A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers Read online

  I only remember these as faint echoes, like a story someone told me once but whose details I’ve forgotten. Did they happen? Yes. No. The chain frays, spreads out like roots, possibilities endless.

  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  * * *

  When Melanie and I were little, we’d lie on the carpet in the winter and warm our soggy feet by the radiator. This was when we still had a bad habit of jumping into snowbanks, exasperating our mom to no end. Melanie had just begun to learn how to melt shapes in the snow, the finest spark at the end of her index finger.

  “I wonder why we can do these things,” Melanie had said, closing her fist around the lightning glinting across her palm.

  I grinned at her, reaching out to catch a bit of stray static dancing down her arm. “Dunno. Don’t you think it’s cool to be special? It’s the one thing no one else can do but us.”

  She wagged a foot at the radiator. “It’s kind of lonely, though.”

  “At least you have me.”

  “I guess so,” she said. “That’s better than nothing.”

  I tackled her to the ground and we spent the next ten minutes hitting each other with stuffed animals.

  * * *

  My sister always dies before the world ends.

  The sky is marred with the scars of my efforts, and I am so, so tired. The storm hums in my veins, one more cycle in many. I can’t count them anymore, numbers constantly in flux, ticking higher with each potential breath.

  I wonder if this is what Melanie felt like every day of her life, so ripe with power, always at the precipice, always afraid to push in fear of making things worse.

  This time around, I’m on the floor of my apartment, staring at my cell phone in my hand. My roommate is out and I’ve already missed my flight home. I let it pass, money evaporating into the void, meaningless.

  Somewhere in the southwest, Melanie is walking out of the house, or is about to, her heart roaring with wildfire, lonely, alone. The sparks dance purple in her hands, lightning like veins through her arms.

  You can’t fix this. It was never yours to control.

  But my hands fumble over the touch screen, thumbs sliding wet over her face on the contact screen. She’s programmed in the same stupid anime ringtone I have on my phone, and it jingles inanely, all synthetic voices and pre-ordained sound.

  I wait, mouth dry, my body shaking like the sky above the Mojave before it rains. Painted in brilliant, feverish strokes in my head, the daisy chain grows.

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  Copyright © 2016 by Alyssa Wong

  Art copyright © 2016 by Rovina Cai

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Begin Reading

  Copyright