Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 119

by Neil Clarke

  With unsteady hands Charlie disgorged the rest of the closet into cardboard boxes, taped them up and labeled the sides, and she did not listen to the message again. She dumped piles of old paperwork into a trash bag, and she made a mental list of what she could do when she returned to mission control. She folded the sheets and blankets, and she kept her phone in her pocket. She layered trinkets and books in a box with the photograph of their grandparents, and she remembered the beach, the wet slap of waves on her legs. She swept the floor, and Intrepid’s message sang beneath her thoughts.

  When Charlie returned to the kitchen, purse over her shoulder and keys in hand, Cath was looking through the window over the sink. All around her the kitchen cupboards were open and empty. The air smelled of bleach.

  “What was the name of that place?” Cath asked without turning. “In Canada, where we went after Grandma and Grandpa’s funeral?”

  “Mistaken Point,” Charlie said. As she said it, uncertainty clouded her words. That was the name she remembered, but what was a place name but noise attached to a landscape, a whipping flag clinging to an ageless continent. She added, softly, “Mom called it Avalon.”

  “Right. She dragged us along those rocks all morning. It was foggy, right? Almost raining. We didn’t have the right clothes. She was so excited.”

  Charlie didn’t remember Cath walking with them on the seashore. She remembered that it had been her and Mom alone, Cath left in a sulk in the car. She remembered sunlight when dawn broke, a painters’ sky so perfect the possibility it might not have been real filled her with a dread so powerful it tasted like despair.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “You know she was never mad at you for being obsessed with your work,” Cath said. “She understood. She liked that you took after her.”

  On her way out the door, Charlie stopped to touch the trilobite fossils as she always did. Hand to stone, fingertips to head, palm to thorax, wrist to the long spiny fan of a tail. There were two creatures preserved in the sample, crossed like clasped hands, dead together for five hundred million years. A slide of seafloor mud inches away, a silent underwater scurry seconds later, and they might have been buried alone.

  “You should take them,” Cath said. She was watching from the kitchen doorway. “Those little guys were always your favorites.”

  Charlie wrapped the slab of stone in a plastic bag before she said goodbye.

  She was a mile from the house and slowing for a bend in the road when a tremble passed through her, sudden as a summer storm. Her hands began to shake; her breath grew short. She pulled onto the grass-choked shoulder and rolled down the window, gasping at the warm fresh air. She closed her eyes. Carefully, mindful of the horn, she rested her head against the steering wheel. The taste of coffee lingered on her tongue.

  She sat there for five minutes, ten, foot on the brake, engine running. Through the window she heard birds, a breeze in the trees, a single car passing. The gentle sounds Mom had sought after decades of students and department meetings and field expeditions. A different daughter would have admired the comfort she found in that peace. It was the rooted calm Mom had craved after a lifetime of wandering, a slowness she had never admitted she needed, and she’d had only a few years to enjoy it. A different daughter would have helped plant the garden.

  Charlie picked up her phone from the passenger seat. She dug through her purse for the power cable, plugged it in. She set the audio file to repeat and tapped play. A burst of sound, a breath of silence. A voice she did or did not recognize. Another she did or did not love. Forty-seven seconds beginning to end. Everybody’s dying, everybody’s fine. The mist was gone from the river, the water glinting in sunlight, the trees a mottled canvas of deepening green. She checked her mirror, checked both directions, and pulled onto the road again. The recording started over.

  About the Author

  Kali Wallace studied geology and geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of the young adult horror novel Shallow Graves (HarperCollins) and several science fiction and fantasy short stories.

  Teenagers from Outer Space

  Dale Bailey

  The first aliens arrived in Milledgeville, Ohio, when I was still in diapers. By the time I’d graduated into the frilly, pink dresses my mother put me in for elementary school, you saw them around occasionally, strolling down Main Street or picnicking by the bandshell in the park. They’d bought into a rundown neighborhood in the east end of town—primarily Polish and Estonian to that point, though once the aliens began picking up mortgages over there, most people just called it Bug Town. This was lazy thinking because the aliens didn’t look anything like bugs, but what are you going to do?

  I never really had much personal contact with them until their kids started showing up in my high school classes. There was grumbling, of course. But who was going to tell a hulking seven-foot alien his kid couldn’t come to school? And so I studied Great Expectations and Home Economics in the company of creatures not of this Earth. Which sounds more dramatic than it really was. We all got along well enough in class, even if we did keep to our own sides of the lunchroom.

  Which is where it might have ended if it hadn’t been for my best friend, Joan Hayden.

  The first thing you have to understand about Joan is that she had poor taste in boys. Everybody agreed. First there’d been Luke Jackson, a disaffected former jock who’d been kicked off the football team when he showed up at the Homecoming game half in the bag. After that, she’d taken up with a guy named Jimmy Ford, violating the unspoken divide between the kids in calculus and the ones in shop. That was about the time Joan got clumsy—started slipping in the shower and running into doors—so when she worked up the courage to send Jimmy packing, we all agreed that she was well shut of him.

  Which brings us to Johnny Fabriano, where this story really gets underway. Johnny looked like a refugee from The Wild Ones—black leather jacket, motorcycle boots, and a greasy DA that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a week. He’d dropped out of high school the day he’d turned sixteen and had spent the last five years hanging around Red’s Billiards Parlor, cadging cigarettes and hustling pool. He was a dead shot, and, rumor had it, he’d won his car in a hotly contested game of Eight Ball with a gearhead from Brookton. The car itself was the envy of every would-be greaser in town—a chopped ’49 Mercury coupé painted a glossy midnight purple with stylized tongues of yellow and red flame licking at the hood and fenders.

  Joan had already gotten a reputation for being fast—undeserved, I have to put in, and if anyone knew, I did, because Joan confided everything in me. She’d moved in next door when we were both in second grade, and we’d been joined at the hip ever since, sharing every joy and affliction, from scraped knees to first periods, which when Joan’s made its debut, I remember how jealous I was—until mine happened along two months later, inflicting such misery upon me that I have never envied anyone anything ever since, or almost never, anyway.

  Joan had grown up in a Pentecostal church, daughter to a strict disciplinarian who saw himself as the earthly agent of the Lord. And if at one level Joan rejected all that, at another level she still believed. You never really escape your childhood training, I guess, and it was this division in Joan’s personality that ultimately caused all the trouble. For while Johnny Fabriano was a perfect candidate to give her father an apoplexy, he was also a young man with an agenda of his own.

  You see where this is going, of course, and it’s not a happy place. But when the alien got involved, his good intentions only made everything worse. Good intentions usually do.

  My name is Nancy Miller, by the way, and it’s nice to meet you, I’m sure. If you haven’t already figured it out, this story isn’t really mine to tell, but my mother always called me Chatty Cathy, so I suppose it’s only natural that it should fall to me in the end. And it’s important that you understand that I wasn’t always on the sce
ne. Much of what follows is reconstructed from second-hand reports with all the bias and self-interest inherent in such accounts. In short, these are the facts as I understand them. If you want the truth, you’ll have to sort it out for yourself. You always do, I guess.

  So cast me in a supporting role: plain-faced confidante and collaborator to the beautiful lead. Joan really was beautiful, too, which is to say blonde and buxom in the slightly zaftig mold then in fashion. She inspired plenty of interest among the boys at Milledgeville High, but as I’ve already said, she never returned the affections of the boys who might have brought her happiness, if happiness was even an option for her, and I think it probably wasn’t.

  Certainly it wasn’t with Johnny Fabriano. Like I said, he had an agenda of his own, and if, on Joan’s part, he was calculated to infuriate her father, then there’s some small irony that had it not been for her father they might never have met in the first place. Sometimes just stopping for gas can change the entire course of your life, and that’s exactly what happened when her father decided to swing their old Caddy into Staley’s Gulf station one September Sunday after church.

  Gas stations were full service back then—the days of pumping your own fuel were still decades away—and while Mr. Staley fussed with the Caddy’s tire pressure, Johnny’s ’49 Merc roared up to the neighboring pump. Both Joan and her father knew the car, of course—who hadn’t seen it around town?—and Joan at least knew its driver by reputation. What she didn’t know was what a sweet smile Johnny had. But he did, I can vouch for that myself, and when he turned his head to look at Joan, he passed one to her, like a gift.

  Maybe it would have ended there, a shared smile in a gas station parking lot, but Joan’s father couldn’t help weighing in on the matter. “What a cheap hood,” he said, pouring into those two words all the disdain that only those certain of their place in Heaven can summon.

  That was enough for Joan, of course. As her father wheeled the car out into the street she smiled back at Johnny.

  When she told me about it that night, she was almost incandescent with excitement, so I wasn’t surprised when she contrived an excuse to walk by Red’s Billiards Parlor after school the next day. Johnny’s car was parked at the curb outside and just as we came abreast of the place—I could already see Joan calculating her odds of coaxing me inside—who should appear in the door but Johnny himself, with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and a toothpick in his mouth.

  He did a double-take, looked Joan up and down, and granted her another smile. It was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, that smile. I practically melted myself, and he didn’t even know I was there.

  “Gas station girl,” he said, and Joan said, “I’m surprised you remember.”

  “Remember?” he said. “How could I forget?”

  He did some dexterous little trick with his tongue and passed the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “You got a name, Gas Station Girl?”

  So she told him her name, and then she said, “You’re Johnny Fabriano. I know you.”

  You could see it pleased him, her knowing his name like that. The way they were looking at each other, it could only go one way, and nowhere good, so I stepped in front of her and held out my hand, hoping to forestall the inevitable. “I’m Nancy,” I said.

  He ignored the hand and dipped his chin to acknowledge me. “How you doing, Nancy,” he said, and then, taking me by the shoulders, he steered me gently to the side. “Where you girls heading?” he asked, but it was really Joan he was speaking to.

  “Just walking.”

  “Not that way. Not unless you’re planning to pay Bug Town a visit.” Which was true. We’d already reached the end of the line unless we wanted to stop in for drinks at some dive with sawdust on the floor and “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me” on the jukebox. Bug Town lay beyond, and Bug Town was forbidden territory. It had been abandoned to the aliens, and those who did work up the spit to visit wouldn’t say much except that it was “catching strange.” It was the “catching” part of that phrase that concerned our parents, for those who spent much time in Bug Town often became odd themselves. They got a faraway look in their eyes, as if they were listening to some distant music that no one else could hear, and drifted into silence. Once in a while you heard about some daring kid making a midnight run through the place, tires screeching, but details were mighty slim on the ground—it was always a friend of a friend of a friend, no one you ever knew—so I figured such afterhours adventures for empty boasts. In short, the aliens walked among us, but we did not walk among the aliens. Which is why, when Johnny asked if we were planning an excursion of our own, I was shocked when Joan shrugged and said, “Sure we are.”

  Johnny, on the other hand, didn’t blink an eye. “Maybe you’d like a ride instead.”

  “We’ll walk,” I said, taking Joan’s elbow. “Home.”

  I was wasting my breath.

  “Sounds like fun to me,” Joan said, prying my fingers loose, and I knew then that it was a lost cause. There was the car, there was the smile, and there was the “cheap hood” himself. Her father already loathed him. So when she said, “You coming, Nance?” I said the only thing I could in response:

  “No, Joan, and you shouldn’t go either.”

  Like I said, wasting my breath.

  A minute later, Johnny keyed the Merc’s engine to life and they roared off down Main Street. This time Joan really had gone too far, I thought as I walked home alone—and at the time I had no idea just how far she’d gone.

  They really did go all the way to Bug Town, though I wouldn’t learn that until later that night, long after the scene that unfolded at the Haydens’ when she got home. Any sane girl would have had Johnny drop her off a couple of blocks from her house and manufactured some plausible excuse for her tardiness—an extra hour at the library, a study session that had run too long. Not Joan. That wouldn’t have created the intended effect. I was watching from my open bedroom window—the September air still had the glow of summer—when the Merc rumbled up to the curb. Joan’s father was waiting at the door. He couldn’t have been home long himself. He hadn’t even loosened his tie. He was an insurance salesman, though why a man so devoted to the rewards of the afterlife should take such an interest in the perils of this one, I never could understand. But he certainly took an interest in the perils Johnny Fabriano posed to his daughter’s eternal soul.

  The Merc thundered away before Joan was halfway up the sidewalk. By the time she reached the front porch, the shouting had begun. It continued for the next hour or so, and while I couldn’t make out the words, it didn’t take a genius to figure out the tenor of the back and forth between Joan and her father. Her mother was silent, of course. She knew her place in the Biblical hierarchy of the home. Joan, however—well, her father’s fury only goaded her to greater histrionics. The entire thing culminated in slammed doors.

  He’d locked her into her room, of course. He always did.

  It wasn’t until after my own dinner that I worked up the courage to call.

  “Joan isn’t available, Nancy,” her father told me, and I could hear the suppressed fury in his voice.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hayden,” I said. “I guess I’ll catch her in school—”

  But I never got to finish the phrase.

  “How much do you know about this Johnny Fabriano, Nancy?” he said.

  “Not much, sir.”

  “Were you with Joan this afternoon?”

  I hesitated a moment too long.

  “Well, then,” he said. “I’m very disappointed in you, Nancy. In fact, I’d like to speak with your father, if he’s available.”

  He was. My mother shook her head in commiseration when I called him over, and my father winked when he took the phone. He listened patiently to Mr. Hayden and made all the right noises in return, but when he finished the conversation, I didn’t get much of a scolding. My father wasn’t the scolding type, and besides we attended the Disciples of Christ Church, w
hich was about as liberal as you could get in Milledgeville, Ohio, in 1955. He bought his insurance from Mr. Hayden, but he didn’t have much in the way of personal respect for him.

  “Just be a good friend to her, Nance,” he said. “God knows she needs one, living in that house.”

  Around 1:00 AM, Joan woke me with a handful of pebbles at my window. This came as no surprise. Sneaking out was routine business to Joan. Just shimmy down the big oak tree outside her window, and clamber back up it whenever she’d accomplished whatever mischief she had to accomplish.

  “So what’s he like?” I whispered the minute I had her installed in my bedroom, and when she responded, “Dreamy, Nance. He’s just dreamy,” my heart fell. “Dreamy” was not good. “Dreamy” had the potential for disaster. But what could I do? Discouraging her would merely encourage her, and encouraging her would do the same. It was an impossible hand to play, and I opted then, as I had opted so many times in the past, not to play it at all. I opted for neutrality. It was as close as I could come to fulfilling my father’s injunction to be a good friend to Joan.

  So what I said was, “Dreamy?”

  With conviction: “Dreamy. He’s not like other boys, Nancy. He’s not like you think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nobody understands him. Everybody thinks he’s some—cheap hood”—this last she practically spat—“but he’s not at all. Why, did you know he takes care of his mother? His father’s dead, and she’s not well, and he does just everything for her, and nobody understands what a good heart he has. And he’s so gentle and soft-spoken and he wants to know all about me. He’s really interested in me, not just in, you know—” She broke off, blushing.