The Sky Is Yours

by Chandler Klang Smith

  “The sickness devoured his body, but his eyes—his eyes were still alive. Esos ojos, esos ojos…It is a mother’s duty to remember, a duty and a curse,” she would whisper to Swanny, furtively wiping her mouth as she lowered the rolling pin. “Our sins are visited upon our children. Your mother knows this. This is why she turns away.”

  “Corona, get me a fresh Carbon8.” Swanny would tap her glass with a swizzle stick. “This one’s gone flat.”

  It was true that Pippi Dahlberg, Swanny’s mother, never even came upstairs when Swanny was sick. She said she could not bear it. To Swanny, this was understandable. Swanny could still vaguely remember the days when her father was dying: the dim, furry light that crept past the velvet curtains in the master bedroom, the bags of fluid, red and yellow and yellow-green, that seeped into his body and then seeped back out. “Your father is not himself,” Pippi had told her, as the twisted figure amid those pillows contorted itself unnaturally, like a hand shaping shadows. Pippi had tended him through his sickness, and now she had no nursing left for Swanny. Besides, they were together the rest of the time.

  The first time Swanny saw her mother without makeup, she did not recognize her. Pippi was a petite woman, trim and active but not slender, with the grasping look of someone who has always strained against the natural tides of metabolism and hair color. Her fingers tapered to lacquered talons; a stenciled mole marked a spot just above her upper lip. Her skin pressed too tightly against the bones of her cheeks, as if her inner self longed to break through the thin barrier of flesh and at last breathe air. Her shoulders, always padded beneath her rainbow of suits, were square and hunched forward slightly. She seemed as though she might pounce.

  Pippi was an Old Mom and an active member of the Old Mom Movement. When Swanny was small, Pippi chaired the local chapter of the organization. The Gray Ladies of Wonland County, as the members called themselves, met each month in the house’s ballroom, around a massive mahogany table still battered and gouged from the days of the Siege. The other Gray Ladies, like Pippi, were anything but gray. Their hair came in shades of Burnt Umber, Sienna, Hayseed, Ebony, Dusty Rose, even Robin’s Egg—Swanny named the colors from the fan deck of paint samples in her Junior Decorator’s Kit. The Gray Ladies wore ostrich plumes and leopard print, patterned tights and fractal hats. Their high heels rang against the ballroom tiles. Though they were Old Moms, not one of them would tell Swanny her age.

  According to Pippi, Old Moms were the target of discrimination by prejudiced individuals who believed women should not bear children after menopause. Corona was one of those prejudiced individuals, though she tenderized meat for their luncheons just the same. Swanny didn’t know what the dentist thought of them; sometimes she noticed him leering through the ballroom French doors, or leaving his business cards on the table for them to find.

  Little Swanny found their meetings dull. She sat beneath the mahogany table, staring at the pointy toes of lizard-skin shoes, and snacked on pinwheels of rabbit prosciutto and cream cheese that Corona had assembled. The other Old Moms did not bring their children. They spoke about the perils of inbreeding (though “Who could blame a person for wanting to keep good genetics in the family?”), thieving servants, seepage, and the declining condition of their various estates, where vines choked hand-quarried stone, and copper monuments crumbled to green dust. Sometimes in their excitement they dropped pamphlets to the floor, with titles like “A Childless Life, Then a Childish Life: Priorities, Motherhood, and the Federal Constitution” or “You Can Have It All, Just Not All at the Same Time.” Sometimes their faces were bandaged; soft neck wattles vanished, noses changed.

  As the years passed, one by one the Gray Ladies stopped coming. First it was Vidalia, with her antique wigs and her eternal scent of apricots, which lingered for days after the meetings she attended. Her disappearance was the source of endless, hushed consternation in the group, which Swanny strained to hear because she sensed she was not supposed to. But all she could decipher were a handful of troubling phrases: “listened to the rumors,” “no time to sell,” and “soil testing here—imagine.” The next to go was Nanette, who according to Pippi had not worn the same pair of earrings twice in twenty years; later, Swanny would struggle to recall her face, but only an unbroken parade of pearl clusters, teardrop diamonds, and tasteful emerald studs would present themselves. Her departure was met with more sympathy, and with speculation about whether it would be appropriate for the group to attend her son’s funeral. It was around this time that Pippi and Swanny began bathing in bottled spring water, heated by Corona in enormous kettles on the stove, rather than in the faintly metallic well water that poured from the house’s taps.

  By Swanny’s ninth birthday, there were no more meetings of the Gray Ladies of Wonland County. There was only Pippi, paying stacks of bills at the immense mahogany table, and Swanny taking tea with her dolls beneath it. Once, Swanny asked why the other Old Moms had gone.

  “I wouldn’t hazard a guess. They sold in a buyers’ market.” Pippi rapped more numbers into her adding machine. “Do you know what estates like ours once cost? To buy outright, then restore? One doesn’t simply abandon such investments in a panic. The market has a way of correcting itself, you know.”

  The dentist tuned up Pippi’s face from time to time: he used that phrase, “tune up,” because the fixes were minor. She’d had her Major Work done the year before Swanny was born, the year she’d retired, the year that she and “Chet” (as she called Swanny’s father) had moved out here to “the boonies.” Once, and only once, with an air of decided confidentiality, she told Swanny that this had all happened the year she turned fifty-five. Because of this secrecy, the number took on talismanic significance for Swanny. She often wrote it in the soot on the chimney ledge while she watched the dragons. It seemed unlikely to her, at age six or nine or eleven, that anyone could ever be so old. It seemed even more incredible, however, that her mother had once been young.

  Before she relocated to Wonland, Pippi Dahlberg had been Prime Mover of McGuffin-Stork, one of the city’s leading content firms. Sometimes she told Swanny stories of those days: the time one messenger, scorched and roughed-up but still alive, had glided up to her window on his HowScoot with the necessary contracts, just barely in time for an important meeting; the afternoon she recalibrated the projection settings on a competitor’s LookyGlass so that all the models in the other woman’s presentation appeared to have sickly green skin and gowns the hue of toxic waste; the diamond brooch her mentor had made for her when she was finally promoted above him that spelled out the words EAT SHIT & DIE.

  “The city was glam in those days, glam and dangerous. The dragons separated out the wheat from the chaff. Either you were in it to win it, or poof, off you went! I was just an assistant then: what a time to be starting out. But now I’m dating myself.” Pippi, scrutinizing the mirror, deftly swabbed lipstick off her teeth with a handkerchief. “I remember the Strike Ums account. Selling lighters to a city on fire, can you imagine? But we did it. We had content for any product, any day—and subliminals every night. Always onward, always ‘What’s next?’ Powdered Zip to keep you going—I never ate. Well, you’re only young once, darling. Besides, the world has changed.”

  Pippi’s stories made little or no sense, but Swanny just liked to hear her mother talk. It was far better than going through the old purse of foreign coins, or sketching pictures by herself. Pippi’s voice echoed through the empty house in a kind of song.

  “What career will I have, Mother?” Swanny asked one afternoon, obediently holding out her nails for Pippi to paint. Pippi frowned at the cerise polish she’d just applied to her daughter’s pudgy fingers.

  “Go, go, go, it’s no life for a little girl,” she said at last. “Now, don’t blow on them, that makes ripples.”

  “But I won’t always be a little girl. I’ll be a Prime Mover and then an Old Mom like you.”

  Pippi shook her head slightly. Swanny looked at the little seam by her moth
er’s ear, where the dentist sewed the skin back during “tune-ups.”

  “The better firms have all shut down, dear,” Pippi said. “Too many people have gotten burnt, in every sense of the word. Now it’s all shilling on the streets. Tawdry.”

  “So I won’t have a career?”

  “Stop crying.”

  “I’m not crying.”

  “Well, you mustn’t, because there’s no reason to. There’s investing in your future, and that’s nearly the same thing as a career.”

  “Can I wear the diamond brooch?”

  “Yes. When I’m dead.”

  * * *

  Now, a decade later, the baroness, age eighteen, is packing her hope chest, pausing, every now and then, to visit her vanity mirror and fret about her chins. This morning, over brunch, Pippi commented on those chins, on their plurality, and though Swanny’s usual response would involve the defiant consumption of bon bons, today she feels apprehensive. It’s begun to occur to her that her meeting with her fiancé, in the flesh (oh the troubling carnal frisson of that phrase!), is no longer a distant hypothetical, but a reckoning soon due. And though she hardly doubts her own beauty, the thought of her body so near his fills her with uncertainties.

  Meanwhile, up in the sky above Empire Island, Duncan Ripple might as well be a world away. He wipes jizz from the steering wheel with the elbow of his hoodie. He yawns. Stroking off reminds him of deleting the junk folder on his ThinkTank. It clears the memory, sure, but you have to reboot right after. Otherwise you crash.

  Ripple zips up, shifts back into DESC, eases the HowFly down a few hundred feet. He wishes he’d thought to bring a few brewskis. The camera crew used to keep a cooler of them under the craft service table and looked the other way when he and his friends helped themselves. It made for better footage. Now, having a brewski at home usually requires chugging it in the walk-in fridge so his parents don’t notice, and he fucking hates shivering. Of course, he could always take the elevator up to the library to see his uncle, who keeps his old-timey icebox full of Bog Peat Stout or Lantern Oil Bock or some other bitter sludge in jugs he calls growlers. But that means having to deal with his uncle, who re-learned English as a second language so he could talk with a British accent whenever he wanted, and who’s lately taken to wearing caftans with tassels that snag in the gears of his wheelchair. Ripple really just needs to get a glove compartment chill bin installed, like his friend Kelvin did.

  Ripple flips on the left engine, just to try it. More grinding, a hint of fumes—he shuts it down in a hurry. To the shop it goes. He’s hungry. He wonders what Hooligan’s been up to, if he’s eaten any more of that unicorn hide rug Ripple’s mom just put down in the third-floor den. Probably did, little stink goblin. Next time the pooch stays in his cage.

  It’s gotten kind of foggy, Ripple’s noticing now; he squints, shifts from DESC to FLY and clicks on the beams. Outside, it’s almost like that commercial, only instead of forming a city, these clouds are more like a cave—a gray one, closing him in. He’s going to be late to dinner. He hates having to eat with the kitchen staff. The beams are showing him nothing but dense vapor. Ditto the brights.

  The first time Ripple took his new HowFly up, his father rode along. Ripple had already taken driving lessons from his impulse-control coach, a squirrelly little guy with an annoying habit of wresting the glide-thrust lever out of his hands, but this was worse. The smell of Humphrey Ripple’s toupee glue filled the air car as he pointedly strapped himself in. What kind of butt nugget doesn’t trust his own son?

  “Dad, I got this,” Ripple said, bringing it up nice and easy, just like he’d learned.

  “This isn’t one of your immersive simulations.” Humphrey depressed a phantom brake pedal with his shoe. “You have to take into account variables that run counter to your expectations. There’s no foreshadowing in reality.”

  “I understand reality. I star in reality.”

  “Starred, past tense. And you don’t understand it, Duncan. You understand narrative constructs, virtual realms. I’m talking about cause and effect here, harsh and brutal. The kind without a laugh track.”

  Ripple wished his dad would stop bringing up laugh tracks; the Toob series hadn’t used one since Ripple was in the fifth grade. Which Humphrey would know if he ever watched it at all.

  “Why did you even buy me a dragon wagon if you don’t want me to drive it?”

  “I want you to drive it cautiously. And referring to the vehicle in those terms doesn’t do much to set my mind at ease. If I ever get an inkling you’ve been using it to taunt these monstrosities, or—”

  “Relax, I’m not stupid.”

  “Wiser men than you have made worse mistakes.” Humphrey’s LookyGlass pinged with a stock update; to Ripple’s surprise, he ignored it. “Listen, Duncan. I was sixteen once too.”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “I’m speaking developmentally here. I know you feel invincible, especially behind the wheel. But you’re not. None of us are. Even if you’re not seeking out the dragons, you aren’t completely safe. Stay attuned. It’s best to keep them in your sight. You may find it hard to believe, huge as they are, but they can have a way of sneaking up on you.”

  But now, Ripple isn’t attuned. And that’s why he’s fiddling with the buttons on the dash when he glances up to see the dragon tail whipping toward him in the fog. He has time to notice the spikes protruding from it—knobby, bone-colored, like exposed vertebrae—the puffy scars amid the dull green scales, the dried starfish and anemones that cling on still, despite the many years that have passed since the creature rose from the seas. It’s as though he’s never seen anything so clearly in his life. It blocks out all view of the sky, and it’s still swinging nearer.

  It’ll stop.

  It’ll stop.

  It smashes through the windscreen.

  Ripple closes his eyes. Pellets of glass hail into his face and hair; the wind gusts around him. He has a sudden sensation, not of falling but of weightlessness, suspension, as though he’s been thrown loose of gravity’s pull. The breath leaves his lungs; he lets it go. He doesn’t need it anymore. A new city, beyond the sky, opens its gate and bathes him in radiance.

  Warm radiance.

  The HowFly is on fire.

  And falling fast.

  Every light on the dash is flashing. The hood’s popped up, the engine’s blazing, and the heat of it pours in through the glass-fanged hole where the windscreen used to be. Ripple slaps every button, twists every dial, yanks up and down on the throttle to no avail. Alarms sound. A cheerful female voice chirps, “Flyby assistance has been contacted. Please be patient. Flyby assistance…”

  Ripple wheezes. The world’s rushing up to meet him. He gropes the floor mats for his inhaler. He feels Sin Bun wrappers, currency, a pebble beneath his hand. He knocks a lever with his wrist. A new light starts flashing.

  “Flyby assistance has been contacted. Please be…”

  Ripple coughs. Dark, gritty smoke tears his eyes. He can’t breathe. He sees the light flashing EJEC, EJEC, EJEC, sees the moon roof pop up. Then he passes out.

  * AF, meaning the current era—after the human discovery of fire.

  2

  CASTAWAY

  The Lady brought the Girl to the Island in a big green tub. The Girl bailed out the bottom with a small pink cup. The Girl does not remember this, but the Lady once told her, so it must be true. What the Girl does remember is the water all around and the sky that drizzled into it. Their world was just a rift for water to pass through. No amount of bailing could keep it at bay.

  The Island was a Human Nature Preserve, beyond the dragons’ reach. Mountains of garbage formed a new horizon there. Shiny black trash bags, tire towers, a piano with a gappy smile. Rusty machine parts. A fridge with magnets still on it. Dead flowers wrapped in plastic. A mannequin’s outstretched hand. A kitchen sink, part of a couch, broken bottles, an iron lamppost. There was no interruption, no bare place for the eye to rest. The lit
ter was the land. The Lady stood at the water’s edge with the Girl on her hip, looking in.

  The Lady did not bother tying up their tub. She let it bob away. The first house she built was made of rotten crates. The second one was a smashed HowFly with the seats torn out and pink insulation for sleeping. The third house she never built because by then most of her had been eaten by the vultures and the gulls. The Girl couldn’t keep them away, but she didn’t try too hard either. She needed the company. She liked the vultures best. Their faces were haggard and creased, like the Lady’s had been.

  The Girl lived on the Island alone after that. She learned to cast the Lady’s pantyhose nets to catch the mossy fish. She scraped out the insides of unlabeled cans. When the barges came, tooting, to pile more trash on the shore, she hid, as the Lady had taught her. In time, her memories of the Lady became vague, crowded out by the cries of the gulls. In time, the barges stopped coming.

  There were still things she couldn’t forget, though. The Lady had told her the Truth about the city, a Truth that God had told to her. This was a Truth that only God, the Lady, and the Girl knew, and now that God and the Lady were gone, the Girl would not forget it.

  “That city is the land of the dead,” the Lady had told her. It had been in the early times on the Island, when they still lived in the crate house. The night was full of thunder, and the wood so wet that the Girl could press marks into it with her fingernails. “Don’t let nobody tell you different. The only people left there is the People Machines.”

  “People Machines?”