“Yes. I like to think so.”
“I guess the real challenge would be finding each other. What if everyone reincarnates on their own private island?”
“Be a hell of a lot of private islands. A planet of archipelagos.”
She giggled. “Oh well,” she said. “I guess we never get as much time as we want, no matter how long it is.” She looked at me, long and wistful, and I don’t know who started it, but we were kissing. Kissing hard. Gasping for breath. Unbuttoning each other’s shirts, groping blindly, crying a little and still kissing and touching as hard as we could, stretched out on the floor beneath the whiteboard, longing for more.
I think I knew in my heart of hearts that I could’ve been anyone, that it didn’t matter, that we weren’t in love or anything—at least she wasn’t in love with me; I just happened to be there.
I didn’t care.
There was a burst and clatter at the door, and we pulled away from each other, quickly, guiltily. The door came swinging open and another enforcer strode in.
We licked our lips, wiped our mouths, moved to button our shirts, and she stared at us, her hand moving uncertainly toward the mister hanging at her side. There was a long, tense, unbearable moment.
Then she pointed at the clock.
It was Friday and it was 5:13 p.m.
We straightened our clothes and followed her out into the hallway where the enforcers were congregating in anguished, heaving clusters around the windows and gesticulating toward the ground below. We could only see their backs, but we could hear: the clatter of gunfire, the moan and wail and scream of sirens, the low rumble of tanks.
It was 5:15 p.m. on a Friday, and it was almost the end of the world.
Almost. But not quite. We still had a long, long way to go.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Desirina Boskovich has published fiction in Lightspeed, Nightmare, Realms of Fantasy, Fantasy Magazine, and Clarkesworld, and in the anthologies The Way of the Wizard, Aliens: Recent Encounters, and Last Drink Bird Head. She is also the editor of the anthology It Came From the North: An Anthology of Finnish Speculative Fiction and is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop. Find her online at desirinaboskovich.com.
Charlie Jane Anders — BREAK! BREAK! BREAK!
Earliest I remember, Daddy threw me off the roof of our split-level house. “Boy’s gotta learn to fall sometime,” he told my mom just before he slung my pants-seat and let go. As I dropped, Dad called out instructions, but they tangled in my ears. I was four or five. My brother caught me one-handed, gave me a spank, and dropped me on the lawn. Then up to the roof for another go round, with my body more slack this time.
From my dad, I learned there were just two kinds of bodies: falling, and falling on fire.
My dad was a stuntman with a left-field resemblance to an actor named Jared Gilmore who’d been in some TV show before I was born, and he’d gotten it in his head Jared was going to be the next big action movie star. My father wanted to be Jared’s personal stunt double and “prosthetic acting device,” but Jared never responded to the letters, emails, and websites, and Dad got a smidge persistent, which led to some restraining orders and blacklisting. Now he was stuck in the boonies doing stunts for TV movies about people who survive accidents. My mama did data entry to cover the rest of the rent. My dad was determined that my brother Holman and I would know the difference between a real and a fake punch, and how to roll with either kind.
My life was pretty boring until I went to school. School was so great! Slippery just-waxed hallways, dodgeball, sandboxplosions, bullies with big elbows, food fights. Food fights! If I could have gone to school for twenty hours a day, I would have signed up. No, twenty-three! I only ever really needed one hour of sleep per day. I didn’t know who I was and why I was here until I went to school. And did I mention authority figures? School had authority figures! It was so great!
I love authority figures. I never get tired of pulling when they push, or pushing when they pull. In school, grown-ups were always telling me to write on the board, and then I’d fall down or drop the eraser down my pants by mistake, or misunderstand and knock over a pile of giant molecules. Erasers are comedy gold! I was kind of a hyper kid. They tried giving me ritalin ritalin ritalin ritalin riiiitaliiiiin, but I was one of the kids who only gets more hyper-hyper on that stuff. Falling, in the seconds between up and down—you know what’s going on. People say something is as easy as falling off a log, but really it’s easy to fall off anything. Really, try it. Falling rules!
Bullies learned there was no point in trying to fuck me up, because I would fuck myself up faster than they could keep up with. They tried to trip me up in the hallways, and it was just an excuse for a massive set piece involving mops, stray book bags, audio/video carts, and skateboards. Limbs flailing, up and down trading places, ten fingers of mayhem. Crude stuff. I barely had a sense of composition. Every night until 3 a.m., I sucked up another stack of Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, or Jackie Chan movies on the ancient laptop my parents didn’t know I had, hiding under my quilt. Safety Last!
Ricky Artesian took me as a personal challenge. A huge guy with a beachball jaw—he put a kid in the hospital for a month in fifth grade for saying anybody who didn’t ace this one chemistry quiz had to be a moron. Some time after that, Ricky stepped to me with a Sharpie in the locker room and slashed at my arms and ribcage, marking the bones he wanted to break. Then he walked away, leaving the whole school whispering, “Ricky Sharpied Rock Manning!”
I hid when I didn’t have class, and when school ended, I ran home three miles to avoid the bus. I figured Ricky would try to get me in an enclosed space where I couldn’t duck and weave, so I stayed wide open. If I needed the toilet, I swung into the stall through a ventilator shaft and got out the same way, so nobody saw me enter or leave. The whole time in the airshaft, my heart cascaded. This went on for months, and my whole life became not letting Ricky Artesian mangle me.
One day I got careless and went out to the playground with the other kids during recess, because some teacher was looking. I tried to watch for trouble, but a giant hand swooped down from the swing set and hauled me up. I dangled a moment, then the hand let me fall to the sand. I fell on my back and started to get up, but Ricky told me not to move. For some reason, I did what he said, even though I saw twenty-seven easy ways out of that jungle-gym cage, and then Ricky stood over me. He told me again to hold still, then brought one boot down hard on the long bone of my upper arm, a clean snap—my reward for staying put. “Finally got that kid to quit hopping,” I heard him say as he walked across the playground. Once my arm healed up, I became a crazy frog again, and Ricky didn’t bother me.
Apart from that one stretch, my social life at school was ideal. People cheered for me but never tried to talk to me—it was the best of human interaction without any of the pitfalls. Ostracism, adulation: flipsides! They freed me to orchestrate gang wars and alien invasions in my head, whenever I didn’t have so many eyes on me. Years passed, and my mom tried to get me into dance classes, while my dad struggled to get me to take falling down seriously, the way my big brother did. Holman was spending every waking moment prepping for the Army, which was his own more socially acceptable way of rebelling against Dad.