Fat Girl in a Strange Land

by Leib, Bart R.

  “Clari, come on!”

  Montgomery tugs me the rest of the way. The others wait for us in the common room, Ildri’s fiery peak lighting up the wall screens.

  “Barca, what’s the composition of the volcanic gasses?”

  She looks up from one of the workstations. “Carbon dioxide is at 25 parts per million and rising.”

  Keston gives a whoop, and Garcia loops her arms around Salus’s waist.

  I nod. It will be enough.

  * * *

  With all the CFCs the volcano belched into the atmosphere, and more eruptions to come triggered by our charges, the eventual warming of Caldwell is assured once the haze effects dissipate. But since the planet’s sulfur-to-water ratio is even lower than Earth’s, the initial cooling will be negligible. Greenhouse gasses will continue to collect in the atmosphere and one day melt the snow.

  It won’t be the planet I know any longer.

  We spend the next three days on board the Magellan, a transport that’s just entered Caldwell’s orbit, debriefing the first wave of engineers and colonists who will monitor the seismic activity and the atmosphere. Then they will supplement the efforts of our converters, first with O2-producing bacteria, followed by plants.

  The new commander listens to our reports and thanks us for our efforts. I gladly transfer my responsibility of Caldwell to her. She fiddles with her uniform, smoothing it over a wide belly with a nervous hand as my team files out of the room ahead of me.

  I should tell her it gets better, but if she’s anything like me, she’d prefer my silence instead. After all, we aren’t the first people to insulate our bodies with extra energy for the good of a mission. Or the last. I smile at her and she gives me a startled nod, dropping her hands from her puckered shirt.

  Grant waits for me in front of the shuttle that will take us to the transport. “Ready to go home?”

  “I think so.” His hand finds the small of my back as we walk up the ramp together.

  I am Clarinda Hilliard, creator of worlds. Now I just need to remember how to live in the one I left behind.

  Lauren C. Teffeau was born and raised on the East Coast, educated in the South, employed in the Midwest, and now lives and dreams in the Southwest. Informed by her background in mass communication and information science, she writes both short story and novel-length speculative fiction that explores the unintended consequences of technology and related socio-cultural issues. Her work can also be found in the September 2011 issue of Eclectic Flash and forthcoming The Memory Eater anthology. She blogs about the writing life at http://thebluestockingblog.blogspot.com.

  Cartography, and the Death of Shoes

  by A.J. Fitzwater

  * * *

  You kill a pair of shoes every six months. Don’t worry; you give them a proper burial, sometimes even a ritual burning.

  You get asked, incredulous and often, “How do you manage to ruin so many pairs of shoes yet stay so big?” Like they don’t see you walking every day of your life, rain or shine. How’s that for a chestnut? Rain, shine, mud, snow, gale that howls down from the mountains or through the gap from the south, light spring breeze, pattering red leaves, pounding heat from the pavement or blanket of pollen that paints the gutters sticky and yellow — you walk through it all.

  You’d rather they didn’t ask how you’re still the size you are. Your legs can take anything — just your metabolism thumbs its nose.

  That doesn’t stop the questions about the shoes or the state of your knees (didn’t you just finish telling them about your strong pins?). They’re fine, by the way. Don’t forget to say thank you for asking — again — or they’ll think you’re rude. Don’t give them any more reason.

  Somewhere in this city there’s a blank spot, in memory and on map. You’ve been walking forever trying to find it. You know it’s there, you’ve seen it twice. Once when you were a kid, your parents brought you to the big smoke as a sixth birthday present — Movies! Lollies! New shoes! — and in the process of playing Happy Families you walked into a fine example of a shoe shop, an honest-to-god cobbler, tucked just off a side street of a side street of the main thoroughfare. Okay, sure, you were a bit lost, and it wasn’t the shop you were really looking for, but you didn’t want to think about the things lurking just around corners, those jeers. You admired the cobblestones shining like quartz, and a leather-bound face all glittering eyes and sparkling teeth — auspicious, not animal — as you were fitted with a new pair of shoes.

  Your parents didn’t think anything of hand-made, perfectly fitted shoes back then. That was when they thought you deserved them. Now, fitting in has a whole new meaning. You take any size 11 when you can find it.

  Despite the welcome from the cobbler, your harried parents could feel the lurk in that street. They were relieved to discover on escape that when they looked back one last time there was nothing but a tired black alley even shadows could not put to rest.

  You hurried on but never forgot the glimpse of warm brown leather, the flash of rouge, the single clack of a heel, the inch of white linen beckoning around the next corner like the crook of a finger.

  Those shoes never got thrown away though you grew out of them. They never scuffed, never kissed dirt, never showed a dent. They were deliciously handmade even though the cobbler took them off the shelf that very day you walked into the shop. Those shoes had been waiting for you.

  You’ve never had a pair of shoes like them since.

  * * *

  The second time you saw that strange spot was on a map.

  You love maps, devour them for breakfast. They are required reading, more than the obituaries. You know villages you’ll never visit, towns that are a mystery within their grids, cities that are only but a dream within tourist snapshots, all by their maps. You can’t go to them, so they come to you.

  You know where the public toilets are in Dusseldorf and all the subway stops in Moscow. You could find a fetish shop in Anchorage or an angling shop in Buenos Aires. And you know the location of every shoe shop in every major city, plus some of the specialist cobblers in the outliers.

  You eat maps, make them ash like you burn shoes. There is a science to it, but no one knows maps, lives within them, like you do.

  That second time you see your alleyway of quartz and rouge and white linen you find it on Google Maps, satellite view to be precise. It’s not there on Street View, but you would know that roof anywhere, even though a six year old would never have been tall enough to get a glimpse of those red tiles and bricks mottled with lichen.

  It’s the Right Place, because the map smells like leather.

  Staring at your computer screen, you wonder if it’s the scent of a workmate’s three-yearly investment in new shoes or the stench of your boss’ mid-life crisis. New Shoes — even yours never smell that unused — is over the other side of the partitioned floor, and your boss is lovingly caressing his jacket, pants and car seat elsewhere.

  Somebody’s laughter jolts you, your eyes refocus. You flush, as usual, even though the laughter is not meant for you. It never is in the kindest sense — at, not with.

  Fingers stumble on the keyboard, then move faster. Someone is always keenly aware of your productivity. They’re also the same people who are incredulous about the amount of walking you do. Something about twice as much to be taken half as seriously always skips through your mind.

  You finish the job, a gaudy attractions pamphlet avec map for an upcoming mountaineering conference. It’s how you came to be Googling local shoe shops, as if you really needed to. It’s a no-brainer really, the graphic design and the shoe shops, but that’s the extent of what they think you can do. Funny, when it comes to the rush jobs it’s always ‘Get the fat girl to do it’, like they think the overtime won’t eat into your life while they rush off down to the pub.

  There is a life, just not the one they want you to have.

  The printout of the map smells faintly and sweetly of shoelaces. A printout isn’t really necessary
, most of the time your eidetic memory takes you the places you’ll never see, but you like the feel of the colours bleeding into your fingertips.

  You put on your walking shoes which are halfway through their life — sorry shoes, your interment is planned — hat, gloves and jacket that will never die, and steer by the prow of your bosom out into the damp-bitten streets. There is an appointment to keep.

  The passengers on your Walking Bus fluctuate but you can always count on Angela, Rosa, and Vinnia to share your route. You climb aboard the concrete steps and paths that rush beneath your feet, judiciously avoiding the stares and collisions and more stares.

  Angela, a local all her life and infused with the grey rash of the city, keeps her eyes downcast. Rosa, a ray of Samoan sunshine, and Vinnia, a sparkle of a girl from SoCal, refuse to. Depending on the weather and the day of the week, you fluctuate. A rainy Monday, you have a crick in your neck. A sunny Friday, the cricks are in your crow’s feet.

  Today is an overcast Thursday, the sun already lost to your toothy horizon.

  Vinnia can smell the promise of shoes in your pocket. She’s always looking for stilettos that fit. You don’t know how she can walk in those things, but even the ones she has to squeeze into make her pins look filthy gorgeous. Women like that, you think, are so lucky — she carries most of her weight in her barrel chest, and even then she has a fantastic window ledge made of 22 Double Fs.

  “You’ve found a new shoe shop,” Vinnia says as you fall into step beside her. You say nothing, which isn’t unusual. This shoe shop belongs to you. She arches a perfectly plucked eyebrow, and Rosa runs a bow across the string of her infectious giggle. Rosa adores Vinnia, but not as much as Angela, though that’s doomed to go nowhere. Angela is a lot like that, and much could be said about the trope that is her mother, but Angela prefers not to. She knows why her mother does it, but it doesn’t stop it from hurting any less.

  “It can wait until tomorrow night,” you protest, but Vinnia has you by the wrist and is dragging you back towards town. You would prefer to wait until tomorrow night, so you can go on your own, because this map smells like the sort of adventure that will only do for you. Vinnia prefers to dance in her shoes, while you walk…and walk and walk and walk.

  “Show,” she demands with rapid snaps of her fingers tipped in a dangerous pink that matches her lips, and you reluctantly pull the carefully folded paper from your pocket.

  Vinnia scowls at the print out. That’s right. She can’t smell it, not all of it. She’s got a whiff of the leather, but she doesn’t know what to make of that tang of elephants, sun soaked linen, and packed dirt.

  “I’ve never seen a shoe store there, and I go past there all the time on the way to the Flamingo bar.” Perplexity pinches between Vinnia’s perfect eyebrows, and her pink lips turn wistful.

  “It’s not a shoe shop, it’s a cobbler.” Your voice is lost beneath that of your rambunctious friend and you have to trot to keep up with her firm grip as the four of you swim against the tide of humanity sweeping for home. No parting of the Red Sea this. Despite your size, other pedestrians greet you with elbows and shoulders. Another storm on the sea to weather. You’re the elephant in the room that people refuse to see wherever you go.

  Angela and Rosa follow like the good little stooges they’ve been taught to be.

  When the four of you get to the spot where the shop should be Vinnia looks from the map to the brick wall and back again. “This can’t be right,” she mutters, pulling at her bottom lip with her teeth until they stain. “There’s supposed to be a lane right here.”

  It is right. Your déjà vu is decades old. There’s the pink fizz of Smokers on your tongue, the hug of new shoes on your six year old feet, and the flick of linen out the corner of your eye. The map is nothing but proof.

  Angela and Rosa make disappointed noises, and Vinnia gives you the side-eye for wasting her time. You love her to bits, but you dare not argue that the escapade was of her instigation.

  The cobbler on its little lane, with its promise of deserts and jungles just around one crumbling corner, is not there because Vinnia and Angela and Rosa don’t need it, they don’t murder shoes like you do.

  The evidence is rescued from Vinnia’s hand before she condemns it to the gutter. You know you’ll never find that map again. Your hungry gut protesting for its already late dinner tells you so.

  You trudge in silence beside your friends until you reach the point where you bid each other happy trails. Despite the never ending silences and words that endlessly simmer below the surface, you know that all you have is each other.

  Exhausted from eight hours of failing to be invisible for other people, there’s no time to relax with hours of work ahead, loose ends pricking at your guilt. Your mapmaking services don’t come for free or with any sort of prestige from those who don’t need them until in hindsight. Tonight you’re doing it by rote, using them as a cover until you realize what is really important, really happening.

  You’re thinking of that map now, aren’t you? There’s a hole in your pocket where it sits, all the way to your heart through your feet.

  There are affairs to be put in order. Maps of this world don’t matter anymore, bar one.

  You write letters. Vinnia will know what to do.

  Don’t worry. Hang on. The desire lines are calling, etched in the sand and snow and mud and grass of your dreams.

  * * *

  It’s Friday night and the city is a heart that beats alone, despite the millions of blood cells that race through its dog-legged arteries, oblivious to each other yet performing a life-sustaining dance.

  You’re near that street and the city’s blood parts around your feet, leaving you as an island.

  You’re tired of being part of this blood dance. The immune system has been trying to excise you as diseased for as long as you can remember, but you’ve been tenacious, clinging to walls and floors as the torrent pushes you around.

  You’re near that street, but not on it because you’re savouring the memory of thick leather across your tongue, like chewing the straps on your old school backpack. So many clichés run through your head and you discard each one: the cobbler is not, nor was, a dream; the cobblestone lane not a hallucination; the travel-worn faces and linen and blushing cheek and perfume that hints at cinnamon and watermelon are not a lie.

  The promise of what is, and was, around the corner of that lane is the only promise that has ever been made to and kept for you.

  As much as you love Vinnia and Angela and Rosa for what pieces of their souls and tongues they can offer you, they can’t come with you. You counted the seconds and the steps until your valediction, unable get a word in edgewise. Out of habit you said “See you later”, though you knew it to be a lie. It was an insufficient farewell, but it would have to do.

  They will figure the city out on their own eventually. You are more worried about Angela than Vinnia, though you’ve told Vin to stay off certain streets at night. How anyone’s glare can be cold and warm at the same time you’ve never figured out. Your mother never had quite that capacity.

  A ways down the street the brick wall and shadows are another lie. Shoes chase through your vision. There are high heels Vinnia could only dream of fitting into, expensive and clean trainers, the cheap and well loved, tatty skate shoes, ugly work boots, and grown up shoes in miniature sizes.

  A pair of bare feet.

  It’s too cold and wet and dark for bare feet.

  You follow these feet, the map in your pocket smouldering to almost incineration as you wrap your hand around it for reassurance. Dodge, dodge, flit, a snap of linen…and those feet are gone.

  The memory of leather is more than just a dark tang on your tongue now. It assails your nostrils, and you lift your nose towards its glory. Your feet itch.

  The dull brick has gone, like the demands and the hush and the blood of the city. Cobblestones shine true in what should be a false light of the city’s twilight, but sunshine peers dai
ntily around that far corner, that turn in the lane — where bare feet are now disappearing — which has made all those unquestionable promises to you.

  A figure moves beyond a dusty window. Somehow the dirt encasing the cobbler’s shop is not unseemly, but an indicator of fine age and experience, like wine.

  There are no words engraved on the window, just the detritus of the craft hinted at in the corners and an old fashioned sign above the door depicting a shoe. It’s a shoe never worn in the city you’ve left behind. The cobbler does not care to display their wares to entice foot traffic.

  There is no question that you will enter the shop. There is no question that a pair of shoes is waiting for you.

  A glass bell chimes clean as you push open the door. Stained glass and crystal, wood and copper. The hidden notes of the perfume from the map become apparent.

  The face of leather, as well worn and lived in as the shoes you love, looks up from an old-fashioned leather bound accounts book. Immediately the lines deepen, the stars of eyes greeting you from the black depths of their sky.

  “Welcome back!” The voice is as warm as the material the cobbler works. You can’t tell whether they are a man or woman, and it really doesn’t matter.

  You hesitate, wondering how their eyes refuse to rake your body up and down in the one second greet-and-dismiss you’re so used to. You glance behind checking whether, as always, the salutation is meant for someone who has crept into the shop behind you…but no. You are the only customer.

  “Welcome…back?” Your voice is rusty from underuse in such situations. You prefer to let shop assistants in the city stores finish their spiel — the more you interrupt to ask for what you really need, the longer the shopping experience takes. Here, no hard sell necessary. Your shoes are promised.