Pet

by Akwaeke Emezi

In the meantime, the angels banned firearms, not just because of the school shootings but also because of the kids who shot themselves and their families at home; the civilians who thought they could shoot people who didn’t look like them, just because they got mad or scared or whatever, and nothing would happen to them because the old law liked them better than the dead.

The angels took the laws and changed them, tore down those horrible statues of rich men who’d owned people and fought to keep owning people. The angels believed and the people agreed that there was a good amount of proper and deserved shame in history and some things were just never going to be things to be proud of.

Some were statues of the dead, mostly the children whose hashtags had been turned into battle cries during the revolution. Others were giant sculptures with thousands of names carved into them, because too many people had died and if you made statues of everyone, Lucille would be filled with stone figures and there’d be no room for the alive ones.

Bitter knew her name was heavy, but she hadn’t minded, because it was honest. That was something she’d taught Jam—that a lot of things were manageable as long as they were honest.

“Monsters don’t look like anything, doux-doux. That’s the whole point. That’s the whole problem.”

So, yes, people forget. But forgetting is dangerous. Forgetting is how the monsters come back.

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

The revolution had been slow and ponderous, but it had weight, and that weight built up a momentum, and when that momentum finally broke forth, it was with a great and accumulated force. This force washed out the monsters who worked in public spaces, allegedly for the public, but it carried farther, into the homes and schools. It touched everyone; it made change. People started by believing the victims, and once this was apparent that it was safe to report monsters now, more and more people did so. The monsters always tried to apologize when they were caught, using the same slippery words that had worked for them before. They thought it would be enough, that some time would pass and they would be welcomed back as if nothing had happened. They were wrong.

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.

He was eating with a casualness that was only a little forced, doing a good job of keeping his mask up. Jam knew how hard it was to stick one to your face around people you didn’t have to do that with before. But when realities diverged and you found yourself on a different path from people you used to share a path with…well. Masks were useful then; not quite lies, not quite truths. Just decisions about what to be and what to show. Curation.

How do we know we’re doing the right thing? she asked. There is no right thing, Pet replied. There is only the thing that needs to be done.