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

The way I knew Dad could smell him, that he was right under that part of the floor now, it was that the show went all static.

He was up, then. Out of the ground, cracked out of his chrysalis, however it worked. It didn’t even matter anymore. Figuring it all out wouldn’t change how any of it had to go.

What could we do against him?

Nothing.

Even if he wasn’t dead or a ghost, he would still be our dad, wouldn’t he? What could a sixth-grader and a third-grader and a mom do against a dad? When they’re drinking, you can slip away, hide. But the only thing Dad was going to be drunk on, it was us.

Dino, at least.

Was that what I was supposed to do, to save me and Mom? Leave Dino like an offering? Trade him for both of us?

None of the cops on my shows would ever do that. Even for the worst criminal.

Because of justice. Because of what’s right.

Dino flew a superhero action figure up into the air to swoop back down against some convoy of dinosaurs—dinosaurs on the trailers of trucks, all lined up—and I recognized it as the one I’d rescued from under the house. Meaning I’d left it in my pocket, Mom had found it in the laundry, and she’d returned it back to Dino’s room. It’s the natural life cycle of toys. Even ones that had been bitten through, partially digested, then somehow been born again, whole.

The reason I could see that superhero action figure so crisp, it was all the snow behind it on screen.

When it swooped down, though, the cop show cleared up.

Instead of telling Dino to do that again—fat chance—I waited for it to happen on its own.

A T. rex batted the superhero back, and he tumbled up into the crackly white snow background then gathered himself, angled himself down, leading with his left fist, and when he came at that open-mouthed, ready-for-battle heavy metal T. rex, my detective on-screen cuffed another perp. The picture was clear enough I could see the tiny key he was holding between his teeth, that he spit down into the drain in the curb just to show this bad guy how soon he was getting out of these particular handcuffs.

I didn’t care about the show anymore, though.

That night, after Mom had lingered too long in each of our rooms like she wanted to say she was sorry—for what?—and after she’d stopped with the dishes in the kitchen, I crept into Dino’s room with my sloshing tube of toothpicks. What gave them their extra kick, I’d heard, it was a single drop of mace stolen from a mother’s purse.

“Turn your head,” I said down to Dino, and he did it without questioning, in a way that made me hate myself, and the whole world.

The hickey hidden behind his ear, I should have known it for a spigot the moment I saw it. You couldn’t grab any skin there, where it’s pulled so tight to the bone. Where there’s no meat, no muscle.

Was that what made it good for Dad? Was he drawing something from the inside of Dino’s bones? Would Dino’s kneecaps also be raw in the same way? The knobby parts of his wrist?

He wasn’t getting clumsy, though.

He was getting slow. Numbers were slipping out of his head. Into my dead father’s mouth.

The hickey was worse now too. Deeper, darker, rougher in a way that made me think of a cat’s tongue.

I uncorked the tube, wet my index finger, and painted that red with heat.

Dino tensed up, every muscle in his little body tensing, but he didn’t turn his head around.

This wasn’t new to him.

“It’s to make you better,” I whispered to him.

His eyes were squinched shut. He nodded yes, okay, do it, but I was done already.

I nudged him with the back of my fingers.

He looked up to me and breathed out, clear drool stringing down into his pillow in a way that made me think of lake water. The kind people drown in.

Standing there, I promised myself that if I ever had kids, I was going to be different.

It’s a promise every Indian kid makes at some point.

You mean it when you say it, though. You mean it so hard.

The second time I saw my dead father cross from the kitchen doorway to the hall that led back to the utility room, and to my little brother’s room, it was technically my thirteenth birthday. With everything that had happened that week, the only one who remembered was my PE teacher. It was because we’d all had to put our birth dates on a fitness form, and he’d ordered them on the wall by those dates for some reason known only to PE teachers.

Without him telling me, I might have forgotten too.

My feet were cold, the beds of my toenails blue.

This time I’d used shoelaces to crimp the circulation off. Because they make better knots. And I’d done each leg by itself so I wouldn’t fall over first thing.

I couldn’t fake sleep, and couldn’t risk it since there was no trigger for sleepwalking that I knew, but I was tired from standing guard the last few nights. And from my face trying to knit itself back into some semblance of myself. I’d nodded off a time or two, I mean. At least I know I’d woken with my top lip dried to the window glass—the reason it was my top lip was that when a face eases forward to a window, and when the neck muscles abandon it in sleep, it slides down until the top lip rolls back to wet, stops that slow fall.

When I licked my tongue back into my mouth, it tasted like metal. It didn’t make sense, but maybe glass doesn’t have its own taste. Maybe that’s why drinks come in it.

What I wanted to do, it was dream. Or, no, I wanted more. I wanted to dream and to remember it.

The next time I woke, it was because something had woke me, I knew.

It’s a different kind of waking up when there’s still the ghost of a sound in the small bones of your ear.

It was the floor in the living room, creaking.

It meant Dad was solid now. That he had weight to give, and be careful of.

Maybe he was just now realizing it too.

At least, there hadn’t been a second creak yet.

I could see his reflection in the glass, dim and close.

Full regalia. The fancydancer he’d always meant to be.

My dad.

My throat was shaking. My heart would be his drumbeat.

“When you died,” I told him, like I’d been saving up since I was four, “I was all crying. You probably know. But it wasn’t for you. I was crying because Mom was crying. I was crying because of your sisters. I couldn’t even remember what you looked like, until the wake.”

No response.

But—I was listening with every part of my body—there was a breath, finally.

He was learning that again too, then.

“And Deener, he doesn’t even remember you at all,” I said.

My plan was for this to core him out somehow. But my plan, it hinged on him still caring about us.

Really, he only needed us to convert into a future he’d already assumed was going to be real.

Not if I could help it.

I turned around all at once, the superhero action figure held tight in my fist like a weapon—I had no idea what it could do to him, just that it was connected, that because part of it had passed through Dino, it mattered, was some sort of tether—but he was gone, had kept on walking. Maybe seconds and seconds ago.

If he was solid enough to creak, to breathe, then maybe this was the last night, then. Maybe this was the night he drank Dino dry, left him open-eyed and dead in his bed, another tragedy at the poverty line.

And because Dino had already been slowing down, or, really, topping out, he was the only one Dad could take from, finally. It made Dino have something inside him that I didn’t have, that Mom didn’t have.

Still, Dino having to die like that, us trying to deal with it, to keep living—it wouldn’t happen.

Mom would collapse into herself a hundred times a day, wouldn’t be able to work any shifts for a year, for two, and I would walk down to the bus stop with a two-by-four, and I wouldn’t stop until there was nothing left of any of them down there. And then the sheriff’s deputy would come for me like he’d always known he’d have to someday, and Mom would take off with me in the Buick, just driving straight across the pasture, for the mountains, for the memory of mountains, both her hands on the steering wheel, and this is already the way Indians have been dying for forever.