John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Unfortunately for you, Saturnian slug-monkeys are far better educated than arrogant humans give them credit for. This one is fluent in several languages, including French. It eats you. Go to Z.

Z. You die a horrible, painful death. But at least you won’t have to deal with your insurance company!

There was no question of going home that night. The streets below Lee’s high-rise apartment had flooded, and everyone had received an alert that the beast had been sighted near their area. If they went out, their safety could not be guaranteed. The wording of the alert troubled everyone, even though of course this was always the case—the non-guarantee of anyone’s safety ever—but still the warnings were alarmingly pushy and made your phone buzz and compelled you to look immediately at the message from the city telling you hi, just a reminder that we’re all going to die someday, especially you, and it might even happen sooner than expected. Hiiiiiiiii!

When Wong had lifted his phone to check if it had been damaged by the rain, it buzzed with the alert; then each of theirs did, one after another. Lee ran to the windows and drew the blinds shut. It was superstition, she knew, but they had all heard rumors that even seeing the beast could be dangerous. That night, half of the group was missing, having canceled earlier with many exclamation points. Sick! Headache! Forgot! In utter terror of going outside! Only Huynh, Kim, and Wong had made it. Not everyone in the group was Asian, but only the Asians were present tonight, which made them feel a little self-conscious.

Lee was glad to see them. The group was not small enough to feel awkward, like that time when it was only Lee and someone else facing Kim like a parent and a principal as they were going to town on his writing. As was customary, Lee was hosting, since her writing was up for discussion by the group tonight. Another custom: the consumption of alcohol.

Huynh had brought a box of pinot grigio that had a picture of an actual bottle of wine on the front, which seemed like an unintuitive marketing choice, to remind you so baldly of what you weren’t getting. But Huynh didn’t care if something was gross, as long as there was a lot of it. She ate like she’d recently emerged from a nuclear bunker.

Kim had brought a six-pack of gruesomely hoppy IPA, which gave one’s tongue a post-diarrhea sensation, desiccated and sour. Lee still had three bottles in her fridge from the last time the group had met at her place, about five rounds ago.

Finally, Wong had brought a bottle of whiskey less than half full, an extremely irritating offering which would only be appreciated later in the evening.

The restaurants in the area had stopped delivering, so Lee set a pot of pasta bubbling on the stove. Everyone kept glancing at it resentfully, knowing that it would make them feel fat immediately and ravenous half an hour later. They still wanted it, very much.

Wong tried to call couch for the night and Huynh smiled at him. “You can try,” she said.

Lee dragged a dusty air mattress from the closet and told Wong and Kim they could sleep on it tonight. This was a cursed air mattress; those who lay upon it were flush with the floor before dawn and beset with prehistorically brutal colds by morning, but no one had to know that.

Though their friendships were no less potent across genders, something old-fashioned and unchill, an Asian, nonhuggy thing, kept them from sharing physical boy-girl space too closely. Huynh, in fact, was terrible at physical contact in general; Huynh hugged like a haunted porcelain doll that had come to life. One summer during college, Lee, Wong, and Kim had sublet an apartment in the city together, and without any argument or question Lee had taken the king bed in the master bedroom, while Wong and Kim had shared the tiny guest bedroom and its twin floor mattress, where essentially Kim slept curled by Wong’s feet every night, sprawled half on the mattress and half on a pile of clothes on the floor.

Of course, no one had thought to give Lee the tiny guest bedroom. But that was usual: Lee got things, occasionally (it seemed like) more things than any one person deserved, but she worked hard enough to deserve many of them. Like her apartment. She made enough money to buy everything that the store had told her went with the items she had picked out; her home was beautiful in a way that wouldn’t necessarily make you compliment the owner, since it was clear that some giant hand with impeccable corporate catalog taste had set down each element in her home like a chess piece, only letting go when everything was just right. But her friends were hers, and her friends she surveyed in satisfaction, draped over her furniture, pinned in here for the night. Everyone, the older they got, slipped away, was harder to hold to real plans or, once the plans were made and honored, harder to keep for long enough, as if death and the way objects got colder and spun out further and further from each other was a process that began long, long, long before the actual dying and heat loss, so subtly that no one knew to be scared enough to stop it.

Lee loved her friends, and she loved that they couldn’t leave tonight. Could there be something like taxidermy but without anything dying? she wondered. If she could do something like killing her friends (but not killing, of course not killing) but a kind of killing of their lives and outside worlds that would force them to stay here and have fun, except they wouldn’t even know they were being forced, it’s just that staying here and having fun would be all that they wanted to do and could imagine doing, would she do it?

The intercom beeped. Lee was startled, for no one else had been expected. On the intercom she saw a long-haired girl standing still, head hanging, blurred by the rain. It was—well, Lee had forgotten the girl’s name, but she did know that the girl was a new member of the group, a person someone else had invited.

Lee buzzed her in. She heard the distant shunk of the elevator below, then the doors slid open. The elevator opened directly into Lee’s apartment, as it did for every unit in the building, which was supposed to be a fancy amenity but felt more like having a giant hole that led right into your guts. Not that kind of hole.

So right away the girl was in Lee’s apartment. No time to think about whether it was the right choice or not to let her in, although why wouldn’t it be? The rain had reduced the girl to the purest essence of herself, hair plasticked to her head, clothes and even skin seeming to adhere more tightly to her skeleton. She had long, thick bangs. Although the rain had separated them into chunks, the bangs covered her eyes so perfectly that you only knew she had eyes because you assumed she had eyes, why wouldn’t she have eyes, but—

—did she have eyes?

The girl swiped at her forehead with the back of her hand like a cat, revealing her eyes, which of course she did have. They were small and very white and very black like dominoes. “Sorry I’m late!” she said.

“Sorry you got caught out there,” said Lee. “Did you get the alert?”

The girl shook her head. “I don’t have a phone.”

Lee reminded herself that lots and lots and lots of people didn’t have phones. Among the people she knew, how many of them did not have a phone? Even if the answer was zero, it didn’t mean it was wrong to not have a phone.

The girl did not have a phone, and it did not look like she brought alcohol. She only brought her wet hair and disappearing eyes. Lee brought her a clean towel from the bathroom and the girl accepted it, smiling. Everyone said hi with disturbing and transparent vigor to make up for the fact that no one knew her name. Still, they found her familiar, and each knew for certain that one of them had invited the girl into the group.