A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong

 
    There was nothing phoenix-like in my sister’s immolation. Just the scent of charred skin, unbearable heat, the inharmonious sound of her last, grief-raw scream as she evaporated, leaving glass footprints seared into the desert sand.
    If my parents were still alive—although they are, probably, in some iteration of the universe; maybe even this one—they would tell me that it wasn’t my fault, that no one could have seen it coming. That she did this to herself. But that kind of blame doesn’t suit me. Besides, they had always been exceptionally blind to matters regarding Melanie. They didn’t even notice when the two of us would take to the sky together, Melanie blowing currents back and forth beneath our bodies, weaving thermals like daisy chains. We used to make sparks dance at the table, and our mom never said a word about it, except that it was rude to do things that other people couldn’t in front of them, and also that we needed to learn to talk to people other than each other.
    Melanie was better at everything than I was, the stormy bit and the talking bit both. She could split the horizon in two if she wanted, opening it at the seams as deftly as a tailor, and make the lightning curl catlike at her wrist and purr for her. She could do that with people too; Mel glowed, soft, luminescent. It was hard to look away from her, and so easy to disappear into her shadow.
    But when things got too bad to ignore, the air in the house dark and crackling with ugly energy like the sky before a monsoon, she dug in and refused to leave. I was the one who abandoned our coast for another, promising I’d be back soon. And then I was the one who stayed away.
    *   *   *
    The day my sister ended the world, the sky opened up in rain for the first time in years, flooding the desert wash behind our house. The snakes drowned in their holes and the javelinas stampeded downstream, but the water overtook them, and the air filled with their screaming as they were swept away.
    I’d tried to take a taxi home, but the roads disappeared in the flash flood, so I struggled out of the swamped cab and slogged the last two miles.
    Melanie was outside, a small, dry figure in front of the ruined shell of our parents’ house. She wore the only dress she had left—the rest our mother had burned when she’d found them. The rain bent around my sister in a bell shape, and electricity danced in her hands, growing bigger and bigger like a ravenous cat’s cradle. Some time ago, lightning had shattered the cacti in the yard, splitting them in two and searing them bone-bare. Only their blackened skeletons were left, clawing upward out of the water like accusing fingers.
    I know she felt me coming. Maybe it was a tremble in the dry ground beneath her feet, or a ripple of energy through the water that crashed around my waist. She glanced up, her eyes wide, bruised circles.
    I remember that I yelled something at her. That time around, it could have been her name. It could have been a plea, begging her not to do what I could see was about to happen. Or maybe it was just “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
    The world hiccupped, warping violet, legs of electricity touching down around me, biting at my hair, singeing anything still alive beneath the water. I barely felt it.
    â€œWhy did you come back?” were the last words she said to me before she went up in flames, taking the rest of the universe with her.
    *   *   *
    It was simple, Melanie had once told me. “Here, Hannah. Pay attention, and I’ll teach you how the future works.”
    She drew the picture for me in the air, a map of sparkling futures, constants, and variables; closed circuits of possibilities looped together, arcing from one timeline to another. I saw and understood; but more than that, for the first time, I saw her power as a single, mutable shape.
    â€œThat’s