by Mike Allen
* * *
“This is ridiculous,” Tom says, and turns off the TV to illustrate his seriousness on the matter. “They think that we are hurting her?”
Janis nods and shows him the clippings. They do not say it out loud, but they both are thinking the same thing: these children are impossible, they are messed up and they cannot be fixed. They do not speak English, and yet they demand, they want things, they require tutors and psychiatrists, and their medical bills are piling up. The orphanages have the secret policy of adopting the most damaged children abroad, and Janis cannot decide if it is out of kindness, trying to get them help they cannot get at home, or cynicism, getting rid of the defectives and the unwanted.
She thinks of the people in the adoption agency and the orphanage staff, and she does not know if those people even know their own motives. She only knows that the doctors at the orphanage give all the children a clean bill of health, afraid to spook the potential parents. In any case, they find out soon enough.
Helen came with a heart murmur and bed wetting; the latter does not seem too bad compared to the congenital heart defect that is too late to fix. But even that fades in comparison to her acting out and scratching, to her fears, to her reluctance to let them touch her. Even that fades in comparison to the unexplained bruises and cuts.
“I think she did it to herself,” Tom says. “The doctors checked her out before—there wasn’t a problem then. Maybe she fell or banged against something in the playground?”
Janis shakes her head. “I don’t know. But those bruises . . . they look like fingerprints. Adult fingerprints, and nail scratches.” She draws a deep breath, dreading the question she has to ask. “Tom. . . . You wouldn’t . . .”
He looks at her open-mouthed, not indignant, just surprised. “No. Of course not.” Of course not, Janis scolds herself. How could she even think that?
He stares at her, clears his throat. “Janis, we really need to talk.”
She knows what it’s about—the child is a problem, like the children in the clippings. The problem. They never fought before, never suspected one another of anything unsavory. They used to have leisure and spare cash, they never used to argue like that. Janis just cannot bear to think about admitting defeat, to tolerate the smug I-told-you-sos from family and friends. “It’s different when it’s your own,” they will say. “What did you expect? She’s too old, too mixed up. It’s not the same as having your own baby. It’s sad, but you can’t save them, Janis, you can’t save them all.”
She thought she could save just one, but even that is apparently too much for them.
“Yes,” she says out loud. “We need to talk. Let me just check on her.”
* * *
Helen squeezes her eyes shut and waits for the woman to close the door, cutting off the thick slab of light reaching in from the hallway. The light makes the monster retreat into its den somewhere between the bed and the floorboards, where its eyes glow with quiet red ferocity in the darkness. She wants to ask the woman—Janis, mom—to leave the door open, to put the lights on, but she cannot, and she cries silently, her salty tears sliding down her cheek and into her hair, soaking into the pillow.
The woman does not leave. Instead she comes in and sits on the bed, the white texture of her cable-knit sweater exaggerated by the light from the hallway and darkness inside the room. It is cold tonight—the cold has finally caught up with Helen. It chased her across the unfathomable chasm of the ocean and nine hours of flying through the air over the stationary clouds. The autumn is here now, and there are no more moths fluttering in the curtains.
Helen peeks between the tear-soaked eyelashes, and the beam of light twinkles and breaks into a myriad of tiny stars. The woman looks back at Helen but does not smile like she usually does when their eyes meet. Instead she sighs and strokes Helen’s hair. She feels the moisture under her fingertips, and she looks like she’s about to cry herself.
Helen considers opening her eyes completely but decides against it and squeezes them shut, feigning sleep. If she looks at her new mom directly, she will start talking, and then Helen would cry in earnest at her inability to understand, to explain about the monsters and shadows and fear.
Helen wants to talk about summers in Siberia—so short and so intense, so full of high-pitched whining of mosquitoes and the smell of pine trees oozing fresh sap, of spongy bogs studded with butter-yellow cloudberries. About the lake where the runaway boy drowned but which becomes transformed by a cloudless blue sky overhead into a swath of precious smooth silk surrounded by soft, succulent-green branches of firs.
But Helen cannot explain these things and she forces her eyelids tighter together, until her eyes burn.
Janis gives up and rises to her feet, the springs of the mattress squeaking in relief. The door closes behind her, cutting off the light.
In the darkness, there is shifting and stirring. Helen watches the sheet of wallpaper peel away, admitting a thin beam of bluish light into the room.
Helen sits up and peers into the widening gap—carefully at first, wary of the monsters. She sees a small man, no bigger than a cat, crouching on the other side of the wallpaper barrier. His withered narrow face looks at Helen over his shoulder, and then he turns away and draws on the inside of the wall—a chain of tiny cranes, dwarfed by the shadows of daisies and poppies. They seem paler on the other side but alive, nodding in the invisible breeze.
Helen pulls the sheets of the wallpaper apart, and she sees a bright blue lake surrounded by yellow-needled larches. The monster crawls from under the bed and stands beside her, panting like a dog, the black fur between its wing-like shoulder blades bristling. Helen is surprised to not be afraid of it anymore.
The monster leaps into the gap and Helen follows, timid at first. She turns to look back and watches the wallpaper fold back with a quiet rustling and grow together, fusing. She sees the ghostly flowers, and behind them—her room, a shadow image from a magic lantern.
The monster growls and bounds ahead, then stops and waits for her by the tiny man and his cranes, which are flying in place, their wings sweeping up and down in a graceful motion. She watches them for a while, never moving and yet flying south among the daisies and poppies which are still blooming despite the autumn and its cold fingers reaching even behind the wallpaper, where the monsters sleep during the day.
The monster barks and laughs and leaps to the right, then to the left; then it gallops toward the lake, looking over its shoulder, inviting Helen to follow. Helen sighs and walks through the fallen leaves, rubbery under her white socks, she walks to the lake where a blue boy with sharp teeth is waiting for her, the monster by his side like a hound.
PALISADE
by Cat Sparks
There are four Ann Elisabeths in my father’s house. He claims he loves them equally, but all I’ve ever been certain of is that he never felt love for me, Luisa Alice, his true biological child. Yet he persists in requesting my presence at his table on those occasions he summons dinner guests. The Ann Elisabeths are spared such tedium, all but the precocious six-year-old, who has the run of the mansion and the surrounding gardens. That single Ann Elisabeth needs three nannies to keep her in check. With ruddy cheeks and golden ringlets, she is the darling presented to his friends, trained to sing and recite poetry when the brandy is served after dinner.
My father’s guests must surely know she is a stint, doomed to a life locked in perpetual childhood, yet not one of them has ever made an unfavourable remark. All but the hardest hearted of visitors declare the child incurably adorable.
Still, I have heard my father claim her as his daughter often enough, a barefaced lie easily caught out by the Indiras or the Vazquenadas or the Temelkovs, returning every visit to find a six-year-old in place. Stinting is illegal on all the worlds but ours. There are no laws on AmberJade. People settle here in order to do as they please, the dense jungle canopies and savage hurricanes giving cover from prying eyes. Even the missionaries have given up on this
place. Were it not for my physical condition, I would have left it behind long ago. I would have abandoned my father to his horrible bugs and his elaborate dinner parties; his slaves and his precious darling Ann Elisabeths.
* * *
I do not care for the Vazquenadas family. There are far too many of them, each one more heartless and stupid than the next. Every year I pray that their sleek silver ships might ignite upon entry, or crash in a magnificent orgy of grinding metal and flame, yet my gods are from the old world, my prayers ineffectual in this hostile alien landscape.
They enter the dining chamber together, all thirteen of them including retinue. Goran Vazquenadas, patriarch, obese beyond measure and little used to walking; his chalk-skinned wife Makayla, her hooped skirts emblazoned with sapphires. Their sons and daughters are a sorry mix of their parents’ physiques, garbed in an assortment of outlandish fashions.
Father has me seated next to little Aelira Vazquenadas, instructed to amuse her with my swallowtails. I sit still and quiet in my embroidered dinner gown. I shall not speak unless I am addressed directly.
Aelira is too young to be of consequence, and many thoughts weigh heavily on my mind tonight. I will not break my concentration without purpose. As I sit here enduring their vulgar small talk, a message waits for me on the Link, back upstairs in my Autumn suite. A message from Harmon, my dearest, most forbidden heart. The only person I have ever loved.
As the waiters serve a dainty entrée of slivered Kryl and Kucha eggs, I feel my father’s cold stare press against my skin. I do not let my discomfort show. I know what he expects of me. Aelira watches as I wave my hand and a cloud of holographic swallowtails materialise above her head. She squeals with delight, abandoning her food to swat at them with small, splayed fingers.
“Damned ugly things,” declares my father, his gaze still harsh upon my skin. “Useless for export. Too short-lived. Too dull.”
“But they are the cleverest creatures,” I explain, my voice as steady as stone. “They seek out the lower forks of Tunjuk trees to build their cocoons, using the close-knit branches as barriers against the storms. After fifty days of cosseted hibernation, the little things push free of their wrappings to burst into the light, only to die soon after their eggs are laid.”
Aelira, a bug-eyed thing herself, with pasty flesh and insipid rosebud lips, pays scant attention to my words. All she wants to do is crush the fluttering creatures between her palms. She does not seem to understand that they are holograms.
Named for the butterflies of old Earth, my swallowtails remind me of a world I’ve never been to, a life I’ve never led. Some days the skies above the house are filled with great swirls of them, buffeted ever upwards by gentle gusts of wind.
“Razed this patch of jungle with my own bare hands,” boasts my father loudly. He flexes his fingers as he speaks, his eyes now on the Vazquenadas girl.
“Our world is named AmberJade,” I tell her, conjuring a planet hologram and setting it to hover in the empty space above my swallowtails. “A bright green jewel inlaid in velvet darkness. Such a pretty sphere; all cloudy oceans and barren rock, with a slim habitable belt running the length of its equator.”
The world turns and I point to show Aelira where my father’s mansion lies. I tell her of its eighty rooms sectioned into four wings, each named for a season; an old world conceit as there are no true seasons here. Just the thrashing hurricane winds and the relative calmness of the pauses between the storms.
“We are safe,” I say, explaining how the buildings nestle amidst a hundred acres of jungle clearing, protected from regrowth and any number of other hostile incursions by an electronic palisade. The only creatures permitted within its barrier field are those whose biological signatures have been programmed into its recognition software.
I have been warned never to stray beyond the palisade’s protective field by my father himself and the succession of servants who raised me to adulthood. The jungle, I am told, took my mother’s life when I was young. An unfortunate accident. She wandered beyond the palisade’s blue-green tint and lost her bearings. The jungle claimed her as its own. My mother’s name was Ann Elisabeth. The stints are all that remain of her now, but I will never recognise her gentle face in those abominations, even if, as my father claims, they were cultured from her living cells.
In any case, I cannot walk far, and I am frightened of the crawling horrors my father traps and breeds for export: bugs as big as my two fists, with glittering carapaces and stinging tails; things with as many heads as legs or jaws that can pierce metal. Collectors of such things pay high prices for them, specimens both living and preserved.
I keep well away from the sturdy holding tanks, terrariums and taxidermy studios where my father’s slaves toil.
Safe within the palisade, I watch the jungle pulse and bloom on screens, lying in the soft grass knowing nothing flying in the air, nor crawling through the soil can harm me. The palisade keeps the storms at bay, and I lie beneath the sky at night, protected from all danger, dreaming of Harmon as the lightning tears apart the clouds.
* * *
My beloved Harmon lives on a small moon circling Bellady; the farthermost planet in our solar system. So far away from AmberJade that the signal relay takes a full twelve minutes to deliver its message via the Link and receive one in return. Thus, our conversations are stilted and paused. This fact makes me choose my words more carefully than I might were our communications instantaneous. I strongly suspect it is this very constraint that caused our love to grow. The words we share are precise and considered. We do not waste our words on frivolous things.
Like me, Harmon suffers certain imperfections of form—dangerous imperfections that cause him to shun physical society. I determined early on in our confidences never to ask him why he could not walk, nor why he rejects prosthesis, even though there are worlds which permit their use. I sensed there was more than discomfort involved. Harmon would have told me had he wanted his reasons understood.
We have grown so very close, my Harmon and I. We met in a Linklounge three years ago, and over time I have come to trust him like no other. I treasure his communications more than anything else in my world.
My father knows nothing of Harmon, or my secret desires. He will never grant me a dowry. But I know where my father keeps his gold. There is nothing I would not do to be with Harmon, nothing I would not give him were the power in my hands.
My swallowtails flutter around me as we speak on the Link, arranging themselves in patterns to suit my mood. I do not show Harmon the private sensorium I have fashioned from his words: the close-ups of his gallant features; snippets of his laughter, firm, yet comforting.
“I love you, Luisa Alice, as I have loved no other. One day we shall run away together.”
One day indeed. When the Link is down, I walk the length of my sensorium with eyes closed, enveloping myself in the sound of his voice, immersing myself in his presence, wishing his arms around me. I fantasise about stealing a ship and flying it all the way to Bellady’s moon to embrace my love. The Link is the key. It holds all the information I need. With it, I could teach myself to pilot. With my father’s gold I could buy a silver ship.
* * *
When the second course arrives—Jester beetles in their shells served with comb grass and raspberry jus—I push my plate aside. Such pretty shells, named for the red and blue diamond criss-cross patterns on their backs. The Jester beetle feeds on the flesh of other beasts. They prefer the meat of the living to carrion, which is why my father has such a lucrative trade agreement with the Vazquenadas family, who have been in the bioweapons industry for at least a century. I do not want to know what the beetles are used for.
My father laughs loudly with the Vazquenadas elders. I have watched him grow grotesque and wealthy off this planet’s vicious spoils. In my tenth year he purchased a consignment of prisoners from a judicial contractor in receivership. Those poor unfortunates were sent out into the jungles of AmberJade to hunt for
the peculiar bugs that fetch such high prices on other worlds. A task previously assigned to automatons, but they performed uneconomically in the humid, sticky air or in the wet, often breaking down, or rough-handling the delicate specimens to the point of rendering them useless. Human hands are so much more gentle, human skin more resilient to the rigours of jungle climate.
The prisoners adapted quickly to their new life. Some strayed into the jungle. Father let them go. They soon learned that there was little palatable food beneath the alien canopy—but plenty of creatures willing to feast on them. The ones that crawled back to the palisade in the following weeks were butchered before the others as a warning. I remember the blood stains on the grass.
I am not supposed to think about such things. I am supposed to smile at my father’s guests and be grateful for the protection of the palisade. I spend most of my time on the Link ensconced in debates with my university friends, discussing the poems of Chartres and Dessiqa; the plays of Modine, the sculpture of Poussen-Yang and Rudiliere. I speak to them through a platinum blonde avatar, with bronzed skin and elegant limbs. Harmon is the only one who has seen my true face.
The thought of leaving my home fills me with apprehension. Despite the enlightened, intellectual circles in which I move, there is always the possibility of exposure. AmberJade, ungovernable as it is, harbours all manner of practises and beliefs not permitted on other worlds. On Sheredon, Ellah and non-secular Carnis Major, the malformed are not allowed to live.
I am never lonely. I have my friends, my swallowtails, my dreams and my secret love. My life is illuminated with the love of Harmon, the man I hope to name as my husband, despite the relentless cruelty of my father.
* * *
As the third course is served, I hear whispering amongst the waiters. They do not seem to care that I am listening. Over time I have become invisible to their eyes. It is only my father they fear. They say that Daria is missing. Baby Ann Elisabeth’s nanny; a skittish girl, forever flirting with the pilots. Her bed has not been slept in these past two nights.