The Best of Galaxy’s Edge 2013-2014 (25 page)

I recite lines from
Oklahoma!
and
Star Wars
in my head. I remember snippets of books I’ve read and sing every pop song I can remember.

Randy stays later and later at the lab, sleeping on a cot in the corner sometimes. Jeanine brings him hot food and clean clothes to keep him working.

I know we’re almost there, but the SuMP decay preys on my thoughts. Motor functions fail always first, then speech. I guess I’m luck lucky not to have, not to have any of those.

* * *

Twenty-two weeks from Leavitt’s ultimatum, we have our proof-of-concept ready. Randy does a fancy double-blind demo where he’s in one room, and I’m in another, and the whole thing is broadcast live on vid screens in the conference room.

By Randy finishes time, our success is clear. The bionet is a reality.

The other scientists Randy’s back pounding and champagne pouring. Jeanine stands nearby, her face the brightest smile ever I’ve seen. He throws an arm around her shoulders, and they come to see me.

I want to be
peaches
happy for them, for us, but I’m tired. Thinking is … effort, and I have to struggle to under, understand things.

“We did it, Maggie! We made history. Who knows where the bionet will go next? And hey, look at this. Jeanine swapped out Leavitt’s press release.”

Randy holds, holds up the text of the release and reads aloud. “Allied Neuro Associates named the discovery after neuroscientist Margaret Hauri, whose work formed the bulk of the project’s underpinnings before her tragic automobile accident at the age of thirty-eight.”

Stands Randy at the monitor to see my reaction. I see my own fMRI through his eyes. Colors sparse, muted. Activity level
vomit
low. I should, should be on top of the world right now, but not I’m
maggots
not.

Randy’s face I see in the monitor. Concerned. “You’re not happy, are you?”

I
hot cocoa
.
Wood smoke in winter
. The colors on the monitor flicker
rotten
weakly.

Randy kisses Jeanine on the cheek, asks her to give us a moment alone. She steps outside, closes the door.

“Is it the Connectomics thing? You know I won’t let them do that.”

trash juice gag brown rotten grass clippings

“This is bigger, isn’t it. Not just the discovery?”

I weak yes
kittens
, but, but complicated the answer.

Randy draws up a chair. Swings a leg over. Rests his chin on the back, dials O2 to
MAX
. He speaks to the monitor, my proxy.

“Talk to me, Maggie. We should have a couple of weeks left. Where we going next? You wanted to take on Alzheimer’s. Are you in?”

Helps, the O2. Days, maybe—not weeks. There’s a
maggots
flicker of yellow in my anterior insula. Hard even to say “no” anymore. The crux of, of it, really. Brownies, vomit. Binary existence. Someone else’s control. Don’t want it. Not
vomit
not.

Randy’s voice deathly quiet goes. “Mag, you leaving me? Is that what this is about? You want to end it?”

Hot blueberry waffles with real maple syrup and fresh, melting butter.
Wish I could explain to Randy. Hauri Net his project now. Stories I read as a girl, clones, cyborgs, space liners. Randy and Jeanine—theirs now.

Off takes Randy his glasses, eyes wiping breaks his voice. “It’ll be fast, Maggie. I’ll just turn off the SuMP. You won’t even feel it. Are you sure?”

I feel a strange lightness, a pulling-away feeling that’s almost euphoric, and my thoughts become clear for a moment. I think of burgers on the grill on the Fourth of July. Sweet corn. Blueberries and cream. I think of sand between my toes at the beach with the breeze whipping my hair across my face.

Randy’s walking to the equipment. He turns on the music with one hand, and flicks a switch with the other. The stately lilt of Pachelbel’s Canon surrounds me.

I’m sneaking sugar cubes as a girl, their edges crumbling sweet on my tongue, then sharing strawberry ice cream with the boys.

Randy picks up a picture of Dale and Zachary, in front of his eyes holds it.
Dale on a red tricycle. Zachary stands behind, arms around his brother’s waist. Summer sun, upturned their laughter faces. Oh, my boys. My beautiful, sweet boys
.

Shaking Randy’s hands, the picture, too, shake-shaking. Bracing on the table Randy his elbows.
fading kittens the silver light

* * *

It was the first big storm of the season. The boys had dentist appointments, so we all slept in, and I made waffles for breakfast.

I can still smell the syrup.

Published in Galaxy’s Edge Issue 9
Copyright
©
2014 by Kary English. All rights reserved.

M
y grandmother lives among the stones. My family’s duties to her are the duties we owe a dead woman. We lay flowers on her resting spot, we sing songs in her memory, and on Vashmihan we light a candle for her. I shift my basket to the other hand. I do what I can, but she deserves better.

“Tahrie.” Grandmother’s voice hisses like sand in an hourglass. It’s nearly lost in the wind and the calls of gulls. A line of boulders stretches before me, pressed against one another along the beach. Tar covers the cracks between them, and water slaps against the other side. The sea is higher than it was yesterday.

The fat stone near the end—the one shaped like a teardrop—shifts. The fissure in the middle becomes a mouth, the hollows, eyes. She looked more like a woman when I was a child. Now,

her nose is gone and she can no longer form hands. “What do you bring me today, granddaughter?”

I pull a honeyed bun from within the basket and place it on the sand, in front of the flowers at her base. “A sweet bun.”

The stone that is my grandmother leans toward the honeyed bun. The tar cracks and a bit of the sea spills onto the ground. She snaps back into place. Once, the sea lived where my village now stands, but the sea fell in love with an island and drifted away. Some say the island spurned the sea’s advances; others say the sea was so amorous that he swallowed her. Either way, when he tried to return home, the stones stymied him.

“Please. Tell me about the things you’ve brought.”

Grandmother can’t smell the honey, or the warm bread, or the savory scent of the meat within. So I tell her about the bun as I pull forth ribbons and a scrub brush and a waterskin. The fissure that is her mouth smiles as I speak, as I wash her face, as I lay the ribbons across what once was her head.

“Thank you, little one. It makes me remember before …” her voice trails off.

Before she fell in love with a stone. Yes, I know. “I’m nineteen, Grandmother. Not so little.”

“And you haven’t fallen in love?”

“No.”

“It’s a wonderful thing, Tahrie,” she says. “Without love, I wouldn’t have given birth to your aunts and uncles.” Her eyes shift to the right side of her face—toward all the stones standing in a row. “I wouldn’t have had your father.” She looks to me. “And I wouldn’t have been able to protect our village.”

My father speaks differently. To me, she has changed; to him, she has died.

“This,” she says, and she doesn’t need to gesture for me to know what she means, “it’s in our blood.”

“And grandfather?” I lay my hand on the stone next to her. His surface is warm and weathered, crisscrossed by so many cracks, like the wrinkles on an old man’s face. “Was it in his blood?” It’s a silly question. He has no blood.

Grandmother’s eyes grow wide and deep. “I don’t know. But I suppose even stones become lonely.”

A wave buffets the back of Grandmother’s head, and another trickle of water wets the sand. I look to the sky as mist settles on my cheeks. When I open my mouth to speak, I taste salt. “And the sea grows restless.”

“Don’t be afraid to fall in love,” she says. “The stones won’t hold much longer.”

I nod, biting back the words on my tongue. I’m not a fool. I will never fall in love.

* * *

As I return to the thatched huts, I feel the villagers watching me, their gazes like unwelcome fingers on the back of my neck. They watch my brother the same way. They used to watch my sister, before she married a man.

If I turn quickly, I catch them—like puppies sitting beneath a table, wondering if the master will drop a bone. I quash the thought; it’s unkind. I’m no one’s master, just a woman with the potential to attract a stone or a tree or something stronger than a man. Something that can hold back the sea.

When I open the door to my family’s home, I find my father chopping scallops and my mother weaving another basket. My brother guts fish in the corner.

“You should leave your grandmother alone. Don’t taunt her with what she can’t have or remember,” my mother says without looking up from her work. Her black hair is pulled back, her eyes narrowed. My father says nothing. Shuramin, my brother, gives me a sympathetic look and shrugs. He’s put up with my mother for nearly as long as I have.

I set the basket by the door.

Father’s hands move in a blur. He never worries about cutting himself. No blade can bite his fingers. His skin feels soft to me, but there’s a gray tint beneath the brown.

“I’ll tend to her if I like,” I say.

“Watch the sharpness of your tongue, Tahrie,” my father says. His voice rumbles and rattles, like rocks in a jar. “Or you’ll fall in love with sawgrass.”

I lift my chin. “Grandmother still remembers what it’s like to be a woman.”

The steady chopping punctuates father’s words. “You don’t know what she was like as a woman.”

Grandmother’s parting words still prickle in my mind. “If her love can turn her into a stone, why can’t grandfather’s turn him into a man?”

This time, my mother answers. “Because stones can’t change, fool girl. Now be of some use and fetch the water.”

I stalk from the house and into the watching eyes.

* * *

It happens for Shuramin several days later, with the first rains of the wet season. I wake in the middle of the night with the crack of thunder loud in my ears. When I turn over in bed, I see that Shuramin’s is empty.

I throw a cape on before searching for him.

Outside, the wind whips through the tree branches, and rain stings my cheeks. I find my brother at the edge of the village, near the trees. He kneels in the mud, his head tilted back, his eyes closed. Rainwater runs into his hair.

There’s something intimate in his expression, so I don’t touch his shoulder. “Shuramin,” I say.

He opens his eyes. “I heard her whispering my name,” he says. “The storm. I had to come outside, to be closer.”

I breathe in sharply, and feel as if I will never again breathe out. I know his next words before he speaks them.

“I think I’m falling in love.”

* * *

It rains for ten straight days as Shuramin grows acquainted with the storm. He spends his nights outside. Nothing I say can engage him; nothing I do catches his attention more than the lightning and the burgeoning clouds.

By the tenth day, his skin begins to grow pale, his lips blue. It’s subtle. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t grown up with him, broken bread with him, shared good times and bad.

He returns home infrequently for meals.

“Perhaps the village will be saved,” my mother says after he leaves for the night. “His storm can use the seawater for her rain—drain the sea away a little and drop the water far from shore.”

Father sits on the floor, repairing a net. His lips tighten as Mother speaks, but he keeps his silence.

“And what of your son?” I say. “You’re fine with him becoming clouds and rain and lightning?”

“If it makes him happy,” Mother says. She eases into the wicker chair by the fire pit, and folds her hands in her lap.

“Happy? Does a storm know happiness?” No one is listening to me. No one cares.

“It knows love,” she says. Her gaze lowers to her hands, her forehead furrowing.

I stride over to her. “A storm won’t be enough. We should move the village away from the shore. Let the sea come home.”

Mother’s head jerks up. “Move the entire village? Leave our houses? Our land?”

“Yes.”

She snorts and shakes her head. “Go. Tell your brother to fall out of love with the storm. Tell the villagers that they must lose their houses, their homes, and move from the shore.”

I clench and unclench my fists, my knuckles aching. She’s right. I cannot change this.

* * *

I go to see Grandmother in the rain. Shuramin rarely comes home anymore. When Mother says something that upsets him, he goes fuzzy around the edges—like a cloud.

Grandmother smiles when she sees me. “Tahrie. You’ve come again.”

I lay a steaming, herbed fish at her base. “I will keep coming, until you won’t answer me anymore. I’ve brought you freshly-cooked fish.”

I describe it in great detail, and Grandmother closes her eyes. As I speak, I hear the waves lapping against the stones. They form a rhythm, and without realizing what I’m doing, I emphasize the words that occur at the same time as the waves.

It isn’t until I stop speaking that I hear it.

Tahrie
, the waves say.
Tahrie, Tahrie, Tahrie …

I drop the ribbons and the brush and run.

* * *

I do my best to stay indoors, despite the way Mother’s comments grate my nerves. She means well, I know. Even so, late at night, when all the village is quiet, the sea whispers my name.
Tahrie
, he says.
Tahrie, come to the shore. Speak with me
.

With my pillow and blankets, I form a cave for my head. I press my forehead to the cool wooden slats at the top of my bed, the sounds of my heartbeat and my breath the only things in the world.

* * *

Five nights after the sea first speaks to me, Father convinces Shuramin to have dinner with our family by the fire pit, as we used to, even though he doesn’t need to eat much anymore. It’s no longer raining, but when my brother reaches for a mango, his fingers drip.

“She’s wonderful,” he says. “There is so much about clouds and lightning I didn’t know. We wish to be married. Soon.”

Father pats his shoulder, his hand lingering, as if he doesn’t wish to let go. When he does, his palm is wet.

Mother leans forward. “What about the sea? Can the storm do something to keep him at bay?”

Shuramin glances between us. “But there’s no need. Hasn’t Tahrie told you? The storm told me everything. The sea has seen Tahrie, heard her. He wants her for his bride.”

They stare, and it’s worse than the way the villagers watch me.

I do not want to be the island.

“Tahrie,” my mother breathes, “you can save the village.”

It’s too much. I shoot up from my place by the fire and my bowl spills onto the ground; clumps of rice, plantain, and fish scatter. “And then what? Will you lay flowers by the shore, will you light a candle for me on Vashmihan—the way you do for Grandmother? The way you will do for him?” I don’t point at my brother, but they know. “Will I have children who can no longer bear to look at me, as I melt into the sea?”

My body can’t contain the press of my emotions, nor can the house. I shove the door open and flee into the night.

Tahrie, speak with me
, the sea says as I make for the trees.
Please.
His voice dogs my step. At the edge of the forest, I turn.

“No!” My shout echoes through the village, and the sea falls silent. I am Tahrie, and I wish to remain as I am.

* * *

I dream of the stones crumbling. The sea rushes in, and he crushes the houses until they are splinters.

No one sees the wave coming.

* * *

My brother finds me curled in the roots of a tree, my head resting upon its trunk. The rising sun sends gold streaking through the leaves. He sits next to me, and for a while we just watch the horizon.

“The storm would change for me if she could,” Shuramin finally says.

I squint into the light. “Are you sure?”

He lets out a sigh, and there’s a rumble at the end of it, like distant thunder. “Every night, I ask her to move the sea. She can’t. There’s too much of him. The water she takes drains him so very little.”

He sounds like Mother—such finality, as if there is no other choice. I grit my teeth. “Then I must move the village.”

“Tahrie.” He tries to grab my arm as I push myself to my feet, but misses.

When I clear the last of the trees, the village has already awakened. People carry water, whittle spears, and line up at the oven. This time, when I feel their eyes upon me, I welcome it.

“The stones won’t hold much longer,” I call out. “The sea is coming. He will smash our houses and carry our people away from shore. We need to move. Build our village anew.”