Tiny Crimes Read online

  Nick Mamatas

  176

  was trying to run back into the house without his flesh, his bones—like he had already been filleted.

  “I’s the kind of guy who maxes out my 401k contributions, D’shawn. I have a portfolio. I’m a winner.” He patted his stomach. “Your retirement plan is a set of first-run, mint, unopened, WWF Wrestling Superstars bendable action figures.” Finn was a fan of old-school rasslin; he’d always hated Hulk Hogan and eighties grappling.

  “What’s your point, dude?” D’shawn asked, half to keep Finn talking, half to remind himself that the point was at the end of Finn’s knife. Fucking Barb, telling him to go outside and deal with this shit. They should have both just quietly left out the back door, or waited for Finn to get bored and go home.

  “My point is that I was fucking afraid of you, but I’m not afraid anymore. I had too much to lose. What if you punched me in the face and I had to get dental implants?” Finn said. “My credit rating was too high, until now, to deal with you and get Barb back.”

  “Oh Christ, did you read Fight Club finally?” D’shawn decided that he was ready to get stabbed; this was all just too fucking absurd.

  “I maxed out my credit, all my cards, for fun. I stopped paying the mortgage. Fuck the bank. It’ll take them months to foreclose. Let them drag me out of there.”

  “You think Barb is going to want to be homeless

  Three Scores

  177

  with you?” D’shawn asked. “Even if this . . . uh, spectacle works out how you want?”

  Finn took a step closer. D’shawn knew he should back up one, keep the distance at least three paces apart, but he couldn’t bring himself to. Front-yard shouting contests were hardly rare in his neighborhood, but only a bitch would let the interloper win. D’shawn liked his fights highly choreographed and live on Monday nights, or at least sans blades. He was running out of options.

  “Barb, get out here!” he called out, over his shoulder. “You better come the fuck out here!” he shouted when he didn’t hear his screen door creak open.

  “Do you know your credit score, Dee-shawn?” Finn asked. “Did you even know that there are three major credit agencies? The difference between FICO and VantageScore? My scores were licking 800. Three credit scores, and you can bet that any lender will take the one that’s 690 more seriously than the two that are 745. I have a fucking app that wakes me up at five a.m. whenever my score changes. It’s been beeping a lot lately. I’ve been ruining myself so I can do this. Nothing left to lose.”

  “Finley, get the hell out of here!” Barb shouted. “I told you, I want you out of my life. D’shawn is gonna kill . . .” She stopped in her tracks when she saw the knife. She had a baseball bat in her hands. It had been signed by somebody. D’shawn had two reasons to suck his teeth.

  Nick Mamatas

  178

  And a third. Now doors and windows were opening. Two kids on their razor scooters had just stopped on the corner to watch and giggle. White people with weapons was something to see on a Sunday morning. At least all the proper old ladies were at church.

  “Let’s go inside and talk this over,” said D’shawn. “You can stab my ass inside, Finn. You’d like that, right? You and Barb could have make-up sex on the couch. Just roll me off of it and grab a towel.” D’shawn’s tongue surprised his brain.

  “Put the bat down, cunt,” Finn said. There was flint in his voice now. A car rolled over the lip of the driveway, then stopped, slowly reversed, and drove off with the three hundred dollars D’shawn was going to make today. Finn turned to watch.

  D’shawn thought about charging. A spear, like Edge’s, Rhyno’s, Goldberg’s. He’d seen them do it a million times. He glared at Barb, willing her to fucking do something. Let her take the cut. Celibacy could be cool. Shaolin monks were celibate.

  “The bat,” Finn said. “Put it the fuck down.”

  “I’ve got range on my side,” Barb said. She pointed the bat at him like a sword.

  “That’s not . . . don’t . . .” D’shawn said to Barb. He should just push her at her husband and run, he thought.

  “Range.” Finn snorted. “I’m the one in range.” He turned the knife on himself, gripped the blade with both hands, and pushed.

  Three Scores

  179

  “Fuck!” D’shawn lunged to grab the knife, then heard a howl and felt the bat crack across his back.

  “Let him do it!” Barb shouted. She raised the bat overhead like an axe. D’shawn had the knife. There was blood, but not a lot. He caught a flash of something out of the corner of his eye and recognized it—the metal scallops of Lou Thesz’s skinny, circa-1957 NWA–heavyweight championship belt around Finn’s waist. The knife had knicked Finn, but not sunk deep. Finn was on his knees, arms snaking around D’shawn’s neck.

  D’shawn could stab him, get brained by Barb. Stab Barb, get choked by Finn. Kobayashi Maru, he thought. What would Kirk do?

  Nick Mamatas

  180

  The Odds

  Amelia Gray

  He had seen her around for months, but first gath-ered up the courage to speak to her the day he found

  her sunbathing on the roof of the apartment complex.

  “You’ll catch cancer doing that,” he said.

  “I hope I do,” she said.

  He immediately asked her out.

  At dinner, she ordered the meat loaf smothered in gravy with a side of sliced bologna and turtle cheesecake and ate it all grimly.

  “Do you really think it will work?” he asked. She looked very slim, as if the processed meat slid right through her.

  181

  “It might be collecting in my heart,” she said. “I could look perfectly happy until it happened.”

  “That’s how it was with my aunt. But wouldn’t you rather not be part of some sad statistic?”

  She sliced a thick triangle of bologna. “You’re a statistic either way,” she said. “You were saying, you took up diving?”

  He’d hired a boatman who didn’t remark on all the bloody meat he brought with him in a cooler, and only frowned and looked away when he dumped the contents of the cooler into the water and went in after. “I thought for sure it would work,” he said. “But I didn’t get so much as a nibble from a grouper, let alone a shark.”

  “Maybe it was the wet suit. You could try it somewhere warmer, where you can have more flesh exposed. Some place tropical, lots of falling coconuts.”

  He considered this. It would cost him another month’s salary, but what was the point of making money if not to spend it? He wasn’t the type who hoarded funds to eventually give to his children, who didn’t exist at the moment, and if they ever did, would probably live in a society where currency had no meaning. The odds were good.

  “I would love to see you again,” he told her at the end of the night.

  “Seems likely,” she said, lighting her next cigarette with the last. She offered him another drag, but he passed it up. Too easy.

  Amelia Gray

  182

  They were newlyweds when the carnival came to town. They walked to the fairgrounds holding hands. She sipped alternately between a soda and a beer as he considered the different rides. A kiddie roller coaster worked its way around a track in low dips. Children ran in and out of a fun house, with two-way mirrors and slanted floors. Towering above it all, a creaking metal contraption threw its passengers from one side of a metal bench to the other while they shrieked, holding a single padded bar for safety.

  “That one,” he said.

  She frowned up at it. “I’ll stay here.”

  “Come on, it will be fun. And you never know.”

  She held his soda while he waited his turn for the metal tower. A family of four was ahead of him, and when it came time to board, the five of them were seated together on the bench.

  “When I was a little girl, one of these flew off its rails at
the highest point,” the mother said. “It went thirty feet before landing on top of a batting cage.” Her children were shoving each other and screaming. “I told them the story, but kids don’t care. They kept saying they wanted to ride the thing that looked like a fidget spinner, and finally I was like, whatever.”

  “Tell me more about the accident,” the man said. “Did anyone die?”

  The ride groaned, shuddering as it lifted from the ground. “I’m going to be sick,” the mother said.

  The Odds

  183

  The man felt his heart beating. He slid to the edge of the bench, felt the edge of his body press into the open gap between the seat and the bar. But he couldn’t make himself do it on purpose. Far too common. And so the ride progressed without incident, and other than the pleasure of the mother screaming for her life beside him, there was no fun in it.

  His wife was sitting on the bench where he left her. It was a filthy bench, a kind of corroded old iron which had been painted a thousand times and covered with all manner of carnival detritus. She was running her hands across the metal and licking her fingers.

  “How was it?”

  “Fine.” He was in a sour mood. “Let’s go.”

  They watched the children running around: children with runny noses, with cotton candy and balloons, with strange raised rashes. “I wonder if any of these kids have measles.”

  “Is measles still even a thing?” he asked.

  “More often than you’d think.”

  She waited until they were standing on their porch to get into it. “It would have happened years ago if you weren’t so precious about it,” she said.

  He gritted his teeth, but couldn’t ignore the bait. “Is this about my diet?”

  “It’s much easier for men who eat meat,” she said.

  Amelia Gray

  184

  “Hard liquor. Processed cheese. You have such an ego.”

  “At least I am trying to ascribe some meaning to it.”

  She scoffed. “You just want to be on the news.”

  After she went in, he stood under the dead oak tree for another hour, waiting for a heavy branch to fall on him.

  They preferred to make their own improvements on the house rather than calling a contractor, though she liked the idea of strangers having an extra key. He insisted on doing all the painting. She tried halfheartedly to trip over a few loose plywood boards and at one point sampled a bit of the paint, but gave up and returned to the couch.

  “You all right?” he asked, holding the ladder with one hand as he leaned over the stairwell to get a spot almost out of reach.

  “It’s difficult,” she said. “I always thought once I started really trying, it would be easy.”

  He came down off the ladder. “It was never going to be easy,” he said.

  She wouldn’t look at him. On TV there was a report of a fire, twenty miles away but growing. Two hundred homes were in danger. The report showed firefighters working their way across smoldering brush. He felt her tense up.

  “I need to go,” she said. She went into the bedroom and came out in a beautiful red dress, a thin one that caught the sunlight and turned her shadow golden.

  The Odds

  185

  “Wait,” he said. “Don’t do this. It should be special for you.”

  “Everything is special,” she said, the word ugly in her mouth. And she was gone.

  He didn’t hear from her after that, and though there was no report, he knew it had worked. He thought that would be the end of it and mourned in a quiet way, using a broomstick to drape her clothes into the lower branches of the old dead oak tree.

  But that wasn’t the end of it, not quite. A few weeks after the fire was contained, the city investigators found a woman’s body near the worst of it, a perimeter of gasoline proof enough that she had played some part. They showed an aerial view on the news, and though her remains had been removed, it was possible to see their outline in the clearing, arms spread in the center of a charred halo of accelerant.

  The reporter describing the scene fell silent, and when her voice returned it was choked with emotion. “It’s almost beautiful,” she said, stammering off script. “The way she’s so perfectly presented. It’s so unusual. Stunning, really. Investigators will be studying this for years to come.”

  The man reached forward to touch the screen. The ashes of flesh and wood, the outline of her body seared into the earth. It was the most beautiful death he had ever seen. She would have hated it, hated it!

  Amelia Gray

  186

  Nobody’s Gonna

  Sleep Here, Honey

  Danielle Evans

  Veronica admits there was a moment when she thought this was going to be glamorous. Everything was only just beginning to go to hell: walls and checkpoints going up, a scattershot of environmental disasters, self-declared militias on patrol. It seemed like a good plan they had, to be on a boat for a while. It was the kind of idea people had early on, when it still seemed possible that it would end soon enough and well enough, when the present seemed like an opportunity to make history. The kind of story a plucky filmmaker would love twenty years from now: mild-mannered booksellers become pirate librarians! A thing they could tell their grandkids.

  187

  The pirate business was mostly theoretical. Performance art as much as anything. They raised the money for the boat on GoFundMe and bought it cheap from a photographer with dual citizenship who had decided to wait things out in Europe. It was a boat and not a ship, even after they painted it and gave it a handmade flag. They were going to sail the great loop, hang out doing banned-book readings from port to port, then go home and fund-raise for part two, a more elaborate trip involving cutting through Panama and sailing up the west coast. At one of the early read-ins they wore pirate costumes, but only because the local community theater had donated them at their launch party.

  They wanted to promote reading and storytelling and art and truth and for three months that was considered safely theatrical because mostly it was, and in the fourth month a border patrol boat shot at them when they tried to pull in to the national harbor. So, no more storytimes. Now they actually traffic in illicit text. Medical texts to the hospital and women’s health books, banned books to people who promise to safely spirit them to other countries, notes and encryptions from one underground group to another. Veronica has learned to shoot, though she has not yet shot at anything discernible. Guns are easier to get now than ibuprofen. Grace has learned to home-brew beer on deck, which is worth more than money in certain circles. By the end of the first year they were on the terrorist watch

  Danielle Evans

  188

  list, which means there are no more safe ports, not officially. Their passports got them in anywhere once, but now most countries assume that a U.S. citizen at their borders is on the run from something.

  Veronica has been on the boat or hiding out on isolated beaches long enough that the sun has darkened her skin to a color she’d never known it was capable of in the Midwest. In the first years the coasts had been riskiest, but now that it was not so much a country people tried to get into, inland was the bigger problem. There are zones she can’t legally go into anymore as a black woman, and even in the safe zones she could be asked any time for a passport or travel pass. When they must go into the interior for something, Grace does it and Veronica waits. She misses highways. She misses rest stops and artificial color and tasteless deep fried food and her body before it went skinny and feral, misses especially her formerly magnificent breasts.

  She misses her daughter.

  Lyla couldn’t be on a boat during the school year, Adam said, and it was only going to be for a little while, Veronica said. Which was a way of leaving, which was a way of not talking about the state of the country or their marriage. They’d spent the year before the election screwing away their anxiety. The barista and Lyla’s swim coach and the
woman who’d been in charge of the losing campaign’s local office (him). The visiting journalist and the bartender and the philosophy professor

  Nobody’s Gonna Sleep Here, Honey

  189

  (her). Hard to say who’d been wronged first but clear they each believed it to be themselves. He thought she was being paranoid about what would happen next. She thought he was spoiled and stupid for not taking her seriously. He could have slept with an entire coffee shop’s worth of baristas if he’d plan for the worst with her, was her view, though he did not seem to reciprocate it. The year they met she got a tattoo of a poem he recited to her on their second date. Their second date was in the cafeteria of a hospital where each of them had a parent dying. It was also the location of their first date and the place where they met. A tattoo is not a scar, it is a wound that never heals. A mild state of permanent infection.

  They saw each other a few times. In Florida she had put on a cap and a fanny pack and gone to Disneyworld to meet them. Lyla lit up seeing her, lit up the park with her excitement about being in a place where you could still call the fear and shifting ground magic. Lyla was sunlight and laughter and Veronica’s beating heart, but also her face, her spitting image except Adam-colored, except pale and blond and happy. Still, it felt wrong. She and Adam whispered in the fear of their hotel room that the trip had been a bad idea. The next time they were on their way back up north and Veronica could still cross borders, so they met in Canada. He looked at her like he did when they met; looked at her like she was oxygen and clean water.