Lightspeed, May 2026
The story is told by a woman walking a young Canadian scholar through what used to be San Francisco — now called Sarah’s Haven — on his way to meet the girl whose laugh brought down the Walls. The narrator is cagey, digressive, and warm in the way of someone who has earned the right to tell a story slowly. She is also, we eventually learn, Reverend Zipporah Douglas, once the most prominent evangelical voice in favor of the corporate takeover she now lives in quiet penance for enabling.
The world she describes is near-future America transformed by the Evans Treaty, a piece of legislation snuck through Congress during an economic collapse that granted large corporations a form of national sovereignty over the territory they controlled. Multinationals began buying up factory towns, annexing surrounding land, and walling it off — creating corporate enclaves exempt from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and any meaningful notion of human rights. People inside the Walls were property in all but name, chained to beds at night, worked without adequate food or pay, cut off from the outside world. The first of these was Miller’s Square, a Virginia ham town bought by a Chinese conglomerate, though the narrator is careful to note that American corporations were doing the same thing simultaneously. The country, spread thin and distracted, mostly didn’t notice.
What it noticed was Sarah Prosser. When Sarah’s father Jimmy drove to Miller’s Square to find his missing parents and confronted a guard at the gate, his toddler daughter — startled awake — looked hard at the Wall, and laughed. The laugh rang like a bell. The Wall vanished. In the chaos that followed, Jimmy gathered his family and fled, and the story of the laugh began to spread.
Sarah is rendered throughout as genuinely strange rather than conventionally magical. She is deeply sensitive, minimally verbal, avoidant of eye contact, happiest in corners with silent plastic toys. She laughs when she laughs, not when anyone needs her to. Jimmy assembles a caravan of followers called the Laughers and takes her to Wall after Wall, but the laugh is unreliable — in Atlanta she spent three hours staring at a fallen dogwood blossom and never made a sound. Some Walls fell to the laugh directly; others fell because people carried the idea of the laugh back through the cracks and sparked their own uprisings. The magic, Watkins makes clear, was never really about the child.
The climax comes at Denver, the last Wall, where Sarah — asleep in her father’s arms, wearing pink ear muffs against the noise of riots and a Douglas prayer rally — laughs in her sleep. The Wall disappears. The cameras catch the moment live. The Douglas woman’s followers, and millions watching at home, see what was behind it. The country’s opinion shifts, the Walls begin to fall, and the economy collapses under the weight of what it had been propping up.
What follows is quiet and human. Zipporah Douglas drops her microphone at the gate, walks toward the Laughers, and spends years earning her way in from the margins of their community — chased off by dogs, begging at the edge of camp — until Sarah, with characteristic economy, says “hi” and settles the matter. The narrator becomes Sarah’s Keeper: managing her sensory needs, talking to her, treating her as a person rather than a tool. The story closes when Sarah, rarely given to speech, says “Love you, too,” and the narrator — Zipporah, reformed villain, surrogate caretaker — finally laughs herself.
The story is structured as an oral history delivered in motion, and Watkins makes excellent use of the form. The narrator’s voice is specific and earned, full of asides and half-answers that accumulate into a portrait of collective shame and selective memory. The magic here operates on a social logic: Walls fall when they become genuinely ridiculous, and the laugh is less a superpower than a clarifying instrument, a sound that strips pretense. The real subject is complicity — how ordinary language, religious authority, and media attention can make monstrous arrangements seem natural — and the story takes that subject seriously without letting it overwhelm the intimacy of the characters at its center.
Melissa A Watkins has been a teacher, a singer, an actress, and a very bad translator but now has found her way back to her first artistic love, writing. Her work has previously appeared in khoreo, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Fantasy Magazine. After fifteen years of living in Europe and Asia, she now resides in California, where she reads and reviews books at EqualOpportunityReader.com.