Kzine Issue 15

by Graeme Hurry

  “Does it have in there all the trips to the hospital your dad made?”

  I kept quiet to shut him up, but he wasn’t done.

  “How about the time you tried to contact your biological parents and they didn’t respond. Is there a picture of that? Maybe a clipping of a phone bill?”

  “No it doesn’t fucking have that. It’s still nice though. It’s all I’ve got from then.” I looked down at the photos, at the saccharine words surrounding them. Claudio’s fifth birthday was a splashing success! I’d gone to a waterpark that day. My dad hadn’t been there though, due to a stroke he’d suffered a month ago. My mom had promised me my dad would be out of the hospital by the time of my birthday. Of course it was no one’s fault that things turned out how they did, but try explaining that to a five-year-old who’s had a promise to him broken. I noticed that the photos were of the other kids that’d been at the party. Maybe she couldn’t get one of me smiling.

  I set the scrapbook down, beside the box. “Alright.”

  “Glad you could see reason. You should ditch that game too, and that gum, and the—”

  “Grumbles, could you not shit all over my stuff? These things aren’t perfect, but they’re the only record of my past that I have.”

  “You could bring me.”

  “Ha! You weigh a ton. If I brought you, I’d have nothing else.”

  “You wouldn’t need anything else. I was there through it all.”

  “Not all of it.”

  “Most of it.”

  “I don’t think so, Grumbles.”

  “At least get rid of that game console.”

  I picked it up out of the box. “Josh was my best friend—this thing reminds me of him.”

  “Best friend until you moved. Then what happened? Phone calls, emails, video chats—all unresponded to. Kind of makes you wonder how ‘best’ friends you ever were really.”

  “You’re a piece of shit Grumbles.”

  “I remember things as they were.”

  “But you always see the worst in things.”

  “So are you leaving it?”

  I dropped it. “Yeah, I’ll leave the game. But the journal and the gum and the memory cards are coming with me.”

  “You haven’t even tried them.”

  “Fine, Grumbles, here we go then,” I opened the tin of gumballs, unwrapped one, and popped it in my mouth. At first it just tasted of sugar, but once I bit down on it the tart, thinly salty, and creamy flavor hit me. Along with it came a bombardment of memories rushing through me and rapidly replacing one another.

  Alison and me holding hands, walking through some park. Laughter. About the gum, “Tastes like ass,” she said. Her kissing me, her hand cupping my jaw, my hand on her back, her muscles shifting beneath my palm. Her head in my lap, stretched out on a bench. Her eyes so deep. “I wish time ticked slower,” I said. Thought it sounded poetic. A smile from Alison.

  “No, really, I want to do long distance. Oh wait, JK, LOL, not really.” That was Grumbles.

  Allison standing by a pond. Looking ethereal, supernaturally beautiful. She glanced back, my heart froze.

  “Remember that? Does it taste like two-facedness?” I walked to the bathroom.

  Her laugh, so soft and kind.

  “Does it taste like a bitch?”

  I couldn’t focus. I spit the gum out, cupped my hand under the faucet and washed the taste out. I sputtered out water until the last trace of flavor was gone.

  “It’s just a nice memory of Alison, Grumbles, that’s all.”

  “Is that possible? How can you have a nice memory of such wicked evil? I mean, do you think God could look at pictures of baby cherub Lucifer and think, Oh, how sweet he,—”

  “Lucifer? Did you just compare Alison to Satan?” I went back to the room.

  “It’s not an equivalent crime, but it is analogous.”

  “How the hell—”

  “She betrayed you! She lied to you!”

  I grabbed the NINS helmet and put it on my head.

  “I guess that wasn’t in the taste there, but that’s what she did. She gave up on you after you two were at college for just a month.”

  I snatched up a card and inserted it, then turned on the helmet. The world—all of it, including Grumbles blathering, disappeared.

  The dining room. Josh, Mom, Dad. A pill in my hand.

  “These will make things clearer?” Josh asks. He takes his pill.

  “They make the memory clearer,” Mom says. I put the pill in my mouth, wash it down.

  “Why do we need to make things any clearer?” I ask.

  “So that when you look back on these in the future, you can see better what was happening.” As she said that, everyone snapped to their place. They were no longer in nebulous positions of ‘to my left’ and ‘by the table,’ they were planted in exact areas around me.

  “Alright, now I am going to get breakfast,” Mom said cheerily.

  “And I am going to eat breakfast,” Dad said, taking his seat. Mom laughed at that. I raised an eyebrow at Josh, who wasn’t paying attention anyway. He sat down, and so did I.

  “Here we go, pancakes!” Mom brought out the plates two at a time.

  “Awesome,!” I said. The pancakes smelled like fried heaven. I picked up the maple syrup and drizzled it all over the cakes.

  “Hey, don’t hog it!” Josh said. I passed him the syrup.

  “I like my pancakes syrupy. What’s the matter with that?”

  “Not a thing at all,” Dad said.

  Something inside the twenty-eight-year-old me screamed, and I yelled “Stop!” and the memory was gone. I ripped the helmet off my head. The pills we’d taken had enhanced more than just clarity of memory. We’d all been acting like we were high.

  “What’s the matter? You catch a whiff of some feces? From a male bovine? Also known as—”

  “Yes. The memory cards are…not true at all.” I stood up. “I guess I’ll just take…screw it, I won’t take anything.”

  “Wait, what about me?”

  “What about you, Grumbles? You remember the worst of everything. I don’t want that along. I know I had a shitty childhood, but I don’t want to take that with me.”

  “So you’re just going to leave me, again?”

  “Yeah.” I walked over to Grumbles, and squatted down to power him off.

  “You’re going to turn me off? And leave me here? You asshole! Why don’t you think about me! Yeah I weigh a lot, yeah I’m not full of fun times, but what about me! Don’t I deserve a goddamn say? After all the time we spent together, you just get to decide that I’m gonna be abandoned? Who the fuck made those rules?”

  I fell back on my butt. A thought occurred to me. I turned around and grabbed the journal from the stack, and read the first entry.

  So, I’m supposed to record my thoughts in here or something. What a crock of shit. The idea that journals help people work things out is probably one of these idiotic perpetuated myths that people say because they sound nice—like how chocolate is good for your heart or whatever. What fucking study says that?

  Wow, yeah, suddenly my life is great. All from writing a few sentences in some book with a pencil. Wowee. What a god damn improvement.

  I looked up from the pages to Grumbles. “Grumbles, what you said just there— that’s how I felt when Sarah had had enough of me and sent me out here. And you— what do you think about Alison.”

  “I think she’s a colossal bitch.”

  “I must’ve come back here and talked about her at some point.”

  “You were back here for Thanksgiving. About a week after the break-up.”

  “Grumbles, you’re not a good record of what happened in the past. You’re a record of how I felt in the past. I trained you to be a cynical, angry bastard.”

  “Maybe so. I think I was pretty cheesy and stupid when you first unboxed me.”

  “Probably were.”

  “Like that douchebag pirate.”

  I laug
hed. I looked at the car. That silly, sardonic smiley face I’d painted on it.

  “Grumbles…you can come with me.”

  “Really? Remember, I’m a soulless robot. I don’t actually give a shit if you leave me behind.”

  “I’m not doing this for you, you narcissistic jackass,” I said. “I’m trying to preserve my adolescence here.”

  “Ha! Says the kettle to the pot.”

  “But Grumbles, I want you to relearn something. Alison was not a bitch.”

  “Oh yes she was!”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “You said she was. Repeatedly. I even tried to convince you otherwise for a bit, but—”

  “I understand. For two or three weeks, I hated her. But the year or so before then, I loved her. If you’re to be a preservation of me as a teen, you ought to love her.”

  “Okay, well how do you propose I relearn that?”

  “Access some old responses you had about her, and say them.”

  “Okay…Except Alison. She’s actually got more than a couple brain cells up there.”

  “Sure does,” I said.

  “You must’ve drugged her or something. I have no clue how you got a girl like her to like you.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “She’s almost as clever as me. Almost.”

  “Or more clever.”

  “Or go fuck yourself.”

  “No, you’re right. That was a really clever comeback, G. You’re way wittier than her.”

  “Thanks, Claudio.”

  I smiled.

  “So, what do you think of Alison?”

  “She did some bitchy things. Still cooler than you though.”

  “We’ll do some more work on that,” I said. I found the box that Grumbles had been in, and began to pack up my sole piece of luggage.

  THE LOST PRINCESS

  by Lynn Rushlau

  Arra stood at the crack in her door. The candlelight from her sister’s chamber only illuminated a small stretch of the hall. Left in the shadows, Arra pressed one eye to the opening and watched her mother rock Ballina. Four years old, not a baby at all, yet Ballina got rocked to sleep. Mother sang songs to Ballina and stroked her golden curls.

  No one held Arra until she fell asleep. No one sang songs to her. Mother never loved her as much as she loved precious, golden Ballina.

  Her mother rose. Arra grimaced, tiptoed across her room, and ducked under her covers. Through the crack in the door, she watched the candlelight recede. Mother returned to her bed. That Ballina’s screaming might have woken Arra and left her in need of comfort likely never crossed her mind.

  Arra hugged her doll and whispered to her, “She’s not my real mother, Bess. She’s not. I was born a princess in a far away kingdom. The Queen and King love me to bits. They never stopped kissing me or hugging me and they sang me songs to wake me in the morning and put me to sleep at night.

  “I slept in a golden chamber under pink velvet covers and hangings of white silk embroidered with roses, and ate off plates of gold. I had my own pony and my own puppy and kitten that I never had to share with anyone else.

  “But one day, the evil washerwoman got mad at the Queen, my mother. The washerwoman shrunk my favorite ball gown and the queen yelled at her and threatened her with a whipping. The washerwoman and her wicked gardener husband decided to make the Queen sorry for her threats. They snuck up through the ivory castle to the top of the tower to Princess Arra’s rooms and snatched me away while I slept.

  “I was only little so I believed them when they told me to call them mother and father, but I remember. I remember the ivory palace full of sunshine and butterflies. All the kingdom adored me and has been hunting for me for years, and, one day, they’ll find me. You’ll see, Bess. I’ll take you with me.”

  Clutching Bess to her heart, Arra rolled over and stared at the darkness above her. She couldn’t see the rough wood bars, but knew them to be overhead. No canopies or hangings on this bed. No luxuries in this room at all. If her parents could afford any, they’d give them to Ballina. Stupid brat. Always waking Arra up in the middle of the night with her screaming.

  Arra sighed and rolled back over on her side. She closed her eyes. Best get back to sleep. She’d have chores to start right at dawn. Only beloved Ballina got to sleep in as late as she wanted and play all day.

  Arms lifting her woke Arra out of a horrid dream about wolves chasing her through the snow. She thought maybe she’d screamed and her mother had rushed to her side and gathered Arra in her arms.

  But the person clamped a hand over her mouth and carried her from the room. Shock froze Arra. Her captor slipped through the house. Outside, where a dozen horses and a cart waited, he leapt onto a horse and galloped away.

  Bess remained in Arra’s hands and Arra hugged her doll tightly. The man cradled Arra to his chest. Arra pushed away but her captor was too strong.

  He muttered something that sounded vaguely like “Princess, we’re here to rescue you.”

  Arra stopped fighting. He couldn’t have said that, could he? He must have said something else. Something that sounded similar, but she couldn’t think what.

  The full moon lit the road like the sun. Strong arms held her gently. The horses galloped on and on rocking her to sleep.

  Arra woke groggy, but fear shook off the sleepiness. She really was on a horse in some strange man’s arms. That hadn’t been a dream.

  The forest remained more dark than light, but Arra could see the men who rode before her now. They wore livery, like in a story.

  The road turned and an immense ivory castle rose on the cliff before them. Arra gasped. It was the exact castle that she’d been describing to Bess for years. She counted the five turrets and the towers and walls. And yes, look there! The pink climbing roses obscured much of the highest tower. She’d always told Bess that the tower she lived in was circled with pink climbing roses! Off to the other side of the castle, she could see the rising sun glinting orange off the river.

  This was the castle of her dreams. The one she’d made up and told Bess all about.

  Arra wasn’t surprised to see fig trees lining the curving road up to the castle. The crenelated white walls glistened overhead. She recognized the flag. The white swan on a field of periwinkle blue. The flag of her make-believe parents, the king and queen.

  They rode through the huge gates and onto the castle grounds, where stood the topiary hare, stag and unicorn that she always described just there. And ahead, right in the middle of the road, the five-tiered fountain of golden swans.

  The horsemen cantered around the right side of the fountain. Arra’s mouth fell open into a gigantic grin. Yes, she told Bess stories about how she used to play with all the children in the castle around the giant topiary crowned swan located right outside the castle.

  The men rode straight up to the castle doors. Heralds trumpeted from the heights. The doors flung open and the king and queen dashed out, straight to the horseman who carried Arra.

  “Bess! Our Bess!” Tears spilled down the Queen’s face. Their hugs smothered Arra’s frown. The queen pulled her into her arms and the king wrapped his arms about the both of them. They covered her in kisses.

  Arra stood stunned in their arms. She recognized them too. They looked just as she had told Bess all these years. But one thing wasn’t right. She pulled away and held up the china doll.

  “This is Bess.”

  The queen and king exchanged a glance. The queen smiled. “They let you keep your doll. I’m so glad you had something of home. Your godmother gave you that doll. Do you remember her?”

  Arra started to shake her head, but froze. Hadn’t she made up stories about a woman called Godmother who wore a pale blue gown with tiny white stars embroidered along the hems?

  ”You call your doll Bess?” the king asked. Arra nodded. “What do you call yourself?”

  ”I’m Arra.” She frowned. The Princess Arra. That was how this story was supposed to go. She should
know. She’d made it up.

  The king and queen exchanged another smiling glance. The king said, “We always called you Bess when it was just family. Your full name is Arrabess.”

  “Arrabess Kielian Dezzany Linais of the House of Aleriss,” the queen added.

  Arra gasped. That was the name she’d made up! No one knew about that name. She only called herself that when playing princesses with Bess! This was her dream world. How could she be here?

  “Come, let’s get you out of those rags. We’ve kept gowns for you all these years. We knew you’d come back to us eventually.” The king smiled and planted another kiss on her head.

  The queen hugged her. “I expect your maids are already running a bath. We’ll have you all cleaned up in no time.”

  They went inside and the great hall looked exactly as she described with its sky blue walls and thin gold stripes and gold stars dotting the ceiling. The queen and king held her hands as they traversed the hall and climbed the first of the seven golden stairs that led to her tower room.

  Every detail, every little item she’d ever made up, she found along the way and in her room. One steaming bath of rosewater later and her hair hung in soft dark curls decorated with pearls. She wore an ivory gown with a periwinkle blue sash and the softest ivory leather shoes sewn with tiny pearls and blue beads.

  Even Bess got a bath. They cleaned her body and hair and offered Arra an entire tiny wardrobe of gowns for her doll. Arra remembered dreaming these clothes for Bess. The gold and ivory one had been her favorite. She shuffled through the gowns and found that one to dress Bess in.

  Could all her stories have been real? Had she really lived in this tower room? She and Bess, when they were small.

  She dined in the private garden room in her mother’s quarters. They ate all her favorite foods. Fried chicken with mashed potatoes, coleslaw, corn on the cob, and cherry tarts. Arra drank three glasses of lemonade and ate handfuls of sugared nuts and slices of all sorts of fancy cheeses.

  Food filled the plates and drink sparkled in goblets. Arra’s belly was full. She leaned back with a sigh and smiled drowsily at the intricate tapestries and glittering crystal furniture.