Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 32

by Kelly Link

  In the magic, you are twenty-nine years old. You and Irene and Frannie and Vivian sit on lawn chairs and watch the Perseid meteor shower. The others’ children run in the yard, catching fireflies in Mason jars. Vivian’s lover, Soledad, sits on the porch beside Roger. Soledad plays the marimba for Roger. She looks like a woman from a movie. You wonder what it’s like to kiss her. You wonder how it feels to be the outer spoon in bed, if Vivian cups her breasts the way your husband cups yours. Frannie wants to know: Why doesn’t Vivian want to get married? Doesn’t she want children? Frannie already has three children and Irene has two. You will never have another child. You have to care for Roger. You and your husband have to be very careful. You wonder why Vivian never told you about herself before, and why she never chose you. Not even your husband is as close to you as are you are to Vivian, and here she is, closer to someone else. Does this make you alone, a meteor falling?

  In the magic, you are twenty-one years old. The war is over. The magic feels like Frannie’s magic, like a purring cat. You have all met to make magic to welcome Frannie’s baby into the world. You sit at a card table in Frannie’s new kitchen, in Frannie’s new house. You eat walnut fudge and drink coffee. You want to tell yourself: Don’t get married. Go to Athens. Go to Cairo. But everything already feels too far along to change. You go dancing with a boy who’s back from Okinawa. Between Saturday nights, you think of him and feel your blood awaken in your toes and shoot straight to your fingertips. You hug your pillow at night and imagine kissing. Vivian says that she will go to South America and become a reporter. That’s breaking the rules. She already left you when she went to London to drive an ambulance. Who does she think she is? Irene is getting married on Christmas Day, and soon you’ll be the only one left.

  In the magic, you are eleven years old. You and Vivian and Frannie and Irene sit in the branches of the elm tree in Irene’s yard. The bark is rough, sharp against your hands. One of you, probably Vivian, has been reading about Venice. Now all of you want to read about Venice. You will pass the library book between each other at school. It is the only book about Venice in the school library. Your teacher will tell you to put the book away. Once a year, sailors toss a wedding ring into the water and marry Venice to the sea. You have never seen the sea, but you want to marry it anyway. Irene wants to marry God, like a nun. Vivian says that the moon fell in love with a boy and watched him while he slept. At dusk, you hold a wedding. You all wear lavender in your hair. You and Frannie are wed to the sea, Irene to God, and Vivian to the moon. You wear a dandelion stem around your finger like a ring.

  In the magic, you are eight years old. You and Irene and Frannie and Vivian walk home from school, crunching maple leaves with your feet. You see the white-haired woman who shows you how to see the layers between the worlds, to weave your hands between the layers, like pleating silk. Your magic smells like lilacs and worn piano keys.

  “My loves,” you tell the children, “May you each see all that you see and taste all that you taste. This mess is all that we get.”

  This is the part of the story when you are supposed to feel wise. But you don’t. You feel as though you have married the ocean. There is something beautiful in this world, something cold and enormous that you cannot throw your arms around. It touches every shore.

  Everything Is Haunted

  Joe. M. McDermott

  Stephen

  I know the donor’s not much to look at, but there it is, and we know most of what’s in him, from baboon to pig to walrus to jellyfish and whatever, and his eyes are so human, just like my son’s eyes. Andrew has his mother’s beautiful brown eyes; so does the donor. Its hair is the same color as Andrew’s. It feels the same. He places his head in my lap, like Andrew used to do when he was younger, but he’s too grown up for that now, and Andrew’s skin is way too sensitive to like being touched much. Not so with the donor. We can hug it hard, like a stuffed toy and its big, blubbery body will take it and squeal with pleasure. We can run our fingers through its hair. Andrew has his mother’s hair, if it isn’t falling out. And, the donor has Andrew’s hair.

  It’s not hard to get over appearances when it looks up at you with those human eyes, places a head in your lap and you can feel how soft the hair is and it’s murmuring because it likes the affection.

  You’re not supposed to give them a name. You’re not really supposed to raise them at home, either, but it seemed silly to pay for someone else to do it when Immie was out of work, and that way she could watch the donor close for signs of trouble—infection, serious misalignments, stuff like that.

  We called it Oreo. Andrew named it. He couldn’t pronounce “Organ Donor” so he called him “Oreo-ner” and that became “Oreo” when my wife and I started calling it something and didn’t want to call it something that sounded like “a boner”.

  A day in the life of an organ donor: it rolls out of the bed in the basement and climbs up the stairs. It’s a lot of work for it, but it does it every day. It eats breakfast at the table with us, sort of. At first we didn’t let it up on the table, but it was getting up there, anyway, and we had an extra chair. They always sell six chairs with a table—I don’t know why. Why six chairs? Why not two? Most tables need just two chairs, with foldouts if there’s anyone over. Why not just two? I mean, a young couple just married needs six chairs. Why six?

  Anyway, Andrew sat in his high chair, and the organ donor sat across from him flopped up in a chair like a seal. After breakfast, Andrew went to school and the organ donor watched cartoons like Andrew just did. Then, it went out into the yard to play and poop. Immie watched him while I was logged-in at work. I went upstairs to the office, and I worked. Immie was downstairs cleaning and folding laundry and gardening while the laundry dried on the line. Amazing how much laundry there was between the three of us. I hated laundry. I’m so glad she did it.

  It ate lunch outside, on the porch. Immie ate with him. I usually came downstairs and went straight back up, unless I was hard-wired into the network and couldn’t leave the desk at all.

  Then Andrew came home, and had a snack with Oreo, and they watched cartoons together if Andrew didn’t have homework. The organ donor fell asleep earlier than us by hours. It couldn’t keep up with us, as fast as he was growing, so it usually stopped watching cartoons and flopped, sleepily, downstairs for a while to take a nap before dinner. Either that, or it just fell asleep on the couch. That’s when it put its head in my lap, and looked up at me with those dreamy, child-like eyes. A donor’s basically a kid, almost, right? It’s mostly made of kid, I think.

  Andrew

  For my senior thesis project in honors media anthropology, for G&T Technical High, I thought it would be cool to do a mixed media presentation about all those empty houses in the eXurbs. My dad said he’d take me out. Before he and Mom got married and got cleaned up and got busy working, they did a lot of urban exploring. There’s empty buildings all over, and empty houses falling apart. Bums live in them, or animals. They’re not really haunted, but they could be. Dad said we’d be okay as long as we kept a taser and an open wifi to the main house with his structural engineering gear. He used to climb all over these when he was my age. He wasn’t sick like I was. He wasn’t fragile. He showed me pictures of him with his friends, and some with Mom, and it looked like a bunch of kids getting drunk and doing drugs in abandoned buildings and tunnels.

  Mom doesn’t know what we’re doing. She’s not supposed to know. She thinks my senior thesis is about the microchip factory where my dad is working, now, and that’s why we need the gloves and masks. We’re not supposed to show her anything until it’s done. She thinks Dad is taking me down into the dusty basement to go over some of the failed logistical and mechanical things that still happen on a machine line, but that has nothing to do with media anthropology, and it sounds about as dull as watching the laundry spin in the machine. No. My parents haven’t been married for seven years, and Dad’s really come around, but she still doesn’t trust him to take good c
are of me. We’ll be fine. It was my idea, not his. Seriously, I’m not that fragile anymore.

  Dad drove us out to the eXurbs. Houses were all built in the same tract, with the same basic blueprints, and they were walled off from the rest of the city so it was harder for emergency vehicles to get in there during the quake, and impossible for supply lines afterwards. Most of them are still standing, but they’re ghost towns. Dad says they’re safe enough, if we’re careful.

  The first place he found for us that was safe had the front door kicked wide open. Someone had painted really good graffiti on it. There were two cold, blue eyes, peering through wire-rim glasses. It’s a mess inside. An old flatscreen got slammed to the ground in the living room from its wall mount, shattered into a million tiny pieces. The couch was an old, plush sectional with enough chewing and fecal mold, that we knew there was mice and rats and everything else in there. We didn’t touch it. I took still photos of everything. Then, Dad checked the stairs to the top floor.

  “Buildings like this were expensive, but they weren’t worth it. No basement. The construction was all flash and plywood, no lasting value. The only brick ones were cheap brick up from Mexico. They cut every corner if you knew where to look. Your grandpa used to build these houses.”

  The windows were all smashed. Glass everywhere. The abandoned furniture was rotten. It stank, even through the mask.

  “Can we go upstairs?” I said. The stairwell looked sturdy enough. The banisters were gone. I took a picture of the joints. Cheap construction, like my dad said. Everything hammered together with cork and plywood where they could sneak it in. No insulation below the stairs, because nobody checked down there. No steel bracing, either. It was amazing the walls were still attached, but the beams were good enough for that, dad said, which was just dumb luck.

  Dad went up first. Then, he came back down. He placed his finger on my chest, pointing where my big scar was, under my shirt. “You don’t go upstairs. Nope,” he said. “Not for you, Andrew.”

  “C’mon, Dad . . .”

  “Not here,” he said.

  Later on he told me that he didn’t want to hang out in a drug den, even if the user was long gone. Call it superstition. I don’t really remember my dad that well before he cleaned up, but Mom said he was really awful. Dad said Mom was right about that, and I shouldn’t do drugs. It was hard to remember because I was so young, and I guess I was still recovering from the first couple surgeries.

  The next house was empty of everything, even the carpet. It was just naked concrete, one story tall, molded white walls and molded concrete. Leaves littered the corners where the broken windows let them in. It smelled like a sweet tooth rotting with all the leaves. My dad stood looking through one of the windows, where rosebushes were pushing inside the window. Hardy pigweed was growing in cracks in the walls, up in mid-air.

  “This will be like our house someday, with your mom’s roses,” I said.

  “A good angle for the project?” said Dad. “Comparing current houses to dead ones?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not sure. I want to find the ghosts of the past. Metaphorical ones. Real ones, if we’re lucky, but metaphors are cool. Media anthropology is mostly about good metaphors mixed with data.”

  My dad plucked a single rose. He sniffed it, and threw it down. Then, he dead-headed a couple of the branches while he spoke. “Think about it this way,” he said. “The housebuilders came and cleared everything out to the dirt and below—all the trees and weeds cleared away for houses. The people came to the houses and cleared the landscaper’s shrubs and grass to plant their designer roses and exotic ornamentals. These plants came, and what’s after them? Most of these plants were non-native, many modified for ornamental use, modded every which way a designer could quietly do it and since they weren’t for human consumption, no one cared what was in them. They sold them by the thousands from the big box stores that were still everywhere, then, and people bought them because they were pretty. Here they are, and they’re still growing, making seeds and shooting runners from the roots, and there’s no telling what will happen next.”

  “I’m not an environmental scientist, Dad,” I said. “They’re still just plants. I’m mostly modded, too, and I’m a human.”

  “Why did you ask me to take you out like this if you didn’t see something in all those photos I showed you? We wanted epiphanies, in some connection to what’s been abandoned.”

  “Did you find any?”

  Dad shrugged. “We certainly thought we did. Mostly the drugs created the illusion. Don’t do drugs, Andrew. Not ever.”

  I snorted. “I think I’m going to write about my surgery and compare it to rotting houses with ghosts in them,” I said. “I’m going to get a lot of cool photos, like your old photos. I’ll talk about what happened then and what happened now and how it all connected to what made me sick. Teachers like personal history statements. Media and anthropology is mostly personal history statements. Metaphors and data and personal histories . . .”

  “Teachers like symbolism.”

  “Yeah, Dad,” I said. “Whatever. Sometimes it’s just a bunch of cool pictures of ruins, too, with lots of data points. I’ll figure something out.” It was about getting high, too, for my dad. He’d go out with his buddies and smoke dope and drop acid and worse and everything would be so cosmic and important. They’d find the poetry of their latest designer drugs and take pictures of each other running naked over broken glass and laughing. I’ve never met any of Mom and Dad’s old friends. They never talk about them, either. It’s like the only proof I have that they existed between childhood and my birth are these weird pictures my Dad hangs onto and my Mom threw away.

  The next house had a dead cat in a cabinet. It was the grossest thing I’d ever seen. The corpse was mummified, like a hairy glove. Its bones were black from rot. There were beetles and pillbugs in its ribs. It was a great shot. Really disgusting.

  Then, we went home. Mom asked us how it was down in the basement of the microchip factory. “We didn’t get to any basements, today,” I said. “We were just going through the exterior boxes in the shipping yard. We’re tracking down a misplaced unit. Computer systems lose things, too.”

  “Be careful,” she said. She ran her hands through my hair and kissed me, and I thought maybe I should warn her before she did that because I hadn’t showered yet, but that might ruin the project if she found out.

  Dad didn’t say anything. After dinner, he went home, and I went upstairs to upload what I had. The best shot was the cat, all gross and mummified and dead. Also, the shot with my dad dead-heading roses turned out really good once the filters got to work on it. I matched it up with a picture from before I was born, and he was doing kind of the same gesture with a broken chandelier, and pretty soon all the filters matched them up perfectly. There’s another shot of my dad standing at the top of an empty skyscraper, and he’s looking out over the city from a half-broken, plate-glass window. It looks really dangerous, actually, because there’s no barrier or anything but a little broken glass between Dad and a fifty foot fall. He has the same look on his face, and his hand is reaching out to the broken glass.

  Stephen

  Oreo wants to go to school. I can tell. Every day Andrew goes to school, and Oreo watches him go. Andrew carries a backpack and a lunch box. Oreo goes in the yard and he grabs a purple mop bucket with his mouth and flops around the yard with it in his mouth. He goes behind the shed for a while, and then he comes out and Immie cheers for him. She scratches the place where his back meets the bulbs and welcomes him home with a snack, just like when Andrew comes home.

  Andrew wouldn’t mind trading places, either, I know. He’s smart, but he hates school.

  We tell people that it’s like having a really smart dog. That’s exactly what it’s like. We’ve got this dog that gets smarter than a dog is supposed to get, with fingers at the end of those awkward flipper appendages.

  Oreo’s trying to talk a little, and I guess we u
nderstand him a little like you would a parrot.

  Andrew wants a real dog. He pretends Oreo is his brother, and talks to him about getting a dog. I don’t think Oreo understands it, but wants a dog, too. Whenever Andrew wants something, Oreo wants it. Even Andrew saw it, and he tried to use the donor as an ally in the house for what he wanted. “Oreo and I both agree that our family should get a puppy. Oreo will play with it in the yard when I’m at school, so mom doesn’t have to watch the dog, and then I will walk Spike—his name will be Spike—when I get home.”

  Oreo looks up like it really does want one—like it understands but I know it doesn’t know what a dog is because Oreo’s never seen one except through the fence posts, and he’s scared of them. They bark at him. A pet dog can’t make much sense to the donor that’s seen so little of the world.

  Oreo’s only ridden in the car once, and it just about scared the donor to death. It buried its head in Immie’s lap and wept and moaned the whole way. The doctor’s office was even scarier. We had Oreo on a leash like a dog and there was howling and moaning the whole time like a sick baby, even though nothing known to man could make it sick. Immie doesn’t want to take it in if we don’t have to, because it is such a pain to just get Oreo into the car. We’d rather pay for the housecall. A nurse comes every month to check his back. Oreo likes meeting new people. The people don’t always like him. When the babysitter comes, we lock Oreo in the basement, and let her know that the donor’s sleeping down there and Andrew is not allowed to wake it up if we’re not around. It’s more for her sake.

  Andrew was getting big. Oreo was getting bigger by far. The bulbs on its back were like huge zits. They leak sometimes, when Andrew’s rough-housing with the closest thing to a dog he has in the house. We have to keep an eye out, because when Andrew gets mad, he’ll play rough. He’ll shout and scream and Oreo will be the one to blame for everything. Oreo won’t fight hard. Oreo is gentle. Donors are bred to be so gentle.