Take Me To Your Reader: An Otherworld Anthology (11 page)

"
Do kids die from cancer on Iskander?"

Helem nearly dropped the music box in his hand. He
'd been so absorbed in his thoughts he'd somehow forgotten she was still in the room and connected to the neuro-translator.

"
We don't have cancer on Iskander," he said.

"
I wish I would have been born there."

"
Me, too." And he did. He wanted to get to know this girl who smiled back at him from the photos around the room. He thought that given the chance, they might have been friends.

"
I don't want to die."

Even through the neuro-translator he could hear her fear and grief. The sound of it got caught in his chest, growing and mutating until it became his own. Tears stung his eyes, and he had to remind himself Fern didn
't need his anger. She'd shut out her parents because she didn't want to be burdened with anyone else's emotions. She wouldn't want to deal with his either.

On Iskander, those who didn
't die in the line of duty as a Raimondas died of old age. Somewhere in their tenth or eleventh decade their body would simply cease to function. For some it's a quick process. They live their lives as normal one minute and are gone the next. For others, it takes a few days. They feel themselves getting weaker and weaker until they finally fade out.

Helem
's great-grandfather had been a fader. When he realized his life was slowly bleeding away he called in his family to be by his side. Helem's mother, who had always been her grandfather's favorite, stood at the edge of his bed, tears streaming down her cheeks as her hands danced over and around one other, unsure where they should be or what they should do.

"
What do you need, Grandfather?" she'd asked. "What can I do to help you?"

His great-grandfather smiled, which Helem found odd. He was dying. What did he have to smile about? His life was over. Soon he would cease to exist. If ever there were a time to not smile, that would be it.

"Just hold my hand," his great-grandfather said. "Hang onto me so I know I'm not alone."

And so Helem
's family had taken turns sitting by his great-grandfather's bed, holding on as the last hours of his life slipped away. The smile never left the old man's face the entire time.

Helem had always considered his great-grandfather odd and different, but perhaps on this point he was right. Maybe what someone needed most at the time of death was to know someone was hanging on, trying to ground them to this life.

He pulled a chair over to Fern's bed and took her hand in his own. It was cool to the touch; cool enough he watched closely to make sure her chest still rose and fell. After a few seconds, her fingers wound their way around his.

"
It's not fair," she said. "I shouldn't have to die. I'm only a kid. There is so much I still want to do. There is so much left I can give the world."

"
Tell me about them," Helem said. "Tell me about the things you would do if you have another eighty years. Tell me what Earth is losing by letting you go too soon."

It took her a minute to gather her thoughts, but then she was telling him about how she would go to college and become a doctor. How she would devote her life to finding a cure for cancer. She told him about the husband who would look like the member of a British boy band and think she was the most beautiful woman in the world, even if her face was swollen from the medication she had to take and her hair was all gone. She imagined the children she would have and how happy and healthy they would be their whole lives. She talked about all the social injustices she would work to right, of how she would eradicate the world of prejudice and hate.

Eventually her words came only sporadically and ceased to make sense. Still, Helem left the neuro-translator attached. Even if they were garbled nonsense, he wanted to hear whatever she had to say.

People in scrubs and lab jackets came in more and more frequently as the night wore on. Some of them questioned who he was and why he was there, but none of them made him leave.

At 2:32 am Central Standard Time on Earth, Fern died.

The woman who turned off the machines had twin streams trailing from her eyes, although she did not make a sound.

"Her parents?" Helem asked in a gravelly voice.

"
On their way." She paused in her activities, her sad eyes finding his. "It's over now. You can go."

Helem looked at the shell, which was only moments before filled with love, hopes, and dreams. He thought about how cancer had taken it all away, and for the first time he truly understood the definition of evil.

"No," he said, pulling up a list of the planet's best medical schools on his com-sleeve. "I can't. I have a monster to slay."

By Amanda Havard

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's website:
http://amandahavard.com/

The House on Maple Street

You can still hear the screams.

Cliché? Sure. But clichés start somewhere, don
't they? And here, they start at the Fentress County line, where you can still hear the screams.

I suppose I can hear them louder in my head than you
'd hear them in yours because I was there. Traumatic memory is funny that way.

It started six months ago. My buddy Dana was hanging around while I closed up shop at the Dairy Queen one night. Dana loves ice cream, and DQ wasn't exactly hopping around closing time in January. She'd come keep me company and eat the large Heath Blizzard slowly — to savor it. Like it was the last one she was ever going to eat. But we both knew there'd be another Blizzard the next night. And the next night. She'd eat a damn Blizzard every night of her life.

Anyway, it was about five minutes till close and an 18-wheel moving truck pulls up in front. The door swings open, and the first thing I see is six-inch heels and a boot that goes up to someone
's skinny ass thigh. Next thing you know, a Blonde Bombshell walks in the front door of my DQ.

Dana and I look at each other. Blonde Bombshell is the kind of chick who makes girls, like Dana, feel like shit because they
'll never compare, whereas guys, like me, look at themselves and feel like shit for a whole different set of reasons. She's unattainable. Everything about her.

I set down the mop and wipe my hands on my apron.
"Uh, can I help you, ma'am?"

"
Do your products contain high fructose corn syrup?" she asks. Her voice is stiff, not the molasses drawl I'd hoped for -- one I could imagine being covered in.

From Dana, I hear an audible scoff. She
's thinking: Of course, Bombshell can't eat what the rest of us do.

I
'm instantly thrilled that the nights get boring enough around here that I've read the nutrition facts and ingredient lists, and, so, I know the answer to this question. "It's in all the sauces, and likely the candy you can put in the Blizzard, but technically the corn syrup in the ice cream itself isn't 'high fructose' per se . . ."

She tilts her head to the side. Weirdly.
"That will do. Make me something. Large. Lots of candy and sauce."

"
You want a large sundae?" I asked.

"
Sundaes. Yes. I would like to order five."

It takes me a second to process, realizing most people ask the question about high fructose crap and then don
't want to eat it. I shake off the confusion and get to making. I'm so distracted, I forget to charge her for them, but when she's gone, I realize there's a $50 bill sitting next to the register. Dana and I don't say another word.

She was the first one I saw. Dana drove me home that night and when we got to the shabby craftsman-house coated street I've lived on my whole life — Maple Street —  we saw the moving truck was parked at the end of the block.

There were five of them, all adults, moving into a big square saltbox house that sits at the end of my cul-de-sac. Everything about the house always stuck out: different architecture, twice the size of everything around it. Vines covered the siding and bricks. The windows on the front looked like eyes staring at you. We pulled into my driveway, got out, and probably stood there for five solid minutes just watching them. Blonde Bombshell carried boxes on her shoulders, still in the heels.

"I think I'm going to go home," Dana said, neither of us able to wrap our heads around what we saw.

But I stayed out on the stoop, swinging on the porch swing, just watching. They unloaded that 18-wheeler in an hour, and at one point Blonde Bombshell carried in a leather recliner by herself.

Forty-seven new families moved to our tiny town in the next sixty days. And they all seemed drawn to the house on Maple Street, like a weirdo mecca. Maybe because it
's the South and we're good at denial, or maybe because people like thinking everything is fine when it isn't, but whatever the case, no one said anything.

My mother, who lives in a uniform of mom jeans, nurse shoes, clunky sweaters from my childhood, and scrunchies, welcomed the mysterious group of five adults living in one house with a tray of chocolate chip brownies she made from a mix. I stood next to her as she introduced herself to the tall, suave man with caramel colored hair. While we exchanged pleasantries — well, while they did, and I watched awkwardly — he ate the entire tray.

Sugar. There was something about sugar. Blonde Bombshell with her apparent need for high fructose corn syrup. Suave Caramel dude with his brownie consumption. The more families that came, the longer the lines at the DQ got. I'd go into gas stations, and the candy aisles would be picked clean. Hostess treats — or whatever people started making after Hostess shut down — and candy, Icees, Cokes and Hi-C, Pixy Stix, and doughnuts, and so on. And so on. And so on. They ate it all. Sugar. The town was going crazy for sugar.

It took me three months to say the word "alien" out loud. I stayed up late reading about extraterrestrial encounters. Though it was safe to say my encounters weren't of the floating-faceless-object or little-green-men persuasion, there seemed to be a number of stories out there about people who just appeared, often to a small town, and then things began to seem . . . off. Just like they had in our tiny ass town.

I thought about an Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode I
'd seen on Hulu — my older sister, Hanna, always reminisced about the show, and bored one night last summer, I'd watched them all online. You know the one I mean, right? With the aliens in the abandoned building, trying to take the twin or something? I don't know. They seemed like that. I decided the Maple Street sugar psychos — or fructose freaktoids, as I got to calling them (eventually shortened to fructoids in my head) — were certainly aliens. I just couldn't determine if the rest of the forty-seven families were aliens or were under some kind of spell.

Dana was the first person I spilled my hypothesis to. She
'd rolled her eyes. She'd asked if I was high. She didn't even humor the thought past giving me the jeez-Fenton-how'd-I-get-stuck-with-you-as-my-best-friend-when-you're-so-lame face. I knew that face too well. The older we got, the more she thought it. And the more stupid shit I said out loud, the more serious she was in asking herself that question.

Too bad Dana was a mean, sarcastic, difficult-to-deal-with, chubby chick in small town Tennessee. She was outcast for the obvious, superficial reasons, which I could care less about. That clearly didn
't keep me from befriending her, or liking her. But on top of that, she wasn't exactly a pleasant person. She wanted to know how she got stuck with me? I wondered how I got stuck with her.

People made jokes that we
'd get married. That I'd be the pussy-whipped skinny husband who got elbowed around by the drill sergeant wife twice his size. You don't know that stereotype? You're lucky. There's a lot of that around here.

But all that brought a few things to light about my alien theory. One, this sugar obsession didn
't seem to rot the population of Small-Town-Shithole, Tennessee the way you think it would. The girls were beautiful. The guys were athletes. They were all way too pretty in a really uncomfortable, Stepford or airbrushed or perhaps Kardashian sort of way. They were constantly overdressed and over-made and wearing clothes that might have passed in a big city — Nashville, maybe, or probably New York — but certainly did not pass here in the land of Walmart and oversized American Eagle jeans. And all they ever ate was sugar.

Secondly, no one seemed to know anything about these people. You
'd ask questions of the kids in school, but they wouldn't be able to answer them. Teachers would call on them, they'd stay silent, and then the teacher would leave them alone, as if they had answered, or as if they'd suddenly been compelled — by alien mind melding, duh — to not require an answer of a student. I figured that one out pretty quickly after several of them showed up in Mr. Fence's third period American History class. Fence was a nervous man, in the Army once, and kind of jumpy now. Kids made fun of him, which was terrible. He always kept his dog tags on him. In the middle of class, he'd take them off, and then wrap them around his wrist, like a nervous habit. I kept a running tally of how many questions he asked the Fructoidss, and a count of how many they answered. One particular day, I looked at my rows of tally and hash and counted them as 0 for 47. He never once gave them a hard time. He'd just look at them, they'd look back, he'd wind the necklace chain around his wrist, clasp the tags in his palm, and then say, "Moving on."