Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

He knew what sin was. And he didn’t want to believe in a world where sinners escaped justice.

He reached into the box. His hand was shaking. Coward, he thought. He grunted and forced his hand around the grip.

It was as if he’d stepped off a precipice, plummeting through air, the water rushing to meet him. The gun fell from his hand. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled to the bathroom. Emptied his stomach into the toilet.

He sat on the floor, sweating, his arms trembling.

Leo heard the noise. He came into the bathroom, knelt beside him. “What’s the matter? Is it the implant?”

Rashad couldn’t speak. Images flashed behind his eyelids. Yellow X. Pistol. Yellow X. He heard Alejandra’s voice: I’ll do anything in my power to help you.

Leo put his hand on Rashad’s back. “I’m here for you, bro. I’ve been so worried about you. Just tell me what you need.”

It wasn’t what Rashad needed that was important, it was what he wanted—​and that had changed the moment he touched the gun. He’d never been so sure of anything in his life.

For New York at 6:48 in the evening, this building is strangely quiet. The one working light in the hallway flickers every ten seconds across the goose-bump layers of glossy beige paint on the walls. I ring the bell again and let my finger drop as a weak chime echoes feebly, then dies somewhere beyond the door. A distant thud tells me to wait a few moments longer, and I look down at my scuffed sneakers against the black and white tiled floor. I’m hot in my ridiculous corn-yellow blazer and my shoulder slouches from the weight of my Kutco-issued messenger bag. Is it just me, or does this hallway smell like trash?

I place my forehead against the wall and let my mind wander to where it always goes, to my mother. I’m sitting on a dresser in her bedroom in Flushing, legs hanging over the edge. She’s wearing a black dress with a swishy skirt and heels. She’s leaning over me, painting my lips with the careful, whiskery strokes of a lip brush. Her perfume envelops me, that lace of roses, honey, and tobacco that smells different on my skin, no matter how many times I spray it.

Here, in this dark hallway, I sniff my wrist and let it drop. I’ll never smell her again.

“I’m coming!” calls a voice from somewhere in the bowels of the apartment, and the memory evaporates.

“Okay,” I shout back. I think about what I must look like in this ill-fitting suit, with its skirt that turns sideways no matter how much I adjust it, and the button-down that keeps untucking itself, and the blazer that bunches at the shoulders whenever I shift the messenger bag. These clothes are trying to free themselves from me. Can I blame them?

Throwing my shoulders back, I widen my smile, which I hope looks less like a grimace than it feels. If I can sell three knives, I’ll break even today. If I sell any fewer than that, I’ll be struggling for the rest of the pay period, a dark, gaping thirteen-day yawn.

The door whooshes open and a tall woman in a gray silk robe looks me over and then extends her hand. She wears a full face of makeup and cocktail rings on every finger, but she’s barefoot. “Thank you for coming,” she says. “I’m Consuelo.”

“I’m Samanta,” I say, shaking her hand, which is surprisingly cool. “Thank you for signing up for a visit. I’m excited to show you the new spring collection.”

She nods without enthusiasm and leads me down a long, bare hallway to a kitchen just large enough for a fridge, a stove, and a small table.

“Make yourself at home, Samanta.” She starts opening and closing cabinet drawers, her large, bare, manicured feet moving gracefully across the small kitchen floor. Her hair is an improbable shade of blond that looks salon-fresh and sits in a tousled pile on her head. I sit at the table and struggle to read the room: the air is vaguely musty, but the little gingham curtains that cover the barred window are clean. The floor has crumbs on it, but matching pot holders hang near the sink.

A cuckoo clock ticks on the wall. This woman seems harmless enough, so why am I reminding myself that I’m the one with the bag full of knives?

“Are you hungry?” Consuelo says into the fridge.

I’m on the wrong side of the door and can’t see what the fridge contains. “Nothankyou,” I trill. “I’m excited to talk to you about Kutco’s latest off—”

“Here’s some snacks,” she says. She dumps a juice box and four wrapped string cheese sticks onto the table and sits down. I finally get a good look at her. She’s youthful but older than I first assumed, maybe in her sixties, skin feathering around her eyes.

My mother looked nothing like this woman, but my mind is pulled back into the undertow of her anyway. I see her in the days before she died, her shrunken frame nearly swallowed by white bedding and overstuffed pillows. She sits up as if she’s just remembered something. “Pass me my lipstick,” she says. Cherries in the Snow. Even without a mirror, her hands are steady and she draws on the red pout, smooth and sure. She blots her lips together and says, “That’s better.” Says, “Take a photo to remember me by.”

Her things, which I rescued from Flushing in white Hefty bags, are piled high in a corner of my bedroom now. I’ve sat on the floor and leaned against them just to listen to the whisper of their quiet squelching. I’ve applied the lipstick using her compact mirror. On my mother, the shade was glamorous. On me, it’s gaudy and clownish.

This far out, I am past the point of crying. Now, I have a new pastime: I go to Walgreens and buy a tube of Cherries in the Snow. At home, I toss away the box and unspool the lipstick to its full length, then break it off into my palms, where I crush it into a rich paste, relishing the powdery smell and the long, focused minutes it takes to wash the pigment off with soap, to watch the red drain away, leaving oily traces all over the bathroom sink. Rinse and repeat. There are at least twenty empty lipstick husks scattered on the floor of my bedroom.

In Consuelo’s kitchen, the clock ticks and ticks and ticks. I swallow hard and focus on unpacking my carrying case, launching into a patter I have memorized about the power of Kutco knives to dice vegetables and debone various animals. “These knives will be heirlooms! Passed down through gen—”

“You are sad and you are angry,” Consuelo says. “And you’ll stay that way for a long time.”

She watches me, unblinking. What is this woman, a fucking soothsayer? I close my eyes long enough to picture my bank balance. We can play fortune-teller if she wants. My job is to be agreeable, to ingratiate myself enough to sell these overpriced knives.

“Yes,” I say. “My mother died two years ago.”

“Two years ago is a long time to still be so sad,” she says. She leans back in her chair, as if to survey me better.

“Maybe,” I concede. “Have you seen our deluxe steak knives?”

“How old are you? Twenty-five? You have a boyfriend?”

“Twenty-eight and no,” I say, unsheathing a butcher knife and letting it catch the light. “Twelve inches,” I say.

“Of course you’re single. Not a nightmare to look at, but that grief is coming off you in waves. I can smell it.” She unwraps the little plastic straw, punctures the juice box, and pushes it across the table.

I take a long drag and feel the sugar rush of elementary school recess. My mother marching across the playground barefaced, in her waitressing uniform and flip-flops, to pick me up after I punched Roy Jimenez in the face. The red shame of not being believed when I said he tried to pull my pants down on the jungle gym.