“What are you?” Leigh asked.
“I’m your best friend,” Malava answered. She looked puzzled by the question. The two girls lay across from each other in the loft space above the living room at Malava’s house. All the lights in the house were off and they were huddled in sleeping bags on the floor, their heads resting on pillows as they faced each other. A flashlight lay in-between them pointed at the wall, illuminating their faces from beneath their chins.
“No,” Leigh said, reaching out and touching Malava’s hand. “That’s not what I meant.”
The question wasn’t mean or accusatory, only curious and interested. “You’re different from me. And your mom, too. You’re both… different.”
“I’m not different,” Malava said. Leigh read pain in Malava’s eyes, but Malava didn’t
move away from her touch.
“It’s a good different, though,” said Leigh, shifting closer. “Like sometimes, I think you
can see the wind. Not just the way it bends the trees. The actual wind. And sometimes when you’re talking, I’m almost positive the birds stop to listen. When you’re playing barefoot outside,
I swear the grass grows right under your feet.”
Malava blushed and shook her head no but didn’t say anything. She was looking down at
Leigh’s hand resting in hers. Malava felt the thrum of energy she harnessed in her fingertips, always there and waiting. She thought about how long she’d wanted to share it with Leigh, to let her best friend feel the pulse of the universe run through her like Malava did. Malava’s mom said that humans weren’t ready for that kind of power yet. That they needed more time to evolve, to ascend the trap of their corporeal form as her mother had put it.
“I’m just like you,” Malava finally said. “But not.” She wiggled up out of her sleeping
bag until she was sitting cross-legged atop it. Leigh mirrored her and the girls sat face to face in the darkness with just the peripheral glow of their flashlight illuminating the room. “Let me show you.” Malava grasped both of Leigh’s hands in both of her own. She felt down into the tips of each of her fingers and probed at the energy there. She whittled and refined it until it was no more than the size of an atom and she passed it into Leigh’s possession.
Leigh felt the energy enter her body slowly, like the energy itself was unsure it belonged there. Her eyebrows furrowed at the strange new sensation and then she smiled at Malava. It felt pleasant, slightly warm and tingly.
“You feel it?” Malava asked. “Hold it in your hands.”
Leigh tried to focus her mind on the location of the thing that had entered her, but it no longer felt like one thing at all. It felt like many, many things crawling up the inside of her arm.
Her first thought was ants, but her second thought was wasp stingers, and her third thought was scalding knives. She looked down at her arm and it looked perfectly normal but she didn’t seem able to do anything with it. She noticed she was screaming.
Malava’s eyes widened in horror as Leigh’s screeches began to fill the house. She
grabbed back on to Leigh’s hand and tried to pull back out the grain of energy she had given her, but it wouldn’t come. Instead, Leigh’s arm spasmed out of Malava’s grasp as her friend began to twitch and flail with uncontrollable spasms. Malava screamed for her mother, who was surely already hustling to the scene, drawn by Leigh’s cries.
Then Malava simply watched helplessly in absolute terror while the person she loved most in the world exploded into a fine red mist that painted every inch of the loft an unnatural crimson.
Malava sat stark still, her mouth hanging open like the hinge that holds her jaw together had utterly failed. The mist of Leigh’s essence was so fine it didn’t even drip off her skin, just clung in a sticky film to every inch of her. She could taste Leigh’s blood in her mouth, she smelled it in her nose. The silence of Leigh’s absence was thick like oil all around her.
“Oh no,” Malava heard from a very long way away. “Oh, god. Malava what have you
done?” The pitch of her mother’s voice was rising. Her ejaculations of sounds reverberated through the air, disturbing the bubble of stillness around Malava.
The breath came back to her all at once, rushing into her lungs like a wave crashing
against an open vessel. Her scream was a note that scattered the light from its bulbs for a pulse.
The sound spouted violently forth from her.
And then her mother’s arms were around her cooing a combination of soothing hushes and muttered repetitions of the word no. They rocked like that a moment before Malava found her words.
“I didn’t,” she gasped as a sob climbed angrily up her throat. “I didn’t know. I couldn’t.”
Tears dripped thick from her blinking eyes.
“Shh, my love,” Malava’s mother ran her hand over Malava’s hair, sticking in the thick
and tangled mess of knots and blood. “There’s no time. We have to go.”
The two creatures were off the floor in moments. They left the house untouched, taking nothing as they cut the lights and slid out the back door.
“Now you know,” Malava’s mother said as they pulled out of the driveway. “Humans are not ready.”
Malava nodded and gathered all the energy she could from her fingertips. It pulsed
through her body like a heart that beat in her chest. And then the blood was gone, and with it the visage Malava wore. It its place was the face of a young boy with dark eyes and an upturned nose. Malava’s mother too, now, was different: an elderly woman with wrinkles and icy white hair. Malava looked out the window and watched their house slip away into the horizon.
Samantha Imperi is a Ph.D. student of Creative Writing at Ohio University. She received her MFA in poetry from the NEOMFA program at the University of Akron in 2023. Her work can be found in Wild Roof Journal, The Great Lakes Review, The Festival Review, and other journals. @simperi08 on Twitter and Instagram
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