Playgroung of Lost Toys

by Exile

  Jim was silent over dinner and made no mention of the modifications he had made. I didn’t see the tunnel piece again until it was time for bed. Jim came in from the bathroom with the most ridiculous hat I had ever seen.

  “What is that?” I asked, even though I already knew. “You look like an idiot.”

  Jim had strapped the toy tunnel to his head with a couple of scarves. The two ends stuck out the sides like great bull horns.

  “Toro! Toro!” I called at him, waving the corners of a bed sheet like a matador.

  Jim obliged me by making a run at the sheet with his curved-tunnel horns. He then mockingly gored me as an angry bull might. Despite the roughhousing, Jim’s rigged contraption remained in place. It may not have been fashionable, but it was secure.

  “Do I look older?”

  “No, you look dumber,” I said.

  “I’ve only had it on for a few minutes. I think I feel older, but it’s hard to tell.”

  “You’re not wearing that to bed, are you?”

  “It’s an experiment,” he said. “A new one. If I’m right, I should be one of the big kids by morning. Maybe even a teenager.”

  “A teenager with a squeaky voice and hair on your balls. That I’d like to see.”

  “I’ll wake you up when I’m bigger than you. Bigger than all those kids at school. Maybe as big as Dad.”

  Jim did not wake me that night. I slept straight through till morning. When at last I rose, I could see, from the lack of a telltale sag, that Jim was not in the top bunk. I was about to look for him when I saw someone standing in the room, quietly staring out the window. It was a man, very old, very frail. He was also completely naked. When he heard me stir, he turned slowly so I could see his withered face and long white beard. Then he spoke – a crackling croak of a voice, familiar and unnerving. I immediately began screaming in blind terror. I would have thought I was having a nightmare if I hadn’t been so acutely conscious of waking up a moment before.

  It didn’t take long for Mother to come bursting into the room to see what was wrong. At first, she only saw me frozen in bed, mouth wide and wailing.

  “Mommy, I wet the bed,” said the old man, and Mother joined in with my terrified screams.

  She swept me out of the room before either of us were capable of making a rational sound. Mother slammed the door and barricaded it with every stick of furniture close at hand. The old man, if he made any effort to escape, was too weak to push through the pile. A quick search of the house failed to find Jim anywhere.

  Calls were made at once. My mother to the police, the police to the media, and an amber alert for my missing brother was issued and featured on the local news at noon. The man in the room was extracted and removed from the house by the authorities while Mother and I huddled together in the kitchen. We didn’t want to look at him, but we could hear his feeble protests to the arresting officers.

  “Did the man say anything to you?” a woman from social services asked me tenderly once the initial fuss had settled down and she was able to take me aside for a chat.

  “Don’t tell.”

  She nodded at my quote, but I knew she thought it sounded sinister. I wasn’t so sure. It was what Jim and I would always plead to each other whenever we’d been caught doing something bad.

  Jim’s face became famous locally. It was on the missing child announcements, the nightly news and, in time, milk cartons. The nude man discovered in our bedroom was considered a prime suspect – the only suspect – but was deemed to be suffering from age-related dementia and was unable to clarify the circumstances of Jim’s abduction to anyone. He was remanded to a psychiatric hospital for observation, but apparently made no more sense there than he had in the police holding cell. A hearing was scheduled to determine his competence for trial, but he died of organ failure before the date ever arrived.

  “You’re the man of the house, now,” friends of the family and relatives kept telling me. It was the same thing they had told Jim when Father died.

  I didn’t feel like a man, not by a long shot, but I knew I had to grow up quickly. Mother was in pieces, unable to cope with our loss. The state of the house was in decline, groceries were scarce, bills were piling up and, before a year had passed, she had lost her job as well.

  I found Jim’s improvising tunnel-hat where it had fallen as soon as I was permitted back in our room. The police had taken everything they thought might constitute evidence, but left the detached model-train tunnel and its twin-scarf rigging on the floor next to our other loose toys, never giving it a second look. I stashed it away from sight for as long as I could, but the time has come at last. I need to step up, for Mother’s sake, for my sake, even for Jim’s sake. Or at least for his memory.

  I’m watching myself in the mirror closely, this supposedly innocuous plaything strapped to my head, careful not to let the advanced years creep up on me as they did with Jim. It’s been several hours now, and I can’t see any change at all, moment to moment, but my newfound maturity seems more prominent when I try to remember how I looked an hour ago, half an hour, ten minutes even. I only have to decide on a point at which to stop, a moment when I’ve cast away enough of my childhood to make a difference. Should I wait until I’m mature enough to quit school? Get a job? Live on my own?

  The problem is, I don’t really think I feel any older at all. Does anyone when they grow up, I wonder.

  MAKOUR

  Lisa Carreiro

  Keirdran clomped across the ceiling bellowing invectives. Her helmet-clad head nearly touched the floor in the cramped, tiny ship. She snapped a palm-sized scrap of metal off her belt – a bizarre assemblage of cobbled-together bits and pieces – and waved it triumphantly.

  “Stride up your dead quarry creek with this ancient shard, you pickled-brained overlords!” she hollered. “I hereby reclaim the last of my humanity!” She scraped the metal against the floor as though she could mar its nearly indestructible material.

  “Keirdran, calm down,” I said. I saw her reflected in the vast clear pane, an upside-down soldier who’d just won a one-woman battle against a mote in her imagination. Before I fully turned toward her, data scrolling above the control board in front of me suddenly flickered, dimmed, and morphed into bizarre icons.

  My heart nearly stopped.

  Keirdran pacing the ceiling spouting nonsense was typical. Data turning into silver snowflakes was not.

  I waved my hands over the board to no avail. Legible text continued to morph into nonsense, then dissipate. I dispatched an urgent cry for help back to Mur Prison; a message I knew would take at least twenty terran weeks to arrive. A message they might just ignore.

  Keirdran stopped shouting and eyed the board, head cocked as though studying the frightening change. She pounded a fist against the wall and wailed.

  “Keirdran, if you’ve got so much as one iota of knowledge left in that iron-clad cranium that used to hold your brain, then help me now!” I flinched as another line of data glimmered pink and flared into the image of a twisting serpent before it faded.

  Keirdran pointed at the serpent.

  “Keirdran? Do you understand what’s happening?”

  But her pointing hand flailed before she dropped to the floor, gloved hands pressed to her helmet.

  Every cell in me recoiled as Keirdran then crawled into her tiny quarters, such as they were. Door always open; tools and rocks strewn across her unused bunk; sooty walls streaked with symbols and specs drawn with a shaking fingertip.

  I disliked the woman she’d been. I despised the creature Mur Prison made of her: a hapless puppet who usually performed Mur’s directives without a hint of the brash person – the one who’d spent at least one-third of her free time brawling – that they’d crushed. A defeated, half-human thing who crept on hands and knees through hoarded trash.

  Geared up like a cross between a medieval archer and twenty-first-century cinema cyborg in a black helmet, red leather-like breastplate, and dark visor all alive with t
echnology, she was built to work. She squeezed into crawl spaces on her belly to repair electronics with gloved fingertips. She jettisoned to rock to test its ore, licking metal to determine its composition. She lumbered from task to task, often repeating chores she’d already completed.

  When not working, Keirdran muttered at scraps heaped on her narrow bunk. As though they might coalesce of their own accord, to become whatever it was she tinkered with in her rare spare time. For seven years.

  Her daily hobby morphed into a mad frenzy after Mur Prison dispatched us to Spakata, a mine deemed dead seventy years earlier. I read the specs three times. Not a soul remained in Spakata’s ghost colonies; not a trace of copper remained in its empty tunnels.

  “You condemned us to death!” I screamed in my message to Mur even though my shackles pinched me for protesting. A purple bruise blossomed on one wrist within minutes. My wrists were scarred beneath the bracelet-like shackles, deceptively gorgeous etched silver bands around each wrist. “Not only are we two years past the end of my sentence, we’re not going back, are we?”

  Keirdran, shuffling through her quarters, said nothing.

  She must have murdered someone. Why else would Mur Prison turn her into a virtual cyborg and ship her off to work in a mining drone? Of course, I committed no crime, yet they convicted me of sedition and theft. I couldn’t imagine myself killing anyone, though.

  Keirdran, yes. Wild, laughing too much, too loud, raucous Kirin Keirdran had a streak in her that lived in sanity’s grey zone: one heartbeat away from rage, two breaths away from violence. Voted most likely to slaughter the crew and then laugh about it. She didn’t wear simple shackles for her incarceration. She was bound in armour that controlled her every move.

  Keirdran emerged from her quarters twenty hours later before I was fully awake, and rapped on my door. Which she’d never done.

  “Pascal,” she called, her voice a file against metal.

  When I slid open my door and blinked in the light, she held out a children’s toy like a sacred offering.

  A train. A shiny red locomotive that fit easily into her palm. Light glinted off its silvery wheels and ebony trim.

  “Uh,” I said.

  Keirdran shook the train at me while she nodded. Through her visor I glimpsed genuine joy in her usually dead eyes. Her mouth was twisted into a crooked expression that passed for a smile.

  “Uh, yeah, nice,” I said. I ran fingers through unkempt hair, then trudged to the dying control board.

  I pressed hands to mouth to suppress my fury, reminding myself that Keirdran couldn’t help it. She couldn’t possibly comprehend that we were speeding along to a dead quarry in a failing drone ship while we waited. Waited to see whether the system fixed itself. Waited to receive updated instructions. Waited to learn whether we’d been dispatched to death. While Keirdran built herself a choo-choo.

  She set it on the floor and pointed at it. The tiny locomotive rolled forwards, backwards, in a circle. Up the damn wall. It tooted a wee, high-pitched whistle, and a puff of blue sparks spurted from its thumb-sized smokestack. Keirdran chuckled.

  “Good idea, Keirdran,” I said, swallowing fury and fear. “Might as well amuse yourself.” I gazed through the pane at the stars in the unfamiliar stretch of space, my one solace. “I oughta get myself a hobby, too, and keep my mind off impending death.”

  Keirdran laughed aloud; laughter I hadn’t heard from her since we were both free and sat a few tables apart in the ship’s pub, relaxing after our shifts. Back when we did real work on a genuine research ship. When we knew where we were going and why.

  “I study stardust,” I’d tell people.

  And the best place to study dust was Mur, a wild west region of the galaxy, run by people who don’t believe in fair trials. We stopped to resupply, and I never re-boarded my ship.

  My trial lasted twenty-eight minutes.

  While waiting to be sentenced I heard a rumour that one-third of our crew had been arrested, and most swiftly convicted. All were condemned to work mining drones, sailing from quarry to quarry through dangerous territory.

  Like us. But now we had been sent to the vast outskirts of Mur territory hunting ore that didn’t exist.

  Keirdran’s locomotive rolled to the control board. Just as its front wheels reached the board’s edge, it stopped. A slender metal thread like a serpent’s tongue uncoiled from a wheel and licked my right shackle. I jerked back my hand. My wrist tingled.

  “Keep that thing away from me!” I shouted. The tingling spread up my arm.

  The train whistled again, but instead of sparks, its tiny smokestack spurted out a silvery cloud with a message in simple text: Rescue is near.

  I coughed out a laugh.

  Rescue is near, it spurted again.

  I turned to Keirdran. She gestured, and her locomotive wheeled back down the wall and across the floor into her hand like a trained pet. Shivering, she slumped to the floor clutching it. Her lower face was ashen and beaded with perspiration.

  My shackles pinched me hard for disobeying orders or questioning Mur’s instructions. I couldn’t imagine the pain Keirdran endured to sneak a message to me. I tried so hard to ignore her and dismissed so much of what she said that I didn’t even realize she could still think clearly. I’d assumed her daily existence was like a simple machine that received input, then acted on it. Fix that engine. Mine that ore. Climb to that ceiling.

  Someone who, when she was very, very good, might be permitted a brief respite to listen to music. For a few moments, she would lean on a wall, hand swaying in time. The music would end and Keirdran silently returned to work. Unlike the old days when she hummed snippets of popular songs through echoing corridors.

  She hummed to the locomotive then, although it was clear she was still very much in Mur’s grip. As far away as we were, her gear still dispatched reward and punishment, just like my shackles.

  She grunted with a spasm of pain. Her gloved hand unclenched so the locomotive dropped to the floor. Those amazing gloves, like scaly claws flexing, spurred something in me: a fleeting memory, like a dream I couldn’t recall after I woke up.

  “Pascal,” she rasped. “Soon.” She shuddered, then banged her head against the wall a few times before she slumped fully to the floor and actually slept for close to three hours.

  I’d tried to take control of the mining drone. Thousands of times in our endless seven-year sojourn I studied its workings in an effort to hijack that ship. Each time, my only reward was new bruises from the shackles.

  That day, I simply stared at stars through the pane, slouched with my hands curled on my lap, unable to dredge up any new ideas. Refusing to look at the dying board.

  Keirdran clomped over to me, tapping her locomotive. Programming it. Those gloved fingertips like dragon’s claws.

  Dragon’s claws.

  I bolted upright.

  Makour.

  I used to have a toy dragon with claws like that. A plastic toy with no special gizmos to make it fly or roll across the floor, but I loved that dragon.

  I ran everywhere holding Makour over my head. Together, we traversed the world, rescuing people from pirates and scanning the seas for trouble. Makour snorted fire. He read minds. He heard cries for help a million kilometres away. No one knew us for the superheroes we were, as we appeared to them as a spindly limbed boy with his damned plastic dragon racing alongside dirty canals or between dilapidated buildings.

  Keirdran set the locomotive on the board and clomped away. It whirred awake.

  Rescue is near, the locomotive spewed. Patience.

  “Patience, my ass,” I told Keirdran’s damned choo-choo. “How can you know anything, Keirdran? Your brain’s been peeled apart and poked full of hardware neither of us understand.”

  I rubbed my aching eyes. When I opened them, the last of the data faded. The board became terrifyingly silent and completely dark. But from the locomotive’s tiny smokestack, pertinent information puffed out like steam.

&nb
sp; We were far off course, it showed; no longer headed for Spakata. Mur territory’s last beacon lay well behind us. My messages to them would simply meander through space, unseen by anyone for a million years.

  “Keirdran?” My legs couldn’t support me. “What’ve you done?”

  The locomotive whistled, high and wee, a familiar aria with new words: Patience. Rescue. Ship. Escape. Be. Quiet.

  Keirdran whistled along. What I saw of her face was creased with agony. The locomotive sprouted limbs and attached itself to the dead board. Slender stalks reeled from the train and crept across the controls, tips oozing like molten ore as each adhered itself in place. A cloud of fresh data puffed from the smokestack.

  And in that cloud the SS Fu blipped, a steady speck headed toward us.

  Keirdran plunked herself into a seat to study the data, nodding subtly. With a grunt, she wrenched off a metal brace from her forearm revealing her poor withered flesh.

  “Keirdran? That’s still you?”

  Keirdran couldn’t answer, only sat silent with pain. But the locomotive sang.

  Dear Pascal,

  have a seat.

  Be patient

  and sit sweet.

  Yhamarda’s

  where we’ll go.

  Take a deep breath,

  all is well.

  Yhamarda territory was comprised of two barely habitable planets with a scant population of ten thousand people – a paradise compared to Mur.

  Keirdran’s dragon-claw hands clenched and unclenched. Perspiration trickled down her chin and dropped onto her breastplate. She drooped like a wilted plant.

  The painful jolts my shackles once administered became gentle squeezes. My arms tingled. My vision blurred. I shut my eyes. Dreamed of Makour.

  I run with a plastic dragon in one hand held high, but in my mind, my arms are wrapped around his serpentine neck as we soar over snowy mountains and sparkling oceans, and even up to the faraway stars.