They had more pistols than gauze. Clever elders broke open bullets and used their powder to cauterize wounds. Rang got used to the smell sooner than she would have expected.
Kasp reached for Rang’s left hand and thanked her every time she passed by. He couldn’t move his right arm because he’d caught the plague a year earlier. All he had was his left hand, and all he said was he was alive because of her. She promised to teach him dominoes after the violence ended.
Rang forced herself to be present, beside Berry whenever she could be. They ferried supplies together for an interminable while. People kept handing in jars and canteens of water for the common need, and sanitizing sheets to make bandages.
“Berry, how do you tear sheets in such even strips? Can you teach me?”
Berry didn’t respond. She kept staring at Kasp, and the pain in the creases of her face was almost as scary as when it disappeared back into blankness, her trauma a sinkhole behind her face.
Seeing the mess of a man coming in on the next stretcher, Rang told her, “Sit this one out. Get us some lunch. You can’t give too much.”
Berry handed off a tray of surgical supplies and left. It was only in surgery that Rang noticed the tray was incomplete. It had three of almost everything. It was missing one scalpel.
They saved people that looked dead, and they lost people with the complexions of health. This wasn’t dominoes. She didn’t learn it; she endured it, refusing to give in to the confusion of how the next surgery would turn out. Then Kasp got some new infection and needed his spleen removed, and she held his hand and was sure she’d have to kill herself.
The feeling overtaking her like that meant she had to get out, and she ran from the mobile hospital with eyes too wet to see where she was headed. She couldn’t give like that. The habits were stronger than she was. She tried running away from the habits themselves, and away from the radius of suffering that roused them. She heard a stream gossiping wet little half-truths, and followed them to the source.
A huge chunk of worn granite lay in front of the stream, and she fantasized about climbing up it and yelling, “No!” The height would add to the defiance. She’d yell until her father heard her.
Berry was sitting on the left side of the granite, her legs pressed together like she was trying to fuse them into a tail. She had one sleeve rolled up, inspecting her wrist.
She had a scalpel.
For a moment, Rang was going to threaten herself. She’d run to camp for a scalpel of her own and open her veins if Berry opened hers.
But an ultimatum didn’t feel right. It’d almost guarantee more guilt, more weight on a tree branch that had cracked.
“Hey Berry.”
“Hey Rang.”
That’s all they had in them. It would’ve been humiliating if either of them had the strength left for that emotion. Rang climbed the granite and sat on the other side, scraping the backs of her thighs.
Berry kept her sleeve rolled up. She said, “The same people with the same skill with the same supplies do the same work, and some of the hurt stay, and some of the hurt took.”
“The people that stay alive come from hard work. I don’t know how a doctor does it.”
“It could all go away anytime. Any of it.”
“Does it scare you?”
“I don’t feel scared.”
“What do you feel?”
Berry hunched over herself, like she wanted to revert into an egg. “I couldn’t help Hillhill.”
“That’s not on you.”
“I see those people in there…split open just like me.”
There weren’t any visible cuts on her, not that that meant they were absent. “Berry?”
Berry said, “Split open like Hillhill. They’re split open like him, and it should’ve been me. If I’d carried my weight, it would’ve been me.”
“You didn’t take anybody’s spot. Nobody is dead because you’re alive right now, and people in that hospital are going to live because you lived and worked.” Rang rubbed knuckles into her tear ducts. “You’re so tired you can’t imagine feeling not tired. I’ve been that way for months.”
“It’s a deep tired.”
Rang asked, “Have you ever seen a miracle?”
“No.”
“Yeah, you have.”
Rang pulled off her top and scratched at the scar over her chest where once someone from Berry’s enclave had shot her to death, and a scar across her midriff where she’d been split in two. This had to be more defiant than screaming at an absent god.
“I told myself that when I got hurt, other people got miracles. But ‘miracles’ was a lie. They were catastrophes. They gave us more confusion, and more people in broken pieces. One time I let people club me, thinking some help would come out of it.”
“What did it do?”
“It made me think I was dispensable.”
Berry’s shoulders shook like new bombs were going off overhead.
It was silent. There were no more gunshots. The fighting had paused, and might be over. They hadn’t heard the silence, because the two of them weren’t done. Berry still had her scalpel, the flat of it over the blue shadows of her veins.
“That’s yours,” Rang told her. Rang sat down close, without moving for the blade. She flattened her hands on her knees and said, “I’m too tired to know what to say.”
“I’m too tired for everything…” Berry said, and her eyes closed like she was too tired for vision.
Rang said, “Please, just be tired with me.”
Berry moved slowly, dripping like she was a sculpture of molasses losing her figure in the sun. Gradually, she slumped into Rang’s naked shoulder.
They listened to the stream gossip, and to the stale sounds of peace time, and wished they could fall asleep, but were too tired for that. Sometimes Berry leaned on her, and sometimes she found herself leaning on Berry.
They stayed like that until a surgeon came out looking for them. Kasp had woken up, and wanted to know if they could teach him how to play dominoes.
© 2020 John Wiswell
John (@Wiswell) is a disabled writer who lives where New York keeps all its trees. His work has previously appeared in Nature Futures, Fireside Magazine, and Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. He will always be grateful to comics for helping teach him to read.
Cerulean Memories
by Maurice Broaddus
Content Note: Suicide
Blue was her favorite color.
He touched the glass case one last time before returning to the desk, but his handprint lingered on, an ethereal smudge above the backlit, cerulean shadow of her face. No matter how often he tried to write their story, he couldn’t shake free of the lies he had built around them. He suspected that even if he could discover the truth, it would pass him by unrecognized, as ephemeral and false as a balladeer’s concept of love. Love knew you better and could hurt you worse. Where fear faded so did love, and he nurtured a delightful terror, a trembling fascination bred in tales. He wanted to reach her and make her understand, but all he had left was the elusive call of memory.
A decade out of fashion, his pin-striped suit hung well on him. A man of occasion, his father would have called him, with a head full of gray hair, a filigree of wrinkles around his gray eyes. His manicured nails adjusted his tie one final time before his appointment. The door chimed fifteen minutes earlier than expected. If he didn’t have to inspect the merchandise he wouldn’t have bothered. The living offered little except their stories.
“May I help you?” he said.
“You the old dude who buys stuff?” A young boy looked past him with heavy-lidded, half-upturned eyes. His camouflage hoodie, drawn up, shadowed most of his face. He under-enunciated his words.
“I am. I’m also quite busy. I have a one o’clock appointment.”
“Yeah, with me. JaQuon Wilson.”
“I see…JaQuon. Shouldn’t you be in school?”
“I should be a lot of things.” The
bulk of the hoodie hid his husky frame and JaQuon allowed his wrinkled clothes to hang from him in calculated slovenliness. His book bag, half-slung over his shoulder, slid into the crook of his elbow before he hitched it back. He avoided eye contact, all the while clutching a skateboard to his chest, protecting it as if it held all the secrets of childhood.
“Is that the item in question?”
“Yeah.” JaQuon gripped the skateboard even tighter.
“It won’t do. I have quite…specific requirements.”
“I know what you want. You think I’d be caught in this creepy joint if I didn’t have what you wanted?” His determined eyes half-pleading with him, JaQuon puffed up his chest and stepped broadly, all bravado and empty swagger.
“Come in.”
The man’s hard-soled shoes sat by the doorway. Walking barefoot into the room, he checked his watch, age spots, like tiny scars, on the back of his hand.
The great thing about wealth was that things mattered less. Not the trappings of power. Not the social jousting of civilized behavior behind smiles like gleaming swords. Money excused eccentricities and only the dreams mattered. That was the last lesson his father had taught him before he went away, leaving behind a blood-splattered envelope—addressed to him in exquisite calligraphy—shaded by the slumping body with the large hole in its head on the couch.
Thigh-high clusters of golden ropes of grass, pallid from lack of water, provided beauty in their dying. Burrs and brambles clung to his pants and socks, scraping his thin skin as he walked without care, a boy with the blush of ruddy peach in his cheeks. Resting in the crook of a low-lying branch, he daydreamed of the castle atop a hill he would one day build for a princess.
Glass enclosed the porch. He dreamed of tending hydrangeas, lilies, and morning glories. From the patio they would sit and watch the sunsets together. The paint fresh and the wood polished, the furniture stopped short of being inviting, museum pieces meant to be stared at and appreciated, but not for too long. Serviceable rooms held little decoration as not to give too much away. No knickknacks, bric-a-brac, or curios; no pictures, no portraits. Thick curtains didn’t rustle when he moved past them, a ghost in his own home.
“Your house is bigger on the inside,” JaQuon said.
“Is it? I hadn’t really noticed.” He leaned down and whispered. “It lies, you know. The walls have ears and move to confuse you when you aren’t paying attention.”
“You ain’t right in the head, old man.”
“You’re the one trying to sell me your skateboard,” he said. “Tell me about yourself.”
“Ain’t much to tell. I go to Persons Crossing Elementary. I’m nine years old.”
“What’s that? Fourth grade?”
“Yeah, I stay with my grandparents. My mother doesn’t come around much anymore.”
He thought he’d seen JaQuon before: a latchkey kid, after a fashion, who punched in the code to the garage—probably because he so often lost his key. JaQuon wandered about the sitting room, without shame or pretense, directed by the insatiable curiosity of childhood.
“So what’s your deal anyway?” JaQuon studied an empty curio cabinet.
“My…deal?”
“Word is you buy stuff people died on. That’s the story anyway.”
“Stories take on a life of their own. Voices of the past, grief working itself out in patterns of familiarity. Objects hold memories of a life lived, but the memories of the death outweigh the memories of the life.”
“You talk funny.”
“Do you wish to hear this or not?”
JaQuon nodded.
“It started with the couch my father died on. My mother set it outside to be hauled away, but I had it brought to my study. She never came near my room after that. When I curled up on it, I could still feel his presence. At night I could still smell him, the scent of loneliness and pain.”
“Dang.” JaQuon gave the word an extra syllable for emphasis.
“My collection has grown over the years. That chair over there? A grandmother of seven fell asleep while knitting and watching her soap operas only to never wake up. A man stroked himself out on the toilet, not to put too crass a point on it, straining during his morning sit down. It reminds me that death comes at any time, and there is no place safe from it.”
“You’re making that up,” JaQuon said.
“Like most stories, some parts are real. But they comfort me.”
Death was separation, leaving unchanging echoes of the people they used to be. He was the caretaker of a grove of memories, his and others. He kept them like a scrapbook, taken out and revisited, an echo chamber of death. Grasped onto like a skateboard he couldn’t bear to let go of.
A time of remembrances, of the day, of days past, of summertime dresses and walks along the canal, of hands held. Her leg brushed against his and he still received the same thrill from her presence as the first day he saw her.
A farmhouse had stood on the field when he finally bought it. He covered her blue eyes as he walked her to the spot.
“This will one day be your castle,” he said.
“But it’s such a beautiful farmhouse.”
“We erase history when the memories become unbearable.”
She leaned into him and kissed him on the cheek. She filled his spaces. That was what love did.
“What am I going to do with a skateboard?” he asked.
“What did you do with the couch?” JaQuon said.
“I can sit on the couch.”
“You can skate on the skateboard. You can sit on the motherfucker for all I…”
“Language.”
“What?”
“Watch your language. You have plenty of words to choose from in order to express yourself. Why limit yourself to the basest ones? It’s so…common.”
“You a weird old dude.”
“You haven’t told me the story of the skateboard.”
JaQuon peered at him, his eyes suddenly seeming too large for his face. His legs quavered and he sat down on the couch without thinking. “It was my brother’s. I was the oldest. It was my job to protect him, you know. My mom used to always hover over us. Wouldn’t even let us walk down the two courts to our friends’ house.”
“It’s a mother’s job to overprotect. It’s difficult to let their children rush off into the dangers of the world. As if they can keep you safe by force of will and control.”
“Sometimes it was like she wasn’t happy unless we were rolled up in bubble wrap before going outside. Playing on the lawn, where only she could see us.
“Demarcus really wanted this skateboard. We tag-teamed Mom for weeks, wearing her down. Demarcus was in third grade, so if she let him have a skateboard, she’d have to give me more room to…be. She bought him this board. Plus knee pads. Elbow pads. Mouth guard. Cup. And a helmet. The next two weeks she insisted on watching him learn to board. And we counted down the days until we’d be able to run free. She began to let us go. Just a bit. We could go over to the next court to play. She even stopped driving by…like we wouldn’t notice her car. Though a couple times I swear I saw her peeking over bushes. Eventually, she trusted us to return. ‘Don’t worry about it, Mom, we just ride around on sidewalks and we just sort of push ourselves along.’
“No one wore a helmet. Definitely not our friends. That stuff was for babies.
“Demarcus wasn’t even going that fast. He turned the corner and the wheels stopped when it hit a break in the sidewalk, but he didn’t. It threw him from the board. I watched him fly through the air, his arms flapping like a drunk bird. He landed head first into the sidewalk and I laughed.
“I laughed.
“It was like one of those funniest home videos. But then he didn’t get up. They said it did something to his brain and I had laughed.”
JaQuon didn’t wipe away his tears, probably wasn’t aware that they trailed down his face. “So, you want to take it off my hands?”
The man leaned forward. In this ch
air a man cheered on his favorite basketball team and had a heart attack. “Five dollars.”
“I can do better than that.”
“I didn’t amass my wealth by throwing good money after bad. I make wise investments. Hold onto it for a while. Offer’s good. Whenever.”
It wasn’t about the money. JaQuon couldn’t bring himself to allow it to go out in the trash. For him to let it go was to begin to let go of his brother and, as painful a reminder as the skateboard was, forgetting his brother was worse.
Death pruned childhood. Sometimes to grow you have to lose something. Sometimes you have to force people to grow and change, shock them back into life, before they become a ghost trapped in a museum.
She found the first stray by the back door, sick and wounded. A large white husky with eyes the color of overripe persimmons. She couldn’t leave it behind: she had already pledged her heart to it. Rivulets of blood streaked when she shifted its matted fur from unseen wounds. Its head lay heavy in her lap, it didn’t move, but simply closed one eye. Its tongue lolled across its lips in pathetic repose. She fed it pieces of torn chicken by hand. Stroking its fur for its pleasure, then for hers, as she nursed it back to full health.
He bought the dog a mate and they patrolled the grounds, fiercely protective of her.
A cat park had once circled the outer gardens, but she was allergic. He loved cats, but he loved her more. Each cat was buried in a carpeted casket under a brass nameplate. His shoes click-clacked, click-clacked, click-clacked along the plated sidewalk each day.
“Come upstairs. I have something I wish to show you,” he said.
“I ain’t going upstairs with you,” JaQuon said.
“You’ve already come into my house.”
“You could be a pedometer.”
“True. And you are wise to be cautious. I was going to show you her bed.”
“I for damn sure don’t need to go to your bedroom with you.”
“You’re right. I don’t know what I was thinking. I get so caught up when I tell the stories. I miss her.”
“Who?”
Uncanny Magazine Issue 37 Page 11