by Mallory Hill
Terminal
Regression
Mallory Hill
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
Studio Digital CT, LLC
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Copyright © 2016 by Mallory Hill
Cover design by Barbara Aronica-Buck
Story Plant Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61188-247-6
Fiction Studio Books E-book ISBN: 978-1-945839-03-0
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First Story Plant Printing: January 2017
To anyone who takes the chance and ventures into my world.
Chapter 1
<<<
People always say to be strong, as if strength and our capacity for it were something within our control. But strength runs out; it’s inevitable. At some point or another, we fail. We fail so supremely that we just can’t get back up again. It doesn’t have to be any one failure either. In fact, what’s most lethal is the combination of all our little failures. Millions of missed opportunities and shattered dreams forming this nightmare amalgamation of inferiority. And we just break. We just fall and keep falling and don’t get back up.
That’s what was happening to me. I’d messed up one too many times, and now I had to live with it. Well, die with it actually. Because my failure warranted my termination, effective the very next day.
I turned my ticket over in my hands a thousand times. The departure date was stamped on it clearly. I had less than twenty-four hours before my train left. As for my destination, that was anyone’s guess. No one knew what happened at the far terminal. No one had ever come back from it.
In perfect honesty, I was hoping it really was the end of the line. It’d be easier that way. I’d had enough new beginnings to know how much I hated them. An end sounded so easy. No one to meet or try to impress. No one to disappoint. Perfect.
But as much as I wanted that, I couldn’t help my fears. If it was death, if I’d never see another day after tomorrow morning, what did that mean? Would there just be darkness? Would I have consciousness? Or would I be judged? Were my actions and their lack of significance truly about to determine my eternal resting place? I started digging through memories. I’d never been exemplary—that was what landed me in my current situation—but neither had I been particularly bad. I was more or less neutral. But nobody tells you what happens to neutral souls. The gray area doesn’t seem to exist in the afterlife.
But I deserved to die. The ticket office had read my application and confirmed that I had nothing substantial to offer the community. I hardly remembered what I’d written. I’d been in such a state of panic and hatred and sheer desperation that the whole process was just an angry blur in my memory. Earlier that day, something had just clicked in my head, and suddenly I was reeling through every stupid mistake I’d ever made, regardless of how minor it may have been. It was happening more and more, these episodes of turbulent self-loathing, utter disgust at what a useless nothing I was.
When I first started feeling this way, back in a time I had to fight to remember, my mom had told me it was just my fire. I was supposed to embrace it, somehow use it to my advantage. So I tried. I’d paint with it or sing with it or write with it, but I only made myself feel worse. Because it was all so ugly. Everything about me, the true crux of who I was, was just this hideous mess of unyielding devastation I couldn’t make sense of for the life of me.
The door opened and I jumped. I fought the urge to hide my ticket. She had to know. I couldn’t just disappear the next morning; she’d be devastated. I owed her closure at the very least.
My mom was everything you don’t want in a mother. If the goal of procreation is to produce more advanced offspring than the previous generation, I was a major evolutionary setback after her. Mom was an artist. She was every kind of artist. I’d grown up amid paints and instruments and the people who could turn them into magic. In the artist community, she was a goddess. Seriously, her artist followers had elected her their community representative on the city council, a figurehead position for the most part, but one that branded her the best in the business. And the worst part was how effortless it all was for her. She never had to think. She’d just smile and a full masterpiece was born in a matter of moments.
She set her bag down on the table, her hands still splattered with paint from her latest project.
“What a day!” she sighed as she sat beside me.
“What happened?”
“Oh, no, just the day. The sky! It’s different everyday, every moment. What I wouldn’t give to be able to change like that. To be everything and anything, a whole universe of change in a single day.”
That sounded awful. We’d never seen eye to eye on the beauty of unpredictability. But I smiled.
“But work was good?”
She pointed at me. “Never work. Work is cleaning up or grocery shopping. What we do is pure joy. And we’re going to have another mural night tonight. Play your cards right and I can get you on the scaffolding with Deb’s son.” She winked at me.
I took a breath. “Actually, Mom—”
“Jane,” she insisted. “I’ve told you. In the community, we’re all of one soul, one generation. Call me Jane.”
She meant well, but in this particular instance, I really just needed her to be my mom. But I nodded. “Okay, Jane… We need to talk. I…” I glanced at the ticket in my hands.
She blinked. “Oh… Is that…? Well, this is something. It came in the mail?”
Nervously, I nodded. “Right… I leave tomorrow.”
“What?” She grabbed the ticket. “No notice? Oh, they’re so rude with these things. It was the same way with your father’s ticket. Well, how on earth are we going to cram all the things you want to do into such a short time?”
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that. I was dying. Couldn’t she at least pretend to freak out? Couldn’t she summon her beautiful, ever-changing temperament to have a decent reaction for the death of her child?
“You know, I’m okay. I don’t need to do anything special. Just a normal night.”
She smiled. “If that’s what you want. And Tony is so good at last minute speeches. You’ll have the prettiest eulogy ever heard. He’ll have a ball with this.”
I felt my stomach twisting at her total indifference.
“Actually, maybe we could keep it to ourselves? It might kill the mood.” The absolute last thing I wanted was one of Tony’s weepy speeches stirring up the community sympathies.
She set the ticket down, prepping for another lecture. “In our culture, everything is cause for celebration. We crave inspiration like this… But maybe that’s the problem. You haven’t got enough time to make something of your inspiration, is that it? You’ll leave with all the energy still in you?”
For half a second, I considered telling the truth. Telling her I wanted this, that it was all too late and I couldn’t do this anymore. I hadn’t been inspired in years, since before I could remember. That cheerful little artist child she so wanted me to be had died long ago.
But I swallowed that down. She didn’t need to know. I knew she’d be fine as l
ong as she could keep believing it was out of my hands, that this was truly a community decision and not just some tragic exchange between me and whoever approved ticket applications. She needed to understand it was my fate, something unavoidable and truly for the best. She might not have trusted my judgment alone, but I knew she wouldn’t dare to second guess the whole community. At least, she never had before.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s probably it.”
She took my hand. “Then I’ll move to make you mural captain tonight. We’ll paint one of your designs.”
“No!” I said too quickly. “I mean… I want to save my designs for when they’re ready. Who knows? There could be paint in the afterlife.”
She sighed. “It’s not the afterlife, Laura. It’s a continuation of life. And it’s whatever you choose to make it. Your dad called it a blank canvas. You can make a mess or a masterpiece. It’s all up to you.”
Maybe that would have been an appropriate analogy if I’d been capable of creating a masterpiece. For all my mother’s talent, I was not an artist. I guess I could paint within the lines and create vague likenesses of things, but I had no skill with design and no natural ability for art of any kind. I was a mediocre novice within my mom’s community, but they were all too polite to say so.
I’d been adopted into the artist community simply because I had no other pursuits to explore. I didn’t have a calling for any of the major areas. Education, math-science, athletics, medicine, law and history, environmental affairs; none of the other communities really appealed to me. I’d even considered cross-community and individual interest. I didn’t dislike them, but nothing had ever made me feel the way I knew my mom felt about the arts. I wanted passion. I wanted to love something so much that I forgot to eat sometimes I was so focused on it. I wanted something to take over and wake me up and give me purpose. But I’d had no such luck.
So many times I’d tried to force myself to settle. I had to pick something. Unemployment wasn’t an option, not in this lifetime anyway. But the more I tried to will my passions to conform, the more they began to fade. Now, I was nothing. There was nothing left in me, nothing more I cared to preserve. I was only in the arts community now so no one would question me. It wasn’t the most popular thing in the world to voluntarily take the train. But I was a noncontributor. I was worthless, and I was the only one with enough sense to do something about it. At least, it had seemed to make sense before. Now that it was really happening, my motives seemed radically less noble.
Mural nights weren’t my favorite. Mom made me dress like her friends. There were a lot of scarves and flowing skirts and beads. Those clothes always felt more like costumes to me, but Mom believed we were the embodiment of our art and our appearances made a statement about the condition of our souls.
My mom’s friends and their kids gathered at the mural site, and this big guy named Jason always started a dangerously huge bonfire. They all brought food and drinks and gallons of paint and spent the whole night painting some wall together. I always found myself roped into campfire a cappella numbers or impromptu poetry readings. Mural nights were the only artsy thing I’d attempted in years, and I only participated after persistent coercion. They were very overwhelming occasions for me.
But one more wouldn’t be so bad. One last night seeing my mom live her dream. That wasn’t so bad.
We arrived on the site as the sun was setting. Mom had me bring the cooler so she could carry all her supplies. I added it to the pile of provisions and sat down next to the woodpile as Jason lit the bonfire. Hardly a minute passed before paint was flying and people were singing their hearts out. We weren’t in a very residential area, but I was sure we were disturbing half the city.
I wanted to put on the “everything’s fine” act for the sake of everyone’s evening, but I didn’t have it in me to participate in anything. If I was going to die the next day, I didn’t need another memory of inferiority. I just stared into the fire, watching all the smaller stuff crack and pop.
“Well, look who isn’t painting.” I had one friend, more of an ally really, in the arts community. He sat down next to me. “No masterpieces tonight?”
I smiled somewhat genuinely. “Fresh out. I must have used up all the genius.”
“Oh, I know that feeling.”
Patrick’s family did music. All his siblings could play at least three instruments and sang like angels; their parents had trained them that way. And Patrick was good too. He just didn’t take it as seriously as the rest of them. He’d never been interested in composition or performance. He liked to play his guitar by himself and only preexisting tunes. Naturally, the family wasn’t too thrilled with his lack of vigor.
We’d grown up together as the only art kids who couldn’t care less. We didn’t really talk much outside of community events, but we’d survived many a mural night in each other’s company.
“So, listen,” he said in a mildly worrying tone. “There’s something I want to tell you… I’m leaving.”
My heartbeat sped up for some reason. “What?”
He shrugged. “This is it. My last mural night.”
Was he serious? More importantly, would I see him on the train tomorrow? I didn’t know why but I dreaded the thought of someone knowing what I’d done. Maybe more than I dreaded the thought of him dying.
“So… Where are you going exactly?”
“Well, I found a couple guys from the medical community who were looking for a roommate. The place is right by the hospital, and I figured it was about time. I’m an adult; I can’t keep living with Mom and Dad. Oh, forgive me, Deb and Mike… So, I’m moving in this weekend.”
Moving. Moving was not leaving. Being selected for a ticket meant you had been called out as an inadequate contributor either by your own admission or by someone in your home community. The train was a punishment. It was how the city maintained its reputation for peace and prosperity. What Patrick was doing was the furthest thing in the world from leaving. Yet another successful transitionary period had transpired while I was hours away from the end of my life.
“Wow, so medicine really worked out for you?”
“Did I not tell you? Yeah, I’ve been in training for a while. A couple more massive tests and I’ll be certified. It’s great, Laura. The way we work is so…simple. Actually, it’s really complex, but we’re all the same inside. I like that. And I like knowing I can put people back together. It really is my calling.”
I nodded. “That’s great. I’m so happy for you.”
He smiled. “My only regret is leaving you here with all of these…colorful characters. How’s your search going?”
I’d searched and searched for the longest time. After I’d finished school, all I did was sample the different communities day after day, week after week. But as our world loved to tell us, no community was any better or worse than the others. They were too equal. I couldn’t even find something settle worthy let alone something that excited me enough to warrant a true “calling.”
“Oh, it’s going,” I lied. “I’m sure I’ll be out of here any day now.” That part was true.
“What about medicine?” he asked. “You love helping people.”
I shook my head. “No. I couldn’t. I tried and apparently I don’t respond well to pain.”
“Does anyone?”
“You don’t understand. If I see people hurt, I have a full-scale meltdown. Questioning the universe, lots of philosophical drama, waterworks you could drown in. And doctors really don’t appreciate it when you do that in front of their patients. It sort of terrifies them.”
My exploration of the medical field had been among the more harrowing of my career search. It wasn’t the blood or the guts that deterred me; it was the idea of suffering. I couldn’t understand its function. What was the point of misery? Why hadn’t we found a way to eradicate it yet, send it away on its own special tra
in and never think of it again? It wasn’t enough to just medicate pain. There was something deeper in it, something calculated and sinister at its core that petrified me.
Patrick just laughed. “Yeah, you are kind of soft. But you’ll find something.”
I nodded. “I’m sure I will.”
I looked into the fire again. On the other side, the a cappella chorus had started up. I watched their faces through the flames. Joy. Nothing but pure, unmistakable joy. I took a deep breath and focused on the burning sticks.
“Laura, are you okay?” Patrick asked.
“Yeah. What does it feel like? Having a calling?”
He sighed. “Well, simply put, it feels good. You’ll know it when you feel it, I swear. It’s not even a choice at that point. It’s something that compels you and consumes you. And everybody has one, Laura.”
I looked at him. He was too smart not to see right through me. “Maybe not.”
He slung his arm around me. “Nice try, but I’m not going to pity you. So you’re in a slump. It’ll get better. It always does. Have you ever met anyone who never found what they’re meant for?”
I hadn’t, but only because all those people were dead. Assuming the afterlife was a communal sort of deal, I was about to meet a whole bunch of them. But I shook my head.
“And if you’re fishing for compliments,” he continued, “you’re smart and capable and can do anything you set your mind to, but you already know that. Just be you, whoever you are, and you’ll be just fine.”
I rested my head on his shoulder, those same tired, meaningless words echoing over and over in my head. “Thanks.”
“No problem. And I’ll visit you. We’ll keep in touch.”
I felt like crying. I’d never see him again. But I just kept breathing and stared into the fire.
“Of course we will.”
I couldn’t allow myself any regrets. If I did, I’d have to include a good majority of my existence. But lying to him didn’t feel right. It was for the best, I knew, and I didn’t owe him an explanation, but I would have liked to have been able to trust him, to trust someone enough to tell the truth. Of course, were that the case, I wouldn’t have been in this mess in the first place.
