For a long time we heard nothing from, or about, our Syoon, which decidedly set a pall over the optimism we'd been feeling since the President's arrival. Then, one day, every residence, be it hovel or better, received a hand-delivered invitation to the Maulkey Mansion. The President was getting married. To Syoon!
Years ago we built trenches beside our houses because we had learned, through the saddest of educations, that when bombs fell it was best to divide our families. Neighbor children and our own crouched in each other's ditches. In this way no entire family was destroyed. This is the terrible mathematics of war. So, when we opened the pretty cream-colored invitations (tied with gold ribbon) and read the beautiful script of Syoon's name, all of us rejoiced for our daughter whose lineage, through a childhood of explosions and ditch-hopping, was uncertain. All through town there was cheering and celebration, only occasionally pierced by Chila's mournful braying, the cry as dark as night and as sad as life, though we found that if we closed the windows, and cheered very loudly, we could drown him out. This worked for much of that day of celebration, until we took to our beds. In the steely air of our closed rooms we listened to Chila's screams, his despair reminding us of something we had once known and could not name, something buried inside, tucked beneath ribs, or smothered by the heart. On that, the happiest day of our lives, we cried ourselves to sleep and dreamt of the time before the war, when we, too, mourned for what was taken from us, as if the taking was a shock from which we could never recover.
Morning came and with it we were returned to our vigor. We opened windows and took great gulps of the blue sky, we smiled at the silence; at last Chila had fallen asleep or lost his voice or taken the pills we all carried for when things got too bad (though we surprised ourselves and discovered we could live, with few expectations or dreams, settling for the worst of everything, finally rewarded by this day when the green was returned to us, leaves unfurled, grass or something like it no longer suppressed, and one of our own daughters marrying the most powerful person in the world).
We sewed new outfits for our children, stitched around the growing limbs and disturbing sexualities which we had not, until then, bothered to bind in any way. We took those who needed, who we even suspected needed, to the abortionist and, when we discovered she could perform an operation for sterility we chose that. Why hadn't we thought of it sooner? It had been years since we even considered the possibilities of reproduction. Since the war, anyone who gave birth to a deformed child was automatically sterilized. We had not been thinking of our children as sexual creatures. We put the abortionist on the list of things to do between haircuts and manicures, there was no possibility any of them could be parents and there was no way we would do the job for them. We were so tired by that point.
Chila continued his mournful braying. We came to think of him as Foghorn, though the horrible sound told us nothing about the weather, and dreadfully much about his sorrow, which reigned at all hours, dark and lonely, a sound we slept and woke to, a sound that accompanied our shopping, our chores, the dreary business of our lives, always reminding us of the other side of joy, a fact we did not appreciate.
We begged Chila to stop. We bribed him with homemade cabbage soup, which he took (the cheater) and destroyed in the area of his mouth. We bribed him with our daughters who came eagerly in giggles and bows, the preservation of their sterility assured; he took them as well, in angry embrace, and we heard the rutting noise of his pleasure, the heavy snore afterward, and understood that an agreement had been made until he awoke and once again returned to his wailing. Eventually we gave up on Chila. We grew used to the sound. Sometimes, when he slept, we even missed the foghorn.
At last, the wedding day arrived. The town swarmed with reporters and photographers. We were all interviewed, even Chila, though no one understood what he was trying to say, his voice hoarse, his words punctuated with sobs. At twelve o’ clock we left the sobbing Chila, and the media, in the street, staring at us as if we were something special, and walked up the hill, guiding our wayward children with their extra limbs trying to take them in various directions. We carried diaper bags decorated with bows and painted with flowers, occasionally stopping to smooth a wrinkle in our best clothes, to adjust the uncomfortable straps of our best shoes, to wipe our children's drool, readjust their hair. The photographers aimed their long lenses at us. There were so many of them that they sounded like gunfire, which was unfortunate. We carried our cream and gold invitations in our hot hands. We breathed in the increasingly heady perfume of flowers and grass and dirt, we pointed to the birds, gasped at the dragonflies.
Long strips of white ribbon fluttered in the afternoon breeze as if the gates, the house, the trees were gift-wrapped, and in a way they were. The suits waved their weapon detectors over us, their expressions disgusted; we tried to hold our children still, we fed them cereal to distract them from the trees, the grass, the birds, all those flowers, and a fountain of water flowing there, as ordinary as sky, all of it decorated with white ribbons which fluttered in the wind like tattered ghosts.
In spite of all the accouterments of festivity, many of us recall a vague feeling of unease, though it is difficult to know if this is recollection, or memory tainted by what followed. I, personally, recall staring at those white ribbons fluttering in the wind and being filled with dread. This was not unusual in itself. Many of us adults, survivors of the war, had suffered the experience of emotions not tied to surroundings. The Doctors called these occurrences flashbacks. We called them ghosts. A popped bubble becomes the shot that killed a mother, a whiff of cinnamon becomes the morning the first bombs fell, a white ribbon flapping in the wind becomes a wounded spouse in an old dress shirt, whose wife dares not come out of hiding to save him, for risk of being shot herself. The coward.
The guards move through the crowd searching bodies, invading orifices with one hand while offering trays of appetizers with the other. Our children, dressed in the best we could manage, register nothing of this abuse on their happy faces. They gurgle and drool and even squirm with inappropriate delight at the invasive touch while shoving cheese rolls and herring crackers into their many mouths. The guards, dressed in tuxedos, look like cockroaches scuttling amongst us. The birds sing, the windchimes tinkle, the water fountain gurgles, the ribbons flap in the wind, and the President's mother (is it her? Is it possible, after all these years?) stands in the doorway of the mansion, her white hair haloed around her little head so that she looks like a human Q-tip. We are silenced when she raises her tiny shrunken hand and speaks in her ancient voice. “We are so happy to have you here. Please come inside for the ceremony. God bless our President, and God bless our country."
For a moment we are silent, then we cheer, though anyone listening closely could discern the nature of our response, a cheer of longing, rather than support, the difference between funeral bells and wedding ones, though the same bells ring for both.
Our children tumble and roll toward the doorway. We follow them into the mansion where the President's mother leads us into a room decorated with white flowers, garlands on the ceiling, and great bouquets in front of the altar. Each chair, in the many rows of red chairs, festooned with the ghostly blooms. When things got really bad and all the green had been destroyed, we lived in a place of these colors. Those red chairs and white flowers remind us, for a moment, of that time of blood and bone. Yet, there is beautiful music and one of our own is about to marry the President. Even our children were subdued by the enormity of it all. The room grew quiet. Well, it had been a long time since we'd heard music, some of the children never had. We think it was a flute.
We sat in silence, listening to the flute, breathing in the scent of unknown flowers, surrounded by tuxedoed security. A religious leader of some kind came to the front, standing before the altar in a gold robe. The President's mother sat in a great chair facing all of us, bowing under the apparent weight of her Q-tip head. After all the build-up it seemed that it began suddenly. Suddenly there were
young women coming down the aisle, tossing white flowers at us (they fell softly, like feathers, and without a sound, but still, we flinched). Later we realized that all these females were wives of the President, each more beautiful than the other. Then the President came, walking down the aisle in his suit of war medals, waving at us as though in a parade, stopping to kiss his mother's cheek (she raised her heavy head to squint at him before she fell asleep again), and as he turned to face us, his demeanor boyish, his eyes twinkling, his mouth in dimpled grin, the music stopped. The silence would have been startling had there not been, just then, the faintest noise of Chila's foghorn rising up the hill. The President's eyes widened though he held his head still. We watched as his face changed from shadow to a beam, and we followed his gaze to Syoon, dressed in white lace, wreathed in foxglove, coming down the aisle, accompanied by the flute. In that moment when we gasped, and we all gasped, there was again that sound, perhaps just a little longer this time, and definitely a little closer. Chila. We fell to weeping, sobs of pretend joyous tears. We made the noise to protect Chila, though it did confuse our children who became quite distressed. They squirmed and blathered. Several of us noted the eye-rolling of security. Even the President's mother lifted her head to squint out at us. Did the flute grow louder? We think it did. Everything got louder. The further Syoon walked down the aisle, the more volume Chila's foghorn made, the louder we wept our false tears, the more noise our children made, while the President's mother glared, the security guards rolled their eyes, and the President, his war medals glimmering in the light of wedding candles, smiled at his bride, who turned toward Chila's sound, which now seemed suspiciously close. Not all our noise, the noise of the children, or the raised volume of flute could drown out his mournful cry. Slowly, with great reluctance, we looked at the President, who no longer beamed like a lighthouse in the storm.
(Oh Green, How We Taste Your Bitter Shoots, Rooted in the Dark.)
The security guards moved to guide Syoon toward the glowering President. She looked at him, we hope for the first time in this cowering position, and began walking forward.
Chila's foghorn sang its terrible note, this time quite near.
Of course there had been other wars and we followed them on the TV and Internet, but then war seemed like a distant planet. We maintained our belief in love, until war came to our town, and love grew a shape we had never imagined. Here we were, in the President's chapel, watching his guards walk Syoon down the aisle, tears streaming down her face, as the President grimly stood waiting. Chila's foghorn, quite near now, brayed again but was ominously cut off. Our distressed children were braying, and moaning; we tried to shush them, and hold them back, as they pushed their way past, and at that point, just when it seemed they were in general revolt, shots rang out.
Of course we knew the President's people were capable of shooting our children, shooting us. What had we been thinking, anyway, to come here as guests? The shots rang out, and for a moment, everything stopped. No one moved. No one made a sound. This moment was followed by terror. We looked at our children, we looked at each other, looking, looking even as we checked the doors, guarded by security, while suits scurried amongst us, swiftly. They knew before we did that the President was shot. They tackled Syoon to the ground, like the football players of our youth (Oh Green, How We Love Your Stain), wrenching from her small, misshapen hand the gun.
Syoon? Our Syoon, an assassin? How was it possible, she, who was the promise of the new generation, the beauty, the charm, the one amongst all the rest who had a chance at a normal life? Or so we thought. It is incredible what people believe, in order to fool themselves about the world they live in. As they tackled Syoon, and wrestled the gun from her small hand, she called Chila's name, over and over again.
We thought we were guests at the wedding, but must accept that we were complicit with her captors. Had we not come to the captor's house? Had we not eaten his food? Had we not smiled at Syoon as she came so unwillingly down the aisle? What had we been thinking? Even now, in the spirit of understanding, we do not really understand, we only know that we are misshapen in ways we had never imagined. When did we become our own ghosts, shadows of what we once believed in, heartless, barren?
The President survived, of course. The wound was not serious, but his capacity to show the world his resolve for peace by marrying Syoon was shattered by her bullet. In fact, he never returned after his short convalescence, but continued on his book tour, and though we were sorry to see the trees, flowers, and fountains carted off, the mansion demolished, we were not sorry to see him go.
We protested the hanging by staying home. We shut our doors, and tried to distract our children, who seemed to sense what was happening, or perhaps we just imagined that their keening had anything to do with us. Still, we could hear the fanfare, the band (they brought in from who-knows-where) playing, the speeches delivered to a bussed-in crowd. We filled the sippy cups, and looked out the windows, to the east, the west, the north, the south, searching, searching first the faces in the windows of the other houses, and then the horizon. We did not know, until we heard the unmistakable sound of the trapdoor drop, what we had been looking for. Chila. We had been looking for Chila to come riding in on a horse, or running down the road on his magnificent legs. We expected Chila, somehow, Chila who was probably dead since the wedding day, we thought Chila would come and save Syoon. We did.
It didn't come true, of course, but that isn't the point, after all.
We have worked hard at making strangers comfortable in our community, made infamous first, all that time ago, by the small militia that had assembled amongst us, followed by the war, and then the assassination attempt here, and also, the strangeness of our population, the way we let our “children” (indisputably grown now) make families in whatever fashion, by whatever whim they desire. Strangers who do dare to come here, often comment on the surprising kindness of our town.
We ask our children's forgiveness, but they are so busy (coupling everywhere, at any time of day or night, in places both public and private) that they never seem to have the time to answer us. Besides, where should forgiveness reside? Often, at night, just before sleep comes and we are taken to memories too horrible for light, we think of Syoon's bloated silhouette, hanging forever, and while there is much to focus on in the nasty dregs of the lives we made from war, when we think of Syoon, we remember that moment before, when we looked at the vast horizon, searching for something we thought we no longer believed in (Oh Green, How Impossible Your Heart), and we smile, even as the rope twists tighter, we smile.
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Short Story: Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot—LXXI by Ron Partridge
By the year 3535, there appeared to be no space hazard with which Ferdinand Feghoot was unprepared to cope. He had been asked to establish Federation contact with the planet Adamantine III, which meant traversing the infamous Diamond Belt. This spherical so-called “Belt” lay outside the planet's orbit, with every declination filled with orbiting low-quality diamond debris of varying sizes. Their vast number overwhelmed the capacity of even the most advanced super-computers of the day to navigate, and their extraordinary hardness, jagged edges, and varying masses played havoc with hull integrity. The Belt was the graveyard of many foolhardy expeditions that had gone before.
"How can you think of attempting such an absurdly hazardous crossing!” his crew complained, on the point of mutiny. “It would take paranormal powers to find a way through this mess!"
With steely determination and cool aplomb, Feghoot replied, “I took the precaution of including in the crew an inhabitant of the planet Capernium. As you know, these goat-like beings are renowned for their truly amazing powers of second sight."
"But how did you get him to agree to come?"
"Simple,” said Feghoot, “Like humans, the Capernians no longer have fur, and, due to the anti-hunting laws of that world, are denied the best defense against the piercingly cold wi
nters there. I have promised to provide, at Federation expense, a vast quantity of artificial furs for him and his people."
"Do you really think he's up to the task?” they protested.
"Of course,” said Feghoot irritably, “You can always get through diamond space with fur-denied fey goat!"
(Compliments of Ron Partridge)
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Novelet: ANOTHER LIFE by Charles Oberndorf
During my summer years, I worked eight weeks as a camp counselor, then joined my parents for a brief vacation in a small village in Michigan. Nearby Northport had two grocery stores and a pharmacy. Each time a parent headed to Northport, I'd hop in, hoping that the anniversary edition of F&SF had shown up. This was my closing ritual of the summer: the rocky beach, the bone-deep cold water, and several hundred expansive pages.—Charles Oberndorf
She says, Tell me about your first death.
After all these years she should be familiar with its details, but age seems to have erased the particulars that never interested her, so I remind her of the outline of events.
No, she says. I meant what it was like when you woke up?
She's lying in her bed, and I've pulled up a chair to sit by her side. I say something like:
I opened my eyes, and there on the ceiling were shades of blues and yellows. You know how I usually don't have a good memory for colors, but I took a psych test when I enlisted, and they told me those were the colors that would calm me when I woke up. I do remember lake water lapping the shore, the sounds of the birds I'd grown up with, because it was odd to hear them in this enclosed room. I expected the sound of the water to actually be the reverberation of a ventilation fan.
FSF, October-November 2009 Page 31
