Tesseracts Seventeen

by Colleen Anderson

  Charlie had always taken his job very seriously. Since Father had begun letting him assist with Isaac, he had filled several notebooks with his careful observations and progress reports. There was a section of his bookshelf set aside for the black-spined books, arranged chronologically over the years. But none of the scientific revelations on those pages could hold the weakest candle to what Charlie was able to learn in the following weeks.

  He granted Isaac his bed and hauled a sleeping bag out of Father’s emergency preparedness supplies for himself, and thus learned that Isaac preferred sleeping on his belly with his wings spread out and wilting over two pillows on either side of him. Also, he groaned in his sleep, and twitched, and whimpered like some small animal grievously wounded.

  After the third day, Charlie stopped taking notes and started paying attention.

  Isaac’s eyes were devastatingly photosensitive. Charlie had previously made note of this fact, of course, but found that Isaac was still entirely content to spend long hours with his arms folded on the windowsill, peeking through the gap at the bottom of the blinds and staring out at the street until the whites of his eyes were tinged red and sore. On sunny days, tears streamed down his papery cheeks until his shirt collar was soaked, but damned if he would budge from his seat at the window.

  Charlie kept his gaze on the sidewalk when he left for school in the mornings, already far too aware of the weight of that stare without turning to wave goodbye.

  Besides his eyes, Isaac’s bones gave him more trouble than he had ever let on.

  “Like growing pains,” he admitted eventually one night, unable to sink through the ache into sleep, “But all over. My shoulders are the worst part. It never really stops. Just fades sometimes.”

  Charlie wasn’t an idiot. He knew that the process of improvement was a painful one. With the diagrams spread out between Father and him on the kitchen table, systematic surgeries and bone-scaffolding rendered in bloodless black and white, Charlie had never for a moment regretted being an unimproved boy. But the human body was a resilient thing and they hadn’t factored in Isaac’s own bones healing and melding over the reinforcement that Father had added to accommodate his new form. The healing process was what had turned the relatively brief agony of the surgeries into something far more protracted. Something, Charlie suspected, which was both lifelong and worsening.

  There were nightmares that Isaac wouldn’t share with him, not even after he’d woken them both with yet another choked-off scream.

  Sometimes he cried in his sleep. Sometimes Charlie couldn’t tell whether he was really asleep when he was crying either.

  But worse than the nightmares or the screams, worse than the moments where Isaac would just trail off mid-sentence and stare into space hopelessly like he had become exhausted by the sheer weight of his strange life, worse than anything, Charlie noticed his eyes. After weeks of wistful bird-watching, color had gradually begun returning to them, a distinctive clear green flecked with odd bits of yellow. Charlie had seen those eyes every day of his life when he looked at Father. And when he looked in the mirror.

  The most likely conclusion was fraternal. A big brother.

  Although Charlie was the only one that Isaac could really talk to, it turned out that he didn’t share everything with him after all. Only the parts that he knew would not hurt Charlie too badly.

  It was for this reason above any of the others that Charlie left the front door unlocked when he left for school the next morning, then turned his face up towards the gap in the bedroom window, raised his hand, and waved goodbye.

  Almost every channel was covering the story of his brother’s jump.

  Sitting on the couch, Charlie flipped methodically through the news stations, trying to patch together the overlapping pieces of the conflicting reports to determine what had really happened. The guys on Channel 3 had introduced the story as the “City Hall Suicide” and were sticking doggedly to that phrasing even after the other stations started throwing around words like “hoax” and “prank” and “tasteless publicity gimmick.” Maybe they just thought the sibilance was catchy. It was so hard to focus. All of the stories kept changing and Charlie’s cheek was still throbbing distractingly where Father had slapped him.

  “At least I’ve still got you,” Father had said.

  He wished he had said something like “At least we’ve still got each other,” instead. “I’ve still got you” had all pragmatic sterility of “There’s still one beer left in the fridge,” and he thought that Father kept glancing at his kid-skinny shoulders and at the curve of his spine, the width of his chest, measuring, assessing…

  So Charlie announced that he wasn’t leaving with him and that unexpected slap had sealed the deal. Father had always insisted on exercising critical thought, and now didn’t seem like the time to give up that practice.

  He had parked himself in the middle of the couch and tried to tune out Father’s hysterical rampage through the house as the man prepared to flee the fallout of his life’s work.

  The local station was showing the eye witness interviews again and the old lady with the pink scarf and the bird’s nest hair was back on. Out of the people who’d been paying attention and hadn’t just chalked it up as some suicidal university student holding up traffic with a bout of pre-exam despair, Charlie liked her best.

  “I couldn’t believe my eyes! He jumped right offa the top, right up there, didn’t even wait around or nothin’…”

  The cameraman obediently panned up for a shot of the bell tower. The stupid thing really did look like the top half of an onion, if you looked at it from that perspective.

  “Now I know I’m looking with old eyes, but I saw what I saw,” the bird’s nest lady continued, not waiting for the camera to come back to her, “That boy, he grew wings. Just sprouted them right outta his back like an angel or something!”

  The news anchor interjected with a sanitary little voice-over about the ambulances that had arrived on the scene after someone called 911, but the lady was ready for them with more when they cut back to her.

  “Yeah, there was a body-bag, but I’m telling you there wasn’t a body in it. Bet my life. And if folks tell you one word different, then they’re just plain scared to say what they saw. That boy didn’t fall. He jumped and then that boy flew.”

  Back on the couch, Charlie pulled his feet up and rested his chin on his knees. There was a funny sort of pressure in his throat like someone digging their thumb in hard just under his Adam’s apple and his eyes had gone kind of hot and prickly. But for the life of him, he couldn’t stop smiling.

  * * * * *

  Megan Fennell was born in Victoria, BC, but has spent the majority of her life in a variety of Albertan cities and considers herself a creature of the prairies. Having disqualified herself from the great Calgary versus Edmonton debate by obtaining degrees at both the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta, she now lives with her two cats in Lethbridge, Alberta, drawing inspiration from the more rugged beauty of the Badlands. She has previously been published in OnSpec Magazine and the charity anthology Help: Twelve Tales of Healing.

  Bedtime Story

  Rhonda Parrish

  I was hiding in my parents’ closet with a friendly goose-neck lamp who promised to stay the night with me, and Laura, a battle-scarred doll of my mom’s.

  “Okay,” I said, snuggling into Mom’s fur coat where it brushed the ground. “Tell us about the vultures.”

  Laura’s mouth had been painted first and then stitched. The two lines weren’t aligned exactly so her voice was distorted and her lips slightly out of sync when she spoke. She rose on unsteady burlap legs, and when the lamp turned her long, flexible neck to face her, her shadow loomed huge and menacing on the closet door behind her. “When the sky is dark and moonless, they come. Their razor-sharp wings slice through the night and the onl
y sound they make is a terrible click and clatter, like the sound of bare bones tapping together.

  “They swoop down chimneys and creep through open nursery windows. Their great curved beaks are as sensitive as a dog’s nose, but attuned to only two things; death and life. They can sense a corpse for miles and an infant from twice as far. Click-clack, click-clack.”

  The lamp made a soft peeping noise and pressed against me but kept her school-bus-yellow head pointed away, spotlighting Laura whose mouths were pulled down at the corners.

  “Click-clack, click-clack,” Laura repeated in a voice so soft I leaned forward to hear. “They snatch babies from their cribs, smothering their screams with magic. Their feathers stick and prickle the infant’s skin obscenely, like grasshopper legs, and they zip away with them. Click-clack.

  “Sometimes,” Laura said, and one of her voices echoed the other, elongating her “s” sounds into an eerie hiss. “Sometimes, the vultures leave nothing behind in the nursery but an ill feeling and a cloud of despair, but sometimes they leave something more. A cuckoo’s egg.”

  I patted the lamp once more, sure she must be frightened, then I leaned further into Mom’s fur coat, disturbing the hangers above me. They whispered their tales to me in hushed voices, and the scent of my mom enveloped me along with their words. A stern glance from Laura stilled them but didn’t stop the scent that struggled to tell me its story, tugging at half-formed memories and impressions.

  “They carry them down into the deep, dark Underground, where the goblins live. Blue-skinned devils with pointy ears and pig noses, goblins can’t abide the Overworld but oh, how they love children. Especially human children. They drink their blood and fry their skin until it’s crisp and salty, then gobble that down leaving only crumbs. Or, sometimes, if they are feeling particularly vicious, they keep the children alive and force them to serve as slaves in their mines.”

  A brown slipper, dog-chewed and ratty, hopped out of the shadows and pressed itself against my side. I felt it trembling, and stroked its nappy surface. “It’s all right.” My voice sounded loud compared to Laura’s creepy whisper. “Sometimes the stories have a happy ending, don’t they, Laura?”

  She was silent for a long while, and turned to stare at a spider scuttling its way up the wall. In profile her shadow was strangely flat and misshapen. “Sometimes. Sometimes.” She paused again, and paced the length of the closet before continuing. Her steps were silent and the volume of her words ebbed and flowed like the tide. “One time the vultures, shadowy harbingers of pain, seeped into a bedroom like smoke. The girl-child who slumbered there was near to her first birthday. Chubby and cherubic, she had golden curls and a pink complexion. So cliché, so perfect for them to defile. She slept peacefully, a thumb jammed into her mouth and an inherited doll settled into the crook of her arm.

  “The vile creatures snatched her up. Their magic made her light, and silent. Her terror was great as they carried her away, and she clung ferociously to her doll, even when they tried to take it from her. Thus, when they left their doppelganger in her place, it had only the toy’s arm for company in its bed.”

  The lamp meeped and pushed harder against my side, but Laura didn’t notice. She was getting into the telling of her tale and the speed of her pacing increased with each word.

  “They took the girl to the Underground, and threw her into a cell. The goblins poked her with their sharp fingers and fed her thin gruel. When she was old enough to walk they sent her to the mines. Scrawny and starving, she carried rock from the bowels of the earth up to the sunlit Overworld where the goblins daren’t go. Each time she emerged, squinting and bent beneath the weight of her load, she considered escape, but each time she ducked her head and descended back into the smoky blackness.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why did she always return?”

  “Because she was a good girl,” Laura stopped pacing and turned to face us. The lamp’s light glinted off her button eyes, making them sparkle with an imitation of life. “She was a good girl. The goblins only let one child out at a time. One day, a boy who called himself Puppy carried his pile of stones outside and never came back. The girl, who knew her name was Beatrice thanks to her doll, and all the other children, were punished for his crime.

  “She was bound in her cell and a horde of starving rats were released into it with her. She curled into a ball around her doll, whimpering on the hard ground while they swarmed and crawled all over her, claws digging into her flesh, sharp teeth nibbling.

  “Luckily, she was a very special girl,” Laura said, her voice calm. “She could listen. She could hear. Perhaps she’d been fairy-touched at birth, or maybe it was the time she spent locked in darkness with only her doll as company. Whatever the cause, she could hear and understand beings that most of her race was deaf to.

  “She squeaked as the rats’ nibbling turned to gnawing. The noise was such a perfect imitation of the rats’ own cry for help that, as one, they paused. When they recovered from their shock and began, again, to feed, she squealed once more. They stopped, despite the pains in their bellies and she was able to communicate with them, to explain how they could escape her cell and find a feast in the goblins’ storerooms. The rodents left her and the screams from the cells around her turned to soft sobbing as the rats took their brethren to seek out the stores.

  “Food was more scarce than usual for a time after that, and hunger clawed at her belly as the rats had her legs. Still, she was alive and so were her friends.”

  “How did she escape?” I asked. Laura shot me a stern look and I gestured to the slipper and lamp, trembling on either side of me. “I’m sorry, Laura, but look at them. If you don’t skip to the escape they might burst!”

  Laura looked toward the ceiling, but the tension went out of her shoulders so the stitches there no longer looked strained. “She escaped a year later, and took the other children with her. The plan wasn’t very complicated, which may be why it worked. After the rats, she listened and learned the language of the beetle and the centipede, the bat and the vole. She traded part of her rations to them each night until she risked becoming too weak to run. Then, one day at her signal, her allies swarmed. The vermin washed over the goblins like a wave. Vultures, too, were caught in the surge, their click-clacking lost in the cacophony of squeals, screams and chittering that echoed off the walls.

  “The children escaped into the sunlight. They travelled by day and huddled together for warmth at night. The vultures didn’t pursue them. They’d grown too big to be carried away, even by magic.

  “Only Beatrice could return to her family because her doll knew the way. All the other children were lost, unable to recall where home was, so they followed her, hopeful, and it was a good thing,” Laura said, and sat down across from us, her legs stuck straight out in front of her. “Because when Beatrice knocked on the door of her home it was opened by a reflection of herself. It was cleaner, certainly, and better fed, but the thing had her features, her shape, and when it spoke she could hear click-clacking in the spaces between its words.

  “The horde of children, grimy, tired and angry, swarmed the creature and forced it through the house to the fireplace in the sitting room. They held it to the flames while Beatrice’s parents, confused and distraught, screamed and pulled at them. Then, with an ungodly shriek, the vulture returned to its true form and burst up through the chimney and away, leaving a pile of shaken humans and the smell of scorched feathers in its wake.”

  “And then her parents understood and adopted all the lost children and they lived happily ever after,” I said, and patted the lamp and the slipper comfortingly.

  The lamp hopped happily in place, until Laura shook her head and clucked her tongue. “Now, Clara,” she said, “I’ve told you, it’s important to tell stories as they were, not as you’d like them to be.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the truth.�
��

  “And?” I demanded, crossing my arms.

  “And,” Laura said, deliberately misunderstanding me, “that’s not how it worked. The children were damaged and never adjusted to society. But, they grew up, and some had families of their own.

  “Vultures have long memories though, and bottomless hate, so on moonless nights the parents who had once been children caged in the Underground, kept vigil over their infants’ cribs, listening for the click-clack of the vultures’ return.”

  Suddenly, the closet door opened. I jumped, pulling my mom’s fur from its hanger so that it fell and lay heavily on top of my companions and me. I struggled out from beneath its folds and stared at Mom’s pedicure.

  “Clara, what are you doing up?”

  “Hiding from the vultures.”

  Mom sighed and leaned over to pick me up, washing me in her breath, which smelled sharply of wine and the mint from her toothpaste. I snatched Laura from the ground by her only arm as Mom swept me off toward my room.

  “There’s no such thing,” Mom said. “They’re just a story. Make-believe.”

  “No.” I shook my head as she carried me back to bed and tucked me in. “They are real. Laura says you know it too, but you try to forget.”

  “Dolls don’t talk, darling.” Her kiss on my forehead said stop bothering me and go back to sleep.

  “Laura says grown-ups just forget how to hear.”

  “Go to sleep,” Mother said from my doorway. In the light from the hall I could see sadness in her eyes and the thin, pale scars on her arms.

  “But, Mom—”

  “Sleep,” she said, pulling the door closed.

  “Laura says she misses you,” I blurted before the door closed completely and Mom hesitated a moment, frozen in mid-motion, and then drew it closed with a click.

  “Thank you,” Laura said.

  I nodded and pulled her closer and then lay there in the darkness, ears strained toward the shadows, tense and listening for the sounds I dreaded more than any other. Click-clack. Click-clack.