Nightmare Magazine, Issue 77 (February 2019) by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [John Joseph Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2019-01-28T19:33:17+00:00

But also a symbol of possession. She hadn’t seen the mark when looking at her reflection in the sleeping monitor of her desktop, but now she saw it clearly, for the first time.

Beatriz owned herself. She owned her face.

She owned her story. She owned her life.

She owned her mind. She owned her soul.

It was also something else; not quite a question mark, but some kind of mark; she didn’t remember what.

Now the siren-sound reached her ears. Now the red and white lights spilled in through the blinds as she walked through her dim living room. The police were coming. It was hard to think. She wouldn’t have much time, but she didn’t need hardly any time at all to take one last selfie.

The men were lurking. She’d been marked by them, turned into a living meme. Now a meme lived on her. She didn’t bother with filters or hashtags, but went to her desktop, woke it up, pulled the tape from her webcam lens, and snapped a picture. She had a program that would upload the picture simultaneously to every still-extant platform on which she ever had a presence—from Palz.com through Diaryville and all the way up to S* and poor abandoned Y’ello?

Beatriz’s hands were on the keyboard, ready to write a brief message to go along with the image. The police were coming. Something that would sear the image into the minds of millions. She wouldn’t have time to articulate the polysemy, and that would ruin the image anyway. Listing meanings meant defining limits. Something for women, for people like herself, the abused and oppressed, to wave around as obnoxiously as any meme. But she also couldn’t just depend on an appeal to her friends and allies to spread the meme without some collective understanding of what it could mean. In a flash, I regret nothing! entered her head. Not her head, no. Wrong, just the muscles in her fingers. I regret nothing! was already a joke, and a reference to itself. Someone else’s imagination had been encoded in Beatriz’s nervous system. The anti-tear needed its own meaning, one that would decolonize minds, a rallying cry and a warning to others. She wanted men to see it and feel their throats tighten, their hearts twitch, the way they made her feel two dozen times a day. The mark would never ever be for them, and always ever against them.

And besides, Beatriz did have regrets. Why did she even decide to date cis again? That was another idea that belonged to someone else, to practically everyone else. She could have just stayed home, or let her mother set her up with some guy from the old country who was twice her age. What she didn’t regret, though, was that little sodium metal bomb. She’d been wanting to do something like that since high school, when her chem teacher dropped a bit of sodium in a beaker full of water to wake the class up. Beatriz stayed woke.

The police were here.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.