Issue 21 June 2015 Flash Fiction Online June 2015

The diner was closed forever. The Closed sign hung on the door, redundant as a spoon in a cup of soup, but Marcie would never turn it over. Never take it down. It was her way of keeping the riffraff out, and these days, there was a hell of a lot of riffraff.

They could smell the syrup. Her supply was running out, but she sprayed ammonia around the doors and windows when she warmed it up. It wasn’t enough, but it could dull the smell. She had the shotgun for any unwelcome visitors and a dwindling stock of meat in the freezer for any welcome ones. The former never made it to the door, but she always checked the latter through the glass to see if they were going bad. One look at Alice, though, and she knew she deserved better than meat.

She fixed the girl some waffles, and the diner filled with the aroma of warm batter. They both inhaled in silence. A much more comforting smell than the sizzle of dead things, Marcie thought. The girl offered her name as a courtesy, and the two syllables wafted through the air and mixed with the scent in Marcie’s mind. The girl looked the right age, too, about 14. This felt right. Like before.

When Marcie slapped a couple waffles onto a plate, Alice’s eyes went wide like she’d only been eating rocks for weeks. For all Marcie knew, she had. She was gaunt, ribs showing through the rags she had on, hair a mess. A scratch on her left cheek, deep. Marcie didn’t ask where it came from, but as she traced the path on her own face, she thought it could have come from fingers. Or what used to be fingers.

“This is real nice,” Alice said, between hungry gulps, barely chewing. “What’s that blue stuff in it?”

“Blueberries,” said Marcie. Last ones she had, but that didn’t matter as long as she still had chocolate chips

“Huh. My mom never put blueberries in waffles.” A pause, the next words crawling out as if fighting against a memory. “Fruit in waffles, that’s so weird.” The pall passed, and as she returned to eating, her face was joyful, satiated. In the right light, at the right moments, she looked like Cynda. Just in those fleeting seconds, and then she didn’t, not because of the light but because Marcie chose not to see her. She would never see her again, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to see her in this outcast waif who just stumbled in out of the wastelands. Not this one, not the last one, not any one of the godda–

Marcie relaxed her grip on the syrup bottle. She’d almost broken the handle. Couldn’t have that.

From behind the counter, Marcie watched Alice devour her food as she’d done with her customers before the Meltdown. Her favorite customer was a big trucker named Maximilian who insisted on being called Maximilian, never Max. He wouldn’t respond to Max, and Marcie loved seeing the passers-through try to engage with him. They didn’t know the code to interacting with him. They didn’t have that connection, not like she did.

Maximilian was out there. Maybe he’d found Cynda. Maybe he would take care of her.

Alice gulped down half a glass of water. Milk would have been better, but it had gone sour as Marcie’s business some time ago. One by one, her staples went bad. That’s how the people went too. One by one.

“So they don’t come in here?” Alice said with trepidation.

“No,” said Marcie. “They don’t come in here.”

“Not ever?”

“The door holds. The sign says Closed.”

Alice chuckled, then let it linger, like she hadn’t laughed at anything in ages. “I don’t think they read signs, lady.”

Maybe the shape of the sign, the length of the word, was a signal burned into the back of their brains, like a red light. They‘d respond to it like fire: stay away.

Cynda never cared what the sign said. She’d push the door open and call, “Yo, Moms, how about some choco waffles?” She’d take her seat at the counter and ask what Max had done today. She never called him Maximilian when he wasn’t around. Everything was short with her; Marcie was surprised she actually pronounced the entire word “waffles.”

The day of the Meltdown, Cynda left the diner with the words “Coulda used more syrup.”

Alice picked at her plate with the fork, soaking the bits of waffle in syrup. Marcie’s eyes narrowed. Stupid, stupid of her to let her in. She’d given her too much syrup. She had to keep some back. Waffle mix, chocolate chips, syrup. The essentials.

So much syrup left on Alice’s plate. It was going to go to waste. But Marcie could salvage it. This girl had had enough. She’d gotten more than the last one. It had been six days since Khaalidah looked through the glass door, her pleading eyes like Cynda’s when Marcie wouldn’t take her to IHOP. Not as chatty as this one. This one, sitting in someone else’s seat. They were all sitting in someone else’s seat.

“Get out,” Marcie spat, grabbing the plate.

Alice had some waffle in her mouth, and she almost choked in surprise. She chewed quickly and swallowed before squeaking, “What?”

“Get the fuck out of my diner.” Marcie stared at her with dead eyes.

“Okay, okay, lady,” said Alice, pushing herself away from the counter, scrambling to keep her balance. “Thanks for the waffles.” She didn’t look back. She ran to the door.

The sign said “Open.”

Alice threw the door outward and fled back into the wastelands. As the door shut, a bell rang.

There were a few pieces of waffle still left on Alice’s plate, not dry. Marcie picked them up and began squeezing to extract the syrup.

The diner was closed forever.

When I bring food to the man in the basement, he asks me what day it is. I don’t remember. The young cockroaches are coming out of the walls. He has killed one. The young ones are yellow, like the ends of the cigarettes I don’t bring him. And we never talk anymore. I cut up magazines and make ransom notes and leave them outside. Sometimes I put them in the mailbox with my return address on them, but no one ever writes back. Sometimes I don’t cut up the magazines properly and I send too much of the article so it says WE HAVE YOUR SON SEVEN WAYS TO PLEASE YOUR MAN.

Once he asked if there was a war, and I think there must have been but I don’t see any point in talking about it. The mailbox is filled with ransom notes. Sometimes I smell smoke from the woods. I bring food to the man in the basement. He is not chained. He could come up the stairs. I worry that he has come up, quietly, that he is standing behind me. The garage is filled with magazines and glue sticks. The oldest magazine is older than I am. It has swollen in the rain.

I have a nightmare that the basement is full of rotten food. I wake up in front of a ransom note that says WE HAVE YOUR SON COME GET HIM. I bring food to the man in the basement. He has either eaten the cockroach, or it is no longer there. The basement is filling with plates. Sometimes I smell smoke in the woods.

I ask him if he’s standing behind me. He doesn’t say anything. He’s probably not there. Yesterday I took the notes out of the mailbox to make room for the new ones. I take a Playboy out of the garage. I cut it up. I glued CUM ALONE to a piece of paper. I ask him if he is standing behind me. He doesn’t say anything. Sometimes I smell smoke in the woods. It is morning. I bring food to the man in the basement. I have a nightmare. The basement is full of rotten food. He asks me what day it is. I have been finding notes in the woods. The letters on some of them are older than I am.

I take food to the man in the basement. The young cockroaches have grown old. They are eating from the plates. The man is crying, asking them something. He wants to know what day it is. Upstairs, I think that I remember it is his birthday. I go to the stairs. He deserves to know. I can’t go down the stairs, there’s no reason to, I have already brought the food, I tell the stairs that it is his birthday. Sometimes I smell smoke in the woods.

I have the kind of scissors a child would use. They are almost too small for my fingers. I cut up one magazine, one yellow newspaper. More letters than I or anyone else needs. How many words do you need to say that I am waiting? I ask him if he is standing behind me. He doesn’t say anything. I cut out We. we. WE. I cut the “re” off a “were.” We. have.

Come COME cum comb com Come

I bring in another stack of magazines. This will take awhile.

It takes time to find alone in the magazines.

The chirphum of mechanical birds that drowns the v. parks—like the woody peetooweet of real birds that used to drown the real parks—can be a murderous shriek of grinding gears, unoiled joints, and etched brass talons on concrete, enough to drive folks crazy. But to me and all the ‘planters, I’ve met it’s a passionate dance funneled through the clavichord tubing of the bird’s intestinal music box to the golden mouth-speaker behind the beak. Nats aren’t keen on the music. I used to know why, but I’ve forgotten.

Especially those forced into long spells at the v. park—nat fathers, for example, taking ‘planter daughters to play, relegated to waiting on the bench in the brisk, loud wind—are the ones prone to cracking. Men like these never lose their minds at the v. park, but you can see the perturbed tremble in their hand, growing faster every minute spent without stimulus save the clankcheeptwiiir of forged finches. The mania eats at them for days, getting worse after every trip until one day, weeks or months after their last park visit, they snap. A man wrings a little girl’s neck or throws his coffee at his boss or is seen strolling Hyde V. Park nude in winter. These types get locked away.

I used to be a militant nat, but those days are behind me. Militant’s what they called us for refusing to get ‘plants, but amongst ourselves, we were the Liberationists. When I joined up, an estimated sixty percent of children received augmentation surgery before the age of two. Is that really healthy for our children? we asked. We organized protests asking the public to consider our questions, to demand the release of research done on effects of ‘planting on children, education, society. No ‘planters ever joined our cause. All we wanted was transparency; we were skeptical, not hateful. Every Sunday we gathered for a protest and forum in the legally designated protest zones: various v. parks about the city.

Nats occasionally do lose it in public v. parks while children sing, dance, and swing but it’s not the well-adjusted, child-rearing types. It’s the poor, the overworked, the homeless. The graveyarders might stop by the swing set early Saturday, after a shift, and scream and tear their hair out. Sometimes you wake in the dark of night or you close your morning daily, roused from your concentration by the even, metallic bang bang bang bang of an unfortunate, bearded bum crunching his head into a light post, driven mad by the nighttime scissor-shear violin of a cast-iron cricket or the patterclanking flirwrenchflir of a sunrise robin mocking worm-hunt. Breakdowns are inevitable. Perpetrators are taken away, and you don’t tend to see them again. That’s one of the questions we raised to public officials. Where are they?

Police footmen met us at the early morning demonstrations donning masks, body armor, helmets, carrying plexiglass shields, pressurized deterrents, and handsomely contracted anti-planter hatred. Each report I filed requesting protest space urged our dedication to non-violence, yet there the city army stood like clockwork at sunrise. The hours protesting in the park wore on us nats, and tensions grew with passing minutes. You would read in the dailies that we’d become violent, threatened officer lives, killed people, but we never did.

The jeering uniforms knew we were uncomfortable and pushed us. Some people were weak. Some people broke, and the protest turned into a brawl. I was a fool for being there, for dedicating myself so much to their cause. In one fight, I was pushed into an officer, and she defended herself, maced me. I came to in a dark hospital, blinded because I wasn’t treated for hours after the crowd was dispersed. I could live a deprived life, or I could accept retinal implants, offered by insurance, and use them to aid the Liberationist cause. Not hypocrisy, compromise.

Until then I’d never understood the beauty of motorized ambiance.
I was so wrong. I knew the second I awoke from surgery that I’d been mistaken for years, wasted so much on the protests when I had no idea of the facts. I don’t blame them, the nats, because it’s a truth you can’t comprehend until you’ve been ‘planted.

Something fundamental changes when you alter your nat body. Something in the psyche. Other ex-nats say so too; I’ve found others disabled in the protest where I lost my eyes—and found my vision—and we all came to the same conclusion. You must feel the change to know it’s a good thing. And, you know, it’s interesting, it’s very powerful, it doesn’t matter if it’s animatronics or augments, a faster hand or a sharper eye, it affects us at our core, our essence, and we all end up craving the clankchip of brass pigeons in the v. park.

I left the Liberationists but see their continued efforts frequently. Every spare minute I can muster I’m in the v. park, so I’m here every weekend as the sun rises, planted on this bench scanning nature and bliss-shivering at the resounding caws of cast crows and the intimate song of the birds and bugs. The colors of the sunrise are so much more vibrant now; I’m getting an enhancement soon to extend my violet spectrum. It’s always been my favorite color. I’m lucky it lies on an extendable end of our spectrum.

The Saturdays that Liberationists gather in my park, I watch them and listen and try to remember how I could’ve been mistaken like that. I wish I could help them know, but I can’t. A deep shadow passes over me now and then and fills my ears with excited poetry sung in exalted sopranos by the thousands of flapping wings passing over the park. It’s the 9:15 to Paris, the great avian zeppelin carrying a platform of early morning travelers over the channel to hear pigeons coo in France.

One of our family’s favorite films is the Cary Grant classic “Arsenic and Old Lace,” in which Grant’s young and dashing character, Mortimer Brewster, about to elope with his sweetheart, discovers that his adorable maiden aunts have been happily murdering lonely old men (which they consider putting the poor dears out of their misery) and having Mortimer’s delusional cousin, Teddy Brewster (who thinks he’s Teddy Roosevelt), bury them in the cellar. Meanwhile, Mortimer’s psychopathic serial killer of a brother returns home, complicating an already wildly unnerving day.

At one point in the script, Mortimer, fearing he may burden his fiance with a lifetime of heartbreak, laments, “Insanity runs in my family. It practically gallops!”

Galloping insanity. I can’t think of a more appropriate phrase to describe this month’s first-run stories.

In “Marcie’s Waffles Are the Best in Town,” by Sunil Patel, post-apocalypse survivor, Marcie, still keeps the diner open, still makes waffles with syrup, still hopes that one day the bell on the door will announce the return of her daughter. When a young fellow survivor walks in… Well, you’ll just have to see what happens. And while you’re there, click over to an interview with the author, and enjoy a waffle recipe from writer/blogger Miranda Suri. Her blog can be found here: http://mirandasuri.com/

Next, a different crazy. You know all those wackos who are convinced the government is secreting mind control chips into our brains? What if they aren’t quite so wacko? Brontë Christopher Wieland‘s “I Found Solace in a Great Moving Shadow” takes us right there in a creepily believable tale. We’re also pleased to have an interview with Brontë. Be sure to click over to that, too.

Finally, “The Man in the Basement” by Joshua Rupp. The title kind of gives it away doesn’t it? This is not going to be a story about mentally stable characters. And no, it is not. Rupp digs deep into an off-kilter mind. Great stuff!

Also this month, we’re pleased to offer second-run story “What Merfolk Must Know” by Kat Otis. Originally appearing in Daily Science Fiction in April 2013, Otis’ story gives us a fantastic and heartbreaking telling of the making of a mermaid. No Disney Ariel or tempting handsome prince here.

So, enjoy. Be disturbed. Take a swim in the pools of madness for awhile.

This isn’t your usual waffle recipe. It was given to me by a Nordic god who rents cars along the Sognefjord in Norway. It produces sweet, chewy waffles. The kind you make by the dozen and pile on a plate. The kind you drape a cloth over and find still just-warm when you return from hunting trolls or snow maidens in the stony peaks of the Jotunheim mountains.

Serves 4 (plus whoever drops by the diner).

In a large bowl, sift together:
3 cups plus 3 Tbs flour
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon

Melt 10 tbs butter and whisk with:
2 1/2 cups milk
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract

Whisk the wet and dry ingredients together and pour the batter by the cup-full onto a hot, greased waffle iron. When they’ve turned a dark golden brown, they’re ready. These waffles are so sweet they don’t need syrup (Marcie would approve of such conservation, I think). Instead, smear them with sour cream and jam and devour them by hand, a whole triangle at a time.

I SAW MY FIRST DEATHSHIP when I was only ten migrations old.

Mamma and I had swum up to the ocean’s surface to play with a pod of dolphins. We were leaping and spinning and dancing in the waves when she caught sight of white sails on the horizon. The dolphins abandoned us, racing off to ride the waves in front of the ship’s bow. I wanted to join them, but Mamma herded me below and told me I was never to approach the deathships.

I asked her why, hoping for one of her delightfully terrifying stories about humans with nets and harpoons, but she only flicked her tailfin and refused to say any more.
The first thing you must know about humans is that they are dangerous; the shoals of the merfolk avoid their ships at all times.

* * *

When I was fifteen, rumors began to circulate among the shoals – rumors of a mermaid who had left the sea. No one knew what had happened to her after she left, but all the rumors agreed that she had gone to bargain with the sea witch out of love for a human. Some claimed she had merely seen the human walking along a beach, while others claimed she had rescued the human from drowning in a storm.

In my favorite versions, the human was not some cruel fisherman but a shipwrecked sailor from one of the mysterious deathships.

* * *

There are two things you must know about the sea witch. One is that she is as wild and as wondrous, as fair and as fearsome, as the sea itself. The other is that any mermaid can bargain with her – but only once.

* * *

After twenty migrations, I was officially an adult. My shoal begged me not to leave, but their love was not enough to stifle half a lifetime’s worth of curiosity. So I left them to live with a pod of dolphins in the waters between the islands where the deathships plied their trade. If there had been anyone who could have answered the questions that burned within me, I might not have gone-

No. No, that is a lie.

Even then, it was not just curiosity that drove me, but desire. I wanted a human of my own, to love and to cherish all the days of my life. Whether it ended in heartbreak or joy, I did not care.

* * *

The most important thing you must know about deathships is that they are named for the dead humans they leave floating in their wake.

* * *

I followed the deathships for moon after moon, playing with the dolphins and wondering why the humans threw their dead overboard in such large numbers. It was dangerous to go too close to those dead – they attracted shivers of sharks, with which it is best not to meddle – but even from afar I could tell that something was wrong. Fishermen occasionally jettisoned bodies that had been carefully wrapped in canvas, but these bodies were naked, and they tainted the water with the taste of blood and iron chains.

It was nearly a whole migration before I realized that some of the humans still breathed when they first slipped below the surface.

After that it was inevitable – I went to the sea witch.

* * *

The bargain I made with the sea witch was this: that I could save one and only one.

* * *

After I had left the pod, it took me almost a moon to find another deathship. All that time, I could barely eat or sleep, I was so excited at the thought of finally having a human of my own. As I trailed in the deathship’s wake, I began to worry how I would tell the living from the dead, so as not to lose time trying to rescue the wrong human. The longer I spent near the ship, the more likely it was that the sharks would finish with the humans and come after me; even the magic of the sea witch could not save me, then.

But the day the deathship finally opened its hatches, I realized there had been no need to worry.Each and every one of the humans screamed as they went overboard.

And there were more than enough for me to share with an entire shiver of sharks.

* * *

The only thing you must know about the way of the sea is that merfolk take what we need and no more; it is rarely kind, but it is always fair.

* * *

The sea witch’s magic shielded me from the iron as I swam among the dying humans, clutching the enchanted scale that would give my choice gills and fins. They were men and women, old and young, strong and scrawny – a bewildering array of differences I had not expected. Some fought their fate, tearing at their chains and clinging to the deathship, while others accepted it, opening themselves to the sea and sinking into its depths. A few panicked at the sight of me as if I was more terrifying than a shark closing in for the kill.

And one breathed the last of her air into the mouth of her small child, then held the child out to me with a silent plea in her desperate eyes.
I could save one – only one.

* * *

The only thing you must know about the way of the land is that humans rend and destroy; a human broke my heart, but not in the way I had expected.

* * *

Someday, Kendria, when you are older, I will take you to the sea witch to learn the name your first mother gave you. And if you wish it, on that day, she will bargain with you and give you magic to help you reclaim the legs of a human. Perhaps you will find joy, perhaps you will find heartbreak, or more likely you will find both – such is love, on land and sea.

And perhaps, just perhaps, you will find the origin of the deathships and chase them from our waters forever.

* * *

Originally published in Daily Science Fiction. Reprinted here by permission of the author.