by Amber Fallon
“It doesn’t taste like anything because you aren’t thinking of anything.” Hellen Two offered from across the room. “Think of something you like to drink and take another sip.”
Hellen Prime thought of her Earl Grey tea from earlier that morning. Although the temperature of the liquid in the can didn’t change, it definitely tasted like Earl Grey tea with the second sip. She wrinkled up her nose and took another sip before deciding that there was a reason Earl Grey iced tea had never caught on. She set the can down on a nearby counter. When she looked back, it had mysteriously vanished.
“First time?” Hellen Two looked up from a magazine that had somehow appeared in her hand and took another sip of her soda.
Hellen Prime didn’t know how to answer that, so she just stared. Hellen Two lifted her arms, palms forward, pulling back her sleeves a bit with the action. There were raised pink scars on both of her wrists.
“Let’s just say it’s not my first rodeo,” she said. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the others.”
“Others?” Hellen Prime asked as Hellen Two walked past her and back into the hall.
* * *
At the end of the hallway was a plain black door. It was different from the other doors in that it was solid and opaque, rather than clear glass. The handle was shiny chrome and almost a foot long. Hellen Prime shrank back a bit as Hellen Two pulled the door open, afraid of what she’d find on the other side.
There were four women seated around a gleaming, glass-topped conference table. They all looked up as Hellen Two strutted in, followed by a timid Hellen Prime. All four women could’ve been sisters, but they weren’t. They were all Hellen Marshalls.
One of the Hellens was thin, almost waifish. She wore her hair long, pulled back off her slender shoulders in a ponytail. Her oddly pronounced cheekbones supported a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. She wore no makeup whatsoever. She was wearing a pale pink shell top under a lab coat of some kind. Her nails weren’t adorned any more than her face was. Her ears were unpierced. Hellen Prime decided this thin, nerdy looking version of herself would be Hellen Three.
Hellen Four wore a t-shirt advertising a metal band over something with long sleeves and red and black stripes. Her short hair was dyed black, she had three studs in one ear and four in the other, with a long metal bar crossing the top of one ear. There was a tiny skull on the side of one nostril and henna-style tattoos on both hands, swirly designs that reached her black lacquered fingernails.
Another of the Hellens wore an expensive looking suit and tasteful pearl jewelry. She wore makeup, but it was so stylishly and expertly applied that it was hard to tell what she was wearing or where. She had the kind of short, stylish haircut that Hellen herself had jokingly referred to as the “Get Me Your Manager” cut. She pursed her lips disapprovingly as Hellen Two flopped down in a white leather chair beside her. This would be Hellen Five.
Hellen Six bore the strongest resemblance to Hellen Prime. This Hellen could have stepped into Hellen Prime’s life and passed easily. Hellen Prime was separated from Hellen Six only by a few inches of hair length and a small scar on her chin.
They all looked similar, of course…same eyes, same thin lips below roundish, upturned noses, same pale, freckled skin…but it was as if someone had given the same doll to a bunch of six-year-olds and checked on them after a few months of playtime.
“Come. Sit,” Hellen Five invited, gesturing at an empty chair. There were twelve chairs in total, all the same white leather with shiny chrome accents.
Hellen Prime accepted and sat quietly, still feeling shell-shocked.
“So…” Hellen Prime stuttered, “you’re, erm, all me? I mean, all Hellen Marshall?”
The women nodded, except for Hellen Two, who quipped, “No shit, Sherlock.” This earned her another glare from Hellen Five.
“How?” Hellen Prime asked helplessly.
“We’re working on that,” said Hellen Three.
Hellen Two leaned further back in her chair and propped her feet up on the table. “Well, we know that we’re all dead…” she snickered.
“We can speculate that we’ve died, yes,” said Hellen Three, “and, from that, we can extrapolate that we’re from parallel dimensions or something along those lines.”
Hellen Two snerked, “Yeah, okay, Poindexter.”
Hellen Three licked her lips, swallowed, and adjusted her glasses before continuing as if Hellen Two hadn’t interrupted her.”Are you familiar with string theory?” she asked Hellen Prime.
“Does it have to do with cats?” Hellen Prime asked sheepishly, supposing she already knew the answer.
Hellen Three sighed and got up from her chair, snatching a marker that Hellen Prime didn’t think had been there a moment before. She began drawing a complex looking diagram on the wall behind her.
“In a nutshell, there are alternate versions of the universe that break off from one another at several set points in space/time. In some of those alternate universes, you were never born, probably as a result of the choices your parents or grandparents made, or things that happened to them prior to your conception. In others, you…as in we”—she gestured at the room—”made different decisions, leading us to be different versions of the same genetic identity.” She punctuated her statement with a flourish. “We are all Hellen Marshall.”
Hellen Prime licked her lips, pausing to try and take in that idea. She looked around the room and received nods of confirmation from everyone except for Hellen Two, who circled her temple with her index finger in the universal sign for “cuckoo.”
“So, um, how long have you all been here?” Hellen Prime asked.
“Time seems to behave differently…” Hellen Three began just before Hellen Two interrupted.
“Time’s all wonky here, wherever we are.” She continued to crack her gum while flipping through her magazine. “First time I got here, I met her”—she indicated Hellen Four—”and we palled around for a bit. Felt like days. Weeks, even.”
“You got that right,” Hellen Four said under her breath.
Hellen Two continued, undeterred by her doppelganger’s outburst, “But when I woke up, or whatever you want to call it, the doctor said that my heart had only stopped for, like, a minute.”
“It seems like we’ve been here for ages, but also like we’ve just arrived,” Hellen Five added almost wistfully.
“There is definitely some distortion of time occurring here.” Hellen Three pursed her lips. “But why, and where exactly ‘here’ is, remains a mystery.”
“Okay…” Hellen Prime nodded. “So we can’t be sure when each of us arrived or how long we’ve been here. So…now what?”
“Well, we’ve just been talking. Trying to see who made what decisions and what the outcomes were,” Hellen Five replied.
“It’s not especially useful to our current predicament, but it is utterly fascinating. From a scientific standpoint, at least,” said Hellen Three.
“Tell us about you,” Hellen Five prompted. “Where do you work? Are you married? Kids?”
Hellen Prime licked her lips nervously. “Um, no,” she stuttered. “I mean, no about being married and having kids. I work at Mason and Price.”
Hellen Five’s eyebrows shot up. “Mason and Price!” she exclaimed. “Me, too! What do you do there?”
“Oh, well, data entry, mostly…” Hellen Prime tried to smile, but it faltered a bit. She had some idea of what was coming, based on her counterpart’s taste in clothing and makeup, but she asked anyway.
“What about you?”
“I’m the Executive Director of Human Resources,” Hellen Five stated with more than a little pride. “What about the rest of you?”
“I work at the Vinyl Emporium,” said Hellen Four. “It’s this really great record store.”
“I’m a researcher at Boris Technologies,” Hellen Three added, to no one’s great surprise.
“I’m sort of between jobs right now,�
� said Hellen Six, looking at her fingernails.
“And you?” Hellen Five asked Hellen Two, who scoffed, rolled her eyes, and went back to her magazine. “Are we really having a dick-measuring contest?” she snarked.
“What about Billy Jacobi?” Hellen Four asked, changing the subject. “Have we all gone out with him?”
“That delinquent slacker from South Central High?” Hellen Three wrinkled her nose distastefully.
Hellen Five chose to ignore her parallel self’s remark. “William and I are married for going on five years now.”
“Married!” Hellen Four gushed. “We just started seeing each other last week, but I can tell already he’s the one for me!” Suddenly, her face fell. “Or, at least, he was…” She trailed off.
“He…he died in the car accident that gave me this.” Hellen Six pointed to the scar on her chin. The room fell silent.
After a few moments, Hellen Prime spoke up.
“So, what do we do now?” she asked.
Hellen Five shrugged, looking to Hellen Three, who adjusted her glasses before doing the same.
“We wait, I guess.” She looked a little lost and hopeless in her lab coat.
“Not much else to do,” Hellen Two said, taking a sip from one of the shiny silver cans of soda.
“So that’s it? We just wait here and see what happens?” Hellen Prime couldn’t accept that as a solution. Action was always better than inaction. Wasn’t it?
“What do you suggest?” Hellen Five asked.
“I don’t know…I just…” Hellen Prime was cut off by a sound from outside the conference room. Somewhere beyond the opaque door, a very familiar voice was crying out in frustration. The Hellens looked at each other.
* * *
ORNAMENTATION
Jim Holiday sat in a shabby brown recliner in his living room. His sweat- (and otherwise-) stained wife beater clung to his sallow skin like a lizard’s exodus, peeling away from the flabby flesh underneath like a scab. The garment had seen better days, much like Jim himself. Also like its wearer, the garment was tired, worn out, and misused. It had grown too small to hold Jim’s burgeoning frame within its cotton cage, so much like a prison, and odd protuberances of hairy lard poked out of worn holes at random intervals. Jim opened his mouth and let out a low groan. Drool reeking of morning breath, nicotine, and old liquor, ran over his lip and down his chin like a filthy river. It meandered through the mangy forest that was his three- or perhaps even four-week-old beard growth. In all honesty, it was far too scraggly and sparse to be called a “beard,” and yet too wild and overgrown to be considered stubble.
Jim sat up, adjusting his position as one of his feet had fallen asleep sometime during the previous night. Beer bottles and empty fifths of Jack and Johnnie clattered to the floor in a derelict melody before rolling under the chair and across the carpet in the direction of the Christmas tree.
Jim’s eyes shifted as he yawned, yellowed teeth like uneven tombstones pushing up through the pink, fleshy graveyard of his gums. The tree stood about ten feet away from where he sat, an ancient monument to a preexisting version of the grotesquery he had become. It had been up for a year, or somewhere thereabouts. He couldn’t be sure exactly what day it was, or, really, what month, though judging by the Christmas music filtering through the walls from the next apartment over, he supposed that it was probably sometime in December. Either that, or they were just plain mad.
The tree had long since gone brown, dried up, and desiccated. It had lost the majority of its needles, most of which lay undisturbed where they had landed like an ashy brown halo around the weary old symbol of Christmas past and the unopened presents beneath its boughs. Ornaments sparkled from its branches through a thin haze of dust and dirt and spider webs, which were now woven throughout the limbs like intricate little garlands. They had become a sort of decoration themselves. Atop the skeletal remains of last year’s happiness perched a little golden angel like a silent specter. Her tiny blue eyes looked down upon Jim as if in accusation or contempt.
Jim barely regarded the tree any longer. It had become just another shadow in what remained of his pitiful life. He hadn’t been out of his recliner in days. He was beginning to worry that perhaps he couldn’t move even if he tried. He struggled to sit up, placing both of his hands with their bloated sausage fingers on the arms of the chair and pulling himself forward, the massive hulk of his gut obstructing his view of the ratty brown carpet in front of him. One of his feet, clothed in what remained of a grimy red slipper, slid to the left, knocking over a beer bottle he had been using as a urine receptacle. The foul yellow liquid splashed onto his leg, running down the grungy mat of hair and spilling into that unfortunate slipper.
“Ahhhh,” Jim croaked, the crackly, course tone of his voice sounding alien to his own ears. How long had it been since he’d last spoken? Weeks? Months, maybe? When had he last heard another human voice? He couldn’t recall. Jim’s annoyance at the wet mess on his leg, slipper, chair, and floor, fueled him into action. He stood up abruptly, grabbing the bottle and throwing it against the wall beside the doorway, where it shattered into a plethora of sparkling shards. They rained down onto the carpet as the remnants of the bottle’s liquid contents dripped down the wall. The shape the mess made was almost festive. It could’ve been a Christmas tree in the right light, with enough imagination. Jim was turning toward the kitchen when a sharp, melodious voice stopped him in his tracks.
“Jim,” it singsonged, “Jim, darling, won’t you be a dear and bring me something to eat?”
Jim stood stock still for a moment, unsure of what to do. It was the voice of the angel, all right, but he hadn’t heard it in, well, nearly a year. He thought perhaps he was imagining things in his deep-seated loneliness, in his longing, but the voice continued.
“I’m so very hungry, my darling. So very, very hungry.”
Jim swallowed. He had missed that voice. Missed his angel these long months, but now that she was back, he wasn’t sure he wanted her. He didn’t know what to do, and so he remained stone still for a few lingering minutes, listening to her pleas. He remembered her hunger, remembered feeding her, watching her eat. He remembered the touch of her skin with a shudder that was so close to revulsion and yet so close to elation at the same time.
Jim faltered for a moment before racing down the hall and opening the door to his bedroom, a door he hadn’t opened in almost a year. The air inside smelled ancient, reticent with mildew, dust and decay. Cobwebs clung to everything. The petals of the rose in the little glass vase on the night table had long since fallen. That rose had been fresh and dewy when he’d last seen it, and as pink as a newborn’s bottom. Pink had been her favorite color, after all.
Jim opened the white accordion doors that lead to his closet. He knelt on the floor, dust and dirt clinging to the sores on the sides of his legs—sores caused by his lack of motion and his near permanent position seated in his old brown recliner.
There she was, folded in the back of the tiny space, still wearing her costume. Her white gown had been discolored by time, as well as by mold and rot, but, in Jim’s eyes, she was still beautiful. The sequins lining the gown had long since lost their luster, but that was okay.
“Why’d you have to leave me, baby?” he whined, voice cracking with disuse. “Why’d you have to go and do a thing like that on Christmas?” Jim straightened the tinsel halo that still clung to the pale blonde wig she had worn that day. The wig had fallen over her face sometime during the twelve months she had been inside the closet. Beneath it, her dried-up flesh had pulled her once full, pink lips into a gruesome smile.
“Merry Christmas, Angie,” he said in a whisper as he leaned forward and kissed her.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amber Fallon is the last surviving member of a species of ancient reptiles that, at one time, were bent on world domination. Currently, she spends her days cooking, hanging out with her husband and their
dogs, and writing weird, disturbing, crazy fiction…while plotting world domination.
Her works include the novellas The Warblers and The Terminal, as well as several short stories in various anthologies and magazines, and even a few bits of nonfiction.
For more information, visit her at www.amberfallon.net.
