Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

Then he ate in silence while Nayima sat beside him, her face and eyes afire with tears of rage and helplessness.

“Where’s your car keys?” he said.

“In the car,” shewhispered past her stinging throat.

“You need anything in the house?”

The question confused her. Which house?

“My backpack,” she said.

“Your gun in there too?”

She shook her head.

“Then where is it?”

She told him.

“I’ll go get it,” he said. “Thanks for the chicken. Real good job.. I’ll get your stuff. Just go around and wait in front of the house. Then I’ll open the garage, and you can get in your car and drive away. One-two-three, it’s done.” His voice was gentle, almost playful.

Nayima was amazed when she realized she did not want to hurt Sanchez. Did not want to lunge at him or claw at his eyes. The index card on the table fluttered in a breeze. The air was so filled with smoke, she could almost see the wind.

“No,” she said. “Just go. Please.”

Any sadness in his eyes might have been an illusion, gone fast. He left her without a word, without hesitation. He had never planned to stay long.

When he left, Nayima ripped up the index card into eight pieces. Then, panicked at having nowhere to go, she collected the pieces and shoved them into her back pocket.

When a coyote howled, setting off the chorus, she heard the ghost of Gram’s screams.

A sob emerged, and Nayima howled with the coyotes and lost dogs and sirens.

Then she stopped. She thought she’d heard a cat’s mew.

A scrabbling came, and a black cat bounded over the wooden patio fence. The cat had lost weight, so she would not have recognized Tango except for the V of white fur across his chest. The sight of Tango made her scratch her arm’s old flea bites.

Maybe it was a sign. Maybe Tango was a message from Gram.

Tango jumped on the patio table, rubbing his butt near her face as he sniffed at the chicken bones. Nayima cleared the bones away—chicken bones weren’t good for pets, Gram always said. Instead, Nayima grabbed a chicken thigh from the grill and tossed it to the patio floor. Tango poked at it hungrily, retreated from the heat. Mewed angrily. Poked again.

“Hey, baby,” Nayima said in Gram’s voice, scratching Tango behind his ears. He purred loudly. Nayima stroked Tango for a long time while he ate. Slowly, her thoughts cleared.

Nayima went into the house, took a blanket from the sofa, and draped it over Gram in her bed. Nayima kept her face turned away, so she did not see any blood, although she smelled it. She wanted to say goodbye, but she had been saying goodbye for weeks. Months, really. She would have the rest of her life, however long or short that would be, to say goodbye to Gram.

Instead, Nayima gathered the remaining chicken, her gun, and her backpack. She didn’t need the meds now, but they were in the car. They would be valuable later. She also had endless cans of Ensure, which would soon be her only food.

Tango followed Nayima to her car; she left the back door open for him while she packed the last of her things. If Tango jumped in, fine. If he didn’t, fine.

Tango jumped into the car. She closed the door behind him.

As she pulled out of the driveway, she took one last drive around the green belt, although she purposely did not look at Gram’s house and the jacaranda tree. The pool’s blue waters were as placid as they’d been when she and Shanice lived in chlorine all summer, with Bob yelling at them to keep the noise down. She noticed a flat basketball at the edge of the court. The shirt and jeans still flapped in the tree.

Tango did not like the car. Nayima had not finished rounding the green belt before he began complaining, a high-pitched and desperate mew that sounded too much like crying. When he jumped to the large cooler on the front seat, she knew she’d made a mistake.

Nayima stopped the car. She opened her door. Tango bounded across her lap to get out of the car, running free. He stopped when he was clear of her and stared back from his familiar kingdom of grass, the only home he wanted to know. He groomed his paw.

Tango was Nayima’s last sight in her rearview mirror before she drove away.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tananarive Due is the Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She also teaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NAACP Image Award recipient has authored and/or co-authored twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. In 2013, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. In 2010, she was inducted into the Medill School of Journalism’s Hall of Achievement at Northwestern University. She has also taught at the Geneva Writers Conference, the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and Voices of Our Nations Art Foundation (VONA). Due’s supernatural thriller The Living Blood won a 2002 American Book Award. Her novella “Ghost Summer,” published in the 2008 anthology The Ancestors , received the 2008 Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society, and her short fiction has appeared in best-of-the-year anthologies of science fiction and fantasy. Due is a leading voice in black speculative fiction.

Toto’s waiting for me in the old rust-red Corolla with tinted windows and the oh-so-not street legal nitrous system I know is hidden away under the hood. The only external hint that the car’s a getaway-special comes from the thick tires.

He rolls a window down as I walk out under the shadow of the imposing concrete and glass corporate facade I’ve just been politely rebuffed from. “Charlie?”

I keep walking along the sidewalk, so he starts the car up with that belch/rumble that lets the car’s secret out. Like Toto, the car isn’t nearly as camouflaged as he thinks; a nearby cop on foot eyes us as Toto creeps the car along to pace me.

“You look funny in a suit, Charlie,” Toto says, leaning an arm out and giving me a puppy-dog sort of look. He has a three dimensional splay of barbwire tattooed on his arm, complete with streaks of blood where it appears to cinch his bicep. “They know you don’t belong. They sniffed you out, huh?”

He knows my moods well enough. I’m angry, hurt, frustrated. Walking fast, leaning forward, my hands pushed deep into the pockets. I’m sweating in the black suit, and the tie is choking me, but I’m thinking maybe I can get used to it. Maybe I can ignore the seams riding up hard against my crotch and the ill-fitted, scratchy fabric.

“You look hot in that shit, man. Come on, hop in the AC. Let me give you a ride back to the apartment.”

We both stop at the intersection. The car’s brakes squeal slightly. I stand still, my toes pinched in the dress shoes. The light turns green. A split second passes, and someone behind us lays into their horn. Toto leans out the window and flips them off.

“Damn it, Toto.” I move to the other side of the car, open the door and slide onto the cold leather passenger’s seat. Because I know Toto’s not going anywhere, I want to save the guy behind us the trouble.

Toto hits the gas, and we growl across the intersection with a bounce of stiff suspension. “They didn’t give you the job, did they?”

I shake my head, looking in the mirror at the corporate monolith behind us with a forced wistfulness.

“Fuck ’em,” Toto says, hitting the wheel. “ Fuck . Them . You would have kicked ass at handling their corporate firewall. You’d have kept their secrets lock-tight.”