Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  I bounded out the gap after them, spinning in the air like a cartoon superhero, bouncing once before giving in to that urge I’d had earlier to fly. Okay, so it wasn’t really flying, but I did manage to jump all the way up to grab onto one of the rollerbug ship’s swinging claw thingies.

  Out of the corners of my eyes—and from some directions in which I don’t have eyes; thanks, magic evil Helmet!—I saw all the other Smash Sisters springing into action alongside me, flipping cars onto rollerbugs, ripping their heads off, taking their fancy atom guns and turning them back on the space invaders.

  I could practically hear what they were thinking.

  Or wait, I could hear what they were thinking.

  A second rollerbug ship swooped down alongside the one I was swinging from, and my datastream vision told me it was aiming its giant atomizer cannon at me. So I did the only thing you can do in a situation like that, and jumped up onto the main body of the rollerbug ship. The cannon followed me and fired, but I’d already launched myself onto that second ship by the time the first one started crackling out of existence like burning cotton candy.

  Sarah was already there, gripping the ship and banging into its hull with her Helmet. One, two, three hits and she was in. I followed.

  It went on like that, but not for long. With the astonishing power of helmet glitter on our side, the rollerbugs had no chance. We rid our city of them before the evening news.

  But we didn’t make it back to the Smash Pad in time for the evening news.

  The war may have been quick as interplanetary struggles for independence go, but it was still longer than your standard roller derby bout, and therefore longer than anyone had ever worn the possessed Helmets before. It’s a beautiful feeling, wearing the Helmet, one I cannot really explain. But I’ll try.

  Here’s the thing. When I put on the Helmet I was twenty years old. Fat. Weird looking. Rocking the community college approach to not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up while still living at home with judgy parents who were unimpressed with my life choices. The only thing I’d ever been pretty good at was roller derby, and as you may have surmised, I wasn’t even that great at derby. I’d aged out of the Smash Brats two years ago and even with the fifteen best players in the league dead (as I now knew), it still took me over a year to get drafted to the travel team. I wasn’t convinced my teammates actually liked me.

  But with the Helmets on, it was different. With the Helmet on, I felt like the best in the world, and furthermore, with all of us wearing them I felt I really, truly belonged. Sure, each of us went off on her own to take out rollerbugs in individual feats of glory, but even more often we worked together, coming at them from all angles with vicious, beautiful combo moves.

  When it was over, we landed in unison on a rooftop with only a few holes in it. We faced each other, and if there was a moment we could have taken off the Helmets it was right then, our mission complete, having won our bout.

  A piece of information pinged in my head, lighting it up like a flare in a cave: stragglers. Rollerbugs, a handful of them, alive in the city.

  We didn’t even need to look at each other before off we went.

  Our Helmets told us where to go. They told us everything we needed to know: how many there were (five), where they were (outside Hillside Hospital), and whether they were armed (they weren’t). We swarmed that parking lot like hungry lions, cutting through a crowd of injured people to reach our prey.

  Everything else was muted. I could see everything, inside and out, in extreme close-up or backed out to an impossibly wide view. But none of it was important save the glowing bones of the rollerbugs. We would smash them into dust.

  But other bones came into my x-ray view, human bones, suggestions of beings that were, inexplicably, protecting the rollerbugs. They said words to us in their human language, words like not a threat, injured, help, but we were so far beyond human that we could hardly understand them. We had squad goals. Destroy. Win.

  We broke into an offensive formation, screening and hitting our way through the blockers between us and those alien jammers. Nothing could stop us. Except—

  “Helga Prudence Syvertson!”

  The syllables were familiar. They got inside my head like an itch. I blinked, looking at the bipedal form whose mouth had shaped them. It too was familiar. I blinked again.

  Bigger than the itch was the hum of my teammates, urging me on. We had each other, and needed nothing more. I kept going, through the squawking being. “What is wrong with you?” it said.

  And that, even more than the other syllables, was familiar. I recognized that as a question this being had asked me many times, over many years. A question I had asked myself. Those . . . words . . . brought a kind of . . . feelings-pain . . .

  Nothing is wrong with you, my teammates seemed to say. The Helmet seemed to say.

  And oh, oh how I wanted to believe it. But as strong as the pull of camaraderie was on me, what is wrong with me pulled harder. The datafeed slowed, my x-ray vision got blurry, flickered colors, the real-world vision flickered colors. I heard a wail of mourning coming out of a mouth that was in my face. I reached my hands up to blot out that sound and found the buckle of a chinstrap. Those hands—my hands—pressed into my face and up and up and the pain was so intense I thought my head—my head!—would explode. Ballistic Missy exploded, Keiko’s voice in my head helpfully told me, and then it was all their voices, the whole team, and oh, they were so disappointed in me, and the pain! My head was ripping in two!

  I blacked out. Luckily.

  But I vaguely remember hearing one last voice as I did. “I’m proud of you,” it told me.

  She told me. The nurse. Mom.

  #

  I don’t actually know what happened to Skaty and Sarah and Keiko and Barbie and all the rest of them after I lost consciousness, because Mom won’t tell me. She says I don’t need to trouble myself with such ugliness, which of course just makes me want to know more. Did they kill those injured rollerbugs? Did they explode?

  I never saw them again.

  All Mom will say, over and over again, is that she always knew those roller girls were a bad influence.

  “We did save the world, you know,” I tell her, and she just tsks. Honestly, I think to her the world-saving just barely makes up for our foul language. She hasn’t told me again that she’s proud. Just the opposite: she nags me about going back to school (it’s not even rebuilt yet) and taking up a new hobby to keep active. Something safe, wholesome.

  Maybe cheerleading, she says.

  ***published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue 150, March 2019

  Story notes:

  This was the last of my stories that my mom got to read, and before I let her I needed to make it super clear to her that the mom in this story wasn’t her. Just because she was a nurse. And wielded her disappointment more effectively than anger. And hated swearing. Unlike the mom in this story, Real Mom was always supportive of me as I was.

  I’d been playing roller derby for eight years when I wrote this story. The jargon is real. The derby names are my own invention, but that doesn’t mean they’re not in use. Back in the old days of derby, when we had two-whistle starts and major and minor penalties, there was a name registry to prevent skaters from having names that were too similar. By the time of this story, the popularity of the sport was such that all attempts to manage or even track names seem to have been abandoned. I did check the registries and do some quick googling before using these. If Scara Thrace, Skaty McSkateface, Stabrina the Teenage Bitch, Try Sarah Topps, T. Ann Keiko Death, Ballistic Missy, or Fluke Cage are reading this, I like the way you think. Let’s be friends.

  Scara Thrace was one of the names I considered for myself. My actual derby name is V. Lucy Raptor.

  The Taking Tree

  The boy, who was an old man, did not stay long. As he hobbled out of the forest, the tree, who was only a stump, watched his cane of burnished wood. Her wood.

  It all ca
me back to her: the roaring of the chainsaw, sap bleeding from her wounds, the torment when the boy dismembered her, taking her limbs for a house and her trunk for a boat. She remembered watching her felled body dragged away across the forest floor.

  After the old man limped away the tree never saw him again, and she was very sad indeed. Life as a stump was boring. She missed the chittering of squirrels in her branches, the feeling of wind rustling her leaves. The tree wished for death. After all, what was an apple tree without apples and leaves and branches or even a trunk?

  But a strange thing happened. The tree’s roots lived on, a twisting, spreading mass of subterranean life, and as the years passed they shot up saplings that ringed the stump. These saplings grew and grew until they united into a massive, gnarled apple tree, their flesh becoming one. The tree was the mightiest in the forest, and though she was alone she was pleased and proud.

  Birds and chipmunks and other forest friends returned to her, and the tree, at long last, felt happy. They nested and nuzzled into her, and the tree vowed never to take these true friends for granted. She taught them which apples they could eat, and they never took too many or strayed too close to the tree’s hollow heart.

  Her long years of misery had changed the tree in many ways.

  #

  One day a child came to the forest: a little girl, whose blonde hair reminded the tree of the boy she’d once loved. For one weak moment the tree hoped she had found another human friend, someone who would climb her trunk and swing from her branches and eat her apples and love her.

  The girl paused, looking up into the tree’s leafy canopy as if into her soul. She eyed the beautiful red apples with hunger.

  And something bitter twisted the tree’s heart. This is how it begins, she thought. She bent one branch toward the girl, loading all her anger and venom into the darkest of her apples, then watched with glee as the girl plucked it and sunk her teeth in. Pale juice dripped down her chin, and a look of joy spread across her face.

  And then, stricken, the look on the girl’s face turned to one of pain and horror and fear. She doubled over, vomiting until her heaves produced nothing but a thin bile like tree sap. When she was done, the girl got unsteadily to her feet and staggered away, out of the forest.

  The tree’s leaves quivered with laughter.

  #

  Summer’s leaves browned and dropped and birds flew south. Snow blanketed the forest, and then melted away. Another child came into the forest. “What a marvelous tree,” the boy said, and he immediately started climbing its knobby trunk and swinging from its branches, just like that long-ago boy had done.

  The tree looked to her animal friends for support, but they had fled when the boy arrived. And that was all the advice she needed. She could still feel saw-blades ripping through her bark and flesh, tearing her limbs away. She remembered the years of loneliness.

  The tree shook with that remembered agony. She shook and shook until the boy in her branches could no longer hold on, toppling from her heights through her lower limbs to land with a thump and crack on the hard-packed dirt surrounding her.

  She hardened herself to his cries and before long he crawled away from her, unable to use one of his lower limbs. Better him than me, the tree thought.

  #

  Again the tree was left alone with her animal friends. Seasons passed and she nurtured clutches of small beings and felt at peace. But they flew away every year; they had such short, flighty lives.

  Summer came and another boy approached. He scrabbled all over her branches, scaring the critters away. He picked up a bird’s nest and peered at it before tossing it out into the woods. And then, near the core of the tree, the boy crouched on a wide branch and pulled a folding knife from his pocket. He pressed its tip into a smooth patch in the tree’s trunk and carved.

  The tree felt those scratches like the deepest of violations. Chainsaws revved in her mind, and she heard the echo of her trunk crashing to the forest floor. No, not again, she thought.

  The tree shook more furiously than ever before. The boy lost his balance and dropped his knife to the ground below. His clawed at the tree with his fingers, trying not to fall. But fall he did, right into the tree’s hollow core. The space in the center of the tree was only a little wider than the boy. The bottom of it was the flat, sawn top of the old tree’s stump, ringed with the saplings that had grown together around it.

  The walls of the space were sheer. Though the boy tried and tried to climb out, each time he fell back to the bottom, bruised and scraped. His shouts for help reverberated through the tree, making her feel pleasantly full.

  The tree thought that at last she had found a friend who would never leave her, never hurt her. The power was hers now, and she would never be lonely again.

  ***published in Daily Science Fiction, May 2013

  Story notes:

  The two pieces of children’s literature that most traumatized me both by Shel Silverstein: the poem “Melinda Mae” and the book The Giving Tree. I have yet to process the former trauma into fiction, and perhaps I never will, but the latter seemed easy enough to fix.

  I know I’m not the only one who was deeply disturbed by The Giving Tree. It’s hard to believe that this is still presented to impressionable children as a straightforward tale of generosity rather than a harrowing cautionary tale about setting boundaries.

  I wish the tree in the original story had slapped the boy with her branches instead of offering them to him for his stupid house. I wish the tree lived in an orchard of other trees and never needed or wanted the companionship of an ungrateful human. I wish instead of being “happy” to let the boy sit on the stump he’d made of her, she could have unleashed her roots like the tentacles of a land-kraken and pulled him under to a dirty grave.

  I couldn’t give her those things, so instead I gave her rage.

  Oneirotoxicity

  Another dream had gone bad.

  I knew it by the color of the liquid in the tiny vial. When Dreams 4 Life delivered the doses each afternoon they looked for all the world like water, but this one was swirled with rusty brown and darkening even as I looked.

  “Shit.” It didn’t convey the weariness I felt. It was the fifth one this week, and too late in the evening to do anything about it now. Thankfully the other four in the day’s batch looked good. I sniffed them to make sure—orange blossoms and sea salt—then loaded the clear vials into the slots on the front of Kyle’s DreamCatcher. A row of empties waited in the rear slots to seal away his natural dreams before they could hurt anyone.

  When the machine had been programmed and the little needle-arm poised over the first vial like a cat’s paw over a koi pond, I stuck the rotten dream in the pocket of my velour sweatpants and shuffled back out to the living room.

  “Only four today, but they’re all set whenever you want to go to sleep.” I’d finished talking before I realized that Kyle was already asleep, curled up on our oversized couch with computer print-outs cascading off his lap and onto the floor. Bad dreams in half-cc vials were lined up in color-sorted regiments on the coffee table, flanked by pill bottles, a glass of water, remote controls, a plastic tray of office supplies, and a neat pile of used Kleenex. Kyle’s hand looked pale even against the sheets of paper it rested on.

  What I wanted to do was climb onto the couch next to him and wrap my arms around his bony frame. We could sleep intertwined, like we did before the fevers and chills, before the bruises. Before the worry. The thought held me rooted to the spot, toes digging for support in the flokati rug. After a moment I knelt in front of the sofa and started collecting the papers—research for his dissertation. When I reached for the one under his hand, he startled awake with a “No! It’s not ready!”

  “It’s okay. It’s just me.”

  He blinked at me, true consciousness flickering on, and pushed himself higher on the sofa. “Of course. In my dream someone was trying to take my research. He was really mad. And possibly a lizard.” He laughed, th
en coughed. I swiveled to grab his water glass for him.

  “Thanks. I didn’t want the lizards to have my research, but you should see it. There’s a compound that keeps popping up in the bad donor dreams. I don’t know what it is, but the markers aren’t consistent with any of the dream types we’ve catalogued before. It’s not in all of them, but . . .” He started coughing again, and this time the fit seemed to go on and on. My own chest hurt from it, though I think it was my heart that ached rather than my lungs.

  “You should go to bed,” I said when it was over. “Your DreamCatcher is all set.”

  Kyle looked alarmed. “I don’t want donor dreams tonight.”

  I sighed. This old fight again.

  “It’s not helping, Mara.”

  Wearily, I replied the way I always did: “It would help if you stuck with it.” And if the dreams stayed viable, I thought, but did not say. “Why are you so stubborn?”

  “As a result of my obviously deficient brain chemistry.” The answer was sarcastic, but he smiled wearily. “Okay, I’ll be a good boy and take my medicine.”

  I helped him off the sofa and he was able to wobble his way into the bathroom and into bed without much help.

  He slept so much lately. I only wished it was doing him some good.

  #

  When I was a child, even before the discovery of oneironutrients, conventional wisdom held that sleep was restorative. My mother told me over and over that I needed beauty sleep, but I never seemed to get any more beautiful, no matter how much of the day I slumbered away. My skin stayed blotchy and my eye sockets deep and dark like a zombie’s.