Issue 12 September 2014 Flash Fiction Online September 2014

The cell I’m in is pretty loud because it shares thin walls with the other ones full of shit-talking and drunk dudes, but all I keep hearing is the fake camera-click sound that my phone makes when you snap a picture.  It echoes in my head.  I keep my eyes open because if I close them, every time I hear that sound, I also see a freeze-frame of Brendan’s puffed-out, blue face with the blood vessels all busted in his eyes so that they’d turned red like a monster’s.

I’m at the East Precinct, so it’s usually just adult “offenders” in here.  They don’t have a space for minors, which I guess is normal.  You wouldn’t be able to tell by the graffiti though—seems like the messages people have somehow scratched into the cinder blocks’ thin paint and the plastic coating on the door could have come from the minds of my classmates for sure: Fuck, Run, Fight, Drink! and Fuck the Police and whatnot.  The one just below the rectangle window on the door keeps grabbing my eye, though: Kill Faggots.

If he didn’t have anything else, Brendan would have used his canine tooth to scratch that out, or, more likely, some witty response.  But I don’t feel like honoring him by trying it myself—a lot of good it did him, all that wit, all that fight, all the ways he stood up and hit back.  

What happened was that Brendan skipped school Tuesday, which was weird, because he was obsessed with getting perfect grades so he could go anywhere he wanted to for college.  It’s true that after school on Monday Brett and Spencer and their little crew of assholes had tackled Brendan out by the buses and stuffed a banana—peel and all—down his throat till he almost puked while some girls screamed at them to stop but lots of others laughed and moved around for a better view and Mr. Abrams, the Spanish teacher, who was talking on his cell phone, and the bus drivers all looked away.  But it’s not like that’s the first time they’d done shit like that to him and besides Brendan got up, brushed off his clothes and spit after them as they all ran off, giggling and high-fiving like it was a big joke.  I’d talked to him later that night on the phone and he was making jokes about how he wished Brett and Spencer would just come out of the closet already so he didn’t have to keep choking on bananas for them.  He didn’t say anything about how I froze up and didn’t help him at all.  I knew he wouldn’t.

So that’s why I went to his house after school on Tuesday, why I climbed the fence to get his spare key when he didn’t answer the door, and why I found him hanging from a fluorescent orange cord tied to the beam in the basement, puffy and blue and dead, Whale Rider still playing on the cheap-ass DVD player he kept down there. Why I took out my phone and snapped three pictures of him as he spun there, though, I’m still not sure.  And I’m not sure why I tapped on the Facebook app and posted them, either.  But I am sure that’s why I’m here.  Even though the next thing I did was dial 911, like seven people from school showed up at Brendan’s before the cops did.  They figured out pretty quick why and instead of just questioning me or whatever, they arrested me.  I asked them what for but the Detective just spat on the ground kind of like Brendan did after the banana thing and shouted some shit at me about interfering with an investigation, invasion of privacy and suspicion of murder, too. 

Looking through the little rectangle window, I can see through another Plexiglas window to where my mom is standing at a desk, arguing with a big cop.  I can only see her back, mainly, but a couple of times she’s turned in profile and her makeup is running and her hair’s gone all wild, which she hates, and it makes me feel awful.

I sit back down on the bench and trace a swastika carved there with my finger, knowing I’m in for a lot of shit, knowing that I’ll feel awful for a long time.  But not for posting the photos.  Not for showing everyone what we’ve done.  

A honeybee fluttered its wings for the last time.

It was the last honeybee, a sickly man-made clone descended from a tragically short line of sickly man-made clones.  Its stunted wings were translucent and crisscrossed with veins.  The blackish yellow fur on its thorax reminded me of the ducklings I saw at the zoo when I went with my mom.

This bee was the last attempt at bees.  Scientists experimented with other technologies — pollination drones to preserve essential plants, nanotech cooling panels to decrease global warming, and time travel to fix the environment before it was destroyed.  Bees became one extinct species among many.

After my mother died, my son and I cleaned out her kitchen.  He was five, and bored.  He dumped a box of alphabetized recipe cards onto the kitchen floor.  The recipes were handwritten on oversized index cards, with pictures printed off the internet and stapled to each one.  I’d asked her once why she didn’t print the recipes and she’d answered that food from a handwritten recipe tasted better.

“What’s this one?” my son asked.  The card was yellow with age and had a smear of red on one corner where I’d grabbed it with jam-covered fingers.

“Almond raspberry thumbprint cookies.”

“Will Grandma make them for me?”

I couldn’t answer.  Mom was gone, and the ingredients for her cookies no longer existed. Pollination drones had saved some foods, but neither almonds nor raspberries had survived.  My inability to make the cookies drove home the realization that my mother was gone, so far beyond my reach that I couldn’t use her recipes.  I stood in the kitchen, tears streaming down my cheeks.

“I’ll make them for you someday,” I told my son.

A honeybee fluttered its wings for the last time.

That memory was my test of whether our manipulations to the timeline worked.  No matter what we did, within the strict rules of the Historical Compliance Committee, my memory was never altered.  The bees died, the ecosystem collapsed, and there were no raspberries and almonds to make cookies for my son.

Our petition to perform Category 2 actions was denied.  Non-essential plants weren’t important enough to offset the risk of major changes to the timeline.  We had tried to save the honeybees, and we had failed.  Others had tried to save the whales, or the butterflies, or the temperate rainforests.  They too had failed.  We would never fix the past.  We would have to find another way.

My son came to visit on my sixty-fifth birthday, with his wife and their three kids.  The kitchen smelled of almond cookies, baking in my oven, each one pressed with my thumb and filled with raspberry jam.  The ingredients for the cookies were stolen from the past, raided from a San Francisco condo that would be destroyed an hour later in an earthquake.  No one would miss jam and almonds amidst the rubble.

“Mom,” my son said sternly, “Did you have approval to get this stuff?”

“I was on an approved plant recovery mission.”  Technically I was only approved for the potted blueberry bush on the balcony, but our HCC rep was known to look the other way in exchange for a good bottle of cabernet.  Before my son could ask any more questions, I added, “besides, we have something very important to celebrate today.  We got approval to bring animals forward.  I will finally have my bees.”

He smiled.  “That’s great, Mom.  You’ve been working towards that for decades, and I’m glad you get to see it happen.”

I snorted.  “I’m sixty-five, not ninety.  Stop making it sound like I could die at any minute.  I’m not going to see it happen, I’m going to make it happen.”

Our discussion distracted me from the cookies, and I pulled them out of the oven a couple minutes late.  The grandkids liked them, but they were dry and crunchy, and my son refused to eat them because I hadn’t gotten permission for the almonds and the jam.

Stolen cookies didn’t count.

A honeybee fluttered its wings for the last time.

We never solved the problems of the past, but age and the passage of time have stolen the once-clear image.  What remained was the memory of a memory.  Vein-crossed wings that were an amalgam of my memory with the countless pictures I’ve looked at since.  Soft fuzz the color of ducklings, but was the color in my mind the same color that I saw?

I traveled to the summer of 1993, to an abandoned field overgrown with grass and barley and wildflowers.  I spotted a honeybee on a blue cornflower blossom, and had the foolish urge to try and catch it.  That was how we’d collected plants — thousands of plants, but only a few from any given place and time.  Bees were not like plants.  We couldn’t take a random sample of bees and hope to make a hive.

At the edge of the field were stacks of rainbow-colored wooden boxes.  Hives.  I unloaded my pack, lit my smoker, and pulled five empty frames from my collection box.  When everything was ready, I flooded the hive with smoke.  I took three brood frames, their wax cells filled with eggs and larva tended by nurse bees.  I took two frames of honey, too, so the hive wouldn’t starve when I brought it forward.  I replaced all five frames with empty ones, and reassembled the hive.

I brought my stolen bees to the lab and set the collection box at the edge of our reconstructed garden.  For a moment, nothing stirred.  I worried that bringing the bees forward in time had damaged them.  A single bee emerged from the corner of my collection box.  Dazed from the smoke, the bee crawled across the surface of the box, from one corner to the other.  Then, in a future built from stolen pieces of the past, a wondrous thing happened.

A honeybee fluttered its wings.

Caroline M. Yoachim lives in Seattle and loves cold cloudy weather.  She is the author of over two dozen short stories, appearing in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, and Clarkesworld, among other places.  For more about Caroline, check out her website at http://carolineyoachim.com

Become a Patron!

We need all the help we can get. For more info on any number of flash-tabulous rewards including extra stories, personalized critiques, and more:

Or…

If you enjoy Flash Fiction Online, consider subscribing or purchasing a downloadable copy. Your donations go a long way to paying our authors the professional rates they deserve. For only $0.99/issue that’s cheaper than a cup of coffee. Or subscribe for $9.99/year.

A week before Christmas, my father left the milk jar for me to skim off the fog-colored fat.  I found his boot prints in the ice kicked out of the goats’ water pan.  The machine in the barn had also disappeared.  

My mother searched his things and found little missing: his graphing calculator, his best shoes, two bottles of antibiotics for an infection that had wandered through her body for the last few months. He left behind most of his clothes and money but took the auction house catalogs he’d been amassing on his nightstand.  

My mother accused him of staging a time-travel triumph to make us admire him while we grieved his absence, instead of doing what we should be doing–growing bitter.  

I measured the diameter of the scorched ring in the hay.  Six feet.  A man’s height.  I imagined my father, like a Vitruvian farmer, making hay angels in the circle.  

I packed a bag in case he, or the machine, should return.  I hid it in the barn.  Four days later, I found a faded oval on the living room wall where my great-grandparents’ wedding portrait had hung until that morning.  I always missed him by seconds it seemed.

Other things taken:

Motion sickness pills

Leather work gloves

Three rolls of gauze

Paper tape

The Gentleman’s Guide to Historical Spirits

The Palette of Insanity: Artist’s Distemper

Nail polish (plum-colored)  

Nylons

Half of a chocolate cake sitting on the counter

I penciled notes for him on the wall by my bed.  Was he planning to come home?  Should I sell the goats?  Was it beautiful wherever he was?  One day, I found his answer traced into the eggshell.  Yes.

Things that inexplicably appeared:

Blood spots on the bathroom floor, like asterisks that sent us searching for the footnotes

Lumpy bandage on the windowsill which my mother threw away without looking inside

Red bra (crimson according to my mother, maroon to me, which I thought made him sound less guilty)

Walking stick with a 15” knife inside its silver handle, on the kitchen table

Stretched canvas of a bedroom in Arles (wet)

French revolver

Warmth on the chair facing the picture window.

A year and a half later, in late July, the machine reappeared in the barn.  I rubbed the fog from the glass with my sleeve.  Inside, a naked man slumped forward.  Same coarse, red hair as my father.  Same beard.  Different tattoo on his arm.  

Victim or accomplice, I owed him assistance.  I dragged him out into the hay where he fell back, his eyes glazed, as if under ice.  I breathed into his mouth, pounded his broad chest until he flailed his arms and legs.  I left him lying there stunned.

I jumped into the machine with my bag: iodine for the water, my mother’s address book with the names struck through, and rolls and rolls of pennies from the bank, having heard all a penny could buy in the olden days.  And just for safekeeping, the revolver.

Here in the northern hemisphere it’s back-to-school time.  For some it’s a melancholy time.  For others it’s a cause for rejoicing.  For me, well, it’s business as usual.

For the boy in our first story, school means facing hard truths—about himself, about the world, about compassion.  Eli Hastings’ “The Cell I’m In” is a strongly worded, in-your-face kind of story that we hope will have our readers thinking about the same hard truths.

 Our other stories this month take our readers into two time-travel-minded tales:

The first is “The Vitruvian Farmer” by Marcelina Vizcarra, in which a teen’s father leaves home for the future, taking the time machine he keeps in the barn.  Will he return?  You’ll have to read to find out.  A poignant tale of loss and longing and taking a mighty leap into the unknown.  

 I have to admit I have a soft spot for “Honeybee” by returning FFO author, Caroline Yoachim.  I think of her story every time I open my own hive of bees and worry about their future and their state of health, every time I taste the honey I harvest from their busy and bustling hive and thank God I have it.  In our protagonist’s time, some near-future world, there are no honeybees.  Big deal?  It’s a big deal.  Lovely story with a lovely ending. 

 Happy school days to our northern hemisphere friends.  And for those in the south, summer is just around the corner! 

Until next month,

Suzanne

Editor-in-Chief