A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers by Alyssa Wong Page A

beautiful,” I said.
    â€œIsn’t it?” Melanie traced the air with her finger, tapping a single glowing point. “Look, that’s us. And here’s what could happen, depending on … well, depending on a lot of things.”
    Options chained like lightning strikes before my eyes, possibilities growing legs like sentient things. “If it’s that easy, why don’t you change it?” I blurted out. “Shape it to make it better for us, I mean.”
    Her eyes slid away from me. “It’s not that easy to get it right,” she said.
    *   *   *
    The day my sister ended the world, I was on a plane home for the first time in years. I’d managed to sleep most of the way, which was unusual, and I woke up as the plane was descending, a faint popping in my ears. It was sunset, and the flat, highway-veined city was just beginning to glimmer with electric light, civilization pulsing across the ground in arteries, in fractals.
    But the beauty was lost on me. The clouds outside felt heavy, and my heart wouldn’t stop drumming in my chest. Something was wrong, but I didn’t know what.
    I felt like I’d seen this before.
    Time stuttered, and outside, it began to rain.
    *   *   *
    If I could knit you a crown of potential futures like the daisies you braided together for me when we were young, I would.
    None of them would end with you burning to death at the edge of our property, beaten senseless in the wash behind the house by drunken college boys, slowly cut to pieces at home by parents who wanted you only in one shape, the one crafted in their image.
    I would give you only the best things. The kindness you deserved, the body you wanted, a way out that didn’t end with the horizon line ripped open, possibilities pouring out like loose stuffing, my world shrieking to a halt.
    I would have fixed everything.
    *   *   *
    The day my sister—
    No.
    The day I ended the world, the very first time, my plane touched down early and I sprinted to catch a cab before the impending monsoon swept the city. This time around, I made it four miles from the house before a six-car pileup—tires slick, drivers panicked in the storm—stopped traffic entirely. It took everything in me not to shunt the water aside in front of everyone else, to stumble into neck-deep currents and anchor my feet to the asphalt below. It took forever to get home, and when I did, Melanie was not there.
    An hour later, my sister’s body floated up in the new river behind our house, covered in bruises, red plastic cups bumping at her bare feet, and lightning spiked white-hot through my chest, searing the ground of my heart into a desert. All I could see were cities burning, houses shelled, every regret and act of cowardice twisting through me into blinding rage.
    And in that moment, perfect power was bright in front of me, a seam in space, in time, across myriad axes. I stretched out and grabbed it, and split the world in two. Its ribs reached out to me, and I reached back.
    *   *   *
    â€œYou can’t change this, Hannah,” my sister’s ghost said as I tore the sky apart, shredding the fabric of air, of cloud, of matter and possibility. The lightning danced for me now, bent and buckled for me the way it had only done for Melanie before.
    I will, I will. I will fix this.
    â€œYou can’t,” my sister said. “It’ll end the same way. Differently, but the same.”
    â€œWhy?” I screamed.
    The world crashed, bowed like wet rice paper, spilled inward. Our parents’ house a crater, the flame that was Melanie nowhere on the brightly lit grid of eventualities. No, no, no. Wrong again.
    â€œI never meant to hurt you.” Her ghost sighed as my hands blindly rearranged the components of reality. “I didn’t mean for you to see it. This was never about you, Hannah. I wish you’d realize