And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

Can she make a scene? And where? She considers her options, as a friend. Scenes are for lovers. Friends are supposed to move on. Friends can be ghosted. But best friends?

History will tell you we made quick peace with our rapists, bore them children, married them. History will tell you how we launched ourselves into the battle like burning arrows, how we landed between kin and assaulters. History will tell you we united Rome. History likes to lie about women.

It’s easy to shrink yourself down when anger burns through you, hot-fierce, like a grass fire. It sucks the oxygen out; it eats up all but the most essential parts. Heart, lungs, brain, blood. Everything else diminishes, shadows itself, clears out disease. To shrink after anger is such a relief. To run toward oblivion a slaking of dark thirst.

And Demeter saw us scrambling in her fields like mice, and took pity on us, for had she not been assaulted by Poseidon, forced despite all her powers to bear his twins? She knew what it is to carry the weight of so much rage. And so she pulled us into her arms, up with the soil and grass, and she scattered us through the skies as stars, shimmering and immortal in the night skies. And for thousands of years, when men looked at the skies—our husbands, our sons, our grandsons, and so on for many generations—they saw us, and were filled with remorse and remembered what it meant to be a woman at the mercy of men. They built us a temple, with statues of ivory and gold, and every seven years the daughters of Rome wove new dresses for us, from the finest cloth on earth.

We cannot destroy man alone.

We would eat evil men like mice. We would rebuild the world in our image, in our glory, in our dazzling beauty and brilliance. Then, only then would we do the thing they say we did long ago: rid them of their wars and bring them peace beyond dreaming, beyond the imagining of any living thing.

She cried until her fairy godmother arrived in her sudden way and hugged the girl tight till her breath was flown. (Fairy godmothers aren’t all lacewings and dew, as everyone supposes. They are quite substantial, sturdy as stout trees and deep as rich dark earth, and their love is as good for you as vitamins and vegetables.)

(And who, by the way, decided fairies were dainty? Spenser, perhaps? It takes a sizable constitution to carry all that magic around, after all.)

Lavoisier’s wife—not time, not contemporaries—secured his place in history. (As is, must we point out, so often the case?)

Lavoisier’s wife was called Marie-Anne, and in full Marie-Anne Pierrette Lavoisier, née Paulze, but for the purposes of this narrative she shall be known as Lavoisier’s wife. This is not intended to strip her of her humanity or personhood, as a woman; rather, it is meant to focus a tight and somewhat ironic spotlight on the role she will play in her husband’s drama, and to signal (wink wink nod, as the OED would do) her eventual and historical erasure from it.

Is the Future a nice place for girls, the queen asked,

Wendy, by the time I came along, had more or less sworn off sex, so I was a nearly holy miracle. She had become an ascetic of the suburban sort; she still poured a little whiskey into her tea and wore pastel capri pants and chain-smoked, but she also thought a lot—an overwhelming lot, she told me—about hell. Some days she’d keep me home from school to help her make her martyred saint dioramas, or pose for paintings of Saint Lucy or Saint Joan.

And she talked to me. She opened her mouth and confessed her life in full, her parents and her childhood and the martyred lady saints and how she admired them so. Men she had no use for, not the saints or popes or even Jesus himself. She loved Mary like the sun, though, and she always wore the Virgin in a locket around her skinny neck.

Despite my spending so much time with her, Wendy was a ghost. She never had that solid feel, that reassuring weight of other kids’ mothers. Hollis used to call her Sister Wendy, but I always thought of her remove as more unscripted than liturgy, more faery than faithful. So far as I could tell, her religion had mostly to do with martyred saints and mystics, with women married to an unseen world.

Wendy had no need or desire for good little girls, only holy ones, which wasn’t quite the same.

Poor Hollis. So rational, so logical, so terribly male in the blandest, prettiest way.

Hollis got a stopwatch for his sixth birthday, and ever since, he’d been obsessed with time. Not time as a concept, or time as in: running out of. Rather, time split up, allotted, doled out. Time parsed and measured. Time served.

All through childhood, through birthday parties and recesses and snowball fights and school dances, we tried to help Oliver break the spell.

We were sad, though, because Oliver was our only link to something beautiful, a strange sort of magic that was otherwise lost to us.

really, is there anything more inclined to train someone to think exclusively of death—manner and method of, and What Lies Beyond—than a Catholic school education?

To be clear, I don’t want a funeral. I want a memorial service, a sort of celebration or party. The term “funeral” is only used as a generic marker, a shared cultural symbol to let others know that: (1) I am dead and (2) hope is the thing with feathers, and I have always been allergic to down.

No pictures age 9–16. See item 1. No Instagramming or live tweeting my death. See item 1.

Stop talking about death, people always say. As if it were taboo. As if it weren’t the Great Leveler. I was trained up to a life of accountancy and account-settling, so how can I not include it in my calculations? WHO DOESN’T LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT AND THINK ABOUT DEATH? I don’t believe it. Death deserves all caps. To deny it is like denying that you eat sandwiches. Everyone eats death.

Is it possible to make of me into a kind of champagne? Or better yet, whiskey—bury me in a peaty bog and get everybody good and drunk on me?

Before my favorite brother, D., died, before in fact he graduated to fentanyl and vodka cocktails, he used to love scotch so much it was a family joke. Because we’re Irish! Haha, ha, haha. Addiction, it runs in our family and this funeral—I mean celebration—will certainly be no place to deny that. Hard truth will be spoken, indulgences indulged. I can’t wait to see D. in the afterlife, so there had better be an afterlife. And he better be clean in it. I really miss him.

My easily shocked conservative family has always been concerned about my fidelity to gender. After a succession of girlfriends, the family was audibly relieved when I found a man. I could have married an escaped convict and still they’d have celebrated my return to the fold. As a ghost perhaps I’ll come back as a man, especially to haunt them. Or perhaps ghosts have no gender. A comforting thought. In the meantime, A. and I will surely share a succession of mistresses, younger and plumper as the years go by.

I’m not sure how much dancing I want. Definitely no DJ. A nice jazz quartet might be tasteful, I suppose. Classical music would be too on the nose. On the other hand, perhaps we’ll need a good band. I have some sexy exes I would dearly love to dance with again, even and especially as a ghost. 21.Would it be a disaster if the memorial wasn’t tasteful? Shouldn’t death, the great renewal, be a sort of breathless bacchanalia, anyhow?

Perhaps my family would learn to love one another at my celebration. Perhaps they’d drop repression for a moment, just one, and stop slicing into one another for the sake of respectability.

The future, it turns out, looks a lot like the nineties. Do you remember those old television programs, the ones highlighting D-list celebrities, fashion mistakes? Cataloging fads like fades? Neons and novelty songs and 2-D video games? This is a future bereft of all such bright trappings. Think instead clumsy car phones, gray pleated pants, office parks and corporate-ladder climbing. Think overtime and pagers. Think shared custody. Think children’s breakfast cereal, eaten alone, in the dark.

We have no idea if the robots have developed a language of their own. They are so inscrutable, so distant and cold, so like the stars in their singular orbits. What language do the stars speak?

Each day, we settle into narrow cubicles, open paper calendars, mark important dates in red ink. We glance at framed school pictures of the children we don’t see for more than a few moments each night, once they are sound asleep. We hold endless meetings in conference rooms, hold lengthy and serious phone conversations over big black plastic receivers. We put people on indefinite hold.

I have been so lonely, O gods. I have been like the stars, white-hot with endless longing. Where is my companion? Wishing, now, I could fall to Earth.

My mother built herself walls of story and so I will rebuild her story castle, right here in this cubicle. Surely, I can’t be the only one dreaming himself out. Surely others will refuse the endless meetings, the swivel chairs, the fluorescent lights, the traffic jams, the built-in ashtrays, the stacks and stacks of paper.

Space was not prepared to receive us and does not receive us now. To the robots, it is immaterial: we needed to leave the planet, the oceans were swallowing us whole, and so we went. We were given no choice. We are lucky they felt some responsibility for their makers, as clumsy and backward as we are to them. But for us, who built Elysian Fields for our dead, who tore down our forests and burnt the sky to please the living, who made the robots to make us whole—we might have made another choice. We might have burned along with the world, drowned along with the dead.

Are we living now? Landscapes are malleable, organic; a human can make a mark. But we are making nothing. I shall construct this castle in honor of that memory of earth, the conquest; Earth, the colony.

Sometimes I think we already died, years or eons ago. Sometimes I think we are living on only in dreams, as brains in a jar, or maybe just ones and zeros. I don’t like to think past this thought.

THE MAN AND WOMAN ARE CHILDLESS AND WEALTHY AND happy. She loves him, and he loves her, in part because of affection, in part because of muscle memory, in part because of their shared personal possessions. They love each other about as much as people who adore things can love other people. She has learned to love things less the older she grows. He has come to depend on them. She is generous and quiet, and he is witty and talkative. They are a good match; all of their friends say so.

He is kind to her and she is kind to everybody; if pressed he would say it’s the only thing he doesn’t like about her. This, he knows, sounds monstrous, but he understands he’s borrowed so many better traits from her. He would not use the word jealous, but resentment, yes, perhaps. He only has enough kindness for one person. He supposes that’s what love means to him. If he were a good person, he supposes, it would be a trait he would love, this boundless heart. But he isn’t a better person. He knows this about himself. She knows this, too, and because she is kind, loves him even more for it.

Debussy knew when he wrote La cathédrale engloutie how small and dreadful sounds can be, drowned in an empty city without bodies to absorb them.