Чарли Андерс - Nebula Awards Showcase 2018

She’d looked good, wearing the pale pink sweater I’d secretly sent her for her birthday, fingernails painted the way they never could be at home. But she’d also looked so tired, sallow almost, her face lined with the weight of our parents’ words.

All the things that my friends expected me to say— the city’s great, it’s exciting, I’m so lucky to live here, I love it —flashed through my head. So did the things I’d never told anyone, that I couldn’t tell anyone, because they wouldn’t want to hear it. How the loneliness was crippling; how I’d been fired from three part-time jobs by now; how every day, on my way to class, I walked past the same madman in the tunnel moaning for Jesus, a mess of languages spilling from his bloody lips, past a banner ad that read: GET A WAY WITHOUT LEAVING NEW YORK.

“It’s different,” I’d said at last. I don’t know who I am without you , I didn’t say.

“I understand,” Melanie had replied. I could tell that she did.

I have followed the path back, again and again, to that first stream of possibility. The events lined up so neatly that I could do them in my sleep, and sometimes did. They always led back to the desert monsoon, slogging through the water, my sister disappearing in a pillar of flame.

Why didn’t you want me there to help you? I wanted to ask. If you were this far gone, why didn’t you ask me to come home? I never got close enough to reach her through the wet-dust wind that snarled and roared around us, snatching my voice away.

There are timelines I don’t think about.

There is a timeline where the power never touches me, where I make it home in time for the party at the neighbor’s house, where a college boy’s hands are around my throat, not my sister’s, my legs kicking around his waist. Melanie scorches him to pieces, blackens him, shatters the boulders in the wash, and howls until her voice bleeds. Her tears fall into my eyes, sizzling and evaporating on contact, as the sky yawns above us, hungry, broken.

There are others, too, reaching back further along the daisy chain, when we were younger: slipping on ice, light cracking hard through my head; the agonizing sting of a scorpion on my arm, the stiffening of limbs, sudden tightness in my chest; Melanie in a dress for the first time, sobbing as our father screamed at her.

And forward, along the lines that branch out, fuzzing the borders of the future’s shape: knives, dented, rejected by my gut; police sirens wailing, gunshots ringing into the crater where my city used to be, the scent of burnt sugar; a plane that never lands safely, erupting into flame on the runway.

I only remember these as faint echoes, like a story someone told me once but whose details I’ve forgotten. Did they happen? Yes. No. The chain frays, spreads out like roots, possibilities endless.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

When Melanie and I were little, we’d lie on the carpet in the winter and warm our soggy feet by the radiator. This was when we still had a bad habit of jumping into snowbanks, exasperating our mom to no end. Melanie had just begun to learn how to melt shapes in the snow, the finest spark at the end of her index finger.

“I wonder why we can do these things,” Melanie had said, closing her fist around the lightning glinting across her palm.

I grinned at her, reaching out to catch a bit of stray static dancing down her arm. “Dunno. Don’t you think it’s cool to be special? It’s the one thing no one else can do but us.”

She wagged a foot at the radiator. “It’s kind of lonely, though.”

“At least you have me.”

“I guess so,” she said. “That’s better than nothing.”

I tackled her to the ground and we spent the next ten minutes hitting each other with stuffed animals.

My sister always dies before the world ends.

The sky is marred with the scars of my efforts, and I am so, so tired. The storm hums in my veins, one more cycle in many. I can’t count them anymore, numbers constantly in flux, ticking higher with each potential breath.

I wonder if this is what Melanie felt like every day of her life, so ripe with power, always at the precipice, always afraid to push in fear of making things worse.

This time around, I’m on the floor of my apartment, staring at my cell phone in my hand. My roommate is out and I’ve already missed my flight home. I let it pass, money evaporating into the void, meaningless.

Somewhere in the southwest, Melanie is walking out of the house, or is about to, her heart roaring with wildfire, lonely, alone. The sparks dance purple in her hands, lightning like veins through her arms.

You can’t fix this. It was never yours to control.

But my hands fumble over the touch screen, thumbs sliding wet over her face on the contact screen. She’s programmed in the same stupid anime ringtone I have on my phone, and it jingles inanely, all synthetic voices and pre-ordained sound.

I wait, mouth dry, my body shaking like the sky above the Mojave before it rains. Painted in brilliant, feverish strokes in my head, the daisy chain grows.

Barbara Krasnoff divides her time between writing short speculative fiction and working as a freelance writer for a number of tech publications.

She is a member of the NYC writers group Tabula Rasa, and her short fiction has appeared in a variety of publications, including Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Space & Time Magazine, Electric Velocipede, Apex Magazine, Doorways, Sybil’s Garage, Behind the Wainscot, Escape Velocity, Weird Tales, Descant, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Amazing Stories, and the anthologies Fat Girl in a Strange Land, Subversion: Science Fiction & Fantasy Tales of Challenging the Norm, Broken Time Blues: Fantastic Tales in the Roaring ’20s, Crossed Genres Year Two, Descended from Darkness: Apex Magazine Vol. I, Clockwork Phoenix 2, Such a Pretty Face: Tales of Power & Abundance, and Memories and Visions: Women’s Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Barbara is also the author of a nonfiction book for young adults, Robots: Reel to Real (Arco Publishing, 1982).

“My name’s Malka Hirsch,” the girl said. “I’m nine.”

“I’m David Richards,” the boy said. “I’m almost thirteen.”

The two kids were sitting on the bottom step of a run-down brownstone at the edge of the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brownsville. It was late on a hot summer afternoon, and people were just starting to drift home from work, lingering on stoops and fire escapes to catch any hint of a breeze before going up to their stifling flats.

Malka and David had been sitting there companionably for a while, listening to a chorus of gospel singers practicing in the first-floor front apartment at the top of the stairs. Occasionally, the music paused as a male voice offered instructions and encouragement; it was during one of those pauses that the kids introduced themselves to each other.

Malka looked up at her new friend doubtfully. “You don’t mind talking to me?” she asked. “Most big boys don’t like talking to girls my age. My cousin Shlomo, he only wanted to talk to the older girl who lived down the street and who wore short skirts and a scarf around her neck.”

“I don’t mind,” said David. “I like kids. And anyway, I’m dead, so I guess that makes a difference.”

Above them, the enthusiastic chorus started again. As a soprano wailed a high lament, she shivered in delight. “I wish I could sing like that.”

“It’s called ‘Ride Up in the Chariot,’” said David. “When I was little, my mama used to sing it when she washed the white folks’ laundry. She told me my great-grandma sang it when she stole away from slavery.”