The Last Summer
slipstream by Ken Liu
Eleven-year-old Eddie sat alone on the evening beach, surrounded by piles of fireworks.
Thirty, count ‘em, thirty roman candles were stuck into the sand, plus a whole army of miniature tanks, rocket launchers, space shuttles, and a battleship. They had cost him all the money saved from mowing neighbors’ lawns earlier in the summer.
The packaging for the battleship showed a goofy-looking kid marveling at the vessel — bigger and ten times better made than the crude ship-shaped cardboard contraption inside — zooming around, shooting exploding lasers every way.
He imagined Alex’s voice: That’s some camera they used to take that picture. If it could make a cheap toy look that good, imagine what it would do for you!
Ha-ha, he answered in his mind. Look, they spelled it battleskip!
He had been looking forward to shooting roman candles together into the night sky, pretending to be stalwart defenders manning the ramparts of a castle assaulted by monsters and dragons. They always did that on the Fourth of July.
But Alex wasn’t here tonight.
“I–can’t go to the beach with you,” she had said.
“Why not?”
“My mom wants me to help at the party. She got me a new dress.”
Since the day her family had moved into their cul-de-sac years ago, he had never seen Alex in a dress. The idea of his best friend serving jugs of lemonade in a frilly dress made him laugh. He couldn’t help it.
“Oh grow up!” Alex had said, annoyed. “We’ll be in middle school after the summer. We can’t always act like little kids.”
So here he was, alone.
He pushed away thoughts of middle school, of the end of the summer, the end of an age he once thought endless. “Who needs you?”
He held one of the roman candles tight in his fist as he lit the fuse. Fwoomp, a red star arced into the sky over the sea. Just before the sphere of red light faded, it seemed to illuminate a great leering face in the sky.
Eddie blinked hard.
Fwoomp.
He gazed intently after the green star. The lit patch of sky moved further and further out to sea, revealing nothing. Eddie felt relief, as well as disappointment.
Suddenly, the ocean about a hundred yards away exploded, and a great black column of roiling water rose ten stories into the sky and doused the green light.
Eddie’s heart leapt into his throat.
Fwoomp.
A bright white star now lit up half the sky. On top of the column of water was a monstrous head. It had teeth formed from broken, jagged pieces of sunken ships and drowned cars, hair made of torn, twisted ropes of plastic that would strangle and suffocate, and eyes that coalesced out of sharp, dark shards of glass that seemed to drain away all light. It came from the world of factories and offices, numbers and clocks, making and trashing, money and importance, a world that had grown up.
The monster roared, and the roar seemed take all color and joy out of life. It was not so much evil as it was empty. Humorless, passionless, pleasureless.
Trembling, Eddie kept the roman candle in his hand aimed at the monster. “Go away!”
Fwoomp.
A blue star shot out of the tube, took an agonizingly long time to reach the monster’s face and explode. The monster screamed in pain and surprise, but its maelstrom of a mouth sucked the light of the exploding star away. It took a step closer to the beach, towards Eddie, with its massive water column legs.
Eddie threw away the spent roman candle, fell down and grabbed another one. He struggled to light it and point it at the approaching monster. Fwoomp, fwoomp, two bright red stars aimed for the monster’s head. But it simply lifted two massive hands made of thundering cascades of water in front of its face. The meager light of the roman candles hissed and died.
A profound sense of futility, of nothing-matters-at-all-ness seized Eddie. He wanted to give in, and leave behind this world of monsters and bright lights, of magic and courage. He closed his eyes.
Fwoomp. Fwoomp., Fwoomp. CRACKLE, hiss, ZINNNNNNNNG.
Eddie opened his eyes. Through the smoke, he saw his battalion of tanks, rocket launchers, and space shuttles firing and launching at the monster in unison. Firecrackers exploded around him. And standing beside him, holding a roman candle in each hand and determinedly biting her lips, was Alex.
“You came,” Eddie murmured. But the crackling, whistling, exploding fireworks drowned out his voice, and the sky before him was as bright as the day.
Alex glanced at him, grinned, and shouted, “I couldn’t let you have all the fun!”
Eddie turned back to the monster, bringing his wand to bear.
Great balls of fire arched across the sky. Alex and he were manning the ramparts with a battalion of brilliant engineers and crafty wizards, and the monster roared in pain and fear as the flaming fusillade — green, purple, red, white, blue — exploded against it. It took one step back, and then another, and suddenly, it seemed to lose all coherence and shape, and collapsed into the void of the ocean.
Eddie gazed at Alex in her white dress. It might have been elegant and pretty at one point, but now it was streaked with powder burns and full of holes left by the embers from the fireworks.
“Your mom is going to be really mad.”
“I’ll live.” She smiled at him. And he smiled back.
But the memory of the battle, of wizards and fireballs and their defiant castle, was already fading. As they silently looked at each other, there was a hint of something older, sadder, in both their faces. A world was ending, as inexorably as the shortening summer days.
Then her eyes brightened. “Check out the picture on that battleskip! What is wrong with that kid?”
For tonight, they would linger in it.
Copyright January 2012 by Ken Liu
Ken Liu lives and writes in Quincy, Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Clarkeworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, among other places. His longest work to date, the novella, The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary, is available from Panverse Publishing as part of the novella-only anthology, Panverse Three.
[...] “The Last Summer” by Ken Liu [...]