Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 37 Read online

  Then John died. Apparently he cut his arms open with a butcher’s knife in the kitchen of the restaurant and bled out on the floor. Which would never happen on its own. The AI for the light townies is not that deep. They can all manage intelligent conversations, sure, and they’ve got a variety of personality types, but they don’t get depressed. They don’t get violent. So it must have been Mag’s idea. She must have convinced him to do it. Later that same day, she told me she’d changed her mind. About the voyage, about everything.

  After that, she started starving herself. Or pretending to, anyway. The nutrition system out in heavy space is automatic—we get our daily allotted drips, no more no less—but Mag stopped eating light food. She lost weight, or appeared to, at any rate. She kept it up for months, until her skin was pulled so tight against her skull I thought it would snap. One Sunday morning she collapsed and lay on the dining room floor for the rest of the day without moving, curled up like a corn husk. I stepped over her on my way to bed, annoyed.

  From then on, she died regularly. At first I thought she wanted attention. It seemed like a childish way to get it, but I played along. I mourned her every time she died, rejoiced every time she returned. When that changed nothing, I tried ignoring her instead. I figured maybe I’d made it worse, that I’d rewarded the behavior. So I pretended not to notice. I looked away. I read a book.

  I knew the doctor was adjusting her dosages, pumping this and that into her little vat out in heavy space. He’d hit on the right combination eventually and she would stop.

  I remember one night she crawled into bed beside me, naked. She had that door in her chest again. I opened it up, eager, but instead of a heart she had a rotten peach, sunken and gray with mold. She pulled it out, squished it in her fist. The juice ran down her wrist and I laughed at her. I laughed! I told her she was such a cliché. And after a moment she laughed too.

  When I got home from work that evening, Mag was out back again. The pool was filled with piranhas and she was sitting at the edge of it, feeding them. I sat down cross-legged beside her.

  “Mag,” I said. “I need you to stop.” I put a hand on her arm.

  “Stop what?” she said. She kicked her feet in the water. Little ribbons of red unfurled from her toes.

  “Oh come on, Mag. I’m tired. I’m so tired of this.”

  “Go to bed then.”

  “Damnit, Mag,” I said, digging my fingers into her arm, trying to pull her back from the edge of the pool. “You can’t keep doing this to me. It’s selfish, okay?”

  “It’s a compromise,” she said, coolly.

  “Compromise?” I said. “Compromise! I don’t think you even know what that means.”

  “I get part of what I want and you get part of what you want.”

  “What is it that I get, Mag? Huh?” I couldn’t help it, I was shouting now. “I’m not getting a damn thing out of this.”

  “You get me.”

  “Barely.”

  “Isn’t that better than nothing?”

  She looked me right in the eyes and it felt like a punch to the gut. All I saw in her eyes was hate. For who, I couldn’t say.

  “Mag,” I said, but I had no follow-up.

  She yanked her arm away and slid off the side of the pool into the water. The piranhas flashed silver in the sun.

  I watched them converge. I didn’t want to watch but I did. It felt like I still owed her that much.

  “I was on the first colony ship, you know,” said the doctor the next morning.

  “What?”

  “They sent me back. My memories.” He tapped the side of his head.

  “Oh,” I said. I’d forgotten for a second that he was pure light. “Did any of them . . . were any of them like her?”

  “There was a rash of murders towards the ends,” he said. “I had to facilitate quite a few group therapy sessions.”

  “But no suicides?”

  “No.”

  “Well then why the fuck are you telling me about it.”

  He blinked at me, seemed to shrink. “I’m sorry, Ruth, I just want you to understand.” Yes, he had definitely shrunk. He looked almost like a child, dwarfed by his cushy chair. “There is no precedent for this. I’m doing the best I can with what they gave me, but this is all new.”

  “This is fucked up,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  It isn’t healthy, what we’re doing. We know that. We’ve got our little holding vats. We’ve got vitamins and drugs and intermittent electric pulses. It’s enough to keep us alive, but they warned us of the risks, too. Our lifespans will be shortened, our muscle tone diminished. There may well be other, unforeseen consequences. I knew all that. But I didn’t know anything. I was eighteen when I signed the contract. Eighteen when I left that hot dry husk of a planet I was never again supposed to think of as home.

  “Mag and I have been talking,” said the doctor. “She’s come up with an idea, a compromise.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “It’s a tricky situation,” said the doctor. “Part of my job is to keep you all happy, but there are limits. You each represent a significant investment, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Your lives are no longer merely your own.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  “So from her perspective,” he said, “everything is a compromise.”

  Mag and I had been dating for only two months when I proposed. I knew it was quick, but I was up to the seventh qualifying tier by then and I didn’t want to go to space without her. That’s what I said, “I don’t want to go to space without you,” and that made her laugh. There was no sound I loved more than the sound of her laugh. I heard it often back then. She seemed happy. She seemed normal. She said yes. We filed right away.

  I made it through the rest of the tiers, and she made it through the screening for spouses. The psych tests, too, of course. Maybe she lied. I don’t know. But we were accepted, both of us.

  We went through training together, boarded the ship together, woke up together on a plot of land lusher and greener than any on earth. Everything was sweet and new and terrifying and full of sun.

  In my worst moments, now, I wonder whether it was all a lie. Maybe Mag was just using me to get on the ship, to get away from a lifetime of scrubbing other people’s tubs. To follow Angelica, even. To live light.

  But I want to believe that Mag truly meant it when she’d said yes. I need to believe that she was happy. That she loved me, or that, at the very least, she had loved me once.

  I still love her, as much as ever. But it’s not enough.

  Why isn’t that enough?

  Sometimes it is like she is in love with someone else. I imagine death as a woman, breasts like the tops of mushroom clouds, eyes empty. I imagine walking in on her and Mag kissing. I imagine walking in on them fucking.

  And I wish it was as simple as that. I’d forgive her. It would be fine.

  I agreed to the new compromise, the terms of which the doctor relayed to me. I told him fine, go ahead, tell her I’m too tired to fight, tell her I don’t care anymore.

  She did it pretty simply for the big finish. Just a gun to the head. She did it in the middle of town so people would know. Some light police showed up and zipped her into a body bag.

  At the funeral the next day I thought I saw her peeking—one eye open just a slit, just for a second. I don’t think anyone else saw. And it was so quick that afterwards it seemed possible that I’d only imagined it.

  Roberta designed an entourage of light mourners for the funeral; they stood in a circle around the casket, wearing black lace veils and wailing in a language I did not recognize. Angelica, draped in black velvet, kept shooting me glances.

  I hoped Mag was pleased with the service. I leaned over her casket and kissed her on
the forehead. Her eyes were firmly shut. A light attendant eased shut the lid.

  The dirt was light. The ground was light. We might as well have been children, playing pretend. Mag’s casket was slowly lowered into the ground. I looked past the graves to where the forest began. I watched the tree line until it was my turn to throw a handful of dirt down the hole.

  Later, I lay on the grass beside her grave and dug my fingers into the freshly turned soil.

  It was a balmy night. Crickets thrummed from the tall grass beyond the churchyard and fireflies blinked among the gravestones. Nice touches, I suppose. I’d never seen fireflies in my life before the ship, never heard anything at night but sirens and the groan of machines.

  “Mag,” I whispered into the ground. “Mag, can you hear me?”

  She was still awake down there, that much I knew. Or if she slept, it was only light sleep. She wasn’t in a coma. She wasn’t dead. Her neurons fired as fast as mine.

  I figured she was probably decomposing herself, filling herself with worms and maggots, letting them slurp her eyes out of their sockets. Becoming an ecosystem unto herself. I pictured her sinking slowly through the earth like it was water, pictured her falling through an ocean of darkness. I felt sick.

  “Mag,” I said again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I still care. I care so much.”

  I wiggled my fingers deeper into the dirt. I wanted to wriggle all the way down and pound on the roof of her coffin.

  “Can we go back to how things were?” I said “Please? We could work out some kind of schedule, maybe. Half the week you could be dead and the other half you could live. Please? Mag?”

  There was no answer. I could have dug her up I guess, but I didn’t know if she would forgive me.

  I went to the doctor the morning after the funeral.

  “It’s humiliating,” I told him. “Everyone’s pretending like things are fine, like this is all normal, but I can see it in their eyes when they look at me.”

  “Do you think they blame you?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Maybe. Has anyone talked to you about it?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “What the hell am I supposed to do now?”

  “Well,” said the doctor, “there are five stages of grief.”

  “But she isn’t even dead. This is idiotic.”

  “Of all the available options,” he said. “It seemed best.”

  “What will happen when we get to the colony?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you and your stupid blue face.” He turned pink, quick as a wink, but I was so sick of it.

  “Ruth,” he said, “anger is a normal—” but I didn’t care what he had to say. He was light, pure light. He’d never felt a real thing in his life. He’d never even had a life.

  I jumpcut straight to the sidewalk outside his office. Behind me, the building burst into flames. I could feel the heat on the back of my neck. It was melodramatic, I knew that, absolute overkill, bad as Mag and her piranhas, her thousand little deaths, but I didn’t try to stop it. Instead, I willed the flames hotter, higher. The other houses on the street ignited one by one like a row of birthday candles.

  And there was Mag, in her white dress with the pearl buttons, coming down the thin dirt path from the woods. She smiled at me. She waved. She hadn’t smiled like that in ages. I’m not sure she had smiled like that ever.

  “Ruth,” she said when she was close enough, and in a moment I had my arms wrapped around her and I was holding her as tight as I could. She didn’t slip away. She was there and she was—

  Light. She was only light.

  But she felt solid. Her skin as soft and warm as bread dough.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I forgive you for everything.”

  I told myself to let go. To go home. To wait.

  I held on tighter instead.

  “Jeez,” said Mag, “are you trying to crush me?”

  “This is a compromise,” I whispered into her shoulder. “It’s only a compromise.”

  She laughed. “Whatever you say.”

  I pushed my hand up under her shirt. She laughed again. I ran my palm up her stomach, until it reached the little hollow between her breasts. I felt the lines of the door which I knew would be there. Mag, this light Mag, this nothing which I could not let go of, laughed again.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you too,” she said quickly. Too quickly, maybe.

  “And you are happy?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “Very happy.”

  I didn’t try to open the door. I just put my hand over it and pressed down, hard, as hard as I could, keeping her together, holding her shut.

  Three Abyss Poems

  Juan Martinez

  1.

  The abyss burns trash

  in your neighbor’s yard:

  receipts and plastic bags,

  photos and mix CDs

  from old girlfriends—

  Yours, you realize.

  Your old girlfriends.

  The abyss burns your trash:

  your mother’s recipes,

  The Father’s Day card

  you never sent.

  The abyss

  burns chicken bones,

  feathers, bags of clothes

  and bags of hair, bags

  stuffed with bags

  your mother meant

  to return before

  she lost her hair.

  Before she could not

  move. The abyss burns

  trash and you burn

  your hands, you pry,

  you find your neighbor’s

  wedding ring. You mean

  to say, Put it out.

  You mean to say,

  Where’s my neighbor?

  but the abyss burns

  the words from your throat

  before the words are out,

  the world black, burnt.

  The abyss is the black smoke

  and the suck of air

  around the fire.

  2.

  The abyss fills a truck stop

  with photos of himself. You stop

  for gas on your way to

  your old campus

  which he’s also filled

  with photos of himself: the same

  red hat, white polo, khakis,

  the same face. “That’s not

  me,” the abyss says, and points to

  his face by the tiki torch.

  The abyss says he’s kidding.

  Can’t you tell he’s kidding?

  The abyss says, “They’re gone.”

  Everyone’s left this truck stop,

  this street, everyone but the abyss

  who tells you that’s not him,

  that you should take a joke.

  That you’ve been here before.

  At this truck stop. At this joke.

  That you laughed. That you

  laughed and he drove.

  3.

  The abyss never dreams.

  He called late last night

  to let you know: He forgot

  to throw you a farewell party

  in this dream he did not have.

  He corners you in the break room

  of his steakhouse and insists

  you put on a cardboard hat,

  insists on calling your friends,

  your cousins, your mom and dad.

  The abyss points to a whiteboard,

  to the names on the whiteboard

  he means to erase. He says,

  No one dreams
in this list.

  Not them. Not you. Not us.

  You remind the abyss

  he’s in a dream. He dreamt up

  this break room, this steakhouse,

  this whiteboard where every name

  bristles with life, already awake,

  already safe and out of reach

  in this part of the dream

  the abyss dreads the most

  where the only name left

  on the whiteboard is his own

  and a brown thumb

  does the work: the name

  erased, the abyss undone.

  AMBIGUITY MACHINES AND OTHER STORIES

  BY VANDANA SINGH

  AVAILABLE IN TRADE PAPERBACK AND DRM-FREE EBOOK

  “. . . a few signal traits stand out. Like Ursula K. Le Guin, Ms. Singh is drawn to scientists, and her speculative worlds are often fleshed out through field reports and research abstracts. . . . The capstone to this hopeful, enriching collection is the small masterpiece ‘Requiem,’ set in Alaska in a future scarred by climate change and dominated by massive tech corporations. A university student named Varsha has gone to a polar outpost to collect the effects of her aunt Rima, a brilliant scientist and engineer who died while researching whales. There Varsha witnesses a whale migration herself, and it’s this miraculous encounter amid the increasingly artificial world that reaffirms the ‘tenuous, temporal bridge between being and being.’ The more mechanized our future, Ms. Singh suggests, the more precious our connections with the living will be.”

  Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

  Time Served

  Leslie Wilber

  The first time Annie Savage stole anything, she was eight and living in a group home. She shared a bedroom with two other girls, improbably named Annie too. Maybe you wouldn’t be surprised to learn three young orphans named Annie became obsessed with the musical by the same name. The Annies stuck together, and were a perfect gang. Annie Z was a hulk of a girl, bigger than the other kids by a head and a large sack of flour. When one of the Annies absolutely needed something from any dust-up, Annie Z took it. Annie H’s family was from Mexico, so she was actually called Ana before taking up with the other Annies. She was the prettiest and best-mannered, the type of kid adults trusted, because she brushed her teeth without reminder, won spelling bees and helped with the dishes. Annie H smoothed out trouble the girls had with anyone so big and authoritative that Annie Z couldn’t handle them. My Auntie A was Annie S by this naming convention. She had a knack for being clever, sneaky and invisible. She was their mastermind and a thief. Stealing things started out of a perceived necessity. The Annies believed if one of them was cute enough and charming enough, she’d be adopted by a bazillionaire—as in the musical—and convince him to save the others as well. Annie H was their best bet. The girls began tireless efforts to dress her in the most adorable fashion.