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

And it would be Dad killing us.

I shook my head no against all of that and ran for the hall, made it just in time to see Dad come reeling out of Dino’s room, his mouth open wide, so I could see that it wasn’t teeth in there at all but wrinkly black muscle, like a worm.

What he was recoiling from, what he was trying to brush away from his mouth, it was the heat I’d left there. The cinnamon, the mace.

In order to make a connection as deep as he was making with Dino, he had to touch the most raw part of himself to that tight skin behind Dino’s ear.

I hadn’t even planned on him getting that far, though.

We were supposed to still be having a big standoff in the living room.

What was supposed to happen, it was me striding right past him into the kitchen, and dunking that superhero into the dishwater Mom had left for the pans to soak in.

He’d drowned once, my father. I was going to drown him again.

He was going to stand there in the living room and spit up white, bubbly water, and he was going to fall to his knees, reach out for me to stop. But I wouldn’t.

I didn’t even have a real plan for what to do with his body, with the corpse that was not going to make any sense at all to Mom, but first was killing him. After that, I would figure the rest out.

Only, now, he was banging back in the hall. Into the back door.

It flapped open and he held on to both sides for a moment, long enough for me to see that his eyes weren’t shiny black anymore. The pupils or irises or whatever were still too big, bigger than human, what you’d probably need for living in the dead space under a house, but there was some white at the edges now too.

It was how I could tell he was looking at me.

It was how I could see everything he wanted to do to me.

I ran ahead, my arms already straightened, and pushed him the rest of the way out, then stood there, my chest heaving.

He didn’t fall up into the sky. There wasn’t any rule about that, evidently. He could be outside or he could be inside.

Because he was solid now, though, that meant gravity could pull on him.

He’d fallen backwards down the steps, had landed hard on the packed dirt. Meaning there was still time for me to rush and fall back to the kitchen, dunk the superhero in the dishwater and hold it there. But, it would take two, three minutes to work, wouldn’t it?

Those would be two or three minutes I wouldn’t have a line of sight on him. Two or three minutes he could have with Dino.

It might be all he needed.

I slammed the superhero into the weather-strip edge of the doorframe face first, but nothing happened.

No choice, then. The kitchen. I had to try.

When Dad took his first step toward me, I was already falling back, one hand to the paneling in the hall, to guide me to the glow of the range light Mom always left on, the only part of the stove that always worked when you hit the button.

I swayed my back away from the thick fingertips reaching for me, and it threw me enough off balance that I slipped on the linoleum of the kitchen, hit a chair, sent it tumbling into the living room, my right hand already clawing for the handle of the refrigerator door. I caught it as barely as I’d ever caught anything, but then the door opened and I slung out farther with it, Dad’s knee or shoulder or head slamming the door, stopping it dead in its arc.

It shut back hard, taking its light with it, and the fingerprints of my middle and ring finger, it felt like, and then Dad was standing there, his regalia making him so much taller than the refrigerator, the darkness making him still a silhouette.

I’d fallen with my back to the cabinet, a sharp metal handle digging into my shoulder.

“Not—not Deener,” I said, and pushed one hand up behind me, like to use that hand to pull myself up.

But what that hand was holding was the superhero action figure.

It slipped into the cold water, and then—

—and then the water, it was lapping all around us. Around both of us.

It was night. Outside. And the air was crisper somehow. No: thinner.

We were on the reservation.

It was trees all around, except under us right now. Under us right now, there was water.

We were in the shallows of the lake, and—and I was taller, I was grown. I couldn’t see my face, but my hands, my arms, my boots, I didn’t know them. I’d never known them.

And then it hit me: the same way that, when sleepwalking, I was kind of inhabiting myself, that’s what I was doing here. Just, now I was inhabiting someone else . Someone before. Someone who had sneaked up on a dying campfire by walking around the whole edge of the lake, numbing his feet, leaving him open for me to inhabit. Someone who had been looking for my dad ever since my dad had left a certain truck in the ditch, a rod thrown through the block.

I had access to this truck owner’s memories, too, and remembered them like they’d happened to me: two days ago, Dad—“Park” in this memory—had come over because he knew where a moose was. He’d seen it twice over the last week. Twice .

This wasn’t some big dumb cow, either, my dad had said. Park had said. This was a proper bull.

Forget the meat. That kind of rack, Park knew a guy down in the city who would go fifteen hundred for it, in velvet like that. He already had the rifle borrowed, and already had a chainsaw himself. All he needed now was a truck, so he could stake out that curve by the little pond, then pop them a high-dollar moose, saw the head off, carry it direct to that guy he knew, the rack wrapped in plastic bags so all the velvet wouldn’t dry up, blow away before he could get there.

Fifteen hundred, split two ways.

And he’d said he’d return the truck with a full tank of gas, even.

It was easy money. The easiest money.

Just like that, even though I knew better, I’d worked the square-headed key off my ring, passed it across, and didn’t see the truck again until four days later. Until yesterday.

It had been on the side of the road, abandoned, walked away from.

There wasn’t an actual rod thrown through the hood, but I’d figured that part out soon enough.

I hadn’t gone back to work that afternoon, or all day today.

Park had been hunting a moose. Now I was hunting Park.

Where I found him was sitting by a dying fire, beer cans lined in a circle all around it. Just, on the way to finding him, he became Dad. Not because he’d changed. Because I had.

I stood there in the water, watching him like a spirit come up from the deep.

When he looked up, he even said my name: “Junior.” Then he said it three more times, softer and softer: “Junior Junior Junior.”

Every fourth person on our reservation, that’s their name, like the same stupid person is trying life after life until he gets it right at last.

Still, this Junior was me, now, not the one he’d loaned the truck to. Maybe it was because we had the same name that I was able to go back, inhabit him, be him, or maybe that action figure, this was his heroic power—to grant the one thing that can save a little brother.

Dad offered me his beer and I swatted it away, liked this new strength, this new, adult reach.

Right now, the four-year-old me was twenty miles south, dying from pneumonia—maybe from how cold it was where this me was standing right now.

There are rules, I know.

Not knowing them doesn’t mean they don’t apply to you.

I couldn’t stop looking at him either, my dad. Not just from this other Junior’s height, but at all .

This was the Dad that Mom had known. That she had loved. That she had thought was going to last forever.

He was still young. Stupid too, you could tell just from the way his eyes were, you could tell from his loopy grin, but he would get better. He would figure this all out. He would come home, wouldn’t he? All his sisters told my mom he would. She just had to wait.