police came and fingerprinted every student in the school. I remember the experience vividly. Standing in line out in the hallway. The feeling of each of my fingertips being pressed to the ink pad and then the paper form. The sight of my fingerprints on what was now a permanent record. My name at the top. I still don’t have an answer, but “Life Sentence” is an attempt to articulate the question that I’ve been grappling with ever since.
Kelly Barnhill is the best-selling author of several books for children, including The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Iron Hearted Violet, and the forthcoming The Ogress at the Far End of Town. She is also the author of many short stories for grown-ups, some of which are included in her collection Dreadful Young Ladies. She is the recipient of the Parents’ Choice Gold Award, the Texas Library Association Bluebonnet, a Charlotte Huck Honor, and the World Fantasy Award. In 2017 she was awarded the Newbery Medal by the American Library Association. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband, three kids, and dog.
■ I started writing “Thirty-Three Wicked Daughters” largely because my husband dared me to do so. While doing research on giant lore for another novel, I came across the Albina story, in a book called Historia Regum Britanniae, a pseudohistorical narrative of the origins of England by Geoffrey of Monmouth, written around 1136. It’s not the only account of the thirty-three sisters who, in one wild night, behead their husbands, and are subsequently exiled to what will be England, where they have lots and lots of cross-species sex (with demons, mostly) and give birth to a race of giants, who go on to rule Albion/England until the Romans arrive and ruin everything. There are several, actually, but this one is the most lurid of the lot. I couldn’t believe I had never come across this story before. I told my husband about it right away. I am guessing that I might have been in a bit of a heightened state as I did so—it was the early days after Trump’s inauguration, and I was bracing myself for what was sure to be an endless litany of unspeakable horrors (alas, even my wildest imaginings paled before what was to unfold). He said, “You know, this is a rageful time. Maybe writing rageful stories will help put things in perspective.” I told him I couldn’t really see a way to do it—too bloody, for one, and I’m not really a bloody sort of a writer. Plus, I had already started noodling on a prose poem about a king who
was obsessed with pigeons. “You could do both,” my husband said. “I dare you.” It became something else, of course, as stories often do. But I enjoyed the heck out of myself as I wrote it. I hope you enjoyed reading it, too.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell award-winning author of thirty novels and over a hundred short stories. Her most recent novel, Machine, is a science fiction adventure set in a hospital in deep space.
She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, the writer Scott Lynch.
■ I wrote this story for Wastelands: The New Apocalypse anthology. It’s set in Las Vegas because I lived in Las Vegas when I wrote the story of mine that appears in the original Wastelands anthology, and because Las Vegas is a great place to set an apocalypse. This story is in some ways a reaction to Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and His Dog, which is in its turn a reaction to (among other things) all those postapocalyptic Adam and Eve stories.
In a twist of fate I never could have gotten away with writing, Harlan passed away while I was in the midst of writing this.
“Erase, Erase, Erase”: This is a story that’s inspired, among other things, by my fondness for fountain pens. Some of the details of the protagonist’s pen habit are echoed by my own experience—for example, my mother, too, is the source of my hobby. It’s not an autobiographical story, however. I didn’t date any terrorists in college, and I can’t walk through walls.
Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times best-selling author and World Fantasy Award winner born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.
His novels and almost one hundred stories have been translated into nineteen languages. His work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, and the Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2020 Page 48