by Tricia Reeks
“I do love you, Maggie.” He sighs, and he sounds older than his years. “I don’t—I don’t know how much longer I can stick around though. I was hoping to see your little girl, maybe she’s . . . like you.”
“Maybe she’ll be able to see you?” Meg snorts. “Because if that’s what you’re hoping, get out of here now; you’re not putting my baby through all of this.”
“What is this?” Big hopeful brown eyes, like he might still mean something to her. He does, of course, he really does, but it’s nothing she can put into words. It’s grieving that never finished, a relationship wrenched apart and not allowed to heal.
“It’s messed up, Dave. It’s really messed up.” She sighs and shakes her head, closing the book and setting it aside. “You said you aren’t going to be able to stay much longer. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs, drumming his fingers silently on his thigh. “It’s just . . . I used to be around all the time, breaking pens in your husband’s underwear drawer, the usual,” he grins at her, almost manic, his eyes wider than they should be, making him look so damn young. “But now when you’re gone, I’m not here, I’m nowhere, and it’s dark and warm, lulling. And then I’m looking at you again, and I can talk—”
“You can’t talk in the dark place? How do you survive?”
“I don’t,” he laughs. “I think it’s tied to the baby. Once you have your own baby you won’t have time to baby me anymore. I think something knows that.”
“Maybe . . . what if you leave now?” she suggests, and it makes her sadder than it should. The thought of the quiet. “What if you walk out of the front door now and just go.”
“I’m not leaving you now, Maggie. I see it, I see how often you’re alone in this house. You need someone here, even if your stupid husband doesn’t want to do it.”
“He’s not stupid,” she defends on instinct. “And I’m not going to be alone for that much longer, you know.”
“Then when the baby comes, I’ll start walking. You won’t have to see me anymore.”
“I think that’s best.” But when she reaches for his tapping hand on the couch between them, she can almost feel him, a buzzing sort of tingle between them, high school butterflies in her stomach.
***
The hospital said it was a brain aneurysm. A brain aneurysm that burst before anyone knew it was there, before anyone could have known. One minute a neatly contained pocket of blood and the next a fatal hemorrhage. One minute Dave was jogging to his room to grab his phone, and the next he was falling down the stairs, light switch flicked off.
Click-click-thump as his body tumbled down the stairs.
Meg found herself blubbering as soon as she heard, sobbing that she loved him, feeling like an idiot that she wasn’t there because maybe she could have done something, maybe she would have known. Dave talked about brains enough. She must have picked something up, she listened to everything he said, and then he said it again. Double inputs on random factoids at all hours of the day, she would have known before he did.
The funeral was on a Tuesday and Meg sat in the front row with Dave’s parents, in the far right seat. The coffin was painted black, and Dave would have hated it. He would have hated all of this, everyone sitting around being so somber, talking about him like he was some inspiration lost to the world.
Make my funeral a fun-eral, Maggie. Everyone should get together, get drunk, tell mean stories about me and say good riddance.
She could hear him too clearly, the voice that she never really appreciated dense in her right ear, echoing around her head until it filled everything. The priest droned on, all the words blending together, and Dave supplied much needed commentary.
Who is that guy? I haven’t been to church since Easter two years ago. That should be you up there, at least you’d tell it like it is. I’m going down like a saint when I spent my whole life trying to be a sinner.
Meg snorted, and she could hear the grief counselor her parents insisted on. “Everyone handles grief in different ways. Laughing at a funeral is normal, healthy even.”
See? You think I’m funny, you always thought I was funny. You were just bullshitting me.
It was so cocky, so true to life, that it dragged Meg’s eyes away from the open casket, and she looked to her right, just to check. Dave squatted there beside her, hand on the chair behind her shoulders for balance, in that same wrinkled hoodie from their first date, band T-shirt underneath.
“About time you figured it out.” He smiled at her, eyes honey brown and glinting in the sunshine. “My parents don’t seem to care but you . . . you’ve always noticed me.”
She reeled back in shock, hand clapped over her mouth, because he looked so real, his hair blowing in the early summer breeze. “Dave?”
“Don’t look so shocked, you fall down stairs too. I’ve seen you. You thought you pulled it off all cool, but I saw you.”
His hand slips from the back of her chair to her shoulder, and she wouldn’t feel it if she couldn’t see it, pale against the black sleeve of her dress. His fingers are drumming against her, silent, slow. The click-click-thump she can’t really hear thrums through her arm, through her chest, rippling along her spine as the priest’s words spiral into startling clarity.
“He will always be with us.”
***
Mostly, it seems to be sleepless young mothers crying in Meg’s mommy and me group about their little darling liking daddy better. Of course, she hasn’t seen any evidence that any of those dripping wet claims are true, but it makes her a little more appreciative of her daughter’s obvious preference. Mama’s Girl isn’t really a thing, it’s not a phrase or a title, so Meg’s inner rebel is a little too proud of the way her little girl holds scalding eye contact with her. Newborn blue eyes just starting to turn her dad’s shade of chocolate brown.
She assumes it’s normal, she’s the one home with the baby—it’s only natural that the bond is going to be stronger. It’ll probably even out at some point, her husband is bound to be the more lax parent anyway. It’ll make sense when her girl ends up siding against her. It happens, it’s part of parenting.
Dave has kept true to his promise, assurance, whatever it was. He hasn’t been around, no voices in corners, no tilted wedding pictures on the walls. It’s quiet, too quiet sometimes, but again, Meg figures that’s normal. Silence is normal, loneliness is normal. It’s the tradeoff for privacy, for her comfortable life.
She hopes he has moved on somehow. Maybe it works like the movies, and he was still around because he had some task to complete and he got it done. Maybe he was supposed to keep her sane through her first pregnancy, except she doubts she’s significant enough for that kind of guardian-angel treatment from the beyond. Maybe it’s her daughter, she can believe that her daughter is that special somehow, that the little girl is going to grow up to be someone so special, so important, that the Great Afterlife made her mother crazy for ten years.
Maybe he found a ghostly girlfriend, and they’re terrorizing a classroom together. That’s always where she thought Dave should be, where she pictured him best. In that school, in the back of the class, yanking laughs from thin air. Maybe he’s doing that again, replacing dry erase markers with permanent and watching teachers squirm.
Meg sets her girl in the high chair and starts rooting through kitchen cupboards in a daze, pausing in her search for cereal every few seconds to catch the baby’s fixated gaze, to smile and make a silly face. The girl laughs, little nose contorting, tickled by her unruly shock of deep brown hair.
She smacks pudgy hands on the high chair table and Meg freezes, head swirling as the little slaps conform to an all too familiar rhythm, clumsy baby fingers filling the room with a click-click-thump.
Possibly Nefarious Purposes
Michelle Ann King
When she got back from Las Vegas, Dayna found a padded envelope on her doormat containing a set of keys, a glossy brochure for a health spa called Rejuvenation, and a sheaf of pape
rwork that said she owned it.
She didn’t know anything about health and beauty, but she did know that when the aliens dropped that kind of hint, they expected her to take it. So she took a course in nail art, and hired some therapists—strangely, all called Sarah —who understood how to do all the other things on the spa’s exquisitely printed menu of treatments.
Amy, of course, thought it was a bad idea. But she did at least come out of her basement for an hour so that Dayna could practice airbrushing scarlet palm trees on her nails.
“Vegas was a wonderful adventure, by the way,” Dayna said. “I flew over the Strip in a helicopter, ate oysters for breakfast, drank neon-colored cocktails from glasses the size of fishbowls, had sex with a Malaysian Elvis impersonator, and shot paper targets at a gun range while screaming, ‘Do you feel lucky, punk?’ as loud as I could.”
Amy shook her head. “Do I have to tell you how disappointed that makes me?”
“No, you don’t. If you’re breathing, then you’re disappointed in me. It’s a given.” Amy strongly disapproved of adventures, especially the alien-sponsored kind. “You have very dry cuticles,” Dayna said. “You should massage them with almond oil.”
***
Dayna and Amy had shared a house for the last five years, ever since they’d met at a UFO enthusiasts’ convention. “This is all complete nonsense,” Amy had said, gloomily eyeing an eyewitness sketch of something that looked like a cross between ET and a Pomeranian. “You can’t see aliens.”
“I know,” Dayna had said, just as gloomily, and a friendship was born.
Dayna had her apartment on the ground floor of the house, and Amy lived in the basement—which was in fact upstairs on the first floor, since the building didn’t actually have a sub-ground level. But since she’d boarded up all the windows and painted every room black, it seemed to embody the spirit of a basement, if not the physical location.
Amy glanced around the spa while Dayna put the finishing touches to her artwork. “I liked it better when you had a garage,” she said. “That was a lot more useful.”
Dayna refrained from pointing out that Amy had never once been to the garage and didn’t drive. She’d only get a lecture. Amy thought driving was a bad idea because it was too dangerous—for other people, of course, not for them. “The aliens would make people drive off a cliff before they’d let them so much as cut us up,” she said. Dayna had tried pointing out there weren’t many cliffs in North London, but Amy had stubbornly refused to see her point.
“There,” Dayna said, putting down her brush. “What do you think?”
Amy frowned at her nails. “Unless it’s meant to be King Kong climbing the Empire State Building, I wouldn’t give up the day job.”
“It’s a palm tree. And this is my day job.”
Amy gave her a dark look. “Only because they say so.”
Dayna tried to ignore the disappointment radiating outwards like a mushroom cloud, and applied a clear layer of varnish over Amy’s nails. “I’m not like you, Amy. I can’t just . . . retire from the world. I still want to work and drive and travel and meet people. I still want to live.”
“Even as the tool of powerful and manipulative extraterrestrial creatures who are using you as a test subject in a study of humanity being undertaken for unknown but possibly nefarious purposes?”
“Nefarious,” Dayna said. “That’s a great word. If they ever want me to open a nightclub, I’m going to call it Nefarious.”
Amy just shook her head, then left without letting her nails dry. But she did at least buy a bottle of almond oil on her way out.
***
Amy held the feathered peacock pose while Dayna timed her with a kitchen clock in the shape of a cheeseburger. Amy had no idea where that had come from, which meant she’d have to throw it out afterwards. She had a strict policy about not accepting the aliens’ gifts, even when they were useful. Especially when they were useful.
She caught Dayna’s gaze. “You’re seeing someone, aren’t you?”
“Seriously?” Dayna said. “How do you know these things? Do the aliens tell you? Do they spill everyone’s secrets because they’re trying to bring drama to you, since you refuse to go out and create any of your own?”
The cheeseburger belched, signifying thirty seconds. Amy shifted into downward facing dog.
“They do give me clues sometimes,” she admitted. “But they didn’t need to about this. It’s obvious, because you haven’t stopped smiling for four days. So, tell me about him. What’s his name?”
“Nathan. He’s a pharmacist. He came in to book a nonsurgical facelift as a birthday present for his sister. I persuaded him to change it to a massage, partially because I’m terrified of that machine and partly because I thought she’d probably kill him if she got a facelift for her birthday, and he’s far too pretty to die.” Dayna reset the timer. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?”
“I’m not disappointed, I’m disapproving. There’s a difference.”
Dayna raised a skeptical eyebrow. “It might not even have anything to do with them, you know. Things do still happen by chance.”
“Now I’m disappointed,” Amy said. “You know better than that.”
“Okay. Maybe. Probably. But I still like him.” Dayna sank down on her own bright pink yoga mat, which practically glowed in the bare, black room. It was giving Amy a headache. “I want a boyfriend. A relationship. Is that so wrong?”
“It’s not necessarily wrong to want it, but it’s a bad idea to pursue it. It won’t end well, that’s what I’m saying.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do. Do you think I never tried?”
Dayna’s eyes went wide. “You had a boyfriend? When? Who? What happened?”
Amy sat opposite her in the lotus position. “When I was about your age, I went through a denial phase. Decided it was all nothing more than an overactive imagination and hallucinations brought on by ingesting pesticides and genetically modified bacon. So I became a vegan and started dating a lecturer in mathematics at Trinity College. Rupert. Very steady, very down-to-earth. Didn’t believe in anything that couldn’t be proven with a series of quadratic equations. I was hoping it would rub off.”
“Did it?”
“I can still recite pi to a hundred decimal places, which can be useful. Better than counting sheep. But other than that, no.”
Amy opened a bottle of vitamin-enriched water and took a long swallow. “But it did teach me that relationships are a bad idea. You said it yourself, the aliens want drama. Excitement. So you start out intending to have a quiet night in, but that’s not interesting enough for them, so they interfere. And before you know it, instead of spending the evening on the sofa with a nice cup of tea and a Bruce Willis film, you’re spending it cleaning intestines off the ceiling.”
Dayna hugged her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them. There was a faraway-looking smile playing at the edge of her lips. “Nathan loves Bruce Willis,” she said.
Amy pinched the bridge of her nose. It didn’t help her headache. “Everyone loves Bruce Willis. He’s probably got aliens too. That really wasn’t the point of the story.”
Dayna blinked and shook herself a little. “No, I suppose not. Sorry.”
“Officially, Rupert’s death is still an open investigation, but nobody’s looking into it. Nobody ever really did. They said it was clearly the work of a marauding, opportunistic psychopath. Or possibly a bear. Although what a bear would have been doing wandering the streets of Cambridge, nobody ever wanted to discuss.”
“I wish we could discuss things with them,” Dayna said. “I’d like to know who they are. Are they scientists? Security guards? Zookeepers? Spies? TV producers? I wish we had a proper way to communicate, not just that weird possession-of-random-objects thing they do. That’s unnerving. And unfairly one-sided.”
“Actually, I’ve been working on that,” Amy said. “Watch this.” She rolled her towel up and draped it aroun
d the water bottle, then moved her bag of pumpkin seeds three inches to the right.
Dayna stared. “Did you just talk to them?”
“Yes. I told them to fuck off out of my house. Or possibly, given that the nuances of the language are very subtle, that there’s no such thing as Bigfoot.”
Dayna nibbled on a pumpkin seed. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I think I saw him doing a lounge act in Vegas.”
“I’m sure they’ll bear that in mind,” Amy said.
***
Since the spa was having an afternoon lull, Dayna slipped into the storage room and lay down on the concrete floor.
Maybe Amy was right. Maybe disengaging, refusing to play the game, was the right thing to do.
She stared at the unpainted ceiling and thought empty, bare thoughts. She envisaged herself as a barren, blank void. Unexciting. Safe. Move along, nothing to see here. She lay still. She breathed. She contemplated nothingness. Then she said, “Fuck me, this is boring,” and went out to get a pedicure.
“I ever tell you about the time I accidentally ate someone’s toenail?” Baltimore Sarah said, as she stroked purple polish over Dayna’s toenails. “I was doing this old woman and her nails were, like, this thick.” She held her fingers about an inch apart. “So I’ve got the clippers in both hands, like this . . .” she mimed squeezing, “and I finally work that beast free, and it whooshes right up in the air, and I’m watching it fly, like this . . .” she threw her head back and stared upwards, her mouth wide open. “And it comes straight back down, and then, well, I guess you can work out how the story ends.” She snapped her mouth shut and mimed swallowing.
“That is truly disgusting,” Dayna said, in awe.
Baltimore Sarah shrugged. “Life comes with hazards attached. What are you gonna do?”
Dayna nodded slowly. “That’s a good point.”
The office phone rang and Sci Fi Sarah picked it up. “Hold on,” she said, and covered the mouthpiece. “Dayna? It’s Nathan. He wants to know if you’re free tonight.”
Dayna shot a swift and slightly guilty look back at the closed door of the storage room, then nodded. “Tell him yes,” she said.