The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  When we had the yard landscaped, after the backhoes were done, I built the yard ecology from the bottom up. Ecologies are complex things. All the parts work together to make the whole.

  I sprinkled genetically engineered fungi I’d ordered from a start-up in Oregon that replaced the soil fungi the backhoe had scraped off, thereby making for healthier soil, and also created a powerful wi-fi zone that covers my whole yard, taking advantage of the networked properties of fungal mats, using nearby trees as antennae. It is more than a fungal wi-fi network, really. It’s also a data storage medium, cloud computing but without fickle corporations—anarchist street tech used for circumventing Internet shutdowns by oppressive governments. It makes my high-end computer hardware run a lot faster, though it’s got an interesting trickle of traffic through my fiber-optic connection.

  After the high-tech fungi, I sprinkled on the really expensive designer grass seed: It’s a special dwarf grass I almost never have to mow because it just doesn’t grow very high. Also part of the mix are tiny nitrogen-fixing clovers, and these little flowers that look like chamomile and are supposed to give a sort of mellow feeling if you walk barefoot on the grass. There was this night when the grass first came up when I walked out into the yard after a rain, and the baby lawn was intensely alive, making a sound just beyond the range of human hearing.

  All this stuff washes down to the lake in runoff. I wonder what I’ve contributed to the local ecosystem.

  Next picture: farther down the steps. These boulders still show the scratches from the backhoe. Yes, I absolutely did tell Officer Friendly that if he didn’t have a warrant, then he and his merry band needed to get the fuck out of my dining room. That is what I was pondering at this point in our descent, that maybe things might have gone better if I hadn’t told them to get the fuck out of my house. There is a little bit of my mail-order moss, but less than on the steps in the previous photo. In preindustrial times, pillows and mattresses were sometimes stuffed with hypnum moss; its Greek name means that it induces sleep.

  Next picture: the last third of the stone steps. The bottom one has lots of mail-order moss. Then we are on open ground.

  I should say that I don’t think the cops had any idea that there was a set of stone steps there; and that they had not noticed the spiral staircase in my house; that they thought the apartment had only one entrance and exit. So all eight of them blocked my front door.

  When they began to talk about waiting for someone to come and take away the kids, we escaped out the side door. Apparently, they didn’t notice we were gone for quite a long time. Officer Friendly was outside my house badmouthing me to my neighbors, claiming I was upstairs passed out an hour and a half after our escape.

  After construction of the wall was complete, I had bombed the whole hillside with wildflower seeds I bought from an organization in Vermont. The next photo shows purple clover, a yellow black-eyed susan, and an orange blanket flower at the base of our stone wall. A few weeks earlier, there would have been bright red poppies, splattered like blood all over the wall. But by August, they were done.

  The next photo shows the view from the woods where we were hiding. It is taken from the shadows. There are small trees on the right hand side, bushes on the left side toward the lake; in the foreground is the fence line of the water treatment plant, and behind the fence are cement wastewater storage tanks that contain the reed beds that cleanse the water.

  The water treatment plant hums, even in winter. And in August, the night is full of the songs of crickets and frogs and American toads, which are especially partial to the reed beds, and the soft sounds of water lapping on the shore. You would think that on a hot August night, it would have been buggy down by the lake, but that night the shoreline was impossibly hospitable. The ground was soft, the air was warm, and the emerald night was singing.

  I should never have told anyone in case I ever need a place to hide again.

  IV.

  The next photo is a not very interesting shot of the ground, except that I now understand that this is the spot where we hid, sleeping in a pile like gorillas.

  When I was in the second grade, the Seattle police department had a PR campaign in the schools sponsored by Sears Roebuck: “Officer Friendly” would come to your school and all the kids would get Polaroids taken sitting on his cool motorcycle. My childhood Officer Friendly was a muscular Aryan type, about five foot eight, with a big-toothed smile and a gun. My parents still have my snapshot in a box somewhere. Later, when we were on car trips and saw a cop giving out a speeding ticket, my father would say, “Looks like Officer Friendly just made a new friend.” I do that, too.

  At the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle when Ben was small, Henry looked at the gorillas sleeping in the enclosure and remarked that that was my ideal arrangement of the family bed. Ever since, it has been a joke between us.

  Our local Officer Friendly is much taller, a skinhead with an elaborately tattooed left arm that he hides behind his back when getting his picture taken for the paper for rescuing dogs or saving babies. The tattoos are detailed in a way that vibrates with significance—a bulging eye that looks terrified, and a mouth that is trying to open but is glued shut—suggesting that they are the consequence of more than a drunken evening in the tattoo parlor. After he’d broken my silence while booking me, I asked him about his tattoos. He was really pleased that I’d noticed them, but changed the subject.

  The final photo makes me sad; it shows the lawn along the north side of the water treatment plant fence, the route by which we returned to the house. My admission of defeat.

  Immediately thereafter (and from the same time sequence) there is a photo of me sitting in my office wearing a tie-dyed tank top and the opal necklace that I bought in Brisbane. It shows the bruises on both my arms. I gather from the caption that my daughter took the picture. This means she also went on the walk with me, revisiting our escape.

  After that, and from the same day, there are a couple of photos of double rainbows, dark pink roses after the rain, and a downed tree in the rainy dark, and someone in a uniform who resembles Officer Friendly’s partner, shining her flashlight into a silver metallic car that has a fallen sumac tree on it.

  She is the one who actually signed two out of the three charges against me. Officer Friendly was incredibly rude to her while I was in custody. He blamed her for all his mistakes.

  He mangled the facts so badly that, even though I was trying to remain silent, I interjected a correction, explaining that what he had just said was impossible. He said, “Shut up. This doesn’t pertain to you.” I wondered if he could define “pertain.” He was drafting criminal charges against me. To who else could they possibly pertain? I remember feeling sorry for her for having to work with such a sadistic moron.

  I have no recollection of taking these photos, yet they exist.

  Prison gangs clean the area around the water treatment plant each spring. I can watch them from my living room window. I try to find out when they are coming, so I can pick through the debris that washed in with the spring thaw before they cart it off. I find the most interesting objects to use in my garden: pieces of blue-and-white pottery, pieces of rusty metal in interesting shapes, croquet balls run over by lawn mowers. If I don’t get there first, all the good stuff is gone. The prisoners leave the shoreline clean.

  I spent two summers pulling glass out of the hillside after we built our big stone wall. For decades, glass bottles had been thrown down the hill. At times, it seemed that the whole hillside was made of glass, brown and blue, and green, and white. I kept picking it up until the job was done.

  Then, when I really needed it, when I needed to flee barefoot with my children in the middle of the night, my efforts were repaid. The grass was soft and safe. I had healed the hillside and the favor was returned.

  I had to sit handcuffed in the lobby of the jail intake area. The stools you sit on have no backs and are small, even for me. It was after five in the morning and I felt exhausted. I was
reminded, while sitting there, of what we were told in Psych 101 about how to sleep deprive a rat: You put the rat on a flowerpot large enough for it to stand on but too small for it to sleep on. You have this flowerpot in a bowl of water. If the rat falls asleep, it falls in the water and wakes up. The stools in the jail waiting room were like that.

  I think I spent about three hours in handcuffs, for no particular reason except that I was being put in my place. Officer Friendly handcuffed me when he arrested me, and I don’t think the cuffs were taken off again until they made me shower right before the mug shot. It is possible that they were briefly taken off for my fingerprinting, but I don't think they were.

  My captors were complaining about how tired they were, bragging about how far beyond a double shift they were, claiming to have worked eighteen, nineteen hours. Officer Friendly claimed to have been awake for twenty-four hours.

  I felt so sorry for him. I apologized for my role in his sleep deprivation. No one answered and there was a long silence as though they hadn’t realized that I could hear.

  I had another wave of these generous feelings about twelve hours later, seven hours after Henry bailed me out, when—during the late afternoon—I suppressed the urge to send the sheriff's department flowers.

  Even now, the mental image of the flowers I intended to send them has a supersaturated, hyperreal quality: a dozen moist long-stem deep red roses in a container wrapped in red foil, with a wide red velvet bow.

  In the 1980s, it used to annoy me that my grandmother would take pictures of her hybrid tea roses and mail them to me. Now I take pictures of my roses and post them on the Internet. What kind of ancestral nonsense made me think of sending roses? I cannot reconstruct why I felt at that moment that they deserved to be sent roses, except that the stripes on my prison uniform were the same color red.

  V.

  Sometime during that day, the lady from Child Protective Services interviewed me. I said some things I shouldn’t have, but in retrospect, I was surprisingly lucid in my dealings with her, under the circumstances. She shook her head at the drama of the previous night and the way the deputies had terrified me. She said, “I hate it when they do that.”

  A year later, when I was having lunch in a restaurant, I overheard two CPS workers gossiping about who was getting promoted and why. The subject came around to my CPS lady, the one I’d met with: They agreed that she was too compassionate, put too much time in to getting clients to tell her what they needed. The woman immediately behind me said, “Who cares what they think they need? If they knew what they needed we wouldn’t be visiting in the first place.”

  Did you know that jail is mostly empty? The county claims they are making money with this new privatization deal, but I saw only one other inmate the whole time I was there, and only from a distance: A tall blonde over six feet with shoulder-length hair, doing laundry. Her skin had a translucence suggesting she hadn’t been exposed to daylight in a while. She was wearing the same kind of red-and-white striped uniform I was, except it looked much better on her. I saw her only for a moment. There was no one else.

  That jail is brand new. The walls are bright white, and there is a broad band of grape color about eight feet up, I guess to make the jail look more cheerful or maybe because the cell blocks are color coded. Or maybe it’s purple because it’s the women’s section. Each jail cell has a stainless steel sink/toilet combo thing and a bed. Just after they put me in my cell, I lay across my bed with my head toward the door and my legs up the wall in a yoga pose. That’s when I was looking at the pink sky through the barbed wire, relaxing into my predicament, letting the pink noise of the sky talk to the tension in my hamstrings.

  A while back, when the county officials were saying they needed to privatize more facilities in order to build office space for themselves, I had to bite my tongue to keep myself from suggesting that they rent office space in the Public Safety Building (i.e., the jail) so each of the county officials could have his own sink and toilet in the same finish you see in Westchester kitchens on ten-thousand-dollar Sub-zero refrigerators.

  Remember the hearings on privatization and the creation of the Prison Enterprise Zone in which civil liberties were suspended to make this a more commercially viable environment for prison privatization? Remember that noisy guy who said, “You like living in your tree-hugging environmentalist utopia, but this doesn’t come for free. Someone’s got to pay for all these trees. There’s no more free lunch. Someone’s got to pay!”

  I know just the office he deserves. A room with a view. That guy chose “What is your father’s middle name?” as his password security question. He is named after his dad.

  I used to know what T-shirt and what pajama bottoms I wore that night. The T-shirt had words printed on it, a phrase mildly though not extremely ironic. I can’t remember anymore. The pajama bottoms were, I think, pale blue flannel. I think I was wearing the ones with garden gnomes, not the ones with snowflakes.

  It bothers me that I can’t remember what I was wearing. I know I used to know.

  When Ben had a two-hour school delay because of snow, I drove him to school, but the roads were really bad. Once you get off the state highways over there, instead of sanding and salting the roads, they use mine tailings. I barely made it up the big hill. After dropping him off, I decided I wasn’t driving back down that hill, so I went the long way, past that other prison. It was snowing hard and in the switchbacks I was driving down the middle of the road in low gear so as to keep as far as possible away from the guardrails.

  I noticed there was a white car behind me, and eventually I realized the car behind me was a sheriff’s deputy. The whole way, I was trying to read his plate number in the rearview mirror. When the roads flattened out and he finally passed me, I saw that the plate number ended in a three and not a seven, so it wasn’t Officer Friendly.

  Whoever was behind the wheel was trying to do me a favor. The road conditions were horrendous and getting worse, and there’s no cell phone reception in that area.

  Please, God, don’t let me hit a guardrail. The scene that keeps playing in my mind was this: I fishtail and take out three guardrail posts and spin backward across the middle of the road and bounce—and my car is bleeding transmission fluid into the snowbank and black plastic pieces of my car are all over the road. I look down over the steep embankment where I almost went. And Officer Friendly gets out of the squad car, striding heroically in my direction, a helpful smile on his face. Which fades to a frown. He says to me, “Aren’t you the woman who filed the Freedom of Information request to find out how much overtime I work?”

  Or maybe he would just pretend he didn’t know me and I didn’t know him. Maybe we difficult middle-aged women from suburbia all look alike and he wouldn’t remember me at all.

  I didn’t used to be like this.

  My purse was in the front hall. In a wicker chair at the top of the stairs. They could have offered me the opportunity to take my purse along to jail, in which case, I could have gotten out my Amex gold card and paid my own bail, and somehow someone would have had to drive me home.

  I’m pretty sure this wasn’t part of the plan. It would have underlined the complete superfluousness of arresting me if Officer Friendly had had to turn around and drive me home at four a.m.

  I don’t remember if the bail hearing was before or after Officer Friendly had his little chat with me about my right to remain silent. He has unorthodox ideas about Miranda rights, if you can call them ideas; Miranda rights don’t apply if a cop is up past his bedtime.

  I attempted to invoke my right to remain silent by remaining silent.

  Officer Friendly told me I had the right to remain silent, but if I remained silent, he said, he would find more things to charge me with and I would be very very very sorry.

  I was scared.

  I began to talk.

  VI.

  About three weeks after the home invasion, someone at his desk at work in the sheriff’s department began sending
me harassing messages over the Internet, calling me a “drunken slut” and threatening to “expose” me. By their own account, Officer Friendly’s team had spent three hours “repeatedly searching” my house. They had complete access to its contents including medical records, financial records, computers… I took the threat seriously.

  The problem with me is that I can find more trouble to get into in my own dining room…

  I had to marvel at his misfortune. If you were going to harass someone from your computer in a government office in this county, I was about the last person you would want to pick on. It’s that relentlessness, that grinding obsessiveness, for which I get paid.

  What kind of an…well, never mind. I’ve already met them. I know what kind.

  At the gala last summer up at the golf course, the woman behind me talking loudly had been seeing a man she met on the Internet who, as it happens, was a freelance computer tech who did work for the county. (Stories that begin “I met him on the Internet” almost never end well.) He persuaded her to let him charge nonrefundable plane tickets for a romantic getaway on her credit card. And then he said he couldn’t go and she was stuck footing the bill. She said, “You know how he got me to trust him? You know how? He told me his password. He said, ‘My password is syzygy28. If I can trust you with that, you can trust me with anything.’” I wrote syzygy28 on a cocktail napkin and tucked it down the front of my evening gown.