Black Static #74 (March-April 2020), page 6
Last night after Annie had stumbled to bed, Ronnie created a new character: Rita. Rita had three boisterous, good-natured children, a devoted husband who called her pal. (One of The Game’s details, a nickname usually employed by absent dads breaking plans with their sons, but you see, that’s why it was funny!) A sister, Ronnie had parsed from her mother’s viscous babbling, disappeared. Ronnie longed to be able to summon sympathy, but instead all she could stoke was rage. Finding comfort only in the fantasy of her flesh falling away, easily, like a stain in a laundry detergent commercial. Flesh then meat then bone then organs and she’s in The Game, completely controlled, spared from life but not dead. It was her ultimate desire, what she would wish for when she blew out her candles next week.
Annie, doggedly pursued by last night’s shame, scanned a canvas backpack, moisture wicking socks, a pair of shearling slippers that claimed to tone your thighs with every step, a shot in the dark based on the latest sample that’d arrived for Ronnie: coupons for custom orthopaedic body supports, a service reserved for paraplegics, amputees, the bed or chair bound. Annie didn’t like to think of how much precious data Ronnie’s game siphoned from her in exchange for these coupons, had a hard time swallowing Ronnie’s very astute accusation that her game was no different from The Shops: strolling through these pleasant, beautiful spaces, Annie did imagine a different version of herself, pulled from her data, a New You who reflected these clean, classic greys, moved comfortably among them, hidden, matching, inconspicuous in a space like this. New You has a pull-out pantry loaded with imported canned goods, jars and boxes with clean, tidy labels. New You knows that throw pillows and blankets are for texture, not comfort. She pours lemonade into pitchers, coffee into carafes, you will never see a liquid in its original container at New You’s house! Then Annie’s device trilled: her packages had arrived. So she headed home, where she found three boxes, as promised, stacked on her spacious suburban porch. But also a woman holding a clipboard, smiling broadly.
Annie cleared her throat. She hadn’t spoken all day. “Hello,” she croaked.
“Hi,” said the woman, still smiling, big blue eyes pinched at the corners, shaggy blonde hair, a linen dress with square buttons down the middle, a big, important looking leather sack slung over her shoulder. She seemed dusted somehow, like a fingerprint revealed.
“Hi, I work at The Shops and I’ve been sent here to perform a customer satisfaction survey. We don’t do these online anymore, trying a more human touch, but we understand if you don’t appreciate it and I will be happy to leave.” She smiled again, gentler this time, and Annie’s chest cinched, something about her, the sound of her voice. But it couldn’t be. Because she was gone. Swallowed by an unknown evil that only a few people in the world had encountered and lived to be haunted by. But the color of her eyes, that ancient blondeness, the right age and smell and shape. It was Rita, it was Rita, and if it wasn’t then Annie would turn around and step into traffic, it was decided, put an end to all this just as her mother had, that is what she would do.
“Rita?” whisper stumbling over fear, name so forbidden to her sober mouth that her stomach turned to say it.
The woman kinked an eyebrow, brought the clipboard higher, over her chest. “Do I know you?” she asked.
“Rita!” Annie exhaled. That familiar knot, the ossified panic that’d lodged in her chest when she opened her eyes to an empty room that night, it shuddered suddenly for the first time since it arrived. Her knees buckled. She reached out but Rita pulled back.
“Have we met?” she asked.
“It’s Annie, Rita, Annie, it’s me.”
“If you’ll excuse me,” Rita started to step down off the porch, “I’ve still got a few more houses to hit.”
“No Rita please, it’s Annie. I’m your sister. You disappeared thirty years ago,” Annie began to choke on her words, “at a cottage, with our family. You and I, we, we, we saw something that day, then you disappeared, you were just—gone. Don’t you remember?”
Rita stopped, turned around. “You’re my sister?”
“Yes.” Annie stepped towards her.
Rita’s eyes filled with tears. “I was adopted,” she said. “I don’t remember much of anything from my childhood, but I, how—how do you know? How can you know that it’s me? It’s been so long.”
“Because I’ve never let you go. Not ever. I’ve been thinking about you Rita, every day for the past thirty years, your face, your smell, so I’d never forget, so I’d never lose you. And now you’re here and you’re you, Rita, you’re really you, I know it, I can feel it.”
Rita blinked, shook her head. Annie knew this expression, she’d seen it before, Rita’s emotions drawn, quartering her, to laugh and cry and scream and run away at the same time. Annie grabbed her, held her tight the way she wished she had that night. An alternate timeline in which Rita never got out of bed, never opened that closet. They grow into adults together, hold hands at Bubi’s funeral, their mother and father crying alongside them. Not shattered. Not dead. Annie cried and Rita laughed and somehow these reactions melted into one another, the talisman forged again.
Annie pulled Rita into the house and introduced her to Ronnie whose eyes glided along the lip of her blanket like a hermit crab. She unfurled an arm to shake Rita’s hand, cold, smooth, then pulled it back in and listened to them talk, shivering with fear as Rita described her devoted husband, her three boisterous and good-natured children. This was Rita, thought Ronnie. Rita from The Game. Come to life and on their front porch because this is what mother had always wanted, what Ronnie had always wanted in a way: Rita to come back to life and make her mother happy. Everything you’ve ever wanted arrives on your front doorstep, your birthday presents and your vinegar and your dead sister too.
Ronnie heard Annie pop open a bottle of wine, two glasses worth of glugging, and she and Rita talked and sipped and glugged some more, and pop and talk and sip and glug and Ronnie listened, moss on the couch, as they played a card game, Meesh. Ronnie didn’t even know her mother liked cards, or games, or anything of the sort. Smoke grew vine-like from a black hollow deep in her chest, glowing red, becoming a hole, eating its own edges, bigger and faster as her mother leaned in, helped Rita spread and sort her hand. The smoke filled Ronnie, escaped her lips in a luscious swirl, inflated her blanket shell with prickling heat. Rage. I had to fix it for you, she thought. You’re the mother but I had to fix it, she seethed, ground her teeth as Annie overflowed with information Ronnie didn’t even know existed: details about their parents, hard-working, fair, genuine people, and their Bubi, funny and stubborn and generous, and finally that fateful day, but now she could barely get the words out, the secret trapped for so long, lock eroded on a box full of poison, she couldn’t get there even now, looking into Rita’s face. “You were there,” was all she could manage. “And then you weren’t.”
And then Rita spoke. “I’ve dreamed about you,” she said, calmly. Ronnie peered through her blanket again and Rita continued. “I’ve dreamed of saving you. We’re in the woods together, being chased by a man, big and dirty, a fern between his legs, his arms are ferns too, and he’s reaching for us, almost getting us every time but then I pull you away and we run again.”
“That man,” Annie manages to utter through her tears, “that man stole you, a man who looked just like that.”
“Just like that?” said Rita.
“Not ferns. Yellow, though. Covered in pollen,” said Annie.
Ronnie pulled open her computer and opened The New You.
“All dusted in yellow pollen from the field. And we didn’t run.” Rita cocked her head. “We paddled.” Rita nodded. “A boat?” she asked. “A canoe,” Annie confirmed.
Ronnie clicked Make a New You and listened closely as her mother continued to describe the man: yellow, naked, long arms. She plugged in the information. A million sons swirling around the yellow man, hopping and leaping on strong legs, crouched low and sturdy. Grinning. Howling. He scatters feed for them and they love him and call him… “Ian?” suggested The Game, and Ronnie clicked “Accept.” Ian lives in the woods, a squat cabin with an orange roof. He steals women who happen across his path and pumps them full of seed so they grow big and fat and eventually spray his little yellow babies like dandelion fluff all over the field. He uses them until they can’t do it anymore, too old or injured from the violence of breeding, then he chops them up and feeds them to his boys.
“Stay with me,” Annie begged.
“I can’t,” said Rita, “I have a family. A husband. Three boisterous and good-natured children.”
“I need you.”
“I’ll be back. I believe you. I know that you’re telling the truth. I know that you’re my sister, so you should know about me that I’m yours now, and you’re mine. We’re family and everything is going to be different from now on.”
Annie’s eyes fixed so firmly on Rita, like a child who finally understands who her mother is and can’t let her out of her sight. Ronnie, so angry beneath the blanket at this new, card-playing mother, vulnerable and open and crying. A good woman after all. Who knew? Ronnie saved Ian to her computer, closed it gently. Then a knock on the door startled her right out of her blanket cocoon, every little bit of rage-heat released and replaced with fear, fully exposed to Rita and Annie who stared at her as though she’d appeared out of thin air. Annie, flat of her fingers against her chest; Rita, head-cocked and smiling. “My niece,” she said and grinned and winked like they were in on something together.
“Are you expecting anyone Veronica?” asked Annie, getting up and walking towards the door. She lifted herself to the balls of her feet, eye against the peephole for a long time. She stepped back, turned first to Rita and then to Ronnie then she picked up an axe they kept but never used next to their fireplace, buried in a more perfect looking log than you could ever hope to find in the woods. The most perfect log money could buy. Annie had seen it in The Shops. She’d desired it. And so it had arrived, wrapped in plastic blisters and a thousand identical white shapes, Styrofoam, light as nothing, there but not really there, like what a girl vanished without a trace leaves behind in her sister. Like the daughter that sister raises, there but not really there, because the people you love can hurt you worst of all without even meaning to, without even trying, just by being too bold, forgetting for a moment or taking for granted that people love them so much so be quiet, be invisible in the world, please, dear god, Annie quiet and invisible like the turtles and the snakes, Ronnie quiet and invisible too.
Heart thudding, swallowing dryness, gripping the handle of the axe, Annie prayed the heat of her hand would make it one with her body, an extension of herself that she could swing with all the power of her pain. She flung open the door “No!” Rita lunged from her chair so it shot backwards, toppled against the credenza, crystal rattling in agony and Ronnie, curled in her nest, watched as her mother pinwheeled the axe, a perfect circle, and heard it land with a crunch in the face of whoever they’d conjured to the porch with nothing but the power of their desire.
*****
Ainslie Hogarth is the author of The Lonely and The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Flux Books, USA). Her short fiction has appeared in Jersey Devil Press and Corvus Magazine.
IN THE WAKE OF MY FATHER
RAY CLULEY
I was surprised by how many people visited my father in hospital. I shouldn’t have been; he was popular enough, in his own way, despite the distance he maintained between himself and others. He’d buy as many rounds as he was bought, no matter how tight money might have been, and he never said no to a job that was offered to him. Bringing the sheep down from the fells, dipping, shearing, working the market, helping at the auctions; my father could always be relied upon whenever an extra man was needed. He had no close friends, but he was known, and if he wasn’t especially well-liked in the most social sense, he was at least respected.
I came back to the fells to spend some time with him at the end, though I didn’t stay at the old place. There’s a room above the Folly, my father’s local, so when I wasn’t at the hospital I was there, or in the pub itself where a picture of my Da and several other men with sheep behind them hung askew and faded on the beam across the bar. As a child, keeping quiet and eating my crisps, I used to imagine that my mother had taken that picture, though I’d never been given any reason to think so. I never asked, either. I understood, even then, that sometimes what I want to believe is better than what is true.
People in the pub recognised me, despite the years. They shook my hand and they said the expected things about how I’d grown, upwards and outwards, and they said kind things about my father. Most testaments about his character used words like private, and quiet, and hard-working. They would have said he was stoic, had they known the word. A few of them, once they’d taken enough drink, said it was a shame he never found himself a good woman after my mother left, but I didn’t know if I agreed with that or not. The most drunk among them tried to tell me things about him they thought I didn’t know, but the same ale that loosened their tongues made their speech difficult to follow and all I did was nod during the pauses. They seemed keen for a story from me, too, but I had nothing for them. Nothing I wanted to share. There’s a tiny gap between the stories we tell ourselves and those we tell others and that’s where you’ll find the truth. I wasn’t ready to create that gap yet. One of my fondest memories of him wouldn’t have satisfied them anyway. A day spent helping build a dry-stone wall was only a chore to these people, and most had turned their own hands to it more than once.
So I kept my story to myself.
***
I was twelve, and waiting forever to become a teenager. The weather was turning, the sun bright but without much heat, not yet. A cool breeze that chilled us in the morning would be refreshing in the afternoon, once the work had warmed us both. Come lunch time we were stripped down to our jeans, my father’s upper body the well-muscled physique you get from years of hard work, and mine all ribs and elbows back then as I scrambled about for suitable stones. My responsibility that day was mostly to backfill, stopping up gaps with smaller stones in the wake of my father. I enjoyed the slow, considered process of it, finding the right stones and carefully placing them so that the plain side, the ugly side, was hidden while the more pleasing side became part of the wall’s face. My father’s job was to place or reposition the through-stones, stones that would hold the wall firm over the years (unless someone drove into it, as had happened with the stretch we were repairing). We worked in silence, but it was a comfortable one, the only sounds an occasional grunt of effort or the scrape of stone against stone as we made a waist-high line of them at the roadside. Sometimes a shrill whistle carried down to us from the fells as someone worked a dog to gather sheep. Otherwise it was a clear and quiet day, one that I remember with a sort of sheen over it, a varnish of memory-light that preserves its perfection.
Many of my favourite memories from back then are held in this kind of hazy sunlight. The sun dictates much of what can be done on a farm. With fewer hours of light, winter could be a stressful time, but come the hazy days of spring there was plenty of work to be done and I would help whenever I could. My father paid me pocket money, but it felt like I was earning more than just that. I often wished we had sheep of our own, but instead my father worked all sort of odd jobs for other people, cash in hand. He’d do anything. As a child, I’d taken a certain amount of pride in that, seeing him as an efficient man, a jack-of-all-trades. Only as I became older did I realise that a jack-of-all-trades was a master of none, and that some of the work that came my father’s way was sympathy work. The community doing its bit to look after one of its own.
“Jake.”
I looked up, stone in hand, to see my father a short way along the wall. He was looking down at the ground beyond it. He glanced at me then beckoned.
“What is it?”
“Come see.”
It was a dead ewe. It had taken shelter where the land dipped into a ditch, a curve of rock making a shallow ghyll where a beck had long since run dry. When it was hot, sheep sought cool nooks exactly like this one, and the wall would have offered it further shade. As good as this spot was, though, it was also steep on one side. The poor thing must have fallen and broken something, become trapped. Maybe it died right then. Maybe it took a while.
It had certainly been there a while, quietly rotting, its soft meat slumping into the soil in slow disintegration. It sat seeping fluids, leaking into the land and feeding the grass it had once eaten in life.
“Why are you showing me this?”
I’d seen dead sheep before. On the fells, working the farms, you see plenty of dead things. Unless there was going to be a lesson here, I didn’t understand why my father had taken the time from his labour to show me.
“I thought you might draw it,” he said.
I’d loved to draw, back then. Still do, and it’s kept me sane during some long, lonely periods of my life. I even studied it at college for a while, though that never went anywhere. My father thought it was all a waste of time. It wasn’t proper work, as far as he was concerned. Proper work meant using your whole body. He admitted I might sell a few landscapes to the in-comers, but in the same breath noted they wouldn’t pay much. We’d argued about it, briefly, prior to this day at the wall, which is to say he’d voiced his view and I had sulked. Yet here he was, showing me something I might draw. Years later, watching TV, I’d learn about how Leonardo da Vinci dissected corpses to get his drawings right and later that evening I’d phoned my father to exchange a few simple sentences about how we were both doing. There was little left to bind us beyond blood by then, and though I wanted to remind him of that dead sheep, and the crow that came after, I was worried he’d have forgotten. I wanted to go on thinking he remembered the day just as well as I did, so I said nothing. What I wanted to believe being better than what might be true.
