Portals

by Ann Christy

  Of course, this is better than going to work with her. That’s another whole ball game and involves me breathing other people’s rebreathed air for twelve hours in a tiny, underground room packed with spouses and kids. Four marines stand outside the entrance with automatic weapons.

  No room for the portal means no portal will come…which means the marines have a good chance to kill anything that comes out before it can get through the door to us. There are squares marked on the floor of the room just big enough for a single, straight-backed chair. Every person gets a chair and a square, no more. We fill the room entirely. It’s so comforting and so very creepy.

  Yeah, even the handcuffs are better than that.

  When I shuffle back into the kitchen, stretching my arms and shaking out the stiffness, she’s cutting chicken for the stew as if nothing happened. The potatoes are already in the slow cooker. I might have already mentioned that she’s really fast with a knife.

  There are clocks all over the house now, at least one always an easy glance away. She looks up, then says, “Six minutes.”

  I sigh, and her shoulders bow a little over the chicken. She feels guilty about the life I live now. I see it in those hunched shoulders, as if it were written across her back.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “So am I.”

  With a final plop, the last of tonight’s dinner is tucked into the cooker. The little red light tells me I’m going to be eating well tonight. This is one of my favorites. A little chicken, a little spice, and a lot of vegetables, all swimming in a thick gravy that begs for a biscuit. My mouth waters even though breakfast is only an hour gone.

  As she wipes the counter, she says, “Go on. You’ve got a few minutes. Go crazy.” She grins over her shoulder at me and I want to hug her for it. Her expression might convey this is no big deal, but letting me more than arm’s reach away is torture and I know it. This bit of freedom must hurt her like a case of full-body shingles.

  I’m out the back door and into the yard in two shakes, running like my hair is on fire and my arms pumping with the freedom to move. I can’t go far, so I run around the house. We don’t have a fenced yard, so I only have to jump the little line of rosemary plants that borders our walkway. I let my shoes brush against them and the burst of sharp sweetness envelops me along with the sunshine of a perfect summer day. It feels so good that I push myself faster, going at a reckless speed that makes me feel like I’ll trip with every footfall, a dizzying pace that brings me back to life in the best way.

  “Time!” my mom shouts from the window.

  My brief taste of freedom is over and my spirits plummet once again. Time to be a prisoner. Time to be afraid. Time to wait for it to be my turn.

  Four

  The whole house smells of stew and my stomach growls loudly as I sit next to my mom on the couch. She’s working while I play a mindless game on my tablet. Since she needs both hands for her keyboard, I don’t have a lot of choices. I’m bored with all the books I’ve got right now, so it’s bursting little colored dots on the tablet screen for me. It only takes one hand.

  The alarm goes off and I ask, “Only three more alarms till we eat?”

  She smiles tiredly as she helps me up from the couch. “Maybe four.”

  “Close enough,” I say, giving her a nudge with my shoulder. She may be doing a lot of this to herself by worrying, but she’s exhausted and growing more fragile by the day. Affection is sometimes called for. It adds a little gas to her rapidly-draining tank. Plus, I love her and all that.

  We’re up against the wall with a few seconds to spare. Instead of that paranoid jerking around that she usually does, she leans her head back and looks at me. “I’ll rethink this. I promise. I’m just not ready yet.”

  “That’s—”

  I don’t get a chance to finish, because at the exact moment the alarm goes off, the portal opens not ten feet from us. Half the couch disappears and all I can see are the beautiful purple and white swirls of light. The glow of it tingles against my skin. My initial response is to tilt my face toward it and soak up infinity. It looks unfathomably deep and as shallow as a mirror’s surface at the same time. The blue tendrils swirling inside seem almost alive, moving with sinuous grace through the swirls.

  “Shit,” my mom says, her mouth hanging open.

  Out of the portal steps my mother, her face blank of any real expression and her eyes traveling briefly around the room. When she sees my real mother, she steps forward without hesitation, as if she doesn’t see the guns in our hands pointed vaguely in her direction.

  My mom is already frozen, her mouth still forming the end of her last word. No one knows why that happens, but the freeze is part of the process. She can’t do a thing to protect herself. That means I have to do something fast.

  I raise the pistol and point it at the replacement. My finger is ready to pull the trigger, but my brain is screaming at me, That’s your mother. Don’t shoot your parent. I swear I’m trying to shoot, but I just can’t. That’s definitely my mom. With a grunt I try again, my finger tightening the tiniest bit before I push out a frustrated breath.

  I can’t do it. I can’t shoot her. She’s my mom. My finger loosens on the trigger and the barrel moves away from her face.

  She has no bolt-cutters with her, so I’m not sure how she thinks she can get my mother through the portal. Her hands rise, reaching for her neck where my mom wears a key. I guess this replacement has her own key, which means we’re screwed. The replacements won’t toss in someone other than their original, but if she can unlock our cuffs with my mom frozen…well…it’s all up to me to stop her. Still, my finger won’t squeeze that trigger. My beautiful, kind, loving, and fun mother is not someone I can shoot.

  “Mom!” I scream.

  She can’t do it, because she’s frozen. Her face is almost as blank as her replacement’s, their expressions a near mirror image. Her gun barrel bumps into the other’s chest as the replacement pulls the key over her head, her dark, wavy hair flopping down no differently from the way my mom’s did earlier when she unlocked me so that I could pee. The freeze may have happened already, but I don’t think it’s a total freeze. I’ve never seen a portal up close before, so this is all new to me. My mom’s eyes blink and water. Her nostrils flare. Her chest moves with her panicked breaths.

  That means it’s not complete, but enough so that she can’t punch the replacement in her mouth.

  “You must go. It’s for your own safety,” my replacement mother says, her fingers closing around the little key and reaching past the gun for the handcuff.

  My mother’s breath comes out in a whisper. “No.”

  It seems to take incredible effort for her to shape her lips into that one simple word. Sweat dots her forehead and a vein on her eyelid swells under the pressure. I don’t need to hear more to know what that tiny, strained word means. She wants me to shoot and I can’t do that. I see sorrow replace the terror in her eyes for a moment. It’s so brief that I might have imagined it.

  Then her gun goes off.

  The replacement flies backward like a superhero power-punched her in the chest, an explosion of blood and other unsavory bits showering us with an unpleasant warmth that I’ll probably freak out about later. But not now. For one eternal moment I stare while yuck drips off my face, then I’m running through all the things we have to do as fast as we can.

  “Quick! Get her through!” I shout, yanking at my mother. She’s standing there with her mouth opening and closing like a fish, covered in her own blood—except that it came from another body. She looks like a horror movie. She unfreezes, almost like a switch clicked.

  I totally get that she’s in shock, but really, we’ve got a portal issue here. If she’s unfrozen, then we need to move. Unless the replacement is dead, she shouldn’t unfreeze.

  “Come on!” I shout, this time yanking the gun away and dropping it next to mine. “We’ve got to get her through before she
dies.”

  My mom comes along, but she’s more like a zombie than the energetic and slightly nervous person of five minutes ago. The truth is, I don’t think the replacement is alive. I think she died the instant that gun went off against her floral-patterned shirt. If the explosion that it made of her chest is any indicator, she has to be dead.

  Even so, I yank the key on my mom’s neck and lift our joined hands, so I can maneuver the key into the lock. She doesn’t so much as blink. I leave the handcuffs dangling from her wrist when I free myself. There’s no time for quibbling over details.

  I pick up the replacement’s shoulders and bite the inside of my mouth hard enough to taste blood at the sight of her face. Even her hair is curled at the temples like my mother’s.

  “Mom, pick her up,” I urge her, my voice going all funny with the tears that I’m doing my best to hold back.

  She snaps out of it, or she mostly does anyway, her head shaking and her fists clenched. “She’s not me. She’s not human.” With the portal gleaming at us in the place where we were sitting a few minutes ago, it’s pretty hard to ignore that we’ve got a big problem.

  One of the replacement’s shoes has come off and I see her toes. The sight almost makes me drop her. There’s a bandage between her toes with a cartoon character on it. It’s exactly where my mom’s is after trying to break in a new pair of sandals and earning a blister for her efforts. I don’t mean similar. I don’t mean the same brand or stuck to the same general area. I mean exactly where my mom’s is, right down to the crooked end where she pulled it to stick it to her foot.

  “Oh my gosh,” I say, staring at the foot in my mom’s hand. The whole thing is too surreal. No wonder people have a hard time doing the deed when it comes their turn.

  My mom looks, then drops one foot to rip off the bandage. Sure enough, there’s a blister there.

  “Talk about attention to detail,” she whispers.

  We toss the replacement into the portal and she’s swallowed like she never was. I’m pretty sure she was dead, but exactly how dead is an issue. Maybe the deciding factor is brain activity or electrical impulses or something else, but not having a heartbeat isn’t a complete deal-breaker when it comes to the portals accepting what we throw back.

  Why we don’t just leave the portal alone and let it shimmer there for the entire cycle is also a question I’ve entertained. Why are people so adamant about tossing something in and letting it close? Now I understand. I absolutely and completely understand that urge. The portal is disturbing at the deepest level. All I want is for it to disappear, but at the same time, I feel compelled to look…to stare into whatever might be beyond. The portal is off-putting and compelling in equal measure. I can almost feel the atoms of my body vibrating as they bathe in that mysterious light.

  I shake my head and back up a step, forcing my eyes away from it.

  Plus, well, if the government finds out we got a portal, both of us will be hauled away to wherever they’re taking replacements. We’ve got to get rid of this body or we’re toast. And if anyone sees this portal through the window, we’re equally toasted. They’ll call the hotline and that will be that. No one can ever find out this house was visited by a portal. Also, if the portal doesn’t keep the body, what will we do with it? Bury it in the backyard in the middle of the night?

  Silently and slowly, I start counting. I make it all the way to five before the corpse bounces out like a bizarre pinwheel of limp arms and legs, then slides to a disorderly halt at my feet.

  My mom falls back against the front window, the glass making an ominous cracking sound when she does. “No,” she croaks out, eyes riveted to the crumpled form once again leaking fluids all over our living room floor. Her dead face is turned in my mom’s direction, the two identical people now staring at each other, except that one of them is sightless, her face already pale with death and blood loss.

  No one can handle seeing that. No one.

  Her handcuff rattles when I grab her by the shoulders and pull her away from the window. There’s a spider web of cracks where her head impacted the glass. It skews the view outside, turning it into a frightening scene rather than the suburban Arlington street it was only moments ago.

  “Mom, it’s not an invasion and if it is, she’s dead. You’re safe,” I say, cupping her face in my hands so that she has to look at me. I wish I hadn’t done that, because it smears the blood on her face, spots and streaks turning into large, red swaths shaped like my hand. She doesn’t look at me, her eyes pulling so far to the side that it must hurt. I shuffle over a step to get between her and any view of the body.

  Finally, she looks at me, but she’s so shell-shocked I don’t know if she understands what’s going on. “They’ll come for you next,” she whispers, specks of blood on her lips smearing as she shapes the words.

  I shake my head. “You know it doesn’t work like that. It’s random or something. And you know they only send a replacement once. No one has gotten one twice. It’s over for you. You’re safe. I’m safe.”

  Am I safe? The truth is, I’ve never thought I was in danger. Not really. For whatever reason, I’m with that much-maligned minority that thinks there’s something other than an invasion going on. I don’t think it’s religious either. There must be a logical reason, a purpose. There must be a sensible explanation.

  My mom really hates it when I say things like that.

  She slides to the floor, her eyes wide and frightened as they shift from the dead replacement to the portal, then back again. She’s completely overwhelmed, and understandably so. I feel the portal behind me like a physical thing instead of a hole in our reality. If I were to close my eyes, I think I would feel it like a hand on my back, urging me onward, while comforting me at the same time. I swear I can feel it right this second, whispering for me to come through and enjoy the sights. I turn and look at it closely for the first time.

  It’s comfortably sized for a person to get through, taller than it is wide. Edging around the glowing oval to get a more complete look, it’s the same from the back as the front. The portal is so thin it almost disappears when I look at it from the side.

  The longer I look at it, the more beautiful it gets. There’s something attractive in it, something that draws me closer.

  “Get away from it!” my mother shouts suddenly, breaking the trance I’d begun to fall into.

  I look back at her and say, “It won’t hurt me. This isn’t meant to hurt us.”

  She moans a little and whispers, “Can you feel that? It’s horrible…”

  I have no idea what I’m thinking or what other influence is pressing me forward, but I know what I’m going to do. This might be my only shot to find out the answers I’m desperate to know. I could go the rest of my life and not see another portal based purely on the odds. And I can feel it urging me in some way, a feeling of deep longing that works on me right down to the roots of my hair. It won’t hurt me. I just know.

  So, I obey that urge. To the sound of my mother’s screams, I race forward two steps and fling myself through the portal.

  Five

  There’s the briefest moment of complete disorientation. I don’t mean feeling a little wobbly or dizzy, I mean utter and complete loss of balance. I don’t know which way is up or down, if I’m two dimensional or three. Even the concept of up and down is suddenly foreign. Am I a being of physical proportions or only the idea of one? Thank goodness it doesn’t last long.

  Even as I pop out of the portal, I see another one right in front of me, this one a deeper purple with streaks of richer, darker blue inside. I’m aimed right for it and I put up my arms—or at least I think I do, considering that I’m not sure if I have arms—but it winks out as I fly toward it.

  I fall onto soft mats, all my sensory abilities slamming into my head at once. Gravity, inertia, the force of muscles and bone, the lightness of air in sunlight…all of it returns to me at the same time. Of course, that’s not good for a
body, so I immediately puke. I don’t mean your standard puke, either. I mean projectile vomiting like I’ve only ever seen in horror movies or comedies about college misadventures. Behind me, I feel it when the portal goes away, like a bit of the air is sucked out of the room.

  “Oh dear,” someone says faintly, but I’m still puking.

  As the last of my innards are wrung out of me and deposited onto the puffy mat in a splattery puddle, I feel better. That’s also nearly instantaneous, and I wheeze in a frantic breath or five. I’m kneeling on some sort of plastic-like mat. It’s very soft and bouncy. I have the odd thought that I landed in the gym where I used to practice gymnastics as a little kid. Almost without my wanting to, my fingers press into the mat, sinking in to confirm by touch that it’s real.

  “We’ve got another one,” that same someone says.

  I look up to see a grey-haired older woman, the kind that should be wearing an apron and perpetually smell of freshly baked cookies. Her chubby hands are pressed together at her waist and her expression is exactly what I’d expect from a grandma whose grandchild just got a boo-boo in need of kissing all better.

  “What the heck?” I ask, wiping runners of bile off my chin. My hand comes away with a load of blood as well as bile, which alarms me until I remember what happened to my replacement mom.

  “Are you hurt?” she asks, concern evident in her tone.

  She must mean the blood. I shake my head and she looks away, her face rather sad. The expression is replaced by something more neutral almost immediately, like she doesn’t want me to see her sadness. Then she plucks a little towel from a stack and steps forward cautiously, as if waiting to see if I’ll attack her. She holds it out, while keeping her body just beyond the reach of my arms.

  “You’ve got a little something,” she says, motioning with one dimpled hand in the general area of my face.

  I’m utterly and completely confused. This is what’s beyond the portal? Grandmas in romper rooms for kindergarteners, all laid out with nap mats and childproofed against falls? I feel my eyes darting everywhere, trying to catalog what I’m seeing, but everything seems remarkably mundane. The light is normal and coming from round patches on the ceiling, though I can’t see actual fixtures, only light. The mats look new, but they’re fairly standard mats. It’s all very, very average.