And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges

by Amber Sparks

They both cling to the tail end of journalism, that ugly, scaly thing shrieking for clicks and shares.

They are both mildly unhappy, with moments of joy, in the unexceptional way of most people who live in the city,

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

She feels she’s missed a beat, a line. A scene has been left accidentally on the cutting room floor.

He has dyed his gray hair a dark, obvious brown, and his terrible beige pants match the terrible beige chairs, and with sudden tenderness she wishes they were still married.

You Won’t Believe What Really Happened to the Sabine Women

AFTER THE ATTACK, WE PULLED OURSELVES SHUT LIKE HOSPITAL curtains. Snap.

History will tell you we united Rome. History likes to lie about women.

The girl herself, in the way of most humans: unready for unhappiness. This fairy tale, in the way of most fairy tales: a warning disguised as a wish.

(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.)

Oh, come, says the fairy godmother, who is lounging on the girl’s lace and lilac bed, prosaically eating a leg of lamb. (And who, by the way, decided fairies were dainty? Spenser, perhaps? It takes a sizable constitution to carry all that magic around, after all.)

Like most fairies, she respects organized religion, but finds it too tame for her purposes.

It’s an abditory, explains the godmother. A place for hiding precious things.

This is rotten magic, she says. Just let me die like I wanted to. Oh, buck up, Melodrama, says the fairy, and she pulls the girl to her feet.

THE THIRD PERSON SHE MET was herself. Welcome, she said to herself, and she smiled.

She baked a cake for herself every morning, and every night she walked through the nearby park, just her and the ghouls and the owls.

I’LL BET YOU THINK GHOSTS ARE SO FUCKING ROMANTIC. I’LL bet you think they only haunt rich people, or like, Europeans: pale lords and ladies in castles or governesses in old family mansions. I’ll bet you’d laugh your head off at the idea of a trailer park ghost. Don’t.

But it’s not as if you choose your friends, any more than you choose your family. With friends, it’s all coincidence and timing and who lives nearby. And we live in the boondocks so options are limited.

I wish you could choose your family. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen this one.

The night he left for good, we threw a big party and got beer and chips and salsa and rented movies from Redbox.

I guess people can get to depend on each other, even if they don’t really belong with each other.

IT SEEMS LIKE NOBODY writes really grand stories the way they used to.

The stories have gotten so small. All this stuff they want us to read, like, cool, that’s great that this kid is hanging out at some grocery store or whatever, okay, but are you going anywhere with this?

She owns her own business, out of her duplex. It’s a small room with green curtains and a super old computer and super loud printer and a whole bunch of ashtrays. When she prints stuff, the neighbors bang on the walls and the dust comes up all around you, like a filthy snow globe.

Mike’s dad owns a cherry-red Camaro. He parks it in his driveway in the summer and washes it by hand every weekend, wearing teeny-tiny shorts and no shirt. It explains a lot about Mike.

ghosts are real goddamn needy, you know? Even the good ones.

I don’t want my life to be amusing. I don’t want my life to be small and funny and disposable.

Sure, it was probably kind of annoying. But you know, when someone’s husband gets decapitated in a revolution, you make allowances for them.

the practical problems of being broad-minded women when women were basically just broads.

what is history, anyway, but the chance to dig up our skeletons and give them new stories?

I wrote down etymology and comforted myself in language’s long and twisting track record, shaped and reshaped, long before we got here.

all our days are like this now, here at the end of the world. Everything feels like a memory already. Everything feels like it’s happening for the last time.

PAREIDOLIA. Attaching significance to insignificant things. It’s supposed to be an evolutionary advantage.

It is always this way, at the end of things, you said. The people will need a god. Are you fucking kidding me, I said.

APOPHENIA. The human tendency to seek patterns in random nature, where there are no patterns to be found.

I was born the day they found a face on Mars. It was a lie, of course; it was a geographical anomaly, a trick of the terrain.

We turn the universe into our mirror. #narcissus, naturally.

And what, at the end of the world, were we breeding more mouths for?

It seemed possible to see a kind of heaven in their stares, a cruel human dream of heaven. And I did not forgive you.

In Which Athena Designs a Video Game with the Express Purpose of Trolling Her Father

THE QUEEN WOKE UP ONE MORNING TO THE FURIOUS SOUND of the Future invading. It had that rumbling, insistent sound all uprisings carry with them.

Fine, said the queen. She’d always strongly disliked the king, forced into the marriage after her elder sister disgraced the family by having secret and robust babies with a shepherd. You should do the same, she told her younger sister, just before she was hauled off to the nunnery. The breeding stock is so much better.

Is the Future a nice place for girls, the queen asked, and the fit woman snorted. Not exactly, she said. But—and she eyed the queen’s cloak and shoes and hair—better than where you come from.

This is the Future, she told her daughter. The baby opened her eyes and looked around.

It was always cities and suburbs, because there she never stood out; so many invisible people haunt the shops and strip malls of suburban America.

You’ve never seen me, she said, walking faster. How had he seen her? No one did. Her heart fluttered and people stared. Her face felt flooded with spotlight.

Who was this man and why had he ruined her superpower?

BECAUSE THERE IS NO GOD, MY MOTHER ONCE MARRIED A man named Arnie Barney.

after making do for so many years on her own, my mother was exhausted. She was a young woman with the heart of an old widow. An upside-down fairy tale.

He loved my mother, of course, in an abstract way, but the men and women in our neighborhood didn’t spend much time in each other’s company, and that was just the way things were.