by Eric Smith
They were all outside waiting, my brothers and sisters, my family. Like me, they’d been called by the same voice, the same song. The one that is beyond words, and beyond worlds. They’d been waiting for me to join them, and I would be the last. We gathered in the blackness of the long Antarctic night, knowing––knowing it all.
It was all so blindingly clear. We were never destined to leave this world. Instead, we would protect it. They had it wrong, the people who brought us here. They were right about the earth being a meta-organism. They were right about it having developed a consciousness. But it was not the adult consciousness they’d thought it was. The earth had the consciousness of a child––a misbehaving child.
The entity we were in contact with on a level that no pure human could comprehend, it wasn’t some cosmic cheerleader rooting for us to make it to the next level. It was a thing so vast, so ancient, that it could not be reduced to a word as simplistic as “consciousness.” And in that lullaby it sang to us the truth of it all. It was what had created us. It was our parent. Our father, and mother, in heaven.
And it had been watching. And like all good parents, it wanted only the best for its child. Did it want to help us grow, as Dr. Ramirez had thought? In a sense. But he was only half right. What it wanted was for us to grow up. And for a child to learn, sometimes that child must learn the hard way.
We never spoke, but we all knew what would come next. From here we would spread out, my brothers and sisters, all one thousand one hundred and twenty-three of us. We would bury ourselves deep in the ice, in the earth, and we would wait. Dr. Ramirez’s ark ships would never be built. Long before that could happen, humanity would reap the devastation it had caused to the planet. The seas would rise. Wars would break out. Civilization would collapse.
And we will wait. We will wait until the advancing glaciers of another ice age destroy all traces of this version of humanity. We will wait until the humans who remain talk of this world the way we did of Atlantis. We will wait, rocked by the lullaby only we can hear. And when the time is right, we will come back.
And we will watch.
Matthew Quinn Martin was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and raised in New Haven, Connecticut. However, it wasn’t until he moved to Manhattan that he realized he was a writer. He’s the author of the Nightlife series (Pocket Star/Simon & Schuster) and screenwriter of the original script for the feature film Slingshot (Bold Films/Weinstein Co.) These days, he lives on a small island off the North Atlantic coast of the United States where it gets quiet in the winter . . . perhaps too quiet.
“Not every adoption has to be some big legal thing. Every time you offer up any part of your life to a child who needs you, you’ve become a part of that child’s life. These ‘small’ adoptions add up to big things. I know they did for me.”
Census Man
by Mindy McGinnis
They said the census man was comin’ and that means something special, I guess, ’cause we got extra time in the bathroom this mornin’. Not enough to make the water any warmer, mind you, but I don’t make much noise ’bout that. Some of the other girls like to brag how where they come from there was a hot water tap, but I don’t much see the point in talkin’ up something you lost. Me, I been in this here orphanage a year, and not a day goes by I don’t thank the Lord for the flush toilets. Nobody appreciates a crapper ’til they’ve had to use an outhouse.
Laura elbows her way in next to me to give herself a good look in the mirror. She pulls up a perfect curl to hang against her face real pretty. “How you doin’ yours, hon?”
I shrug. I don’t have so much as a bounce in my stick-straight hair. What there is left of it, anyway. The last lice check left a good part of it in the trash bin.
“Aw, c’mon now, Mary Ann,” she says, turning me toward her real gentle. “You’ve still got the baby fat in your cheeks, looks real sweet with that short cut. Somebody’s gonna spot you and say—that, ‘That one, right there, the one with the cherub face.’”
She points at me like she has a hundred times before, play-acting the day when I walk out of here with a new family, easy as spit. I seen it happen for a few, mostly the littlest ones, some of ’em so small they got to be carried away crying, too young to understand this ain’t home, just a stopping point on the way.
“What’s a sin-sus man do, anyway?” I ask Laura. My mouth was all awkward around the strange word. She wets her fingers and tries to smooth out what’s left of my hair. “He write down things we done wrong?”
Her eyebrows come together like I said something funny but she doesn’t laugh at me like the others. “Not sin like the kind they talk to us about in chapel, Mary Ann. C-e-n-s-u-s.” She spells it out real careful, her fingers brushin’ against my ear as she tries to cover up the top bit that’s all wiggly from where I got up against the stove one time.
“He comes to count us,” she goes on.
“Why? He have to practice his numbers or somethin’?”
“No, not exactly.” Laura takes me by the hand, and we find our step on the long stair, each of us standing on the one that’s got our named chalked on it. She’s one below me, so when she turns to answer me it’s like we’re the same height.
“He counts us ’cause the government wants to know how many people there is,” she says, patient as ever. “So the census men, they go out and write down the names of all the people in the houses, and who’s the parents and who’s the kids and how old they are.”
I scuff the toe of my too-big shoe against the step, rubbin’ out part of my name by accident. “That’d take an awful long time,” I say as I change my name from Mary Ann to plain Mary. “Not as long as writin’ out everybody’s sins would, I guess.”
Laura laughs, and that gets us a whack with the headmistress’s hazel switch. Our calves are smartin’ as we go down to breakfast to the sound of a hundred borrowed pairs of shoes marching down stairs in a house no one lives in.
“You know an awful lot ’bout it, the census,” I say to Laura around a mouthful of eggs.
“I remember the last one. They do ’em every ten years,” she says, touching away a line of milk above her lip with her napkin. “I was only six, but momma made a big show, put us all in our Sunday clothes.”
My throat tries to close up around my eggs, but I act like hearing her say momma don’t bother me none. Laura’s far enough away from hers that she can say it casual like that, ’cause it don’t mean nothin’ to her no more. And maybe it’s easier, too, ’cause hers wanted to stay with her. Laura’s told me more than once how she fought the fever, swearin’ up and down her girls weren’t goin’ to no goddamn charity house. But the sickness thought otherwise, and Laura’s been here longer than most.
Laura always gets a little shiver out of me when she says the swear word in her story, coming down real hard on that goddamn like it’s the best part. She thinks that’s why I ask her to tell it over and over, her words whispered tight and low so we don’t get the switch after lights out. She don’t know it ain’t the bad word but the good ones I’m dying for, and the thought of a momma that tried.
I gulp my milk down fast, chasing the ball of tears that wants to find its way up to my eyes. I don’t know if it’s a bad thing to be mad at my parents or not, or even if that’s allowed. But there’s one name that won’t be on this census and wasn’t around for the last one. My little sister Luella died with a bellyful of lye after momma mixed it and left it on the counter, too soused to put it up high where little hands and a curious mouth couldn’t reach.
I try not to think about Luella too much, how I couldn’t get her to uncurl from around her tummy, how I tried to wake up momma even though I knew if the sound of Luella’s screaming wasn’t going to do it there was no way I could either. The headmistress tole me when I got here that what’s past is behind me, but if that’s the case I must have eyes in the back of my head, ’cause I can see the look
on my momma’s face plain as day when the court lady came to get me.
I reach up to itch my scalp and Laura eyes me real hard, so I drop my hand. I been thinkin’ so close on Luella and momma that I took no notice of the hall gettin’ quiet around me. Everybody’s sittin’ up straight and proper and using their polite voices, so I know the headmistress musta come in with some people who want a kid and here we are a whole room full of kids who want people. I’m one of them, and dang if there isn’t a tickle on my head that needs a scratch like the dawn needs the sun.
“Laura, Mary Ann, this is Mr. and Mrs. Ocker.” The headmistress’s voice is right at my elbow, and the two of us look up, me trying to seem like a good and pretty child and Laura not having to try at all. We nod and say “good morning,” and Mrs. Ocker smiles at me, answering with, “Guten tag.”
The German sounds like a coiled-up spring next to our English, a wild word that bounced around inside her mouth before finding a way out. Reminds me of the Richstein boys who would walk the train tracks with me, looking for coal that mighta blown off the cars so that we could heat our houses.
“Mary Ann is a good, clean girl,” the headmistress says. “She’s been with us for a year, and I can personally attest that daylight can’t get in between her hand stitches.”
Mr. Ocker waits for the headmistress to finish, then speaks to his wife in German. She nods, and they’re about to move on when Laura pipes up.
“She’s a good cook too, Mary Ann is,” she says. “Knows her way around the kitchen real well.”
The headmistress frowns at Laura for speaking out of turn, and I give her a kick under the table for stretchin’ the truth. I can boil water, but that’s about it.
Mr. Ocker repeats what Laura said to his wife in German, and she reaches out to tuck my stubby hair bits behind my ear. Her fingers are soft and cool, and I feel the slightest waver in them when she sees the damage the stove done. But she keeps her face still and says something to me in German, eyes on mine even though Mr. Ocker does the talkin’.
“She says you must be from strong stock,” he says, his English thick and heavy.
I feel those tears coming back hot and fast, because if I’m strong it’s by my own right, and nothing to do with a father who knew the inside of a jail better than his own home or a mother who only loved me when I brought her a bottle. But I can’t say that, so I dig down deep for the one thing those Richstein boys taught me, other than to look for coal where the track curves.
“Danke,” I say.
Mrs. Ocker could keep her face straight at the sight of my ruined ear, but the one word of German I know breaks a smile out like I just recited the whole Bible in her language.
“Go along then, girls,” the headmistress shoos us. “The census man is waiting.” And even if she is a bit quick to flick her switch hand sometimes, I swear the headmistress tips me a wink as I clear my place.
There’s a line of girls in the hall waiting to file in to the front room. Laura’s in front of me, scratching the back of one leg with her foot.
“Didn’t know you speak German,” she whispers over her shoulder.
“I don’t,” I tell her. “And I don’t cook none, either.”
“I betcha you could learn,” she says before she goes in the front room, the door clicking shut behind her.
“I bet maybe I could,” I say to no one.
She comes out a few minutes later, squeezing my hand as she passes by.
I don’t know what I thought the census man would look like, though I was expectin’ something like the judge who banged a hammer and said I couldn’t live at home no more. But this guy looks like anybody else, lines around his eyes and a smudge of ink on his hand. He glances up at me as I sit on the stool, crossin’ my feet at the ankles like the headmistress says to.
“Name?” He asks, teeth clenched around a pipe that isn’t lit.
“Mary Ann Hummel, sir,” I says, and he scratches my name into the biggest book I ever seen.
“Age as of September 1 this year?”
I know my age, but he found a way to make a simple question hard. I fold my hands in my lap and realize they’re sweaty. I clear my throat and look up to find he’s still waitin’ for an answer, but he don’t look mad or nothin’.
“How old are you, sweetheart?”
“Eight, sir.”
“Mmm,” he says, and I hope it’s the right answer because he writes it down in his book and that makes it official. He doesn’t ask me anything else, but his pen keeps going, like he knows things I don’t. So I lean over a bit to see.
There’s rows and rows of names, some of them girls I know pretty good, some I don’t. Laura’s is above mine, her age—sixteen—looking big and grown-up over my little eight. The names look all confused piled on top of each other, like if I tried to read them they’d come out in a jumble. The ages, too, look like some kind of arithmetic problem I’d never be able to figure out. But the line after that’s the same word over and over, and my eye goes to the neat stack of letters even if I don’t know what it says.
“What’s . . .” I pause, my eyes tripping over the census man’s script. “What’s inmate mean?”
“It means you’re a ward of the state, kid,” the census man says.
I slide down off the stool when he excuses me, thinking about that long row of inmates, written with ink that don’t fade. And I’m walking down the hall wondering if maybe for the next census it can say daughter next to my name instead, when the door to the headmistress’s office opens.
“Mary Ann,” she calls to me. “Mr. and Mrs. Ocker would like to meet you.”
Mindy McGinnis is a YA author who has worked in a high school library for thirteen years. Her debut, Not a Drop to Drink (Katherine Tegen Books, 2013), a postapocalyptic survival story set in a world with very little fresh water, has been optioned for film by Stephanie Meyer’s Fickle Fish Films. The companion novel, In a Handful of Dust (Katherine Tegen Books), was released in 2014. Her Gothic historical thriller, A Madness So Discreet (Katherine Tegen Books), won the Edgar Award in 2015. Her newest releases, The Female of the Species (Katherine Tegen Books, 2016) and Given to the Sea (Putnam’s Childrens, 2017), are available now!
“My grandmother spent a few years of her childhood in an orphanage, and as a kid I always asked to hear those stories. She always kept them light and appropriate, but looking back I can see the gaps where things she chose not to share with us fit.”
Invited
by Lauren Morrill
The drive is almost two hours, most of it on the interstate. I spend the time watching McDonald’s restaurants and BPs and Dairy Queens whiz by every few miles. I’m hoping it lulls me into something like a hypnotic state, which both distracts me from my nerves and keeps me from getting carsick. Mom, in an effort to avoid conversation or distract us from our destination, queues up a book on tape. The volume booms through the car as if it’s being read by God himself, though I doubt God has much use for romance novels. Not that I would know, since we’ve always been an Easter-and-Christmas kind of family.
Miranda is preparing to leave Jonathan at the altar when we pull up in front of the house, a beautiful white brick home with black shutters, a red front door, and elegantly creeping ivy that practically screams, “HAPPY! FAMILY! HOME!” Mom pulls up behind a line of cars at the curb, parking behind a shiny silver minivan. The stick-figure family on the back window consists of a mom, a dad, three children of decreasing heights, two dogs, and what I think is a cat but might be a possum.
“Are you sure?” Mom asks.
No. “Yes.”
“Because we can leave right now.”
Yes, please. “It’s fine.”
She looks at me for several seconds, and I can tell she’s doing that mom-intuition thing where she’s trying to decide if she’s going to believe me or not. She sighs.
“Okay, well, I’ll just be at a coffee shop somewhere nearby. There’s got to be a Starbucks or something. I brought a book.” She pats her purse.
“Don’t watch me walk to the door. It’ll make me nervous. You can just go,” I tell her. She raises an eyebrow, and I can see that this is one request she’s thinking about not granting me, but she finally nods.
“Okay. Out you go, then.”
I climb out, then duck my head down and give her the closest thing to a real smile I can muster. “Thanks, Mom.”
“I’ll be just down the street. Call me if you need anything.”
As I watch her drive away, I know she won’t read a single word of whatever book she brought. She’ll be spending the entire time sipping on a rapidly cooling latte while she engages in some Olympic-level worrying. About me. It’s what moms do.
I know that now.
The stone path up to the front door is perfectly manicured and devoid of weeds. I pass a red plastic baby swing hanging from a branch in the front yard, swaying slowly in the light summer breeze. The sight of it sends my stomach directly into my throat.
I’m standing on the doorstep, staring at the brass door knocker shaped like a lion’s head, wondering if this is a knock or a let-yourself-in kind of gathering, when the door opens. A tall, athletic black man is standing there holding a bag of trash, and when he sees me he does an almost-comical double take. His muscular shoulders hunch for a fraction of a second before relaxing, an overeager smile spreading across his face. I remember reading that he played football in college. A knee injury ended his chances at going pro, so he’d gone to law school instead and is now some big-shot attorney. It’s why he’s leaning more on his right side, supporting the weight of the trash bag. He calls it his lucky knee. I remember liking that when I read it in the file.
“Corey! You’re here!” He drops the trash bag on the mat and steps forward, then back and to the side in a funny little waltz. He can’t decide if he should hug me, and in the end he just gestures for me to come in.
