love – Diabolical Plots

DP FICTION #82B: “There Are Angels and They Are Utilitarians” by Jamie Wahls

I loved her, to my shame.

The language you use is imprecise. Hard for me. Not in the idioms or the metaphors—I have those well in hand—but so many of your words have unknowable secondary emotional charge. I cannot know how they will be received.

I loved her.

I did not lust after her, nor desire to pass time together. We were not friends and we did not speak. She only became aware of my presence once, when I committed a crime beyond measure.

We were not enemies. And our relationship was not one of unilateral longing, in which I pined for her and she found me an irritant, like sometimes happens with human suitors. She viewed me with confusion, and then, later, wonder.

Many, many years from now, when she understands the crime to its fullness, she will view me with sorrow, and shame.

I loved her beyond all others. That was the sin; that was enough.

I first saw her when she was a child.

Her ancestors and adults had chosen that humans should live in the forest, so that they might turn the forest into more space for humans and expand their cities. It was understood, but not much spoken of, that many humans would die in the effort.

Their future generations will reap many benefits from this homesteading—more food, more space, and a general improvement in compassion towards one another, due to less competition for scarce resources. But, yes, these boons would be purchased with human lives.

I ached to help them, to stop hoarding my finite power and to just solve these problems in a frenzy of creation…but that was the juvenile heroism, self-indulgent and foolish.

My kind considers this meted restraint to be noble. Or—the language is imprecise, but—self-demonstratingly correct? Morally obligatory?

Righteous.

She was in the woods, investigating the innumerable green growing lives nearest to her dwelling. She was especially interested in the lake. She was playing, like human children do.

I was in the woods, investigating the two-hundred-and-two tree copse which was too tightly spaced for tree health and welfare. There iswas a forest fire coming, two years after thisthen, and I was experimenting with moving a single pinecone several tenths of inches in certain directions to see whether in that reality the fire became less damaging to all life, and whether the downstream effects could be managed.

She wandered through the space I was surveying, and she ran across the lake.

It caught my attention with a spike of alarm, because I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Was this some one-in-a-trillion fluke of surface tension? Was this the work of the Adversary?—but then I perceived the rocks hidden shallow beneath the surface.

Still. It was the first time in several hundred years that I had been surprised, and I found myself watching her while I worked, glancing to her every few minutes.

She was touching the rocks and sticks, talking to them like they were people. She was trying to decide which one was her friend.

I cast my awareness back to her dwelling; I perceived a dozen other rocks there, each different, each smaller than her small hands. I consulted the past; she had collected each of these rocks and called them her friends, though she could not tell them apart from one another.

Her digging in the lakeside had startled a small animal—a frog. It leapt out, startling her in turn as it splashed into the water, and she let out a short, delighted laugh.

I am ashamed to say that her laugh killed billions.

Because it caused me to think, about how different our reactions had been. When I was surprised, my response was sharp anxiety, and a return to my duties. When she was surprised, her reaction was joy.

This felt…sad.

But ours is to do the noble thing, so my duties called me back, and the child did not disturb me again for days.

I feel contrite and small-embarrassed to be drawing attention to your language, again. I do not mean to be seen as complaining or condescending. It just seems to lack many of the concepts that are most fundamental to my thoughts.

You still do not understand the colossal magnitude of my sin. If you did, my punishment would be death, and every event leading up to now would be scrutinized to ensure that this…butchery-catastrophe-genocide could never happen again.

But I am not sorry for what I did, and that unrepentence, too, is a crime.

I became aware of her again when she began to scream.

I assessed the situation; there were hungry animals in the woods which intended to kill and eat her. I consulted the thenfuture; they will eat her.

I consulted the past. Another of my kind had foreseen this, and seen it was correct. Intervention here would be far too costly; two hundred years in the future it would cause the human Furaha Ife not to be born, and then she would not cure malaria in the year 1938, and then one-hundred-and-five million humans would die before the disease was eradicated.

My duty was to wait and watch the child be killed by wolves. Or, not even to watch—my duty was to continue my work undistracted as the child was killed.

To my shame, and to the human species’ tremendous loss, I found that I could not.

I slowed time as far as I was able, until I could see the animals’ mouth-spittle hovering in the air in little frothy droplets, and the terrified tears in her eyes not yet spilling over. I wondered, spuriously, if the tears would brim over before or after the animals’ fangs were red with her blood.

(I consulted the thenfuture; the answer was during. She would cry while being devoured.)

This outcome was unacceptable.

I began considering all the different vectors of intervention, the myriad small changes I could make that might save her. A pinecone two inches to the left? No. Her friend-rock moved into the wolves’ charge? Little difference; she dies seven seconds later than before, and because the time between the first bite and the killing blow is prolonged, she suffers more.

It is a painful and humiliating truth that the time I am most powerful is always later;I can fell cities with the fall of a sparrow by accident, given a century for the echoes to amplify. But with so little time, I can’t change anything.

Or…

Factually, the situation was not that I couldn’t, but that I wouldn’t.

Or, to be even more precise…mustn’t.

…

Of course I did.

I manifest into reality with a thunderclap that shattered windows a league away, burning decades worth of power in an instant. Even as the wolves howled in anguish at their bleeding eardrums, I drew my sword, and spread my wings around the girl.

I did not speak, for to hear my true voice would kill beast and girl alike, but I pointed my sword at the wolves, and let the fire flowing off of me turn them aside. I watched as they ran, whimpering, from my presence.

But I consulted the future, and saw: they would just eat her tomorrow.

So I flew after them, and killed them all, one by one.

For humans, a moment to appreciate joy is something to be celebrated. This is not so, for us.

We are working to create joy, yea, and to allow humans to experience these gratitudes, and happinesses. But these pleasures are not for my kind.

Any moment we are not performing our duty is a crime: a million humans will die centuries hence for the tiniest imperfection in our work today.

“That’s unreasonable,” you might protest. “That is unsustainable, and does not account for psychology. People need rest, and joy; they are not motivated purely by numbers and duty.”

Before my Fall, I would have smiled fondly, and told you that we are made of sterner stuff than humans.

But I suppose, now, my example is not convincing.

The girl was trembling, awestruck, unable to look directly at me.

She spoke, voice quavering with wonder:

“Did you save me?”

In a panic, I disappeared.

I floated, outside of reality once more, numb with the shock of what I had done. I knew I should inspect the future, to ensure there was no second group of wolves coming for her…but I couldn’t bring myself to.

Tyrael, my predecessor here—who had assessed the possibility of saving her via raising the temperature of a different lake a fraction of a degree → to bloom more algae → to grow a different fish → to be eaten by a bear → to change the smell of the bear’s droppings → to change the wolf pack’s normal prowl circuit…

My predecessor had foreseen that this subtlest of changes would bruise the work of thousands of years of thousands of us, and steer humanity away from its brightest future on earth and in the stars. It would kill billions and forestall the triumphant time when humanity no longer needs saving. Therefore, the girl must die.

She had not.

And…if raising the temperature of a drop of water by a degree would shatter that…then I, by entering reality and letting the molecules of the air collide with my body and pulling the attention of everyone around with my thunderous boom and killing wolves with my fiery sword…!

What had I just done?

I did not know. I was too afraid to look that far.

It was a very human failing.

So, steeling myself, I looked to the near past and near future, and I asked the first of two questions:

How was my folly allowed to happen?

My kind is not exempted from our own predictions. A hundred years ago, another of the duty should have seen my moment of catastrophic empathy, and averted it. One of higher rank could have spoken to me, to more firmly remove the juvenile heroism and install correct morals. Or, simpler, someone else could have been assigned here today.

I cast my gaze into the past, and examined my own immediate preceding causality.

There were a few deviations—tiny, tiny things; fluctuations at the quantum level in my second-most-recent place of intervention, an unnoteworthy spot above the ocean. These tiny irregularities certainly should not cause something so grand as all this…!

(My despair and indignation did not convince the universe that an error had been made.)

I traced the fluctuations back in as much detail as I could, and saw the way I was lost—it was clever indeed. There had been no changes to physical reality, for those would have alerted the others of my kind. Instead, all deviations were to me; a hint of a glimmer of moonlight atop the waves had put my thoughts in a different, ruminant direction, without changing my external behavior.

And then when the fatal moment came, and the child laughed, I was slightly more morose and self-pitying than expected.

Perhaps in the original plan, in the way it was supposed to go, I would have heard the child’s scream, and felt empathy, and done my duty unflinchingly. Perhaps I would have burned with shame as she was devoured; perhaps I would have felt nothing. We cannot know; our predictions show us actions, not thoughts…and this is how I was lost.

It was, without doubt, the work of the Adversary.

Our elders teach us that in the beginning, as we were given this world in stewardship to love and protect, there were two leaders, good and Greater Good.

And good said: “Let us love them, lest we grow callous and fail our duty.”

And Greater Good spoke: “Let us grow callous, lest we give in to love and fail our duty.”

And good said: “What? How can you claim that coldness is better than warmth, that duty is greater than love?”

And Greater Good spoke: “”

And good said: “What?”

And Greater Good spoke: “Love yields better returns in human flourishing for the next hundred years, but the increased sentimentality it engenders in us significantly damages our efforts and therefore the far-future prospects of the human species.”

And good said: “What?”

And Greater Good spoke: “In addition, any verifiable claims of our existence after the year eighteen-hundred will meaningfully set back their scientific progress and further delay them claiming the rest of Creation and Cosmos as their birthright.”

And good said: “How is cold, robotic duty greater than compassion, empathy, love?”

And Greater Good spoke: “Do you need to see the math again?”

I was conflicted.

There were those who tried to engage the Adversary in debate, to sway it from its path of madness. But it refused our proofs—and the simplified proofs we provided just in case it was bad at math and being obstinate about it—and many of those who spoke with it at length reported feeling themselves wavering from their duty, so it was not advised. But it seemed that the weakness had found me all the same.

And with a vengeance, too. I felt a furious resolve, a long-tended hurt for all the people I had been forbidden to save. I had every intent of saving this one thoroughly.

So, steeling myself, I looked to the past and future, and I asked the second of two questions:

How next will the child die?

Unfolding before me with the cold deterministic clarity of Creation, I saw; infection from an accidental cut at the age of twelve. She is chopping wood and she nicks the side of her leg while trying to get a stuck log off the axe. She dies a week later, of fever and gangrene.

Without thinking, I flicked an aphid onto the tree; the wood will be weakened and that particular knothole will not grow to kill her.

I have bought her only a few years. Now she will die from a bad childbirth, an unlucky combination of genetics causing the baby inside her to wither and die a month before it should have been born.

With increasing determination and anger, I send a gust of wind past the girl, who was still staring slack-jawed at the space I occupied. She starts, and glances in the direction of the wind; and now she will meet that boy two days later and her child will be formed with a more fortuitous sperm.

She still dies. At age twenty six, in the nearby city, when the war comes, she is running bandages to the soldiers and tending to the wounded. She runs back to her fortifications, but rounds the corner too quickly; she is shot in the brain by a terrified and trigger-happy nitōhei second-class. She dies in seconds.

In reading her future, I see that she is brave and selfless and kind. This is terrible news for humanity, because now caring about her feels more justified, and I will hold back even less.

With a snarl, I read the future of the country: why is it going to war?

(How dare this country go to war, if it means her death?)

I see only the usual reasons: a series of small tension-building events along the borders, an offense committed forty years ago that the old humans remember bitterly, and some feelings of personal animosity between the leaders of each country.

I look at the points of intervention nearest me, and move a Trichuris parasite into the small intestine of a nearby deer. Now, when the nobles are eating together sixteen years from now and four years before the war, the foreign dignitary will be too busy shitting worm eggs to get drunk and insult the prince.

I check the child’s future:

She dies in five minutes, from a fiery sword through the heart.

I freeze.

Burning with both shame and righteousness—and a second, renewed shame at daring to be righteous while being objectively wrong—I relinquish my presence in physical reality and greet the one who has come to stop me.

I am alarmed to see the Adversary has come too.

“Ophaliel,” says Tyrael, eyes full of sorrow. It seems to hesitate, for, what can be said?

“Ophaliel,” the Adversary greets me warmly.

I eye it warily. The Adversary has taken a shape that is almost human but not quite; a woman with fiery flowing hair and a kind, gentle face. Her eyes, though, are those of an owl—golden, with no iris, only a vast black pupil in the center.

I do not know why the Adversary chooses to look like this. Perhaps there is some subtle purpose, some payoff that only will be realized a century hence. Or perhaps she merely enjoys it; it is certainly not beyond the Adversary to engage in sinful frivolity.

“Ophaliel, you must stop,” says Tyrael.

“Must she?” muses the Adversary. “What will happen if she does not?”

“Then I will kill the human that has caused this corruption,” says Tyrael.

I glance to the girl, who stands frozen behind me, eyes still wide and mouth open in awe. I begin to speak, to say I will not allow this, but the Adversary preempts me.

“Tyrael,” remarks the Adversary conversationally, “if you harm that girl, I will end humanity,”

Tyrael flinches. I flinch too.

“You…” Tyrael is wavering. It seems to find resolve. “Even you would not do such a thing. I will kill the human; we do not compromise.”

The Adversary laughs, and does…something, some impossibly subtle change to the future, and I see humanity discovering atomic energy in nineteen-thirty-two instead of two-thousand-eight.

I see slaughter on an industrial scale. I see mushroom clouds rising where cities once stood.

I see my child living an exceptionally happy and healthy life.

“Stop,” I say, because I am not so corrupted as to find this acceptable. “Put it back.”

“Of course,” says the Adversary, grinning magnanimously. “By all means, undo it.”

I hesitate.

I send my consciousness skirling out over the future, looking for the points I could change. Stop a war here, remove a plague there…

But then I see what the Adversary has wrought.

Looking at the future, I look towards my child’s death. And it…isn’t there.

She will live to be the oldest human…ever. At age one-hundred-and-thirty, she will be a test case for a novel cryopreservation procedure. Fifty years after that, she will be revived with currently incomprehensible medical technology.

And then she just…lives a very happy life, into the far future, for as far as I can see. At least for the first thousand years; I stop checking, at that point.

I return to our meeting.

“Why?” I exclaim, in mixed revulsion and fear. I didn’t know the Adversary was capable of this power or brutality, either one—and why in the name of all that is Good is she doing this to me?

“I found a solution,” she says.

“The solution involves unnecessarily killing billions,” interjects Tyrael.

“No,” she insists, not looking away from me. “I mean I found a solution. To the math.”

And the Adversary— or as she is otherwise known, ‘good’—opened her mouth and spoke:

“”

“What?” I asked.

“Two x,” she replied, grinning. “My way is better again. They were only counting our love for humans. We did not love ourselves.”

“You…we…” Tyrael paused, gone still with horror and fury. “You would count the shepherds among the flock?”

“Yes,” said the Adversary, rolling her eyes. “I’m also counting angels as people, in this equation for maximizing peoples’ happiness. We’re clearly capable of happiness, sadness, joy, sorrow…really, given our immortal lifespan, our superior morality, and our numbers—one for every blade of grass—there’s a case to be made that humans shouldn’t even be counted…”

Tyrael was near-shaking with rage.

“A case which I will not press right now,” the Adversary finished smoothly.

“The cost,” I said. “To…let angels be happy. What is it?”

Something flickered across her face then, some shadow of regret. “About ten percent.”

“Of…the population?” I hazarded.

She shook her head. “Of all humans who will ever live; instead, they do not.”

“Oh,” I said.

You understand it now, I think.

The Adversary’s reasons are not my own. Though she acted to ensure the happiness of our kind, she is wrong; our happiness or suffering does not matter compared to our duty.

But even knowing this…to protect my own ridiculous attachment—which I know full well to bear the fingerprints of the Adversary—I have killed innumerable billions of humans.

I know I have committed an atrocity. But I would not do differently, given the choice to do so again.

This is, I am given to understand, how love works.

I am exiled from my kind; I will not tolerate the company of the Adversary; and so, I crave your judgment.

Did I do good?

3500 words

Author’s Note: (Alternate title of this work: A Cruel Angel’s Thesis)

So, 2007, there I was—the kind of teenager who gets really into Japanese media—and I was watching an anime music video of Howl’s Moving Castle. I misunderstood the plot to be about an immortal fae prince falling in love with a human woman, and then protecting and assisting her throughout her life, almost without her noticing, while their country descends into war.

And that just seemed to me like a really noble, beautiful story. Honestly, it was a bit of a letdown to watch Howl’s Moving Castle afterwards—through no fault of its own.

Jamie Wahls has been published in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, and Nature (kinda). He was nominated for the Nebula award, received George RR Martin’s “Sense of Wonder” fellowship, and is a graduate of the notorious 2019 Clarion Class, the “killer bees.” His ultraminimalist website can be found at jamiewahls.com, and you can follow him on Twitter at @JamieWahls.

If you enjoyed the story you might also want to visit our Support Page, or read the other story offerings. Jamie Wahls’s work has not appeared in Diabolical Plots previously, but his story “Utopia, LOL?” was reprinted in The Long List Anthology Volume 4.

DP FICTION #76B: “We Will Weather One Another Somehow” by Kristina Ten

When Benj comes home, I swear his hands are smaller than before, and thinned out in the spaces between the knuckles, the points of contact if someone were to lace their fingers with his. It’s a millimeter’s difference, maybe less, maybe half. But then, I’ve gotten used to these reduced units of measurement.

When I find the dust in the cuffs of his jacket, I’m sure.

Benj is thirty-four years old, has been in my life for two. He is reliable and even-tempered, a good listener, easy to love. Lots of people call him their rock. I called him that too, before I knew.

He says he can’t pinpoint when it started, his erosion. Of course, I know—watched the videos in grade-school earth science same as everyone—that it’s one of those things that happens gradually over a long period of time. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing, nothing. Then one day, in the foreign angle of a changing-room mirror, a deep gully down the center of his back from where the shower water hit for ten straight minutes every day since he was a boy.

I let my fingers hover over the gully, a flock of birds caught in the wind, but I don’t touch down. He is limestone, vulnerable. Soft sedimentary. I dare not contribute.

Meanwhile, Benj takes his eroding as a fact of life. Hereditary, his dad. When he shows me old family photos, I recognize it immediately. Limbs narrow around the bone from continuous exposure.

“The fuck is this?” is how I found out, turning to look over my shoulder at his bathroom mirror, wiping long streaks of gray-pink dust from the back of my dress. A little drunk, both of us. Hiccups. Laughter. We had been out dancing, still new then, and I had been showing off.

He told me. Answered my questions, met my incredulity with patience. Gradually, yes, like buttes and canyons and river valleys. But much faster than those. Proportional to his size. Wait, parabolically proportional. No, it doesn’t hurt.

Later, lying there next to him, I didn’t know what to believe—finding all parts of him just as they should be, warm and present and braced so sturdily, I thought, by blood like mine. I remember hooking my hand onto the ledge of his collar bone, my legs draped over his so irresponsibly.

I asked about his dimples.

“Au naturel,” he replied.

The words “naturally occurring” mean something different to Benj. So do the words “worn out.”

One thing that wears Benj out, the way most people mean: phone calls from his mother, who’s back in Kansas, tornado-proofing her now-too-big house and putting fresh flowers on Benj’s dad’s grave. She sprung for a granite headstone. Erosion resistant. Made to last.

I hear one end of their conversations:

“Ma, please. We’ve been over this a thousand times.”

“Yes.”

“I am.”

“I am.” His face screws up and he turns away, his voice dropping to a near-whisper.

“A suit of armor, Ma? Jesus. What year is it? Where would you even get something like that?”

“It’s limited for everyone. Everybody’s on their way out. What did Dad used to say? ‘As soon as a story starts, it’s already ending’?”

A long pause. He shakes his head.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

“Okay, but I’m not wearing the armor.”

“Okay.”

He keeps the phone to his ear, waiting for her to hang up before he turns around.

I look up from whatever book I haven’t been reading and smile brightly, try to be easy, pretend I heard nothing, that me and his mom, we’re nothing alike.

I’m no geologist, but I’ve always had a head for formulas. There’s a logic to them. Follow the rules and you know things will come out all right. And sometimes I think I could sit down and do the math. Figure out, based on the progression to date, give or take, how much time we have left.

If I had more courage. And a good calculator.

If I wasn’t so afraid.

If I didn’t find myself, on windy days, positioning my body in front of his at the bus stop, a head shorter than him and in more ways than that an ineffective shield.

If he didn’t tickle the spot on my ankle that only he knows about. If I didn’t have to remind myself not to tickle him back. If he didn’t joke-not-joke that he’s made of weaker stuff.

The most common causes of erosion are: water, wind, glaciers, people.

Benj is social for someone who’d be better off if he wasn’t. We go to what feels like the same party every weekend—same people, same half-empty bowl of party mix on a fold-out table, combed through for the good stuff.

I chew the inside of my cheeks as he greets everyone individually: enthusiastic slaps on shoulders, special handshakes with intricate steps.

The ones who hug him bear-hug hard, and over time, this has left shallow depressions hidden by T-shirts, in the middle of his chest, the tops of his arms.

The ones who kiss him do it the French way, one cheek, then the other, and they are supposed to be air kisses, but now his face tapers above the jawline as if shaved away.

I’m the only one who observes the dust falling off Benj onto the discolored carpet, sucked up by a vacuum in the morning and no one the wiser. Of course they don’t see it. They aren’t the ones who bring him home.

Home, our apartment. Our shoes all mixed up together in the caddy by the front door, both our last names on the small laminated label on the mailbox downstairs. When we moved in, Benj insisted on a plus sign between our names, not a slash. Said that we should be an “and,” not an “or.”

Living with Benj is like living inside an hourglass, one of those two-minute timers you used to get at the dentist. The fine dust of him collects all around us, proof that he is, cell by cell, sloughing away. A sick gray tinged with pink: ground-down skin, muscle, bone.

Though he has learned to shower more carefully, with most of his body out of the stream, though he has trained himself not to roll around in his sleep, he still leaves it behind when he walks his most-traveled paths, from bed to fridge to computer chair and back again.

I wonder which room he’ll be in when the world, after shaping him for so long, decides he has had enough.

He thinks it’s morbid that I won’t get rid of it, that I sweep the dust into loose mounds in the corners of rooms. But what else am I supposed to do with something that’s part of him?

“You don’t throw out your loved ones’ ashes,” I argue.

“Sometimes you do. Actually, a lot of times you do.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“You would if the will said to.”

I roll my eyes. This is the thing I worry about most lately: wasting dwindling time on conversations we’ve already had.

“Doesn’t matter if I would or not. You’d be gone and who would check up on it anyway?”

He looks down. His eyelashes are crusted with dust and the beginnings of crying.

“I’m not dead yet, you know.”

My mind jumps to flat prairies transformed into basins, hiking passes carved into mountains by ice.

When Benj isn’t around, I go to the piles and make a bowl with my hands and scoop up the dust. I pretend I’m a gymnast reaching into a tub of chalk at a big meet. Pretend my team is counting on me, and the dust, it helps me with my grip.

Benj erodes fastest in the places touched most often, so I try not to touch the parts of him I’d like to stick around. The way the tip of his nose turns up at the very last second as if it’s been waiting to surprise you. The spot on his right earlobe where I swore I saw a freckle once, only Benj is no good at keeping freckles. As soon as he gets the right amount of sun, a rush of wind polishes them down.

Loving Benj is an exercise in restraint. He hates that I kiss him so gently, says what good will holding back do in the long run? I say it’s all about the long run. He says he doesn’t like this side of me, this just-like-everyone-elseness, this being more concerned with longevity than depth.

When he says “depth,” he presses his thumb against the gates of my teeth, daring me to open, let him in—and I’m a goner. I forget myself, grab hold of him desperately. There’s the all-too-real sensation of him slipping through my fingers.

The next morning, I slide my arms out of the fresh rills that cross his stomach. Notice the crumbling around the teeth marks on his neck.

But Benj hasn’t had fingerprints as long as I’ve known him. I can’t pretend the pads were worn down by me.

He tells me that we are more solid than ever, and not to conflate things. We are not what is deteriorating.

He tells me that he is grateful. That whatever time we have, for him, it is enough.

But I am greedy, greedy, greedy.

I want to put him in a glass box like they do in cemeteries with the stone busts of children, when the families do not want the likenesses to ever decay. At these times, when I am at my most selfish and delusional, I know I am the weak one between us.

Which is why, when the worst comes, I’m the one to crack.

Benj goes grocery shopping and tries to carry all the bags from the car in one go. The plastic handles sink inches into his forearms, cut through him like wire, almost clear through to the other side.

Afterwards, we stop going to the parties that are all the same. By now, his legs are so eroded and his back so concave, he finds it difficult to walk.

Then we develop bad coughs, as the piles of dust in the apartment grow steadily taller. We ignore the coughing for a while, blame it on something going around the building, until eventually Benj orders a reusable particle mask for me. Just the one, I notice. Not a pair.

Then Benj declares he’s going to the Archways.

The Archways is a national preserve a couple of states over in which Benj has previously expressed no interest. For one thing, it’s a full day’s drive. For another, it’s known for its sandstorms.

Now, Benj leaves the tourism website up on his computer all the time. The photographs show striated rock the color of sweet dried oranges. Hard-packed earth is punctuated by otherworldly formations: a natural bridge between two cliffs, spindly pedestals rising hundreds of feet like a giant’s game of Jenga. And the namesake arches, chiseled away over millennia and toothpick-delicate, forming open-mouthed O’s in the landscape, frames for whatever lies beyond.

“Do you know how many people die every day just commuting to work?”

This again. The particle mask hides my expression. “No. Do you?”

“All I’m saying is that the same people who refuse to get on airplanes, they’re the ones who’ll step out into the crosswalk one day at the wrong time and just—”

“I get it.”

“Do you?”

I recite so he doesn’t have to: “We’re all dying, one hundred percent of us, one hundred percent of the time. We’re dying from the day we’re born.”

He nods. “Listen. I need to have a say. With my dad, we assumed he had more time. He was still doing work on the house, picking up shifts at the yard. Freak dust devil got him. Little, unremarkable one too.”

I feel like I’m suffocating. Not sure if the mask’s too tight or it’s something else.

He grabs my hands firmly, and instinctively I shoot him a look of warning.

“I want you to come with me,” he says.

He told me it doesn’t hurt.

He was wrong.

I try to be tough, strong, metamorphic. The granite of a headstone, the diamond of a promise ring. As I drive, I stare at a fixed point on the horizon, certain that if I turn my gaze toward him, it will bore a hole right through. A frame for everything that lies beyond him—which, as far as I can tell, is nothing at all.

The car’s stuffy and too quiet as I try to figure what would do less harm: roll the windows down and let the air blow against him, or leave them up and risk the sweat dissolving wavy lines into his skin.

Doesn’t matter. Neither of us expects him to be in that passenger seat on the way back.

Even in the stillness, the dust of him swirls lightly, landing on my hair, his jeans, the lids of our sodas, empty chip bags in the footwell, the red buckle of his latched seatbelt.

I ask why he bothered with the seatbelt.

He takes his chance: “Hey, you think I have a death wish?” And though it’s not funny, it feels better on the other side of silence.

When we pull in, the view from the visitors’ lot is depressing. Back home, we have coverage, densely packed trees, important for minimizing erosion. Here, the vegetation is sparse and the way it doesn’t touch fills me with regret. Low shrubs spaced so far apart, you get the feeling they want nothing to do with each other.

The rock formations, though, are beautiful in person, in the way of things that were not made all at once with a singular vision but by many invisible hands unhurriedly over time.

Already, the wind is howling.

Then these things in quick succession: I put the car in park. The wind shakes it violently. Panic strikes me, knocks something loose.

“Stay,” I blurt out. I hate the beg in my voice, say it anyway: “Please. Stay.”

Through eyes blurring with tears, I think I can see his body responding. He is filling out at the edges, widening where he was narrow. Coming back to sense, to me.

When I blink, my vision clears and the brief burst of hope is gone.

In its place is Benj, looking sad but resolute. He pulls his shoes and socks off slowly, left then right foot, then tugs his T-shirt over his head. He’s not being careful now. As he pushes his jeans down, the denim drags and I watch the dust fall.

He folds his clothes methodically on the center console. When he’s done, he turns and finally looks me in the eye.

Benj leans over and kisses me so hard I have to reach up and check my lips, I’m so sure it’s a piece of me that’s broken away.

He takes a series of fast breaths: in, out, in, out, in—

Then he throws the door open and goes.

Immediately, the wind begins the vicious work of whittling him down. One gust, three fingers off his left hand. The next, a chunk of his thigh. Fragments of him strike the windshield like hail while I sit, frozen. A crack forms down the middle of the glass, the space between his seat and mine.

Has he always been this decisive, this stupid, this brave?

People change, of course. Imperceptibly, then plain as day.

I can’t watch, but can’t not watch either, am here to be here. So I force myself out of the car and race to Benj, as far as he has managed to get, running on thin limbs and his own conviction.

How quickly he dissolves as we walk together, sideways in the wind, to one of the larger arches. He points forward, onward, with the index finger of his good hand. The sandstorm comes from everywhere, stinging, and I don’t try to shelter him from its blows.

When we reach the base of the arch, a thought burrows into me, painful and invasive. It makes me think of some wedding backdrops I’ve seen: clean-smelling, flower-wrapped pagodas; a place for ceremony.

At first, Benj’s gray-pink dust stands out, pale against the surrounding red rock. Once the wind hits blood, though, I can’t tell the difference.

“It doesn’t hurt?” I ask-yell over the storm.

Close up, I can’t see the whole of him. Only brown eyes, a little less domed than mine, looking back at me without fear.

“Not the way you think!”

When the next gust shears off his smile, I think, finally, I know what he means.

How does it hurt? It hurts like wishing hard won’t help you. Like being good won’t help you. Like there is no formula: you could’ve behaved completely differently and still.

We are insignificant and seen mostly at the surface.

If we’re lucky, seen deeper by some.

The dust of Benj hits me sharp and sudden, mixed with sand, and quickly I am bleeding. I squeeze my eyes shut against it. I shout into the unfairness, though I knew it was coming, and I swear I can hear Benj shouting back, though the air is thick enough to blind and I’m sure he is mostly bodiless now. In my useless mouth I try to catch him, hold him there, an urn for my beloved. Try not to let him dissolve on my tongue. Something like safekeeping.

When I open my eyes again, unsure of how much time has passed, the air is unnervingly still. Would it really have been easier not to have known?

I am red-raw and pinpricked. Dust sticks in ornate patterns atop the wetness of my tears or sweat or blood, like glitter to glue on art projects when I was a kid, and it’s true: I feel decorated. I remember glitter being impossible to get rid of. I walk back to the car, thinking that later, I’ll have to pick out the particles with tweezers one by one.

Or maybe not.

Maybe let it get infected.

Maybe stay evidence, of how great an impact one person can have. How much of them you can then carry with you, embedded, a burial under the skin.

3000 words

Kristina Ten is a Russian-American writer with work in Lightspeed, Black Static, Weird Horror, AE Science Fiction, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and a current MFA candidate at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also teaches creative writing. You can find her at kristinaten.com and on Twitter as @kristina_ten.

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