Strange Horizons, September 2002

by Strange Horizons

  “Cold turkey,” she muttered, and poured herself another shot of lime vodka. “I need to. One of these days, for sure."

  Jenae spun and marched over to Ally as if she'd heard her. “Drink-up. We're-going-now."

  Ally froze with the shot glass halfway to her lips. “Where?"

  “To see those alien friends of yours.” Jenae's voice was slow and deliberate. Ally shivered as she swallowed the sickly-sweet alcohol, almost gagging. With numb hands she set down the glass as Jenae filled her pants pockets with capsules of Blur.

  “What are you going to do?” Ally felt like she had a mouthful of glue as she spoke.

  “Expand-the-customer-base,” Jenae said, her thin white face all angles and bulging eyes. She cackled as she spoke. “Wanta-Blur, Alissa? Or should I say, ‘Wantaviewer'?"

  * * * *

  There was a moment that night, the last day of May, when Alissa Trang realized she could stop it all. She could just walk away from the situation, taking the Blur with her, and nobody would get hurt. Ally saw the moment with the perfect, unfettered clarity of an addict at the peak of her high.

  Jenae stood next to her, laughing and hugging herself as she shook her way through the Blur rush. Ally stared as Jenae held pink capsules out to the half-dozen aliens that crept up to them like hesitant forest animals approaching a watering hole.

  No, Ally thought. That's wrong. They're not animals at all. They're just extra-cautious, freaked out because of the way Jenae's acting. There's intelligence in those black eyes. They know what sort of poison Jenae is offering them. And they want it.

  One of the females, her squirming hair held back in a plastic clip, reached a short-fingered hand up to Jenae. Her long gray body rocked forward, and then back suddenly, as if she was trying to get her balance. The male next to her, wearing cuffed, second-hand jeans with holes and patches just like the other Wannoshay, also lifted a hand, palm up. The eye in the middle of each wide forehead remained closed. The night air was thick with the salty smell of the aliens.

  The moment was there. Ally felt her own hand move, poised to either knock the Blur from Jenae's quivering hand, or grab the capsules and run. She could do it. She had to do it. Then she thought about the images on her Netstream, and Jenae calling her “Wantaviewer.” Ally nearly bit through her lower lip as it curled up with fear and disgust.

  The moment was there, but Ally allowed it to pass by.

  Instead, the two Wannoshay took capsules and, following Jenae's pantomimed movements, placed them in their lipless mouths. Their black eyes widened as they swallowed. More gray hands reached for Jenae, the pink capsules disappearing.

  “Now you fucking did it,” she muttered, and at least three alien voices repeated her words back to her: “Nah you fuggin’ did id,” one said, like a deep-voiced man with a head cold. “Fuggin’ did id,” echoed another, higher voice.

  The screaming began less than a minute later.

  Spinning and leaping up and down in a mad dance of agony, the Wannoshay on Blur broke free from the crowd and uncoiled into the streets. Most drivers from the city avoided Ellice Avenue, but a new hydro car with American plates flew up the road as if on cue and barreled into two Blurred, madly-dancing aliens half a block away. The twin thuds hit Ally like hammer blows to her chest, and she tried her best to look away from the wreck. But as always, she had no control. She looked at the broken bodies and screamed along with the others.

  Hesitant Netstream reporters began to arrive as the night went on, come to collect their cams and report on the madness in the wake of the explosion that day. Many of them never made it back out of the city once the aliens got their first taste of Blur. The drug seemed to activate the taste for violence in the Wannoshay, and nobody besides Ally got close enough to film Jenae passing out Blur like Halloween candy.

  Ally's only consolation, in the midst of the chaos, was that her three friends were nowhere to be seen. She'd spent enough time with them—shot enough footage of them—that she felt able to pick them out immediately in a crowd of aliens. Also, there was a different feeling Ally got when Brando or Thumper or Jane was near, a slight ringing in her ears that was more of a tickle than a sound. Maybe it was the Blur, clogging her other senses of the aliens, but she didn't see or feel her alien friends, and that thought gave her a tiny sense of victory in this night of madness.

  Amazed that she'd been able to get away from Ellice Avenue in one piece, Ally made it back to Sanford at half past midnight. She'd been sick twice on her way home, and the trucker had been nice enough to pull over to let her spill her guts both times. The driver didn't say anything when she climbed back into the truck, wiping her mouth. The big, gray-haired woman just looked at Ally with a look that was equal parts sadness and anger. Not at her, Ally knew, but at the deaths from the past week, and the Wannoshay.

  Ally trudged toward her apartment from the gas station where the trucker had dropped her off. She cried silently, trying to cover her occasional sobs by humming a tuneless song. She felt the bag of Blur in her pocket, and a part of her wanted to throw the capsules into the sewer grate below her. Instead she pushed them deeper into her pocket and balled her hand into a fist. This was no time for drastic actions.

  Casting her gaze skyward, Ally looked at the stars littering the sky. Somewhere out there was their home, she thought, wiping her eyes. She pushed the images of the burning elevator and the black smoke of the brewery from her mind. Now they're stuck here with us, with no way to get back if they even wanted to.

  The thought made her bend over and heave, but she had nothing left inside her. Sobbing in spite of her tightly-closed mouth, her thin body wracked with cramps and shooting pain, she finally made it to her apartment around one o'clock. Her housemate Darius was asleep and snoring on the couch, while Anita's bedroom door was closed.

  Inside her bedroom, Ally opened her closet door and gazed at the five or six dozen mini-DVDs she'd never gotten around to organizing.

  “Evidence,” she muttered, her voice hoarse. She set a mint tab on her tongue and felt cool ice fill her mouth.

  Just like the capsules of Blur in my coat, she thought. It's all evidence, linking me to the Wantas.

  Ally pushed open her window and slid her metal wastebasket in front of it. She fumbled for an insta-flame on her cluttered desk, and after breaking it in half, she used it to ignite the garbage inside the wastebasket. She was crying again, as much as she hated the tears. She'd flashed on the Blur long ago, and all she felt now was emptiness.

  “Damn it,” she whispered over and over again as the fire grew and she began moving discs from her closet, making a pile next to the wastebasket. “Damn it all to fucking hell."

  She dropped the first disc, labeled 4/2/16, into the fire. Grabbing an old paperback dictionary she'd been using to keep her desk legs balanced, she ripped pages out to feed the fire. More discs followed, melting and giving off an acrid blue-black smoke. Ally fanned the smoke out into the summer air as best she could.

  With the last disc in the burning mess of plastic and paper, something Brando had been trying to explain after the brewery explosion came back to her. She nearly moaned at the memory of her Wannoshay friend.

  “I knew them,” he'd said, sitting with his back propped against the wall of his furniture-less living room. His apartment had been cold enough to make his and Ally's breath steam, but he seemed to enjoy the chill. He pointed a stubby finger at his third eye, which had been closed all afternoon.

  “The Wannoshay in Milwaukee, where the explosion was?” Ally stared at the design on the back of his hand, the triangles and the one tiny circle in the middle of them.

  Brando bowed his head in his version of a nod of agreement. “They were..."

  He stopped, his face going blank as it did when he was concentrating, trying to find the words in English. He put his right hand palm up, letting Ally know that the game of charades was on. When she grinned in response, Brando put both hands sideways in front of him, and then moved his hands ove
r to his right, hands sideways again.

  “Next to you?” Ally guessed. “Like neighbors?"

  Brando bowed again. “And they were late.” His last word came out sounding like “lake,” but Ally had heard him say the word often in their recent conversations. It meant something bad, she thought, something worse than just being tardy.

  As the stink of burnt plastic began to fade in her apartment and most of the smoke had cleared, Ally clicked on her wallscreen and spoke the name of her Netstream into her speaker remote. In less than five seconds the home page of her “Wantaviewer” ‘stream came up, and Ally felt her face grow warm at what seemed now like a childish logo and naive stills of Brando, Thumper, and Jane and the rest of their people in Winnipeg.

  “Admin page,” she said into the remote. “Password atrang91."

  A sparse white screen appeared, displaying lines of code on the left with tiny thumbnails of all the screens of Ally's Netstream on the right.

  What does it mean if an alien is late? she wondered, squinting at all the streaming digital movies she'd uploaded in the past few months. There was the movie from the night the Wantas first came to Winnipeg, along with the dozens of interviews with Brando and Jane and Thumper.

  They were neighbors, maybe, she thought with a smile, thinking of Brando's earnest face and his strangely effective gestures. And sometimes neighbors were late, for one thing or another. Late as in tardy. Or late as in dead.

  Ally wondered if Brando was hooked on Blur now, just like she was. Maybe someday they could talk about that, like old friends sharing their battle scars. Maybe someday, she thought. Maybe if the Wantas don't kill us all, and we don't kill all of them. Still smiling through the tears sliding down her cheeks, Alissa Trang began deleting every single one of her movies from her Netstream.

  Copyright © 2002 Michael J. Jasper

  * * * *

  Author's Note: I'd like to thank Lenora Rose for her excellent details about the city of Winnipeg. Any and all inconsistencies or errors are wholly my fault.

  * * * *

  Michael is “this close” to completing work on a novel entitled The Wannoshay Cycle, which is about the aliens in this story. His fiction has also recently appeared in Asimov's, Gothic.Net, Future Orbits, and The Book of More Flesh (upcoming). His previous appearances in Strange Horizons were “Crossing the Camp” and “Explosions,” both stories of the Wannoshay. For more about him and his work, see his Web site.

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  Coyotes, Cats, and Other Creatures

  By Karen L. Abrahamson

  9/30/02

  “Let Agnes go,” says Dr. Michael. “She's been dead a year. You have to move on."

  I look at him, seated in his ochre armchair. “How can you expect me to let go of someone who joined her life to mine for forty years?” I ask. The tears come again, filling my eyes, coursing my cheeks. I sit back in my chair, daring him to respond.

  Agnes, I still feel the brush of your fingertips, smell the scent of your herbal shampoo. It has only been a year since you ... left me. But this—this smooth-faced doctor my children hired to “heal” me—how can he help? He hasn't lived. Hasn't watched death slip past his guard and take away his love. I look away from him, firming my jaw, wiping the tears. I don't have to do anything he suggests. But I would like to stop crying.

  Dr. Michael leans forward in his chair, his voice smooth as his skin, honeyed as if he were cajoling a cat. He smiles with sharp teeth. “Will you work with me, Richard? I've got something I'd like you to try. Something to get you living again.” His furtive hazel eyes flick across my face.

  I won't fall for his tricks.

  But I nod, not meeting his gaze, and fight to breathe. “What is it this time? Another hypnosis session? More chat therapy? I've been through it all with the other therapists."

  Dr. Michael sits back in his chair. The autumn sunlight beyond the window pushes through the closed blinds in long bands of light. His florid aftershave scents the room. “It's simple, really. You said you go for a walk every day?"

  I nod again, resentful.

  “Then each time you go, I want you to think about one of the difficult feelings you have about Agnes. The painful things that make you not want to get up in the morning. I want you to carry that feeling with you and imagine it's something concrete, something you can see. Take it with you into the woods and leave it there. Focus on the feelings being left behind. If the same feeling comes back later, take it back out to the trails and leave it there again. Can you do that?"

  I nod again, amazed at myself for doing so. How can I take the advice of someone who has lived so little? My hands carry the marks of years, while his carry the smooth color of his voice. “For all the good it will do,” I grumble.

  Dr. Michael ignores my petty resistance. “Good, then. Do it over the next week and we'll see how it's going next session.” He stands. I shake his hand, wipe my tears, and leave.

  But I do as he asks. Agnes stands by as I decide to start with the haunted feeling—the sense that she waits in each room of the house. I take that feeling with me on my walk, like a pet on a string, and leave it in the forest.

  It almost works.

  But when I get home and unlock the door, the feeling has beaten me back to the house. Perhaps it entered through the cat door, but as I move around the house I know Agnes waits in the kitchen. In the living room. In the bedroom. I will take her back to the woods tomorrow.

  And I do. And this time I take string—a bit of Agnes's coloured yarn—and tie it to a tree to hold the memory there. And it works.

  Dr. Michael praises me for my work. I resent his congratulations, but the tears come a little less.

  * * * *

  Agnes favored the fall. We'd go for long walks on the trails, long walks amid the discarded cottonwood and aspen leaves, and laugh at the rustling sounds they made. “Their voices,” she would say. “Hear them whisper?” She'd stop and so would I. A soft voice on the breeze would say, “I love you, Richard."

  I'd laugh and hug her to me. Her grey hair tossed around her blue eyes. “Whispering woman! I love you, too.” That was then.

  Now Agnes fills the woods. Bits of my memories I've left behind as Dr. Michael encouraged. Bits of my life tied to branches in bright yarn, to empty out my house, my mind. I breathe deeper now, my children say. I'm “more present,” they tell me. More centered, Dr. Michael says.

  “Centered,” I huff to myself in the November wind. I may cry less. But my walks take me further into the forest, into memories of Agnes, and my left hand fills my pocket, fingering Agnes's glove—the one I always carry. The cool air smells of snow. I walk the trails, listening to the leaves underfoot, to the wind in the stripped branches, to the rough cries of crows that watch me pass. They call warnings to something of my approach, just as they call warnings of the coyote to the small things of the brush.

  The coyote moved in this fall. The neighbors tell me they have seen him. They whisper of old legends—warn of coyote as messenger and trickster. With his coming, small pets go missing. Both of Agnes's cats disappeared last week. At first I thought they had simply tired of me, of my sadness. But the cat door no longer clatters in the night. Their warm bodies no longer dent the bed beside me. Their food remains untouched. It is an absence I don't care for—almost a betrayal of Agnes. I know the coyote preys on the small loved ones of the area, so I look for him on the trails. I never see him.

  But small movements in the underbrush catch my eye: the quick tremble of a leaf, a shadow that shifts swiftly, a hurried movement across the trail. Though squirrels and birds elude me, I see the movements. I see them more now than I ever used to when Agnes walked with me. The woods ripple with them.

  Sometimes I even see them at home. As I read on the couch, something scuttles across the floor and I look up from the pages. A spider? But nothing stirs. The room stays still except for my breathing. Until I look back to the words. Then the movements begin again. Perhaps mice or some ot
her small creatures have moved in, in the absence of cats. I will nail shut the cat door. That will keep me busy for a while.

  It might stop me from being haunted by the memories of Agnes I don't want to lose. Dr. Michael says to heal I must let go of many more things. He says he has techniques that will work—even on me—and I believe him.

  * * * *

  I have walked all winter, leaving my bits of memories as gifts to the barren branches. Agnes waited for me on the trails. Her two cats waited with her. They left delicate paw prints in the snow. And the unseen denizens of the woods scurried after as I followed the trail of my previous days’ footprints. The winds chilled my cheeks and earlobes; the snowflakes caught in my hair.

  Agnes, I thought each time, you would laugh at my salt-and-pepper mane. You would stroke the flakes from my face and eyelashes. You would kiss my cheek and make me warm.

  I left the house often this winter and spent my time wandering.

  And I stripped the house, until it no longer rang with memories or Agnes's laughter. “It's over,” Dr. Michael told me at our last session. “You've done well, moved on, forward.” He smiled his cajoling smile as I shivered in my chair.

  I know I have quit crying. I know my children are pleased. I know Dr. Michael wears a satisfied expression. But I hate the house now that I have done what they asked.

  Today I take my last walk for Dr. Michael in the snow. My bit of yarn will tether my fears of being alone. I say a prayer to Agnes-of-the-woods and seek a likely branch for the bit of red wool I will use.

  There. A willow branch swells towards spring. I remove my mitten and tie the wool in a neat bow and step back to admire it. Agnes, I think. The breeze whispers in the pines. My breath steams in the air. I smile. Agnes smiles with me.

  Afterwards I hike the hill to Thurman Ridge, where I can look out over the valley and the housing development that encroaches closer to the old house and woods where I live; the places Agnes also lived. The birch and poplar gleam blue-white in the afternoon sun. The cedar and pine wear skirts of shadow beneath the loads of snow in their branches. The air parts around me. From the corner of my eye I catch something moving across the trail.