Category: Fiction

DP FICTION #33A: “When One Door Shuts” by Aimee Ogden

The whole family wants to know when Mia is going to walk through the door, but no one has asked her about it. No one will.

The front door of Mia’s parents’ house is painted emerald green on the outside, off-white on the inside, with a knob contrived to look like real brass. No one has opened it for six months. Mia hates that door, has hated it for its full half-year of disuse. Ever since the front door of every house on the street became a portal into death.

Or a portal to somewhere else, at least. But it’s the dead who walk through from the other side. The Garcias’ stillborn little boy was the first one to come back, crawling through their open door as a fat, cheerful one-year-old. George Bojanek, who died of a heart attack three years ago in May and who was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Custer, strolled through one day. None of them have anything to say about where they’ve been and how they came back, certainly not the one-year-old and not old George and no one in between.

The doors are a mystery, but the trick of operating them is not. All it takes is someone opening the door from the inside of the house and walking out. And disappearing forever. Dead, Mia supposes. A cosmic tit-for-tat. But no one knows where George Bojanek’s elderly mother-in-law is now, and the Garcia baby certainly can’t tell what happened to his mother’s little niece.

The doors are almost all anyone can talk about these days, though their voices drop when Mia walks into the room. Yes, the doors are inscrutable, but to Mia they’re also infuriating. She visits her parents’ home as infrequently as she can, preferring to keep to her own apartment in her own town, where the doors are just doors and the only expectations hung on her are that she will arrive at work on time and get things done while she’s there.

But whenever she parks on the too-familiar street for a visit, she has to walk around and enter the house through the garage. When the postal carrier rings the bell to announce a package, it means finding shoes and making the tedious trip around. And each time Mia finds her mother standing in the doorway of Allison’s room, pretending to close the door as if she hasn’t been standing there staring into the darkness for hours, she has to pretend she didn’t see as she walks past to the bathroom.

It’s Allison’s room now, and it always will be. Once, it was Mia and Allison’s. For fifteen years, it was. Mia has had the privilege of having her own room, elsewhere. A series of rooms. A dormitory, a studio apartment. Briefly, a roomy space in Lee and Amanda’s attic. White walls, blue, gray. Her scenery has changed; Allison’s has stagnated in three static shades of pastel green with white geometric-patterned curtains, ones that fifteen-year-olds must have considered the very height of style. Softball and Science Olympiad trophies still line the bookshelves. No dust. That much at least is different from how it was when it was still Mia’s room too.

Mia goes into the room sometimes, when she thinks her mother isn’t looking. She’s not certain it would start a fight, but she’s not certain it wouldn’t. She has as much right to be here as anyone. It was her room too, once. And it’s not as if Allison is here to object. She sits on the bed, rumples the spread. Thumbs through the copy of 1984 on the nightstand. Allison liked to say it was her favorite book, though Mia was certain she never actually read it. She flips to the first page and reads: the clocks were striking 13. She slams it shut and throws it back into its place. It slides to a rest against the white plastic base of the bedside lamp.

Sometimes, often, Clayton is downstairs, playing video games with Mia’s younger brother Brandon. Like Allison’s bedroom, Clayton is a relic left untouched in the wake of her passing. If Allison were still here, Clayton certainly wouldn’t be. She would have outgrown him, like she would have outgrown those atrocious curtains. Someone should have outgrown Clayton, because he doesn’t seem to be aware that he ought to have outgrown himself at some point in the last eight years. At least he’s of more utility than the sepulcher of a bedroom. Brandon likes him, anyway, and he’s nice to the kid. And if Mia’s parents aren’t going to discuss the fact that Clayton was the one driving the car that night, then Mia certainly won’t broach the subject herself. Mia was the one who didn’t insist Allison wear a seatbelt. She was seventeen minutes older, and thus, her sister’s keeper. Nothing to keep anymore, except a silent green room and an old boyfriend with male pattern baldness.

There are pictures of both of the twins in the house—all three children, with baby Brandon making his debut during Mia and Allison’s second-grade year. It’s a polite fiction, the window dressing on the household’s grief. No one has ever come to the library in Rochester where Mia now runs the children’s section. But every year, the whole family makes a pilgrimage to Ann Arbor to visit Allison’s first-choice college and med school.

On her birthday—their birthday, Allison can keep their childhood bedroom but not this, not the entire day—there is no party planned, no bright-colored envelope waiting in the mailbox at Mia’s apartment. She bakes her own birthday cake using a box of Betty Crocker mix, as she’s done the past seven years. She adds extra butter to the store-bought frosting to make it taste more like the stuff her mother used to make. No candles. They seem like a waste. She leaves the finished product on her kitchen counter, untasted, before she heads over to her parents’ house for a silent, miserable Saturday afternoon. She’ll go out with her coworkers next weekend: Tobin, who runs the circulation desk, has a birthday at the end of the month, so they’ll split the difference. It’s oddly reassuring to share a birthday again.

She lets herself in the side door using her key. She’s had the same one since she and Allison were old enough to come home from school alone. Her key ring has changed, but the locks have stayed the same. Most things have stayed the same in this house. Mia wonders what will happen when Brandon graduates and goes to college.

Her footsteps are light on the peeling linoleum of the mud-room. She leaves her shoes under the bench, where no one will trip on them. Where no one will wonder what kind of shoes Allison would have been wearing today.

The grade door closes silently behind her, and she ghosts through the house in her stocking feet. She peruses the contents of the fridge, peels back the lid on a container of cold spaghetti, thinks better of it. Her mother might have plans for lunch already. In the basement, Brandon and Clayton shout at their football player avatars on the big-screen TV. There was a time when Scott, her own high school boyfriend, was just as much a fixture in the house as Clayton is now. She hasn’t spoken to Scott since graduation. What is he doing today? She can’t imagine him playing video games with a teenager. In fact, she doesn’t want to imagine him at all. Too hard to think of a life that’s not chained in orbit around that single day. She drifts upstairs instead.

The door to her mother’s room is cracked open. Not far: just far enough for Mia to catch a glimpse inside as she comes up the stairs. She can see her mother, facedown on the floor. Shoulders twitching in great silent sobs. Fingers twisted into the rug.

Eight years. Eight years of this. Mia remembers a class trip when she and Allison were nine, to a petting farm on the other side of the freeway. One of the chickens was missing feathers, open sores mottling its head and sides. While the girls stared, another hen strolled over and lit into the wounded bird’s neck with its beak. “Why did it do that?” Mia asked, and the farmer shrugged: “They just can’t let it alone.”

A break in the smothered sobs. Mia’s mother looks up from the cradle of her arms. Her fingers slacken on the much-abused rug. Her stained eyes meet Mia’s. A flicker of recognition, of contact. And Mia wonders: was this an accidental intrusion on her mother’s private pain? Or was the whole scene staged for Mia’s benefit? Is this just another pitstop on the nearly decade-long guilt trip Mia has embarked on?

And does it matter?

Even in nothing but socks, Mia’s heels bang on the wooden stairs. She likes the sound. For so long, she has tried to be a silent presence in this house, neither seen nor heard. An unassuming hitchhiker on the long road to nowhere. It feels good to make noise. She is here. Let them remember that.

Someone calls after her—Brandon?—but too late. Her hand closes on the doorknob; her wrist twists. She looks back over her shoulder. Brandon’s face, too pale, just behind her mother’s shoulder. Just behind him, Dad, close-mouthed and frowning. Her mother’s arm is outstretched, but as Mia turns, it falls back down to her side.

No turning back now. That would be a cruelty to all of them.

Mia closes her eyes. Time to go.

The front door opens, and Mia steps through.

And into the foyer of her parents’ house.

For a moment, disorientation shakes her. This isn’t right: she should be gone. But everyone is still standing there, silent and staring, just as she left them.

But no, this is not the same smothering sameness Mia has acclimated to. This is not her family’s house, not exactly, not entirely. Not the same family she left behind when she walked through the door. Her mother’s arms are still by her sides, but they come up now, and Dad grabs onto the wall for support. Brandon sits down on the stairs. “Mia,” her mother breathes, and when she tries to say it again, her voice shatters.

Mia takes an uncertain step forward, looks back at the door she came through. “No!” her mother cries, and Mia turns just in time to be crushed in those strange, familiar arms. Brandon wraps around them both, his threadbare teenage pride tossed aside for the moment, and both he and their mother are weeping, and Mia doesn’t understand why until Scott comes up the stairs.

She hasn’t seen him for five years, not since senior year, when they parted ways to different colleges and different lives. She’s never considered what her life would have looked like if she’d hung on to her high school sweetheart. Having Clayton around was always enough of a souvenir of those days. “I thought I heard … ” He looks as if he’s seen a ghost, and of course, he has. “She did it,” he says, and that word, she, hangs over Mia like a cold shadow.

All Mia’s mother can say is how much she’s missed Mia, and she tucks the hair behind Mia’s ear: an uncertain, familiar gesture. They want to show Mia the house, and she lets them. They emphasize the sameness, the house as museum or mausoleum, but she already sees it: every untouched crack in the linoleum, all the foot-worn carpeting.

Somewhere during the tour, Brandon ducks out. He returns with a birthday cake from the corner store, a packet of multicolored candles, and a lighter. While Dad is digging in the farthest reaches of the freezer for a theoretical carton of Moose Tracks ice cream, Mia excuses herself to the restroom.

There are no bathrooms on the first floor, and given the choice of basement or second story, Mia moves upward. There are pictures on the walls in the staircase, as she’s used to seeing. Just like she’s used to, the family history depicted there screeches to an abrupt halt: smiling pictures of the twins, baby Brandon, suddenly stop in the girls’ junior year of high school. The final picture on the wall is as familiar as a reflection, and just as strange: a high school graduation photo. But of course, the face under the tasseled black hat is Allison’s, not Mia’s.

The bathroom is at the end of the hall, but she stops first at the only closed door. It opens at her push, and she leans into the doorjamb as she looks inside. No sports trophies here, only hand-made picture books and a third-place ribbon from a high school poetry contest. On the bureau, a dog-eared copy of The Fountainhead. Mia grimaces, turns her face into the doorjamb. The walls are green and the curtains are patterned in geometric black-and-white. She wonders if she will have to sleep here tonight. She looks over the bookshelves: there is no copy of 1984, not that she can see.

She closes the door quietly, but she wants to slam it.

Mia uses the bathroom, splashes water on her face. When she comes down the stairs, the family is waiting for her, with Scott in anxious orbit. They sing “Happy Birthday” to her. She eats cake and freezer-burned ice cream. No one asks her what has happened to Allison, and she does not tell them.

© 2017 by Aimee Ogden

 

phhfhrs4gkAimee Ogden is definitely not six angry badgers in a trenchcoat. She enjoys baking, reading comics, weightlifting, and digging cozy burrows. Her work has also appeared in Shimmer, Apex, and Escape Pod. You can keep up with her on Twitter or at her website.

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #32B: “Three Days of Unnamed Silence” by Daniel Ausema

A letter would be waiting for me at home, a real physical letter, like the old days. I knew about it, knew what it would mean, as I rushed through the day, calibrating grading bots and marking AI tests. As soon as I met my quota and had the batteries for my hDevice fully kinked, I hurried down to the great rotating front door.

The grunt whose effort powered the door slipped just as I approached. It shouldn’t have been a problem. Engineers work all kinds of failsafes into the systems so what a grunt does won’t go directly into the connected machine. Supposed to, anyway. But for some reason, the grunt’s tripping translated into an interruption in the door’s power, which made the door jerk. I slammed my shin into it, limped inside.

Immediately the grunt was dragged away and another thrust into its place.

I rubbed my leg as I waited for the door to resume its usual rhythm, then headed out to the street. That time of day the busses had so many stops and starts, they were always unwinding their screws way too fast, having to pause and shove in new ones. Better to walk.

I cut across the university lawn, though it was a longer way. It was where my letter would come from. A letter adding, appropriately enough, a few key letters to my name. PhD, it sounded good added to the end of my name. I repeated it in time to my steps. P, H, D, P, H, D.

The sidewalk passed by the university library’s subterranean power station. In a gesture at humanitarianism that no one would insist on anymore, the power station had a wide, narrow window to let in the sunlight. The glass was angled into the side of a subtle rise, so that from the sidewalk I could easily see down into the station. The grunts worked furiously, kinking and winding the batteries that kept the library’s power-hungry devices running. Treadmills fed power to other machines, those not connected to the batteries. A great, horizontal wheel in the center of the station had a dozen grunts around it, all pushing together to wind up the massive battery placed in its center.

P, H, D, P, H, D. I left the library behind and walked past the campus center. Its clock tower beamed out the time into the air before it, with a ticker of class news and information. I focused on it for a moment, and the words expanded in my eyes. Was it announcing the new candidates? Would my name be there?

If I opened up my hDevice, I’d surely see my name right there. It was smart enough to display that portion of the ticker for me without asking. But I wanted to keep the batteries full, and searching with my eyes wasn’t worth the effort. I let myself enjoy the knowledge it was there, probably even pushed to the front for any friends who passed by. Knowing it was enough.

Across campus, I caught a moving walk. A waste of energy, most places, but gravity and high use by students meant it was one place a kinetic sidewalk made sense. I joined the crowds, watched them peripherally as we strolled along en masse. Did they realize what was waiting for me? Could they see the aura of the PhD hanging over me as I walked? One young man smiled as I passed at a faster pace, a shy smile that I returned. A stunning, older woman gave me a frank grin, which I returned as well. I smiled at everyone, wanted to ask everyone their names. Tell me them all!

I kept quiet, only thought the words. Still, there was a glow to the people around me, as if they could hear me asking, could hear my new title awaiting me at home. Maybe I only imagined it. But maybe my giddy mood did transmit in some way.

I got off the walk a few streets later and had to wait for a two-biker to pass, its grunts straining to pull a full cart of riders. My street was lined with high wires, twisted so tightly they hummed. By night they would all be loose, as we powered our houses through the evenings, the screens and dinners of home life. Then I’d be glad my hDevice was charged. Did I have all the numbers, all the people I’d want to tell the good news? I planned out my order as I walked.

By morning the grunts would have the wires set for breakfast and showers and the morning rush. By then I’d be a PhD for real. My first full day with a title to my name.

I took the steps up to my flat two at a time, and the hollow ring of my footsteps repeated those letters. P, H, D, P, H, D. My finger unlocked the door, and my house greeted me, though its voice was oddly subdued.

“Any deliveries for me, house?”

“Yes, Entity 37-58231-K. One delivery.”

Why my ent number? My house had never greeted me that way since I first moved in. I shrugged it off and looked in the slot for the delivery. There it was, a single envelope. My hands shook as I pulled it out.

It wasn’t labeled as university mail.

It was addressed to Entity 37-58231-K.

Inside was a government letterhead, and a letter that would have superseded any other deliveries of the day. Somewhere, intercepted by the nets and screens of the oversight offices, was my acceptance letter, but it didn’t matter anymore. The government letter was brief, direct. “Entity 37-58231-K, your lottery number has come up. You are scheduled for un-naming. While you retain your name, the government thanks you for your sacrifice for the good of all. Know that it is appreciated. Please report to the nearest courthouse or administrative center immediately.”

The letter dropped from my fingers.

***

When your name comes up for un-naming, you run. Not everyone does. It’s hopeless to flee, and many simply submit. But not you.

Before the letter has settled to the floor, you tear outside the flat, take the steps down at a leap. Are the officials already coming up the elevator? Maybe they’re at the foot of the steps, expecting this. At the second floor, you leave the stairwell, run to a window. It opens stiffly, but wide enough to drop through.

Alleys or main streets? Hiding or blending in? Either has its problems, so you stick with the small street you’re on, run as fast as you dare, as fast a pace as you think you can maintain. No sense sprinting only to have to walk once you’ve gone two blocks.

People look as you run past, but not to stare. A glance, you’re noticed, you’re forgotten…mostly. Forgotten until some official comes asking them. Someone running by? Oh, yeah. Late for a bus, looked like. Went that way. Maybe better not to run at all.

You slow down, ease in behind a group of deskies chatting with each other on their way home from work. Do they have titles behind their names? Unlikely, yet they still have names, and that’s key. They are still people, not grunts toiling away to serve modern society. You will yourself to be one of them, title-less but still named.

A police car passes by. You huddle into your coat, ease in close behind the deskies. The car doesn’t slow.

Still unnerving. When the group passes a thickly wooded park, you peel away. There are trees for cover, and you’re tired. Come morning, the chase will have cooled, and you’ll be able to leave the city entirely behind.

There are rumors of places off the grid, where sun and wind give power and grunts aren’t needed. You’ll find it, somehow. Somewhere out in the wastes you’ll stumble across a hidden settlement. You’ll befriend an odd stranger who gives you the secret, once you show you can be trusted. That’s how it works.

So you sleep, hidden inside the evergreen bushes, where the branches weave together into a perfect hiding place. No one will be able to find you here.

You wake up, stumble away before light, only to find the bush you chose already surrounded by police. Their guns whine with the pent up energy of their kinked batteries, and two grunts stand ready to recharge them.

As if you could ever put up such a fight.

The police grab you before you can flee, before you can swing a single fist or evade a single attempt to tackle you. None of which prevents the police from kicking, hitting, beating you senseless before they drag you away to your unnaming treatment.

***

The grunt trudges. It might well be the only way a grunt is allowed to move, after all. Once the surgeries and incisions are done to slice away a person’s name, it may be the only way it is still capable of moving. No grunts have ever done anything to undermine the idea, anyway.

It takes its place at a great wheel, grabbing the sawdust-coated handle with gloved hands. It does not know where that wheel is. The same one in the university library? Or any of countless others across the city? All identical, and any attempt to remember a named life causes a shooting pain in its brain.

The sawdust keeps the grunt’s hands from slipping off the wheel as it strains with the other workers to push. The device gives off sparks as they move, twisting and kinking as much power into its strands as the weave can hold.

After hours of mindless motion, the grunt is done for the day. Or for the shift, anyway. The lives of grunts are not organized around days but shifts. It enters a cramped dorm off the power station, eats a bowl full of protein-rich paste, and falls into its cot to sleep.

Another shift, some uncounted number of shifts later. The grunt is sent out to gather unwound batteries from drop boxes around the city. The same city where it used to live? Even thinking the question is enough to bring the sharp pain just behind its ear. It keeps its head lowered, lets the streetlight fall on its bare head.

After gathering the contents of two drop boxes, it pauses. The street is open. Has it forgotten that flight to freedom? Those rumors of another way to live? Nearly so, but a glimmer of that dream breaks through its namelessness. It weighs the bag of unwound batteries in its hands. To throw them? Smash some windows? A lifetime of viewing batteries as just shy of sacred holds firm, though, and it sets the batteries down beside the road.

It turns in a circle, a dog checking its internal compass, a beast following a pre-human instinct. But it doesn’t lie down to sleep. It dashes for the shadows of the nearest alley. Unnamed and so not entirely human, it no longer fears the rats and trash that clutter the alley. It slithers into the smallest place it can find.

Alas that the grunts clean the alleys so well. Alas that the humans know to watch for grunts on the run, especially those that are new. Its hiding is brief, and by the end of the shift it is back at its labor. Many shifts will pass before it is allowed outside again, and many more before it goes beyond the sight of a human overseer. By then even the glimmer of memory will have faded nearly to nothing.

Over time, grunts come to resemble each other. The hard labor, poor hygiene, and lack of names melds one into the next. What do minor variations in skin tone or gender matter in the face of drudgery? The grunt that was once Entity 37-58231-K loses the hair on its head, grows dense muscles on its legs and chest. Like all the others. The intelligence and drive that once nearly earned it a doctorate fades from its eyes.

The next time it goes out to gather unwound batteries, it never deviates from its assignment. Most shifts it plods along, turning the great wheel in its assigned power station, never talking and never complaining, even in demeanor. Along with the other grunts, it powers the city. And it watches its fellow grunts fall one by one and be replaced by the newly unnamed. The relentless kinking and twisting of modern life.

Until the grunts rise in revolt.

It starts at the wheel, with a grunt jumping onto the top and grabbing the central axle that rises up to the ceiling. The wheel kinks the grunt, killing it instantly. Its death jolts the rest of the grunts away from their work. At first, for a moment, they might flee in fright. But one —is it the grunt once known as Entity 37-58231-K? We may never know —checks its flight and lets the anger of unnaming rise up.

Anger? It should have been silenced with its unnaming. The humans remove much that made the formerly-named a human, a surgery physical and mental and psychological. Yet the sight of the dying grunt brings a measure of it back, and not only in one grunt. It is as if such strong emotion is a magnet, drawing out the same anger in grunt after grunt, until all roar in voiceless revolt.

They charge from the power station. At first, the humans don’t know what to do. The grunts are unnamed, unthinking, powerless. What can you do, when the machinery of society fights back? More grunts join, leaving behind their tasks. Spinning batteries unwind, and the twisting machines fall still. The more that join, the easier for the next to jump in too.

Then the shots begin. The police don’t hold back. Grunt after grunt falls. But what are bullets except another form of drudgery? Shot, they press on, even after a named person might give up. And unshot, they don’t shy from fear. What mental room they’ve pried open for emotion is filled with mob-rage.

And as they advance, the shooting lurches into uncertainty. How many bullets do the police have? How fully are their batteries charged? And who will they send to get more when they run out? Not a grunt. Even a person, named, must rely on the grunts to rush to the storerooms or face catastrophic delay.

The grunts gather strength, swell in unnamed fury. The police fall back, conserve their firepower, fear their loss of control.

This is it, the time to overthrow, the time to take back names. They move in concert down the street. Where to? It is not strategy but mob impulse that guides them away from the power station and toward the crueler power of the city center.

Here, where so much of the city is run, there is a greater stockpile of kinked batteries and ammunition. The humans find their resolve, form into lines, trust in their guns once more. Even the advantages of namelessness aren’t enough to overcome the firepower of mobilized human forces. They crest, push again toward their oppressors, and fall down. As more fall, the anger ebbs into fear, and grunts fall away one by one.

Our grunt, who once dreamed of a PhD, is still among those who fight, a tightening knot of grunts who refuse to concede defeat. There must still be a way to find the city’s weakness. The grunt falls. No, that’s another of the grunts…maybe. Their identities blur. The knot barges as one around a corner. More fall. Ours? They are too alike to know.

A choice lies before them, a split they must take. One way leads to the place where they had their names removed. Might they still reclaim them? Or make sure no one else loses theirs, at least? The other way leads outside the city, into the wilderness where rumors place other escapees.

They veer toward the wilderness. Too slow, as forces move in to stop them, humans with stronger weapons, sure now in their ability to stop the grunts before they run out of power. The knot nearly comes undone as they waver between fight and flight. Perhaps it is our PhD who pulls them together, forces them toward the unnaming place.

It is locked. Humans with guns move in. This time the grunts do not fight back. They take their places before the door, stand tall in the view of anyone who might see. With arms outspread, they stand, are shot, fall.

No humans lament their deaths, only the disruption.

The revolt is over, the nameless grunts forgotten. But the bullets that mow them down damage the entryway into the unnaming place. No one may enter. For several days, no one is unnamed, just when the city most needs new grunts. Only when human workers are able to repair the door can new grunts be made.

Three days of unnamed silence. That is the only memorial, the only name that remains of the fallen grunts and their brief revolution. But sometimes, at the limits of namelessness, the word only approaches, approximates everything.

© 2017 by Daniel Ausema

 

Author’s Note: The past couple of years I’ve participated in an event called Wyrm’s Gauntlet, which challenges writers with a series of tasks, winnowing the participants with each round. The final task in 2015 involved a quote about how society relies on stripping us of our identity. I’ve forgotten the exact quote, but at the time is struck me and inspired this story.

 

daniel-ausema-headshot-1A writer, runner, reader, parent, and teacher, Daniel Ausema’s work has appeared in many publications including Strange Horizons and Daily Science Fiction, as well as previously in Diabolical Plots. He is the author of the Spire City series, and his latest novel, The Silk Betrayal, is coming this fall from Guardbridge Books. He lives in Colorado, at the foot of the Rockies.

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #32A: “Lightning Dance” by Tamlyn Dreaver

Lightning Dance sat next to Willa Bernardi on the side of the road. Rain splattered down around them, damp and uncomfortable, and the heavy smell from the gutter wrapped the air. Dance balanced a cigarette between her gloved fingers; its red tip glowed in the dark street. Somewhere in the distance sirens blared through the city. The police, ambulance, fire brigade: everyone came, and also probably the media.

Dance had pushed her mask up off her face, and without it she looked almost too human. She was beautiful, but faint lines of cynicism marked her mouth and eyes.

Willa huddled further into herself. She tried not to shiver in the chilly air. The rain had plastered her hair to her face. She’d lost her shoes somewhere, and her frozen feet were scratched and muddy. Her blue satin dress, which she’d thought so beautiful — which she’d thought made her beautiful —was ruined, the material stained and torn. Willa stared at her toes and wriggled them.

Dance wore elegant white boots that enabled her to leap from building to building, from wall to ground, as she fought the villains of the city. She didn’t have regenerative powers, but she was never hurt; she moved too quickly. Not many knew that, but Willa did. Willa knew everything about Dance — or so she thought, once upon a time.

Willa darted a quick look at Dance as the hero took a long drag from her cigarette. The street was empty of anyone but them. The sirens grew closer, but no one had passed the abandoned district and stopped to gawk; they’d follow the sirens. The constant sound of water mingled with the slow crumble of the half-demolished building behind them. One functioning street light reflected off the river of water gurgling through the gutters; the rest of the metal poles had been torn up and used as weapons in the fight between Lightning Dance and Unbender. He had used the poles; Dance fought with speed and lightning and pure grace.

The remaining light lit up the street all too clearly. A clump of something unidentifiable swirled by in the gutter, and Willa prodded it with her toe. She almost wished she shivered in the safe, obscuring dark.

“Your boyfriend?” Dance asked unexpectedly between drags; her voice was husky.

Willa hadn’t even known the hero smoked. “Yes,” she said quietly.

Garret had been charming and witty, and raised so many red flags, but she’d ignored them because she could never say exactly why he made her uneasy. Men like him never paid attention to women like her, and she’d alternated between amazement and terror that she’d do something wrong. She didn’t know if Garret had been real — if he was the person behind Unbender’s mask or if he was the mask.

“Babe, you have shit taste.”

“Yes.” Willa remembered the posters on her wall, at first of all the heroes, but then only of Lightning Dance. She remembered the scrapbook of newspaper clippings, then internet articles, the montage of computer backgrounds, and the embarrassing fantasies through high school she wouldn’t even share with her best friend. She still had everything stashed in a box in the back of her cupboard.

Dance muttered something under her breath, cursing, and Willa hugged her knees tightly to her chest. Her wrist hurt. Dance had dropped her down the stairs to get her out of the way, and she’d landed badly. Tears pricked her eyes, and she was glad then for the rain that spat around them.

“Not even going to say thank you?”

“Thank you,” Willa said mechanically.

Dance snorted. She stretched out her lithe body clad in white Lycra that somehow remained clean despite the fight and the mud and the dirty gutter. She didn’t look uncomfortable in the rain, only indifferent. “Not very grateful, are you?” She snuffed her cigarette on the wet sidewalk, then tossed it out onto the road.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Willa said.

The hero, one hand on her mask to slap it down and the other poised to push her to her feet, paused.

Willa flushed. “It can cause fires,” she whispered.

“Huh.” Dance half-smirked. “Not in this weather. Pretty sure I just caused a hell of lot more fires anyway.” Dance jerked her thumb back over her shoulder at the demolished building.

A piece of crumbling wall crashed down and drowned out the sirens. The explosion of dust momentarily overwhelmed the stench of the gutter. Any fires within probably sizzled before the growing onslaught of the rain. It had been an empty warehouse. Garret had said it was an exclusive nightclub. Willa hated nightclubs. It hadn’t seemed odd when they entered the abandoned district; exclusive often seemed to mean luxury in squalid surroundings.

Dance leant back again and pulled another cigarette from her belt but didn’t light it. “Do I know you?”

“No.”

The hero’s lips twisted. “Fair enough. Half expected a ‘you saved me once before’ there. It’s normally what I get.”

“You did once.” Willa rested her chin on her knees and stared fixedly at the road. “I was five.”

Dance snorted again. “Sorry, babe, don’t remember.”

“I don’t expect you to.” And she didn’t. She’d walked on air for days. She’d fallen in love with Lightning Dance then and there, and she’d thought she’d never fall out. “You rescue people all the time.”

“Way too many sometimes,” Dance muttered.

Willa twisted a fold of her soaked dress into her clenched fists. The sirens grew louder, and the rain heavier.

“You know…” Dance said slowly. “I do remember you. I think.” She twirled her cigarette in her hand and touched a fingertip to its end. With a slight sizzle of lightning, the cigarette glowed.

“I doubt it.”

“Yeah, I do. You told some dude off for littering then, too.”

Willa had. She’d stood up, a tiny child scratched and bleeding, and berated the bemused mayor. Dance had laughed, looked right at Willa, and told her not to change.

“The mayor.” Dance took a long drag on her glowing cigarette.

“Yes.” Willa bit her lip. “That was me.”

She’d almost rather Dance didn’t remember her. Her eyes ached through the rain. Her arm, still locked around her legs, throbbed from elbow to fingers, and she didn’t dare move it.

She wondered if Garret was dead or if he’d escaped. Nothing had been clear in the fight.

“Well.” Dance breathed a smoke ring that lasted only a second before the rain ripped it apart. “You were a lot more grateful then.”

“Yes.”

“What changed?”

Willa tilted her head back to the sky. Despite the rain, she could see a sprinkle of stars. A quick burst of light that sped across the clouds was probably Sprint. The city had a league of heroes; some places could only handle one.

“Babe?” Dance looked at Willa as if she was actually interested, and the cynicism in her face faded a little.

Willa sighed. “I grew up.”

The hero laughed and flicked her barely touched cigarette away. “I always thought that was a good thing.”

Willa thought she could hear the engines of the emergency response vehicles now as well as the sirens. They had to be near. “Not always,” she said before she realised she was talking – before she remembered she was sitting and waiting and hoping Dance left to save someone else. “When you’re little, you believe in everything.”

“Reckon if you’d closed your eyes and said this ain’t real, Unbender would have disappeared?”

Willa hugged her legs tightly to her. “No. You believe in heroes and good people and bad people and everything makes sense. When you’re older you realise…”

“Ah.” Dance tapped her fingers against the pavement. Lightning twitched across the concrete, and the rain evaporated with a hiss. As soon as the lightning disappeared, the dry patches disappeared too. “Sorry, babe. There are good people out there. I’m probably not one of them.”

Willa ducked her head. Lightning Dance was one of the good people. And Dance had to be good – she’d saved Willa when Garret would have killed her. She saved people. She protected the city. She just…

“That’s the problem with being a hero.” Dance’s lips twitched, a bitter movement. “People expect you to be perfect.”

She had been perfect when Willa was five and even when Willa was twenty.

Dance rose and wandered down the road; she flipped her mask down, preparing to leave, and suddenly looked much less human and much more the hero on the pedestal where Willa had put her. Willa dunked her feet into the freezing water in the gutter. Her cuts stung, but some of the mud washed away.

Looking back, Dance paused. “Hey, babe, don’t do that. The water’s probably contaminated.” Lightning flared around her and lit the street.

Willa blinked stupidly; then she looked down at her feet. A strangled laugh caught in her throat. It seemed Dance couldn’t help herself: she had to stop and say something because she saved people despite themselves, even when it irked her.

It wasn’t Dance’s fault Willa had grown up. It wasn’t Dance’s fault Willa had worshipped her to begin with.

It didn’t make Willa feel any better.

She drew her feet from the gutter, and Dance nodded in satisfaction.

“Two minutes, and the ambos will be here. You’ll be fine. I’ll see you around, babe.” Her teeth flashed in a grin beneath her perfect white mask. “If I’ve rescued you twice, I’ll rescue you again.”

She darted away, up the wall of the nearest building as if it was flat ground, and Willa sat alone in the street.

© 2017 by Tamlyn Dreaver

 

author-picTamlyn Dreaver grew up in rural Western Australia and now lives in Melbourne. She’s never had a secret basement or a dragon nesting in the backyard or anything nearly as interesting so she makes up stories about them instead. She can be found on the web at www.tamlyndreaver.com and tweeting at @tamlyn_dreaver.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #31B: “The Entropy of a Small Town” by Thomas K. Carpenter

I gave up the memory of my first kiss to fix the carburetor. It uncoiled from my mind like a constrictor that’d just figured out it was strangling a steaming pot of chicken soup, or the way an unclasped belt loosened and released a pair of tight hipster jeans from some skinny hips, maybe even Osmond’s.

Sitting in the attached garage surrounded by smudged grease, crumpled car parts, and a snot-filled rage that oscillated between “No, I’m fine” and “What the hell does any of it matter” I pictured that kiss as it slipped free.

It’d been awkwardly delivered by a girl in seventh grade, behind Hamilton Elementary School, where they parked the buses they didn’t have the funds to fix anymore. Her name was Abby Silver. She’d kissed me with open eyes and rubbery lips, and whispered my name, “Phillip?” as she pulled away.

Eventually, I couldn’t hold onto it and the memory became an object I couldn’t describe, like being told a word in an alien language and trying vainly to picture it. The first time I traded a memory, I tried to cheat the reaction by writing it down in exquisite detail first. Afterwards, it was like reading someone else’s diary, someone who knew you, but somehow in your small town, you’d never met. It gave me the uncomfortable feeling my life was being observed and recorded. I never tried that again.

When I looked back to my oil-stained hand, covered in little black cuts from torn steel, the carburetor looked solid and whole like a frozen gray heart. Even the dirt had been cleansed from its skin and my fingernails were angry dark crescents against it.

I was about to fix the radiator, crushed like a wad of spent tissue paper, when the screen door from the kitchen wheezed open. Osmond’s mother backed in with an arm full of laundry, untidy hair spilling over her lumpy black dress. I escaped out the side door before she saw me.

I headed towards the center of town, following signs of the accident. Using a memory from when I went to the water park forty miles away with my parents only to find that it’d closed, I uncurled the stop sign, putting it back into its stiff policeman’s pose, which only reminded me of Osmond’s father, red-faced and shouting in a world full of “No”. I ran from that corner, forgetting that I’d been trying to hold onto a memory, which one, I didn’t know, before it obliterated.

My physics teacher, Mr. Anderson —a puffy-eyed well-known bachelor who wore pink Hello Kitty! socks most days —had once explained that the second law of thermodynamics stated that entropy always increased.

The laws of entropy explained why life was always so complicated. Whenever Osmond and I skipped class behind the gym, he would smoke cigarettes and talk about whatever new band he was into, while I admired his pale, lean arms sticking out from an ironic Ramones t-shirt with expertly cut off sleeves. If either one of us was having a bad day, which was most of them for Osmond, we blamed it on entropy.

Why did Osmond’s dad drink whiskey and yell at him at night? Entropy. Why had the Grizzly Bears sold out on their latest album? Entropy. Why did there always have to be so much physics homework? Entropy.

The last one was all me, and a bit of a lie. Mr. Anderson was why I’d considered a career in physics and had even applied to MIT, his alma mater. But Osmond and I didn’t share any classes and I never had anything to really complain about, so I’d made it up.

But entropy couldn’t explain how I could exchange memories to fix things. By the second law of thermodynamics, I shouldn’t have been able to put things back to how they’d been before. Giving up the memory violated the law as much as the fixing did, because that made it like it had never happened.

When a cherry red Camaro drove past me on the way to the Quickie Mart, I used the epithets they hurled at me, ones I’d heard a hundred times before in this small town, and fixed the cracks in the sidewalk. I repurposed my memories so quickly, their insults burnt up on contact, like an icy rain falling into a hot fire.

I always wondered if the Streets Department ever noticed that the sidewalks and roads were in better shape than their age would indicate. Maybe they thought a concrete faerie was protecting its realm, and maybe it was.

When I got to the old oak tree that Osmond’s light blue Chrysler Dynasty had crashed into last week, I clasped my hand over my mouth, smelling the leftover oil and grease I couldn’t quite scrub free, and trembled like a knife thrown into the dirt.

Black skid marks stained the gravel-speckled street, turning to raw earth as the tires had hit the grass. The whole scene looked like a giant had punched the tree, dragging its Neanderthal knuckles through the dirt as it swung. Little bits of plastic were imbedded into the tree that had a crack wide enough to fit my hand snaking up the trunk. Already, the leaves on the north side had withered, curling up just like I had to do each night to get to sleep.

Fixing static objects like stop signs and carburetors was one thing. They were frozen entropy and maybe fixing them rearranged the atoms enough to satisfy the second law of thermodynamics. But living, growing things were another. They were entropy in motion, constantly changing and updating themselves.

I thought for a while about what memory would be strong enough to fix the tree. It would have to be something that went down to the core of who I was. I studied myself for clues: jeans so tight they looked painted on, a belt I painted gold because the stupid Sears here didn’t carry the kind of clothes I liked to wear, an aqua linen buttoned-down shirt.

The first memory I toyed with trading was the time Osmond and I were sitting on the picnic table someone had hauled out to Knoll Point, when we talked about my ability. I’d shown him how I could fix things, putting a broken pencil back together as proof. He asked if I could fix people. He had a hungry, vulnerable look about him. I tried to kiss him, but he pushed me back. It wasn’t like we hadn’t kissed before; we’d been having steady make out sessions for the previous month since we’d got drunk on cherry wine and I made my move.

“Can you fix people?” he asked again. “Can you fix what’s in their head?”

“What do you mean?” I asked in a throw-away voice, clutching my hands into fists.

He shifted on the table then, hands and face flinching in a syncopated dance, mouth jawing at the question he wanted to ask, but settling on the one that actually came out.

“My dad. Could you make it so he wouldn’t care?” he asked eventually.

I was so mad at the time, I didn’t even answer. I pulled out a lighter that we used for making cozy fires in the rock-lined pit, flicked the flame to life, and held my hand over it.

“Tell me you love me,” I demanded as I lowered my palm onto the flame. The pain bit into my hand, nerve endings searing and turning to black smoke. The outer layer of my skin cracked, black with char. My muscles jumped and flexed, ready to lift my hand free of the flame.

“I need a powerful memory to fix it,” I said through gritted teeth, imploring him with my face, constricted into a hideous mask to say the words.

“I love you, Phillip,” he said, his mouth opened into a wide circle of horror.

When I pulled the flame away, he grabbed my arm and turned my hand over, recoiling from the damage. Tears squeezed out of his eyes as he tenderly tucked my hair behind my ear.

I felt like such a bitch for tricking him like that, but I was mad at him that he didn’t love me like I loved him. I repaired the third-degree burns on my hand, with a memory I no longer remember, but it wasn’t what had just transpired between us.

When the flesh was knitted and whole, Osmond pulled back, and changed the subject to what we were going to do after school. Either I was a such a good actor that as I explained I thought I was going to go to Cal Tech to study architecture that he believed I traded away that memory, or that he was so wrapped up in the question he’d wanted to ask that he didn’t notice. Either way, that was the only time he’d ever spoken those words to me.

I left the old oak tree in the state I’d found it, realizing that if I kept trying to fix everything in this little town, I’d end up an empty husk of patchwork memories. Put enough holes in my past and eventually the lattice would collapse.

Hamilton General Hospital was only two blocks from the site of the crash. I snuck around the nurse’s station, using a guy rolling a rack of food trays with what seemed like a thousand quivering bowls of Jell-O as my shield.

Osmond was alone when I entered, his family had left for the day. His eyes were sunken and the mask over his mouth looked like something you’d see on an alien spacesuit. The tubes and wires turned him into a puppet that no one had bothered to animate. Only the faint mist of breath against the mask indicated he was alive.

I was sitting on the chair next to Osmond holding his hand when his father came in. He was wearing his Sheriff’s uniform. His jaw pulsed with an anger that made my eyes flick to the gun at his hip.

“I told you, you’re not welcome here,” he said, puffing up his chest. “You did this to him.”

I was glad there was a bed between us. Not glad, maybe frightened. Frightened of what I might have done if I’d been in the chair on the other side.

My lips hardened into knives, thin blades dripping with venom. “I wasn’t the one driving his car. Drunk.” He blinked. “And if you so much as touch me, I’ll tell every newspaper in the county about what happened.”

Osmond’s Sheriff father actually reeled on his feet as if I’d punched him right in the mouth. His knees buckled and his face went through contortions of thought as if he were walking across hot coals.

Osmond and I had been making out in his light blue Chrysler Dynasty when his father had found us. There was no question to what we were doing, Osmond’s hand was down my pants when the flashlight burned into the car.

His father had yanked me out, shouting gin-soaked curses. Osmond tried to defend me, clawing at his father like a wounded cat.

Osmond’s father never hit me, but I wish he had. Maybe then he wouldn’t have driven away in a drunken rage.

Osmond was shoved into the passenger seat, and the Dynasty spat gravel in every direction before fishtailing down the road, leaving the Sheriff’s truck idling by the side of the road with the door open and the lights on. I shuffled back into town, puffy-eyed, and came upon the wreck after the ambulance had already left.

The airbags had deployed, but the passenger side of the Dynasty had slid into the old oak tree and Osmond’s head had hit the glass so hard the concussion put him into a coma.

His father sank into the chair across from Osmond’s lifeless body and sobbed into his huge hamhock hands. When he finished twenty minutes later, he didn’t look up, and said these words as if nothing had transpired before: “I just want my son back.”

After the Sheriff left, I placed my other hand on Osmond’s and squeezed.

The funny thing about entropy was that as chaotic and destructive as it sounded, it was quite life-affirming. A static Universe was just a button of unreleased matter. A flower that couldn’t bloom was dead.

I placed my fingertips on his temples and summoned the memories of Osmond and I together: the way his smile twitched when he was thinking of me, his lean hips, laughing at the jocks sweating on a hot August day in their football pads, the taste of mint as he kissed me, skinny-dipping in Miller’s Creek before we both knew, the glorious burning entropy of the night sky as we lay on a blanket on Knoll Point holding hands and whispering to each other as if we might disturb the heavens.

Just as I was leaving the hospital room, the boy who’d been laying in the bed was awake. His brown eyes locked with mine as he pulled the mask down.

“Phillip,” he said, his tone imploring me to stay.

“You’re Osmond, right?” I asked, one foot in the antiseptic hallway.

His eyes flickered with confusion, twice, as if the first time wasn’t enough. He looked at the bed and the medical equipment which brought signs of recognition.

“Yes,” he said, his lips curling into disappointment. “Have a good time at Cal Tech.”

“How did you know I was going to Cal Tech?” I asked, stunned and trying to remember why I’d come to the hospital in the first place. I guess it was because I went to school with Osmond. I probably had a crush on him, though I’d never let him know it.

He looked around the room as if he was trying to find a script to read from.

“I guess I heard you mention it in class,” he said, dejected, which confused me in turn.

“Well, have a great life,” I said, and left the room.

I thought I heard something that sounded like, “I love you,” from his room. I hurried back in, my heart beating like a thunderstorm, hands and face tingling with electricity.

“What did you say?” I asked, breathless.

Osmond paused for a moment before saying, “You, too.”

The words dropped unceremoniously from my lips, “Oh, thanks.”

I left Hamilton General Hospital with the nagging feeling I was forgetting something. I’m sure it had something to do with leaving town in a few months. Maybe I was a little disappointed that I was almost eighteen and I’d never had a first love.

But that’s okay; I’m a flower bud buzzing with entropy. Someday I’ll bloom, and it’ll be glorious.

© 2017 by Thomas K. Carpenter

 

Author’s Note: A couple of different scenes sort of grew together in my head as I was contemplating the idea of trading memories for magic.  The first was the protagonist cradling a greasy carburetor.  I didn’t know why at the time until I had the scene with the lighter come to me on a run (I get my best thinking done when exercising).  The rest just snowballed from there.

 

author-photo-tkcThomas K. Carpenter writes in a variety of genres including: post-cyberpunk, historical fantasy, YA dystopia, alternative history, steampunk, and contemporary fantasy.  His short fiction can be found in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Abyss & Apex, Galaxy’s Edge, and other publications including this one.  The Alexandrian Saga, his best-selling alt-history series, has reached readers worldwide, while his current series, The Hundred Halls, is a cross between Harry Potter and Supernatural at university.  The first four books of the series can be found on Amazon, starting with The Trials of Magic.

 

 

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DP FICTION #31A: “Strung” by Xinyi Wang

The red string around Mom’s ankle does not lead to Dad, and Dad doesn’t have a red string at all. But she makes him laugh with his head thrown back, and he makes her smile the way I do at Ria Ruiz, the prettiest and smartest girl in not just my class but the whole first grade—so they must be in love, no matter what the Old Man in the Moon says.

“I hope I’m like you when I’m older,” I whisper one night, as Dad tucks me in.

He smiles and lifts his brows. “Bald?”

I scrunch up my nose. “No. I mean I don’t want a string, like you. I don’t want the Old Man to tell me who to love.”

Dad looks down at his unburdened ankles for so long I nearly fall asleep. Finally, he presses a kiss to my forehead. “Sweet dreams, Weilai.”

I change my mind for the first time two years later, when my oldest cousin gets married to a golden-haired lady who shares a string with him. The red between them coils at their feet, pulsing as they exchange beautiful words about fate and certainty. My parents are still happy together, but what if Mom would be happier with the person on the other end of her string? And if a scant ring of red appeared around Dad’s ankle one day, would he leave? Would he want to?

It would be better, I decide, to have a string and love who the Old Man says you should. That way, there is no doubt. Only certainty. For the first time, I consider myself lucky to have been born in the Old Man’s domain, under his sky with his moon overhead—to have eyes that can see the intricate web of red unspooled all around us.

But when my string shows up in the middle of my third grade math class, it unfurls like wildfire and bleeds out of the room instead of to Neal Lang, who I’ve loved for three whole weeks. I bite my tongue to keep from sobbing, but fat tears leak out anyway because whoever the Old Man wants me to be with is not this perfect boy who made me a daisy crown and asked me to be on his kickball team. A steady chant of “wrong wrong wrong” beats against my skull. My vision blurs, but not enough to wipe the red from the corner of my eye.

Miss Sabrina calls my parents when I can’t stop crying on my times table, and Mom carries me out to the car even though I’m getting too big for it.

“The Old Man is not absolute,” Mom says when we stop for milk tea on the way home. She lets me put my feet up on her lap while we wait for our order, gently rubbing my newly-bound ankle. “He was wrong about me.”

“How do you know?” I confetti my napkin and pinch the insides of my wrists to stave off fresh tears. “What if your destiny is better than Dad?”

Her mouth smiles. “Who could be better than Dad?”

I swirl a finger through the pile of napkin scraps before me, then shrug. “What if.”

Our strings trail off into the distance, in parallel. They snake across the street, around an elm, and out of sight. Mom stares out the window as she says, “I have more faith in me and your father than I do in any distant old man. Don’t you?”

As I chew on a mouthful of tapioca pearls, I change my mind again. About wanting a string, a destiny. About trusting, so wholly, the will of an invisible stranger. What does the Old Man know, anyway?

Over the next twenty years, I will change my mind twenty hundred more times—sometimes from day to day, hour to hour.

Mom and Dad get divorced, and my faith returns. As they sign their papers at the dining room table, Mom’s string runs, as ever, away from Dad—a stark warning that they were never meant to be. So if the Old Man knew they were wrong for each other, he must also know who’s right for me. With that belief lodged firmly in my bones, I spend a summer chasing my string. Mom and hundreds of generations-old stories say it’s futile; no one has ever found their destiny by looking. But I still devote three sweltering months to the search, tireless even when the red wisping away from my ankle leads me in infinite figure-eights through town.

A year later, my cousin and his beautiful, fated wife split as well—so I abandon faith again and take Katie Nilini to junior prom, even though my string arcs past her without ever brushing her skin. She beams as we dance to bad remixes and worse ballads, and my heart pounds when she sticks her fingers into the chocolate fountain and smears the melt across my nose. I hold her gaze all night, not once looking down at the red that winds away from us.

But when I kiss her on Monday, between classes, I can’t help staring over her shoulder at my string—running down the hall and out the door, away from her and her lilac perfume. The Old Man knows best, or he doesn’t. Either way, I can’t stop thinking about that damned sliver of red.

In college, I date but don’t commit. Five or six weeks into every relationship, I cycle from ignoring my string to agonizing over the destiny waiting at its end. Guilt over those wandering thoughts quickly fills my chest, and I pull back from my partners with vague excuses and genuine remorse.

A few ask, beg, scream for real explanations—and I tell them the truth. I palm my ankles and talk all night about the ethereal red that streams toward my unknown destiny. About wanting certainty, but being helpless against doubt. About my parents, my cousin, and my ever-changing mind.

They listen until they believe, even though—born outside the Old Man’s land, beneath a different moon and sky—they can’t see red like me. I swallow thickly, each time, and ask if they still want me after hearing all that.

They never do, but I never expect them to. After a dozen cycles in three years, I start choosing to be alone.

I don’t date again until my final year of grad school, where I meet Aaron Lao. He’s a professor, with eyes that see like mine, and he has his own string that doesn’t lead to me. We agree from date one that this won’t be serious, because his faith in the Old Man’s wisdom has never fluctuated like mine—he intends to spend his life with his destiny, once they find each other. I’m just for now, just until then, but I still fall in love with him over midnight talks about Confucian principles in wuxia novels.

“You’ll be happier with yours,” he says a year later, when he finally meets his destiny. His brow is creased, and he breathes an apology against my skin when he kisses my ankle. If I ask him to choose me, I’m afraid he might.

So I don’t ask, because he needs certainty that he’ll never have with me.

But knowing that doesn’t soften the loss. I wake up missing him for months afterwards, and I begin to hate the Old Man and his strings. Some nights, I drink and stick my head out the window and shout at the moon. Once, I sink to my kitchen floor and take a knife to my string. It curls like water around the blade, enduring, and I only succeed in slicing open my palms and spilling fresh red across my skin.

Therapy helps. Not immediately, but with time. After a year of weekly sessions with Dr. Aimee Ping, I unlearn my habits of glancing at my string a hundred times a day, of crossing my ankle over my knee and curling my fingertips beneath the band whenever I can spare a hand. Of caring entirely too much about the trickle of red that plagues my periphery.

By my ten-year high school reunion, I’m close to believing that I don’t need or want the Old Man telling me who to love. Close enough that I go up to Neal Lang at the reunion. My string still doesn’t run to him, but I still tell him I had the biggest crush on him in third grade. He laughs with his head thrown back as we talk, and I can’t take my eyes off him when he ducks across the gym to refill my punch cup.

I stay in therapy, and Neal and I stay in touch. Daily texts turn into nightly calls, and we start thinking of ourselves as a couple. We stay long-distance and non-exclusive at first, which helps stave off the guilt that once squeezed my lungs every time I’d glance at my ankle, away from a loving partner, and wonder. I almost tell him, a hundred times over, about destiny, a string he can’t see, and the Old Man in the Moon.

But I imagine swallowing thickly and asking if he still wants me after hearing all that, and fear of history repeating drives me to say, instead, “I love you.”

To say, eventually, “Marry me.”

We exchange vows at his parents’ church, and move into a condo with my dog and his two cats. Red spills from our home and runs unerringly toward my supposed destiny, but I think on it less and less—once a day, then once a week, then rarer still.

But as much as I want to, and as hard as I try, I can’t stop wondering altogether. Sometimes, unbidden, my mind drifts along the red river flowing away from Neal and floods with the idea of destiny. A pang of guilt accompanies each of those thoughts, and they coalesce over time into a dense weight beneath my skin.

On our tenth anniversary, we sprawl out beneath the full moon in our backyard. I’m bloated with good wine and Neal’s love and my decade-old knot of guilt, and I know I won’t be able to stand again without shedding a part of that weight. So as he makes me a daisy crown, I tell him everything. I talk about a string he can’t see, a weight he can’t feel. I describe the winding maybe that I sometimes stare at when we’re having breakfast at the kitchen counter.

And when I’ve talked my voice hoarse, I force myself to add, “If this is a deal-breaker, I understand.”

Neal is quiet as he turns the finished crown in his hands. Stray petals float down his wrists, and the heat of shame and fear slide down my chest in tandem. Finally, he places the crown on my head and hooks an ankle around mine.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I don’t mind.”

My breath stutters. “How could you not?”

He shrugs, his shoulder warm against mine. “The way I see it, everyone wonders. Whether or not they’ve got a string to follow. Thinking ‘what if’ doesn’t mean you love me less. It just means you wake up every day and choose me.”

“And—” I roll onto my side to look him in the eye, my own stretched wide. “And it doesn’t bother you that maybe one day I won’t?”

“Of course not,” he says, like it’s obvious. Like it’s easy. “Because it’s just as likely that one day, I’ll wake up and not choose you.”

I turn back to the moon, quiet for a long moment as Neal’s words loop in my mind. The crown’s petals are soft against my forehead, and Neal’s ankle is a solid weight atop mine. My red string, caught between us, squirms free and cascades into the distance, bright and stark beneath the light of the moon. It pleads for my attention, presents me with a choice.

Neal is smiling when I close my eyes and kiss him on the mouth. I choose him again the next day, and the next.

As for the ones after that—that’s between me and Neal, and not the moon.

© 2017 by Xinyi Wang

 

xw_headshotXinyi Wang was born in Beijing and raised in Northern California. They studied Creative Writing at UC Riverside, then resettled in the Bay Area to drink mass amounts of milk tea. When they’re not reading, buying hats, or refreshing the same five websites for hours on end, they write stories and babble intermittently on Twitter @byxinyi.

 

 

 

 

 

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DP Fiction #30B: “Typical Heroes” by Theo Kogod

Tony started training the new girl the day before the world ended.

It was the third apocalypse that year.

The others had occurred when the dead all rose to fight the frost giants, and then again when the President’s new cyber-security tracking program became sentient and started sending combat drones against registered voters of the opposing party.

Tony was registered with the opposition, and had actually gotten to see the drones up close and personal as they descended on him, but then one of the supers had flown in and saved him, so he’d ended up still having to go to work.

He’d worked at NuremBurger for a little over a year, ever since New York had raised the minimum wage and the shoe store had let him go to cut costs.

The restaurant paid him all right, but he needed more hours. He hadn’t been able to get a real date in ages, since everything he owned now smelled like fry oil, sauerkraut, and chemically-treated pseudo-meats. His boss, Mr. Schulze, was one of those “I’m not racist but—” racists who was forever making people uncomfortable by trying to show how enlightened he was.

Yesterday, his boss had introduced Tony to his newest hire—a cute freckly twenty-something whose figure Tony guessed was half the reason Schulze gave her the job. “Antonio, I want you to meet someone,” Schulze had said in that merry I’m-excited-but-in-control voice that was a staple of white people’s professionalism. Tony had long ago stopped trying to get Schulze to stop calling him “Antonio,” which the balding middle-aged man seemed to think was a display of cultural sensitivity. Tony needed more hours, so he put up with it, and instead of saying “Please, just call me Tony,” he said, “Yes?” at which point he was introduced to “Patricia Strauss, though she prefers we call her ‘Trish,’ don’t you, ‘Trish?’”

He had shaken Trish’s hand. “Tony,” he said, holding her gaze long enough that she wouldn’t catch how he eyed her up and down. Trish had a slim fit figure, which her low cut shirt and skinny jeans accentuated enough for Schulze to honor her preferred nickname. In fact, she had the hard-lined athletic build of a gym rat, and he guessed she was probably into weightlifting or rugby or one of those other tough-people sports rather than the usual pop-music Pilates and celebrity-of-the-month yoga. Her freckly face was halfway between cute and “don’t call me cute,” with her blonde hair pulled back into a short-cropped bun.

“Antonio here is one of my best cooks,” said Schulze. “Antonio, I’m gonna have her watch you cook a bit, okay, and let you two get to know each other some. Meanwhile, I’ve gotta go deal with all the drama out there,” he gestured toward the dining area, where a tangle of stressed-even-for-New-York-rush-hour customers dressed in Stars-‘n’-Stripes T-shirts were shouting.

Tony shook his head at them once his boss’s back was turned. He’d never understood how people could be patriotic. His own father had been a proud US citizen after emigrating from Chile, and had carried a small tourist-sized American flag folded in his wallet until the day he died. But Tony never got it, any more than he got how people worshipped all those American celebrity heroes, All-Star and the Twelve Stripes, flying about to rescue babies and fight aliens on TV. They weren’t any different than any of the other televangelist Congressmen or born again reality-TV-stars he’d seen, except they had powers, which supposedly symbolized the American dream. Hearing a bunch of crazy tourists make a scene while wearing shirts with All-Star and his super-groupies annoyed Tony almost as much as the American Heartland-types who came all wide-eyed to stare up at the Statue of Liberty and Times Square as if the crass monuments still had meaning.

The real America was the same here as anywhere else: flipping burgers, selling Chinese-made clothes, mowing lawns, and doing real work while just barely paying the bills. The only difference was that here you could occasionally catch a glimpse of the supers flying over Wall Street to keep the suits there safe from the shitstorm that rained down on everyone else.

He tried to drown out the noise of a particularly vocal banshee-tourist and focus on training the new girl.

“So, is this your first cook job? What all do you know?” Tony asked, flipping two of the patties sizzling on the griddle.

“No. I’ve had a number of them,” she said, and began listing restaurants ranging from a high-end steak joint to a few chain stores that made McDonalds look like fine dining. Altogether, she named eight different restaurants before trailing off.

“Jesus, that’s a lot! How many jobs do you work at once?” Tony asked her. She couldn’t be more than twenty-five, and yet she’d worked at more places than he had.

“I spend a lot of time supporting my family. It’s made me change jobs a lot. And, I mean, you know how it is in this economy,” she said, fidgeting and looking away.

He agreed, and they got talking as he taught her how to defrost the burger patties, fry the “Frank Fries”TM, and coached her on the subtleties of the menu’s German dishes.

Eventually the tourists got too loud, and Tony couldn’t help but mumble “fucking cape-chasers” a little too audibly.

“What?” said Trish, giving him a look. “They’re not so bad. And besides, it’s not like the supers don’t serve and protect us.”

“No, they serve and protect you! People like you. The rest of us get lucky sometimes, but pale skin and good looks go a long way toward getting saved. I grew up being stopped and frisked and profiled by cops and capes alike every day on my way to school, and not much has changed since I became an adult. So no, I’m not a fan, and don’t buy into the whole line about them keeping us safe,” Tony said.

“Oh, come on! First, there are plenty of supers of color! Time Cube and Conqueroot and Black Turner, for starts, and oh, Olmech is Mexican! And second, don’t you watch the news? Tomorrow everything could be gone! Our reality is about to be invaded, and it’s the supers who are keeping us safe! Without them, we might not even be here!” Trish fumed, furious and passionate.

It was a more serious reaction than Tony had been expecting.

He took a breath before responding, collecting himself. “Look, I don’t like talking politics at work, okay. But since you care so much, let me put a few things out there. I don’t care about supers, whatever their color. It’s just not my thing, any more than I care about the Kardashians or Brangelinas or any other celebrities. They don’t affect me, and for all the tragedies they miss, the world keeps turning. They don’t change the things I go through, y’know. I’ve got rent and child support to pay and I’d like to get through a day without being told some dumb shit about how Olmech being Mexican should be important to me. I’m Mapuche, not Mexican.” He sighed. “Now, can we just get back to work?”

The rest of the day at the restaurant progressed with only minor incidents. Trish overcooked a plate of spätzle and a tourist ripped off their server with a 2% tip. When Tony left, he agreed to help train Trish some more the next day.

On the train home he squeezed into a seat between a Hasidic couple speaking Yiddish and a trio of over-pierced teenagers excitedly discussing the news that tomorrow the Twelve Stripes would join forces with the other supers to help repel an incursion from the fifth dimension (or was it the fifth sphere of hell? He couldn’t tell from how they babbled on in nonstop manic slang). He remembered being that age, and actually being excited by the supers and the big events of the world, as though anything ever changed. That was before his uncle had been brutalized for an unpaid traffic ticket, before his cousin had been shot while cosplaying, before Marianne had taken their son.

Until Marianne, he could deal with it. He got that the world just wasn’t fair. He had no heroes—not capes, not politicians, not entertainers—yet he still took care of things. But when she left him for her new job doing IT for All-Star and the Twelve Stripes, she’d taken Dante.

She’d taken their son.

Tomorrow—Friday—the world would end.

And so what? His world ended every Friday, when he got his paycheck and there was that little bit missing for child support—when all he wanted was to actually be there to support his child in person. On Thursdays, he should’ve gotten to see Dante after work. It was his visitation day, and he should have gotten that day—all of it. But Schulze always changed the schedule at the last minute so he had to work until the mid-afternoon. The last time he’d argued with Schulze about this, the man had threatened to fire him, and cut his hours so he only worked Thursdays for the next two weeks.

Normally, he’d be picking Dante up from daycare on a day like this, but Marianne wouldn’t let him “endanger himself spending an evening with his damn burger flipper of an absent father when there are things going on in the world.” He’d called, texted, Facebooked, and Skyped her, and she’d still denied him, which meant there was pretty much nothing he could do about it since she got off before him. Dante was already with his mom, and Tony didn’t have the codes into her apartment building. Maybe it was better for Dante, being stable and all. What did he need with a father who could see him only once a week?

There was that old saying about how the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Well, the more they stayed the same, the worse they got, but at least Dante’s mom might be able to shield him from some of that.

Tony got off at his stop, walked the three blocks from the station to his apartment, and settled down with a beer and leftover Chinese takeout as he watched old episodes of Sabado Gigante on his tablet. Normally, he’d spend Thursdays cooking a special dinner to share with Dante, asking about his week, and then (if the boy had done his homework) they’d watch cartoons together on the tablet, but tonight, he just didn’t want to think.

As a kid, that’s what TV was for. There weren’t so many end-of-the-world scenarios back then. The US was a safe country, “the safest America” his father used to say, as they exported all their misery to the other Americas, and because their heroes really did keep the world safe. And while he didn’t quite agree, he at least saw his father’s point.

That was back before the Twelve Stripes had changed their lineup. Back when the old All-Star—the first All-Star—championed the team with twelve other New York heroes in their brightly colored costumes, patrolling the neighborhoods and stopping the real crimes they saw every day. But then there’d been that one apocalypse where the first All-Star had been ripped in half above the city, raining blood and guts and cosmic starshine down on everyone. After that, everything had changed. Tony had decided life was too short to waste, and enrolled to take classes at CUNY, studying graphic design. But then work got in the way, and he and Marianne were always fighting, and there was Dante to think about. It wasn’t long before dreams of a career with computers had been traded for contentment selling shoes, and not much longer ‘til he was—as Marianne put it—that “damn burger flipper of an absent father.”

Tony’s Sabado Gigante marathon was interrupted when the screen momentarily froze to allow a small pop-up window—the sort of pop-up that appeared for storm warnings and bomb threats and invading armies of North Korean lobotomechs.

He closed the pop-up, continued watching his show, and fell asleep on the couch with his beer still unfinished.

When he awoke the next morning, the beer bottle was empty and the tablet had drunk itself to an early death.

He cursed, bemoaning another loss he couldn’t afford. He got ready for work, needing to hurry to make the lunch shift and help train the new girl. Outside his window, he heard screaming, the honking of New York traffic with the volume turned up, and an eerie humming sound he couldn’t place. He ignored them, buttoning on his pants and grabbing a pack of Oreos to eat on the way to work.

Outside the streets were filled bumper-to-bumper with drivers honking and shouting. Some people had gotten out of their vehicles to look and see how bad the traffic was. Others had just gotten out and fled on foot. The skies above were black—not overcast, but altered into a rippling obsidian lake that bent slightly inward like some cosmic meniscus.

But the trains worked just fine, despite delays. As he rode to work, he tried not to think that this might actually be the end of everything (or at least the end of him). He should be spending the day with Dante, not going to work. All he wanted to do was sit with his son on his lap watching cartoons and hear Dante’s laugh. But if tomorrow came, he’d need his paycheck.

Even if it didn’t, the collection agencies would still hound whatever was left of his corpse, terrorizing Marianne and Dante to collect on his debts.

The train emerged from a tunnel, and he saw that a black rain had started, inky drops splattering against the train car. Above, the dark orb had swollen, engorging into the eye of some malevolent god watching them at the hour of Judgment.

He got off at his stop, trying not to look up, and when he arrived at NuremBurger, he found Schulze, Trish, and a pair of servers already there. He greeted them, ignored Schulze’s comments asking where he’d been (like the answer wasn’t obvious), and began the day’s work, showing Trish how to use the fryer and prep the stove and the two dozen other basic tasks to start the day. She worked diligently and learned quickly, and at one point he made the mistake of praising her with a “good work, but you can take it easy. We aren’t saving the world, just working the kitchen.” She spent the next hour nattering on about how hard supers worked to save the world, and how the Fifth Dimensionalists had undermined everything with their chronaliminal engineering by bringing on an apocalypse that chronocops like Time Cube and Panthea said wasn’t due for three centuries. The girl was a cape-chaser alight, and rambled about superteams like the Twelve Stripes, U-Knighted, and the Repairmen. Then she embarked on a tangent about the hero Numen, how his suffering was underappreciated and no one understood him like she did. He remembered being in high school, watching girls obsess over capes and boybands, and figured it was just her age. Thankfully, only four customers came before noon, so it was a slow day.

Then as he finished sizzling a WurstBurger, there was a strange keening and the burger began to shake and–

The kitchen exploded!

And time slowed.

Tony was knocked from his feet as the floor split. The ceiling imploded and he rose to meet it. Gas pipes splintered in fiery gouts. Pain raked his arm—flying debris—and as flaming cutlery and shattered cinderblocks enveloped him, he realized this was the end.

He thought of Dante.

And then a force enfolded him, pressing close to him with a warm forcefulness and a moment later, it was over.

A super had him.

He looked up, seeing the restaurant in ruins. Two supers—one he recognized and one he didn’t—were embattled with a horde of what appeared to be car-sized insects, like spiked arachnids. A woman dressed like a Celtic warrior in blue-glowing warpaint bashed her fists through carapaces, riding through the wreckage aback a shining horse-sized battle-pig. Tony vaguely recalled this woman was Coventina, some British goddess reincarnate and involved in a number of controversial transatlantic security arrangements established in the Thatcher years. The other super wore too-tight black spandex and was gratuitously backflipping over the gargantuan death beetles and shooting bone spikes from his fingertips. The spikes pierced their hides, shattering shells amidst spurts of viscous gore.

Above, the sky had opened into a gaping mouth that consumed half the space between horizons, fangs and tentacles and more bugs drooling from it toward the earth.

Sirens blared. People screamed. Another super flew overhead, riding a nimbus of what Tony guessed must be nanomachines, black nanite clouds extending from his palms to catch falling debris. Groups of heroes soared high above, wrestling with tentacles the size of skyscrapers, bright blasts of light and flame flashing from their fists. A blurred streak whizzed through the streets, clearing the roads of debris as an unidentified speedster shot past, and moments later, the sirens grew louder, emergency vehicles traversing the now-clear streets.

Vaguely, Tony realized he didn’t know who had saved him. He looked around, saw Schulze standing with a perplexed look, one server beside him and both splattered with gore.

But there was no sign of his rescuer.

Somewhere in the debris of what used to be the NuremBurger kitchen (and was now a flaming outdoor garbage pile being used for gladiatorial combat), somewhere under the broken brickwork and metal shards and scattered contents of the walk-in freezer, was Trish.

With horror, he looked back up at the chunky red stains smeared across Schulze, and wondered how much of that could be her. Schulze opened his mouth and closed it again wordlessly. The server cried, shaking.

Coventina leapt from her mount and delivered a roundhouse kick to the last of the bugs, catapulting its broken body into the horizon. Then she remounted and rode away toward some other threat, her companion already gone.

A shadow fell across Tony, and he looked up.

Floating above him was another hero he recognized—All-Star’s teen sidekick, Americana. She just hovered there for a second, her muscular slim frame exaggerated by the red-white-and-blue uniform that seemed cut to emphasize more assets than just her patriotism. She flashed him a familiar freckle-faced smile, and he smiled back, waving to show his gratitude.

Then she was off, darting into the air without any regard for Newton’s Laws. Somewhere above the rooftops, he saw her join with a group of a dozen other patriotically dressed supers helmed by what even Tony could not mistake for anyone other than All-Star. As one, the group shot straight up toward the open jaws above.

Typical heroes.

Still, looking about him, he could not deny the immensity of what was happening. The world was a blur of screams and debris and mangled bodies. The heavens had been swallowed by hell.

He realized what he needed to do. What a real hero would do—not some steroids-and-cosmic-power super— but the kind of hero the world actually needed in times like this.

“Mr. Schulze!” he shouted. The old man stared at him, blinking in half-recognition. The man was probably in shock. Hell, Tony probably was too, but it’s not like it’d be the first time. “Mr. Schulze!” he repeated, louder.

“What is it, Tony?” Schulze asked, and Tony realized it was the first time the man hadn’t called him “Antonio.”

“I’m going,” Tony said.

“What?”

“I’m getting out of here.”

“You can’t,” Schulze said, his focus apparently clearing. “The police. They’ll need to interview you, to take a statement about the damages.”

“The police have better things to do right now,” he said, gesturing toward the events unfolding all around them. “Besides, there’s somewhere I need to be right now.”

“You need to be here. This is your job!” Schulze shouted, sounding hysterical, as though if Tony left now, then he truly would have lost everything.

“My job is to be a dad. My boy needs to know there’s a real hero there to look after him when the world is falling apart.”

With that, Tony turned his back on the older man, walking through the chaos to find Dante.

© 2017 by Theo Kogod

 

Author’s note: Do you remember that scene at the end of the first Avengers film where the heroes all get schawarma?  It’s a great scene, but what was going on in the personal lives of the restaurant workers that they stayed at work amidst an alien invasion blowing up the city?  And what do people grow accustomed to in a world with such horrors and wonders as superhero comics present?  This story explores some possible answers to those questions while showcasing the struggles (both absurd and very familiar) of life in the shadow of superheroes.

 

Theo Kogod is a teacher, scholar, wanderer, and the Resident Writer for 3 Feet Left.  He has spent time living in Greece, Japan, and the United States.   He currently resides in North Carolina with his two cats, an amazing spouse, and a small mountain of books.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #30A: “For Now, Sideways” by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

The text pings her mech’s computer out of nowhere. Victory is ours.

Holst lowers her railguns, steps back from the blown-apart husks of the birdshells. Can’t wipe the cracked viewscreen clean or the streaks of blood dried onto the rivets. Her lungs burn. For years, she’s felt like she’s suffocating—no oxygen left, just smoke and dust. All around her, on the desert’s edge, there’s nothing but sand and corpses. Mech, human, ghost. Metal and flesh and feathers mangled in ugly shapes like bad graffiti on the planet’s skin.

This can’t be it.

She scans the field, hoping she’s in radio contact with whatever remains of her squad—and remembers that she’s the only one left.

*

When the birdshells came, they looked like dusty gray ribbons, the outlines of doves. They were hollow: clouds speckled in uneven feathers dried and brittle. Up close, they had razors in their beaks, hooked claws strong enough to rend flesh to bone, and a soul-rending coo that broadcast from empty eye sockets.

And they came in millions. Swarms led by queens shaped like the ghosts of peacocks dipped in acid. Where they came, they devoured. Settlements disappeared, some swallowed in flameless heat from the phoenix-tanks, some torn into confetti, some just…gone.

Gill was in one of the first camps that fell under the birdshells. Holst got a text—I’ll meet you back at Alpha Base tomorrow—moments before the airwaves went dead. She never found her husband’s body.

*

Holst de-suits at basecamp, tries not to flinch at the screaming. It’s joy, she knows, logically. But it’s still too loud. Not like the insulated thrum of her mech, the grind of hydraulics and the vibration of gunfire. She limps on her cramped bio-leg and the badly-fitted prosthetic.

The bunker smells of old sweat and mold and sour beer. And the birds, always the fucking birds. That dry, cinnamon odor that stains her dreams and wakes her up choking. She drops to her cot, eyes half closed to acclimate to the space. The bunker’s small, like all the camp units along the northern perimeter of Eau Seven, but it feels massive after months in a three-ton cage of weaponry and armor.

“Holst!”

Her head snaps up, her hand on her sidearm.

It’s Burbank, another mech-bod. Burbank lost half her face and both arms; her cybernetics are clunky, metal and plastic scrap fused into bio-tissue. The arms are too big, throwing her balance off, and the face-plate has no articulation. Just a slab of blue against dark skin. In a mech, it doesn’t matter.

“Not gonna join the celebration?” Burbank asks.

Holst spent the last five years fighting. Lived inside her mech almost that whole time. Somewhere out there, she’d find Gill. As long as there was war, she had a reason to fight. To find him. The words victory and won are empty slates. She’s forgotten the dictionary definitions. “Dunno.”

Burbank’s half-smile wavers. “With the swarmqueens dead, Earth will send transports now. We get to go home.”

Holst stares back, blank. “What home?”

*

There’s this quote she remembers, printed in gaudy blue boldface on the inside of her helmet strap: Live to fight another day, motherfucker.

She ran her fingers over the words until they rubbed off on her skin, and she’d refuel and press forward.

Gill used to crash her dreams, fierce smile always fixed, always bright. Hey, babe. You coming to pick me up, yeah?

Yeah, Holst could never say.

But he hasn’t been around in a while. She lost her digital photos when a power-surge ruptured her mem-chip implant and she ripped it free of her scalp before it electrocuted her. Every day she went on the offensive, hunting the birdshells. No retreat. No real plan. Find the nests, torch them. Metal and fire worked on ghosts.

Somewhere out in the ruins of this world, Gill is waiting.

*

Holst can’t sleep. She lies dry-eyed in her bunk, listening to the other soldiers sing or fuck or laugh. It’s suddenly more alien than the birdshells. All she’s done is fight and lose. Lose and fight.

She and Gill left everything behind when they boarded the transport ship to this new world, this promised land free of pollution and disease, this world where they could have their own land, their own house, their own lives. Gill wanted kids, and was willing to find a surrogate. There were plenty of other women who had wombs.

She can’t picture what an Earth transport looks like. What faces unscarred by the war look like. What tomorrow looks like.

There’s never been a tomorrow since the war began.

*

A week drags by. Holst is out of her mech for longer than she’s been in years. Orders trickle in from fractured command posts. Stats. Lists of survivors. Delta Camp risks sending up a satellite to map the terrain; no one’s been airborne since the war.

Longer lists follow. Lists of the identified dead.

Burbank gives her the news: Gill’s found.

His body was identified by dental records in the mass grave covered in birdshell feathers ten miles from where he went missing.

“I’m sorry,” Burbank says, but Holst just rolls over on her cot. She can’t dream if she doesn’t sleep.

*

The bitter ocean laps at Holst’s mech feet. Wet sand sucks down the armor weight. She can walk forward, deeper until the pressure breaks her seals and pops the oxygen tanks like blisters. Just disappear away from air and light and sand.

“Hey, Holst.”

She switches the rearview cameras on. Burbank’s mech is up the beach, a pillar of metal against the gray horizon.

“Going somewhere?” Burbank’s hatch creaks open and she drops from the mech. Her bare feet sink into sand.

“Dunno.” Where is there to go, when the war is done?

Burbank’s buzzed head is sweat-smeared and Holst remembers Burbank used to be damn proud of her hair. Back when they had time for hygiene and Burbank had articulation in her hands. She has a sudden urge to use her sleeve and wipe the grime from Burbank’s skin.

“What are you doing here?” Holst asks.

Burbank sways, her version of a shrug. “Thought you might want some company.”

The chapped leather of her headrest scratches her scalp. “Not now.”

“‘Kay.” Burbank plops down in the sand halfway between her mech and Holst’s. “It’s gonna be at least a year before we see those transport ships anyway.”

Holst licks salt off her lip. It’s stifling in her mech since the AC unit shorted before she left base. She used to be an engineer; she can fix it. Not sure why she should, when the sea is cold.

When she first suited up, it was in the initial panic after the original swarm came. She didn’t run tests, just plugged her neural implants into the mech and grabbed the controls. She needed to find Gill.

“I wonder if my old job’s still open back on Earth,” Burbank says. “I was in accounting. Hell of a transfer from a desk to mech.” She leans on her elbows. “I had this CO who used to tell us, ‘if you can’t go forward, go sideways.’ Back’s never really an option.”

“Your CO make it?” Holst asks.

“She saved my ass when the second swarm hit.”

That wave cost Holst her company. She chugged along the desert for a solid month on her own, hunting nests, so furious she couldn’t see straight. The burn in her lungs started then–that inability to suck in breath, to shunt the pain aside. She’s been suffocating since.

“I lost most of my squad just before the ping caught me that we…won. I–” Burbank slams a heavy hand into the sand. Grit sprays like a bullet impacting a hollow bird. “Fuck. I really want a drink, but I got no one left.”

Holst kills the camera.

She still hears Burbank’s voice.

“Share a drink before you go, Holst?”

*

The canteen’s filled with alcohol distilled from tubers, one of the few plants left after the birdshells chewed up the world. It’s awful, but it gets a body drunk.

“To the ones we lost,” Burbank says. “I’ll say their names every day long as I remember.”

Holst takes another swig. “To Gill,” she says. First time she’s spoken his name aloud since the news. She imagines him toasting her back. I’m fine, he’ll say. Keep on keeping on, babe.

Okay, she’ll say. For a while longer, she’ll try.

Holst’s mech, left in thigh-deep water, topples in slow motion, sucked down with the rising tide. She watches it and doesn’t flinch. Holst’s fingertips brush Burbank’s metal digits as she passes the canteen back.

Burbank nods to the water. “You want me to fish it out?”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

Burbank lifts the canteen in salute.

Holst’s mech disappears under the foam-licked waves.

She breathes.

© 2017 by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Author’s Note:  This was inspired by a prompt for a Codex contest (I can’t recall the exact seed for it, alas!) and was further developed by my love for mechs and interest in exploring the aftermath of massive events. I’ve read so many stories that are centered on the conflict (the war, or Plot Event, or whatever) and I always wondered what happens when that plot is over. Who gets to go home and who can’t?

merc-headshot_professionalMerc Fenn Wolfmoor is a non-binary, queer fiction writer from Minnesota, where they live with their two cats. Merc is the author of two collections, So You Want To Be A Robot (2017) and Friends For Robots (2021), as well the novella The Wolf Among the Wild Hunt. They have had short stories published in such fine venues as Lightspeed, Nightmare, Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, Diabolical Plots, and more. Visit their website: mercfennwolfmoor.com for more, or follow them on Twitter @Merc_Wolfmoor.

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DP Fiction #29B: “The Shadow Over His Mouth” by Aidan Doyle

Greetings From Transylvania!

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
7th July 2016.

I’m in vampire country! That’s right, I’m in Brasov, in Romania. Now that I’ve finished university, I’ve decided it’s time to take my food blog on the road.

I was supposed to start my adventure in Paris, but a storm meant my flight was diverted to Transylvania. The airline staff said it would be at least a week before flights to Paris resumed, so I’m going to make the most of my time in Eastern Europe.

Brasov has its own version of a Hollywood-style sign on the hill overlooking the city. It also has some really narrow alleyways that make Melbourne’s laneways look big. Nowhere to hide if the vampires come after you. 🙂

I had somehow gained the impression that Eastern European hostels are full of beautiful women trying to lure foreigners to gruesomely erotic deaths. Instead I found myself sharing a dorm room with a creepy old Dutch guy, who must have been more than fifty years old. The hideous actuality of his non-Euclidean snoring kept me awake all night.

Yesterday morning I went on a tour organized by the hostel. We visited Bran Castle, the so-called Dracula Castle, but it actually has little to do with Vlad Tepes, who inspired the Dracula legend. There were a couple of Spanish guys on the tour who had each brought along a set of plastic red vampire teeth to wear when posing for photos. The Dutch guy glared at them and kept muttering that nosferatu was no laughing matter.

I had arranged to meet the Spanish guys to go out for drinks in the evening, but they didn’t turn up. When I checked their dorm room, all of their stuff was gone, except for the red plastic teeth lying on top of their pillows. They could have at least told me they were checking out.

This morning I took the train to Sighisoara and had lunch at Casa Dracula, the house in which Vlad Tepes was born. It’s now a tourist restaurant. I know some food bloggers who refuse to eat in restaurants where anything on the menu is described with fewer than three adjectives, but I appreciate simple food. I had a steak skewered on a little wooden stake and covered in tomato sauce (ketchup for my North American readers). The meat was bloodier than I prefer and the sauce had an eldritch tang I couldn’t identify, but it’s not every day you get to eat a steak on a stake in Dracula’s house.

The Dutch guy was in the restaurant as well and glared at me while I was Instagramming the steak. Old people don’t understand the importance of documenting your meals. Unfortunately there was something wrong with my phone and the photos all came out blurry.

When I got back to Brasov, I went on a vampire walking tour. The Dutch guy was there again, but at least the guide was super cute. She had these indescribably quasi-hypnotic cerulean eyes that I could have stared at for immeasurable eons. Halfway through the tour, two guys in cloaks leaped from the roof of a building and landed next to the Dutch guy. Before anyone could even take a photo, the cloaks had dragged Dutchie down an alley. I wish the guide had given us some warning, so we had a chance to video the whole thing. I was expecting the Dutch guy to join us later, but he didn’t return. I guess the tour company must have planted him on the walk.

When I got back to the hostel all of the Dutch guy’s stuff was gone. I was pleased about the idea of getting a good night’s sleep, but I discovered an envelope and a book hidden under my pillow. The envelope was addressed to me and contained a letter penned in scarlet ink.

Dear Barry,
Dark forces are gathering. You must embrace your family’s legacy. Only you can stop an unholy alliance forming between Eastern Europe‘s vampires and the protoplasmic fish people. If I fail in my mission to train you, use this book as your guide. 

The letter was unsigned.

The book bore the title, Eldritch Planet: A Guide to the World’s Arcane Secrets (Fifth Edition Completely Revised and Updated) and promised to reveal the places other tourists don’t go. It was bound in paper recycled from health food restaurant menus and exuded a blasphemous odor of stale kale. It contained reviews of exclusive hotels hidden deep in the Carpathian Mountains, antediluvian ruined temples untouched by mortal man for centuries, and restaurants with food so indescribably tasty that a single bite would drive lesser food bloggers insane. I found an entry on a restaurant in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia that the book claimed was the world’s greatest seafood restaurant. I searched online and couldn’t discover any mention of Eldritch Planet or the restaurant. A restaurant that other people haven’t written about is a food blogger’s dream come true. It was then that I realized what my true destiny was. I will visit this restaurant, brave the monotonously aquatic nature of its menu, and upload photos of its meals to social media. As usual, I’d appreciate it if you share this post with your friends and family.

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Greetings From Bucharest

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
10 July 2016

I’m in Bucharest now, heading south towards Macedonia. (Would you believe one of my exes broke up with me because I didn’t prefix the country’s name with Former Yugoslav Republic of?) This time I’m sharing a room with a wide-eyed German man who looks as though he escaped from the set of Hipsters Gone Wild, a creature more beard than man.

I’ve only stayed in a few hostels, but I’ve already met more than my fair share of eccentric characters. Presented for your edification is the:

Youth Hostel Wandering Monster Table
Roll 1d8
1 – A German complaining about the hostel’s lack of cleanliness.
2 – A bemused Japanese who speaks little English.
3 – An Australian who wants to tell you about his fuckin’ sick pub crawl.
4 – An American worshipping at the altar of Rick Steves.
5 – A Canadian who has covered every inch of their luggage in Canadian flags.
6 – A young woman terrified to talk to anyone because she has watched one too many Liam Neeson films.
7 – A guy who refuses to eat at any restaurant mentioned in a tourist guide because he wants an “authentic” experience.
8 – People having sex in the communal showers.

I wanted to get some sleep, but the manic German almost had a fit when he saw my copy of Eldritch Planet.

“Where did you get that book?” he hissed.

“A friend gave it to me,” I told him.

“It’s a trap!” the German pronounced. “They’re sending you to your doom.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don’t have any idea what’s going on, do you? You haven’t peered beyond the veil that separates the realm of man from the beasts that lurk in the shadows. Everything changed after some of the Eastern European countries changed their immigration laws. Now most foreigners need a letter of invitation before they can get a visa.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“They’re inviting visitors into the country. That renders them powerless against vampires. The whole of Eastern Europe is crawling with bloodsuckers. And now they’re trying to make an alliance with the deep ones. They’ve decided that keeping forbidden texts hidden is counterproductive when they want more accursed creatures to walk the earth. Their goal is to spread dark and terrible knowledge as far as possible, so they’re trying to take control of people with social media influence.”

The German was quite mad, but it was nice to be recognized as a blogger of some import.

“They’re going to lure you to Lake Ohrid, one of the oldest and deepest lakes in Europe,” the German said. I had kept my destination a secret. I was going to ask how he knew, but the swarthy hostel manager came into our room. “There’s a phone call for you,” he said to the German. The German followed him out of the room.

I waited ten minutes for him to come back, but then a wild ululation echoed throughout the hostel.

I dashed out of my room. A Korean man emerged from the bathroom, looking shocked. I’ve encountered some unspeakably eldritch hostel bathrooms in my travels, but I suspected something more was going on.

“He’s dead,” the Korean man said.

The swarthy hostel manager appeared. “Go back to your rooms, everyone. I’ll clean up the mess.”

It turns out Bucharest has a bad problem with wild dogs. A dog got into the hostel and killed the German guy while he was taking a dump. What a way to go!

I went back to my room and made sure the door was shut and the window locked. I didn’t get any sleep that night. I kept hearing squeaking sounds in the darkness, as though there were rats in the walls.

I made sure to give the hostel a one-star review on Trip Advisor. From now on I’m going to stay in hotels, even if it does blow my budget.

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Greetings from Lake Ohrid

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
10 July 2016

Traveling by bus in Eastern Europe feels as though you are crossing an unimaginable abyss of time and space, but I finally made it to Lake Ohrid and checked into a hotel in a lakeside village.

I went for a walk along the shore in the late afternoon and looked for the restaurant. I tried asking some of the locals for directions, but they muttered at me in a primitive, guttural language and hurried on their way. It’s not good enough. These days if you want to attract tourists, people need to speak English.

I persevered and eventually found The House of Fin. The restaurant was housed in a rudely fashioned Cyclopean building, but Eldritch Planet claims it’s the world’s greatest seafood restaurant. Since it was early and I was the only customer, I got a table with a great view of the lake.

The waiter was a pale-skinned man with bulbous eyes and an elongated head. A most peculiar odor clung to him, as though he had doused himself in cheap cologne, but at least he spoke English. He handed me three menus – the main menu, the wine list and the squid menu. I’m not a big fan of tentacles, so I focused on the main menu.

“Is it legal to eat penguin in Macedonia?” I asked.

The waiter nodded. “Our friends from Antarctica bring us the freshest penguins. They are lightly steamed and served with a garnish of kale.”

Goddamn kale has even made it to Macedonia. “You have toad in the hole on the menu? Doesn’t that have sausages in it?”

“That’s the British version.” The waiter smiled. “Our toad in the hole is more authentic.”

“What do you recommend?” I asked.

“The king prawns in yellow sauce are my personal favorite,” the waiter replied. “The jellied eel is superlative, and of course one must try our local specialty, the deepfish.”

“There aren’t any prices on the menus,” I pointed out. I hate being ripped off in tourist scams.

“Our prices are most reasonable,” the waiter assured me.

I would have preferred actual numbers, but I decided to trust him. In my travels I’ve learned that the more you are open to people, the more they will give you in return. “I’ll have the eel and the deepfish.”

It was a good decision. The jellied eel’s flesh was so tender and so bursting with flavor that explosions of indescribable ecstasy ricocheted around my mouth.

The deepfish was served on a bed of lettuce and glowed with a pale, green luminescence. “Why is the fish glowing?”

“Our chef’s special sauce,” the waiter replied.

Other bloggers would have fled in abject terror at effulgent fish, but I’m brave enough to try things beyond their limited comprehension. I took a bite of the deepfish.

The flavor was vaster and more primal than anything experienced by man since the decadent Gods of Taste walked upon this earth. My mouth achieved a state of transcendence and I was transported beyond the realm of food bloggers to a time before the Age of Social Media. I dwelled a long time in that place, savoring each bite and the unbridled flavor that coursed through my newly potent body.

“We are going to prepare a special dessert for you,” the waiter said after I finished the deepfish.

The deepfish had been so filling. “I couldn’t possibly eat another thing.”

“You must try it,” the waiter said. “It will blow your mind. It will take some time to prepare, so please be patient.”

“Of course.”

I’m so excited about my discovery that I wrote this post while I’m waiting for dessert. The food here deserves to be shared with the world. I might even be able to get a book deal. Barry Lovecraft Presents The Secrets of the House of Fin.

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Help!

Posted by Barry Lovecraft

10 July 2016

OMG! OMG!

I’m locked in the bathroom. Please, you have to send help!

The waiter wheeled out a huge coffin-like covered dish. I thought there was no way I was going to be able to eat all of what was under there. Then he opened the lid.

The image of the creature beneath has been forever seared into my mind. I fear I shall never experience a single moment of peace ever again, knowing there are things like that in our world.

The squid-like creature was a mass of writhing tentacles bathed in an unearthly eldritch light and emitted a malodorous, pungent, fetid odor. Most terrible of all was its swarthy human-like face. Its unutterably hideous eyes stared at me with a malignant purpose. A vast alien intelligence, against which no spiritual firewall could hope to withstand, probed the inner reaches of my mind.

The pustule-covered tentacles reached for me.

I leaped from my chair and dashed to the bathroom, locking myself within.

There is a terrible knocking at the door. I fear my time on this earth is almost at an end. Please share this post with the relevant law enforcement agencies.

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Melbourne Gathering

Posted by Barry Lovecraft
10 August 2016

I’m sorry for the silence and the website problems. There was an issue with my host, but that’s been resolved. I’m back in Melbourne again. Some of you might think travel has changed me, but I’m still the same Barry Lovecraft you knew. Travel opens your mind to new possibilities and lets you perceive formerly hidden realities. The only reason I look a little different is that I now have a mustache. Any suggestions that it is because I have something to hide will be treated with the contempt they deserve. I’m going to prepare a special banquet to share my newfound knowledge of the culinary arts. A feast that will never be forgotten. Please tell all your friends and family that they need to attend. I must gather all my followers.

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Story © 2017 by Aidan Doyle

Art © 2017 by Sonya Craig

 

Author’s Note: I was having a discussion with a friend about how there were so many Lovecraft parodies around.  The conversation later moved on to the topic of restaurant reviews and I decided that a Lovecraftian food blogger would make an interesting character.

 

Aidan Doyle is an Australian writer and computer programmer. His short stories have been published in places such as Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Fireside. He has been shortlisted for the Aurealis, Ditmar, and XYZZY awards. He has visited more than 100 countries and his experiences include teaching English in Japan, interviewing ninjas in Bolivia and going ten-pin bowling in North Korea.

 

 

 

 

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DP FICTION #29A: “Monster of the Soup Cans” by Elizabeth Barron

“I created a monster the other day, but I’m trying not to think about it. These things usually take care of themselves, don’t they?”

The scientist’s words echoed against the grey walls of her tiny kitchen laboratory, while the orangutan she was training to speak just stared at her with a bored expression, like he’d heard all this before.

Even the fluorescent frogs, hopping around in their tank above the microwave, looked bored whenever the scientist talked about her problems. She’d created them to cheer herself up, but there was only so much that bright colors could do.

The orangutan’s speech training was a failure so far, which was actually a relief to the scientist. If the orangutan ever did start to talk, he would no doubt feel entitled to offer his own opinions and tell the scientist exactly what her issues were and that he was done listening to her babble instead of resolving them. Conversing with a silent orangutan was just easier.

“I put the monster in the cupboard,” said the scientist. “I didn’t know what else to do. I know, I’m so scattered. I try not to be, but I’m getting worse, aren’t I?”

The orangutan hooted and puffed out his lips, and then started taking apart the coffee maker. The scientist hoped he meant, “Why worry? You’re just fine the way you are, this monster thing will work itself out.”

The monster waited patiently in the kitchen cupboard, rearranging all of the scientist’s jars and cereal boxes and building little towers out of the soup cans—a tower out of tomato, another out of minestrone, another out of corn chowder. The monster was hungry, but he didn’t dare eat any of the scientist’s soup. He didn’t want to upset her. The monster only ate food from the back of the cupboard, things she wouldn’t miss—dusty cereals left behind by ancient boyfriends, or fancy dried pastas brought by guests who never came back.

The monster felt like he knew everything about the scientist, just from watching through the crack in the cupboard door and listening to her talk to the other experiments, the ones she could stand to look at. But surely the fluorescent frogs and the orangutan didn’t know that her favorite soup was minestrone, or that she always left her keys in the same place and then forgot where they were, sparking a frantic search whenever she left the house (which she hardly ever did).

The monster liked this about her. She was always nearby, even though she never went near the cupboard door. The monster caught a blurry peek of his reflection in the dusty metal lid of a soup can and shuddered. No wonder she wanted to forget him.

The scientist busied the rest of the day away with observing the fluorescent frogs and finger-painting with the orangutan, but soon it was late and she got hungry. It was Monday, she realized with relief, the day she ate Nepalese take-out, so she had a practical excuse not to go into the kitchen cupboard.

The monster would be fine for another day, or even longer, she told herself as she searched for her keys. In fact, the longer she put off dealing with him, the easier it would be—he was probably just sleeping anyway and wouldn’t want to be disturbed.

All reasonable creatures, she’d often concluded, preferred to be alone—it was as natural to her as the thing in the cupboard was not.

The scientist finally found her keys on top of the organ cooler. “One of these days, I’ll remember where I left them. Tomorrow, I swear it. It’ll be a new day.”

The orangutan rolled his eyes.

The monster held his breath all the while she was gone, wishing that he’d gotten up the nerve to tell her where her keys were before she’d worked herself into a panic.

One of these days, he would be brave enough to say something, and she’d be so grateful she might even look at him.

When the scientist returned home, the monster pressed against the crack in the cupboard door, watching with wide and hopeful eyes. She looked crestfallen, an expression he’d seen on her only once before—when she’d created him.

“I can’t believe the Nepalese place was closed,” she said to the fluorescent frogs. “I was really hungry for yak curry too.”

The fluorescent frogs blinked their pink and yellow eyes, and the scientist hoped they meant, “You could eat soup two days ahead of schedule, but you’d have to deal with you-know-what . . . better to go hungry. You could stand to lose a pound or two anyway.”

The scientist started to agree over the sound of her growling stomach, just as the cupboard door began to creak open. Her heart raced as a cloudy grey eye blinked and then recoiled. Delicate fingers reached out and handed her a metal can, then closed the cupboard door with barely a sound.

The scientist turned the can over in her hands, unsure of what to think—how had the monster known that minestrone was her favorite? Probably just a coincidence, she thought. She walked out of the kitchen, turning the lights off as she left.

© 2017 by Elizabeth Barron

 

Author’s Note: A struggle to connect with others and break from the normal writing/class/take-out routine inspired this story. It’s lonely being trapped in the cupboard, but it’s just as hard to have no other company but your half-formed creations. I’m much better at letting them out of the cupboard and into the light nowadays.

 

elizabethElizabeth Barron lives in the dark, football fan-infested forests of Ann Arbor, Michigan. She has a degree in creative writing from Oberlin College and an MFA from Hamline University. She and her partner have a dog and three cats that really should know better than to sneak into the cupboards. She has also been published at Empyreome, Fiction on the Web and The Fable Online.

 

 

 

 

 

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DP Fiction #28B: “Regarding the Robot Raccoons Attached to the Hull of My Ship” by Rachael K. Jones and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2160-11-11

 

Dear Ziza,

You already know what this is about, don’t you, dear Sister? The robot raccoons I found clamped along my ship’s hull during this cycle’s standard maintenance sweep?

Oh, come on. Really? You know I invented that hull sculler tech, right? They’ve got my corporate logo etched into their beady red eyes so my name flashes on all the walls when their power is low. I admit some of your upgrades were… novel. Like the exoshell design–I’ll never understand your raccoon obsession. Impractical, but points for style. I hadn’t thought you could fit a diamond drill into a model smaller than a Pomeranian’s skull, so congrats on that. Not that they made much progress chewing through my double-thick hull, but I’ll give credit where credit’s due.

Still, it was unsisterly of you, and it’s not going to stop me from dropping the terraforming nuke when I get to Mars. Come to grips with reality, sister: you’re in the wrong. You always have been, ever since we were girls. Especially since Mumbai accepted my proposal for Martian settlement. Not yours.

I’m sending back the robot raccoons in an unmanned probe. Back, because yes, I’m still leagues and leagues ahead of you. I only lost a day cleaning up the hull scullers. I’ve kept the diamond drills. I bet they’ll chew right through that Martian rock.

I’ve also included a dozen white chocolate macadamia nut cookies, because I know it’s your birthday tomorrow. Happy birthday!

Now go home.

Love your sister,

Anita

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2160-11-12

Dear Anita,

Remember that summer when Father dropped us off at the northern rim of the Poona Crater on Mars? Alone. For two weeks. “This rustic camping trip will be a great learning experience,” he said. “My precious daughters will bond.”

When I learned that there were no pre-fab facilities and that we were responsible for erecting our own dwelling, sanitation pod, and lab, I started plotting ways to poison our father. You, on the other hand, I am still convinced, were determined to thoroughly enjoy the experience just to spite me.

But Father was a conservationist, and now that I am older, I can appreciate that he was trying to instill that same spirit in us. “Not all life jumps out and bites you in the butt,” he used to love to say. And we learned the truth of that when we unearthed a family of as-yet-undiscovered garbatrites in the red dust on one of our sand treks.

We spent hours watching them under high magnification under the STEHM, trying to communicate with them, recording their activities and creating hypotheses about the meanings of their habits. I have to admit, there was a point when I stopped cursing father and started to secretly thank him. And where I sort of, kind of, could maybe see why you weren’t so bad after all.

I don’t think I’d ever seen you so dedicated to anything before this. You missed meals and stayed up throughout the night trying to communicate with the elder garbatrite. The one you named Benny. Exhausted, you fell asleep at your desk and left the infrared light on too long and effectively fried the poor critter. You cried for days and you even held a formal funeral for Benny, something his fellow garbatrites didn’t seem too pleased about.

With that in mind, how could you possibly want to drop a terraforming nuke on a planet you and I both know is already teeming with life? Creating a new habitable world only has merits if it’s not already inhabited.

If you won’t see reason, then I’ll just have to make it impossible for you. The Council for Martian Settlement may have accepted your proposal, but let me remind you that I’ve never been keen on following the rules.

So, you found the hull scullers, eh? I knew those diamonds would distract you from my real plan. You’ve always been so… materialistic. But hey, someone has to be.

On another note, the cookies were to die for! They were even better than Mother’s, but I’ll never tell her that. I really appreciate you thinking of me. I have a proposal to make. On our next monthly meal exchange, I’ll make your favorite, a big old pot of Anasazi beans and sweet buttered cornbread, if you’ll send more of those cookies.

XOXO

Ziza

P.S. My sweet raccoonie-woonies, Bobo and Cow, liked the cookies too. They also send their love.

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2160-11-15

Sister:

Come now, Ziza. Let’s not make me out to be some kind of villain. Of course I remember that summer. I remember how we licked the condensation inside our lab windows to stay hydrated because Father’s Orion Scout childhood romanticized survival stories. It’s the real reason we’re such die hard coffee drinkers nowadays. He ruined the taste of water for us.

And I remember the garbatrites. How could I ever forget? That dusty red boulder we found in the sandstorm provided just enough shelter to pitch our emergency pod while we waited out the squall. Nothing to do but talk with each other, or play with the STEHM. Which meant we chose the STEHM, obviously. It’s the closest look I’ve ever gotten at you, all those disgusting many-legged organisms crawling on your skin and hair, in your saliva, your earwax. You’ve always had an affinity for vermin.

But I’ll be forever grateful you suggested taking samples around the boulder. When we first saw the garbatrites, their tiny little dwellings drilled into rock like mesa cities–that might be the closest I’ve ever felt to you, each of us taking one eyepiece on the STEHM, our damp cheeks pressed together, our smiles one long continuous arc. When the light brightened or dimmed, they danced in little conga lines. We weren’t sure if it was art, or language. Is there really a difference?

There’s something I realized when Benny died. The sort of revelation you only have when you’re nudging together an atomic coffin beneath an electron microscope with tiny diamond tweezers just three nanometers wide: life is short. Life is painfully short, full of suffering and tragedy and wide, empty spaces. And those rare spots hospitable to life are just boulders tossed into an endless red desert, created by accident or coincidence. The only real good we can do in life is to spread out those boulders, minimize the deserts where we find them. Make a garden from dust. Plant our atomic coffins and let them bloom. Terraform whole planets, so we’ll have more than just the blue boulder of Earth.

That’s what you never understood, dear sister. It’s why when you spent your youth chasing pretty men, I betrothed myself to science, burned my hopes of human love in the furnaces of my ambition. Do you remember when Asante, my poor besotted lab assistant, proposed to me at the Tanzanian Xenobiology Conference? How I laughed! As if any children he could give me would approach the impact my terraforming nuke will make on our species. Never forget, Ziza, that this mission is my life’s work, my legacy. You will not stop me.

In other news, I got the Anasazi beans and cornbread, still warm and fresh in their shipping pod. How did you know I had the craving? That was a kindness. I remembered you while making salaat today.

I was less pleased about the virus installed in the shipping pod’s warming program. Nice try, but I saw through that in about five seconds. Here’s a tip: next time, beta test it on all the shipboard systems I invented, not just the navigation. My sanitation program does more than filter my own crap.

I’m sending you an e-manual on Programming 101, and an ordering catalogue for Anita Enterprises in case you’d like to support the family business.

XOXOXO,

Anita

P.S. Go home.

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2160-11-28

 

Anita,

It’s been nearly two weeks since we last spoke, and of course, you know why. When you told me to go home, I knew that you were serious, but I never thought you’d resort to using the health and welfare of our dear mother as bait to get me to turn around and head back to earth.

I’m still trying to figure out how you managed to simulate for video not only our mother’s countenance, darkened and marred by some mysterious illness, but her voice, the cadence like smooth stones tumbling in water and her accent. When she pleaded for me to return home, telling me that she was afraid to die alone, of course I turned back.

How much time did it take for you to create those videos, one arriving each day, her looking progressively worse? The worst was that one video with her by the window in her study, Mount Kilimanjaro in the distance. It came on the third day. The sunlight that glinted through her silver hair, like icy filaments, made her look so painfully beautiful, yet it was not enough to erase the shadows beneath her eyes or the sadness in them.

A better question, I suppose, is “Why?” Why resort to that when you know how much Mother means to me, especially now that Father is gone? Are you still jealous of our closeness? Do you still believe she loved me most?

Not that you deserve to be, but I’ll let you in on a secret. I used to believe Mother loved me more than you as well. One day, I must’ve been about twelve, in my pathetic need to always be reminded that I was loved and cherished, I asked her why she loved me more than you. I waited a few moments, as she looked skyward, it seemed, for the answer. I was sure she’d say it was because I was more beautiful, more kind, smarter, that I had a more generous spirit, because truth be told, these things are true. But she didn’t say that. Mother told me that she did not love me most. Nor did she love you more than me.

Then why do you spend so much more time with me than Anita? Why do you kiss me goodnight and not her? I numbered all the things she did for me and not you. Do you know what she said?

Because you need me more than Anita.

In her way, which was always kind yet honest, Mother was telling me that you were the stronger of the two of us. But now, I wonder. Would a strong person use her sister’s weaknesses against her just to win? This was a low blow, Anita.

By now you’re probably wondering how I eventually figured out that the videos from Mother were merely a cruel ploy to get me to go back home without a fight. It was the video from Day Eight.

Mother lay in bed, slight as a sliver of grass. When her image popped up on the view screen my heart felt like it was trapped in a vice. She reached out. A tear traveled from the corner of her eye toward the pillow. She coughed, then called out my name. Her voice was so soft, so small and weak.

“Please hurry home, Ziza,” she said. “I don’t want to die without laying eyes on my favorite girl at least one more time.”

Favorite girl? No, Anita. Our mother never would have said that.

You think you’re so smart. You think you know everything. Yet, you don’t know kindness or humility. You don’t even know your own mother.

The decision to dedicate your entire life to science was an error. Life is so much more than entropy, polymerisation, and endothermic reactions. You really can have your coffee and the cream too. You should have married Asante. He would have humanized you. He would have taught you to slow down and enjoy the precious little moments, that together they all add up to a great big life full of disappointments, yes, but also joy and love and mystery. He would have saved you from yourself and cold loneliness.

This is where I remind you that you know nothing about programming that I didn’t teach you. Anita Enterprises is the mega-conglomerate it is because of me, your older sister and mentor. If I wanted to shut down every system on your ship, including life support, I could. And believe me, after this latest stunt of yours, I’ve been giving that idea serious consideration. The fact that I haven’t sent a couple of torpedoes your way is a testament to my love for our mother. She’d be angry if I killed you. So, I won’t.

See you on Mars.

Ziza

P.S. Don’t start none, won’t be none.

P.P.S. Bobo and Cow are very displeased with you.

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2161-01-01

 

Ziza,

It’s been weeks since I last wrote, but you haven’t been far from my thoughts. Far from it.

While I continue toward the planet, I’ve been passing the time on my escape pod making a list of all the reasons I hate you, numbered and ordered least to greatest. It’s a long long list, forever incomplete. A sister’s hate is like the heat death of the universe: infinitely expanding, eternal, the last flame burning in this cold, barren desolation where God abandoned us.

Reason #1,565: I hate the way you eat popcorn with chopsticks to keep your hands clean. Are you too good even for butter smudges?

Reason #480: I hate how you laugh at bad jokes. Puns aren’t actually funny, Ziza. Everyone outgrew “why did the chicken cross the road” after elementary school.

Reason #111: Blue eye shadow. Self-explanatory.

Reason #38: “Don’t start none, won’t be none.” Really? Better knock that shit off. Like you’re not an adult responsible for her own actions.

Reason #16: I hate how Mother named you after herself, like you were the pinnacle of all her hopes, while I was named to placate our pushy grandmother.

Reason #15: I hate how you always laugh at me.

Reason #10: I hate how your favorite animal is the raccoon. You only picked it because it’s endangered. You can’t resist a lost cause, even if you don’t actually want to do anything useful about it.

Reason #9: Seriously, blue eye shadow.

Reason #4: That last family dinner we had before Father died, when we took the shuttle out to the Moon to picnic on Mons Agnes while we watched the Perseid meteor shower dancing bright upon Earth’s atmosphere like the footsteps of angels. Mother brought her heirloom silver for the occasion; I think we all knew in our hearts it was a special trip. We’d agreed for Father’s sake to get along, just for a few hours. He hated how we fought, how we picked at each other like children picking old scabs that won’t heal. Do you remember the white curling through his black hair? His cheeks sunk deep by the chemo? He wanted to dish up the jasmine rice and flatbread himself. His hands trembled so badly the peas rolled onto Mother’s quilt beneath the picnic pop-up, just skirting the regolith.

We both know I wanted to talk with him about the inheritance. I just wanted my share, my 50/50 split, but Mother was so concerned about poor helpless Ziza, who had run into such tough times after college, chasing after pretty men and idealistic wide-eyed save-the-raccoons causes that she needed a larger cut to keep up her lifestyle. Anita Enterprises cost me everything while all you ever did was chase your girlhood dreams of love and happy endings.

We were having such a great time. Your useless pet raccoons were recharging their solar batteries in your lap. Father told us stories of his childhood, how they didn’t even have a family shuttle when he grew up, and you could only sleep rough in wild places like Antarctica’s rocky plains. Mother held his hand and kissed him, love shining in her eyes. No matter how sick he got, he was still the dark-skinned 17-year-old godling she’d met on the road to Mount Kilimanjaro in their youth. We even tolerated a few of your puns.

It would not last. I volunteered to scrape the leftovers into the recycler at the service booth down the path. It was so close, I didn’t bother to bring a communication device. You deny it, but we both know you followed me. You used the Moon’s lower gravity to pile those rocks against the door while I did my chores inside. When I tried to leave, the door wouldn’t budge. I could only watch my family from the viewing port, my mother and sister and dying father laughing together, though I couldn’t hear them. I screamed and pounded the window, but nobody noticed from the picnic pop-up. No one could hear me through the vacuum of space.

How can I ever forgive you that prank, those precious minutes of our father’s health ticking away, and me unable to be there? How can I forgive that lost opportunity, those memories that should have been mine to cherish, to bear me up when I wake at night so desperate to feel his whiskered kiss on my forehead, his voice telling me he’s so proud of me, proud of everything I’ve done?

This is why I hate you, Ziza. This is why I can never stop hating you.

Reason #2: Those diamond drills in your robot raccoons weren’t just drills. That cornbread pan wasn’t just a pan. You know what, Ziza? In spite of everything else, I only sent you back to Earth with those fake videos to protect you from yourself, and keep you out of harm’s way. Because despite this whole list, part of me still loved you, stupid as it sounds. Maybe it’s because you’re named for Mother. But you tried to dump me into the vacuum of space, Sister Dearest. You tried to murder me in my sleep. You activated the wafer computer in the pan’s false bottom, hacked my defenses, and the drills turned my hull into cheese by the time I woke up. If I hadn’t mounted the terraforming nuke to the escape pod… but I did.

Reason #1: Did you ever love me? Ever, Ziza? I’m not filling this one out yet, because I don’t think I’ve yet hated you as much as a woman can hate her sister. Not yet. But I will.

So I’m going to tell you something else you don’t yet know: On the wreck of my shuttle, scraping by on the last of my life support, are a dozen rare raccoon specimens. I was going to release them on Mars after the terraforming ended so they could colonize a safe place far from any predators. My shuttle is set to self-destruct in two days’ time. If you leave your current course, you might just have time to save them. Let’s find out what you care more about: helpless garbatrites, or near-extinct raccoons.

The shuttle also contains an urn with Father’s ashes, wrapped in extra scarves in the top hatch in my quarters. Mother asked me to scatter them on the planet because Father had so many happy memories of camping there with his daughters. I didn’t have time to rescue it when I had to abandon ship a few days ago.

I don’t have that one on my list yet. Better go add it now.

Hate you always,

Anita

P.S. Why did Ziza fly across the solar system twice? Because she was a double crosser. Get it?

P.P.S. Happy New Year, by the way.

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2161/01/02

 

Anita,

By now you’ve probably realized that regardless of your efforts, your escape pod’s trajectory is no longer Mars. You are now on an intercept path with me. I know that you must be seething, cursing my name, praying for my damnation (you’ve always been so dramatic), but give me the opportunity to explain.

Your ship was never in danger. The plan was that once you entered in new coordinates to anyplace other than Mars, preferably home, the diamond drills would have set about repairing the holes they’d created in the hull of your ship. Genius ancillary programming, if I do say so myself. All you had to do was turn around. But you, with your flare for the dramatic and unwillingness to give up, even when you know you’ve lost, decided to jump ship and make the rest of the voyage via the escape pod.

The escape pod. The escape pod with only half the power you’ll need to complete the trip to Mars. At the rate you’re going you’ll be one hundred and three before you even break orbit. If you paid as much attention to the details as you do the drama, you might have remembered that.

Why couldn’t all your hot hate keep those poor raccoons warm as your abandoned ship plunges onward toward the cold outer depths of space, too long and too far for either of us to go? I won’t be able to save those raccoons, nor Father’s ashes, because I will be saving you.

You can thank me later.

Your last message, so thick with evil enmity for your only sibling in the galaxy, reminded me of Tariq, the only man I ever considered staying with for a lifetime. I’ve tried over the last forty-three years, without an iota of success, to tangle and finally lose my memory of him among the many others. He was brighter than Sirius and sweeter than lugduname, at least to me. I know that long-legged bird wasn’t perfect, he chewed with his mouth open and, truth be told, he wasn’t very bright but he loved me without reserve.

You didn’t like him at first. You called him a “pretty, useless thing”, because he didn’t have the same knack for business or driving ambition for more, that you did. He was an artist and liked to create beautiful things, to experience the delights of life with all of his senses exposed and ready.

It was through your senses that he finally won you over. So thoughtful was he, that knowing your dislike for him, he still surprised you with your favorite, hot homemade waffles, on your birthday.

When I broke off the engagement with him only a week later, you, who had hated him all along, refused to speak to me for months. You said I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. You called me a fool.

I never told you why I broke off the engagement. And I bet you never knew that even now, there are sleep cycles when instead of sleep, I lay awake imaging how happy I’d be today had I not broken poor Tariq’s heart.

I broke off our engagement because of your Reason #1. In answer to your question, I love you more than breath itself, baby sister.

Tariq said to me one day, as we lay beneath the sun in a field of cool holo-grass, “Any sister who would waste her dying father’s final hours arguing over an inheritance is surely too selfish to bear.” He took my foot in his hands and kneaded my heel expertly. “I’m willing to tolerate Anita, my love, because of you.”

I said nothing to this for a while, mostly because the foot massage was so exquisite that it stole my breath and crossed my eyes. But when he was done, I politely slipped on my shoes, clapped off the holo-vision, and asked him to leave.

“If you love me, you must love my sister too. Anything less is unacceptable,” I told him.

So you see, silly sister, you can hate me a million times, but no matter what, I’ll still love you, even though you don’t deserve it. God, you’re such a brat.

Ziza

P.S. Are you seriously pouting about your name? Mother should have named you Shakespeare because you’re nothing but drama.

P.P.S. I didn’t pile those rocks against the door. That was Bobo and Cow. They were just trying to play hide and seek with you. I guess my sweet raccoonie-woonies won that round.

P.P.P.S. Why did the raccoon cross the solar system? To keep her sister’s paw off Mars.

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2161-01-11

 

Dear Ziza,

Greetings from Mars.

Don’t worry. Nothing has changed. I have regretfully failed to deploy the terraforming nuke. My mission has failed, for now.

Perhaps even before you read this message, GalactiPol will be taking you into custody. I called them when my escape pod veered off course, when the navigation stopped responding to my counter-hacks. You might have forgotten in your rashness that the Mumbai Council for Martian Development endorsed my plan for terraforming, and that I was their agent. Interfering with my mission meant meddling with the Coalition of Humankind itself.

I didn’t call GalactiPol sooner because I wanted to beat you at your own game. So few people in this huge, empty universe can even approach my creativity and intellect. You’ve always pushed me to the greatest apex of my brilliance. I’m never as inventive as when you’re scheming to ruin me. But the thought of losing Father’s ashes into the void of space… well, it gave me no rest. He doesn’t deserve that, not at our hands. I’d hoped you’d fetch the urn, but instead I’m calling an end to our battle of wits.

GalactiPol scooped up my escape pod and listened to my account of your wrongdoings. They have dispatched a salvage vessel to my wreck, and an armed cruiser to arrest you. Unfortunately, I made a fatal mistake: the raccoons. As you well know, I did not have authorization to remove these endangered creatures from Earth.

So they’ve arrested me too. I’ve been dropped on Mars for safekeeping while they run the raccoons back to Earth. They’ve dispatched another cruiser to your coordinates. Soon they will bring you here too, dear Ziza, and for the second time we’ll wander the sands together in this desert of red storms, with only wit and curiosity and mutual hatred to keep us alive until someone returns for us.

Did you know part of our old camp is still here? Somehow the shell of our mobile lab held up against the years. Probably because of the garbatrites. Remember we’d left the lab tucked in the shadow of their great stone. Apparently they liked it (perhaps for the way it holds warmth during the cold Martian nights) because they covered it in their tiny homes like a shipwreck bejeweled with coral and barnacles. When I turn on the lights at night, they dance along the seams in swirling shapes, carving microscopic paths through the dust coating, just as frail human biceps have pushed and moved the world until you can see their efforts from space. The Great Wall of China! The glittering glass megascrapers of Nigeria! How floating Melbourne glistens like a blue jewel in the dark, riding the waves forever, its flooded gondola channels sipping the ocean’s rise and fall! Our little lab is a world for these tiny creatures. They shout,  We are here. We exist.

But let’s talk about Tariq. Now there’s an unhealed wound running to our cores. It’s true, Ziza, that you were always the prettiest. I am a plain woman, an experience you can never understand. Your beauty is a passport into people’s best nature. Everyone sees in you the face of an angel, and they give you an angel’s due. Well, any plain woman knows the converse is true, that we have to prove again and again our worth and goodness to a world that mistakes the grotesque for evil, the ungroomed for lazy, the fat for stupid.

Your Tariq, like all pretty men, suffered from the same assumptions. He was never as good to anyone as he was to you, Ziza Angel-faced. When he didn’t ignore me outright, he liked to pick on me for your amusement. He named me Yam Nose and Ogre Teeth, and when I protested, he laughed me off as too sensitive, as if I didn’t have a right to my dignity. People like him are cruel to girls like me in a thoughtless, automatic way, like they can’t imagine us having feelings any more complex than a dog’s. Yes, I detested him. But the day he made me waffles, throwing me one small, quiet kindness, I realized how happy he made you, that you intended to marry him. He’d be around our family a long, long time. I made my peace.

I am sorry you realized so late the flaw in him that was obvious to me from the first. But know, Ziza, that Tariq must accept responsibility for his own character. If you had married him, when you aged and your beauty began to fade, he surely would’ve turned that same cruelty on you. He may very well have been your soulmate, but take a hard look at your own soul, and ask whether you too mistake your angelic face for more than it is. You are merely human.

So come to Mars, Sister. Come to where this all started that summer our father wanted us to bond, back before we hated the taste of water, before we learned to despise each other in small ways and big. We cannot escape one another. Our hatred has been our brilliance, our secret genius, the harsh red desert that pushed and pinched and goaded us to build towers you can see from the Moon. Imagine what a lifetime of love might have accomplished

Come to Mars, Ziza. Scatter our father’s ashes with me. If we cannot make this place bloom with life, at least we can make it a little more dusty.

Anita

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2161-01-11

 

Dearest Anita,

I can see the GalactiPol cruiser from my starboard viewport. Its black and gold stripes practically glow beneath the strobing orange beacon and make it look like a psychedelic bumblebee. Most people in my situation, facing detainment on Mars, endless expensive legal proceedings, possible time in prison, would be locked in the grips of fear and worry. Perhaps even shame. But not me. The one thought stuck in my mind, like a diptera fastened to sticky paper, is how beautiful that cruiser is and how excited I am to begin this second adventure.

It’s all about perception.

During that last picnic on the moon, when you were locked in the service booth, Father talked about perception. “Perception is everything. If you can project what you perceive it will become reality. You will believe it. More importantly, whether good or bad, everyone else will believe in your reality as well, and they will believe in you.” Not until I read your last letter did I realize how right Father was. And how wrong we have been.

In the mirror I’ve always seen the imperfect likeness of our mother, not quite as beautiful, not quite as kind, and with but a fraction of her intelligence. I have our father’s height and amber-flecked brown eyes, but none of his grace, strength, or athleticism. Yet, somehow you see in me the face of an angel.

In you I see the sharp mind and steady hands of a scientist. A fearless tenacious spirit intent on exploring all possibilities even at great cost, able to articulate your ideas, to change hearts and minds. You have boundless strength, so much so that you have been the central support for Mother and me since Father’s death. There is nothing plain about you, little sister, nothing wanting.

How is it that our perceptions have never aligned?

Be right back. GalactiPol is hailing me…

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

To: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

Date: 2161-01-12

Sorry it has taken me so long to return to this letter, but I had a few calls to make. Officers Gavalia and Ambrose boarded my ship at 2315 and took me into custody. My detainment cell is surprisingly modish, with full amenities including a computer and personal uncensored communication device. I have even been given unrestricted access to their onboard digital library.

According to officer Gavalia, though entry into GalactiPol requires extensive training and a stringent vetting system, they have little opportunity to actually do the type of policing their organization exists to perform. I suppose there just aren’t that many galactic criminals to catch these days, besides you and me, that is.

Now where was I? Ah yes. Perceptions.

I’ve been mesmerized by the images you sent of the garbatrite homes, the bright multilayered encrusted structures in every shade of red, orange and pink, lambent lights beneath the gaze of the sun. They expound beauty and ingenuity and life and more than anything, a prescience greater than anything either of us could have conceived.

We’ve been darting back and forth through this solar system, in an effort to outdo one another, trying our damndest to affect the change of our choosing, thinking we are so smart and so in control, when in truth, we are no greater than those garbatrites, and perhaps we are even less wise than they.

Perhaps there is a way for us both to have what we wanted, to terraform Mars and to protect the garbatrites. They were always keen to share their world with us and seeing the ingenuity and beauty of their structures, perhaps we can convince them to help us transform the barren surface of Mars into one of cooperative beauty. We can provide the framework for our cities and homes, and they can build upon them, layering their coral-like exoteric structures, creating homes befitting us all, unlike anything in the entire solar system.

I called Tariq shortly after my detainment aboard the GalactiPol cruiser. Before you think me hopeless, let me explain. Besides being happily ensconced in a polyamorous relationship with two of the nicest men and woman I have ever met, he has long since given up on his art (he was never very good anyway) and has been the Chief GalactiPol Officer for several years. I was hoping that there was still enough lingering affection between us that he would agree to assist me in this difficult situation.

Unfortunately, he is unable, as I had hoped, to have the charges against us repealed, but we have been allowed to serve the entirety of our sentence on Mars. Together.

Shall we do this, sister? Shall we make our dreams come true?

I envision us making a home from our old pod quarters. Perhaps we can build on an extra room and invite Mother. We can even build a special corral for Bobo and Cow, where they can play happily and where they won’t be able to disturb you as you work on your next great experiment. With the help of the garbatrites we can build a greenhouse. We’ll grow corn and tomatoes in soil fertilized with the ashes of our father. We will create a real home, a life. And we will relearn one another, our strengths and weakness, our mutual love for each other. One day other Earthers will join us on our red planet and find a world of wonder encased in garbatrite domes. A home.

Can you see it, sister? Good. Now hold that thought in your mind until we are reunited.

With all my love,

Ziza

 

*

 

From: Alamieyeseigha, Anita

To: Alamieyeseigha, Ziza

Date: 2161-01-13

 

Dear Ziza,

Why did the sisters cross the solar system? To get to the other’s side.

See you soon,

Anita

 

© 2017 by Rachael K. Jones and Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali

 

Author’s Note (Khaalidah): When I met Rachael about three years ago, I experienced an instant and sincere affection for her. We toyed with the idea of a collaboration for awhile before we finally dove in. We didn’t outline this story beforehand and had no clear idea where it would go. It took us across the galaxy, with great food, adventure, and lots of laughter. Collaborating with someone as talented and easy-going as Rachael was a joy for me. She charged my imagination. I am pleased to be able to share the results with everyone else.  In many ways the end result reflects how I feel about Rachael. She is a sister in my heart and a dear friend.

Author’s Note (Rachael): Khaalidah is my dear friend, my comrade-in-arms, probably a time traveler, and everything I want to be when I grow up. So when we started kicking around the idea of doing a collaboration, I jumped on the opportunity. Writing this story with her was immensely fun, often hilarious, and always surprising. While working on “Regarding the Robot Raccoons,” we eventually realized that although we each controlled a single character’s voice, we were actually writing each other’s characters via our reactions to one another, creating a more complex and nuanced view of Anita and Ziza that you get through just one perspective. I think this phenomenon also exists in all good friendships: in seeing yourself reflected through another’s eyes, you’re inspired to push harder, reach higher, and go farther in life than you ever would on your own. Khaalidah’s friendship makes me a better person, just as collaborating with her makes me a better writer. I hope our readers, in turn, will enjoy the results.

 

Rachael K. Jones grew up in various cities across Europe and North America, picked up (and mostly forgot) six languages, and acquired several degrees in the arts and sciences. Now she writes speculative fiction in Athens, Georgia. Contrary to the rumors, she is probably not a secret android. Rachael’s fiction has appeared in dozens of venues, including Lightspeed, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Strange Horizons, and PodCastle. Follow her on Twitter @RachaelKJones.

 

 

 

 

Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband and three children. By day she works as a breast oncology nurse. At all other times she juggles, none too successfully, writing, reading, gaming, and gardening. She has written one novel entitled An Unproductive Woman available on Amazon. She has also been published at Escape Pod , Strange Horizons, and Fiyah!.  Khaalidah is also co-editor at Podcastle.org where she is on a mission to encourage more women to submit fantasy stories. Of her alter ego, K from the planet Vega, it is rumored that she owns a time machine and knows the secret to immortality.

 

 

 

 

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