Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  She pulls a picture from under her blouse and holds it out to me. This one is newer than most of her stash, printed on a color printer from somebody’s digital camera. I remember that printer. We sold it long ago, with everything else: the antiques handed down from Great-Grandma Ann, the farm equipment, the land. None of it was enough. The house is in foreclosure.

  I say, “That’s our old horse pasture.”

  “We had horses?”

  “One horse.” White Foot. He’d been mine.

  “Where’s the horse?”

  “Gone.”

  “Where’s the pasture? Is it the dirt field over by the falling-down fence?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But what are those?” She points at the photograph.

  In the picture the pasture, its fences whole and whitewashed, is full of wildflowers, mostly daisies. Wave after wave of daisies in semi-close-up, their centers bright yellow like little suns, their petals almost too white, maybe from some trick of the camera. When was the last time I saw a daisy? Had Ruthie ever seen one?

  I say, “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

  “You just said bad words!”

  “They’re called ‘daisies.’ Now go away, brat.”

  “You said bad words! I’m telling!”

  Heavy footsteps on the stairs. Ruthie, looking close to tears, thrusts the photo under her blouse and skitters out the door. It isn’t the tears that do me in, it’s the blouse.

  My parents come in, with Sheriff Buchmann. The room is too full. I know from her face that Mom hates Buchmann seeing my patched bedspread, faded curtains, sparse furniture. Me, I just hate the sheriff’.

  He says, “Daniel, did you go last night to the site of the Allen Corporation’s pipeline?”

  “No, sir.”

  “How’d you get that bandage on your head?”

  “Tripped in the dark and fell off my bike.”

  “Where?”

  “corner of Maple and Grey.”

  “And what were you doing down there?”

  “I had a fight with my father and wanted to get away.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  “My grades. My teacher called yesterday. My math grade sucks.” Could Buchmann tell I’d been rehearsed? He’d check, but Mr. Ruhl did call yesterday, and my math grade does suck. My parents gaze at me steadily, without emotion. They’re good at that. So is Buchmann. I want to ask if the pipeline guard is okay, but I can’t. I wasn’t there. It never happened. Unless the guard can I.D. me.

  I gaze back, emotionless, my father’s son.

  Ruthie is drawing daisies. I don’t know where she got the paper. Her crayons are only what’s been hoarded for years, now stubby lengths of yellow and green laid carefully on the kitchen table. So far she’s covered three sheets of thin paper with eight daisies each, every flower in its own little box. They have yellow centers, green leaves, and petals that are the white of the paper outlined in green.

  “Hi, Danny! Is your head better?”

  “Yeah. What are these?”

  “Daisies, stupid.”

  “I mean, why are you making them?”

  “I want to.” She looks up at me, crayon stub in her fist, her face all serious. “Do you know what my teacher taught us in school today?”

  “How would I know? I’m not in the second grade.” Unlike me, Ruthie likes school and is good at it.

  “She taught us about the pipeline. Some people broke it Monday night.”

  My hand stops halfway to the fridge handle, starts again, opens the fridge door. Nothing to eat but bread, leftover potatoes, drippings, early strawberries Mom picked today. She will be saving those.

  Ruthie says, “The pipeline people are fixing it. It’s supposed to carry water to ‘The Southwest.”’ She says the words carefully, like she might say “Narnia” or “Middle Earth.”

  “Is that so,” I say. I take bread and drippings from the fridge.

  “Yes. The water will come from ‘Lake Michigan.’ That’s one of the Great Lakes.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “There are five Great Lakes, and they have four-fifths of the fresh water in the world. That means that if you put all the fresh water in the world into five humongous pots, then four—”

  I stop listening to her math lesson. The guard couldn’t I.D. me. I watched him on TV—we still have a TV, so old that nobody wants it, but no LinkNet for any good programs. The guard looked even younger than I remembered, no more than a few years older than me. He also looked more scared than I remembered. I spread drippings on my bread.

  Ruthie is still reciting. “The water is supposed to go to farms around the ‘Great Lakes Basin,’ but it’s not. It’s going to go through the big pipe to ‘The Southwest.’ Danny, why can’t we have some of that water to make our farm grow again?”

  “Bingo.”

  “Answer me!” Ruthie says, sounding just like Mom.

  “Because the Southwest can pay for it and we can’t.”

  Ruthie nods solemnly. “I know. We can’t pay for anything. That’s why we have to move. I don’t wanna move. Danny—where will we go?”

  “I don’t know, squirt.” I no longer want my bread and drippings. And I don’t want to talk about this with Ruthie. It fills me with too much rage. I put the half-eaten bread in the fridge and go upstairs.

  The next night, the pipeline is attacked in Fuller Corners, twenty miles to the south. There were two guards, both armed. One is killed.

  “Daniel Raymond Hitchens, you are under arrest for destruction of property, trespass, and assault in the first degree. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in court. You have the right to an attorney—”

  The two cops, neither from here, have come right into math class during final exams. They cuff me and lead me out, my test paper left on my desk, half the equations probably wrong. My classmates gape; Connie Moorhouse starts to cry. Mr. Ruhl says feebly, “See here, now, you can’t—” He shuts up. Clearly they can.

  Outside the classroom they frisk me. I bluster, “Aren’t I supposed to get one phone call?”

  “You got a phone?”

  I don’t, of course—gone long ago.

  “You get your call at the station.”

  They take me to the police station in Fuller Corners. There is a lot of talking, video recording, paperwork. I learn that I am suspected of killing the guard in the Fuller corners attack. The surviving guard identified me. This is ridiculous; I have never even been to Fuller corners. That doesn’t stop me from being scared. I know that something more is going on here, but I don’t know what. When I get my phone call to my father, I am almost blubbering, which makes me furious.

  My parents come roaring down to Fuller Corners like hounds on a deer. Along with them come more TV cameras than I can count. More shouting. A lawyer. I can’t be arraigned until tomorrow. What is arraigned? It doesn’t sound good. I spend the night in the Fuller Corners lock-up because I’m seventeen, not sixteen. The jail has two cells. One holds a man accused of raping his wife. The other has me and a drunk who snores, sprawling across the bottom bunk and smelling of booze and piss. He never wakes the entire time I’m there.

  Dad drives me home after the arraignment. I am out on bail. More TV cameras, even a robocam. I recognize Elizabeth Wilkins, talking into a microphone on the courthouse steps. She looks hot. Everyone follows my every move, but in the truck it’s just my father and me, and he doesn’t look at me.

  He doesn’t say anything, either.

  We drive through the ruined land, field after field empty of all but blowing dust. The thing that gets me is how fast it happened. We learned in school about the possible desertification of the Midwest from global warming. But it was only one possibility, and it was supposed to take decades, maybe longer. Then some temperature drop somewhere in the Pacific Ocean—the Pacific Ocean, for fuck’s sake—changed some ocean currents, and that brought years of drought, ending in dust that blew around from
dawn to sundown. Ending in grass fires and foreclosures and food shortages. Ending in Fuller corners.

  Finally my father says, “This is just the beginning.” He keeps his eyes on the road. “But not for you, Danny. You’re not going to prison. If that’s what you’re thinking, get it out of your mind right now. Not going to happen. They got nothing but made-up evidence that won’t hold up.”

  “Then why was I arrested?”

  “PR. Yeah, you’re the poster boy for this. Bastards.”

  On the courthouse steps, Elizabeth Wilkins said into her microphone, “The protestors are even using their children in a shameful and selfish fight to stop the pipeline that will save so many lives in the parched and dying cities of Tucson and—”

  I am not a child.

  “Dad,” I blurt out, ‘Were you at Fuller corners?”

  His eyes never leave the road, his expression never changes, he says nothing. Which is all the answer I need.

  I thought I knew fear before. I was wrong.

  At home, Mom is frying potatoes for dinner. It’s warm outside but all the windows are shut against the dust, and all the curtains are drawn tight against everything else. Ruthie lies on the kitchen floor, frantically coloring. I go upstairs and sit on the edge of my bed.

  A few minutes later Ruthie comes into my room. She plants herself in front of me, short legs braced apart, hands clasped tight in front of her. “You were in jail.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Go away, squirt.”

  “I can’t,” she says, and the odd words plus something in her voice make me focus on her. When she was littler, she used to go stand on her head in the pantry and cry whenever anyone wouldn’t tell her something she wanted to know.

  “Danny, did you break the pipe?”

  “No,” I say, truthfully.

  “Are more people going to break the pipe more?”

  “Yes, I think so.” Just the beginning.

  “An ‘eviction notice’ came today while you were in jail. Does that mean we have to move right away?”

  “I don’t know.” Is the timing of the eviction notice with my faked-up poster-boy arrest just coincidental? How would I even know? The people building the pipeline, which is going to be immensely profitable, are very determined. But so is my father.

  Ruthie says, “Where will we go?”

  “I don’t know that, either.” The Midwest is a dust plain, the Southwest desperate for water, the Great Lakes states and Northeast defending their great treasures, the lakes and the Saint Lawrence Seaway. Oregon and Washington have closed their borders, with guns. The South is already too full of refugees without jobs or hope.

  Ruthie says, “I think we should go to Middle Earth. They have lots of water.”

  She doesn’t really believe it; she’s too old. But she can still dream it aloud. Then, however, she follows it with something else.

  “It will be a war, won’t it, Danny? Like in history.”

  “Go downstairs,” I say harshly. “I hear Mom calling you to set the table.”

  She knows I’m lying, but she goes.

  I go into the bathroom and turn on the sink. Water flows, brown and sputtery sometimes, but there. We have a pretty deep well, which is the only reason we’re still here, the only reason we have electricity and potatoes and bread and, sometimes, coffee. I’ve caught Mom filling dozens of plastic gallon bottles from the kitchen tap. Even our small town, smaller now that so many have been forced out, has a black market.

  I turn off the tap. The well won’t hold much longer. The Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin Water Resources Compact won’t hold, either. Lake levels have been falling for over a decade. There isn’t enough, won’t be enough, can’t be enough for everybody.

  I go down to dinner.

  Exhausted from two nights of sleeplessness and two days of fitful naps, I nonetheless cannot sleep. At 2:00 A.M. I go downstairs and turn on the T.V.! Without LinkNet, we get only two stations, both a little fuzzy. One of them is all news all the time. With the sound as low as possible, I watch myself being led from the jail to the courthouse, from the courthouse to our truck. I watch film clips of the dead guard. I watch an interview with the guard I clobbered with a rock. He describes his “assailant” as six feet tall, strongly built, around twenty-one years old. Either he has the worst eyesight in the county or else he can’t admit he was brought down by a high-school kid who can’t do algebra.

  Not that I’m going to need algebra in what my future is becoming.

  When I can’t watch any more, I go into the kitchen. I gather up what I find there, rummage for a pair of scissors, and go outside. There is no wind. Dad’s emergency light, battery-run and powerful enough to illuminate the entire inside of the barn we no longer own, is in the shed. When I’ve finished what I set out to do, I return to the house.

  Ruthie is deeply asleep. She stirs when I hoist her onto my shoulder, protests a bit, then slumps against me. When I carry her outside, she wakes fully, a little scared but now also interested.

  “Where we going, Danny?”

  “You’ll see. It’s a surprise.”

  I’m forced to continue to carry her because I forgot her shoes. She grows really heavy but I keep on, stumbling through the dawn. At the old horse pasture I set her on a section of fence that hasn’t fallen down yet. I turn on the emergency light and sweep it over the pasture.

  “Oh!” Ruthie cries. “Oh, Danny!”

  The flowers are scattered all across the bare field, each now on its own little square of paper: yellow centers, white petals outlined in yellow, green leaves until the green crayon was all used up and she had to switch to blue.

  “Oh, Danny!” she cries again. “Oh, look! A hundred hundred daisies!”

  It will be a war, wont it? Yes. But not this morning.

  The sun rises, the wind starts, and the paper daisies swirl upward with the dust.

  2012

  AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL

  NOVEMBER 2013

  It wasn’t dark and it wasn’t light. It wasn’t anything except cold. I’m dead, Pete thought, but of course he wasn’t. Every time he thought that, all the way back to his first time when McAllister had warned him: “The transition may seem to last forever.”

  Forever was twenty seconds on Pete’s wrister.

  Light returned, light the rosy pink of baby toes, and then Pete stood in a misty dawn. And gasped.

  It was so beautiful. A calm ocean, smooth and shiny as the floor of the Shell. A beach of white sand, rising in dunes dotted with clumps of grasses. Birds wheeled overhead. Their sharp, indignant cries grew louder as one of them dove into the waves and came up with a fish. Just like that. A fresh breeze tingled Pete’s nose with salt.

  This. All this. He hadn’t landed near the ocean before, although he’d seen pictures of it in one of Caity’s books. This—all destroyed by the Tesslies, gone forever.

  No time for hatred, not even old hatred grown fat and ripe as soy plants on the farm. McAllister’s instructions, repeated endlessly to all of them, echoed in Pete’s mind: “You have only ten minutes. Don’t linger anywhere.”

  The sand slipped under his shoes and got into the holes. He had to leave them, even though shoes were so hard to come by. Cursing, he ran clumsy and barefoot along the shoreline, his weak knee already aching and head bobbing on his spindly neck, toward the lone house emerging from the mist. The cold air seeped into his lungs and hurt them. He could see his breath.

  Seven minutes remained on his wrister.

  The house stood on a little rocky ridge rising from the dunes and jutting into the water. No lights in the windows. The back door was locked but McAllister had put their precious laser saw onto the wrister. (“If you lose it, I will kill you.”) Pete cut a neat, silent hole, reached in, and released the deadbolt.

  Five minutes.

  Dark stairs. A night light in the hallway. A bedroom with two sleeping forms, his arm thrown over her body, the window open to the sweet
night air. Another bedroom with a single bed, the blanketed figure too long, shadowy clothes all over the floor. And at the end of the hallway, a bonanza.

  Two of them.

  Four minutes.

  The baby lay on its back, eyes closed in its bald head, little pink mouth sucking away on dreams. It had thrown off its blanket to expose a band of impossibly smooth skin between the plastic diaper and tiny shirt. Pete took precious seconds to unfasten a corner of the diaper, but he was already in love with the little hairless creature and would have been devastated if it were male. It was a girl. Carefully he hoisted her out of the crib and onto his shoulder, painfully holding her with one crooked arm. She didn’t wake.

  No doubt that the toddler was a girl. Glossy brown ringlets, pink pajamas printed with bunnies, a doll clutched in one chubby fist. When Pete reached for her, she woke, blinked, and shrieked.

  “No! Mommy! Dada! Cooommme! No!”

  Little brat!

  Pete grabbed her by the hand and dragged her off the low bed. That wrenched his misshapen shoulder and he nearly screamed. The child resisted, wailing like a typhoon. The baby woke and also screamed. Footsteps pounded down the hall.

  Ninety seconds.

  “McAllister!” Pete cried, although of course that did no good. McAllister couldn’t hear him. And ten minutes was fixed by the Tesslie machinery: no more, no less. McAllister couldn’t hurry the Grab.

  The parents pounded into the room. Pete couldn’t let go of either child. Pete shrieked louder than both of them—his only real strength was in his voice, did they but know it—the words Darlene had taught him: “Stop! I have a bomb!”

  They halted just inside the bedroom door, crashing into each other. She gasped: perhaps at the situation, perhaps at Pete. He knew what he must look like to them, a deformed fifteen-year-old with bobbly head.

  “Moommmeeeee!” the toddler wailed.

  “Bomb! Bomb!” Pete cried.

  Forty-five seconds.

  The father was a hero. He leaped forward. Pete staggered sideways with his burden of damp baby, but he didn’t let go of the toddler’s hand. Her father grabbed at her torso and Pete’s wrister shot a laser beam at him. The man was moving; the beam caught the side of his arm. The air sizzled with burning flesh and the father let go of his child.