ASIM_issue_54

by ed. Simon Petrie

  “Are you ill?” she asked. The man in the black coat looked taken aback and he didn’t say any-thing for a moment. Orla tapped her fingernails on the doorframe.

  “Uh … no …” he stammered, “I haven’t slept of late, but it’s nothing … nothing …”

  “Why are you here?” Orla said.

  “Orla!” her papa chided from the next room. “There’s no need to be rude!”

  “I’m being curt, Papa,” Orla called back.

  “It is perilously close, my darling,” her father replied, but Orla could tell from the tenor of his voice that he had gone back to his book and had likely lost all interest in the exchange.

  “I need to speak to the old man.”

  Orla frowned, because that was a name for her papa that the villagers had and she did not like it. They should be grateful. Papa was famous and he was the only interesting, the only good thing about their miserable little hamlet.

  “He does not do commissioned work any longer,” Orla told the man. This was not entirely true, but she had brought the idea up to Papa many times. Her father was a genius and they had plenty of money and Orla had long thought that he should be free to pursue his own interests. “Orla, my dear, I do not do it for the money,” was all he had said.

  “Please,” said the man at the door. One hand clung whitely to the frame, it looked as though he might break apart the wood with his fingers.

  “Let the boy in, Orla,” said Papa from the next room. Orla pursed her lips and reluctantly stepped back from the doorway.

  “Thank you.” He reached out, as if to grasp her hand gratefully, but Orla balled her hands into fists and tucked them deep in her apron’s pockets. Visits always overtired Papa, she knew that he would sleep late the next morning and no doubt be grumpy all the rest of the day. Thursdays were shopping days, too, which always added a certain amount of stress to the household.

  The man in the black coat closed the study door behind him and Orla went upstairs to the kitchen. She had an idea that she might have a cup of chamomile before Parse started on dinner.

  Orla’s father had made Parse for her when she was six and three quarters. He cooked meals for her and Papa, he braided her hair the way she liked it and darned up her dresses when she got rips in them. He even tucked her in at night before going down into the lab and helping Papa (this was when Papa was younger and worked long into the night). Parse didn’t speak and sometimes his movements were clumsy and uncertain. Orla’s papa said this was because he was a first draft and he had perfected others like him since. But Orla always understood Parse and she did not want a better version of him.

  Parse was waiting in the faded yellow kitchen, standing watchfully over a small kettle that was about to boil. Orla smiled at him and sat down at the table.

  * * *

  Thursday was shopping day and Orla did not want to go. But there was nothing in the way of jam in the pantry and she knew that her father had a fondness for jam with his toast in the afternoon. She wished sometimes that she could take Parse with her. That way she would know that she had one friend at least. But Papa quite wisely had said that that was not allowed. Orla herself had lived so long with Parse that she could not even remember a time when his, admittedly unusual, face seemed anything other than friendly and comforting. But the villagers were not like Orla.

  On shopping days, she woke up early to wash her hair specially. It was very long; wet, it swept the backs of her thighs. Parse brushed it patiently until it was dry and straight as pins. He braided it for her and her plait skewed uncertainly to the right, but Parse had very soft, tentative hands. This was the last part of shopping day that Orla enjoyed.

  Orla did not like children. They were noisy, unpredictable and remorseless, like loose firecrackers with sticky little hands. The children in the village seemed to feel similarly about Orla. Their mothers called them in as she passed, but she could see their pert little faces in the windows, eyes empty of anything except curiosity.

  “Go on by, missus,” one of those sour-faced mothers would say, standing in the doorway with wet stains on her apron, her face reddened from long hours in a close kitchen. As if Orla would stop, as if she would wish to stay even one moment longer with any of them.

  When she was much younger, Orla had a cautious fondness for the shopkeeper’s wife. She did not jeer or snipe at her like the other women and she was tall and pale with lips so red they were nearly purple. She reminded Orla of her own mother and the two of them had a mutual regard for one another. At least until one day when the shopkeeper’s wife leaned helpfully over a barrel of white sugar and the cold iron nail she wore around her neck slipped from her collar. It hung in between them like an accusing question mark.

  “Just superstition,” she said, with a bright smile on her purple lips and not in her eyes. Orla said nothing to her. She was nine years old, but she knew what cold iron was for. It kept the evil things out. The shopkeeper’s wife stopped making small talk with Orla after that, though she occasionally looked at the girl with something akin to sympathy. But Orla could still see the faint, curled outline of the metal she wore close to her heart.

  The shopkeeper’s son Derek, on the other hand, had never even pretended to be nice. Today he was playing a particularly one-sided game that was a favorite of his. Orla would ask for something, a pound of butter or a loaf of rye bread, and Derek would wrap it up tenderly as a baby in swaddling clothes and then unceremoniously drop it to the floor. Sometimes he would pretend it had been an accident, but most of the time, he would just smile meanly at her as though daring her to object. Orla never did, but only knelt down and collected her parcel.

  They both heard the heavy, muffled cracking when he dropped the strawberry jam. Orla stared at the brown package at her feet.

  “Replace that,” she said. She did not look at him, but she could imagine the delighted smile spreading across his face.

  “Sorry missus, ‘fraid you’ve paid for just the one,” he said sweetly.

  “It’s broken,” Orla pointed out. One whole corner of the package was heavy and red. It was getting on the floor, it would stain if he didn’t clean it up soon.

  Derek shrugged. He put his hands on the counter between them and leaned heavily towards her. He smiled again, an awful sort of smile. A little rabbit-thought skittered wild across Orla’s mind. There was a long-handled spade on the wall, just behind Derek. It wouldn’t take very much force at all, just one good swing and … She wondered if it would look anything like seeping, spreading strawberry jam?

  Orla reached into the pocket of her sweater and brought out her father’s ancient leather wallet once again.

  * * *

  Back in her gold-colored kitchen, Parse helped Orla unpack the shopping bag. As she pushed the new, unmarred jar of strawberry jam to the back of the ice box, she heard voices coming from the long hallway. Her father’s warm rumble and the uneasy staccato of the man in the black coat. She did not know that he was in today and the thought of it prickled at the back her scalp. People could not be coming and going at all hours. Right now, this very moment, Papa was supposed to be giving Parse his weekly check-up. Orla looked at Parse, cradling the bread to him on the way to the cupboard. Had he even seen Papa at all today?

  Orla strayed far as she dared towards the open doorway. She couldn’t see anyone, but she could hear her father clearly.

  “—happy to do it,” he was saying. The man breathed out a great, rushing sigh as though he had just been relieved of some impossible burden.

  “You have no idea how long—”

  Papa interrupted him. “I have always appreciated a man with vision,” he said.

  “Vision,” the man in black echoed as though he were hearing the word for the very first time.

  At three o’clock, Orla brought her father toast and black coffee, as she always did. He was bent over his long table in the study, drawing something with small, intimate pen scratches. When Orla interrupted him he gave her a distracted kiss on th
e cheek and had her set the coffee down at the end of the table. It was still there at five o’clock when she came back in preparation for their walk around the lake. The toast was untouched as well. Orla poked at it with her finger and found the bread soaked through.

  “Papa,” Orla said, touching his shoulder gently. He did not look up at her, but that was usual when he was working on something very important. “Did you see Parse today?”

  “Parse is fine,” her father soothed.

  Orla drew her lips into her mouth, bit down hard. “But what if he isn’t?”

  Papa looked up at her and sighed. “Parse is not malfunctioning, my dear. You need not worry over it.”

  “But precautions exist to prevent emergencies,” Orla pointed out. “You say that.”

  Papa rubbed his side of his head. His hair was all white now and Orla wondered when exactly the last of the brown had gone. “Child, can you think of no better occupation for your time?”

  * * *

  There was a little room in the deepest part of the laboratory. The walls were thick and freezing cold, the huge door had a spinning lock larger than a man’s hand. If Orla were to shut that door and scream until her throat was dull and raw, no one would hear even the faintest susurration. Papa called it the ‘just in case’ room. It was where Orla’s mother lived, for the time being.

  Orla had never known her mother as anything other than what she was now. Her hair was still mostly black and her white face remained unlined. Sometimes, when Orla looked very hard, she could see the ghosts of freckles that might flare into life, had they ever known the sun. She imagined her skin was dry and cold but she did not know. Even Parse had only ever touched her with thick rubber gauntlets on. Papa promised that someday he would fix her and Orla would be able to hug her mother, touch her face and hear her voice.

  Orla had not known that this was not the ordinary way of mothers for a very long time. When she was eleven years old, she asked her father about the women she had seen in town who saw to their children and swatted at them and held their hands going into shops. Papa had sighed and sat her down on his lap, though she had mostly outgrown such things. He told her about the terrible illness that had stolen her mother’s eyes and her tongue and stilled all her limbs. It was something in the blood of her, he told her and she could feel rattle and billow of his breath in his chest. Her mother—Orla’s grandmother—had suffered the same way. Died the same way. But he had spared Mother that.

  Her chamber was tall, but not very wide. If she could have stretched out her arms, they would have had to bend at the elbows. Wires blue and black and clear plastic tubes extended into her arms and her legs. There was an oval metal plate that covered her back. Orla had seen it when Parse dressed and washed her mother in the mornings. Machines did her breathing, pushed the blood through her veins, allowed her to hear Orla’s disheartened rapping at the clear plastic of the chamber front. She blinked in response.

  Short short long, short long long short, short short short—

  It was “upset.”

  Orla was very good at Morse code. He father had taught her when she was small, just after he had put Mother in the chamber. Sometimes, she thought she might like it better than talking. There was always plenty of time for her to think about exactly what she wanted to say. Orla thought that people in general should choose their words with more care.

  “Papa took a job,” she rapped out quickly. Her mother blinked.

  “Good.”

  “Seems different. House changing,” Orla responded. Mother appeared to consider this for a moment, her white and sightless eyes staring into nothingness as they always did.

  “17 now,” she blinked. “World changing.”

  * * *

  Two months later, Orla found the man in the black coat in her kitchen. He wasn’t wearing his black coat now, but his hair was still sweaty. She had never seen it to be otherwise. He was washing the neat little pile of breakfast dishes that Parse had collected in the sink.

  “No,” Orla burst out, anguished. She must have startled him because his whole body gave a hard jolt and the plate in his hand clattered noisily into the sink. Orla rushed over and picked up the plate, inspecting it for cracks and chips. The china was her mother’s. She had hand-painted the little vines around the rim.

  “That’s not how the dishes go,” Orla murmured, after satisfying herself that the plate was undamaged.

  “I’m … sorry?” the man managed. “I wanted to help.”

  “First you rinse and then you scrub and then you soak in the cleaning solution.” Orla looked down and was surprised to see how tight her fingers were around the plate’s edges. She set it down tenderly next to its fellows.

  “I didn’t know,” the man told her, sounding subdued. Orla shook her head, like it didn’t matter. But she would have felt better if he were gone from her kitchen. He looked out of place here, contrasted the yellow tiles too vividly. Orla found she could not look at him directly.

  “If you break one, I have to go to the village and get more,” she told him, hoping he would take the hint and leave the dishes to her or to Parse. He did not move again for the sink, but he didn’t move towards the door either.

  “You … don’t like the village?” he asked her. Orla gave him a look full of distain and he laughed. “Yes, I suppose that was a stupid question.” He tilted his head to look at her as if a single angle would not do and he required another. “Do you know what your father is building for me?”

  “Not my place.” Other than the ‘just in case’ room, Orla was not allowed in her father’s laboratory.

  The man smiled at her. It was as jittering as the rest of him. “It’s something the villagers are going to hate.”

  “It doesn’t matter what he builds,” Orla said. Her hands felt heavy and strange at her sides, she picked up an abandoned dishtowel and worried it with numb, ineffectual fingers.

  “People don’t really like genius,” the man said earnestly. “They like the benefits that genius produces and they like the comfort and safety that it affords them, but no one wants to see the real work done.” He leaned forward, touched Orla’s bare arm. She had expected his skin to be clammy and cold, like that of some creature that made its home deep under rocks and water, but he was warm. So warm, in fact, that she wondered if he would leave a red handprint when he drew back.

  “Everyone is always talking about the good of humanity, but Orla, I have never experienced much good in humanity. Individuals, maybe, but altogether … They lack vision.” Orla found herself nodding along, though she didn’t exactly understand what he meant. How was it that she had never noticed the curious gas-flame blue of his eyes?

  “I would not like to think of people like that troubling you, Orla,” he said, still with his hand on her arm. His eyes seemed to dampen, as though someone somewhere had turned down the range. “But that can be fixed, you know.” He looked as though he needed something from her, some word of encouragement or agreeable gesture. Orla only looked at him, a little uncomfortable and a little apologetic, though she hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Someday soon,” he told her, “no one will trouble you at all.”

  * * *

  “Miss!” called the man with gun as Orla made her way towards the door. She slowed but did not stop and she did not turn. Her father had warned her often to be wary of strangers. This one was particularly strange. Big boy, blond-headed, he looked as though he were … more vivid, or more heavily outlined than everyone else. And, of course, he wore a gun on his belt and did not even try to hide it.

  Behind her, the boy laughed. It was deep in his chest and warm, like Orla had made a joke. But Orla rarely made jokes and she hadn’t said anything at all to him. “You’re leaking,” he said, crossing the floor to stand behind her. Orla turned, looked down towards her feet where indeed there was a white spill of dust and a trail leading away from the counter.

  “The flour,” Orla said, shifting her parcels until she could examine i
t. One corner of the package was gone, had clearly been sheared off with scissors. Orla cupped her hand over it in an attempt to save the rest of the bag. There was a little more than half left.

  “C’mon,” said the boy, “we’ll get you another one.”

  Orla shook her head. She had no desire to tangle with Derek today. The boy looked quizzically at her and Orla tilted her hand away from the package. White flour gathered in her palm.

  “Look,” she said, in a voice so small it was only marginally audible, “he cut it.”

  The boy examined the bag carefully and then looked back at Derek, who was dumping wrapped candies into the barrel beside the long counter. “Why?” he asked. Orla just shrugged. He looked genuinely puzzled, but Papa had told her that sometimes strangers were sneaky and they would try to trick her into talking about him, talking about the work he did.

  The boy shook his head. “This must be some sort of mistake. That is not how ladies are treated.” Orla had never thought of herself as a lady before. She clutched the parcels, leaking flour and all, tight against her chest and did not look at the boy.

  “Excuse me!” he said. Orla watched as Derek assessed him without speaking. Strangers were only marginally more welcome in the village than Orla and her father.

  “Yeah?”

  “You wanna replace the gal’s flour?”

  Derek folded his arms and smiled his mean little smile that Orla had seen so often. “Not particularly,” he said.

  “Did your mother raise you wrong, or are you just a natural asshole?” The boy spoke oddly. Sort of outsized and flourishing, like the rest of him. It was as though … with each word he was carving his name upon the world. Here, here, and here. This is mine.