The Family Fang

by Kevin Wilson

Anonymity was a key element of the performances; it allowed them to set up the scenes without interruption from people who would be expecting mayhem.

Buster fished pennies out of the fountains, his pockets damp and overflowing with coinage.

“Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes,” their father told them. “Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.”

The entire family, walking into the sunset just past the horizon, held hands and sang, almost in tune, “Kill all parents, so you can keep living.”

He was surrounded by former soldiers, a year returned from Iraq, young and strangely jovial and scientifically proven to be invincible after serving multiple tours in the Middle East.

“We’re a family again. This is what we do. This is what the Fangs do. We make strange and memorable things.”

“Good Lord,” Caleb said to his wife. “People have become so stupid that you can’t control them.”

They paused before they stepped out of the van, every Fang in their place. The four of them then walked up to the house, their home, and each of them had the undeniable feeling that, now that they were together again, they could not hope to prevent the thing that would come next, whatever it would be.

“I’m a monster,” Buster bellowed, and his parents did nothing to dissuade him of this belief.

Art, if you loved it, was worth any amount of unhappiness and pain. If you had to hurt someone to achieve those ends, so be it. If the outcome was beautiful enough, strange enough, memorable enough, it did not matter. It was worth it.

They had, in fact, handed over to her a large sum of money to help her get started in California. “It was a lot of money, Buster,” Annie had told him once on the phone, “like rich people kind of money.”

The thought that his parents had given some of that money to Annie made Buster happy, because it showed that his family, fractured as it was, might someday heal.

and he was careful not to damage the camera, so expensive that his father made him name it (Carl),

Buster had wanted to put up a sign on the phone, which said OUT OF ORDER, but Annie nixed the idea. “No one uses pay phones anymore,” she said. “I can’t believe they still exist. There’s no point complicating things with fake signs.”

As soon as they arrived in North Dakota, Annie understood that it was the exact place you wanted to live if the apocalypse ever arrived: the clear, stingingly pure air, the absence of color, the feeling that the place had never recovered from the Ice Age and would therefore be nearly unchanged when the world was stripped of what mattered most. It was wilderness, even the largest city in the state, and Annie felt trepidation upon walking out of the airport, the sense that her parents knew the terrain, had acclimated to this barren expanse of land, whereas Annie and her brother would be torn apart by wild animals.

“We want to hear about that,” Thomas said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for kids,” she told them. “I hate it when people say that,” Caitlin yelled. “Why do people write stories about kids if they don’t want kids to read them?”