We spent the last two hours of Bonnie’s birthday drinks talking about shitty men and didn’t think to apologize to Bonnie about it until after we got kicked out of the bar, long past closing time.
The bartender had tried to wait us out. Our group had become way too terrifying and annoying to approach. Our faces were red and our eyes were red and our auras or spirits or vibes or whatever were reddest of all. A dank, singed red that dimmed to black.
Although the bartender was extremely built, he wore his bounty of muscle like an old woman carrying too many grocery bags. He sighed and leaned against the bar and we ignored him.
Phyllida had been sketching on a napkin with meticulous and confident strokes. She seemed exactly like a real artist as long as you didn’t look at what she was drawing. “It needs a really long handle,” she said. “For leverage.” On the napkin was Phyllida herself, as a stick figure with scribbled hair like black hay, standing on a beach and holding an enormous fork. At the end of each fork tine, she added eight stick figures, who were being shoved helplessly into the surf.
“Ta da!” She pushed the napkin in front of us. “The drowning fork! For all your drowning-more-than-one-man-at-a-time needs. Eight men maximum. You don’t have to use all the tines. But it’s such a waste if you don’t.”
“Motherfucker, I’ll take fifty,” Devon said, slapping her wallet down onto the table.
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Excerpted from A People’s Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers, edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams, to be published by One World, an imprint of Random House LLC, on February 5, 2019. Now Wait for This Week by Alice Sola Kim. Copyright © 2019 by Alice Sola Kim.
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