by Breach
This is how it happens, more or less: Dan’s coming home from work one day. He’s tired. Not exhausted, mind, just a bit battered. Things weren’t falling into place today. Someone was meant to send an email but didn’t. Dan got it late, almost missed a meeting. He pulled things back together – Dan always does – but that stuff takes its toll. Anyway, small wonder he’s distracted, and he’s gone two blocks past his street before he realises he’s missed the turn. Stupid, he thinks. Worrying too much. He gives his head a little shake to clear it and doubles back.
The city council’s really been pushing the project in the last few months. There’re developments everywhere. Dan passes a construction site and tries to picture the building that was there before. It can’t have been demolished more than three weeks ago, but it’s gone from his mind. He shakes his head one more time. It’s a wonder he remembers what his own street looks like.
And apparently he doesn’t, because he walks right past it again.
Now Dan stops. He makes his way back. He keeps his eyes on the signs, and he reaches his street. It’s not clear what the problem was. Everything looks the same as usual. Or does it? There’s a building he’s not sure he remembers. A few, actually. And the restaurant doesn’t look right. Under new management, maybe? Or they updated the branding? He’ll have to ask.
Leah’s not at their usual table. Dan peers through the window, but can’t see her. Down in the house, perhaps. Baby’s had a fever recently, so she’s been keeping him home to let him sleep. Dan heads round the back of the restaurant and takes the elevator down to the substreet. Most people are out having dinner on the surface, but a couple of houses have their lights on. His is one of them.
He notices a weird smell when he gets inside. Not unpleasant or anything, just unfamiliar. He goes into the bedroom and knocks his shoes off, then walks out to the kitchen in his socks. He’s got the fridge open and is looking for a drink before he twigs that something’s wrong.
The TV’s on. Some rom-com with a B-list cast. A family of five are watching it. Or they were. Now they’re watching Dan – looking at him like he’s lost his mind. For a few seconds, he thinks he has.
Then he gets it. That smell. It’s an other-person’s-place kind of smell. He’s messed up again. This isn’t his house.
And let me tell you, he’s pretty embarrassed. He explains what’s happened, tries to laugh it off, but it’s clear the family thinks he’s bonkers. The father gives him a thin smile and a firm hand out the door. A minute later, Dan’s having to knock and ask for his shoes back. He leaves buzzing, sweat under his collar. Then he goes looking for Leah.
But the houses next door are locked, and Dan’s key doesn’t work. The lawn strips look wrong. Dan mowed his yesterday – these have too much growth. He goes up and down the substreet looking for the house that looks like his, and he doesn’t find it.
Is he worrying yet? Not really. Poor guy’s just bemused. Can’t figure it out. Maybe afraid something’s gone wrong in his brain. His family has a history. But Dan’s still way too young, surely?
He goes back up to the surface, heads into the restaurant and asks after Leah. The manager’s not seen her all day. Is the street looking weird today? Is something different about this place? The guy just shakes his head. He asks Dan if something’s wrong. Dan says he doesn’t know. He goes outside.
There’s a reasonable explanation, he thinks. This is all some sort of mistake. He’s got muddled somehow, and when he finally sees Leah and tells her she’s going to be laughing at him for years afterwards. It occurs to him that he hasn’t even tried to ring her yet. He pulls out his phone and dials the number. The call rings out. Dan tries again. Nothing.
He stews for a moment, then he remembers their home system. They’ve got the lights, speakers, TV, computer all linked up and accessible via their phones. You can make calls through the system base, so Dan does. Poor bastard. This is what he hears:
Silence. Dead silence. And in the background, a baby crying.
He starts talking. Shouting for Leah. People in the cafés nearby are looking at him. People on the street are crossing to avoid him. Dan stays there, on his phone, listening to whatever’s happening in the house he can’t find. The crying changes, but it keeps going. Right up until his phone dies.
The siren goes off then, and the rotation happens. Up comes the house. It’s still the wrong one. He sees the family through the window. Recognises them. He’ll never forget them. All night he stays there, watching that house. Then when morning comes he watches the rotation again. The barriers slide up, the cogs whir, and the houses drop like piano keys. The restaurant slides over the top. It shudders upwards and locks into place. And now Dan’s seen both rotations. He knows for sure his house is gone.
He goes to the police. They have some trouble figuring out what he’s trying to tell them. They say they can put Leah and the kid on their missing persons file, but they don’t understand about the house. They ask him if he’s trying to report lost property. He says that’s exactly what he’s trying to report. Blank stares all around.
Next, he tries the city council. They treat him to a lot of demonstrations about why what he’s suggesting is completely impossible. They show him drawings, computer simulations, animatronic models, and they ask him time and time again if he’s sure he knows where he lives. It’s happened before, they tell him. People aren’t used to things changing so much. They forget. They get disoriented. But then they find their street and things are right as rain. Dan doesn’t need to worry.
Dan does nothing but worry. Poor guy prowls the streets for the next three years, looking for his place, his family. His friends and his folks keep asking what’s happened, where Leah’s gone, why she took the baby. What can he tell them? So of course they assume the worst. They cut him off, cut him out.
He tracks down those others. The ones the council told him about. The other ones like him. And slowly, slowly, he hears it all. The places that go missing. The places that move. The people that don’t come back. One woman had a house vanish five months ago. Swears she saw it in Abbottsford the other day, just before it rotated. Another guy’s found the place he lived with his brother, but his brother’s not in it.
They go to the authorities. They go to the papers. And one by one they break down and go to see psychologists. All except Dan. Dan won’t let go. Wouldn’t let go. It got to him in the end, I think. I said it was sad.
He couldn’t stay in Melbourne, so he moved. He started drinking. I met him in a bar on Ann Street. Don’t know why he told me all this. Guess he just needed to get it out. Probably would’ve told anyone who walked in. Wish it hadn’t been me.
Because this next bit stops me from sleeping. When I met Dan, he’d been in Brisbane for eight years. All told, that’s eleven since his home went missing. But his phone’s still linked into the system. He can do everything: switch the lights, play music, tap the baby monitor. And he still makes calls. Still listens. Almost every day. Talks, too, sometimes. Talks to Leah and his son like they can hear him. But mostly he listens.
He told me he hears silence, though not always. The crying stopped a long time ago, but now he thinks he hears movement. Something shuffling around. Soft voices, too. He swears to that.
He linked up while I was there, made me listen to it. That’s when I realised how gone he was. Because there was nothing on the end of that phone but the hiss of an empty room. He made me keep listening, though. Said it was there. Kept asking if I heard it yet. In the end I snapped. I thrust the phone back at him and walked out.
I couldn’t say it, see. I couldn’t do that to him. Not after all he’d been through. Though if I’m honest, it was as much for my sake as for his. Because if I really believed it, then I’d be just as lost as him.
And so now I lie awake at night, trying to talk myself out of it. Telling myself that I invented it. That it was a glitch. That I tricked my mind somehow. Telling myself that – when I picked up the phone that evening and held it to m
y ear – I didn’t hear a child say: ‘Dad?’
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The Naked Astronaut
Hari Navarro
Hari Navarro comes to you from the breast-shaped bit that pokes out of the West Coast of New Zealand’s majestically monikered North Island. Far from an avid reader, inspiration is drawn instead from the lacerating love letters of Cobain and Frangipane and all things short and squat. He's had work published at 365Tomorrows, Breach and AntipodeanSF.
The banquet table is hung in an ornate golden cloth and regimented bowls of dipping sauce encircle the naked astronaut at its centre. The ceiling arches up high and something it rolls in the wall.
They cleaned me up before laying me out. Underlings in black with balled scented cloth pushed the piss and the smears of shit from between and down the length of my legs. They wiped the singe of black smoke from my face and clipped the fused lumps from my hair.
I felt it as they kneaded and rocked on my skin, as they tried to scrub away this thing that they did. But it sticks to me still and I smell like tobacco, the type that is old and wheezed.
There was a machine, a floating thing that with a zephyr sweep of black light stitched the deep gash at my cheek. Redundantly it returned me, restored and buffed to a sheen. My face as it was that second before they hit. That moment before I surged and became first to cross the line, first to touch a planet green and lush, that which was not my own.
I am conscious, whereas before I think I was not. I keep coming and going but I remember, I remember the heavy tincture syringed into the ball of my eye. A weight that has now soaked and settled into every last cell, and the last twitch spasm has slid from my fingers and its numbness it has taken me whole.
At first, I had thought I was standing looking into a mirror. I felt no resistance beneath my back and before me was the stretch of my own naked form. I now know it is a projection that hovers above me, without so much as a flicker. A digital mirror of sadistic design, a pixel-perfect window to allow me to spectate on whatever the game is to come.
I think I know what it is. I think I have pieced together this impossible thing. But I also think that the sheer insanity of it all is maybe trying to wrap me, falsely comforting with the notion that all is but a figment.
I cannot feel it, but I know I am laying on a table. I gaze upward at the setting below me and it is not unlike one I think I once saw, a memory rummaged from that Italian shore-leave retreat. Yes, that's what it is I’m sure.
Nothing alien to see here, move along people. Move along.
And speaking of the off-world elephants in the room, they are people. Humanoid and exactly like me, such are these things that now murmur and jostle as they lower themselves into their chairs.
Chairs, tables, and things that have clothes which have buttons and collars and countless other things that my mind knows and can touch. This is far too vivid to be a dream, its a film perhaps? I’m sick, injured, sitting safely in a medical unit watching a screen. My head lolled to one side a single strand of saliva connecting my lips to my shoulder.
Roll back. Yes, my mind it was damaged, I remember the crash, I do, I do. Do I? The ejection sequence and my body thrusting upwards into a shrapnel strewn sky that gripped my skull just so, then forces that strafed my face pushing me down — crushing me back into myself.
I can smell things, aftershave and alcohol and the hot sizzle crackle of oil. Just wait for them to talk, I tell myself. Wait for them to speak and their words will be earthbound. English not one doubt. And this alone will surely then out this most bizarre and wicked of dreams.
A man of regal gait, dripping in jewels and with hair that balds at the back, approaches the table and puts a finger to his lips. The whispers, the shuffling, it stops as if slapped and he grunts as he slips into place. I think he is going to speak but he doesn't and he reaches down and raises up a knife and with a neat flick slices the ear from my head.
I don’t feel a thing, no pain at least, as my head is twisted and the other gristle flap is detached and the hungry they swarm to my face. Connoisseurs with special hooked prongs to probe my canals and pluck the dead drums from their hollows.
Well played delusion, well played. You are covering yourself well. You squashed sound to a buzz and now you have seen fit to kill even that. But in this silence, I feel and smell their sticky breath on my cheek and it speaks to me. I know these people.
I don’t want this.
But, they continue to hack, no not hack, it’s so precise, each incision cleaving through blossoming fat and dancing delicately against the bone. Peeling me away from my frame.
I see flashes of blue light as the lackeys they cauterise. I see electrodes at the ready, wires to keep my heart thumping when the only thing left for it to feed is the brain in the opencast bowl of my skull. I see the game you have engineered, so foul with self-hatred and rotten with boredom. Let’s pluck her apart, see how much of me you can swallow, how much of me you can strip from my bones before death it finally drops its harlequin flag.
So much anger. Such frenzy as you feast.
The effort in the detail. Such vile utensils you provide your guests. Such odious finery, as a glinting sickle now scoops the arc of my breast. And a modicum of the tactile returns as I feel it detach and I look on as its lofted away. Go, fuck off, soak it in lukewarm water for a couple of hours. Then cook it in brine until tender. Remember to slice it up thick, season and dip in whisked egg and then evenly pat it in breadcrumbs. Fry me in butter until crispy and deep golden brown. And fuck you as you gobble me down.
Be patient and let it pass.
The smell of raw flesh fills me. It reminds me of home; of a childhood, of fat bursting sausages gripped in white bread, of a beach were ancient bones and beading wet bodies bleach in the Christmas sun. These beautiful things I forgot as I stood and pushed that which was behind me and greedily reached up into space.
God, these aliens are hot. Look at his tar black hair, the lines in his cheeks as he laughs. Beautiful and streaming confidence, but I know he's shy this one. He’s not one of the pack. I know he doesn't want to be here as his long fingers they slot into the loops of an intricately embossed pair of scissors and he snip, snip, snips at my lips.
What the fuck is wrong with me? I want him, I want to curl and loop my arms up under his from behind and press my head to the small of his back. I want to cry for him and love him so much that he never would do this again. If I could I’d smile at him, even now as he cuts away at my kiss.
Time to wake up.
Time to wake up.
Fuck. I feel the tug as they grip and rip down the muscle and it hangs like fronds at my thigh. And I feel the crush as they all now fall silent and they gather and inquisitively poke and chat at my groin, this confederacy of forks with two prongs.
Why won't it stop? My body is numb but I can’t stop feeling. I can’t stop watching. Maybe this is it? Maybe this will be the last fucking terrible thing I see before my eyes too are wrenched from my head. Make it stop.
Got to shift, focus on something.
Something old and safe. The farm. My childhood. Bloated dead cow, dragged to the roadside for collection its labia grotesquely swollen and red. Fuck.
Next day. Think.
Summer. Light. Walking to school. The smell of drying hay gust in my hair. The cow is still there. Look what the dogs have done. Chewing and ripping at that ballooned puffed lip in the night. Sex is dead and only a fleshy torn gape cavern remains.
Wake the fuck up.
Wake the…
The yawn of the early morning sun begins to feast on the arched brick facade of the Collins Street Station underpass. Mote-filled beams creep, gently steaming fingers that brush away at the night's thickness. A slow reveal of the darkness's battered ward, strings of bile hanging from the rip of her torn mouth.
Curled foetal, hugging what’s left of herself Flight Commander Anahira Hing stares into the gibbous round of the graffiti-smeared mirror above.
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