Lucy’s voice was an urgent hum in the background as he changed angles and exposures.
Lucy clicked off the cell. “We’re exclusive with Xinhua!”
“Both of us?”
She held up a warning finger. “Don’t even start up on me again.”
Timo couldn’t help grinning. “Wouldn’t dream of it, partner.”
Lucy began dictating the beginnings of her story into her phone, then broke off. “They want our first update in ten minutes, you think you’re up for that?”
“In ten minutes, updates are going to be the least of our problems.”
He was in the flow now, capturing the concrete canal and the dead Texan on the other side.
The dogs leaped and jumped, tearing apart the man who had come looking for water.
It was all there. The whole story, laid out.
The man.
The dogs.
The fences.
The Central Arizona Project.
A whole big canal, drained of water. Nothing but a thin crust of rapidly drying mud at its bottom.
Lucy had started dictating again. She’d turned to face the Phoenix sprawl, but Timo didn’t need to listen to her talk. He knew the story already—a whole city full of people going about their daily lives, none of them knowing that everything had changed.
Timo kept shooting.
THE HUNGRY EARTH
CARMEN MARIA MACHADO
Carmen Maria Machado’s debut short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Tin House, VQR, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Michener-Copernicus Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the CINTAS Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is the Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, and is the guest editor for Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019. She lives in Philadelphia with her wife.
The last carnival in human history was in Miami. It became the last carnival because Gilberto refused to switch to the devices. “To download popcorn,” he wheezed. “Foolish. Those ugly terminals. No ambient smells.”
The bird-men who had come for the hard sell offered him Scenters for half-price. They would pump the air full of fat butter-smells and fried-dough-smells, they promised. He refused again.
“How do you even shove food through those tubes, anyway?” Gilberto was unclear on the mechanics of computers, even on a good day. The bird-men shifted from foot to foot, and one of them muttered something about electricity.
Gilberto ignored them. He’d been a small boy when Castro had taken power, and did not respond well to threats, no matter how much they were packaged as helpful suggestion. Behind him, the thin-gold filament of a funhouse bulb went bright as a dying star and then blew. The daylight dimmed incrementally around us, and the fabric of the emerging sky was matte and black. The moons of the bird-men’s faces waned into half-shadow. I did not like the way the darkness pooled in the creases between their stippled skin and the wicked curve of their beaks.
“The day when a carnival uses those stupid things—bosh,” Gilberto said. “Strip the ghost from my bones. I embrace the future as heartily as the next man, but this? Strip the ghost from my bones.” He chuckled a little, probably imagining carnival patrons plugged into the machines like rows of toasters.
Perhaps if he had seen the silver knives of the bird-men, he would not have said this twice, or even once. They moved quickly and obliged him, and though many of us saw his body fall to the packed dirt, there was nothing else to do or say. A carnie’s life was defined by fear of extinction. We buried him and we ran.
Many years after that last Ferris wheel came down, when the terminals were everywhere and the fields were permanently fallow, I sat in a restaurant in Little Havana. This was in the final wave, and the nauseating fog of hunger defined my days. With trembling fingers, I hooked the jack into my neck. Somewhere in a distant server, a fixed amount of credit left my account and entered another.
Around me, other people were hooked in and silent. The only sound in the room was the thin, barely perceptible hum of many machines running at once. The terminals filled me with the nutrients that I technically needed. I was a cavernous and empty well, and they tipped a thimbleful of water into my depths.
The splices did not intend for this to happen, not in this way. They say this as a matter of propaganda, though I think I believe them. After we created them, and after they freed themselves, they could have killed us outright, but they did not. They just wanted us passive.
How could we blame them?
In the beginning, the bird-men were the foot-soldiers, the enforcers. The cow-men were wiser than we had previously supposed—what we had attributed to stupidity was actually a kind of deliberate thoughtfulness that most humans did not possess—so they made up the majority of the splice governing body. The pig-men became radicals and in the early days blew up the terminals with dynamite before they realized we were being phased out anyway and did not need to be slaughtered directly.
Of course they laid waste to our farms and our meat-packing plants. Of course they tore up and torched the acres of genetically modified crops. Whole states burned. My three sisters fled Miami for the rolling earth of Iowa, but Iowa was a field of fire, after.
Slow starvation was a kind of transcendent experience. So I was certain, there at the terminal in Little Havana, that I saw Gilberto, moving through the sea of people like they were a field of wheat, though I had never seen a field of wheat, and I had not seen Gilberto since my teenage days as break-boy and ticket-taker and sweeper-of-trash. The Gilberto vision came to me.
“How have you survived, Mario?” he asked me.
“I do not know,” I said.
He pressed his thumb into the center of my forehead. “Wake up, Mario. Wake.”
I closed my eyes and opened them, and I was again in this room of humans, completely alone. A woman fell off her chair. The jack popped out of her neck and the room was awash in her moans.
I slumped back in my seat, my arms resting in my lap, the base of my skull cradled in a soft brace. I could twitch my fingers a little, and I found myself tapping out the rhythms I overheard on the leg of my pants: the cycles of rain that struck the roof and floor-to-ceiling windowpanes, the syncopated sound of human breath, even the uneven sounds from the woman who had fallen and could not stand. No one lifted from the chairs.
I remembered a howling storm that tore over the carnival in the weeks before the bird-men came. The rain drummed against the main tent, and we all sat and watched the structure around us inhale and exhale like it was alive, as if we were resting in the lungs of a giant beast. When I touched the leathery canvas and pulled my hand away, beads of water slid down my fingers. The whole place smelled like wet animals and hay, and human sweat. Celia, one of the acrobats, held me tightly against the bony arc of her ribcage, her heart banging around like a terrified bird, gently shushing me even though it was really her own fears she was trying to soothe away. Thunder slit open the seams of the air. Lightning threw our faces into relief unevenly, like we were watching a badly joined filmstrip. The horses panicked and gouged nautilus-shaped curls of wood out of their stalls with their flailing hooves.