Issue 71 August 2019 Flash Fiction Online August 2019

We buried Mother in a tasteful rosewood cube. I couldn’t stop thinking that she looked like a paperweight.

When I got home, I made an appointment for some movers to take Mother’s hospital bed out of her room. Really, it was my master bedroom, but since Mother had been living there for the past three years, it still seemed more like hers than mine. I boxed up her bedpans and her kidney-shaped vomit basins and I took down the ugly crystal suncatcher she had made me put in my kitchen window. It felt like I was packing her into little pieces, but at the same time, it got easier to breathe.

I kept catching myself going onto tiptoe. Mother had napped fitfully throughout the day, and every time she’d woken up, she’d needed something.

I was coming back from the curb—trying to walk normally—when something shook itself from the side of my shoe to the little hollow place below my instep and I stepped down on it, hard enough to make me hop. I took off the shoe and shook it out over my palm. What fell out was like a chip of mulch, but warm, and smooth, and a little bit rounded, with a tiny seam. A bury-me-not. It leeched the heat from my hand.

I turned the bury-me-not over. If I held it at the right angle, I could see an outline of Mother’s eye and the curve of her cheek in the shimmer of the woodgrain. The outline narrowed, as if the bury-me-not could tell what I’d been doing. It spread itself to the approximate size and shape of a sand dollar.

Bury-me-nots don’t show up after every death, but they only show up after a death. That’s when you have to decide what to do about it.

Some people try to throw a bury-me-not away or even bury it, in spite of the name. They end up crushed by bury-me-not trees or skewered by thorny brambles, their houses smashed to rubble.

There are only three other things you can do with a bury-me-not: live with it, ignore it, or destroy it. If you live with a bury-me-not, it grows to the size of a deflated soccer ball and shoots out four thick roots it can use to drag itself around. It mimics the person you lost. And if you play along, and treat it like that person, it won’t get any bigger.

If you ignore a bury-me-not, nothing happens. It stops growing. It doesn’t shoot out roots. But you have to really ignore it. You have to put it in a jar under the sink or a box in the basement and forget you even have it there. If you don’t, it puts out all four roots and burrows right into you.

Or you can destroy it. People usually don’t. Even though it only takes one blow, it’s supposed to be too difficult. You have to catch it by surprise, smash it before it can get to you, because it defends itself when it feels threatened.

I went to the kitchen pantry, grabbed a mason jar, and dropped the bury-me-not in. I closed the jar and shoved it to the back of one of the lower cabinets. I thought about taping the door, to keep myself from opening it on accident, but that would be a constant reminder of the jar tucked under there.

The bury-me-not rattled, day and night. I started leaving the TV on to drown out the noise. Mother had left the TV blaring all day, too, after her ears had started to go. She’d said it kept her company.

* * *

The gunshot-pop of cracking glass jolted me awake. The mason jar! I grabbed a set of fireplace tongs and Mother’s lockbox, unlocking it and dumping out her tax forms and old receipts. The lockbox would be even noisier than the mason jar, but at least it would be more secure.

In the kitchen, I opened the cabinet and thrust the tongs in to grab the bury-me-not…

… and smashed its jar—which hadn’t even been cracked—against the cabinet wall.

The bury-me-not trembled and swelled, puffing and stretching until it was the size of a squashed soccer ball, glass clacking around it. I raised the tongs.

The bury-me-not shuddered and flipped itself over, revealing the shimmering impression of Mother’s wide right eye, a tremor in the cheek below it. It was how she looked when she clutched my hand to her chest after a nightmare, her heart juddering under her flannel nightgown. I would pet her hair and she would cling to me.

We had long since stopped having good days, but we’d sometimes had good minutes. That was the kicker. Not all of the minutes had been bad.

I couldn’t swing the tongs.

The seam of the bury-me-not split open, and root tendrils slithered out with a noise like slurping in reverse, needle-thin at first but thickening as they went, until the roots near the seed were as fat as my wrist.

The bury-me-not lunged for me.

“What are you doing here, Mother?” I asked, keeping my voice loud and calm. Speaking from the diaphragm.

The bury-me-not stopped, its roots still straining in my direction.

“You’re at home, Mother. Remember?”

The bury-me-not lowered its roots.

“Let’s get you back to your room.” I’d said those words so often in the last year that it was like my throat was oiled for them. I gripped the front of the sink to keep myself upright and stared out my kitchen window. The eye of a dead robin stared back, its broken-necked body fractured by a spiderweb of new cracks in the pane.

The bury-me-not leaned heavily on my leg above the knee as I guided it to the master bedroom. It scuttled into Mother’s hospital bed and I tucked it in, arranging the covers gently around its twitching appendages.

I remember a childhood that didn’t exist.

Hot apple pies cooling on park benches. Small toes pressed into scorching white sand. Snowball fights leaving crisp, crunchy ice crusted in the collar of my coat.

A tangle of neurological connections to construct a lifetime that never was. Things that never happened. Places that don’t even exist.

We whisper about these memories sometimes, Marina and me. She’s the only other X3-Model left in the office – the only other employee-asset remaining from that brief phase in biotechnological progress before designers began second-guessing the cost of programming us with such concocted complexity.

“It cost ten thousand dollars per memory,” Marina muses as she swirls her spoon around her yogurt. It’s strawberry, as usual. She buys it by the gallon and brings it to work in dainty little Tupperware bowls that she stacks beside the white cube food-packs that the rest of us apathetically consume. I’ve always suspected it has to do with her childhood, but I don’t ask – not in front of the others. No need to draw more attention to the fabricated pasts that they view as defects, signs of our antiquity.

“If you could buy one more,” she asks, “what would you pick?”

“I don’t know.” I flatten my empty food-pack and keep my voice low, head down. “We ought to get back to work.”

“I’d buy a birthday party,” she says, staring at her spoon. “One with family. A mother. Father. Siblings.”

“They wouldn’t be real.” Marina and I are the closest we’ve got to siblings – members of the same genetic batch, products of the same vats, designed for proficiency in the mind-numbing tasks of corporate sorting and filing.

Marina shrugs and licks the spoon. “At least I’d have someone to remember.”

* * *

In my favorite memory, I’m sitting on a front porch swing, my legs tucked beneath me and a book on my lap, watching a cerise sunset over a vast, windmill-dotted field. A breeze blows across my face, and I close my eyes, breathing in rich loam.

Marina says that’s why I like the quiet – why city life sets me on edge. A glitch, the company would call it if they knew, which is why I work so hard to keep from startling when the boss calls out my number, summoning me to his office.

I’ve never been in his office before.

It’s a small room with buzzing, yellowed light. A trio of framed pictures sit upon a desk too large for the space, and one of them depicts a scene so familiar, I can’t help but stare, can barely comprehend his words:

“You’re being decommissioned.”

“Decommissioned?” I stare not at him, but at the lighthouse in the photograph. The cliff. The waves. I can almost feel the sand in my toes, taste the salt on my lips.

“We’re bringing in new X14-Models,” he continues. “When you punch out today, we’ll remove your chip and you’ll be free to pursue other employment, no longer company responsibility.”

No longer company responsibility, meaning they will no longer provide me food, shelter, clothes. Decommissioned, meaning declared obsolete.

“Any questions?”

“Yes.” I point to the picture. “Where was that taken?”

* * *

Before I punch out, I slip Marina a note that I hope makes her own decommissioning easier: They’re real. I’ve seen it. The places from our childhood exist.

I buy a bus ticket I can’t afford to a state where I’ve never been and hope that whoever programmed that lighthouse in my mind was drawing from their own experiences, and that the farmhouse will be nearby.

* * *

My toes press into the scorching white sand. I lick my salt-cracked lips.

A hot-dog vendor loans me his pen, and I scribble a napkin-sized sketch, but none of the beachcombers recognize the windmill field. None knows of jobs for decommissioned X3s.

The sand turns gritty. My shoulders burn. The sun dips low toward the horizon, and doubts creep in with the cold.

I shouldn’t have left the city. I shouldn’t have assumed that because one memory was based in fact that all of them must be real.

Yet it doesn’t stop me from asking two… four… ten more times. It doesn’t stop my tears when someone finally says, “I know where that is.”

* * *

I stand on the doorstep and wring my hands, unsure what I hope for, yet hoping against hope, and when a woman in overalls and a red bandana answers, she looks just as confused as I feel.

“Do you live here?” I ask. “That is… have you lived here long?”

“Grew up here. You’re an X3-Model.”

“Yes.”

“I worked on your kind, back in the day.”

“In memory modifications?”

She raises a graying eyebrow. “How’d you know?”

I want to ask about the porch swing, about the book, about the sunset itself – things so important she infused them in her work, leaving a sliver of herself within me.

I want to ask how she ended up here – if, when the memory mods were discontinued, she became obsolete, too. No longer company responsibility.

I want to ask if she needs anything sorted or filed. I want to ask about the dirt on her knees. I want to ask about snowball fights and apple pie and whether the city noise makes her nervous, too, and if that’s why she returned to this quiet place with gentle breezes that smell of loam.

But she’s the one to make the first move, to nudge the screen door open. “Why don’t you join me on the porch for some tea? It seems we might have some things in common.”

I follow, in steps of hope, as a cerise sunset lights the sky.

Previously published in Nature: Futures, October 2018. Reprinted here by permission of the author.

When we find the old fruit seller sprawled on his back, face a livid gray, I’m all for following the proper rituals. But Ituani wants to eat his eyes.

“That’s disgusting,” I say. Ituani has been my best friend since forever; her grandmother half-raised me while working for my father. But sometimes she says things that embarrass me, things she should know better than to say.

“It’s not,” Ituani says. “It’s honoring the dead.”

I sigh. Ituani’s people believe strange things—about the gods, wind, even flesh. Some are things you don’t talk about in polite company. Others are banned outright.

Eating a dead man’s eyes is definitely one of the latter.

“He died poor and alone, Jaeya,” Ituani says. “I told you, people treated him like dirt.”

“At least we didn’t.” I study the shelves lining the tiny shop. “Do you think there’s any mangasa left?” Mangasa is why we come every week, even though other places sell it for less. Just one bite of that exotic fruit, with its honey-caramel juices, is worth the trip.

Ituani doesn’t let up. “What will become of his memories? How will they live on if we let him rot?” She lifts a knife from the counter. “I’m going to do it.”

“Ituani!” I hiss. “Stop pretending to be an eye-eater.”

“I’m not pretending,” Ituani says. “My people have done it for centuries. Grandmother said it’s how we learn about our ancestors. About ourselves.”

The mention of her dead grandmother makes me bite my lip. I loved that woman, but though my father is a tolerant man, he’d never have allowed an employee to practice eye-eating. Not knowingly.

“There are no eye-eaters in Saryoza,” I say. “It’s forbidden.”

“Just because some king drew lines on a piece of paper doesn’t mean we all follow the same map.” She kneels over the dead man. “I’d want it done if it were me.”

And before I can say anything, she slides her knife into his eye-socket.

* * *

“We’ll see everything he saw,” Ituani explains. “Every memory. That way he’ll live on. But be careful—grandmother said it can be intense.”

“Will it work for me, though?” I point to my plain brown Saryozan eyes that no one would ever eat.

“Of course,” Ituani says. “An eye is an eye. A soul is a soul. It’ll work.”

“If people find out, we’ll get in so much trouble,” I moan.

“We won’t. Yto protects us.”

Maybe you. Yto is her god, not mine. I’m Saryozan. I look anew at Ituani: at her flat nose, bronzed skin, and flecks of purple in her eyes. It’s a face not unlike the fruit seller’s. A face that suddenly seems foreign.

“Grandmother told me to never let Saryozans make me hide who I am,” Ituani says. “I’m not hiding anymore.”

“No one’s trying—”

“You are,” she says. “Right now.”

“Gods,” I snap. “This is why girls in our tier don’t like you. You don’t listen.”

“And you don’t see.” Ituani gently lifts the fruit seller’s eyes. The sight makes my stomach roil. “Please, Jaeya. Yto gave us two eyes for a reason.”

“I won’t! It’s… indecent!”

Ituani’s eyes narrow into slits.

“Grandmother wanted you to have one of hers,” she says. “She said you were different. You didn’t hate yet. But they took her body away before I…”

Silence. I don’t know what to say.

“Would you have hated her?” Ituani finally asks. “If you knew?”

I stare. “You know I wouldn’t.”

“Do I?” she whispers.

I don’t know why I take the eye. Maybe to prove something. Maybe because she’s my best friend.

Maybe because of the look on her face, a look I’ve seen her flash at other Saryozan girls… but never, I thought, at me.

With a shuddering breath, I thrust the eye into my mouth and swallow.

Oh, gods—

* * *

At first, I don’t know what I see. Just colors and shapes, so fast and fierce they make me dizzy.

Then:

people, so many people—

distrust on their faces, contempt in their eyes, none of them purple—

Filth, their lips snarl, eye-eater—

the Saryozan Watch—their heads turning, following—

Troublemaker, their faces say, interloper—

Stop, I think.

Saryozan boys, looting, hollering—to which the fruit seller dares not raise a hand—

a woman with purple-flecked eyes—

a squalling baby boy—

the woman smiling, until—

the catchfire pox, spreading, worsening, from man, to woman, to child—

no, no—

“Ituani—” I hear myself say.

the Watch, rooting through every box and basket, tossing mangasa on the floor—

dragging the bodies away as he begs to keep their eyes—

Stop, I beg. It’s too much. I reach out for Ituani’s hand. She grasps mine tight.

the shop, empty now, silent—

new shops, sprouting like mushrooms after rain—owned by men with no purple in their eyes—

mangasa, their signs read. Saryozan mangasa—

a girl, two girls, me—

I gasp. I see me.

Just a glimpse in a swirl of images. Plunking down a pitiful few coins yet leaving with as much fruit as I can carry. Already eating before I’m out the door.

Other shops sell mangasa for less, I see myself reason. We only come here because Ituani insists.

Ituani, lingering behind to apologize—to pay a few more coins—

to flash me a look—

That same look. Eyes narrowed into slits.

More memories, some including me. But I can’t watch anymore.

All I see is that look. 

* * *

We walk home in silence. I should be thinking about the eyeless body we’ve left behind. When they find him, there will be questions. But all I can think about is Ituani.

About that look.

“Ituani—”

I’m sorry, I want to say. I didn’t know—

But I did.

She turns. Regards me with purple-flecked eyes. Eyes she’ll want cut out some day.

It’s how we learn about ourselves, she’d said.

She looks at me, and for the first time in my life, I’m afraid of what she sees.