by Leyna Krow
The little boy wants Katie’s attention again.
“Like this?” he asks. He’s got the toy space shuttle pointing straight up this time with its nose in the air.
“No, it’s okay if you want to taxi first,” Katie says. “You do it your own way.”
The little boy shakes his head.
“Will you count down to blast off?” he asks.
Katie says she will. She starts with ten and then says nine and then eight and all the way down to one and then she says, “Blast off.”
The little boy purses his lips then opens his mouth wide to make his rocket firing noise. It sounds like “Pow.” He lifts the toy up as high as his arm will reach. He stands up on the booth seat to reach higher.
It’s hard for Katie not to feel a little hopeless about her prospects of finding the maps. After four days in Portland, she is no closer to locating the former girlfriend than she was when she first arrived. And it is also possible Katie has erred in her belief that the former girlfriend values the maps as much as Katie herself does. It may be wrong to assume that she even still has them. Now, the more Katie thinks about it, the more convinced she becomes that the former girlfriend has not actually kept the maps at all. She has not hung them on her ceiling and does not look at them when she lies in bed each night. More likely, she destroyed them as soon as she and Alex broke up. Or gave them to a friend. Or dropped them off at Goodwill. After all, why would this woman want some relic of her broken relationship literally hanging over her head? Katie thinks the former girlfriend probably made the right choice by purging Alex from her life entirely. Good for her. Like Michael Collins, the former girlfriend has found beauty, and maybe even solace, in her time spent alone. There is part of Katie that wishes she could do the same. After all, what good is it being hung up on someone who doesn’t even care all that much about stars or what his future children might look like or if he always made Katie feel somehow less important than the woman who had been in her place before her?
Still, Katie knows tomorrow she’ll go out in the rain again, looking for the last address on her list, scanning each street for the adorable bright yellow house with its adorable front yard garden.
“Now it’s your turn,” the little boy says, handing Katie the toy.
His mother interjects. “Ryan, that’s enough. Let’s let the nice lady finish her dessert.”
“It’s all right, I don’t mind,” Katie says, accepting the toy.
She sets the space shuttle on the back of the booth bench, pointing up, just like the little boy did. He counts down. He says each number slowly and deliberately. This is a little boy who takes his countdowns seriously.
When he gets to “blast off,” she says “Pow,” and lifts the space shuttle up, about half an arm’s length, then flies it toward the little boy, landing it in his outstretched hand. He shakes his head. “That wasn’t a very good blast off,” he says. “You should do it again.”
Katie looks to the parents to see if they’ve heard their small son’s indictment of her blast off abilities, but they are absorbed in their own conversation, their bodies pressed close on their side of the booth. The father, smiling, whispers into the mother’s ear. The mother laughs and whispers back. Katie imagines their exchange, something private and crude.
Across the room, the couple at the counter has adopted a similar posture. They lean, shoulder to shoulder, talking in low voices. Katie decides they are probably recounting their earlier fucking session. It was no doubt the greatest fuck of their lives thus far, and so they’ve got to keep replaying it over and over for one another right there at the counter.
Once again Katie stands the toy space shuttle upright and waits while the little boy does his deliberate and precise countdown. This time, when he gets to “blast off,” Katie says “pow” like she means it, like it’s an actual explosion. It’s an extended “pow,” guttural and drawn out, because space shuttles aren’t launched by just one quick burst, but by rockets that continue to fire all the way up out of Earth’s oppressive atmosphere. She lifts the space shuttle into the air. When she can’t reach her arm any higher, Katie stands on her booth seat just like the little boy. She has to stop her explosion noise for a second to breathe, but when she starts again, it’s with renewed energy and louder than before. She reaches the toy toward the diner ceiling. She stands on her tiptoes, hand and toy as far up as they can possibly go. The little boy smiles and claps. His parents stop their flirting to watch. The couple at the counter turn and look at Katie like they can’t believe the ruckus she’s making.
May 21, 2077, Outer Space
Lieutenant Colonel Parker Timothy Olstead
It’s been seven hours since the space shuttle Krona Ark III’s electrical system ceased functioning. It runs now on its backup fuel cell, which powers only the barest of necessities: the oxygen generator, the pressurization system, and a thin rail of lights across the interior walls. He doesn’t know how long the fuel cell is capable of sustaining them. Or how long they can last on their own, if it too fails.
He is frightened now and tries to think again of the ocean and the exhilarating notion that they are really just a ship lost at sea. A new kind of ship on a new kind of sea. What might Captain Cook have said in such a situation? Surely, he would not have abandoned hope.
But he is no Captain Cook. Therein lies the trouble with his analogy.
His Swedish shuttlemates move around him in a rush, floating from cabin to cabin, console to console, whispering foreign words to one another. They assure him they know what the problem is and are very close to fixing it. He does not question them. It’s their shuttle and he is only a privileged guest. Besides, he’s not an engineer. He’s a marine biologist. He’s here to learn how his squid and their protective bacteria react to unexpected modifications in their physical environment. From this data, he’ll speculate how similar creatures on Earth will react to similar disruptions. Not that he anticipates Earth is about to experience a dramatic shift in its gravitational strength. But the planet is changing in marked and upsetting ways. The only way to predict the impact of one change is to observe other kinds of change.
That’s the extent of his mission. And now, in the light of the current situation aboard the shuttle, it seems minor, even petty. He hasn’t flown aircraft of any kind since his Air Force days, and even then his knowledge of the planes’ inner-workings was theoretical at best. As for the Krona Ark III, here in its time of need, he is only a concerned passenger. All he can do is wish it well and nod encouragingly each time Edvard and Annika tell him they have everything under control. He wants to believe them.
“Do not worry,” they say. “We have trained for this.”
They call him Lieutenant Colonel when they speak to him. He hadn’t noticed this before. They, like him, have been keeping their professional distance. But now he wishes they would call him by his first name. Parker. He wishes they would call him by his nickname. Spud.
He’s been thinking about what to call the baby. He gets to choose the name. At first he wanted to name him after a personal hero—someone from the space program or the sciences. Michael Collins Olstead. Charles Darwin Olstead (who, himself, spent a good deal of time at sea). But those handles seem too weighty, too contrived. Shortly before boarding the Krona Ark III the previous morning, in a moment of familial affection, Olstead decided on a different name. He wants to name the boy for his mother, Samantha, ten years deceased, and also for his spinster sister, Caroline, who lives in their childhood home, barely eking out a living in Western Washington. Sam Carroll Olstead.
After all, family’s the reason he agreed to take part in the clone program in the first place. He wants a family of his own. His mother is dead, his father ran off shortly after he was born, and his sister is so very different from him that, on the rare occasions they do see each other, he hardly knows what to say. As if they are strangers. In fact, that’s how he feels in the company of most people, if he’s being honest: estranged, and often alone
. Easier to be around plants, animals, and fish.
But this little boy, he’ll be just like him, exactly like him. It’s impossible to feel alone when you’ve got someone else in the world who’s exactly like you. It’s a selfish desire, he knows. But he thinks, in a way, it will be good for his relationship with his sister, too. The arrival of a new generation always brings the previous generation closer. He’ll take the boy with him whenever he visits her (he assumed this will be allowed, though he hasn’t checked with the lab’s director about travel policy). The boy will give them common ground, something to talk about, something to love together. The boy will share her name, and she can share with him an interest in the boy.
Now, though, he wishes he’d sent a note to the lab’s director prior to the launch, detailing this name choice. Who knows what they’ll call the boy otherwise.
Habitat
On summer evenings, the neon green hills of the Palouse sparkle and shimmer as if the Greenspree were waving back and forth in a gentle wind, catching the last of the day’s light. It’s a bucolic, almost surreal vision for passing drivers who don’t know what they’re looking at, who don’t know that the shimmer and sway is actually the motion of thousands of snakes winding through acre after acre of an invasive fern that just happens to be the exact same color as their bodies.
This is the scene from almost every window in my dad’s house as my brother and I work to remove light fixtures, built-in cabinets, light switch faceplates, anything, really, that can be stripped from the already empty rooms.
“The snakes are out,” I say. We’re upstairs in the master bedroom.
“What?” Kenton is inside the closet, pulling out shelves.
“The snakes are out,” I say again.
“They’ve been out for an hour. You just weren’t paying attention.”
“No way.”
“Maggie, they were out when we got here.”
I tell him this cannot be the case. If the snakes had been out when we arrived, I would have insisted he turn the car around.
Half inside the closet, Kenton shrugs.
“They can’t hurt you,” he says.
“That’s not the point.”
I don’t like the snakes. Nobody does. Kenton is right though—they can’t hurt. Or rather, they choose not to hurt. They’re skittish creatures, quick to dart out of sight as soon as something larger than them approaches. Mostly, they stick to the cover of the ferns where it’s safe. It’s rare to see even one out on the road, or really anywhere that isn’t totally taken over by Greenspree. Which is good, because even by snake standards, they are ugly as sin.
They’re called cob snakes and can grow up to twenty-four inches long, with narrow, tube-like bodies. Their eyes appear puckered, half closed, and they have skinny-long fangs that Kenton insists look like all other snakes’ fangs, but I say worse—skinnier and longer somehow. And, with the exception of a single black stripe down their backs, they are entirely bright green, florescent green, almost: an identical shade to the Greenspree, even though they don’t come from the same place and therefore could not possibly have evolved together in such a way.
Kenton and I are out at our dad’s house, taking apart all the things there are to take apart because this is what Dad has asked us to do.
“You kids,” he said. That’s what he calls us when we’re together, even though we’re thirty-four. “I’d like you kids to bring me some things from the house.”
I told Dad since the house now belongs to the state of Washington, it’s probably illegal for us to be on the property, much less removing chunks of it.
“It’s trespassing,” I said. “And also vandalism.”
“Come on, Maggie,” Kenton said. “They’re just going to bulldoze the house eventually anyway. What do they care if we take the doorknobs?”
Again, my brother was right. He usually is. Kenton is eight minutes older than I am and, ever since we began to talk, he’s won almost every argument. He’s also funnier than me, more confident than me, more ambitious than me, and a better driver than me. He’s my best friend and the person who infuriates me most.
About the house: When the Greenspree first spread through the wheat fields of the Palouse, the state started buying out farmers, offering them cash for land. I think initially they’d hoped to fight the Greenspree and then sell the land back, but when the plant proved too aggressive, too hardy, the buyouts became a good-faith gesture. Thank you, dear farmer, for your years of service to the great state of Washington. Now go buy yourself a mid-range condo. That’s exactly what Dad did eighteen months ago. Now he lives in a two-bedroom townhouse in Spokane. Instead of looking out over rolling hills of wheat, his view on all sides is of other two-bedroom townhouses. Instead of getting up at five o’clock each morning to go to work in his own backyard, he walks to the library downtown three days a week to shelve books for minimum wage. To keep himself busy, he says.
Another thing about the house: It’s where Kenton and I grew up. I think Kenton always secretly assumed he and his wife, Elsa, would take over Dad’s business and raise their own family there. I don’t know where I would live in this scenario of his, but I imagine somewhere nearby.
Anyway, it will likely be bulldozed. Many of the abandoned homes and barns on the Palouse have been already, if for no other reason than uninhabited structures are a hazard. The best the state can do now is clear everything out of the way, let the Greenspree do its thing, and hope it stays confined to the Palouse.
It doesn’t take long for us to finish taking everything there is to take out of the bedroom. Then we move on to the upstairs bath. I stand on the toilet seat to unscrew the overhead light while Kenton works to remove the shower door.
“Seriously?” I ask. “That?”
“Why not?” He adds the door to a pile in the hallway that already includes strips of crown molding, faucet heads, the closet shelves, a variety of handles and latches, a radiator baseboard, and a segment of copper pipe. It’s weird to see this stuff separate from the rooms it’s always been in. But then, it was weird to see the rooms without furniture when Dad first moved out. Someday soon, it will be weird to see this property without the house on it at all.
This is our second trip. We did the kitchen, den, and the half bath on the first floor last Saturday. When we got back to Spokane, Dad told us not to bring anything inside, just to take it all to his storage unit at the east edge of the condo complex. Neither of us asked what he planned to do with it, or why he needed it now, after a year and half of living without it.
I linger in the entryway and watch as Kenton carries stuff from the pile out to his truck. It takes him four trips, but I refuse to help. I don’t want to be outside if the snakes are out. It doesn’t matter that they won’t bite, aren’t poisonous, and want nothing to do with us. I still find them deeply unnerving.
Ultimately, I suppose, we’re lucky when it comes to the Greenspree. It’s restricted itself to the wheat fields, preferring soil that’s soft and nutrient-rich. That’s why you never see it in people’s yards or anywhere else. Were it less picky, it could have consumed land across the entire Inland Northwest. Then, the snakes would be everywhere.
There are four rooms left—the basement, a small office, and the bedrooms Kenton and I slept in as kids. I’m standing in the doorway to my room, picking at a peeling strip of paint when Kenton comes in from loading the truck.
“Should we do these rooms today?” I ask.
“No. The truck’s almost full. Next weekend.”
I stare for a moment into the space where I spent so much of my childhood. Unlike Kenton, I wasn’t a popular kid. I read books and played with my stuffed animals and kept my door closed, pretending I had a secret life the men in my house knew nothing about. Or rather, a secret life they would eventually find out about and when they did find out, they would be shocked and proud and say things like, “That Maggie, we always knew she had it in her.” The place of my wildest and most sincere daydreams.
“I’ll do your room if you do mine,” I offer. “It’ll be easier that way.”
“Not now,” Kenton says. “Next weekend.”
And so, another Kenton victory. By ignoring my offer, he gets to be the cool sibling—the rational one, taking everything in stride. Which would be fine, except, then what does that make me?
People often think Greenspree is named for its color. It’s not. The full name of the plant is the Corbin Greenspree Deciduous Fern, after Corbin Greenspree, the botanist who first identified it as an independent species and observed its properties. One such property is a deep and lengthy root system. The plant is most commonly found on river banks in the southern United States, embedded in soil that looks as if it could, at any moment, give itself up to the water, but doesn’t. As Corbin Greenspree noted, the ferns’ roots actually help hold loose soil together. This is how the Greenspree ended up in Eastern Washington. One particularly rainy spring, a group of neighboring farmers purchased Greenspree to plant along the parts of their property that ran beside the Palouse River, to prevent erosion. The plant thrived in the cooler climate in a way no one had predicted. It spread, unable to be stopped, and within just a few years had taken over the wheat fields, crippling one of the region’s oldest industries. The irony of this was not lost on the farmers who originally imported the plant.