A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers

 

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There was nothing phoenix-like in my sister's immolation. Just the scent of charred skin, unbearable heat, the inharmonious sound of her last, grief-raw scream as she evaporated, leaving glass footprints seared into the desert sand.

If my parents were still alive—although they are, probably, in some iteration of the universe; maybe even this one—they would tell me that it wasn't my fault, that no one could have seen it coming. That she did this to herself. But that kind of blame doesn't suit me. Besides, they had always been exceptionally blind to matters regarding Melanie. They didn't even notice when the two of us would take to the sky together, Melanie blowing currents back and forth beneath our bodies, weaving thermals like daisy chains. We used to make sparks dance at the table, and our mom never said a word about it, except that it was rude to do things that other people couldn't in front of them, and also that we needed to learn to talk to people other than each other.

Melanie was better at everything than I was, the stormy bit and the talking bit both. She could split the horizon in two if she wanted, opening it at the seams as deftly as a tailor, and make the lightning curl catlike at her wrist and purr for her. She could do that with people too; Mel glowed, soft, luminescent. It was hard to look away from her, and so easy to disappear into her shadow.

But when things got too bad to ignore, the air in the house dark and crackling with ugly energy like the sky before a monsoon, she dug in and refused to leave. I was the one who abandoned our coast for another, promising I'd be back soon. And then I was the one who stayed away.

*   *   *

The day my sister ended the world, the sky opened up in rain for the first time in years, flooding the desert wash behind our house. The snakes drowned in their holes and the javelinas stampeded downstream, but the water overtook them, and the air filled with their screaming as they were swept away.

I'd tried to take a taxi home, but the roads disappeared in the flash flood, so I struggled out of the swamped cab and slogged the last two miles.

Melanie was outside, a small, dry figure in front of the ruined shell of our parents' house. She wore the only dress she had left—the rest our mother had burned when she'd found them. The rain bent around my sister in a bell shape, and electricity danced in her hands, growing bigger and bigger like a ravenous cat's cradle. Some time ago, lightning had shattered the cacti in the yard, splitting them in two and searing them bone-bare. Only their blackened skeletons were left, clawing upward out of the water like accusing fingers.

I know she felt me coming. Maybe it was a tremble in the dry ground beneath her feet, or a ripple of energy through the water that crashed around my waist. She glanced up, her eyes wide, bruised circles.

I remember that I yelled something at her. That time around, it could have been her name. It could have been a plea, begging her not to do what I could see was about to happen. Or maybe it was just “What the fuck do you think you're doing?”

The world hiccupped, warping violet, legs of electricity touching down around me, biting at my hair, singeing anything still alive beneath the water. I barely felt it.

“Why did you come back?” were the last words she said to me before she went up in flames, taking the rest of the universe with her.

*   *   *

It was simple, Melanie had once told me. “Here, Hannah. Pay attention, and I'll teach you how the future works.”

She drew the picture for me in the air, a map of sparkling futures, constants, and variables; closed circuits of possibilities looped together, arcing from one timeline to another. I saw and understood; but more than that, for the first time, I saw her power as a single, mutable shape.

“That's beautiful,” I said.

“Isn't it?” Melanie traced the air with her finger, tapping a single glowing point. “Look, that's us. And here's what could happen, depending on … well, depending on a lot of things.”

Options chained like lightning strikes before my eyes, possibilities growing legs like sentient things. “If it's that easy, why don't you change it?” I blurted out. “Shape it to make it better for us, I mean.”

Her eyes slid away from me. “It's not that easy to get it right,” she said.

*   *   *

The day my sister ended the world, I was on a plane home for the first time in years. I'd managed to sleep most of the way, which was unusual, and I woke up as the plane was descending, a faint popping in my ears. It was sunset, and the flat, highway-veined city was just beginning to glimmer with electric light, civilization pulsing across the ground in arteries, in fractals.

But the beauty was lost on me. The clouds outside felt heavy, and my heart wouldn't stop drumming in my chest. Something was wrong, but I didn't know what.

I felt like I'd seen this before.

Time stuttered, and outside, it began to rain.

*   *   *

If I could knit you a crown of potential futures like the daisies you braided together for me when we were young, I would.

None of them would end with you burning to death at the edge of our property, beaten senseless in the wash behind the house by drunken college boys, slowly cut to pieces at home by parents who wanted you only in one shape, the one crafted in their image.

I would give you only the best things. The kindness you deserved, the body you wanted, a way out that didn't end with the horizon line ripped open, possibilities pouring out like loose stuffing, my world shrieking to a halt.

I would have fixed everything.

*   *   *

The day my sister—

No.

The day I ended the world, the very first time, my plane touched down early and I sprinted to catch a cab before the impending monsoon swept the city. This time around, I made it four miles from the house before a six-car pileup—tires slick, drivers panicked in the storm—stopped traffic entirely. It took everything in me not to shunt the water aside in front of everyone else, to stumble into neck-deep currents and anchor my feet to the asphalt below. It took forever to get home, and when I did, Melanie was not there.

An hour later, my sister's body floated up in the new river behind our house, covered in bruises, red plastic cups bumping at her bare feet, and lightning spiked white-hot through my chest, searing the ground of my heart into a desert. All I could see were cities burning, houses shelled, every regret and act of cowardice twisting through me into blinding rage.

And in that moment, perfect power was bright in front of me, a seam in space, in time, across myriad axes. I stretched out and grabbed it, and split the world in two. Its ribs reached out to me, and I reached back.

*   *   *

“You can't change this, Hannah,” my sister's ghost said as I tore the sky apart, shredding the fabric of air, of cloud, of matter and possibility. The lightning danced for me now, bent and buckled for me the way it had only done for Melanie before.

I will, I will. I will fix this.

“You can't,” my sister said. “It'll end the same way. Differently, but the same.”

“Why?” I screamed.

The world crashed, bowed like wet rice paper, spilled inward. Our parents' house a crater, the flame that was Melanie nowhere on the brightly lit grid of eventualities. No, no, no. Wrong again.

“I never meant to hurt you.” Her ghost sighed as my hands blindly rearranged the components of reality. “I didn't mean for you to see it. This was never about you, Hannah. I wish you'd realize that.”

*   *   *

The week before my sister ended the world, I didn't go home. I stayed in the theater and broke every plate, every mug in the green room, hurling the shards in the faces of every person who'd come to court me. I blinded my agent, I crippled my director, I hamstrung the rest of the actors with porcelain shrapnel. Gale-force winds whipped around me, a crushing power at my back, the storm building behind my pulsing temples, and I blew out into the city, heading downtown.

At Melanie's favorite bakery, where we'd ordered donuts as big as our heads the last time she'd come to visit, I ripped the boards out of the floor one by one, sending them flying through shattered windows. Icing splattered, electricity scorched wood and sugar alike; the scent of ozone was ripe and acrid in the air.

“Hannah,” said my sister's reflection in the glass pieces on the floor. The gentle weight of her phantom hand on my shoulder burned, and time tugged at me again. “That's enough.”

*   *   *

The blame circles back, hungry, and I recognize my own voice hissing from its mouth.
Your fault, Hannah. All your fault. You could have stopped this, but you were blinded by your own ambition, your own selfishness; you let the haze of the city—the toxic glamour and crystalline cold—seduce you away from the people you love.
And it was true. Even once in flight, the taste of glory lingered on my tongue the whole way home, sharp in the stale cabin air.

But Melanie and I had talked, we'd Skyped. Even if it had been through the computer screen, why hadn't I seen the storms at home crackling on the horizon, their dying sparks reflected in my sister's eyes?

*   *   *

“You're being selfish,” my sister's latest iteration said as I whipped the storm into a dark frenzy over the barren mountains. I couldn't remember if the body in the wash this time was hers, or if that was a memory by now. “Hurting yourself over this is just a way of trying to get control over something that was never in your—”

Shut up. Shut

“—something that was never
yours
to control—”

up. Shut up.

The world ended with a bang, folding in on itself, the lines of the horizon collapsing like soaked origami. Our parents' house turned to glass, to fire, to energy sparking ripe and rich for the taking. I drained it, pulling it deep into myself until the house was empty, our parents gone. And then there was nothing but me and my sister, her imprint, her echo.