The hover bucked. Davis staggered. The propulsion fans roared. He swore.

He cut power to the fans and looked out the back window of the cabin. The towlines had gone slack and the skimmer tilted, half sunk in the viscous orange lake. “Shit,” he said.

Davis had been harvesting for twenty-five years. The lake was too thick for the mollusks to surface in the coldest months, and the summer winds whipped the lake’s sludge into a toxic foam, so harvesters like him made the most of the fall and spring.

He pulled his hood over his brow, leaving the mask dan-gling, tugged his gloves up over his sleeves and stepped out onto the rear deck. The hover floated, its impellers turning the lake into a pale orange ring around its air cushion, opaque like pulled taffy. The sun had tugged itself above the horizon, and the air stung his cheeks and eyes.

The skimmer was a basic design: a floating bin with a grilled front. When open, the grill angled down, forming a ramp that rode the mollusks up into its bin as the hover pulled it across the lake. He fired up the winch. The torque motor whined as it reeled in the skimmer. Something had fouled it badly.

Davis reached out with the gaff-pole to hook the skimmer. The backwash from the impellers blew up between the vessels, catching him in the face with fumes. He stepped down and ba-lanced his way around the skimmer’s rim.

The bin was half-full of sludge. He stirred the orange goop with the end of the gaff. Only a few flat mollusks had been collected so far. Then he saw it: black and round, a fat object, the size of a large buoy, almost submerged. Beads of orange slipped across it, leaving its surface pristine.

* * *

An hour after turning back, he saw the headland that marked the eastern end of the span. He had closed the grill, and now the skimmer tugged behind the hover like salvage. The propulsion fans thudded in an interference rhythm.

The radio beeped. Time for the call, he thought. He grabbed the headset from its hook.

“Thanks for doing the dishes,” Reeda said.

“No problem, hon.” Davis had started cleaning up in the kitchen at the onset of Reeda’s morning sickness. Nowadays, it seemed just as important to continue. “Did you sleep okay?” he asked.

“Oh, you know. How’s the lake?”

“I’m coming back early. What are you doing?”

“Laundry’s on. I’ll need to run the generator.”

“Could you have a look at the cold-house?” he said. He had forgotten to check it on his way out that morning. “Its cells probably need changing too.”

“Sure, I could use the walk,” she said.

“Great,” Davis said, uncertain. It was rare for Reeda to want to do something so active these days. “I’ll be back early afternoon,” he told her.

“See you then.” She clicked off.

He checked his heading and adjusted the fans. Ahead, a pack of skaters ran across the glistening orange swells, their long lizard tails leaving a fading mesh on the viscous surface.

* * *

Davis got his rig onto the wide flats of the shore, a safe distance from the lip of the lake, and deflated the hover’s cushions. Behind it, the skimmer was pitched to one side, its back right corner had scored a groove across the packed black sand.

He yanked open the skimmer’s chute and stepped back as the sludge drained. He reached in and scooped the ooze along with his gloved hand. When the bin was empty, he climbed up to get a look at the offending object. It sat tilted in a corner and looked like a fat, squashed, oversized child’s top. It was unmarked but obviously manufactured.

Goddamn Mirfac, he thought. I am going to sue their corporate ass.

* * *

“I’ve navigated my whole life by the tower out of Bremi,” Davis had told Rass the night before. “Hell, I know the shape of every headland along this shore.”

“It’s not about that!” Rass said. “And you know it.”

Their conversation had been working toward this since the two friends had sat down with their tea. Rass sighed, and Davis followed his gaze to the sitting room where Reeda leaned over the coffee table, sketching.

“She’s designing her dream home,” he explained.

Rass said nothing.

Davis’ eyes returned to the kitchen, to the cupboards he had painted himself and the unmatched plates draining beside the sink. “She says she still lives in a bachelor’s shack.”

“Losing the baby hit her hard,” Rass said. He had said this often in the last months.

“I know,” Davis said, impatience creeping in. “But she won’t get over it obsessing over a house that’ll never get built!”

Rass cleared his throat, but Reeda made no sign she had heard.

“Toby saw two fliers over the lake last week,” Rass said. “They’ll be moving up the span next.”

The mollusks Rass and Davis harvested were sold for the blue-white ingots of antimony inside, a by-product of their digestion. Last year, the moon’s biggest processor had announced plans to mine the bottom of the lake instead of buying from the harvesters. Mirfac’s drones were a common sight now, surveying for antimony concentrations deposited on the lake bottom by decaying mollusks.

The harvesters in Bremi all talked about blocking the company, but no one really expected success. A lawyer had advised them to save the logs from their navigation systems. Laying claim to the patch where you harvested might let you sell your stake for an early retirement.

“Look, Rass, everyone knows my patch. Who’s going to dispute it? Not anyone from here to Bremi, least of all some shoe-wearing lawyer from Mirfac.”

Reeda came up to the table.

“Rass, would you like some meringues?” she offered. She went to the cupboard.

“Sure,” Rass said. He looked at Davis.

“Thanks, hon,” Davis said. Her short dark hair was growing out. She had always worn it long, and only now was she starting to look the way he remembered. He missed her. He missed the way she used to smile and tell him not to be so loud when he laughed. “Have a cup of tea,” he said.

She had laid the plate of sweets between them and shook her head.

* * *

Davis clambered into the bin and kicked the few flat gray mollusks out of the way. He needed to shift the object to right the skimmer. He squatted with a grunt and reached underneath, laying his hands flat against its underside. A tingling sensation danced across his palms. He pulled away. Spots floated in his vision. “God in hell!”

He looked at it again. It was featureless, smooth, black, but giving no reflection. He touched it. Starbursts danced across his eyes.

He stood again. The lights in his eyes–what had first appeared as fireworks–had resolved into geometries. He lay his palm against the black surface and closed his eyes. Circles, triangles, and rectangles–retinal negatives–ordered themselves, searching according to some logic. A pattern of circles and dots hit on a childish outline of a face: a loop enclosing two bright specks and an oval mouth. The mouth flattened and turned up its corners in a smile.

Startled, he lifted his hand and looked out to the lake. A wind was coming off it, and the horizon was pale gray. A squall was building, summer storm.

He squatted again, his suit pinching behind the knees, and positioned himself, wiggling his back against the metal wall of the bin. Reeda would have warned him against what he was about to do. In one sure motion, he got both hands behind it, leaned in, and shoved.

His whole body buzzed–his hands, his chest, his chin where it pressed the top of the object–a chemical feeling. Lights danced under his eyelids. The object was far heavier than it had any right to be. With one gasp, he scraped it across the skimmer’s bin. The tingling surged up his arms. The moment the skimmer righted, he let go and stepped back, panting.

He could still see the image that had written itself on his eyes. The childish face had gained detail, strings of light joining, curving, searching their way into a clear portrait of Reeda.

* * *

The wind tugged the steering as Davis drove the four-wheeled runabout across the black sand, the device stretch-cabled into the basket behind his seat. He steered past the long, squat cold-house where he stored his harvests, then turned and headed up the rocky crest that marked the limit of the flats. The runabout struggled, its servos whining until he crested. His home stood in the distance across his half-cleared rock-scrabbled lot.

The tingling reached out to him. He felt it behind his ears as if he were clenching his jaws. His skull itched under the skin. Images visited him. He fought them, like a dream he couldn’t put aside. He saw the dials on his hover’s dash, the lake’s undulating horizon, a clattering of mollusks, their fan shapes tumbling into the cold-house’s hopper. It was an inventory of his daily life, sorting the pieces. An intelligence was behind it, voracious, collecting every scrap. He saw Reeda bringing him tea. Reeda sitting in the dark when he went to bed.

He parked the runabout at the house, hurried up the back steps, and released the memory he had been refusing to think, fighting to keep it safe. It was Reeda, exhaustion and joy written in her smile, beaming up at him with Sally in her arms. The saddest and happiest memory of his life. He sealed the door behind him and called Reeda’s name.

“I’m in here,” she answered.

She was in Sally’s room. He couldn’t help it. The utility closet opened off the back hall, and he stepped to it in his boots. He slid the plastic door open. Wet clothes were clumped unattended in the washing machine.

In the baby’s room, Reeda was sitting beside the empty crib.

“The laundry’s not done,” he said.

“I’m sorry, hon.”

“I guess you didn’t do the fuel cells either?”

“Please.”

His body filled the doorway, his hands on either jamb. Angry. “Reeda…”

“Not here, Davis.”

“Where else am I going to tell you? This is where you spend all your time.”

“Please, I said.” Her voice went quiet.

“I’m fucking tired…” he started, and then relented. His hands fell. “Get the laundry into the dryer. I won’t do everything.”

She brushed her cheek with the back of her hand. Her eyes were red.

“Look. You can have the runabout tomorrow,” he said. “Go see your mom. I’m going to set the generators.”

* * *

Davis scrubbed down and changed out of his work clothes. In the utility closet, he switched the cells and started the generator. The laundry sat untouched in the washer. He put on a light suit, stepped out the back door and tightened its seals. The house’s filters had blown out last summer, and he hadn’t got them running again yet. If the season was over now, he’d have to get to that.

The back of the house faced away from the lake, across the rocky plain. Windblown dust smudged the flat horizon. The runabout was parked where he had left it, next to a pile of prefab sections he had bought last winter for an addition he had yet to build. The black object was still cabled behind the runabout’s seat.

There was time before dinner, he decided. He was going to walk out to the cold-house. He descended the steps and followed the runabout’s worn tracks around the corner of the house.

* * *

When he and Reeda had been dating, she had always wanted a stroll after dinner. He had lived in town then, working one of the large harvesters that sailed from the pier. “There’s not that much to see in Bremi,” he’d tell her. After you walked the main road and the lake-edge, there wasn’t much else. The depot took up most of the shore, and with its cold-houses, hangers, and hovers, it was too industrial to be picturesque.

But Reeda was from Citadel and didn’t care. “I like walks,” she would say. “And you need to learn what I like.” It was kind of a joke.

Whenever anybody asked Davis and Reeda how they met, they always described their second date. On the phone, Davis had joked that he didn’t really know her yet, so at the coffee shop, she had pulled out a box of photos. Baby pictures, family holidays, photos from nursing college. “I want you to really know me,” she had explained.

He had loved that in her, her fearless openness.

Whenever Davis told the story, Reeda always brought up that the picture he liked best showed her in her high-school uniform. She had played on the slide-ball team, and in the picture her arms were around two teammates in blue shorts and jerseys with large blue numbers. Reeda was number fourteen. “That’s the picture he went for straight away,” she would tease. “The man cannot resist a girl with a bit of leg.”

* * *

At the cold-house, he checked the seals on the door and climbed to the roof to check the hopper’s seals as well. The wind whipped across the flats and burned his nostrils. He climbed down, rotated the cells in the generator, set the timer, and headed back.

Gusts scoured the ground, and the mounds of cleared rock reached toward him with late afternoon shadows.

He found Reeda in the kitchen chopping apples and liver for dinner.

“What’s that thing?” she asked. She scraped the peels and end bits into the compacter.

He sat at the table and stretched his feet. “On the runabout? I don’t know,” he said. “Some kind of Mirfac probe. Tomorrow I need to check how much it damaged the skimmer.” A yellow notepad lay on the table. It showed a floor plan, the windows and doors carefully marked, the rooms labeled. One featured French windows opening to a rock garden. It was marked “Sally’s Room.”

“Did you deal with the laundry?” he asked.

She banged her knife and plate in the sink.

“I’m going to call Rass,” Davis said, getting up. “I’ll get it out of the runabout in the morning. Best not to touch it.”

* * *

The winds bit viciously. Flecks whisked off the lake, and pellets of foam stung Davis’ suit. It was miserable work sorting the skimmer out. One wheel had knifed under and been dragged across the hard mud. He had to take it apart and straighten its hub to get it to roll clean.

Rass had been mystified on the phone the night before. “It’s not enough their flyers are scanning the lake,” his friend had said. “Now Mirfac’s dropping probes to screw up our gear.”

Davis had avoided mentioning the visions. They felt like a violation. Wearing gloves had made no difference when he had wrestled the probe from the back of the runabout that morning. A gallery of faces had cascaded before him–Rass, Reeda, his parents and brother, Tam from college, Sally’s big hazel eyes–and then somehow, in a single voice, they asked, “You are Davis?”

“No!” He had been surprised by the hollow in his gut, as if he were about to cry. He repeated it in his mind: “No, no, no, no!”

It had seemed lighter. But that wasn’t right. It was still obscenely dense, but when he fought to lift it, it had lightened just enough to get over the basket’s lip. It dropped and stuck solidly in the ground. He had left it there in the corner by the back steps.

Davis tested the skimmer’s wheel, returned his tools to the cold-house, parked the runabout there, and walked back to the hover against the growing wind. The lake was pushing up the flats. A thin, orange tentacle reached into the groove scratched by the skimmer. He winched the skimmer onto the hover’s deck, fired up the fans, and drove it up to the cold-house where he closed it down for the season.

When he pulled up at the house in the runabout, Reeda was at the back door, staring at the probe.

“You should leave that alone,” he said, unzipping his hood.

Reeda turned and smiled. “It knows me,” she said. She kneeled down and rested her hand on the black convex shape.

He moved fast. “Reeda! Don’t!” He grabbed her arm and pulled her away. “It’s not safe.”

“Davis, this can’t be from Mirfac. It’s something else.”

“Doesn’t matter. I don’t want you touching it.”

“It showed me Sally.”

“No, Reeda. It’s not real. I saw all sorts of things too.”

“You don’t understand. It’s communicating,” she said.

“It plays with your mind.”

“It… it let me talk to her. It said I can visit her.”

Davis held her by the shoulders. “Stop it! Stop it! Sally’s gone!”

He saw her eyes measuring his cruelty.

“Come inside,” he said. He slid his hands down to her wrists. “I’m going to call Rass to help get rid of it.”

“No,” she said. She shook her hands free.

“It’s not right to obsess. It doesn’t help. It hurts me to watch you suffer–”

Her whole physical self burst. “Why don’t you suffer!” She slammed his chest. “It makes me hate you. You don’t cry. It’s not fair. You don’t cry.”

“Reeda…” He hated this. They were going to fight. He was going to yell. “Reeda, Reeda!” He breathed. “I cried, you know I cried. You were there. I cried–”

“I’m suffering! I’m doing it all!” Her voice broke.

It shocked him–how the anguish inside her was endless. “I am not doing this,” he said. “I am not!” He pulled her hands off his chest and went up the steps.

* * *

In the morning, Davis woke to the alarm clock’s intermit-tent trill. He recalled rolling over and finding Reeda’s side of the bed cold. She had come in some time after dark, and he had called out to remind her to seal the doors.

He pulled a T-shirt over his shoulders and walked to the kitchen in his shorts. “Reeda?” he asked.

The room was empty. The kitchen had an outside door that faced the lake. It hung open a crack, and a track of mud led across the floor to the sitting room. “For God’s sake,” he said.

The baby’s room was closed. “How long have you been up, hon?” he asked through the door. “Reeda?” He knocked.

He heard her voice and leaned forward, turning his ear. She was crying. No, it was more coherent than that. Talking.

“Reeda!” he called again. This pushed his patience. He wanted to pound the door open and start yelling.

At the tea maker, he found his pouch from last night and held his mug under the spout. Then he pulled some dishtowels from a bottom drawer. The house was silent except for the wind outside.

Davis got on his knees and started mopping the muddy tracks, working his way from the sitting room to the kitchen door. She needs help, he thought. She needs… he didn’t know. He had held her before; he had comforted her once. Those days seemed so far away.

Maybe Rass was right, maybe she needed a doctor. It was so unreasonable–everybody wants to help Reeda because she’s not coping, and what help does he get? He gets to crawl on the kitchen floor mopping up dirt. That’s what he gets.

He reached the door and pushed the towels up against the metal seal. A foot-wide dent flattened the strips into which fit the door’s high-density seal.

“Shit!” He stood and looked back through the kitchen. Reeda had rolled the black object around the house from the back steps to the kitchen door, which was level with the outside. She had pushed it across the threshold, through the kitchen and sitting room, and into the baby’s room. He pulled the door shut and turned the seal. It wouldn’t go.

He headed back to the baby’s room. It must have taken her all night to get the probe in there. “Reeda!” He banged on the bedroom door. There was no answer. “Come on, Reeda.” He shook the handle. She had locked it.

* * *

Davis stood outside in the growing storm. The lake was an angry orange froth, the horizon lost in swirling clouds of gas. The air tasted of burnt plastic. He hadn’t bothered to suit up. Time was short.

The kitchen door was off, and he was pulling apart its outside seal, bolt by bolt. He had left Rass a message to come and help and then found a door section in the pile of prefab sheets behind the house. The wind had caught the flat aluminum, pulling his shoulder. He was going to cannibalize it to replace the kitchen door.

He attacked the next bolt, putting his whole weight on the wrench. It didn’t move. He picked up the crowbar and swung his anger at the wrench handle. The bolt jerked loose.

His eyes burned and the wind stung the back of his neck. It would leave scars. He pulled on the wrench, and the nut came loose enough to finish with his fingers. He would have to put on his suit if he wanted to continue.

A pale orange foam was spreading into the house, coating the kitchen floor and pebbling the furniture. Where the froth had melted, rivulets gouged veins in the floor.

Wooziness unsteadied him. He looked at the untouched door section behind him, its ring of sharp clean nuts still in place. There was no way he was going to get this door in place before the storm suffocated them both.

He stepped through the wound in the side of his house and hurried to the closed bedroom. The air in the house was heavy, still. Fumes sank past the back of his throat.

“Reeda,” he called, but didn’t wait for a response. Holding his elbows, he launched his shoulder against the door. And again. The hollow plastic buckled.

Reeda was on her knees. Her shoulders slumped over the slim mattress of the crib. Resting in her curled arms was the black object. Panic choked him. He linked his hands across her chest and pulled her off, dragging her into the sitting room. He fell, sitting behind her.

He breathed. “Reeda, we have to get out. The house isn’t safe.”

She looked over her shoulder. “Davis? Your face!”

He stood, grabbing her wrist, and pulled her up. “Come on.”

She looked back to the shape on the crib. Her weight shifted forward, and he pulled her around.

“Let me go,” she said. “It knows Sally.”

“Sally is dead. She died as a baby.”

Her eyes snapped into focus. “No, no. It knows her older. She’s talking. She drew a picture of a house and a bunny. She told me she wants a bunny.”

“Stop!” Davis yelled. “She was a baby. She died in the crib. You got up to feed her. You got up and she was dead!”

“I know! I know!” She turned calm. “Davis, listen. Don’t you want it to be true? It makes things from our memory. It’s why it came. It told me it can bring her back. It can take us to her. We can live with her.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“You’re not listening. You don’t know. You closed your-self to it.”

“Of course I did! Listen to yourself.”

She looked back at the crib. “Why don’t you want her back? She’s our baby.”

He followed her look. The black shape tilted itself upright.

Davis didn’t wait. He dragged Reeda through the kitchen. She stumbled against a chair, and then they were outside.

The wind tore at them. He held his collar over his mouth; his chin burned where it touched. Reeda put her sleeve to her face, burying her nose in the crook of her elbow. His eyes watered. The air was orange. At the limit of visibility, gusts curled over the crest down at the flats. The storm would have pushed the lake right up to the cold-house, but even there, in the teeth of the fury, it was their best refuge. Sealed tight.

They passed the prefab door and Davis found the tracks that led out to the cold-house.

He fell to one knee and retched violently. His throat and lungs hurt. She crouched beside him.

“Shallow breaths,” he said.

“We won’t make it,” she said.

“We have to. We’re almost… We’re halfway there.”

He lifted her to her feet, struggling. He stepped forward, but she stayed. “It can help us,” she said. “I believe it. We can live with Sally.”

Davis looked back. Near the house, the storm warped around the squat black cone, which hovered a foot above the ground. The shape moved through the gale like an equal force of nature.

Reeda saw it too. “See. It can take us away.”

“No!” He grabbed her shoulders and turned her into the wind. Her hands went immediately to her face. “Reeda, I need you! You have to get to the cold-house.”

She looked at him. He turned her again. “Go!” he said.

Davis turned back. The whine and scrape of the wind filled his ears. The thing moved toward him, the shape of the storm changing around it. He let the wind throw him forward. His hair was slick and burned his neck and forehead.

The dark solid slowed as he neared it.

He felt it touch his mind. “You are Davis,” it said. The voice cut out the storm. Reeda’s face flashed, just as he had seen it a moment before. Livid and raw, her earlobes half eaten away.

“Leave her alone!” he yelled, and opened his eyes. He didn’t realize he had closed them. It floated inches before his thighs.

It tilted as if to go around. He threw himself onto it. It filled his gut; his shoulders fitted around it. He wrapped his arms under, holding desperately. His face, his hands–he could feel nothing but the dizzying vibrations.

“Leave her,” he said.

Like a burst dam, he remembered it all. Taking Sally into his arms in the hospital. The sweet sour smell of her skin, the wispy hair on her pink scalp. Reeda’s tears of joy. He could still feel Sally’s weight in his arms, and his heart ached. “Take me,” he cried.

A convulsion grabbed. Every sensation froze. Something flowed in his mind, in his head, dripping, winding like a worm, a coursing voltage.

“Reeda,” he gasped. “Go!”

A shock of cold. Like a drain suddenly pulled, everything rushed out. Himself.

* * *

My wife, Reeda, will tell you I’m a complainer. She thinks I’m stuck in my ways and can’t accept anything new, but my host looks after me, and, honest truth, I don’t complain. I’ve been here… . . . I don’t know how long. The house is nice. I like this bright room with the bay window and the rock garden outside. Sally’s crib is here.

There’s always a meal if I’m hungry. Tonight it was Ree-da’s black stew with apples. We take a stroll in the garden after dinner. They ask me to remember. The more I remember, the happier I can be. Some days she’s pregnant, sometimes her hair is short. She’s young tonight, wearing her uniform–number fourteen.

Reeda was good, you know. She kept playing at college. She didn’t go on a scholarship, but she made the team. She was proud of it, you could tell, the way she always perked up when somebody asked her. I tell her I wish–I was going to say, I wished I could have seen her play, but I did, just like in the photo. No, that’s not right, if it was in the photo, I never saw…

There are things I don’t understand. Everything flickers if I turn my head too quickly. Why don’t I ever see Sally? I hear her voice in the next room, but she’s never there. Some-times I think I died, but then, there’s Reeda, just the way I remember.

The other thing I don’t understand. I miss her. I miss her so much.

---

Peter Atwood is a writer and editor who lives and works in Ottawa, Canada, where he once grew up and to where he returned after living in Toronto, Seoul, and Cairo. He is an alumni of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, and his story “All In” (Weird Tales, 2008) was nominated for an Aurora (Canada’s SF awards).

I am you, and you are me. We haven’t met, but we will, in some months. Then again in a year. More frequently after that for a stretch, though it doesn’t last. Or perhaps we never meet. Or just that single time, which was (will be) both meteoric and ephemeral.

Except I remember that weekend and you don’t.

I remember them all. All the moments. Even the ones you forgot, and those which never happened. They are all here, in this one place in my mind (in your mind).

Our time together was (will be) catharsis for you, but I will fall in love, like a spaniel. The world cracked open the day we met (or another day, in another place), and we became one. We have always been (will always be) one. We stand in two places at once, two times, two dimensions. We are separate. But I am in your head, in my head.

We grew up on either end of the same street. We both had grapevines growing in our yards. (Have you heard?) Yours in front by the mailbox, ours hidden like a naughty secret next to the fence out back. We only had three blocks between us, go figure, but the road stretched all the way from Antioch to San Juan, spanning a continent, spanning the ocean, spanning a million, million miles. Or only a millimeter.

It took too long for us to find each other. (Sometimes we never do. Sometimes it is too soon.) Once we had, we were inseparable. Except when we fought. Or never meet.

You always walked the difference between our houses, even though the hill between us was almost too steep to climb. I rode horseback (or drove a car) even though going to you is always downhill. Maybe it wasn’t laziness. Maybe it was precognitive thought–(Photons in two places at once, two times, two different dimensions, two heads, two minds, two hearts. Twins, inseparable even apart.)–the truth already, so subtle, so soon, so obvious.

Maybe it’s only common sense, the knowledge that once I’d gone downhill to find you, I’d have to return the way I’d come, and that hill was always too steep to climb.

Sometimes we met (will meet) in the middle. Halfway up the hill for you, halfway down for me. We’ll sit in the gutter next to the mailbox with the ugly plastic flowers zip-tied to its flag. (I stole one of those flowers, sun-yellowed and cracking, once when you were gone. Maybe you never noticed, or maybe the flowers were bright and new when you looked at them. Maybe you stole one, too.)

Did you know, growing up, we went to the same school? I don’t think you ever saw me. I watched you in the hallways. We passed each other every day at 11:25 and again in the break between Chorus and Ancient Greek Sexuality. I sat in the back of the class, three seats behind you. Sometimes, if I strained my eyes hard enough, I could just make out what you were writing on your lapscreen.

It usually wasn’t notes for class. Sometimes it was porn. Sometimes it was poetry. Or a suicide note.

Once, I came to class stoned on a cocktail of weed and microdots and Corona Extra (with a twist of lime). No one seemed to notice, but you gave me a cock-eyed glance as I shuffled past your desk. I let myself trail fingertips across your papers, and you didn’t think I saw you blush. Paper feels like velvet when you’re stoned.

One day you will ask me to tell you what it’s like to find your future (faith/destiny) in tarot cards or chemicals or the variations of oscillation in ceiling fans. Jesus loves you as much as your light fixture.

Of course, back then neither of us knew what I was seeing (would see/never saw). Neither of us understood. Those were daydreams or flights of fancy. (Nightmares.) Maybe. When everything happens at once, when everything could happen, when everything will happen, everything becomes equal. Potentials are realized. Negated. Equated.

I don’t like to think on it too much. Better to dwell on the happy moments, for they are infinitely equal to the unhappy ones. Infinitely better. (Infinitely worse.)

The first time I kissed you, we were in front of our old house. The house at the bottom of the hill. (Uphill in both directions back then. Now. Tomorrow.) I remember tonguing over your braces and worrying that we might get stuck together.

We only kissed. I didn’t want to share my bed with you. (Or my head with you.)

Much later (or on some other visit), you made a pallet on the floor beside me and spent the night. I dreamed I caused the apocalypse, gave birth to the antichrist, or learned to split photons with my mind (Option D: All of the above?), and you held me while I told you what I’d seen in those dreams. You said you never dreamed. I tried to open your eyes, but you couldn’t put yourself in my place. I wish I could make you understand.

There’s so much you don’t see (won’t ever see/haven’t seen yet). How is it that we are the same, but so different? Sometimes we can’t even speak the same language.

And yet, we talk for hours when we finally meet, filling up the space with words. You drive us to the lake (the caldera on top of the volcano/the dollar theatre double-feature/your house). Just off the edge of the lake is a small island, hardly more than a sandbar really. The water between the two shores comes halfway up my thighs. I hold my skirt up to keep it dry and you carry my shoes. Your pants are soaked through all the way to the crotch, but you don’t complain. There’s a wide plank-swing on the island, hanging between two trees. I thought we’d sit on it together to talk but, instead, I sit on it and you push me. We say only two words during the entire night.

“Higher?”

“No.” (Or “Yes.”)

We don’t kiss that night because I am so intimidated by you. You take me home when it’s too dark to see the stars. And then I’m with you two years later (last week). We are making out in your basement. When we come up for air, you take me to look at your paintings, and I accidentally kick over a cup of dirty mineral spirits, ruining the rug. For many years, the stain will look like spilled blood.

Our relationship dissolved after that (except sometimes it fermented, cemented, or otherwise improved). I apologized, but it was too late. By that point, I’d already broken your lamp (knocked it over with my head when I rose up from kissing you) or backed your car into the security-light post in the parking lot at Swif-T-Mart.

“Don’t drive when you’re high (drunk/splitting photons/in a hypnotic trance). Just don’t.” I don’t drink. I don’t do drugs. I’m a straight-edge. It’s true.

That was the year I discovered how to be everything and nothing. You were the one who showed me how to alter my consciousness. You got me drunk on a bucket of frozen margaritas, then helped me outside when I couldn’t stop coughing from all the pot smoke. You showed me transcendental meditation. You showed me the power of prayer.

You showed me how to be in two places at once, two times, two minds. How to be here and there.

You showed me Jesus (Krishna/Buddha/The Invisible Pink Unicorn). You tripped me and I hit my head. Or I tripped you and you hit your head. Or we were both dreaming. (I thought you said you never dreamed.) All our life (lives/past lives) passed in the flash that occurred during the moment right before our death.

One of us looked into a scrying mirror. One of us learned time travel (quantum mechanics/psychomancy/telepathy). One of us learned that photons exist in two places at once, or two times at once, and we learned to split them and share them with you, with me, with each other. One of us fell into a black hole.

Do you remember? So much happened between us in no time at all. Time did not exist for us. It’s overwhelming.

I say, “I think I’m going to throw up.”

“That’s okay. You’re in the bathtub. It’ll wash down the drain.”

It didn’t.

“You’ll see,” you said, “Chemicals don’t change people.” (Or maybe you said, “Time travel is impossible.” Or “I can control your mind with my psychic powers.”)

But it wasn’t true.

Chemicals changed you. We both had psychic powers. You invented a time machine, and I used it.

In school I sat beside you, one row closer to the door. You smelled like watermelon lip gloss. We were fifteen and sixteen, and I still wanted to kiss you but wasn’t brave enough. Besides, you had a boyfriend who wore heavy metal T-shirts and smoked cigarettes.

The second time I kissed you (the first time) we were at Caitlín’s pool party just after we’d graduated from high school (elementary school/rehab). My very first kiss with anyone, ever. You had a different boyfriend every week, back then. Someone discovered how easy it was to play Spin the Bottle in a swimming pool with a plastic two-liter bottle half-filled with water. We held our breath and kissed where no one could see us.

When I am everywhere and nowhere, I revisit that moment. I hold you under the water. My eyes were open; yours are closed. Air bubbles cling to your lashes, and you put your hand on my breast. I taste your wintergreen breath-spray and the chlorine in the pool.

I once tried to tell you about that kiss. A hundred million times I’ve tried to tell you about that kiss in the pool, but you never remember, and you never believe me. I don’t know why I keep trying to remind you.

It’s okay. I remember. I remember you rescuing me. I remember calling you to come over to my apartment and sit with me when I couldn’t stand reality. How many times did you let me stay with you when I had no other place to go? (Where can you run to when you are everywhere and nowhere?)

When you moved away, I thought my heart would break forever. I never wrote you letters, but you wrote back anyway. You wrote me replies to questions I never asked you. When the Internet was invented we had secret liaisons on GEnie. You sent me poetry.

Once, you showed me my letters. I did not remember writing them. Once, I showed you a poem you sent me. You said you’d never seen it, hadn’t sent it. Both were only echoes, slipping across reality.

Sometimes, we never met at all. Sometimes we meet while you are away at college. I fly out to see you. We make love in the airport, and the world ignites in apocalypse while we bring each other to orgasm in a bathroom stall. We are frantic, as if we know with certainty that we only have a few moments left together.

“I love you,” I whisper. It echoes off the bathroom walls, and old women powdering their noses can hear us in the stall. I can smell their rosewater perfume even over the cleaning chemicals and urine.

“I love you more,” you say. “I love you a hundred times more.”

“That’s impossible. I love you to infinity.”

We are silent, both pondering the possibilities inherent in that statement. (“I hate you.”/”Don’t know you.”)

You ask the impossible question, the question that begins and ends everything.

“What does that mean? What is love to the infinite power?”

“I think it’s like a wavefunction. An uncollapsed wavefunction,” I say, but I don’t even know what that means, really. I was never any good at theoretical physics. (In another instance/timeline/universe, I don’t reply.)

“You don’t love me at all.”

“Don’t you believe in God? (Allah?/Zeus?/The Flying Spaghetti Monster?)” I say. I’m crouched with my feet up on the commode, in case airport security comes through. Men can be arrested for sharing a bathroom stall in an airport. “God is infinite. God is in everything, even a ceiling fan. God loves you.” (Or maybe, I talked about physics, instead–and the practical applications of the infinite.)

“I don’t believe in God. I’m an existentialist. I am God.” (Or maybe, we discuss alchemy, or paradoxes.)

“Then I am you,” I say, “and you are me, and I love you infinitely.”

“And you do not love me at all.”

I couldn’t argue.

What is infinity? Surely it is more than nothing? Isn’t it? I rest my cheek on your cheek. You kiss me again for the first time, and there is paper (a pill/a microchip) on your tongue (or a love note in your hand), but now it is on my tongue (in my hand).

I love you, like a puppy, and you don’t love me at all. But you are me, and I am you. We love each other just enough, and not too much. We are strangers, and we are the same person. We are crazy more than we are sane. Again and again, or only once, (or never) we make the wrong choice/the right choice. When every moment in our life is singular, there is no choice.

We are Love, infinite.

---

Terra was born on top of a volcano (in Hawaii) and since then has crammed a lot of unusual experiences into a relatively short number of years. She tamed a wild mustang before she turned sixteen. Before twenty-five, she traveled throughout the U.S. and to parts of Europe and Mexico. She has also held some unusual jobs, like training llamas and modeling high-heeled shoes (though not at the same time!) At her current day job she pokes holes in people for a small fee, in a tattoo studio north of Atlanta.

“Shrödinger’s Pussy” is her first published short story. You can find her online at www.terralemay.com.

This month’s audio production comes courtesy of Naomi Libicki (author) and Alethea Kontis (reader).

Download in MP3 format.

Click to listen.

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Miker drove our fire engine through the dark neighborhood, the red emergency lights flash-synching to the deep bass of the rumbler siren. Parked cars and flower gardens and mailboxes flashed by, illuminated for seconds before sliding back to night. We used to turn the siren off on quiet streets like these to avoid disturbing the peaceful, sleeping taxpayers. Not anymore. Now we wanted everyone to know there were still those who braved the darkness.

But bravery didn’t mean we were stupid. While Miker steered, the rest of us aimed spotlights all around, jumping burn-deep shadows off everything we passed. As we entered one intersection Karl, the probie four months out of the fire academy, yelled, “Ripper!” For a moment we saw it–a black line reaching with stick arms. But then the ripper shifted and we realized it was only a tree’s shadow, cast by a front porch spotlight.

Karl muttered, “My bad.” While everyone had made the same mistake at some point, Miker grumbled, “Rookie,” from the front seat and we laughed.

The laughing stopped when we reached the fire.

“It’s fully involved,” Miker said. We stared out the engine’s large windows. Only three months ago, we rarely encountered fully involved house fires because someone would call 911 at the first sight or smell of fire. Now no one went out at night, and fires too often grew massive before people noticed.

“A guy’s hanging out the third floor window,” Karl said. “He has a kid in his arms.”

I cursed. Karl reached for the door handle.

“Do not open that door!” our squad leader, Lt. Helen Stivers, ordered.

Karl looked like he wanted to argue–hell, we all did–but we knew she was right. Helen had that weird mix of caring and kick-ass attitude found in all great leaders. During her three decades with the division, a few macho-cocky firefighters had defied her orders, but never twice. She’d once smashed a disobedient firefighter across the face with a tire iron. None of us would go against her.

“Forty-five seconds, boys,” Helen said calmly, stating how long it took our engine’s booms and remote spotlights to properly deploy. Once arrayed, the lights made it difficult for shadows to exist in our field of operation. “Keep a good watch,” she ordered.

So we searched for rippers. Our spotlights star-brighted the neighborhood until the fire receded to a dull glow, as if cowering before our power. Lights also shone in the houses around us, showcasing people peeking from behind the security blankets of curtains and blinds. In the house across the street, a picture window framed a pink-robed woman kneeling in prayer.

“The guy’s screaming,” Karl whispered, stating the obvious as all rookies did. I looked at the dying man, sickness gagging my throat. Helen counted the seconds out loud–fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen–steeling our nerves and hers–as the superheated air boiling out the window cooked the man alive.

To the man’s credit, he didn’t let go of the little girl, holding her clear so the heat and smoke couldn’t reach her. After a final pleading glance at us, the man’s strangled face disappeared completely into the smoke. Only his arms hung down from the spewing clouds, like an unknown god debating whether to spare the girl’s life.

“Twenty-nine, thirty, damn it, we can’t wait,” Helen yelled. “Go!”

Karl opened the door and we sprinted toward the house. The man’s grip had weakened so he barely held the screaming girl. She was small, a toddler, and Karl and I held out our hands to catch her. But, as she fell, the tall blackness of a ripper rose from the ground beside us, protected from our spotlights by the barest sliver of a tree’s shadow. The damn thing had been waiting, hoping the man would drop the girl through its dark rip in space.

Trusting Karl to catch the girl, I flipped on my portable spotlight and illuminated the ripper. For a split second I saw another world through the ripper’s body–a surreal scene of darkness upon darkness, of shadow creatures slipping here and there screaming unknown obscenities and begging for my soul. Then the combined illumination from my spotlight and the engine’s lights overwhelmed the ripper and it singled out to nothing.

When I turned to Karl, he held the crying girl in his arms. She pushed away from his face, more afraid of his protective gear than the fire or ripper. I glanced up at the man’s down-slung body as Helen and Miker grabbed a ladder to try and save him.

He was dead by the time we reached him.

After we’d extinguished the fire and sent the girl to the hospital, Helen told Karl he’d done good. Karl kept glancing at the dead man’s sheet-covered body. Helen slugged the rookie in the arm to distract him.

“Least he didn’t get sucked into that ripper’s hell,” Karl muttered. “That’s gotta be worse than burning alive.”

As the wind shifted and blew across the sheeted man, carrying the greasy whiff of cooker-burnt meat, I prayed Karl was right.

* * *

After my shift, I arrived home to discover my sixteen-year-old daughter Sammy slumped on the sofa, watching the news on her reader. I leaned over to hug her, but she shot a scowl which stopped my arms in mid reach.

She held up her reader with a disdainful flick of her wrist, showing me the video of the fire and ripper. Obviously one of the neighbors had filmed us last night.

“The man’s name was Aaron Wills,” Sammy said in the word-flattening voice she’d adopted since her mother was taken. “His wife was staying across town helping a sick relative. Their daughter’s in Children’s Hospital. Expected to recover.”

“He was a brave man,” I said. “You have to honor courage like that.”

Sammy snorted, like she did anytime I mentioned an emotion or ideal not grounded in pure cynicism. For a moment I stared at her and didn’t see her close-cropped hair–sheared off in the bathroom by her own hand–or the black ripper tattoo on her cheek–reaching for her right eye as if to pull her sight into another dimension. Instead, I saw Sammy as she’d been at nine, the girl with flowing red hair whom I’d tickle until she laughed tears from her eyes. The girl who hugged me in a tight python grip before each shift, and always kissed my cheek as she whispered to be careful.

Now such love seemed beyond her. As if to taunt me, Sammy muttered how I should have let the ripper take the girl.

I couldn’t believe she’d say that. “Why?”

“She’d have ended up doing something worthwhile with her life.”

“And you know this…”

“A friend told me.”

I groaned. If Sammy had spent the night talking to a ripper, I was going to get an earful from my mother-in-law.

* * *

I got an earful.

Turned out my mother-in-law had caught Sammy talking to the ripper outside her bedroom window. Scared Arlene silly, seeing that monster in the backyard, Sammy grinning at it from the window like some idiot-struck firebug.

I tried telling Arlene not to worry. The ripper had appeared in our backyard for the last two weeks, but I’d installed spotlights outside Sammy’s windows, which kept the damn thing several yards from the house. However, Arlene had no patience with my ideas of safety. “Never your fault, is it?” she asked, tired razor-eyes slicing my words to ribbons. “What’s your plan? Let the damn things take your whole family?”

I tensed, the exhausted part of me screaming to beat the crap out of her. But instead of giving in to anger, I took a deep breath as I looked at Arlene’s tired face and saw my wife’s. Or, I saw what Carie would have looked like in another two decades if we’d been allowed to grow old together. Red hair turned grey. Thin bones and muscles etched with strength and determination.

Arlene and I both knew Sammy’s morbid fascination with the rippers resulted from her mother being killed by one. Well, not killed. Disappeared. Transformed. Whatever you called the painful things those creatures did to those they took.

When Sammy had first talked to the ripper outside her window, I feared she’d let it in. For some reason, rippers only appeared when there was no light, and they wouldn’t cross the simplest of barriers, whether a shut door, a closed glass window, or even a tent’s fabric. They wouldn’t follow ventilation shafts or bends and curves inside buildings, almost as if they were truly shadows which couldn’t leave the path of whatever blocked their invisible light.

Some people said rippers didn’t enter our houses out of a minor respect for humanity. Others searched for a scientific reason. But in the end, all that mattered was if you left a door open at night, or a window cracked more than a hair, a ripper might reach in and steal you away.

With such devils outside our homes, it’s a wonder anyone slept at all. Even during the day, everyone looked numb and scared. Few worked their jobs anymore. Instead, people rushed out by day to find food and supplies, and rushed back home before night fell.

I thanked Arlene for watching Sammy. Arlene sniffed and apologized for being so angry–”It’s just the tired speaking,” she said–and walked to her car.

“My fault,” Sammy droned from the sofa after Arlene had driven away. “You said not to act weird while Gramie was here. ‘Act weird.’ Your words.”

I winced at the accusation. Instead of taking her bait, I told Sammy not to worry about her grandmother. “She simply misses your mom.”

If I expected Sammy to say she also missed her mother, that was expecting too much from my emotionally disconnected teenage daughter. Sammy stared at me blankly before returning to her reader.

Unable to handle any more drama, I walked to my room, closed the door, and fell into bed to cry.

* * *

I’d met my wife two decades back. Carie was a successful artist who painted beautiful illustrations for children’s books. She also spent her weekends volunteering as a rural firefighter. Her tiny department responded to car crashes and brush fires thirty minutes outside the city.

One night my department was called to assist Carie’s. We arrived at a full-gone warehouse fire to see Carie dragging a fellow firefighter overcome by heat. I’ll never forget the sight of that determined woman–red hair crowding her facemask as she dragged a man twice her size to the ambulance.

After we beat down the fire, Carie and I talked. Carie said when she wasn’t volunteering with her department, she worked as a freelance artist. “My last book was Boo Boo Gets a Choo Choo,” she’d said, wiping sweat and black soot from her face.

How could you not love someone like that?

Because of Carie’s experience, she understood the dangers and stresses of my job. Where another spouse might have worried about my safety, Carie waved it off. In fact, I worried far more about her volunteer work than she ever did about me.

The rippers stole her on the night they’d first appeared. She’d been on a routine medical call, walking toward a house where a child had broken his arm, when a ripper appeared. Carie vanished before her squad could react. All they heard were her screams echoing from nothingness as the ripper tore and twisted her body and soul into things they were never meant to be.

I still wonder about the hell she was stolen away to.

I pray it’s a nice place.

* * *

I cried until I fell asleep, and woke in the late afternoon. To my surprise, Sammy wasn’t in her room or the backyard. Instead, I found her in the basement studio, painting on my wife’s smart canvas. I almost yelled to get away from the canvas, but caught myself. Carie didn’t need the computerized art system anymore, and if Sammy was still interested in painting, I should encourage her.

I walked over to see what she was painting, but Sammy raised her hand to stop. All through Sammy’s youth, Carie had spent hours each week painting with our daughter. Sammy had always kept her paintings a secret until they were finished, at which point she’d reveal her work with a dramatic flourish of her hands. I smiled at the memory, and assumed she was about to do this again.

Instead, I heard a computerized click, followed by the stylized swish of the canvas’ trash being deleted. Sammy yanked the memory sliver from the canvas’ control board and threw it to the floor, crushing its crystal shape beneath her right boot.

I screamed, and shoved her away from the canvas. Part of me heard Sammy hit the basement wall, but I didn’t care. I touched the smart canvas with my finger, pulling up the memory. Where before there had been hundreds of paintings created by Carie and my daughter, now there were none.

“What did you do?” I asked, my body shaking. That’s when I noticed Sammy’s nose bleeding from hitting the wall. Ever my daughter, she stood up as if she didn’t hurt, smirking at my anger.

“It’ll be over soon,” she said nonchalantly, wiping her bloody nose with the back of her hand. Her blood sparkled starry highlights in the smart canvas’ blue light.

“What’ll be over? Your painting?”

“The rippers. They’ll only be here a few more weeks.”

I remembered my daughter’s talks with the ripper outside her window. I chuckled nervously.

Sammy walked up the stairs, leaving me with the blank canvas. I tapped the controls and accessed the recovery program Carie had installed after a crash had deleted one of her paintings. The canvas began rebuilding what was left of its remaining memory as I climbed the stairs to tell Sammy dinner would be ready in a half hour.

* * *

Our department ran on modified Kelly schedule, meaning I worked forty-eight hours straight with four days off. Even though I always slept soundly in a noisy firehouse, at home I couldn’t rest. Every few hours I’d obsessively pace the house, making sure the windows and doors were closed tight.

Some time well after midnight I passed Sammy’s door and heard her whispering. I didn’t wish to disturb her privacy. But I also needed to apologize for what had happened in the basement.

I knocked on the door, which creaked open. “Sammy, I wanted to…” I stopped, fear slamming the words from my mind. The spotlights I’d rigged outside Sammy’s room were off, and her window stood wide open with a ripper filling half her room. Its flat body hovered like a shadow swollen on pain.

I grabbed Sammy, hoping to throw her into the hallway before the ripper took her. But instead of taking my daughter, the ripper inhaled deeply–for lack of a better word–and sucked its shadow back out the window. For a fleeting moment I saw the ripper’s portal. Saw its light-gone world, where shadow nightmares flickered and howled–creatures which my body felt more than saw. Then the ripper was gone.

I slammed the window and latched it shut. Sammy turned the bedroom lights on as the worst shakes since Carie’s abduction hit me.

Fury ran Sammy’s face. “You dumb asshole,” she screamed, kicking me hard. “That was mom.”

“Carie?” I stammered. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Sammy looked at me like I was slow, and maybe I was. “That ripper is mom,” she said. “Or what’s left of mom, after the rippers changed her.”

“Sammy, it’s trying to trick you. It wants to snatch you away.”

Sammy kicked her bedroom wall, leaving a dent in the plaster. She took a deep breath to calm herself. “Do you know why rippers take people?”

I waited for Sammy to say what she knew. After all, why rippers kidnapped people was the only question worth asking in today’s world.

“Well?” I finally asked.

“Well, what?”

“Why do they take people?”

Sammy giggled. “You’ll just have to find out.”

That made no sense, like so many of my conversations with Sammy since her mother had disappeared. In my mind I laughed, I cried, I screamed. I wanted to embrace her in a massive hug until some sense entered her mind–to tell her it wasn’t her fault or mine that her mother was gone. But I also knew that to Sammy, everything she said made perfect sense, which only frustrated me even more.

I looked out the window. The ripper had disappeared back into the dark. I also noticed both outside spotlights lying on the ground. Sammy must have knocked them down after opening her window.

I told Sammy to leave the bedroom light on until morning so the ripper wouldn’t return. Sammy bit her lower lip. “I suppose you’re mad,” she said.

“You suppose?”

Sammy sighed. “Mom wouldn’t hurt me. She simply misses me.”
I hugged her gently and told her to go to bed. As I walked down the hall to my bedroom, I heard Sammy say in her soft, low voice, “I can’t be here forever, you know.”

I didn’t know if she was still talking to me, or if she was muttering at the ripper again. But I didn’t stop to find out.

* * *

By the start of my next shift, Arlene had gotten a few good nights sleep and was in a better mood. “It’s not the lack of sleeping that burns me,” Arlene said. “It’s the stress of knowing those things are out there–and that Sammy doesn’t realize how dangerous they are.”

I thanked her for all she’d done for me and Sammy, and showed her the key locks I’d installed on all the windows so Sammy couldn’t open them. Arlene seemed satisfied by that, and said she’d see me when my shift was over.

At the fire station, Miker, Karl, and Helen sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee. I told them about the ripper, and how Sammy had opened a window for it. The only thing I left out was that Sammy believed the ripper was Carie.

“Sammy’s lucky,” Helen said. “Most rippers, they get a shot at someone, they take it.”

“I know. But I keep thinking about what Sammy said, that this ripper wouldn’t hurt her. You ever hear of a ripper taking a special interest in someone? I mean, Sammy’s been talking to the damn thing for weeks.”

Helen lowered her voice. “One of my friends is high up in the FBI. She told me there have been quite a few cases of rippers talking with people. The problem is: these people eventually jump into the ripper. So while most rippers are content to simply steal people, a few want to talk you into doing the deed.”

Miker and Karl nodded knowingly, as if the two idiots hadn’t been as clueless as me. From the limited interactions scientists had with rippers, we knew they were intelligent. But actually conversing with them was difficult. Most rippers wouldn’t speak, and those few who did rarely made sense, sometimes claiming to be friends and family, sometimes spinning lies as easily as truth. Sort of like when Sammy and I talked about anything deeper than what I was cooking for supper. Half the time we didn’t understand what the other was truly saying.

Karl, being a typical probie and needing to be the center of attention, mentioned a neighbor who’d been taken a few days back. “People heard his screams up and down the block. What makes a person scream like that?”

We all shrugged. Whatever the rippers did to people, it hurt like hell.

“I think rippers have been here before,” Helen said. “That’s why our religions have so many depictions of devils and hells.”

“Nonsense,” Miker said. “Hell’s a place of fire, not darkness.”

This was too much for me to ponder. “Maybe I should put more spotlights in my backyard.”

“False security,” Helen said. “There’s always going to be shadows those things can hide in.”

“But why are they doing this?” Karl asked.

Helen muttered how better people than us had failed to understand the rippers’ motives. Before she could say more, the fire bell rang, pushing our minds onto nothing but work.

* * *

During the day, the runs felt like old times. Car accidents. Heart attacks. False alarms at the few schools still open. But as the sun sank and the civilians rushed home, the fire station lost its timelessness and became a great smoldering stack of now. We closed the front doors. Flipped on the spotlights. The station beamed like the heart of the sun, illuminating several city blocks in our false security of hope.

I think if people could, we’d light the whole world so there’d no longer be night. But light can’t remove every shadow.

There were no calls during the next few hours. Feeling daring, I opened the station’s side door and stepped outside. As my eyes adjusted to the spotlights, I noticed a tiny sliver of shadow between two parked cars on the street. Holding my hand before my eyes like a shield, I walked toward the cars. Sure enough, the shadow there squirmed and quaked as a ripper tried in vain to reach me. The ripper smelled of musk and sandalwood, like the incense my wife used to burn while painting.

“Carie?” I asked.

The ripper floated around its box of shadow as the word Yes caressed my mind, a word mixed with the sensation of Carie hugging me tight. I wanted so badly to reach in and touch the ripper, to find out if it was really her. But I knew the ripper was merely trying to trick me.

“Why don’t you like the light?” I asked, leaning over for a closer look. “Why don’t you enter our homes?”

The ripper merely stared–if a faceless shadow can stare–before opening the portal to its world. As always, the ripper world was pure darkness but, while my eyes couldn’t see anything, my mind saw all too clearly. I watched helplessly as a woman fell through the ripped dark–red hair blowing, her screams building louder and louder as a thousand cutting shadows sliced in and out of her skin, twisting and tearing her to pieces. As a vomit taste slicked my mouth, I realized this was Carie. This was what had happened to the woman I loved when the rippers stole her away.

But Carie wasn’t dead. As the ripper caressed my mind, I felt my wife’s lips on my own. Why don’t you and Sammy join me? she asked softly, her thoughts merging with mine. I miss you something bad.

I stumbled back, falling to the sidewalk as the ripper squirmed to escape its shadow prison. My legs wouldn’t work–except to run toward Carie, to join her in darkness. Ignoring my wife’s haunting needs, I crawled away, each inch and foot a battle to reach as Carie begged me to join her–the imagined smell and feel of her body beside mine smothering my every rational thought. Finally, I reached the firehouse door and crawled inside, slamming it shut as I shook and cursed.

* * *

Unfortunately, Helen happened upon me a few moments later and instantly knew I’d had a close call with a ripper. After letting me move past my shakes, she blessed me out, yelling that I’d better not be on some suicide trip. “You will not put this squad in danger,” she warned.

“I won’t,” I said. “I was just curious about the damn things.”

“And did you learn anything?” she asked sarcastically. I remembered her comment about better people than us not knowing what the rippers wanted. When I didn’t answer–not daring to mention that my wife might now be a ripper–Helen walked away shaking her head, obviously irritated.

Once I was alone, I called Arlene to check on Sammy. Arlene said Sammy had already gone to bed, even though it was barely ten o’clock. I thanked my mother-in-law, and told her I’d swing by the house in the morning. While I didn’t mention it to Arlene, I wanted to talk with Sammy about this ripper. About whether or not it might truly be Carie.

The entire squad felt squirrelly that night, so around midnight we boarded our engine and drove the traffic-emptied streets, the only vehicles we passed, an occasional police car or ambulance. We responded to a heart attack call shortly after 2 a.m., but otherwise the night was quiet.

We were driving back to the station when Sammy called my cell phone. It was strange for Sammy to call in the middle of the night; more so when she didn’t speak. I listened to the silent phone and heard crickets chirping and the wind blowing. Then my mother-in-law screamed, “Get away from her!”

They were outside. I knew from the shiver which ran along my nerves that Sammy had gone outside to talk to that damn ripper.

Helen asked what was wrong. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t say what I knew. “My house,” I gagged. Helen motioned for Miker to crank the lights and sirens as we raced to my neighborhood.

“Don’t be mad, Dad,” Sammy whispered over the receiver. Her phone hit the ground. I heard my little girl scream in horrible pain, a sound which echoed far longer than any parent should ever be forced to hear it.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, even though Sammy was no longer listening. “I’m on my way.”

We arrived to find my mother-in-law crying on the front lawn, oblivious to the dangers around her. We lit the scene and I asked where Sammy was. Arlene pointed to the grass beside my boots.

There lay Sammy’s cell, the line still open and connected to my phone.

* * *

How do you grieve for those who might be dead, or might be alive? Who might return, or might never be seen again?

Helen told me to take all the family leave I needed, but there was nothing for me at home but tears for a daughter and a wife whom I prayed still lived on the ripper’s dark-hell world.

Arlene told me she’d checked on Sammy in the middle of the night and found her asleep. She’d then gone to the bathroom, at which point Sammy ran outside to talk to the ripper. Arlene chased her, but the ripper only wanted Sammy.

I told Arlene it wasn’t her fault, but she didn’t believe me. After she’d gone home, I wandered my empty house, feeling Sammy’s lingering presence. Her bed covers turned down. The slight indention from her head on the pillow.

In the basement art studio, the smart canvas glowed its usual blue light. A message said the retrieval system had recovered the last painting viewed, probably whatever Sammy had been looking at before she’d deleted and destroyed everything else.

My finger hovered over the ‘view’ button, but I couldn’t handle the past right now. I told the canvas to save the painting and walked back upstairs.

At the start of the next shift I returned to the fire station, grateful to be around my only remaining family.

* * *

The next two weeks passed with numbing speed. Helen kept a close watch on me, afraid I’d go suicidal, and to my shock I considered it. On night-time runs, I obsessively watched the rippers flickering just beyond our spotlights. I found myself edging toward the damn things, wondering if I had the guts to follow my family. Wondering if Carie and Sammy were among the rippers prowling around us.

To keep me safe, Helen stuck me with routine tasks like manning the apparatus controls. She and the squad also refused to leave me alone for even a few minutes.

Then came the shelter fire.

The fire broke out in an abandoned megastore converted to a shelter for people with nowhere to escape the rippers. Because it was night, the people inside were afraid to leave the building, even with the fire beating down on them. They stampeded to rooms not filled with smoke and flames and waited for us to save them.

We were the second engine to arrive. After setting up our spotlights, Helen ordered Miker and Karl to enter an emergency door and do a quick check. Less than a minute later, they dragged two young men out.

“We heard more people yelling,” Karl said as the EMTs began working on the victims.

Helen glanced at me, trying to decide if I was together enough to risk going into the building. “Okay, we four go in, find as many people as we can, get them out.”

Karl and Miker nodded and walked back in. Helen checked my air supply and facemask and muttered, “Don’t screw us up.” I breathed a cool swallow of bottled air and followed her in.

The billowing smoke was so thick I couldn’t see. I heard myself breathing, always breathing, and heard the roar of the fire, a raspy Sammy, Sammy which boomed louder and louder the deeper we walked. Just when I thought we wouldn’t find anyone, a faint cry echoed across me. I grabbed Helen and pulled her toward the sound. We entered a new room to find five people huddled beside an emergency exit. They crouched against the tile floor, breathing what little good air was left.

Helen reached for the emergency door release, but one of the women stopped her. “Rippers,” the woman yelled. “Just outside. They already got one of us.”

Helen waved me closer as she radioed in our position and situation. The smoke was building, the heat rising. This spot wouldn’t be safe much longer. “We can’t take them back through all that smoke,” Helen yelled.

I pushed against the door release to test it, opening it slightly and closing it again. “We wait,” I yelled. “Let them bring spotlights to this side of the building.”

But waiting is hard with hell screaming over your shoulder. We passed our facemasks around, letting the men and women take turns breathing clean air. But the smoke built up more and more, and the fire burned nearer and nearer. The spotlights still hadn’t reached our door when an explosion knocked us to our feet. A flash of flame washed over us, and smoke filled the entire room.

“We go now!” Helen yelled as she grabbed a woman beside her. One of the men screamed that he’d take his chances here, but I pulled him to his feet and aimed my spotlight at the door. Helen kicked the door open and we pushed the five people out as we shone our lights around, looking for rippers.

“Stay close,” I yelled as we coughed in the chilled outside air. Each tree and bush and blade of grass cast a flickering sliver of dark. An engine’s spotlights sliced the smoke from around the corner of the building, barely a hundred feet away.

“Go!” Helen yelled. We ran for the light, Helen in the lead, me bringing up the rear and pushing the scared people along. A tall woman ran next to Helen and, as we neared the spotlights, I saw she had red hair. But even as such a worthless detail registered in my mind, the woman disappeared, the barest shimmer of a ripper standing in her place. Her screams echoed across the dark empty all around.

“Get away,” one of the men yelled. He panicked, slamming me against the side of the building, my helmet hitting hard on the cinderblock wall. I collapsed–dazed–as the man bolted across the shadowed night and fell into another ripper. I again saw a glimpse of that dark world as the man begged for mercy. Then Helen stood before my face and pulled me up.

The other two men and one woman we’d been trying to rescue stayed with us, and Helen placed them between us and our spotlights. She talked the civilians through their fear–”Just keep going, we’ve got you”–until her light crashed to the ground, a ripper vanishing from where Helen had stood. As I would have expected of Helen, she didn’t scream at whatever the ripper did to her. Only a single, pained groan floated through the air, followed by silence.

I threw my spotlight at the vanishing ripper. “Go ahead,” I yelled. “Take me.”

A greater dark rose before my face, ripping space and time into whispers and tastes–the roar of the fire becoming Carie’s body beside my own, the fire engines’ comforting flashing lights becoming Sammy’s final cry as the ripper stole her away. As my world disappeared into the ripper’s darkness, my arms and legs tore into base strings of muscle. My throat spasmed once before being pulled through my mouth even as it refused to stop screaming. The ripper giggled, and I suddenly knew the worst was yet to come. It would merge our souls. Me into it, and it into me. Worse, the bastard would never stop laughing at what it’d done to me.

And then, just like that, the pain disappeared.

I remained partly inside the ripper, it in me, but the perverted amusement I’d felt moments before was gone. Instead, my daughter’s monotone voice whispered, “It’s okay, Dad.”

The ripper seemed irritated at this interruption and tried to dispose of Sammy. But Sammy merely flicked herself from wherever she was and appeared alongside me in the ripper. For a moment the ripper’s consciousness screamed before it was absorbed by Sammy–just like the ripper had been trying to do to me.

I fell to my knees, unable to understand what was going on. I was split between two worlds. I distantly felt the three people I’d been trying to save, who huddled around my body back on earth. But I also floated in a world I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Darkness surrounded me. My eyes were worthless, even as I saw millions of shadows circling and laughing and tearing into one another with wild abandon.

“I’m one of them,” Sammy said, both of us sharing the ripper’s body. “Mom promised I’d be with her if I came here.”

And just like that, my wife’s consciousness appeared in the ripper with me and Sammy. Carie hugged me, if I could say she still had arms to touch with. Instead, she and Sammy were ghosts, haunting the strange emptiness which was the ripper’s body.

Seeing I didn’t understand, they opened themselves to me.

I saw the rippers–ancient, powerful, their way of life completely alien to humanity. They traded consciousness the way we communicated words. Their shadow bodies were merely containers to hold an eternal parade of souls–souls which continually merged and changed with each interaction among the rippers. A strong consciousness might absorb a weaker, only to be enveloped by an even stronger soul moments later, and split into two new rippers the next second. But nothing was ever truly lost as the rippers merged and split and merged again.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Imagine we’re talking,” Sammy said. “Imagine human souls as simple words. Each time you spoke, your consciousness would go out, mixing with each person who heard you speak. As people repeated what you said, you’d continually be turned into something new. But you’d also remain. Changed. Different. But still partly you.”

I shook my head, vertigo shoving my mind as I felt a renewed vision of Carie and Sammy holding me. But this wasn’t the Carie and Sammy I remembered. I felt the hundreds of rippers which had already merged with them. While Carie and Sammy still loved me, they were also quite capable of tearing my soul to shreds for their own needs.

“You make it sound bad,” Carie whispered in her dream of a voice. “But it’s so simple: The rippers need an occasional infusion of new consciousness. This time they chose earth. It’s a true honor for humanity.”

“Honor?” I asked, shocked at these creatures which were no longer my wife and daughter. “Rippers steal people. Tear them to pieces. And you call that honor? It’s wrong! No other word. Wrong!”

Sammy giggled. “Wrong’s a human creation. Rippers don’t understand the concept.”

I screamed as Carie and Sammy dug into my soul, each licking different pieces of me, each tasting and deciding which parts to take into their own beings. I knew I should simply give in. That this would let me live with them forever. But instead, a familiar anger built in me. I kicked and bit and hit and yelled, a ghost fighting ghosts. Unable to tell if this was truly my body or merely an illusion, but still refusing to give in.

Carie and Sammy paused.

“You don’t want to be with us?” Carie asked, hurt by my decision. The anguish of tears formed in my eyes, but I knew that wasn’t my emotion. It was hers. Theirs.

“No,” I said. “I won’t live like this.”

I thought Carie would be angry with me, but she only laughed. She danced her mind through the air like her fingers used to fly across her magical canvases. But instead of creating colors and pictures, this time the rippers swirled to her motions, each oblivious to the changes the humans they’d stolen were making to their world. Carie dipped her being into a passing ripper. An echo of her soul lodged in the creature, which had been about to snag the scared woman who still clung to my body back on earth. The ripper released the woman and floated away, unsure why it now felt shame for the deed it’d almost done.

“This is art,” Carie said. “The deepest of arts.”

I remembered Carie sitting before the smart canvas in her studio, Sammy working at her side, and I was tempted to stay with them. So sorely tempted. But the Carie I loved would never have taken our daughter to a world like this. The Carie I knew was gone, and I didn’t like where what remained of her and Sammy were going.

“No,” I said again.

For the briefest of moments their souls locked together, swimming back and forth into each other, trading bits of themselves as they discussed my fate. Then Sammy, and Carie, kissed me on the cheek.

“We’ll miss you,” Sammy said, letting me see her a final time as the red-haired child hugging me before each shift.

Carie and Sammy stretched me and sewed me and stitched me back together before throwing me toward reality. I woke to find the people from the fire still huddled around me in fear. I stood them up and told them everything would be okay. I then led them toward the fire engine and the protection of its lights.

* * *

A few days later the rippers disappeared.

There are endless theories about what the rippers wanted, but I believe what Carie and Sammy had shown me. That the rippers are built for darkness. Are unable to tolerate even the faintest light shining into their world. But the idea that they didn’t enter our homes and buildings out of respect for us is bullshit. They did that because it made the hunt more fun. Granting an illusion of safety made us more afraid–and the more we feared, the more the rippers enjoyed feasting on our final moments of agony.

I refuse to accept the rippers’ belief that “wrong” is merely a human creation. Now that I’ve been to their world, I know their way of life is wrong. Absolutely wrong. Until I die I’ll scream this simple truth.

But maybe, just maybe, the rippers can be forced to change.

* * *

After returning home from fighting the shelter fire, I slept for two days. When I finally woke, I wandered into the basement, where the smart canvas glowed its gentle blue light.

I pulled up the single piece of art the canvas had recovered. It was a finger-painting of our family, created by Sammy when she was only six. Carie stood beside me–red hair down to her shoulders, her outsized-drawn hand holding my own. On the other side of me stood Sammy, a giant green grin touching both of her circle-face cheeks. Her cartoon hand also held mine.

I smiled, feeling echoing smiles from the remnants of Carie and Sammy now living inside me.

I wondered what Carie and Sammy would be like, years from now if the rippers ever returned. Maybe the art they hoped to create would actually work. Maybe we scared humans really could change the rippers. Maybe whatever remained of my wife and daughter would be the conscience which finally stopped the rippers from doing such evil.

Or maybe I’m lying to myself, afraid to see the truth of life.

Seeing no choice but to keep to my flicker of hope, I saved Sammy’s painting and shut off the canvas. I then walked back into the night to see if the station needed me to work an extra shift.

Originally published in Interzone 225

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Jason Sanford has published a number of stories in Interzone, including the novella “Sublimation Angels,” which was a finalist for this year’s Nebula Award for Best Novella. He is also a two-time winner of the Interzone Readers’ Poll. His fiction has also been printed in Analog, Year’s Best SF 14, Intergalactic Medicine Show, and Tales of the Unanticipated, while his story “When Thorns Are the Tips of Trees” was reprinted last year in Apex. His website is www.jasonsanford.com.

Say you’re lost in the hustle-bustle of the local farmer’s market in search of some shiny bibelot for your girlfriend, and you find your mother mouth-to-mouth with a man who isn’t your father. In fact, he’s nothing like your father. He’s skinny and shaggy and short. You tell yourself that if he at least looked like your father, you could stomach the scene. Deep down you know that’s not true.

And maybe that’s not how it happens. Maybe you track her down. Maybe you climb the fruitless mulberry in front of their house and that’s how you cut your leg. Maybe you bought yourself some night-vision goggles off of eBay. Maybe you’re watching and waiting, and when you finally do see them together, in their bedroom, naked, you drop a bomb of vomit onto an unsuspecting yard gnome below.

You think, Get your fucking hands off my mother.

But she’s not your mother, is she? She used to be. Before she moved in here. Before she changed her name. Before the funeral.

Say this was your mother, and this is your life. You’d be here too, like me. You’d hear about Porter from a friend of a friend, and you’d show up at his doorstep with a hundred bucks and a wrenching knot in your gut.

Porter opens the door. “Yeah?”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.

“You’re Hadley?” he says.

“Yeah.”

“All right. Come in.”

I follow him inside. My mind spins, but I still notice that his home is a shitty place. Every step, my feet crunch down on trash and squish on soggy carpet. Lines of duct tape patch a few holes in the wall, but most are left gaping. I stop breathing through my nose before I have time to identity the sour stench assaulting the air.

He takes me to an empty room. At this point, the walls are more hole than wall. Under more relaxed circumstances I would crack up over such irony as the tarp on the floor, but I’m more in the mood for weeping.

“You brought the money?” he says.

I nod and hand him the bill.

He gives it back. “Not until after.”

“Oh.”

He takes another look at the money. “That’s a hundred dollar bill, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen one before. In person, I mean.”

“Oh.” I stuff the thing in my pocket, almost violently.

“Should I get undressed?” he says, and starts for his belt.

“I’m not here for…that.”

“I know, man.” He grins. “Just some people like me naked when they’re doing it. I don’t mind either way.”

I consider this. “Keep your clothes.” Part of me, though, wants to give the other answer. The thought makes me shudder.

“Whatever floats your boat.” He kneels. “Whenever you’re ready.”

I take a step forward, and then pause. “Is this going to hurt you?”

“Fuck, man, what do you care?”

“I care.”

“You say that now. Let’s see if you ask me again in five minutes.”

“Maybe I’m not your normal clientele.”

He sighs. “No, we don’t feel much pain, so clear your fucking conscience.”

“Are you just telling me that or do you mean it?”

He runs his hand down his face. “Look, man. You can either do this or go home. But no one ever goes home, so just face the fucking music and get on with it.”

So I do.

I start off by slapping him hard across the face, and go from there. Five minutes later, I’m not asking, “Is this hurting you?”

Five minutes later, I’m straddling his chest, smashing in his mangled face with my bloody fists, over and over and over. He’s shouting, “Stop it!” and I’m loving every second of it.

* * *

Hafwen’s nickname is Zippy. She likes to skip and sing about the dishes as she’s washing them and write poetry on waterproof paper in the rain. She’ll call me up just to tell me that she’s discovered the name for those imprints left in the skin when you press it against a textured surface too long. A frittle.

So when I see her sitting cross-legged on my bed, motionless, not frowning, but not smiling either, I know something’s wrong.

I sit beside her and kiss her. “What’s up, Haf?”

She doesn’t look at me. “I have to tell you something.”

My insides erupt. I’m afraid.

I’m afraid her feelings for me were just a frittle in her heart and now she wants to end what we have before I even have the chance to tell her I love her.

“Tell me,” I say. I try to sound brave, but I fail.

“My mom,” she says. “She’s a Remade-American.”

“Oh,” I say. “I didn’t know Cambree wasn’t your real mom.”

“No, Hadley. Cambree is my real mom. She’s a Remade-American.”

“Oh God…I’m so sorry. When did this happen? I saw her last week.”

“No, Hadley. She was a Remade since before she married my dad.”

“Oh.”

“I’m a Remade, Hadley.”

“But…” I can’t think of anything else to say except, “You don’t look like one of them.”

“One of them?”

“I’m sorry. I…”

She looks at me now. “I should’ve told you before we started going out, but…I liked you so much. I wanted you to get to know me first before you…you know…decided.”

“Oh.”

“I told myself that I wasn’t lying to you, because I never said that I was alive, but keeping this from you was deceitful and I’m sorry. I understand if you’re angry at me. I’m angry at me too.”

“I’m not angry,” I say, and that’s true. I’d have to be feeling something to feel angry.

“I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad one,” she says.

“Me neither.”

She puts her face in the bowl of her hands and makes crying sounds. No tears come out, obviously.

I almost put my arm around her, but I don’t.

“I can’t keep living this way, Hadley,” she says. “I’m a Remade. I’m tired of hiding it.”

I want to tell her, “Don’t worry.”

I want to tell her, “I’ll love you no matter what.”

But I fail.

* * *

I thought Hafwen was happy before. But she tells me she wasn’t. She says she was smiling on the outside and crying on the inside.

Now, she cries a lot.

Now, she’s pale, because she’s stopped wearing makeup. She’s cold, because she’s stopped wearing heated clothing. Her hair is white, because she’s stopped dyeing it. She looks dead and says she’s the happiest she’s ever been.

I should be happy for her. Instead, I keep thinking about how someone else used to inhabit her body. I can’t look at her the same way anymore.

She’s used.

Second-hand.

Impure.

She says a lot of Remade girls try to pass for living, because they’re ashamed of who they are. They buy into the whole natural is ugly paradigm. But natural isn’t ugly, she says. Death isn’t ugly.

Whether she’s right or not, I don’t know.

If there is a beauty in death, I don’t want to see it.

I hate death. I hate that my mom died of thirst in a ditch on the side of the road. People drove by, but they didn’t see her. They didn’t hear her.

Now when Hafwen stands right in front of me, I try to look through her. When she talks to me, I try to tune out her voice. Deep down, I know she doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment. I also know that Porter doesn’t deserve the beatings I give him every Tuesday morning.

I just don’t care.

* * *

“Animal brains have to be illegal,” I say. I say it with conviction, but I don’t really know what I’m talking about. I defend the living and the systems controlled by the living only because doing otherwise would feel like a betrayal. “They’re a gateway to human brains.”

Hafwen laughs. “You really think there are hordes of Remades out there feasting on the brains of the living?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It could happen.”

“Hadley, animal brains are illegal because Remades eat them. They make us feel good.”

“Have you ever eaten any?”

“No, but that’s not the point. The point is, prisons are filled with Remades, and most of them are there just because they’ve eaten animal brains. The government sells these prisoners to corporations to use for manual labor, and every living person involved makes a lot of money. Doesn’t this seem wrong to you?”

“I guess,” I say. “But you have to admit. Violent Remade crime is a big problem.”

“If you read the statistics, you’d know that violent living crime is an even bigger problem. It only seems like a Remade problem because the media publicizes Remade crime a lot more often. A lot.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“But we are talking about it, Hadley. It’s important to me.”

A few days ago, Hafwen told me the story of her parent’s divorce. I expected her to say that her mother lied about being a Remade and that when her father found out the truth, he left her.

But that’s not how it happened.

Her father, Barry, knew that her mother was a Remade from the very beginning. He was an activist for Remade rights and that’s how they met in the first place. He loved Cambree and he wanted to start a family with her. So they had a baby. Her name was Bronwyn. Since she was born from a Remade mother, Barry and Cambree knew that at any time she could pass away and be Remade with a new personality. This happened when Bronwyn was 19 years old. Barry loved Bronwyn, and refused to connect with Hafwen in any meaningful way, and all the while he blamed Cambree for his daughter’s death. One day he left for work and never came home again.

Now, this story buzzes in my head. I know that Hafwen’s just looking for some living person to listen to her. To understand her. To say, “You’re right. These things are very unfair.”

But instead I say, “I’m going to bed.”

* * *

This is our coffee-shop, Hafwen’s and mine. Neither of us drink coffee but we enjoy the comity and the photographs of dancing mannequins on the walls.

Today, I don’t invite her. I’ve never seen a Remade in here before, though I tell myself the reason I don’t call her is because I need some alone-time.

A man and a woman at the next table converse in loud whispers.

I stare at my book like I’m reading.

“I’m no racist,” the woman says. “But they have no legal right to be here.”

“I say send them back to where they came from,” the man says. “Start paving all the cemeteries and let that be the end of it.”

At least I’m not them. I don’t want to get rid of the Remades. I’m all for equal rights. Hell, I’m even dating one of them.

I’m not a terrible person. So why do I feel like such a monster?

Minutes later I’m in my car making a call.

“Porter?” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “Hey, man.”

“Do you want to hang out?”

“Hang out?”

“Yeah. We could go bowling or something.”

“I hate bowling.”

“Whatever you want.”

“I don’t know, man. I don’t usually hang out with clients.”

“Come on.”

“All right.”

Fifteen minutes later, and I’m in a Remade bar. My mind spins, but I still notice that this is a shitty place. Like it hasn’t been cleaned since it opened. Maybe that’s true.

The waitress, who’s either a living person or one of those Remades who buy into the natural is ugly paradigm, hands me my chai, and gives Porter a wad of tin foil.

“Thanks, man,” he says to the girl.

She smiles and walks away.

Porter unwraps the foil.

“What is that?” I say.

“Brains,” he says.

“I know that. I mean, what kind?”

“Human.”

“Oh.” I swallow.

“I’m just fucking with you, man. They’re pig. Want to try some?”

“No!” I’m louder than I expect.

“Calm down, man.”

I try.

Porter nibbles at the brains. He trembles.

After a few sips of my tea, I say, “Is it really so bad being dead?”

“What do you mean?” he says, gazing at his hands.

“I mean, why do so many Remades eat brains? Is it such a horrible existence?”

“No, man. Being dead is cool.”

“Then why do you eat brains?”

His expression changes to one that I’ve never seen on him before. It’s one of the looks my mother used to give me, when she was disappointed in me, but showed sympathy at the same time. “Figure it out yourself, man,” he says, very quietly.

“Fuck you!” I say, standing.

“Let go of me.”

I realize my hand is squeezing his arm. My other hand, it’s in a fist.

“I think you should go, man,” he says.

Part of me wants to stay and beat the non-living shit out of him. I want to blame him. Not just for how I’m feeling right now, but for everything. My mother’s death. The state of the world.

Everything.

Instead, I release him and say, “Yeah.”

* * *

Say you’re lost in the orange groves behind your apartment complex because you’re not ready to go home again, and you find three guys dragging a tied-up young woman toward a hole in the ground, with three shovels nearby. They’re alive and she’s not. You tell yourself that if they were dead and she wasn’t, the scene wouldn’t be so disturbing, because it’s supposed to be the dead who do things like this. Deep down you know that’s not true.

You think, “Get your fucking hands off her.”

Say all of this happens. You’d be here too, like me. You’d crouch down behind the nearest trunk you can find, waiting and watching, with a wrenching knot in your gut.

For a moment I consider racing out into the clearing, bellowing and swinging my fists. But these guys, they’re not like Porter. They’d fight back. They’d kill me.

So I watch them bury the poor girl. I listen to her muffled screams.

They dump her in the hole and start shoveling.

They say things like, “You like that dirt in your face, don’t you, bitch?” and “Fucking zombie whore.”

I try to study their faces, so that I can identify them later, but it’s so dark. And I’m crying too much.

When they finish with the dirt, they pound the backs of their shovels against the grave, over and over and over. They laugh, and high-five.

Finally, they leave.

I dive onto the ground and start digging with my bare hands.

What I’m uncovering isn’t just a young dead girl.

From deep within myself, I pull out a truth that I’ve always known but never wanted to admit. Remades don’t eat brains because of the pain of being dead. The real pain comes from how the living treat them. How I treat them.

I pull her out of the hole. I remove the gag.

She looks at me with fear in her eyes.

I’m afraid she’s going to scream.

I’m afraid she thinks I’m one of them.

But her face changes. It’s one of the looks my mother used to give me, after I did something bad and then made things right. “Thank you,” she says, very quietly.

I put my arm around her, and in my heart I’m embracing Hafwen at the same time.

I see her when I close my eyes.

She’s beautiful.

I’m ready to go home.

“Those Below” first appeared in the anthology Love and Sacrifice

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Jeremy C. Shipp is the Bram Stoker nominated author of Cursed, Vacation, and Sheep and Wolves. His shorter tales have appeared or are forthcoming in over 50 publications, the likes of Cemetery Dance, ChiZine, Rosebud, Pseudopod, and Withersin. While preparing for the forthcoming collapse of civilization, Jeremy enjoys living in Southern California in a moderately haunted Victorian farmhouse with his wife, Lisa, and their legion of yard gnomes. Feel free to visit his online home at jeremycshipp.com

Note: This story is a game of skill. Can you solve it?

“Which door should we open? Help me think.”

“I’ve told you already, I have no idea!” Thad let himself sag back against the wall. Even with the support, he could feel himself trembling with fatigue and fear.

“Which one?” she murmured, studying the doors; her back was turned toward him, her hands on her hips. “Hell,” she said, “there’s a clue here somewhere. I’m positive. There has to be.”

“Elizabeth,” he started. “What…” His voice came out rasping and thin. It shocked him.

“This clue,” he said, groping for steadiness. “Explain this to me again, would you? What exactly are you looking for? How will you know it when you see it?”

“I should think it would be obvious,” she said. Turning to face him, she seemed to loom before his eyes, then suddenly recede. Expect disorientation, man, he thought, you’re badly dehydrated.

“We’ve been kidnapped by parties unknown,” she began, “–my vote’s still for aliens, by the way. Held, then dropped into this… this labyrinth, or whatever it is. Incredibly slowly, we’ve inched our way through it. Tackled games of skill, strength, wit–and learned that, incidentally, our captors aren’t above penalizing us for a wrong guess… ”

“Exploding thresholds,” he muttered. “Weight-dropped arches, and that napalm thing–”

“Horrible stuff, yes. It’s clear they’d let us die here, and want us to know it. …That brings us to these doors.”

“Exactly.” Which stood before them now in a neat row. Heavy, simple, cold. Identical, except for their colors. The smooth surface of the first shone with a green luster; the second, white; the third, a pale, chilly gold.

Eyes throbbing, head pounding, he felt dehydration and low blood sugar beginning to take him down. “Why don’t you just pick one?” he demanded, seized by a convulsion of despair. “Hand on knob and shove it open. It’ll blow us up or it won’t. That’s better than waiting here to starve to death–or, God knows, whatever else they have in mind!”

Elizabeth scowled. “With due respect, Thad, no. Help me think this through. I know I can find the clue–”

“There is no clue, Elizabeth!” he said angrily.

“Everything can be understood if you look carefully enough. We can find the key. Help me think! It’s got to be here somewhere… They can manipulate everything in our environment, Thad. Examine everything. Where would an alien put the pattern? How would they hide the key?”

Impossible, but he tried. Think like an alien. Everything can be understood…

White, green, gold. How would a master manipulator hide the clue? It’s here, somewhere…

Thad felt the last of his energy leaving him, like a spasm of physical anguish, and closed his eyes to blot out the corridor and the brilliant, hopeless light. Elizabeth stood silently, still staring at the doors.

* * *

Is Thad right, or is Elizabeth?

Which door should they try?

First appeared at The Daily Cabal, July 9th, 2009

---

Susannah Mandel was born in California and grew up near Boston. She has since lived in Philadelphia and northern France, and is now heading for Japan. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Shimmer, Strange Horizons, Goblin Fruit, Sybil’s Garage, and Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, among others. Her flash fiction appears regularly at the Daily Cabal (www.dailycabal.com).

Day 409
They told me
When they came for me
The man-
His thumb, I bit it off
He needed twenty-four stitches.
Imagine that.

Day 387
My hands are calloused
And senseless
I run on all fleet fours as I
Chase down deer
(the fawns are slower
and soft
and their tiny spines
break
so easily)

Day 211
When I bleed
I lick the crimson
With pink tongue
So the wolves can not find me

Day 159
I am untraceable
Among black knotty trunks
Thick like- what’s the word?
I have (been) forgotten

Day 134
The first time I snapped a
Rib-bone and drank the sweet marrow
I remembered my mother’s gazpacho soup
Warm and salty
By the second time
I had forgotten

Day 91
Mountains in the deep dark of the night
Hum like contented babies
The thought chases itself across my mind as I shit in a stream

Day 56
The tips of my highlights have disappeared
Into the mat of my hair, caked with pine sap and mud

Day 23
I haven’t dreamed of people in eight days

Day 1
Something is greening in the air
High and strong
It twitches at my nose
At my brain
Regretfully, I shut down my computer
And begin to
Run.

---

Colleen Kimsey is attending a private, all-women’s college, studying the spread of epidemics and wondering how the hell she got here.

Ghost flesh sears easily, like the skin of xeroderms.
This is why so few hauntings take place at noon.
The sun is a scourge. Photons burn like acid.

But when, as will happen up to four times a year,
a new moon (itself as well a ward of the sun)
swings into place and is positioned just right,
a liberating pall of darkness descends
upon the earth, creating a night as artificial
as the coverlet that douses a parrot’s cage.

Ghosts may walk at noon then. You can see them
shambling about if you angle your lenses of smoked
glass right. Quite a few look like boorish tourists,
wearing loud shirts, deriding local customs, afraid
to drink the water. But just as many others are watching
for those who have deliberately sought them
out: people like me, who, despite the prevalence
of tidal night, have never quite been lucky enough
to be haunted outside the realm of dreams
or memories.

For years now I’ve been following the ephemeris tables,
chronicling the stately pavan of sun and moon, waiting
for the opportune eclipse. The geographic locus
for best observation has not always been ideal. Nevertheless,
when accessible, I’ve tried to arrange my disposition
and schedule so I could be there. Hence Africa today –
the once and future dark continent. Overhead,
as the sun begins to diminish, the air grows chill.
While I strain to view better in the murk, forms
are already condensing, like statues in a river
of black milk.

Then I spot her. And am stunned in heart and mind,
paralyzed to the core.

All the things I’ve wanted to say, the love, the regrets,
the apologies, the simple ordinary poetry of talking
to the most important person in my cosmos, each stalls
in my brain, I’m so happy to see her, to take my phantom
wife once again into my arms. Whence the poltice
of tears, as uneclipsed,

like some lunar pendant itself, my heart
lifts out of shadow,

our lips joining umbrally.

If only, if only, if only. Please, God, whatever
aspect of you governs
the clockwork universe, delay the planets
in their course
for just a few seconds more, and I will never
rebuke you again.

But then as the dark rim of the sun begins to brighten,
a rooster shakes its feathers nearby, crowing. Too early,
fresh kisses fade like smoke. Too soon, burning

like a flare, and somewhat
of a surprise,

the wrong one of us begin to dematerialize.

---

Robert Borski did not start writing poetry until he was well into his sixth decade, but is now pursuing the craft with a vengeance. On-line, his poetry most often appears in Strange Horizons; in print, in Star*Line. He has been nominated for the Rhysling Award thrice and continues to live in Stevens Point, Wisconsin.

After the ground is burned and
its black skeleton trees removed
the machines scrape
till it bleeds yesterday,
worms rolling up to escape;
the warm dark disturbed
by needs no one understands,
by dreams that include no
living protective layer, no smell,
nothing holding life
or its confusion.

When the ground is cleansed
by those who do not know
what it is, what it means,
do not weep.
Start again.

Bring in deep mulch to blanket the startled ground,
to hide its nakedness, and when it asks,
say: “it was a dream; a nightmare, yes, go back to bed.”
Plant new trees, small and tender. Tell them stories
so they know they can be
penthouses for song.
Plant flowers, by design.

The ground forgets its nightmares,
even stone ones, if allowed.
The ground is wise.

---

Lydia Ondrusek is a native Texan who describes herself as writing her way out of a paper bag. She writes fiction (mostly flash) and poetry, and like everyone in this and all other parallel universes, is working on a novel. Okay, two. Find her at www.lydiaondrusek.com and www.thelittlefluffycat.com, and on twitter (@littlefluffycat).

I think back to a night on a moonlit beach, the crash of breakers loud in our ears. Mara is beautiful in a floral sundress, her dark hair pulled back into a windblown braid. It’s the end of the term, a time for celebration. Situated crookedly in the sand is a bottle of red wine, two glasses, half-empty, perched next to it. We are barefoot and my pants are rolled up to my knees, Mara’s sundress riffling against my bare skin as we dance.

She whispers that she loves me, but we are drunk – and careless.

Two weeks later, we’ve created one of the most stable forms in the universe, a tiny sphere that will one day turn into our beloved Anna. On the ultrasound, Mara’s pregnancy is nothing more than a pea-sized shadow. Fluid shows up black while tissue glows white. The amniotic sac isn’t much larger than a bean.

“You’re due in March,” the doctor tells her.

When he leaves, she starts to cry.

I tell her not to worry – but, to my surprise, she looks at me and says fate has dealt her a different hand.

I think of this as it relates to quantum physics. Why didn’t I see it coming? In theory, we should remember the future as we remember the past, but something in our mammalian brains prevents us from taking a peek at our fates before they blindside us. I tell myself it makes sense, that a will to live must come from not knowing what happens next.

***

As an astronomer, I try to answer life’s most unfathomable questions. I always thought I wanted to know about such things as supersymmetries and flop transitions. Now my questions, though couched in physics, revolve around what happens to us after we die.

We are always able to go back to the beginning, watching as our blueprints unfold in a cramped darkness, as I once watched Anna’s month by month. Only scientists haven’t yet been able to see the universe’s conception. They know down to a hundredth of a second or so what happened, that first brilliant flash of light, when everything blossomed, but the nanosecond before, the force that ignited the spark, is still man’s biggest mystery.

It’s no different for the giants than it is for the dwarves. Like each of us, the universe was conceived. All of nature’s little spheres, and I call them little because in relative terms they are, the suns and moons, the red and blue giants, the binaries, the dwarf stars, and yes, even the black holes, have parents.

As a professor of astrophysics, I stand before a class of 22, writing my calculations on the board as I share with them the discovery I’ve made. I haven’t told the dean or the head of my department about my hybrid, the connection I’ve made between the earliest occurring imperfections of genetics and the first moments of the universe, a practical application to the fractal geometry I’ve applied to M-theory. Everyone else will be skeptical. But I know my students. They are open-minded.

“You forgot something,” one woman says, raising her hand.

Turning, I catch a glimpse of tangled blonde hair and troubled gray eyes.

“What about the energy?”

Sheila Porter. Beautiful and sick. It began last term, this degeneration, her illness. She’d been at the top of my class, one of the smartest students I’d ever taught.

She is adamant. “You forget; it thinks.”

“Thank you, Sheila.” I’m embarrassed for her and she knows it. My gaze bounces around the room; I am desperate for someone, anyone, to speak.

“You don’t believe me, but I can prove it.”

I clear my throat, the class silent.

“Energy is sentience.”

“Ok.”

“It’s pure consciousness.”

“Well, let’s–”

“It’s God.”

“Just–”

“God is everywhere.”

Snickering.

Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out a knife. “It’s the answer to the horizon problem.”

Adrenaline floods through me, white-hot. I stammer. “Just…don’t…”

She walks toward me, the knife in her hand. I stand, paralyzed, the class watching, silent. I keep thinking someone will come to my rescue, maybe myself. But I don’t move.

She stops directly in front of me, her grin crooked and her gray eyes teasing as she says one word: “Watch.”

Quick as light, she shoves the steel blade into a nearby socket, the heat singing the hair on my arm. I lurch backward, a reflexive cry erupting from me. Sparks fly, the smell of ozone heavy in the air. Students leap out of their chairs. I hear the bang of overturned desks, books hitting the floor, the clatter of pencils as they go flying. Hubris. Chaos.

***

In the fifteen years my daughter lives, stars are born and die. Whole worlds vanish. And Anna? Like space’s primordial origins, she begins as a tiny sphere, her neurons dividing at 100,000 per hour. But something else has already happened; she’s been given an extra 21st chromosome and that little piece of imperfect genetic material has changed the glorious staircase scientists now call DNA into something it shouldn’t be.

Seven and a half months later, she comes too soon, before I can get Mara to the hospital. She’s born in the backseat of our station wagon, slippery in my new bride’s hands as she lets out her first squall.

“There’s something wrong with her,” Mara, sweaty and delirious, gasps. “Clark, look at her…”

At the hospital, neither of us speak. The tiny baby that tiny sphere has become has already set our marriage adrift. Mara won’t look at her – or at me – knowing somehow that I’ve caused something irrevocable and that Anna has descended upon us, unwanted. After the baby’s whisked away, my wife is wheeled into the Mother-Baby Unit and put into a bed. Nurses check her vitals. Doctors sweep in and out in their white lab coats and all the while I sit in a bedside chair with my head in my hands.

“Mr. and Mrs. Namast?” one of the doctors, a balding 40-ish man, says somberly. “I have some bad news.”

Mara looks up, her dark eyes red, anticipation and fear in her gaze.

“Your daughter has Down Syndrome. It occurs in approximately 1 in 800 births.” He pauses delicately. “The good news is that, these days, high-functioning individuals can live relatively normal–”

“Normal?” Mara sits up straighter, her face red, fury in her brown eyes. “Did I hear you right? Were you about to say these people live normal lives?”

The doctor takes a step back.

“Does she look normal to you?”

“With all due respect, Mrs. Namast–”

“You want to trade me, then? You got a kid, right? A normal one? How about I trade you my normal kid for your normal kid?”

I jump up, a reflex, a protective father already. “Mara…” I put a hand on her arm. “It’s not his fault.”

She turns from the stunned doctor, her eyes imploring. “I don’t want her, Clark.”

***

Sheila’s heart stops four times before paramedics establish a regular heartbeat. She is clinically dead for over two minutes and a walking miracle. Proof, I suppose. And 22 people bore witness.

I visit her in the hospital, wanting to know why. She is haggard, black circles beneath her piercing gray eyes.

“I saw what I needed to see,” she says.

“What?”

“God.”

I look away.

“You still don’t believe me.”

“You’re sick.”

“In this life.”

I catch her gaze.

“But not in the other.” She smiles.

I swallow a lump, think of Anna.

“I’ve never been so purely myself.”

Anna’s brown eyes, her silky blonde hair, and that wonderful dimpled smile run through my mind, attributes unappreciated. My anger erupts. “Do you know how selfish you are?”

“I’m just trying to hang on to who I am,” she says. “That’s all that matters to me now.”

I think of Anna and who she was. Kind and willing to give, but nobody’s friend. I realize how alike they are.

“I’ll never be smart again – not in the way people want.”

Though steeped in the cloud of mental illness, I see her brilliance. “You’re still smart, Sheila,” I say quietly. “You’re still head and shoulders above every other student I’ve ever–”

“So what?”

I stare at her, dumbfounded.

“You think NASA’s going to hire a schizophrenic?”

The words inspire an ache in me, celestial in nature, bone-deep; they are Anna’s words.

“I have to think of other ways to make a difference.”

“By killing yourself?”

“By proving that there’s more to life than what we see.”

***

I want to believe her – desperately. There’s got to be more than this. Heartache. Uncertainty. A constant search for truth when the truth we see is never enough or too hard to face.

***

In the grips of severe postpartum depression a week after Anna’s birth, Mara gets up at 4 a.m., slips into a robe and tiptoes into our daughter’s bedroom. She peers over the crib railing at our newborn, watching as she sleeps. Tears slip from Mara’s eyes as she makes a decision.

“I won’t let you suffer,” she whispers. For a moment, she thinks about pressing a pillow over the baby’s face. It would be painless, easy. It’d look like SIDS. Down’s children are prone to crib death.

But she can’t bring herself. If she does anything, it has to be abstract, cleanly and comfortably out of view. There has to be some doubt. She has to believe that maybe she didn’t succeed, that maybe, just maybe, her daughter might someday be living that normal, productive life the doctor spoke of. So instead, Mara wraps our daughter in a pink receiving blanket, climbs into our beat-up Honda, and drives 40 miles south. All the while, as her cold hands grip the wheel, she shakes and cries. Anna’s on the front seat, squalling, hungry and wet, a typical newborn and an anathema.

It’s a patchwork morning, gray clouds crumpled over the ocean, cobalt blue in the east. Out on the shore, death is waiting. Mara looks for it there. Some shape of it. A form slipping beneath the waves or around the rocky abutments she sees. Fog clings to the sand, to the water, now calm. She pulls over, closing her eyes as she picks up our newborn, and steps out into a tongue of frigid air.

She tells me all of this later, after driving home, still shaking, horrified at what she almost did – and for fifteen years, I keep her secret.

***

That newborn turns into a girl of fifteen who likes Star Trek and dreams of going elsewhere. She is high-functioning enough that Mara insists she go to public school. “We’re not babying her,” she says. “There’s more to life than dancing with boys.”

I almost believe her, but in the quiet of the night I hear Anna crying, and that’s when I realize that there isn’t more to life; it is everything to be normal.

Our true heartbreak begins one morning when Anna sits down at the breakfast table, smiling that sweet, dimpled smile and I notice something shining blue on her eyelids.

“Notice anything?” She grins.

I smile back. “You look nice.”

She points at her eyes, giggles.

“Anna Grace Namast, you march into the bathroom and wash it off.”

I catch Mara’s gaze, anger spiking through me. “She’s fifteen; she can wear a little–”

“It looks ridiculous on her.”

“She looks nice.”

“Everybody’s going to laugh at her.” Mara turns her attention back to Anna. “It’s not going to change anything.”

I don’t remember what Anna did, whether she washed off the makeup. I do remember the look on her face, her fading smile, her brown eyes brimming with tears. And that’s when I have to believe in something more, something beyond this, our everyday lives.

***

At birth, a child’s brain has as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. That’s what I thought when I looked at Anna, that she had the whole galaxy in her. And it didn’t matter that some small thing went wrong in the beginning; she was still whole, still beautiful. Still a galaxy.

As a scientist, I studied her as such. From the time of her birth, I collected information on Down Syndrome, cataloguing all of the disorder’s idiosyncrasies, from the physical (the upturned corners of Anna’s doe eyes and her flattened face) to the mental (her “delayed” development, though I tend to think that she simply held onto a child’s spirit longer than most), to the genetic (an extra chromosome replicating itself in all of her cells). I wondered who’d caused it. I asked, was it me? Is it my fault she’s so unhappy?

Even now I look for the answer doing what I do best. I use numbers and probabilities and I plug them into formulas. I know they can’t extrapolate and explain a child’s crippled spirit, but maybe they can tell me something.

I write on the board, frenetically, as my students look on. But the principles I apply aren’t about cosmic space and time.

“Can anyone tell me what this is?” I point to the numbers, formulas upon formulas. A continuum of inner space, soul.

Silence settles as my glance darts over all of the blank faces. Then I see hers. She knows, smiles, raising her hand. “The human genome,” she says.

I swallow a lump. “My daughter’s.”

“I know.” Sheila’s eyes sparkle.

“You’re applying M-Theory to inner space, to genetics?” another student asks, bewildered.

I nod, my eyes still on Sheila’s. “I want to know what happened in the beginning.”

***

I wait for her to come down the stairs, holding the paper up when I see her. “What’s this?”

A shadow passes over Anna’s face as she pauses at the bottom. “My project.”

“What project?”

“It’s about what I want to do when I get older.”

I gaze at her scrawled handwriting, heartsick. “Anna, this paper’s about Laika.”

Her smile fades. “I know.”

My heart sinks as I stare at the paper about a dog in space, science’s first orbital casualty, launched by the Soviets in 1957 and left to die. “What’s this got to do with you?”

“I want to be like you; I want to learn about space.” She waits, desperate for my approval. “That’s the only way I can do it.”

A lump catches thickly in my throat; her answer takes my breath away. “That’s not true.”

“It is true.”

“Laika died, Anna.”

Her gaze is unflinching. “I know.”

***

I find the letter to NASA a day later, a 6-page offering, Anna’s life laid out, her bone-deep pain, her all-encompassing despair and her fierce desire to make up for it by sacrificing herself to science. I don’t read much, but I read enough to feel it in the pit of my stomach. Enough that I’ll go to my deathbed with the weight of it on my shoulders.

I tear up the letter, viciously, enraged and grief-stricken, breathless as I rip at it with my teeth, the tang of lead on my tongue.

“Clark, what are you doing?”

I turn to see Mara standing in the doorway.

I burst into tears as I let the torn bits of Anna’s bequest swirl to the floor. “We’re losing her,” is all I can manage.

***

Contrary to the seeming paradox of it, there is such a thing as deterministic chaos. Initial conditions exist. Add time and evolution and you get something else. What appears to be random isn’t.

Scientists believe time flows in this way, in one direction. And this fact is often one of life’s biggest tragedies; people lay awake at night thinking, if only…never to return to that magical half-second something might’ve changed an indisputable and heartbreaking truth.

“We lost her years ago,” Mara answers.

“You lost her, not me,” I shout, my anger spiking. “You were the one who gave up. You were the one who didn’t want her.”

“Clark Namast!” My wife’s voice is full of tears.

Dear God, what have I done? I catch Anna’s sweet face peering around the doorway. That angel face, looking at Mara, then at me, disbelieving.

I can’t stop her, can’t catch her as she runs away from me. Anguish has a strength all its own.

***

Alone in the classroom, I feel her hand on my arm and I look up to find Sheila’s shining gray eyes.

“I want to help you prove your theory,” she says. “I want to die again.”

I slam down my book. “No way.”

“I haven’t forgotten what it’s like.”

Her words stop me, quiet me. I turn to her.

She seems small suddenly, vulnerable, like a child. “Most people forget.” She smiles. “It’s different than you think.”

I look away, a lump in my throat.

Once again, I feel her hand. “It isn’t heaven.”

I feel sick. Now there is doubt.

“Help me do it.”

I shove her hand away. “I can’t.” I catch her gaze. “I won’t.”

“What are you afraid of?” Her gaze has hardened. “Don’t you want to know what it’s really like?”

I jump up and sprint out, papers flying in my wake. I am suddenly, inexplicably, terrified of her.

That night the lights go out sixteen times. My cell phone drops four calls. Seven severe electrical surges fry my TV and DVD player despite the fact that outside, the stars shine. There are no tempests. No sunspots.

Then I get a call from Edric Lind University Hospital.

***

“She left a note,” a doctor tells me. “And your phone number.”

I find out that Sheila took fourteen of her Lithium pills, enough to send her into acute renal failure, though doctors were still able to flush her kidneys and save her life.

But I can’t face her. Not this time. I turn from the doctor and walk away, realizing at last that I don’t really want to know after all.

I return to my office at the University and destroy my research, shredding, deleting, feeling the paper tearing in my adrenaline-drenched hands, all the while recalling a dog lost in space.

Then I see her face in a dream. Anna’s dancing brown eyes and her sweet smile. Those dimpled arms poised to embrace me. I awaken with an anguish so bone-deep it chokes me, Sheila’s disheartening words flashing through my mind: It isn’t heaven.

Then what is it?

***

She is asleep when I get there, as I stand at the foot of her hospital bed.

Then she opens her eyes, smiles. “That was me.”

“Huh?”

“Sorry about your TV.”

My breath catches.

“I was trying to tell you no one dies.”

I cover my face; I can’t let her see me cry.

“I was myself. Pure energy. Electricity. Light. Power. I was with you and I was at the farthest corner of the Universe at the same time. There is no light speed after death. No vast space to traverse.” She makes a gesture. “It’s all right here.”

I swallow a lump, my heart pounding. “What’d you mean when you said it isn’t heaven?”

“Heaven’s too oversimplified. This can’t be defined – or quantified. Everything’s here and now. There’s no time. No space. It’s as though every dimension is unified.” She smiles. “It’s the answer to the horizon problem.”

I nod, drifting. “Death’s dimension…” Something I’ve never considered in my theories or calculations.

“And life’s dimension,” she adds. “There’s a reason there isn’t a unified theory. We’ve never considered the possibility that there was more than one force acting on the point of origin during the big bang.”

“A conception?”

She smiles, nods. “Two Gods.”

***

As I offered up Anna’s genetic profile as proof, Sheila confirmed what I already knew; that we are all pieces of a whole, the living fractals of an astonishing Union.

I can’t stop the flood of memories. The rush into the woods, Anna’s footprints through the mud, my strangled voice calling her name. We find her hanging from a tree branch, one of my neckties cinched so tightly around her neck that I cannot find a grip to loosen it.

And then Mara’s heart-wrenching screams: “You did this. You killed her. I hate you I hate you I hate you…” Fists on my chest, blows to my heart. Tears on my shirt. A spirit unraveling.

I close my eyes. I can think no more.

“This is your shot,” I tell Sheila. “I want you to present our theories at the upcoming Astronomy Conference in Paris.”

She gazes at me, puzzled. “But don’t you want to–”

“This is yours. You made it happen.” I smile. “After the Conference, no one will care about your illness.” They are words I wish I could’ve told Anna.

***

I close my eyes as I sit at my desk. As I remember her sweet smile. I think of the random fractals that made her up, the same fractals that make up snowflakes, coastlines, and mountain ranges. I recall a night on a moonlit shore and I’m inspired. Two Gods. Maybe love existed long before space and time.

I think of a dog lost in space. A scientific breakthrough. Mankind’s step forward. And an unspoken loneliness. I need to find her, to tell her what Sheila told me – though I’m sure she already knows.

###

---

Holly majored in Criminology and Political Science, working in government before deciding to quit her job and write full-time. She got her start writing nonfiction in 2008 and has since sold stories to Running Times, Competitor Northwest, Cosmos Magazine, and Analog. She lives in Oregon with her husband and son.