CONTENTS

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

PROSE

THE SOWER  // Takim Williams        

In this gripping horror tale, an unearthed video reveals to us that humanity’s time is over. We are merely seeds, and it is time for us to blossom into something new.

FURIOUS GIRLS  // Juliana Goodman        

Amberjack is a Furious Girl, rejected by her family and the town of Onyx Falls for her anger, which manifests as flame. But when Onyx Falls and the family that rejected her are threatened with destruction, Amberjack has to decide whether she will save Onyx Falls or let them suffer their fate.

VALLEY FIELDWORK  // Stefani Cox        

A solar-strengthened fungus is destroying humanity’s crops, and it falls on Lydia, a student and scientist, to figure out how to stop it. Lydia will have to work against time, evolution, and corporate interests in order to save her crops...and her career.

THE OTHER SIDE OF OTTO MOUNTAIN  // Ivy Spadille        

Lazarus wants to live a simple life catching fish on the lake near Otto Mountain, but he cannot escape his regrets. When Lazarus discovers that Otto Mountain isn’t what it seems, he’ll be forced to face some uncomfortable truths about himself and the life he’s made for his family.

POETRY

a combustible illness clots the blood  // Terrance Brown        

EXTRAS

INDIE SPOTLIGHT  : Nigel Henry        

RIA’S WEB OF LIES         

THANKS

April 2018

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

Welcome to issue six of Fiyah  Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.

We are now solidly into our Year Two run, and this issue promises to be a treat. As always, we want to thank our longtime readers and welcome those of you who are just joining us with this issue.

This issue’s theme is “Big Mama Nature,” and all of the stories we’re presenting to you deal with the complicated relationship between humans and our planet, but through a uniquely Black lens. Like most interactions between Black people and the world, our relationship with nature (the original Big Mama), and our planet, is very, very complicated. Black people are connected to the land, the seas, and the skies in ways integral to our very being, using our scientific and ancestral knowledge to cultivate fields, bank storms, and explore space. We requested stories that plumbed the depths of this relationship while examining the uncertain future that those relationships face as our climate and the health of our planet shifts, bringing to the fore record-shattering climate changes, irregular weather patterns, and the corporatization of our farms. As usual, our authors delivered.

Our cover art for this issue comes from Jessica McCottrell, and her take on Big Mama Nature shows a being as beautiful as the dawn, as tempestuous as the sea, and stronger than the foundations of the earth. We have some great fiction lined up as well. Takim Williams’ horror tale “The Sower” explores the idea of humanity as merely seeds planted for more deeply rooted entity to return to power. Juliana Goodman’s “Furious Girls” shows us how the rage and love of a disenfranchised group of girls helps them to weather various storms in their lives. Stefani Cox’s “Valley Fieldwork” examines the power of Black folks’ connection to the earth and the revolutionary power of our histories, And Ivy Spadille’s “The Other Side of Otto Mountain” is a haunting tale that examines the complexity of generations of Black lives, and the regret that can fester within a body.

Our poetry offering from this issue is “A combustible illness clots the blood” by Terrance Brown, and this piece does a great job of tying together all the themes of the issue through its examination of our effect on this planet we call home.

In this issue’s Indie Spotlight, we are talking to Young Adult Fantasy author Nigel Henry, author of the Ria Miller and the Monsters  series.

As always, we appreciate you, dear reader, and we want to thank you for your continued support of Fiyah  Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. Spring is alive (in some parts of the country), so if you’re able, head outside and enjoy these stories with a hefty draught of fresh air and sun.

We hope that you enjoy the issue.

Executive Editors: Justina Ireland + Troy L. Wiggins + Brandon O’Brien

Acquiring Editors: Brent Lambert + DaVaun Sanders + Kaleb Russell + Danny Lore

Layout: LeKesha Lewis

Cover Artwork by Jessica McCottrell

THE SOWER

By Takim Williams

0:00 - 0:05

We see a spore enter the jet stream. Not from below. From above. Circumnavigates.

Statue of Liberty, presiding over early spring harbor. Taj Mahal. Skyscrapers in Dubai, straining Babel-like toward virgin altitudes. Across the planet – regardless of hemisphere – the world warms slowly, incubatory.

Voice-over, elderly male (A): "We like to think we’re important."

0:06 - 0:11

Thick jungle. The sound of a chainsaw in the distance. The sound abruptly cuts off, replaced by a faint scream.

V/O, A: "We would hardly be missed."

A pair of dark-skinned heels dangling in mid-air, rotating slowly.

V/O, A: "In fact, we’d be bid a good riddance."

0:12 - 0:15

A closer look at Lady Liberty’s torch, the familiar green obscured by a yellow patina.

Along the fruit streets of Brooklyn Heights, the few pedestrians walk quickly with pollen-dusted shades and scarves over their noses. A police officer wears a gas mask.

V/O, female news anchor: "The record pollen count continues worldwide."

[Fade to black.] Someone sneezes.

0:16 - 0:17

Middle school classroom. Pockmarked teacher places a dead fly between the leaves of a Venus flytrap. Nothing happens.

0:18 - 0:23

Mars against a background of pitch black dappled with stars. Jupiter in the foreground, Saturn peeking over its horizon.

V/O, A: "Our planet is not red…or yellow."

Earth as viewed from a window of the International Space Station.

A suited astronaut’s visor, the glass reflecting an emerald glow onto her fear-twisted face, tears flowing.

V/O, A: "Earth is green."

0:24 - 0:31

[Title Card.]

The following is a preview of actual near-future events

adapted from fragmentary images glimpsed by a Brazilian farmer in a polluted well

spliced into semi-coherent narrative

and released on Vimeo

as a warning.

0:32 - 0:39

Suburban street, morning. Pollen coats everything, drifts through the air. Middle-aged woman in thick-rimmed glasses “drives” her sedan in stand-still traffic, her five-year-old daughter in the backseat in plaid school uniform. The windshield wipers make yellow streaks.

She says, in English, “I think we should walk.”

Her daughter puts on the surgeon’s mask hanging around her neck. They both get out.

Looking around, she says in French, “Do you feel like someone is trying to tell us something?”

Her daughter responds in American Sign Language, “Someone is angry.”

0:40 – 0:42

A brightly-plumed bird gliding over the canopy of the Amazon, the treetops rolling by endlessly like green waves.

V/O, young male, breathless: "390 billion trees in the rainforest."

0:43 - 0:48

V/O, same young male: "100 billion neurons in the human brain."

Beneath the canopy, a group of boys whooping as they sprint across the forest floor.

They trip in unison. Face first. High-speed impact. Impossibly, they do not slide even an inch, their halt almost comically abrupt, heels-over-head as limbs whiplash past the point of contact with tendon-tearing inertia.

On the forest floor behind them, a thin raised root obscured by undergrowth like a tripwire. The boys are splayed awkwardly, stuck fast wherever they touch the waxy surface beneath them. Veined, smooth, innocuous. It is a giant, sticky leaf.

One boy jerks in silent panic, his nose and mouth caught by the flypaper adhesive.

0:49 - 0:53

Time-lapse clip of a field of sunflowers following the sun across the sky in perfect synchrony, first one day, then another, then a third.

V/O, A: "We’ve failed to respect our evolutionary elders. We’ve forgotten our roots."

0:54 - 0:56

V/O, A: "Time for a reminder."

The pockmarked school teacher frowns. He puts his finger on the Venus flytrap.

The jaws snap shut.

0:57 - 1:05

Modern laboratory. Skinny botanist in white coat speaks rapidly as he peers through his microscope. His is the breathless young voice.

He says, “According to one theory, life on Earth began with a seed brought from elsewhere.”

Magnified between millimeter-thick panes of glass: a thin cross-section of a germinated lima bean.

A hairline fracture crawls across the microscope slide.

“We were planted. We are someone’s project.”

1:06 – 1:13

Interior. Night. The woman with glasses wakes to a repetitive percussive sound.

We follow her down the hallway as the noise grows louder. She opens the door to the garage and a sliver of light partially reveals her husband, his back to us, pushing what could be a lawnmower. It damages the garage floor in its wake.

It is an aerator.

The woman shouts, “What the hell are you doing?”

Her husband half-turns. An emerald glow emanates from his shadowed face.

He sounds distant, distracted. “A new project.”

1:14 – 1:20

Sunny day at the park. Pretty 20-something mother wipes pollen off a slice of watermelon to hand to the boy tugging at her blouse.

The boy says, “Uncle Bryan said if you swallow a black seed, a tree will grow in your stomach!”

His mom smiles. “Uncle Bryan was teasing.”

The young boy looks down at the slice with apprehension, takes a bite.

1:21 – 1:23

A man’s face, twisted in pain, pollen powdering his features and matted thickest below his nostrils, eyes unnatural green.

He is shambling down a city street with a crowd of others like him, all of them sniffing.

Sniffing for instructions.

1:24 – 1:28

V/O, A: “ It’s springtime again. But not just here.”

The time-lapse sunflowers have broken their choreography, each swiveling to its own logic, looking like nothing so much as satellite dishes scanning anxiously for a signal.

When they sync again, they are facing something in the sky other than the sun.

1:29 - 1:32

Space. The sun small and dim in the distance. A few asteroids drift.

A massive object rises slowly into view. Smooth, a brown that is nearly black, a soft taper. Size comparable to Pluto, it resembles an acorn. A nutshell.

It drifts toward the center of the solar system.

V/O, A: “ It’s spring again, out there."

1:33 - 1:40

A landscape speckled with deep, regularly spaced holes. The grid of holes has made a dotted line of the railroad tracks.

V/O, female news anchor, screaming over helicopter blades: "Exactly the same here as the instances in Central America! Whatever they’re up to, the Diggers are consistent!"

1:41 - 1:53

V/O, the young botanist, voice unsteady: "I didn’t know who to talk to."

On his monitor, a pink-flowered ivy writhes on a brick wall. The time-lapse recording plays at one month per second.

At the beginning of the video, the ivy is shaped recognizably like a capital “A,” then proceeds to morph as it grows, each letter fluidly becoming the next like cursive, peripheral creepers and leaves comprising the plant’s calligraphic flourish.

A-N-N-U-A-L

The botanist says, “I thought a linguist might have some insight.”

The woman with glasses, a linguist, awed, “Non-human intelligence under our noses all this time. They never spoke up…”

1:54 – 2:00

V/O, A: "Spring is a time of renewal."

Jungle. The dangling heels begin to kick.

V/O, A: "A time of transformation."

        Interior of a speeding ambulance, sirens deafening. The pretty 20-something mother is hysterically crying. The young boy, stomach grotesquely bloated, vomits blood.

2:01 – 2:06

The back of a filthy hand, flexing into the dirt. It drags out of view to be replaced by its counterpart, fingers torn bloody. Pull back to see the man digging like a dog in a highway median, slinging grass and soil between his legs.

On the road, a man on a jackhammer punishes the asphalt. A businesswoman unloads a pistol into the widening wound in the street. She runs out of ammunition and drops to the ground to use the stilettos on her polished shoes. She loses an arm to the jackhammer but continues working.

        They see no tools but drills and spades. They see no purpose but digging.

2:07 – 2:12

V/O, botanist, whispering: "Boston ivy is perennial."

He looks from the monitor to the greenhouse beyond it where the real-time ivy is seemingly motionless behind the glass. The “L” is slightly obscured by less intentional growth, the ivy relaxing into some ambiguous punctuation.

Botanist: “It’s not referring to itself.”

2:13 – 2:18

V/O, A: "Everything in its season."

The linguist’s husband borne in an open casket, eyes once green now closed, flowers heaped on his tuxedo.

The linguist and her daughter, holding hands as they watch him pass. They are both crying, but the wife’s expression is more complicated than mere grief.

Fear. Guilt. Relief.

2:19 – 2:25

Night. Gravediggers fill in the hole. They are professionals but they leave prematurely, complaining that the humidity is unreasonable. Unseasonable. Topsoil remains loose, rippled as if tilled.

2:26 – 2:31

V/O, A: "This is spring cleaning. Pruning the Garden of Eden."

Campsite clearing. Morning.

A body lies halfway out of a large tent, as if he died trying to crawl away. He is naked, completely covered in red welts and long, bloody furrows. His fingernails, caked with dried blood, trail ribbons of skin. His own.

A couple of other bodies are visible through the open flap.

There are footprints near the edge of the clearing, where the particularly virulent poison oak lies in a tangle.

2:32 – 2:40

V/O, A: "Humankind has outgrown its moral trellis."

Cornfields. An adolescent on his knees collecting soil samples at the base of the crops, his father standing above him with a tall scythe in one hand and a half-empty fifth of whiskey in the other.

He kicks his son in the behind. Hard.

Laughs.

The son lies with his face in the dirt, stunned but not surprised, as the cackle goes on and on.

A: "Man is not grounded."

2:41 – 2:42

Unfinished residential basement. Exposed wooden supports, pink insulation, concrete surfaces.

        In one dim corner, the root of a nearby tree has burst through the wall, branched to form new limbs that have each burrowed through the floor into the earth.

        The home’s foundation is compromised.

2:43 – 2:46

V/O, A: "Now we are weeds."

Low rumbling noise.

Burj Khalifa in the distance, a kilometer-tall grimy finger, its usual glass-and-steel luster dulled by a pollen coat.

Slowly, it tilts.

2:47 – 2:50

V/O, A: Now we are compost."

[Mute scene.]

Against a white wall, a shadow in the shape of the young boy on his back in a gurney, his belly bulging like a pregnancy. He spasms. His back arches suddenly as his mouth cracks open in a distended yawn.

From the rounded peak of his shadow-belly, the silhouette of a single-leafed shoot slithers up the wall.

2:51 – 3:06

From high above, the grid of holes extends as far as the eye can see.

The holes are full of flesh.

V/O, female news anchor: "The Diggers, apparently finished with their mysterious excavation, are lying down in the holes they created! It looks like the zombies knew they were dead all along, and were courteous enough to dig their own mass graves!"

The cameraman leaning out of the chopper suddenly turns his shoulder-mounted camera toward his face. Sounding absent, dreamy, he tells the world, “Those aren’t graves.”

He rubs his leaking nose. He jumps.

V/O, A: "Now we are fertilizer."

3:07 – 3:10

V/O, linguist: You’re saying the Amazon is conscious?"

Jungle. A handful of Brazilian farmers hang by long vines that circle their necks and extend up out of sight. Their heads droop at odd angles as they sway softly above the smoldering remains of their slash-and-burn agriculture. Their dangling feet are familiar.

One of them looks up, eyes the color of the jungle.

3:11 – 3:17

The skinny young botanist, sweating, sitting on his lab chair, looks up with wide eyes. He says sincerely, “The Amazon is a god.”

[Fade to black.]

V/O, A: "God bless you."

3:18 – 3:21

Arthritic hands opening a black leather-bound Bible.

V/O, A, chanting: "You are the vine. We are the branches. You are the vine. We are the branches…"

3:22 – 3:30

V/O, linguist: "Who are you?"

In an oblong room with walls of bark, we see the back of an elderly man’s bald head. He wears a crown of roses, the thorns piercing his scalp and rusted in place by long-dried blood. There is a vine that meanders from the ground up to the base of his neck, splitting into a dozen starchy fingers that each disappear under his skin, transitioning from green to red or blue as if becoming his veins, one with him.

In the voice of A, the elderly man says, “Every Doomsday requires a prophet.”

3:31 – 3:42

V/O, A: "This is not an extermination."

A drop of tree sap at the end of a tap. It swells. Falls.

Northern woodland. The linguist’s husband, born once now born again, crushed flowers clinging to his ratty funeral tux, a few red roses blooming from his chest, as if they have sunk roots into his heart. He leads their daughter by the hand to the edge of a pit. He lowers her feet-first into golden liquid. She sinks slowly toward anonymous shapes.

From deep within the well of sap, the daughter’s feet and husband’s green eyes are in focus near the surface, all else blurred.

[Rack focus.]

As daughter and husband fade in the upper distance, another child’s face becomes sharply visible right above us, eyes open, silent scream frozen in the already-crystallized amber.

V/O, A: "We will preserve a remnant. A cutting."

3:43 – 3:51

The linguist is in the oblong bark room. We look over her shoulder.

She says, “What do you want?”

A replies, “A new beginning. A second coming.”

A’s face is blurry. The only things in the room that are in focus are the two thick books stacked on the table, which is a wooden cylinder that seems to rise organically out of the floor. Beneath the Bible is a hardback reference book whose spine reads PANSPERMIA.

“An apocalypse.”

3:52 – 3:57

V/O, A: "Man reaps what he sows."

The drunken farmer falls out of bed. Gets on hands and knees as the shadow of a man in the doorway falls over him, the sharp silhouette of a scythe clearly outlined against the back wall.

The farmer burbles, in recognition and confusion, “Son…”

3:58 – 4:01

V/O, A: "We have always been our own grim reapers."

Deserted street. Evening. Pollen piled against abandoned buildings like yellow snowdrifts.

A man in a ratty police uniform snatches the canned food cradled by an older woman, knocks her down.

When she clings to his leg he raises his baton.

4:02 – 4:07

V/O, A: “ But perhaps what we should fear more than ourselves…"

One of the boys stuck to the giant flypaper leaf lifts his head slowly, straining for every inch, taut filaments of the natural glue pulling the skin of his face. He is screaming, though he grins, parts of his lips and cheek digested away from his jaw. He smiles with too many teeth at his motionless friends.

4:08 – 4:10

Outer fringe of the jungle. A half-dozen Brazilian farmers emerge from the trees, machetes and chainsaws in hand, heads flopping from broken necks, vine nooses snaking back into the foliage like umbilici tethered to who knows what floral nexus, what fruiting body birthed them.

4:11 – 4:16

Blackness.

Lightning momentarily reveals the lone silhouette of an intricately twisted baobab against a violet-charcoal sky, the grass plain flat, dark, empty.

The next flash reveals a dozen similar apparitions arranged Stonehenge-like to the first, risen like meerkats from hidden dens. Within their gnarled imitations the outlines of familiar joints are visible - an elbow forms this turn, this bulb could only be a head cocked just so, at this extremity splayed fingers like needles, there an angled foot like a clumsy leaf.

The silhouettes change shape very slowly. They rain dance in place.

4:17 – 4:20

[Title Card.]

Coming Next Spring

4/16/∞

4:21 – 4:30

[Dissonant theme music screeching to a crescendo.]

As it approaches Earth the nutshell splits along previously invisible seams, blooms open like a cosmic iris, vomits thousands of meteorite spores from the open petals of its mouth. They disperse, drift through the mesosphere on dandelion-fiber parachutes, each releasing winged seeds that helicopter along coriolis-curved trajectories.

The planet is engulfed in slow motion.

V/O, A: “… Is The Sower."

—END—

ABOUT TAKIM WILLIAMS

Takim Williams graduated from Princeton University in 2016 with a minor in creative writing. Founder and former editor-in-chief of Figments , Princeton’s campus publication for speculative fiction, Takim is the creator of the #InContext blog for the Human Trafficking Institute. His debut novel, The Experiment Himself , is scheduled for release in late 2018 from Inkshares in partnership with Nerdist. Takim is searching for a version of Christian faith that is viable in the modern world. If the Rapture happens before the Singularity, he will ask for an extension.

FURIOUS GIRLS

By Juliana Goodman

I was five when I set the Christmas tree on fire. Momma had yelled at me for doing something, I can’t remember what now, but I felt something hot and alive rising up inside me like steam from a pot of water. Then BOOM, Christmas tree lit up like a real burning star.

        When I was eight, I kept the house warm for five days after daddy’s job laid him off and we couldn’t afford the heating bill. I remember those days, snuggled under a Barbie TV throw with Cassia and her thick head of kinky curls tucked under my chin. She let me put my fingers in it back then, squeezing and squeezing because her hair was just so thick  and strong. Momma and daddy whispered about their college years as we sat in front of the trashcan daddy had brought in from outside. All I needed was something to hold it, the fire. I could handle the rest.

        I was fifteen when I set Cassia on fire. Not her whole body, just her hair, that thick luscious hair that grew full and proud down to her shoulders. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, is what I tried to explain. She had nothing to do with Christian kissing Margo behind my back. But when that anger bubbled up inside me as I stood facing the mirror in our bathroom, Cassia made the mistake of touching me.

        I didn’t mean to do it. It wasn’t meant for her.

        All the same, I was a danger to my family. Never mind all the times I had helped them, kept us alive, kept us safe, kept us warm. All they knew was that I had maimed Cassia. That thick black hair I loved to squeeze never grew back. Just dark warped slices of flesh covering her skull.

        “Amberjack, you better not say shit,” Galia says. She and her friends are huddled on her bed, whispering like I’m not laying on my bed two feet away.

        “I didn’t even hear shit,” I say because I don’t care about Galia or any of the other Furious Girls. We don’t have anything in common besides Fury.

        “Nah, it’s better if we take her with us,” Brizo says, shaking her head. The hanging gold beads braided into her hair clink together like wind chimes. When I sneak downstairs for my ice packs at night, she’s the one I hear cursing in her sleep. If I step on a creaky floorboard, she stops.

        “Yeah, she can’t tell on us without snitchin’ on herself,” Ariel agrees. Her weave is long, wavy and fire engine red like the Little Mermaid’s. When I first came to the house, she showed me around and then sucker punched me when Miss Babs wasn’t looking.

        “Alright, it’s settled then. Get dressed, Amberjack, we’re going out,” Galia declares.

        I sit up and glare at her. She might run Ariel and Brizo’s simple behinds, but she doesn’t run me.

        “ Yall can go out. I’m staying here. I won’t rat you out to Miss Babs.”

        All three of them narrow their eyes at me. Can you really ever trust a Furious Girl? We can’t even control ourselves sometimes.

        “You remember that lady at the ice cream parlor who spit at us last weekend? Talkin’ bout we were gonna melt her whole supply?”

        I remember but it’s hard to get upset with strangers for not wanting you when your own family doesn’t love you. What does a stranger owe me?

        “So what? You guys are gonna light her shop up?”

        Galia huffs and a small orange stream of fire unfurls from her lips. She laughs and fans her mouth.

        “She asked us to do it when she spit on us. Why should anybody in that town get served ice cream if we can’t have any? You think that shit’s fair?”

        “I don’t really like ice cream all that much.” I lay back on my bed, close my eyes and pull my Beats over my ears. Leela James’ “Don’t Want You Back” has been on repeat on my iPod all week. It’s the only thing keeping me from texting Christian back. Of course he’s messing with other girls. I know that. Probably not Margo again, she’s old news. I’m desperate for someone, anyone, but I think it’s best if I try to keep a little dignity about myself. I’m not the first person in the world who’s ever been alone.

        Two seconds later, someone snatches my headphones off my head. Me and Galia are alone in our room. She’s standing over me like a disappointed school teacher.

        “What?”

        “How come you don’t wanna be down with us? You really like pretending you don’t have any Fury like the rest of the Plucks?” Her tone is softer now that her flunkies have disappeared. Her warm yellow eyes gaze into mine and she smells like butter and waffles. When she leans towards me, I want to hug her because it’s been so long since I hugged someone who wasn’t afraid of me.

        “I don’t want to be a pluck. Or whatever y’all are. I just wanna be me. Do my time and get out.” If the School for Furious Girls had a welcome pamphlet, the plucks would be on every page. I don’t really know how she does it, but Miss Babs is a calmer. She can take a Furious Girl, swaddle her in a blanket and rock her back and forth until every drop of Fury leaves her body.

        But only if the Furious Girl wants to.  She has to agree to it.

        “You sleep with ice packs in your bed.”

        “I get hot,” I say.

"Obviously. We all get hot. We roast like fuckin’ hot dogs on a stick unless we let some Fury out during the day. You haven’t let it go once  in the four months you’ve been here. It’s not normal, girl.”

        I snort.

        “We make fire with our freaking brains, you really wanna talk about what’s normal?”

        She sits down on my bed and tucks her dark curls behind her ears. Then, her fingers are on mine, resting on my stomach. A soft yellow glow emanates from where our hands are touching. I feel the Fury flowing through the both of us, but I can’t tell whose is stronger.

        “I know what you’re trying to do, Amberjack. But it won’t work. It’s only going to get stronger. Harder to control. Your family won’t have you back.”

I snatch my hand away from hers.

        “I know that. Who says I even wanna go back?” But I do. I want to be back in my own room and fall asleep on the floor watching The First 48 with Cassia, a bowl of pepper popcorn between us. I want momma to yell at us about the laundry we left in the basement. I want daddy to hold me by my shoulders like a masterpiece he painted and marvel at how much I look like my mother.

        Galia sees right through me. I’m glad, although I hope we never have to admit just how far inside my head she can see.

        “Fine, Amberjack. You’re still going with us tonight, though. You can just watch if you want.”

        “I said I’m not going.”

        “We can stop by your house.”

        I get dressed.

∙∙∙

        By midnight, Miss Babs is asleep in her room. You can hear her snoring like a garbage truck throughout the whole house. We don’t bother tiptoeing down the stairs. We don’t even say ‘hi’ as we pass the plucks in their long white nightgowns that sweep the floor. They stand in their doorways staring at us, in anger or awe, it’s unclear. I feel sorry for them.

        Their minds don’t make fire anymore. And there’s something off about them, like water from a cooler in a paper cup; too clean, too crisp, too sterile. But what’s really sad is that they gave their Fury away for nothing. Of course their folks didn’t want them back after whatever horrible thing they’d done. Some of them probably did some real damage, like an explosion in a Walmart. Others, it was something small, using the toaster while it was unplugged, being caught in the bathroom testing their power with small squares of toilet paper. Some people in Onyx Falls are old fashioned like that. First sign of some weird shit and they send their kid packing up the mountain. I guess I should be grateful my folks at least gave me a chance for fifteen years.

        Outside, the sky is a sea of velvet purple dotted with blinking stars light-years away from us. It’s March and a cool leftover winter breeze sweeps up the mountainside but we don’t shiver.

        Dressed in only black shorts and black sports bras, we still burn.

        Ariel and I ride on the handlebars of Galia and Brizo’s bikes. We glide down the mountain like we’re in a bobsled, faster and faster, racing until we finally plateau out at the bottom of the hill. We zip past the silver gates that mark the entrance to Onyx Falls, Galia pumping her legs, her hot breath nearly singing the delicate skin of my ear.

        Furious Girls aren’t supposed to be in town after nightfall. They really don’t want us in town at all but sometimes they need us for stuff, like lighting stoves or teaching their cheating husbands a lesson. You can make good money doing odd jobs like that but most boutiques and stores won’t let you inside to actually spend it.

        “Which way, mademoiselle?” Galia asks as we near the town square. The black marble fountain in the middle is still shut off for the season but this is where they hold the Taste of Onyx festival each summer. Where me and Cassia stuff our faces full of spicy crawfish and fried alligator, the salt crystals dotting our fingertips like diamonds in the sun. I remember the way she would smile at everyone who passed while I always had this dark grimace on my face, even when I tried to look pleasant.

        “To the right!” I shout. I won’t say I’m happy but I feel good tonight, like I could float away on a breeze. This is the first time I’ve been to town without the villagers throwing crap at us. They’re all inside, eating, sleeping, dreaming.

        As we turn down my block I remind myself that there really aren’t any visiting rules at the School for Furious Girls. A girl’s family could go up there and see her as much as they wanted to. Or even take her back home. If they wanted to...

        I guide the girls through the alley and make them stop behind my garage. We kinda look like a mini girl gang and I don’t want my parents asking too many questions about what we’re doing. I don’t want them to know this part of my life exists now, that I’ve moved on from my place at home, because I haven’t.

        I hop down off the handlebars and move to open the gate when Galia grabs my wrist tight. Blue sparks of fire skitter from my skin at her touch but it doesn’t burn. It’s warm. It tingles.

        Galia looks worried, almost scared. Even Ariel and Brizo look a little stressed.

        “What is it?” I ask.

        Galia bites her lip and looks back at her friends. They only shake their heads.

        “Um…it’s nothing. Just don’t stay too long. We still have business to take care of.”

        She lets my wrist go.

        I think I know what this is. They wish they were me right now, going up the steps to their old home and seeing their families. But they’re long gone by now.

        “I’ll be quick. I promise,” I say. Even though they’re jerks most of the time, I’m not abandoning them. Not unless…I shake the thought from my head and unlatch the fence. I’m jogging up the walkway to the porch when I see my mother.

        She’s sitting on the patio bench, her head tilted up to the sky, seeing the stars. I used to sit with her some nights and I’d ask her to show me the constellations even though I knew them by heart.

        “Momma…” I say, stepping in her direction. She looks up and squints in the darkness, like she can’t quite make me out. When she realizes it’s me, her face crumples.

        “Amberjack!” she cries. My mother flies towards me, wrapping me up in her strong thick meaty arms that have held groceries, worry and two fat baby girls.

        I burn and melt into her. Never leave me again.

        The backdoor squeaks and bangs shut and then daddy is hugging me, too, his beard scraping my forehead, his breath smelling of the peach cobbler I know momma made for dessert.

        “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!” he cries. But it wasn’t him that brought me down from the mountain, it was Galia and her bike. I’ll have to thank her. I’ll have to send her back up the mountain without me on her handlebars.

        The backdoor squeaks and bangs shut again and there she is, Cassia. Wearing a yellow bandana and the old clothes I left behind and said she could have. She unwraps my parents’ arms and folds herself around me fiercely. A hug between sisters is different than a hug with parents. One hovers over you, the other hovers with you. Cassia and I are now the same height even though I’m two years older. Our chins were made to fit into the dip of the other’s collar.

        “You don’t hate me?” I ask her. I know she doesn’t but I need to hear it.

        “Never.”

        “But what I did to you was terrible.”

        “It’s not your fault. I know it’s not.”

        We hug for a while in the dark and I can see Galia shooting tiny purple sparks up into the air behind the garage to signal me. But I have no intentions of leaving.

        I’m going inside.

        I’m eating the cold fried chicken in the refrigerator.

        I’m waiting five minutes for the shower water to heat up.

        I’m throwing the quilt back on my bed and falling into it.

        I’m pretending to be asleep when my parents leave greasy kisses on my forehead.

        I’m going home.

        At least, I think I am. It’s funny how you can tell you’re not wanted somewhere without being told. It’s the way my family’s tears dry in the wind and their smiles start to turn down. The way they rub their fingers over their bare arms because they are cold and I am fire.

        Somehow, my family ends up on one side of the yard and I end up on the other. The side closest to the gate I came in.

        It only takes me a few seconds to understand I am not being invited in.

        I want to force them to do it, to turn their backs on me and walk inside our home and lock me out. But that would only hurt me and there’s no point in torturing myself anymore. Four months is enough. I don’t think I know these people.

        I turn my back on them.

        In the alley, the girls don’t ask me what happened. They know. They knew before I even went in there. Without a word, I hop back up onto Galia’s handlebars and she pumps her legs faster and faster until we’re far away from the place I used to call home.

        “You heard the story of Tina and Tiana Wilks?” Galia asks between breaths.

        “Sounds familiar. Who are they?”

        “Sisters. Twins. They burned things, too. Because they were sick of the world’s shit. Full of Fury.”

        “Where are they now?”

        “Dead. They got sent to the crazy house. They told them it was destructive to burn things. Did some electroshock shit so every time they thought about it, ZAP! So one day they just stopped letting it out. But the Fury kept growing and growing.”

        “It killed them?”

        “Doctors said it was inflammation of the heart. But it was the Fury that burned them from the inside out.”

        I imagine myself imploding and it wouldn’t surprise me if it happened one day. I’m angry all the time and it won’t stop.

When we get to the Ice Cream Shop on the other side of town, I’m thinking of what happened that day last week in a new light. I don’t like ice cream that much, but I have a right to get some without someone spitting on me. Who are these villagers to tell us we don’t belong somewhere? We are their daughters.  

        “Me first!” Ariel says, hopping off the handle bars of Brizo’s bike.

        “No. Amberjack gets first lick,” Galia says.

        I slide off the handlebars and approach the dark store front. This week’s sale is painted in purple and pink letters on the big glass windows: Three Scoops for $1! I see the owner with her short gray hair. The shining globs of spit that landed on our brown arms and on Galia’s face. I see my family tucked into bed right now maybe feeling a little guilty but all the same, tucked in for a good night’s sleep while I’m out here in the cold. Even if I don’t feel it, I do.

        I feel everything.

        Then.

        I let it go.

        BOOM.

        An oven in the back explodes, the fire running up and down the walls and along the floor. Flames inch up the wooden chairs, to the pristine white table, then jump over to the next table, and the next and the next.

        I feel the Fury vibrating in my cells, slipping through my bloodstream and out of every pore in my body. It gets stronger, hotter, and I know that Galia, Ariel and Brizo are standing by my side, letting their Fury spill out with mine.

        This is no ordinary fire. It burns red, purple, blue, orange, green. It desiccates. It obliterates. It cleanses. It goes on and on.

        Soon, we hear the shrill sound of a fire engine in the distance. Before we can get caught, we climb back onto the bikes and speed away, back up the mountain where we came from. We laugh and scream as we ride because we just made something beautiful and letting the Fury go is like giving your soul a warm bath with freesia and mint. I lean back on the handlebars against Galia, spread my arms wide and let the purple sparks spit from my fingertips, leaving a trail of light behind us.

∙∙∙

        Miss Babs slams the newspaper on the table between the plates hot of eggs and bacon. The ashes of the Ice Cream Shoppe made the front page, along with an insert of the owner bawling her eyes out and being held by her husband.

        The plucks gaze up from their plates at her curiously while me, Galia, Ariel and Brizo shovel grits into our mouths like we don’t see the paper.

        “It’s coming tomorrow,” Miss Babs says. She uses her long blue acrylic nails to shake her big lilac afro. She’s older than us, but looks too young to be taking care of other people’s kids. Her skin is brown like the center of a tree and she has a line of delicate symbols tatted between her breasts. She’s also got two names tatted on her collarbones, Ezekiel and Leo. But she won’t tell us who they are.

        “What’s coming tomorrow?” one of the plucks with a ribbon in her hair asks.

        Miss Babs opens the paper to the second page. The weather section. Us non-plucks let out the breath we were holding.

        “A storm. It’s about to throw down. I felt it in my knees when I woke up this morning.”

        A pluck with a face like a sad clown picks the paper up.

        “It says here it’s just a thundershower.”

        Miss Babs pulls her chair out at the head of the table and sits down with a sigh.

        “They don’t want to worry the villagers. You girls are too young, but I remember the last ‘thundershower’ we had. Nearly wiped the town clean off the map. A lot of people were rescued by volunteers from up state, but many were killed. It took over a decade to rebuild Onyx Falls.”

        “People actually died? How bad is this one supposed to be?” I ask. I turn to look out the window and see the sun has been eclipsed by a black cloud. Not just dark, but black.

        “You girls have nothing to worry about, we’re safe up here. We’ll have to board up the downstairs windows, but this house was built to take a beating. Been standing since 1924 and not a scratch on her.”

        My heart clatters down my ribcage and lands with a thud. My family. A regular windy day could blow the roof off our house, there’s no way it’ll make it through this. I see a blurred vision of three bodies floating and my lungs start to burn. Sweat dripping from my brow, I take a sip of cool water but it doesn’t help.

        It’s wild that thoughts of my family can still do this to me. After all, they’re not worried about me, why should I be worried about them? I can’t stop thinking about Cassia though. I see her begging momma and daddy to let me come home and them telling her no. I can be mad at them, but not her.

        “They’ll be here soon enough,” Miss Babs continues, flipping through the paper and crossing her legs, “within the next five minutes I bet.”

        “Who?” I ask.

        “The mayor,” Galia answers. “He comes around every time something bad happens and asks for our help. Thinks we’re fuckin’ witches or some shit. He asked Miss Babs to get rid of a wart on his big toe once.”

        Everybody goes back to eating their food like it’s a perfectly normal day and the town’s impending doom isn’t a big deal at all.

        “Well…” I start, “ is there something we could do about a big storm? If we wanted to, I mean.”

        Miss Babs peers at me curiously over the top of the paper but doesn’t answer.

        “Water beats fire every time,” Ariel explains.

        “Best we could do is set everything on fire beforehand,” Brizo says with a snicker.

        Suddenly there’s a knock at the door.

        “Told ya,” Miss Babs says, setting her paper down and getting up to answer. We can’t see him from the dining room but the mayor’s voice carries all the way through the hall. He is not invited inside.

        “Babette.  You haven’t returned any of my calls. I thought I’d pay you a visit in person instead. I surmise you’re well aware of—“

        “I know, Lamont. A storm the likes of a monsoon is coming. I suggest you get back down to the village and start telling folks the truth so they can at least have a chance of getting out before it’s too late.”

        Mayor Lamont sighs.

        “You know they’ll never come back, Babs. We’ll have a ghost town on our hands.”

        “That’s probably going to happen either way,” she says flippantly.

        “My god, woman, don’t you care about anything?"

        “Yes, this school and my girls.”

        “Should I remind you that the Village of Onyx Falls owns this school?”

        “Should I remind you there’s unbridled Fury running rampant in this house? You didn’t build this school as a favor, you did it to rid the town of your angry daughters. Of course, if you’d like to suggest to the girls that you want to evict us, by all means, go ahead. You just might upset them though. Don’t know if you’d make it back to town before the storm. Or ever.”

        “Well we can’t very well have them running run around town setting everyone on fire!”

        “These girls have done nothing wrong but be born. All that anger bottled up inside for centuries, from our ancestors, through slavery, even now. It was bound to release itself somehow. And it did. Into the babies.”

        It’s silent for a moment, the mayor probably sizing Miss Babs up and her not backing down.

        “Come on, Babs. I’ll give you whatever you want. New sheets? Done. A full-time chef for the school? You got it. Just name your price.”

        She clucks her tongue.

        “Lamont, have you ever heard a word that’s come out of my mouth in the past eight years? I can’t name a price because there’s nothing we can do. Now if you’ll excuse—“

        “The twins! What about the twins? Uh…Tina! Tina and Tiana! They could do things! They saved people! You can help us, I know it!”

        “Those twins were long gone before you and I were even born. Your villagers made sure of that.”

        “Don’t punish everyone for the mistakes of a few.”

        “Well we’re still up on this mountain today, aren’t we?”

        “Babette, please!”

        “Goodbye, Lamont.”

        The front door slams and Babs strolls back into the dining room without a word. She takes her seat at the table and bites into a piece of burnt toast, white billows of smoke spilling from her nostrils.

∙∙∙

        “This is bullshit!” Brizo shouts, slamming her hammer into a vase. It shatters into a million shards, which she crushes with the heel of her foot.

        “What is?” I ask, ripping a table cloth down the center.

        “Duh! That we risked going into town to burn down an Ice Cream Shoppe that’s about to be underwater any damn way!” Ariel yells. She throws a teacup at the wall where it explodes in a cloud of white.

        “Right. That bitch is about to get a good ass insurance payout. They’ll have that place back up before next spring. Then we’ll have to burn it down again,” Galia says, lighting a row of candles and blowing them out with her mind.

        We’re in the wrecking room, where we’re supposed to go when we need to release our Fury but it’s nothing like the real thing. Like picking up a glass you think is Sprite but it turns out to be water. It’s not bad, but it isn’t enough. I thought letting my Fury out last night would cool me down but I’m burning even hotter than before. I’m only in shorts and a bikini top and the sweat is pouring down the small of my back.

        “Yall just gonna keep burning it down every time they rebuild it?” I ask.

        They glare at me like their old jerk selves from before last night.

        “You got any better ideas?!” Brizo asks.

        “Yeah. Do something productive with your time.”

        “Like what?!”

        “…I don’t know.”

        There’s a knock at the door. Ariel opens it and the pluck with the ribbon is standing there.

        “The hell do you want? Miss Babs said we can make as much noise as we want til 8pm.”

        The pluck shakes her head.

        “I need to talk to Amberjack.”

        I head to the door but she’s walking away before I get to her. I follow her down the hall. The door to the wrecking room slams shut behind me.

        “What is it?” I ask.  It’s barely six but the house is dark. Through the windows at the end of the hall, I see dark black clouds rolling in from the horizon, fat drops of water pelting the panes.

        The pluck doesn’t answer me though, just walks straight to her room. Inside sitting on the baby pink bed and drenched in water is Cassia.

        “Cassia!” I grab her tight, her cold wet clothes dripping all over me. “What the hell are you doing up here?”

        “It’s the mayor. He’s locked the town gates so we can’t evacuate. But everybody knows the storm is coming tonight. They say it’s going to wipe us out, Amberjack.”

        I sit down on the bed next to her while the pluck pretends to make herself busy arranging the pastel clothes in her wardrobe.

        “How did you get out?”

        “I climbed the fence. But it’s too high for the babies and the older folks.”

        “Okay…you can stay here. With me. You’ll be safe,” I say. I don’t want anyone to die but inside my heart is singing because at least Cassia won’t be among the dead.

        “But what about momma and daddy? What about the rest of the people?”

        “What about them?!” I say, standing up to face her with my arms crossed. “They don’t want me down there. I don’t want them up here.”

        “I know you don’t mean that, Amberjack. You’re hurt, you’re angry, you’re upset. I get that. But you still care, I know it! We can fix this but only if we all make it through the storm.”

        I shrug.

        “There’s nothing to fix. And there’s nothing I can do to help anyone but you.”

        “But there’s rumors floating around town. About those twins Tina and Tiana. That they could do other things, too.”

        “What the hell does that have to do with me? I couldn’t even stop myself from hurting you! You think I can control a storm? How?”

        Cassia looks down at her lap.

        I kneel in front of her, take her hands in mine.

        “Look, I’m sorry for yelling at you. It’s just…I’m different now. Things are different now. I’ll get you some pajamas. You’ll sleep in my bed tonight.” Even as I say the words they feel wrong on my tongue. Could I really sleep as my parents and innocent people thrash for air underwater?

        But before I can say anything else, Cassia stands up and storms off toward the open window. The rain is falling in heavy sheets of sparkling silver. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s beautiful and terrifying.

        “Cassia, you’re not going back down there!” I shout. I stumble over to the window but she’s already halfway out, hanging onto the ladder of vines as water pours down her face.

        “I’m not leaving them, Amberjack! If you don’t want to help, that’s your choice, but I have to!”

        “Cassia, no!”

        I lean out the window to grab her, the last piece of my old life, but she disappears into the wet night below. I move to grab the vine ladder but a hand on my shoulder yanks me back.

        The pluck.

        “What are you doing? I’m going after her!” I shout, shoving her aside, but the pluck is stronger than she looks. She pushes me and I nearly trip over backwards onto the bed. I watch as she closes the window, locking out the rolls of thunder and lightning that split the sky.

        “You can’t force someone to stay with you,” she says softly. “It’s the worst thing you can do, trust me.”

        “So I’m just supposed to let her die out there?”

        The pluck only smiles and pulls out a stack of news clippings from her nightstand. She hands them to me but I’m not even tryna be bothered with her right now. I have to get to my sister. I have to save her.

        “Are you crazy?! I don’t have time to read shit!” I say, pushing her hand away.

        “Then I’ll read them to you,” she says firmly. “‘Stranger saves boy from ice pond’. ‘3 year old baby pulled from apartment fire’. ‘Nursing home residents rescued after photo goes viral’—“

        “—Who the hell cares?!” I shout. Fire sparks in my fingertips. It hurts.

        “This was all the work of Furious Girls. The mayor, your sister, they’re right. We can do more than light things on fire.”

        “ We? You’re a pluck. You gave your Fury away.”

        She gives me a knowing smile and holds her hand out with her palm facing up. Never taking her eyes from mine, a pink flame sparks and dances wildly on her fingers. She closes her hand around it and it’s gone.

        She doesn’t even break a sweat.

        “My name is Kyla, not ‘pluck’.”

        Now I’m fumbling for words.

        “How did you…but you’re a—“

        “—Furious Girl. Like energy, Fury cannot be destroyed. Only contained and controlled.”

        I watch as she places the newspaper clippings back in their drawer and adjusts the hot pink ribbon in her hair.

        “If you can control it then why are you still here?”

        “Well, that part of the ‘pluck’ story is true. No one sends their daughters up here to be cured. They send us up here to stay. But that’s a story for another time, don’t you think? The town will be washed away soon if you don’t get a move on.”

        “What the hell am I supposed to do about it? Water beats fire every time,” I mutter, remembering Ariel’s words.

        She shrugs but doesn’t turn around to look at me.

        “You must have heard that from one of those idiots. What do you think would happen if you tried to extinguish a house fire with a thimble of water?”

        “Nothing.”

        “Exactly.”

        “Uh, I think a monsoon is a little more water than a freaking thimble! I can’t help anyone. All I can do is make fire. Fire that burns everything around it.”

        “Goodness, you fledglings are quite literal aren’t you? Yes, the monsoon is obviously more than a thimble of water which means you’re going to need even more fire. You need to make a shield over the town to protect them.” Kayla waves one palm over the other and a small orange dome of fire appears.

        “I can’t do that,” I say.  

        “Yes, you can. The other fledglings? Their Fury runs too wild. You’re different.”

        “But…I think I’m one of them. I lit my sister’s hair on fire once. I’m burning up all the time. I can’t control it. Like, at all. I’ve tried.”

        “No, you’re not  one of them. I knew it when you came in the house. The Fury runs within you but you don’t run with it. There’s light and warmth still in you.”

         I don’t know Kyla but I want to believe her. I really do.

        “Will you come with me? Help me. Please.”

        But she only shakes her head and walks over to the window where the black storm clouds have covered the sky.

        “I can’t make a shield that large. Power like that…it takes more than just Fury. It takes…something I don’t have anymore.” She presses a hand to the glass window pane and sighs.

        “What’s that?”

        She turns to me, her big brown eyes glassy.

        “A home to fight for. Now, hurry, you only have so much time before it’s too late to save them. Get to high ground, it’s a little harder to channel Fury underwater.”

        “Okay, I’ll go,” I say, heading to the door. Before I leave, I turn back towards her.

        “Why are you doing this? Helping me, I mean. We don’t even really know each other.”

        Kayla smiles.

        “The Fury that runs through you is just like the Fury that runs through us all. We might not know each other but in a way, we’re almost like sisters.”

        Our eyes linger for a moment and I wish I knew what to say to her. I mumble out a thanks as I rush out of her room and down the hall to mine.

        Galia and the girls are sharing a bag of Doritos and painting each other’s nails.

        I pull a t-shirt on over my bikini top and slip into some sneakers with a good grip for climbing.

        “Where you going?” Galia asks.

        “To the village,” I say.

        “Look at that, little Amberjack is going to try to save her mommy and daddy,” Ariel mocks.

        “Maybe they’ll let her come back home if she does. She can save them a buck or two on that electric bill,” Brizo adds. They both burst into laughter.

        “Shut up!” Galia snaps and they both fall into silence immediately. “Amberjack, come on, you’re crazy if you go down there in this weather. Just stay here with us. We’ll even bike down with you tomorrow to check on things once it’s over.”

        “You mean after my family’s drowned?”

        Galia only shrugs.

        “It’s fucked up…but you can’t save everybody. If it was us down there and them up here, do you think they’d try to save us?”

        No. But I need Cassia. Momma and daddy, too. Even though they’ve hurt me, it’s true. I need them. Admitting it to myself makes me want to cry but instead I feel my heart expand with the warmth of love.

        “You guys were born in Onyx Falls right?” I say shoving the bag of Doritos off the bed and sitting in between them.

        “Yeah. All of us. So what?” Galia asks with her usual snark. But she’s listening.

        “So I need your help. I’m going to save the town and I need you guys there with me.”

        Ariel rolls her eyes and Brizo clucks her tongue. But Galia, she’s listening<./span> Yeah, with a stank look on her face but she doesn’t tell me no or shove me off the bed like she normally would.

        “Look, Amberjack, I get it. It’s your baby sis. Your folks. But the three of us? We don’t have any family anymore. My momma’s dead and my daddy’s somewhere in Montana pretending I don’t exist. Why should I help you save the town that hates us? Why do you even wanna save it?”

        Her cheeks begin to burn red but I know it’s not towards me. It’s towards the people who made us climb this mountain alone, who told us we didn’t belong, who told us there was something wrong with us, who asked why we were always so angry, like we could help it. I know Kayla said I’m not one of them, but maybe she was wrong. Maybe she never saw the girl hiding underneath Galia’s attitude, the one who smells like waffles and cares even when she shouldn’t.

        I place my hand on hers and we create a white flame so brilliant it nearly scorches the bed. She doesn’t let go and neither do I.

        “What if…what if I said I’ll  be your family?” I turn to Ariel and Brizo, red smoke billowing from their nostrils and sweat running down their brown faces. “You guys, too. And the plucks and Miss Babs. What if we could be a whole new family?”

        I turn back to Galia, her head turned away from me because she’s crying. “Even though our families sent us away,” I continue, “we’re not alone. Even if some of the people in Onyx Falls hate us, we don’t have to hate each other. Maybe we can show them the truth of what we can do.”

        There’s a moment of silence where I hear nothing but the flames inside our bodies licking against us. I think they might say no and that terrifies me. There’s no way I can do this alone. Please, help me.

         After a minute, Galia turns to me, her eyes suddenly dry but still red. She looks to Ariel and Brizo who mean mug back but still…there it is. They nod.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s do this.”

∙∙∙

        Outside, we can barely see our own hands in front of us. The storm winds nearly knock me over and the rain streams down my face and into my mouth. The taste of salt and sin.

        Galia and Brizo grab the bikes and we zoom down the mountain in darkness. It’s not as much fun when torrents of water are pouring down on you. When I expect to plateau at the bottom of the hill, I feel the cold water rise up to our ankles. The town is already flooding fast.

        “We gotta move quick!” I yell through the rumbling thunder of the storm.

        “No shit!” Galia shouts back.

We ditch the bikes where they float in the water and start climbing the silver gates into town. They’ve been shut with a big padlock but it only takes us a few minutes to haul ourselves over and drop down on the other side.

        I see villagers in the darkness, illuminated by intermittent strikes of lightning. They carry suitcases and appliances on their head, wading through the rising water to nowhere it seems. Most of them couldn’t climb the fence even without their belongings strapped to their backs. But even if they could, there’s nowhere to go from there but up to the School and I have a feeling Miss Babs won’t be letting them in.

        “Goddamn, I’ve never seen a storm like this! Who pissed off mother nature?!” Brizo shouts.

        We’re almost to my house when someone nearly yanks my arm out of its socket.

        “You!” an old woman snarls. It’s the lady who owns the Ice Cream Shoppe and she’s digging her nails into my wrist.

        “Get off me!” I shout, trying to pull my arm away without hurting her.

        “You demons burned my shop down! You sent this storm! Everybody, look, I got one of ‘em!”

        The townspeople wading around hopelessly turn their anger on us. Despite the fact that they’re probably about to be washed away in the storm waters, the villagers start to form an angry mob. What Kyla said was right, Fury cannot be destroyed. Just because the villagers are about to die themselves doesn’t mean they won’t try to kill us first.

        “Get the hell off her!” Galia shouts. She, Ariel and Brizo wade towards the lady and I know they’re running high on so many emotions, they might just kill her. I can do this, I can control it.  The Fury bursts alive inside me and the woman is thrown back thirty feet where she lands with a sizzle like a hot skillet in a sink. I look at my smoking hands and I’m grateful for the storm because it could have been so much worse for her without it.  

        The short man leading the mob suddenly stops in his tracks, reconsiders, and goes on about panicking. The rest of the angry villagers follow suit. They don’t want nun.

         “What the hell was that, Amberjack?! She didn’t feel anything! Let me show you how it’s done,” Galia says. The woman is being helped to her feet by a couple of boys. Galia heads in their direction.

        I pull her back.

        “No! That’s not why we came down here, remember?”

        She shoots daggers at the lady but nods reluctantly.

        We make our way down my block and suddenly the two story house on the corner caves in on itself, sending a huge wave of water that takes us under. I feel my knee hit something hard in the water and suddenly I’m breathing in sour water. I am NOT going to die like this. I flail and kick, grabbing onto a light pole for support.

        “Amberjack!” I hear behind me.

        I turn around to see Cassia wading towards me, her scarf missing and her bathing suit and cut-offs soaked.

 “We need to get to high ground!” I shout over the pounding of rain drops on the water’s surface. I don’t even have time to celebrate that she’s still alive. I scan the water searching for the girls but I don’t see them.

“Galia! Brizo! Ariel!” I scream into the madness, my sister clutching onto my arm because I’m the big sister who saves the day, only I think I may have gotten my friends killed.

Then, I feel something hot against my foot. It crawls up my leg and I reach down and pull up a hand.

It’s Galia’s and she spits out a torrent of water before nearly collapsing in my arms. Brizo and Ariel are right behind her, spitting and coughing and looking spent.

“Are you guys okay?” Cassia asks, grabbing onto their hands while I pat Galia’s back to get the rest of the water out of her lungs. When she’s done, she looks up at me, her cheeks as red as apples.

“I thought you were…I thought you—“

“I’m okay, Amberjack. Don’t worry about me. Let’s just get this done,” she says.

But I’ve lost my nerve. Fury doesn’t make us invincible. We can still die. There’s no guarantee this is going to work. I don’t even know what I’m doing. But I have to try.         

        Cassia leads the way to our house, the water already inside. I can hear momma and daddy inside screaming for Cassia. They don’t scream for me. They think you’re on the mountain, safe, it doesn’t mean they don’t love you anymore.

         The five of us swim over to the side of the house, my arm tight around Galia’s waist because I refuse to lose her again. We climb the wooden lattice up to the roof where me and Cassia used to watch stars and eat sugary microwaved smores together.

        My sister pulls me up and we all tilt our heads up to the sky. The black clouds are looped in a funnel, but high up, there’s a glimmer of day time and sun. A glimpse of Heaven.

        “Do it, Amberjack!” she shouts.

        I look down around us and there are people swimming, splashing and screaming. Colorful suitcases, spilled clothes, microwaves and dollar bills float in the black water below us. Soon, people will start to drown. Bodies will float. This will all be on me.

        I freeze even though my skin is still piping hot. It was stupid to come down here. I can’t save my sister or my family. And now I’ve dragged the other Furious Girls in it for no damn reason. Still, my baby sister is looking at me with terror in her eyes. I’ll do something. When we die together, at least you’ll think I tried.

        I have no idea what I’m doing but I hope it’s better than nothing. I stand in the center of the roof, shut my eyes tight and envision a shield of fire protecting us from the storm raining down above. I picture us all, dry, warm and safe.

        The Fury bubbles through me but it doesn’t leave my body. Maybe I’ve broken myself? Maybe this was Kyla’s plan all along, to get rid of us rogue Furious Girls in a storm she knew I couldn’t stop. I picture myself throttling her but remember that I’ll be dead before I get the chance.

        “It’s not working!” I shout, opening my eyes as the rain comes down harder and harder. I can’t see anything around me but the silver-white of rainfall. I can’t even see Cassia anymore. But I feel her hands wrap around mine.

        “Try it now! Together!” she shouts.

        I close my eyes and picture it again, the shield of flames blocking out the blackness. I feel my Fury build up and course into my hands. And Cassia’s. Her Fury. She has Fury. Lime green. It shoots out from her and sprays in every direction.  But still, we produce no shield.

        I turn to find Galia’s eyes, brown and wet with rain and tears. I don’t have to ask. Her hands wrap around ours and then Ariel’s over that and Brizo’s over hers. We all begin to burn and vibrate so intensely, my vision starts to blur and I think my soul is prepared to leap out of my body and take flight. In all the years I’ve handled my Fury, I’ve never felt anything like this before.

Suddenly, where there was blazing heat there is coolness wrapped in the nest of our hands. The Fury softens around the edges. It calms and settles.

        I hear my mother below us.

        “Amberjack! Let her go! Don’t you hurt her!”

        Suddenly the sound of the rain stops.

        The screaming and splashing down below stop.

        The world

        STOPS.

        For several moments there is nothing.

        And then.

        The roar and heat of a fire.

        We open our eyes and look up to a translucent shield of heat and colors, pink, lime, indigo, red and yellow. The storm above still rages but the raindrops repel against the shield like glass, protecting us.

        We did it. But we still don’t let each other go because this moment is too beautiful to ever want it to stop. I look around at their red faces, labored breaths and wet hair clinging to their cheeks.

        My sisters.

—END—

ABOUT JULIANA GOODMAN

Juliana is a former professional student and young adult writer. She received her MFA in fiction from some place in Indiana. She was a 2014 semi-finalist for the Jack Kent Cooke Graduate Arts Award and has been published in Elements, Blackberry: a Magazine and The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle. Juliana aims to provide black girls with the fierce stories of power they deserve. She currently resides in Illinois with her handsome dog Artie Partie. You can follow them on instagram @jeweliana.

VALLEY FIELDWORK

By Stefani Cox

         Dying trees littered the orchard. The symmetric pattern of their spindly, decaying trunks reminded Lydia of a cornrow style she used to braid into her hair as a teenager. She appraised the damage in frustration. This wasteland of foliage didn’t make any sense, not so early in spring, even if the heat was already setting records again.

“It came out of nowhere,” said Devaun. “I even tried one of my own mixtures, but the ingredients must be off.”

As soon as the words left Devaun’s mouth, Lydia knew they would be the tinder to ignite yet another argument with Rob Kenworth. Dr. Kenworth , as he liked to be known around the University. She twisted one of her pen spring curls. Devaun seemed to have no idea what he had just started. He was preoccupied with watching the crops, a hand clamped to the back of his neck. But, Lydia saw the fight brewing because she knew Rob better than Devaun. Too much better,  she thought.

Lydia had observed the men through their government-sponsored partnership for years, and by now she could tell they had very little in common. They didn’t look anything alike either.

Devaun was short and compact, with tight, wiry curls like Lydia’s. His skin was sun-ripened beyond its usual rich brown from the many hours he spent supervising his workers and tending to the University’s crops. He was partial to long-sleeved, flannel shirts and pants that looked just like denim blue jeans, but that must be made of a material more resistant to the climate.

Meanwhile, Rob was the epitome of his status as a rising white microbiology professor—tall and fond of neat button-downs with beige slacks. He hosted a nest of unruly brown hair that he couldn’t help raking back anytime he felt frustrated, such as now.

 “We’ve discussed homegrown methods before,” replied Rob, as he scuffed at a dead leaf. “It sounds like we might need to have another conversation about the approvals process.” The note of condescension irritated Lydia. Rob’s self-assuredness, once attractive, had been grating on her these past few weeks.

“This is different,” said Devaun. “Garlic has been used for centuries to combat fungi. We just need the right concentration with—"  

“Devaun, please leave the science up to us. No unauthorized treatments.”

Lydia ground her molars together. They didn’t have time for the two men to duke out whose was bigger. “How about we get back to the fieldwork?” she suggested. It was hopeless. The men had already doubled down on their positions and were clearly going to be arguing for a while.

Fine,  thought Lydia. I’ll manage the project. As usual.

She surveyed the orchard with dismay. Its would-be produce—Carmel-type almonds in this case—were shriveled, dark husks littering the ground. Lydia crunched over the sad remnants of their latest project. None of the trees looked salvageable.

Lydia felt like everything was crumbling around her, and fought down a wave of anxiety with long, drawn breaths. Rob’s grant was pushing into year three, and the Department of Agriculture was getting impatient about seeing results. It made sense. They hired the University to stabilize the Central Valley’s fruit and nut crops against rapidly rising temperatures. Given the shrinking acreage of viable growing land and increasing drought, there wasn’t a lot of room to be lenient in their expectations. Pests were metabolizing faster every year, and had begun to devour everything Devaun planted, despite Lydia and Rob’s best efforts in the lab.

Devaun’s crew was spread out among the trees, picking off pieces of wood, leaf, and nut for the lab’s later examination. She was always surprised when she saw how many of them there were, given that growing trades had almost died out with the introduction of mass-harvesting AIs.

But Devaun was old school. He’d taken the grant on the condition that he could do his work with actual people in the fields, well-paid people. Rob hired Devaun because at the time his yield was higher than that of the farmers who relied more heavily on technology. Now that AgCode had entered the picture, however, Rob was no longer as happy at his prior choice.

Lydia stopped next to an older farmhand. He was lighter-skinned than Devaun, Latino perhaps, though similarly suntanned.

“I’m Lydia.”

“Samuel.”

Lydia wondered how he saw her, a black woman riding along with the hotshot professor that they all had to obey. Lydia was taller than most women, and she often wore outfits inspired by the goth movement of the late twentieth century—today, it was a calf-length black dress with boots, an arm cuff studded with spikes and rhinestones, and a dark spread of purple across her lips.

Lydia’s outfit wasn’t exactly suited for the day, even if it was only a hundred and five, but she liked the confidence the clothes gave her. By late spring, she’d have no choice but to don the decidedly less-personal, but heat-reflective bodysuits issued by the department for fieldwork.

It didn’t seem that Samuel had too many feelings about her one way or the other. And it didn’t matter, not when there was work to do.

“Can I see that?” she asked him, pointing to the airlock sack he’d been using to collect leaf material. Samuel waited for Lydia to pull on her standard lab-issued gloves before handing her the bag. As he did so, she saw a black, stepped eagle tattoo on his forearm. She realized Devaun must have recruited workers from the most recent farmworker justice marches. Or at least supporters of the protests. That would explain his insistence on their wages, which were three times the state average.

Lydia crumbled a leaf into powder and then sprinkled the dust into the compartment of her tiny field microscope. She wasn’t encouraged by what she saw through the lens.

The suspect microbes were easy to spot among the normal bacteria and other organisms she expected to find in this part of the Valley. The fungus was a system of long, thin strands that overlapped and tangled with one another throughout Lydia’s field of vision. Their ends were capped with thick round bulbs that seemed to be covering over the soil’s other biogenic material. She recognized the structure immediately.

“Shit,” she muttered to herself.

“Bad news?” Samuel eyed her curiously as she raised her eyes from the microscope.

“Not the greatest.”

He spat onto the earth. “I could tell this gig was headed for trouble. None of the farm jobs are safe these days.”

Lydia winced at the idea of their project putting others out of work. “Could Devaun get you a different placement if...” she didn’t finish the sentence.

“You can see how old I am. I’m not getting any new work. Even this was a longshot.” His fiery eyes softened. “Devaun is good people though. He does his best. You should let him experiment more. Did he show you—"

“Lydia!” It was Rob. “We’re all set. Can you pack the samples?”

Apparently, the argument had finally ended. She nodded to Samuel and held up the sack. “Thanks for this.” He waved a hand dismissively and watched her walk away.

Lydia could tell by Rob’s confident stance that he had won this round. Devaun had his arms crossed and was surveying his workers, rather than looking the professor in the eye. She felt bad for him. Devaun was eccentric, but she understood his passion for growing things. It was clearly his gift.

        “The soil fungus is the same as last time,” said Lydia. “I gather our last pesticide formulation didn’t take?”

Devaun turned to her. “No luck from the last batch. That’s why I tried my remedy.” He shot a dirty glance at Rob. “The fungus ate clear through the peaches over on B field too. I’ve been wondering if it’s feeding off solar energy somehow. This spring is even hotter than the 2089 spike.” He sighed. “So, given that things aren’t looking great, how much time do we have?”

Rob snorted. “If the feds had their way, none. But, let’s just say the next month is critical. They’re starting to talk to AgCode about shifting resources. It wouldn’t be the worst idea to beat them to the punch, let AgCode try some of their latest here.”

“Absolutely not,” said Devaun. “I’d have to fire all the workers to let them try that magnetic frequency stuff on the orchards. I’m not caving to them, just because they swooped in from Silicon Valley and bought up half the University’s research departments.” He looked to Lydia. “Is that what you want?”

Lydia was taken aback. She didn’t consider herself to have an opinion on the issue, since she was in favor of whoever, or whatever, could get the job done. But she could see Devaun was digging his heels into the last realm where he still had control—for now at least.

“What I want is to get back to campus, because it looks like Rob and I have a bunch of work to do.” Lydia discreetly nudged Rob’s arm with her own. “Let’s go.”

She took herself through the three-step cleansing station at the edge of the property, peeling off her gloves and boot covers and depositing them in the sealed trash receptacle, before moving through the arch of the duster that blasted away any residual particles. Finally, Lydia stepped onto the metal plate that sent a flash freeze of air from the soles of her shoes up her entire body.

She heaped the samples into the back of the University’s white electric pickup truck, making sure each airlock bag made its way into the correctly-labeled box, and that the cartons were all snugly secured for their hour-and-a-half drive back to campus.

As she organized, she reflected on Devaun’s persistence with the old ways of doing things. She wondered how he could remain so adamant about his methods when everyone else had long-since abandoned them to the past.

∙∙∙

Lydia checked her lipstick in the mirror of the passenger side sunvisor as they drove through the hot, dry Valley. She’d gotten into dark shades recently and was testing out the plum. She pressed her lips together. Nice matte, but a not quite enough hold, she decided.

Rob was deep in thought, probably crafting responses to funder emails or rehashing one of his recent University-comped lunches meant to smooth over inter-departmental tensions. He wasn’t stunning in the same unconscious way of some other professors, but his intensity for the work and for moving up the ladder of the University’s hierarchy had always been attractive to Lydia.

As they drove, she noticed a couple of AIs looming half-a-mile from the road.

“Are those the new models AgCode has been talking about?”

“Yeah,” replied Rob distractedly. “For tomatoes and vegetable crops.”

The machines were enormous grey pods with multiple arms branching out like spiders. Each one was the size of a mansion, operating and moving about on its own algorithms with no field hands in sight. She knew the machines were essentially control centers for AgCode’s latest breakthrough—manipulating crop cycles and harvest potential by synchronizing with internal frequencies and magnetic properties. Lately, they’d had been exploring how to trigger inherent pest defense mechanisms in plants, which explained their burgeoning interest in Rob’s lab.

“They must have improved the range,” she commented. “Look how big of a field each one is managing.”

Lydia wondered again how long Devaun would be able to keep operating the way he did, keeping his business afloat despite the new technology. She knew he wasn’t going to stop trying any time soon, based on a conversation they’d had a couple of months ago.

She and Devaun had been discussing the budget for supplies, when suddenly he blurted, “You know my ancestors way back were sharecroppers.”

“Yeah?”

“They used to run peaches and the like, but out in Texas.”

Lydia thought for a moment. “My folks too. Except, not peaches. They had a small family farm in the Midwest—greens, tomatoes, squash. Even a few pigs and chickens I think. That was a long time ago though.”

“There are so many of us with ancestors that farmed!” Devaun was excited at his audience. “And there’s so much we don’t know about how they did it. Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and just learn from them. I work with what I’ve gathered from my family, but I’m always missing something.”

He paused. “I don’t know if they would be proud or disappointed to see where I am now. But I’ve always needed to work with plants. Not sure I’d know what else to do with myself.”

“Is that why you don’t like AgCode? Because it goes against old farming practices?”

Devaun looked rueful. “Maybe I am of the ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ camp. But there’s more than that. It’s also about the workers. They fought so hard for stable jobs like this one.”

A pothole in the road jarred Lydia out of her memory. They were pulling up closer to one of the big machines now.

“If we can just figure out this fungus, we have a shot at finally getting the ground stable,” she told Rob.

        “We’ll see,” he replied noncommittally. He kept glancing out the window at the AIs. “As much as Devaun hates it, we’re going to have to bring in AgCode’s tech if the soil keeps rejecting the crops. I don’t understand why he’s so stubborn about it.”

        “He seems pretty competent at what he’s doing,” said Lydia. “This fungus is the first problem that’s completely thrown him. His work is good, you know that.”

        “He’s stuck with all those rigid ideas though. We don’t live in that world anymore.”

        “I don’t know,” replied Lydia. “Maybe we just need to give him a little more time.”

∙∙∙

        They fucked on Rob’s couch after stopping by the lab to drop off the new samples. Usually the sex softened both of them, encouraging the pressures and work politics to wash off their bodies as they moved in harmony.

Today was different though. When Lydia slipped her dress back on, she still felt the day’s weight in her shoulders, taut and unyielding. She reapplied her lip color, and then threaded her fingers underneath her hair, giving it a few bounces for shape and volume.

Lydia hadn’t come to the University to be that  woman—the smart, eager student who falls under the spell of the powerful professor. But it happened. One minute she was signing up to help run Rob’s experiments, staying late to make sure she got the hang of things and attending his office hours to double check strategies. Then the next, she and Rob were making out in dark corners of the lab after everyone else had gone home. Lately, however, she’d been thinking it was time for this part of their relationship to end.

The pressures of the work and its history took a toll on Lydia, and she sighed to herself. Through her own hard work and dedication, not her involvement with Rob, She’d become the most senior of the student researchers. She didn’t want to — wasn’t about to — lose her all her dissertation work to couple of dead fields. Her tuition and living expenses were dependent on the federal grant, and she couldn’t afford to switch to an unsponsored project.

Rob had buttoned his spare shirt up and was running a comb through his hair before he mentioned the day’s trip again. “The reemergence of the soil fungus is really terrible timing,” he sighed, as he rearranged the papers on his desk. “I’m going to have to beg the folks in Sacramento not to cut off our water allotment.”

It always took Lydia a minute to adjust to the different environment here on campus compared to the fields. Rob’s room was a temperature-controlled glass box, with a remote mechanism that could turn the walls into one-way mirrors for privacy. He’d taken advantage of the light-filled space to grow a variety of succulents, cacti, and other desert-type plants. They peppered his bookshelves and hung from the ceiling like a new-age Garden of Eden.

        His office wasn’t too different from how the entire campus felt to Lydia. The walkways between buildings were outfitted with a roof that chilled everything beneath it. The covering kept anyone on the premises at a comfortable sixty-five degrees, no matter the weather outside. The fancy systems were, of course, all thanks to AgCode’s vested interest in the University over the past decade.

“The microbes are pretty complex,” said Lydia. “I’m going to take a closer look at them this week. It’s possible the fungus has been hiding in the soil all this time and somehow grew beneath the reach of the field biofences. I’d like to extend their depth by another hundred feet or so.” The biofence densified any earth directly beneath it, essentially creating an impermeable barrier of itself that pushed deep underground.

        “Good. We should also double check that Devaun’s crew is using the cleaning stations each time they switch fields. Can you handle next week’s visit on your own?” He sat in his plush, black desk chair and braced his head between his hands, elbows resting on the spotless glass surface of his workspace. Lydia perched on the arm of the navy-blue couch they had just set to disarray, scuffing her boot against its side.

        “Not a problem.”

        Rob looked up at her. “I don’t always say it, but I really appreciate you Lydia. And not just...for this.” He gestured awkwardly toward the couch. “I can’t trust Devaun or any of the others in the lab the way I can you.”

        It was in that moment that Lydia caught a glimpse of a familiar logo on one of the desk papers Rob had just rearranged. It was a stylized, interlaced A and C at the top left corner of a small-print document. She moved closer.

        “Is that a contract?”

        Rob looked down. “Shit,” he said, quickly shuffling the sheet under some other papers. “I didn’t mean for you to see that until I could explain.”

        “Explain what, exactly?”

“Nothing’s signed yet. I’m just considering all the options.”

        “It looks like you’re about to sign it.”

        Rob breathed out heavily. “We just don’t have time to be slowed down anymore. I know Devaun has had a good track record, we wouldn’t kick him out. He can stay on to help manage the equipment AgCode brings in.”

        “His workers though?”

        Rob cleared his throat. “It’s not ideal. Partnering with local farmers is obviously important. But the whole project goes to hell if the next crop isn’t perfect.”

Lydia knew Rob had been under fire for results, but she hadn’t thought he would undercut Devaun like this. She walked abruptly to the office door.

        “Lydia! Where are you going?’

        “I have work to do.” It pissed her off even further that she couldn’t slam the sliding glass door as she left. She made a quick call to Devaun to tell him what she’d learned, then spent the rest of the night holed up inside her lab pod, running tests, fuming, and figuring out nothing.

∙∙∙

Lydia avoided Rob for the next couple of weeks. It was easy enough to do, given his busy meeting schedule — one which she could now assume included AgCode representatives. After their blowup, she found herself stuck on an ice blue lip color, just as cool in tone as she was feeling toward Rob.

Lydia spent her days in the lab experimenting on the fungus, barely going home long enough to shower and catch a couple hours of sleep. The lab steadied her mood. Despite the politics, this was where she belonged. She loved the process of crafting new chemical suspensions and then carefully pipetting them onto the circular plates where she cultivated the microorganisms.

Lydia especially adored the time of night after the undergraduates and her fellow grad students went home and she was left to her own devices.

But no matter what new or old chemical she tried, it wasn’t enough to dampen the growth of the pest, especially once any sort of heat was applied. By the time the day for her next visit with Devaun rolled around, she was desperate and more than in need of a break.

Lydia pulled off the highway onto a country road that led to another and yet one more before parking in the dirt just outside Devaun’s office. The structure was a corrugated tin building looked like it would have leaked in the days when rain was an issue, and she knew that it sometimes served as his bedroom after longer days.

The heat was just as stifling this visit as the last, but the sky was slightly overcast, sending passing cloud shadows, and a little relief, over the landscape from time to time.

        At first glimpse, the fields looked even more shriveled than before. Her heart sank. This was her second-to-last visit before their check-in call with the Department of Agriculture, and if there wasn’t any new greenery yet — well, then everything might be off. She leaned heavily against the truck, deflated.

        Devaun made his way over. Lydia dimly noticed his solid blueberry T-shirt that brought out the same rich notes in his dark skin. He came to lean against the side of the car with her, both of them examining the mass of dull, brown trunks.

“The second field of almonds caught the bug too,” said Devaun. “I’m not sure how it keeps hopping orchards, but even extending the biofence didn’t stop it.” Lydia could see him bite his lip in the corner of her eye.

        Lydia wanted to throw her hands up and go home. The barrenness of the plants felt like a personal insult, given that she’d spent the last three years of her life mixing every possible solution she could think of to help them grow. She felt like she had gone through all the combinations in the world, and to see her hard work manifested in death and decay was the ultimate slap in the face.

Devaun for some reason, didn’t seem nearly as defeated.

“Can I show you something?” he asked. He led her around the back of his building to a tiny grove that was impossible to see from the parking area.

Lydia gasped. Standing in a tight cluster were four perfect almond trees. They reached high and confident, strong branches dripping with beautifully-round pods. At their feet were white blossoms that had recently fallen.

Lydia couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing. “You’re still running your own experiments? You know that’s completely unauthorized.”

“They’re gorgeous though, aren’t they?”

“These trees have been exposed to the fungus? Then how are they—"

“Garlic,” was Devaun’s simple answer. “Well, garlic and a couple other ingredients mixed with your last pesticide batch.”

Lydia stared. After months of seeing only curled, dry remains, the flourishing trees in front of her were nothing short of a miracle.

“I figured if I could help get it right, that would go a long way toward keeping my crew employed — thank you for the heads up with that contract situation, by the way.”

“Whatever you’ve done here, if we can replicate this on a bigger scale —"

“That’s where I might need your help,” said Devaun. “My mixture worked fine on these four, but something didn’t take when I tried to use it on the regular field. I think it has to do with how the fungus has interacted with the dirt over time. But if you could study the differences in soil composition at the lab, and —"

“Isolate the chemical properties that help your trees flourish,” she continued. “Then we could stabilize the ground.”

“Exactly.”

Lydia felt a somersault of hope. “How did you know what to try?”

“I’ve been using garlic on my personal plants for years,” said Devaun. “It’s something that got passed down through the family. I did try to tell Kenworth about it, but you saw how that went.”

Lydia’s mounting excitement was tempered by a rush of shame. Of course Devaun had known the solution all along. And of course Rob had brushed off his informed suggestion as ignorant. What made her feel worst though, was that she hadn’t thought to ask Devaun herself about his knowledge of anti-fungals, given the connection to his family’s oral history of farming traditions.

Still, Lydia was bursting with questions. She started to make mental notes. Could Devaun’s results be an anomaly? She wondered whether the solution would scale or stay viable if there were any evolution of the fungus. And would the results sway Rob’s decision to sign AgCode?

She spent the rest of the afternoon deep in conversation with Devaun, hashing out a plan to rush a new version of her solution through the lab and test it the next week. Devaun did his best to keep up with her brainstorming, and it wasn’t until he was walking her back to the car that Lydia let herself experience calm and relief. Perhaps now they finally had a shot at solving this thing.

She felt her phone buzz and fished it out of her bag, not surprised to see Rob’s name pop up. She knew that they had to talk at some point, and she knew that it would be complicated. Tomorrow. She would handle Rob tomorrow and present the new strategy. For now, she had to get back to the lab.

When she put the phone away, Lydia saw that Devaun had been watching her face. He chose his words carefully. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “You don’t need Kenworth.”

“I know,” she replied softly. And she did. She had known for a long time, now.

As she drove the same route back to campus that she’d traveled with Rob just a few weeks earlier, Lydia ran her tongue lightly over the newest addition to her lipstick collection. She had a feeling this one might become her favorite. All the right elements were there — smooth application, strong hold, and, of course, wildly vibrant color. Her selection was a deep, bold forest green, and it suited her perfectly.

—END—

ABOUT STEFANI COX

Stefani Cox is a California-based speculative fiction writer. She’s an alumna of the VONA/Voices writing workshops and an associate editor for PodCastle fantasy fiction podcast. Her short fiction is forthcoming in the Glass and Gardens: Solarpunk Summers  anthology through World Weaver Press. Stefani also works as a communications consultant and holds a master's in urban planning. Find her on Twitter @stefanicox  or her website stefanicox.com.

THE OTHER SIDE OF OTTO MOUNTAIN

By Ivy Spadille

Lazarus Caruthers eased his skiff out onto the lake and rowed to a safe distance from the mountain. At this early hour, the surface of the water was a mirror reflecting the pink of the waking sun. He threw out the fishing line far across the glimmering veneer, watched the bait and sinker submerge as the bobber bounced easily on the currents. Fishing was one of the few times he could sort out his thoughts, separating the past from the future so he could settle into the now. Otto Mountain, the jagged monolith of black stone, absorbed the confessions he whispered daily across the water, his offering in exchange for its secrets.        

        He drew a cool breath from the morning breeze and gathered his patience. A tough day now and then was expected, but he hadn’t caught a fish in over a week. He combed the shallow and deep areas of Lake Ottonia, adjusting the depth of his bait, but got no bites. Usually if no fish pulled on the line, he’d at least trap a few in the net. Too many times to count, he hurled the cast net and watched its weighted ring sink into the deep only to pull up debris, so he tossed it to the other side of his boat in frustration. It'd been a while since he’d seen any birds circling overhead or skimming the surface to feed. The skies were as empty as the lake seemed to be.

        He looked back at his home where his wife, Mae, had already put on the coffee and soaked the grits for the fish he hoped to catch. If he was lucky, in a little while, she’d fry them up crispy in cornmeal the way he liked them. The abandoned homes of neighbors that had long since passed away languished along the edge of the lake. Over the last decade, the population of Udora, Oklahoma had dwindled from 29 to just the two of them.

        When he returned his attention to the fishing line, a thread of light wormed across the lens of his spectacles, luring his eyes to a point above Otto Mountain where something slithered in the upper air.

        Lazarus removed his eyeglasses and blinked twice to clear his vision. He glanced again at Otto, the dense, magmatic black rock striped with rainbow hues like his granddaughter’s coloring books. At the very top, near Otto’s peak, he saw what appeared to be heat haze, like the glassy mirage that billowed from his barbecue after the black coals turned white with fire. The mountain swirled the sky with a prism of colors. He put his glasses back on and the spiral seemed to fade, so he decided to leave them off. It was the only way to get a clear view of that subtle turn in the sky.

        Then the great lake gurgled as if it wished to swallow him up. When his bobber dipped beneath the water, he thought he’d caught his first fish. But the lake’s silver ripples ruddied; the water surrounding his boat bubbled. There was banging at the bottom of the boat, vibrating his feet and thighs, before the fish soared out of the water. At first it was ten, maybe twenty. No, now hundreds of fish--catfish, bass, carp--leaped from the depths of the lake. They hovered at varying heights, their scales iridescent; their fins fluttered like wings.

        He closed his eyes, hoping one of his prescriptions had caused the hallucination. Looking up again, the fish still quivered in the air. The fishing pole was a mere prop in his hands; he dropped it and rocketed to his feet, frantic. His shaking nearly rocked the boat over until he carefully balanced himself. The fish were suspended far and wide across the lake, dangling like Mae’s Christmas tree ornaments, stars of the early morning.

Lazarus’ method for testing reality was always to look a thing in the eyes. He leaned toward a fish hovering near the boat’s edge but couldn’t get close enough, so he reached out and touched its nose.

         The splashing came all at once as the fish dropped. Many landed in his boat, several plummeting inadvertently into his net. Before he knew it, he was clenching their slimy skin, the fish slipping from his bare hands as he attempted to dump them overboard. And then Mae came to mind, and with a frenzy, he snatched the fish one by one, dropping them into the bucket--a way to pay his debt to her. The fish that had fallen back into the water floated at the surface, stunned a while before recovering. Lazarus scooped up a few of those unlucky ones.

        Something ran with the fishing line, nearly dragging the pole into the water before Lazarus rescued it. He leaned back and reeled in a huge catfish at least 2 feet long. Counting the gift of five in his net and several more in the bucket, he felt guilty, so he freed the catfish from the hook, releasing it to the waters. He looked back at Otto’s peak again, and both the radiant swirl and the glossy heat haze had gone.

        Lazarus poured the fish trapped in the net into the bucket to join the others and rowed back to his home at the edge of the lake.

        Mae greeted his return, the gaze of her right eye rebuked him while her lazy left eye searched for his pardon. She stood firm with hands on hips, head cocked over her right shoulder. Likely she'd watched the entire event--carp flying out of the water, frozen in midair--and was unfazed. Nothing surprised Mae. She waved her index finger and shamed him. “Not those fish , Laz. Those fish aren't for eating."

        Lazarus turned towards Otto Mountain, his shoulders drooping. He tossed the fish back into the water and watched them swim away.

        "We’re having corned beef hash and grits today, Laz,” said Mae as they walked back into the house.

∙∙∙

        Lazarus awoke a few minutes past 11 to a buzz reverberating from the sky. A flash of light strobed through the drapes of the bedroom window interrupting what should have been a clear, dark, normal  Oklahoma night. Though Mae snored peacefully beside him, she knew his every move. Lazarus had always considered her to be a kind of lazy clairvoyant.

        Lazarus put on his robe and slippers, grabbed his binoculars, and walked out onto the dock. When the cold air hit his ankles and knees, he wrapped the robe tightly around his old bones. Across the lake, a helicopter hovered beside Otto Mountain, sending a spear of bright light into the night. He peered at the scene through the tunnel of his binoculars. Several vans and trucks pulled up to the mountain’s base. A pack of men wearing orange striped jumpsuits exited the vehicles and lined up. Guards in black uniforms waved flashlights, ushering the men to Otto’s other side.

        He sat in his lawn chair on the dock and reflected on the kids, wondering how his son, Pete, had taken the wrong turn in life. He’d done his best by his two older boys anyway, Emmett and Traevon. Emmett, his wife, Anne, and the grandkids lived 200 miles away. Traevon and his wife only came around for Christmas or Thanksgiving--choose one. But Pete, his youngest, the one folks never asked about at church, was locked up. Ten years already at Yazoo Sound Penitentiary at the far end of the state. For seven of those ten, Lazarus hadn’t spoken a word to his son.

        Yet he'd given all three boys a firm instruction, the benefit of his own experience. Back when he'd first returned from serving in Vietnam, officers pulled him over on Hayton Street and had him sprawled face down in the dirt as Mae and newborn baby Emmett looked on from the station wagon. Since then, he'd created rules for interacting with law enforcement and had passed them on to his sons. The rules had kept his two eldest alive and out of jail, but they didn't seem to work in Pete's case. Pete had been in and out of jail so many times, Mae had given him an ultimatum: “Either you straighten up and fly right or you fly right out of here and don’t come back. You can’t stay under this roof the way you’re living.” Pete never came home after that. Later Mae told Lazarus, “Let him be. He needs to find God. The hard way.”

        Looking past the memories and into the night, he noticed the excitement across the lake had died down. As dawn broke, the stars faded, the light that travelled centuries to get to Lazarus pulling away. His eyes got heavy. His head drooped, releasing the weight of his 74 years. After a few seconds he jerked awake, wiping a thread of drool from his lower lip. He went back into the house and crawled under the covers at Mae’s bedside.

        “You were out there too long, Laz,” Mae warned from her secret world of slumber.

∙∙∙

         His eyes seemed to have only been closed a second before he heard the creak of the old wooden floor, announcing Mae’s puttering about the house. She always rose at a quarter to five. Fifteen minutes later, her clanking alongside his desire for fresh fish and grits invariably got him out of bed.

        He went out into the shed near the dock to gather his fishing supplies. As he picked up the tackle box, his thoughts entered a semi-religious zone, normally his wife’s domain. One of her bible verses even surfaced in his awareness:

         Cast the net on the right side of the ship and ye shall find.

         And with those words came a decision: today he’d fish on faith. He returned the tackle box to the shelf, placing it between his trombone and the old boat motor. Remembering how his eyeglasses had interfered with his view of the whirl in the sky, he set them to rest on top of the tackle box and left them there with his fishing pole.

        Lazarus pushed his boat off from the dock with the sky covered in its eyelid of darkness. Fishing every morning in the half-light grounded him in a semblance of routine yet promised the unveiling of some vast mystery.

        The head of the endless mountain range, Otto, looked down at Lazarus from almost a mile away, his jagged black peak looming from the other side of Lake Ottonia. Otto’s arms and fingers divided Ottonia into a series of iterative coves and inlets called the Seven Wives, while his torso was a barricade, a sprawling plateau of sedimentary rock that seemed to ride the world to protect them.

        Many years ago, Lazarus had visited a few of Otto’s wives, but not enough of them. In those days, Mae was active in the ministry and she’d call him back from the waters with her bull horn, the one she used on Salvation Sundays when she’d pace the single strip town of Cimarron to call the lost sheep home to Jesus. That was around the time his boat motor broke, and she made sure he never got around to fixing it.

        He could feel his wife’s eye on him even now. But still, this was his  time. He’d been married 50 years, and it had been ten since he’d retired from the rubber plant. There was little reason to utter a word to her anymore. No resentment. His life had simply been reduced to the routines Mae set in motion:

Fish and grits.

“Take your medicine, Laz.”

Trips to the general store.

Hanging laundry on the line.

Drying dishes.

"Did you get your suit cleaned, Laz?"

Church.

Bid Whist games after church with Sam and Thelma.

"Laz, did you pay the light bill?"

“Time for a haircut, Laz.”

Mae's commands, truth be told, kept him on track, and he didn’t mind it most of the time. However, during these quiet fishing hours, a respite from running between Mae’s A and B, Lazarus contemplated just two things:

Was this all there was left to life?

And where had he gone wrong with Pete?

        Hidden behind Otto Mountain, he came to believe, was the answer to both questions. And since yesterday it became clear he didn't need a fishing pole anymore, just a net.

        He flung his cast net far across the water, quickly secured it to the boat’s edge, and waited. The water was quiet and still.

        It wasn’t long before he looked up into the light of dawn to see the sky shimmy above Otto's peak. Without the barrier of his spectacles, he witnessed the mirage with clarity. Heat haze. Something was cooking inside that great earth mound--and this was no volcano.

Once again, a new source pulled on the lake’s currents as the waters reddened and fizzed around the boat like Oozay, his favorite soda. When the fish slammed the bottom of the boat he took hold of the oars to steady himself, though this time he felt more exhilaration than fear. Carp, bass, and catfish launched out of the water with gusto, as if they’d gotten accustomed to the ritual. Their gills pulsated, straining to breathe in the air. With the net already in position, Lazarus set the timer on his watch as the carp hung there. Time stretched. Forty-seven seconds, exactly. It felt like 47 minutes before gravity restored and they all fell, diving back into the lake as though not a moment had passed. He heaved the bloated cast net out of the water and filled his bucket to the rim.

        Lazarus arrived at the shore facing Mae with the bucket of fish in hand. Mae stood on the dock with arms folded, eyes narrowed. She regarded him as she would a child testing the boundaries of her discipline.

        “Come on, Mae. Let me clean them. They’ll be just fine,” he pleaded. Each time he brought a catch home to her he felt a little more vindicated, but he knew he had a long way to go.

        “ I said  no, Laz. How many times do I have to tell you? Those fish  aren’t fit for eating.” She raised her arm and pointed across the lake to Otto Mountain. “Send them back.”

        He missed Mae’s fish and grits.

∙∙∙

        For nearly a week this continued: Lazarus, determined to get his fish and grits, took his skiff out onto the lake, waited for the fish to rise out of the water, shimmer for 47 seconds in the morning light, and fall into his net. He glimpsed the eerie heat signature disperse at the top of the mountain, and then returned to the lakeside only to have Mae reject his fish again.

        Otto Mountain at night was another story.

        Lazarus couldn’t sleep through the nights any longer. His internal body clock attuned to the noise of the chopper, the lights whirling across the lake. They brought in more men in orange stripes than he could count, but Lazarus never saw any of them leave.

        Night after night, he’d slink out onto the dock and watch the commotion through his binoculars until he fell asleep there in his lawn chair under the moon. The chill in the air would wake him just before the sun sent the night running.

        One night, after the vehicles, the military men, and the prisoners were long gone, Lazarus checked the scene from the window again. He glanced back at Mae as she turned and grunted in her sleep. He knew she sensed his presence awake in the room.

        With eyes shut tight, deep in the dreamworld, she said, “Those crazy fools. Don’t bother with them, Laz. Nothing we can do about our boy Pete now.”

        The next morning, Lazarus sat with Mae at the breakfast table, he with the paper, she listening to Baptist Radio as they ate corned-beef hash and grits. He regarded her briefly, taking a sip of his coffee, but her eyes looked past him, fixed on the word of God.

        The two of them, he thought, were like the mixers and grinders in the old rubber plant, never straying from their designated functions. Creatures of habit, with little conversation. But she used to be the pearl of his eye.

∙∙∙

Lazarus and Mabel grew up right next door to each other in the small town of Emanuel, Oklahoma, which named after Lazarus’ great-grandfather. They were classmates at the Emanuel School held in basement of the town church. In those days, the church was active and alive and more of a community capital than any sanctimonious place.

The Wells sisters, Mabel and ‘Baby-girl’ Vidalia, were somewhat famous in town. The old folks used to say people born with a veil over their face had second sight. Mae never talked about it, but the elders in town said she’d come into the world with the veil and described her as ‘a seer,’ someone who could predict the future. Mabel’s much younger sister Vidalia couldn’t hear or speak a word but would often be found making signs and semaphoring to imaginary friends. ‘Baby-girl’ had a way of wandering off and getting lost too, just like Mae’s left eye.

Kids used to tease Mae about her left eye, but it was what Lazarus loved most about her. Even when he was a boy, he noticed the way the recalcitrant eye seemed to always be focused on heaven or somewhere special: it drifted off to mysterious places he’d hoped to explore one day. And as he grew older that eye made a man wonder. Mae had an uncanny way of finishing his sentences, and then she’d giggle as her right eye twinkled, and her left eye shimmered. That left eye was his pearl, and she was the pearl of his eye.  

It wasn’t too apparent to Lazarus when they were young, but later he’d thought about how that left eye may have known a lot more than the tail end of his sentences. Days before a twister would hit, Mae would say, “Storm’s coming.” Soon after that she’d be found tending to the storm cellar, the place where she and Lazarus shared their first kiss. Mae knew when people would be late, so she never fretted about them not being on time. She took everything in stride and never worried her pretty little head about a thing. And all the while they were going steady, even after Lazarus reassured her, “I’m not going nowhere,” she’d tell him that eventually he’d take off and leave her, and for a good while.

When he’d found out he’d been drafted for the war, he immediately proposed and expected to marry her before his deployment, but Mae insisted the wedding had to happen after he got back. So Lazarus promised her daddy, Shelden Wells, that he’d marry her as soon as he completed his tour of duty. Time and again, and in between combat, he’d see that special day in his mind’s eye: he’d arrive at her house in full army uniform with flowers and her ring in hand. She’d put on one of her pretty dresses, and they’d walk right over to Emanuel First Baptist.  

But the wedding couldn’t happen the way he’d imagined it. He’d heard the story told a few different ways but while Lazarus was away, Mae’s younger sister, Vidalia, had gone missing—couldn’t take your eye off of her for a second. Everyone in the town went looking for her. They yelled her name out over the plains and into the woods, knowing ‘Baby-girl’ couldn’t hear their calls. On the third day the search party found her beside an old shack at the edge of town near one of the bubbling tributaries of Lake Ottonia, her body half-buried in the red soil, her clothes torn.

Lazarus didn’t get the chance to say his goodbyes to Vidalia, but the service was held at Emanuel First Baptist. A few weeks later, the Wells family picked up and moved to Pleasant Valley, a town northeast of Udora where they joined a new church, Heaven Helps Baptist. In his letters, Lazarus suggested that Mae should go to school like her girlfriend Sylvia and get her mind off things; become a nurse or teacher. But Mae didn’t care much for schooling. All they’ll do is confuse me about what I already know, Laz,  she wrote. Mae started training for the church ministry instead, and Lazarus figured there were worse places a woman could spend her time. But reading between the lines of her longhand he could already tell that the preachers at Heaven Helps Baptist were the kind who always spoke of the tricks of the devil and the terror at the end of days—the fire and brimstone variety.

Lazarus noticed something different in Mae’s eyes when he’d returned from Vietnam: the twinkle was gone, the soft shimmer had dimmed, and he figured it was still the grief. But he’d promised Mr. Wells he’d marry her, and he always kept his promises.

Mae never discussed Vidalia, and Lazarus never had the heart to bring her up, but he sensed that Mae carried the burden of her second sight not preventing her sister’s death. Sometimes when Mae sat very still and her left eye explored the ethers, Lazarus wondered if her clairvoyance extended to the past where she could get some answers. She’d predicted many things, but no one could see this one coming. And they never did find out who did it.

Although Mae was never the same girl he knew, Lazarus eventually bought their new home in Udora and they made their lives together. Before the children came, Mae admired the mountain. They’d sit out on the dock together in the early evenings and marvel at the way its shadows shifted in the twilight. Gradually, as the kids grew older, and especially after Emmett and Traevon moved away, she’d scowl at the mountain and came to resent its presence on the lake. Otto Mountain became a burden and an eyesore. Slowly, Mae began scowling at Lazarus like she scowled at the mountain, and her right eye grew sore in effort to prevent future wrongs, even as her left eye still wandered freely.

∙∙∙

Back when the boys were young, Mae, always with her cutting words, treated Lazarus like a piece of furniture. Their love had dried up in a flurry of routines. Then Dorothy, a secretary from the plant, had come along. Next it was Lucy, and a few other women. Not long after that, the gambling and the whiskey had started, and he’d never spent his nights at home.

        Lazarus complied with Mae’s orders without question as a reparation for all the things he’d done wrong early in the marriage. He owed her, and this was his penitence. But in their silence, Lazarus moved through Mae’s motions for him with firm regret. Regret centered on his son, Pete. And, like Pete, he too was a prisoner.

        As he stood up to dry the dishes Mae had washed, the phone rang. Mae went to answer it as usual; she always answered the phone. She picked up the old cordless handset from its base and studied it briefly. She was suspicious of cell phones and never allowed Lazarus to get one.

“I can’t think of anybody that’s got to reach us with that kind of urgency,” she’d say. “Whoever it is can wait.”

        On the third ring, she handed the phone over to Lazarus, “That call is for you.”

        Lazarus pressed the talk button. “Hello?”

        “Hi, Dad.”

        It’d been seven years, at least, since Lazarus spoke to Pete. And he’d been on his mind more than usual these last weeks. Lazarus needed a moment to hear his son’s voice echo in the quietude.

        The regrets formed into a ball at the base of his throat, and he unsuccessfully swallowed it down as he attempted to speak. “Son? It’s been some time--”

        “I know, Dad. Is Mabel alright?” There was a high-pitched squeal in his voice, the tone nervous, urgent--something beneath it he couldn’t place, like when he was a teen and his voice first went through the change. Only now he was near forty.

        “Yeah, Mae’s still kicking. You know your mother.”

        “Tell her I found God, Dad. Tell her I finally found God.”

        “Ok. That’s good, real good. Listen, I’m glad you called. I was thinking to take a ride up there and …”

        “--Dad, you know, they’re moving me.”

        “Where you going, son?”

        “Some new facility. Therapy special for repeat offenders and brothers on the row. Priest said I’m getting out of this box.” His breath was thin with fear.

        “A priest?”

        “Yeah, Dad. Father McKenna. Some particle research that helps scientists see God. I said yes, Dad. I said yes. I don’t want to be in here anymore. It’s no way to live. Always someone on top of me. Can’t breathe.”

        Lazarus furrowed his brow, wondering what Pete had gotten himself into this time. “Research, you say? Where you going? I’ll come see you there.”

        “Dad, they’re moving me tomorrow.”

        Lazarus gripped the receiver. “Where to?”

        There was a buzz on the line.

        “They’re telling me my time is up. Bye, Dad. Tell Mom I found God. Will you? Please, tell her?”

        “I love you, son,” Lazarus managed, after the phone clicked, knowing Pete hadn’t heard him.

        Lazarus stood in the archway dividing the kitchen from the den. Mae buzzed through, tidying the room. “Mae, you know that was Pete on the phone?”

She dusted the trinkets on the fireplace mantel with her right eye anchored to the everyday world while her left eye traversed the hidden one. “I figured that call was for you.”

        “Well, I was thinking to visit him.”

        “Not me,” she said, straightening a doily. “Are you sure you’re ready to see what new  Jim Crow done to our baby boy?”

        She picked up a portrait, the one of Pete at 12 years old, the only photo of him in the house. That picture had been taken before he’d started running with T-Money and the Walker brothers, carrying on. That was right after Lazarus had checked out, gambling, and dating other women.

        “He’s not a boy no more, Mabel. He must be close to forty now.”

        She wiped a layer of dust from the portrait’s glass with a hanky from her pocket, “Nope. I’ll remember him just like he was, before the corruption.” She began to hum as she set the picture back down on the doily. Moseying past him, back into the kitchen, she attempted the melancholy contralto of Mahalia Jackson singing In the Upper Room:

         Sitting at His blessed feet,

        Daily there my sin confessing,

        Begging for His mercy sweet.

        “He says he’s found God, Mae.” Lazarus made the point warily. “He's in some program with a priest.”

        Mae shook her head. “But if he hasn’t been saved, I don’t know what he’s found, Laz.”

        There was little reason to report Pete’s newfound faith to Mae. If he didn’t come to Jesus through the red door of Heaven Helps Baptist or one of its partner churches, he might as well have been serving the devil as far as Mae was concerned.

        Lazarus followed her into the kitchen. He set the phone on the counter and then clenched his hand into a fist. “They’re moving him.”

        “ I said , I don’t want to hear nothing about it, Laz. Now, put on some decent clothes. We’ve got that church meeting today.”

        “I’ll drive this time,” said Lazarus.

        “You better put on your glasses then,” she said. “They’re on top of your tackle box where you left them.”

∙∙∙

        At the church meeting, the discussions about kids in Sunday school, choir practice, and the new minister faded into his periphery. Lazarus could only think of Pete and the wondrous fish rising out of the water every morning at dawn. Perfectly good fish Mae was determined to throw back.

        Driving home from church, they reached the corner near the Johnson’s old house with the boarded-up windows. Instead of turning on the old dirt road that led to their home by the lake, Lazarus swerved off onto an adjacent one in the direction of the mountain. He deliberately rode past the sign that had kept him on this side of Udora thousands of times.

        WARNING. NO THROUGH ROAD. TURN AROUND HERE.

        Mae pinched him on the shoulder, hard and sharp. “Lazarus, turn this car back around. See, I knew you were up to no good.”

        Lazarus charged forward until he could drive no further, the road blocked off by a towering barbed-wire fence bearing another warning sign:

        DANGER. RESTRICTED AREA. NO TRESPASSING UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.

        “I want to see the other side of Otto Mountain,” said Lazarus, with the longing of a child for a toy.

        “It don’t have another side. It just keeps going, Laz. Nothing good comes from being here.”  

        It struck him then that Mae was right. No one could get to the other side by land, if it had another side. No roads extended beyond the mountain in the state. The only way to get closer to what was going on inside of Otto Mountain was to cross the lake.

        Mae shifted in her seat, agitated, sweat on her brow. “Laz, if you don’t get me outta here…so help me, Jesus…”

        Lazarus sighed and put the car in reverse.

        Mae sat with folded arms as they drove away. “That mountain is cursed by the devil. Nothing but the devil inside that striped rock.”

∙∙∙

        Later that evening, Lazarus called Yazoo Sound Penitentiary to find out about Pete’s transfer.

        “The name again?”

        “Pete. Peter Emanuel Caruthers, sir. That’s my son.”

        “I don’t see any record of a Pete Caruthers. No Caruthers here. Do you have his ID?”

        “What’s that?”

        “His identification number?

        “No. He said they were moving him. Some new facility.”

        “Which one?”

        “Well, he didn’t say.”

        “We’ve got a lot of inmates here, Mr. Caruthers. If you don’t know his ID number, he’s as good as lost. We don’t have any record of him. Maybe you’re calling the wrong prison.”

        “I just spoke to the boy this morning.”

        “Did he call the number you’re calling from?”

        “Yes. This phone here. At my home.”

        “Let me check the phone records.”

        Lazarus pressed his fingers into his eyes, and rubbed his forehead, worried even more about Pete.

        “Sir, our system shows no record of anyone calling your number from our facility. If he called you, it must have been from another location.”

        “Another location? That’s not possible.”

        “Sorry,” the officer’s voice held no trace of apology. “I can’t help you further.”

∙∙∙

        The next morning Lazarus climbed into his fishing boat. Mae hadn’t put on the coffee or started breakfast yet. She called out to him from the lakeside, “Picking up green peppers at the general store.”

        Because of course you can’t make corned beef hash and grits without green peppers.

        She drove away in their station wagon.

        This one time, while Mae went out, he’d venture closer to Otto Mountain to see if he could get to the other side. He’d make it back before the onions caramelized, before he could smell the melded flavors of the potatoes and the meat in the steam piping from the kitchen window.

        The sun crept up the sky. The breeze was cool and the water still. As he drew closer to the mountain, his arms grew tired from rowing, but he pushed on. The surface of the mountain appeared volcanic, gravelly, with stripes of pink, orange, blue, and purple. At the halfway point between his home and the gigantic, multihued stone, he set his oars aside, and took a rest.

         He looked back to the dirt driveway for signs of Mae. Though he was confident she’d left, the press of her stare always circumscribed his actions. He saw no trace of her.

        He scanned Otto’s peak and observed the waves of color, curling up the sky. The lake bubbled and frothed. Fish hit the bottom of the boat before they broke through the water’s surface, their scales glistening in the light. And now that he’d seen it so many times, it became as normal as a rainstorm. After 47 seconds, his net was bursting with fish, his bucket overflowing.

He examined one fish from the bucket: its eyes were bright red and bulbous; the fish, more than alive, pumped its gills wildly to suck in oxygen. He realized then, Mae was right. No good for eating. He dumped the fish overboard. They floated for a while before recognizing their whereabouts and then plunged back into the lake.

        Lazarus surveyed the mountain through the binoculars, the heat signature above the peak dissipating. Once the mountain settled, the water calmed too, not a ripple in sight.

        He turned about and searched past the boarded-up houses for their station wagon. Surely Mae would have crossed the bridge by now, heading toward the closest town of New Udora, 25 miles away.

        Somewhere in the bundle of nerves of his solar plexus, he felt a jolt as he thought about the midnight chopper pouring light over the prisoners at the base of the mountain.

         He grabbed hold of the oars again and propelled the boat further, keeping his eyes on Otto’s jagged peak.

        But the closer he got to the mountain, the heavier he felt. He was so close to Otto, the great sweeps of color nearly blocked out the sky. Now the mountain surrounded Lazarus, only a narrow path of water leading out behind him. The water was still deep, he could tell by the dark patches. It wasn’t long before he came upon a magnificent cove, walled in by a canyon on Otto’s other side.

        Lazarus didn’t think he could row much longer so he stopped for a moment and looked way up and around. This could be one of Otto’s seven wives or an eighth one no one knew about. He admired the massive cavern; it looked to have been created by the swift hand of a giant ice-cream scoop, hollowing out a dark chocolate and red velvet swirl. The walls reached up so far that the cavern dimmed, but then the sky tore in, revealing a swath of blue light. He sat in awe of the bands of color, the majesty.

         A stream of current rushed towards him, disturbing the placid surface of the lake; it divided into several streams, coming from all directions.

         Swoosh.

        A man in a black wetsuit broke through the water’s surface. Swoosh, swoosh.  Now there were two or three--No, maybe four frogmen closed in on him, holding to the edge of his boat--young, fit men. Lights beamed from the top of their heads, burning his eyes.

        They moved with expert speed. There was nowhere for him to go, so he resigned himself to sit as still as he could. He’d never seen men move that fast, that coordinated.

        The four men saddled his boat from all sides. Another man, directly in front of him, treaded water momentarily, pulled out an elastic disc from a pocket of his wetsuit, raised it above his head, and shook it in the air. Instantly, it inflated into a boat large enough for six men. Then he unwound a cable connected to the newly inflated boat, threw it expertly to the hull of Lazarus’ skiff and it sizzled there, gluing itself to the surface metal. He climbed into his black airboat and pulled out a weapon Lazarus hadn’t seen before; like a mini power drill with a spinning copper turbine at the barrel. Intermittently, it spit out blue flames and sparks like Mae’s gas stove.         

        Remembering his rules for old and new  Jim Crow, Lazarus’ arms rose above his head automatically.

Keep your hands in sight at all times.  

“I’m unarmed,” he announced as calmly as possible. “No weapons here!”

        The frogman holding the strange blue gun studied Lazarus. “You are not supposed to be out here. You’re trespassing. You’ve crossed into a restricted military zone. Is there a reason you’re out here today?”

        “Yes, sir. Lovely morning, sir.” Lighten the mood with pleasantries.  “I live just across from the mountain, around the other side. Out fishing is all. Good time of day for fishing.”

        “Where’s your fishing pole?”

        “I don’t have any weapons. Left my fishing pole and tackle back in the shed. Only a net here. No worms. Don’t need any bait. It’s a funny thing, these fish just fly up into the sky waiting for you to catch them.”

        “You don’t say. Well, I don’t see any fish on your boat.”

        “Yes, I guess my wife was correct, again. Something’s not quite right with these fish, so I threw them back.”

        “Your name, sir?”

         Paint them a pretty picture.  “Yes, sir. Lazarus Caruthers. Lazarus Emanuel Caruthers, Jr. That’s right. I used to work at the rubber plant in New Udora, down on Hayton Street. Started working right after I served in ‘Nam. You know, they shot my helicopter down into the ocean? I made it out, though, me and another buddy.” He spit out as much information as he could in one breath, arms still raised high. “After that, I married my sweetheart and worked forty years at the rubber plant. I’m retired now. Mr. Norfleet owned the plant. You know the Norfleet family, don’t you?”

        He only heard the deep breaths of the men around him, still holding to his skiff, kicking their feet, treading water. One of them called out to the lead one, still pointing the gun at Lazarus, “He’s a veteran.”

        “Yes, sirs. I love my country,” Lazarus continued, nervously tapping his feet at the bottom of his boat. Dial down the emotions.  He drew a slow thin breath and counted his nerves down from the number thirteen: twelve, eleven, ten …        

        “You know, how about I take you around to my home for breakfast? My wife, she’s waiting for me. She’s making corned beef hash. I’m sure there’s enough to go around. You know women, they always cook too much. Why don’t you good men come on by?”

        “Mr. Caruthers,” the lead diver said, “Didn’t you see those signs before entering? This is a prohibited area.”

        Nine, eight, seven… Be deferential and apologetic.

        “Oh, I’m sorry,” Lazarus forced a deep and hearty laugh. Six, five, four. When possible feign gleeful ignorance.  “Oh dear. I guess I forgot my glasses again. Mae keeps telling me. Must have left them on the counter. This mountain, beautiful, isn’t it? Mighty peculiar. Never seen anything like it. I was so caught up with all the colors, I must have missed your sign.”

        The lead one withdrew the weapon. “Alright, Mr. Caruthers. You’ll have to come with us.” He unfurled another spinning device from his wetsuit that snapped to the airboat, forming a makeshift motor. They hauled Lazarus’ skiff towards a rocky mound near the canyon wall. The other four men swam, guiding his boat, while the lead one kept his eyes on Lazarus, his back to the mountain.

        Once they reached the cove's bank and got out of the boats, water pebbled on the men’s wetsuits and dried instantaneously. They turned off their dive lights and surrounded Lazarus.

        “We’re going to have to hold your cell,” the lead diver said, as he patted him down.

        “Don’t have one, sir. My wife won’t allow it.” The man took his wallet and house keys instead. He’d never fought Mae on the cell phone, but right now he wished he had one.

         “Mr. Caruthers, you can lower your hands now,” the lead one said.

        “If you don’t mind, I’ll keep them up. I want you young men to feel comfortable. Yes, sir. Nothing underhanded going on here. No weapons at all.”

        “But we need to cuff them.”

        Lazarus gingerly lowered his arms, but intentionally kept them spread wide to his sides, before they fastened them together behind his back.

        The lead diver waved his hand across a stone protruding from the mountain and a hidden door slid open to let them inside. After pacing down a ramp through a dark cave, Lazarus squinted at the light flooding in from a room the size of an aircraft carrier. Several trucks and vans sat in a lot, emblazoned with the logo ‘MercuryOne.’ They loaded him into one of the vans and drove him into a tunnel wide enough for two-way traffic.

         It may have been ten minutes that they travelled in silence, before Lazarus caught himself drooling with his mouth agape. There was enough space inside Otto Mountain for a city. What in the world is this place?  Lazarus wondered. And would his rules protect him here?

∙∙∙

        The lead frogman escorted Lazarus down a hallway and directed him into a small conference room. A guard in black fatigues approached, standing at the door holding an assault rifle.

        Another man dressed in a suit and tie entered after that, the guard following him inside.

        “I’m Joe Simon, Mr. Caruthers. Do you understand you’ve broken the law?”

        “Going fishing? Which law did I break?”

        “The sign clearly reads: ‘No Trespassing Under Penalty of Law. Use of Deadly Force Authorized.’”

        “I’ve never seen that sign, Mr. Simon. I was just telling the other gentleman, that I left my glasses at home again.” He summoned a laugh. “You know us senior citizens sometimes forget things.”

        “I’m afraid that’s too bad for you, Mr. Caruthers.”

        “Well, you know my memory seems to get even worse these days, what with all the racket going on here at night, the lights, the chopper, and carrying on. I can hardly sleep.”

        “How can you see all of that?”

        “Me and my wife live just across the lake in that little brown house. Been there for quite some time, even after all our neighbors passed on. Been there since I served in ‘Nam.” Since he couldn’t see his wristwatch, he searched the bare walls for a clock. “Any idea what time it is? Don’t want to worry my wife. Once she sets breakfast on the table, she expects me to be there.”

        “Repeat your full name again?”

        “Lazarus Emanuel Caruthers. Jr., sir.”

        “Wait here, Mr. Caruthers.” He left Lazarus alone with the guard glaring at him, assault rifle at the ready.

        Lazarus twisted his wrists behind his back, wanting to free them from the cuffs.

        After a few minutes, Joe Simon returned to the room with another man in a suit and tie who stood beside the guard in silence.

        “Mr. Caruthers, it seems you’ve been out on the lake every morning. Are you looking for something?”         

        “Fishing, mainly. I love my fish and grits. Though, I haven’t had any since they started flying out of the water. My wife won’t cook them.”

        Joe Simon sat up straight in his chair, “Mr. Caruthers, did you have any children?”

        “Yes, sir, Mr. Simon. Three boys. They’re grown now.”

        “And, where are they?”

        “Two of them are a few hundred miles away with my grandkids. The other one, well, he ran into some trouble some years back. Running with the wrong group of boys.”

        “Where is he now?”

        “Last I heard, Yazoo Sound Penitentiary. But they say he’s not there anymore. He called yesterday and said he got transferred into some research program with a Father McKenna.”

        “Can you tell us his name? The son at Yazoo?”

        “Pete, sir. Peter Emanuel Caruthers.”

        “Have you been looking for your son, Pete?”

        “I hadn’t figured out where to look. I called the penitentiary, and they don’t know where he is. Said I needed an ID number or something. I never had a number for him.”

        “Mr. Caruthers. It seems that there’s been an oversight here. This mountain, the lake, and the adjacent houses have transitioned into government ownership as unincorporated territory.”

        “But I own my home. Right here in Udora. Bought it in cash.”

        “Udora dissolved years ago. There’s only New Udora now.”

        “With all due respect, Mr. Simon. That can’t be right. It’s always been Udora on this side of the lake, New Udora on the other side.”

        “Your neighbors have all passed away, correct? Leaving just you and your wife?”

        “Yes, sir. But …”

        “That’s where the mistake in our records comes in. Your house had been wrongly zoned as part of this military installation, and with clearance. You came up as part of the military, being a military family. And of course, it goes without saying that we thank you for your service.”

        Lazarus got quiet. Earlier, the man had asked specifically about Pete. “Mr. Simon, do you know where I can find my son, Pete?”

        “I may have information on his whereabouts. However, we have a rather unusual situation here that needs to be resolved first.”

        Lazarus thought his rules had reeled in any emotion, but then the words flew out of his mouth with the meanness of old  Jim Crow. “You tell me  where my son is.”

        The guard at the door stepped forward, gripping the gun at his side. He leaned over Joe Simon and asked, “Is there a problem?”

        Joe Simon waved his hand, shooing away the guard. The second man with the suit and tie produced a small electronic apparatus, a file folder, and a pen, setting them on the table.

        ‘What’s this?” asked Lazarus.

        “Mr. Caruthers, we may be able to provide information about your son, Pete.”

        “What do you mean? He’s here? He’s here, isn’t he?”

        “For me to say anything further, you’ll have to sign a nondisclosure agreement. It’s in your best interest to do so, as you won’t be able to leave here today without signing it.”

        Lazarus looked over the form as the guard temporarily removed his cuffs. “You’ll see it’s fairly standard,” Joe Simon said, pushing a button on the electronic gadget, “Run your palm across this scanner and then sign near the 'X'.”

        Lazarus had to get back home to Mae, but he needed to see Pete first. He extended his palm and signed without reservation.

        “Thank you, Mr. Caruthers.”

        “When can I see him?”

        “You cannot see him,” said Joe Simon. “That is a restriction of the program, I’m afraid.”

        “What do you mean? He’s right here in my own backyard and you tell me I can’t see him.”

        “Again, Mr. Caruthers. This is not your backyard. It’s government property and more the backyard of the pilot program called 'MercuryOne.’ Your son, Pete, is here participating in a new energy initiative with the Department of Transportation and our corporate partners.”

        “I don’t know what you’re talking about. He said he was working with some priest. Bring me my boy.”

        “Well, there is one way,” said Joe Simon. “You'd have to submit to a screening before leaving today, and…sign a waiver regarding the property matter.”

        “What am I waiving away, Mr. Simon?”

        “We’ll issue you regular checks under social security, equivalent to the value of your home. You can remain there if you so choose, but by living on facility grounds, you must acknowledge the risks.”

        “You can’t take my home. I’ll speak to a lawyer. I have rights.”

        “Unfortunately, Mr. Caruthers, no lawyer can defend you in this territory without jurisdiction. This offer is a courtesy."        

        The need to see his son was simple and shone through any logistics around his home. Besides, his heart might give out under the weight of any more regret. He signed the papers.

        “And check the box agreeing to the screening afterwards.”

        “A screening?”

        “It’s just a routine exam given to all visitors. Otto Mountain is a highly advanced research facility and you may be exposed to unusual elements here. We’ll just run a test to make sure you’re safe."

        Lazarus checked the box. “Alright, Mr. Simon. Lead the way.”

∙∙∙

         Joe Simon and the guard led Lazarus out of the conference room to a shuttle that carried them deeper into the mountain. A multitude of utility vehicles passed in the opposite direction. An entire world is down here inside Otto Mountain , Lazarus thought to himself as they drove. And somehow Pete had found himself snared in its pit just like in the world outside.

        They brought Lazarus to another meeting room, at the far end of a dark hall. The walls were painted a stale green. Inside sat a metal table and two chairs. The guard walked up to Lazarus and removed his handcuffs. Remembering old and new  Jim Crow, Lazarus raised his arms again.

        “You don’t need to do that, Mr. Caruthers,” said Joe Simon. They left him alone in the room, so he took a seat.

        Soon after, the door opened and the guard brought in Pete. Without thinking, Lazarus got on his feet. Pete was not dressed in orange stripes, but in a white jumpsuit, his hands cuffed. He wore tiny braids in his hair, the braids almost reaching his shoulders. There was a restraint around his ankle, and he walked with a limp.

        "Dad--" The word was primal, as if Pete were still a toddler needing Lazarus’ protection. The guard removed Pete’s cuffs, and Lazarus walked over to where his son stood. They looked at each other frozen, as strangers might, until Lazarus wrapped his arms tight around his son and shook him back and forth.

        “It’s been a long, long time.”

        “I know, Dad.”

        Lazarus tugged on one of Pete’s braids. “Don’t they have a barbershop in that place, son?”

        “Oh,” Pete barely mustered a laugh, “Since I started with Father McKenna, they said I could let it grow, you know.”

        “I see. Listen, Pete. There’s some things I’ve been meaning to tell you. I mean, I’ve got some things to say,” Lazarus rested a heavy hand on his son’s shoulder.

        “Dad, don’t worry. None of it matters.”

        “Boy, if you don’t sit down and listen. This might be the only time…”

        Pete’s eyes widened as he backed up to sit at the table. Lazarus pulled up a chair beside him.

        “What I got to say is…son, I know your mother is hard on you. She’s hard on everyone. Shit, she’d be hard on Jesus after he came down off the cross. But none of this is your fault, okay? It’s mine. it's mine."

        “What are you talking about, Dad?”

        “I’m talking about your life. How you ended up in prison. Look, I made some mistakes when you were at a tender age. I was off in the bars and gambling, and there were a few other women. Lord knows, Mae won’t let me forget it.”

        “Yes, Dad, I know all that.”

        “I just mean to say that I wasn’t there like I should have been. And I don’t want you to never, ever, blame yourself. Blame me, okay? I’m the one to blame. I was lost.”

        “Are you found now? Does coming here, telling me this, make you feel found?”

        “I don’t know what you mean, son.”

        “Because I’m found. I’m found  now. Was blind, but now I see. Look, Dad. I forgive you and Mom. I forgave you a while ago. I’m past all that now.” Pete’s eyes glazed over as his words overflowed with faith and optimism. He rested his hand at the center of his chest and tapped it a few times like a drum. “See, I’ve seen the light, and all the things that have happened up to this point have brought me here, right where I’m supposed to be.”

        Lazarus raised his eyebrows, baffled, then he released a long sigh. “Look son. I just want you to hear the words. I’m sorry. I messed up. Okay? It was me.”

        “Dad, you’re not getting it,” Pete’s voice rose an octave, the same note Lazarus heard on the phone the other day. “I need you to hear my words. Don’t worry about it, because I’m free. I’m finally free. They can’t hold my spirit inside the walls of a prison. I know that now. I found God. And he’s shown me a glorious world where fish fly and birds swim deep in the oceans. A way of being that extends beyond our physical restraints.”

        Lazarus looked back at him, puzzled. He registered Pete's words as mere coincidence to what he'd seen on the lake as he clung to the disappointment that his apology didn’t have the effect he’d expected. Perhaps it was more that he needed to say the words--maybe Pete didn’t need to hear them as much as he’d thought.

        “Dad?”

        “What is it, son?”

        “They’re sending us to Mercury.”

        “What? Mercury? Isn’t it a little too hot there, son?”

        “Astrally. Some kind of photonic drive. We’re pioneers testing a new kind of travel, right here inside Otto Mountain. And God has brought 19 of us here today for that purpose. And somehow, he must have called you here too.”

        “Is that what these crazy people told you? Look son, are they forcing your hand?”

        “No, Dad. I’ll be walking through nebulas and flying around Mercury, close to the sun without burning.”

        “ I said , are they forcing your hand? Is this something you want? This, this research?”

        “Of course I want it. It’s better than rotting away in a jail cell. Some of the guys, they’re kind of depraved, if you know what I mean. I don’t like being in close quarters with them. They gave us a choice, some of the brothers on the row are going too. I read the lessons Father McKenna gave me, and now I realize God has brought us here for a reason. Just trust, Dad.”

        “I don’t know, Pete. I don’t like the sound of all of this.”

        Joe Simon returned to the room. “It’s time, Pete.”

        Pete shivered with excitement, his bright smile sincere yet unhinged. “Can my father watch? Can he be a witness?”

        “Certainly. And Mr. Caruthers, you’ve already agreed to submit to our simple procedure afterwards, correct?”

        “That’s right,” said Lazarus. He rose from his seat reluctantly. When Pete got up, Lazarus embraced him, uttering the only words that mattered in his ear: “Love you, son.”

This time he was sure Pete heard him.

        The guard guided Pete and Lazarus out of the green room and through a long hallway, which gave way to a vast amphitheater hewn deeper into the mountain. The guard led Lazarus to a seat in the stands, but he refused to sit. Instead he watched another military official bring Pete down the stone steps to the arena. Down at the bottom, at the center of the rocky cauldron, stood a brilliant crystal, a giant blue diamond at least 12 feet tall. One of the military men loosened Pete’s cuffs then strapped him onto one of 19 platforms chiseled from the stone mountain wall. More men were brought in, all dressed in loose-fitting white jumpsuits. Soon the platforms filled with prisoners, encircling the center stage from which rose the luminous stone. An immense curved display hung from the cavernous ceiling, projecting the scene below.

        A priest entered the center stage and walked up to each of the men, waving a blue glimmering cross on a chain before them. Lazarus hesitantly took his seat and looked around. Scattered throughout the stands sat several onlookers, perhaps scientists and military officials. The priest’s words were a little more than a murmur from where Lazarus sat, but he heard him say, “…your final words for the earth plane.”

        One at a time, the men called the names of friends and family, even pets they loved. They spoke words of forgiveness and gratitude, their eyes wet with religious ecstasy. When they got to Pete, he gazed up to the stands, perhaps looking for Lazarus. He called out, “Dad, forgive and free yourself. We’re all just finding our way. And tell Mabel, tell my mother, I’m found."

        Once the men went quiet, the priest left the floor. Another man dressed in a tight-fitting metallic jumpsuit walked briskly into the arena. Lazarus noticed the logo for his favorite cola, Oozay, stamped boldly in bright red, onto the shoulder of his suit. That same logo flashed above on the monitor.

The man in the Oozay jumpsuit looked out into the stands and smiled broadly. He signaled a thumbs-up to the few officials in the front row of the audience. At once they stood to applaud him. Lazarus remained in his seat, bewildered. Two highly decorated military men on the floor saluted the man in the shiny Oozay jumpsuit as he walked directly inside the blue diamond. Lazarus realized then it was some kind of chamber, but for one man only. Inside the large stone, he could see the man’s body cut up into facets of light.

        The men in white stood still on the platforms, their eyes closed with exhaustion. Lazarus looked again at Pete, to wave at him perhaps, but his eyes had shut out the world. Another man circled around to check that the men were secured to the wall and then promptly left the floor. The lights dimmed and a cold sweat coated the back of Lazarus’ neck--he was unable to process what was unfolding before him.

        There was a low tone as the men in white hummed together. Then the entire stage and part of the mountainous wall the men were strapped to and the platforms on which they stood, turned, slowly at first, around the blue crystal. Their humming grew louder and louder, blending with automated sounds pulsed from speakers somewhere above, as the 19 men, including Pete, turned faster and faster like a merry-go-round.

        Lazarus looked for his son, but his body was a blur with the other spinning men. The Oozay logo faded and was replaced with a field of rolling digits, the word 'hertz' blinking on the display.

        Discordant tones resonated throughout the hall until the numbers stabilized around '141 Hertz' along with the sound. Lazarus recognized it as a note close to C-sharp from back when he played the trombone in the US Army Band. Onscreen, beneath the numbers, flashed the words:

        “Transmission Active. Frequency of Mercury Reached.”

        When the array of colors swirled at the tip of the translucent rock, it reminded him of the vortex he saw in the sky above Otto’s peak, and his feet tingled.

        Suddenly, the rotation of the men in white around the stone stopped. They were unconscious; he saw his son’s neck had gone limp, his head falling near his shoulder. A blue-white stream of light poured from Pete’s chest and all the other men’s chests to the center, nineteen beams hitting this brilliant blue diamond with the man inside. The stone lit up so bright, Lazarus had to duck his head and cover his eyes. He heard the C-sharp tone again, only now so loud he had to cover his ears.

         Finally, the sound stopped, and the amphitheater’s lights returned to normal brightness. A few gasps sputtered across the audience, breaking the silence. When he looked up, all the men in white including his son, were gone. The center stone had fallen dark, and the man inside had also vanished. Piles of ash remained where the prisoners stood before--where Pete had stood. A strange, burnt smell lingered in the air.

        Lazarus stood up and yelled, his voice echoing throughout the hall, “Pete? Where’s my son!” He made his way down to the arena, then turned around back and forth, searching the air. “Where’d you take him,” he demanded. “What is that dust?”

        Joe Simon attempted to take him by the arm, but Lazarus pushed the man away hard, then dropped to his knees. Two guards cuffed Lazarus again, helping him to his feet.

        Calmly rising from the floor, Joe Simon wiped the sleeves of his well-fitted jacket. “Mr. Caruthers, that dust is what’s left of your son’s physical body. He and the other prisoners have assisted the CEO of Oozay Soft Drinks, Mr. Jim Melody, on his first round-trip to the planet Mercury. Mr. Melody owns all the penitentiaries in the state.”

        “And is my son with this Mr. CEO? Will he return with him?”

        “No, I’m afraid not, Mr. Caruthers. Your son and the others underwent a transmutation to help Mr. Melody make his trip. We expect Mr. Melody’s return in approximately six hours.”

        “What are you saying?” The pain in the center of his chest made him weak on his feet. “Are you saying that my son was your fuel?"

        “Walk with us, Mr. Caruthers.” The guards nudged him forward, Lazarus’ feet felt heavy as that crystal stone.

        “We’ve learned from our studies,” Joe Simon continued, “that the pressures these men endure before ending up in prison, coupled with what they suffer once behind bars, is immense. They possess inside them, a great power, formed in the same way carbon under pressure becomes a diamond. We offer these men a way to release that intensity while contributing to the new frontiers of science. We are just harnessing that energy.”

         Breaking away from the men, Lazarus trudged down a dim hallway. He walked backwards and then in circles to nowhere. The guards got hold of him again.

        Joe Simon came closer, looking Lazarus in the eyes. “But you got to see him, and since you were a witness today, we have something you can take back with you. Perhaps you can spread his ashes as you see fit.” Another official dressed in a white lab coat approached and handed Lazarus a metallic bag.

“Although,” said Joe Simon, “by the time you leave here, you won’t exactly remember the purpose of the bag.”

        Lazarus crumbled to the floor, his hand gripping the bag, his body bent double. A sharp pain splintered his upper thigh. He glanced up with shock at the man in white who was injecting a needle into his leg. He closed his eyes for a moment, or an eternity, and saw his boys, running and laughing in the yard. He saw Pete, at the tender age of twelve with a beaming smile. The voice of Joe Simon brought him back.

        “You’ll have to get up now, Mr. Caruthers.”

        They walked Lazarus into a pink room and ran a device across his head several times. He felt a buzz, buzz, buzzing inside his brain. They asked him a circle of endless questions until he no longer recalled his reasons for being there. Another man in a lab coat held up several flash cards, including one of a fish and another of a bird. He said, “Mr. Caruthers, it’s fair to say that anything that you’ve seen here today and any phenomena that you continue to see in the air, sky, or water around Otto Mountain is really nothing at all.”

        The last card he displayed was the red logo for Oozay Soft Drinks. “When you see this symbol, you might get flashes of this experience again. Soon after that happens, you will realize it was all just a dream.”

        They guided Lazarus back to his skiff, which was still waiting at the edge of the lake.

        Joe Simon said, “A good day for fishing, isn’t it Mr. Caruthers?”

        “Yes, sir. Indeed.”

∙∙∙

        Lazarus rowed back to his small house across the lake. Mae stood at the dock, waiting. She scolded him for not making it home on time for breakfast.

        “What did you catch, Laz? What’s in that bag?”

        Lazarus shrugged, “I guess it’s just bait. I didn’t catch any fish this morning.”

        Mae took the bag in her hand and opened it.

        She stood solid and still. The currents on the lake seemed to freeze with her. Her right eye pinned him, a tear sliding down her cheekbone as her left eye drifted off and stared at Otto Mountain. When Mae was that quiet, something wasn’t quite right.         

        She pulled herself together, back to the Mae he knew best, and said, “This looks too dry for any worms to live in. There’s nothing but death in this bag. Are you losing your natural mind? Dump that into the lake and come inside. I’ve still got the corned beef hash warming on the stove and some greens from last night. Then you need to take out the trash and tidy up your study before Sam and Thelma come over for cards. And don’t forget to take your medicine.”

        Lazarus felt a deep sadness for Mae and himself, a lament he couldn’t quite place, but he looked up at Otto Mountain and asked no more questions. He took his skiff back out onto the lake, but not too far. He opened the metallic bag and turned it upside-down. The dust particles twinkled in the high light of the midday sun. Little diamonds floated in that fine powder like the fragments of light that shimmered in black coal.

        It wasn’t anything unusual, but a lone fish rose out of the water and levitated for maybe 47 seconds, bold in the afternoon. Lazarus reached out and touched its nose, and then it fell, splish-splash, straight into the water.

        He turned his back on Otto Mountain, rowing the boat toward his home, and then followed Mae inside the house.

        Before sitting down to a late lunch, he went to grab his paper from the den and gazed at a picture of a young boy on the fireplace mantel, maybe around 12 years old. The boy seemed to call out to him from behind the photo.

        “Who is this in the picture, Mae?”         

        “Why that was  our youngest son, Pete. You remember, Pete, don’t you Laz? You old fool, eat your supper!”

Lazarus joined Mae in the kitchen and took a cool sip from a red can of Oozay, his favorite soda.

“Pete, yes. He always was a good boy.”

—END—

ABOUT IVY SPADILLE

Ivy Spadille is originally from Virginia and lives in New York City. In addition to writing speculative fiction, she is a member of the Galactic Order of Master Soup-makers, pledged to bring healing to planet Earth. Find her on Twitter @ivyspadille.

a combustible illness clots the blood

By Terrance Brown

& they say her arteries are crystal clear

until the sediments settled in

to her deep blue well

her cliffs erode

& she crumbles into herself

& she crumbled & cracks

at the seams, her seminary

seeps an ancient theology

& God named Love teeming in her navel,

the nape of the neck

a wind-clothed stanchion

separating tension like strands

land torn loose from gravity

& she's sure, that is natural

feeling so torn from gut born emotion

that she don't how to shoot straight,

she's torn from the gun & the bullet

I mean humans, her burden:

can muddy the water

sediment the blue well

& it's never really a straight shot

from the pulse, to the chamber

in the heart

especially when lead & iron break

skin, push through & crumble crust

& the crude congealed puss surges up

slick & black as the night.

is consumed as hungrily, recklessly

as the night.

& as bullets bleed through

her silent twilight sky,

soot-faced tenants paint

their faces slick with spoils of war

oil lines their pockets

grease the very palms

that uproot currency from land's ore

eschew the umbilical,

unbiblical the maternal from merciful

& they say her arteries

are clear

renew,

the body's hydrological cycle

her eternal engine

& a pool of fuel

wells at Earth's eyelids

she weeps an intermittent tear

in the window of the tenants

as the pistol bearers consume

incessantly as the nights

her eyelids callus over

shutter, shield, & blot out the light

∙∙∙

ABOUT TERRANCE BROWN

Terrance Brown is a 24-year-old writer from St. Louis Missouri, previously published in Bellerive’s Sonder, wusgoodblack.com , issue 3 of Bad Jacket, poetrypotion.com , enclave.entropymag.org, & BrooklynButtah.com. A pacifist deciphering the mathematics of a war time society. Bred from scribbles on the tabletops in your local schoolery. He also shares his work at stepstaystrongrepeat.wordpress.com.

INDIE SPOTLIGHT  

The road to publication is not easy for anyone and comes with a number of hurdles. For black writers, these challenges are multiplied and because of institutional issues, the path seems almost impossible. But the resiliency of black folks always finds a way and for many black SFF writers that way was in the form of self-publishing. At FIYAH, we do not snub our noses at those writers who chose this path. We salute them because they have decided to embark on a journey by themselves that in traditional circumstances would involve a team. So we wish to acknowledge those black indie SFF writers out there working hard and dropping a good product.

This issue’s feature is Nigel Henry’s RIA’S WEB OF LIES:

NO POWERS, NO PROBLEM. MONSTERS BEWARE.

My name is Ria Miller. I'm from a family of monster hunters. Where other kids my age are worried about crushes and teachers, my parents and I fight trolls, werewolves, and other creatures that would like to crush their teachers.

But just because I'm good with a knife doesn't mean I don't like the simpler things in life. So obviously I jumped when my dad offered me the chance to get my own car. But there's a catch: to get the wheels, I've got to do what the cops can't and figure out what's making kids at my new high school disappear. Knowing my luck, it's probably got sharp teeth.

So now I've got to untangle a massive web of lies and figure out who—or what—is behind this before they strike again. And I've got to watch my back, because whoever is taking students is willing to kill to keep their secret.

The first chapter lies in the pages that follow. Visit our website to read an interview with the author and support the work by purchasing it at the link below.

AVAILABLE ON AMAZON (US) | BOOKS 2 READ | INTERVIEW

RIA’S WEB OF LIES

By Nigel Henry

My night starts out on a rooftop. Whose rooftop, I’m not exactly sure. I am  sure that it's your typical New York City blacktop in the middle of your typical New York City summer. Which means it's hot as balls up here.

The couple in the apartment below me is arguing. I hear the guy say something about grinding and flirting. The woman comes back with something about never going anywhere and having a little fun. God, the things people whine about. I wonder if stupid arguments would go away if people knew monsters were real.

They start shouting even louder and now I’m curious about what’s going on. I consider climbing down the fire escape to see if I can hear more, but we all know New York City fire escapes are held together by spit and duct tape, and the last thing I need is to get killed before I’m old enough to have my first legal drink. If they’re still arguing four years from now when I'm twenty-one, then I’ll take my chances.

I feel like I’m about to catch a serious heat stroke, so I unzip my leather jacket and twist my hair up with a tie. Why can’t trolls decide to go on their murder sprees during the cold-weather months? Maybe even spring or fall? Anything but August, the “go screw yourself” of months.

My father’s voice sounds from the wireless headset in my ear. “I’m in position,” he says. “Either of you see anything?”

At that, I pick up a pair of binoculars and start scanning the area around Avenue B. I spot my dad near a green dumpster. He’s the tall, lean black dude wearing a ratty old black robe, a dirty white t-shirt, frayed shorts and beat-up brown sandals. There’s nothing beyond him, though. The street’s mostly empty. A pedestrian here and there, but nothing suspicious.

“Negative,” I answer and sigh. This asshole better not keep us out here all night.

“Also a negative,” my mom chimes in. She’s sitting at a café a couple blocks down, dressed like a normal person in black jeans, white sneakers, and a black t-shirt with a baseball cap over her head. She’s got on a book bag, which I know has my dad’s regular clothes along with two collapsible batons and two knives.

Thinking about her weapons reminds me to check mine, so I feel for the slingshot and baton at my waist and the knife inside my jacket sleeve. Then I fumble with the pouch belt I’ve got slung across my chest. I tap each pouch, feeling satisfied that I haven’t lost any salt balls.

“You sure this is the right area?” I ask as a bead of sweat rolls down my forehead.

“Perkins was sure,” Dad says. “He’s cleared out as many of the homeless as possible, so if it’s going to show, it’s going to have to come for me.”

The it  in this scenario is a troll. Yes, a goddamn troll. They’re real. And yes, ghosts are real too, and so are werewolves. But we’re not worried about those other things right now. Tonight, we’re focused on trolls: short little assholes with stubby arms and legs, big blunt teeth and a real mean disposition. And probably rabies or something.

Inspector Perkins, Dad’s source at the police department, says something’s been snacking on the homeless here in Alphabet City and leaving behind some pretty messed up early-morning surprises for the locals. An eyewitness told the cops they noticed something yellow. Now, being yellow and eating humans tend to be defining characteristics of trolls, so we’re here to find the bastard and kill him before he can hurt anyone else.

Dad, as you probably guessed from his awful outfit, is playing the role of bait. He’s the hobo-sandwich that we hope will lure the troll out of hiding. Then Mom and I can swoop in and take it down. No muss, no fuss. Well, the troll will probably fuss when we stab it in its gross little heart, but we’re not exactly worried about how he feels.

“Outkast, can you give me another sweep of the area?” Dad asks. That’s my codename for when we’re working a hunt in public. I’m Outkast, my dad’s Hendrix and my mom’s Whitney. Yes, our code names are musicians. Yes, it was my idea. If you can’t have a little fun while hunting monsters, why are you even alive?

My real name is Ria Miller. I'm just your average seventeen-year-old black girl in New York City, except instead of crushing on boys and dealing with teachers, I fight the things that would like to eat, crush, or possess boys and teachers.

“On it,” I tell him as I give the block a once-over. Trolls like to hang out in dark, shaded areas. In fairy tales that means under bridges. In real life that would be in sewers or alleys or…

I spot movement in a storm drain a block east of my dad on Avenue C. I’m about to write it off as a mouse when I see stubby little fingers as they close around the drain and push it out of place. Then I see the troll’s ugly little bald head as it pokes up.

I hold back a shudder. Trolls are nasty. They look like awful little hunchbacks and for some reason, they’re always covered in snot. And I don't mean a perma-runny nose, I mean they're literally  covered in snot, from head to toe.

“I got him,” I say. “Avenue C, coming from the northeast storm drain.”

“Okay,” Dad says. “We’re a go. Whitney, wait for my signal. Outkast, don’t move in until Whitney does. Hendrix out.”

No sooner does Dad finish speaking does he get up and start swearing and stumbling through the street. He passes by a couple walking toward him and they cross the street in a hurry. Then he starts the mumbling and cursing and, I’ve gotta say, he looks convincing.

I look back over to the troll. It’s out of the sewer now and slinking toward Dad, hiding in the shadows as it goes. That’s the thing about trolls: they don’t look like it, but they can move pretty quickly and silently. They’re pretty strong too. A reasonably fit human would eventually win in a fight, but then again a normal human would be too busy wetting their pants to actually defend themselves.

That’s why we’re the ones doing the fighting. I don’t know if that makes us crazy or not.

Mom’s gone from the café. She’s walking down the block, slowly making her way behind the troll. It casts one beady eye toward her as she passes but then turns its attention back to Dad. They’ve got it boxed in now, but it doesn’t know that yet. Instead, it creeps forward like a greedy little cat. You know, if cats were the size of a postal box, dirty yellow, and had a taste for human flesh.

The last pedestrians turn the corner, and now the block is empty except for Dad, the troll, and Mom. The troll moves until it's about six feet from my father, then it tenses and pounces.

Dad’s ready for it, whipping a can of pepper spray from his robe and shooting a jet that hits the troll square in the eyes. God, that’s gotta sting.

The troll hits the ground and rolls, rubbing at its face and making an awful shrieking sound. It turns to run away only to meet my mother, the collapsible baton out of her bag and fully extended. She smashes the troll in the eye and I don’t have to be near the fight to see the green troll blood as it goes spraying. The grubby little beast is on the floor, pawing at its eyes as Mom cracks it over the head again.

Finally, the troll rolls free and races down the street back toward Avenue B. That’s my cue, so I grab the climbing rope from my bag and hook one end into the emergency stairwell railing. The other end goes around my waist. I give both ends a quick tug, then collect the net from the bag. I walk over to the edge of the roof and wait, judging the height and the troll’s speed. He’s coming fast and will be below me in three… two… one…

I jump, feeling the wind in my face and forcing my stomach to stay below my throat as I drop the net on the troll. The rope goes taught right before I splatter on the ground, yanking me by the waist and sending me careening back toward the wall of the building. I pull the ripcord at the last second and the rope breaks from me. I land on my feet and stumble slightly before regaining my balance. Not my most graceful dive, but style points only matter in the Olympics.

The troll’s still tangled in the net in front of me, so I take the opportunity to pull my slingshot from my waistband. My free hand goes to the pouch belt around my chest. I reach in a pouch and draw a salt ball. Quickly, I slot it in, take aim and fire at the troll’s eyes.

Now, I don’t care if you’re an inhuman monster with superior strength; getting hit in the eyes with salt is going to suck and it’s going to mess up your day. And this troll’s now having a very  bad day. It starts swinging out and trying to claw at me with jagged brown fingernails. I dodge backward, but it still rakes a hand across my jacket, leaving three scratch marks across the chest. Crap, now I’m going to need a new jacket.

My father arrives a moment later, slamming a baton across the troll’s knee and dropping it to the pavement. It starts to flail, but I wrap the net around it tightly and soon it’s just a wiggling mass of yellow hell.

Mom’s watching from around the corner. “We’ve got people coming this way. Let’s get this over with.”

Dad nods and places a foot on the troll's chest. He then draws a knife from under his shirt and stabs the troll directly in the chest. Its eyes bulge and it starts making this awful mewing sound as it slowly starts to change color from yellow to gray. I hate how trolls try to guilt you as they die as if they weren’t trying to eat you half a minute ago.

Dad yanks the knife out and the troll’s mewing stops. It finishes changing color to gray and then starts to melt. This is the nasty part, the part that makes me glad I’m not the sanitation worker that’ll have to deal with this mess tomorrow. A bit of the troll’s death juices flow toward me and I take a step back to keep my Doc Martens from getting ruined.

Dad calls back to Mom. “It’s done. Let’s go.”

Mom nods and jogs over to us and we’re out of the area before the first Good Samaritan arrives on the scene. They’ll arrive to find the worst-smelling puddle ever, no clue to the fact that any one of them could’ve become lunch meat if not for us.

∙∙∙

I’m in a good mood as I settle into the backseat of my parent's Honda, stretching out as the car pulls onto the highway to take us back to Brooklyn. This was an easy night, and we haven’t had too many of those lately. We’re a good team, my parents and I. We’ve been doing this for the past five years, and we work like a well-oiled machine. But things have been hard lately, like last month, when Dad and I had a whole nightmare ordeal with a revenant and her son in Staten Island. So it’s good to get an easy win for a change.

I take out my headset and stuff it in my pocket before pulling out my phone and starting a game of Fruit Crush. Now that the battle’s over for the night it’s time for some fun.

“Good work out there tonight, both of you,” Dad says from the front seat. He then calls back to me. “Great roof dive, Ria.”

“Aww shucks, Dad, you’re going to make me blush.”

“I mean it,” he stresses. “Perkins said that troll’s responsible for about a dozen deaths in the past three weeks, and we got it down without so much as a scratch. I’m proud of you both.”

Mom smiles and places a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe this is the start of a hot streak.”

See, it’s easy to get distracted at times like this, to think that, despite our weird-ass night job, we’re still a regular family. Hell, we even look the part right now. My mother’s beautiful when she smiles. Technically she’s beautiful all the time, with flawless dark brown skin, big brown eyes, and a chest that makes guys stop in their tracks—trust me, I’ve seen it happen. But it’s moments like this, when she’s smiling at Dad, that her eyes really light up, really look alive.

Dad, too. Most days he’s got big brown bags under his eyes and his lips are brown from the cigs he swore to Mom he stopped smoking. But at times like this, he stops looking like a reporter at a perpetual crime scene and more like the dad-joke-spewing machine he is.

When they’re both clicking like this it can be easy to forget why we do what we do. But then you catch it; one of them remembers Patrick, my dead brother. And then they remember the werewolf that killed him, and suddenly Mom’s eyes dim just a bit, and Dad’s smile fades a little. Suddenly we’re back to being monster hunters; the only thing between the people of New York City and very untimely, very painful deaths.

I turn my eyes back to my phone. I don’t need to see it happen tonight. Tonight I want that last image, of Mom smiling with her hand on Dad’s shoulder, to be burned into my memory for as long as possible.

Mom’s phone rings. Her work phone, not her hunter phone. Although, technically, you wouldn’t hear her hunter phone if it went off since the headset is only audible to the wearer… I’m getting off topic. Anyway, she answers the phone, says a few short “yeses” and “okays” and hangs up.

Dad glances over. “Work?”

She nods, sighing. “Yes. Mr. Bannerman needs a contract redacted A.S.A.P.”

“Mr. Bannerman” is the head of Bannerman Global Group, the investment firm where my mother works. She’s his executive assistant, which means she gets to be at his beck and call twenty-four-seven. Sometimes it even gets in the way of hunts.

“Do you need me to drop you off at the office?” Dad asks.

Mom shakes her head. “No, I can get it done from home.”

I glance down at my watch. It’s almost midnight on a Thursday night. Whatever I end up doing in life, please let it not involve working past five o'clock. Actually, on second thought, please let it not involve hunting monsters forever. This job’s got a short shelf-life, and I’ve got a feeling that once you reach a certain point the only way out is in a box. Or in pieces at the foot of a werewolf. Same diff, really.

Dad glances back at me. “What do you say you and I get some burgers while your mom works?”

See, now you’re speaking my language. “Can we go back to that place downtown, the one open late?”

“I don’t see any reason why not. We did just get the win of the week.”

“Well, in that case, I say I’m totally down.”

“All right, you got it,” Dad says. Then to my mother, he adds: “Want us to bring you back anything?”

“No thanks, sweetie,” she replies. I can hear the frustration building in her voice. My mom HATES it when Bannerman needs something late at night. She says she’d leave if the money wasn’t so good. Not that I see it in my allowance. She sighs before adding: “Could you take care of that thing we talked about?”

I can see Dad’s frown through the rearview mirror. “I thought we were going to do it together?”

Now my ears perk up. “Do what together?”

“Nothing, Ria,” Mom says to me. Then to Dad: “It’s not like I don’t want to be there. But I need to get this done.”

“You know,” I say, “I’m getting a feeling that this has something to do with me, and I’m hoping it does not involve ballet. I already told you guys I’m not doing it again.”

Dad purses his lips and I go quiet. Dad only purses his lips when he’s stressed out. Suddenly all of my enthusiasm for the evening is gone. “Fine,” he says.

“Thank you,” Mom says as she leans her head on his shoulder. Dad’s still pursing his lips, so I return to my phone. Something tells me I’m going to find out what he’s dreading in just a few minutes. That same something tells me I’m probably not going to like it.

The car pulls up to our house, a stoic red brick single-family home in East Flatbush. Mom gives us both a kiss before leaving the car, and I pass her the bags of weapons to take inside. It’s standard protocol for us: no use getting pulled over with a bag of knives, batons, and crowbars in the car if you’re not hunting. I’m never really unarmed, anyway, I’ve got a small wooden stake in the sole of my boot. No, it’s not for vampires, they  don’t exist. At least, I don’t think they do. The stake’s just in case I need to get through metal detectors to kill something. It wouldn’t be fun, but being caught completely defenseless would be even less fun.

I slide into the passenger seat and Mom kisses my forehead before she heads in.

“Can I refuse whatever you’re planning for me?” I ask.

She smiles and shakes her head no. “I don’t think you’ll want to,” she says as she heads inside. At that Dad steps on the gas and we’re off.

Teddy’s is my favorite burger place in the entire city. It’s run by this guy from Australia, so all of the burgers have silly names like “Matey” and come with extras like fried eggs and stuff. We only come here three or four times a year, usually when we have something to celebrate. Monster kills don't usually count, so obviously, the fact that I’m here tonight makes me suspicious.

I’m eyeing Dad skeptically as he fumbles with the menu. He’s pretending to still be trying to decide what to eat. I’m tired of this dragging out.

“How is it that you can ask tough questions to the mayor but you can’t just spit out whatever it is you’re trying to tell me?”

His face flashes with surprise and then amusement. “Straight and to the point, huh?” he says.

“What can I say, I’ve got a crime reporter for a father,” I reply. “I hate spin.”

“All right,” he says finally. “I really wanted to do this with your mother, but here goes: we wanted to talk to you about your senior year of high school.”

Now it’s my turn to look surprised. That was NOT what I was expecting.

I’m supposed to be starting my senior year at Kennedy High School in Flatbush next month. But here’s the thing: I hate Kennedy. I hate the stupid depressing metal detectors you have to walk through every morning—you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to sneak a weapon through those. I hate the feeling of hopelessness that floats through there as if everyone expects to either be dead or homeless by twenty-five. I told Mom and Dad I didn’t want to go there back when I started high school, but they said they wanted to keep me close by in case anything ever went bad. Now the only thing that’s gone bad is my education.

“Okay,” I say slowly. “What about it?”

Conversation pauses as the waitress comes over with our sodas—a delicious orange soda for me, a disgusting Coke for Dad. We put our orders in and I sip on my soda. He then unfolds a piece of paper from his back pocket. It’s a clipping from the New York Chronicle. I read the headline: THIRD STUDENT GOES MISSING FROM INWOOD HIGH SHCOOL.

I look up. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve been talking to Perkins,” he says. “The three kids that went missing from this school were straight-A students. Their relatives and friends say they were all the happiest kids around. All of them vanished during the last year, no trace or clue or reason.”

I look from him to the paper and back as I slowly start to understand what he’s getting at. My neck gets hot as my temper starts to rise. “You want me to transfer to this school so I can check in on missing kids?”

“You’re always saying that you hate Kennedy,” he says.

“Yeah, but that’s because it’s a shit-hole where futures go to die. Now you want me to go someplace where futures literally  die.”

“Language,” Dad says.

“Sorry,” I grumble as I sit back in my chair, arms crossed. The waitress arrives with our burgers, but I’m suddenly not hungry. I glare at Dad from across the table.

A job. That’s all this is to my parents. They ignored my pleas for three years to leave Kennedy and they’re only listening now because they want me to find out what’s making kids go poof. Listen, I know they say teenagers are chock-full of more hormones than a Perdue chicken, but I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here.

“Just try it out,” Dad says. “It’s supposed to be a good school. You can stay an extra year and graduate with an associates degree for free.”

“How is it a good school if people are actually vanishing from it?” I flick my eye back to the newspaper. “And where is Inwood anyway? That sounds like it’s in the Bronx.”

“Close,” Dad replies. “It’s at the top of Manhattan.”

“Oh come on!” I slam my soda down in surprise, rattling the table and drawing stares from the folks seated next to us. “Sorry, sorry,” I mouth to everyone around before turning back to Dad. “The top of Manhattan? That’s like an hour-and-a-half away on the train. I’d have to leave at the crack of dawn just to get there on time!”

“I know,” he says. “That’s why your mother and I have come up with a compromise. And I think you’ll be on board if you stop shouting long enough to actually listen.”

Well, that’s enough to get me to shut up for a moment. I slink back, holding my soda as he continues.

“As I was saying, this current outburst aside, your mother and I realize that you’re almost eighteen. And you’ve shown enough maturity these past few months to warrant some extra freedom.”

“Go on…” I say. What’s he getting at here?

“What I’m trying to say is that we know getting to school in Inwood would be difficult by train. So, if you’re willing to work with us, transfer to the school, check it out and give it a chance , we’ll give you the Honda.”

Once again I explode out of my chair, but this time it’s to hug him tightly. “Deal! Thank you, Daddy! I’m in, I’m so in!”

“Teenagers,” I hear the guy behind me snicker to his friend. I ignore him as I let go of Dad and pick up my burger. All of my anger gone, I take a bite, relishing the taste of beef and eggs and sauce as I picture myself cruising down the street in my very own car. Listen, I don’t care if this is completely at odds with the person who just jumped off a roof to kill a troll, a girl’s gotta be able to dream of something other than monster hunting, right?

I frown after a moment. “But wait, what will you and Mom drive?”

“We’ve actually been talking about getting a new car. But the Honda would still be a great starter car for you.”

 I’m taking another bite from my burger when he says his next words. “But here’s the deal: you have to actually give the school a shot. If there really is nothing behind the disappearances, we think it’s a great way to get a head start on your college education. So no complaining, no pouting, no getting in trouble with the principal. You do any of that and the car’s gone. Understand?”

A bite gets caught in my throat at that. How exactly does he expect me to find whatever’s snatching up these kids without getting in trouble? Parents. Every thing’s so simple to them.

But it’s fine, for the chance to get my own car, I'll smile while tap dancing to every class. I’m game.

“Understood,” I say as I take another bite.

∙∙∙

ABOUT NIGEL HENRY

Nigel Henry writes gripping fantasy novels about monsters that want to beat up the world, heroes who have to beat the monsters, and distress-free damsels who can beat up everyone.  As a child, Nigel was the boy who constantly walked into street signs because his nose was buried in a mystery, adventure, or fantasy book. As an adult, he’s managed to get his sign-bumping down to “only occasionally.”

Nigel is the author of The Demons of Sedona epic fantasy series and Ria Miller and the Monsters, an urban fantasy adventure series. By day, Nigel is an award-winning digital journalist. He and his wife live in New York City.

Special thanks to this quarter’s donors:

Bethan Scott & Tasha Lennhoff

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