Patrick leaves, and Apollo guards the body. Suddenly the warehouse door bursts open. Seeing him standing over the dead body, a man in a police uniform yells for Apollo to drop his weapon. Apollo shouts that he is a cop and moves to gingerly put his golden gun on the ground, but he is too slow. Bulletproof vests do not cover the head. He is very, very dead.
I wasn’t trying to do apologetics for him. Before, I mean. I wasn’t saying it’s okay to kill people because they aren’t perfect or do things that are vaguely threatening. I was just trying to find some meaning, the moral of the story. All I ever wanted to do was write a good story. But murder is inherently meaningless. The experience of living is a creative act, the personal construction of meaning for the individual, and death is the final return to meaninglessness. Thus, the act of killing is the ultimate abnegation of the human experience, a submission to the chaos and violence of the natural world. To kill, we must either admit the futility of our own life or deny the significance of the victim’s.
This isn’t right.
It’s not supposed to happen like this.
Why does this keep happening?
It’s the same story every time. Again and again and again.
I can’t fight the man in the police uniform. He’s real, and I’m an authorial construct, just words on a page, pure pretend. But you know who isn’t pretend? You. We have to save Apollo. We’re both responsible for him. We created him together. Death of the Author, you know? It’s just you and me now. I’ve got one last trick. I didn’t mention this in the interest of pace and narrative cohesion, but I lifted the Omega Question off Lord Tklox before he died. I don’t have the answer, but I know the question. You’ve got to go in. I can keep the man in the police uniform at bay as long as I can, but you have to save Apollo. We’re going full Morrison.
Engage second-person present.
God forgive us.
You wake up. It is still dark out. You reach out to take hold of your spouse. Your fingers intertwine, and it is difficult to tell where you stop and they begin. You love them so much. After a kiss and a cuddle, you get out of bed. You go to the bathroom and perform your morning toilette. When you are finished, you go to the kitchen and help your spouse with breakfast for the kids.
They give you a hug when they see you. You hug back, and you never want to let go. They are getting so big now, and you do everything you can to be a good parent to them. You know they love you, but you also want to make sure they have the best life possible.
You work hard every single day to make that happen. Your boss is hard on you, but he’s a good guy, and you know you can rely on him when it counts. You trust all your coworkers with your life. You have to. There’s no other option in your line of work.
After some paperwork, you and your partner go out on patrol. You’ve lived in this neighborhood your entire life. Everything about it is great—the food, the sights, the people. There are a few bad elements, but it’s your job to stop them and keep everybody safe.
It’s mostly nickel-and-dime stuff today, citations and warnings. The grocery store reports a shoplifter. An older woman reports some kids loitering near her house. Your partner notices a man urinating on the street while you’re driving past. That kind of thing.
As you are on your way back to the station, you notice a man walking alone on the sidewalk. It’s late, and it doesn’t look like this is his part of town. His head is held down, like he’s trying to hide his face from you. This is suspicious. Your partner says he recognizes him, that he fits the description of a mugger who has been plaguing the area for weeks. You pull up to him. Ask him what he is doing. He doesn’t give you a straight answer. You ask him for some identification. He refuses to give it to you. You don’t want to arrest this guy for nothing, but he’s not giving you much choice.
Suddenly his hand moves toward a bulge in his pocket. It’s a gun. You know it’s a gun. You draw your weapon. You just want to scare him, show him that you’re serious, stop him from drawing on you. But is he even scared? Is that fear on his face or rage? How can you even tell? He’s bigger than you, and he is angry, and he probably has a gun. You do not know this person. You cannot imagine what is going through his mind. You have seen this scenario a million times before in movies and TV shows.
You might die.
You might die.
You might die.
The Omega Question is activated:
Who matters?
Contributors’ Notes
A winner of both the Shirley Jackson Award and the International Horror Guild Award, Dale Bailey is the author of The End of the End of Everything: Stories and The Subterranean Season, as well as The Fallen, House of Bones, Sleeping Policemen (with Jack Slay, Jr.), and The Resurrection Man’s Legacy and Other Stories. His work has twice been a finalist for the Nebula Award and once for the Bram Stoker Award and has been adapted for Showtime television. He lives in North Carolina with his family.
# “Teenagers from Outer Space” and “I Was a Teenage Werewolf” are siblings, both born from my abiding love of the ultra-cheap sci-fi movies of the 1950s and both part of a larger project to use the risible titles of those films as inspiration for stories that engage the source material with some emotional nuance and thematic complexity. These particular titles (it seems to me) are endearing both for their absurdity and for their essentially innocent exploitation of a then-new niche in the ecology of the American consumer—the one inhabited by the teenager, a word that, the Oxford English Dictionary informs us, did not come into usage until the 1940s.
In retrospect, of course, the teen culture of the 1950s—from Blackboard Jungle to Buddy Holly—seems tame, but middle-class parents of the era must have felt as if their kids had undergone a transformation no less radical than Michael Landon’s in I Was a Teenage Werewolf. Though the anxieties attendant upon that transformation are here veiled in nostalgia, they remain no less relevant today. Despite their titles, these are not—or were not intended to be—camp stories. In the note appended to the original publication of “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” I said that I was pretty sure that my own teenage daughter was a werewolf. I wasn’t entirely joking.
Leigh Bardugo is the best-selling author of Six of Crows (a New York Times Notable Book and CILIP Carnegie Medal nominee), Crooked Kingdom, the Shadow and Bone trilogy, Wonder Woman: Warbringer, and most recently The Language of Thorns, an illustrated collection of original fairy tales. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The Best of Tor.com, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys, Last Night a Superhero Saved My Life, and Summer Days and Summer Nights. She lives in Los Angeles.
# I had a college roommate from Penticton, a small town in British Columbia. When she would describe it—the cottage she shared with her dad, the fruit she picked off the trees for her breakfast—my city-kid imagination painted her hometown as some kind of idyllic haven between Avonlea (wrong coast, I know) and Bradbury’s Green Town, Illinois. Years later I got to visit, and despite the miles of pristine pine forest we traveled through to get there, the town itself was a disappointment, full of fast-food drive-thrus and bargain water parks. But I was still obsessed with Penticton—the Ogopogo they claimed lived in the lake, the giant fiberglass peach where town kids worked part-time serving pie and smoothies, the rowdy tourists who found a way to roll that peach into the lake every summer until the owners finally weighted its base down with concrete. I like places like Penticton that are one thing to visitors and another to the people who live there year-round. I like the haunted feeling of towns where half the businesses shut their doors through the winter and the whole world seems to wait. When you’re young, summer has power. It’s this strange gap in the year that requires new routines and operates by its own rules, a time when you can be someone else, and maybe see yourself transformed. In Little Spindle, that magic is real. Many thanks to Stephanie Perkins, who edited this story and who has been known to cast spells down at the DQ.