Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  “Goddam,” he said. “Goddam thing.”

  He grabbed a paper towel from the table dispenser and furiously wiped his eyes.

  “Goddam,” he said again. “Can it do that?”

  Lauren poured him coffee at his usual booth.

  “Do what, hons?”

  “Rain sea water.”

  She stood in the salt rain, watching Reith and the courier driver load the truck.

  “Geez, what is this?” the driver had said, blinking sea-sour out of his eyes as Reith answered the door. He came up once a month from the city to pick up installations Reith had sold from his website. He was a peninsula man and took the opportunity to catch up with family. Installations did not spoil and were not time sensitive. He could dawdle with his relatives. Reith liked that even though he did not appreciate the Driftings, he was mindful of them. Even bubble-wrapped and taped, they were delicate; frail corals, tsunami-foam.

  “It’s been doing it for a day and half now,” Reith said. “I’ve had to garage the pickup. Things rust while you’re looking at them.”

  “Evil smell,” the driver said. “Like dead crabs. Have you got a theory?”

  “What?”

  Reith had broken the Marine Boy Drifting down into three sections to get it through the door. Instructions and a video were included for its precise re-assembly at the gallery in Denver. Each Drifting landed a little further from Reith’s door than the last.

  “Everyone needs a theory. Do you know what I think? It’s some kind of water-spout. Things get sucked up and deposited hundreds of miles away. There’s been rains of fish and frogs—all well-accounted for. Newspapers and all. God knows what’s going on out in that ocean.”

  “You think it’s going to start dropping plastic toys on my head?”

  “It’s all in Charles Fort, my friend. A wise man would read and heed.”

  Then he saw her, in the rain, at the place where the pavement met the grass. The rain dripped from the ends of her long, straight hair, but seemed to Reith to run off it without wetting it. Raindrops dewed the fibers of her cardigan.

  “Can you handle this?” he asked the driver.

  “Just sign the waybill and she’s on her way.”

  The girl stood in a circle of drips beneath the fractal fronds of the Ningyo Drifting. She dabbed at herself with the offered towel.

  “You should really have a shower, get that salt off you. It’s not good for you.”

  “I seem to have missed most of it. But it’s nice to be out of it.” The towel was dry. “Can I ask a question?”

  “You can ask anything you like.”

  “At the beach, the things I saw you bring out of the sea, what have you done with them?”

  Reith did not show works in progress to people. Sharing broke the unity. People put ideas onto things that were not theirs. Opinions demanded recognition. And some were too big, too long, too diffuse in their evolution, to make any sense before the moment when he decided that to add one thing more would start to subtract. When he videoed them for his YouTube channel, he never showed the build, the Drifting, the explanation; just long, swooping orbits of the details.

  So he said, “Oh, yeah. Here.” He rested a finger on the Puchie deer. He had picked apart its rear end, flayed and splayed it and grafted it on to the chest of a Barbie doll. “Come up pretty good once I got the salt off. That vinyl finish can crack if you don’t treat it like skin. There’s stuff you get for shining up auto interiors, works good on it. Nice piece.”

  The hat was in the former best bedroom with all the headgear. He had not developed an idea for the Drifting that pleased him. But the conceit was faces, a few simple lines in black marker pen, loosely connected to his imagining of the hat’s purpose, drawn on the inside of the hat. This yellow hard hat, Reith had decided, belonged to a longshoreman, who had worked ocean-going barges. In a few strokes the inverted face showed hard-weather, resignation, peace and toughness.

  The child’s trunki had made it to the plastic-well in the kitchen, to the top of that heap, to the work-top for assimilation into the Kanagawa Drifting. It had faltered there.

  “I’m not sure about this one. I think this one is complete. I can’t see how it would fit. It may be the start of something else. I’m thinking about children.”

  The girl ran long fingers over the sand-scratched plastic.

  “What did you do with things inside?”

  “I didn’t throw them away. Nothing gets thrown away. That’s the idea. Nothing is ever lost.”

  A fleece-fiber scarf, a bucket of plastic zoo-animals, a drinks cup with spout, a sea-rotted cardboard picture book sat in a clear plastic box. The animals had been spilled from their bucket. Reith saw the girl inhale very slowly as she bent over the box to closer examine the little castaway menagerie. Her long fingers walked through the lost things.

  “Here’s a story. There once was a little girl but she’s dead now. She drowned. She was in the car with her parents and her big brother. They all brought one thing; that was all they had time for before the sea came. So she brought a thing with things in it. They drove fast but no matter how fast you drive you can only go where the road leads you and the water didn’t need roads. I think we forget how fast water can be. Water has weight and water has mass. The road wouldn’t take them away from the water and it just swept them off the road and tumbled them over and over and spilled everything out and they drowned. I know this story.” She trailed her fingers across the still-sodden pulp of the children’s book. “It’s called Mouse Heart Robot. It’s about a robot who was last to be built before the factory closed, and so they forgot to give him a heart. He just stood there, looking, thinking. Then a family of field mice moved in to the place where his heart should be, and he came to life and looked after them, but when they grew up and moved away, he went dead again. Mice have such short lives. I used to get read that story. The poor robot. I felt so sad for him. There, that’s a story inside a story. Something with a story and a hurt. Give it back.”

  Reith gave a small start. “What?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’ve had so much. Like you said, nothing is ever lost. Things have memories. Maybe give some of them back.”

  The doorbell rang. A second startle.

  “Just as well I looked,” the courier said. He presented the waybill. “You forgot to sign it.”

  “I’m sure . . . ” Reith took the pen. The space for the signature was blank. Over the courier’s shoulder, he could the see the girl, walking away, already a distance down the road, very straight and upright, in the salt rain.

  The plants were dying. The floral borders outside Driftwood Crafts, Gifts and Pots; the flower tubs and baskets at the McLaren Realty; the raised beds outside the Westwood Lodge were shriveled. The lawns of 3rd Street were scabbed with brown patches. The tougher shrubs were browning at leaf tip and blossom. The trees shed needles, drift upon drift.

  For five days the salt rain had fallen. Salt water rushed in the gutters, sheeted across roads, clogged drains with rafts of brown needles.

  “Half the dogs in town are sick,” Lauren said pouring coffee for Reith. “And things are coming out of the forest looking for water. Axel chased deer away from the back door. Dead birds all over the place. And he says the propane tank is rusting bad. Why haven’t we made the television news yet?”

  The mailboxes, the barbecues, the garden seats, the swings and chain fences, the kids’ bikes, the garden tools, were turning to rust. The gas station canopy, the elementary school climbing frame, the cell phone relay, the electrical step-down transformer, the oil and gas tanks, the cars, scabbed with creeping rust.

  “And the stink. I just can’t get it out of my hair, my clothes. Off my skin. I smell like a harbor. Like a dead seal.”

  Reith splashed out across the streaming salt-water to the pickup. The air was thick with salt, weed, ozones and ions and briny, iodinic sourness. He gagged. He drove up to the house as around him the town crumbled to ochre rust. Endless par
ade of low, curdled clouds marched in from the ocean; endless, endless salt rain.

  He thought he glimpsed the girl in the rear-view mirror, standing on the roadside at the edge of the dying forest, arms long at her side, her hair so straight and glossy. When he looked over his shoulder she was not there. Of course.

  He could feel the salt caking on his skin, itching, desiccating in the few steps from the car to the porch. A shower. Fresh water on his body. Cleaning, cleansing, sanctifying. He strewed salt-sodden clothes along the path between the Driftings. The stench was in the house; rotting weed, brine, deep water. He was naked by the time he reached the bathroom door. He closed his eyes and waited for the anointing gush of warm and pure.

  Sea-rot gusted in his face, so strong Reith retched. Salt water blasted in his face, hot salt water filled up his eyes, his ears, his nostrils, his open mouth. He gagged, spat, dived to the water-cooler. He drained a plastic cupful. Reith choked, sprayed water across the room, heaved and heaved; dry, retching, wracking heaves.

  Sea water.

  Reith plunged into the surf line; knee-deep, the water heavy around his thighs; waist-deep, pushing against the resistance of an entire ocean; wading out chest-deep, slow now, every step ponderous and buoyed at the same time. The rain fell steadily, pocking the glassy surface of the slow swell. He held the trunki over his head. Towed behind him on a surf-board line, it would have filled with water and become unmanageable. Held high, it was an offering to the things of salt-water.

  Give it back. Each time he had spoken with the girl, she seemed startled by her own words, as if she were not in control of them, as if other voices formed them.

  Give it back.

  It had to be the beach where he had found it. He drove through gray rain half blind, half-crazed, the wipers throwing handfuls of salty, gritty water from the windshield, the pickup squeaking and creaking as the brine wore into its struts and bones. He slipped-slid down the path between the stark, rain-gray trees to the shore. The driftwood like looked like the bones of the ocean, heaved on to the solid world to see the sun and die. He was sick, so sick of the reek of rot and weed and sea in his sinuses. Into the ocean.

  Reith stood a moment, the plastic child’s trunk held high. He had packed it with the painstaking care of a Drifting maker. The fleece scarf washed and freshened with fabric conditioner and folded. The zoo animals returned to their plastic bucket-Ark, battened down beneath the lid. The drinks cup cleaned and sterilized and filled with Minute Maid. A libation. One thing he had omitted; the book. It was unsalvageable, the story all but erased to patches of kanji and bright color on gray board: a robot’s head, a mouse paw, a heart-shaped hole. Mouse Heart Robot. It touched him, it made him remember and feel things long washed out. She had loved that story, she used to have it read to her. She felt so sorry for the poor robot. A hole for a heart. The image excited him. Filling holes. Secret chambers, hidden hearts. He could feel the nature of the Driftings changing, from huge assemblages, whip-stitched Frankensteins; to small juxtapositions.

  Give it back. It had given to him. The ocean closed around him; gray before and gray behind, above and below, the circle of the waters. Easy to become disoriented, to strike out into open ocean believing horizon line was shore line; drawn out by those tows and currents to join the gyre. Human flotsam.

  “It’s yours!” he shouted. The words were thin and pointless. But he still said, “Thank you!” Then he hurled the trunki as far as he could out into the ocean. It splashed, bobbed, each bob taking it lower in the water as the sea jetted in through the imperfect seal. Reith watched until all that could be seen was a single plastic tiger ear, stealing out to sea, drawn back into the great gyre of tsunami-things.

  Reith drove back slick as a seal in his wetsuit. As he stepped out of the car the air caught him, breath to sigh to near-sob. Clean. Fresh. He turned his face to the clouds and let pure, sweet water fill up its hollows and stream from its angles.

  Mouse Heart Robot: He had a pure, sweet idea for it.

  Reith opened the door.

  The living room was filled with hair. Long, sleek, black hair, hanging from ceiling to floor, sleek black hair, dripping with sea water. The door closed behind Reith. The wet hair rippled, as if someone were moving through it.

  Everything Must Go

  Brooke Wonders

  Split-level ranch-style home features a spacious and private fenced backyard with a covered deck and small dog run.

  The blue-gray house at 1414 Linden Dr. is afraid of the dark. The foreclosure crisis hit its neighborhood hard, and in house after house, lights wink out and never turn back on. The house at 1414 waits for new families to move in, and sometimes they do, but more often than not the owners abandon their property. Linden Drive grows increasingly desolate, and 1414 clings to the warmth and safety of its inhabitants, sure that it is too well loved to be left behind.

  Its family owns a dog, an ancient mutt with a gray-frosted muzzle who spends most of his time in the backyard, sprawled on his side in the brown grass. The house has long admired the diligence with which the mutt defends its home. When neighbors pass by with their own dogs, Lucky drags himself over to the gate connecting his run to the front yard and lets loose a fit of barking. But one morning in late summer, a man with two collies strolls past, and Lucky doesn’t bark.

  Two thick branches of English ivy pull away from 1414’s exterior and wend their way around the corpse. The rusted hinges of its cellar door croon a lullaby of creaks and whines as they gape wide to receive Lucky. The house pulls the vine-choked body deep inside its walls. Tucked between sheets of plaster and insulation, the dog mortifies; soon the basement reeks of decay. Upstairs, a girl mourns her lost pet.

  East-facing bedroom catches morning light, a bonus in wintertime.

  The daughter at fourteen is a folded-up girl of elbows, knobby knees and angles a which-way. She loves origami, late into every night creasing out birds of paradise, pagodas, sea horses, and lotuses that trip from her fingertips. From her ceiling hang a thousand cranes it took her months to fold, multicolored and hopeful, made of wrapping paper, construction paper, butcher paper, wax paper, glitter paper, natural-wood-pulp paper. Origami paper proper she treasures, hoards like allowance money or dragon’s gold. The house thinks of the folded-up girl as Paper, and loves her.

  Corner bedroom features windows on two sides. Bright and airy!

  The son is growing wings. They first appear after his thirteenth birthday party, when his mother burns the cake and then locks herself in the bathroom while his father sits alone in the garage, drinking whiskey and building birdhouses out of scrap. The son packs a suitcase and explains his plans to Paper: he’ll escape out his bedroom window, run away to join the circus. His sister talks him out of it, to the house’s relief. The boy’s wings begin as nubbins protruding from each shoulder blade that ache and ache as he grows. By seventeen, nubbins have grown into a skeletal wing-structure, hollow bones covered in tufted feathers and long pinions, though he cannot yet lift himself off the ground. The house thinks of the winged boy as Bird, and loves him.

  Third bedroom, slightly smaller—use it for storage, or turn it into baby’s first bedroom.

  Their mother has her own workspace wherein she fashions elaborate textile art from found objects, fabric, and yarn. Lately, though, the house has noted a desperate loneliness threaded through her. Husband at work, kids at school, she fritters away her time following the soaps, crocheting blankets only to unravel them. She ties each member of the family to her via thick silken cords, cords whose color changes depending on her mood: crimson for anger, cerulean for disappointment, jet for possessiveness, silver for regret. The house lets these strings tangle throughout the hallways, following the arcing filaments from room to room. The house tries to warm to her, but she’s metal-cold, her voice scissor-sharp. The house fears her, and calls her Needle.

  Two-car garage.

  A grease-stained man who smells of slaughter, their father lives in the garage when h
e doesn’t live at his butcher shop. The house envies him his children’s unconditional love: they crouch at his elbows as he shingles a miniature roof, then fight over who gets to help install his latest creation. A neighborhood’s worth of elaborately finished birdhouses dot the backyard, attracting flocks of cardinals, rooks, and wrens.

  But the house knows where the father keeps his skeletons, round glass secrets full of intoxicating oblivion stashed everywhere: in the trunk of the car, in with the New Year’s decorations, beneath the bathroom sink. When the couple’d first moved in, before there were papers or birds between them, he’d kept this secret, and long has the house tracked the ebb and flow of his addiction. It calls him Glass, for the bottles that clink like chains and sing to him from within their hiding places.

  Kitchen has no dishwasher but plenty of counter space.

  The teens have never seen their parents in the same room at the same time. Needle pours canned green beans and mushroom soup into a casserole dish, then retreats to the pantry just as Glass heads to the fridge for an ice water. Only once he’s wandered back to the garage does she reappear. Though the parents play elaborate hide-and-seek, the walls speak; every night the teens lie awake in their beds and listen to their parents argue.

  —The mortgage is too expensive; where can we cut back?

  —Do we really need another birdhouse?

  —We don’t need more of your wall blankets, that’s for sure.

  —It’s not a wall blanket, it’s fiber-art.

  —If we can afford your art, why can’t we afford mine?

  The house rustles the homemade tapestries that line its walls, drapings heavy with dust and guilt.

  Downstairs master bedroom for maximum privacy.

  The walls shout louder and louder, the house hating every resonant echo, until the only way the kids can sleep is by pressing palms deep into their ears. As if to compensate for the increase in noise, both parents have begun to fade from view. Their mother flickers in and out like TV static, as if she’s trying to switch to a different channel. Their father’s skin has become glass, behind which amber alcohol roils.