Spark a Story

by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Mild confusion? That was probably a little under-exaggerated.

  But in that moment in time, I couldn’t remember why I had wanted to take that pill so badly.

  “Jessie? Are you okay?”

  My mother’s voice once again brought me back into reality. The lobster was sitting on the table in front of us, a rich aroma emanating from the dead crustacean. My mother had already begun to dig some of the meat out of the shell.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” I paused. “Hey, Mom, when did the lobster get here?”

  “You were zoning out, dear. Would you like the tail?” she asked cheerfully, dropping the tail’s meat onto my plate.

  I stared at the pale meat and then back at my mother.

  “I’m not really sure I’m hungry right now . . . Do you think we could just get a to-go box or someth—”

  I heard a crash behind me. I turned around to see a tray flipped over on the stone tiles. A mixture of broken dinnerware and spilled food was heaped on the floor next to the table of a middle-aged married couple. Their attention was still focused on each other, and they seemed unaffected by the spilled food below them.

  I turned back to my mother, who also seemed indifferent.

  “What just happened?” I asked my mother.

  “What?”

  I stared blankly at my mother.

  She had to have seen it. She’s facing that direction, she had to see it!

  “Excuse me, I believe you have a phone call in the back?” a new waiter interrupted. His eyes bounced around the room and he refused to make eye contact with me. If that wasn’t already weird enough, he had his arms awkwardly forced into an L shape as if he was carrying something.

  I looked at my mother, but she acted like she didn’t even notice he was there. I cautiously got up and followed the waiter into the back room. The waiter was still holding his arms in the L shape and he was walking very oddly. His steps looked forced and awkward, like he was a video game character from the ’90s. We went to the back office I assumed belonged to the head chef, and I picked the corded telephone up off of the counter and held it to my ear. A man’s voice immediately began speaking.

  “Please, we’ve been trying to reach you for years. Something went wrong. Please, if you can hear me, you need to get away from your mothe—”

  Silence.

  “Hello? Who is this? Is this a prank call?”

  Silence.

  “This isn’t funny. Answer me! Who’s there?”

  The silence was replaced by startlingly loud static. I ripped the phone off of my ear and stared at it while it continued to whine in my hand.

  I cautiously placed the phone back on its receiver and walked back to my mother, passing the strange waiter and the couple with the spilled food next to their table. The mess was gone and cleaned up nicely, but the couple were acting oddly. They seemed to be attempting to eat off of invisible plates with their silverware.

  Crazy loves company, I guess.

  “Where did you disappear to?” my mother asked as I sat back down across from her. She casually dipped a shrimp into the bowl of deep red cocktail sauce before taking a bite.

  I paused, staring at her.

  “I had a phone call,” I slowly explained, “but I think it was just a prank call.”

  She saw everything that just happened, right? I couldn’t have walked away from the table without her noticing . . .

  She nodded and continued eating the shellfish.

  “Wait . . .” I stared at her plate. “When did you order shrimp?”

  “What are you talking about, Jessica? We ordered shrimp to share.”

  “No, we ordered a lobster to share,” I cautiously argued.

  “It’s just your medication acting up again,” my mother insisted, shrugging it off.

  Heat began to fester in my cheeks as my body turned hot with anger and embarrassment. I took a deep breath, rubbing my eyes as if that would calm me down and make me understand what was happening. I dug my palms into my eyes until I saw blue and purple galaxies sparkling in my head. Suddenly I removed my hands. I had remembered something important.

  “Mom, where’s Dad?”

  My mother pursed her lips and nervously adjusted her dress.

  “Sweetheart, you don’t remember?”

  I shook my head unsurely, but a horrible feeling burned in my stomach.

  “Your father,” she said, starting to tear up, “he died in a car accident two years ago. He’s gone . . . I’m so sorry, Jessie.”

  My face whitened. This couldn’t be right. He was just late coming home from work yesterday—or was that just another mistake of my memory?

  Anger and confusion snaked through my body. My chest felt cold and tingly, almost numb. I couldn’t feel myself breathe, but I didn’t really care if I was. Pressure began to build in my head, and I slammed my hands into the table. Standing up, I stormed off. I heard my mom yell after me, but her words didn’t matter.

  I can’t handle this. I can’t.

  I had to go on a walk to clear my head, but as soon as I stomped through the front door, everything went white again.

  The mechanical high-pitched sound was louder than ever. It shocked spikes into my brain with every noise. I heard a panicked, squeaky female’s voice this time.

  “We’re losing her!”

  I saw fuzzy shadows that looked like they could be people rushing around me. I tried to speak, but nothing would come out.

  Why can’t I speak to them?

  The whiteness turned to blackness, and I opened my eyes to see a pitch-black sky littered with stars.

  “Come on,” a deep, familiar voice coaxed me as a hand appeared in my line of view. I took it, and the hand’s owner pulled me onto my feet.

  I saw the silhouette of a man holding a fishing pole and a tackle box. He held the pole out to me, and I could see the moonlight reflecting off of his teeth as he grinned.

  “You wanted to learn how to fish, right?”

  I cautiously took the pole.

  “You alright, Jess?” he asked me.

  Dad! He’s my dad.

  I bit my tongue, trying to think of the right words to say.

  “Dad,” I said. “I, uh . . . I had a dream that you died.”

  I stared out at the water layered with glitter under the moonlight.

  “What? You had a dream that I—” My dad coughed, making mock-choking sounds and wrapping his hands around his throat before laughing his deep, hearty laugh.

  I rolled my eyes and laughed with him.

  God, I hate his jokes.

  “I think your medication might be acting up again, yeah? So, do you remember how we got here?”

  I thought for a moment. We had climbed all the way up this cliff because I told him I wanted to learn how to fish. My dad had never fished a day in his life, but he’d kick himself if he missed out on a chance to bond with me. He carried the two brand-new fishing poles paired with a fully stocked tackle box, and I lugged his backpack there. He looked at it as a learning experience for the both of us. He was wearing an army-green hat riddled with holes from being overworn. The words RESPECT MY AUTHORITY were written in all caps around a small round figure wearing sunglasses in the center. He was wearing his father’s fishing vest, and he bragged about his twenty-two pockets during the whole car ride here.

  “I have one pocket for every Trump supporter!” he had shouted while we were getting worms in Walmart, upsetting the old cashier. We had laughed about it while we walked back to his truck in the parking lot.

  “Yeah, I remember,” I said, focusing on his silhouette.

  “Good, that’s good. Alright, let’s fish!” he said as he clapped his hand on the back of my neck and rubbed my shoulder.

  “As long as you put the worms on. They’re way too slimy for me.” I scrunched up my face, causing a warm chuckle from my father.

  He pulled a radio out of his backpack, still grinning. He turned on the radio, and “Blackbird” by the Beatles began playing
from the speaker.

  “Ah, the Beatles. My favorite,” my dad grinned, sitting down in the dewy grass. “Okay, so you’re gonna want to make sure your line is behind you, and to cast, I think you press down the button and—”

  The music changed to static. Startled, I stared at the radio. A woman’s voice spoke between fits of white noise.

  “Shouldn’t—woken up?—wear off—coma ward—get—off medication—with—father—get them out—not fair to the kid—depression—wakes up—What do you mean nothing’s working?—need to wake up.”

  The radio began to play music again.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked my dad.

  “What?” my dad said, his attention on his orange glow-in-the-dark bobber down in the water below us.

  “No, you had to hear that! The radio just had some kind of voice coming out of it, I swear. They said something about—”

  “Jess, I think you need to clear your head. Here, I’ll turn off the radio. Why don’t you cast your line?” my dad directed, his face full of concern.

  I took my royal-blue pole from him and waited for my father to put the oozing worm on the hook. I would usually make a comment about how gross it was, but my mind was elsewhere as I stared at the impaled but still wiggling worm.

  “Oh, it doesn’t bother me,” my dad laughed.

  I looked away from the worm to stare inquisitively at my father.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I insisted, though I wasn’t completely sure.

  Could I have just forgotten I said anything? No, there’s no way.

  “Maybe I’m going crazy,” he said with mock seriousness before breaking into a huge grin.

  I lightly laughed with him before casting my line and staring into the open water. I became lost in my thoughts.

  Am I going crazy? What did that girl on the radio say? “Wake up!” Wake up? Wake up from what? I am awake! Aren’t I? It’s probably just another fluke of my medication. My medication . . . What am I taking this for? Why do I need this medication so badly? Oh God . . . Oh God . . .

  I swung my feet over the side of the cliff, gripping the fishing rod in my hands until my knuckles glowed white in contrast to the solid black night. My breath quickened and I clenched my jaw. I stared hard at the waves crashing into the rocks below me in an attempt to calm my nerves.

  “Hey, Dad, why am I taking this medicine? What is it for?” I asked. When I didn’t get a response, I turned around to see that my dad wasn’t there. His tackle box, his radio, everything had just . . . disappeared. I slowly looked back to the ocean and . . .

  There’s no way . . .

  The fishing rod I had been using for the past hour was missing from my hands.

  Suddenly it was silent. The waves crashing under my feet had become still. I licked my lips and felt the pressure in my chest steadily build.

  I’m crazy. I am completely crazy.

  Behind me I heard deep laughter followed by something being unzipped. My shoulders tensed, and I snapped my head around to see my dad taking his radio out of his backpack, laughing at my surprise.

  “Did I scare you?” he said with a grin.

  My shoulders relaxed a bit, but I was still confused.

  Did he pack everything up just to play a joke on me? No . . . that wouldn’t make sense. None of this is making any sense!

  Tears began to well up in my eyes. It was too much. I stared back out at the water. It was so beautiful, a perfect serenity to battle my heightening anxiety. The deep-purple abyss swirled under my feet as the surface shimmered under the moonlight. The water’s breath fogged the air, and I breathed it in. With every breath, the intake of oxygen became more difficult. Soon I wouldn’t be able to breathe.

  I heard my dad finally get the radio to work behind me, and a familiar tune began to play.

  Didn’t this already happen?

  “Ah, the Beatles. My favorite,” I heard my dad say again.

  The burning in my throat suddenly cooled. My anxiety melted away. I was completely numb. I stared straight ahead at nothing, my eyes glossing over.

  I took a deep breath, letting the music fill my brain. I shut my eyes and scooted forward on the ledge before pushing myself off into the abyss.

  I open my eyes to a solid white hospital room. Busy people in white lab coats who are various ages and various genders surround me, and they are all staring. I look to my right and see a monitor displaying an identical monitor . . . which showed another of the same monitor . . .

  Oh, God. Could they see everything I saw?

  I touch my hand to my forehead and feel the various wires stuck there. In a fit of panic, I rip them off of my head, and the monitor goes black.

  “Where the hell am I?” I demand, unaffected by the dozen doctors surrounding my white bed.

  The doctors stare at each other, clearly unsure who should explain. A janitor pushes his cart, stacked with spray bottles, paper towels, mops, and more. He seems not to notice the intensity clouding the air.

  Finally, a middle-aged man with graying hair cautiously steps forward.

  “You’re in Berthen Laboratories. You agreed to partake in an experimental drug trial on account that it allowed you to see your parents again.”

  “My parents? Why? What happened to my parents?”

  The doctors exchange sympathetic glances.

  “Your parents”—a young female doctor bites her lip uncomfortably as she searches for the right wording—“passed . . . when you were about four years old. This drug trial . . . It granted you the opportunity to speak with them again, but it didn’t work out quite as well as we had hoped.”

  I sit in silence, staring at the sympathetic faces, each refusing to break eye contact, as if they could find the answers to their questions in my eyes.

  “We saw everything you saw,” a young Asian doctor squeaks, pushing back her glasses. “What made you jump?”

  Each of the doctors are staring at me in anticipation of my answer. At that moment, an acoustic guitar begins to play over the hospital radio.

  Blackbird fly, Blackbird fly

  into the light of the dark black night.

  The janitor moves to the window and stares outside, abandoning his cart in the corner of the room. He suddenly turns around and faces me, his arms still in front of him as if he is pushing his cart. His radio begins to produce static. “—​she can’t really believe—won’t listen to—need to get—out of there—”

  The janitor returns to his cart and pulls out a blue spray bottle and a towel. He sprays the table under the window and begins to clean as if nothing had ever happened.

  I look out the window to see the roof of the industrial building next to Berthen Laboratories. The frame is unlocked, and the bottom of the window is cracked open, whispering to me.

  Beckoning to me . . .

  I don’t know what’s real anymore.

  JARYN BLAIR

  The Gene

  TODAY WAS MY BIRTHDAY. I was turning seventeen and I hated it. I wished I had the gene. I wanted to experience it, even just once. I got to see it happen, of course, got to watch it happen to my friends. We learned about it in science class, we learned how it worked. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me. No one else could either. The doctors just said it was a birth defect and it was bound to happen. But if it were a birth defect, I would have met someone else or at least heard about someone else who didn’t have it. No, instead it just earned me a lifetime of bullying and confused faces.

  “Yo, man, you okay?” my friend asked, cutting me from my trance.

  “Oh yeah, fine,” I said, turning to face him.

  “You sure?” he asked. I nodded. He didn’t know I didn’t have the gene and I really didn’t intend on having him find out yet.

  “Yeah, I’m sure, look I gotta go. My mom needs me,” I stated.

  “It’s your birthday!” my friend exclaimed. I shrugged my shoulders.

  We talked for a couple more minutes before I finally managed to
get away from him and go home.

  “Hey, honey!” my mom called from the kitchen when I walked in.

  “Hey,” I said, slinging my bag to the floor and walking into the kitchen, grabbing a granola bar from the pantry.

  “Happy birthday,” my mom said, moving to hug me.

  “No, Mom, please don’t,” I stated and stepped backward, not wanting to have the same conversation we’d had last year, and the year before, and the one before that.

  She sighed. “Honey, just because you don’t have the cloning gene doesn’t mean you can’t age,” she said a lot quieter and took a step toward me. Yep, this conversation was going to happen again.

  “You’re right, I don’t have the cloning gene, so therefore I age differently than everyone else. I can die sooner, I can get in accidents, there’s so many things that can happen to me where I can die!” I yelled and turned, going upstairs, not wanting the conversation to go further. I knew how it ended. It was the same thing every single year for as long as I could remember.

  The cloning gene is what kept us alive, kept us from making mistakes. We could have the perfect life, get as many redos as we wanted. I’d seen my friend. He used to be a year older than me but he accidentally drove his car off a cliff in a midnight joyride. Now he was a year younger than me. My uncle had shot three people when he was forty-one. He got caught and was found guilty at forty-three. Now he’s forty again. He never shot those people. He was younger than the shooter and besides, everyone was still okay, yeah, they might be younger but they were okay. And my uncle hadn’t shot them yet. He’d done it with the forty-one-year-old body. The forty-two- and forty-three-year-olds faced the consequences of that. But the forty-year-old body? That body hadn’t shot anyone, so he was okay.

  Me? I had to live with what I got. I got no do-overs; whatever mistakes I made, I had to live with. I couldn’t see how far down the lake a few miles north of here went down. The bottomless lake, as we called it. Everyone else could go down to the bottom with no fear of drowning and dying. Me? I couldn’t do that. I had to be careful. Anything could kill me. People used to be like me; well, I guess they did, that’s what I learned in history at least, but now no one was like me. One specialist said maybe evolution was reverting back to how it used to be. Another one said it was just a glitch in our system. I didn’t know who to believe. I didn’t think we’d be “reverting back to how we were.” We were so weak back then, could die so easily. Now that we couldn’t, we knew so much more about the universe. It helped the human race so much, why would we go back to how it was before? So I guess I thought it was a glitch in the system, a stupid glitch but a glitch. But glitches happened every so often to everything right? So wouldn’t there be another person with a glitch? Or at least someone else who had a glitch but died or got it fixed? I just didn’t know what to think about it.