“You’re not stepping out on me, Jesse Turnblatt? Because I will—”
You cut her off with a kiss. “Are you jealous?”
“Should I be?”
“Never.”
She sniffs, but lets you kiss her again, her soft body tight against yours.
“I love you,” you murmur as your hands dip under her shirt.
“You better.”
Tuesday morning and you can’t breathe. Your nose is a deluge of snot and your joints ache. Theresa calls in sick for you and bundles you in bed with a bowl of stew. You’re supposed to meet White Wolf for your usual drink, but you’re much too sick. You consider sending Theresa with a note, but decide against it. It’s only one night. White Wolf will understand.
But by Friday the coughing has become a deep rough bellow that shakes your whole chest. When Theresa calls in sick for you again, you make sure your cough is loud enough for Boss to hear it. Pray he doesn’t dock you for the days you’re missing. But what you’re most worried about is standing up White Wolf again.
“Do you think you could go for me?” you ask Theresa.
“What, down to the bar? I don’t drink.”
“I’m not asking you to drink. Just to meet him, let him know I’m sick. He’s probably thinking I forgot about him.”
“Can’t you call him?”
“I don’t have his number.”
“Fine, then. What’s his name?”
You hesitate. Realize you don’t know. The only name you know is the one you gave him. “White Wolf.”
“Okay, then. Get some rest.”
Theresa doesn’t get back until almost 1 A.M. “Where were you?” you ask, alarmed. Is that a rosy flush in her cheeks, the scent of Cherry Coke on her breath?
“At the bar like you asked me to.”
“What took so long?”
She huffs. “Did you want me to go or not?”
“Yes, but . . . well, did you see him?”
She nods, smiles a little smile that you’ve never seen on her before.
“What is it?” Something inside you shrinks.
“A nice man. Real nice. You didn’t tell me he was Cherokee.”
By Monday you’re able to drag yourself back to work. There’s a note taped to your locker to go see Boss. You find him in his office, looking through the reports that he sends to Management every week.
“I hired a new guy.”
You swallow the excuses you’ve prepared to explain how sick you were, your promises to get your numbers up. They become a hard ball in your throat.
“Sorry, Jesse.” Boss actually does look a little sorry. “This guy is good, a real rez guy. Last name’s ‘Wolf.’ I mean, shit, you can’t get more Indian than that. The Tourists are going to eat it up.”
“The Tourists love me, too.” You sound whiny, but you can’t help it. There’s a sinking feeling in your gut that tells you this is bad, bad, bad.
“You’re good, Jesse. But nobody knows anything about Pueblo Indians, so all you’ve got is that TV shit. This guy, he’s. . . .” Boss snaps his fingers, trying to conjure the word.
“Authentic?” A whisper.
Boss points his finger like a gun. “Bingo. Look, if another pod opens up, I’ll call you.”
“You gave him my pod?”
Boss’s head snaps up, wary. You must have yelled that. He reaches over to tap a button on his phone and call security.
“Wait!” you protest.
But the men in uniforms are already there to escort you out.
You can’t go home to Teresa. You just can’t. So you head to the Hey U.S.A. It’s a different crowd than you’re used to. An afternoon crowd. Heavy boozers and people without jobs. You laugh because you fit right in.
The guys next to you are doing shots. Tiny glasses of rheumy dark liquor lined up in a row. You haven’t done shots since college but when one of the men offers you one, you take it. Choke on the cheap whiskey that burns down your throat. Two more and the edges of your panic start to blur soft and tolerable. You can’t remember what time it is when you get up to leave, but the Big Chief is bright in the night sky.
You stumble through the door and run smack into DarAnne. She growls at you, and you try to stutter out an apology but a heavy hand comes down on your shoulder before you get the words out.
“This asshole bothering you?”
You recognize that voice. “White Wolf?” It’s him. But he looks different to you. Something you can’t quite place. Maybe it’s the ribbon shirt he’s wearing, or the bone choker around his neck. Is his skin a little tanner than it was last week?
“Do you know this guy?” DarAnne asks, and you think she’s talking to you, but her head is turned towards White Wolf.
“Never seen him,” White Wolf says as he stares you down, and under that confident glare you almost believe him. Almost forget that you’ve told this man things about you even Theresa doesn’t know.
“It’s me,” you protest, but your voice comes out in a whiskey-slurred squeak that doesn’t even sound like you.
“Fucking glonnies,” DarAnne mutters as she pushes past you. “Always making a scene.”
“I think you better go, buddy,” White Wolf says. Not unkindly, if you were in fact strangers, if you weren’t actually buddies. But you are, and you clutch at his shirtsleeve, shouting something about friendship and Theresa and then the world melts into a blur until you feel the hard slap of concrete against your shoulder and the taste of blood on your lip where you bit it and a solid kick to your gut until the whiskey comes up the way it went down and then the Big Chief is blinking at you, How, How, How, until the darkness comes to claim you and the lights all flicker out.
You wake up in the gutter. The fucking gutter. With your head aching and your mouth as dry and rotted as month-old roadkill. The sun is up, Arizona fire beating across your skin. Your clothes are filthy and your shoes are missing and there’s a smear of blood down your chin and drying flakes in the creases of your neck. Your hands are chapped raw. And you can’t remember why.
But then you do.
And the humiliation sits heavy on your bruised up shoulder, a dark shame that defies the desert sun. Your job. DarAnne ignoring you like that. White Wolf kicking your ass. And you out all night, drunk in a downtown gutter. It all feels like a terrible dream, like the worst kind. The ones you can’t wake up from because it’s real life.
Your car isn’t where you left it, likely towed with the street sweepers, so you trudge your way home on sock feet. Three miles on asphalt streets until you see your highly mortgaged three-bedroom ranch. And for once the place looks beautiful, like the day you bought it. Tears gather in your eyes as you push open the door.
“Theresa,” you call. She’s going to be pissed, and you’re going to have to talk fast, explain the whole drinking thing (it was one time!) and getting fired (I’ll find a new job, I promise), but right now all you want is to wrap her in your arms and let her rose scent fill your nose like good medicine.
“Theresa,” you call again, as you limp through the living room. Veer off to look in the bedroom, check behind the closed bathroom door. But what you see in the bathroom makes you pause. Things are missing. Her toothbrush, the pack of birth control, contact lens solution.
“Theresa!?” and this time you are close to panic as you hobble down the hall to the kitchen.
The smell hits you first. The scent of fresh coffee, bright and familiar.
When you see the person sitting calmly at the kitchen table, their back to you, you relax. But that’s not Theresa.
He turns slightly, enough so you can catch his profile, and says, “Come on in, Jesse.”
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
White Wolf winces, as if your words hurt him. “You better have a seat.”
“What did you do to my wife?!”
“I didn’t do anything to your wife.” He picks up a small folded piece of paper, holds it out. You snatch it from his fingers and move s
o you can see his face. The note in your hand feels like wildfire, something with the potential to sear you to the bone. You want to rip it wide open, you want to flee before its revelations scar you. You ache to read it now, now, but you won’t give him the satisfaction of your desperation.
“So now you remember me,” you huff.
“I apologize for that. But you were making a scene and I couldn’t have you upsetting DarAnne.”
You want to ask how he knows DarAnne, how he was there with her in the first place. But you already know. Boss said the new guy’s name was Wolf.
“You’re a real son of a bitch, you know that?”
White Wolf looks away from you, that same pained look on his face. Like you’re embarrassing yourself again. “Why don’t you help yourself to some coffee,” he says, gesturing to the coffee pot. Your coffee pot.
“I don’t need your permission to get coffee in my own house,” you shout.
“Okay,” he says, leaning back. You can’t help but notice how handsome he looks, his dark hair a little longer, the choker on his neck setting off the arch of his high cheekbones.
You take your time getting coffee—sugar, creamer which you would never usually take—before you drop into the seat across from him. Only then do you open the note, hands trembling, dread twisting hard in your gut.
“She’s gone to her mother’s,” White Wolf explains as you read the same words on the page. “For her own safety. She wants you out by the time she gets back.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Only the truth. That you got yourself fired, that you were on a bender, drunk in some alleyway downtown like a bad stereotype.” He leans in. “You’ve been gone for two days.”
You blink. It’s true, but it’s not true, too.
“Theresa wouldn’t. . . .” But she would, wouldn’t she? She’d said it a million times, given you a million chances.
“She needs a real man, Jesse. Someone who can take care of her.”
“And that’s you?” You muster all the scorn you can when you say that, but it comes out more a question than a judgment. You remember how you gave him the benefit of the doubt on that whole Cherokee thing, how you thought “pretendian” was cruel.
He clears his throat. Stands.
“It’s time for you to go,” he says. “I promised Theresa you’d be gone, and I’ve got to get to work soon.” Something about him seems to expand, to take up the space you once occupied. Until you feel small, superfluous.
“Did you ever think,” he says, his voice thoughtful, his head tilted to study you like a strange foreign body, “that maybe this is my experience, and you’re the tourist here?”
“This is my house,” you protest, but you’re not sure you believe it now. Your head hurts. The coffee in your hand is already cold. How long have you been sitting here? Your thoughts blur to histories, your words become nothing more than forgotten facts and half-truths. Your heart, a dusty repository for lost loves and desires, never realized.
“Not anymore,” he says.
Nausea rolls over you. That same stretching sensation you get when you Relocate out of an Experience.
Whiplash, and then. . . .
You let go.
STRANGE WATERS
SAMANTHA MILLS
Samantha Mills is an archivist in sunny Southern California. Her short fiction has also appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Daily Science Fiction, and Escape Pod.
“Strange Waters,” her professional debut, is about fierce maternal love attempting to defy destiny in a world of shifting histories.
FISHERWOMAN MIKA SANDRIGAL WAS lost at sea. She knew where she was in relation to the Candorrean coastline and how to navigate back to her home city, Maelstrom. She knew the time of day. She knew the season. She knew the phase of the moon and the pattern of the tide.
She did not know the year.
Strange waters flowed beneath the hull of her fishing boat, illuminating the midnight darkness with phosphorescent swirls of yellow and green. The thick scent of pepper and brine tickled her nose, and she knew that a juggernaut swam far below, vast and merciless and consuming shield fish by the thousands.
Mika squinted up at a familiar night sky, at the Dancing Girl, the Triplets, the Mad Horse. She had fished off this coast for nearly twenty years, eight of them lost in time. She’d seen green waters, pink waters, blue. She’d been to Candorrea when it was a loose collection of fishing villages, and she’d been to Candorrea when the buildings were so tall she could hardly look at them without shaking. No matter what century she washed up in, however, the constellations were there to guide her home.
It was a windless night. Mika pulled out her oars and set course for Maelstrom, keen to find out when she had landed.
It was the Year of the Blade, 992. The city was metal and glass, its gleaming spires and brilliant rainbow lights casting a skyline like an oil painting. A dome was under construction on the southernmost hill, its name written in freestanding stone letters so large they were visible from the water: OCEANARIUM.
This was not her time, not even close.
Mika arrived shortly after the breakfast hour, when dockworkers and merchants were trickling down from the city in the hills. She bypassed the piers entirely, each of them far too tall for her little wooden boat, and glided into the sandy shallows at the north end of the dockworks.
She opened the fish hold in the middle of the deck and hauled out three large nets containing her catch. There were sixty pounds of rainbow-colored senfish, always popular; assorted deep-water crabs, all but one of them extinct since 646, if her Timeline of the Deeps was correct; and a single mammal, as large as a barrel-chested mountain dog and thick with hallucinogenic fat: the rare and lucrative sleepwhale.
She wasn’t the first fisherwoman-out-of-time they had encountered, and she wouldn’t be the last. The anachronism of a sixth-century fishing boat had caught the eye of every merchant on the north shore, and soon they came running, eager to beat one another to strange fish.
The sleepwhale went to a pair of glossy young researchers from the oceanarium. They wore white rubber gloves and green rubber boots, and Mika didn’t care one whit why they were taking the beast, but they seemed incapable of keeping their thoughts inside their heads.
“Gene mapping—”
“—reproduction—”
“—grafting the fat signature onto land-bound species—”
Mika understood one word in ten. She held up a hand and enunciated carefully. “Please. I will take the hardtack and beans, and a crate of apples, and be on my way.”
The young woman blinked at her owlishly, crouched beside the sleepwhale with one arm wedged under its fin. “You canny mean to weigh off so quick! We have questions—”
“No,” Mika said firmly. That word, at least, always remained the same.
After a bit of pleading and attempted bribery (a month’s worth of supplies—navigation tech—a warm bed for the night!), they let her go. She had been prepared to fight her way out, if necessary. She knew too well the avarice of researchers.
Researchers never stopped at questions. In their zeal for information they spouted theories, they babbled context, they shouted history and timelines and data and conclusions. Mika didn’t dare listen.
For eight years, she had avoided all knowledge of the late sixth century.
For eight years, she had avoided all knowledge of her children.
In the Year of the Mad Horse, 537, Keira was sixteen years old and waiting for her mother to return home from a fishing trip. She was a smart girl, bold and strong. If it hadn’t been for a lingering influenza, she would have been at the helm that morning, when a trio of waterspouts blocked Mika’s escape from the timestream.
In the Year of the Mad Horse, 537, Emry was fourteen years old. Bowen was eleven. Terrewyn was nine. They were each brilliant in their own way, Emry with numbers and Bowen with animals and Terrewyn already reading the stars. Their father was gone, his thread cut short in 5
32. They needed their mother to come home. They needed their mother.
Keira, Emry, Bowen, Terrewyn. Mika breathed their names every morning when she woke and every night before she fell asleep. If she was going to see them again, she had to keep going, no matter how long it took, no matter how exhausting, how difficult, how demoralizing.
It would have been nice to stay the night in 992, to cleanse the salt from her skin and the sway of the waves from her hips. But it wasn’t worth the risk. It was only a matter of time before Mika drew the attention of someone worse than a researcher. Like a politician.
Or a librarian.
It was the Year of the Sidewinder, 782. Maelstrom was well into the industrial age, boasting wrought-iron gaslights on every street corner and mechanical cargo lifters along every pier. Unlike the light and shine of the tenth century, this city crouched beneath a blanket of smog.
Mika saw far more of it than she’d intended, because she’d been caught. Succumbing to the lure of a hot meal, she had entered the nearest dining hall—and had the bad luck to sit next to a bureaucrat.
Petro had lacquered hair and a crisp tweed suit studded with silver medallions. He took one look at her sun-faded clothing and declared, “I certainly hope you haven’t just engaged in an unauthorized beach auction. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”
He marched her into the hills with a pair of guards at her back, to a prison hotel built for the purpose of assimilating new citizens. Mika had landed in one of the guild eras, unfortunately, and clearly belonged to no guild.
It was a nice prison cell, at least, with fresh sheets and a writing desk and a folding screen to cover the privy. Mika spent three nights alone, charting what constellations she could see through her window, before Petro returned with his inevitable list of questions.
“Your name?”
“Jera.”
Petro’s eyes narrowed, but he neglected to challenge the lie. “Your boat is clearly sixth century,” he said, “—excellent condition, by the way—but there are patches to the hull, the rails, the equipment in the cockpit.”
Mika said, “Yes.”
“Some of these metals we have never encountered. They are forged in a manner our engineers declare impossible. You must have landed very far ahead, yes?” He stared at her, expectant, pen poised over a leather-bound notebook.
The New Voices of Science Fiction Page 23