Mother says Mia lives with us because we’re not savages. When I was born they had M1A made immediately. They freed my umbilical cord from my belly and sent it away for processing. It wasn’t long before the baby was returned to Mother and she could hold M1A in her arms just like a real child. I was just a little bit bigger then, but now we’re the same size. Just like twins. I was one-year-old when I needed my first part from her.
Father says sometimes little girls get sick and all the science in the world can’t predict why or how. Mother cries because it’s unfair. All this, she says, and our little girl becomes ill.
Father says it is one of life’s mysteries and we’re lucky because we have Mia. A few simple surgeries take what I need from her body and make me new and strong again. It’s been that way for a while. Mia and I have been bedside in so many hospital rooms together it’s like she’s my sister. After so much back and forth Mother had her move in with us. It’s what the compassionate families do, and besides, we can afford it. I was small when she moved in, so to me it’s like she’s been here forever.
She lives in the bedroom downstairs by herself and is quiet and obedient, like a lap dog. Sometimes when we play and something funny happens, her mouth opens wide and I can tell she would be laughing if she could conjure a sound. If she had vocal cords and wasn’t mute, her laughter would ring out over mine. Our voices would be identical.
Sometimes Mia’s silence scares me. Her gaping throat looks like an endless void and I’ve had nightmares that her jaw unlatches and swallows me up like a python. It’s one of my fever dreams, Mother says. When you’re scared of something so sweet.
• • •
Mother pets my hair as Mia plays the piano, one last song before bedtime. We are preparing for the next surgery, though I feel mostly okay. Mother feels for lumps near my throat and I tell her I feel fine but she prods for a long time and makes me open wide just to be sure. Father comes in to check as well and I think, this time it’s my throat, this silly body of mine.
Your favorite song? Mother asks when she’s through, and I nod, and Mia sends her small fingers fluttering over the piano’s keys and I feel sad because surgery is no fun, not for anyone.
Tomorrow? I say. Mother nods.
Mother hums along to Mia’s performance. Just one more time, she whispers to the small girl playing, and the melody begins again. If I could, I would write Mother a song, but when you’ve been as sick as I have there isn’t much time for pianos. Mia plays for me when I’m recovering—she heals faster than I do—and I sing along from my bed, funny songs about animals in fields with pumpkins for heads. They make Mia smile and she turns to me when she’s happiest, with her wide-open mouth, and I have to look away for a moment, just because for some reason, I can’t stand that big open cave.
Father says Mia can sleep in my room tonight but she needs to get ready. I know this routine, though I take very little part in it. I crawl into bed and Mother says, It’s all for the best. I repeat it back to her in my singsong voice, the one she loves so much. She places a hand on my neck as I say so. The vibrations are soft and easy. It makes her so happy.
Good girl.
I listen while Mia is scrubbed down from head to toe in the bathroom, all her discarded skin cells collecting in the special drain in our tub. Her urine and waste is collected; stray hairs are gathered, the ones Mother can find anyway. They can use just about anything to these days, that’s why she can just keep giving and giving. She’s a perennial harvest of parts for my body. Whatever I need, just plucked out of her and given it to me.
• • •
I am asleep for an hour, maybe two, and wake up to find the spot next to me empty. I crawl out of bed, cold and shivery, and follow the soft glow of the downstairs light until I hear voices in the kitchen.
Mother and Father are speaking happily about tomorrow and I pause for a minute on the stairs because their happiness makes me happy too, and being healthy is the best reason for such joy. I’m surprised to hear soft tapping. When it stops Mother and Father clap and say, Yay. Mia is dancing in wool socks and a cotton nightgown on the kitchen floor and Mother and Father are eating a berry cobbler enjoying the entertainment.
Mia twirls and Mother beams, causing red juice to fall from her lip down to the soft part of her neck. It collects in the area of skin between her collarbones and Father takes a thumb and smears it away. There is a trace of juice left behind, a streak of red.
It’s nice for them to give Mia this moment, I think.
I will ask for some berry cobbler when I wake up after surgery tomorrow, a treat for being such a good girl. Mother will hold me in my bed while Mia plays the piano or draws on the wall and I will eat cobbler.
The tapping stops and Father lifts a bite from his plate, raising it like a glass of champagne for a toast. His plate is smeared red from eating, cuts from his fork tear through the dish like sore slashes. He looks to Mother and then to Mia and toasts, To our daughter.
Mother replies, To tomorrow.
Mia starts another dance. She wears my blue eyes and small freckled nose, the slope of my shoulders and the size of my feet, just as I do. She opens her mouth, wide and vacant, but there is no sound.
© 2014 by Kim Winternheimer.
Kim Winternheimer’s work has appeared through Tin House, Gigantic Magazine, theNewerYork, The Oregonian, The Rumpus, and was the winner of Flavorwire’s Short Fiction Contest. She is the founding editor of The Masters Review and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Standard Deviant
Holly Schofield
Ashley crouched behind her boyfriend’s Audi, watching him through the plate glass window of the Denny’s restaurant. The red and yellow neon sign above punctured the darkness. Pancakes. Coffee. And, visible in the window below: sweet, sweet Brut. He was sprawled sideways in the booth, leaning back against the window, plaid Hurley cap tilted, a cup at his lips. Maddog slouched on the opposite bench, grinning fiercely, his dreadlocks huge. Some chick sat beside him, skinny with spiky black hair, leaning toward Brut; who the hell was that? Plates, piled with bunched paper napkins and cutlery, lay scattered in front of them.
Ashley was late for the party.
As usual.
She shifted her feet and her metal boot studs rasped on the wet pavement. The drizzle had almost stopped but she wrapped her ratty army jacket around her more tightly anyway. She should cross the street and join them in the restaurant—at least it’d be warmer. Eggs over easy. And hash browns.
The Audi’s windshield burst into a painful kaleidoscope of violets, pinks, and reds. Just her luck to hide behind a car that had some kind of weird electrical problem.
“We need an ambassador.” The voice seemed to be coming from the flashing windshield. It was matter-of-fact and friendly.
“Piss off,” Ashley said. She squatted even lower behind the car in case the flaring lights caught Brut’s eye. Home fries. And bacon.
“We have only minutes to keep the wormhole open,” the voice said. Ashley flipped her blue hair off her eyes. The hair color was called “dystop-cyan” and cost her the entire haul from a purse-snatching down on Fifth Avenue yesterday, but she’d thought Brut might like the color. He’d liked her zombie-snake tattoo last week, enough to nuzzle her throat where the tail curled around.
“We will recruit you to spread the word. Our spot-checks indicate America and several other countries are finally progressive enough to enroll into the buzz-buzz-buzz,” the voice said, then chuckled. “That clearly did not translate. Let’s use the vernacular: You guys can enroll into the Galactic Federation. Peace and prosperity await.”
Huh. Maybe she shouldn’t have popped that little white pill she’d found in Maddog’s bathroom earlier tonight.
Ashley edged around to the front bumper. She stared at Brut through the window again, glad the darkness provided cover. Soon. She’d go to him, soon.
Just not quite yet.
“Get a life,” she told the voice. She hoped Brut would take h
is feet off the seat when she approached the booth.
Her throat was dry. She swallowed and looked more closely at Brut’s car in spite of herself.
It was a newer model Audi, dark red in the streetlights. The windows were tight and black, except the windshield which shifted colors in patterns too rapidly to make sense. Clearly, the Red Bull chaser had also been a bad idea.
“Our analyses indicate you are within the range of standard deviation for your country, race, and age,” the voice said, with warmth.
“Yeah, a standard deviant, that’s me,” Ashley muttered. Not even an original deviant.
The patterns shifted and emerged into an almost-shape, like a word on the tip of her tongue. If this was a crazy mugger or some kind of scam, it was different than any she’d seen before. And, in four years on the street, she’d seen it all.
It might make a good story to impress Brut with. Something to make her stand out among the other chicks. Something to make his eyes glint and the corner of his mouth twitch. Maybe he’d let her spend the night in his apartment again. Maddog’s sofa was getting lame.
“What’s in it for me?” She put a hand on her hip and pouted at the windshield like a Japanese porn star.
“Improving mankind and expanding world knowledge is not your mandate, I see,” said the voice, with a slight edge.
Ashley grinned and flipped a finger at the car. I can piss anybody off, given a few minutes.
“Perhaps this will convince you?” The kaleidoscope shifted to blackness so immense, so deep that Ashley gasped. Her skull began a not-unpleasant throb and her eyes felt stretched with infinite possibilities. A high that took her higher than she’d ever been, even that time in Arizona with the peyote.
Rotating planets and whirling galaxies flashed in a cadence that matched her thudding heart and she was lost in the universe, spiraling among the stars.
Finally, her mind found a tiny corner and tugged on it until it opened like a window on her phone. She rubbed a toe on the gritty sidewalk and cleared her throat.
“Why me?” she asked. “I’m, like, nobody. And, like, the most unreliable witness you’ll ever find.” Just what the cops had told her the night they released her stepdad for the eighth time. Without bail. No one ever did internal exams on trailer park trash.
“A hard truth,” the voice said, with an emotion she couldn’t label. “However, you are the only one on this street, the wormhole is closing, you have little to lose, and, sadly but most importantly, this nexus will not be disrupted since … well, actually … no one will miss you.”
She glanced at the restaurant window. Brut was holding out his coffee cup and smirking at the unamused waitress. The new chick was on Brut’s side of the booth, cuddled against him.
She climbed onto the hood of his car, one boot stud screeching a long silver gouge through the paint. She admired it for a minute then clambered into the whirling space where the windshield should have been. Her last thought, before reeling away into the cosmos, was of her mom. The last time she’d seen her: high heels clacking as she paced the kitchen floor, cell phone clamped to her ear as she made a date. She’d been laughing shrilly at something the client had said when Ashley had slipped out the door.
• • •
Ashley dropped gracefully to the street as the closing wormhole deposited her a few centimeters above the pavement. She was lucky to have caught this same nexus in front of the Denny’s, almost ten years to the day after she’d left. The Federation had wondrous technology but it was hard science, not magic and not perfect. The space/time juncture was only open for a moment; no time to see how Earth had changed in the past decade.
That shouldn’t matter. She had changed.
She was ready to be ambassador to the USA. To deliver her message to the country, the continent, the world.
Finally, she was about to do something with her life besides screw it up.
She kept her eyes squeezed shut, waiting for the transit afterglow to recede. She smoothed her chestnut hair behind her ears and straightened the collar of her sleek, form-fitting jumpsuit. She had amused the Federation staff by refusing to give up her boots—their worn leather now in sharp contrast to her chic appearance. The staff had fixed her brain chemistry—no more addictions or depression—as well as adjusting a slight pronation in her left foot and clearing up her herpes. Her muscles were magnificently toned and her posture impeccable. She was trained in politics, in psychology, in negotiation, in persuasion; a hundred years of education crammed into a decade. She was primed to bring humankind, with all their foibles, into the future, into an era of affluence and unbridled happiness.
She stretched joyfully and clicked her metal heels together, like a futuristic Dorothy.
Then she opened her eyes.
The Audi was gone. Litter blew across the street. The Denny’s, boarded up and graffitied, loomed at her in the predawn dimness. She walked toward the restaurant. Her foot hit something soft and she looked down. A rotting corpse lay in the gutter. She hurried past it and up the far curb. A crude newsletter tacked to an unlit lamppost caught her eye. The headline proclaimed: “World Economic Devastation Continues, Billions Starving.”
Her message would go unheard.
The party was already over.
© 2014 by Holly Schofield.
Holly Schofield has been published in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review and Perihelion, as well as three anthologies, including Tesseracts 17. She travels through time at the rate of one second per second, oscillating between the alternate realities of a prairie farmhouse and her writing cabin on the west coast. For more of her work, see hollyschofield.wordpress.com.
Getting on in Years
Cathy Humble
“Along came sixty,” I said, “with eighty not far behind, and 100 hard on its heels. By now, I’m up to 830 and weary of grieving for lost family, learning new trades and finding new homes. But most of all, I’m tired of the fear and the hiding.”
“So, Mr. Smith, what brings you here is concern about what happens when people learn you’re immortal?”
I winced at the word. “Right.”
Nothing I’d told her made her flinch at all. Good sign. But then she’d come highly recommended, and she’d be well paid.
Everything about Alyson Brochette was impressive but subtle. Her hair was red, but a deep auburn variety, and not too long or too short. Her tunic, real silk, must have come from a colony world, but didn’t scream “money.” On the wall behind her desk, the company name had a soft glow, pulsing ever so slightly: Public Relations Options. Yes, PRO summed her up just fine.
“We’ll start right away with some focus groups, Mr. Smith. We’ll tell one group you’re immortal because you’re an alien, another that your long life was engineered in a lab. Other groups will learn that a virus changed you, or that you’re a time traveler with a normal lifespan who just ducks in and out of the centuries.”
I shook my head in protest. “But those explanations aren’t true. I’m just a mutant who doesn’t age, and I’ve always tried to keep a low profile.”
She smiled a just-right smile and stood to indicate our first meeting was over. “Truth is a very fluid concept, John. The focus groups will help me sort out emotional responses to you, such as fear, envy, anger or sympathy. I’ll get back to you soon.”
She did. “John,” she said, her voice tinny with what must have been offworld distance, “I’ve analyzed the focus group results and drafted our strategy. We’ll keep it simple at first. We can always regroup as necessary.”
• • •
The next two weeks I appeared on every flash-interview and in all the print media that still existed. The headlines tell the story:
Genetic twist cheats man out of normal life
“No more hiding!” says 800-year-old man
Terran authorities call for Smith to divulge finances
Protesters attack plutocrat Smith’s limo
“OK,” Alyson said, “time to regroup.
I hope they warned you that I play rough when it’s necessary.”
• • •
The new batch of headlines rolled along:
John Smith big loser on national trivia show
Smith slips on icy step, breaks arm
“I can’t age, but I can break” says Smith
800-year-old man funds Super Start classes in poverty areas
“Just call me Jack”
Jack Smith tutors low-income kids
The noisy crowds died down to a handful of angry sign-wavers here and there. “Excellent,” Alyson said. “Now it’s time for some big guns.”
• • •
She kept me on the move, and the headlines followed:
Smith addresses United Planets General Assembly
Smith visits Dalai Lama
Pope blesses Smith in special audience
“We’ve calmed them down,” Alyson said. “Now let’s warm them up. Are you sure you’re ready for this?”
I was more than ready. No matter where I was or what I was doing, Alyson’s delicate silkiness and cloud of auburn hair haunted me. By now I was spending every minute with her I could and she was scheduling meetings with me on the flimsiest excuses.
• • •
The paparazzi soon realized that something was up:
Jack Smith and publicist an item
Will they or won’t they?
Jack/Aly to wed
Aly breaks it off—Jack devastated
Jack wins Aly back
Smiths return from secret island ceremony
Baby on way for Jack/Aly
Will Smith baby be immortal like dad?
• • •
At this point, I was interviewed by a serious journalist. The heart of the interview went like this:
“Jack, is it true that your telomeres are what make you different?”
“That’s right, Tom.”
“So what are telomeres and what do they do in your body?”
Lightspeed Magazine Issue 49 Page 37