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June 1, 2025
The ONE project is our way of elevating and showcasing other Horror writers by publishing a single story at a time. We want to focus on that one we find really special. Exclusive. This is not meant to generate income, that’s not the goal of ONE. It’s all about the story. And we finally found the ONE for this year... |
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The Net
by Nick Mamatas
by Nick Mamatas
Gretchen wasn’t much for bridges, but she was on the pedestrian walkway of the Golden Gate anyway. Elaine wouldn’t find her in time, nor would Gretchen’s mother, nor Gretchen’s shrink, or ... no, that was all of them, the entire list of people who might care. And Gretchen’s shrink was paid to care to the tune of two hundred dollars per truncated fifty-minute hour per week. Gretchen, Elaine was about to break up. Or was it Elaine Gretchen was about to break up with, the hard way? Gretchen’s mother mostly cared about Gretchen’s womb these days. Gretchen’s mother had stopped short of simply offering her daughter money to buy sperm on the “black market”, but only just. “Technically, it would be a gray market,” Elaine had said, “because insemination is what sperm is for, and it’s legal to possess some.” Elaine had no womb at all, never had.
The bridge was cold and windy. San Francisco is a city that only pretends to have nice weather. Thanks to climate collapse, the fog burned off early most mornings, so Gretchen could see the skyline as she traveled along the pedestrian walkway. San Francisco was two cities, really. There was the nice one with the Transamerica Pyramid and hills and tightly packed Edwardians and curvilinear streets. The second sprouted out of the first like fungi from a rotting log, consisted of the diseased steel mushroom of Salesforce Tower, of half-empty high-rises and the tilting condominium complex that Elaine would always point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” when she and Gretchen walked past.
Don’t mind if I do, thought Gretchen. This was not a suicide attempt. Gretchen’s shrink was a good one, and the city’s engineering feats were second to none, except for the Millennium Tower and whatever else that building might bring down with it when it finally fell fell fell. A long steel wire net stretched across the entire length of the bridge on both sides, so no running across the motorway to jump off the non-pedestrian side and into the water to die fast or a little faster. The net wasn’t like the bouncy wonderous thing stretched under tightropes at circuses and lives in indulgent wealthy families; it was basically a fence. Maybe a spaghetti strainer. Landing on it would hurt but probably not kill, which is why hardly anyone jumped anymore. Who hates themselves so much that they crave a broken pelvis, shattered limbs, and the embarrassment of a dozen bikers in tear-drop helmets looking over the railing and saying “Whoa!” and then pulling out their phones? Fuckin’ nobody, man. Oh, to hit the sea like a sugar-candy wrecking ball and shatter instead!
Gretchen was going to jump, and she was going to hit the net, but she would not be harmed. She’d noticed, these past weeks, the sun looking at her in the precious minutes after dawn, when the horizon opened red and bloodshot, the slit of red bisecting the cosmos between heaven and Earth revealing a great swirling eye. San Francisco was a sunset town, not a sunrise town. Everyone preferred to look west, out at the Pacific, at the splashy purple and tangerine sunsets. Fuck the rest of America, uncivilized time zones already as much as thirty-three point three-three-three threeeeeeee unto forever percent done with the work day, Slacks and Team beeping and vibrating in Gretchen’s left ass pocket and in the pockets of a hundred thousand others, nobody in SF wants to turn East. But Gretchen did, Gretchen had. She’s a midwestern girl; the endless sea made her queasy, set her ears spinning and the ground falling away under her. And so she alone saw the great red eye of dawn, and she alone understood what was required.
Gretchen had thick boots, tight pants, a man’s peacoat, and the hat Elaine insisted on calling a toque even though she had never even been to Canada. Gretchen thought of it as a longshoreman’s cap. She’d seen it in movies. She bet it wouldn’t even fly off her head when she jumped, or when she hit the wire mesh. What would happen is that an exact tone would reverberate across the steel net, and the whole of the bridge would ring with a cosmically resonant signal, and off to the East, a second eye would open. Twin suns! The gravitational impact would be immense, the Earth pulled apart, and the foetal being in the sold core of the planet would be freed to live, to suckle upon cosmic rays, as those twin sun-eyes were also nipples somehow, and it would grow, and thrive, and Gretchen would be plucked from the shattered world and held in a five-fingered solar flare, safe and warm and immortal in a new cosmic body after her fleshy one had bubbled away.
Far-fetched? Wait till you read about every other religion us monkeys have come up with so far, Gretchen thought to herself, or really, to Elaine, who would be missed, despite the dour silences, the endless rhetorical paper cuts, the two feet of tectonic fault line between them in bed where two cats and a dog once laid before the mammalian flu took almost every pet on the coast. Everyone would be missed, Gretchen supposed.
“Hey, mami, out of the way!” some delivery guy on an ebike called out to her. She leapt forward, a tiny bit, and he zoomed past her, whistling low and long. “You’re breaking the law, you jerk! No electric bikes on the pedestrian walkway!” she shouted after him, but then she felt stupid and Californian for doing so. What the hell was she about to do on the bridge, and to it? Poor guy was probably working a delivery gig, Gretchen decided. Who in the world had ordered an omelette its own private chauffeur for a cross-county trip from brunch joint to belly, from SF to Marin County? Well, they weren’t gonna eat much of it, whoever they were.
Gretchen had herself eaten a couple of gummies, and a Red Bull, for breakfast, plus her usual coffee, and her stomach was unpleased with the wind and the balancing act as she stepped up to the railing and pulled herself onto it. She didn’t look down; she was sure that if she did her idiopathic intermittent vertigo would take over and ruin everything. Had the genes of a hundred generations of women conspired to disable her at the last moment, to keep humanity alive in its great green ruin of a world, and to keep the being below asleep? Probably! she decided, but it ain’t gonna work. That last clause was pure Elaine, who liked to talk like an old man from the black and white days sometimes.
Gretchen kept her eyes on the sun, waiting for a signal. There were horns honking now, some more human noises. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket again and again. A big crunching noise rang out. Then a wisp of remnant fog, black like a shard of obsidian, cut across the rising sun, a bisection of a bisection. That had to be it.
She jumped, and as her feet found space Gretchen realized that every problem she had—the credit cards, the dark days when she couldn’t get out of bed, deadlines, the men who ruled the world by whim and appetite, Elaine, children and their sticky paws, every dead dog she’d ever owned, the resigned snort of her shrink, her phone full of little round pictures of every auld ac-quain-tance she for-got but they had all forgotten her first—was easily solvable. The 401k was a lower interest rate than her credit cards, so cash out the former to pay off the latter! Telling her shrink the truth for once! Just rolling over on top of Elaine and smiling the sharky smile Elaine loved and sucking on Elaine’s lower lip, fucking wetnaps and a little goddamn patience or whatever. Total anarcho-syndicalist revolution or at least an email newsletter about trying it! Reaching around behind her to retrieve her crazily vibrating phone and texting someone, Geoffrey or Lynn maybe, a line like hey guess where I am? or even just a plummeting selfie, for whomst could leave such a thing on read—solutions flooded her like freezing air flooded her lungs as she screamed.
She hit the net so hard she thought she’d been split in two and screamed twice. Her limbs were like rotten bananas smacked flat by a toddler’s palm. A lot of herself she stopped feeling entirely; she was a head, a torso, and the sweet relief of one of her legs now belonging to someone else somehow. But she could see them, shaking as the net reverberated under them, the pants split open. There went her little hat, fluttering away. The tone being rung under her felt wrong.
Gretchen’s gaze followed her hat as it flew away like a bird. Perhaps ten yards away was the ruin of an ebike and twisted in it a groaning man. Above him a polygonal truck, all angles and gunmetal planes, tilted and swayed on the bridge.
“Fucking God!” Gretchen called out, but not to God. A chord is not a note. The sun rose as it always did and nothing else happened except that she coughed up a bit of blood and a bit of tooth. “You fucker!” she shouted at the man on the net, “You ruined everything!” He groaned and waved a floppy forearm up toward the bridge, then cried.
Did her body work? It flooded with pain now. She got up on one knee and vertigo swept her down onto her belly. There was the Bay, right under her. Blood filled her mouth. She could crawl with one leg and two arms, and she did, gaze on the man because she couldn’t bear to look down again. The man rolled over and beckoned her. They weren’t so far apart—a few yards, maybe, but it was hard for Gretchen to pick her way across the net. It curved upward, to keep determined suicides from rolling off the edge and dying that way, she guessed.
The man had landed hard on one of the support girders. No wonder he wasn’t moving anything but his arm, and that weakly. Probably a broken back. “Hey,” Gretchen said, but the wind took the word away. So, she shouted, “Sorry! I’m so sorry!” though she wasn’t sorry for a damn thing. It was just what you say to a broken person. She noticed that his pants were soiled, then realized that hers were as well.
“You’re the one who ruined everything!” he said. She couldn’t really hear him, but Gretchen could read his lips. “My whole fucking life!” Gretchen swallowed another Sorry! I’m so sorry! She had come to the bridge to ruin everything, for everyone, after all. What did she have to be sorry for? Fucking nothing.
The media don’t publicize individual Golden Gate Bridge jumps anymore. Doing so only encouraged copycats, or at least that’s the story the media do publicize. One cannot even look up photos of the anti-suicide nets online without whatever search engine one uses offering up suicide hotline numbers first. Help is available! But social media is something different than the news; passers-by aren’t journalists. The streams of Gretchen, a bloody wake behind her, crawling toward the man twisted up in his bike, went live immediately. Thirty thousand people watched the truck teeter upon the edge of the pedestrian walkway. Halfway around the world, the fifty-cent-per-hour social media moderator nightshift of half a dozen apps started shutting down the feeds, but some channels go entirely unmoderated, now don’t they?
The point is that many many people got the chance to see the wedge-shaped truck go over the edge and take out the net. Gretchen fell. The man fell.
On the way down, they had the chance to argue. The wind whipped away any words that could have come out of their lungs; this was pure mental communication, which only people who are about to die together, eyes wide open, can ever achieve. In a moment Gretchen knew everything about the man—how he went by Luis as a matter of convenience but his name was Leocadio, how the tattoo of a butterfly on his forearm was to make his daughter laugh and that it had covered up an older tattoo of the face of his favorite childhood dog, how the moon had called to him to ascend Mount Tamalpais--What? thought Gretchen, then Oh, Mount Tam—and there play a note from the trumpet he had taken up as a child as an asthma treatment. This particular note sounded atop Mount Tam would summon a certain “falling star” to Earth, the core of which would be a sphere of diamond, one with a flaw that would allow Luis to open the superheated shell with his gloved hands and within that sphere would be
The pair hit the water and their brains turned off. Gretchen’s body slammed into the sinking truck, while Luis’s drifted down past it. The truck’s tailgate cameras recorded everything: Gretchen folded in half, being opened and closed like a mouth by the current. Leocadio’s face, imploded, cheeks shredded, smile toothless and cavernous.
The net was broken, and that was news. The pedestrian walkway had to be closed for weeks, and that was forgotten every morning by local strollers who skulked away disappointed. The teetering, then fall, of the truck as though it had had enough and committed suicide, was a cause of public celebration. Its driver had rolled to safety, so it was fine to laugh. About Gretchen and Leocadio it was not fine to laugh but in darker corners of the net, where secret underwater footage had been leaked, among a few people, there were snickers. Obsessive searching for facts and trivia. Theory-spinning. There was even fan art. Cartoons of them in the truck and necking. Gretchen the flexible cheerleader, Leocadio the leering letterman.
And among even a fewer people, us people, us party people, the snickering and obsession—what really sent those two into the deep?— led to revelation.
Here, look. See? Put down the hors d'oeuvres tray and check this out. Look at my phone; I got the footage. Don’t ask how. Just kidding, you can ask how if you want. Watch, there she goes, flopping out of camera range. Here comes my ol’ pal Luis, face like cartoon character that had been hit with a cast-iron frying pan. Yeah, they sink fast, as though embarrassed to be on camera. The friggin’ truck was more buoyant.
How do I know what Gretchen was thinking about the sun? Why was Luis on his way to a rendezvous with diamond meteorite? I didn’t get my omelette that morning, but I got revelation—not fan fiction. You heard different, from some worm in your brain? You heard wrong. You read another fate in the guts of a pigeon that landed on your lap as though eager for you to squeeze it in your grip? You misinterpreted the passages oozing out between your fingers. Here is what is really about to happen. New Year’s Eve! Almost midnight, but nobody’s dancing because the floor up here in the Millennium Tower penthouse is tilting thirty-six inches to one side. Speaking of public celebration.
You know who is down there among the chilly ants, fighting the December wind off the Bay? The widow Elaine! She saw the footage, too. Both sets. There wasn’t enough body left to retrieve, so the police showed her what they had. Drove her mad, the poor thing, but she bounced back. Gretchen would have wanted her to find someone else. She’s on her way—not here, a few blocks from here, a different party in a black room in SoMa. If it’s catered, like this shindig is, I don’t want to know what’s on the end of their forks. Elaine’s off to the kind of event where you dress in a big furry costume with a giant wide-eyed head in honor of the mammals we have lost. The New Year’s party where you learn someone’s name after they penetrate you, or you them. Fun, but it lacks the penthouse view we have.
She is going to get turned around, because it cold enough that she’ll keep her hands in pockets and not look at her phone. And she’ll find herself below us, and she’ll risk a cold finger for a joke and point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” at us. Look, I see her. And now, thanks to pure mental communication, so can you. That little platinum dot walking in a tight circle on the corner across the street. You can see her costume’s little tail swishing to and fro behind her.
And will Elaine’s little curse bring the tower down and ring the world like a bell and signal to the sun to reach out with a solar flare and lick us like a crumb and it shall be I who survive? No, that’ll be the earthquake that comes right after. So why don’t you stand there and I’ll here, and when at midnight the moon rock strikes you’ll fall into my arms and I’ll fall out the window and together, eyes open, we’ll kiss and learn everything there is to know about one another before we tear through the scaffolding and hit the ground.
The end.
The bridge was cold and windy. San Francisco is a city that only pretends to have nice weather. Thanks to climate collapse, the fog burned off early most mornings, so Gretchen could see the skyline as she traveled along the pedestrian walkway. San Francisco was two cities, really. There was the nice one with the Transamerica Pyramid and hills and tightly packed Edwardians and curvilinear streets. The second sprouted out of the first like fungi from a rotting log, consisted of the diseased steel mushroom of Salesforce Tower, of half-empty high-rises and the tilting condominium complex that Elaine would always point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” when she and Gretchen walked past.
Don’t mind if I do, thought Gretchen. This was not a suicide attempt. Gretchen’s shrink was a good one, and the city’s engineering feats were second to none, except for the Millennium Tower and whatever else that building might bring down with it when it finally fell fell fell. A long steel wire net stretched across the entire length of the bridge on both sides, so no running across the motorway to jump off the non-pedestrian side and into the water to die fast or a little faster. The net wasn’t like the bouncy wonderous thing stretched under tightropes at circuses and lives in indulgent wealthy families; it was basically a fence. Maybe a spaghetti strainer. Landing on it would hurt but probably not kill, which is why hardly anyone jumped anymore. Who hates themselves so much that they crave a broken pelvis, shattered limbs, and the embarrassment of a dozen bikers in tear-drop helmets looking over the railing and saying “Whoa!” and then pulling out their phones? Fuckin’ nobody, man. Oh, to hit the sea like a sugar-candy wrecking ball and shatter instead!
Gretchen was going to jump, and she was going to hit the net, but she would not be harmed. She’d noticed, these past weeks, the sun looking at her in the precious minutes after dawn, when the horizon opened red and bloodshot, the slit of red bisecting the cosmos between heaven and Earth revealing a great swirling eye. San Francisco was a sunset town, not a sunrise town. Everyone preferred to look west, out at the Pacific, at the splashy purple and tangerine sunsets. Fuck the rest of America, uncivilized time zones already as much as thirty-three point three-three-three threeeeeeee unto forever percent done with the work day, Slacks and Team beeping and vibrating in Gretchen’s left ass pocket and in the pockets of a hundred thousand others, nobody in SF wants to turn East. But Gretchen did, Gretchen had. She’s a midwestern girl; the endless sea made her queasy, set her ears spinning and the ground falling away under her. And so she alone saw the great red eye of dawn, and she alone understood what was required.
Gretchen had thick boots, tight pants, a man’s peacoat, and the hat Elaine insisted on calling a toque even though she had never even been to Canada. Gretchen thought of it as a longshoreman’s cap. She’d seen it in movies. She bet it wouldn’t even fly off her head when she jumped, or when she hit the wire mesh. What would happen is that an exact tone would reverberate across the steel net, and the whole of the bridge would ring with a cosmically resonant signal, and off to the East, a second eye would open. Twin suns! The gravitational impact would be immense, the Earth pulled apart, and the foetal being in the sold core of the planet would be freed to live, to suckle upon cosmic rays, as those twin sun-eyes were also nipples somehow, and it would grow, and thrive, and Gretchen would be plucked from the shattered world and held in a five-fingered solar flare, safe and warm and immortal in a new cosmic body after her fleshy one had bubbled away.
Far-fetched? Wait till you read about every other religion us monkeys have come up with so far, Gretchen thought to herself, or really, to Elaine, who would be missed, despite the dour silences, the endless rhetorical paper cuts, the two feet of tectonic fault line between them in bed where two cats and a dog once laid before the mammalian flu took almost every pet on the coast. Everyone would be missed, Gretchen supposed.
“Hey, mami, out of the way!” some delivery guy on an ebike called out to her. She leapt forward, a tiny bit, and he zoomed past her, whistling low and long. “You’re breaking the law, you jerk! No electric bikes on the pedestrian walkway!” she shouted after him, but then she felt stupid and Californian for doing so. What the hell was she about to do on the bridge, and to it? Poor guy was probably working a delivery gig, Gretchen decided. Who in the world had ordered an omelette its own private chauffeur for a cross-county trip from brunch joint to belly, from SF to Marin County? Well, they weren’t gonna eat much of it, whoever they were.
Gretchen had herself eaten a couple of gummies, and a Red Bull, for breakfast, plus her usual coffee, and her stomach was unpleased with the wind and the balancing act as she stepped up to the railing and pulled herself onto it. She didn’t look down; she was sure that if she did her idiopathic intermittent vertigo would take over and ruin everything. Had the genes of a hundred generations of women conspired to disable her at the last moment, to keep humanity alive in its great green ruin of a world, and to keep the being below asleep? Probably! she decided, but it ain’t gonna work. That last clause was pure Elaine, who liked to talk like an old man from the black and white days sometimes.
Gretchen kept her eyes on the sun, waiting for a signal. There were horns honking now, some more human noises. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket again and again. A big crunching noise rang out. Then a wisp of remnant fog, black like a shard of obsidian, cut across the rising sun, a bisection of a bisection. That had to be it.
She jumped, and as her feet found space Gretchen realized that every problem she had—the credit cards, the dark days when she couldn’t get out of bed, deadlines, the men who ruled the world by whim and appetite, Elaine, children and their sticky paws, every dead dog she’d ever owned, the resigned snort of her shrink, her phone full of little round pictures of every auld ac-quain-tance she for-got but they had all forgotten her first—was easily solvable. The 401k was a lower interest rate than her credit cards, so cash out the former to pay off the latter! Telling her shrink the truth for once! Just rolling over on top of Elaine and smiling the sharky smile Elaine loved and sucking on Elaine’s lower lip, fucking wetnaps and a little goddamn patience or whatever. Total anarcho-syndicalist revolution or at least an email newsletter about trying it! Reaching around behind her to retrieve her crazily vibrating phone and texting someone, Geoffrey or Lynn maybe, a line like hey guess where I am? or even just a plummeting selfie, for whomst could leave such a thing on read—solutions flooded her like freezing air flooded her lungs as she screamed.
She hit the net so hard she thought she’d been split in two and screamed twice. Her limbs were like rotten bananas smacked flat by a toddler’s palm. A lot of herself she stopped feeling entirely; she was a head, a torso, and the sweet relief of one of her legs now belonging to someone else somehow. But she could see them, shaking as the net reverberated under them, the pants split open. There went her little hat, fluttering away. The tone being rung under her felt wrong.
Gretchen’s gaze followed her hat as it flew away like a bird. Perhaps ten yards away was the ruin of an ebike and twisted in it a groaning man. Above him a polygonal truck, all angles and gunmetal planes, tilted and swayed on the bridge.
“Fucking God!” Gretchen called out, but not to God. A chord is not a note. The sun rose as it always did and nothing else happened except that she coughed up a bit of blood and a bit of tooth. “You fucker!” she shouted at the man on the net, “You ruined everything!” He groaned and waved a floppy forearm up toward the bridge, then cried.
Did her body work? It flooded with pain now. She got up on one knee and vertigo swept her down onto her belly. There was the Bay, right under her. Blood filled her mouth. She could crawl with one leg and two arms, and she did, gaze on the man because she couldn’t bear to look down again. The man rolled over and beckoned her. They weren’t so far apart—a few yards, maybe, but it was hard for Gretchen to pick her way across the net. It curved upward, to keep determined suicides from rolling off the edge and dying that way, she guessed.
The man had landed hard on one of the support girders. No wonder he wasn’t moving anything but his arm, and that weakly. Probably a broken back. “Hey,” Gretchen said, but the wind took the word away. So, she shouted, “Sorry! I’m so sorry!” though she wasn’t sorry for a damn thing. It was just what you say to a broken person. She noticed that his pants were soiled, then realized that hers were as well.
“You’re the one who ruined everything!” he said. She couldn’t really hear him, but Gretchen could read his lips. “My whole fucking life!” Gretchen swallowed another Sorry! I’m so sorry! She had come to the bridge to ruin everything, for everyone, after all. What did she have to be sorry for? Fucking nothing.
The media don’t publicize individual Golden Gate Bridge jumps anymore. Doing so only encouraged copycats, or at least that’s the story the media do publicize. One cannot even look up photos of the anti-suicide nets online without whatever search engine one uses offering up suicide hotline numbers first. Help is available! But social media is something different than the news; passers-by aren’t journalists. The streams of Gretchen, a bloody wake behind her, crawling toward the man twisted up in his bike, went live immediately. Thirty thousand people watched the truck teeter upon the edge of the pedestrian walkway. Halfway around the world, the fifty-cent-per-hour social media moderator nightshift of half a dozen apps started shutting down the feeds, but some channels go entirely unmoderated, now don’t they?
The point is that many many people got the chance to see the wedge-shaped truck go over the edge and take out the net. Gretchen fell. The man fell.
On the way down, they had the chance to argue. The wind whipped away any words that could have come out of their lungs; this was pure mental communication, which only people who are about to die together, eyes wide open, can ever achieve. In a moment Gretchen knew everything about the man—how he went by Luis as a matter of convenience but his name was Leocadio, how the tattoo of a butterfly on his forearm was to make his daughter laugh and that it had covered up an older tattoo of the face of his favorite childhood dog, how the moon had called to him to ascend Mount Tamalpais--What? thought Gretchen, then Oh, Mount Tam—and there play a note from the trumpet he had taken up as a child as an asthma treatment. This particular note sounded atop Mount Tam would summon a certain “falling star” to Earth, the core of which would be a sphere of diamond, one with a flaw that would allow Luis to open the superheated shell with his gloved hands and within that sphere would be
The pair hit the water and their brains turned off. Gretchen’s body slammed into the sinking truck, while Luis’s drifted down past it. The truck’s tailgate cameras recorded everything: Gretchen folded in half, being opened and closed like a mouth by the current. Leocadio’s face, imploded, cheeks shredded, smile toothless and cavernous.
The net was broken, and that was news. The pedestrian walkway had to be closed for weeks, and that was forgotten every morning by local strollers who skulked away disappointed. The teetering, then fall, of the truck as though it had had enough and committed suicide, was a cause of public celebration. Its driver had rolled to safety, so it was fine to laugh. About Gretchen and Leocadio it was not fine to laugh but in darker corners of the net, where secret underwater footage had been leaked, among a few people, there were snickers. Obsessive searching for facts and trivia. Theory-spinning. There was even fan art. Cartoons of them in the truck and necking. Gretchen the flexible cheerleader, Leocadio the leering letterman.
And among even a fewer people, us people, us party people, the snickering and obsession—what really sent those two into the deep?— led to revelation.
Here, look. See? Put down the hors d'oeuvres tray and check this out. Look at my phone; I got the footage. Don’t ask how. Just kidding, you can ask how if you want. Watch, there she goes, flopping out of camera range. Here comes my ol’ pal Luis, face like cartoon character that had been hit with a cast-iron frying pan. Yeah, they sink fast, as though embarrassed to be on camera. The friggin’ truck was more buoyant.
How do I know what Gretchen was thinking about the sun? Why was Luis on his way to a rendezvous with diamond meteorite? I didn’t get my omelette that morning, but I got revelation—not fan fiction. You heard different, from some worm in your brain? You heard wrong. You read another fate in the guts of a pigeon that landed on your lap as though eager for you to squeeze it in your grip? You misinterpreted the passages oozing out between your fingers. Here is what is really about to happen. New Year’s Eve! Almost midnight, but nobody’s dancing because the floor up here in the Millennium Tower penthouse is tilting thirty-six inches to one side. Speaking of public celebration.
You know who is down there among the chilly ants, fighting the December wind off the Bay? The widow Elaine! She saw the footage, too. Both sets. There wasn’t enough body left to retrieve, so the police showed her what they had. Drove her mad, the poor thing, but she bounced back. Gretchen would have wanted her to find someone else. She’s on her way—not here, a few blocks from here, a different party in a black room in SoMa. If it’s catered, like this shindig is, I don’t want to know what’s on the end of their forks. Elaine’s off to the kind of event where you dress in a big furry costume with a giant wide-eyed head in honor of the mammals we have lost. The New Year’s party where you learn someone’s name after they penetrate you, or you them. Fun, but it lacks the penthouse view we have.
She is going to get turned around, because it cold enough that she’ll keep her hands in pockets and not look at her phone. And she’ll find herself below us, and she’ll risk a cold finger for a joke and point at with her devil’s horn malocchio gesture and chant, “Fall, fall, fall!” at us. Look, I see her. And now, thanks to pure mental communication, so can you. That little platinum dot walking in a tight circle on the corner across the street. You can see her costume’s little tail swishing to and fro behind her.
And will Elaine’s little curse bring the tower down and ring the world like a bell and signal to the sun to reach out with a solar flare and lick us like a crumb and it shall be I who survive? No, that’ll be the earthquake that comes right after. So why don’t you stand there and I’ll here, and when at midnight the moon rock strikes you’ll fall into my arms and I’ll fall out the window and together, eyes open, we’ll kiss and learn everything there is to know about one another before we tear through the scaffolding and hit the ground.
The end.
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Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including The Second Shooter, I Am Providence, and the forthcoming Kalivas! Or, Another Tempest. His short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Best American Mystery Stories, Tor.com, Weird Tales, Asimov’s Science Fiction and many other venues. Nick is also an anthologist; Wonder and Glory Forever: Awe-Inspiring Lovecraftian Fiction was published in 2020. Out now is 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era. Nick’s fiction and editorial work have been variously nominated for the Hugo, Bram Stoker, Shirley Jackson, Locus, and World Fantasy awards.
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