by Anthology
I could tell you how it watched me, found me, took me up from the world that didn’t see me for what I was, or what I could become. I could tell you of how I was sung to this room by a poisoned voice, each note another snare to catch me and bind me tight. I could tell you of how I gently resisted, until I didn’t.
But the stories would be a lie. I have always been here.
I am a box.
I am a wife.
It screams when the pumping dies out and I fade, and its thick boots go smash smash smash on the stairs—and then on body and bones. I know that this means no more food for the pumper, stuck far down below me. No sustenance until the lesson has sunk in. And I lay back, deflated, the sheepskin sagging at the corners.
I wonder if this is the time when it won’t come back. Maybe today, the pumper will defeat it and we can both leave, together. But no, soon enough it is up and up the stairs and leaning into my corners.
“Jennifer. My sweet Jenny,” it whispers at me and my lack of ear. “Jenny, darling, you’re here.”
I imagine one up above me, hovering in this place in order to keep me safe. I wish to smile when I think of that one, the watcher. Perhaps the watcher is real and has been, always. Ican see a crack in the roof through which the watcher could observe me. I have looked and looked. Listened. I’d only need a scratch to know that the room above is occupied; just one faint drag of a nail.
Perhaps the watcher has a window, too. I hope that the watcher can see things, everything, all of the world that I do not know and will never visit. I would give anything—even my sheepskin—for the watcher to come down and whisper to me of the sights and the sounds and the taste of the world, even if it was nothing more than stories of dust and mold.
Anything.
I would also like a kiss.
Just one.
“Brenda. Glenda. Kate!” it says, hips rolling. It picks up speed, quivering around the throat. Its skin is red and wet. I wonder if this time it will shake me to pieces. If so, I am sure that I will be repaired back into usefulness.
It wriggles like something freshly caught.
“Charlene! Oh, my love, my little one!” It is louder and faster. Drips patter onto my rubber skin. One hand grips my shoulders. The other is lower, moving. I am fortunate not to bruise. I notice, idly, that today the room is fresh with morning sunshine. I wonder if it will go out and live a real life today, after it is finished with its wife.
I do not know what it does when it goes, but it often comes to me smelling of flowers and methanol. Once, it visited me in the smallest hours of the night, near to the dawn. It reeked of cheap perfume and I knew then that it had tried to be somebody else’s. It chastened itself, repeated again and again that this was its life now, that I was its world and that it would never leave me, not for anything.
It made promises to me, the kind that you should treasure. And then it started and kept going until noon.
All the while, I stayed perfectly still.
Now it shivers and shakes. It must have built me to be pretty, but I don’t know what that means.
I realize that my hair has fallen off. The hank must be huddling on the floor like a lonely spider. It notices, shouting that I have ruined everything, and swings a hard slap. I rock to one side and I know I shouldn’t, but I tilt up my hip as I roll and I know I should have warned it with my lipless mouth, but—
The point of the spring is sharp and dips into its upper thigh with ease, cutting into its thickest blood-tube. This metallic slip is utterly silent, but it begins to scream immediately. There are no words, but there is terror. It lays about with its arms, as red comes in spurting throbs. My rubber is drenched with warmth.
It knows that I shifted and it wants to kill me. It screeches with the voice of death and brings both clenched fists down upon my face. My teeth clatter down the back of my throat. The pump of my false-breath sucks them into the dark of my belly. It hits me again, but this time the blow is weaker and I know that I will outlast it.
“Caroline,” it sobs, “I only wanted—I wish that you were…”
It dies next to me in the bed, the way a faithful lover ought to.
I lay broken for a time. I am not sure what to do or how to be. My false-breath continues to ease in and out of me, slippery and moist. I count the strands of cobwebs that are high in the corners of my room and when I am finished, I start anew. This continues, perhaps for hours, until I hear whimpering from the pumper. My breath continued, even through all of the noise, because nobody has told the one below to stop. The pumper does not know that we are both alone now, together.
I hear another cry, a hungry sound.
I know that, somehow, I must go.
Firstly, I must sit. My wired arms are extended above my head but as the cries grow louder, I swing them up so that they clatter down on either side of my sheepskin. My wires thrum as I hoist up my torso. I ease myself forward, dizzy with the tilt of the world. My sheepskin falls off and I can see the worn wool sticking up in bloody peaks.
My displaced teeth rattle in my belly as I stand on sprung legs. The tubes that carry my breath and blood to me pop off the suckers that sit along the ridge of my wooden spine. There is a leak. I lurch toward the door and cogs spill from me like dropped coins.
I realize that I will never hear its voice again.
I do not mourn. It didn’t build me to mourn, or to grieve. I was built to be silent and useful.
I move from my room and carefully turn at the top of the stairs. I know that I must go down and down and down.
So much of me has fallen off that I am nearly nothing when I reach the middle of the stairs, but every step has shown me a new thing. I go slowly, relying on stiff knees that were never meant to take weight. My painted eyes would widen if they could, even at the zigzagging strips of crackling wallpaper.
I halt at the window, a full storey lower than my own. I see a yard thick with weeds and broken glass. The sight is glorious. There are machines lying at odd angles, gutted. I wonder if I carry any of their parts within me. I am rapt, until I see the others. They are scattered about the enclosed yard with a carelessness that speaks of their failures.
Broken wives. Lost wives. My predecessors. I wonder if I hold any of their screws and nails and am all at once sure that I do. I think that I might match at least two of them for paint.
My glossy eyes show me ruins and hulks. I trace their frames and feel something that could be horror and something that may be love.
The only thing that could move me is another cry from the pumper.
“Please,” comes the call. “Please.”
I go. I go to save the only one left.
I shuffle down in to the dark and I lose more of myself with every step. I remind myself that they are only fragments and parts. Surely I have a few to spare.
I hear clanging and sobbing, but when I reach the door the pumper goes quiet, perhaps expecting punishment. My fingers scrape at the latch until the door opens. I stand in the frame, illuminated by the light of a new day. I must look a fright, for the pumper shrieks at the sight of me. With great effort, I hold up my hands.
Peace, I am here for you, here to take you away from all of this, I think, though I cannot shape the word with my empty mouth. I wonder if the watcher would say the same to me, if I were the one being rescued.
The pumper runs to me and I grind into a hunch.
I am enveloped by pale arms. They squeeze me tight and I creak.
“You came,” says the pumper, breathlessly. “I wished and hoped for you to come. I knew that you would. I knew it.”
My bloody shoulder is dampened with tears. I lean forward, pressing my rubber skin to the stark bones of the one who gave me breath. We turn and my knees pop, but I can see freedom and know that I only need to walk a few steps and then we will be outside. I begin to shake and I do not know if I will ever be able to stop.
The pumper wraps a hand around mine, whispers a secret to me and kisses me.
Just
once.
That is enough.
Zip(Short story)
by Emma Osborne
Originally published by Bastion Science Fiction Magazine
One hour and six minutes until his boots crunched into the soil of a disputed planet. Lieutenant James Kent sat on the floor of his bare room and field-stripped his blaster methodically, relying on his years of training to find the oxygen-boosting cartridge, to correctly grease the release points, to stay steady and not look up at the empty space above his rack where the photo of his former captain and lover had been.
The mission destination flashed up on his comms tablet: a deserted jungle planet with a low combat risk rating, but all the same, the Allied Planet Military was going in with fingers on triggers. Prudent. Nobody had forgotten the Ba’Tooth scandal: two full squads bleeding into black mud under the shadow of a traditionally woven peace tapestry.
Captain Simon Albright had been assigned to that ill- fated mission and Kent had wept with relief in his rack when the zip had come through from him. Before that final message, Kent had thought him dead, but Albright had been switched out from the squad at the last minute to make room for a linguistics expert. The news of the raid had been all over the base-wide feeds. Albright found out from the feeds that it had been his squad shredded planet-side, his brothers and sisters who caught the fallout from a generational hive-war. He took it hard. I should have been with them. The last line of the zip had been free from Albright’s usual sign-off, a coded blip of love that could wriggle around a censor’s scrutiny. It should have been me.
Kent figured that Albright had found someone else to numb the pain after receiving that last, lonely message. The silence had stretched and thinned until nothing remained but a wisp, coupled with the pervasive feeling that nobody would ever speak to him with love in his voice ever again.
The LT finished up with his blaster. Every piece of Kent’s equipment was maintained and prepped: steel-silk rope coiled in its pouch, boot-toes sharpened for kicking into rock, face-shield programmed with thousands of languages and ready to take on dust, ice or jungle-sweat. Kent carried everything he needed to command the base raid—everything except the certainty that he would be mourned by the one he loved if he spun out, ate dirt, was blown away, baby. It doesn’t matter, he thought, breathing deep. I gotta go. No matter what he’d lost, he always had his squad, and their mission. They were the only two things that could get him out of his rack.
A short melody bleeped through his tablet. Time to report to the transport. The commanding officer was always first aboard, last to depart. Kent locked his face-shield into place and tucked a dog tag into the pocket on the left side of his uniform. A blank zip-film poked out from under his thin pillow. He’d figure out what to write if he lived.
***
Everything felt wrong in a flash. It was a teeth-grating feeling, a shiver that didn’t stop or show in gloved fingertips that gripped the handrails tight. The scientists called it transport displacement and lectured them about the shifts that occurred at a sub-atomic level. But it was perfectly safe, they said, scrawling absently onto erasable clipboards. Perfectly safe.
It was best if you rode the flash with your eyes closed. He couldn’t see shit through the view-plate anyway, just grey half-space: the in-between of things. The screaming slip through space manifested in fireworks that sparked behind his eyelids. Kent always saw green-blue ripples that once reminded him of a show he’d seen about aurora borealis. But that was before the mission that he and Albright had teamed up on, under the icy crust of the moon Europa. They’d been tired, cold and so far from home, in both time and space. Kent had been astounded when Albright had wrapped his hand around the back of Kent’s neck. He remembered the taste of that first kiss and the scrape of Albright’s stubble as they both gave into something that had been brewing for months. Now, every flickering light reminded him of the play of the waves above their heads and the close huddle of an anchored tent.
Flames silently bloomed around the view-plates as Kent and his squad descended through the atmosphere of the planet Kelvin. The twelve of them opened their eyes and watched the view-screens, watched one another, sending silent promises of solidarity around the interior of the shuttle. The tongues of fire were as chaotic and vibrant as the tropical flowers that had once grown around the windows of Kent’s parents’ house. Both the flowers and his parents were long dead and crumbled; they had both stubbornly clung to Earth as if it would somehow heal itself one day.
Dex, their droid, gazed at the display impassively. Corporal Sowell’s silver whiskers prickled out from the grim set of his jaw. The veteran knew better than to trust the official reports. He scowled as Malik and Hughes began to throw up roughly. Lombardi looked on, smug. The three of them, always mischievous, had been up all night drinking and playing cards. Lombardi always held her booze better than any of them. Goddamn genetics.
The squad shared a battleground comms matrix that worked like an extended warning system; a tremor of nerves that shot around emotional flashes. No secrets—nothing so well formed—but between them flooded a sense of danger or apprehension that twined around the regular comms. It could mean the difference between breathing and choking to death on your own blood.
Kent took a moment to once again mentally run through the mission stats. His orders were to land, trek to the base, and capture it. Each base, each planet was a crucial part of the Allied Planet network. Since the mass departure from a sun- blasted Earth, the military was constantly on the lookout for planets with terraforming potential. Regaining even one would be a coup.
The base on Kelvin was supposedly abandoned by the Kee, but Kent’s squad hummed with the caution of veterans. He checked the reads. The atmosphere would be negated by the bionics of their combat suits but the acidity in the air would wear them out in under twelve hours. Uncovered skin would melt down to muscle in minutes.
They landed in a patchy clearing. The automated hatch hissed open and the squad bounced out, Kent on point. He’d insisted. He barked out formations and as one, the team slipped through the black, sticky jungle that rotted around them. The planet had been torched in the Inferno Wars between the rock-like Kee and the delicate, merciless Alalani birds who were capable of flying between worlds on their smoking scarlet wings. Kent flipped himself sideways to avoid trampling a patch of green moss that marked the start of a grow-back. However hot the flames, something always grew back.
Even though they were on mission and even though he’d promised himself that he wouldn’t, Kent’s heart and head slipped back to his worries as his augmented knees flexed and propelled him over burnt and blackened trees.
Albright had slowly broken his heart, over a year or so. Each harsh word piled on top of the others until the stress was unbearable, heartbreaking. Kent didn’t know if Albright knew or cared. Try as he might, Kent couldn’t shake the memory of his eyes after that first rough kiss, nor could he forget the way that they fit together when they slept: his skin pale against Albright’s dark, muscles and angles matched and everything simply right.
But he was never coming back, and the empty space where he’d been was crushingly, unbearably large.
I would rather have every inch of my skin ripped off than feel like this. It was as if someone had shot fragments of hot metal into his chest. Something nameless squeezed him as he dashed through the jungle and dragged out tears that were whisked away by the moisture sensors in his helmet.
Even at first, Albright hadn’t been entirely sure. It had been too new, too fast. It was a game to him, an adventure into an experience. Kent had been in love with other boys since he was twelve years old, during the last math class of the rainy season when he’d noticed just how very blue Tim’s eyes were. Albright was different. He’d left a girl and their unfinished business back on his home colony, and although she was long gone, her memory kept tugging at him.
Albright had broken it off with Kent after stammering out his reasons.
The separat
ion had lasted as long as it took for the alcohol rations to come through from Command. Kent had taken his alone in his room in an effort to privately dull the sharpness of the break. Before long, the door had boomed under the weight of Albright’s drunken fist.
I should have turned him away, but how? He knew I couldn’t. His heart and his hope had overtaken any good sense.
After that, Albright drifted in and out, capricious with his heart and his collection of imagined futures. Sometimes he left with tears, sometimes with accusations, sometimes without saying a word. On the good days, they’d built imaginary houses, arguing over the window frames and planet quadrant. The bad days scrunched up Kent’s stomach with anxiety. The last Kent had heard was that Albright was messing around with a new guy: a loudmouth colt of a rookie, fresh out of basic.
Early on, Albright had promised that Kent was his great love, the one who belonged. And then it had faded out, until even the very briefest meetings had come no more. It was one thing to suspect that Albright didn’t want him and another thing entirely to know that he didn’t need him.
Lost in thought and with three kilometers of thick jungle terrain left to navigate, everything changed.
Kent missed the rumbles under his boots. His skin-suit took action where he could not and sprang him high into the air as the ground shook and split beneath him. The squad’s shared reflex boomed. Kent leapt high, up and away from the unreliable terrain. For a moment they were all floating in the air like great dark birds, their green sensor lights flicking down and over the earth to map out a safe landing place.
There was none. They tumbled down, as everything must.
Kent’s suit stiffened with the shock as his knees and shins smashed onto broken rock. He slipped into a dark chasm. For a moment he hung from the wrist-strap of his blaster after it jammed into a cleft, but then something snapped and he was falling again, weaponless, with the squad screaming at him from eleven different directions. They were all down. Lombardi and Callis blipped out, their login replaced with white noise for a second before switching off automatically.