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

by Various

  “We don’t know that you’ll hibernate.”

  “We don’t know that I won’t. We should try to get into the States, Aidan. Hotter country and more people to hide among. A whole culture of illegal migrants. I could be someone’s nanny.”

  “How would you get me through the border?” He was American, but he was on the missing list. The bog, ever a jealous lover, had eaten his ID along with his clothes and his research team.

  “I’ve already seen the Prairies. I want—”

  “Just one winter. Longer we’re loose, the better our chances are,” he said. This was his mantra, that thread of hope I didn’t quite believe in. If the mystical apocalypse kept getting worse, he thought, governments might run out of resources for chasing those of us who’d been contaminated by magic.

  I took a long whiff of the sandy air, trying to dry the tears that threatened whenever we had these conversations. As long as we didn’t look at it square, I wasn’t unhappy. When we did, I got to thinking: is it really going to be marginal jobs and fear of the cops and the packed truck ready to go, for as long as we live?

  Aidan must have sensed the storm building in me, because he changed the subject. “What happened that day in Vancouver? The day you lit out for here? You’d kicked me out of your place, told me to get lost. Why’d you change your mind?”

  “I can’t get out of the habit of rescuing people?”

  “Don’t be glib.” He adjusted his glasses on his nose; he didn’t need them anymore, but somehow he’d hung on to them through it all: they were the only past he had left.

  I thought back to the storm: standing on my back porch with a paper birthday hat melting on my head in all that warm, pouring rain. Aidan had been hunched in a corner, semiconscious, obviously hurting. Cedars and maple saplings were sprouting on his legs, using him as a nurse tree. Black slugs and leopard slugs pooled in his elbows and in the hollow of his neck. A stack of shelf fungus was fluting out on his rib cage.

  It was an unsettling, unpleasant memory; this was what I screwed every day, after all, this guy who just needed a good soaker to reduce him to a spongy mass of rotten vegetation.

  If I’d left him where he was that night, he’d be gone, absorbed back into a forest that wanted its mind back.

  “Calla?”

  “I was trying to get back on the job. There was the physical stuff, with my lungs.”

  “Which are improving.”

  “Love heals,” I said.

  “Not the dry air? Or the magical contamination?”

  “Love,” I insisted. “There was this physical I had to pass, and the therapist with her questions. Why’d I go into that building again when I knew it was unsafe, why did I risk myself and the guys from my firehouse? How’d I feel about the civilian dying? Civilian, she’d say, like he wasn’t even a person. How’d I feel about being burned? She seemed to think I needed friends and hobbies…”

  “Friends and hobbies and a normal life?” he asked, a little wistfully.

  “It was stupid, I told her. Plenty of time to putter in the garden and go for drinks with the guys: give me my job back. Who am I if I’m not a firefighter?”

  “Who are you now? A fugitive.”

  “I’m yours.” I wrapped my arms around him, locking eyes until the sadness went, until he nodded that I should go on with the tale.

  “You kissed me, Aidan, and we argued. You didn’t square with getting my job back, and I was scared. So I forced myself to tell you to clear off.”

  “You stormed out,” he remembered. “‘Be gone ’fore I’m back from physio,’ you hollered.”

  I’d never made it to the physiotherapist’s: I’d gone down the road to the public library, locked myself in the women’s bathroom and sobbed until they kicked me out. Instead of telling him that, I said: “My friend June had hatched this plan to show my shrink I had a social life on the go. A surprise party, for my birthday. She’d been waiting for me to leave for physio.”

  “She had a key to your place.” Aidan nodded. “I was about to leave when she came into the house with a dozen people. The decorating committee for the birthday party. I had to sneak upstairs.”

  He’d been cowering in the closet when I finally made it up there, hours later. Safe enough, but miserable. And I was so relieved. “Don’t go, don’t leave, I’m sorry,” I had begged him, and we ended up necking like horny teenagers. I remember that crazed teen romance part of me thinking it was capital-D Destiny, that June had saved me from a terrible mistake.

  Destiny was nosy. She set me to cutting a cake and went up to investigate what her guest of honor had gotten up to. It all turned a bit French farce, after that: Aidan had to climb out the window and down to the porch to escape her, and that’s when it started to pour.

  “But what happened at the party?” He repeated. “What happened between our fight in the afternoon and when you came upstairs? What changed your mind about getting rid of me?”

  “I realized all those people I used to know…they were looking for the old me, the Calla from before the fire. Maybe even the Calla before my dad passed away and Richard dumped me, the me from before the magic spilled out and the world started circling the bowl—”

  “Those people cared about you.”

  “You love me,” I said. “You.”

  “They didn’t?”

  “Whoever it was they loved, she’d burned away. I pretended to be that woman they’d known, for two hours. For me, too, not just for them. I had to know: could I do it? Just two short hours. But it was like walking in boots that didn’t fit anymore. It rubbed me raw; it hurt, every step hurt. My lungs were full of steel pins. So I sent them home and scraped you off my porch.”

  “It wasn’t about loving me, then. It was about being done with your old life.”

  “What is this, insecurity? I wanted you to live,” I told him. “I’d fallen for you. Love at first sight and you die, I die and all that magical bullshit, remember? It is mutual?”

  “It’s mutual.” He pressed his wide, cold hand to my chest, feeling my pulse between our joined skins. “I love you.”

  “It’s enough,” I told him. “It’s gotta be.”

  We sprinted back to the trailer and jumped into bed. All the talking in the world wouldn’t change the situation. We were sometimes tired, we were often scared, there were rewards out for anyone who turned in the contaminated, and the world, for all we knew, was ending. The two of us and everyone else, we were all just pretending to believe we still had a future.

  Sex at least was here and now. Joy and love and shaking the trailer until we were spent, post-coital giggles and pillow fights drove it all back to a manageable distance. For a while, anyway.

  It was the first time I moved Aidan that I got magically contaminated.

  He’d come home with me from the lake, inside the phone’s memory chip. I’d captured the picture and he had got in there, and then, like a sprout, he’d grown. By the time I’d showered off my run, he was lying on my kitchen floor, in the shredded remains of my day pack, buck naked, fetal, immobile as a statue, and with water condensing all over his birchy skin.

  I’d heaved him across the house and into the tub, thinking he could drain there. He fell in face first, his butt pointed up at the ceiling. I meant to call the police, but even so I couldn’t leave him that way. It was undignified; it felt cruel.

  So I reached into the tub, wheezing with the effort I’d already made, and tried wrangling him over, onto his side or sort of sitting. I was pulling on his feet—I didn’t want to grab the obvious handhold near his center of gravity. Awkward, slippery fumbling in a close space, and all of it made harder by the thick, numb scar tissue on my palms. By the time I had him flipped upright, I was soaked in sweat…

  …and my hands itched.

  Know how a hot dog looks after it’s been skewered and stuck in a campfire? The red, burned meat, the seared brown-black blisters? I made a point, in those days, of not looking at my palms much. Other people stared when
I went out; I refused to wear gloves, to hide. But I was something of a genius at getting through the days without looking at the burns myself.

  Naturally, this was another thing the therapist had an issue with.

  (After we ran, the story I gave out about my hands was half the truth: I told people I was a firefighter, told them I got burned doing a rescue. But I also said I saved the guy, that it was Aidan, and that his weird pale skin was grafts. I’d give them a good look at my scorched-sausage palms and say, “And then we fell in love.”

  “Awww,” these strangers would reply. Everyone loves a romance, right? So far, nobody’d turned us in.)

  Anyway, the hands—I’d moved him and they itched. I took a good look.

  It was splinters, driven into the burns. They were lined up like little dominos, bristles driven in to the lines of my hand, life line, heart line, brain line…all the grooves where palm readers look for meaning. Tiny spiked fences of bristling birch, dividing my hands into mapped terrain, lumps of territory, each filament barely aglow with the blue that had come to mean magic.

  “Go to jail,” I whispered. “Go directly to jail. Do not pass go.”

  Behind me, someone answered, in a voice so deep it vibrated my bathroom mirror: “Ma’am? May ah have some pants, please?”

  My best cash job that summer was delivering concrete statues to people who wanted Italian Cupids or ornate birdbaths or what-have-you on their front lawns. My boss, Vitaly, claimed to ship them from whatever country the designs nominally originated in, but he really cast and painted them in his garage. All very authentic, he was fond of saying. He pronounced it “Aww Thenn Teek.”

  It was a good gig. I drove all the back roads, coming to know offbeat ways to get from town to park to vineyard, identifying a dozen isolated spots where Aidan and I might hide if a manhunt broke out.

  When he wasn’t at the bakery, I’d bring my swamp man along. We turned off the AC, letting the cab of the truck heat up. I swigged water and sweated as the sun baked in. The almond tint in his birch-bark skin came out and he looked as human as anyone. We’d pretend-fight over music as we drove around the little British Columbia locales with their funny names: Osoyoos, Penticton, the Naramata Bench.

  We explored the Similkameen, delivering jumped-up lawn dwarves, the occasional Buddha or Ganesha, once even an Easter Island head the size of a ten-year-old boy. The vineyards and orchards spread out on either side of the highway, cultivated land in patchwork arrangements, divided by fences. It rolled down to the powder-blue waters of Okanagan Lake—which was supposed to be home to a monster, Ogopogo, they called it, sort of a Canadian Loch Ness monster, a tale from before magic broke into the world.

  I wondered about Ogopogo when I had nothing else to keep my mind off my problems. Was it there before the magic escaped? Was there one now? Sea monsters had been sinking ships in the Pacific since the magical outbreak in Oregon.

  Was Ogopogo alone, or did it have a mate?

  Our best conversations happened on those long stretches in the truck. I’d pick a random childhood memory: my favorite book when I was ten, the first movie I saw in a theater, some toy I got for a Christmas present.

  Once: “When I was a kid, my mother bought jelly in cans.”

  Aidan busted out grinning. “Yeah. There was a plastic lid on the bottom of the can, for once it was opened—”

  “Like for canned coffee. And you used a can opener.”

  “The jam would have these grooves from the can lid,” he replied.

  “Like circles in a pool of water, but frozen in place, and full of fruit seeds. I liked raspberry.”

  “Strawberry for me.” He drummed his fingers on the dash, keeping time with his clangy Nicaraguan jazz. “You could get those circles with coffee, too, if you opened the can carefully enough.”

  “Yeah, and then trace them with your finger until the machine pattern disappeared, and it was just like sand, with finger-circles.”

  We loved finding these little ‘before’ things we had in common. Like the fact that we both studied Sparta in grade four. We’d both tried and failed to get our mothers to buy us Cap’n Crunch—too much sugar, was their ruling. We’d both collected soup labels for a while, to mail in for some prize neither of us could remember getting, and sold magazine subscriptions—unsuccessfully—for school fundraisers.

  Nostalgia, I concluded, after the coffee can conversation ended with us screwing madly in the back of the truck, next to a full-sized concrete Roman warrior swaddled in bubble wrap, had become some kind of aphrodisiac.

  One of our grim little in-jokes is that the bog loves Aidan for his mind.

  “Spill it,” I’d said, that first day, after I got him out of the bathtub and into a discarded pair of Richard’s pants and a Vancouver Fire Department T-shirt. “What happened to you?”

  “I got caught in the magical outbreak, in Oregon.”

  “You’re one of the missing townspeople?”

  “Not a local. I am—well, I was a biologist.”

  “A scientist?” It was stupidly thrilling just to be near him; I hadn’t felt like this since I’d had a pointless crush on my grade six social studies teacher. He could have been talking about the War of 1812 and I would have been riveted. That I managed to say, “Go on,” and not, “Do me now!” was something of a miracle.

  But he was magic. Contaminated. He had to go, or I’d never get my old life back.

  “We’d camped on the edge of a riparian zone, taking DNA samples. We’re—we were—building a taxonomy database. Three of us: me, Debbie, Ian. Then Debbie didn’t come back from the weekly food run to Indigo Springs. When we realized she was hours overdue I decided we should go out, trace her steps, report her missing if need be.”

  “We were packing up, and the quake walloped us. Trees fell across the path, there were aftershocks, and naturally we lit out for town. We couldn’t know that was the epicenter. After sunset, we were blind. The magic was changing everything, the trees were getting bigger, and the wildlife—”

  He rubbed his face. “Pitch black, the sounds…and we realized all the animals who could were fleeing past us, running away from the direction we had taken. But then I pitched off the edge of the trail and into an ice-cold pool. I swallowed—I all but drowned. I scraped myself on all sorts of things, and a birch branch stabbed through my forearm…”

  I remembered holding on to the burning man as long as I could. They’d had to force me to let go; one of the guys from the firehouse almost broke my wrist. It was the day after we’d found out that magic existed and I’d been so scared and angry.

  As Aidan talked I pulled the blue splinters out of the meat of my palm, leaving dotted lines like tattoos among the burn scars.

  “Ian called my name, for a while,” Aidan said. “Until somethin’ scared him. He ran, and I tried to follow. I thought I did follow, in some fashion. I could hear him. I was beside him or with him. But it was all a muddle. I was in the forest, becoming tangled with it, and it was as if the trees and ferns and all the little birds were watching Ian, and I was within them…”

  “He died?”

  “There was an ants’ nest. Big, magically contaminated ants. They tore him apart while the rain forest watched…” His hands drifted up, as if to cover his ears.

  To block out the memory of screaming, I thought. I held up my scorched, punctured palm. “I saw a man burn to death that same day. It was slow. I couldn’t help.”

  He reached out with just a fingertip, tracing my heart line. We stared into each other’s eyes, dizzy, voltage building between us, until it was break apart or kiss. I knew there was no way, no way at all, I’d ever call the cops on him.

  He’s gotta go, I thought again. Keep your lips to yourself, Calla.

  Finally he closed his eyes and drew back, saying, “I’ve been woven into the rain forest ever since. Diffused. Watching, growing, spread thin.”

  “We’re hundreds of miles from Oregon.”

  “An ecosystem is one big body
, just as a person’s a big collection of cells. I gathered in that lake, more of myself every day, caught somehow near a swirl of lilies by the dam. I found my glasses on the lake bottom and grabbed on to a birch stump. It’s taken months to be me again, Calla. And this morning, I felt something separate, a part of me that wasn’t tied to it all, a way out—”

  “The picture I took?”

  Aidan stared out at my yard. Salmonberry canes were growing against the door, extending long thorns around its frame. It was crazy, but we could both sense they wanted to get in. “It wants me back. I might be better off if I go to the authorities—they’d put me in a plastic room; it might be safe.”

  “Safe,” I said glumly, looking at my palm. “If what you’re saying’s true, the whole Pacific Northwest is…?”

  “Saturated with magic,” he said. “Every leaf, every tree, every rat, bug, and starling.”

  “Nobody knows?”

  “Government must know,” he said. “They just can’t admit.”

  It was all I could do not to put my arms around him. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t keep plants or pets. We’re the only things alive in here.”

  Like most of the contaminated, I was devolving into an animal.

  The process started with my nose.

  I was allergic to dust and pollen as a kid, and both my parents smoked. I’d never thought I had much of a sense of smell, even after I left home. But that day I fled with Aidan, a whole World of Stink flowered out to find me. An hour after I’d driven off, outstripping the chronic gridlock of the suburbs, I started picking up the faint whiff of oil in the AC, the ghost of a dog Richard had taken with him nine months earlier, when he left me, and the salt and oil in a bag of chips wedged under the backseat.

  I smelled blackberries ripening on the side of the highway and had to fight an urge to pull over. Because that was the other thing: I was hungry. The last thing I’d done before leaving Vancouver was eat everything remaining in my fridge, finishing with the six leftover squares of June’s birthday cake.

  When I parked at a highway rest stop, I got my first mind-blowing, heady whiff of fresh salmon. I felt my entire body lurch at it, ravenous, straining to grab, to eat it raw, to eat it all.