NOTHING ELSE TO LOVE
By Pamela Painter
This room is supposed to assist me in living but it is a sorry sight. Lumpy bed. Lumpy chair. Potty chair. Bed. TV. Hate TV. Dresser with two drawers too hard to open. Nothing in them anyway. Bed. Did I say bed? Bed. A squeaky walker as chatty as the staff. Staff deliver trays of grey food. Then they wheel me into the room full of chair-sitters. I wheel myself out. I stay in my room in my chair near my lumpy. Lumpy? My lumpy bed.
I was dumped here by a person I almost recognize. It was last week. Maybe last month. The man’s pursed mouth reminded me of someone I knew as a child. He pursed and muttered. He dumped out stuff from a box. I said take it away. He dumped stuff back into the box. All the time muttering. I couldn’t hear him.
Today a woman is with him. I tell the man with the pursed mouth to stop muttering and push my lumpy chair up to the window. I tell him I am a lump in a lumpy chair. This does not make him laugh? The woman’s mouth was also pursed before she laughed. She laughed big. Oh happiness. He purses some more. She tells the man with the pursed mouth to hand over her purse. She fishes around for something. He mutters at her. She might cry.
I go close to her. She smells good. She looks like someone I used to know, maybe someone I used to like. I push my container of Kleenex toward her. It falls off the brown bedside mound that might be a table. She sniffs. They sit some more before they stand. He mutters to my face. She mutters in my ear, touches my hand. They leave. I sit in the window and wait for the moon. It rarely fails to visit me. There is nothing else to love.
Two Hands Clasping a Crowned Heart
By Jennifer DeLeskie
You spy it while crossing the street on your way to buy cat food: a gold ring trapped in the ice, glittering like the promise of true love. You squat to take a closer look, straining to focus in the miserly light of a winter afternoon, because your eyes have grown unaccustomed to the day.
You know this kind of ring (although you cannot remember its name): two hands clasping a crowned heart. If it is worn with the point of the heart toward the fingertips, the wearer is seeking love. If it is worn with the point of the heart toward the wrist, the wearer has already found it.
It is the kind of ring a mother gives her daughter, or a true love gives their beloved. It is the kind of ring your true love might have given you, before something arbitrary and unfixable happened, transforming you from a person deserving of love into whatever you’ve now become.
The intersection is on your daily route—or was before your life shrank down to sleeping all day and feeling bad about the things you can no longer do: bathing, answering texts, showing up to work. The light has a generous pedestrian crossing of 45 seconds, long enough for you to free the ring from the ice. But why has no one else claimed it?
Perhaps because it is frozen into a dirty puddle in the middle of a busy intersection.
Or perhaps because it is waiting for you.
Extracting the ring from the ice isn’t going to be possible with your bare hands; only the pointed end of the heart sticks out, not big enough for you to grasp. And it is cold—so cold the ice is as unyielding as rock, so cold your fingers are clumsy and raw.
You take a quick glance at the light: forty-one seconds remain. You rummage in your backpack, withdraw a pen, and stab it into the ice. The pen snaps and you almost cry out in frustration. But for now you are undaunted. You just need a better tool, such as the plastic thermos attached to your bag. Once, when you were adept at caring for yourself, it would have been filled with hot tea, but now it contains only weeks-old dregs. You unclip the thermos and bash it against the ice until its plastic skin is pitted and the glass inside it breaks. Still the ice does not yield.
Another glance at the light. Twenty-nine seconds left. You fumble in your pocket for your key, jam it sideways under the pointed end of the heart, and push up on both ends with stiff, aching fingers. When this doesn’t work, you jab the tip of the key into the seam where the ice meets the ring, attempting to gouge it loose. But the key—unthinkably—snaps, and this time you do cry out.
Thirteen seconds remain, an attenuating lifeline stretched over the abyss. If you do not free the ring before time runs out, you will never be loved by anyone ever again. You shove the thumbnail of your right hand under the pointed end of the heart and wrench upwards, once, twice, three times, until the point of the heart tears through the brittle nail and blood speckles the dull carapace of ice. Your hand is now swollen and grotesque, so frozen you feel nothing. But still the ring does not budge.
Now the truth strikes you backhanded across your face. The ring isn’t meant for you. It is meant for someone pure and bright and deserving of love. Someone with unbloodied hands.
You bow and touch your lips to the pointed end of the heart, trying with the warmth of your breath to dissolve the icy scab separating that person from you. But the exercise is as futile as freeing the ring, for the ice does not melt. It sends its tendrils through you, colonizing the empty chambers of your heart. You are frozen, finished.
Time is up. From somewhere close by comes the blast of horns and revving engines. The air thickens with exhaust.
Roofing in Warm Weather
By Corey Farrenkopf
The idea of roofing in warm weather makes sense because asphalt shingles melt a little to adhere to the roof itself. The process helps if hurricanes are on the horizon. If you lay them down in fall, when it’s getting cold, the sun won’t bake them in place, and they’ll come right off when the wind picks up. That’s what my boss says anyway, though he tells me this from the comfort of the ground, an iced coffee turning to a slurpy in his hands.
The idea of roofing in warm weather does not take into account what the heat does to our bodies, the sweat induced hallucinations I see while I’m nailing down the peak. The apparition looks like my ex-girlfriend, Ruby, crooking a finger just beyond the edge of the gutter, two stories down to the stone driveway beneath. I shake my head, wipe my eyes, try to clear the specter from my sight. I know she’s standing on nothing. Scaffoldings on the other side. Just open air, my dehydrated brain keeping her aloft.
The idea of roofing in warm weather only gets worse each year. The climate never got this hot two decades ago when I started the job fresh out of high school. The thermometer occasionally poked a hundred, but not for days on end, the cloudless sky baking us onto the roof just as much as the shingles. But the job pays, and it’s what I know how to do, so I press down the nailgun’s trigger, firing another spike into the roof.
Until my boss gets drones up here, the crew and I will be pushing back our own unique ghosts as they attempt to call us into oblivion. I watch Mike and Jer and Ricky stare off beyond the roof’s edge. I want to ask what they see, but no one asks what they see. I’m not going to be the first. This isn’t a sharing circle. We aren’t open with our emotions. We all have someone we’d rather be spending time with than our ladders and hammers and chalk lines.
Roofing in warm weather wasn’t so bad when I was nineteen. I had things to look forward to after I stripped off my tool belt and sweat-drenched t-shirt. There was my band, there were shows, there was whatever restaurant Ruby wanted to check out that night, because we weren’t the type of couple to cook. She sang for the band, worked at a doggy daycare during the day. She always joked about the tradeoff of air conditioning for her allergy to their saliva. Grooming dogs paid well because her uncle owned the business. I can still smell her scent, the patchouli and honey and rosehips. They daubed it on her neck for the viewing, for those few minutes I was allowed to kneel by the casket and sob into her cold collarbone. But her father never liked me, and I never thought he’d drag me off the kneeler, but I also never thought there would be a day where I woke up without her next to me, but I was wrong on both accounts.
The idea of roofing in warm weather becomes untenable at a hundred and twenty degrees. One-nineteen wasn’t so bad, but one-twenty … Ricky called out, and I can’t blame him, but the rest of us need to pick up the slack, because deadline is right there, no more days left on the calendar before the next job needs to be staged and the next one after that, and the one after that.
After a while, you feel like there can’t be any more roofs, like you’ve done every last one in the state, in the country, in the entire world. But there is always new construction, houses going up where derelict lots lay fallow, some new rental property for some new app that promises fast cash for a fold-out couch and viable a/c.
I stand there with a sandpaper mouth, ready to pass out, and she appears, wearing the same band hoodie she always wore, her bangs falling in her face, that finger dragging me over to the gutter, all that empty air below. She smiles as my boss yells up from the ground, but his words are lost, just static on an untuned radio, advice for someone younger than me with less roofs behind them.
“There’s always going to be another. You and I both know this,” I hear her voice in the back of my head. “But you know what would be better than another day burning beneath the sun?”
And I do. But I don’t want to say it. Because once you say it, there is no going back, no sure footing beneath your boots. So I turn from Ruby’s ghost and kneel next to Jer as he lines up the pattern for the next row of shingles, making sure everything is going on straight, despite the difficulty of sweat slicked hands and eyes burning with salt.
Tethered
By Julia Schneider
Motherhood has worn caution tape for as long as I can remember. In early years, it looked like abstinence pledges and purity rings (rituals completed, of course, by the shaming of teen moms). Later, it looked like birth control, feminism, the right to choose, the right to independence; like 37 years of glorious self-indulgence, two graduate degrees, and a late marriage to the right man; like the idea of children pushed off to some distant After, to the place where I’m-fine-if-it-happens-I’m-fine-if-it-doesn’t, and finally—biological alarm bells screaming—to Science.
Now that motherhood is here (or, more accurately, now that it is waiting in a cryogenics lab just two weeks shy of my uterus), I don’t know what to do with all this caution, all this fear. I find myself using the word “tethered” in obnoxious and unlikely ways; like, (pointing to the dog’s collar) “How did her name tag come untethered?” or, (pointing to my sore hips) “It’s like an anchor is tethered there,” or, (pointing to my journal) “I don’t know what I mean. I feel untethered.”
My friend Kendra comes over for tea and we sit on the patio while our dogs play in the yard. Kendra is eight months pregnant and she’s wearing one of those underbelly supports that look like suspenders, but somehow she pulls it off. She has this zen kind of glow, sipping her chamomile like a happy bodhisattva in horn-rimmed glasses. I smile, wishing my tea into wine.
We talk about Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, which we love because it points out how queer motherhood really is—a body becoming otherwise, a body that grows and delivers another totally separate body, the relationship that develops between those bodies. And then, of course, how queer IVF really is—the injectable hormones, the almost-magical molding of a body into other chosen shapes. We are both married, straight women, so there is something deliciously taboo about a book that deems us and our desires queer. It makes us feel a little less like we’re just doing what we’re supposed to.
Like even this can be a rebellion.
Kendra’s beagle Barb is going berserk in the yard, running circles around the perimeter, barking at squirrels and clouds and everything that moves, taking up space in every direction as if to say It All Belongs To Me! Kendra laughs and whistles for Barb to come. When Barb doesn’t, she laughs again. I wonder if her happiness is hormonal, and if so, how long it lasts.
Kendra reminds me that the book is named after a question: if over the course of its journey home to Ithaca every piece of the Argo is replaced, is it still the Argo? I stand to shake a cramp, considering the question, rubbing my hips at their injection sites. Am I the boat, reassembling? Or am I the Argonaut, the one the boat carries unchanged?
I walk Kendra to the door and she hugs me, all breasts and belly and warmth. I know the next time I see her, she will have become a “we.” I resist the urge to touch her belly with my hands, and then I resist the urge to touch my own. I watch her waddle to the car, Barb racing back and forth from the end of her tether like a radar detector, not after anything in particular but after all of it at once, or maybe just looking for something to pull against.
The house is silent, peaceful, a little too empty now. In the bathroom, I prepare the day’s injection. As always, I thank my lonely body for her patience. I turn to see my hip in the mirror and catch a glimpse of my mother there, her body where mine should have been.
Have I always carried you?
(Will you always carry me?)
The Seven Year Itch
By Roberta Beary
Marilyn Monroe slips off the diamond wedding band Daddy bought her — lays it on the nightstand beside the puffy round bed and poof — she’s single again — the sex beneath the gold mirror is incredible — but Marilyn can’t quite reach the mountain top — she is close close close — until Norma Jeane whispers close doesn’t count except in horseshoes bitch — Marilyn hears her married lover’s was it good for you, baby — and conjures up her trademark sex kitten voice trilling — yes yes yes — her fingers find her diamond band — Marilyn Monroe slips on the ring and poof — she’s forever Daddy faithful again.
Rose-Colored World
By Tiff M. Z. Lee
The capsule girl is waiting for her time. Every time a kid sticks four quarters into the machine with a ping ping ping ping and winds the crunch crunch crunch crunch of the knob, she drops closer and closer to the Door. She figures she’s about three dollars away now. The compact mirror with the rhinestone Pikachu design will go first, then the pink Cardcaptor Sakura charm bracelet. The capsule girl loves pink—she knows nothing else. She wears a baby pink crop top, baby blue miniskirt, and white thigh-high boots. She wears a sparkly headband in her shiny black hair. She wears a plastic smile and factory-painted eyes.
#
Amy Fong is out of time. The yellow bus pulls away as she’s running across the bridge that marks the edge of the nice part of town. She can see Penelope Wang through the dirty back window, staring straight back at her before laughing with her friends. The bus accelerates smoothly through the tree-lined street and disappears into the fog.
Shit! She can’t call her dad—he’s sleeping off a late shift. Her dress shirt and uniform skirt are totally soaked through with sweat and rain. Her second-hand Doc Martens are holding strong, though.
She checks her phone—a city bus is coming the next block over in 45 minutes. If she takes it, she can still make it to Miss Maamoun’s class for second period. Miss Maamoun teaches History and English. She has long black hair all the way down her back and a master’s degree in Jane Austen. When she looks at Amy, in class or in after-school Yearbook Club, she sees Amy, not the goth-lite-stoner-who’s-never-actually-smoked-anything-in-her-life that Amy projects to almost fit in with the not-cool kids. Miss Maamoun is pretty much the only thing Amy likes about school. She decides that she has to make it to second period.
She clutches her wet backpack against her chest and walks down the block to the bus shelter. When she gets there, though, she sees a little Japanese grocery store across the street. Her stomach rumbles at the thought of iced matcha and strawberry Pocky sticks. If she’s gonna be late, she might as well get a snack, right?
Amy rubs her hand under her eyes to wipe off the worst of her streaky makeup. For the first time that morning, she relaxes.
#
The toy capsule vending machines are at the very front of the store. There’s a whole row of them, with every theme from Digimon to Winnie the Pooh. The last one is decorated in pink and glitter, everything that Amy would have loved three years ago and would never admit to liking now.
Amy makes her way to the snack aisle and chooses extra-hot shrimp chips and strawberry Pocky in a special edition box covered in cartoon hearts and sparkles.
Of course, she asks for a dollar in change, just enough for one capsule.
There’s someone ahead of her at the pink machine now: a boy, maybe in middle school, wearing jeans and a backpack. Amy can tell by his eyes that he’s not supposed to be here, either—not in this store on a school day and definitely not in front of this capsule vending machine.
The boy finishes and leaves, a capsule hidden in each jean pocket.
Amy steps forward and inserts her quarters one by one.
ping ping ping ping
crunch crunch crunch crunch
A capsule falls out. She grabs it and twists to release a tiny doll with a baby pink crop top and shiny black hair all the way down her back.
Amy looks at the doll. The doll looks at Amy. They both smile and head into the rain together.
Scenario: One of Those High School Parent/Teacher Conferences Where the Student is Strongly Encouraged to Attend
By Miranda Keskes
The rules are simple.
1. Players take turns asking each other questions.
2. If a player makes a statement, they’re out.
Teacher: Before we start, do you or [insert student name] have any questions?
Parent: Can we make this quick?
Teacher: Why don’t we review [insert student name]’s most recent progress report?
Parent: What about it?
Teacher: Are you aware [insert student name] has several missing assignments?
Parent: How would I know that?
Teacher: Have you been receiving my weekly updates?
Parent: Do you think I have time to read those?
Teacher: Perhaps [insert student name] could bring home a weekly report for you to review and sign?
Parent: Why am I being punished with homework because my kid’s a lazy ass?
Teacher: Why don’t we ask [insert student name] what would be most helpful?
Student: (Shrugs).
Parent: Why don’t you answer your teacher? What’s the matter with you? Are you deaf? Are you stupid?
Student: (Puts head on desk).
Teacher: Have you read any of [insert student name]’s poetry?
Parent: Isn’t that your job?
Teacher: [Insert student name], would you allow me to submit one of your poems to the library’s annual poetry contest?
Student: (Opens mouth).
Parent: Do you think I’m going to let you turn my kid into some poetry-writing faggot?
Teacher: Why are you so offended by poetry?
Parent: Why can’t people just say what they mean?
Teacher: [Insert student name], does writing poetry bring you joy?
Student: (Nods).
Parent: Who cares?
Teacher: Don’t you want your child to be happy?
Parent: (Points). Is that a rainbow flag behind your desk?
Teacher: Do you have a problem with that?
Parent: Did you know I can get you fired for indoctrinating my child?
Teacher: Now you care about your child’s well-being?
Parent: (Stands). Are you aware I pay your salary?
Teacher: (Stands). Are you aware I pay taxes too?
Parent: I’m reporting you to the school board! (Exits).
Teacher: No, wait. Come back here! (Exits).
(Long pause).
Student: I win?
Atlas
By Christy Stillwell
I caught the dog smoking this morning. I called and called but he didn’t come. I checked both his beds and the basement. In the hall I pulled the blinds to look out and was astonished to see him in my chair, back legs stretched out in front of him, smoking a cigarette.
I don’t know how he found my stash in the birdhouse mounted on the fence. I’ve been trying to quit and I’m careful to hide them. How he got them out through the hinged lid is another mystery, not to mention getting the thing lit. He was sitting in the low beach chair placed strategically under the bird feeder, where I hope that one day a black-capped chickadee might land on my head. Not likely while I’m smoking, but I hope.
It was a sunny day. From up this high I could see a man walking by, the odd one with his little dog Tigger on a leash. I could hear Tigger barking, which meant the man was saying, “Bad boy, Tigger, bad boy. Tigger, no bark. No bark.” Normally this drives Atlas wild. Atlas is a long-haired mutt that sounds like a demon when he runs the fence. In fact, he’s very sweet and likes to cuddle in the mornings. But he doesn’t like Tigger.
Today, Atlas doesn’t bark, doesn’t even get up. I see from up here that he hasn’t cleaned up the sunflower seed scraps the chickadees left this morning. Often when I smoke, he vacuums the area, gobbling up peanuts and millet and seed shells. My side yard ecosystem at work: the bird feeder feeds the birds and their trash is eaten by the dog which then moves his bowel. Also, Atlas gets exercise when he runs the fence, which happens a lot. We are on the corner of a connecting thoroughfare. Dog neighbors include: Tigger, Penny, Garth, Shaggy, Lacey-girl and Boomer. Atlas gets a lot of exercise. It’s a shame, all the barking, but people don’t seem to mind. They don’t alter their route. Well, one man minds. His dog is Veronica and he wears a bright red coat; I’ve seen it through the slats. Atlas runs, barks, and growls and the guy mutters, “Give it a rest.” Or, “Put a cork in it!” Once he shouted, “Oh for Fuck’s sake.” Which hurt my feelings.
This morning, all that ends. No more hiding. Next time Veronica walks by it will be me that runs the fence making vicious noises. See how he likes that.
The Goat
By Christian Gurrola
There was a goat who terrorized the town of Perkins. He had no name and only responded to the rebukes of one man. Schoolchildren would run to Marlon’s house hollerin’, “The goat’s holdin’ everyone in the bank hostage.” The next week they would hold their knees, out of breath, and say, “Old Man Brown gave the goat the wrong kind of lettuce, now he’s under siege in the park bathroom.” Or “The goat’s forcin’ kids to stay in the public pool, and they’re all gonna get in trouble for missin’ supper.”
Marlon would let out a deep sigh and force himself to his feet to go yell at the goat. The goat would shake his head, then Marlon would raise a finger and say something fatherly, like, “I’ll whoop your ass if you make me come out here again,” and sometimes he would whoop the goat’s ass.
Marlon was the old Sheriff, and he knew the goat well. The first time the goat got put behind bars, it was Marlon who done it. It happened after one of Joanie Bale’s hamsters went missing. That was the goat’s first day in Perkins. Joanie had taken note of the stranger and was sure that the hamster had shapeshifted to try to get away from her. “I bought ,’im fair and square—now he’s tryin’ to go back to Rod and Cleo. They train them to do that, you know. They’re not honest people. Bust down their door and I bet you find drugs or devil stuff.”
Marlon didn’t beat down Rod and Cleo’s door. Instead, he took the goat, threw it in a cell, and told Joanie to come back the following day. “If it’s still a goat after a night of sleep, that means it ain’t your hamster.” Joanie acted shocked the next day when the goat was still a goat, but everyone knew her hamster had already been picked up on the interstate. “Poor thing was tryin’ to hitchhike its way to the city,” said the reports, “but it ended right back where it started.”
Maybe the goat always held a grudge for the night he was arrested without cause, or maybe he was just a bad goat from birth. Whatever it was, the goat wreaked havoc on Perkins. Every week, at least one night, he’d get up to the devil’s business and land himself in a cell.
Then Marlon retired. He was too old and didn’t have the drive to do much else but sit in his home drinking a beer now and again. The town was a burden on him, always needing his help to deal with one damn goat. Even so, Marlon knew he wasn’t long for the world, and if the people of Perkins couldn’t take care of themselves, the whole place might blow away when he died. He could think of no solution but to hope, for their sake, that he stayed a while longer. But Marlon’s life was not extended by hope. When the children came in yelling about how the goat had unplugged the ice cream man’s freezers, they found Marlon unresponsive.
All of Perkins gathered for the funeral. Even the goat made an appearance. People here and there muttered that the goat only wanted to be sure the old man was dead, but the goat showed no sign that he cared for their talk. He walked to the open casket and paused a while. Everyone else glanced back and forth, trying not to be obvious in their observation. Then, without a word to anyone, he left.
Next week, things went back to normal, except that when the kids ran to tell Marlon about all the broken mailboxes, they stopped midway. They went home instead, and because no one gave the matter any closure, the mailboxes stayed broken.
The goat smashed the front window of the liquor store, got drunk, then went streaking through town. No one stopped him. The goat climbed the water tower and painted a phallus. The goat huffed paint while failing in his attempt to teach a Sunday school class how to urinate in public without getting caught. The window stayed broken, the tower stayed vandalized, the children stayed urinated, and no one confronted the goat.
One day, the goat made Mrs. Creary do jumping jacks. Used to be that kind of thing only ended when Marlon came to put a stop to it, but Marlon never came. Near midnight the goat got tired of prodding Mrs. Creary and left without a word.
The next day he threatened to burn down the fire station, but no one tried to stop him, so he started the fire. He didn’t actually want to burn it down, just to hear the cries and lamentations in response to his threat. The flames gave him no joy, so he put them out. He let the volunteer firefighters back inside the building.
The goat hated the urine smell of the town’s children, so he ran them all into the community pool. The goat was tired of looking at the phallus, so he repainted the water tower. The goat boarded the window of the liquor store.
While buying a pack of cigarettes, the goat heard Jim and Lina arguing over who would take care of the kids on date night. The goat volunteered.
When a group of hoodlums from Benson came to preach heresies, the goat ran them out of town.
The goat had a barbecue and gave out free hotdogs. They weren’t poisoned with laxatives. The lemonade wasn’t spiked. It was a pleasant afternoon.
The goat sent his resume and got a job offer in the city, but he thought better of it. Soon after finding work in town, he married. He and his wife built a nice little home, and once a week the goat left his family to take a morning walk on a route that passed through the cemetery. He always tended to linger at one grave in particular.
Hey, It’s a Gig
By William Shaw
I’m not stupid, you know. I didn’t take this job because I thought it would be good for me. I signed up to work with Mercury Transportation for the sole reason anyone does anything these days: money. If someone wants to pay me to stand next to a teleportation booth and press a button, then I for one am too desperate to say no, especially at thirteen pounds per customer.
My official job title is Independent Contractor, No Wage Guarantees, No Benefits. But the title on my badge is ‘Teleportation Facilitator.’ My job is to greet the customer, direct them to the teleportation booth, and hit the big green ‘Initiate Teleport’ button once they’re inside. That’s all there is to it. I don’t even have to wipe the booth down before the next customer comes in and the process repeats. And repeats. And repeats. On a good day, there are enough repeats for me to afford my evening pain medication.
At least Mercury throws in free transportation. Every day I teleport to work in Leeds from my local Mercury Hub in Sheffield. There were no vacancies in the Sheffield Hub when I applied, but my mate Paul, who lives in Leeds, landed a gig there not two weeks after I started. Funny, that. It always seemed weird not to have the two of us just work at our local Hubs. But ours not to reason why. It beats delivering groceries or training AIs for pennies an hour. It may not be a good option, but there are worse ones.
That’s what I try to tell myself, anyway.
*
I knew Fatima was a journalist from the moment I saw her. I also knew that I didn’t want to talk to her. I was having a hard day already; my chest pains had flared up something awful that morning, and I needed to serve another twelve customers to afford any painkillers. So I didn’t realize her angle until much, much later.
“How long have you worked for Mercury Transportation, Mr. Enfield?” she asked.
“Three years,” I replied.
“And have you experienced any medical problems during that time?”
“I don’t have to tell you that,” I snapped. A wave of pain shot across my chest, making the lights above my head swim. “It’s not like I’ve even seen a doctor in that time.”
“I understand,” said Fatima. “May I ask if you had to complete a blood test before working here?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I thought that was to see if I was on drugs. Why do you—”
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Enfield.” Fatima switched her recorder off. “I think I have everything I need.”
She turned on her heel and headed for the door, before pausing and looking over her shoulder.
“And I’d take the train home, if I were you.”
I didn’t know what she meant by that. Not till the following month, anyway, when her article came out.
*
You’ve heard the old sci-fi story about teleporters, right? It goes like this: A man steps into a teleportation booth in one place and steps out of another one somewhere else. He can go from Earth to the Moon, Venus to Mars, or hell, from Sheffield to Leeds, and think no more about it. The boffins tell him it works by taking his body apart, atom by atom, at one end, and reassembling it, atom by atom, at the other.
But here comes the twist: the teleporter isn’t taking him apart and putting him back together. It’s destroying his body at one end and creating a copy at the other. He is killed every time he steps into the teleportation booth, and the travel industry has instituted a regime of mass murder in the name of passenger convenience.
Mercury Transportation isn’t doing that.
Too much effort, for one thing. Incinerating millions of users every day? It’d be cheaper to buy them all first-class plane tickets. Too much scrutiny, for another. Some of the richest people on Earth use Mercury Transportation. You think they’d stand for being murdered every time they pop out to the Louis Vuitton store? Please.
No, it’s much simpler than that. Every time an employee makes use of Mercury’s oh-so-generous free transportation, the company intercepts the transmission and clones a tiny piece of the data. That data is siphoned off to a secure location and converted back into living matter, typically whatever organ is selling for the highest price that week. That’s why they make us take those blood tests; they don’t want any damaged goods. They’ve cloned thousands of hearts, livers, lungs, even a couple of uteruses in the ten years they’ve been up and running.
All of this is completely illegal, of course. But why should that matter? Some of the richest people on Earth use Mercury Transportation. They’ll get around to making it legal eventually.
The real trouble isn’t for Mercury. It’s for Mercury’s staff. All that cloning takes its toll, you see. I first started getting chest pains after three months of working for Mercury. Now, thanks to Fatima, I know why.
*
When I finish reading Fatima’s article, all I can do is stare at the wall.
I should quit. I should really, really quit. This isn’t right. This isn’t healthy. How many of my trips have been intercepted? How many rich tossers are walking around with copies of my heart while the original keeps barely limping on? How much longer before my body gives out completely?
But when I look at my phone, I know what I’ll see. Another angry message from the landlord. A final demand from the student loan company. The water. The heating. The electricity. And if there’s anything left over, I need something for the pain.
All that cash has to come from somewhere, fast. My next shift at Mercury Transportation starts in three hours.
I may not like it, but hey. It’s a gig.
Single Saucers Only
By Arthur Davis
I just threw down my first beer of the afternoon when two flying saucers landed in my backyard at the same time, almost crashing into each other trying to maneuver into the one spot clearly marked as “Single Saucer Parking Only.”
“Shit, now what?” I groaned, nearly falling off my lounge chair a few feet from the parking space.
A half dozen small blue creatures jumped from the blue saucer and almost as many red aliens piled out of the red saucer. A few red aliens wore short skirts. I guessed they were females. The saucers were inches from each other, clearly overlapped the boundaries of my ten-foot-by-twelve-foot alien landing space. The red ship had taken up so much more space it was crushing a patch of my prize begonias.
I instantly disliked their entire race. A blue ship landed months ago. I spotted them leaving as I drove up my driveway. The parking space they left was spotless. In the past I’ve had saucers land disgorging a batch of rowdy, noisy, disrespectful aliens. I had to force them out of my backyard with a rake after the neighbors complained.
“You’re both crazy,” I said to myself, making mind bets on who would displace the other.
The blue and red aliens argued as if I wasn’t there. They jumped up and down. I think that was a way of expressing their anger. Here on Earth we have laws that allow you to carry a gun almost anywhere. If the red and blue aliens had these kind of insane boundaries, my parking space would be littered with dead aliens. Two aliens from the red saucer jumped sideways and landed back where they originally stood.
“How did you do that?” I asked, interrupting the turmoil and my plans for the afternoon.
I was looking forward to taking Cynthia out for a nice dinner. It was our second date and there was already chemistry. A widow at forty, she was nearly a decade younger and had lost her husband in a car accident years ago. Cynthia was easy on the eyes, an assistant principal at a local middle school. The conversation was effortless, as was her sense of humor infectious.
And she was hot. Quietly hot. “Put your weapons away. Can’t you read?” I demanded, trying to get a suntan to impress Cynthia. The small parking lot sign clearly read “ONE SAUCER and NO EXPOSED WEAPONS.”
The heat of the moment subsided. A thicket of clouds far back to the horizon was shading the sun’s rays. First saucers, now the sun. I was never going to get a tan. I looked down at my belly. “You’re no help at all,” I said, shaking my head in mock despair.
I hadn’t been out on a date in a long time. An engineer, I worked almost every day on multiple projects, all the while making sure I convinced myself that I had no time to find a partner. Then I met Cynthia at a friend’s party. For the first time I was conscious of being at least ten pounds overweight and had long ago lost too much hair to be called “handsome.” I was tall. I think that helped.
“I’m going to flip an invisible coin. Heads, the red guys can stay and you blue guys have to look elsewhere.”
All the aliens nodded in agreement. I flipped the coin. It came up heads, which provoked some last-minute threats. Before the blue aliens took off, I directed them to another alien parking space a few blocks away.
“We prefer your lot. I’ve been here before. You know we’re better aliens than those boneheads,” Burt said. He was a good guy. Married with two kids. He loved cigars.
“Burt,” I said, “what’s fair is fair. The toss was fair.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he mumbled and climbed back into his ship. It flew off as the red guys maneuvered their ship into the center of the parking space. Burt was a good guy. I wasn’t happy with the outcome either but needed to get back to what was left of the sun.
Flying saucers and thoughtless aliens were an all-too-common part of our culture since they first landed, when I was in high school. My licensed space was federally subsidized as a way to increase our relations with aliens from any planet. Every time a spaceship landed no matter how long they stayed, I received $50. Nice.
I’m sure Cynthia would not have been as pissed off. She would have been more forgiving. Certainly more patient. Over the years they became more an annoyance than a threat to mankind.
“Life happens,” she had said when we first spoke. “Some good, some not so great.”
“Life happens,” I said, picking up my lounge chair and moving it away from the red saucer. “Sometimes you get crashing alien saucers, clouds interrupting your plans, and every once in a while a pretty woman finds her way into your life and you’re never the same.”
BRILLIANT FLASH FICTION 