by Neil Clarke
I have looped through this moment so many times, stepping into Scarlett’s machine again and again, and letting it rip me apart. Every word from your lips, every gesture of your hands, the way you lean your body away or toward me, frightened or longing—I have it all memorized. Sometimes I wish I could leave; spying on your life this way—a string of moments in your past and your future—doesn’t seem right. But somewhere in one of those moments there has to be a key, a word, a phrase, something I can do or not do to save your life.
In a future just a few days from now, you will tear your fashion magazines to pieces, stuff the scraps down the drain, and run water over them until they are pulp. You will slam the apartment window, eschewing the breeze playing with the ends of your hair. You want the apartment sweltering, sweating out the memory of me, sweating out everything you’ve buried deep inside you for so long.
I’ve been there to witness this destruction. Seen the way the curls stick, sweat-damp, to the back of your neck and wanted to taste the skin between them. Even angry, even broken, even denying what you are, in that near future I’ll want to run my tongue over your collarbone, rest my hands where your waist dips in, and feel your pulse beating just under your skin.
I’ll want to whisper to you that everything will be okay. Even though it’s a lie.
If I hadn’t killed you in my past, your future, I wouldn’t be in love with you. Or would I? Was this always meant to be?
Here and now, you are distracted. Your eyes are the same color as the coffee you’re holding. Not just brown, but the color it turns when it catches the light as you pour it from pot to cup. A rich color on the edge of red. Secret. Flavorful. Strong.
Steam rises into the light slanting over the kitchen table between us. You keep glancing at the clock, counting the minutes until your husband comes home, projecting yourself into the future when all I want to do is hold you in the here and now. You haven’t told me to leave yet, but you will. You’re already thinking about fixing your hair, smoothing powder over the places where my lips have been, making dinner, all the things a good wife should do.
Everything about your posture says brittle, haunted. Fragile as the cup in your hands.
“You should go,” you say.
Inside those words, I hear all the ones you don’t say, at least not this time, the words you’ve said in the times before. “I can’t do this anymore. I want a baby. That’s something you can’t give me. I don’t love you. I never loved you. You’re sick and wrong and it’s a sin. I never want to see you again.”
In all of those times, never once have I told you that in two years, right before Christmas, I will cause your death. I don’t tell you about the children, either of them, who will never be born. And I don’t tell you about the horrible things I’ve contemplated doing—finding a way to cause another miscarriage, murdering your husband, all to keep you safe, keep you alive.
No matter how deep your words cut—and they cut to the bone—I don’t fire back with my secret knowledge. It isn’t fair that I know you better than you know yourself. Besides, the knowledge would rip your heart out and I tell myself it’s a mercy to you, letting you live in bliss and innocence for a while longer.
It’s a lie. I’m sparing myself. I don’t want you to die hating me. I need to pretend I can still fix this somehow. I haven’t given up on you. I swear.
I want to take your hands across the table. I want to hold them and look into your eyes. Maybe this time you’ll believe me when I tell you the future gets better. If you ran with me, we could go to a place where we could love each other openly and no one would judge us. We could have a baby and it would be ours, our family, something new to fill the hole in my heart where my family used to be.
I wonder if that’s unfair to you, if I’m trying to make you into something you’re not. All the words I could possibly say in this here and now don’t feel right. Not yet. But maybe one day. I have to keep trying.
In this here and now, I don’t say anything at all. But I do stand for a moment outside your apartment door, breath held, listening. I stand there long enough to hear the coffee cup shatter as you hurl it against the wall.
It will be all cleaned up by the time your husband gets home. Every trace of me will be scrubbed clean from your body, and you’ll be smiling. Just like a good wife should, no matter the white-hot ball of rage you’ve pushed down deep inside.
Seven
It is 1941. In this here, in this now, our first cup of coffee is still ahead, for both of us. I haven’t met you yet, and I’ve already killed you in the future, four years from now. I haven’t tried to convince you to run away with me. I haven’t tried desperately to undo what I’ve done. I don’t know the scent of your hair, or the feeling of your skin under my fingertips. All I have is a name, so I don’t even know it’s you when we collide.
You’re just coming out of the post office, your arms full of catalogs and fashion magazines. It’s summer, and the magazines scatter—bright, beautiful women, caught in the sunshine, pages fluttering in the breeze.
You blush, hurrying to gather them, and I bend to help you. I don’t know anything about you except the way a curl of your hair sticks to the corner of your mouth as you pause to look up at me. In that moment, I’ve already started to fall in love. It’s too late by the time you tell me your name. I’ve invited you for that first cup of coffee. I’ve heard you laugh, self-conscious, guarded, but with so much promise of joy tucked inside.
I could run away before the waitress brings the cups. I could go back—to the future, to the past, try again. If I did, would it change anything? I wouldn’t know the taste of your skin, or the look in your eyes, right before you tell me to go. Maybe my heart wouldn’t break, and you wouldn’t throw yourself into your husband’s arms with such angry determination, set on proving me wrong, determined to be something you’re not. Maybe you wouldn’t be carrying a child that needs killing according to some grand cosmic plan that I don’t even understand.
Or maybe all of this was always meant to happen, always will happen, no matter what I do.
But that doesn’t mean I’ll stop trying, looking for a way to unravel everything I’ve done. Maybe it isn’t possible, but I have to try. For you. For us. For all the cups of coffee in our past and our future.
All I know is that in this moment, this here and now, you’re looking at me in a way I’ve never been looked at, been seen, before. And I wouldn’t trade this cup of coffee for the world.
About the Author
A.C. Wise’s short fiction has appeared in Apex, Uncanny, Shimmer, Clarkesworld, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2015, among other places. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and contributes a monthly Women to Read: Where to Start column to SF Signal. Her collection of inter-linked short stories, The Ultra Fabulous Glitter Squadron Saves the World Again, was published by Lethe Press in October 2015.
The Governess with a Mechanical Womb
Leena Likitalo
It rains thin sharp drops like shattered glass. Saga and I won’t go out today. We might not go out tomorrow. There is nothing but time to kill, and yet I don’t seem to be able to get started in the one task that is more important than the others.
Saga plays with a red wooden horse stolen from the past. I fidget with the quill. I need to write down everything now before I lose courage, before the embers in the fireplace die or the governess returns.
“Agneta . . . ” Saga lowers the horse down on the floor. Its carved hooves gallop a hollow clip clop tune. My little sister glances at the horse, then at me, biting her lip. Her gray eyes glint with curiosity. “Were all horses this small?”
I’ve seen pictures of real horses in the glossy magazines the governess doesn’t allow me to bring with me from the places she takes us. I’m pretty sure horses were huge animals, larger than reindeer, and that there were multiple breeds and even within a breed, multiple colors. But horses are extinct now, and with this thought, my stomach knot
s. The magnitude of everything lost nauseates me.
“Agneta?” Saga studies me from under her pale brows with the merciless attention of a six-year-old.
I force myself to smile as if nothing whatsoever had ever bothered me. Saga doesn’t need to know the truth. Not yet. “Some might have been.”
I pick the pen up again, but my hand shakes. I won’t be able to take this much longer. I dread the empty pages, but not only them. These days I’m afraid of everything, but I can’t talk about this with Saga. I have to protect her for as long as I can.
“When I grow up, I want to have one.” Saga brushes the horse’s back as if it really had a fur. “A real horse.”
My sister is still so naïve. I envy her for that. “I doubt the governess will provide you that.”
“She might,” Saga replies. “If I ask nicely enough.”
I dip the pen in the inkwell and scrawl the first hesitant words. This is exactly why I have to write. When I’m gone, my sister might be the last human left in the scorched world.
The day the Victorians killed Pa, they sent a governess to take care of what remained of our family—and possibly of the whole of humankind. The men in impeccably fitted tailcoats and towering top hats led Pa away from the weather-beaten farmhouse. The women in black crinoline gowns followed them to the barren hilltop overlooking the glacier-carved lake. No words were exchanged before they incinerated Pa.
Saga, I shivered with you on the farmhouse’s porch. I held your head against my chest to shield you from the sight. Though, since you were only three at the time, I don’t think you understood what happened.
Saga and I are in the root cellar when the super-sonic boom tears the day apart. The jar of apple jam slips from my fingers and shatters against the dirt floor. The sickeningly sweet tang mixes with the damp smell of the cellar, and I gag despite myself.
“Agneta . . . ” Saga chuckles, stepping back so as not to stain her bare feet. “I bet it’s just our governess returning.”
I rivet my gaze on the spreading, sticky stain. Perhaps my sister doesn’t see our governess as a threat because she’s so young. Or perhaps she’s managed to convince herself that there was never a different world, that the tales I’ve told her about the time before the Victorians burned every city and town to dust are just figments of my imagination.
“Should we not go and greet her?” Saga asks. Still staring down, I notice her wriggling her toes.
I kick what remains of the jar under the shelf. The jam that took so many hours to boil is lost for good, as is the world before the Victorians. “We should. But shouldn’t you be wearing shoes?”
Saga doesn’t reply to me, not when we leave the cellar, not when we make our way back to the house in silence that suits well the rugged landscape of post-apocalyptic Lapland.
Our home, a graying farmhouse, hunches against a rocky slope. I tense despite myself when I hear the metallic click-click of the knitting needles. My sister’s eyes brighten. I quickly take hold of her hand, to prevent her from dashing off. I hate it when she acts like an overeager puppy, as if she’d missed the Victorian. “You don’t have any shoes that fit you, do you?”
“Nope,” Saga replies. “None at all.”
We find the governess knitting on the porch. We halt before the lichen-laced stone steps and wait for her to acknowledge us. A tendril of cold, sharp air brushes my cheek, taunting.
“Good afternoon.” The governess lowers a half-formed, poison green mitten on her lap and meets us with an emotionless gaze. She was once a full human, but never an attractive one. Her face is round, with eyes set too close and chin tilting inward right below her wide mouth. It doesn’t help that she always wears her pale hair in a tight bun atop her head. “How are you today?”
Saga and I curtsy, not much of a sight either in our battered jeans and hoodies. Once again, I feel tempted to rebel against the governess. A creature obsessed with routines, she will continue to stare at us until we behave according to her expectations. But since Saga needs new shoes, I skip the games and reply, “Good afternoon, governess. We are fine. How are you today?”
The governess nods solemnly at us and resumes her knitting.
Saga nudges me, her elbow sharper than it ought to be. My sister might not be afraid of the Victorians, but she never voices any requests either. That’s good. I don’t want her to grow too dependent on them.
“Governess,” I address the Victorian. I hate asking for help from those who killed Ma and Pa, but Saga can’t go shoeless once the temperatures drop. “We find ourselves in need of your assistance.”
The governess’ lips twitch up, but the smile doesn’t reach her colorless eyes. Pa once told me that in the early years of Victorian occupation, some lads in Oulu captured a governess, killed her, and cut her open to see what the Victorians did to converts. The governess’ veins were lined with an unknown silvery metal, and where her heart should have been was something akin to a battery. But neither of those findings was the one that left the men too horrified to sleep at night—the governess’ mechanical womb sheltered a black cube impossible to break open.
“Now do you?” The governess’ reply stabs like a broken needle. Not for the first time, I wonder if she, too, bears a black cube in her mechanical womb. That’s something I’ll never learn. The Victorians hunted down the men who killed the governess and incinerated them. “What would you need?”
Saga wiggles her toes. She’s got dirt under her nails. “I’m afraid my feet have decided to grow on their own.”
“Huh.” The governess tugs more yarn from her omnipresent satchel. Click, click, her needles go. Click, click. “Needless help passivates. Are there no hand-me-downs you could use?”
Saga glances at me. I wrap my arm around her narrow shoulders. Empathy might be a foreign concept to the Victorians, but they have no difficulty in understanding a well-formed argument. “I’m ten years older than her. I have worn all my old clothes, shoes included, thread-bare beyond repair.”
The governess blinks blankly as though someone else were making the decision for her. Then she stashes the needles and yarn into her satchel and rises up. “Very well, then. It is my duty to provide for you.”
Pa was born the year the Victorians arrived and nuked every city, factory, and highway to dust. The invaders never proclaimed their intentions, never showed themselves, and for a long time they didn’t even have a name. They shot beams of energy from the orbit, erasing Shanghai, Delhi, and Lagos in an eye blink. The populace of smaller cities held their breath, until they too, were incinerated one after another.
Pa’s family was lucky enough to live in Finland, a country so scarcely populated that it took a while before the Victorians paid any attention to it. His family fled from Helsinki to Tampere, then onward to what remained of Oulu. They lived in a bomb shelter dating back to the Second World War and scavenged the city ruins for food. The survivors of the cataclysm avoided one another—by then, they’d figured out that larger communities and anyone who dabbled with high tech or even electricity got instantly incinerated.
The first converts appeared a decade later, seemingly out of nowhere. The men sporting top hats, tailcoats, and silver-knobbed canes paraded down the ruined streets. The women in black crinoline gowns followed in their wake. They claimed they came in peace, and when asked what species they represented, they named themselves the Victorians.
Pa met Ma, a refugee from Sweden with eyes the color of ice about to thaw, when he was eighteen. Both hated Oulu and living by the rules the Victorians enforced, but never bothered to share with the mere humans. Some of the survivors disappeared, only to appear the next day converted. Others fled what remained of the city. And despite their parents’ pleas, Ma and Pa decided to seek a better life further up north.
Ma and Pa rode rickety bicycles through four hundred kilometers of dirt tracks. During the endless white summer nights, they encountered no other living souls, only forlorn, rusting car skeletons and hordes of starving mosquit
os.
They stumbled across the small community of Sodankylä by accident. Though they were happy to meet other survivors, they couldn’t imagine staying. The Victorians walked amongst the humans, exchanging formal greetings as if that was all there was to good life.
At that point, Ma and Pa realized they could never pedal far enough. As a sort of compromise, they set home to an abandoned farmhouse about fifty kilometers away from Sodankylä. I was born a year later.
I guess that for a while our parents were as happy as two people ever can be.
The portal remains open behind us, a shimmering oval between two tall pines. In this time and place, the air smells of wet bark and bent grass. It must have stopped raining just moments earlier.
The governess glances at her golden pocket watch, then at Saga and me. “We have thirty minutes exact.”
“Sure,” I reply. When I first stepped through a portal, the governess warned me that those who remained behind after it closed would simply cease to exist. If it hadn’t been for Saga, I might have . . . But now, I won’t even entertain the idea, no matter how I hate my life.
The governess produces a red-checkered mitten from her satchel and hangs it at the tip of a pine branch. Without sparing us another glance, she strides through the forest of young trees, up a slope thick with shrubbery. Lingonberries squash under her heels, but she doesn’t notice that.
Saga and I follow the governess as fast as we can, but not quite fast enough. After we lose sight of her, we follow the mittens. I idly wonder if this is the reason she knits them in the first place. Perhaps. Who can tell how the mind of a convert works?
The forest gives way to a well-tended clearing, an ochre-painted, two-story holiday house with plain, white window frames and a black mansard roof. A gravel road leads through the forest toward north. The governess is nowhere in sight. Her kind comes and goes as they please.