by Logan Jacobs
“I had a lot of time on my hands over the winter,” Emma admitted. She rushed over to a door on the right wall and closed it before I could get a chance to look inside, then turned back to Fela and me. “Don’t look in the dining room, it’s a work in progress. Really rather awful. I’m sorry I don’t have many places to sit, but I’m afraid I wasn’t expecting company, and most of the furniture in the house was utterly unsalvageable. I could always spread some quilts out on the floor...”
“It is fine.” Fela had left her spear outside as well, and she wandered over to the window and parted the curtains. “Floppy is eating and safe. So far.”
“Oh, you must be quite hungry!” Emma clasped her hands in front of her and smiled. Her smile lit up those sky-blue eyes, and I was starting to find that little hand-clasping gesture pretty adorable. “Why don’t I make us some tea? I’m afraid I don’t have any meat just at the moment, but I’ve got some parsnips that ought to be quite tasty with the apple butter I made this fall.”
“Tea sounds great,” I said. I had no idea what a parsnip was or what it had to do with tea, but I was prepared to eat pretty much anything that Emma gave me. “Do you want some help in the kitchen?”
“It’s very kind of you to offer,” Emma chirped as she turned and bustled down the whitewashed hall on the right side of the room. “It will go much faster if I have someone to help me chop things.”
“Chopping things I can do,” I said as I followed Emma to the kitchen. “You alright out here, Fela?”
“I can survive on my own.” Fela crouched by the window and peered out through the quilt curtains at Floppy. “I will keep watch for the dogs while you two make food.”
“So you two are from down south?” Emma asked me as she led me into the kitchen. “My great-grandmother lived near Richmond before the Great Electrical Storm. Did you ever pass by that way?”
The kitchen was as neat and whitewashed as the living room, with a white sink next to a wooden counter, a little iron stove with a kettle on it, wooden shelves stacked with jars of multicolored jellies and pickles, and a white wooden cupboard that stood against one wall. There was even a little wooden table in the middle of the room with a tall wooden stool next to it.
“Not really, no,” I muttered. I shrugged off my jacket, spread it out over the wooden seat of the stool, and went to the sink to wash my hands. When I turned the knob, the water poured out in a thin, ice-cold trickle. I scrubbed at my hands with the cake of yellow soap next to the sink and sighed in relief as I felt the gunk of the last two days wash away from my fingers, then dried my hands on my T-shirt and leaned against the table. “Alright, let me at those parsnips.”
Emma opened the cupboard, pulled out a wicker basket of fat white carrots that I assumed were the parsnips, and a huge sharp knife with a wooden handle, and set them both on the table. I pulled a parsnip out of the basket and set it down on the wooden table, grabbed the knife, and sliced the leafy top of the root off. A fresh, sweet smell rose to my nostrils when I sunk the knife’s sharp blade into the crisp root.
“Go ahead and slice those up for chips, and I’ll put the tea on.” The black-haired girl pulled a silver tray out of the cupboard and set it on the wooden counter next to the sink, took three tin cups out of the cupboard and arranged them on the tray, then started to fill the kettle out of the tap. “Do you like mint tea? I found the mint growing out back. It was so tasty, but it had rather taken up the entire yard. I spent two days ripping it out, and I don’t even want to tell you how long it took me to plant the garden. I even have a jar of honey. Now that I didn’t harvest myself. I’ve never been fond of bees, but I got it from the general store and it’s barely crystallized at all.”
“Mint tea is great.” I glanced out the small kitchen window at a square plot of bare dirt with all sorts of green things sprouting out of it. I assumed it was Emma’s garden, since the green things looked like they were growing in rows instead of scattered all over the place.
“So did you come up through Ohio, too?” Emma asked. She pulled a jar of dried green leaves out of the jar, unscrewed the top, and took a long, happy sniff of the herbs inside as the kitchen filled with the sweet scent of mint. “Do tell me all about your journey. Oh, and you must tell me all about your home, the Prairie of the White Flowers sounds like such a lovely place!”
Before I’d seen the state of my hometown in this universe, I’d been thinking about cover stories to explain Fela’s appearance, Floppy’s existence, and my own weird dimension-hopping situation. Of course, I’d assumed that everything would be humming along like normal in this world, whatever normal happened to be. I had only been in this particular universe for a few hours, but it seemed like the world had stopped being anything like normal more than a century ago.
“I’m not exactly from the same place that Fela is,” I began as I watched Emma tip mint into the tin cups.
“I rather suspected that she was from somewhere quite alien, but I didn’t want to pry,” Emma confessed. She shook a little more mint into the last cup, screwed the lid back on the jar, and went to put it back in the cupboard. “Please do not take my question as rude, but may I inquire as to where you found her? She does seem… a bit… cat-like?”
“Okay, so this is going to be kind of a complex concept.” I swept my pile of parsnip slices to one side, set the knife down on the table, and took a deep breath as I prepared for an intense conversation. “What if history didn’t happen the way it did in this world? What if it happened in a completely different way?”
“Have you read Lord Jacob Chisholm, too?” Emma set the kettle on top of the range, pressed her hand to the side of the stove, and took a deep breath. Her sky-blue eyes started to glow a deep cerulean as the stove crackled with faint zaps and bolts of electricity, and her loose curls frizzed out around her heart-shaped face. “He’s the only author I’ve ever read who asks such questions. I think my favorite might be Alexander’s Palaces, where Alexander the Great doesn’t die in Babylon, but goes on to conquer Arabia instead. It’s so lovely to think of such a great empire lasting so long and protecting so many people.”
“Yeah, you get the idea!” I agreed. I grabbed another parsnip and started to chop again. “So what if you could travel to one of those worlds instead of this one?”
“I think I’d pick the one in The Empire Never Ended,” Emma mused. “I don’t think Mama would be very pleased with my answer, but I would be quite willing to live in a world where people worshiped all sorts of pagan gods as long as I got to go to those marvelous Roman dinner parties. Oh, it’s so fun to meet a fan of the books you like! Which world would you choose, Dave?”
“Those sound like really fun books, but I’ve never read them,” I confessed. “I’m actually from one of those worlds where history happened differently.”
Emma’s red rosebud lips parted softly, her blue eyes widened, and her shoulders stiffened.
“Why--” she began. “How--”
“My father invented a machine that does it,” I interrupted her, since it seemed like she was just stuttering in surprise. “Some, uh, brigands were trying to track him down and find the machine. They found him, but before they got him he sent me a message asking me to destroy his machine. And I didn’t. So now I’m kind of lost in all these different possibilities on a circle of dirt that gets bigger every time we travel, I can’t stay in one world for more than three days or monsters will get me, and I accidentally brought Fela and Floppy along with me from the last world, so now they have to deal with all of this, too.”
I caught my breath and wiped my brow. Even though all I’d been doing for the past few minutes was chopping parsnips in my T-shirt, my heart was still hammering, I felt like I was dripping with sweat, and my head was reeling a little. I’d thought that my entire situation would start to feel a little more real as I went along, but every time I tried to explain it to someone it all just felt a little more dreamlike and ridiculous.
“I suppose that does explain your f
riend with the cat ears and tail, and her hairy elephant,” Emma said slowly. “Are you part animal, too?”
“Nope, I’m all human,” I assured her. “I think our worlds actually diverged from each other about a hundred and twenty years ago.”
“The Great Electrical Storm!” Emma blurted out. “That explains why none of you were Westinghousing those dogs.”
“Doing what?” I asked.
“That’s what Grandmama used to call it when we’d, ah... over-apply our electric fields to animals.” Emma held up her hand with her palm toward me, pulsed a faint blue glow from the tips of her fingers, and winced. “It’s not too painful most of the time, but sometimes it feels really strange when I overdo it. I suppose I should have known something was odd about you from the start. Every other human I’ve ever met, even the cannibals, had some kind of electrical field and some ability to manipulate it.”
“Believe me, if anyone in my world had a superpower like that, they’d be running around in a cape defending Manhattan from bank robbers,” I said. “I read about Tesla’s free energy invention in the newspaper in the library. He never even got that far in my world. What can you tell me about the Great Electrical Storm?”
A high whistling sound filled the air and steam started to rise from the kettle’s mouth.
“Oh, tea is on!” Emma pulled her hand away from the stove, grabbed the handle of the kettle, and started to pour the water into the cups. “Leave the parsnips, I’ll make them for supper. They'll take too long now, and I simply must tell you and Fela all about the Great Electrical Storm right away!”
“Yeah, I would really love to hear about that,” I agreed. I was a little amazed that Emma had accepted my explanation about being from an alternate version of history so quickly, but maybe when you lived in a world where motorized vehicles with endless energy and nasty animals with Pikachu powers roamed the woods as a result of a mad scientist’s messed-up invention, it wasn’t so hard to accept a lot of other weird things.
“I am so happy this is not the best of all possible worlds!” Emma grabbed a jar of floating red things and a jar of honey from her shelf and set them on the tray, then yanked open a drawer, pulled out a handful of silverware, and dropped it on the tray without looking at it. “I knew that Voltaire was wrong.”
“His music is kind of fun if you’re a fourteen-year-old mall goth,” I remarked. I walked around the table and headed for the laden tray on the counter. “Let me get this for you.”
“Oh, no, let me, but thank you awfully for asking.” Emma lifted the tray up easily and started toward the door. “You are my guest, after all. But do take a jar of pickles from the shelf if you think they’d suit your fancy or that of your companion’s. Oh, I’m so glad you stopped by, Dave! I simply can’t wait to hear about your world, I’m sure it must be lovely.”
I loaded two jars of green things into my arms and followed after the lovely Emma, and I couldn’t help smiling. It was amazing how easy it was to make new friends after college--all I had to do was leave my own universe first.
Chapter 11
“Tea’s up!” Emma chirped as she toted the tray down the hall and back into the living room.
“And pickles.” I held up the two jars of green preserves as I followed Emma.
Fela had pushed the table off of the rag rug and to the side. She’d also pushed the quilt curtains open so that the room was full of sunlight, and I could see Floppy chewing contentedly on a bush just a few feet outside the window.
The saber-tooth cat-woman sprawled out on her stomach in front of the hearth in the shaft of sunlight that stretched across the room. She’d taken one of the cloth-bound books from Emma’s bookshelf and spread it open on the floor so she could flip through it with one clawed finger. Her tail flopped back and forth lazily on the backs of her tanned, muscular legs, and she glanced up from the book every few seconds to check on Floppy. Her ears pricked up as we approached her, but she didn’t turn around.
“I see you’ve made yourself quite comfortable,” Emma remarked. She set the tea tray down on the table behind Fela, unscrewed the top on the jar of honey, and picked up a spoon from the tray. “Do you take honey in your tea, Miss Fela?”
“No honey, and it is just Fela.” Fela propped herself up on her elbows, stuck her round, tight ass up in the air, stretched like a cat, then sat up and nodded at us. “I am sorry for not helping, but I did not wish to leave Floppy alone.”
“That’s quite alright.” Emma spooned a glob of honey into one cup. “Mister Meyer explained all about how you came from an alternate history while he was helping me with the tea things.”
“I thought we were pretending that I was testing out my costume for the furry meet,” Fela protested.
“No furry meets here,” I said. “But keep that one in mind for the next world.”
“Do you take honey, Mister Meyer?” Emma asked. “I’m afraid in all the excitement I’ve quite forgotten if I asked you or not.”
“Load me up, but you don’t have to call me mister.” I set the jars down on the table and started to screw the lids open. “Unless you really want to. It just reminds me of my Geometry teacher asking me why I’m late to class again, to be honest.”
Fela leaned over, parted her petal-pink lips, and sniffed at the jar of pickles. Her nose wrinkled, her ears went back, and she waved her hand in front of her face as if to dispel the smell.
“Then I shan’t, and I do apologize for bringing up unpleasant memories.” Emma’s cheeks flushed pink and she lowered her eyelids demurely as she stirred honey into another cup. “I thought a bit of formality--well, it’s hardly a formal occasion, is it? I’ve never entertained guests from another timeline before, I’m afraid. I suppose your world has quite a different set of manners. I really don’t mean to offend.”
“My world is just super informal, and if people call you Mister whatever then it usually means that you’re either in a lot of trouble or about to spend a lot of money.” I grabbed a fork from the pile of cutlery, speared a pickle with it, and then took the tin cup of honeyed mint tea that Emma handed me. “But I’m really curious about that Great Electrical Storm. It seems like it screwed up this world pretty badly. Can you tell us more about it?”
“Everything I know about it comes from the story that my Mama told me.” Emma handed a cup of mint tea to Fela, unscrewed the jar of red things, and frowned. “Oh, I didn’t get saucers, I’ll just--”
“Never mind about the saucers, we’re fine.” I patted the sofa next to me and took a big bite of the pickle. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until my mouth was full of crunchy, spicy-sweet cucumber.
“Of course, the storm.” Emma picked up her cup of tea and sat back down on the wicker sofa next to me. She glanced at me from under lowered lashes as she arranged herself on the couch. Her pleated black skirt was close enough to my jeans that I could feel the warmth from her body, but not the pressure of her flesh itself. “As I said, my Mama told me this story. It happened to my great-grandmama Esther not too long before my Mama was born.”
“Now that is how you begin a story,” Fela commented. She closed the book she was reading, and I could see Jane Eyre stamped in gold letters on its spine. “I have only looked at a few books so far, but I think humans like to begin right in the middle of their stories. In this book I do not even know what day it is, or why it is important, but I know that they did not take a walk!”
“I know it starts off slowly, but it gets much better when she meets Mr. Rochester.” Emma took a sip of her tea, then she set the cup down on the table next to her. “Anyway, Great-grandmama Esther was married to my great-grandpapa at the time, and she had just sent him off to the coal mine with a good breakfast in him. She was standing in the front yard hanging up the clean laundry on the line when the Great Electrical Storm started.”
I took a sip of the sweet, refreshing mint tea and settled back into the wicker sofa as the warmth of the hot drink settled into my stomach.
“Gr
eat-grandmama Esther didn’t know what was going on that day,” Emma continued. “They only got the newspaper once a week, and she didn’t have a radio. The town wasn’t wired for electricity at the time, you see. She said that it started with the ground buzzing like a hive of bees under her feet. She thought it was an earthquake at first, since those weren’t too uncommon in the mining town. But the ground stayed still, and the buzzing traveled up her legs and through her whole body like ants had gotten under her skin.”
“Ants under the skin.” I shuddered. “That must have been Tesla injecting the charge into the ground.”
“That’s what we think.” Emma nodded. “One moment she was looking up at the clear blue heavens with not a cloud in sight, and the next moment the sky turned yellow like the sun had melted all over. She figured out what happened much later after she’d gotten to Richmond and found a newsstand, but just then she thought it was the Lord opening up the heavens to take all of His faithful followers home.”
“I understand about your great-grandfather the digger,” Fela interjected, “but I think I am missing something about what you just said. Are you descended from bird-folk who live in the air?”
I was a little worried that Fela’s misinterpretation of the Rapture might offend Emma, but the black-haired girl just smiled.
“I rather wish I was a bird sometimes,” Emma sighed, “it would be quite nice to have wings. No, this was... something my great-grandmama believed might happen some day if she was a good enough person.”
“That must have been Tesla sending that electrical charge into the conductive upper layer of the atmosphere,” I said. “So what happened next?”
“When she was surrounded by bright white light, she thought she was being taken up to Heaven, too,” Emma said. “but that buzzing got so much stronger, and she could feel it in her fingers and her toes, and in her bones, too. She realized that it wasn’t the Rapture at all, and she was being struck by lightning. She said it felt like it lasted forever, and the only thing she wanted was for it to end.”