When you relax your fist, you’ll find inside it a clue to how or when or where you’ll die.
Elodie lost track of how many times she replayed that first video. She wondered what she’d do if she opened her hand to find a seashell resting there. Avoid beaches for the rest of her life? Skip out on post prom, which always took place on a yacht? She’d rather die.
At lunch, in study hall, behind the stairwell during passing period, her classmates traded their deaths. Drowning was preferred to burning. Falling was the crowd favorite for a while, until Shivam from Elodie’s forensics club pulled an uncut emerald that got everyone guessing. A collapsed mine? A botched heist? At the end, he swapped it for a lipstick that he insisted meant assassination by femme fatale, which they all agreed would be a pretty hot way to go. Way better than sticking around for the end of the world.
Elodie did the Mother Mayhem challenge, of course. It was inevitable, from the first time she punched in the hashtag on her own phone and watched dozens of skeleton hands unfurl like bony flowers in bloom around shell casings and car keys and the plastic caps to syringes.
She did the challenge—repeatedly.
Night after night, Elodie called on Mother Mayhem and plucked from the air and darkness ticket stubs and ball bearings and, once, a spool of thread. These she threw into a tea tin that she shoved underneath her bed. She thought she could hear them sometimes, all her little deaths rattling gently below her pillow like her own personal white noise machine, lulling her to sleep.
Leg
BRIAN EVENSON
The captain of the vessel was named Hekla, a name that in the language of her ancestors meant “cloak,” though she had never worn a cloak. One of her legs was not a leg at all but a separate creature that had learned to act like a leg. When she needed to walk about her vessel this served as a leg for her, but once she was alone in her quarters she would unstrap it and it would unfurl to become a separate being, something she could converse with, a trusted advisor, a secret friend. Nobody knew it to be other than an artificial leg except for her.
Hekla had found the leg before she became captain, a few moments after she lost her flesh-and-blood leg, severed cleanly mid-thigh in a freak accident. Hekla had the presence of mind to tourniquet what was left of her thigh. She was fading from consciousness, having lost too much blood, when it appeared.
It was bipedal but strange and glittering, made of angles and light. Each time Hekla looked at it, it seemed subtly different.
“What is that?” asked the creature.
“What?” Hekla managed.
“The dark substance puddling around you.”
“That is my blood,” said Hekla. “I will soon die.”
“Ah,” said the creature.
“You don’t exist,” claimed Hekla. “I’m hallucinating you.”
The creature ignored this. Instead it said, “Would you not prefer to live?”
And with this began a relationship that bound Hekla and leg tightly together.
“I’m bored,” she told the leg one day many years later, once she was captain of a vessel. “We do nothing but float. I want something exciting to do.”
The leg told her this: “On the winds of the darkness is a creature as long as this vessel, and which moves in a slow undulating pattern across the currents of space. Its back is quivered with spines and it is long and thin like a snake but has the head and metal-breaking bill of a bony fish. With a swipe of its tail it could destroy this vessel.”
“Why do you tell me this, leg?” she asked.
Leg shrugged. “It is a worthy foe. I thought you might like to hunt it.”
At first Hekla dismissed leg’s suggestion out of hand. It made no sense to endanger her crew and the passengers sleeping in the storage pods for her own amusement. But as the days dragged slowly past, she began to favor the idea.
Eventually she listened to the leg with interest. When it told her where such a creature was most likely to be found, she directed the navigator to change course.
“Why should I change course?” he asked. His name was Michael.
“Because I am your captain,” said Hekla. “And I tell you to do so.”
“We have a destination,” said Michael. “A new life awaits us.”
“Change course,” said Hekla.
“I will not change my course without a reason,” said Michael.
So Hekla explained.
“This is not a worthy reason,” said Michael once she was finished. “If you do this thing, many of us will die, perhaps even all of us. No, I will not alter our course. We shall continue to our intended destination.”
The captain asked again, and again he refused. In the end he made it clear that she would have her way only if she killed him first.
She returned to her quarters muttering to herself, “What use is it to be captain if I cannot have my way?”
Once back in her quarters, she released her leg. It unfurled and revealed itself.
“Did you hear him, leg?” she asked.
The leg simply inclined its head—for as curious as it seems, the leg, when unfurled, had a head—to indicate that it had.
“Who is the captain?” asked the leg in its strange voice. “Is it not you?”
“It is indeed me,” said Hekla.
“Then force him to do it,” the leg said.
“He claims he would rather die first,” said Hekla.
“Then kill him.”
But the captain did not want to kill Michael herself. She knew it was wrong and that she would feel guilty doing so. And yet, perhaps if she were not the one to do the actual killing, it would not be as wrong and she would be able to live with what had been done. The only one she could trust to kill Michael and keep her involvement a secret was leg.
“Leg,” she said.
“Hekla,” said leg, and bowed deeply.
“Will you kill
