Living Forever & Other Terrible Ideas

by Emily C. Skaftun

  #

  Arielle left for another business trip the next day. Lief held her new umbrella for her as she loaded her suitcase into the car, looking past her to the mushrooms that had sprouted on the little patch of grass they called a lawn. It was morning, and a double-rainbow gleamed vividly against dark clouds in the west. The rainbows were so bright that Lief could even make out the indigo between the blue and the violet. He pointed them out to Arielle, who sighed and leaned against Lief’s side.

  “That really is beautiful,” she said. “Aren’t those supposed to be a promise of no more rain, though?”

  “I think it’s just a promise of not so much rain that it kills us.”

  Arielle laughed. “Well then it better stop soon.”

  “You’re not gonna die, you big whiner.”

  “No?” She turned around to face Lief. “Maybe not. I’ll miss you though.”

  They kissed goodbye and when Arielle was safely in the car Lief folded up the umbrella, shaking water out of it. “You want this?” he asked, holding it up for her.

  “I think you need it more,” she said.

  Sure enough, the rain got heavier as soon as she drove off. The beams of sun faded away until clouds filled the sky, and it rained like that for three days straight.

  Lief dreamed of falling every night. He was a raindrop; he knew that now. He was exuberant with the joy of falling, of being rain, of the wind funneling him into shape, of seeking people and plants to nourish. He loved all the plants and animals and people that he fell on, but the one he loved the most, in his dreams, as a raindrop, was Lief. He would do anything to land on Lief.

  On the third morning, Lief woke to a drip on the side of his face, and rolled over to peer up at a yellow stain on the ceiling. He couldn’t help but feel that the rain had done it on purpose, actively burrowing into his house.

  He put a saucepan under the drip and called a roofer. And then—and this is how he knew he was losing it—he went for a long drive. In a diner fifty or so miles from Sunlight, he stared out the window into a sheet of rain. When he got home, he couldn’t bring himself to ask anyone if it had rained while he was gone. He was certain it hadn’t.

  On the fourth day Arielle came home, and the battle-of-the-clouds weather began again. It hadn’t stopped raining for over three weeks. In that time, Sunlight had received four times its average yearly rainfall. On his hikes, Lief was starting to notice fungus and mold growing on the prickly pears; Joshua trees were beginning to wilt and droop, their bristly limbs taking on an attitude of despair. In Lief and Arielle’s own xeriscaped yard, cactus and other succulents were growing soft with overwatering.

  Lief had spoken to Arielle the night before, so he already knew her trip hadn’t gone well. Investors were spooked by the sudden yet unrelenting rain and clouds over the Sunlight Solar Plant.

  Arielle pulled into the driveway, and the clouds parted. It was still drizzling, but now the house was highlighted in gleaming sunshine, turning water to liquid gold. This time she stepped right out into the trickle of rain. She stood there for a moment before Lief noticed her and came out of the house. “Has it been doing this the whole time I was gone?” she asked, a look approaching fear on her face.

  “Mostly it rained,” he said. “It rained a hole in our roof.”

  “Oh my god.” She shivered, though it wasn’t cold. She turned around in the driveway like she was looking for a place to go.

  Lief retrieved her suitcase from the backseat of her car. “You probably want to get inside, right? Or under the overhang at least?”

  Arielle nodded. “I guess I do.” They walked to the house but only stood on the porch, looking out at water falling. Water dried on their skin, making their hairs prickle.

  “I think I’m going crazy,” Lief said after a while.

  “Well I can see why,” Arielle said. “All the rain. If I hadn’t had some sun on this trip I think I’d have gone crazy too.”

  “It isn’t that, exactly. I mean, I grew up in Oregon. I know about rain. But there’s something . . . different about this rain.” Lief stared out into it like a man hypnotized.

  “Is there?” Arielle turned to him. “You know, I’d never seen rain before this.”

  “Yeah, it hardly rains here.”

  “I don’t think you understand,” she said, looking into Lief’s eyes until he tore away from the rain to look back at her. “I’d literally never seen it before. I’d hardly ever seen clouds.”

  The thought surprised Lief, but only for a moment. He wanted to be surprised for longer, to disbelieve the statement. He would have a month ago. But the more he thought about it, he realized he couldn’t remember a single rainstorm that he’d been in with Arielle. He couldn’t remember one when she’d been in town, before this month. Or even a solidly overcast day.

  Arielle shrugged. “The sun loves me.”

  He wanted to be surprised, but instead all Lief felt was a cold, watery feeling in his stomach. “I guess it does.

  #

  Lief only got as far as Las Vegas before sunset. He checked into the Treasure Island and called Arielle from his room. “Not a cloud in the sky,” she answered, her voice hushed. “And there?”

  “It’s a real storm,” he said. His window looked west into dark clouds against a background of darker clouds. Palm trees whipped side to side by the pool and huge raindrops battered his window. He could imagine their psychotic enthusiasm, seeking him out, and it frightened him a little.

  He drove west through Death Valley. The rain did slow down some, but to Lief’s growing unease, it didn’t stop. He drove south through the Cajon pass and then turned east toward Palm Springs and Arizona beyond. Phoenix. Tucson. Las Cruces. North to Albuquerque. Farther north through the Canyonlands of Utah and as far as Salt Lake City. It rained. Lief pointed his car back toward Sunlight.

  It had been a week when Lief pulled back into his driveway, roadweary, missing his wife and the sun. The clouds in Sunlight were the patchy pink he’d come to expect when he and Arielle were both there, rain and sun fighting for control of the sky. It had been sunny and clear all week.

  Arielle met him in the doorway with a kiss, but Lief’s attention was immediately drawn to the stack of cardboard boxes behind her. He pulled away. “What’s this?” he asked.

  Arielle’s tan face flushed. “The Joshua trees look much better this week. The Plant’s output is back to normal.”

  “That’s nice,” Lief said, “but what’s all this?” He gestured to the boxes.

  “Are you really going to make me say it?”

  Lief said nothing. He was going to make her say it.

  “Well, you have to go,” she said, a false light note pushing her voice into a higher octave. “It’s not good for the ecosystem or the economy of Sunlight.”

  Lief tried to smile, but only half of his mouth cooperated. “I know that,” he said. “But I thought you could come with me. We’ll travel around. We can have two houses. We don’t have to spend all our time together—”

  Arielle was smiling too now, but her smile was filled with more sadness than all the clouds could hold. “I can’t,” she said. “It isn’t good for me either.”

  Lief felt like rain, liquid inside. He went back outside before the clouds in his eyes could burst. He walked and walked without knowing where he was going, but he wasn’t surprised when he found himself at the river. A thread of water ran down the middle of the wide sandy wash, and he followed it until he reached the road where he’d first found the wrecked car and the dying man. The car was gone now, hauled up out of the wash and probably long-since recycled. The tire scars were gone too. All that was left was the rain; Lief carried that with him now, and he thought he always would.

  Now he understood the man’s final words.

  ***published in Flurb, Issue 8, Fall/Winter 2009

  Story notes:

  The final week of Clarion West in 2009 had the hottest few days in Seattle’s recorded history, a record that as I write
this in spring 2020 has still not been broken, despite climate change. As we eighteen students sweated in an un-air conditioned sorority house, insane from cumulative sleep deprivation, we were led further into insanity (in a mostly good way) by our instructor Rudy Rucker. He taught us about transfiction, in which the writer twists their own circumstances into speculative fiction.

  I did not see this story as transfiction at the time, but in retrospect it’s not hard to see how this story was melted out of my brain my the heat. That summer was also the first time I’d spent more than a couple weeks in the city of my birth since leaving for college. At the time, I lived in a desert town in California.

  Frænka Askja’s Silly Old Story

  “Well, I didn’t want to taste that anyway,” Whale Breath said petulantly, and dissipated into the dark sky. A scant half-kilometer away, the lights from the new electric plant cast an orange sheen on the already-dark afternoon, reflecting between snow and snow-laden sky.

  Móðir didn’t need me to come in. The animals were put away, and she’d probably forgotten dinner entirely, locked away doing whatever it was she did in her workshop these days. I was older than you are now, little ones. But since Magnús had run off with the submarine whaling fleet and faðir died, móðir thought I was alone too much and kept a closer watch over me. I was late.

  But I wasn’t alone.

  I had a number of good and true friends of discarnate nature who lived at the hot spring. They wouldn’t tell me their names, so I was forced to dub them with the most unappealing monikers I could manage—in hopes they’d hate them enough to reveal themselves. That was really the only flaw in our relationship.

  “She’ll be wanting you the instant she’s done,” Hairy Troll Bottom advised, a stretch to his steamy limbs that reminded me of squinting.

  I sighed. “I’m going. See you tomorrow?”

  “We’ll be here,” came a chorus of their wispy, chirpy, drippy voices. Even the ones I couldn’t see at the moment chimed in, as usual, in the ritual goodbye. Of course they would be there tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that, for longer than I planned to live. They were made of steam. Where else but a hot spring could my steam friends survive an Íslensk winter?

  #

  Móðir had her face pressed to the window like a puppy when I came up the path, steam from my water-heated body curling off me into the dark night. I stepped out of my boots, leaving them in móðir’s fancy wind-up drying rack. She held her hands by the bustle at her back, the hump in the silly imported dress she’d had to have. The look on her face was a sort of manic excitement that, since faðir’s death, I’d come to fear even more than her cold somber silence.

  She waited just long enough for me to hang my coat up over a radiator, mercifully not scolding me for being “late,” before whipping the surprise out from behind her. It was… something I’d never seen. A collection of bolts and cogs and gears and strips of tin and copper sheet intricately welded into the shapes of limbs and body and massive sheet metal ears, hinged to flop this way and that. It was a type of animal, something I’d seen in drawings in teacher’s big reference book. An elephant! One of the whale-large monsters that roamed Africa and other such places. But móðir must have made this one strictly from memory. Its chunky body was a mere wire skeleton cradling blocky copper and wires. Its trunk was long and lumpy, segmented and bendy looking, dropping down between two black marbles sunk into the thing’s face to make soulless, lidless eyes.

  It was a horror.

  Móðir held it out to me, thrusting it toward me as if she wanted me to take the thing from her. I reached out carefully, afraid of sharp metal edges. She’d made me toys before, delicate wind-up birds and sheep and horses, but none of those had looked so menacing, and none of them had made her so obviously proud.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  The unexpected weight of the thing dropped my outstretched hand as she let go. The tip of its ear snagged in my wool sleeve. “It’s heavy,” I said, grateful for an honest comment.

  Móðir flipped a switch obscenely near the elephant’s tail—were elephant tails supposed to be this thick?—and it sprang to life. Its legs moved back and forth and its head shook and its ears tanged like cymbals. I quickly set the thing on the floor, and it scampered off down the hall toward the bedrooms, striking the wall and ricocheting off at an angle.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “A gift for you,” she said. “A playmate. It runs on battery, so you won’t even have to wind it.” And she still had the scary enthusiasm in her eyes, so I just mumbled a thanks and asked about dinner.

  #

  In the coming days and weeks more of the animals appeared, all powered by batteries from the new Dreki Anda power station tapping our hot springs. It was indeed convenient not to have to wind the toys, or it would have been if I had wanted to play with them. You understand, I was too old for mechanical monkeys and giraffes and alligators, no matter how intricate their multi-metal scales or how well they clapped pattycake. I turned them on enough to please móðir, then let them run down their batteries until they slowed to a stop.

  There were always more batteries, though. Grief-stricken móðir had proven a much more capable negotiator than the battery man assumed, and among other perks for leasing them the land, our farm would always have free power.

  I didn’t need her “playmates.” I preferred the company of the sheep and horses, whose simple, sleepy needs were easily met. I preferred hunting among the rocks and lichen for the Hidden People. I preferred the company of my steam friends. A mechanical shark with thrashing tail and snapping jaws was no substitute, especially one that couldn’t even swim. I ruined that one by letting it loose in the spring, where it sank to the bottom like a rock.

  The toys frightened me. I was more than familiar with clockwork; móðir had tinkered with it for as long as I could remember. These were… different. They were bigger than most of her creations, for one, and… angrier. Not cuddly. Not comforting. I’d sliced myself on more than one occasion with a ragged edge of cold metal, and I’d swear some of them were trying to trip me.

  But it was more than that. Their behavior wasn’t right. I could see most of the gears and pistons that made them work, but even so I couldn’t figure out how they made some of their movements, which changed more than made sense. A mechanical elephant should just walk, endlessly, while the switch is on. Instead, sometimes it folded its legs to sit or raised its trunk to the air. Or fixed its bottomless-well eyes on me for so long that I thought it was either out of power or thinking very deeply.

  And maybe I wasn’t behaving right either, because sometimes I’d swear the things had intent, a spooky agency to the way their sightless eyes looked at me. I kept them turned off as much as possible.

  One snowy day, in the waning light of a long late-winter afternoon, I made the trek to the hot springs only to find it empty.

  Don’t get me wrong; it had water in it, steamy hot as usual. Just as I always had, I slipped my toes and legs and body into the reservoir faðir had fashioned from carved stone, but the steam that rose from the surface of the pool held no voices, no shapes, no friendship. It was formless and random, mere gaseous water like móðir always said it was.

  My friends were gone.

  I didn’t tarry long, and I didn’t rush back the next day. Water alone couldn’t take the chill of winter out of my bones.

  #

  On the third day after my steam friends disappeared, I ran back from the hot spring right past the Do Not Enter signs into móðir’s workshop and stopped in my tracks, awed by what her madness had wrought. The place was filled from floor to ceiling with scraps of iron and wood and wires and the assorted parts that made her creations move. As it always was.

  But in the center of the space was what had to be her masterpiece: a metal horse, bigger than life-size. It looked ready to rear up and trample us both. It had no mouth and only sockets for eyes, but it somehow looked angry, like D
ögun did before she threw her rider. The rest of its body was a bundled mass of metal rods and gears and pistons and gadgetry that resembled muscles and tendons. The creature’s massive ribcage held dozens of batteries wired together by a veritable nest of coiled copper.

  “Oh,” I said, words failing.

  “Isn’t it marvelous?” móðir said, creeping out from around the animal’s flank. If my calculations are correct, it’ll do the work of six horses.”

  “Marvelous,” I replied, slinking away.

  Back in the house I sat on the floor of my room surrounded by a clanking and ticking chorus of the unnerving toys. They really were the only friends I had now.

  “I miss Whale Breath,” I said, watching a tin sheep headbutt the wall again and again while a quadruped that móðir claimed was a zebra traced an intricate pattern in a circle around me. Across the room, a raven turned its head so suddenly that I had to look, and was met with the stare of its black marble eye. It raised both wings and opened its mouth as if to squawk. Luckily, it had no voicebox. But still, the thing seemed agitated. After a minute or two it lowered its wings in a huff, then raised just one, pointing it toward the zebra that still zigged and zagged seemingly randomly around the room. Even the sheep stopped ramming the wall and looked toward the zebra.

  The hairs started rising on the back of my neck. “Are you…” I swallowed, “trying to tell me something?”

  The raven flapped its wings. The sheep jumped. A number of the other little monsters reacted in some way, each of which felt like a nod. Only the zebra kept doing its thing, tracing strange shapes around me. Were they random? By the time it made a circuit I couldn’t remember the beginning of it.