Mnemo's Memory

by David Versace

  "Father!" Balthazar Stonechurch snapped into unexpected movement. He threw himself at the floor and scrabbled for the Colonel's discarded pistols. Stonechurch's companions scattered. Balthazar raised a shaky revolver to Tempest's chest. "Drop it, you mad bitch, or so help me I'll -"

  A thunderclap cut him off. Balthazar's head snapped back. His father was showered with blood and bits of skull. Tempest howled, but her face transformed as Bill crowed. "Dumb son of a mule! She showed you they was unloaded!"

  All sense drained from Molly like the colour from her face. She managed to say "Bill? What are you doing?"

  The gun stayed fixed on the cringing Stonechurch, but Harriet turned to fix Molly with a dumbstruck glare. "Did you do this to me? What did you do?"

  "She gave me what I wanted most, Colonel! Revenge on you!"

  "No!" Molly shook her head. She clutched the Colonel's hat to her chest, as if a shield of felt and leather could stop the bullets from a ghost's gun. "I didn't want this!"

  Tempest's jaw was set and her neck muscles strained as she tried to turn the pistol away from Stonechurch. Her voice rasped, as if the strain of carrying two voices was cutting it to shreds. She snarled again, "Molly Bright, what did you do?"

  The near-headless body of Balthazar Stonechurch kicked and twitched on the floor. His father's face was a shroud of gored-blotched horror. The revellers of Mirror Springs, those who had not fled at once, fell back from the violence like pond ripples.

  "I sewed one of his hairs into the coat," cried Molly. How had it gone so wrong? "I bound him to it and so to you."

  "But why?"

  Bill replied, curling Tempest's face into a sneer, "Because she knew I'd kill you soon as the chance came along, that's why!"

  "That's not why! I tried to force him to talk with you. To get him to face what he did and make peace with you! I didn't know he could do this!"

  "You mean this?" Bill pulled the trigger. The pistol barked again. Jeremiah Stonechurch dropped like a rock fall. He spilled across the body of his son and lay still.

  "No!" Molly and Tempest shouted at once. Windows smashed as the remaining ball-goers sought to escape.

  "And now what am I going to do with you, Harriet Tempest?"

  Bill cocked the wrist holding the pistol and turned the gun on Tempest. The muzzle nudged her temple; he thumbed the hammer back.

  "At ease, Colonel," mocked Bill. He squeezed the trigger.

  Molly moved before she thought about it. She rushed at Tempest and closed her hand over the cocked pistol, jamming her finger between the hammer and pin.

  It was colder than the bottom of a lake in winter; her hand numbed in an instant. The pistol's hammer crunched on her little finger, which bent sideways. Molly barely felt it. Yanking the pistol from Bill's grip was like pulling a mule through a hedge; she met with resistance no matter which way she turned.

  Tempest seized her opportunity. With Bill distracted, she wrestled her other arm free of the coat, wrenching it off so it hung from just the forearm Bill controlled.

  "Got it!" Molly twisted the gun out of Bill's hand and flung it at the nearest window. As it spiralled through the air, the pistol trailed wisps of green smoke. It became faint and dissipated before it reached the hole in the wall.

  Tempest wrapped the coat around and around her offending arm, until it was a midnight blue bandage immobilising the hand. She pinned the bound limb under her other arm and held it with a ferocious grip. She turned on Molly with blazing eyes. "This is your doing, Molly Bright. It's your business to make it right. This can't end but one way."

  Molly could not control her streaming tears. "What do you want me to do?"

  Harriet nodded toward the corpses of the Stonechurch clan, and her own equipment pinned beneath. "You load one of those pistols. One round will suffice."

  It was a battlefield command, stripped of doubt and hesitation. Molly jumped to obey.

  "Don't listen to her, Little Moll." Bill's tone was suddenly contrite, pleading. "She don't have your best interests at heart. She's been cheated of her riches. She'll take it out on you. Don't give her nothin' she wants."

  Molly slotted a fresh bullet from the Colonel's ammunition belt into the chamber. "I'm sorry," she said. She wasn't sure who she was apologising to. A bitter corner of her heart knew it was mostly for herself. "I didn't mean for this to happen."

  "The gun, Miss Bright."

  Tempest opened her hand and for a moment Molly saw her own laid across it, seeking comfort. The instant passed. She knew there was none to be had now, if ever there was. She pressed the butt of the pistol into Tempest's open palm.

  Molly fixed on the motions of Tempest's hand as she clicked the loaded chamber into the weapon's belly. The nocked, slender fingers closed over grip and trigger with familiar intent. Tempest raised the pistol.

  Molly thought, At least this is where it ends. The women in my family don't come back.

  Out loud, she said, "I'm sorry, Colonel. I wish I'd chosen otherwise."

  The woman who thought she could stop being the Colonel looked at her with glittering eyes. "I should have known you Brights were all cut from the same cloth."

  She put the barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger.

  #

  On her last day in Mirror Springs, Molly Bright rode straight down the main street of the town with her chin held high. Some backs turned on her, of course. A few curses were uttered and more than one man idling at his leisure on a porch spat in her direction or grabbed at this crotch in blatant offense.

  But Molly thought the friendly faces outnumbered the hostile ones. The passing of the Stonechurch clan into town history had opened doors for opportunity-seekers. Houses had been looted. Herds were rustled away into nearby farms, where brands were artfully altered. Mining claims were jumped and, once any differences over ownership were settled with exchanges of gunfire or grudging handshakes, the town went back to its old routines.

  The question of Molly Bright's culpability in the Gallowsbreath Eve Massacre, as a sensational monograph dubbed it, was debated and disputed. Most contended that Harriet Tempest, whose wartime exploits were gleefully exposed by her former subordinates, gunned the Stonechurch men down over some unheard insult or unknown grievance, or just because the mood took her. The ghost of Bill Bright might, it was claimed, have been her own injured conscience made manifest. People were inclined towards simple explanations, if not credible ones.

  In the end Molly settled the matter by agreeing to depart forever. As she trotted by Uncle Key's General Supplies, Mercy barged into her path and waved her to a halt. She tugged a bundle of rags from under her shawl and dumped it into Molly's lap.

  "You take this," she said. "It's no good to us anymore."

  Molly unfolded a patch of cloth, exposing grey metal beneath. It was the pistol Bill stole. Or stole the idea of, she supposed. "I can't take this. It's too valuable."

  Mercy was already walking away. "Better they find it in your hands than our shop," she replied. "You take it where nobody knows it. Okay? Go. Find somewhere far away where nobody knows you."

  She bustled back to her store, stopping only to point out an unswept patch to her new shop assistant. Justice hurried to apply the broom to the unsightly spot.

  Molly rode on. Out to her left, the last hazy clouds were beginning to clear over the ashes of the Colonel's house on Finality Hill. Curls of lazy brown smoke still curled up from the skeletal stump of the spikewood tree. Nobody had wanted to claim the home of the murdering Colonel, especially not with all that talk of ghosts, and so it had been set alight before Gallowsbreath had dawned.

  When she reached the handful of shacks surrounding the rail stop, where the town of Mirror Springs gave way to the bumpy, rutted track back to the East, the rangy cur caught up with her. It barked once, in greeting perhaps, then trotted off to sniff out some lizard burrows. It never strayed too far from her sight.

  The chill winds out of the desert nipped at her back, but the sun rose ahead wi
th a fierce, judgmental glare. Molly tugged Bill's hat down low over her brow and cinched the Colonel's coat a little tighter about her shoulders. Two faint voices, dimly argumentative, echoed at her back.

  She ignored them and rode away.

  'The Dressmaker and the Colonel's Coat' is the longest story I've ever finished. I had the idea I wanted to write a Western, but when supernatural elements crept in at the rough outline stage, they opened the door to another fantasy world. That happens to me a lot.

  This story started as a challenge from my friend Jodi Cleghorn. The idea was to write a story in a month – starting on the first of the month with a single line, then two lines on day two and so on until the final writing session was thirty-one lines long. I read 'lines' as 'sentences', which stretched the project out even more – and still, when I got to the end of that month, I realised the story was still only about half-done. I got there in the end though.

  I'd like to revisit Molly Bright in the future. Here, she's been squeezed into the margins of her own story by Bill and the Colonel (which I should say was intentional). There's a great deal more to her and her world than I could fit into 'Dressmaker', even as long as it is.

  She deserves her due, though she probably won't thank me for the attention.

  Out of Context

  I think they closed down the poetry servers last night. That must be what happened, because this morning nobody understands how metaphors work. We all remember using them, but now we're not sure what they were for.

  Ish is pissed off because song lyrics are gone too, and he had tickets to take me to a concert tonight. I look at them. The name of the band means nothing to me; it's a phrase that refers to a historical event, but I don't know what that's got to do with anything. Allusions are gone too. The only songs of theirs I can remember are called "Untitled" and "Track Three".

  I tell Ish I still want to go. I still want to have fun while there's time. But he gives me a look which I can't figure out and holds up his phone. According to the news feed, the lead singer-songwriter killed himself this morning. "Some people spend all their time only thinking about one thing," says Ish. "They don't know how to deal with not having their thing anymore."

  I know this is true. My cousin washed down a whole bunch of pills with some kind of ethanol solution when they deleted the concept of organised physical competition between opposing teams. Whatever that was called. He died.

  A lot of people have died, I guess. Most of them blamed the scientists for their discoveries but I don't think that's fair. They couldn't have known what would happen when they proved the universe was an artificial simulation of reality. They had no context to understand how its operators might react to being exposed.

  A lot of kids think there's not enough left to do now. I know we used to go to buildings where older people would talk about the world and all the things in it, but I don't know why. With so many of the servers down now, it doesn't really take long to learn everything there is to know.

  I disagree though. Even without a lot of the things we used to like – mechanical transport, that gas that made balloons go up, the light patterns in the sky at night – we still have plenty to talk about.

  "We still have music," I try to remind him, but he's distracted. The band has recorded a video pleading for a new keyboard player to cover the gap in their lineup. Technical experts only; they have no time to rehearse. The gig is still going ahead.

  Ish's eyes are watering and his bottom lip won't stop quivering. I press my face to his. I don't remember why, exactly, but I know it's calmed him down in the past.

  Not this time. He looks at me; the skin on his face is pulled tight and the tendons are showing in his neck. "It's happening faster and faster. Don't you understand, Matt? We lose something new with each passing moment. Soon we won't have anything left."

  We feel the mild all-over itch that coincides with a deletion. It's not usually hard to figure out what changed.

  I give Ish his pieces of paper back. I don't know what he expected me to see on them. They're covered with patterns, black on white. Meaningless. "Everything ends. Songs. Conversations. Meals."

  "What was that last one?"

  "What last one?"

  He moves his head around and makes a noise with his throat. He pokes his phone until some music starts. We lean our heads close together so we can listen to the song.

  We don't need to talk.

  There's nothing to talk about.

  For several years I've been trying to figure out a story to wrap around the probably mathematically ludicrous theory that our universe is an artificial simulation being run by some higher-order beings (or more likely underpaid lab technicians). This story started out being about something entirely different, until the simulated-universe concept imposed and made itself at home.

  'Out of Context' was first published in October 2017 as a Friday Flash Fiction post at DavidVersace.com.

  Imported Goods—Aisle Nine

  "What the hell is chlorophyllising flour?"

  Gina blinks against the saturated glare of the overhead halogens. Her eyes haven't adjusted from the walk to the shops yet. Truth to tell, neither have her nerves. Perry's mood and the blacked-out street lights have both left scratchy patches on her positivity. "Uh? Never heard of it."

  She wonders if this is the spark she's been waiting for, the one that will set him off again, maybe for the last time. He's been a stinking grouse for hours, finding fault with everything. She concocted this past-midnight grocery expedition to escape being cooped up with his petulant mood. No such luck, he just followed her out the door, griping about the power outage. Like an infant bawling in the distance, she can't quite ignore his noise.

  He shrugs and tosses the bag back on the shelf, where a little beige cloud puffs out. "Or this? Quinoa breakfast flakes?" He holds up a cereal box, its spotted midnight and gold jaguar mascot pinning down a bowl of warm orange scales bobbing in milk. As usual, Perry's expression suggests she's done something wrong. "Who eats this crap?"

  "I dunno." She gestures vaguely at the cartoon cat. "Kids, I guess." He moves along the aisle, pointing out oddities. The box crumples in his grip, each sharp gesture a maraca-rattle of crackling flakes. "Flax paste? Fumewort sprouts? Groundskeeper's clay?"

  Now that he comes to mention it, none of these products look familiar, but she's damned if she's going to give him the satisfaction. She can feel a headache rolling in. Acknowledging his complaints will give it legroom. "I'm just looking for milk and toothpaste." Maybe he's so irritated that he'll go off to look for her groceries to get out of there sooner? The hope of a moment's peace in his company is a precious little spark she still nurtures from habit more than expectation.

  Her luck is in. He's turned his baleful attention on some hapless shelf-droid. The kid's face is radioactive with scarlet acne and wet blue eyes. The oasis of colourless chin hair hinting at a far-future goatee suggests that eighteen is some way off.

  "Hey, buddy," he says. His coarse growl in no sense connotes friendship.

  "Where's all the real food? I'm not buying any of this Asian junk."

  The kid blinks at him with late-shift eyes, his pricing gun wobbling in a limp hand. Perry's a big man with a keen sense of his own size. The kid sways in an undetectable breeze. "Asian?" he repeats, like he's checking the pronunciation.

  Perry takes it as a challenge. Of course he does. He does his straightening up trick which adds a good ten centimetres to his height. "Where's the real food, sport?" He saves expressions of affected camaraderie for moments when he's being an overbearing tool. Sometimes, when he hits the right tone with the right guy, all it takes is one word to provoke a reaction. "We can't find anything in this rat maze."

  Gina tunes him out as he fires questions too fast for answers at the kid. Where are the pretzels? The sour sweets? Is there a coldroom? Do they sell hot pies?

  The kid doesn't appear to get that his expression of acute dumbfoundedness is escalating the situation. She cons
iders abandoning them to the inevitable while she finishes the grocery search, but it's mean to leave the kid. Besides, if he ever comes out of his trance he might actually be able to help.

  "Where have you looked already?" the kid asks at last.

  Perry affects irritation that his question has been answered with a question.

  Secretly, she knows he's delighted. It's easy enough to see where this is going.

  It's his pattern, varying little from one setting to another. Social sports centre, bus stop, Saturday night club. Once he provoked a cinema usher into throwing a punch. Perry got a cracked molar and the guy lost his job. Gina was the one who'd had her feet up on the seat in front.

  "What did you say, mate?"

  The kid actually scratches his head and frowns, like he's translating Perry from the Russian or something. "What did you call me?"

  Gina can hear the capillaries bursting behind Perry's eyes from across the aisle. She's stepping between them before she even realises it. She draws up to eyeball height and tries to catch Perry's attention. Most times it works at least once. Not tonight. He just steps right around her, his fat spade of a hand dropping on her shoulder and, yeah, he's pushing her out of the way.

  "Perry, wait."

  Right now, she thinks as she stumbles back. This is when I should cut my losses and call it done. Enough is enough. But she can't admit to herself that she's wasted her time.

  Perry's her sunk-cost fallacy.

  The physical contact has rattled her. That must be it. She ought to know better. He's stoking himself up for a meltdown.

  He's never hit her.

  Sometimes she tells herself that's why they're still together. But she knows it's crossed his mind. She knows there have been times when some guy with a smart mouth or a roaming eye has taken a couple of extra kicks on her account, past the point when Perry's furnace would normally have run cold. "Forget it Gee," says Perry, closing in on the shelf packer. "This little bugger needs customer service training."