“Our friend Thalia meant no harm,” Joy said. She waited for the sunflowers to drift, lightly, overhead.
Would the spell work, powered by truth? I held my breath. My hands, cuffed at the wrist, chafed against the metal, raised as my hands were. My ankle monitor beeped once, turning on. Nothing happened with the petals. Not at first. Then I was tucked back in a squad car.
The others went home as I was escorted to my new confines: my apartment, under monitoring.
The press followed me home, a silent parade.
When we arrived, we found Mary Vine, governor of our state, waiting at my apartment door. She wore a thick, camel-colored coat and a peach colored sweater set. Pearls at her neck. Her fingers played with the white beads.
“Give them back,” she said. “Give all the words back, and I’ll consider pardoning you.”
“Why do you want those old words back?” I say. “You bent them all out of shape and they’re too weak now to do you any good. To move forward—to progress —you’ll have to make up new words to have anything worth bending to your will. Or you can let the old words go back to their real meanings.”
“I know,” she says. The governor sat down on the stoop and picked lint from her coat. “To be honest,” she paused. Reached for words. They came to her lips like the truth often does once the lies go away. “It’s not very enjoyable, forcing words to behave in unnatural ways. You knew that all along though.”
“I did know that. So you were doing spells.”
“A few. Just the normal political ones. For charisma and longing, mostly. It got out of hand. What you did was wrong, but it made me think.”
“So I’m off the hook?” I sat beside my sister and pointed to my ankle bracelet.
“No, you’re still in trouble. But you and I can try to fix things. And then I may pardon you.” She held out a packet of sunflower seeds. Gold and green.
“Your friends said that under the right conditions, these can spread like the dandelions. And they’ll carry words back to those they touch. Good words. Solid, sturdy, real words.”
The word pardon (noun, verb) has always meant what it means today. Perhaps because it’s so important to politicians.
I looked Mary Vine in the eyes. “They will, it’s true.”
“Then share them.”
We’re still being watched, the League of Vigilant Lexicographers. We aren’t allowed to hold any meetings, unless a representative from the state is there.
But we’re watching them, too. The politicians.
And we’re getting requests from all around the state. From farther than that. For definitions. Which are kind of like binding spells. For meanings. We write back, tucking usages and histories and sunflower seeds into each envelope.
The words have nice heft, solidity.
The news channels showed my plea deal. My mother stood silently in the background. They caught Mary and me shaking hands after my pardon.
I was worried for a moment that, once Mary had my promise not to take any more words, she would get up to her old tricks again.
But she didn’t. Her speeches became filled with hope, rather than promises. They bloomed, nurturing new futures, rather than grasping at impossible pasts.
And, from my home monitoring, I began to write to the newspapers, too. I tucked sunflower seeds into each envelope. Joy, Euphrosyne, and Jason did the same.
The seeds are heavy with newly-freed words.
Last spring, when they bloomed for the first time, the final part of the spell I’d planned from the start took hold.
On the sunflower-dusted air, in the golden, pollen infused fields, and beside the rivers silver with dandelions, people began to remember words on their own, and to use them in their proper forms.
They sometimes even knew how a word had evolved over the years, if they walked into an especially pollinated field. The headlines began to return to their senses. The news started to report actual news.
Like today’s front-page headlines, from the governor’s mansion, all decked out in sunflowers: New Press Celebrated at State Level to Produce Dictionaries.
South of the Waffle House
by Marie Vibbert
Me and Chester were throwing rocks at bottles lined up on the freeway guardrail behind the Waffle House when some redneck chewed up the berm, knocking everything to crap and hee-hawing, “Build me a wall, Sancho!” out his Confederate-flag-painted window.
That was meant for me, and it was bad enough without him calling me a boy’s name. I threw a rock after him, not that he would have been able to tell, and asked Chester, “How far damn north do we gotta be? We’re, like, two blocks from Canada.”
Chester threw his handful of gravel like it was slow motion and loped up to the guardrail. “If you’re south of a Waffle House,” he said, “you’re in the south.”
“The hell does that mean?” I said. Chester had a way of saying odd things, and moving odd, underwater-slow like that. I joined him, picking through the wild chicory that grew thick under the metal rail. There were so many wrappers and paper bags and cup lids in the weeds, it was like the ground was white. I hated humanity just then, and Waffle House in particular. The glass Rolling Rock bottles were all shattered. I’d been looking forward to shattering one myself. All we had left were the Mexican Coke, and those bottles are thick and hard to break, and an assortment of plastic. It was fine to knock plastic bottles off, but you didn’t have that hope of clean, bright destruction.
“You ever think there’s aliens?” Chester asked. He was looking up at the freeway.
“Space aliens,” I corrected, but like usual, he ignored me.
“Like … there are aliens, but we never see them because the whole Earth is a crap rest stop town to them, and they won’t ever stop here.”
“People do stop here,” I said. “I wish they didn’t. Place would be cleaner.”
Chester did his shrug again, the one that took his whole body into it. He was a pudgy kid, not fat but pudgy, with frizzy, blond curls and skin almost as dark as mine. You’d think it was a suntan, but it didn’t fade in winter. That was why he’d hang out with me, even though I was a year younger and a girl. I wondered if Chester was a space alien. Not for the first time, either. It wasn’t just how he moved and looked a little different. He escaped North Fork with regularity to stay with his dad in Toledo, where he had a whole other life with a whole other bedroom and everything, but he always came back like it was from a war and he didn’t want to talk about it.
I threw a good-sized chunk of gravel at the Coke bottle, and it freaking bounced off. “This is lame,” I said. I waited for Chester to suggest something else to do.
Since we started fifth grade, everyone teased we were boyfriend-girlfriend, even though I wouldn’t kiss Chester if he were the last human being on the planet. I might, if he were an alien, though. For science.
Chester nodded like he was considering the gravity of it all, and then he looked sideways at me. “Wanna see something secret?”
I threw the pebble in my hand at him. “Does the pope crap in the woods?”
Chester flinched more than he needed to because he knew I wanted a reaction and waved me over to the dumpster fence. Every fast food joint has a dumpster fence, this outside area with a wall around it so people can’t steal their trash or something. This one was in the back corner of the lot, tucked into the rising curve of the freeway onramp. I’d never gone over there because … eeew.
Chester picked through the taller weeds, waving me on. There was this line of stunted, shabby Christmas trees to hide the dumpster fence from the freeway. Chester ducked between them and the fence.
It was cool and dark and surprisingly open under the shrubs—like a miniature pine forest, all needles on the ground. And there was this thing.
“The hell is that?” I asked. It looked like a mattress, made of wire and fans, and I started to worry that all the boyfriend-girlfriend teasing had gotten to Chester.
“Drones,” he sai
d. He squatted down and poked a black fan. “This one, I got for Christmas. It’s the best. This one, I found in the trash behind Denny’s. This one, I found in the crick.”
The structure started to make sense. There were six separate drones, lashed together with wire and braided strips of plastic like a six-pack, only flatter. “You made a super drone,” I said.
“Well, kinda,” Chester said, and shrugged. “It doesn’t actually work. But I was thinking, if it did, we could, you know, fly out of here. Visit places. Like maybe Six Flags.”
My heart and stomach did a simultaneous flip like I was already in line for the Goliath. “You should have shown me sooner. Let’s get her fixed.”
“Thing is, only my drone actually works. Well, this one kinda does.” He nudged the one next to his.
Just like a boy. I would have put the working ones on opposite sides. “What’s broken on that one?”
“It spins, but not fast.”
“Are these all battery powered?”
He looked at me like this was way too technical a question to have considered.
“Dio … Dude,” I said, “how are you going to make big plans and not think about how to make it work?” I was so annoyed, I almost spoke Spanish, and I didn’t do that anymore, not even at home.
“I got all this stuff put together!” he said.
“Well, yeah. And it’s awesome. But now we gotta talk about power.” I knee-walked around, getting pine needles in my jeans, and checked each of the drone’s battery packs. Sure enough, two of them were leaking battery blood. I took those apart and threw the dead batteries at the freeway slope. Then I went and got ’em back because I hadn’t checked what size they were. I’d never seen batteries like these. They were flat rectangles, wrapped in plastic, not the usual cylinders.
We ran to both of our houses, looking for batteries. My dad had a whole drawer full of size D’s, but half of them were dead. Chester’s mom didn’t have any batteries that weren’t in anything, and she chased us out of the house because she was folding laundry and we’d tracked dirt in.
We reconvened in my dad’s garage. “What we need,” I said, “is solar power.” I’d done a science project once where I tried to heat up water by running it over baking sheets. Dad found me all this plastic tubing from an old fish tank, and we scrubbed the cookie sheets with steel wool to get them shiny. I could get the water warm, but not steaming hot, you know? It needed to steam to turn the pinwheel.
It would never be portable enough, even if I could get it to work.
“What about this,” Chester said, and held out a plastic canister about the size of a D-cell.
I popped the top off, hoping it would have a stack of watch batteries. “Dude,” I said, “This is a gum eraser.”
“No, it’s a battery. My dad gave it to me. He said it was. I don’t know how to use it, though.”
“This is not a battery.” I handed it back. “We’ll take these D’s and we’ll charge ’em up, right? And then we can rig some wires to connect them to the contacts.”
Chester nodded and helped me pull the battery charger out of the back of dad’s workbench. “Why don’t we work on Super Drone here?” he asked. “Your dad could help.”
“He’ll get in the way.” I could tell Chester wasn’t liking what I was saying, and I didn’t like that it made me sound like a bully. I’m not. “Chester, I’m going to get this thing to work for you. I can do it without anyone else.”
He set his hand on mine on the battery charger, like it was a solemn oath. “You can,” he said.
I was glad, because we’re best friends and best friends means something.
Dad opened the door then and took a double-take, finding us there with our hands on his battery charger. “Oye, hija. Qué es esto?”
“Hi, Dad,” I said. “We’re working on something for school.”
Dad gave me this sad look like he always did when I answered him in English, but I wasn’t giving in. Kids teased me relentlessly at school until I’d scrubbed all the Spanish from my voice.
“Okay,” Dad said, the look gone. “I’m making spaghetti.” He left with a wave.
I could tell Chester thought I was being mean again. My dad’s an alien. I mean, officially. We’re not supposed to even think about it. He’s lived here his whole life. He didn’t tell me until last year, when I asked him to fill out some paperwork for a school trip. I was still mad about it, part of me. I didn’t get to go to the National Air and Space Museum, and it might’ve been my only chance to, and I could have learned something. Something great. It might have been my one chance to grow up a scientist.
Chester could judge me and ask me about aliens, and he didn’t even know.
We took the battery charger to my room and set it up. Chester made me look online, to see if there was such a thing as a battery that looked like a kneaded rubber eraser. There SO wasn’t.
Four D batteries leaked overnight, but the rest didn’t, and the next day, we were able to get four of the six drones spinning, but the slow one was still slow. There was no remote control for any of them but the one Chester got for Christmas, so that one would do the driving. I did some wiki-walking and got the others set to hover mode.
“Maybe you should put them in lifting mode,” Chester said, pacing and fussing while I pushed teeny little switches with a broken pen.
“Then we won’t be able to control it. Okay. That’s the last one. Try it.” I scooted back.
Three drones whirred, kicking up dust. Chester turned on his remote. The fourth one kicked on hard. Christmas-Drone rose a bit off the ground. It dragged the others, but they acted like they were weighed down by cement. The whole thing started to slide left, toward a tree trunk. Chester turned it off. “I told you, those batteries were too heavy,” he said, which he absolutely did not.
The D cells were in bundles, wrapped in some twenty-gauge galvanized wire I’d found in my dad’s workroom. I shoulda used string or something lighter, but the wire made it easy to make contacts.
I worked the batteries off. “Maybe we don’t need that many of them,” I said.
“But it didn’t even start when you made me test with one battery on each!”
“Well, let’s see if we can get the rectangle batteries into the charger, somehow.”
“Are you crazy? Those things explode.” Chester smashed his grey kneaded gum eraser into the drones, a pea-sized bit in each. “If this is a battery, it’s just gotta touch the contacts, right?”
He only understood contacts because of me. “That’s never going to work. There’s no such thing as a mooshy battery.” How many times did we have to go over this? His dad had probably lied to cover up not having a present to give, and Chester wouldn’t admit it. “You’re going to short it out.”
Chester didn’t say nothing. He just put the rest of his battery-goo in his pocket and turned on the remote again. The super drone lifted corner-first, wobbled, but then it was hovering. Really hovering.
“I’m going home!” Chester shouted. It shouldn’t have worked, but it worked. I felt like I was watching a miracle. Needles and twigs rained down at us. Super Drone cracked into the low branches of the bushes, sawing its way deeper into the tree canopy. It was going to get stuck good.
“Stop!” I grabbed for the remote. Chester wrestled to keep it. “You’ll use up the batteries. We gotta take it out into the parking lot to do a real test flight.”
Chester was breathing heavy, his fingers white against the black plastic. Slowly, he let me take the remote.
I turned Super Drone off and handed the remote back. Then I picked up the front end. It was lighter than I expected, like a raft made of dragonfly wings. “Come on, get the other side.”
I backed up against the fence so Chester could swing around and go first. We made it to the edge of the fence when Chester stopped dead and crouched low.
“The hell, Chester,” I said.
And then I heard a bottle smash. We set Super Drone down and crawled to
peek. Five teenagers with beers were sitting on the guardrail. One of ’em had a bag from Waffle House.
“Jerks,” I said.
Chester balled up his fist and started forward. I had to tackle him to stop him. “Let’s go around the other way,” I said. He twisted in my arms, trying to get out, all grimy and sweaty. “Chester! Do you want them to find Super Drone? They’ll tear it apart, just for fun.”
That got through to him.
We snuck out to the front of the Waffle House and ran to the abandoned gas station across the street.
We lay down on our bellies behind the gas pump island and we could see the shadows of the damn high school kids.
“Let’s act like we’re playing,” I suggested. “Just two kids, playing. That won’t be suspicious.” I drew a hopscotch board with a piece of gravel, but we were both too sophisticated to actually play. I mean, we were practically thirteen!
It was getting dark and cold. The pavement was still warm. We laid ourselves flat, to soak in as much warmth as we could. The stars were coming out, bright and clean.
“You ever think there’s aliens?” Chester asked.
I hated that question of his because I knew he didn’t even think of another definition of “alien” when he asked it. “No,” I said. “You ever think there’s intelligent life on Earth?”
He pushed my arm because he knew I was going to say that. “What would you think,” he said, “if you met an alien? I mean, could you be friends? A friendly alien. He wouldn’t be all gross or anything.”
I looked at the stars because I had to say one of those things you can’t look at anyone when you say them. “People call me one. An alien. It’s not true, and even if it were, it’s not who I am.” I could hear Chester breathing. This wasn’t coming out right. “I want to invent things. I want to have been the kid who invented stuff. Like spaceships and robots that talk to you. It makes me feel stupid that I can’t.”
This silence stretched on for about a decade and I kept regretting what I’d said until Chester said, “Yeah, me, too.”
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