#alara's october 2020 prompt fics
Text
Writeober 2020 #21: Dragon
How to Care For Your Pet Human
Congratulations! You’ve made the decision to adopt a human. Humans are excellent pets – intelligent, loyal, longer-lived than most other pet animals, and hypoallergenic, producing far less dander than the average mammal or bird. But they can be a challenging pet to care for as well. Here’s what you need to know to keep your human healthy and happy!
Committing To A Human
Like any pet, a human wants a forever home it can stay in for its entire life. Unlike most pets, a human can live for close to a century, if well cared for. It’s a big commitment! Make sure you’re ready for it.
Humans are incredibly intelligent, and if you do not provide sufficient enrichment, they will find it… one way or another. Everyone’s heard a story about a dragon who left their human alone in their lair, only to find the human gone after they returned. There are very few predators that are dangerous to a human, so if you don’t smell that another dragon has invaded your lair, and your human is missing… they found a way to escape whatever enclosure you had them in, and they may never return. Don’t let this happen to your human!
Humans are also incredibly social. If you’re not willing to take on more than one human, you must find a petsitter when you nap. The isolation of being alone while you’re asleep for a year or two may kill your human – and, of course, humans need food and fresh water every day, so you’ll need to make arrangements for them to be fed while you’re sleeping. We also recommend strongly that if you cannot care for more than one human, you frequently bring your human for play dates to a friend with a human, or a human rescue center.
Most breeders and rescue centers will be able to tell you if your human has the trait of “introversion.” Such humans are valuable and may cost significantly more, because introversion allows a human to be left alone for much, much longer than the average human. An introverted human can get all of their social interaction from you, as long as you provide enrichment for them to entertain themselves. You’ll still need a pet sitter when you sleep, but you don’t have to take them on frequent play dates. Other humans without the trait will be stressed by the lack of human companionship even if you interact with them frequently. We strongly recommend that in general, if your human is not introverted, they will be happiest with a human companion or two. Because they’re low-allergenic and they’re (for the most part) very clean animals, and because they enjoy socially sharing food, most dragons find that it’s easier to care for multiple humans than it is for just one!
Human Nutrition
Some dragons claim that humans can live on a purely carnivorous diet. While this is technically true, humans are obligate omnivores – they must consume vegetable matter to get all the nutrients they need – and they will die much younger on a purely carnivorous diet. So no, you cannot feed your human nothing but scraps from your kills.
We don’t recommend human chow. It’s well balanced for human nutrition, but firstly, most humans crave variety in their diets, and if you don’t provide it to them, they’ll go hunting for it… which may result in them being accidentally poisoned! Secondly, one of the most entertaining parts of keeping a human is watching them handle flame to process their meals into something they find easier or more palatable.
Yes, we did say flame. Alone of all animals, humans are adept at managing fire! Of course, they’re just as vulnerable to it as any other animal, and they can’t breathe it, but if you breathe a spark onto some charcoal or wood for them, the majority of humans will be able to maintain the flame, and will use it to prepare their food.
Remember what we said about variety? Humans can eat many foods that no other animal will touch, or that only insects and other invertebrates care for, because they can use fire to make some foods edible to them. There are tools you can purchase and provide to your human to make it easier for them to do this.
The healthiest diet for most humans is approximately a third meat, with the remainder being grains and vegetables. Give a human a haunch of pig, and watch them roast it slowly over the flame you gave them! They may even share their food with you – humans enjoy providing food to anyone they love and trust.
Your human probably loves fruit. Give it to them occasionally as a special treat, but don’t let them have access to too much of it. Humans who gorge on fruit usually suffer digestive problems as a result. And while they usually keep themselves clean, humans who’ve consumed too much fruit may have accidents. Do not punish your human for such accidents; firstly, it’s probably your fault, because you let them eat something they shouldn’t have, and secondly, your human already feels shame over their accident and will try to avoid having them if they can.
Humans and the Outdoors
Human lack of fur, except on the top of their heads and a few other specific places where they concentrate pheromones, helps to make them distinctive in appearance and gives them a great deal of heat resistance. But there’s a price they pay; they’re more vulnerable to ultraviolet burns from sunlight than creatures with more covering. You may be tempted to keep your human inside your lair all the time, safe from ultraviolet light, but most humans actually require a certain amount of sunlight to maintain their happy, energetic dispositions!
Pale humans are more vulnerable to sunlight than darker humans, but any human can suffer ultraviolet burns. Your local pet store or apothecary can provide you a compound to put on your human to protect them… because humans enjoy being outside, and will stay outside to play much longer than they should. Humans’ delicate paws, with dexterous opposable thumbs, are usually better at applying the compound fully, so if the human doesn’t spontaneously put the compound on, you may do it once or twice. After that, let your human apply it to themselves.
If your lair is close to water, be careful with your humans and supervise them outdoors! Unlike most non-aquatic animals, most humans enjoy playing in water, and their layers of fat make them buoyant… but they don’t usually know how to swim, unless they were born at a reputable breeder that allows them to spend at least twelve years learning from their mothers. You may consider paying for swimming lessons for your human, but even an experienced swimmer may be taken by surprise by an undercurrent, so supervise them.
In fact, in general, your human is very curious and will explore its territory as far as you allow it to… so supervision outdoors is always a good idea. While a full-grown adult human isn’t in danger from most predators, there are some – large cats, bears, wolves – that present a serious threat to them.
The greatest threat to your pet human may be a wild human. Wild humans roam in packs, and they will usually either kill a pet human, or steal it. Either way, if wild humans get too close to your pet, you will never see your human again.
Treat your human as part of your hoard; don’t let it out of your sight when you’re outdoors.
Should I Leash My Human?
In a word, no. Humans dislike being leashed, and with their extreme intelligence and dexterity, they will find a way out of the leash.
If you do choose to leash your human, always use a harness, not a collar! Humans’ evolutionary adaptations for the wide variety of sounds they can make result in them having weak and vulnerable necks. It’s very easy for a human to choke, and a human leashed by the collar will die if they fall any significant distance while on the leash; it will break their necks.
Nothing can substitute for supervision!
But what if you’re too busy – or too sleepy – to supervise your human as often as they need outdoor enrichment? No worries, there are several strategies to help you out!
Enclosures are not one of them. No matter how cleverly designed your human enclosure is, a sufficiently determined human will find a way out of it. It’s going to require giving up a lot of your time or a little bit of your hoard to make sure your human gets sufficient outdoor enrichment in a safe way.
- Human care centers: In a human care center, your human will get social interaction with other humans, constant supervision, and all the enrichment it needs, including outdoor time.
- Pet sitters: Most pet sitters are experienced adults, but even an adolescent dragon can usually be trusted to supervise a human, and many of them are looking to add a little bit to their hoard.
- A supervisor human. Yes! You can rent a human to supervise your human! Supervisor humans are trained especially to keep watch over other humans and keep them out of danger. Many supervisor humans can even provide first aid for an injured human!
Occasionally you will encounter a human that is very content to stay in one place, or even one that doesn’t like going outdoors. If your human doesn’t like going outdoors, make sure it has sufficient indoor enrichment, including activities they can engage in to get exercise. Get your human some play equipment. They love climbing, swinging, sliding, exploring tunnels, swimming or bathing in safely enclosed pools, and throwing things, especially things that bounce. If you give your human a bouncing ball, they may get hours of entertainment from it… and if you have more than one human, expect to see them play together, and even make up contests with rules!
Mental Enrichment
Humans, as mentioned, are very, very smart. You must provide your human mental enrichment. But what kind of enrichment is best for them varies widely, depending on the human. Some humans enjoy having a pet of their own – dogs and cats are popular, and they will eat your scraps. Some like to use dyes and paints to create pictures on stone tablets; some like to use clay to make shapes. Some use their amazing vocal talents to sing, or mimic sounds they hear. And many humans enjoy watching other humans – provide them a crystal ball that connects to one viewing other humans, and most humans will be mesmerized.
Your human will also probably spend a great deal of time stimulating its genitals. This is normal. Humans are actually constantly in a mild form of heat or rut, and are almost always ready to mate. This produces a great deal of physical tension, which they alleviate with their hands. If you have more than one human, they will probably mate. This is true no matter what genders of humans in what combination you have.
Should I Have My Human Fixed?
That depends a great deal on your human, and what you hope to get out of them. Castrating a male human may produce a lot of behavioral changes, some of which you may not enjoy – an energetic and active male may become sedentary, for example.
There are multiple strategies to fix a female human. To fix your human without changing her hormonal balance and potentially disrupting her behavior, you can have her ovaries disconnected from her uterus (the mammalian organ she uses to gestate her live young). Or you can have her ovaries removed, which will end a painful bleeding cycle she undergoes approximately every moon cycle, but will also radically change her hormone balance. Your vet will be able to advise you on what might be best for your human.
If all of your humans are the same gender, we recommend not fixing them. They’ll satisfy each other’s mating urges, but they won’t breed.
If you do, in fact, want to breed a human, you should read our companion manual, “Breeding Humans.” Breeding a human is a very difficult and dangerous process that will change your humans’ lives forever. If you’re thinking that you may at some point breed your female human, but you aren’t sure whether you’re ready to support her through such a complicated process, you can get a medication from your vet that you can provide to her in her food, or train her to voluntarily take, and she will be able to mate with male humans without having young.
Fur Trimming
In most varieties of human, the fur on top of their heads needs to be trimmed occasionally, or it will become matted and unmanageable. For the males, the same is true of the facial fur.
Humans have difficulties trimming their head fur, and if you have only one, you will need to bring it to a groomer occasionally. If you have multiple humans, they will usually trim each other’s head fur, if you supply them the necessary tools.
A young male human will need to be exposed to an older male human to receive training in managing his facial hair for himself.
Training Your Human
Humans are incredibly trainable! They have a language of their own (several, in fact, just like dragons do!), and, if you breed a female human and end up with a human child, the child may very well learn to mimic some of your language or even learn to almost fully understand you! You can also purchase older humans who already have that trait.
Humans can be trained by being allowed to watch other humans performing a task. They can be trained by allowing a human who speaks their language to tell them about the task. And they can be trained in the same way as other animals, but are generally much faster to figure out what you want them to do.
In fact, every single human you have ever interacted with was trained by other humans. Humans have defective infants who lack most basic instincts, but do have the ability to mimic sound and learn language. A baby human must be cared for by an adult human; do not try to provide care to a baby human yourself, without a human who is experienced in caring for children present! Dragons have successfully taken care of baby humans as young as three, but doing so makes the child behave as if it thinks it’s a dragon, and makes it nearly impossible to mate the human or have another human train your human. Don’t do it. No matter how cute they are, you should never adopt a human younger than 12 unless you have humans who have cared for children in your possession.
By the way, both male and female humans can care for children – they are like birds in this way. An infant human must be cared for by a lactating human female, or, you must provide the human caring for them with human milk substitute and specialized bottles to feed the baby. But male humans are just as capable of caring for children who are eating solid food as female humans are. If you have somehow acquired a child who is too young to be without care from a human, you can often rent a human child carer to provide the care, or a couple of them. Couples are better, because caring for human children is stressful, and it’s easier when two of them are working together to do it. Be aware that if you do this, you’ll need to rent them until the child is twelve, and longer in some cases.
Why Twelve?
There are many specialized tasks that a human can perform for another human which are difficult for a dragon to do, from preparing and mending the artificial coats they must wear in most climates, to using fire to prepare food. Humans must learn almost everything they do, and there’s a lot to learn!
Twelve is generally the youngest age at which the child is prepared to do the things humans must do to survive and thrive. In fact, many humans benefit from being allowed to remain with their parents for longer, and are usually happiest when adopted after they are fully grown adults… but children are adorable. We confess we’ve adopted our fair share of human children, just because they are so cute!
If you have an adult human or two already, you can adopt a young human without doing them much harm. Most adult humans are happy to train younger humans in any number of skills humans enjoy learning. In fact, if the human or humans you already have are experienced with children, you may be able to adopt a very young child, but be careful. Most humans will bond to some degree with any child, and most humans who are experienced with children are very good with them… but some just won’t bond to a young child to the degree that child needs for optimal care, and some bond, but are not careful or responsible enough to leave a young child in their care.
What If My Human Won’t Learn What I Want From Them?
Occasionally you’ll encounter a human who just can’t seem to learn a particular skill. This can happen for several reasons:
- The human you found to train your human doesn’t speak the same language
- You are very bad at demonstrating to your human what you want them to do
- The task is one that that particular human finds very hard, often for physical reasons
- The human knows how to do it perfectly well and is just stubborn and doesn’t want to
A qualified vet can usually diagnose the reason why your human is having difficulty.
Some dragons believe that if they limit enrichment to the tasks they want the human to learn, it will facilitate their training. Nothing could be further from the truth! If you have arbitrarily limited the tasks you will allow your human to perform, and prevented them from performing ones they enjoy, they will become resentful and angry, and often will start refusing to perform for you. Always leave your human plenty of free time to play and engage in the activities they choose, even if you are training your human as a service or performance animal!
What Do Humans Need?
Here’s the basic, minimum amount of stuff you need to care for a human.
- Water dispenser and hand-held human water cups. Humans don’t lap water from bowls; their heads are poorly designed for it. Give them a dispenser that provides them clean, fresh water whenever they like, and water cups to pour the water in. They’ll drink from the cup, holding it in their paws.
- Food bowl or plate: Humans are very prone to diseases from food contamination, so provide them with many of these or wash them constantly. You can train a human to wash their food bowl or plate themselves.
- Bed: Humans’ bipedal stance causes back problems as they age, and almost all humans prefer to sleep on something soft that cushions them – children prefer it because it makes them feel safe, and adults prefer it because a stone or dirt floor is hard on their bodies. Don’t expect your human to sleep on the floor like you do. Get it a bed.
- Clothing: Unless where you live is very warm, humans require artificial coats to replace the ones they don’t have. Speak to a vet, a pet store employee, or a dedicated human clothier to find out what kind of clothing your human needs for your climate.
- Shelter: Most dragons need this too, and a lair usually provides shelter from the elements that is perfectly adequate for a human. But if your lair is exposed – for instance, if you den outside in a desert – you will need a separate enclosure to shelter your human. They don’t have scales, or even feathers or fur, so the sand in the wind will harm them.
- A plan for letting them have access to other humans they can play with. Humans have excellent memories, almost as good as dragons, and they form strong attachments. For most humans, you’re better off giving them a small but stable number of other humans they have opportunities to play with than to constantly expose them to new humans (although some humans do enjoy that!)
Enrichment is vital for humans, but some of you have lairs that already provide all the enrichment a human could want, with plenty of climbable handholds, tunnels to explore, underground lakes, etc. Others may need to purchase toys and other enrichment equipment. Make sure what you get is age-appropriate; a twelve-year-old will love a climbing frame, but if you’ve adopted a fifty-year-old from a rescue shelter, it will not enjoy that nearly so much. Older humans tend to have already learned a set of tasks they greatly enjoy performing for fun, and a reputable rescue will be able to tell you what your new mature-years human’s favorite activities are.
Your hoard can be a form of enrichment. Hide items from your hoard, and if the human brings them to you, praise them and give them treats. Because they can go into smaller and deeper tunnels than you can, at their small size, humans may find gems or ore in underground caves, and if you’ve trained them to bring your hoard back to you, they’ll bring you whatever they find.
Tools to prepare their own food are also a form of enrichment. Some humans prefer not to do this and will eat human chow. Don’t try to force a human who’s uncomfortable with food preparation to do it; they may not have been trained in it, or they may have been burned at a young age and are afraid of fire. But if your human makes use of a firepit and a stake or spit for holding food above it, they will probably enjoy other food preparation tools as well!
Your Friend For A Lifetime
Treat your human well, give it the enrichment, social interaction, and food variety it needs, show it attention and care, and your human will be a truly loyal pet until the day it dies.
Make sure only to get your humans from reputable breeders or rescue shelters. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to capture and tame a wild human! This has occasionally resulted in packs of wild humans with sharp metal tools descending on a dragon’s lair, injuring or even killing the dragon! If you don’t interfere with the wild humans, they will leave you alone, but attempting to take one as a pet can bring the whole swarm of them down on you.
(At this point, generally someone brings up the legends of wild humans leaving adolescent females out for dragons to take. This does happen sometimes. No one knows why the humans reject certain females, but the behavior of leaving adolescent females usually happens when dragons encroach too closely on wild human territories, and seems to be an attempt to bait dragons away from the dwelling spaces of the rest of the humans. These females are typically traumatized and do not make good pets if they have not been rehabilitated. Take such a female to a rescue, and stop foraging for food near the wild humans; the next step, if their sacrifices of adolescent females don’t lead you away from their territory, may be to try to swarm and kill you!)
While there are definitely challenges to caring for them, humans do make wonderful pets who will bring joy to the lair of any dragon who adopts one. You and your human will make an amazing journey together, and sometimes, your human may even teach you things you didn’t know about yourself.
Enjoy your new human, and take care!
129 notes
·
View notes
Text
52 Project #30 (Writeober #15: Mortality): Everybody’s Happy As The Dead Come Home
Ever since my mother died of breast cancer a few years ago, I’ve been making time to go visit my elderly father about once a month. That may be conjuring up the wrong image in your head, so let me clarify. My father’s over 70, but he still has a lot of the energy he had as a younger man. He works as a consultant for the big corporation he spent his entire adult pre-retirement life working for, for about three or four times as much money, and he enjoys it. He’s got an active social life, spending time with friends he had shared with Mom as a couple, and new friends he’s made from his bereavement group or his consulting work. And my sister, the baby of the family, lives with him, and my two younger brothers come to visit him a lot more often, since they live a lot closer than I do. So if you’re imagining a lonely, stooped old man pining away in a house that smells like stale cat food – that’s not my dad, and I can’t imagine it would ever be.
I arrived late on a Friday night, as usual. My sister met me at the door, and actually looked me directly in the eye. Stephanie’s autistic; she never looks anyone in the eye. “Eleanor,” she said, and that was another strange thing, because she almost never calls anyone by name… unless she’s doing it for emphasis. “When you find out, don’t say anything about it,” she said.
“About what?” Most of the time Stephanie makes sense, but every so often she says something that sounds like her mind has jumped ahead in the conversation without realizing all the missing pieces she never bothered to say.
“You’ll know,” she said. “And you’ll want to ask ‘why’ and ‘how’, and I’m telling you that you can’t do that. Don’t ask any questions. Just come talk to me after you’re done.”
“Done with what?” I asked.
And then a voice called me from the TV room. “Lennie? Lennie, is that you?”
Only my mom and dad are allowed to call me Lennie. And that was a woman’s voice. I froze in place.
“Go see her,” Stephanie said, and headed off to her room.
I turned toward the TV room, slowly. “Lennie! Come out and see me!” my mom’s voice called.
I didn’t know whether to be terrified, or to start crying and fling myself into her arms. I walked very slowly, very cautiously, to the edge of the kitchen, where I could see my parents in the TV room. Both of my parents. My dad was smiling.
“Lennie!” my mom said, standing up. She hadn’t been able to stand up without help for months before she died, but here she was, standing up easily. She didn’t look any younger than she had when she died, but she looked healthier. The extreme thinness she’d suffered from at the end after it had metastasized and she’d barely been able to eat was gone; her flesh was filled out, her skin as taut as you could expect from a woman her age, and healthy-looking. Pale, but her natural paleness, not the weird, sallow, almost yellow color it had been at the very end.
“Mom?” I whispered.
“Come here. I need a hug,” Mom said, sounding exactly like she always had – joking, but there was always that note of truth under it. She didn’t wait for me to make my way to her – she never had, not until she was too ill to get up – but came straight for me and gave me a hug, and she smelled like herself. Not like a rotting corpse, not like ozone or nothing or whatever a ghost is supposed to smell like.
When I was a kid, my brother Jeff and I watched the miniseries version of “The Martian Chronicles”. In particular, he was always impressed (and terrified) by the part where the astronauts meet their long-lost loved ones, who turn out to be Martian shapechangers luring them to their deaths. I always wondered, if the people they saw on Mars were dead, how did they fall for it? How did they not know that dead people could not somehow be on Mars?
As I held my mom, who’d been dead a few years now, I understood. They’d wanted to believe. I wanted to believe. Stephanie had warned me not to ask anything – no “how are you not dead”, “how can you be here”, “why are you alive,” nothing like that. I assumed that was what she’d meant, anyway.
“Mom, I’ve been trying to trace some of my past that I’ve forgotten. Do you remember the name of my third grade teacher?”
“Huh.” My mom seemed to be thinking about it. “I think it was Mrs. Wilder, but I’m not a hundred percent sure. Second grade was Ms. Jenner, right? And fourth was Mrs. White?”
“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t, in fact, remember my third grade teacher’s name, and neither did my dad. The Martians in the story had been telepaths; they’d been able to perfectly impersonate the astronauts’ loved ones because they could read the astronauts’ minds. Now I had a piece of information whose answer I didn’t know, and no way to easily confirm it unless Jeff remembered; he was only two years younger than me and had had some of the same teachers. But some of the people I had friended on Facebook were high school classmates, and a tiny number of my high school classmates had also been with me in elementary school, and might remember my third grade teacher’s name.
“I haven’t seen you in so long,” my mom said. “What’s going on in your life?”
“Oh, you know,” I said. “Things are going okay. Mom, if I’d known you were here I’d have brought the kids.”
“You can bring them up next time,” Mom said.
This was so weird. My mom was definitely dead. I had seen her body in the coffin, lying in state, looking nothing like she had in life. But here she was, impossibly, and I was holding an almost normal conversation with her. “Have Jeff or Aaron come over since you’ve… been here?”
“Jeff was here last weekend,” Dad said. “And Aaron lives next door, so he’s been over nearly every day.”
My grandparents used to live next door. When they died, my mom and my uncle inherited the house. My uncle bought out my mom’s share and rented the house out, and my youngest brother ended up renting it. My other brother lives in an apartment down in the city; I’m the odd one out, living in a completely different state, with a husband and kids.
So all of them had known, and none of them had told me. I expected Stephanie and Aaron to never tell me anything, but I was more than a little irritated with Jeff.
“Let me go drop off my stuff,” I said, since I was still carrying my bag.
I went back to Stephanie’s room, which used to be my room, a long time ago. The boys used to room together, but my room was too small for Stephanie to share with me, and she had needed a lot of space of her own… so they’d converted the loft in the garage into a bedroom. It had never been warm in the winter, though, so as soon as I moved out, Stephanie had moved in.
Stephanie was, as usual, on her computer. I shut the door behind me. “Okay. What the hell is going on?”
“She’s not the only one,” Stephanie said, without looking away from her computer. “I’ve been doing research. They’re all over the place. There’s no explanation yet, and apparently none of them will talk about it. I asked Mom and she said I was really rude, and sulked and was really passive-aggressive.”
“So we’re not worried about Mom turning into a Martian shapechanger or vanishing, we’re just worried that she’ll get mad?” To be fair, making Mom mad had always been a thing worth avoiding at all costs. “When did she come back?”
“I don’t know exactly, but presuming that she came to see me right after she came back, it would have been Monday around 3 pm.”
“And no one told me? You have my email address!”
“…It just didn’t feel right, telling you something like this in email. I felt like I should wait for you to be here.”
“And Jeff didn’t? And Aaron didn’t?”
Stephanie shrugged. She still didn’t look away from her computer. “They probably felt the same way.”
“Does Dad… know? Like, does he even remember that Mom is dead, or does he think this is normal?”
“I didn’t ask him.”
I sat down on her bed. “Steph, I’m asking you to make an informed guess. Has he said anything to you that would either suggest that he’s aware this is abnormal, or that he isn’t?”
“I don’t read minds, but I haven’t heard anything from him one way or the other. He’s very happy, though.”
“I got that impression,” I told her. I went to the guest room, which used to belong to the boys, opened up my laptop, and sent Jeff a question on Facebook about my third grade teacher.
Mom appeared while I was debating whether or not to also ask him why the hell he hadn’t told me about her. “Lennie, don’t hide in your room. Come out and talk to me and your dad. You need to catch me up on your life!”
Part of me wanted to break down crying. Part of me wanted to run to the car. Part of me was annoyed the way I always used to be annoyed when my mom wanted to spend time with me and I had stuff to do. And part of me hated myself for being annoyed by my mom for any reason at all. She was back from the dead and I wanted to hide in my room? But I wanted to hide in my room because I wanted to do research to figure out if this was really my mom or not. And what had Stephanie meant by “all over the place”? People all over the place had returned from the dead? Why wasn’t this all over the news?
What I said was, “Okay, mom,” and I went out to the TV room to talk to her.
***
Here I was, having a completely mundane conversation with a dead woman.
Yes, my husband was doing well at his consulting business. Yes, my oldest daughter was doing well in college. My youngest daughter had a rough spot a few years ago but was doing better. The daughter in the middle was putting a lot of time into her music, and was getting really good. I didn’t mention that my oldest daughter had gotten a diagnosis of autism like her aunt, or that my middle daughter was failing all her subjects because all she cared about was music, or that my youngest daughter was openly bisexual and dating a nonbinary teen in her class, because those would be fraught topics around here. My mother would be openly disapproving of the failing in school – as was I, but I wasn’t here to listen to a lecture about what I should be doing differently to make sure Rhiannon passed her classes – and she’d be what she thought counted as supportive about the other things. Are you sure it’s a good idea for Janie to have an autism diagnosis on her medical record? Lots of people will discriminate against her, just ask Stephanie, it’s not a good thing to admit to the world. And if Lori wanted to date a person who claimed to have no gender, good for her, but was she sure it was a good idea to admit to the world that she was bi when the world is so prejudiced? Blah blah blah. No. I wasn’t going there, not with my mother back from the dead.
All the questions I wanted to ask. How? How was she back? Why? Was there an afterlife after all? What was it like? Are you absolutely sure you’re not a telepathic shapechanger who wants to eat us? Is anyone else coming back or is it just you? But I couldn’t do it. My mouth wouldn’t make the words, and I felt like Mom being alive was a soap bubble that might burst any moment. If I said she was dead, would she disappear? I couldn’t take the risk.
Now I knew why Jeff and Aaron hadn’t told me. The compulsion not to talk about it, the fear that talking about the circumstances of her death and her apparently-no-longer-deadness would cause her to stop being no-longer-dead. I wouldn’t be able to tell my husband about this, or my kids, not unless they came here. Not without feeling like Mom might disappear if I did.
Which was probably how Stephanie had gotten away with it, in the beginning. If this was some kind of emotional pressure, something emanating from the presence of a dead woman... Stephanie was typically immune to emotional pressure. Or pretended she was, anyway. She hid behind her monotone and her face that barely expressed anything until she couldn’t, and then she’d go and have a meltdown in the bathroom. But she wanted to please Mom. We all wanted to please Mom. So if Mom had told her she was rude for mentioning the death thing, Stephanie would be unable to mention it again. Because she wouldn’t want Mom to think she was rude.
This felt very much like I was in an episode of the Twilight Zone. Dead mother back to life, check. Weird inexplicable pressure not to talk about it, check. But Mom clearly remembered things that had happened shortly before her death, and showed no evidence of knowing about anything that had happened since, unless it was public knowledge. She talked about interests the girls had had three years ago, interests they’d all outgrown since. She talked about my plan to remodel my own garage – I had completely forgotten that was even a thing we’d planned at one point, because I’d lost my job shortly after Mom died and then the money wasn’t there for the remodel. She didn’t know I was working with my husband in the consulting business now, which a telepath would obviously know because it dominates my life nowadays. Obviously a Martian telepathic shapechanger would have to pretend not to know things that supposedly happened while they were dead, but if I’d forgotten about the garage, what were the odds a telepath could pull it out of my head? There had to be more accessible thoughts in there, after all.
I didn’t know what to ask Mom. How do you feel? That was always a good one, back in the day, because Mom’s chronic illnesses meant there was always something she could complain about, but she wouldn’t do it until she was asked… she’d just quietly resent the fact that no one had asked her. But did dead people still feel things? Would that intrude on the topic I wasn’t supposed to talk about? What’s going on in your life? Oh, nothing much, Lennie, I’m back from the dead, how about you?
So I talked about myself. I was learning to work leather and I’d made myself a wallet, but I left it at home, I could bring it to show her next time. I was also learning to repair dolls. The girls had all abandoned theirs and I felt bad about it, so I was cleaning them up and repairing them and putting them in dioramas. Mom was very interested in both topics, and asked if I could repair some old dolls she had up in the attic. I was pretty sure I’d already done it – if it was the dolls I was thinking of, Dad had given them to me right after Mom died, and they were the ones I’d learned on. But was it safe to talk about? Dad wasn’t saying anything; had he forgotten he gave me the dolls, which was entirely possible, or did he think it wasn’t safe to talk about either?
I’d wanted for three years to be able to tell my mom that she was wrong about all the weight loss advice she’d given me because now it had come out that scientists had never proven that fat made you fat and the low-carb diets were probably better for you than the low-fat ones, but I didn’t know if she could still eat. Also, my mom was back from the dead and I wanted to start an argument with her about a topic I’d always hated when she talked about? Didn’t I have anything better to do? That really kind of made me a shitty person, didn’t it?
When Mom had been dying, I couldn’t talk to her about the future. I didn’t know how to bring myself to talk about things she’d never see. I’d never known how much my conversations with her consisted of me talking about future plans until I couldn’t any more. Now I couldn’t talk about the future or the past, at least not the past three years, and large parts of the present had to be left out too, because I didn’t know what would remind her that she was dead and make her go back to her grave. Even though, logically, I knew that was unlikely to happen because Stephanie had done it and had just gotten a rebuke that that was rude.
At the same time… I knew I had to say something that Mom could talk about, because if I just talked about myself all night, later on she’d probably make some passive-aggressive remarks about how everything always had to be about me. In desperation, I asked her if she’d seen anything good on television lately.
“Oh, I haven’t been watching anything in a while,” Mom said. “It’s been so long since I felt well enough to go anywhere, so I’ve been going for walks, and your father and I have been taking trips to museums and historic sites. We’re going to be going up to Boston next week.”
“I have a client up there,” Dad said, “and they want me to do a training thing. And I was telling them, no, no, Boston’s too far, but I remembered how much your mom loved Boston, so I asked her if she wanted to go and she said yes, so now we’re going. We’re going to fly, though. The days I was willing to drive that kind of distance are long over.”
“You could take the Amtrak.”
Dad made a dismissive gesture. “It’s gotten so expensive. Flying’s actually cheaper.”
“When are you going?”
“Next Wednesday we’re going to fly up there,” Mom said, which said something about her opinion of the future, at least. “Your dad’s got his presentations to do on Thursday and Friday, and I’ll wander around the city, and then we’ll spend Saturday seeing the sights together.”
“There’s this fantastic restaurant I went to last time I was up there on business,” Dad said, “and I checked their web page, and they’re still open. So we’re going to go there.”
So Mom could eat. Or Dad wasn’t afraid of talking about eating with her, anyway. Maybe ruled out vampire, but Martian shapechanger was still on the table.
I didn’t literally believe my mom – or the entity that appeared to be my mom – was a telepathic shapechanger from Mars like in The Martian Chronicles. But it was obvious that something so far outside the norm that it was only imaginable by making references to fantasy and science fiction was happening.
I tried, very carefully, “How have you been feeling, Mom?”
“I’m great!” She laughed. “I haven’t felt this good in ages. Sugar’s under control, I can see pretty well, none of the usual aches and pains… I’m doing pretty good!”
Did she remember she had died of cancer? Did she even remember that she’d died?
It was 2 am before I got to go to bed.
***
6 am and I was up and out the door before there was any chance of my mother or father being awake, assuming my mom even slept anymore. But at the very least, she was in her bedroom with the door closed and no view of the driveway I’d parked my car in.
Do I sound like a terrible daughter when I tell you I’ve never visited my mom’s grave? I haven’t been back there since the funeral. I always knew my mother wasn’t really there – that if any part of her had still existed in any form, it wasn’t trapped in a coffin under six feet of dirt. It made it somewhat difficult to find the graveyard, though, because I couldn’t remember where it was, or its name, or which church it was associated with, and it wasn’t exactly like I could ask my mom. When I finally found the place– it wasn’t that hard in the end, my parents live in a small town and there aren’t many graveyards – it took me half an hour to find her grave.
It seemed undisturbed. But if Mom had been back from the dead since Monday, that would have been time to fill in a grave. I went looking for the caretaker.
They get to work early in the graveyard caretaking business, I guess; I found him pushing a lawnmower over on the other side of the graveyard.
“Can I help you?” he asked.
“This is going to sound stupid,” I said. “But I got an email from a jerk I used to know in high school claiming he was going to dig up my mother’s grave, and I just wanted to make sure nobody’s touched it.”
“Nobody’s touched any of the graves, ma’am,” he assured me. “Aside from a couple of funerals we’ve had this week, no one’s done anything to disturb the ground here at all.”
“Thanks,” I said, “that’s reassuring. He was talking like he was actually going to do it, but I guess he was all talk.”
“Well, if anyone comes by and disturbs any of the graves, we’ll have them arrested,” he said.
I had my answer. My mother had not climbed out of her grave. Which seemed impossible anyway, now that I knew enough about the funeral industry to know exactly how hard it would be to smash a coffin open, let alone dig through six feet of dirt. I couldn’t rule out her turning immaterial and floating out of her grave, but my mom had seemed very material and biological when she’d hugged me. I’d always thought of ghosts as something that were almost never solid enough to interact with the world, if they even existed.
***
If I was going to get up this early, I was going to get a pancake breakfast at the diner. My parents still think sugarless cold cereal is a reasonable thing to eat for breakfast. They were always night owls; I made myself breakfast and school lunch every morning but the first day of school, every year after about third grade. I was also a night owl, once I didn’t have to get up for school anymore, but I used to make my girls a lunch every night and store it in the fridge for them. Now they’re too old and too cool for Mom lunches. They’re eating something, but it might be cafeteria food, lunch they pack for themselves, or for all I know sandwiches from 7-11 or Starbucks with their allowance.
The point is, I hardly ever get a nice breakfast, because I am hardly ever willing to wake up early enough to cook myself one, and my parents certainly weren’t going to. So I went to the diner.
Normally I don’t talk to anyone at a diner, beyond smiling at them and telling them my order in an upbeat, cheerful voice because waitresses get too much shit from too many people for me to add to it inadvertently. Also because I don’t want them to think I’m eating alone because I’m a sad, lonely bitch no one would love; I want them to know I’m doing this because I really, really enjoy not having to socialize. But today I had something I needed to know.
“I’m a writer,” I told the waitress, “and I’m doing research on ghost stories in the area. Have you heard anything, you know, Halloweeny or spooky? Ghosts appearing, dead people walking around, poltergeists, that kind of thing?”
“Can’t say I have, but I’ll ask around, see if any of the girls know any good stories,” the waitress told me.
And then she took my order back to the kitchen, and I surfed the net on my phone while I waited, and then I got my pancakes, and I ate them. I was chasing the last blueberry around on the plate when another waitress approached me. “Stacy told me you were collecting creepy stories for a book?”
“From the local area, yeah.”
“I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you’re looking for, but… my cousin says that a lady on her street, her husband died a few years ago? But she just saw the guy walking with the lady down the street, having a conversation like the guy never died.”
“Do you think you’d be able to give my email to your cousin and have her reach out to me? That sounds like exactly the kind of story I’m looking for.”
“Uh, sure.”
I gave the waitress my email address. This was probably going to come to nothing; I doubted the waitress would even remember to give it to her cousin. But it’d be really good if I could get the details from someone who knew more about it.
***
Jeff’s more of a morning person than I am. I got a response on Facebook, but I had to wait to get back to my parents’ house, where my laptop was, to read it. On mobile, Facebook will only let you read messages if you have the app, which tells Mark Zuckerberg exactly where you are and what you’re doing with your phone, all the time. I don’t have the app. Sometimes this means I can’t read messages on mobile, but I prefer that to having an evil data empire know everything about my movements.
My parents weren’t awake when I got home. Or they were still in their bedroom. They used to do that a lot. Mom’s desk was in there, and Dad had a laptop… which he usually used on Mom’s desk, since she died. I wondered where her machine was, and if she had made a thing about it once she came back.
“I’m not sure I remember what your third grade teacher’s name was… I can barely remember my own third grade teacher. Were they the same? I can’t remember. I think my own teacher’s name was… Wil-something? Wilber? Wilkins? You’d be better off… well, you’re at the house now, or are you back at your home? Kind of important to know, because I could give you some advice about who to ask, but it’d be a different thing if you were at Dad’s house.”
He meant, “You’d be better off asking Mom, but I don’t know if you know Mom is back from the dead or not.” I was pretty sure, anyway.
I responded. “I’m at Dad’s house. Wondering how I’d be able to tell the difference between someone who’s real and a Martian shapechanger. Could the name have been Wilder?”
Five minutes later I got my answer. “Mom isn’t a Martian shapechanger. It was the first thing I thought of, so I checked.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.
That answer I didn’t get until half an hour later. “I… just didn’t feel right, talking about it in an impersonal medium like the internet. I know you have a cell phone and I probably even have your number somewhere, but I remember you’re not the biggest fan of actual phone calls, so I didn’t want to disturb you.”
I replied with my phone number and the message “Call me.”
And then I had to sit by my phone, doing nothing important, nothing that would engage my attention in any serious way, waiting for him to call. Which took twenty minutes, despite the fact that I could see that he was online.
Finally the phone rang. “You raaaaang?” I answered in my best parody of The Addams Family.
“I’m pretty sure I must have, or you wouldn’t have known to pick up,” Jeff said. “Of course, I might have buzzed. You could have your phone on vibrate. Or maybe I sang, depending on what you have for a ringtone.”
“’You saaaaang?’ doesn’t have the same je ne sais quoi to it.”
“Wow, how long has it been since I heard someone put je ne sais quoi in a sentence? I think we’re old. I think that’s an old person expression now.”
“What’s going on with Mom?” I asked, quietly, in case anyone might be in the hallway to hear me.
Jeff sighed. “I don’t know what is, but I can tell you what isn’t,” he said. “Stephanie confirmed that she eats, sleeps and goes to the bathroom normally, and I confirmed all of that for myself. The toilet in their bedroom is still broken enough that they don’t flush it unless they have to.”
I winced. That was a level of detail I could have done without. “So, not vampire or undead. How did you solve the Martian thing?”
“On Monday, Dad woke up and she was laying next to him in bed. If the goal was to kill him, it would have made more sense to do it then, before he woke up, than to put on this whole elaborate performance.”
“You’re taking me too literally. I’m not worried about aliens trying to take our family off guard so they can kill us. There’s any number of things they could be up to, and they don’t have to be aliens. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Stepford Wives. My Little Pony.”
“…My Little Pony?”
“There’s creatures called Changelings that feed on love. They impersonate ponies and take the love that other ponies feel for the ones they’re impersonating, as food.”
“Kind of psychic vampires mashed up with Martian shapechangers.”
“Yeah, but without the telepathy, so they’re not as good at it as you’d think. It’s a children’s show; they have to telegraph to the kids that these aren’t the real ponies. In real life, anyone who did something like that would be more competent.”
“How much verisimilitude do we need, though? She’s got moles in the same places Mom had moles. She’s missing a toenail just like Mom. Things I didn’t consciously think about, things I might not have remembered if you asked me to describe Mom.”
“That just means that if it’s not Mom, it has the ability to rummage deeper into our memories than we’re consciously aware of. That’s why I asked you my third grade teacher’s name. I genuinely don’t remember. Mom would, I’m pretty sure. Dad wouldn’t and Stephanie and Aaron were both too young.”
“I’m not sure I remember, but when you said Wilder, that sounded like it could be right. Do you know anyone from elementary school? Some of them went to high school with us.”
“I have some Facebook friends from high school, and maybe one or two went to the same elementary we did, but I haven’t been able to locate any actual people that I remember from elementary school. They don’t have a Classmates.com thing that works for elementary—”
“It says it does.”
“It lies, there’s nowhere to enter your elementary in your profile. All it lets you put in is high school, and it’s from a drop-down, not even freeform.”
“Huh. Guess I never tried it. I’m still in touch with anyone I cared about from back then.”
“I literally don’t care about anyone from back then, but that makes it hard when you’re trying to figure out your third grade teacher’s name.”
“If she can probe our memories,” Jeff said, “then nothing you or I know, or ever knew, would be safe. You’d have to come up with something to ask her that Dad wouldn’t know, or me, or Aaron, or Steph, or yourself, but that you know Mom would know and that you know someone else who would know it too.”
“I could ask Mariana for something.” My mom’s close friend and high school classmate was one of my Facebook friends. We don’t generally communicate directly with each other, but I follow her posts.
“That’s a good idea.” I heard the sound of a whistling teapot in the background. “That’d be my hot water for my oatmeal. If you get anything from Mariana, can you tell me about it?”
“Yeah.” I’d wanted to tell him about the story I’d heard in the diner, but no one got between Jeff and his oatmeal. “I’ll talk to you later. Probably online. Voice is making me paranoid.”
“I know what you mean. Do you need me to come up this weekend? I could make a day trip tomorrow.”
“That might be a good idea. I want to talk to Aaron, do you know what schedule he’s on?”
“He works nights now, so you’ll want to get him around 2 pm or so.”
“All right. Enjoy your oatmeal.”
“I will!” he said, putting a ridiculous amount of emphasis into it as a joke.
***
Before I could finish writing a message to Mariana – before I could really start, honestly, because how could I explain why I needed what I needed without admitting Mom was back from the dead? – someone knocked on my door. It was Mom. She was wearing one of her usual kind of shapeless but colorful nightgowns, and her hair was not brushed, so it was kind of a wreck. I noticed for the first time that it was grey. Mom had always dyed her hair since she started going grey, and it had still been auburn when she’d died. I’d never seen it fully grey. “Your dad and I are going to the arboretum,” she said. “Do you want to come?”
“Since when have you been into trees, Mom?” My mother had always been fascinated by history, and to some extent natural history like dinosaurs, but I’d never seen her express an interest in nature per se.
“I never was, much,” she admitted, “but the world is so beautiful. I was always more interested in the way humans shape the world than the way it came out of the box, but things like arboretums, Japanese gardens, zoos and aquariums… they’re made of nature, but they’re made by humans, and they say something about the people who chose to make them the way they are. And you know that your dad has always enjoyed nature.” My dad was interested in science, in general, and considered the natural world part of that. He was not exactly the kind of guy who would go camping.
In the past, I would have said “no, thanks.” I was never all that interested in nature myself, certainly not trees – maybe beautiful rocks or interesting landscapes, but looking at trees wouldn’t have seemed interesting to me. I still didn’t care much about trees… but my mom was back from the dead. I’ve gone much stupider and more boring places than an arboretum with her in the past, and now… if this was really her, if she was really alive again, I was going to spend all the time with her that I reasonably could.
“Sure, I’ll go,” I said. “I’ll take my own car, though. Just give me the address.” I always took my own car if I possibly could, because I’d get carsick if I wasn’t the one driving. “Should I ask Stephanie if she wants to come?”
“Sure, you can ask. I doubt she will, though.”
Stephanie, however, surprised me. “Yeah, I’ll go with you. We’ll meet Mom and Dad there?”
“Yeah.” Dad had texted me the address, so I pulled it up in my GPS. “About half an hour from here.”
In the car, she asked me, “Have you found anything out? I know you were looking into the whole Mom thing.”
“Jeff thinks she’s really Mom. We have a plan to get Mariana to give us a question that we don’t know the answer to, but that Mom and Mariana both would, so we can confirm she really knows things and isn’t just reading our minds. And a waitress at the diner said her cousin has seen what looks like someone else coming back from the dead.”
“It’s all over the place, actually,” Stephanie said. “I’m finding reports from everywhere.”
I glanced at her. “Why wouldn’t this be making the news, then? People coming back from the dead!”
“I feel like maybe no one wants to go on the record.” Stephanie looked out the window. “Nothing on Twitter or Facebook. No pictures of dead people on Instagram. I’m seeing things on Reddit and Tumblr – places where people use a consistent pseudonym, not like 4chan, but where that pseudonym can’t be tied to their actual identity. I’ve posted about it in both places, but I can’t make myself tweet about it.”
“Any idea why not?”
“It—” She shrugged, hands exaggeratedly widespread and head canted forward slightly. “It just feels wrong,” she said. “Like… we’re getting away with something. There’s a natural law we’re breaking here. I can post as toomanymushrooms or u/catonahottinroofsundae and no one knows who I am, but if I post as Stephanie Robbins and I tell everyone that my mom Suky Robbins is back from the dead…”
“What if that brought it to the attention of, what, some kind of authorities?”
“Yeah, pretty much. And even if I was just posting under my own name… I don’t have to say Mom’s name. I don’t have to put a mention to her Facebook in a post. But everyone knows my mother’s name, or they could find out from my name if they wanted to.”
“And you think maybe there are a lot of people with these weird feelings?”
“I don’t think so, I know so. A lot of posts explicitly talk about the fact that they can’t bring themselves to say anything in public, or talk about it with their real names on it.”
“Are they all parents?”
“No. It’s all kinds of people. Best friends, siblings, spouses, children… the only pattern I see is that nobody died a long time ago. It’s all, ‘my brother who died last year’ or ‘my aunt who died two years ago’ or something. Longest I’ve seen anyone talk about was a son who died five years ago.”
A thought occurs to me. “I can add something to your pattern, though.”
“Yeah?”
“You’d expect that, even if everyone with a resurrected relative feels this sense of dread about telling anyone about it with their name attached, because they feel it will, I don’t know, maybe cause the dead person to disappear back into their grave… you’d think somebody would do it anyway because they don’t care. Someone whose alcoholic abusive father came back and they wish he’d go away again, someone’s asshole brother, someone’s former best friend who betrayed them. But so far, no one has. How many people have you seen talking about this?”
“It’s hard to say because no one’s using their real names. Someone might post from their main blog and their side blog, or maybe they have a different name on tumblr vs reddit but they posted to both. But I’ve tracked thirteen separate names, and of those, I can tell for a fact there are at least nine unique ones because they talk about different people.”
“Thirteen isn’t ‘all over the place’.”
“I didn’t mean all over the Internet, I meant people coming from all over. I’ve tracked the UK, California, North Dakota, Ontario, France, India and New Zealand. Nobody’s tagging their posts and no one is willing to contribute to a master list, so it’s hard to find anyone outside of the people I follow or the subreddits I’m in, and I don’t know where everyone comes from. But it’s geographically widespread. I suspect it may also be happening in other places where people don’t generally speak English or maybe don’t have Internet access.”
“And what’s their sentiment? Like, are people frightened? Upset? Excited? Weirded out?”
She took a moment to think about it. “They’re happy. People are happy it happened. Weirded out, yes. But happy.”
“No whacked-out conspiracy theories about how it’s the contrails raining down adenochrome or something?”
“Not from the people it’s happened to. There was one flame war I saw where a religious person was saying that the person whose sister was back from the dead had to repudiate her. She’s not really your sister, she’s a demon from Hell sent to trick you, et cetera. And the person whose sister was back turned out to be just as religious, and they threw a holy fit. Literally. A holy fit.” She giggled. “A whole lot of stuff about how the righteous were coming back and Jesus had granted some people eternal life and this was that, and how dare you call these beings demons when they’re obviously blessed by Jesus himself and you’re the kind of person who would have called for Jesus’s crucifixion if you’d been alive then, and all that kind of thing.”
“Did anyone else who’d had returned people say anything?”
“This was Tumblr. None of the people who have had returns are communicating with each other in any way I can see. I reached out to a few on Tumblr private messaging but no one has answered. The only places I’m seeing conversations about it between people with returns have been on Reddit, because it has a forum structure. Tumblr is more like a whole hanging web of disconnected strings.”
“Still, you’d think that someone would be publishing a news article about it. Even if no one is willing to go on the record with their real name…”
“Maybe it’s not enough people. Nine unique instances, maybe up to thirteen, maybe more in places I haven’t surveyed. It’s not like I have access to literally all of Tumblr, after all. But that’s all I can confirm, and what if there isn’t any more?”
“If anyone came back from the dead I would expect the news to take notice.” I turned onto the final road; the arboretum was at the end of this stretch. “I went to the graveyard today. Mom’s grave hasn’t been disturbed. I checked with the groundskeeper. So either Mom’s body floated ethereally through the grave dirt, and her coffin, or her original body is still in there and whatever she is now, it’s not the same as what she was then.”
“It’s too bad we can’t have her exhumed,” Stephanie said.
“It probably wouldn’t tell us much anyway.”
“She’s younger-looking than she was before. Not by much, and the grey hair hides it, but she’s healthier-looking and less wrinkly. And I don’t see any evidence that she still has diabetes, or that she’s taking any pills at all. I haven’t seen her take any insulin shots, or anything.”
“Huh.” She wasn’t restored to her youth, or her hair wouldn’t be grey and there would be no wrinkles at all. She wasn’t restored to what she was at the moment of death, obviously. She wasn’t restored to what she’d have been at the moment of death without the cancer that killed her, if she didn’t have diabetes anymore. I felt like there had to be a pattern here I wasn’t seeing. I really wanted to talk to some of these other people having this experience.
I pulled in to the arboretum’s parking lot. Mom and Dad weren’t there yet; Dad doesn’t drive like an old man, but he doesn’t drive as fast as he used to, either. “Do they do this kind of thing a lot? Arboretums, parks, et cetera?”
“They don’t usually invite me, and I wouldn’t usually come if they did, so I don’t know. They do leave the house a lot.”
Dad’s car pulled in, and he and Mom got out. For the first time I could remember, Mom was actually moving a bit faster than him. Both Mom and Dad were the kind of people who walked quickly everywhere they went, but for a long time, Mom was slowed down by her various illnesses. Dad was still healthy for his age, but he’d slowed down a good bit since Mom’s death – grief was hard on his health, it seemed – and now Mom seemed healthier than he was.
“Did you know there are people who come here from all over just to see our leaves in the autumn?” Mom said.
I did know that; it was typically a factor in making it hard for me to come visit during the autumn. “I think it’s the mountainsides. There’s leaves turning colors all over the country, but not on mountainsides.”
“In California they don’t even consider these mountains,” Mom said. “They call them hills when they come visit.”
“No respect for the elderly,” Dad said.
“Yeah, these young mountains think they’re all that, but wait 100,000 years and see how tall they are then,” Stephanie said.
We strolled around, looking at the trees, reading what it said on the plaques in front of them. American Elm. Yellow Birch. Eastern White Pine. I’d seen trees just like these my whole life, and a good number of them, I’d never known the names.
“You never think about how beautiful the world is,” Mom said. “We’re all rushing through it, trying to accomplish the next thing. Or entertain ourselves. Read a book, watch TV. So few of us really want to interact with nature.”
“Careful, mom, your hippie roots are showing,” I said, teasing.
“I think if my generation had remembered what we were back when we were the hippies, the world would be better off.”
“We didn’t forget, Suky. The hippies were always big news, but you know as well as I do how many people our age just wanted to go punch a clock, buy a house, vote for Ronald Fucking Reagan… We thought we were the generation that would change the world, but it wasn’t our generation, it was us. People like us, who wanted to see a better world and weren’t content to just live like the sheep our parents were… but there’s people like that in every generation. And they’re always outnumbered by the assholes.”
“Actually, they’ve done a study,” Stephanie said. “The reason generations get more conservative as they get older is that at every point, the poor are more likely to die than the rich, and the rich are more conservative than the poor. So by the time you get to middle age, a lot of the people looking for social justice and diversity are dead. And there’s a lot more dead by the time they’re elderly.”
“I don’t buy it,” my dad said. “There’s entirely too many stupid poor people in this country who are brainwashed into supporting causes that help out the rich people and screw themselves over. They’re not living longer than anyone else in this country. The math doesn’t work.”
“Let’s not talk about politics,” Mom said. “I think we all know there’s something more important we ought to be discussing.”
“Mom?” Stephanie said, and looked at her, which is not a thing Stephanie does very often.
“Suky?” Dad said.
I didn’t say anything. I watched as Mom looked up at a tree and said, “It’s time we dealt with the elephant in the room, don’t you think?”
“Are you going to tell us about—” I couldn’t say anything more. I couldn’t bring myself to make the words.
“About the fact that I was dead, and now I’m not?” She looked at all of us. “I think we should talk about it, yes.”
It felt like there were eyes, watching us. I wanted to yell to my mother, to tell her not to talk about it, that someone might hear… but who? And why would it matter?
“Is that something you’re okay with, Suky?” Dad asked.
“I’m fine, but I’m getting the impression the rest of you aren’t,” she said. “Why haven’t any of you brought it up, except Stephanie, the once?”
“Well, you told me it was rude,” Stephanie said.
Mom sighed. “I guess I did. I’m sorry. This isn’t really easy for me either.”
She sat down on a bench, and Dad sat with her. Stephanie and I sat on a short stone wall around a tree. “I suppose I should start by saying, I don’t really know much more than you do. I don’t have any memories of being dead. I woke up in bed, next to your dad, on Monday morning, and for a while I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there… I assumed I went to bed the previous night, but I couldn’t remember what had happened the night before. I couldn’t pin down anything I remembered as to exactly when it happened, not in the recent past. And when your father woke up, the shock on his face and the fact that he kept asking me if I was really here made me think, wait, the last thing I remember was that I was in a hospital dying of cancer, so why am I here now?”
“So you don’t remember any kind of afterlife?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I believe I had some sort of existence, but I don’t remember anything about it. When I wake up, I have flashes, feelings that I dreamed something about it, but I can’t hold it in my head long enough to write it down or even talk about it. It just… disappears, leaving behind only the memory that something was there a few minutes ago.”
“You know how unlikely the idea that an afterlife exists is, scientifically, though. Right?” Dad said. “Consciousness is an emergent property of a trillion neurons working together. Imagining that there could be some sort of construct that exists outside the brain and body is like imagining that a video game character could be waltzing around in front of us.”
“And yet I’m here,” Mom said.
“Time travel or a Star Trek transporter with some modifications would make more sense than something supernatural, like an afterlife,” Dad said stubbornly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Stephanie said. “If Mom doesn’t remember…”
“Have you had a medical exam?” I asked.
Mom laughed. “I don’t have health insurance anymore. I’m dead, remember? I can’t even begin to figure out how we’re going to address getting me a legal identity again, and to be honest… I can’t know I’ll be around long enough for it to matter.”
“None of us know that,” I said, “about ourselves or anyone else.”
“True, and it’s going to be hard to travel if I don’t have a legal identity. So I suppose I’ll have to address it eventually, if I last that long.”
“Thank God your state ID hasn’t actually expired yet, or there’d be no way we could fly to Boston. The passport’s expired,” Dad said. Mom had been legally blind when she died, so she’d had a state ID rather than a driver’s license.
“Is there any reason you might not? Aside from the things that could kill anyone?” I asked.
Dad said, “Your mother and I discussed… when she first appeared, I found it nearly impossible to talk about the fact that she’d been dead. When she broached the topic, I could talk about it to her, but I couldn’t tell you kids.” He shrugged. “My working theory is that there’s some kind of alien experiment going on or that time travel is somehow involved, but the fact that none of you kids were able to tell each other about it until you knew the other one knew suggests to me that someone with the ability to directly affect human emotions or thought is, for some reason, making it hard to talk about this. Maybe that means it’s a short-lived experiment.”
“Maybe I escaped from hell and no one wants to talk about it for fear the devil will take me back,” Mom said, but she was laughing. Mom had never believed in hell. Dad was an atheist; Mom definitely had strong spiritual beliefs, but they were kind of a package of woo that included reincarnation and ghosts, even though she’d been raised Catholic.
“There are others like you,” Stephanie said. “None of them have talked about it themselves, but family members or friends have talked about it online, under pseudonyms. I haven’t found any evidence that anyone has mentioned anything under their real names.”
“A lot?” Mom was surprised.
“So far I count between nine and thirteen unique individuals, plus Eleanor heard a rumor that someone who might live in town might have come back. We don’t know any details, though.”
“We need to find them,” Mom said. “I need to find them. I have a second chance at life, and I’m not ashamed of it. I won’t be silenced about the fact that I exist.”
“It might not be the best idea, Suky,” Dad said. “There are a lot more crazies out there than there were when you died—”
“—there were plenty of crazies then, Dee—”
“—right, and even then it wouldn’t have been a good idea. There might be some religious nut job who thinks that if you were dead you should stay that way. Or someone else thinks that you know how you came back, and wants to force you to tell them.”
“Those are valid points,” Mom said, nodding. “And to all of those people who might want to harm me because they think I shouldn’t be alive or they think I know how I came back, I say a hearty ‘fuck you.’ I won’t be silent because there are crazy people in the world. I’m not afraid of death, not anymore.”
“You’re going to risk Eleanor’s kids?” Dad asked sharply.
“I agree with Mom,” I said, standing up. “Nobody should have to keep quiet about the fact that they exist. But I have to tell Will.”
Stephanie made a face. My family doesn’t like my husband. They have justifications, but in the past few years, since Mom died, Will’s gone to therapy and has done a lot of work on himself. Mom was the only one in the family ever willing to forgive anything, though, so I’ve never tried to get them to change their minds.
Mom said, “Well, is he still a total asshole?”
“He’s… been trying not to be. He’s in therapy, and we’re doing couples counseling, and he’s working through a lot of baggage from his upbringing.”
“Why not tell him to bring the kids up and join you here, then. Coming back to life, might as well start a clean slate and see where things go from there. And you’re right, he needs to be involved in the discussion. Your girls, too. They all are old enough to understand what’s going on here, and what could happen.”
“You know I will never stand in the way of anything you want,” Dad said, which is the kind of thing Dad says rather than “I love you”. Things like, “If they ever fail to respect you, I will smite them” – talking about us and our treatment of Mom – or “You have always been my worthy opponent.” Yes. Sometimes my father talks like a comic book character.
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Stephanie said, “but I know you taught me to be who I am to the world and fuck anyone who gives me shit about it, so… same principle. I don’t think you could be you and lie about who you are.”
“And we need to involve Jeff and Aaron,” Mom said. “I’ll call them and get them to come here.”
“We turned off your cell phone ages ago,” Dad objected.
“Dee, we still have a land line. I know we do because I hear it ring, and sometimes you even answer it.”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s right, we do.” Dad shook his head. “This world where everyone carries around their phone in their pocket all the time… it’s strange how you get so used to a technological or societal change that you forget that you did it a different way for 67 years.”
Nothing ever stopped my mother when she wanted something strongly enough, if she believed it was right. I hadn’t even thought of the considerations my father brought up before he talked about them, but I’ve never believed it’s okay to hide in conformity and live in fear. I didn’t think Will had ever believed in doing that, either, and my daughters had grown up going to political protests.
“We need to find out more about these other people,” I said to Stephanie on the way home. “See if we can contact them directly, find out if any of the actual returned people are planning on going public like Mom. We could coordinate if they are. Strength in numbers.”
“The religious right are going to crap their pants,” Stephanie said, laughing. “A Deist who believes in reincarnation, is married to an atheist, and has a gay son, came back to life. Jesus Christ hasn’t got a monopoly anymore.”
“That is probably going to be the most fun part of this going public thing,” I said.
***
So now I don’t know what will happen. My husband’s driving up from home with our girls, my oldest younger brother’s on a train, and Mom’s been looking up contact information for journalist friends she had once, checking which ones are still alive, using Facebook – we never deactivated her account – and my dad’s LinkedIn. Stephanie’s found two other people who have family members who came back from the dead, and one of them’s been willing to talk to her in private messaging on Tumblr.
I still have a hard time telling anyone who doesn’t already know, but it turns out, I can write about it without feeling the pressure, the fear. Don’t know if I can post it, yet. I guess we’ll see. I’m hoping that if I can get more information from more people who’ve been through something similar, maybe we’ll find a pattern, a point of commonality… maybe even an explanation for why we all feel this pressure not to talk about it.
Tomorrow we’re all going to talk about whether we’re going to do this or not, but I know my family. What my mom wants, she gets, if it’s possible and if it’s ethical. My husband and my kids are going to be in favor of her going public, and my brothers won’t stand in her way any more than my dad would. So we’re going to do this. The thing we’re really going to talk about is how to keep ourselves safe when we do.
Everything in the world is going to change. I just don’t know exactly how yet.
***
***
Obligatory notes because I’m so fucking late with this piece:
I have fucked up royally. I went into this without an outline and about 6,000 words in I realized I had attempted to consume a ball of energy larger than my head. This is going to end up being novel length, most likely. I struggled really hard to find a place I could reasonably end it as a short story, and yeah, it is absolutely not an ending. No followup on the Martian shapechanger thing, new idea is brought in and then treated like it’s the climax, protagonist is almost entirely reactive and passive. As a short story, it’s shit.
Unfortunately I found this out after I was already late. Not going to bore everyone with why this was a week late except that it’s allergy season and I’ve been exhausted lately. So there was no time to try to write something else. I hope you found it entertaining, if somewhat frustrating; it’s shit as a short story because it’s plainly a piece of a novel. Which I’m not going to write real soon because I have like 3 novels ahead of this one in the queue, but if I live long enough it will get done.
It’s kinda cute that story #30 falls on the 30th now because I’m late and story #31 is the last of my Spooky 5 Halloween-appropriate stories. But not cute enough to justify how late this is.
BTW, while this is not as autobiographical as “Radio” from Inktober, it is heavily drawn from real life. I altered some things because this is fiction, but the mother and the father in this story are pretty close to real life. Except that my mother hasn’t come back.
54 notes
·
View notes
Text
52 Project #31: (Inktober 2020 #26: Hide) Survival Traits
Trigger warnings: This is a horror story. I’m serious. If you’re triggered by harm to children don’t read this. This came from a nightmare I had a very long time ago, and it still upsets me.
***
My heart beats faster, my palms sweat, but tension is good. Tension keeps me on edge until the moment it begins. My eyes seek a pathway through the crowd, and I am ready for the Hunt.
Our Hunt is being conducted in an abandoned shopping mall. In the basement of one of the department stores we wait, tensely, for the Hunt to begin. I am more ready than the others, the spirit of flight in me. I will find safety before they do.
"Let the Hunt begin!"
And I shove my way through the path I found, faster, ever faster, threading my way through the milling mass of children around me. This is the moment of exploding forth. When they come to hunt us, we need to be in a place of safety.
I will find such a place.
I take the stairs as fast as I can, running, almost flying. There are others, in front of me and behind me. I thread past them, going up, always up, then out into the store and running. Dozens of them swarm onto the escalators‑‑ I dodge through them, out onto the top level. A boy nearly falls as I brush past him, and I give him a hand to right himself, then go, through the bed department. Perhaps I can find safety there.
Groups of girls congregate and sit down, shutting me out with their laughter. Are they stupid? Don't they know they have to find a safe place? I run past them, through them, ignoring them as they laugh behind my back. There is no safety here. I dodge around the curtains and head out into the mall.
Already it's full of children, seeking hiding spots. They are in the stores, behind counters, under clothes racks, in groups. As if there's safety in numbers. Don't they understand how easy it is for a group to be found? I leap down over a banister, onto a staircase, and run down it. No telling how much time has passed. I've seen no place that could be truly safe. They could search anywhere-- a shopping mall doesn't have true hiding spots!
I understand the Hunt. I know it's safer to keep moving than to stay in a bad hiding spot-- but it won't be safer for long. Soon they'll begin searching. I have to find a place before then.
All around me, children are forming into groups, sitting in places that, while not immediately obvious, are certainly not safe. Do they think numbers will save them? Part of me wants to be part of such a group-- they seem to feel more secure than I do... But that security is an illusion. I'm contemptuous of their huddling, and I don't want to die.
Besides, they wouldn't have me anyway...
There! A blacked-out store window!
I run to it and press my face to the glass, looking as hard as I can. Try as I might I can't make out more than vague shapes. I go around, inside. The window is one of the kind that isn't open to the store-- there's a wall in front of it, with a door. I open the door to the window and toss in my white shoes. Then I run back outside to check. I still can't see them-- it's completely dark in there. So I go back around again and climb in, shutting the door behind me-- and then I hear the siren. They're coming. The hunters are coming, but I have the perfect hiding spot. From behind the darkened window, I can see them, but they cannot possibly see me.
And I watch, somewhat shocked, as group after group of children escapes their notice. We were told the Hunters would be tough, merciless, would spare only those with the necessary survival traits. These children are barely hidden, and yet the Hunters spare them-- could it be I was wrong to be so worried? Maybe they're not so tough after all.
Then I see a boy who hasn't yet found a hiding place. He looks around him in terror, and my heart stops for him. Run, hide, come on! Hide! He runs, finally--
--and a Hunter grabs him by the ear. He struggles desperately, kicking, then begins to scream as they lift him and muscle him into the portable compactor. My heart is slamming with terror and horror for that poor captured boy. He shrieks, an inhumanly high sound, as they turn on the compactor.
Then they remove a cellophane-wrapped square bundle of flesh. I want to be sick, or scream, but my mesmerized eyes can't leave the Hunters outside. Now horrible anxiety overwhelms me. What if they find me?
They won't, I tell myself over and over. I'm hidden too well. They won't.
But what if I'm wrong?
They pass another small group of children, who appear to be sick, but not particularly afraid. Now I know they saw that group-- why didn't they take them? Not that I want them to-- god, no one should die like that-- but what's the reason?
They pass the water fountain, where one of them leans down suddenly. I see signs of a struggle, and then they pull a slim girl out by her leg, shrieking. Again my heart pounds, sick with dread, and I cannot turn my eyes away as they throw her in the machine and crush the life out of her...
Where was she hiding?
If she'd been in the fountain, she wouldn't have been able to breathe-- and I saw them reaching, pulling. I read a story once where a child hid in an air pocket in the reservoir that fed a fountain. But if she'd been there-- how did they find her? That would have been the best hiding place of all...
Then I see they have some sort of device, that they're passing back and forth. Several groups they see, and ignore, but children alone they take, and kill them. No matter where they're hiding. This happens several times. I cling to a piece of mannequin and tremble, terrified beyond imagining. My heart wants to stop with terror.
They're ignoring the groups, and coming for the loners. Like me.
I've never fit easily into groups. When they used to tell us to do something with partners in school, I could never find a partner. Unless they assigned it, I could never find a group. Hardly anyone ever wanted to be my friend.
It's not my fault! It's not my fault!
I’ve always tried to be a good person, a kind person -- I saved that boy on the escalator, before, didn't I? It's not fair that the ones who form groups and shut other people out should live! It's not my fault I don't belong!
They are heading toward me.
Mad thoughts run through my head, of breaking out of here, running to join a group-- oh, but there's no time, they're coming, they see me, I know they see me, oh help me help me somebody please save me--
They open the door to the store I'm in, flick on the light, and open the door to the window.
35 notes
·
View notes
Text
52 Project #29: The Last Boy (Inktober #11: Disgusting)
This is fanfic-adjacent; it’s an unauthorized sequel to Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree Jr)’s story “The Screwfly Solution”. It is... less dark than that story, but if you’re familiar with it, that’s not saying much. (If you aren’t familiar, don’t worry, this story explains the backstory necessary.)
This is a horror story... or at the least, dark science fiction. (Nothing supernatural in this one.) I am not tagging any of the triggers inside because spoilers, which are destructive to a horror story, but I will include them at the end, which is below the cut. If you rapidly scroll through the story you can reach the trigger list without actually reading any of the story.
--------------------------------------------------------
Roy is very excited, running, practically skipping, ahead on the trail. “Uncle Matt! This is great! I can see the woods up ahead already!”
Matt forces a smile, because he’s very much afraid of how this expedition might end, but he has to try. He has to have hope. “Sure is. Ready to go hunting?”
“You bet!” Roy turns around and flashes Matt a big, heartwarming smile. His face is pocked with acne and he’s late to have lost his last baby tooth; it’s a gap on the upper left side of his face. He looks so young, so boyish. Which he is; he’s thirteen. Thirteen is still a kid. Matt’s sixty; thirteen’s practically a baby to him. They grow up so damn fast. “You think we’ll bag a deer?”
“We might. Or we might bag a goose. Or we might come home empty-handed. The point to hunting is to be quiet and patient, and let nature bring to you whatever it will.”
They hike up to the tree line. This is one of very, very few forest areas that’s still being tended and managed by people. The rocky hiking trail up to the tree line’s been kept clear of scrub; there are bushes and tall grasses on either side of the trail, but nothing on the wide stretch of packed dirt.
From here Matt can look down the side of the mountain, to the acres planted with corn and wheat, the women working in the rows, a couple of men stationed to sit by the road with their guns, watchful for whoever might come by. He knows them both. Good boys. He took Evan out on a hunting trip like this one, ten years ago, and they came home with a deer and a couple of rabbits. Jase was called Lisa back then, and didn’t need to go on a hunting trip like this. The tradition of the hunting trip when you’re thirteen isn’t for the girls, or the gay boys, or the trans kids. Most of them resent that, until they get to be old enough to understand why.
“This is the best,” Roy says. “Just me and you, Uncle Matt. How long has it been since we got to just spend time together, just two men?”
“I think you were 10. We went out to the river and went fishing, didn’t we?”
“Yeah. I didn’t catch anything,” Roy laughs. “You got a couple of fish, though, right?”
“Yeah,” Matt says, smiling as he remembers. “Had to throw ‘em back, though. They were too small.”
“Why don’t we do stuff like that more often, Uncle Matt? Just hang out, without all these stupid girls around?”
Matt sighs. “You have school and I’ve got work; crops don’t grow themselves and we don’t get security by going on vacation.”
“Yeah, but why do we have to even live here? Why don’t we go live somewhere where there’s just men?”
“That’s a little hard to find. There’s not a lot of men around,” Matt points out.
“Because the stupid girls wouldn’t go to them and have their kids,” Roy mutters.
That is a disturbingly misleading viewpoint on what happened, but Matt tries to let it go, for the moment. “Hey. We need to keep quiet now,” he says softly. “If there’s any deer, we don’t want to scare them.”
Roy nods, and the two of them walk quietly into the forest.
***
Roy was such a sweet little boy.
Matt remembers him bringing the pictures he drew to Matt and to his mother – who Matt, despite being called uncle, is not actually related to; Matt is uncle to all the boys he takes under his wing – and being so enthusiastic about showing it to them. He remembers one of the pictures, of himself and Roy holding hands. Another, of Roy holding hands with his mom. Roy hasn’t had anything positive to say to his mother in weeks; he’s been disobeying her, insulting her, calling her stupid and saying he doesn’t have to listen to her because she’s just a woman.
It’s biological. Roy wasn’t raised to even have the concept of men somehow being better than women at anything or for any reason. Most of the boys develop the attitude around puberty, the result of a disease that infected the entire world over a century ago. Many of them get over it. Many don’t. Matt never suffered it at all; it’s linked to heterosexual desire, and Matt knew he was gay ever since he was nine.
He remembers Roy running around with a toy airplane, declaring that when he was grown up he would help restore humanity’s control of the skies, working to bring back the airplanes. He remembers Roy making him lemonade when he was six, cooking him an egg when he was ten. Roy making a card for his mother’s birthday with a big heart on it. Roy asking him what stars were made of.
It’s going to be all right, he tells himself. Evan was a little ass to his mom and his sisters, and it all worked out for him. Lebron actually punched his mom when he was fourteen, and he came through it. Roy’s going to be fine.
All the boys mean so much to him, but Roy is special… maybe because he’s the most recent one. Matt hasn’t been working with the little boys so much, lately. There’s enough men in the settlement now that the younger men, with more energy, are taking up more of that role. When Matt himself was a child, there were almost no men – Uncle Harry was the only cis man he’d known. Of the boys he grew up with, only Andrew, Tyrone and Jose were still there by the time he was an adult, plus Deandre who was trans and joined them in their late teens. He’d dated all of them except Deandre, who was straight. Ended up eventually with Cole, three years younger than him. Cole had a heart attack six years ago, and after that Matt couldn’t bear to open himself up to any of the new little boys, not without the emotional support of an adult man to share his life with. Roy has been the last one to call him Uncle.
“Uncle!” Roy hisses. “Is that a deer? Over there?”
Matt looks where Roy is pointing. “It could be,” he whispers back. “Let’s see.”
They walk closer, carefully, trying to be quiet. But Roy steps on a branch he doesn’t see. It snaps, and the vague outline that might be a deer startles and runs, proving that yes, it is a deer. Roy pulls out his gun and fires, but misses, predictably.
“Oh, son of a bitch!” Roy swears.
“What have we said about language?” Matt asks mildly.
“Come on, Uncle Matt. I’m not a baby anymore,” Roy protests. “Besides, I said ‘shit’ when I stubbed my toe on a rock on the way up here.”
“Yes, but ‘shit’ is disgusting and everyone makes it. ‘Bitch’ is an insult specifically for women, and calling something a ‘son of a bitch’ when you want to swear at it is basically saying that it’s the fault of mothers if their sons are terrible.”
“Well, who else’s fault would it be? Stupid b – stupid women don’t know anything, but they act like they know everything.”
“I think that’s a little bit of an overgeneralization. I know you’re not getting along with your mother lately—”
“She just makes me so mad. She’s always telling me what to do! Like she knows everything!”
“She is your mother,” Matt says mildly. “And she’s twenty-five years older than you. That does tend to make people know more than you.”
“Yeah, but not her. She really doesn’t know anything. Sometimes I just wanna punch her.”
“That happens to a lot of boys at puberty, but they get over it. By the time you’re twenty-five, you’ll be amazed at how smart your mother has suddenly become.” He smiles at Roy.
Roy glowers. “I don’t think so. Girls are just disgusting. I just want to hang out with men, like you. You’re not a dumbass, Uncle Matt. All the girls are dumbasses, but the guys aren’t.”
“That’s the hormones talking. You’ll get over it.” Matt points at the ground. “Do you see that?”
“No, what?”
“Tracks. For the deer.” Matt crouches down and points them out to Roy. “We can see what direction it went in, now.”
“Oh, yeah! I can see it now!” Roy starts to run, but Matt holds him back by the shoulder.
“Roy. Slow. Patient. Quiet. The deer can run faster than you or me, but it burns more energy doing that. If we walk, we catch up with it, because it’s got to rest. But if it hears us, it’ll run again. So we walk, and we’re quiet.”
“Right. I get it, Uncle Matt.” Roy is much more quiet and careful about where he puts his feet after that.
***
When Roy was eight, Matt walked the fields with him and showed him how to sow corn. They went to the vegetable plots and planted carrots and lima beans. Roy was so proud the day they harvested his carrots, and he got to eat one. Matt took him fishing the first time, that same year.
The little boys are always so sweet, so bright, so full of promise. It hurts so much when they don’t fulfill it.
Please, God, let Roy be all right. Let him get past this. Of course he would. Matt has been training him, teaching him since he was small (but there were others, other boys Matt had loved like his own sons, who he’d trained and taught, and they weren’t around here anymore).
He should have been around more often in the last three years. Roy was heading for puberty and that scared Matt. Still does. He visits the boy often, but Roy is right – they haven’t done anything together, just the two of them, in a long time.
“You ever spend any time with any of the young men? Jase, or Evan, or Fred?”
“Yeah, sometimes. I hang out more with the guys closer to my age. You know any of them? Steve, Paolo, Rafael?”
“Sure, yeah, I know them.”
“Paolo has a dad,” Roy says enviously. “When I grow up I want to be a dad.”
“Well, you’re in luck, because humanity needs more men to be dads,” Matt says. “You can go live where they’re using your donation, if you really want to be a dad, and help to raise the kid you helped make, or you can stay here and help raise the boys as an uncle, and maybe go out and visit the places where they used your donations.”
“How come I can’t stay here and raise a boy here?”
“Genetic variation. If we let human men have sons with their sisters, we get inbreeding. All kinds of diseases. Sending your donations to the other compounds makes us strong and healthy as a species.”
“Did you ever donate, Uncle Matt?”
“Back in my day, if your balls worked you had to donate. We didn’t have enough men. You know old Gran Stacie, she had to donate too. She couldn’t take the hormones to look feminine until there was a safe compound for women to live in and plenty of donations so the human race could keep going.”
“She’s okay, I guess. But the other girls are really stupid and gross.”
Matt stops Roy there. “Hey. You keep saying that. It’s like you’ve forgotten everything we taught you about our history.”
“I remember history,” Roy protests.
“So tell me. Why do we live this way? Why do women live in secure compounds with only a few men? A hundred years ago the world was very different. Tell me how it was, and what changed.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes. You do.” Matt sits on the ground, and gestures for Roy to sit across from him. “Come on. Tell Uncle Matt all about it.”
Roy rolls his eyes. “A hundred years ago men and women lived together but then there was a disease and it made the men sick and the sickness made them want to hurt women so they couldn’t live with women anymore, the end,” he says in a rapid sing-song.
“No. That shit doesn’t fly with me, kid, and you know it doesn’t. Tell it to me right.”
Roy sighs. “Okay, okay. So. Back then, women and men lived together all the time and every kid had a dad, and the men still took care of the women but there weren’t a lot of men trying to kill them, just one or two weird ones.”
Matt, being an adult, is aware of how far this is skewed off the truth of what life was like a century ago, but the boys are being raised with no awareness of historical misogyny. Nothing to give the disease any historical justification it can hook onto. They learn more details when they’re proven to be safe. “So far so good.”
“So back then, there was this thing we used to do to kill flies where we made the male flies wanna kill the female flies instead of mate with them.” This is also a distortion of the facts, but Matt lets it go as well. “Then suddenly, men were trying to kill women instead of having sex with them. But it was just the straight men who were affected and they had to have balls. Women weren’t affected even if they had balls, and gay men weren’t affected, and men who didn’t have balls weren’t affected, and men who didn’t want sex even though they had balls weren’t affected, but all the men who had balls and wanted to have sex with women wanted to kill the women. And a lot of the time, little girls or old women that no one wanted to have sex with, because they thought in their heads it was God telling them to kill women or something. They didn’t know the truth.”
“And what was the truth?”
“That it was aliens. They spread the virus around on Earth because they wanted humans to die, just like the flies, so they could take the Earth for themselves. But humans are more complicated than flies. So there were men who were affected too much, who killed little boys because little boys look like little girls, and there were men who weren’t affected as much, who’d killed their wives but they were trying to protect their little girls. And there were men who didn’t have sex with women even if they wanted to because they were trying to honor God or something, and those men could resist wanting to kill, because the wanting to kill thing was related to wanting sex. If they could resist one, sometimes they could resist the other. Plus, all the asexual men and the gay men and the trans men and other kinds of men without balls like castrated men, plus the trans women, who could fake being men so they could stay alive. And there were also a lot of women with guns, too.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, most of the women got killed, and the men who were doing the killing, they didn’t have any kids. But the women who survived, they went into compounds where all the women had guns and they would kill strange men who came near them. And a lot of the kinds of men who didn’t want to kill women would help women get to those compounds. They called them ‘allies.’ You’d have been one if you were alive in those days, Uncle Matt.” This is said proudly. Roy doesn’t realize how much Matt is still called on to be an ally, even today.
“I would have, yes. So how did we get where we are today?”
“A lot of the places were run by women who hated men even before they started killing women, called rads, and the rads were okay with women getting donations from ally men, but if they had boy babies they wanted to send the babies to live with the men or else throw them outside and kill them. And the moms didn’t want to do that and they thought it was stupid. So they made their own compounds and they let ally men live there. And if boys grew up and they didn’t want to kill women, then they were allowed to give donations and be dads. But if they did, then they couldn’t be dads and they couldn’t live there anymore.”
So much heartbreak, so much agony, skimmed over so neatly and briefly. Mothers pleading with their baby boys, grown to young men, not to do this, before the boy killed the mother… or the mother killed the boy, in self-defense. Entire compounds of women lost because some mother couldn’t bear to kill her son, so she locked him away instead… and he got out. Boys with the compulsion to kill sent to live with the femicidal men, only to be killed themselves, because there were no boys among the men anymore and the young boys were more feminine than anything the killer men had seen in years, by then. Or castrated, so that they would theoretically be safe to stay, except humans were complex and some of them retained the femicidal compulsion even in the absence of testicles, and the horror of boys everyone thought were safe suddenly murdering their sisters. Gay boys in love, their hearts shattered when their love interest proved to have enough interest in women that he became a killer.
They’re more careful now. Things like that don’t happen anymore.
“And the killer men thought that the aliens were like messengers from God or something, but the women and the ally men killed a lot of aliens. And when lots of aliens were dead, they realized that their plan to get Earth for themselves by making the humans die out from killing all the women wasn’t going to work, because humans are complicated. So we guess they changed their minds, because they left and no one has seen them since.”
“And that’s a good thing. We lost a lot of people when the aliens were willing to fight back in self-defense. If they’d had the stomach for it, they might have won, and humanity might have been wiped out. But, we assume, they weren’t willing to die to take our planet; they’d been trying to kill us off so they could have all the bounties of the Earth without doing any damage from removing us. If you try to settle in swampland and you try to kill all the mosquitoes, and instead the mosquitoes start killing you back, maybe you go find somewhere else to live.” Or maybe you come back, later, with a new plan… but humanity has collectively decided that, while it’s important to try to have contingencies for that possibility, it’s more important to rebuild humanity and reclaim what was lost. Matt worries about that, but it’s not something he can do anything about.
“You think they’re ever going to come back, Uncle Matt?”
Maybe. “No. We kicked their butts hard enough I’m pretty sure they’re gone forever. But they left us with this giant mess to clean up.” He sighs. “This stuff you’re feeling about how girls are stupid and irritating and you can’t stand being around them? That says, you’re in puberty and you’re going to grow up to be attracted to girls. Maybe guys too, but definitely girls. And the virus is waking up in you, trying to turn your desire for girls into hatred, but it doesn’t have to win. A lot of guys make it through this stage no problem, and never hurt anyone.”
“It doesn’t feel like a virus. It feels like they’re stupid and boring and gross and I hate them.”
“Of course it does. If it felt like a virus, the men a hundred years ago would have figured it out before they killed most of the women. It messes with your emotions, Roy. It takes feelings that are natural and normal, and twists them around. But if you understand that, then you don’t have to let it win.”
“Okay,” Roy said, and rocks backward, looking around him. “Can we go hunt for the deer now?”
“Sure, kid.” Matt gets to his feet. “We’re done here. You remember what they taught you about controlling your anger?”
“Yeah. Take deep breaths, take a step back from the situation, walk away if you hafta.”
“Right,” Matt says. “Let’s get a move on. That deer won’t shoot itself.”
***
They amble along through the woods. Another deer makes itself known, and Roy takes another shot, but misses. “Dammit! I was sure I had that shot!”
“I thought you did too,” Matt says. “But they move fast. You gotta be able to sneak up on them and shoot before they hear you coming.”
“Can you do that, Uncle Matt?”
“Used to. I’m older now; wouldn’t be surprised if the deer could hear the creak in my bones.” He grins.
And then they circle around a big rock, and there’s a girl.
She’s a teenager, about Roy’s age, maybe a little older. “Hi!” she says cheerfully. “I wasn’t expecting to run into anyone from around here! You’re from the compound down the mountain, right?”
Roy’s face twists into visible disgust, and he backs away. “That’s right,” Matt says calmly. “I’m Matt, and this is Roy.”
“My name’s Jennifer!” Jennifer has dark, wavy hair and tanned white-person skin. She’s wearing cutoff shorts, sneakers that have been patched many, many times – there are no companies that make goods from the old world like sneakers anymore – and a short-sleeved blue buttondown shirt that’s been tied up under her breasts to show her midriff, and opened in the front far enough to see her cleavage. When Matt was young, women were advised not to wear anything that could be arousing, because if they ran into a killer male, their life might depend on how much he was not turned on. By now, though, so many of the killer males are dead, and with women outnumbering men by three to one, the women and girls dress in whatever they want. It was never a good strategy for dealing with the killer males anyway; too many of them were willing to kill women dressed in nun robes, so it plainly had nothing to do with revealing clothes. There are numerous large lumps in her front pockets, which could be rocks, or animal bones, or any number of things.
Matt’s gay and far too old to see teenagers as anything other than young kids, but Roy is plainly very uncomfortable with Jennifer’s state of exposure. “What are you doing here?!” he half-shouts, angrily, at her.
“I’m from a compound on the other side of the mountain, and I hiked up here to try to collect mushrooms,” Jennifer says, her voice just a little bit too loud.
“Well, we’re hunting, so I’d like it if you could be a little quieter,” Matt says. “Don’t want to scare the deer.”
“Ooh! Hunting sounds fun! Can I join you?”
“No,” Roy says, loudly.
“Oh, come on!” Jennifer pouts. “I’ll be quiet!”
Matt takes in Roy’s trembling hands, the whiteness of his lips. Terror, or rage, or both. Roy’s expected to control himself no matter what the circumstances, but Matt… really doesn’t want to push him. Not now, when he’s so fragile. “Sorry, Jennifer, but Roy and I really came out for some uncle-nephew time. Maybe you can join us another time, but not now.”
Her eyebrows go up. “Huh,” she says. “Okay! I know a lot of guys like to go hunting with their dads or uncles when they’re thirteen. You’re thirteen, right?” This is directed to Roy.
“None of your business!” Roy snarls.
“Yeah, he’s thirteen,” Matt says tiredly. “Nice meeting you, Jennifer. Maybe we’ll meet again someday.”
“And maybe we won’t,” Roy mutters. He and Matt hike up the trail, away from Jennifer. “Good riddance.”
“I want you to think about this anger you’re feeling. It’s really out of proportion to the situation, isn’t it?”
Roy sighs. “Uncle Ma-att, I just wanna go hunting with you! I don’t wanna talk about my feelings!”
“Sure, but it’s safest for everyone if you do. What’re you supposed to do when you feel really angry?”
“I already took a step back from the situation! I told her to go away!”
“Didn’t hear any deep breaths,” Matt says.
Roy manages to deeply breathe sarcastically. It’s an impressive trick. Matt would never have thought it possible to breathe in a sarcastic way. Most of it’s with body language and facial expression, but there’s definitely a sarcastic note in the breath itself. “Now can we go find a deer?”
“Maybe we’d have better luck setting up a snare to trap rabbits.”
Roy’s whole body sags. “I wanted to bring home venison, Uncle Matt! Nobody cares if you bring home a rabbit!”
“All right,” Matt says mildly. “We’ll keep going.”
***
The forest is full of sound. Birds chirp and call. Squirrels and other animals rustle in the branches and bushes. Many of the sounds go silent as Matt and Roy approach, but not all. They come up into a clearing, someplace where someone, long ago, had a concrete pad. Most of it’s broken and destroyed, but there’s enough of it that even after a hundred years, the forest hasn’t completely taken it back.
And then there is the deer, quietly grazing on the other side of the clearing.
Matt whispers to Roy as he points it out. “Quiet, now.”
Roy nods. There’s a broken half-wall part of the way through the clearing, blocking the deer’s view of them if they go low. Matt and Roy crawl toward it. Once they’re behind it, Roy pokes his head up, very slightly, following Matt’s hand signals. He lifts his rifle. Quietly. The deer doesn’t stir.
Matt hears a tiny click. His eyes go wide and his blood runs cold.
Jennifer comes bounding into the clearing behind them. “Hi, guys! Didn’t think I’d run into—”
The deer leaps and runs off. Roy spins around, utter rage in his face, and screams, “You stupid bitch!”
“Roy, don’t—” Matt tries to grab Roy, tries to pull him down, throw off his aim, but it’s too late. The gun goes off, twice. Splotches of red explode on Jennifer’s chest, and she falls backward, twisting as she does so she lands on her front. Red oozes out from underneath her.
Roy drops the gun from fingers suddenly dead white and shaking. “I – I didn’t mean to – I was so angry--”
Wounds where the red had blossomed on Jennifer would be fatal; she’d bleed out almost immediately, and the quantity of red seeping out from under her body suggests that that’s what happened. It looks like a strike to the aorta, or the heart itself, maybe. Matt cannot stop himself. “No, no, no—”
“I’m sorry!” Roy screams. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry—”
Matt gets hold of himself. “Roy. Roy, come here. Come here, son.” He means it as an endearment – Roy is neither his literal son, nor has he raised the boy as a father – but it’s real as well. Roy is like a son to him. All of them have been, and he loves Roy so much, and his heart is shattering.
Roy collapses in his arms, sobbing. Matt holds the boy tightly with one arm. “It’s not your fault, Roy, it’s not,” he tells the crying child, tears welling in his own eyes. “It’s the virus. I know you didn’t mean to. I know you’re a good boy.”
“I’m so sorry—I just got so mad, and the gun was in my hand—”
“I know,” Matt says, as the boy’s wet face presses against his shoulder. “I know. I love you so much, Roy, you know that?”
“I love you too, Uncle Matt,” Roy says into Matt’s shirt, still sobbing, and a sob escapes from Matt’s chest as well as he raises his pistol with the arm that isn’t holding his nephew, his child, his son, the little boy who trusts him and loves him, and as Roy cries against his chest and cannot see what he’s doing with his other hand, he lifts the pistol to Roy’s temple, awkwardly, being sure not to touch him with it, and fires.
The sobs stop. After a moment they start again, but they’re only Matt’s.
Jennifer gets up. “I’m sorry, Matt,” she says quietly.
“Get the fuck out of my face,” Matt snarls. “You provoked him! I told you to back off! I told you we weren’t having you join us!”
“I have to do my job,” Jennifer says wearily, and there is no longer any mistaking her for a teenager, despite the expertly applied makeup on her face. She’s short, she looks young, and with the right makeup none of the boys ever guess she’s not a teenage girl. There’s red all over her shorts, soaking her legs and belly, from where the bags of fake blood in her pockets burst, and splotches of red over her heart and her liver. The paint pellets look horrifically real; they even smell like blood.
No, wait, that’s probably Roy’s blood he’s smelling.
"Fuck your job.” Matt holds his little boy in his arms, with both arms now that he doesn’t need one free anymore. “You pushed him. If we’d just given him a little more time – a little more training—”
“And who might he have killed while you were giving him a little more time? His mom? One of the girls his age?”
“He wouldn’t have had a gun!—"
“He could have had a rock. Or a steak knife. Or a baseball bat. I’m so sorry, Matt, but—”
“If you say ‘that’s the law’ or ‘those are the rules’ to me, I will hit you,” Matt snaps. “Not because you’re a woman, but because you’re a piece of shit.”
She sighs. “I know you’re distraught. It’s horrible, having to do this—”
“You didn’t even know him!” Matt screams. “You didn’t watch him when he was little, you didn’t teach him to tie his shoes, you didn’t play airplane with him – you didn’t—”
“I had a son,” Jennifer says sharply. “Don’t tell me I don’t know how much it hurts, when we have to—I was 16 when I had my son. It was six years ago that – that he took his test, at thirteen, and he failed it.”
“There’ve been so many,” Matt whispers. So many little boys. Slightly less than half of them pass; that’s why the ratio of women to men is around 2:1. He was so, so relieved when Blake turned out to be a girl and took the name Cassandra, twelve years ago; the trans kids are immune to the violent impulses. He’d known that Cassandra wouldn’t have to face the test, that he’d never have to take her on a hunting trip she might never return from. So relieved when Joe, eight years ago, reported himself gay at eleven and then showed no sign of aggression toward his mother or sister or any girls his own age.
But all the others. All the others, he’d loved, and they’d loved him, and trusted him, and he took them up the mountain on a hunting trip… with a gun that could only shoot paint pellets and blanks, and the paint pellets only after the bait’s radio transmitter came into range and switched it on.
Roy would never have bagged a deer with that gun. But if he hadn’t shot Jennifer, if he’d controlled himself and proved he could overcome his femicidal impulses, Matt would have “discovered” that there was no ammo in it, and given Roy a different gun, and then they could have had a real deer hunt. Like Evan, ten years ago. Like Jamal, five years ago. Like LeBron… how long ago had LeBron even been?
He’d already decided he wouldn’t take on any new little boys, after Cole died. Roy was the last one, the last child to shepherd to adulthood, the last he had to test. “God,” he cries, holding the little boy he’s just killed in his arms. “Why couldn’t you have let me have the last one? Why didn’t you give him the strength to overcome it?” He rocks the body back and forth. “Why did you let any of this happen? Why do you make us have to kill our sons?”
“God’s got nothing to do with this,” Jennifer says softly. “This is evil. If God allowed such evil as this to exist, then She’s not worth worshipping, and if She can’t stop it, then there’s no point in blaming her. It was the aliens.”
The aliens his ancestors drove off planet, who he’ll never have a chance to fight, or get revenge on. There’s no one he can blame who’s here. He understands the system, he understands the necessity. Little boys who try to commit femicide once don’t have the control to stop themselves from doing it again, and if it’s not the bait with her paint bags in her shorts and the radio transmitter to make the gun fire paint pellets, it’ll be a girl or women who really dies because the boy will have a real weapon. They can’t let the femicides live among them, and they can’t send them away to live with the few bands of roving femicidal men that still exist… the only reason those still exist was that once upon a time, femicidal sons were turned out into the wilderness. Where they could grow up to be bandits who invaded compounds, stole the food, and murdered the women. The men, too, because the men would defend the compound, but the women they’d hunt and kill for fun.
He would never have wanted a future like that for Roy. But he didn’t want this, either.
“I’m… I’m going to go. I’ll radio the compound and let them know the results of the test.”
“You do that,” Matt says bitterly. He knows his anger isn’t fair. He knows his attempt to drive Jennifer off, put off the test at the last minute and get her to come back another day so Roy could maybe develop stronger self-control first, was wrong. He knows it could have resulted in Roy murdering someone he loves. Loved. But how much better is it that Matt had to murder someone he loves? Why do they need to kill the teen boys to protect the women? Oh, he knows why, he signed on for this job years ago because he knew why, he’s seen what happened when a boy grew into a killer and turned on the women he knew. But why has God or Fate or Allah or whatever the fuck is up there listening to human prayers allowed this? Why is this horrible thing something that they are forced to do?
After what seems like hours, crying and holding Roy’s body and whispering how sorry he is, he’s finally out of tears. He looks down at his pistol. Cole’s dead six years on now, and there’s no man in his bed waiting for him, back home. There’s no little boy he’s working with, and there will never be one again. Is there anyone to care if he lives or dies, now? What if he ate a bullet, right now, so he could stop seeing Roy and Jason and Manuel and little Matt, named for him and he still shot him in the head while the boy was bent over the bait’s body, and all the others, all the boys who loved and trusted him, and failed the test he brought them into? Was there any good reason not to?
…there were the boys who’d lived. Adults now, all of them, but they loved and respected him as their old uncle, and they still were willing to spend time with him, sometimes. There were the girls, who yelled “Mister Matt! Mister Matt!” when they saw him and crowded around him, showing off their accomplishments, and he’d never have to take any of them up the mountain. There are trans boys who just figured it out, and need an older man to mentor them and teach them how to be a man, and none of them will ever need to go up the mountain either. There are the gay boys who want to talk to him about boyfriends, and how to date a guy, and how sex works, and all the other things gay boys need to know.
He can still help the children. But he’s never going to take on a little boy as his nephew again.
After a few more moments, he picks up Roy’s rifle, which can’t fall into the wrong hands, and his own pistol, and slings them into the holsters he has for them, on his belt or on his back. Then he picks Roy up and cradles him. A fireman’s carry would be easier, especially with the long hike down the mountain, but he wants to give his boy’s body as much dignity as he can. He won’t sling Roy over his shoulder like a flour sack. He’ll carry the dead weight of the boy down the mountain, and then he’ll carry it for the rest of his life.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
this space intentionally left blank
triggers listed at bottom because they are spoilers
dashboard removes all the line spaces
so I have to put lines in
*
*
*
*
Triggers: Child death. Serious misogyny. A backstory from the original story that involves a worldwide near-complete femicide.
#52 project#inktober 2020#alara's october 2020 prompt fics#horror#science fiction#spooky5#more horrifying than spooky though
28 notes
·
View notes
Text
Writeober 2020 #5 - Guardian #7 - Potion
“The price,” the witch said, “will be your first-born child.”
The man wavered for a moment. “My daughter?”
“If she’s your first-born, then yes,” the witch said.
“I couldn’t possibly give up my daughter!”
“That’s fair,” the witch said. “But if that’s the case I couldn’t possibly give you a love potion.”
“But I must win Emilie’s favor,” the man said desperately. “Without her, I will die!”
“No one ever actually died because some other adult wouldn’t fall in love with them,” the witch pointed out.
“You don’t understand.” The man paced in front of the witch, twisting his hands together. “Emilie is beautiful, of course, and I love her, but the entire reason I need a love potion is that I have no wealth. My children will starve unless I marry a woman with a fortune, and Emilie is the daughter of the mayor. She has wealth, I have land; together we can make a future that would be the envy of anyone, but apart… well, she’ll do well, but I won’t. My children need me to make an advantageous marriage.”
“What happened to your wife’s fortune?” the witch asked, curiously.
“We had three children. Fortunes don’t always last as long as you’d hope.” He shook his head. “Ever since she died in childbed… are you sure it must be the first-born child? My daughter Essopeia is three, but she’s healthy and strong. She’s survived every childhood fever she’s suffered thus far. Could you not take her instead?”
The witch considered this. “Who is your oldest daughter?”
“Eleope is the delight of my heart,” the man said. “She’s beautiful, and she knows her letters and figures already, and she cares for her younger brother and sister.”
“How old is she?”
“She’s seven. I can’t do without her. She does all the chores at home. Has ever since her mother died.”
Simple math suggested that if the youngest was three, and Eleope was seven, and the mother had died in childbed, she’d been doing all the chores at home since she was four. “If you married the wealthy Emilie, you’d have servants to do the chores.”
“That’s true, that’s true… it’d break my heart to part with Eleope, but I would still have Reilin and Essopeia…” The man took a deep breath. “All right. I’ll do it. Give me a love potion to win the heart of Emilie, and you can take Eleope.”
The witch had never said what she wanted his first-born for. She noticed that he had never asked.
“I will give you the potion tonight, at midnight,” she said, “and you will give me your daughter.”
***
Eleope didn’t question anything as her father told her the witch would be taking her. Her eyes were downcast, which could be demure politeness, or a means of hiding rage, or despair. The witch lifted her onto the back of her mule, and walked alongside the mule as the three of them went off the path and into the woods.
“Am I to be your apprentice?” Eleope said finally.
“Do you want to be?” the witch asked.
“I… never thought I would apprentice to a witch. I thought… perhaps… a baker? Maybe I would learn to bake? My mother was a baker.” She sighed. It was entirely too adult a sound. “But if I’m to be your apprentice, I’ll make the best of it and be as good a student of witchery as I can. Witchery? Is that the word?”
“It’s usually called witchcraft, but I like the word witchery,” the witch said. “A great deal of witchery is learning how to brew potions, and you use the same skills to brew potions as you do to bake. You must know exactly how much of each ingredient to add, and when, and what temperature to cook it to, and for how long. Obviously we don’t shape potions with our hands the way we do dough, but there are other tasks of witchery that require such skills. Making homunculi of clay, or poppets for healing or harming. If you learned to become a witch, you could easily learn to become a witch who bakes, the skills are so similar.”
“Will I ever be able to see my father and my brother and sister again?”
“You won’t see your father again.”
“I’ll miss my brother and sister. I don’t know how they’ll manage without me.”
“Your father must think they’ll get by. But perhaps sometime you can visit them.”
The mule plodded into a clearing, and a small boy, close to the age of Eleope’s brother, came running forward with a lantern. “Arna! Is the new sister here? Oh, yes she is!” He set the lantern down and jumped up and down. “New sister! What’s your name? I’m Mishel!”
“Mishel, what are you still doing awake? It’s past midnight.”
“How could I sleep? I was so excited about the new sister coming!”
“I’m sorry,” called an older girl, running toward them. “We’ve put him to bed five times. He wouldn’t stay there.” She reached Mishel. “Okay, you’ve met the new sister. Can you come back to bed now?”
“But I don’t even know her name!” Mishel complained.
“Eleope,” Eleope whispered. “That’s my name.”
“Great! I’m Rahel. Mishel, now will you come back to bed?”
“It’s all right, Rahel. One day of being up late won’t harm him,” the witch said.
“Are there a lot of other witch apprentices?” Eleope asked.
“There are a lot of kids here,” Rahel said, “but we’re not all witch apprentices. I think actually only Gerb and Leleth are.”
“I’m gonna learn to ride horses!” Mishel said importantly.
“Helle is studying to be a carpenter, and Telemeos is learning to spin and weave, and I do figures and manage money, and Ideth and Romon are learning farming, and—”
“She doesn’t need a list,” the witch said. “She can meet everyone tomorrow. It’s late.”
“I don’t know why you always pick them up at midnight,” Rahel said.
“Theater, mostly,” the witch said. “Is Minda still up?”
“Course she is. She’s in the kitchen with heated cider for you.”
The witch helped Eleope dismount. “This will be your new home,” she said to Eleope, “and these will be your new brothers and sisters. Perhaps one day, your own brother and sister will join us here. For now, can you go with Rahel? She’ll find you a bed and get you a glass of water or juice. Milk if you like.”
“Will I begin learning witchery tomorrow?” Eleope asked.
“If you want. Or you could learn to bake. Or sew. Or plant. Or repair a wall. Or you can spend most of your time just meeting the other children and playing.”
Eleope whispered, “I don’t understand. Why am I here?”
“Because your father is the kind of man who’d sell his own daughter for an opportunity for money and power,” the witch said tiredly. “Rahel, please take Eleope and find her a bed. Mishel, go back to your own bed.”
“Okay, Arna,” Mishel said, “but I wanna play with Eleope tomorrow!”
The three children went off to the main house. Arna, the witch, went to the kitchen-house, the smaller building where everyone here made food and ate.
Inside, her wife Minda greeted her with a peck on the cheek and a mug of hot mulled cider. “How is the child?”
“Confused. She thinks this is an apprenticeship.”
“Not a bad guess. At least she doesn’t think we’re going to eat her.”
Arna smiled. “Yes, at least we have that much.” She sat down, resting her feet. Minda sat next to her.
“Why this one?”
“She’s seven. Her father had her doing all the chores for the family since she was four. He tried to sell me on taking his youngest child, the one his wife died to bring into the world, because his daughter Eleope was too useful to him. Also, he wanted a love potion to make a mayor’s daughter fall in love with him because he wants to marry into money.”
“He does have another child, though—”
“Two. Middle child’s a boy.”
“Two, then. Some people have to marry into money to make sure their children can eat.”
“He inherited a substantial sum from his father. He squandered it. Then he married a woman with a small fortune. He squandered that in the three years since she died. Now he’s looking to marry another woman with a small fortune. I don’t have any sympathy.”
“And do you know, will the woman he wants the love potion for be affected by it?”
“I don’t know her. If she is, though, we’ll take the other two children.”
Love potions didn’t take away free will – a woman who was influenced by a love potion could still refuse a man. It was more like a potion of attraction. It also wouldn’t work unless there was a sympathetic resonance between the two people. If Emilie the daughter of the Mayor was as shallow and influenced by desires for material gain as Eleope’s father was, she’d be attracted to Eleope’s father when he used the love potion, but she still might turn him down in favor of a richer man she found less attractive. If she was a good person – or even a bad person, but a bad person who wasn’t influenced overly by a desire for money and power – the love potion wouldn’t work.
So if Emilie did marry Eleope’s father, she would probably be the kind of woman who’d be cruel to her stepchildren, and that would mean Arna and Minda would find a way to trick her or the father into giving the children to them.
There were ten children here – eleven, now. Minda had been an abandoned child, her mother leaving her in the woods, and she’d been taken in by Arna’s mother, also a witch. Arna and Minda had become fast friends, and later, each other’s beloved. If anyone came to Arna seeking potions for healing, or something to ease the pain of a dying man, or a potion to end their own pregnancy or make themselves more fertile, she would give those away for free. But if they wanted a love potion, or a poison, or something to end another person’s pregnancy against her will, Arna would demand their first-born child as payment.
And if they balked and refused, Arna would talk to them to find out why they wanted such a terrible thing, and if there was any ethical way to give them what they truly wanted or needed. But if they agreed… Arna would make the deal, because a parent who would give a child away to get a potion was a parent who might abandon a child for many other reasons as well.
Usually the potions either did not work, or they backfired. It was on the strength of the word of mouth of the unselfish, not-cruel people who got potions from her that did work that her reputation rested on.
“Still. She probably loves her father, and her siblings.”
“Certainly. Especially her siblings. I’d like to take them and bring them here.”
“It’ll have to be done carefully.” Many people thought that witches, in general, stole children and ate them. Any taking of a child had to be done carefully, generally in legal exchange with the parent, who then couldn’t bring charges of witchcraft without it coming out that they’d sold their child to a witch. Eleope’s father would have to be conned into handing the children over.
“Agreed,” Arna said, sipping her hot cider. “But it’s late now. I imagine you’ll want to get up early with the children.”
“Early enough. I’ll let the new girl sleep in, if she can.” Minda stood up. “Ready for bed?”
“Ready enough.” Arna stood as well, finishing the last sips of her cider. “Shall we go?”
And the two of them retired to the room they had above the kitchens.
-------------------------------------
From the prompt from @writing-prompt-s, “The witch is buying first-borns to rescue them from shitty parents who sell their children.”
26 notes
·
View notes
Text
Inktober 2020 #25: Buddy
“That,” Liath said, “is an ik’errikt.” Her voice sounded strange as she spoke the alien word. Normally the translator implant in Wanda’s ear rendered everything any of the aliens said as English, but when it encountered a word that English had no equivalent for, it just let her hear the alien speech with no overlay.
Wanda looked down at what looked very, very much like a pale blonde white man, face down on the ground, which was just as well because Liath’s blast would undoubtedly have removed his face. “How is this not a person?”
“It is a person,” Liath said. “But it’s also a predator on people. Ik’errikt need to consume human neurotransmitters for their own brains to function properly, so they kill people and—”
“Eat their brains?” Wanda asked, eyebrows raised.
“They don’t literally eat them. They have to extract them, purify them, sterilize them, and inject them into their own brains. But the basic principle is similar.”
Wanda looked at Liath, who was an albino, with epicanthic folds, facial features that would, on Earth, have gotten her classified as a person of African descent, and extremely pale skin. “Do all the ikerrikt look like this guy?”
“They’re not all identical, no—”
“No. I mean white skin, yellow hair.”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Well, now I finally know why those bastards kept calling you a demon.” Wanda shook her head. “I haven’t seen any white people the entire time I’ve been on this side of the galaxy. Black people, people who look like they came from all over Asia, people who look like they came from the Americas, blue people… no white people.”
“I am technically white,” Liath said.
“And that’s why everyone treats you like shit. It’s not that you look like something they’ve never seen; it’s that you look like something they have seen, but it’s a brain vampire. I’m kind of surprised you’re not dead.”
“That’s why I don’t shave my head.” Liath’s hair was at the moment a frizzy reddish cloud, though most days she had it in braids shaped into elaborate patterns on her head. “Also, my eyes help. Ik’errikt don’t have eyes shaped like this.”
It had been somewhat strange – refreshing, even exciting, but still strange – to discover that, while there were human beings, or at least people that looked human, on the other side of the galaxy, none of them were white. Take that, American science fiction TV shows, she’d thought. Now it turned out that there were white people, only they were vampires who wanted to eat your brains.
“Well, I guess thanks for shooting him for me? I had no idea.”
“We are… friends,” Liath said, sounding like she was trying out the word for the first time. “It is my responsibility to protect you, and you to protect me, correct?”
“Yeah. We watch each other’s backs.”
Liath nodded. “Meaning, so knives don’t end up in them.”
Idioms apparently translated literally. Liath was smart enough to figure most of them out, and had a formal speech pattern that meant she didn’t put too many in her own speech. “Yep. You got it.”
Wanda Joyce had downgraded from the captain of a science vessel to a short-range courier when she’d had kids, so she could stay closer to home and be there more often. Ironically, the science vessel probably would have been able to detect the wormhole before she fell in it, but a short-range courier didn’t have the right instruments for that. She’d ended up here, far enough away that she wasn’t sure she could even see Sol from here, and had been captured by the blue people, who thought she was one of their enemies, the brown people. (They had names – the Teylo were blue, the Amarasi were brown – and they weren’t the only human people around here. There were a handful of actual alien aliens, also.) Irin Liath had been a scientist of the Amarasi Protectorate, but she’d been betrayed and framed for treason – apparently, not only was she an albino, but she was half-Teylo, which the Amarasi absolutely hated her for. She’d fled, and been captured by the Teylo, and she’d helped Wanda immeasurably when they’d been imprisoned in cells next to each other. So when Wanda found the opportunity to escape, she took Liath with her.
Liath was soft-spoken but aloof, rarely showing any sign of emotion other than calm – not robotic, sci-fi “emotionless” calm, but the genuine thing. She did have a temper, but it came out rarely, and so far, never to Wanda. But Wanda hadn’t been aware up until this moment that Liath genuinely considered her a friend.
“There’ll be more ik’errikt,” Liath said. “They need advanced technology to survive, so you almost never find one on their own. They probably have a ship, in geosync orbit opposite to ours so our scanners didn’t see them, and they’re sending down harvesters.”
“Is this planet populated? Should we be worrying about these people?”
Liath gave Wanda a puzzled frown. “It’s populated, yes, but why would we be worrying about these people?”
“Uh, because there are vampire zombies going around trying to eat their brains?”
“That’s not our problem as long as we kill any of the ones trying to eat ours,” Liath said.
Wanda sighed. “Look. Liath. I know you were raised by wolves and you have an issue with empathy, so let me put it to you this way. I cannot tolerate the idea of vampire people running around on a fairly low-tech world – which this obviously is, since we didn’t see any tech signs from space – eating innocent people, who have no idea what is preying on them. Is there any way the vampire people can get what they need without having to kill people, and if there isn’t, is there any way for us to destroy their ship?”
Liath blinked. “This isn’t an issue with empathy. Nobody would go out of their way to kill ik’errikt on a world that isn’t their own and hasn’t entered a protection pact of some kind with them or their world.”
“Well, on my world, people were starting to get there,” Wanda said, “nobody willing to stick their necks out for anyone who couldn’t pay. But that’s not how I roll, or my family, or my friends. It’s a basic human thing to take care of other people. It’s the right thing to do.”
“They can’t repay you, Wanda. And once we’re done here, you’ll never see this planet again.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s still the right thing to do. Now you can help me or not, but I’m gonna try to stop these assholes from eating anyone’s brains.”
Liath sighed. “I’ll help you. You’d die an idiot’s death if I didn’t.”
“And you care about that, because we’re buddies! Right?” Wanda tried to give Liath a fist-bump. It didn’t work.
Liath stared at Wanda’s hand, suspended. “Is that a type of salute from your world?”
“Never mind,” Wanda said.
#inktober 2020#alara's october 2020 prompt fics#nightmare before xmas prompt extension rules#wanda joyce
18 notes
·
View notes
Text
Inktober 2020 #4: Radio
Based on the prompt originally from @writing-prompt-s, “You’re taking a road trip in a 5 seater car. Each seat is filled with you, but at various points in your life. One of you strikes up a conversation.”
***
I’m in the driver’s seat, with myself at forty on the passenger side, window down of course, just like I’d do if I wasn’t driving. My selves at ten and twenty are sitting in the bucket seats in the middle row of the minivan, with Ten behind Forty and Twenty behind me, and Thirty is in the back, lying sprawled across the entire seat. My Pandora feed is playing through the radio, and right now, it’s Area 27’s “Driving With The Future Self”, which is apropos, though technically, I am the only one who’s not.
“I hate vans,” Twenty complains. “I can’t put down the window. Why do you even have one?”
“Four kids,” Forty says, and Twenty is taken aback. Ten, however, seems impressed.
“Do you have a lot of cats?” she asks.
“Too many,” Thirty complains from the back seat, so apparently she hasn’t fallen asleep.
“I’ve got small windows open in the back, or I could open my window all the way, and the air would get back to you,” I tell Twenty.
“Roll down your window, it’s better than nothing. Ugh. Why are you driving a car that has windows you can’t open?”
“I’m pretty sure Forty answered that,” I said.
“What, don’t they make vans where the side windows open?”
“Pretty much no. I could maybe have gotten an SUV—”
“AKA, a death trap on wheels—” Thirty calls from the back.
“But as you can see, I don’t want to.”
“What’s an SUV?” Ten asks, young enough that it doesn’t bother her to demonstrate ignorance. I happen to know Twenty doesn’t know what they are either.
“Sports Utility Vehicle. They range from ‘pickup truck, except with a roof and back seats’ to ‘I took this regular car and pasted it onto the wheels of this ice cream truck,’” I say, rolling down my window. “Is that any better?”
“Yeah, but now it’s hard to hear.”
“You and Ten have the best hearing, so you’re just gonna have to tough it out,” I say. “Better miss some words than feel nauseous, right?”
“This is great,” Ten says. “I finally found an adult who will take my issues seriously. Too bad it’s my own older self.”
“It could be worse,” Twenty says. “You could find out that your older self doesn’t care about your issues, which I am not sure is not going on.”
“Oh, for gods’ sake, Twenty, I have a minivan because it moves large families and drywall for construction projects and a million boxes of books when I am moving, or storing extra books, and unfortunately they don’t have them where the gas mileage is pretty good, the reliability record is excellent, and the windows go down. Cheap, fast, good, pick two. I picked gas and reliability.”
“I’m glad you picked gas,” Ten says. “And that you have the windows down instead of the air conditioning. We have to save energy.”
“Does anyone even care about that anymore?” Thirty complains.
“I thought I’d ride a bicycle,” Twenty says. “Not contribute to pollution and wasting gas.”
“I want you to think back to the time we rode a bicycle three miles to our friend’s horse barn, and then maybe you will have the answer for why no bicycles,” Thirty says.
“Actually, it’s because I broke my tailbone having kids, and I can’t sit on the damn things,” Forty says.
“Actually, it’s because of all those things, plus cities aren’t great places for bikes, plus hard to tow young children, plus now I’m old and my knees are shot,” I say. “I could probably come up with half a dozen other reasons.”
“Do you at least have a short commute? Please tell me you have a short commute,” Thirty, who suffered a severe depressive episode that was at least in part caused by a 5 hour daily commute, says.
“I work from home.”
Thirty is now sitting up. She cheers. “Yes!”
“How does that work?” Twenty asks, puzzled. “Wouldn’t you have to go into the lab?”
Oh, wow. I’d forgotten. Twenty still thinks she’s going to graduate college and go to grad school and become a scientist. Forty says, delicately, “We do IT now, actually.”
“What’s IT?” Ten asks. “Aside from the villain in A Wrinkle In Time.”
“Information Technology. We work with computers.”
“We’re programmers?” Twenty asks, dismayed.
This is why I never made the big bucks in IT. “No. More like… oh, hell, it won’t make any sense to you. You don’t even have the Internet yet.”
“The College of Engineering has it,” Twenty says, “but I don’t think the College of Arts and Sciences can get it. Why is it useful and what do we do with it?”
I’m taking this – even Forty’s not quite far enough along to fully understand. Things change fast. “You remember Phenoma Jones’ Phenomenally Weird Phenomenon?”
“I just made that up,” Ten says. “Just, like, a month ago or something.”
“Yeah, of course I remember it if you do,” Twenty says.
This is not entirely accurate. Thirty doesn’t remember the shelf of dolls we had in our bedroom as a child, or more accurately, Thirty doesn’t think about it. Forty just found a picture of it and it reminded her so hard and made her so nostalgic she paid a lot of money to get hold of “new” used versions of all our old dolls, plus a lot of random extras. She still thinks she’s gonna make money selling the random extras. I’d forgotten the Silver Kitten until my brother brought it up a year ago – a story I told about a silver statue that was a stylized number 8 with cat ears and a simple cat face on top, which was somehow alive and powerful. I don’t remember the details. Ten probably does, but I don’t want to derail the conversation by asking her, because she will tell me, at great length, and I can’t bear to hurt myself by interrupting her and making her stop infodumping the way I remember everyone else doing. At my age I know why they did it, but the memory still hurts. So Forty doesn’t remember it and probably not Thirty either.
“Okay, so you know how in those playings, in the future, there’ll be a network connecting all the computers and there’s shows on it and you pay a little bit of money for each show?”
“Yeah,” Ten says.
“That’s real. That’s happening.”
Her eyes go wide. “I predicted the future?”
“You’re not psychic, you just read the right science fiction. And you didn’t get it perfect. Instead of microtransactions to buy a show, we usually subscribe to a service that gives us shows we want.”
“Like cable,” Twenty says.
“Yes, but it doesn’t suck. Instead of thirty million channels and half of them are sports, it’s like a library of videotapes on your computer and you can watch any of them anytime you want.”
“Can you make your own?” Ten, who is very interested in making videotapes, says, and tears prick my eyes. Because yes, Ten, yes, people all over the world make their own and they put them on Youtube, but it’ll come too late for you. You’ll be thirty-five with a tiny baby and a lot of insecurity about your looks and no time to record yourself, and by the time you have the time you’re even older and there’s so many other things you need to do with your time, because it’s running out.
“I think so,” Forty says. “Right, Fifty?”
“Yeah. Our kids have done some of them. We really don’t, though.”
“Oh,” Ten says, disappointed. “Why not?”
I’m not going to tell her because of insecurity about how we look. She’ll understand that well enough but think we just need to push past it, like she does. But Twenty finally likes her appearance, and Thirty doesn’t think she’s too bad looking, and I don’t want to tell them that someday they’re going to see themselves in the mirror and think they look like a short, squat troll or something. And Ten won’t understand what it does to you to finally think you’re beautiful, after suffering with thinking you’re ugly your entire childhood, and then losing it.
“We have other stuff we do,” I say vaguely. “Like learning German.”
“That’s great, but it doesn’t answer my question about what we do for a job. Do we do something with these shows?”
“No. Not the shows. But people put their files up on the Internet as well, and they send emails – messages through the computer—”
“I am smart enough to figure that out from context,” Twenty says disapprovingly. I’ve forgotten what an arrogant twit she could be sometimes. Well, to be honest, I didn’t forget because I never knew. When I was her age, I thought my behavior was fine.
“Right. Subscription services exist for that too. We help people get onto those services, move over any emails or files they had on a different service, and fix their problems.”
Forty is dismayed. “Really? That sounds horrible. Is that tech support? Don’t we get to do anything with data?”
“Sometimes,” I shrug, lying.
If I thought telling them all about everything would change anything for me, I would. But I don’t know how we all get out of this car without me being the only one who remembers any of it, because I don’t remember ever being in a car with my future selves. Either they’re from alternate universes or nothing I say can change their fates, because they won’t remember.
“Are we at least published?” Ten asks. “Tell me we’re published.”
“We have a few short stories published in some anthologies and magazines.”
Twenty is horrified. “Only that? After I’ve written all these stories?”
“The problem is that you suck and nothing you wrote is publishable as-is,” Forty says.
“What do you mean, I suck?”
“Twenty,” I say, because I’ve learned some diplomacy in the past ten years, “everything you’re writing goes into making us the writer we become. Thirty’s pretty damn good. And regardless of whether you ‘suck’ or not, I have a project going on where I’m publishing your stuff online. But it’s for free, on my—” I stop. She won’t know the word “blog”, or even “web page.” “—online journal. I’m editing things to bring them up to my current standard, but if you weren’t writing so much right now, I wouldn’t have anything to draw from.”
“Why aren’t we making money publishing books?” Ten demands.
Forty says, “Because fanfic. When you’re sixteen you’ll start writing stories about Battle of the Planets, and you’ll know you can’t publish them, but you’ll do it anyway. Then you’ll discover a place where there are other fans of the show and its original Japanese version.”
“Writing stories about shows where you can’t publish it in a magazine or a book and you can’t make money is called fan fiction,” Thirty says. “Or fanfic for short.”
“Fanfic’s great, but I’m still writing original stuff,” Twenty says.
“You’ll stop,” Thirty says. “You get instant feedback from writing fanfic – we can put it on the internet, we don’t need to worry about xeroxing two dozen copies anymore and waiting six months to hear anything from anyone. And the instant feedback’s addictive. I thought I’d be able to overcome it and write some books, but apparently, according to these guys, no.”
“I’m doing the 52 Project now,” I tell Forty, since she’s the only one who knows what I’m talking about.
“Now? Like… not eight years ago?”
“Now,” I say. “We needed a fire to light under our asses and we finally got one.” I won’t tell her what it was.
“What’s the 52 Project?” Ten asks.
“52 stories, one a week, every week, for a whole year. That’s where your stories are going, Twenty. And some of your ideas, Ten. I’ve lost everything you ever actually wrote, but it’s ok – you’re going to find a style that doesn’t sound like Mom next year, and a little while after that, I have everything you’ll write. Also, I wrote a kids’ book based on Superkitty.”
“Wow!” Ten says. “But how can you have Underdog in it? Wouldn’t that be fanfic?”
“I changed a lot of things,” I admit. “In my story, Superkitty’s ten. She doesn’t have a hundred family members, just Lara Kitty and a little brother. She’s not working as a slave of the dogs, she lives in Kookalariland, but her family are refugees because the dogs really did take over her home country. And the Underdog character is named Arthur Boy.”
Underdog’s secret identity was Shoeshine Boy. “I see what you did there,” Forty says, grinning. “I assume this isn’t published yet.”
“No. I finished it this year but it’s the first children’s book we’ve ever done – young adult novels, sure, but this is a chapter book for second graders, so I need someone who’s willing to look it over and tell me if it’s good before I send it to an agent.”
“So why are you doing everything now?” Thirty asks. “Did fanfic stop being fun, or did we manage to wean ourselves off it, and if so, how?”
“That rhymed,” Ten tells us all. No one tells Ten that that was not important information because all of us remember being what it was like to be Ten.
“Stuff has happened,” I say. “You know, no one lives forever, and I’m fifty. I need to think about the fact that there’s more time behind me than ahead of me, and I don’t want to disappoint all of you. Maybe if it was just me, I could just go writing fanfic until the end of time, but I know what you all wanted and I don’t want to let you down.”
Thirty says, slowly, “Fifty? Why isn’t there a Sixty in the car with us?”
I almost think I can see a Sixty. She fades in and out in the back seat. Might be my imagination, all the rest of them are as real as anything. “I can guess why, but for obvious reasons, I don’t actually know.”
“Is it diabetes.” Forty says that like it’s not a question.
“Yeah, but also other stuff.” I make a decision. Forty is past the point where any of our children were born; nothing she does can change my timeline enough to make my kids disappear. Either she won’t remember, or nothing will change for me but she can change her own timeline… or maybe she can fix things. The last decade was when everything went to hell. “High blood pressure. Took us a while to get the right medication for that. Then diabetes. Then breast cancer.”
No one in the car says anything until Forty bursts out, “That’s not fair! We don’t even have a family history of cancer—”
“Mom’s going to die of it,” I tell Forty.
“Mom dies?” Ten is appalled. She knew, of course, that people die, but hearing it as a thing that actually happened to Mom is freaking her out. I guess she thought Mom would live a ridiculously long time.
“Lung or breast?” Forty asks me in the harsh monotone I use when all of my effort is going into not showing my emotions. She really doesn’t have to; we all know the trick – maybe Ten’s not self-aware enough to know, but the rest of us do – and we know we have emotions. But I also know I’d do the same thing.
“Brain, in the end. It started in the lung.”
“That doesn’t mean we have a family history of cancer, then. She smoked.”
“Then what’s the point?” Ten screams, tears welling up in her eyes. “I tried and tried and tried to get her to quit! She didn’t quit? After all the times I told her about how bad it was for her?”
“That’s not how addiction works,” I say. “Addicts know what’s bad for them but they can’t stop craving it, and that overrides your willpower. Besides, she did quit. Thirty, has she quit yet?”
“Just did, but… I agree with Ten. What’s the point if she’s gonna die of cancer anyway?” I can’t see her, all the way in the back, but I hear it in her voice. Her eyes are going to be wet and she’s struggling as hard as she can not to cry.
“We don’t know. Maybe that gave her more time. Maybe it wasn’t the smoking at all – she was taking medications for issues with diabetes that they say could cause cancer.”
“When?” Forty asks.
“2015. In 2013 around December they’re going to see something on the X-ray of her lung, but they’ll think it’s scar tissue from smoking. In 2014 they’ll find out it’s cancer, but it’ll be too late by then. She’ll die a year later.”
“No, she won’t,” Forty says. “I’m going to stop it. I’m going to tell her – I dunno. Tell her I dreamed about Grandma telling me I have to warn her about that scar and she needs to get more tests.”
“Yeah, she’ll buy that,” Thirty agrees.
“I hope you can,” I say, “but… I don’t remember ever having ridden in a car with the rest of you, so I don’t know if you can.”
“Maybe this is the start of the paradox cycle,” Thirty says. “Then on the next iteration everything will be different.”
“How did we even get in this car, anyway?” Twenty asks. “And where are we going?”
“More important,” Forty says. “When did you get cancer and how serious is it? Is it related to diabetes? When did you get that?”
“2017 for the diabetes but honestly, probably right after Mom died, because we were too fucked up to go to a doctor and we pretended nothing was happening. And then we did the same goddamn thing about a lump in our breast in 2016 because they said they couldn’t see anything but we should go for more tests, but we lost the paperwork so we didn’t. In 2017 the lump started hurting, so we did go for the tests, and it was cancer. I lost the breast. This is a fake.” I thump my chest. “They say they think they got it all, but there isn’t any test you can undergo yet to find out if the damn thing has popped up somewhere else. The other breast’s clean. They’re giving me drugs that kill my sex drive and are going to ruin my marriage eventually, most likely, because the cancer responds to female hormones.”
I think Ten might be grossed out or upset by talking about sex drive, but I’ve forgotten. Ten can treat the subject of sex as if it’s a clinical matter of interest. She’s the one who tried to explain the birds and the bees to my uncle when she was five. Well, I guess all of us are.
Thirty mutters, “I might get more done that way…”
“You won’t,” I say.
“You’re actually publishing stuff that isn’t fanfic now, are you sure?”
“I’m going to change it,” Forty says. “I’m going to change all of it. I’ll warn Mom. I’ll fix our eating habits now so we don’t get diabetes until later. I won’t let the breast thing go. I’ll change everything. None of the rest of you change anything; if you try to alter the timeline you might erase our kids. But I can do it. I can start the writing earlier, too.”
There’s so much she could theoretically change that she really can’t. I can’t warn her about Donald Trump; she won’t have any power to do anything about it, any more than she did in 2015 and 2016. Same with COVID – she has no power to change that. I could tell her about the issues with the marriage but if I did, I risk Thirty deciding to break up with her boyfriend, who is my future husband and the father of my children. There’s one thing I can say, though. “If you can actually change anything… you’re gonna get the other house. Make sure Dad puts it in your name. Mom and Dad will have issues with some of our pets and it’ll be really upsetting when the house is a mess and they come to visit and complain about the house all day because it’s their house.”
“…How does Dad end up getting involved with the house?” Forty asks.
“Too complicated to explain,” I say, “and not an issue you need to force to exist.” Forty just attempted to get that house – the other half of our duplex – and failed because the underwriters for FHA loans refused to believe she was buying it to live in it rather than rent it out, and she didn’t have enough money to buy it the other way. It’ll work out better the way it actually happened, because Dad got it for a lot less money than Forty would have been able to buy it for, but she needs to not have the specter of how we are treating “their” house hanging over every interaction with Mom and Dad until Mom is dead. Especially if she can do something about Mom dying.
“Is there anything I need to watch out for?” Thirty asks Forty, or maybe me, or both of us.
“Nothing we can tell you. You’re going to have kids. Anything, however small, that you change could affect the timing of that and make you end up with completely different kids.”
Thirty considers that, and then nods. “Okay, good point.”
“Is everything really going to be terrible?” Ten asks. “It sounds like all the awful stuff happens between Forty and Fifty, and then we don’t even know, but… isn’t there anything good?”
“We’re not going to be what we thought we would be,” I say. “We’re not going to change the world. We’re not going to be the Uber-Feminist and whip our man into doing everything we say.” Ten is the only person here who even thought there was a chance of that one, really. “We’re not going to be published novel writers by this time. But we’ll have written four million words, most of it fanfic, most of it good, and we’ll actually enjoy reading it over, and it will always be a huge thrill to hear from someone who liked it. We’ll make many friends, over time, and there will be times when there aren’t any, but there will be times when there are a lot. We’ll make a huge difference in the lives of at least three children who aren’t biologically ours. We’ll learn a lot about ourselves and why we are the way we are and we’ll finally feel like we belong to the human race and there are others like us out there. And we’re also going to publish fifty-two stories in fifty-two weeks.”
“Well, I mean, we don’t know that,” Thirty says. “Unless you’re done.”
“Nope. Halfway through, though. And we’ll learn a lot about how to write short stories that way, and I’m sure that next year we can use that to write new ones that we can publish. It’s not over yet, girls.”
“But maybe you don’t have very much time,” Thirty says. “Because Sixty’s not here.”
“That’s why we’re in this car,” I say. I didn’t know what I was going to say until I said it, but now that I’m saying it, I feel with all my heart that it’s true. “We’re going to look for her. And if we find her, we’ll look for Seventy. Eighty I’m pretty sure is not happening, but what the hell, we’ll look for her too.”
Jig of Life by Kate Bush is playing on the radio. “This moment in time, she said, it doesn’t belong to you, she said. It belongs to me, and to your little boy and to your little girl and the one hand clapping, where on your palm is my little line, when you’re written in mine as an old memory…”
All of us stop to listen to the song. Ten doesn’t know it, but she likes it. She hasn’t seriously discovered her own tastes in music yet, and that song hasn’t yet been written. Twenty and the rest of them all know it, but only I know what it means.
The four of us who know the song sing along with it, and I start crying, but I keep singing anyway.
13 notes
·
View notes
Text
Inktober 2020 #21: Sleep
Based on the prompt from @writing-prompt-s, “The worst thing a wizard can do is sleep-talk.”
---------------------------------
Words spoken by a person without the power thrumming through their veins were just words. Even the Words of Change, the secret language the universe was built in, meant nothing to the people without the power. But for the people who had it, words needed to be guarded carefully. “Umhaha”, for instance, unraveled thread. An easy mistake to make; almost every young wizard had a story about accidentally rendering themselves and everyone in the room with them naked, just by laughing a certain way after saying the word “Um.”
“Kefzhizoss” should have been a word that no one would ever say unless they meant to say it.
The young man was crumpled up as small as a human could make himself, on the bench in the police wagon. No one had confiscated the amulet of protection from his neck; like most such amulets, it wouldn’t come off while he was under emotional stress, pain or fear. But he was under a silencing charm, and the amulet didn’t protect him from being silenced.
The cleric was arguing with the detective on the scene. “It’s obvious he didn’t mean to do this,” he said, waving his hand at the devastation of what had been the young man’s home, with his parents and siblings. The broken remains of the wards that had contained the word, made sure the destruction spread no farther than their property, would have stopped the word if it hadn’t been spoken within their house, and there were other fragmentary charms present. One to prevent fire. One that would probably have protected books from water damage. There was one, still intact, that purified air as it went into the lungs of birds.
There were no birds in the wreckage, or bird cages. Neither were there human corpses, or any human beds, except for the one the young man had laid in. The destruction had been too thorough.
“Look, Elimiss, maybe I agree with you. Could be accidental sleeptalking. But four people are dead, and the damage was clearly done by the Devastating Word, and the only survivor’s a wizard. You see why I can’t just let him go, right?”
Tears ran down the young man’s cheeks, but there was nothing physically wrong with him. Either he was tremendously talented for one so young, or one or both of his parents had been very skilled wizards, to have created an amulet that had perfectly protected him and the bed he had been found on from the Devastating Word. It didn’t matter anymore.
“He’s traumatized! He needs a temple, not to be held indefinitely under a silencing charm—”
“Oh, for the love of all your gods, the kid can still read and write. But I can’t let a man who killed his entire family just traipse off to a temple to have his trauma healed. Did it occur to you that maybe a guy who killed his parents and brother and sister maybe deserves to have some trauma?”
“It was obviously an accident! He was wearing pajama pants, for the love of Merenethe Who Heals All Wounds! What kind of devious, evil killer wears pajama pants and lays down in bed before blasting his entire home to ruin?”
“The kind who knows that people like you will assume it was an accident from that,” the detective said sharply. She was irritated that the cleric had felt the need to provide his god’s entire name, like he was offended that she’d invoked all his gods instead of his specific patron. “He needs to be interrogated, and we can’t let him speak until he’s told us his story.”
The man raised a tear-streaked face, brought up his cuffed hands, and with just one of them, signed, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again. Both hands, he might have been trying a sigil, though the detective was an experienced enough wizard herself to catch that before it accomplished anything, if he’d tried it. One hand, it was obviously sign, and she relaxed. Only about half of all wizards knew some kind of sign language, which was stupid given the control wizards needed to keep on their speech. Sigils were much more complicated and couldn’t be done accidentally.
“Babababawa” brought a light, misting rain… into a building, if that’s where the wizard said it. It was a hazard of raising wizard babies, that some of them came into their power so early they couldn’t really talk yet, and their baby babble could very easily accidentally land on that one. “Sh’shoot,” an expression thaumnulls might say any time if they started to say “shit”, thought better of it, and instead said “shoot” as a full word without just following from the original sh – more than one wizard teenager had been found that way, growing up among thaumnulls, not knowing what they shouldn’t say. It made existing electrical current surge in power, and could very well blow every circuit in a house, or start a fire. “Kolonel” was a big problem with people learning the language as adults, who didn’t know how to not pronounce the word “colonel”. The only thing it did was create an impenetrable darkness that flowed out to the nearest boundary, if indoors, and a mile or two outdoors, until a wizard said “Kohanoel” to turn it off and restore the light… but people who’d said it by accident and hadn’t known they were wizards didn’t know how to turn it off.
The Devastating Word, however – the detective, being a wizard, did not even think the syllables to herself – was commonly thought to be impossible to say by accident. The “zh” sound wasn’t even common in this language; most native speakers around here wouldn’t even make that sound in their sleep. And here was Elimiss, the mandated social worker who worked with the cops to de-escalate situations and help folks with mental illnesses, insisting that obviously the man – boy, really, he probably wasn’t even out of college – had said it in his sleep, because that was what the plainly traumatized boy had told the cops when they’d arrived. Because a perp couldn’t possibly carefully plan out the excuse he’d use to get treated like a trauma victim and charged only with negligent manslaughter, maybe even go free, after he’d murdered his family. Right.
“Sanavah. I know we have to get his full story from him. But do we really need to treat him as if he’s a dangerous killer?”
Detective Sanavah ofWinterfall looked over at the destroyed house, and then back at the cleric, an expression of disbelief on her face.
Cleric Elimiss Elidanson, adept of Merenethe, sighed deeply. “Yes. I know he killed his family. But if it was an accident—”
“How does anyone say that word accidentally?” Sanavah exploded. “It’s just… not a thing you’d say!”
The boy signed. “We were studying it today. The Dire Words. I’m in magic school.”
Okay, so he was out of college. Magic school, like law school and medical school, was a graduate school; you needed at least a two-year degree to get in. “Why the hell would you be studying the Dire Words?” Sanavah snapped. “How fucking irresponsible would your teachers have to be—”
“Be professional, Sanavah,” Elimiss advised, and she wanted to punch him.
“It’s advanced work. Magical theory. We have to take the Words apart to determine why they work and have so much power,” he signed. “K-E-F-Z-H-I-Z-O-S-S was fascinating, I was working on an analysis all day… but I would never say it intentionally! I was calling it the Kef word.” He signed the individual letters, but ended it with the sign that indicated he was replicating a pronunciation, not a spelling.
Oh. Well. Maybe that changed things. Maybe not; it might still be a really good story. “You know we’ll follow up with your school, right?”
He nodded. “I don’t care what you do to me,” he signed. “Any kind of punishment. I deserve it. I killed Mom and Dad and Lifah and Raoun. But I want the world to know, it was an accident! I loved them! I’d never have said the Kef word in my own house, not without containing it first!”
“This the first time you’ve sleep-talked?”
“No… Mom said I’ve been doing it since I was a baby. Raoun insisted I had to move out and get my own room when I was eight because I was keeping him up at night. My parents turned my dad’s study into my bedroom.” He picked up the amulet. “Mom gave this to me so I wouldn’t accidentally hurt myself by sleep-talking, but I guess she never thought… I mean, I never thought…”
“I’m going to charge his teacher with negligence contributing,” Sanavah said tiredly. “Gonna charge you, too, kid. At least. I’d charge your mother, too, but she’s dead.”
The boy began to cry again, sobbing soundlessly into his hands.
“You believe me now?” Elimiss said. “I’ve had a feeling from Merenethe all this time that this boy isn’t a killer. Not intentionally.”
“That’s great. Very nice of Merenethe. I’m sure ‘a cleric of Merenethe had a feeling’ will be great evidence in court. He’s still coming down to the station.” She spoke to her forensics team. “You about ready to wrap up?”
“Yeah, pretty cut and dried. I think we’ve found all the evidence of standing charms we’re going to, and the Devastating Word would ruin any evidence of any other active spells,” Sofrani, the head forensic wizard, said. “We can head on back now if you want.”
“BTW, got a name,” the analyst, Charron, said. “Bylan Evertide.”
“That is not a real last name.”
“It absolutely is. Got it out of the city database. There’s a whole Evertide clan in and around the city here.”
“It’s going to be all right, Bylan,” Elimiss said. “The police and court, I mean. If you’re telling the truth, we’ll be able to get confirmation from an oneiromancer or a cleric of Morosma. We’ll clear you of wrongdoing.”
“Aside from the negligence and sheer stupidity of a guy who talks in his sleep learning Dire Words and then not putting a silencing charm on himself when he goes to sleep,” Sanavah said. “Elimiss, don’t make promises to the kid that you can’t make good on.”
“I know it’s my fault,” the boy signed. “Charge me with whatever you want. I won’t fight it.”
“Not how it works,” Sanavah said. “You’ll get a public defender, and if you want to plead guilty, you’ll have to convince her that you actually are before she’ll let you plead it.” She looked over at Elimiss. “You took your own pheasant over here, or did you get a taxi?”
“Taxi,” Elimiss said. “I don’t have a place to take care of a pheasant, I live in an apartment.”
“Take Elimiss back with you,” she instructed the driver of the enclosed auto-wagon. “I don’t think the chief’ll be thrilled if he expenses another taxi.”
“Will do,” the wagon driver said, and spoke a word under his breath, that made the magical engine that drove the cart fire to life. Elimiss got in the wagon, and the forensics team either got on their own pheasants, or into pheasant-drawn carriages, because no one got rich enough on a cop salary to ride around in an auto-carriage.
As she saddled up her own pheasant, who squawked in mild irritation because the beast had been enjoying plucking seed pods off the nearby mimosa tree and snacking on them, she gazed over at what had been the Evertide home. “Hell of a thing,” she murmured. “Come on, Basil, let’s get back to the station.”
Basilica, a middle-aged hen pheasant who was known for her reliability and love of sunflower seeds, snorted, flapped her wings, and took off. Running pheasants – named that because they were actually faster on the ground than in the air – had native magic that allowed their wings to work despite their enormous size, and they could easily bear a human or two through the air. A running pheasant could cross the distance back to the station fast enough, if it was through open or forested territory, but being on the ground, in traffic, mildly upset most of them and absolutely freaked Basilica out, so Sanavah had to fly back to the station every time.
12 notes
·
View notes
Text
Inktober 2020 #24 - Dig
This comes from the latest incarnation of the very first novel I ever wrote.
When I was 10 I was blown away by a book called “The Girl Who Owned A City”, about a girl my age trying to survive after a plague killed all the adults. This predated the TV/comic series “Jeremiah” by a good bit. The book had a lot of weird shit in it that I now know is libertarian/objectivist bullshit, but at the time I was amazed by it. So, of course, I wrote my own version of the concept, “Below”, which was terrible because I was in 7th grade and in those days, without the Internet, we all sucked when we were young. Then when I was 13, I wanted to enter a contest for teen novel writers, and my mom “helped” me by completely rewriting Below into a totally different, equally terrible work that was terrible in a very different way.
Sometime in my 20′s, I started a rewrite, more or less using the plot skeleton of the original but completely rewriting from the ground up, but I only got, like, two chapters into it. In 2017, I picked up the rewrite again, and would probably have gotten farther with it if not for the 2018 cancer diagnosis. One of the things I did was to add an explicitly autistic character as a counterpart to the main character, who, being that she was originally based on me, is an undiagnosed autistic girl who more or less successfully fakes being NT most of the time. Andy Thorn is a boy, does not successfully fake being NT pretty much ever, and was diagnosed as autistic at some point in his life. He’s also anosmic because my older son is and I wanted to explore how not being able to smell might affect a kid in a world without adults, after a plague.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The house was like most of the other houses Andy had visited. One window was smashed, but the front and back doors were still locked, and aside from the broken window, there was no evidence anyone had gone inside. “Stay, boys,” Andy told his dogs. They’d led him here, and he didn’t question their noses, but it was good to get independent corroboration.
He used the stepladder he’d been carrying around in the cart attached to his bicycle to climb up to the broken window. Carefully he reached inside, unlatched the lock on the window, and screwed two clamps to the lower rail of the window sash. With the clamps attached, he was easily able to open the window enough to slide inside without hurting himself on broken glass. The front door was deadbolted, but the deadbolt could be opened with the twist of a knob – it didn’t require a key. Andy opened the door and let his dogs in, and then pulled in his cart.
Clifford and Updog immediately began sniffing around, exploring the house. “Clifford. Find the dead thing. Find dead, Clifford.” Tail wagging, Clifford went in search of dead people. “Updog. Heel.” Updog took the appropriate position. “Good boy. Let’s go.” He followed Clifford, and Updog followed him.
They were in the master bedroom, of course. Two of them this time, two men. Their rotting bodies lay next to each other, as if they had huddled together before the end had come.
Andy was here to make a bargain with them. He didn’t need to talk out loud, because they were dead and couldn’t hear him, and because he knew they wanted what he had to offer. Or would have wanted it, if he had been able to make the deal when they were alive on behalf of when they were dead. The dead wanted to be buried. They didn’t want to rot in the pajamas and nightgowns or sometimes naked in the bedsheets that he found them, bringing maggots and disease to the homes they had loved when they were alive. They wanted to go down in the ground and have a stone to mark where they’d been laid to rest. And they would pay him in the bounties of their home, canned goods and medicines and other things Andy could make use of and that they couldn’t anymore.
Stealing was wrong. Andy didn’t like the looters any more than he liked the gangs. The looters stole from people who weren’t alive any more – generally speaking people who had died in a hospital, far away, because they stayed away from the houses that smelled like death – and the gangs stole from the looters. Stealing was wrong, even if you were doing it to survive, because it was wrong. Wrong things didn’t stop being wrong just because you felt like you had to do them. Andy had found another alternative. He performed a service for the dead, and the dead repaid him.
He found bedsheets in the linen closet. Wearing his gloves, which he never forgot because he hated touching anything because everything had germs on it, Andy wrapped the first body in a bedsheet, and then the second one. They didn’t fall apart too much. The skeletons were strong. Some of the meat had rotted enough to fall away from the bone, but it was stuck in the pajamas so it didn’t fall away from the body, and then it was all wrapped up in the bedsheet. Another bedsheet, he carried out to his cart and lined it, and then pulled the cart to the bedroom.
It was hard for a 10 year old boy to move the dead body of an adult man. It involved a lot of pushing and pulling, and eventually, the body fell off the bed onto the cart. Two dead bodies would be too much to carry, so Andy moved the first one first, going back to the front door. “Don’t worry,” he told the dead man. “Your friend comes next. You won’t be alone.”
Outside, he dug in the dirt. Clifford and Updog helped. They liked to dig. For sanitary reasons a grave should be six feet deep, but Andy wasn’t even six feet tall, and there was no way he could dig that much. He dug down about a foot and a half, wide enough for two bodies to lie next to each other, long enough that they could lay mostly straight without having to curl up a lot. It took hours. Not as long as it had taken the first time he did this, when it was his mom and his dad that he was burying; he was stronger now, even if his hands were sore and calloused from all the digging, but it was still hard and it still took half the day.
When he was done digging, he tumbled the body off his cart and into the shallow grave, and then went back for the second body. That one was dumped into the grave too, lying half on top of the first body. Then Andy started putting the dirt that he’d taken out back on them, forming a mound.
He ate two meals there at the house, while he was digging. The cheese that had gone bad in the fridge was covered with mold, but the mold didn’t go all the way into the hard cheese, so he was able to get it all off with a cheese planer. The bread in the pantry was moldy too, but there was an ancient hard baguette that was too crunchy and tough to have grown any mold. Water still ran from the taps, though the hot water was all gone by now. Hard baguette plus water made softer, more edible baguette, and cheese where he’d cut all the mold off tasted weird but satisfied his hunger. For his second meal he ate cold vegetable soup with milk made from powder, and had a dessert of a can of cherry pie filling.
There wasn’t any dog food in the pantry. They hadn’t had a dog. Most houses Andy visited didn’t have a dog, and the one he did find, the dog had eaten most of the old man’s body, making it very hard to collect all the pieces of the guy to bury them. He’d released the dog; as much as he liked dogs, it was a small yappy dog who barked at him and his dogs a lot and also growled at his dogs, so letting it free to join a wild pack was probably better than making Clifford and Updog jealous or stressed out. Andy did find canned Vienna sausages and canned tuna fish. He liked to eat those things himself, but Clifford and Updog needed meat in their diet; Andy could survive without it as long as he ate things like powdered milk and peanut butter, things with the protein he couldn’t get from most vegetables. So he fed the canned meat to his dogs. It wasn’t very much; they’d need another meal when they all got home.
It was close to evening as he finished shoveling dirt onto the mound. He heard a whistle, and turned. Three boys were standing outside the fence. He was face-blind, so he couldn’t tell from looking at them if he knew them from anywhere. One was a littler kid, maybe seven or eight, but the other two were around his age, 10 or 11 or so. One of the kids his age was white; the other two boys looked like they were from India or Pakistan or something. All three of the boys were wearing hoodies that had some kind of green blob painted on them, that looked as if maybe it was trying to be the same shape each time but whoever had had the can of spray paint wasn’t a good enough artist to be consistent. “Shit, dude,” the white boy said. “Did you just dig a grave for some deads?”
“Yes,” Andy said.
“This your house then? I thought this was the house where the gay guys lived.”
“Is that why they died together?” Andy said.
“Didn’t you know them?” the older brown-skinned boy said. When he talked, Andy recognized him. It was Nish Varma, who’d been in most of his classes with him. “How did you not know they were gay?”
“I didn’t know them,” Andy said. “I looked through all the envelopes in the house to find their names and I wrote them on this rock.” He showed the boys the rock he had written the men’s names on, in crayon because Sharpie markers didn’t stick to rocks as well as crayon did. Andy kept crayons in his pocket for that reason.
“What were you burying them for then?”
“That’s what I do,” Andy said. “I bury the dead. Stealing is wrong so when I need food, I go to houses that have dead people in them, and I bury them. That’s a service, so I take the food they left as a repayment. That’s better than stealing. There’s nothing wrong with bargaining for what you need and working hard to provide a service and getting paid for it.”
The little boy said, “How can you stand how bad it stinks? We don’t go to houses with dead people! There’s flies everywhere and it smells awful!”
“I can’t smell anything,” Andy said.
The white boy said, “Seriously? You can’t smell that? What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me is called anosmia,” Andy said. “It means I have no sense of smell. It’s like being blind or deaf except for smell.” He gestured at his dogs. “My dogs here find the dead people houses for me. Dogs don’t mind dead people smells. So I bury the dead bodies. You’re supposed to make graves six feet deep but that takes grownup men a long time to do and ladders so they can get out, so I don’t dig as deep.” Andy had suspected that the main reason the houses he visited were usually untouched and unlooted – at most, a broken window or a jimmied door, but no food taken – was that people with a sense of smell couldn’t stand it, and as long as there were still houses where the owners had died in the hospital and so there were no dead bodies on the premises, other kids weren’t desperate enough to go to the houses of the dead. He knew dead people supposedly smelled bad; he just had no idea what a bad smell was actually like, since he couldn’t smell anything. But this was the first time he’d had it confirmed.
The white boy whistled again. “But still! You can lift dead grownups and you can dig a hole that big? You must be ripped, man.” He leaned on the fence. “Look, me and my dudes here aren’t here to get on your stake and take the food here. I can see you’ve got big dogs, and you look pretty tough.”
That surprised Andy. Most people didn’t think he looked tough. He used to get bullied a lot. “Maybe I got pretty tough from a lot of digging,” he agreed. Or maybe they were fake complimenting him in a sarcastic way and it was really bullying. Andy could never tell if that was what kids were trying to do until they started laughing. But he preferred to give people the benefit of the doubt and take their word for it until they proved otherwise.
“I’ll just bet,” the white boy said. “That’s why we’re here to recruit you. The Green Bears could use a strong dude like you.”
“You wouldn’t have to dig any more graves,” Nish said. “When you’re a Bear, you get fed. We’ve got access to gas-powered ranges that are still on, so we get cooked food.”
“We had spaghetti yesterday,” the little boy said. “With sauce!”
“Yeah, and me and my brother are vegetarian but the kids who aren’t vegetarian got meat sauce.”
“And you can live in your own house, since the Civic Center got too full for any more guys,” the white boy said. “The Bears are fucking huge, man.”
Andy winced. “That’s a curse word. You shouldn’t say that word.”
“Oh, like my mommy and daddy are around to wash my fucking mouth out with fucking soap? Fucking shit damn on a bastard son of a bitch. Who’s gonna fucking stop me?”
“No one,” Andy said, “but wrong things don’t stop being wrong just because no one can stop you doing them.”
“Fucking hell, dudes, we got ourselves a real Boy Scout here,” the white boy said, and Nish and his brother and the white boy all laughed.
“No,” Andy said. “I was never in the Boy Scouts.” The other boys laughed harder. Andy scowled. He knew they were laughing at what he said, and he was pretty sure it was probably in a nasty, making-fun-of-him way, but as usual he had no idea why they thought what he’d said was funny.
“Andy’s special,” Nish said, leaning on the fence. “If he doesn’t wanna swear I’m cool with that.” Nish hadn’t been one of the kids who’d bullied him in class. He had never talked to him or tried to be friends with him either, but at least he hadn’t bullied Andy. “How about it, Andy? Come join us!”
“No, thank you,” Andy said politely.
The white boy scowled. “Dude. You have no idea what you’re passing up.”
“That’s okay,” Andy said. “I don’t believe in stealing. Gangs go around stealing things from other kids, so I don’t want to join one. And I don’t believe in hurting anyone unless they hurt me first.”
“Bullshit,” Nish said. “In third grade you hit the teacher with a chair.”
Andy winced. He had done it because she took his book away while he was reading about dogs, even though he was already done with his assignment, because it was math class and he wasn’t supposed to be reading in math class. It had been totally unfair and triggered a complete emotional meltdown. He’d been suspended for three days and had had numerous Talks with his parents during that time. “I have a bad temper,” he admitted. “That doesn’t mean I think what I did was right.”
“I think you’d better reconsider,” the white boy said. “Carrie doesn’t like it when we report to her that some guy didn’t want to join the Bears. She’s psycho, man.”
“Who is Carrie?”
“Carrie Mulhaney. She’s Rich’s younger sister and second in command. When guys say they won’t join the Bears, she burns their houses down.”
“I’m not worried about that,” Andy said.
“I’m not fucking with you, man. I’m serious. She will burn your fucking house down.”
“With what?” Andy said. “Gasoline? Wood that’s on fire? Alcohol?”
“Are you serious?” the boy said. “With whatever! What does it matter?”
“My dogs are trained to smell dangerous things for me,” Andy said. “Fire is a smell they’re trained on. Gasoline is a smell they’re trained on. Natural gas is a smell they’re trained on. I don’t know of anything that can be used to burn down a house that isn’t a smell they’re trained on.” He smiled, with all his teeth, because a couple of kids in his class said that when he smiled with all of his teeth he looked like a psycho and he should stop doing that, except that right now, these boys were threatening him so looking like a psycho so they would leave him alone was a good thing. “I have guns upstairs in my house. If my dogs alert me that someone is bringing a dangerous smell to my house, I’ll take my dad’s rifle and I’ll shoot whoever is on my property. And dogs can smell a dangerous thing from a long way away. I could tell you all about how good dogs are at smelling, if you want.” Most kids never wanted to hear him talk about dogs. Occasionally adults would listen to him, but there were no adults anymore.
“Don’t let him get started,” Nish said. “If he starts talking about dogs he never shuts up.”
“Your funeral, man,” the white boy said. “If you’re saying no, you’re saying no, but I betcha Carrie isn’t worried about your guns.”
“That’s good,” Andy said. “If she’s not worried about them, then she won’t take precautions and it’ll be easy to shoot her if she comes into my yard.”
“Whatever,” the white boy said. “Come on, dudes, let’s go. We don’t need this loser anyway.”
“Weirdo,” the little boy said. “Creepy weirdo. We don’t even want him in the Bears.”
They left. Andy brought his dogs back into the house, sat down on the dead men’s plush, soft sofa, and called his dogs up on to the sofa with them. Then he hugged them while he cried. Emotional confrontations upset him, a lot. He’d gotten better at controlling his temper since third grade, and he could hide the fact that he wanted to cry until he was alone or with a safe grownup, but he couldn’t keep himself from crying indefinitely. Updog lay his head and paws down on Andy’s lap, which was heavy but comforting anyway, and Clifford snuggled close so Andy could hug him and cry against his fur.
After he was done crying, it was time to take his payment and go home. His dogs needed food, and he had candy bars at his house that he was saving for stressful times like this. He loaded his cart with the powdered milk and all the cans he could fit, as well as a bunch of fitness food replacements like energy bars and protein powder. Maybe tomorrow he’d come back for the rest of the cans; he didn’t know how fast dead smell cleared out of a house, though, so it was possible that other kids would hit the place before he had a chance to.
It was dark, and Andy had a hard time finding his way in the dark, but he trusted his dogs to know the way. “Home, Clifford. Home, Updog,” he said, and they trotted in front of him, pulling just hard enough on their leashes to lead him forward. Really, he was only holding their leashes to make them feel secure, because they were trained with leashes; he knew they would walk with him if he let go of the leashes, and it was hard to pull his heavy cart with one hand and hold onto two big dogs’ leashes with the other, but he did it anyway because his dogs expected it and he know how upset he got when things happened that he didn’t expect, so he imagined his dogs felt the same way.
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Inktober 2020 #3: Bulky
The entity scowled, tapping his (its? Their?) foot impatiently. “I told you, you get to bring one thing.”
Sara smiled brightly at him. “This is one thing. My garden.”
Ganymede looked down at her, his expression even more supercilious than usual. “Do you honestly think I’m going to allow an entire garden as one thing?”
Sara sat down on the tree stump. Part of her still couldn’t believe she’d lost the house, that all of this – the tree stump her father had cut down to prevent the wind from knocking it onto the house, the tire swing he’d put up for her, Mom’s rose trellises all around the house and the herb patch she’d had Sara weeding and tending from the age of 5, the screened-in porch, the attic bedroom – all would be gone in a matter of weeks. The bank would take it, and sell it to someone who would probably destroy everything her parents had built to make the place special and unique, and she would never see any of this ever again.
She’d thought Ganymede’s offer would allow her to take at least a part of her home with her, but he was balking.
“When you think about it, can we describe anything as just one thing?” she asked. “Everything we have is made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of quarks. We’re all a multiplicity. We all have legions contained within us. So how is a garden not ‘one thing’ but, say, if I wanted to bring a bicycle, that would be ‘one thing’ even though it’s made of so many things?”
Ganymede’s expression went from deeply irritated to reluctantly amused, and he chuckled. “A nice argument, but no. Your garden’s too bulky. It can neither transport you, nor can it be carried around with you.”
“You never said there was a weight limit.”
“It’s not a weight limit. If you wanted to bring a car, you could. I don’t advise it, but you could.”
“Are any of the others bringing a car?” Sara asked.
Now Ganymede laughed. “Tsk, tsk. I told you I wouldn’t tell you anything about what the others are choosing.”
Ganymede – who appeared to be a tall, slender man with pale skin and curly green hair, like he was some kind of comic book character, and who claimed to be a very bored alien with godlike powers who was taking human form so that he could interact with Sara – had showed up at the café Sara waitressed at, three weeks ago, and was apparently very impressed with Sara’s ability to put up with entitled idiots and even get them to calm down and do what they were supposed to do. He’d ordered cherry pie and asked her if she’d ever wanted to travel into the past, and when Sara had pointed out that in the past, she would have had her rights severely curtailed because she was a woman, he’d asked, what if she could bring one thing from this time, one thing in her possession?
Sara’s master’s degree in the history of plant cultivation in Europe and how it impacted society had never done her a damn bit of good. It had resulted in crushing student loans that a job as a waitress couldn’t keep up with and still pay the mortgage her parents had left to her when they’d died in a car accident, and it hadn’t resulted in a good-paying job in academia like she’d expected when she started college. She was about to lose her parents’ home, the only place she’d ever considered home in her life. And before her boyfriend had dumped her last month, he’d turned most of their friends against her with lies and distortions.
Sara didn’t want to die, but she had lately been seriously reconsidering how badly she actually wanted to live.
So she’d agreed to Ganymede’s offer. Go back to the pre-Renaissance medieval era – or something very much like it – with one thing brought from the future. He’d explained that she wouldn’t actually be going to her own world’s past, so she couldn’t create a paradox by changing the future – she could freely do whatever she wanted without worrying about making her grandparents never born or something. He’d also told her that he was making the same offer to several other people, but that she wouldn’t necessarily get to meet them unless they happened to run into each other by chance in the past-world. And she had a month to get the thing she wanted to bring to the past.
Sara had spent the last three weeks digging up her garden and potting everything in ceramic pots, figuring ceramic wouldn’t be an issue in the past like plastic would be. Sadly, she’d had to abandon the apple trees, the peach tree and the grapevines – she couldn’t exactly dig out trees and pot them – but she’d gotten everything else. The potatoes had been a challenge – exposing potatoes to light while they were growing would make them inedible, so she’d had to dig them out on a cloudy night with no moon, more or less digging by feel instead of sight. Carrots, potatoes and onions had needed very large, deep pots. She’d wound her zucchini around a tomato cage in the large pot she’d put it in. The small fruit bushes – the blueberry bush, the raspberry bush – were already in pots. She had her peppers, her tomatoes, her tiny soybean bush, her arugula.
And now, after she’d done so much work to pot everything, Ganymede was telling her she couldn’t bring it?
“Look, if I had a caravan wagon and a horse, I could definitely carry all of this.”
“But you can’t bring a caravan wagon and a horse back with you.”
“No, but I could get one there.”
Ganymede chuckled. “You think I’m sending you with money? You get period-acceptable clothes, the ability to speak the language, immunity to all the local diseases, and the thing that you bring with you, and that’s it. If you appear in the middle of a field, or a town square, surrounded by potted plants, how are you going to bring them with you to whatever shelter you need to take?”
“They’re plants. If I have to leave them out in a field for a few days while I carry them all to wherever I end up going, nothing bad’s going to happen to them.”
“And what if you appear in the middle of the town square?”
“Then I prevail upon some good gentlemen to help me move them someplace safe.”
A deep sigh escaped Ganymede. “I’m almost tempted to let you. Just to let you find out first hand how much your plans are not likely to work. But no. An entire garden is too bulky, and I’m quite certain that most humans would define a garden as a collection of things, not one thing.”
“Come on! I did a lot of work to put all these plants into pots! Doesn’t that count for something?”
“Sadly, no.” Ganymede walked around the garden of pots, randomly touching most of the plants. “You did do quite a lot of work. I tell you what, I feel bad for you. Pick something else to bring and I’ll make sure all your plants get donated to people who like to grow things and are good at it.”
“And aren’t racists,” Sara insisted.
“It’s interesting that that matters to you; aren’t you part of the dominant ethnic group in this nation? Racism doesn’t affect you, generally speaking.”
It was true that Sara was white, and therefore, racism rarely directly affected her, but she had an answer for that. “Racist people in this country have been brainwashed into believing that climate change is a hoax, that gay and transgender people are some kind of terrible threat, and that it’s more important to make sure the government doesn’t tax rich people than to put any accountability on big corporations. Everything bad that we can’t get solved in this country and we can’t even begin to start solving it, because people won’t let us… it’s because rich people have figured out how to use racism to brainwash white people into voting against their own interests.”
“Oh, I understand.” Ganymede grinned broadly. “You’re a hippie, aren’t you?”
“Uh… not really? That was sort of my parents’ generation? I think of myself more as solarpunk. But if what you’re trying to get at is that I’m someone who cares about the environment and wants people to be happy and healthy and to care about each other, then yeah.”
“All right, very well. I’ll hand them over to people whose political beliefs generally track with yours, who are good with plants, and who have space to grow them. Now, pick something else.”
“A big sack that I can carry on my back, maybe 50 pounds, and I get to fill it with seeds and bulbs and anything else plant-related that I can fit in the sack.”
Ganymede raised his eyebrows. “You’re really dedicated to this bit, aren’t you?”
“I know how to use plants to change history. I don’t know how to change history with anything else – not in a way I might want to. I mean, I could bring a gun, but after I was out of ammo, what good would it do me? And also, I don’t like guns.”
“All right,” Ganymede said. “I’ll allow it. As long as you can carry the sack on your person, you can stuff as many seeds into it as you want.”
Sara smiled at him with her best customer service smile. “Thank you, I really appreciate that.”
“One more week,” he said, and vanished.
One more week and she’d leave all this behind. One more week and she wouldn’t have to worry about the foreclosure and impending eviction anymore, because she’d be in a whole other world.
14 notes
·
View notes
Text
Ok, so, the explanation no one asked for
You are probably not wondering why I was late for #30 of the 52 Project, or why I fell off a cliff on my story prompts for Inktober/Writeober. But I’m gonna tell you anyway.
On Oct 17-18, I cleaned too hard and too much to have any energy left to write, and then I was sick on Oct 19 as a direct result. My allergies got so bad on the 18th I had to take a Zyrtec, because my usual allergy med, Allegra, is a stimulant and I take it in the morning. I couldn’t sleep with my nose running that badly.
Problem is that I respond to every sedating antihistamine by becoming really fucked up. So I spent Oct 19 in a haze of incompetence and sleepiness.
The 20th was my birthday, and as I’d planned, I took the day off and wrote. But I really had no idea exactly what I was doing with “Everybody’s Happy As The Dead Come Home”, and it did not occur to me that this fact should result in me focusing on it and not putting it off. Also, I decided to treat myself to a full course fondue/hot pot dinner like they do at Melting Pot, because I can’t go to Melting Pot under Covid, and this took 12 freaking hours. I got a lot less writing in than I expected, as a result.
After the 20th, I didn’t write any more prompt fics until Oct 30, because I was spending all the time I had to write on “Everybody’s Happy”, but it slipped out of my control and wanted to turn into a novel, and I didn’t know how to fix it. Also I spent the next weekend cleaning as well, and had a few exhausting days at work where I could have maybe popped out a quick prompt fic, but I felt too guilty about not working on “Everybody’s Happy” to work on anything else. Inktober 24 was able to go out because it’s a novel excerpt and I wrote it last year.
So now here I am. I have the next 52 Project fic in the can already and the one after that, the first third or fourth of it was posted as a ficlet, so there’s work already done on it. Everything in November is fics I’ve started and am relatively close to finishing. This was deliberate, because I’m planning on doing goddamn Nano -- not classic Nano start a novel, but my version where I work on one I’ve already got, because god knows I do not need more unfinished novels, and 60K is never gonna be enough to finish an adult science fiction or fantasy novel, not if I’m writing it.
So the insane thing I’m doing this month -- finishing three 52 Project fics while doing Nano -- I’m now making more insane. I haz a sad that I didn’t get my prompt fics done, because I had plans for them. Last year, the prompts I didn’t finish were the ones that didn’t excite me or that I couldn’t think of something for, but I have ideas for 9 more prompt fics, and I want to get them written.
So I’m gonna do the Nightmare Before Christmas rules again, where I try to get my extra Inktober prompts out before Christmas. Kinda sorta planning on releasing one a week, after the two that will appear today, Nov 1 (written yesterday). I can promise you that if I get them done, there will be two stories about lesbians (maybe more but probably not.) Also planning on posting excerpts from The Cold At The Heart Of The Light, the novel I’m working on.
#52 project#alara's october 2020 prompt fics#october prompts under nightmare before xmas rules#explanation no one asked for
7 notes
·
View notes
Text
Writeober #3: Bone
Gerlach Schwartztern cackled maniacally as he felt the bindings keeping him out of the world faltering. He had expected this, ever since he’d seen that the historical building where the ritual had been performed was scheduled to be knocked down. There had been three days of demolition, and finally, the sacred circle at the center had been breached. He was free!
“Hey! You! This is a hardhat area! You can’t be in here!”
Gerlach shuffled around – being bound out of reality, able only to see what was transpiring, without having muscles to move, had done no good for his physique, and all his muscles were stiff beyond belief – to see a man in a bright yellow helmet and a shining orange vest, yelling at him.
“Dost thou know to whom thou speaketh?” he said, smiling cruelly, raising his own bony fingers as he prepared to teach the fool a lesson.
“Come on, asshole. Don’t give me that Scadian shit,” the man said. “You need to get off the grounds. It’s not safe.”
“Unsafe for whom?” Gerlach laughed, and reached out with his power. He called out to the dead buried below and all around to rise from their graves.
Nothing happened.
“Unsafe for you, asshole. You. Did I stutter? Get the hell out of here before I have to call the cops.”
Where were the dead?
Now that he was looking for them, he couldn’t feel them. In the Old World, there had been skeletons everywhere. But he’d had to flee the witchfinders – not the idiots who accused old women with black cats and herbal knowledge of being witches, but the ones with real power, who hunted those with real magic – so he’d taken passage to the New World, four hundred years ago.
Life was hard, then. Many colonists died, and their skeletons became his servants. He’d terrorized the colonists and the natives alike… until mages of both groups had teamed up against him. The natives had used their magic to confine him within a single town, herding him to the colonist mages, who’d bound him and locked him outside the world so long as the runes and symbols they’d carved in the stone under a church floor remained intact.
Now that the church was demolished, and the stone broken, Gerlach was free. He’d been able to see the world from his prison outside it; he’d seen the population explode. Surely the dead must be everywhere! People still died in this brave new world, did they not?
“Very well, knave. I shall leave, if you direct me to a graveyard.”
The man in the yellow hat sighed. “I don’t have to do this,” he said. “You’ve been an ass. But fine. The new church that replaced this one is about two miles down the road, and it has a graveyard. I think you have to turn right on Whitman – or I dunno, maybe it’s Baker? One of those streets. Go in about three blocks, you’ll find the church, and the graveyard’s across the street.”
“Then there I shall go,” Gerlach said, picking up his robes – they were dragging in the dust of the construction – and walking toward the gate in the fence. An interesting fence, that, made of wires woven together loosely.
“Thank you is a thing, asshole!” the man called after him, but Gerlach did not thank his inferiors.
***
It took far longer to find the church than the knave’s directions suggested. Gerlach was calling down curses on the man’s entire family unto the seventh generation by the time he finally found it, his legs and feet screaming at him for making them perform so much work after just being embodied again.
But there it was. The graveyard. And now he could feel the dead, lurking below, waiting for his call. With them at his command, he would rule over this town – and others. As the dead came to answer him, he would grow in power, and he would be able to call more and more of them as his power expanded. Eventually he would rule over this entire nation. Perhaps even the world.
Gerlach took a deep breath, and then called to the dead.
He felt them respond, felt skeletons restless in coffins push against the lids.
And push.
And push.
“What transpires here?” he roared. “You should be rising from your graves! I have called you, and you must come!”
Skeletons still pushed against coffin lids.
“Why can you not come forth?!”
Some skeletons broke their wrists and fingers trying to push open their coffin lids. None of them succeeded in actually opening anything.
Gerlach tried for hours. And then he walked to another graveyard and tried again. Still the dead could not open their coffins. Gerlach was furious. Back in the Old World, only the most wealthy had even had coffins. And they were decorated wooden boxes that a sufficiently motivated skeleton could punch through. Here in the New World, four hundred years after arriving, apparently skeletons were all contained in unbreakable coffins.
He sank to his knees on the ground and screamed, his dreams of conquest dying just like the skeletons trapped in unbreakable coffins, and just as unlikely to rise under his power.
***
Elias Whittaker was furious.
The city had concealed the plans to demolish the old church until he was out of the country, and then gone through with the destruction. He hadn’t known about it until his daughter drove by the place and saw it destroyed. It had been a month.
None of the records of the Whittaker family, passed down from father to son (or daughter in some cases), had said anything about Gerlach Schwarztern being a patient and crafty man. A brilliant necromancer, yes, but he’d named himself Black Star in German for gods’ sake. He was not the type to lay low. So why hadn’t the city fallen to walking skeletons yet?
Could it be that Schwarztern had died in his prison, or perhaps died the moment he re-entered the world and time began for him again? Maybe all the aging he hadn’t done while he was trapped caught up with him at once.
But Elias didn’t think that was likely. From everything he’d read in the family tomes, carefully preserved for four hundred years, the crafters of the spell hadn’t thought it would do that. They had warned, over and over, of the danger should the binding circle they’d carved into the rock ever break or wear. All of them had passed on the knowledge to their children, but between illness, war, and adult children’s desire to strike out west to make a new life for themselves, far away from their parents… Now the Whittaker family was the only one left.
Elias had been on the Board for Historical Preservation, had argued for years that that tiny run-down little church needed to be preserved exactly as the city’s founders had left it, that it was nearly 400 years old and was a view backward into a past that America had almost lost, the early days of the colonies. And what happened? The moment he was out of the country, the rest of the Board caved in like a wet tissue and let the city government have its way. They were going to put up some mixed-use development there, townhomes and offices and retail all mixed together, somehow. And that was worth letting an ancient necromancer free in a world where almost no one remembered that magic existed, or how to invoke it. Right.
But there was nothing Elias could find to indicate that Schwartztern had escaped. No graveyards were disturbed. No records of dead people getting up and walking. No disturbances at the morgue.
His daughter Rebecca found something—a record of an old man who’d been caught in the Jewish graveyard, obviously digging up graves because several graves had shown signs that the dirt had been interfered with, holes and clods and piles of dirt all over the graves. The elderly caretaker for the graveyard was still spry enough to shoot at an anti-Semite committing a hate crime, though. Rebecca reported that the old caretaker didn’t know if he’d actually hit the man in the tattered black coat or not, but that if he had, he must have only winged him, because the man had run without sign of injury. Since then, members of the Jewish community had been taking turns helping him guard the graveyard, with their own guns, and there had been no further disturbance.
Oddly, the fellow hadn’t left a shovel behind, but Ira Friedburg, the caretaker, had never seen him carrying one, either. Maybe it was under his coat, and the bullet had hit it instead of the man.
Of course, Elias knew why Schwartztern hadn’t needed a shovel. The graves had been disturbed from the inside. But why had the Jewish graveyard been affected, and not the much less well-guarded Catholic and Protestant ones? Schwartztern might well have been an anti-Semite, considering that in that time period almost everyone was, but he had never shown a preference for any specific type of corpse.
For the first time in his life Elias was grateful for the Second Amendment. Gerlach couldn’t know of any firearm technology more advanced than maybe a musket. A small weapon that fired deadly ammunition with terrifying accuracy and speed was nothing Gerlach Schwartztern could have any experience with. And the Jewish graveyard had suffered enough hate crimes that the caretaker patrolled it with a gun, regularly, and was small enough that Schwartztern hadn’t managed to raise a single body before being caught at it.
It was frustrating and maddening. He searched for three months. No sign of Schwartztern anywhere. Had the man left town? Was he right now trying to raise the dead in New York City or Washington DC or something? Had he returned to his homeland? Wait, no, he couldn’t have done that without a passport.
In desperation Elias started going around to funeral homes, asking them if they’d seen a man of Schwartztern’s description – long graying hair, a long beard, pale skin, aquiline features, crooked teeth. None of them had.
Until Elias went to Baron and Sons Funeral Home, and was met at the door by a man who looked exactly like the portraits of Schwartztern that had been passed down, if the man had gotten a modern haircut, a shave, and gotten his teeth straightened.
Elias’ eyes widened. “Gerlach Schwartztern?”
The man looked surprised. “There’s not many who know me by that name,” he said, and called back into the funeral home. “Mr. Baron, there’s a man here who wants to speak to me specifically. I’ll take a break to talk to him and then return to the clock.”
“Sure, that sounds fine,” a man’s voice called back.
“How are you – Why are you – What, did you find religion while you were trapped? You were freed almost four months ago,” Elias hissed. “But you’ve raised nothing.”
“Not entirely true,” Schwartztern said. He had a thick accent, but it wasn’t quite placeable – which made sense, because it was from another country 400 years ago. His English, though, sounded plausibly modern for a foreigner. “Let us walk to the back.”
“Where the graves are, and where you can attack me?” Elias snapped.
Schwartztern shook his head. “There is a contemplation garden for the grieving. No funerals are scheduled now, so it is unoccupied. We can talk without interruption.”
Oh. Right. There wasn’t a cemetery anywhere near the funeral home. That was why funeral processions were a thing. He followed the ancient necromancer, bemused, to the garden. “Did you forget your powers? Or lose them?”
“I assume from your knowledge of my name that you were one of the guardians my captors must have left behind to keep me contained,” Schwartztern said. “You may call me Gerlach Schwartz now, though. Or simply Gerlach. Apparently this new age is one of great informality. And yet they don’t even use ‘thou’ anymore.”
“Uh, yeah, we got rid of that a while back,” Elias said. “And you’re correct. My family has been keeping watch. Everything I’ve read said to expect an insane necromancer who would do anything to rule over the living with the power of the dead. But here you are in a building with… maybe two dead people?”
“There are four corpses here, in fact, but you’re correct. Four corpses is far from enough to conquer a town with.”
“What happened?”
“Modern caskets,” Gerlach said simply. “In my day, only the wealthy were even interred in a coffin; most bodies were lowered into the bare ground. Apparently since that time everyone who dies is buried in an impregnable sepulcher called a ‘casket’, or they are burned to ash… except for the Jews, who bury their dead in wooden boxes that I could at least work with, before the Jew fired his weapon at me.”
He shook his head. “The weapons they have in this time! It would never work, raising the dead, not now. I have been watching some of their movies—” He put a strange emphasis on the word. “So many tales of dead rising and biting the living to make them a risen corpse as well. And in these tales, everyone has one of these terrifying weapons, and they can entirely destroy a corpse with them. Perhaps a skeleton would be more difficult to hit, but with sufficient ordinance, they would prevail over my skeletons as well. The creators of these tales added the part where the dead can bite and their bite kills to make it a believable tragedy, else none would believe that enough firepower could not overwhelm even the dead.”
Elias rather thought no one had done anything to the plots of zombie movies to make them believable, but he could see how a necromancer might have a different opinion. “So you’re telling me you’ve given up. That I don’t need to kill you or capture you because you aren’t interested in raising the dead to conquer, anymore.”
Gerlach laughed. “Interested, perhaps. But it will not work, and this I now know. There are far more dead today, but that is because there are far, far more living, and they greatly outnumber the dead. Most of the dead are locked away in boxes far too strong for a skeleton to break open. I know, for I have made them try, and try again.” He shrugged. “So it is not practical. And it is also hardly necessary.”
“Why unnecessary?”
“Men live like kings in your time, young man.” Elias was not a young man – he might actually be older than Gerlach was when he was trapped – but this didn’t seem like something worth arguing to a man born over 450 years ago. “You need no servants to bring you hot water for your bath – simply turn a knob, and hot water comes forth! Food of any kind can be had at any time, no matter the season! Music can play anywhere, whether musicians are there to play it, or not. Entertainments as rich as the plays put on for kings can play endlessly, never repeating, on a box of light in your home – a home which is heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, and both are done evenly, throughout the home, without risk of fire. And there are treatments for lice.”
That explained the shorter hair. “So you’re, what? Trying to be a good tax-paying citizen now?”
“I am told there will be great, great difficulties in becoming a citizen, as I cannot present papers to prove what nation I was born in, or what date, or when I came to this land. Apparently I am an ‘illegal immigrant’, and if I am found by the authorities, they will deport me… somewhere. Since my own nationality no longer even exists, I have no idea where. But my employers here are sympathetic.” He nodded at the funeral home. “I came here because I thought the presence of the dead plus the title Baron meant another necromancer was here, but that was not the case… as I suspect you know well. They’ve arranged for me to work here and learn their trade, for there are many techniques of preserving the dead that exist now but did not, in my day. Apparently they are paying me ‘under the table’, an expression I understand not, except to say it is a means of paying one with no papers to prove their identity.”
“It means they’re paying you in cash and not taking out your taxes, so I guess you’re not a taxpayer after all.”
“In my day, taxes were paid in grain.”
“Sometimes money is referred to as ‘bread’ in this day and age, but the days when you could actually pay tax in grain are long behind us.”
“I do realize that,” Gerlach said. “Have I satisfied your curiosity? Do you understand now that I present no threat to your world?”
“And you use your necromancy here?”
“As God witness, no, why would I do that? They have techniques for moving bodies and they know nothing of magic. If I were to use the power I have over the dead, now, it would perhaps be as a detective, who can hunt down dead bodies after they are murdered and hidden away by the murderer. I have watched many entertainments about detectives,” he said, in a tone as if he were telling a salacious secret. “In my day the profession didn’t exist, but today it seems a very popular job. I wonder that any murderers can go free, with so many detectives.”
“It’s… not actually that popular in real life. People just like stories about detectives. They like to see a mystery presented to them, so they can try to solve it, or enjoy watching the detective solve it.”
“Ah. Well, I have much to learn about this new world before I dare leave this job,” Gerlach said. “They provide me with a room here to live in, upstairs, but for food and clothing and a box for entertainments I must pay my own way.”
Elias shook his head in complete bemusement. All of the effort he’d put into, his whole life, to keep the necromancer contained, and this was what Gerlach did when he got free. “Well, there’s nothing I can charge you with and nothing you’re doing that warrants my interference… but I will be watching you.”
“That would be delightful!” Gerlach said. “It grows tedious sometimes, to have no acquaintances I can share knowledge of the past with, or my necromancy. You would make an excellent companion!”
I have worked all my life to keep this man in prison and he wants to be my friend. Well, it would help Elias make sure that Gerlach was continuing to not be a threat. “Fine, I’ll come take you out to lunch sometime.”
“I look forward to it greatly!”
As Elias left, he wondered how he was going to explain any of this to Rebecca.
--------------------------------------------------
From @writing-prompt-s, “ An ancient evil awakens to destroy humanity, only to find out he is no match for modern technology, thus forcing him to become a functioning member of society. “
9 notes
·
View notes
Text
Writeober 2020 #27 - Crows
Set in the universe of “Birds”.
----------------------------
“Murray! Is your room clean?”
Murray side-eyed the door, where his mom’s voice was coming from. “I’ll get right on that, Mom. With my opposable thumbs and my status as one of the largest land animals in most habitats.”
“Don’t be fresh with me.” Mom threw the door open. “Look at all that bird shit. You could clean that up, at least.”
“With what? My beak?” Murray flapped from his computer to the post of what had once been his bed, back before he slept by perching on things. “Mom. I am a crow. I don’t know why you keep acting like I am still a human being. I’m a crow. Caw, caw, motherfucker.”
“You could probably operate the shop vac. We put a twist tie around the hose for you to use.” Mom looked around the room, disapprovingly. “Also you could try not to shit on everything.”
Murray sighed. “Birds can’t hold it, Mom. When I gotta go, I gotta go. I try to fly over to my poop tray, but most of the time I don’t get there in time.”
“I was watching on the television this nice magpie fellow talking about an exercise routine that lets birds get control of their pooper. He had a web site, should I send it to you?”
“It’s bogus, Mom. They’re all bogus. If he really had a technique like that he wouldn’t be publicizing it in infomercials, he’d be selling his books and videos on Amazon.com and they’d be national bestsellers. Everybody’s having trouble holding their poop.”
“Well, you’re going to have to learn! You can’t have it both ways, Murray.” She gestured around the room, which he had festooned with bottle caps, shiny bits of glass, most of his mother’s jewelry, tinfoil, and all of his foil Pokemon and Magic the Gathering cards. Shiny stuff just looked so amazingly good now that he was a crow. “You like having a human bedroom, right? You like having your computer, and your keyboard, and the electricity to run it? You like having me serve you hamburgers and spaghetti, and buying you new games for your PC, and I’ve got those Switch joycons for bird talons on order, and you like having a whole bedroom you can decorate with your shiny crap? Not to mention I let you have my jewelry? You like not having to go outside and find roadkill to eat?”
“Yeah, mom, get to the point, obviously I like all those things.”
“Well, then you gotta stop crapping on everything! Humans live in civilization, and if you’re civilized, you don’t get your poop all over everything and then shrug your shoulders and say ‘meh, I have no hands, how do I clean it’ like you weren’t the one who made the mess. You figure out how to clean up your own bird shit, boy, or there’s the window.”
Murray sighed again, more dramatically this time. “Okay, Mom, but how do I clean it? I can’t carry a shopvac in here. I can’t even squirt a bottle of Windex. All the cleaning supplies were built for hands, and human strength. I can fly and I can see better than you but I can’t carry a roll of paper towels! Not unless it’s close to empty, anyway.”
“That’s not my problem!” Mom said. “That’s your problem! You figure it out!”
She stomped out and slammed the door.
Murray couldn’t roll his eyes anymore, but he made sure to roll his head in a swinging motion that more or less encapsulated eye-rolling from a crow’s head. And then he flew back to his PC, moved the tracball with his talon, clicked on Chrome, and typed into the Google prompt “how can birds clean poop”. Mom was probably not serious about kicking him out if he didn’t clean the poop, but he really didn’t want to push her, and some bird had to have figured out how to do it by now. Half the human race was birds since six months ago. This was obviously a problem a lot of birds were going to have. How were they dealing with it?
#writeober 2020#alara's october 2020 prompt fics#nightmare before xmas prompt extension rules#birds universe
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
Writeober 13 - Rose
The first of her old group that Sandy ran into was Aliyah, looking every bit as gorgeous as she used to back when they were all in high school. “Sandy!” Aliyah hugged her. “Girlfriend, you look fantastic!”
“You liar,” Sandy said affectionately. She was forty pounds heavier than she’d been in high school, and the stress of motherhood and scrambling to make ends meet had taken its toll on her face, and she knew it. But that was Aliyah for you. The most beautiful girl in the entire school, and she always had a kind word or an encouragement for everyone else she met. Aliyah was older now, but no less beautiful – possibly moreso, in fact, because she’d grown into confidence and power. Her skin was darker than Sandy’s, but perfect and smooth, while Sandy’s brown face had never entirely grown out of its teenage habit of developing pimples, nor of showing blemishes where the pimples used to be. And her clothes, of course, were fashionable and fit her like they were tailored, whereas the dress Sandy was wearing came off the rack at Target and fit like a gunnysack.
None of that mattered. Sandy had worshiped Aliyah as a kid, had wanted to be her… up until the revelations of their senior year, when she’d learned the price Aliyah had paid for money and beauty. They’d been in touch periodically ever since; neither of them had much time to meet in person, but Aliyah desperately needed a confidante she could call and talk to, or email with, who didn’t care about her money or fame, and Sandy felt honored to be that friend.
“Who all’s here?” Sandy asked.
“I’ve seen Gwen and Tulsi—”
“Gwen?”
“Harriet used to call her Gun, remember? Red Sky.”
“Oh, that’s right. Glad she made it. What about Susan?”
“I think she’s coming,” Aliyah said. “She was on the planning committee with me. But I haven’t seen her yet. And I haven’t seen Harriet.”
“I’m going to circulate around a while, see if I can find any of them,” Sandy said.
“You should try the fondue fountain, it is to die for,” Aliyah said.
Sandy laughed. “Some of us poor mortal girls have to watch our weight.”
“Oh, don’t even. You’ve had two kids, you’ve got a mortgage to pay, your job has you sit at a desk all day – you are in fantastic shape for someone who’s done everything you have and works as hard as you do. You deserve a chocolate strawberry or two.”
“Thanks,” Sandy said, “maybe I will.”
“I mean it, Sandy. You see me looking like this, but looking like this is my job. I have personal trainers, I have nutritionists, I’ve got a whole gym in my house. And what do I do? I’m an actress. I like to think I bring joy to people’s lives, but I don’t have any children, and you fight health insurance companies to make sure your doctors get paid and your patients don’t get screwed, and that is so important in this day and age. You’ve made two humans and you work your ass off to give them good lives and raise them up right. You are the one of us who’s still a hero, Sandy, I’m just the one who was lucky enough to have rich parents.”
“I remember you telling me about your parents, Ali. I don’t think you were lucky.”
Aliyah smiled wistfully. “Yeah, no, you’re right about that part of it. I just don’t want you being down on yourself because you gained weight, girl. Nobody gets out of high school without getting bigger. It’s natural. The only reason people think thin is beautiful is the beauty industry trying to sell them garbage.”
“Didn’t you do a makeup commercial a few years ago?”
Aliyah laughed. “I did! Beauty products are garbage, but as long as women are going to buy them, I want them to see glamorous black women wearing product that makes our skin look spectacular. You know?”
“I do,” Sandy said. “I – oh. Is that Red Sky with that little girl on her shoulders?”
Aliyah turned and looked. “That’s her. Why don’t you go talk to her? I’m going to look for Susan.”
“Good luck,” Sandy said, and went over to greet her former comrade.
Red Sky – Gwen, who almost never went by that – was tall. Sandy remembered her being tall, but wow, she must have kept growing out of high school. Her red hair was still cut short, military-style, but she was wearing a dress, which had to be the first time Sandy had ever seen her in one. The dress showed off her biceps, which had been amazing back then and still were, and she had a small girl around five or six, pale-skinned with curly black hair, riding her piggyback style. She waved cheerily at Sandy as soon as she saw her. “Hey there! Sandy! How’s it going?”
“Pretty good, pretty good,” Sandy said. “That your little girl?”
“She sure is! Ginny, say hi to my friend Sandy.”
“Hi!” Ginny waved. “Are you friends with both my mommies?”
“I don’t know who your other mommy is,” Sandy said.
“Sure you do,” Gwen said. “It’s Harriet.”
That stopped Sandy dead for a moment. “Harriet. As in Black Rose.”
“Yup.”
“As in the girl you said you totally hated.” She was censoring that for Ginny’s sake; there had generally been a few f-bombs thrown into that statement when Gwen had made it, back then.
“Sure did.”
“As in the girl who bullied you all through elementary, middle, and high school.”
“To be fair, I gave as good as I got.”
“The one you said you wanted to join the army to get away from. That Harriet.”
“Yup, that’s the one.” Gwen laughed. “Turns out we didn’t really hate each other after all. She was just the most repressed lesbian ever and I was… well, I wasn’t repressed, but all the stuff I did to annoy her because I thought I hated her, turns out there was another reason for that.”
“Wow.” Sandy shook her head. “Amazing.”
“I have Mommy Harriet’s genes,” Ginny said, which seemed to Sandy like a very strange topic of conversation for a six year old to bring up. “But I grew in Mommy Gunnie’s tummy.”
“You know about genes?”
“She’s Harriet’s kid,” Gwen said. “Of course she knows about genes. Don’t you, cookie?”
“Genes are why we are what we are,” Ginny said. “We get them from mommies and daddies. My daddy doesn’t live with us but he was very smart and so Mommy Harriet picked him for his genes so I could be smart and he said yes.”
“Paul,” Gwen said before Sandy could ask.
“Oh. Makes sense.” Paul hadn’t been a member of their group, but he’d known about them, and he’d been close friends with Tulsi and Harriet, and he’d helped them out on numerous occasions. While Harriet had been bizarrely obsessed with human biology, and Tulsi had been an all-around genius who was just good at every academic subject ever, Paul had had a penchant for engineering and computers.
“You know if Susan’s here?” Gwen asked.
“Aliyah thinks she’s probably around here somewhere. She was on the planning committee. Is Harriet here?”
“She said she was gonna be—” The door to the school gym opened, and a short, pale woman with black curly hair, wearing an open black coat, a black velvet dress, black nylons, and a necklace made of bits of polished white something that Sandy would bet were animal bones, stalked in. “—late,” Gwen finished. “Hey! Harriet!”
Harriet did not look up, or at anyone in the room. She just power-walked over to Gwen, head partially down but eyes pointed straight ahead and glowering. “Green Vine,” she said to Sandy. “Everyone’s here. Gather them up and meet me in the old senior lounge.”
“What’s going on?” Gwen asked.
“They’re back, Gun.” Now Harriet looked up, meeting her wife’s eyes high above her own. “I’m not here as Harriet Nonasky. I’m here as Black Rose. The Guardians need to gather again.”
“Fuck!” Gwen said. “Harriet… we’ve got Ginny here! We can’t go anywhere without finding her a sitter!”
“What about Daddy Paul?” Ginny suggested.
“And I’ve got kids back home,” Sandy said. “They’ve got a sitter, and they’ve got their dad when he gets home later tonight, but neither the sitter nor my husband are expecting me to… what? What are we even doing? I can’t fit in my Green Vine costume anymore! I don’t think any of us could!”
“Harriet can,” Gwen said. “I’ve seen her wear the Black Rose costume at home. She still fits in it.”
“Forget costumes,” Harriet said. “I got Paul for Ginny, and he said he’d find help for Sandy’s and Susan’s kids. Where’s Susan?”
“No one’s seen her yet,” Gwen said.
Harriet closed her eyes. She’d ladled on a good bit of black eyeshadow on top of her black mascara, and thick white foundation everywhere else, so when she closed her eyes they looked almost like shadowy holes in her face. “We need to find her. Now. Because they might have gotten her.”
“I’ll tell Aliyah,” Sandy said. “And whoever finds Tulsi first, let her know.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve got a minivan now, so… if y’all want me to, I can be the driver again.”
“That might be the way things go,” Harriet said. “Gun, give me Ginny. Paul’s out in the parking lot waiting for her.”
“I – all right.” She set her daughter down on the floor. “You gonna be good for Daddy Paul?”
“Uh-huh. Are you gonna go be superheroes, Mommy Gunnie?”
“We sure might,” Gwen said. “Harriet, tell him thanks for me.”
“Right,” Harriet said. “Ginny, come on.”
“Is this really happening?” Sandy asked rhetorically, shaking her head. She turned around and searched the room for Aliyah. Or Tulsi. Or Susan. Especially Susan. She saw Aliyah, and she saw Tulsi… but no sign of White Fox.
“Red Sky, Blue Sea’s over by the girls’ locker room. You go talk to her. I’ll tell Golden Sun.” Blue Sea was Tulsi, and Golden Sun was Aliyah.
“I thought we killed those bastards extra dead,” Gwen said. “Goddamn.”
“Me too.”
Gwen shrugged. “Oh well. I gotta say, I won’t cry if I’ve gotta killinate them some more. Let’s find the others and then meet up with Harriet, and hopefully she’ll actually tell us what the hell is going on.”
“You’re optimistic. She never did before,” Sandy said.
“I’m married to her. She’s mellowed out. Some. Trust me.”
#writeober 2020#alara's october 2020 prompt fics#magical girls#are now grownup magical women#any resemblance between some of these characters#and the characters of the locked tomb series#is entirely intentional
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Writeober #4: Loud
The children were playing. It was toy hour, so they had out Legos, and dolls, and wooden trains, all that sort of thing. Quiet, by the standards of an orphanage. A couple of Eights were reading, an activity they preferred to playing with toys. Children’s babble filled the air, but not the shrieks they made when they played outside.
And then Jayden started screaming, almost painfully loudly. “I want my mommy! I want my mommy!”
Laurie ran to him and gathered him into her arms. “Oh, Jayden, I know,” she said, rocking him. “I know, honey, I know. But she’s not here.”
Jayden was a Four who had just been surrendered a few weeks ago. “Where is she? I want to see her! I want my mommy!” He thrashed in Laurie’s arms, but the limiter prevented him from exerting any more strength than a normal four-year-old child.
“Sweetie, I’m so sorry. But this is your home now, and any day now, a new mommy or daddy might come through that door and see you and say ‘What a beautiful, wonderful little boy! We want him for our own little boy!’ and take you to a new home with them, and they’ll be your mommy or daddy.”
“I don’t want a new mommy! I’ll kick the new mommy!” Jayden howled. “I want my mommy!”
“I know, sweetie,” Laurie said, sadly. It was all she could say. It was all she could say to any of them.
Several others started crying for their own mommies and daddies. Basil, who’d been in the back working on the finances, came out to help, and the other childcare workers moved around the playroom, soothing children. In her mind, Laurie damned to hell the men and women who’d abandoned these children. How could they do that? How could anyone do that to a child?
But humans weren’t designed to have children who never aged, who lived 40-50 years and grew more knowledgeable but never substantially more mature. Laurie loved the Calvin children desperately, and wanted to save all of them, and if she had been queen of the world she would have made their continued manufacture illegal and had everyone involved in creating and marketing them arrested. There shouldn’t be any more Calvin children coming into the world; it was far too terrible a place for them.
At that, it was better than it had been when Laurie was younger. In her freshman year at college, her roommate Kathy had recruited her in a panic to help her save her little brother, an Eight. Like most families who bought them, Kathy’s had gotten a Calvin child when they’d had no children of their own, but then Kathy’s dad had undergone an experimental fertility treatment, and for him, it had worked. Turned out down the road to cause prostate and testicular cancer, but he’d managed to get his wife pregnant with a healthy baby.
Kathy’s brother had fallen in love with the new baby, playing with her and cooing at her and taking care of her, even learning to change diapers and feed her a bottle. So her parents had kept him, for the help he gave them with her. By the time Kathy was old enough that they didn’t need him to watch her anymore, she’d been so attached to him they hadn’t been able to get rid of him. He’d been Kathy’s older brother that she looked up to, and then her peer that she played with, and then the little brother she protected.
In those days the Calvin Corporation had only leased Calvin Children; you couldn’t buy them. It was intended as a measure to protect the children from abuse, but it almost guaranteed that if parents had their own child, or grew tired of a child who never aged, or were tight on money and needed to cut costs, they would stop leasing, returning the Calvin child to the corporation… where their memories would be wiped, and they’d either be sent on to a new home, or destroyed if they couldn’t be leased. So Kathy’s parents had waited until she was out of the house, at college, and then returned her brother to the corporation. If her brother hadn’t been a model with an internal cell phone antenna, and been able to call Kathy for help, she’d have lost him forever.
As it was, Kathy and Laurie and Basil had had to drive five hundred miles and jump through flaming hoops to get little David back before the mindwipe. As college students without money, they didn’t have the funds to lease him; Kathy pretended to be her mom, got the contract re-activated, and then Basil jailbroke David, replacing his internal antenna with a new one that wouldn’t report his whereabouts to the Calvin Corporation, allowing them to effectively “steal” him. And even then, he’d had to dye his hair, alter his skin tone, and wear glasses he didn’t need and put a thick sole insert in one of his shoes to throw off his gait so recognition software couldn’t find him.
It hadn’t been until ten years later that Kathy, Laurie, Basil and their friends had won the court case that made it possible to purchase Calvin children outright, and with depreciation, and Kathy working at a law firm, and Basil’s IT job, they’d had the funds to buy him, so he’d be safe. He lived with Kathy and Kathy’s girlfriend Imani, and took care of his niece and nephew when Kathy and Imani were at work. They were currently three and five. David was an Eight. Eventually they’d catch up to him and go past him, again, but Kathy owned him outright and loved him tremendously. He was a happy Eight.
The world was full of Calvin children who were not happy.
Parents leased-to-own their children because that was the model Calvin Corporation was currently pushing, with the court order that required them to make full ownership not only available but affordable to their customers. And then, either they had a biological child – most men in the developed world weren’t fertile, but there were plenty of men from all around the world who still had sperm and were selling it, and many men would eventually give in and agree to let their wives buy some so she could have a bio-child at least – or they simply grew tired of a child that never aged. Calvin Children ranged in age from Threes to Tens, but whatever they were, they would be that forever… or at least until their internal battery ran down and their bodies wore out.
(Once, Laurie had gone to visit a brand new care home, for Calvin Children dying of old age. She had never been back. As heartbreaking as it was to deal with children who’d been abandoned by their parents, it was so, so much worse to see those children dealing with their own growing exhaustion and slow decline into death.)
And now, there was a new model of Calvin Child, who could grow older. Their brains were modular, and could be removed from their bodies and put into a new body a year older, every year, updating their firmware in the process to grow more mature – which was costly, but many people were willing to pay. Even if they needed to skip some years, they wanted a child who could grow to adulthood, to take over the family business or help work on a farm or go to college and make something of themselves. No one knew what would happen to the legal framework that allowed people to own Calvin Children once they were “adults”; the fact that Calvin children were chattel didn’t usually conflict with people’s understanding of what adults were allowed to do to their own children. You weren’t allowed to abuse a Calvin child any more than a “real” child, and in general parents of “real” children were allowed to do anything to them that wasn’t abusive.
The only thing you were allowed to do with a Calvin child that you couldn’t do with an organic child was abandon them. People who couldn’t or wouldn’t take care of their Calvin child anymore could return them to the corporation, who would still mind-wipe them and resell them, or, if the thought of their child forgetting everything about them didn’t sit well and they didn’t want to take the risk that the corporation would decide their child was too worn out to resell as used and destroy it, they surrendered them at homes like the one Laurie and Basil ran, where Calvin children would be cared for until an adoptive parent could be found.
Before the new models came out, it wasn’t hard to find adoptive parents. Laurie and Basil charged a pittance for an adoptee, not even enough to cover their costs, mostly because people took better care of things they’d paid for than things that were free. Plenty of people who wanted a Calvin child were happy to give a home to a used one for far less than they’d have paid for a new child, or a used one from Calvin Corp directly. But now that the new models were out… everyone who wanted a Calvin child wanted the kind who could grow up. Laurie had, in desperation, waived the fee, to get someone, anyone in the door to love these children, but no one who could pass the background check had done so in a month.
It burned that she felt like she was lying to Jayden, that maybe there wouldn’t be a new parent for him, that there almost certainly wouldn’t be one in a little while like she was saying. But Jayden was a Four. He wouldn’t understand or appreciate brutal honesty; he needed hope to keep him going. Laurie wasn’t going to lie to him and pretend the mother he remembered, the one he’d spent six years with since his original purchase, would ever come back. But she would try to make him happy, or at least content, to bide his time here until a parent came for him… even if one never did.
Jayden’s sobs wound down. Older children, Eights and Nines and Tens, programmed with an incredibly powerful drive to care for and protect younger children, had reached out to the little ones that Jayden’s outburst had set off, and soothed them, despite their own hearts breaking because their own parents had abandoned them, and they were old enough to know their own parents were never coming back.
“How come she left me here?” Jayden asked, no longer crying, but the streaks of tears still all over his face. They cried, they ate, they pooped, they slept; in all regards but one, Calvin children were virtually indistinguishable from organic children. But it was that one regard – the fact that they’d never grow up – that caused all the problems. “Was I bad?”
“Oh, no, Jayden. You’re a wonderful little boy. It was nothing you did, okay? Nothing you did or could ever do. Your mommy just ran out of money and she couldn’t take care of you anymore.” This was a lie. Jayden’s mother had just been sick of having a four-year-old child for six years. Laurie would never tell any of the children something like that, though.
“I miss her.”
“I know you do. And I know that even if you get a new mommy or daddy to love you and take care of you, you’ll never forget your first mommy, and you’ll always miss her. But there will be a new mommy or daddy someday, and they will love you even more than your first mommy did.” Laurie made prospective parents watch videos of children having meltdowns like Jayden just did, sobbing and begging for their parents to come back, and then impressed on them that this was a lifelong commitment. You were signing on to take care of a Calvin child until you died or they did. Parents who expressed horror or pity or empathic pain for the abandoned children were much more likely to go home with a new member of the family than parents who seemed to shrug it off. Laurie wanted these children to find new homes, but she wanted them to be forever homes, with parents who would never abandon them again.
Laurie stood up. “Now, I think it’s snacktime, kids. Who wants a snack?”
“Me! Me! I want a snack!” children who’d been crying five minutes earlier chorused.
“All right! Everyone take your seats!”
Children were resilient. Even Calvin children. If she couldn’t give them their own mothers, Laurie would be the best mother figure to them she could be. She’d adopt them herself, but there were so many children who needed help, and a mother with too many children was no different from a child care worker in the attention and love she could give each one. Better to be the mother figure of the orphanage and take care of all of them as best she could.
8 notes
·
View notes
Text
Writeober 18 - Plague
(Set in the same universe as “Norris and the Plague Doctors”, which was #16 of the 52 Project, but entirely different characters.)
(BTW, I am an American.)
-----------------------------------------------------------
The van pulled into the checkpoint. An officer went to meet it, walking around to the left side to speak to the driver. “Have you guys got your passports?”
“We don’t have passports,” the woman in the passenger side said. “We’re refugees.”
“Oh. Refugees,” the officer said, with just the faintest note of mockery in his voice. ‘’Course you are, should’ve known. You ever been to Canada before?”
“No!” the man, who was driving, snapped. “We’re from Oklahoma! For gods’ sake, let us through! We’re in a hurry!”
“Any family in Canada? Any paperwork proving you have a job?”
“Re-fu-gees,” the man pronounced slowly, as if he thought the officer was stupid. “No, we don’t have jobs yet! We’ll get jobs once we’re in!”
“Mm,” the officer said. “No family. No jobs. No guarantee you won’t be a burden on our resources. Can you give me a reason why I should let you in?”
The man opened his car door, his face red with rage. “Now listen here--!”
“Sir, you’re not understanding the situation here,” the officer said. “You listen. We talk. You want something from us – you want to come into our country as refugees and take shelter here. We don’t need or want anything from you.”
“We have money!” the woman said, rolling down her window. “We have a lot of money!”
“Really? Let me see.” The officer walked around to the woman’s side of the car, and inspected the large pile of bills she proffered. He took one of the $100 bills off the stack, looked at it, and then returned it. “You’ll want to save those. There’s a serious shortage of toilet paper, and American money’s washable.”
“Fuck you!” The man got all the way out of the car and drew a handgun – only to have a dozen rifles trained on him.
“I’d put that down if I were you, sir,” the officer said, completely unruffled. “Here. Why don’t you drop it, and then step back and away from your car?”
“No! Fuck you, I don’t—”
“George, don’t!” the woman said. They were both middle-aged, somewhat overweight. The woman was wearing an off-the-rack pantsuit suitable for an office job, and the man was wearing a black t-shirt and jeans. “You have to drop the gun!”
“I don’t—It’s my right to have a weapon!” the man shouted. “The Second Amendment—”
“Doesn’t apply, because this is Canada, not the United States,” the officer said, sounding just slightly exasperated. “Now, we’d really rather not fill you full of bullet holes in front of your wife, so please drop the gun and step away from the car?”
Glaring, the man obeyed. Once he was far enough from the car, the officer came and picked up the handgun, while the other border patrol guards kept their rifles trained on George the American. “Hmm. Nice gun. Thank you for your donation, we always appreciate good weapons in today’s day and age.”
“That’s mine! I didn’t give it to you! It’s my right to carry a weapon to protect my family from deaders!”
There were three children in the car. They were all being very, very quiet. Two of them played portable video games, and the third one, the oldest, was watching the situation, but none of them made a noise.
“It sure is,” the officer agreed. “After you’ve been through the quarantine process, and you move on to the refugee compound, you can volunteer to be on deader patrol and man the walls, and they’ll issue you a weapon. But you won’t get to have this one. Edmondton, Roy, if you please?”
Two of the border guards walked over to the car, one of them instructing the woman to open the back hatch of the van.
“We’re not going to a refugee compound,” the man sneered. “We’ve got money. We’re going to buy a place to live!”
The officer laughed. “I’m sorry, you’re what? With that money? The money I told you to save for toilet paper?” He shook his head. “American money is completely worthless. Your economy collapsed; you don’t even use money in your own nation anymore. We’ve heard you use barter for everything. Why would it be valuable to us?”
“They’ve got a lot of guns in the trunk,” Edmondton reported.
“All right, I’m sorry. All of you will have to get out, and we need to inspect your vehicle for contraband. Don’t need you smuggling any more guns in under your seats or something.”
“But these are legal guns!” the woman protested. “We have permits!”
“For the United States, sure, but this is Canada. You are not allowed to bring guns over the border. You can have them as part of assigned security detail duties in the refugee compound, and that’s all.”
“Mom, is this all gonna be okay?” the oldest child whispered to the woman.
“Of course it is, honey. We’ll be fine. These men will let us in,” the woman whispered back.
“Why are you harassing my family like this?” the man demanded. “My kids and my wife have been through a lot! We’ve had to escape deaders more times than you can imagine!”
“My husband was killed by the deaders,” the officer said calmly. “So I understand—”
“Oh, you’re one of those,” the man sneered.
“You do know that homosexual fornicators will burn in hell, right?” the woman said.
The officer closed his eyes, and then opened them. “Arrest both of them,” he said to his guard detail.
“What?” The woman was horrified. “What did we do?”
“Take the children to the waiting area. We’ll see whether we can send them all on together or if the kids will go to the refugee camp and the parents will be deported.”
“You can’t do this!” the man raged. “I’m a lawyer! I know my rights!”
“If you were actually a lawyer, you’d know that you’re in Canada and the laws of the United States no longer apply,” the officer said. “Also, you’d probably know that your country established a precedent of separating families when refugees came to the border—”
“That’s different! You’re Canada!”
“We are different,” the officer agreed. “That’s why I’m arresting you rather than demanding that you turn that vehicle around right now and go back. Maybe I will authorize you to continue on to quarantine, depending on your behavior.”
“Mom, what should we do?” the oldest child asked. The two other children continued to play their video games, sitting on the concrete, but from their pale and trembling lips and hands, it was obvious they were well aware of what was going on, terrified, and trying to distract themselves.
“Go with them,” the mother instructed. “Take care of your brother and sister. We’ll catch up with you soon.”
The girl – she looked to be about 11 – followed the guard to the waiting area, shepherding her younger siblings along.
***
The American couple were in cuffs, sitting in chairs in the main office where the officer did his paperwork. They’d been there for an hour, after being ordered to strip and put on neon pink jumpsuits that weren’t quite felon-orange, but stood out just as much.
“Now, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to listen,” the officer said, “and if you keep interrupting me or posturing as if you have the upper hand, we’re going to confiscate your van and make you walk back over the American border.”
“That’s our car! You took our guns – what would happen to us if we ran into deaders?” the woman did not quite shout. “What about our children?”
“Oh, your children have already been granted refugee status. The only question we’re resolving here is whether you will be going with them to quarantine, or whether you’re deported and we find foster carers for them in the refugee camp.”
“You can’t just separate families!” the woman said.
“Why? Your nation did it for a few years. Is it because you’re white? Or because you think that you’re from the USA and that makes you special and above everyone else?”
“Well, we’re better than Mexicans!” the man said. “We work hard—”
“Sir. Shut up or you, at least, will definitely be deported. If I hear another word from you, you’ll be on a truck going back over the border and we’ll drop you in Buffalo.”
“Buffalo’s infested with them!”
“Technically, that was more than one more word, but I’ll give you another chance. Shut up now or you will, indeed, be shipped back to a city that’s infested with zombies, with no gun. Do I make myself clear?”
“How can you do such a thing?” the woman asked, pleading.
“You Americans are so arrogant,” the officer said. “You think you’re so special, so above everything. You’re so smart, so superior to everyone, of course you expect Canada to bend over backwards to let you in.” He leaned into the woman’s face. “I saw your bumper sticker. I know you voted for that absolute, incompetent moron—”
“You can’t talk like that about our president!” the man shouted.
“Take him to the deportation cells,” the officer instructed the guard.
“No! Wait, please!” the woman begged. “He’ll be quiet! George, shut up, this man is serious!”
“Against my better judgement, I’ll give you one more chance,” the officer said, closing his eyes for a long moment. “But I’m quite serious. One more word out of you and you’ll be deported. Nod if you understand me.”
The man nodded, after being elbowed by his wife.
“I need to make something clear,” the officer said. “Every single bit of this is your fault. Your fault and the fault of every absolute moron in America who voted him in. You were told he didn’t have the temperament for the job, you were told he didn’t have the qualifications, but you supported him anyway… and not only did he do nothing about the deaders except try to convince the most gullible among you that the deader plague didn’t even exist, now it comes out that he intentionally let it go on because he thought it would kill all the people in your big cities, and leave only his supporters, like you. He attempted to engage in mass murder against the citizens he was supposed to protect, to keep control of power. That’s unconscionable.”
“That never happened,” the woman argued. “That was proven to be a hoax—”
“You be quiet too, or I’m deporting the both of you. You’re going to learn, very quickly, that up here we don’t tolerate anyone cherry-picking one incredibly biased source of propaganda and accepting only what it says as truth, while ignoring twenty-seven other sources who say the opposite.” The officer paced. “Your country was overrun by deaders and they don’t respect borders. It’s all we can do to hold the line and make sure none of them slip through and kill Canadian citizens, or spread their plague. The only reason we let any of you in is our long history of friendship with America, and the fact that more than half of you didn’t vote for the man.” He paused, as if waiting for them to interrupt. They didn’t, for once.
“Now, I need you to understand how this is going to go. Everything you own will be taken and sterilized. You’ll get back clothes, toiletries, items without value outside sentiment like photographs and toys, and electronics, but anything else will be confiscated and sold, to support the costs of the refugee camps. You will remain in quarantine in individual rooms for three days, to be sure you’re not carrying the deader plague; you’ll be able to communicate with each other by telephone, and food will be brought to you, but you’ll have no human interaction. If any of you show signs of having the plague, you’ll be shot.”
“Wh-what signs do you mean?” the woman asked.
“Turning into a deader,” the officer said. “We won’t shoot you for having a fever. We’ll shoot you for apparently dying and then waking up and trying to bite people.”
“I – I guess that’s fair…”
“Once you’ve cleared quarantine, you’ll be taken to the refugee camp. Don’t ask for your van back, you’ve lost it. You can keep your cash, I was serious about the toilet paper. In the refugee camp, you’ll obey the camp directors and the peace officers, or you will be deported. You’ll be given food, and if you have dietary or religious restrictions on what you can eat, you’re expected to tell them on intake, and we’ll do what we can. You’ll also be given jobs, and you’ll be expected to do them. You’re working for your room and board; you won’t be paid. Do you understand?”
“How would we ever get out of the camps, then? With no money?”
“There are job training programs in the camps, and hiring agents. Americans who have relevant experience, like doctors, might be hired quickly; others might have to complete a job training course. Our goal is to get you out of the camps and mainstreamed into Canadian society as quickly as possible. Since you’re a married couple, you’ll be in there until there’s two job availabilities in the same area, one for each of you, and at that point you’ll be sent to live wherever that job has opened up. You’ll get a subsidized apartment for two months and after that you’ll be expected to pay rent.”
“I… I guess that’s fair,” the woman said again, sounding completely cowed.
“We’ll test your children and put them in grades based on their test results, not necessarily what grade they were in back home. The exception would be if they’re ahead of grade but want to remain with their agemates for social reasons, then they’d be allowed to stay behind. We expect your kids will probably end up below grade level; it’s well known that most American states have terrible schools.” The woman opens her mouth to speak, and the officer interrupts. “I’m sorry, did you have something to say? Something ignorant that will irritate the person with the power to let you in or see you sent back to Buffalo in your pink jumpsuits?”
“I’m sorry,” the woman says submissively, looking at the ground.
“Any violation of the laws and regulations may result in you being deported. This includes starting loud and obnoxious arguments, abusing the staff anywhere, or harassing people by demanding everyone cater to your religion. No one needs you in this country. You need us, because we know how to protect our people from deaders and our government and economy hasn’t completely collapsed.”
“But… we have useful skills…” the woman said.
“You’ll have your chance to prove it.” He pushes two separate sets of paper at the two Americans. “Read these over. Sign if you agree to be bound by these rules. Recognize that if you won’t sign, or if you sign and then break the rules, you’ll be deported.” He looked up at his guards. “Please remove their handcuffs so they can sign.”
Both of them signed. He didn’t expect otherwise. So far not even the most belligerent American had been willing to be deported back to Buffalo.
After the two Americans were taken back to the waiting area to be shipped to quarantine with their kids, the officer put his head in his hands, on his desk. Most of the Americans weren’t this bad. Every time he met idiots like this he had to remind himself. Most of the Americans, even the ones who had voted for the man who fiddled while a zombie apocalypse burned his country, were appropriately humble about seeking refuge, and weren’t willing to defend the indefensible.
But these two. If they hadn’t had kids, he would have refused them entrance.
------------------------------------------
Thankfully, I have never actually met someone who behaved like this. The Americans in this story are kind of composited from American customers that people ranted about on customer suck sites like Not Always Right.
7 notes
·
View notes
Last Seen Blogs
itssawah
Sawah's world
captainswanfanfic
Captain Swan: A FanFiction Rec
shiftybecky
justine claire
alunasky-blog
Alunasky
nonushotties
Non US Hotties