The Mantinai

by Edd

Larry is sure he grew up going to the same school as Constance, but as time goes on he remembers less and less of her. For a while in June the trend reverses and he graduated college with her, married her, and had two kids before he died of an aneurysm at age sixty. What were their names? Willis and– and was it Bobby? Then the moment is gone and he only remembers remembering. Now she is only a faint memory from third grade; a girl who transferred in and then out. He is and has always been alone. What would have made her want him? The shades of memories are too faint.

The Mantinai swim through time.

Martina was once a senator from the state of Colorado. She remembers this, despite being eight years old. It will be decades from now, but as the evening progresses she knows she’ll die, high on crack, after her high school graduation. It’s far worse than monsters under the bed, but the same solution applies. She sleeps, a terrified child who in the morning will recall another future.

The Mantinai swim across time.

Dead Earth. Nothing living.

The Mantinai prefer worlds with sentients, whose futures and pasts are ripe with branching points to nibble.

Yusuf lost two brothers to the third war with the Saudis. Then there was no war, but then no brothers either. He sits in the café, knowing it will be bombed, will be intact, will never have existed, all at once.

The Mantinai are instinctual, clustering at decision points, eating bits of future, excreting others.

Alice knows Yukio remembers Nora will Philippe never Nmala hasn’t Gilly always–

Everyone goes insane. This alone does not change.

Spiders

by Jen Larsen

Her husband said, “Don’t kill it. They don’t mean any harm.” She was pressed back in the corner, her hand over her heart, which was thumping so hard it should have burned right through her blouse, and he was bent over the thing on her desk, extending his hand.

“There we go,” he said, and he turned and extended his palm toward her. “See?” She saw. She couldn’t breathe. It crept from the end of his fingers down to his wrist. It lifted its legs like a woman folding a sheet, snapping it out in the sun. Her head jerked back and hit the wall.

He said, “Phobias are merely mental blocks. You need to work your way through them.” He lifted his hand up under her nose. Tears started to run down her cheeks. She could feel them running cold down the line of her jaw and dripping off her chin. He didn’t even notice, for a moment. And then he said “Oh, Julie.” He shook his head and left the room with the thing twitching in the palm of his hand.

She dreamed that night about spiders. They ran down the walls in streams, flowed around the bottom of their bed as if it were a rock in a river. A fountain, a waterfall of spiders sounds like nothing, magnified a thousand times; a whispery, bristly-legged nothing at all, made of legs and tiny eyes. They poured out their bedroom door and cascaded down the stairs, where the living room lights were still on.

In the dream, she didn’t move. The curtains fluttered in their wake, and the bed rocked, just a little bit, and the bedroom door shuddered. Her sheets glowed white beneath her hands.

Would it be worse if she woke up and found her husband’s body wrapped in silk, hanging from the corner of the living room? Or if she woke up to find him snoring on the couch with his mouth open? She laid in bed after she woke up, trying to decide which she hoped for most. In the corner, a spider lifted its legs exactly like an angry woman casting a curse at midnight, and spun a web.