The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror by Paula Guran

Author:Paula Guran
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781645060338
Publisher: Pyr
Published: 2021-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Test Pattern

An experiment that cannot be repeated is evidence of nothing.

Johanna establishes a beachhead in Owl’s Head Park. Back supported by a black walnut tree. Bare toes clenched in a sea of tiny white flowers and clover-infiltrated grass. Big Edie propped against her breastbone, lens stabilized by knees on either side. Mapplethorpe’s yellow lead loops around her ankle, but the big fellow has long passed his days of running off after unsuspecting children. He munches philosophically on a pricey organic broth-basted rawhide shaped like a braided ring.

She finds a target, hits the button, rolls footage for a few minutes, tracking them as they throw frisbees for far-inferior dogs or kick soccer balls or kiss on picnic blankets or drag giant wooden chess pieces across a giant board or just walk aimlessly, whatever Saturday afternoon moves them to do. She doesn’t look through the viewfinder into that hellworld of black and white. Just presses buttons.

Turn it on.

Shut it off.

Find someone new.

Repeat.

She chooses at random. No more Anikas. No one is special, or unspecial. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they look like. They’re just data. That man, that woman, that child, that set of twin babies, those skaters, that guy sleeping with a James Patterson book over his eyes. Compressed data to be converted later.

Johanna’s brain checks out and begins a speed run through the five stages of grief over the death of a reliable reality. Denial: you’re losing it, change up your medication, girl, it’s not real, it’s not anything, just a stupid old camera that you bought because you are stupid, at best it’s old footage coming through on an old tape.

Stop recording. New person. Girl in green skinny jeans with a sketchbook.

Anger: fuck this, fuck you, fuck estate sales, fuck Robert Ballard, fuck the Columbia School of Law, fuck sad elephant print fabric, fuck hydrangeas, fuck curry puffs that make my dog poop out his soul, fuck Betamax you dumb drooling obsolete idiot tech, fuck me, fuck my dad, fuck Jeff Havemeyer’s dad, fuck I-84, fuck Margot, fuck the linear flow of time, fuck everything, life is garbage and this is proof. Why is this happening to me?

Stop. Scan. Record. Lanky white-dude dreds fuckboy in a vest but no shirt.

Depression: Of course it’s happening to me, because I am garbage and this is proof, and whatever cosmic hazmat disposal dump site got its back end trapped in my camera would only open the gates to a warped maladjust like me.

Stop. Scan. Record. Old man on the bench with god-tier eyebrows and a yellow plastic sunflower in his lapel.

Bargaining: I’ll just watch this back tonight and whatever happens, afterward I’ll tip Big Edie in the bin and never tell anyone. And then I will straighten up and clean my apartment and go on Tinder and eat leafy greens five times a day and see Anika more often and make amends and buy an exercise bike. Okay, Elder AV Club Gods? Deal?

Stop. Scan. Record. Kid on a dirt bike with (elephants) puffins on her dress.

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