Pet

by Akwaeke Emezi

N. K. Jemisin books

Jam let out a breath that had been choked in her chest and stared up at the ceiling, air spooling out from her mouth into the nothingness around her.

Even when he fought, Redemption fought for the beauty of what his body could do, for the frailty of being human, the power and vulnerability tangled up in being flesh.

He and Jam had been lying on a grassy hill behind the school, one they liked to roll down, watching the sky bump and skip in hiccuped blue as gravity played with them.

You fight, she’d said. Of course you hold violence in your hands, she meant. Redemption heard what she hadn’t said out loud, and shook his head. “Here,” he said, tapping his chest. “Here is where I hold it, and I look at it and I fold it into something else. Even when I fight, it’s not about letting it out. Especially when I fight.”

We’re both alive when we fight. We’re magnificent; we’re testing our aliveness against each other. How fast is your alive? How smooth is your alive? How hard, how resilient? We’re alive because we can be hurt; we’re alive because we can heal. I think it’s beautiful. It’s why I fight.”

But Jam could still feel the anxiety and fear like a spilled sourness soaked up by the floor,

It was rare that Jam felt distinct from her parents—those moments when she was reminded that while in some ways they were a unit of three, in other and older ways, Bitter and Aloe were a unit of two and she, Jam, was an addendum. A loved and cherished addendum, sure, but still an addendum.

when he had made decisions that could soothe his anxiety with their firmness, their surety.

Her parents exchanged looks stuffed with silent words;

They had such loud conversations around her even when they weren’t using their words, as if she couldn’t understand all the other kinds of languages that didn’t need sound.

He snapped his fingers, a small bullet of sound breaking against his palm.

blinkered

“Here to push me into the black, away from the eyes, I am too loud, too saying loud things, too looking loud. Your parents think if you wipe me away, you can wipe away the inside of my mouth, the things I came with that live there. They don’t even know, they know enough to want me gone, they know the shape of the thing from the edges.

Jam gazed at the floor, focusing on a small splatter of blue paint that looked as if the sky had bled and no one had cleaned it up in time.

It was hard to keep secrets; you had to keep track of them, regulate how they moved through your body, make sure they didn’t swerve and jump out of your mouth.

The first step to seeing is seeing that there are things you do not see, it said.

If you do not know there are things you do not see, it said, then you will not see them because you do not expect them to be there. You think you see everything, so you think everything you see is all there is to be seen.

There is the unseen, waiting to be seen, existing only in the spaces we admit we do not see yet.

her words heavy with contempt laid over a skeleton of fear.

Relief burst large and bright

“Whenever you’re ready to share, I’m here,”

The stories seemed to scald her mouth.

Maybe when he breaks his arm again, he’ll learn? Jam said. “Ha! If the first time didn’t teach him, another one won’t.”

Redemption’s third parent,

Love

Your knowing, you think it gives you clarity, sight that pierces. It can be a cloud, a thing that obscures.

You have to learn that things might not be real, even if they look familiar.

It is fine to be afraid, to have a fine fear, to not want to cross a fine line.

You want many things, you are full of want, carved out of it, made from it, yes. But the truth does not care about what you want; the truth is what it is. It is not moved by want, it is not a blade of grass to be bent by the wind of your hopes and desires.

The truth does not change whether it is seen or unseen, it whispered in her mind. A thing that is happening happens whether you look at it or not. And yes, maybe it is easier not to look. Maybe it is easier to say because you do not see it, it is not happening. Maybe you can pull the stone out of the pool and put the moon back together.

You can choose to believe me or not to believe me. The truth does not care. The thing that is happening will happen whether you believe me or not.

She wasn’t sure how to hold the picture of Redemption’s house and the family inside along with the things Pet was saying. It felt like one should push out the other entirely, like both couldn’t be real together.

Maybe it’s not how people look, it’s what they do?

If she could, she’d find the feelings that lay behind the voices when the grown-ups were talking, hunt without moving, just with her hand pressed to the floor.

“So the obvious monsters would’ve been like the police and the billionaires,”

“All knowledge is good knowledge.

his concerned face a foreign arrangement of skin and muscle.

She wished he and Bitter would stop asking how she was, if she was mad at them. Their worry felt like a blanket they kept trying to throw over her shoulders, one she kept having to shrug off.

readying for readiness,

This keeping of a secret, it is not a good thing to keep, you are keeping too many and they do not fit inside your heart, they will keep spaces between you and your humans.

Am I a terrible person? she asked Pet. There is no such thing, it replied. There’s only what you do.

You humans and your binaries,

What, you like being feared better? It has its advantages when you are a thing that does not fit.

Ube was laughing his deep belly laugh, the one that sounded as if it had started at the bottom of a barrel and wound its way up before bursting into the air.

And if you come here looking for information, I’ma give it to you. That’s what I do. Ain’t no grown-up in the whole of Lucille grown enough to tell you you don’t deserve answers to your questions. You understand?”

“You have seen an unseen,” it said. “You now know a thing that was unknown. What is it?”

his voice low, almost crawling against the floor of the room.

The unseen can tear your eyes open when it comes into sight, and sometimes the mind behind that tears as well.

She didn’t say anything, not wanting to interrupt his silence. Instead, she climbed into the silence with him, staying there, feeling its soft curves.

Truth does not care if it feels true or not. It is true nonetheless.