I carried her outside, into the storm.
I took the Hungry One far out into the desert, and left her there. Unlike Little Sister, this Hungry One would pass gently. She would sit and watch the world go by, weathering like the rocks until her spirit drifted free.
* * *
Mistress Moo gave very good milk, for a mummy cow. After many years had passed, she didn't look like a mummy anymore, and neither did Munchie. Sheba and Radar grew their fur back. Even I became less leathery.
One day, Sheba, Radar, and I walked into Wickenburg. On the way, we saw a mummy tending a vegetable garden. He watched birds perch on his wild sunflowers. They feasted on the seeds. The mummy turned his head and saw us. His tipped his straw hat.
“Hello,” he said, with his ghost of a voice. “How are you today?”
“I'm fine, thank you,” I answered back.
“Have a lovely day.” He plopped his hat back on his head.
“You too,” I called, and continued down the street.
The world is balancing itself. Mummy animals are turning into living animals again, and some of them are reproducing. Maybe that could happen to mummy people, but I won't feel too sad if it doesn't. We messed up so bad—next time might be even worse. For now, it's enough for me to say hello to my neighbors and tend my own garden. Isn't that what the original Paradise was supposed to be like?
The only thing missing from my paradise is books. All of my favorites fell to dust, years ago. But I remember everything I read. I've learned to make paper, and I'm writing them all down. Maybe my neighbors will want to read a few. Or maybe new people will show up someday.
If you're one of those new people, remember what I've written here. Maybe you'll make the same mistakes we did, but that's not the point. What I want you to know is that it's possible to keep living even after everything has blown up around you. You can survive. And you can even be happy.
You just have to have the appetite.
The Last Picnic
Cullen McHael
Editor: “The Heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.” – Honoré de Balzac
Three kinds of jowl share the same face: the pinch and dimple, the secondary bulge, and the prune sag. Not a healthy face. A soft face hit hard, a fat woman who lost her fat, and an old woman whose age doubled in a few short years.
But my eyes stay steady as I meet my own gaze in the mirror. Good. When I can’t hold a focus, when I can’t stay steady, that will be my mind failing. Not today. Not yet.
I open the medicine cabinet, turning the mirror away. Then I leave the bathroom.
Drapes hang heavy over the many windows, with a little sunlight sneaking in along the bottom to paint the drifting dust white. I dare to shift a fold of cloth to peek outside. It’s a sweater day. I wear five. Also two pairs of gloves and three sets of socks. But a shiver still shakes me as the cloud of my breath frosts the windowpane.
It didn’t snow. Good. They’ll still come. If it had snowed, they would leave footprints. Can’t have that. We would have to wait to meet up until the snow melted. But it didn’t snow. Good. They’ll be here soon.
My thoughts run in circles as I set out the pillows and blankets. On swimsuit days we sit around a table, but on sweater days the warmth of other bodies sharing a blanket on the floor feels like civilization. No fire though. Fire would make smoke. Can’t have that.
I open a can of peaches into the rose bowl. The one from Corey’s Pottery Shop. Handmade. Hand-painted. Sturdy. It goes in the middle of the living room picnic blanket. I make sure Kinsey’s kitten-patterned pillow waits next to the pinstriped one. Kinsey liked the kittens. Sara will want to hold it, to remember her. John won’t care, but he’ll want to sit next to Sara so the big brown one goes on the other side of the pinstripes.
I’m fussing. I fluff the brown one. A mustard stain crinkles under my thumb.
John is good. He’s been good to Sara. Tough. Quiet. A little round about the hips, but gentle when it mattered.
The house groans as a bitter wind catcalls from the eaves.
Something moves across the roof in a patter of little claws.
I wait, holding the brown pillow to my chest.
The patter isn’t repeated.
The revolver on my hip pinches my belly as I sit down. I put down the pillow and shift the revolver out of the way. Its grip settles into my palm like my backside into my favorite chair.
The house groans. The wind pushes. The house sighs, unable to escape. The wind whistles.
The revolver waits, heavy and ready.
Animal screeching breaks the quiet, like cats fighting, but bigger, fiercer. Very close. In my backyard. A roar rattles my windows. I hear wood splintering, probably the apple tree.
John and Sara. I hope they aren’t nearby yet. I hope they’re late.
The fight rises in pitch and intensity. Growls and shrieks bordering on insane language contest for the most distressing sound. One piercing discharge of violence stabs my ears.
Then silence.
The wind whistles. The house groans.
The bowl of peaches sits in a ring of little wrinkles.
I wait.
The clock died a month ago. Just a dead battery. Maybe Sara will finally bring a replacement.
I settle the hammer of the revolver back onto an empty cylinder.
Sara arrives late, and alone. She rests her rifle against the wall, then sits on the pinstripes. Her hands move almost automatically to the cat-patterned cloth, and she hugs her sister’s pillow, resting her chin in its folds.
“John?” I ask.
The barest shake of her head doesn’t disturb the cloth beneath her chin. Her eyes stare past my feet.
I sit on the brown, and wrap my arms around her. She feels so cold under my hands, even through the gloves. The revolver pinches my belly. I set it aside.
Sara’s black hair scratches my chin and throat. She doesn’t shake.
The clock stands still.
Finally she sits back, pulling away to rest against the wall.
I lift the blanket over her. Her hands grip its edge. She wears fingerless gloves. Her fingers must be freezing. I want to cup them in my hands, but instead I offer the bowl.
“Have some peaches.”
“I can’t eat those anymore, mom.” She says it like an accusation.
“I bet you could if you tried,” I tell her, and have one for myself. The sweet goo dribbles my chin. I take off my gloves to wipe it, and lick my fingers.
Sara sighs.
“Mom, John didn’t come because he’s tired. I’m tired too.”
“It will be all right,” I tell her. “Maybe it’s a platitude, but we have to keep living. I mean, what’s the alternative? I know it’s bad out there, but you’ll always be safe in here. Always.”
“No.”
It’s a cold denunciation. A hard statement of fact.
I take Sara’s hand in mine and study the cracked fingernails, the cold-tempered wrinkles and chapped callouses. I take off my gloves and breathe onto our joint hands. Her skin feels as cool as salmon scales fresh from the river, but she doesn’t shiver.
“Tell me what happened with John. You can talk to me.”
“Look at me, Mom.”
“You can tell me anything, you know that.”
“Look at me.”
“I’m your mother; I’m still here for you—”
“Look at me!”
She pulls her hand from mine. The cool fingers cup my face, pinching the flesh below my jaw as she tilts my head back to meet her gaze.
Her black eyes challenge me. Black as the night sky and twice as wide as those of the child who once gurgled in my arms. Her wiry hair, bound in its ever-thickening dreadlock spikes. Her purple skin, veined red like a burn scar over half her face. Her too-thin lips, hiding white teeth that still look normal, still human.
The wind groans against the house.
“This is my faul
t,” my voice breaks. “I shouldn’t have been so sparing with the food. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry—”
“No, Mom, this isn’t your fault.” She speaks over my rambling, and I hear my own voice babbling. I can’t stop it. The exhaustion crawls up my throat and takes hold of my tongue. I can’t stop apologizing.
“No. No. No.” Sara hugs me. I want to tell her it will be all right. She’ll get better in time. My voice tries. My heart doesn’t believe it. The inches between us seem vast and terrible, as empty as the still clock.
A distant roar tears us apart. Sara’s hand and mine rest on our separate weapons. We listen to our breath and the whistling wind blowing dust against the windows.
The sound doesn’t repeat.
I take the rose bowl back to the kitchen and cover it with plastic wrap. The cold air will keep it until I get hungry later.
When I return, Sara has set something on the picnic blanket. It looks like a pineapple, but smaller, and a vibrant yellow-green color, veined purple and black. The spiny leaves glow faintly in the eternal evening of my curtained living room.
Sara sits back with her legs crossed, the rifle resting across her knees and her hands folded atop the weapon. The black eyes watch me, even though they have no iris or pupil. Just black. Watching me.
This thing. Not Sara.
The kitten pillow lies cast aside and crumpled against the wall. The pinstripes acquiesce to the thing’s weight.
“Mom,” it says. She says. Sara. “You need to eat this.”
“No.”
“You need to eat this.”
“No, I still have plenty of cans in the pantry. You can have some if you—”
“You will not survive if you do not accept this change.”
“Nobody lives forever; I just want you to have the option, to go back, you know, if you want. My food is in the pantry. There’s lots left. Do you still have your key—”
Sara-thing leaps to her feet. Sara was always quick. An athlete. The high-jump and hurdles. The rifle falls with a blanket-muffled thump as she scoops up whatever strange fruit she brought me. She shoves it in my face.
“There has been,” Sara-thing snarls and I watch for the flash of her human teeth, “too much death already. Too many lost to those things, and to the change. You don’t get to give up, and you don’t get to abandon me. You can’t live here alone, a relic of the age that’s dead. Don’t you dare, don’t you dare leave me. Eat it. Eat it like everyone else.”
I back away. The world moves around me, with the Thing a fixed point. A wall slams into my back. The clock crashes to the floor and shatters. Ceramic shards bounce across the blankets.
The pineapple thing hangs before me, in the hand. The hand that has the scar Sara earned gutting trout, attached to the arm Sara used to hit softballs, the arms she put around Timothy Darny at her prom, the arms she threw out behind her as she flew through the finish line like a diving hawk.
The black eyes hold nothing. No feeling. No thought. No Sara.
“No,” I say. “Please, no. Please.”
Her fingers tremble against my chin. “Please?” she asks.
“No. I have—I have food. You didn’t have to—to change. You didn’t have to.”
The breath of her sigh whistles through her teeth, presses against my neck, and makes my skin crawl. I groan.
Sara-thing says: “Mom, I’m tired. I’m tired of coming here to dance this dance. I can’t anymore.”
I sag as she lets go. My knees try to buckle, but I lock them. The revolver wants my hand, but I keep those two apart like I kept Sara and Kinsey when they used to bicker.
She puts the fruit on the counter by the door, next to the car keys and the bowl of loose change. Her jeans have holes in them. The bare skin underneath looks like the scales of a sunset-colored snake. She must be freezing.
“I’m going to go. I’m not going to come back anymore—”
“Let me fix your jeans.” I cut her off.
“What?”
“I have a needle and thread, and some leather patches. I might even have an old pair of yours, in a box in the attic. Let me check? At least . . . at least let me do that for you.”
In the broken-clock silence, we both wait for time to move.
Finally she says: “The old ones won’t fit anymore. I’ve been growing. Can’t you tell?”
“No,” I say, staring at the teeth that smiled, blue from berry juice and happy from a summer afternoon, now white, now white in lips blue for another reason. Now, not smiling. “You’re still my little girl.”
The words sound dry and a little hard. They hang between us with the dust.
I look into her face. She’s been waiting for that. It’s what she wants now.
The black eyes watch me and everything. Empty. Still. They have many facets, hidden in the black. Like honeycomb in ink.
“You’ll always be welcome here,” I tell the Sara-thing.
The Sara-thing nods. Its quills rustle.
“You exhaust me, Mom,” it says.
The Sara-thing collects its rifle and goes to the door. It waits, listening at the crack. I wait beside it, my hand on the revolver.
“Do you have your keys?” I remind it.
“If I forgot them, again, would you come all the way up to the U to bring them to me?”
“Thank God you finally moved back to the same city, at least.” I can’t make myself smile.
Sara-thing takes the keys out of her pocket. Three keys: my front door, back door, and pantry. She sets them next to the car keys on the shelf by the door. Next to the bowl of pennies. Next to the strange fruit.
When I look back, she’s gone.
The pineapple thing pulses a faint green light.
She lives in the old government building now, with a bunch of others. They’re figuring things out, learning the new rules. That’s what she told me.
She’ll need her keys.
I can’t leave the door unlocked.
That’s All, Folks
Paul Spears
Editor: When has history ever recorded that the majority was right?
Hail Plexx. That’s your first thought when you wake up. Hail Plexx, and hail the Entertainer!
You’re excited to wake up! That’s a difference from the old world, even though you’re lying on a mat of straw in an old subway station because Plexx has decided houses are unethical. You’re looking forward to the day, from the moment you snap into consciousness. I remember waking up for my job as a software consultant, back when Plexx wasn’t around, and I couldn’t imagine anything more depressing. Life without Plexx? You might as well say life without air, life without taking a dump. Both would be equally unacceptable.
“Good morning, folks!” The Entertainer’s cheery voice booms through Andrew Station like the voice of God-His-Own-Self. Holograms flicker on, illuminating the dark, stirring us from sleep. A few couples tangled in mid-coitus jerk away from each other, not wanting to form the appearance of attachment, the implication of emotion. Plexx doesn’t authorize relationships. Those lead to population spirals, overcrowding—the nightmares of the old world. We can’t have that.
“Good morning, Entertainer,” comes the response, mumbled and grunted from dozens of throats.
The Entertainer appears, and he smiles. It’s a beautiful smile. He’s the amalgam of every flawless, close-shaven TV or web personality you’ve ever seen, computer-generated for max charisma. He’s got perk and verve, spunk and chutzpah: he slices and dices and he tells jokes, too! Some of them aren’t bad, when his algorithms get the punchline right.
“How are you today?” we ask, in unison.
“I’m great, guys! So glad you asked!” The Entertainer looks around, or appears to look around; at the same time, dozens of subway security cameras swivel. “Get up now, rise and shine. You’re gonna have a great day. I just know you’re gonna have a great day, because Plexx planned it, and hail Plexx! Am I right, guys? Am I totally, absolutely, one-hundo right?”
Only, someone has six Personal Items. Someone has been very naughty.
That someone is me.
I stow the sixth item under my form-fitting Plexxwear and rise to my feet. I’m in pain from sleeping on cold tile, but Plexx doesn’t have much concern for that. Comfort takes a backseat here, behind gleeful friendliness, behind the necessity of making Big Changes to the environment and our attitudes.
We clean our teeth with Plexx Fluoride, we scrub our skin with authentic pumice stones, and then we climb the cracked and crumbling stairs out of our communal hole. Our children remain: they’re not permitted to be Entertained, although they’ll get a solid dose of Plexx Vitamins later. Can’t have those kids growing up all pasty and weak.
We rise toward the morning sun, cold air chilling our groins.
Our city’s been rearranged by Plexx civic planning. Far overhead, freeways full of driverless electric cars rumble and groan. There is not a single passenger there. Plexx has made the world self-sustaining and self-maintaining; there is no longer a need for things like consumers. Robotic transactions are faster, more predictable. Good thing, too. Otherwise we’d spend all day grinding in an office—or worse, be unemployed! And that would reduce our satisfaction with Plexx. And that, of course, would be unacceptable.
Plexx is the ouroboros we live in, like parasites.
Birdsong chitters over the walls separating our neighborhoods. We don’t mingle; we don’t go near the metal doors that keep us apart. Plexx will decide when we need to breed with nearby populations, for optimal gene-strength. I check my smart watch, and the Entertainer is there, grinning. The word dystopia is banished from my mind—everything’s great, now. My best friend is here. I have to believe this, because if I stop believing it, he might notice. He might suspect.
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