Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  He sat on the edge of his desk and gave Ali another long look. “But you—you’re stuck in the fanatical past, huh? You know, I believe this story about following your OS is actually true. Not a robber. Just an idiot. You’re as pathetic as my brother was. A dream-chasing relic. You really walked down the OC Road?”

  Ali nodded but said nothing.

  A sympathetic flash lit the Shaykh-Captain’s eyes, but he quickly grimaced as if the moment of fellow-feeling caused him physical pain. “Well, my men will call me soft, but what the fuck? You’ve had a rough enough trip down here, I suppose. Tell you what: We’ll get you a corner in steerage on a hover-cluster, okay? Those northbound flights are always half-empty anyway. Go be with your wife, asshole.”

  Ali could not quite believe what he was hearing. “Thank you! Thank you, Shaykh-Captain! In the name of—”

  “In the name of your mother’s hairy tits! Shut up and take your worn, old expressions back to your falling-apart city. Boys, get this butt-fucked foreigner out of my office. Give him a medpatch, maybe. Some soup. And don’t mess him up too bad, huh?”

  The big men gave him a low-grade medpatch, which helped. And they fed him lentil soup and pita. Then they shoved him around again a bit, but not enough to matter.

  When they were through, they hurled him into the steerage line at the hover-docks. Ali was tired and hurt and thirsty. Both his lips were split, and his guts felt like jelly. But war had taught him how to hang on when there was a real chance of getting home. Riches buried beneath the jade-and-grey-marble fountain. Cure-money. Despair had weakened him, but he would find the strength to make it back to Lubna. He would watch as she woke, finally free of the disease.

  Faithful Soldier, you will—

  The prompt cut off abruptly. Ali boarded the hover-cluster and headed home to his beloved.

  Beautiful Curse

  Kristine Ong Muslim

  It was not an accident at all. I planned on the most opportune time for my family to find out that the removal of my tentacle had not suppressed my predatory urges. And in all this time, I also could not stop thinking about that room in our house, the one with no windows and a thick door lined with steel, a door that only locked from the outside.

  I chose a Sunday afternoon in April. April was the time of the year when the northern sky developed a loathsome purple tinge, a consequence of the early stages of redshifting. The government issued warnings about this phenomenon, warnings which were useless because they could not change the eventual course of things—that we were all headed for extinction and no one could do anything about it. That afternoon was perfect. My family deserved a little pep in their long, uneventful lives.

  When my family discovered me behind the shed, I was disheveled in all ways that a person could be disheveled. I crouched in the bushes. My mouth was clamped to the neck of the bloodied, still twitching chicken. The feathers made me gag, but I kept on chomping, kept on tearing at the doomed fowl’s flesh until, at last, the animal, the prey, stopped twitching—a weakling’s ultimate recourse.

  My father restrained me, gagged me so I couldn’t bite him, and then half-dragged/half-carried me inside the house. It was probably out of shame that he ended up manhandling me. He needed to get me inside the house before anyone could see the bloody spectacle I had created. With her screeching my sister woke the neighbors and our hibernating house pets. Oh, I wanted to snap her neck just to shut her up, eat her and my father, devour their corrupted bodies, and leave only the bones for the rare scavenging birds of prey to pick; but I just could not get to them. They managed to chain me up and plug my mouth.

  My mother said that I had the peculiar maniacal look she associated with the residents of Bardenstan, the place nearest the epicenter of the 2115 fallout. Her comment was not meant to be an insult. She said it in the manner of someone expecting me to reform afterwards. My mother was a first-rate Loyal, thus the genuine kindness. My father bought her from an auction house. I never heard him complain about her expensive solar upkeep and collagen sustenance. If he did, well, that would be another story. My mother, a first-rate Loyal to the core, was wired to love me unconditionally with or without my tentacle.

  Do you know that there’s a picture of me hidden inside my parents’ safe? In that picture was the real me. It showed how I looked the day I was born. I saw it only once when I turned twelve, the mandatory age for Truth—the government’s thirty-three-year campaign to make parents—both prearranged and natural—confess to their children about the circumstances of their birth. The Truth was supposed to foster family bonding, a hazy concept that was prevalent in the nuclear families of the late twentieth century.

  I believed in it. Or I thought I did. I believed in any effort, no matter how preposterous, to be truthful. In that picture I did not look human because I had an enormous tentacle protruding from the side of my body. The tentacle was covered by bluish skin. The skin was sparsely dotted with tiny sacs. Deoxygenated blood, the doctor curtly answered, when asked why it was bluish. The tentacle allowed for voluntary movement. It was, more or less, a prodigious limb.

  “The tentacle,” the doctor went on to explain to the younger versions of my parents, “is an extension of the appendix. This anomaly is linked to predatory instincts.”

  I looked it up in an exotic biology textbook, memorized the passage that defined what scientists thought I had: The tentacle is not a simple anatomical curiosity. It is associated with the need to hunt, to assemble in packs—a behavior that has been observed in long-extinct animals like canines. If the tentacle is not cut out in time or before the host turns sixteen, the predatory instincts may prove to be overwhelming and may lead a person to harm others, as in the harrowing case of Flynn Romero, 19, who finally had his tentacle surgically removed when he was seventeen. Romero, who attacked everyone in a department store toy section where he worked on a contractual basis, killed nine people that day.

  Ah, Romero! I thought when I first read about his case. Had they stopped moving and teasing you to hunt them, you wouldn’t have been interested in them and they would have survived, right?

  Now in that picture in my parents’ safe, I had the squelched look of defeat, the squelched look of an ancient creature that believed itself to be dangerous but had no faculties to behave as such. It looked as if something vital had been seized from me. And something, indeed, had been taken from me—albeit temporarily and not fully. In that picture my lips had the hideous color of raw and ragged flesh, as if I had chewed them up. You see, even preselection and genetic engineering could ruin even the most ordinary of human stock. Something could always turn out wrong. My sister and I were deemed to be from a good batch during the recount of 2120. But look at how I turned out—sentient and disfigured, maladjusted and happy—a familiar fixture if I had lived years ago.

  My parents had my tentacle surgically removed when I was five years old. The visible section of the tentacle was eliminated. The part that was anchored to my spine was left untouched. Removing that part could kill me.

  I missed having my tentacle around. As a child, I used to swing from it on the banister.

  Outerbridge, the only place in America where crops are still grown in soil, does not take kindly to deformities. There are towns where physical aberrations are tolerated. Bardenstan, for example. Anyway, that’s another story. (I have plenty of stories left in me. Now they’re mostly about the hunt, the hunt, the unending hunt.)

  Think about the ones who cannot be saved. Think about the ones who cannot adjust to being different. Think about all our stories and those of the ones before us. This terrible unfolding does not always see a blunt object gain shape. Sometimes, it distorts the object and the landscape that conspires to retain its shape.

  Outside, something darted across my line of vision. It looked like a bird, a real one. Flightless birds were the only real birds. I would find it soon. I would find it, and then I would kill it. And you could say that this urgency was attributed to the unexcised portion of my tentacle
. You could believe whatever sounded convenient because that’s what drives people to stay sane. Father put me inside the room where there are no windows, the room with just this one door that locks from the outside. I hear them talking outside the room. They are scared. They are panicking. I sense their restlessness. My mother, the first-rate Loyal, I’ll gnaw her throat first when I get out of here, slurp whatever comes out of all her ragged holes.

  Real Boys

  Clara Kumagai

  Before I was a donkey, I was a boy.

  I’ve been in this same field for a while now. It might be years. I’m old, I suppose. It’s not that I can’t measure time; it’s just that I don’t care enough to.

  So here I am, dying.

  I lie down to make it easier, flat on my side with my neck pressed against the ground. This is how calves and foals sleep—artlessly and abandoned to their rest. I wheeze into the dust. There are footsteps coming towards me, and I wonder if my master is going to attempt to whip me back to health or worse still, shorten my dying. Let my death be my own, at least.

  My memories of how it began are all tied up with him even though he wasn’t the cause of any of it. Probably it started long before that, when Toyland was built or when a spell was cast in the woods or with something that I don’t know about at all. He was strange, enchanted—a wooden toy that had come to some semblance of life. I was a boy then, leaning on a street corner, and he made my skin prickle when I saw him. His face was smooth and polished, a varnished expression painted in place. His eyes were flat. His voice was not. He talked fast and desperately. He was an uncanny thing, asking for directions home like any other lucky fool with one to go to.

  But then I’d seen my fair share of strangeness and took it to be a curse or a spell or even some spirit caught in clockwork. He was an innocent thing. Or stupid. I think I called him stupid at the time.

  “What’re you?” I’d said, all rough and ready. I spat.

  “Me, I’m a puppet I am, made by a man, my father, and I’m alive, I don’t look it but I am—”

  Babble, babble. He’d do that if you weren’t quick to cut him off.

  “All right, whisht now.” I took to him. He reminded me of somebody I used to know. There was an air to him—a sort of hunger so fierce it grabbed and grappled at you. But not like the other hollowed-out young ones and old ones I’d grown up around; this one wasn’t starving for food. “Ye seem grand,” I said. “A grand lad.”

  His head tilted to one side. “Yes, like a boy, you know I want to be a boy, the fairy told me I’d be one tomorrow, a real one—”

  “Ye’d like it where I’m going,” I said. “Only the real lads—the real boys—get to go there.”

  “Where’s this, where’s that you’re going?” he said, all eager.

  “Toyland!” I said. His face was blank. Well, it always looked blank, but when he didn’t talk straight away, I guessed he was baffled. “You never heard of Toyland? It’s a grand time.” Rumours had been growing, creeping through the streets, flourishing in the tenements, and blooming in the alleys. “They feed you there. Boys don’t do enthing but play all day. No work or school or nothing.”

  “I have to go to school, the fairy told me, it’s what good boys do, and I have to be good—”

  “Ah, the piseogs’ll always lead you astray.” I’m sure I would have spat again at this point. I may have even farted for emphasis. The puppet was silent for a while. Perhaps he was impressed by my physical flourishes.

  “And who made this place, how are you going there, when?”

  “If you come along, you can see for yourself. Bet you’ll learn more than in a week of school.”

  “And the real boys, they go there?”

  “Oh yes, indeed they do! Indeed we do, amn’t I right?”

  That had him. He swallowed it up like a duck eating bread. Real boys, that’s all he wanted to hear about, that’s all he desired to be. Could’ve told him real boys wore aprons and had babies and he’d be in labour, cooking dinner before you could finish a sentence. I did call him stupid, I remember now.

  A donkey’s head is far heavier than a boy’s. My nose is low to the ground. It’s best to keep eyes down, anyway. I am kept alive, just. The collar around my neck rubs me raw. Donkeys don’t need a metal bit, but the taste of metal in my mouth is not unfamiliar to me.

  They put a jenny in the field with me once. They wanted me to sire more donkeys, create some stock, something to sell. I turned from her snuffly nose and wagging ears. She was a donkey, and I was a boy who had been made one. We were not the same.

  But in the end I fucked her anyway.

  The puppet and I made an unlikely pair. I was big and dirty and hungry enough that I avoided being a target. The puppet, though, he was a victim just begging to be abused. He attracted tricksters and liars and scoundrels. It was like wasps at a picnic.

  He’d had some adventures, some capturings and escapings, and he told me all about them in that too-fast, tripping-up way of his. It took me a while to realise why he spoke like that: he had no lungs, of course. Silly me. I listened to him because there was nothing better to do. I did become interested, in the end, if only because I was trying to figure out if all this had really happened to him or if he was mad or infested with woodworm.

  It was no bother finding a way to Toyland.

  “Get on board, boys,” said the sinister coachman, opening the door for us.

  Did I waver? If I did, it was only for the length of time it took me to spot the bread and meat and bottles set out on the seats. We got in, and the coachman leered and merrily whipped his donkeys onwards to Toyland.

  The puppet became less strange the longer I was around him. He told me his father and maker had wanted a son. I wanted to ask him what had stopped the man from taking in one of the ragged barefoot children that roamed the town or from getting some slut pregnant. Someone had unearthed a lump of talking bogwood while cutting turf and had taken it to the puppet’s maker, and the result was sitting across from me in that dusty, chilly coach.

  My thoughts move slowly as a donkey. I have caught myself not thinking for days on end, days and days in which I have just been a donkey. Those times are not bad. I am not happy to remember that I can think otherwise; I am never pleased at my return to consciousness. It’s easier to be without it.

  Toyland, when we got there, was no grand amusement park. It was more like a slum of shabby houses and filthy pubs. I didn’t even know where it was, but I assumed the midlands. It had a claggy sort of feel to it. By the look of the other boys, I could tell our stories would be similarly grim, backgrounds of hunger and beatings and nights in doorways.

  The puppet drew attention, all right. Took hardly any time for a gang to approach us with matches in one hand and cruelty in the other.

  “Back off, ya bastards!” I shouted valiantly.

  “What, are you his brother or something? Yer ma must’ve needed some real wood after she had you.” It may have been the funniest thing this particular boy had said, ever.

  “I don’t have a brother,” I said. “Or a ma, neither.”

  “We just wanna see if he feels pain,” said another. He must have had a scientific mind. I saw a tattered cat skulking in a corner and grabbed it.

  “Play with this instead.” I shoved the cat at them.

  “Ah, we know cats feel pain,” the scientist said.

  I’d already dragged the puppet away. We ducked into a pub.

  “The cat!” The puppet was twisting his twiggy limbs under my hand, giving me splinters.

  “Why did you, why did you give it to them?”

  “Shut up,” I said to him, and pulled the door closed behind me so that we wouldn’t hear the shrieks of the cat as it was set on fire.

  I’ve been bought and sold several times. It’s a nerve-wracking time, being brought to the mart. The sellers trot us out, and prospective buyers wedge our jaws open to look at our teeth. Between my own inspections, I would look at the other donkeys and wond
er which ones I would buy if I were a boy again. I’ve decided now that I wouldn’t buy a donkey at all; I would much prefer a horse.

  I always tried to look good for the men who seemed a bit gentler. Pushed my nose to their hands and hoped I’d get a good master. Snapped at the men I didn’t like. I’ve daydreamed about being bought by a girl, one who would take me home to a stable and brush me down and rub my ears with her soft little hands. But a girl like that would never visit the grubby small town markets that things like me are sold at.

  And in the end one master is much the same as any other.

  Toyland was a fine, old time. We were carefree boys with no rules or responsibilities coming into the prime of our teenage years. It was, as a result, a violent and volatile place. There were brawls and gangs that were quick to form and even quicker to dissolve.

  The majority of our time we spent in the run-down pubs. There were never any barmen, just a seemingly endless supply of watery stout. There was tobacco, too, and cheap cigars. I partook in all of it, though the puppet didn’t. He generally just kept me company while I drank myself to the lively point of vomit and unconsciousness. When I awoke, he would still be there, and we would carry on.

  We rarely saw any grown-ups, though they must have been around to restock and supply our vices. One day we came upon a gang of boys who had found some opium, and I passed some hours in a haze of vertigo and nightmares. None of us missed an adult presence; we were doing just grand on our own.

  The puppet might have missed his father. He talked about him often enough. He never said he wanted to leave, though. He just kept asking me if he was a real boy yet.

  “Yer certainly getting closer,” I would slur. “This is wha’ real boys do.”

  “But I don’t look any different, do I, or feel any different, I feel the same—”

  “Give it time,” I said. “You won’t feel different straightaway. Give it a bit more time.”