Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  “Wishes, wishes, wishes,” Iris said. She floated lazily up and toward the house. “Keep dreaming, sister.”

  I fumed at her for a moment, then went into the house. As soon as I did I could tell something wasn’t right. The air seemed shimmery, unstable, and the hair on my arms stood on end. I ran through the hallway to Elise’s door and tried the handle, but of course it was locked. Pressing my ear to the door I thought I heard murmuring, though it might have been the reflected sound of blood pounding in my ears. Otherwise the house was as quiet as it had ever been, which added to the spookiness. Was she trying the summoning now? How would I know? Did magic have a sound?

  I rapped on the door with my knuckles. Nothing. I knocked harder with the side of my fist. Stepping back from the door I examined the handle. Maybe if I got a paper clip or a bobby pin I could pick the lock.

  My left hand felt heavy, and my ring warm on my finger. My wedding ring.

  Not just warm, hot, and getting hotter all the time. I pulled the gold ring over my knuckle as it started to burn, and quickly dropped it onto the hardwood floor. It clattered to a stop, emitting a mild glow, then it wobbled once and slid purposefully under the gap in the door.

  “Elise!” I yelled, pounding on the door with the heels of both hands. “Stop! Let me in!”

  “Go away,” she yelled back. “Why don’t you drink some more wine?” The air seemed less agitated while she spoke, which I took as a good sign.

  Ignoring her insult I continued. “I’m not going away, Elise. You have to stop before you hurt yourself.” Iris flew down the hallway, and even from a distance I could see that she was worried. “Before you hurt all of us.”

  “All you care about is yourself!”

  The door next to Elise’s opened, and Kari stumbled into the hallway in her oversized nightshirt. “I feel funny,” she said, leaning against the wall.

  “That’s not true, Elise. How could you even think that?”

  Iris paused in mid-air. “That’s a good question,” she said.

  I blinked, and opening my eyes I saw the little naked fairy hovering over Kari. She was peering into her eyes and feeling her forehead with the back of her arm, as Kari smiled sleepily back at her. I thought of the books in Elise’s room. Why hadn’t I known what she was reading? How could I not have known her wish? I thought of the wine, and the secret smoking, the three of them all awake before me, making breakfast. My girls used to help me in the kitchen all the time. When was the last time we’d done that?

  I shook my head, blinking in the increasingly fuzzy air. My head was starting to hurt, and I felt dizzy. I leaned against the wall for support. “Nevermind that, Elise,” I said. “I know why you think it. I haven’t been spending much time with you lately, have I? I’ve just been so . . .” How were you going to end that sentence? my editor-mind asked. Selfish? Mopey? Pathetic?

  “Distracted,” I finished, and immediately thought better of the whole sentence. “But that’s no excuse. I screwed up, and I’ll do anything to fix it.”

  The voice coming through the door sounded hard, yet brittle, like it could shatter. “You’re just trying to trick me into stopping.”

  I hung my head against the smooth-painted wood of Elise’s door. Kari had slumped to the floor, and Iris was hovering with her palms against the girl’s forehead.

  “Elise,” I said, sounding weary even to myself. “I’m not. I love—Ow, what the fu. . . ?” Something sharp had hit me in the shoulder, bouncing off to land on the door in front of me. It was a picture frame, held picture-side-down to the vertical surface of the door by some force I couldn’t begin to understand. Turning it around I saw that, of course, it was a picture of Allan. He was sitting on Elise’s bed in the old house between our two grinning princesses, all three of them done up in my makeup. I remembered the day; he’d let them dress him up as their “fairy godmother,” with a pink tutu over his jeans and a too-small conical princess hat strapped tight under his chin. The lavender wings from Elise’s Halloween costume had barely fit over his shirt, bunching the fabric at the armpits in what looked like an uncomfortable way. But in the picture he smiled his goofy smile, holding a wand with silvery streamers in the air over Elise’s head.

  You couldn’t see me in the photograph, standing behind the camera. But I knew how I looked: plain old Deb, plain old clothes, no fun at all. Like an evil stepmother.

  My eyes were wet as I looked up from the picture, and the door looked blurry. “Please stop, honey,” I said. “I’ll give you anything you want, I promise. If you want—daddy—then we’ll get him back.” I paused, sniffling. “But not like this, Elise. It’s not the right way.”

  There was a pause, during which I almost thought things would be okay. But then I heard Elise’s ice-cold voice. “You don’t mean it,” she said. “You don’t love him.”

  I couldn’t respond. It was at once too simple and too complicated an accusation.

  “It’s true!” she said, louder now. “You don’t love him and you don’t love me either!”

  Of course I did. I shouted as much. I pounded on the door again, pulling on the handle. I looked around the hallway for something to break down the door with, but there was nothing. There was only Kari twitching on the floor, and Iris hovering over her. There was only me.

  “Do something!” I hissed at Iris.

  The fairy glared at me. Then she suddenly smiled, in a way that made me sick to my stomach. I will never forget that smile. “There is one thing I can do,” she said.

  “You’re lying!” Elise screamed, and it was the longest, loudest sound I’d ever heard in my life. The glass in the picture frame shattered. I heard things move all over the house, falling and thumping and clattering like loose stones in an earthquake. Iris snapped her fingers, and at last my daughter’s shrill scream broke off into unnatural silence.

  Iris was gone. Kari was stirring on the hallway floor, murmuring like she did just before waking. I threw my shoulder into Elise’s door again and again until the latch finally gave, and I tumbled into an empty room.

  #

  I’d like to say that I never saw Elise or Allan again. It would be simpler than the truth, and truer than it too.

  After Elise and Iris vanished I put Kari to sleep, then I picked up the phone and dialed Allan’s number. It rang and rang and rang, and I wasn’t surprised. I was starting to think he was way outside cell range. After that I called the police and filed missing persons reports on both Elise and Allan, though I knew it was a fool’s errand.

  And then I wept. For hours, for days.

  There was a lot of talk in that small town, especially when the police investigated me for killing my husband and daughter. But they never found any bodies, and most people thought I’d simply been abandoned. Perhaps Allan had been cheating, they said. Wasn’t our marriage on the rocks already?

  Part of me still thought Allan would be back for the fall semester, but of course he wasn’t. I started working as a freelancer, refusing to move from the farmhouse and the town that I had never loved and hated more and more all the time.

  Kari grew up, as children do, and went off to college on the west coast. She married and had kids of her own, two boys, and then divorced while they were still in school.

  I spent many years alone. I grew older than I ever thought I would, until I was so old that I became young and helpless again. Kari’s boys were grown by then, and after I slipped on the steps and broke a hip she came home to live with me.

  She told me, as many had, that I should move. But I couldn’t.

  One day I was woken from an afternoon nap by the sound of the front door swinging open on squeaky hinges. It was a small sound, barely audible to my elderly ears, but I’d been listening for it for almost fifty years. A young man and a little girl walked tentatively through the door, looking with shock and fear at the house they thought they knew. I didn’t need to look at the pictures on the walls to recognize them; they hadn’t changed at all.

  I stirred o
n the sofa and made ahem noises, trying not to startle them, but it didn’t work: they both jumped. “Who are you?” Allan asked. “What are you doing in my house?”

  “It’s my house too, sweetie,” I said. “I’m glad you’re home. I’ve been waiting for you for a long time.”

  Kari came in from the kitchen then, and dropped whatever she was carrying with a clatter and splash. “Daddy,” she said, breathless, and sounded just like a girl again. “Elise.” She ran to them and wrapped them in hugs while they stared dumbfounded, looking like memory made flesh.

  Allan’s horrified stare cut right through me. I knew I wasn’t beautiful anymore; I was old enough to be his grandmother. I was nobody’s princess. Still he came over to me and held me in his arms. “I’m so sorry,” he said, and when he pulled away his eyes were wet.

  My own tears spilled over my eyelids and ran down a wrinkled, unfamiliar face. “I know,” I said. “I’ve always known.”

  It wasn’t exactly a storybook ending, but it was enough for me.

  ***published in The Colored Lens, Issue 6, Winter 2013

  Story notes:

  I pretty much wrote this for the naked fairy humor.

  This is one of my oldest stories, one that confounded me for a long time. The first draft ended with Deb offering to call Allan before Elise even got around to magicking dangerously, ho hum. A middle draft, which I used as my application story to Clarion West, let Elise get pretty far and hurt her sister a bit, before Elise listened to reason and desisted. Better, but still unsatisfying. I am still learning this most basic writing lesson: always take your characters to the place they fear the most.

  My Only Sunshine

  Lief thought the wrecked car was a boulder. One of those road-colored cars everybody seemed to drive, it was crumpled against the road’s support pylon in such a way that all he saw as he hiked up the wash toward it was dull gray metal. It didn’t occur to him that rocks in the desert were never that shade of gray; he thought of home.

  The rain was to blame: without the sun reflecting off shiny surfaces Lief was lost. It had been raining for three days already, almost since the beginning of Arielle’s business trip.

  It had started as a dull drizzle, which was surprising enough. The town of Sunlight, Nevada almost never saw clouds, let alone actual rain.

  But it was while Lief hiked through what passed for a river in those parts—a wash, really, dust-dry most of the year—that the rain had suddenly intensified, blinding him with more water than he’d seen in years. Not long after that he came across the boulder-wreck.

  Once Lief identified the car as a car, he could see the signs: tire tracks leading from the road down into the wide wash, and a pair of deep ruts and sand spray some distance from the pylon against which the car had squashed itself. And—was he crazy?—it seemed to Lief that there was a curtain of even more vigorous rain enveloping the car itself. He looked for other cars up on the road, but of course there were none. Rain was like a natural disaster for the natives of Sunlight, so they’d all be hunkered down in their homes, nervously listening to the foreign sound on their tin roofs.

  The tracks in the sand were clearly stamped, fresh. Steam rose from the front end of the car. Lief ran the remaining yards to the car, stumbling in the loose rock and falling once, and splashing his bare legs with gritty mud.

  The front end of the car had accordioned. The windshield’s safety glass had shattered, but clung together in one wavy sheet. Shielding his eyes against the rain and the imagined horror, Lief peered through the passenger-side window. He thought the man was dead simply from his complexion; beyond pale, it had the bleached look of certain subterranean fish. Water poured into the car from the sunroof, washing his skin clean. Otherwise, Lief thought, there would have been blood. The man had been crushed by his engine.

  Eyelids flickered open. Lief jumped, hitting his head on the window frame. “Shit,” he said. “Are you hurt? I’ll go get help.”

  “I just wanted to see the sun again,” the man croaked. His rheumy eyes looked up into a dark, cloudy sky. And then closed.

  It was like the sky opened up. Lief hadn’t thought it could rain any harder, but it did. It seemed to follow him as he ran for help, waited while the paramedics pronounced the man dead, and finally walked back home, wading up the ankle-deep river.

  It rained all night long.

  #

  In the dream, Lief was falling. The whole town of Sunlight spread out below him, a jumble of squat buildings with flat roofs. Beyond that, the mottled desert stretched to the horizon, broken only by the purposeful black line of the two-lane highway and the meandering line of the river wash. He fell quickly, loving the way the air streaked past him. As he fell lower he saw the red rock formations, then the Joshua trees and the creosote bushes, then as he fell lower still he saw a pale man standing amidst the brush and cactus. The man looked up, and in the instant before Lief struck him he recognized the face as his own. He braced for a crash, but the impact felt more like a splash. As Lief broke apart, bouncing into a ring of droplets, his only thought was yay!

  The rain was still tapping on the roof like hundreds of tiny hands seeking entry. Lief rolled over in the bed, and was only a little startled to find it empty. The house felt empty without Arielle, gloomy and dark. He was glad she’d be home later, so he could wake up tomorrow to her long blonde hair tickling his nose.

  Lief got out of bed and went about his own business—thank god for telecommuting—but all day he thought about the rain, so after lunch he went for another hike. Fearing dead men, he avoided the river and hiked out into the desert in the general direction of the Sunlight Solar Plant. It was still raining, but lighter now, and as Lief weaved his way around jumping chollas and other spiky plants he started to feel better. The rain intensified the creosote and sage smells, adding a little ozone to the mix. It occurred to Lief that he liked rain. He missed it. Growing up in the Northwest, Lief had taken rain for granted, even been irritated by it. But in Sunlight it was novel, and it was familiar, and it was warm enough to enjoy. It loved him.

  Lief paused, looking up into the praying arms of an old Joshua tree. He shook his head, feeling water fling from the ends of his hair. He decided to go back to the house, clean up a bit, maybe stick a nice bottle of wine in the fridge for Arielle. She loves me too, he thought.

  #

  Around four in the afternoon the clouds started to lighten. Though it wasn’t particularly windy on the ground, the clouds were moving across the sky as though they were being chased. Somehow, though, it kept raining. The clouds would be blown away, but then they would regroup. Shafts of pink-tinged light sliced through them like swords, sweeping the town like searchlights. Rainbows formed, dissolved, and formed again.

  Finally a beam of light struck Lief and Arielle’s house, bouncing off puddles in the driveway and giving every surface a gilt edge of sun on water. The air around the house grew mystical with evaporation, even as the rain continued.

  Arielle came home a few minutes later. Lief met her in the driveway, swinging her around in a wild embrace before she could even shut her car door. “Isn’t this amazing?” he asked.

  Arielle certainly looked amazed. She stared at the sky, open-mouthed like a turkey. She ran a hand through her hair, then looked at the hand like she’d never seen it before. “So this is rain,” she said.

  Lief laughed. “It’s the best rain ever! How ‘bout a dance?” He held out his hand, bowing slightly.

  “You’re a nut,” she said, smiling. “But I’m going inside. It’s wet out here.” She grabbed her suitcase from the backseat and shut the car doors, then scurried toward the safety of the overhanging roof.

  Lief and Arielle ate dinner out on the covered patio, sipping white wine, listening to raindrops, and recounting their days apart. Arielle told Lief about her meetings with potential Solar Plant investors—she was sure they’d have enough funding to start building the second collector array within months. Lief told Arielle about the dead
man in the river, babbling on and on about his waxy skin until she shuddered and asked him to stop.

  As the sun slid down the sky it left the clouds behind and its light poured in under the patio roof. The rain grew stronger too, clouds covering the rest of the sky.

  “This is nice,” said Arielle.

  #

  The weather went on this way for almost two weeks. Sunlight residents went about with surprised looks on their faces, talking about the rain that just wouldn’t let up, the battling clouds, the beams of godlike light, the rainbows. It was the most rain the town had seen in thirty years, and it gave no hint of stopping.

  Lief found that he liked it more and more every day. He went for long walks, loving the feel of the rain dripping off his hair and running down under his collar. One day he walked two miles into the desert, and when he got home he found Arielle cursing as she hurried to bring laundry in from the line.

  “Why were you hanging laundry in the rain?” he asked, laughing.

  When Lief saw the look on his wife’s face he regretted the laughter. “It was sunny the whole time you were gone,” she said. Lief looked up to the sky, noting that it was sunny still, and only just drizzling. “It just started again.”

  Lief started gathering shirts off the line. “Sorry,” he said. “I could leave again.”

  He meant it as a joke, but from the way Arielle glared at him he wasn’t sure she took it that way. She muttered under her breath as she went into the house, “Fucking rain.” Apparently she liked it less and less.

  Lief waited until he was alone outside before laughing again. As far as he was concerned, she still hadn’t experienced rain worthy of complaint.