Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  All of that so Oskar could go and find his sister, Jessica. He’d been worried that she might need help, but she wasn’t sitting helpless in her apartment. No, she’d gone off to the space station to be one of Earth’s ambassadors. This was supposed to be his big chance to not be the baby brother anymore, to swoop in and save Jessica from the post-invasion chaos, and she hadn’t needed him at all. She never did. He had no idea if she’d even gotten the message he’d tried to send.

  Someone pounded on the door. Probably the neighbor kids. Brayden liked avocados, and trading with him was a better deal than trying to buy them somewhere.

  He opened the door. “Jessica.”

  “I can’t believe you changed my locks.” Jessica faked a scowl, then grinned and gave him a big hug. “You look like crap.”

  Oskar retreated to Jessica’s guestroom. His sister hadn’t understood how he could come down here and leave Ellie behind, no matter how he tried to explain.

  People started pouring in from the east. They moved into abandoned apartments, office buildings, malls. Los Angeles turned back into a bustling city. Jessica said that the government had traded Arizona and New Mexico to the frogs. All the extra people made it harder to get work. His heavy heart made it harder to wake up and face the day.

  On his second straight day of refusing to get out of bed, Jessica marched into his room like she was twenty and he was ten, and she could boss him around. “Draw me a bird.”

  “Go away,” he said. There were no birds, and he could see right through his sister’s scheme. Birds were from happier times. She thought sketching a picture would pull him out of this funk. She was wrong. Remembering the way things were would only make it worse. “There are no birds. Sporefall killed them all.”

  “Think of it as rent. It’ll do you good to draw something other than Ellie, over and over again. All I’m asking for is one really good picture of a bird.” Jessica left without waiting for him to answer.

  He only had a few sheets of good thick paper left; he’d used most of it to draw his pictures of Ellie. He got one out. He closed his eyes and tried to picture the stellar jays that had eaten peanuts from the feeder outside his window, back before the sporefall. He remembered blue and black feathers, and the general shape of the head, but the details were fuzzy. There were pictures of birds in books, but he shouldn’t need that. He should be able to do this. It had only been a year.

  For the first time in weeks, he opened the guestroom blinds. The apartment was on the fourth floor, and the window looked across the alley at a near-identical brick building. He tried to imagine birds flying in the alley, landing on the concrete below to hunt for bugs or seeds, but thoughts of flying set his mind to thinking about soaring out through the window and falling into oblivion.

  He closed the blinds.

  Two days later Oskar had only one sheet of good paper left, and he had not yet managed a picture of a bird. He ate when Jessica forced him to, and he slept until Jessica made him get out of bed. There was no point to pictures of birds. There was no point to anything, not anymore.

  Jessica came in with half an avocado. Did he really have to eat, again? But no, she started eating it herself, spooning the mushy green into her mouth and smiling as though it actually tasted good to eat a plain avocado, again. “This is the last one from the bag, and food rations have been short at the community center, so we can’t count on that. We need to decide what to do next. There’s a caravan going north, right through Portland.”

  He didn’t want to go back. What if Marybeth had abandoned Ellie, despite all her promises? He couldn’t face the chance. “I’m staying here.”

  Jessica shook her head. “You’re not. I’m trading the apartment for passage on the caravan and food for the trip. If you want to stay in L.A., you’re on your own.”

  She left him to consider his options, and his gaze drifted to the window. It would be so easy, so quick. If he never went back to Ellie, he could believe that she was okay, maybe even happy. He wouldn’t have to face a world that could never possibly be right again.

  He opened the blinds. An alien was walking in the alley, smiling the same damn frog-smile that the aliens always smiled. It saw him in the window, and thinned into a cloud. When it came back together, it was a flock of birds. Not the stellar jays he’d been trying to draw, but pigeons, plump and gray. They fluttered up and landed on windowsills and power lines outside the window. They weren’t real, but they were enough to evoke a clear memory in his mind.

  Oskar could soar out the window, or he could draw this memory of birds for Jessica and go with her back to Portland.

  He calmed his shaking hands and sketched the birds.

  ACCEPTANCE

  Marybeth walked with Ellie to the clinic. Ellie insisted on bringing ‘Lexi,’ a bundle of filthy blankets that she refused to believe wasn’t actually her dead baby. Marybeth hoped the new treatment would help. Ellie was an amazing woman, able to find joy in all the smallest things. Even now, as they walked along abandoned streets with Eridani foodplants, Ellie chattered to her blanket-bundle baby about how beautiful the orange blossoms were on the lovely purple trees.

  Marybeth couldn’t appreciate the beauty of the ‘blossoms.’ They weren’t flowers at all, but clusters of tiny spheres, each one full of orange spores. The trees would release spores soon, and despite Eridani assurances that there would be no harm to humans this time, she could not put aside her memories of the last sporefall, and all the death it caused. Yolanda’s death.

  Very few healthy adults had died in the sporefall, but her wife hadn’t been healthy. She’d had alpha-1-antitrypsin deficiency emphysema—a genetic disease that left her with the lungs of a 60-year-old smoker when she was only 32. Even without the sporefall, her condition had been deteriorating. She’d had a complex daily routine of inhalers and pills to try to keep the coughing fits and wheezing in check, and a tank of supplemental oxygen for her worst days.

  Yolanda would have seen the beauty in the alien plants, just as Ellie did. Looking at Ellie was like looking into Yolanda’s past, back to the early days of their relationship, before her illness sapped away her strength.

  Was falling in love with a straight woman any better than carrying around a bundle of filthy blankets?

  *

  The clinic was an Eridani clinic, one of several that were part of the treaty that had been negotiated with the aliens. They were greeted by a man in a white coat when they entered, and left to wait in a small room with black plastic chairs and battered magazines from before the sporefall.

  “Will Oskar meet us here?” Ellie asked. Much as she refused to accept the death of her baby, she continued to believe that Oskar would return.

  “He’s not here, El. We’re going to see one of the Eridani,” Marybeth explained. “They have a treatment that might help you.”

  An alien appeared in the doorway, wearing what looked like a down comforter tied like a toga. It studied them with beady black eyes, then beckoned to Ellie, recognizing that she was the one more in need of treatment.

  “I’d like to come too,” Marybeth said.

  The Eridani doctor nodded its assent.

  The treatment was painful to watch. The alien thinned itself into a gray fog, then reformed into images drawn from Ellie’s mind—not mindreading, exactly. If Ellie said nothing, the alien could not hear her thoughts. It was only when Ellie spoke about her daughter that the memories came through. Then it was like watching a moving slideshow all in shades of gray:

  Oskar holding Lexi in the hospital, the day she was born.

  Ellie’s struggles with breastfeeding when Lexi wouldn’t latch.

  Bottles of formula, carefully mixed and warmed at all hours of the night.

  So many things that Marybeth had never seen, memories that haunted poor Ellie and made her break from reality. Then came the worst, the sporefall.

  Ellie going out to find formula for Lexi, and coming back covered in fine orange dust.

  Lexi’s pitifu
l coughing and weak cries.

  The days on end where she only slept upright, leaning on Ellie’s chest.

  Finally, the end, the moment when there were no more breaths, and Oskar took Lexi away. Marybeth cried as the baby disappeared from the three dimensional scene the Eridani recreated from the particles of its own body. She glanced at her friend, hopeful that the therapy had helped. Ellie was crying, but she continued talking. Her baby was dead, but Ellie wasn’t finished.

  More images appeared, of a Lexi that never was, in a world that no longer existed. Lexi toddling across the living room, Lexi putting on a ridiculously big backpack and going off to kindergarten, Lexi at the park feeding ducks. There were no ducks, and Lexi would never be six, but the Eridani doctor showed the impossible futures right along with the horrifying past.

  Lexi’s senior prom, her wedding, the birth of Ellie’s first grandchild. The scenes skimmed through time and Marybeth could no longer watch, no longer listen to Ellie’s words. She simply watched Ellie stare into the images that poured out, and held Ellie’s hand as she cried. Since she had turned away from the doctor, it took her a moment to realize that the Eridani had resumed its default frogform. Ellie was no longer speaking, only sobbing softly.

  She met Marybeth’s eyes, and there was a depth to her gaze that was missing before.

  “My Lexi,” Ellie said. “My Lexi is gone.”

  After the treatment, Ellie didn’t need a caretaker, but Marybeth had long since abandoned her apartment and they enjoyed each other’s company. Ellie often wore the same grim smile that so often graced Yolanda’s face when she was sick, and it tugged at Marybeth’s heart. She tried to remind herself that Ellie was a different woman, a straight woman, but she could not help but hope that somehow, if enough time passed, things could be different.

  Ellie made good progress in embracing reality. Together they dismantled Lexi’s crib and set it out on the curb in front of the apartment. It wasn’t long before a woman who looked like she might be expecting came and carried it away.

  Oskar came back from L.A. Marybeth greeted him at the door, and had no choice but to let him in, for all that he abandoned Ellie when she needed him most.

  “I’m so glad you’re both okay,” he said. Marybeth shrugged. He could say what he wanted, it wouldn’t change what he had done. She only hoped that she wouldn’t lose Ellie, now that he was back.

  “Hi, Oskar,” Ellie said. The sight of him brought her to tears, but Marybeth couldn’t tell whether they were tears of joy or pain or anger.

  “I’m so sorry,” Oskar said. “I didn’t want to leave you, but I couldn’t stay. I was hurting too.”

  “I forgive you,” Ellie said. “I know it must have been hard.”

  He smiled and went to embrace her, but she stepped back. “I forgive you, but we can’t go back to how things were. I saw what might have been, if the Eridani had never come, and Lexi had lived, and it was beautiful. We could have had an amazing life. But those are impossible futures, and I have to let them go and come back to what is real.”

  “Is it another man?” Oskar asked, then realized that Marybeth was standing there. “Or another woman?”

  Ellie shook her head. “There’s no one else. Certainly not Marybeth, though she’s a dear friend.”

  It was nothing that Marybeth did not already know. She had always known that Ellie was straight; there had never been any sign that she was interested. Ellie would never be Yolanda.

  Marybeth grabbed her coat and made polite excuses. Ellie and Oskar had a lot to talk about, and Marybeth didn’t want to hear it. She went outside and started walking, not caring where she went.

  The wind picked up, and an orange cloud blew down from the Eridani foodtrees. The second sporefall had begun, a new cycle of alien life. According to the translators, the initial sporefall had been a different strain, modified to be more aggressive for terraforming, so that the Eridani would be sure to have foodplants when they arrived at their new home. This second sporefall should be as harmless to humans as ordinary pollen.

  Marybeth sneezed at the orange air, but she refused to go back inside.

  She would not hide from this new world.

  BETTY AND THE SQUELCHY SAURUS

  Betty was hanging wet towels on the clothesline when a faded blue Plymouth Roadking came up the drive. Someone had donated the car to the Six Sisters orphanage back in 1952, and Sister Mary Margaret was the only nun who knew how to drive it.

  A new girl got out of the car—maybe five years old, with brown hair and lots of freckles. Skittish little thing, probably terrified of monsters. It’d be no problem getting her to follow the rules. Betty hung the last towel and wiped her hands on her skirt.

  “Since you’re done, you may show Catherine around the orphanage,” Sister Mary Margaret said.

  “Yes, Sister.” Betty grabbed Catherine’s hand and pulled her inside. “Come on. You’ll be sleeping on the third floor, but you gotta learn the rules first.”

  “Mary Margaret told me the rules in the car.”

  “Sister Mary Margaret,” Betty corrected the younger girl. “These are different rules. These rules will keep you from being eaten.”

  Catherine had no answer to that. Betty took her to the second-floor room she shared with Janet. The walls were bare and both beds were neatly made. Betty knocked on the closet door three times, paused, then pulled the door open. Taped to the inside of the door was a sheet of blue-lined paper covered in small slanty handwriting.

  “This is the Treaty of the Bathroom Alcove,” Betty said. “It keeps you safe from monsters, so pay attention.”

  The rules had been written in pencil by the Giant Unsquishable Cockroach who lived in the coat closet in the front hall. The treaty had been signed in the bathroom alcove because that was neutral territory—not quite a closet because it had no door, but kind of like a closet because the nuns stored towels in there.

  Betty read the treaty out loud:

  (1) Closets and under the beds are monster territory. Children may obtain items from the closets during daylight hours, as long as they knock before entering. Items that fall under the bed should be considered lost forever.

  (2) Monsters must not be seen during daylight hours. Monsters are free to roam the orphanage at any hour of the day or night, so long as they are not seen.

  (3) Monsters may not eat children during daylight hours.

  (4) Monsters may eat children at night ONLY if the child (or any portion thereof) leaves the safety of its bed.

  (5) Children may ask adults to check for monsters under the bed or inside the closet. However:

  (6) Children may not, under any circumstances, request that an adult drag a monster out of its territory to shoot or otherwise kill the monster. Violation of rule #6 will release the monsters from the terms of this treaty.

  The treaty was signed by Roach and by Allison Michaels, who lived in Betty’s room until last year, when she got adopted. One corner of the paper was missing, and Betty suspected that Squelchy Saurus—the monster that lived in her closet—had eaten it. Squelchy was fond of paper.

  “Do you understand the rules?” Betty asked.

  Catherine nodded, and Betty sent her upstairs to the big third-floor room where all the younger girls slept.

  Squelchy Saurus lived in a closet. It was a nice closet, small and cozy, full of delicious-smelling clothes. With the door closed it was wonderfully dark, and it kept her hidden from the terrifying grownups that sometimes came to make sure the room was clean.

  Squelchy wasn’t as quick as Stabby Gnome, or as strong as Crushmonster—she wasn’t even clever like Gooey-Blob-That-Can-Look-Like-Most-Anything (aka “Bob the Blob”). As monsters went, Squelchy Saurus was disappointingly ordinary. The thing that made her special was where she happened to live—inside the closet of Betty Williams, the oldest girl, and the one who had given the monsters their current names.

  Betty had given Squelchy her first name because her skin oozed with clear slime, and her
last name because her shape resembled a dinosaur from a book on the shelf above the bed. Squelchy decided to try and get the book. She balanced on her hind legs and bumped the corner of the shelf with her head. If she got the book, she could use it to lure Betty out of bed after dark.

  She wasn’t sure what she’d do if Betty did leave the bed, but the girl was too smart to fall for any of Squelchy’s tricks. The attempts seemed to amuse Betty, and it kept Squelchy entertained, too.

  Squelchy heard a sound and darted back to her closet, afraid it might be one of the nuns, but it turned out to be Poison Bitey-Snake. Bitey fit under the bed and seemed to dislike any monster that didn’t.

  “Hi, Bitey,” Squelchy said, creeping back out of the closet.

  Bitey hissed. “Those are her namesss. Must you use them?”

  “Well, what should I call you?” Squelchy asked. Bitey didn’t answer. Monsters were good at many things, but terrible at names.

  “So,” Bitey said, “have you heard the newsss?”

  Squelchy shook her head, sending droplets of slime spraying everywhere. “What news?”

  “Theresa Smith was adopted, and before she left, she broke the treaty. All the monsters on the third floor have been shot.”

  Squelchy felt sad for the poor dead monsters, but Bitey clearly didn’t care.

  Bitey slithered up one side of Janet’s bed and coiled himself around the pillow. “We no longer need to obey the rulesss. Today, we will plan our strategy. Tonight, the children are ours for the taking.”