by Kelly Link
Step Four: Build the fire. Once the initial fuel has been reduced to a bed of coals and new fuel added to create some flame, begin to cook.
By now you should have developed a relationship with the fire itself. Most likely you’ve been talking to it all day. You may have even named it. That’s normal—even necessary. At the restaurant we called it things like The Devil, Sweet Baby, Smoky, Firecracker, Snaggletooth, Slowpoke or simply That Bitch.
Whatever you name your fire, don’t worry if it doesn’t obey you. Slavish compliance is not in its nature. Just be in the moment with it, and maybe you’ll be able to coax it into helping you make dinner.
Photo © 2015 Dawn Kimberling. Model: Miss Mandible.
Putting Down Roots
M. E. Garber
5/10/2062
VoiceNode 1453a:Anni_Miller
To: Buvaneswari Delall
Buvana,
I wasn’t trying to hide from you, but this has been hard to deal with. I just put my head in the sand, you know? (Which seems ironic, considering.) I’m sorry—I should’ve reached out to you sooner. You’ve always been my bestest friend, even before our crazy AT throughhike. I still miss the Appalachian Trail, our trip there. All my stress fell away. I could use that now.
Jared moved out yesterday. Can’t blame him—he’s moving on. Whereas I, apparently, won’t be moving for long.
They’re running tests, doing experiments. I feel like a lab mouse in a cage, and I hate it all. I want to run away, but can’t. I know they’ll figure it out. They have to. Until then, I dream impatiently. Can’t wait to get my life back.
Anni
p.s. You bet our Pacific Crest trail hike is still on!
5/11/2062
VoiceNode 1453a:Anni_Miller
To: Buvaneswari Delall
It’s mostly like that, yes. My prenatal neural treatments were the earliest available. They’re the ones “misbehaving” now. Somehow, the adaptive photosynthesis helping power my neural link-up is failing. But not just shutting down. No, that would be too simple. It’s been slowly devolving my entire nervous system for years. YEARS! “Slower metabolic state” is what the media say, but talking to the docs, they’re suggesting a plant-like state. I’ll start relying more and more on what my body photosynthesizes, less on other forms of energy. I’ll be alive, but unmoving, by the end.
Already I walk more slowly, and my reflexes are “noticeably retarded.” Hell, Buvana, I even catch myself talking more slowly! Can you believe it? Your nickname for me won’t be applicable soon; the Motormouth is finally stalling.
/Redacted: unknown sounds/
Sorry. I’m still having a hard time with this. I’m furious. The docs tell me to start planning—but for what? They won’t tell me anything. More experiments? No thanks. They’re destroying what little life I have left. I’m done with them. Sit and wait, that’s all it is. I’m not going to sit still any longer!
Those months we had on the Appalachian Trail? I want to do it all again on the Pacific Crest. I’ve only seen a small bit up in Oregon, and already I want it all. I wanted to know that trail—every inch of it. The way we did the AT. I want to keep walking, keep moving, forever. I want my thoughts to run crystal clear again.
I’m afraid, Buvana. Terrified. I know it’s short notice, but I could use my best friend here, in person. Please, can you come? Soon?
With inexpressible thanks,
Your BFF,
Anni
10/21/2062
FastNNode2/Anni_Miller
To: Buvana
I miss you and your humor so much. You really helped. I think you know that, but I want to be sure you know it, and for me to know you know it.
I watched the net feeds for news on your shuttle, and was so glad to hear your trip was safe, and on time. I’m spending more time each day just parsing the feeds. It’s soothing. Strange, isn’t it?
I wonder now if all that inescapable motion, all those long hikes, all the energy I burned when young, was compensating for the coming lack. Something to ponder.
I feel better since your visit. I’ve slowed more, but those patient hikes—moving—helped me to think. Deep thoughts, Buvana. Deep like the roots of trees. They communicate, you know. Trees send messages—pheromones through their leaves and roots to the trees around them.
I’m walking every day. Everything feels different. The sunlight—wow. It pools on me, in my skin, and I expand and lift, turning towards it without thinking, just feeling the glory of that energy. I wish I could share that sensation with you.
Being with you made me see this situation in a whole new way. I’ve been looking for a place, like we discussed, but haven’t found anything yet. Nothing feels right.
I’m so glad you helped me upgrade my networking. It’s so much easier sending messages without having to subvocalize. It got frustrating. Thought-activation is much better. I can never thank you enough for figuring out my connectivity for the long term. However long that may be.
Gratefully,
Anni
5/17/2064
FastNNode2/A_Miller
To: Buvana
I’ve found the place. GPS coordinates listed below. Don’t share them with anyone. This is where I will rest, when I root.
The solitude is stunning. Delicious fog sometimes. The air is clear and pure, and the sea is near enough to warm the area, creating year-round sap flow. When the sunlight hits, it scintillates on my nerves in such a way that I feel truly alive. I didn’t used to know what that meant. Now I do. I wish I could share it with you, but you’ll have to trust me.
My mobility is coming to an end. My limbs are slow, heavy. I can’t bend easily, and my thicker skin cracks and splits if I’m not careful. I’m leaving for my permanent home now. With luck, I’ll be there in a week.
Visit me when you can. I’ll wait for you.
Ann
9/29 . . . 10/3/2086
FastNNode2/A_Miller
To: B
I saw you . . . yesterday . . . I think. Time is difficult. Fast. It took me time to see you, to know you. Your hair is gray, and your face so lined. But they were your eyes, your smile. And your hand on mine—I know your touch, friend. Don’t cry for me.
You spoke so fast. Who is Motormouth now?
Don’t cry for me.
I thought once to know the world by walking it. Now I understand that I’ll never know this tiny spot around me. It’s always changing. I can’t keep up.
The newsfeeds stream too fast. I only catch the biggest trends. More like me? Tell them not to fear, not to fret. To find a home. They will root, and be content in the sun.
An
Singing Beach
Peter Jay Shippy
After I left home, I worked
in a store on the coast
that sold little hurricanes.
They were kept in cobalt
canning jars with lightning lids.
When the humidity rose
the wooden shelves chinkled.
People used them to water
their orchards or to ruin
a rival’s garden party.
For a few weeks it was a rage
for teenagers hide them
in unlucky cars. But after
a girl, Jill, drank her tempest
the store had to be closed.
They never found her body.
Her Mom said the Jill-splat
found in Iraq, was iffy.
The owner gave me a box of jars
in lieu of a last check.
I keep the jars in my basement,
wrapped in damp, thick canvas
so I don’t imagine her
when they begin to chatter.
The March Wind
Eric Gregory
“Up here,” said Shanna. “Stop at the station.”
Bright as spotlights in the backroad dark: a twenty-four hour Stop-n-Go. Caroline parked, leaned on the wheel, and peered at the other two cars in the lot. They’d brough
t her hybrid Highlander for the extra space, but now it felt conspicuous.
“Well,” she said. “No crowd.”
No laugh. Shanna had dark circles under her eyes. She tugged her hair back into a ponytail, then let it out again.
Shanna said she had to pee, so Caroline wandered the aisles of the store, glancing at racks of protein bars. The clerks — two guys in their twenties — watched so intently that she was tempted to put on a ski-mask and wave a wrench, just to see how they responded. Near the door, there was a table covered in shoddy pamphlets with titles like A GREAT PLACE FOR A FAMILY.
When Shanna came out of the bathroom, Caroline asked her about the flyers.
“Town Preservation Society,” Shanna said. “Pair of brothers, had a farm and a diner by the creek. Did a lot of business with tourists and hikers.” She touched one of the papers but didn’t look closely at it.
“Preservation Society,” Caroline said.
“Try to get folks to come back. Keep the doors open.”
Caroline picked up a copy of IS IT SAFE TO STAY? Started to make a joke about the bug-eyed clipart question mark, but Shanna’s gaze had already drifted to the sparse racks of beans and soups.
The highway was badly cracked beyond the convenience store, riddled with potholes. Not worth it to the county to risk equipment repairing it, and no use anyhow.
Shanna set down her backpack, took out her lantern, and opened a box of matches. Cursed the first three as they sputtered in the breeze and snapped, got a steady flame going with the fourth. She put on her backpack and picked up the lantern. The pines cast shadows like shaky pillars.
“You ready?” Shanna asked.
“Sure,” said Caroline. She’d brought a hunting knife, sheathed against her thigh, and she still couldn’t decide if the weight against her leg felt absurd or reassuring. Shanna reached out her free hand and Caroline took it.
The skeletons of pickups sat along the side of the road, a dozen in as many minutes of walking, the trucks all skinned by weather and salvage. Caroline checked her phone. Dead now, and it would stay dead until they left. They were in what Shanna called the almost around the occlusion.
“How many times you taken people?” Caroline asked.
Now that they were moving, acting, Shanna’s nervous tics had mostly subsided. But Caroline had started to worry about straying onto wrong trails, meeting animals or men. Like she and Shanna were two sides of a scale with only so much anxiety to balance between them. Caroline had thought of them like that for a while now. A scale.
“Just once after the state job,” said Shanna, and then she actually smiled. “Not a woman. If that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Well, she was a woman. But an appraiser. For the house.”
Caroline hadn’t heard about this before. “What was the estimate?”
“A joke. What I expected. Thought in some weird way it would persuade Mom, but probably had the opposite effect.”
The weedy pavement gave way to tall grass. The highway terminated in a wall of woods. The pines were gray and bare, except for a deep green moss that plastered the trunks.
“There,” said Shanna, pointing into the woods. Suddenly gentle, like she was talking to a child. “Do you see?”
Caroline looked down at her palm. Clammy. She felt far. Far and cold. Ahead, no way, no path. Only a dense tangle of trees. Backroads dark. She concentrated on the lantern, on the line of Shanna’s finger. Then some internal arrow snapped to its pole, the way seemed obvious, the trail unfurled like a tongue between the trees. Like Shanna had parted the woods with her finger.
“Steady,” said Shanna.
Later, that was all Caroline could remember of the forest. Right up to the wall of pines. Far and cold and steady.
She was tipsy, the first time she asked. Years ago, early days. She hadn’t even asked, really: just ventured a mention of Shanna’s hometown, the topic she most obviously avoided.
“Saw online,” she said, “they gave up on the fences.” Chatty and warm with the good date glow. Leaned forward a bit, smiling over her plum wine. And somehow, in that moment, it was the right thing to say. Shanna grinned.
“I could’ve told ’em it wouldn’t work. Did tell ’em.”
“What do you mean?”
“Few years, they’ll give up on the patrols, too. Just watch.”
“What do you mean?” asked Caroline. “That you told them.”
Shanna shrugged, sipped her wine.
“I worked for the state,” she said. “For a hot second.”
“When was that?”
Shanna told her. The state had deployed surveyors and cartographers to draw new maps of the occluded towns. Some cities by the dunes of the coast, some mining towns in the mountains: only thirteen municipalities, but enough ground to distort the map, to upend some careful gerrymanderings. The state hired any natives of the towns they could scrounge up to lead the surveys. It was July, and Shanna’s summer classes had been canceled. Not enough kids interested in her immigration course that year. She took the job.
She recalled the work with a sort of darkly satisfied humor. These confident linedrawers led by the hand at night, each the author of a different map, each map impossible. Over and over, the same result: different shapes, different borders. An occluded town was like a drunkard, uncertain of its boundaries.
After the forest, the first thing Caroline remembered was the school. They stood in an overgrown field, grass up to their waists. Shanna wasn’t holding her hand anymore. Ahead: a mound of charred desks on the weedy blacktop. Piled up and burned.
“Hey,” said Shanna. “You with me?”
The sense of cold distance receded. Caroline’s head cleared. She looked back over her shoulder at the woods. Could make out, in the lantern light, thick roots threaded through the dirt. Too many roots, she thought.
“Yeah,” said Caroline. Conscious of a faintness to her tone. “I think so.”
“We’ll rest a minute.”
“I’d rather go on in.”
“Up here,” said Shanna. “On the playground. We’ll rest.”
They sat on a raised metal bar, the fulcrum of a seesaw. Caroline waited for the warmth to return to her hands. Stared at the pile of desks and textbooks on the blacktop. There was an ash smell in the air: the bonfire couldn’t have been too long ago. She looked over at the school itself, one of those squat cuboids of the seventies. Part of the roof had fallen in.
“You went here?” Caroline said.
Shanna nodded. “Middle school.”
“This is pretty much what I remember middle school feeling like.”
Shanna pulled back her hair into a ponytail. “I guess after the county built the new consolidated school, they left everything behind. Impractical to carry, cheaper to buy new desks and books and things. So—” She waved at the desks. “Teenagers, maybe. Waste of wood and kindling. Surprised Jamie let it happen.”
Caroline was quiet. “There are teenagers here?”
“A few.”
She didn’t say, Hard to believe. But, maybe contradictorily, Caroline kept glancing around expecting to find someone watching them. The place felt abandoned, but it was a nighttime stillness, a stillness that could be occupied. Now that she was actually here, she felt a stab of regret. Suddenly, she just wanted everything to be over with.
“If you want to go,” Caroline said, “I feel better.”
Shanna sighed and stood up with a grunt. She didn’t hold out her hand this time.
An occluded town had its own laws of nature. You could only walk there at night. Only someone born in the town could leave and return freely. The name of the place was lost, unreadable and irretrievable to memory, even outside. Inside, the machines were broken. Its constants were its own, but it had its constants.
Shanna was the same. She finished grading by nine every night. She liked to be kissed on the spot just under her earlobe. She was preternaturally disciplined and she e
xpected discipline of others. She drove forty-five minutes down I-77 every Saturday to tutor an undocumented sixth-grader from Honduras. She loved cheap white wine and could be relied on to help her friends move. Which she did more or less annually, because the college paid poorly and even her non-faculty friends were moving away. Maybe for money, or maybe because they’d been spooked by the forgotten, forgetting little world twenty (almost twenty, sometimes twenty) miles north of campus. This place that had reached into their heads and retracted its name. Shanna never took anyone to her occluded town. When you asked, she said no. Even when she loved you. She had her constants.
Yet she had asked Caroline along. Caroline took it as a mixture of concession and need. Concession that the two of them were almost over, that this was perhaps the last chance for them to go along together. For Caroline to see one of the towns, her town, and for Shanna to have her help. Before one of Caroline’s applications elsewhere panned out, before she left for home or an ex or anywhere. Caroline wanted to do this last thing for her, a kind of apology, and she supposed that Shanna must have seen that, in the porousness between them.
Caroline looked in the windows of a defunct ice cream shop. Mostly Main Street looked like any small town gone downhill. Gas stations that must always have had worn boards in their windows, that must have closed the day they opened. Antique stores that were antiques themselves. A Battery Emporium and a Dairy King and a tiny park with a weed-choked fountain.
You wouldn’t have known it was an occluded town, except that the streetlights bore promotional flags announcing:
The 17th Annual Apple Festival
Between Annual and Apple, characters in some unfamiliar script, the markings curved and elegant. “The first character,” said Caroline, “what does it look like to you? Like a lowercase cursive s?”