Issue 65 February 2019 Flash Fiction Online February 2019

Rex could teach anybody to quilt. He didn’t care if you’d never sewn before, if you’d never held a needle. He had a gift, knew the fabric, and inherited a lifetime of needles from his grandmother. Quilts came together easy under Rex’s careful eye.

It didn’t matter if you had no money. Goodwill was brimming with fast fashion’s detritus, and Rex could pick up a pallet of it for forty bucks. Holey jeans with busted out thighs, lacy shirts that never looked good off a mannequin; if it was cloth, it went in the box. Rex hauled all of it through Alderwood Coffee’s back door every Sunday and sorted the pallet in their conference room by color, composition, and vibe.

All used fabric had vibe, and even Goodwill discards knew love once. A SeaWorld tee-shirt with a hint of nausea in the seams, a handknit sweater turned to felt in the washing machine, a Halloween costume torn when its wearer was caught TP-ing a neighbor’s house.

He could teach stitching, but vibes were deeper, a talent everybody felt and nobody could match. Rex cut the bad vibes out of the pallet of clothes and sifted all the best to the top of the stacks where his students would find them quickly. His students were artists, they made their own design, but they never had to dig far to find the perfect fabric.

Oliver came in with a coffee. The kid never owned a needle before Rex. Barely owned his clothes, and there was a new rip on the hem of his grubby tee shirt. The kid wasn’t punk enough to have done it himself.

Oliver scooted the cup across the table.

“You shaved your head,” said Rex. He knew not to comment on the rip. Oliver hated heroes worse than bullies.

“Like yours,” said Oliver, running a hand over the light brown fuzz that was nothing like Rex’s steely gray.

“Biting my style, kid.”

Oliver grinned. “Bald is beautiful, but not as beautiful as that coat, my dude.” He pinched the sleeve and tested the fabric. “Whoo, like a fireplace in a storm!”

Rex’s jacket was quilted all the way down to his knees, with a high collar and enough pockets to hide half a city’s secrets. The jacket had taken him a year to build. The fabric was stitched into a deep forest scene with stars along his shoulder blades, but the picture was nothing compared to the vibes in the fabric. Graduations, favorite vacations, perfect gifts from friends you haven’t seen in years. Those feelings are rare in $40 pallets from the Goodwill.

Rex primped the collar. “A lot of care went into this jacket.”

“I got a lot of care to give.”

Oliver pulled his sewing from a duffle bag and tossed it to Rex.

He caught it and unfurled a finished top, each block a portrait of the other students in Rex’s class.

“You can keep the blanket,” said Oliver. “I need myself a coat.”

#

Oliver’s jacket came together slowly from the clothes Rex brought each week. The kid dug deep through the stacks, overturning Rex’s careful assortment. He worked in black and gray and the occasional slash of violent red. Oliver took his own measurements with the tape gripped in his teeth, only speaking to Rex when he needed to reference the man’s jacket.

Rex offered to measure, offered complementary fabrics, buttons pilfered from his own private stash. Oliver refused help at every turn, and Rex stopped trying. It worried him, that the kid stashed his work every time Rex drew near, but Oliver never missed a Sunday.

Halfway through the collar, he came in with a black eye and asked for a new needle. Rex handed him a pack. He even bought the kid a coffee, only to watch the coffee go cold as Oliver stitched in the corner of the shop.

#

Oliver modeled his half-sewn jacket in the bathroom mirror, hood pulled up. The hood wasn’t his only modification. He’d fit it slimmer, fewer pockets, and shark teeth sewn around the open hood from white fabric that had been a hospital sheet.

“Rex, you got a sewing machine, right?” He squinted hard out of the gaping mouth, head cocked like ‘do you feel lucky?’

Rex nodded. It was his first look at Oliver’s jacket, and the thing prickled his spine.

Oliver dropped the hood. “Can you put the lining in? It looks nicer machine stitched.”

Rex took the jacket and felt the weight of bad boyfriends and long illness. Three gunshots hung heavy on the ends of the sleeves. The work itself was beautiful, and it was stitched from the ugliest feelings Oliver could dig from the stacks of discarded clothes. The boy knew vibe.

“This is a bad jacket,” said Rex.

“It’s mine,” said Oliver, with jaw set, daring Rex to take it away.

#

Rex walked home with the jacket stinking evil from his backpack. His coat was a work of terrible beauty, a warning to keep the world away. Oliver could get himself killed with a jacket like this. The vibes might scare away his bullies, but bigger evils are drawn to bad jackets. He didn’t need the weigh of bullets pulling him down.

The lining was already pinned. All he had to do was sew it. Rex positioned the jacket on his machine and startled at the sense of candy corn in the shiny black fabric spread across the shoulders. Oliver’s lining had been a Darth Vader cape. The coat was a mask.

Rex touched the outside of the coat again and laughed. The boy wanted his jacket scary, dripping with intimidation, but a Halloween scary that he could box up safely when the ghouls had gone away.

Yep. The kid knew vibes. Knew enough to make a very good very bad jacket. Rex dropped the presser foot to the fabric and started to sew.

We are the alive ones. We have grown fewer with time. Our cousins stay near us in the form of objects although they are not of us any longer.

The conch on the mantel was of us once. The tasseled ottoman was of us once. The carven bell was of us once, and we ring it to think of ourselves as we were and of the days when we were many.

The house held no cousins then: all our objects were only objects in those days, things we used as directed. We used can openers that were not cousins to open cans that were not cousins. We heated beans on the stove, which was also not a cousin.

We moved through a wider world then: we traveled in a cloud over many waters. We visited grasses short and tender, grasses tipped with fluffy seeds, grasses yellow and sharp with drought. We visited mosses dense and emerald green, mosses star-shaped, mosses red and hairy, which grew on stones at the water’s edge. We visited ways cobbled with foot-worn bricks, ways graveled with red sandstone, ways paved with sections of weather-broken concrete.

We had our first cousin the day of the storm. Lightning broke from the ground and rent us apart, as we had not known we could be rent. After this rending, on the rain-soaked earth lay our cousin: a wheel, spoked, as from a bicycle. We gathered this cousin to us, but our cousin was not of us any longer. And we saw we were fewer.

We still moved through the world. We brought our cousin with us. Soon we had another cousin: the day of the shipwreck, when smoke poured from the engine room and then flame came forth, and the ship had to be deserted in tiny boats, and by the time our boat reached safety we had with us our cousin the wheel and also our new cousin, a brass compass the size of an apple. And we saw we were fewer.

One day we were rent apart more than any other day: cousins lay around us on the verge, on the track, on the meadow. We saw a great black scar where the explosion had scorched the earth and scattered us, and we saw other kinds of cousins lying there, red and torn. We knew these for the cousins of object-makers, and we had not known object-makers had cousins until that day. We left those other cousins for their kin to gather, as we gathered ours, and we heard object-makers’ voices crying out behind us long after we left that place.

We moved through the world for much longer, and the number of our cousins grew, and the number of ourselves dwindled. We began to find it hard to carry all the cousins. We understood much better, now, what it was to be rent apart. We would not further divide ourselves from our cousins, and so we returned to stay in the house.

We are the alive ones, here in the house, caring for our cousins. We dust our cousin the china horse. We polish our cousin the samovar. We rub beeswax into our cousin the sturdy leather boot.

We miss the grasses, the mosses, the ways.

We miss traveling in a cloud, as we did when we were many.

Our cousins cannot tell us what to do. If they speak, it is only among themselves; but they seem more separate than we are, and we are not sure if they speak at all.

We arrange them in a wide circle in the parlor, compass and boot and wheel and tiger rug, stone knife and patterned bowl and glass jar filled with ginger candies, dozens of cousins from tiny pearl bead to heavy anvil to nearly weightless skein of silk. We listen.

Nothing.

Our house has its noises, and we go about silencing them, unplugging the noisiest objects, repairing the creaking floorboard, oiling the hinge of the shutter. We return to the circle of our cousins.

Nothing.

We miss the world and its ways, the many shapes of clouds there are, the height of some buildings overlooking the harbors and the depth of some stairways down under the cities. We miss the world.

We are so few, so many fewer than we were. We cluster together, aware as we never used to be of how we can be torn apart.

We touch each of our cousins in turn. We have never used them as directed: our cousins are not that kind of object. We simply touch them while we may.

We cannot know if they consent or if they understand. Here is what we do: We ring our cousin the bell.

Our cousin’s voice sings out, sharp and sweet, hanging in the air.

While it lingers, we open our cousin the glass jar, who contains many ginger candies, many more than the number we are.

We take just enough and we taste them and the taste is a benediction.

We, the alive ones, we who are left, leave our cousins in the house.

We turn from them, from the fading sound of the bell, and we seek fresh grasses and mosses and ways. We travel out, our cloud sparse and light, to what we have not seen.

The ginger sweetness of the candies from our cousin the glass jar stays with us only for a little time, and then that fades too.

You no longer sleep well. Your commute is a third-to-half-a-work-day. You put in long hours. You have responsibilities that matter more than anything else in your life. And illness and depression have returned to make everything harder.

There are two projects you are planning for the year. You’ve paid each one little attention.

What do you do?

The younger version of yourself would lose more sleep, friends, and happiness to reach the goal.

But he did not see the accidents on the highway, people who are also sleep deprived and doing their best. They don’t have a real relationship to come home to, a life to build beyond art.

You know how to sacrifice and get shit done. Checked that box for twenty years. And yet the dark slivers in your mind think that it all washes away once there’s a new project.

This is your process.

And it is dumb.

So you admit your mind is a wonderful friend and idiot at the same time. You sit down and plug away in fits and starts as you feel your way into the new project. Each one big. Each one will challenge what you can do. Each one is a book only you could write.

And then you give yourself some slack. Past is prologue. You’ve written close to twenty books. It will happen. It always does. To think a break will break you is the mythology of America, which would rather you work yourself to death in all directions.

Stop. Rest. Repeat. And take solace in the fact that the great Neal Barrett, Jr., gave you when you started, almost twenty years ago, words of agency and freedom where others saw hardship and suffering:

The only one who can make you write is you.

The only one who can make you stop writing is you.

Now go watch wrestling, heal up, and dream of what magic you will create next. Then you can breathe–and release the monsters within.

Hello, and welcome to LifeVault, the world’s only remaining digital preservation site. Now, you can access your documents and photos from anywhere without fear of identity theft or summoning the Stained Ear. Our patent-pending Nostalgorithms are tailored to recognize only you and your loved ones, keeping your treasured memories safe even from Echoes!

>Please enter your username: MeghanLin1993

>Please enter your password: ●●●●●●●●●●●

We’re sorry, LifeVault cannot accept that password. Samantha hasn’t loved you since the day next to the gingko trees at Harding Arboretum when she told you she was pregnant.

>To reset your password, please answer the following security question. (You have three attempts remaining)

>What did you call her on that day?  ●●●●●●●●●●●

Sorry, that is incorrect. You called her a “little whore,” which incidentally, is the same thing your mother called you when you told her you were pregnant with Samantha. It might have been the  dried-vomit smell of the gingkoes that put you in mind of the old couch in the room with the blinds that were always closed, or the three glasses of chardonnay you drank at the Harding café to stop your hands from shaking, but the words just seemed to slip out. You would’ve taken it back if Sam hadn’t slapped you.

She should’ve known better, should’ve remembered about your mother.

We, at LifeVault, understand that regret gnaws at you during the quiet hours when the Ear slips along the horizon, and there’s nothing to do but watch it bleed mildewed silence into a sky the color of wet concrete. We know how lonely you’ve been since Echoes carried off the others, how hard it is not to speak Samantha’s name into the expectant hush. She’s probably dead, after all, so there’d be no harm, no memories for her Echo to devour. It would almost be worth it to see her face again, even twisted by hateful longing.

Often, you wonder why Sam never said your name.

>Please answer the following security question. (You have two attempts remaining)

>Why didn’t you ever look for her? ●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●●

Sorry, that is incorrect. You had plenty of chances. Two weeks passed between the first algal blooms creeping onto land and when the Ear ripped open the sky. You knew Samantha was still in Cleveland because she forgot to take you off her emergency contact list and the hospital called when there were complications with the birth. That was back before they realized there were going to be complications with every birth. You told yourself Sam wouldn’t want to see you, especially after all those things you said about her and the baby. She had friends, certainly, people to look out for her. It was better to stay away, easier to think she hated you than believe there was anything worth salvaging.

You even saw her once. Yes, that was her running down St. Clair Avenue just ahead of the rising damp. She was dragging a man along with her–about her age, glasses, messy brown hair, jeans and a ripped flannel shirt. One of his shoes had come off, and he was limping, his bare foot already black with mold. He had a kind face, though, and Sam really seemed to like him.

The horizon was clear. She would’ve heard you call out.

It made you proud to see her still fighting when so many others had simply lain down and let the damp cover them. Sometimes, you stumble across their bodies–little mummy mounds soft with lichen, sporting huge, pale mushrooms and fungal cockscombs like some wonderland nightmare. Knowing Sam isn’t among them makes you smile.

You’re right; you probably would’ve just slowed her down. It was better for her to think you were dead.

>Please answer the following security question. (You have one attempt remaining)

>Why are you still alive? ●●●●●●●●●●●●

Sorry, that is incorrect. None of it means anything, although we can see how you would believe otherwise. Humans are skilled at finding patterns in random events. It was only by chance the Ear passed above you so many times without taking your voice, and that the Echoes always came for others. That time when the floor gave way just as the mold was seeping through the walls, and that time when the pack of looters was chasing you and you found that station wagon with a full tank and keys in the ignition, those were both happy accidents.

Even now, you wonder at the luck of discovering a charged tablet and internet access in the stairwell of the hi-rise you hid in to escape the rising damp. Unfortunately, it’s just another coincidence.

If Samantha survives, she may find the apology you plan to write once you access your LifeVault account. She may look at the pictures of you and her at Cedar Point or standing in line for Twilight tickets or gutting jack-o-lanterns on the kitchen table. She may even forgive you. But that depends on her.

We understand how necessary it is to think there’s a reason behind all this, that you’ll see Sam again, that your continued survival is indicative of some greater plan instead of just one of the many lies you tell yourself.

Go on believing, there’s no harm in it.

>Please answer the following security question. (This is your last attempt)

>How much time do you have left?: ●●●●●●●

Sorry, that is incorrect. You are out of time.

Previously published in Daily Science Fiction, December 2014. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

For 247 sleep cycles, the safebuoy has been drifting. The only window is a round, pillow-shaped patch of transparent steel. Loocha tells her son, Corvey, there’s nothing to see, and he believes her. Until the giant ice cream cone appears.

From his sleep-sack, Corvey points and asks, “What’s that?”

Since the evacuation of the Oort Colony, this has been their game. He sees something through the glazed window, and Loocha must come up with outlandish answers for whatever happens to be scrolling by outside.

Lately, he has been playing the game without emerging from his bed, a bungeed cocoon of blankets and mats. His voice has grown high and reedy. The medications have increased. The nursing grub no longer provides morning blood counts.

Corvey is pointing at a triangular gleam obscuring the stars. A wide, jagged semicircle fans off one end. Hard edges, nothing natural. A geometric sprouting.

In an instant, Loocha recognizes the object. It’s another safebuoy.

“That,” she tells him, “is a giant ice cream cone.”

Corvey’s hazy expression reminds Loocha that, for him, ice cream is squeezed from an aluminum bag and gobbled mid-drift. So she explains, again, about the un-seeable force that pulls all things together. Light and stars, planets and moons, asteroids and colonies, ice cream dollops and conical pastries.

Corvey laughs, “Yum.”

He lowers his arm and, looking sideways, smiles. This is what Loocha calls, fondly, his cheeky look. He knows she’s hiding something. He notices the blue flash on the console.

“There’s nothing to see,” she says.

Her signal to let it drop, and he does. Loocha has spent months teaching him that it doesn’t matter what’s outside the window. When she tells him, don’t think about it, he doesn’t. When she says, don’t worry, he talks about something else. Like now.

“Can we play Bullconomy?” he asks.

Loocha is so sick of Bullconomy.

“All right.”

She has to dig around to find the scrollgame. As she yanks a swing-table loose and smooths the magnetic scrollgame against it, her lower back aches. Gathering decrepitude despite thrice-daily microgravity yoga sessions.

A holographic landscape of colored buildings and busy streets emerges from the scrollgame. They play for three hours. Corvey wins only because Loocha fudges her chances. She cannot stomach handing him a loss. He needs as many wins as she can provide him.

After the game, she coaxes Corvey out for exercise. Pulling himself from one handrail to the next, he manages one circumferential “lap” of the safebuoy’s only living quarters. Cramped and thick with the hum and throb of machinery and the damp stink of their unwashed bodies. The vessel is ninety percent life support mechanics and armor. Its structure is honeycombed with pockets of sand and ice. Shields against radiation.

After his lap, Corvey eats a locust cracker and swaddles himself back into the sleep-sack, complaining in his attenuated, old man’s voice of pain in his limbs, his stomach, his lower back. The back pain is new.

When the complaints become sobs, she uses her curled pinky to nudge the globular tears toward the nearest hazard-vac opening. She then cracks a hot pad to life and traces letters between his shoulder blades, which lately seem more jagged. The absence of crying tells Loocha he’s finally asleep.

This is safe time. When Corvey sleeps, nothing can happen. Another lie, though this one is to herself. Loocha must believe her own lies, at least a little, if she’s to pass them on to her son.

A lot can happen when Corvey sleeps. His cells never sleep. The good ones and the bad. But she needs the chance to rest and not think. Not thinking is almost as good as sleep.

Not thinking about the evacuation. The preposterous luck of reaching a safebuoy. The preposterous misfortune of ionizing radiation, cascading electromagnetic fields and fifty other imperceptible casual factors that lined up against her son in a microburst. Not his fault, not hers, yet the bad cells began to blossom. The grub caught it quickly. There have been complications.

Too soon, a soft whir emanates from the floor. The grub emerges from its shaft and wriggles up a track leading to Corvey’s sleep-sack.

The grub’s metal-mesh body sprouts needles of varying gauges—for drawing away sickened blood, for injecting delicate poisons, for thrashing healthy cells to life. As the grub draws nearer to Corvey, these needles bristle.

With a flex of her fingertips, she pushes away and buckles herself into a cot. The crooked shadows of infusion pumps and intravenous branches reach across the ceiling like shattered limbs. Cylindrical lights wink green or red, sometimes both. Every other second, the lights and shadows are washed away by the persistent pulse of blue.

The giant ice cream cone is trying to talk to them. Two adults, three children, according to the schematic flashing on the holopad.

Already, their safebuoys are drifting apart. Loocha should respond. She should activate the tether cables so they can anchor onto each other.

But Corvey is weakening. If Loocha hails them, what germs might strangers bring? Either way, the situation will change. Maybe better, maybe worse. But she can’t bear the risk. Her life’s landscape must remain stable. Stable means not worse.

There isn’t much more worse for their situation to get before it sinks into the unthinkable.

She studies her sleeping son. The swell of his chest so slight under the hot pad and blankets. She thinks positive thoughts. She visualizes him leaping free with the power of his own laughter and waking everyone far too early.

“What’s happening?”

The grub’s pokes have woken him. His voice, so sudden and clear, alarms Loocha.

“What’s happening to me, Mummy?”

She unbuckles and struggles to his side. “It’s a giant ice cream cone,” she soothes. Though that’s not what he’s asking.

Together, they look through the patch of transparent steel. The cone has diminished to a sliver. The pulsing blue light begins to fade.

“There’s nothing to see.”