Free Love and Hydrogen by Jim Shepard

called.
    â€œTell her you feel bad,” Anson said.
    â€œI feel bad,” his father said.
    There was some clinking and then his dad came in with two drinks and gave his mom one. He wedged himself on the sofa between her and Anson.
    They watched the movie go by. The Phantom on the roof of the opera house, his cape billowing in the wind. His escape in the carriage, the horses’ too-sharp turn, the carriage going over. His holding off the mob by pretending to have a bomb, and then his opening his hand, voluntarily, to show that he didn’t.
    â€œLook at that,” his father said.
    He was looking out the deck doors at a shape in the yard. It was black and the snow was blue. It was the Airedale that played with Shitface. The wind was blowing the snow around, but the Airedale’s fur was barely moving.
    â€œIt’s gotta be twenty below,” his father said.
    The dog lowered itself to the snow. It took the sphinx position.
    Anson slapped himself. He slapped himself again. His father grabbed his hand.
    â€œGeoff,” his mother said. She was crying. He stopped trying to twist his hand out of his dad’s grip. What they didn’t get was this: He didn’t blame himself for what happened. He blamed himself for who he was. He blamed himself for who he’d be. Someday he’d take himself into the woods and run his head into a tree. He wasn’t going to make things harder. He was going to make things work. And that was the most selfish thing of all.

THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON
    Before they came, I went about my business in pond muck, slurry, roiling soups and thermoclines of particulate matter and anaerobiotic nits and scooters. I’d been alone for somewhere between 250 and 260 million years. I’d forgotten the exact date. Our prime had been the Devonian, and we’d been old news by the Permian. We’d become a joke by the Triassic and fish food by the Cretaceous. The Cenozoic had dragged by like the eon it was. At some point I’d looked around and everyone else was gone. I was still there, the spirit of a fish in the shape of a man. I breaststroked back and forth, parting underwater meadows with taloned mitts. I watched species come and go. I glided a lot, vain about my swimming, and not as fluid with my stroking as I would have liked to have been. I suffered from negative buoyancy. I was out of my element.
    Out of the water, I gaped. In the hundred percent humidity it felt like I should be able to breathe. My mouth moved like I was testing a broken jaw. My gills flexed and extended, to pull what I needed out of the impossible thinness of the air. The air felt elastic and warm at the entrance to my throat, as though it had breath behind it that never got through. The air was strands of warmth pulling apart, dissipating at my mouth.
    My mouth was razored with shallow triangular teeth. I lived on fish that I was poorly equipped to catch. I killed a tapir out of boredom or curiosity but it tasted of dirt and parasites and dung. For regularity I ate the occasional water cabbage. I’d evolved to crack open ammonites and rake the meat from trilobites. Instead I flopped around after schools of fish that moved like light on leaves. They slipped away like memories. Every so often a lucky swipe left one taloned.
    How long had it been since I’d seen one of my own? We hadn’t done well where we’d been, and our attempt at a diaspora had been a washout.
    I’d gotten pitying looks from the plesiosaurs.
    Was I so unique? In the rain forest, the common was rare and the rare was common.
    The lagoon changed over the years. It snaked out in various directions and receded in others. Most recently it had become about nine times as long as it was wide. The northern end was not so deep and the southern end fell away farther than I’d ever needed to go. Something with bug eyes and fanlike dorsals had swum up out of there once seventy-five hundred years ago, and