Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Nice of him to take a shower, but his breath was giving funky receipts for all his recent activities.

She caught his face in the palm of a hand and pushed him off. “The way yo bref kicking, you just been down on some bad pussy for real , for real.”

He ran for the Listerine and then crept back, looking at her with dog’s eyes—a very bad dog. So handsome, though, so hot, he blessed the room just by being in it. And girl you know this dopey bloodshot gaze is full of the purest love you’ll ever get. She sighed, reached out a hand, ran fingers down his scalp between frizzy cornrows. “Ya head’s looking pretty rough. Hand me that comb and sit here. I’ma take these out.” Anhell sat on the floor between her knees. She turned up the volume a little, just to a friendly mutter. He pulled the table closer to pinch open a phillie and roll up his late-night .5 grams.

Ready for Iraq in combat armor, whitepolice in Missouri and Louisiana held machine guns, rode tanks. Natural hair sisters holding poster board signs. Baltimore niggas wilding like the cops won’t shoot. Close-up of a brother, his face fades out. Baby mama crying. Close-up of another brother, that face fades out. His muvver crying. Another face, another wife. Face, mother. Wife, mother. Faces. Crying.

“Know what I wanna see?” Anhell, with each word, scrawled cursives of smoke on the air. “Some crying white bitches on this TV.”

Normally she had better things to do than ponder the reefer ramblings of a nigga fly as hell, yes, but oh so simple. Now, for whatever reason, her hands paused in the springtime flood of his hair. Fascinated, she said, “Yeah?”

“ Yeah !” Anhell said, throwing out a preacherly hand at the TV. “Why’s it always us gotta have the sad story? Let me see some bad ass niggas who get away with nothing but stone cold murder. Then let me see white mamas, white wives, cameras all up in they face, weeping and wailing outside the church. Now that would be some funny shit!” His laughter caught on hooks of smoke, broke into helpless phlegmy barking.

The hair stood up on her neck, goosebumps chilling her arms. She slapped on his back, inspired to her soul. It came to her with a bright ten-story-high clarity, like the LED billboards at Times Square. True vocation. God’s work and the devil’s!

4.1 police massacre, October

4.2 state funeral, November

The sky at one a.m. hung low above the city, orange clouds damn near bright as day. Gypsies bumped the horn when slowing and sped back up. Draped in colored Christmas lights, almost, the curbside mountains of garbage bags, all beaded by spitting rain, winked under headlights, brake lights, sodium and neon. The piped corridors of all the scaffolding over the sidewalks, all the doorways, and all the stairwells going down breathed back at them parfum de piss . It was unseasonably warm in the Bronx, and a lovely night for an atrocity. There was the precinct house just ahead. Time to make the bacon, Mr, Pig.

A sextet of cops were smoking on the precinct stairs. Three cigarette cherries flaring with the draw, three redder and dim hanging hipside. Who knows but that qualms might not have stirred the hearts of dark gods, who then might have brought down the storm elsewhere, on some other night, if all those cops out front hadn’t been white? But police have their own little clicks, too. Spanish tight with Spanish, black with black, whitecops keeping to their own kind.

Anhell laid down an enfilade that had him doing numbers before half a minute was out. The devil, if it ain’t been said, saw to questions of ammo and aim, chambering embers di l’Inferno just faster than Anhell could squeeze the trigger. Hellfire tracers went streaking through the dark and one, two, three, four, five whitecops turned explosively to redmeat. Number six, before losing the lungs to do so, gave a shout. She and Anhell ran—not away, toward the trouble. Just vibing on the slaughter at first, thrilled how babyboy had put em down like that, now she felt eager for a taste of her own. A bitch gotta post up, right—get her hands dirty, too?

Some cavalry came pouring out the precinct front doors to see about that shout, and chop, chop, chop were three who had been whole made all in twain. The machète went in and through without effort, but still she felt, somehow, a slow buttery drag across the blade, as if demonic steel were stiff meat belonging to her own body and sinking deep into a lover all wet, hot and open for her. No need, as it turned out, to drink down whole gallons from any one body when this much blood was flowing. The first cupful’s sweetest, anyway. Naw, a spoonful will do, given this abundance.

Stepping over the bestrewment, they went in.

4.1 police massacre, October

4.2 state funeral, November

4.3 police massacre, October

Lastly, twelve widows filed on camera. Whitewidows, all white, though their eyes sought reflexively for any who weren’t. Only one widow would be allowed to speak, and not an ugly one. They knew which one it would be the very instant she, blond, stepped into view. The black lace she wore overlaid a silk sheath that, iridescing under the lights between deep purple, reddish black, and… indigo ? lent her gown the dark complexities of a raven’s wing seen in direct sun. Not the dress your granny would wear to the funeral, this number, and “gorgeous” only got you about halfway there. The camera lingered a bit over the distinctive red soles of her glossy black pumps.

“Eight outta them sixty-three we kilt weren’t even white,” Anhell complained. “How come they ain’t let nunna them widows on TV?”

“Optics, baby,” she said and swallowed deeply, in wisdom and resignation, from her tumbler. “They gotta keep shit looking a certain way for the message.”

45 hadn’t won the presidency for no damn reason: He quit reading off the ’prompter all wooden and halting and started ad-libbing for his base.

“Studies show, there’s a yuge amount of science, so many studies showing that our African Americans, the blacks, actually kill each other 99.9% of the time. Facts!”

Anhell sucked his teeth. “Ain’t nobody wanna hear this cheeto ass looking fool! When they putting the widows on?”

“President first,” she said, “then the mayor. Widows go last.” One more watery sip drained the ice in her glass, and she looked around with increasing consternation for the bottle. “ Yo , my nigga—how you drank up all the Henny that quick?”

“Ain’t even that serious, ma.” Anhell leaned over the couch’s far side. “Got the bottle right here…” After pulling it up from where it sat (still one-third full) on the floor, he poured over her ice until, clinking, the cubes floated up.

“ Oh ,” she exclaimed. “Cause I was getting ready to say …!” She took a good, long swallow.

4.2 state funeral, November

4.3 police massacre, October

4.4 state funeral, November

With a step backward into the brimstone sirocco, they couldn’t be seen well from here, earth. And so from there, hell, the screams of the damned and heat blasting at their backs, they juked around wildly shooting cops and took the whiteones bang! to the head, swap! through the neck. It was less a trick of witchcraft than basic physics, time in hell running at a faster clip than our earthly clock, and so much so that, when they stood on the smoldering threshold, all these police, by contrast, were moving in slo-mo and clumsy as fuck.