Forever Magazine Issue 70 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, science fiction magazine
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2020-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

I took Sharifa and Aissa to Salt Bay for a week. I built sand castles for Aissa to knock down and taught her how to put her head underwater and blow bubbles. She stayed up too late and ate too many popsicles and was as happy as any two-year-old had ever been, before or after the men disappeared. It was almost enough to make me forget about the Descanos and the devils and the Index of Human Dysfunction. Sharifa bought a new bathing suit and read a novel about a queen who married a dragon. We had asparagus twice that week and made love every afternoon while Aissa napped. I held myself to one lonely drink a night. Whenever Sharifa took Aissa to the playground I would spread my blanket on the beach and think.

Late in the week I told Sharifa about how Haddad had maybe implied that maybe I was really a man. She listened and then laughed and said that she’d love me no matter what equipment I came with. It didn’t matter to her. I knew she was only trying to be playful and make me lighten up, but it mattered to me too much. I thought if I was supposed to be a different gender, then did I have to rewrite the life I had been living all these years? I didn’t feel like a man, didn’t want to feel like one. I felt like me. But deep into the night as I spooned beside my beautiful wife, a snake inside my head twisted and tried to swallow its own tail. Maybe I was the way I was because I was really somebody else. If Haddad was right, then I was in denial. That meant that I couldn’t even trust my own thoughts.

Business was slow when I got back to the city. I briefly had a missing teen case, only she wasn’t very missing; she showed up the day after the mom hired me. I was sitting on a cushion of Seeren’s money, so I didn’t charge her. But I told Sharifa I was working the case so I could hide out in the office and keep Johnnie Walker company. I spent the time reading everything I could find about Hieronymus Bosch and studying his devils. None were ours. Bosch had painted at least three versions of The Last Judgment. One was in Vienna, another in Bruges. The third had been lost. A large fragment of this last piece had once been in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, but the museum had been burned during the Crazy Time. A smaller fragment now hung in Maude Descano’s library. All the The Last Judgments showed Jesus sorting the damned from the saved at the end of the world. Maybe being a P. I. was getting to me, but I had to agree with Bosch’s count: he painted twice as many sinners as saints. It was pretty to think that on Judgment Day we would find out if we’d lived right or wrong, but I was no Christer.

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