Issue 80 May 2020 Flash Fiction Online May 2020

“It’s me,” Phil lies. “It’s Phil. It’s Daddy.”

Mira and Christy — Phil’s wife, Phil’s daughter — stare at him, daring themselves to believe. Mira puts her hands on Christy’s small shoulders: holding her back, or pushing her forward. The door to Phil’s room is open and, in the corridor outside, one of his doctors strolls by with two technicians in tow. She slows her step to peep inside the room. When Phil catches her staring, she flushes and moves on fast.

It’s all been leading to this. Learning to use this body of false flesh, submitting to the fine-tuning of technicians and neurologists and psychiatrists; before that, lying still for the long hollow hours that it takes for a lifetime’s worth of memories to be shunted into storage.

But that wasn’t him, then. That was Phil, the real Phil. Young child, promising career, outstanding record of community service, tragic illness — an easy choice for the first cohort of candidates. That Phil loved the symphony; and the feeling of a good kitchen knife flying, falling slickly through carrots and potatoes and peppers for a stew; and, best of all, long sunny summer afternoons in the garden.

Mira lets go of Christy and totters forward one step, two. She stretches out a pale, shaking hand. A hand that would have clasped Phil’s, when he died. When Phil’s wife touches his cheek, he feels the pressure, the warmth, even the electrical transduction from her skin to his. But he doesn’t feel what Phil felt when she touched him. All that’s left is mere physics.

This Phil cringes away from sunlight even when he dials his ocular inputs down to the lowest parameter allowed. This Phil listens to a symphony and hears nothing but noise. This Phil eats the nutrient paste that powers his fuel cells and nods along when the technicians swear that future models will integrate inputs for smell and taste (along certain limited parameters, of course).

Can Mira feel that wrongness when she touches him?

She lingers a moment, then pulls her hand back to her side. Her fingers curl and uncurl, fist to flat and back again. In the doorway, Christy huddles alone. She’s smaller, without her mother behind her. When Phil takes a step to the side, to see her better, she gasps. She can see him better now too. He doesn’t quite look like Phil, though the voice capture matches him well enough. His face is a mask of Phil’s, animated but not-quite-there. The eyes especially; the eyes are all wrong. He remembers what Phil is supposed to look like and, on the first day of his post-procedure recovery, he asked the doctor to have the mirror taken out of his room. There’s a faint rectangle on the wall where it used to be, the paint unfaded by daylight’s touch. It’s getting lighter, but it’ll never be the same color as the rest of the wall.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he says, “I’m sorry.” He bends down to one knee. He’s not Phil but he remembers Phil, knows him through every clenched knuckle of gyrus and sulcus, each tangle of intestine and crest of vertebrae. He summons a facsimile of Phil’s smile, and sees its distorted reflection in Christy’s eyes. “I know it’s strange. It must be scary.”

Everything has been strange and scary, since the leads were peeled away and the connection severed. Since the upload ended and the electric lifeline to the old Phil, the late Phil, terminated. The moment when he stopped being Phil and started being something new and ill-fitted to the well-worn treads of Phil’s thought patterns. Instead of Phil, he has become the absence of Phil. All he can do now is blunder forward in this new guise, and try not to wound anyone else with that loss.

Phil is not Phil but he knows Phil and he misses Phil and he remembers Phil well enough to understand that Phil would never, never do a thing to hurt this child, that he would crack his chest open if he thought she needed shelter, that he would break his bones for the marrow if he thought she needed sustenance. That he would turn his mind inside out if he thought she needed a father.

Phil would have moved the world to make his daughter smile. Phil can’t do that, but he can lean forward, balance accelerometers humming, and hold his arms out open wide. “I’m scared, too,” he says, and this is the truth. He calls upon the stored data in his head for an old familiar nickname: “Let’s be scared together, Christiroo.”

She lurches forward, a tangle of scrawny six-year-old limbs. Mira’s hand flutters to her mouth as Christy wraps herself around him. He is not Phil but, whoever he is now, the instant before she’s upon him, he sees her smile crack wide open. In her face, raw and wild and red, is the memory of sunshine.

Originally published in Fireside, July 2019. Republished here by permission of the author.

September 2019 marks the twentieth anniversary of Jay’s decision to become a writer. His gift to you all this celebratory year is DO IT – Twelve hard lessons on learning by failing, succeeding by accident, never giving up and saying FXXK WRITING all at the same time. You’re welcome!

• • •

“Pardon me for staring,” said my Google student from Spain. “I’ve never actually met a writer before.” Apparently being a writer is a novelty. Not as much as an actor, but more so than a poet. Please notice I did not say ‘successful” or “acclaimed” or even “published” writer. In such classes, I try to dismiss the mystical and novel elements of this vocation. Writing is labor. Writing is work. It is a skill, not a cosmic gift from destiny for the privileged few. It is available to almost anyone willing to put in the work (talent, circumstance, and context notwithstanding).

I had enjoyed the limited cultural cache of this novelty and identified with the toughness associated with surviving in the cultural marketplace. But there were darker streams of this attachment to the novelty of seeing yourself in mythic terms because of your oh-so-special vocation. Writers can justify their seclusion and solitary existence every day. Art is more important than human relations, until you’re clutched by the suicidal loneliness of art that can’t love you back. But hey, you almost sold a short story to Creepy Sci Fi Writer Monthly.

It took compounded trauma and poverty to shatter the illusion of art being my identity. After working sixteen hour days, six days a week, I clawed back to writing. But the middle-class daydream of being a career novelist vanished. Living below the poverty line for years forged a new truth. Being a writer was not magic. Writing was magic. I was not plagued by dreams of stardom. Shit, there were no dreams except the fever dream of stories on the page, of revising to make it crackle, of throwing everything I had into it, to challenge myself, of embracing unconventional structures, forms, topics, and taboos. Of trying to get better and avoid the signal to noise ratio of writing gurus who sold bullshit about story over craft. And as they say in the wrestling world, business picked up. But the writing is still what fucking mattered.

I came to the hard conclusion known far and wide by blue-collar, working class, and under-represented and oppressed communities of writers: the act of creating alternate realities, screaming desires, and spilling fears on the page, makes the shitfucking drudgery of the bottom rungs of capitalism bearable, and that can keep you real and alive.

Ironically, these truths bled bright when I largely abandoned writing fantastical fiction and embraced a much wider range of genres from where I’d spent the past twenty-years. In this chrysalis, I was introduced to the work of Mark SaFranko, author of Hating Olivia, The Favor, and other fine works of confessional fiction and crime stories. His work injected straight into my id, and the more I read, the more I craved. A blue-collar writer from New Jersey whose work is bigger in France because they think he hates America, SaFranko unveils the truth I’d only seen when I had nothing left to lose.

So I leave you with his words.

“Someone once said, ‘Art is an addiction. That’s why there are so many bad artists.’ I think that’s true. I can’t imagine not liking to write. Why the fuck would you do it, then? For the inevitable rejection? Sure, you get stuck here and there, but why put yourself through the torture? Isn’t there enough in life to make you miserable?

“I don’t know why I love it. For some reason I’m wired that way. Probably it has to do with coming from a blue-collar background, where really tedious, boring, unrewarding work was what you had to face every day, day in and day out. Doing anything creative [is] like traveling to another universe.”

The sand was dry and loose, still warm with the lingering heat of the day.  Nora stole across the darkened beach, a large wicker basket clutched beneath one arm. Beside an outcropping of rock near the water’s edge, she stopped, lowering her bundle and pulling an oilskin bag from across her back. She glanced furtively about, relieved to see that she was quite alone. The baby in the basket woke, blinking grey eyes but making no sound. The tide was steadily swelling; time was running out.

A full, August moon—the Grain Moon—reigned high overhead, casting its pale glow across the sea. It was enough light to work by, and Nora moved quickly. With shaking fingers, she drew a rosette of protection in the sand. She set the basket in its center, lingering just a moment to kiss her daughter’s cheek—she looked even thinner than the night before, her skin so pale it seemed to glow. It was a wonder she’d made to the full moon. A miracle.  A wave crashed, its foamy edge stretching toward the child.

The water was near the circle, the tide near its zenith.

In a rush, she pulled a handful of crystals from her bag: aquamarine for a tranquil sea, sharp-edged epidote for healing, jet for protection, and a moonstone to harness the energy of reflected light. “Amphitrite, Lady of the Ocean,” she murmured as she buried a stone in the sand, “who dwells within the sea, accept this heartfelt offering; bestow your grace on me.” She repeated the incantation three more times, placing a crystal at each cardinal direction.

In her bag, Nora found a jar of clumpy, grey salt—local salt she’d collected herself from the flats that edged the marshland near her home—and a vial of oil that had been steeped with agrimony. She dabbed the oil on her finger and traced an arc across her daughter’s forehead, then she scattered the salt in a circle around the child’s basket. The wind picked up, pulling her hair loose from its braid.

Beyond the dunes, her husband’s urgent voice called her name.

The foam of a wave dampened the hem of her skirt.

Nora couldn’t spare the time it would take to look up, not even for Adrian. “Heal and protect,” she whispered into the wind. “Heal and protect.”

She took the chain from around her neck. The heavy brass locket held a bundle of herbs she’d harvested at the last full moon. She’d kept it against her skin for twenty-nine days and nights, infusing it with her own vitality. Now she nestled it into her daughter’s basket.

He called again, so much nearer, and her heart surged. She’d promised to wake him, but when the time came, she had not. Instead, she’d slipped out in silence, gathering up their child and hurrying to the shore without him. She wanted Adrian on that beach with her. Desperately. But magic required equilibrium—blood for blood, life for life. She didn’t know how much she would have to give of herself and she longed to protect him from that choice. She would take it all on her own shoulders, even if it meant dying alone.

She pulled a small knife from the pocket of her dress and knelt. The tide rolled in, soaking the sand, reclaiming the salt and exposing the crystals. “Heal and protect,” she repeated, each time louder than before. The baby’s eyes were rimmed in ink-stained shadow. She whimpered, lately too weak even to cry.

Adrian was almost there. He scrabbled down dunes, stumbling over his feet in the deep, clutching sand. She looked back at him, their eyes locking as her breath hitched. For the first time, she let go of the panic she’d been holding at bay all night. She wasn’t alone anymore.

A surge of dark water encircled the basket. It was time.

Nora pushed sharp metal against the pad of her thumb, closed her eyes as the skin resisted the blade. It gave way in a burst of heat and pain. “Heal and protect!” she cried for the ninth and final time. The salt stung as she plunged her hand into the ocean, trading blood for magic, trading herself.

The world grew soft and dark. Waves tumbled about her, lifting the basket and spinning it just out of reach. The water erased the circle, washed the crystals away. The baby’s eyes went wide.

Nora felt heavy, suddenly so heavy that even kneeling was too much. She slumped forward, glimpsing her daughter’s basket nearby, bobbing at the crest of a tiny swell.

And then Adrian’s arms were around her. He pulled her into him, cradling her against his body, strong enough to resist the shove and pull of the sea. His lips were warm against her hair, murmuring words she could not hear, and Nora felt her vigor return.

Whatever the spell had taken, Adrian restored. It shouldn’t have been possible.

He knelt in the surf, barefoot, his shirt unbuttoned, and his hair wild with sleep. A gash on his forearm dripped blood into the water—her knife clutched in his other hand. His own sacrifice. For her. For their child. His eyes were fixed on the basket rocking on the waves.

“Did it work?” he whispered, half to his wife and half to the ocean itself.

Nora had no answer. She looked out at their daughter, tears mingling with seawater on her face. His blood had been enough to save her, but had they saved the baby? Nora was as helpless as he was.

“Did it work?” Adrian’s voice pitched wild, but the wind caught it, threw the sound back at them.

But the sea must have heard. As though in answer, it shifted its current and brought the basket back, left it half-sunk in the sand, and retreated once more. The baby’s skin was flushed pink, her eyes bright. She opened her tiny mouth and, for the first time in weeks, she wailed.

She approaches the mirror: I’m there to meet her. We study each other through identical brown eyes. The spray of freckles across our noses. The incisor that’s slightly askew—hers on the left side of her mouth, mine on the right. We blink simultaneously.

Her mother’s voice, calling: “Have you brushed your hair?” She looks over her shoulder and I do the same, where no mother is calling for me, where no one cares how many snarls I have.

“Yes,” she says, and I feel the lie on my own lips.

She turns back to me and picks up a brush. Mine is made of pine needles, the handle a broken stick, my hair tangled with leaves and crusted with mud, but she can’t see any of that. She sees what she expects to see.

After a few cursory strokes, we set down our brushes. Her mother calls again, sterner now, and we turn away from each other. Her footsteps recede, leaving silence behind. I glance back toward her empty room. My fingers reach for the edge of the mirror.

No, whispers the sky. The dark clouds release an icy spray of rain. Sit.

I squat on the ground and pick at a scab on my knee. If it were me, I would brush my hair until it shone like still water. I’d never make my mother call for me twice.

• • •

When she was little, I’d lurk just beyond the frame and listen in when her mother put her to sleep.

“Tell me again about the fairies,” she said, her voice smelling of milk and toothpaste.

“When you were just a baby, they tried to steal you away,” her mother began, her words as gentle as a lullaby. “They made another baby girl to leave in your place, one that looked just like you, only this baby was made of mud and moss and spider webs and dew. And even though it wasn’t real, it cried and cooed and sneezed just like you did.”

“Why did they want me?”

“You were a beautiful and perfect little baby, clean and fresh and sweet-smelling. The changeling was covered in grass stains, with dirt under its fingernails and hair that had never been washed. Of course, they wanted you. But I turned on the lights and I caught them! They hissed and bared their fangs, but I held on to you and wouldn’t let go. And in the end, they took their changeling and disappeared…”

“Right into that mirror,” she said, and I knew without looking that she was pointing at the gilded frame on the wall, behind which I cowered. “But where are they now?”

“Gone away,” said her mother. “Gone away forever.”

Gone away forever, echoed a voice like wind through trees, like water over rocks. She doesn’t want you.

“Shh!” I hissed. I heard the curious sadness underneath her mother’s words. Day by day, the girl stretched and bulged and lengthened. Every day she became someone new. I, on the other hand, remain just as I am. The one behind the mirror. The one made to take her place.

• • •

Her mother enters the room without knocking, takes in the dirty clothes smothering the soft bedcovers, the carpet made gritty with crumbs and clutter. The unicorn figurine lying near the edge of her dresser, toppled on its side, horn snapped off.

“What are you doing in my room?” Our faces twist.

Her mother points at the figurine. Once it stood proudly in front of the mirror, cream and blue and gold, smooth as an evening lake. Once I wanted desperately to take it. Not to keep. Just to hold, for one shining moment.

“This room is a disaster,” her mother says. “You’re ruining all of your pretty things.”

The girl grabs the figurine with careless fingers and tosses it into the basket she keeps under her desk, the one where she throws things to be taken away—things she once cared for, that she no longer wants. My own limbs follow her movement. Her mother flinches when the unicorn thuds at the bottom of the basket, and she looks into the mirror, searching for the daughter she once knew.

“See me,” I whisper with tight lips.

The skies above my head darken and rumble with thunder. Don’t, growls the voice. You cannot.

I grind my teeth together. But it doesn’t matter; the girl screams “Get out!” and I have no choice but to mouth it with her. Her mother’s cheeks blotch autumn-red, and she turns and is gone.

• • •

Later, when the girl is downstairs, her mother sneaks back into the room to pluck the unicorn from the basket. Her fingers run over the chipped flank, the jagged lack of a horn, and once again her eyes find the mirror. She shouldn’t be able to see me, but the force of my longing is as loud as a shriek.

A fierce wind blows into the wood, watering my eyes and pelting my head with leaves.

Not yours. Come away.

I grimace and grit. I was never meant to be more than currency, and the forest will not give me up for nothing. A changeling for a baby; that was always the bargain. But instead of a baby behind the glass, there’s a girl who hates everything she once loved: her mother, her room, herself. She’ll do.

If the forest demands a trade, I will bring it one.

I place my fingers against the glass. I send a thought that only a mother will hear: “Mud and moss and spider webs and dew.”

A tear draws a single black line down her cheek. “Grass stains and dirt under fingernails and hair that’s never been washed,” she answers.

Behind me, the wind quiets, becomes thoughtful. I bristle and breathe.

“Mother,” I whisper.

Her hands meet mine on the other side of the mirror. I wait for the glass to dissolve.

The facility is state-of-the-art, all swooping balustrades and huge panes of glass.

Mom’s dozing in her wheelchair, and as the lift rises to the clinic on the thirteenth floor, Alyssa brainstorms how she’ll start her article on the procedure.

She still can’t shake how excited her editor was, how he’d barely apologised when she pointed out they were only getting the insider treatment because of her mom. Part of her still wishes she’d quit, but she’s been a reporter for fifteen years now—she wants this story, loath as she is to admit it.

Besides, the treatment is supposed to work wonders.

“Lyssa, honey?”

“I’m here, Mom,” she says, job forgotten. Mom’s lucid, which is rarer than not these days. “We’re going to see a specialist. Someone who can help you.”

“That’s nice.” There’s a pause that stretches on so long Alyssa wonders if her mother’s gone back to sleep—or if she’s fading again. Then the older woman shifts in the chair. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “For all of this.”

Alyssa reaches down and squeezes her mother’s hand, so frail and thin compared to the one she remembers from her childhood decades before. “We’ll get through this, okay? You and me. Like always.”

• • •

By the time they reach the clinic’s empty waiting room, Mom’s fast asleep. They’re a little early, so Alyssa lets her rest and reads a pamphlet about the procedure while she waits for the nurse on duty to call them back. It echoes what she’s found from her research: a nanoscale mesh that’s injected at the base of the neck to integrate with the brain, recording neuron activity to trace patterns of deterioration and abnormal activity. 

She’s just had time to reflect that even with this surgery they can’t design comfortable waiting room chairs when the nurse—a middle-aged man with dark tousled hair and a smile, calls Mom’s name.

Mom wakes with a jolt. “Where are we?” she asks, voice tremulous.

Alyssa puts a hand on her shoulder. “Mom, it’s okay. We’re going to see a specialist. Remember?”

Mom slaps her hand away in an instant. “Who are you? Where have you taken me?”

“It’s me, Mom. Alyssa. Your daughter. It’s okay—you’re safe.”

“I don’t have a daughter,” her mother snaps, voice rising. “Get away from me!”

“It’s okay, ma’am,” the nurse says, addressing her mother. “We’re here to help you.”

Alyssa wheels her mother towards him, and his smile never wavers. She barely has the power to walk, seeing her mom like this, and she wonders how he can witness this day in and day out and still talk to his patients with that much warmth, that much empathy.

“They’re killing me!” her mother shouts, as he closes the door behind them. “Help! Help!”  

• • •

“It’s not a miracle cure,” the doctor is saying. 

Alyssa closes her eyes, hating the part of her that registers the sensation of tears prickling at her eyelids, that tucks away the words she’ll use to describe this in writing.

“I’m sorry,” he continues, “if someone told you otherwise. The mesh helps maintain neuron structure, but doesn’t reverse degradation—we’re not even sure that’s possible yet. We need more data. More tests.”

Alyssa knew this already, but hadn’t realized how different knowing and hearing could be. How hard.

“I understand.” It’s Mom’s voice. “I hate this. I want it to stop. But you’re saying you can’t.”

“Not yet.”

“Then I’ll give you data,” mom says. “I’ll sign whatever I need to. Hurry up.”

She signs the paper in a few rapid strokes, then sags back in the chair as the doctor fetches the nurse.

“Mom.” Alyssa’s voice breaks. “I—”

“Shh,” her mother whispers. “It’s okay, honey. I’m here. We’re going to get through this together. Like always. Right?” She looks up with a lopsided grin. 

Alyssa bites back a sob, then buries her head in her mother’s shoulder. “Like always,” she promises.

• • •

The procedure itself is easy. 

She holds Mom’s hand—fighting off a weird sense of inverted déjà vu from years and years of childhood vaccines—while the nurse anaesthetises and then injects a needle into the base of her neck. Then it’s over, and after a brief return visit from the doctor explaining what to expect in the next few days—some redness and pain at the injection area, possible headaches, to call immediately if the pain was intense—Alyssa wheels Mom out and down the lift to the lobby.

Mom doesn’t speak the entire time, nor while Alyssa flags a car through the hospital’s network, secures mom’s chair in its passenger side and inputs their home address. As the car smoothly rolls into motion and onto the motorway, she stares out the window at the passing scenery, responding to Alyssa’s questions in a monotone or not at all.

A bad sign? A good one? Alyssa can’t tell. After a while, she puts in her earbuds and queues up some classical. As the familiar sounds start up, she tries to focus on her article: how to strike a balance between empathy and rigor, intimacy and objectivity. More than anything, she wants to make it clear her mother is a victim of dementia without making her seem like she’s an infant, incapable of independent thought.

It’s too much. Part of her is angry, furious, but mostly she’s just exhausted. She leans her head back, closes her eyes. When she opens them again, they’re halfway home. Mom’s still sleeping, the late afternoon light playing across her features, and something about how peaceful she looks reminds Alyssa of the nurse from earlier.

Seeing it, she feels a tension she hadn’t realized she was holding in dissipate. She doesn’t know how things will end up, but she can stay in the present with Mom. Instead of being angry, she can smile at the unknown. She can keep being there, day in and day out. No matter what.

She picks up her work tab and stylus and starts to write.