Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  Each incoming wave washes tiny, fingernail-sized crabs onto the shore, dozens of them. They weigh almost nothing, what a heavy breath weighs, perhaps. Their shells and flesh are transparent. As the water recedes they take their bearings, right themselves, and scuttle toward the sea. A few make it. Most are driven back onto the shore by the next wave.

  Long ago Mmdhf explained to me how so many of her children had died, all of them actually, and that this is what brought her to a deeper thinking. It was then (how had I not known this before?) that I understood she was the last and only one of her kind.

  Our subsistence, the subsistence of most all the island’s life forms, depends upon a fruit we call Tagalong, which also serves as substitute womb for the island’s most common insect, a horned, armored species resembling a cigar that has sprouted legs. These lay their eggs in the Tagalong. Commonly one bites into the fruit to discover a larval head peering out.

  Tagalong grows most abundantly toward the center of the island—due, the professor says, to the dormant volcano there, its creation of a temperate zone. For the same reason, and for ready access to quantities of Tagalong, birds flock to the area in vast numbers. Of late, birds have begun to move away. This suggests, the professor tells us, that the volcano is about to erupt.

  The parrot agrees.

  Mmdhf and I have spoken daily for months when I come to realize that I find something in her speech unsettling. Her enunciation is perfect, her word choice spot on; she speaks without appreciable accent and with proper inflection. Yet something nips at the heels of our dialogues. My uneasiness, I decide at length, lies in subtle shadings of verb choices.

  Is it possible, I ask one morning, that we experience time differently?

  “As in our earlier discussion of dream and waking,” she replies, “yes. And you cannot imagine how surprised I was to learn that time for your kind is not continuous but sequential.”

  “But if continuous, how can there be said to be time at all?”

  “This.” She turns her head, pauses, turns back. “Change.”

  “If all time is one...” I hesitate, groping for the question. “... then you know the future, you know what will happen.”

  “Yes.” She lifts two legs, as I have seen her do only once before, when she spoke of her children. “I miss you.”

  * * *

  THE COLD SIDE OF THE ISLAND

  Kali Wallace | 6750 words

  Kali Wallace studied geology and geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. Her short fiction has also appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, and Tor.com. After spending most of her life in Colorado, she now lives in southern California. Her first novel Shallow Graves is available from HarperCollins. In Kali’s second tale for Asimov’s, a woman returns home to face the consequences of a discovery that she and her teenage friends once made on...

  Lacie missed the funeral. She overslept and didn’t get out of Providence until after ten, and any chance she had of making up the time vanished when the storm turned I-95 north of Portsmouth into a skating rink. An accident slammed traffic to a crawl for the better part of the afternoon. Snow whipped across the road in horizontal streaks, scouring the windshield like sand, rocking the car with sudden gusts.

  One o’clock ticked by on the dashboard clock. The funeral was over. Jesse was in the ground.

  Lacie exhaled and flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. She should have set another alarm. She should have excused herself from the exhibition early. Too late now for what she should have done. She practiced what she would say to Jesse’s mother: I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, traffic, weather, I wanted to be there, I’m so sorry. The guilt clenching her chest was a clean, righteous thing, well deserved and welcome.

  It was nearly dark by the time she made it to Knockdown Island. The bridge was frozen over, the sign advising visitors to slow down flocked with spiky white crystals. All the tracks were in the opposite lane, leaving. She was too late to visit the cemetery, so she went straight to her mother’s house. In the gloom nothing looked as it should: houses too small and trees too large, air moving in restless puffs and swirls, the world sucked free of color.

  Lacie parked beside her mother’s car, grabbed her backpack, and went inside. The sudden warmth prickled her scalp beneath her hat. The house smelled of tomato sauce and garlic.

  “Mom? I’m here.” The television in the living room was too loud, a jangling chorus of commercials for Black Friday sales at four A.M. Lacie raised her voice. “Mom?”

  Marla appeared at the end of the hallway, a silhouette brandishing a wooden spoon. “There you are! I was getting worried when you didn’t call.”

  “I did call.” Lacie took off her coat, leaned on the wall to toe off her boots. “You didn’t answer.”

  “Oh, I must not have heard it,” Marla said. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

  Lacie kissed her mother’s cheek and gave her a quick hug. “I’ll just put my stuff upstairs.”

  The second floor was a good twenty degrees colder than the first, but Marla had already turned on the oil heater in the guest bedroom. Lacie closed the door and set her backpack on the bed. A couple of ladybugs inched across the pillow. She flicked them away and felt a pang of guilt when she heard the soft taps of them landing. Marla was always insisting she was going to have somebody look in the attic, find where the bugs were coming in, but in the very next breath she would laugh and say they weren’t hurting anyone.

  Lacie shook out her funeral dress and draped it over the back of the chair, unpacked her sensible sweaters and jeans, her toiletries, her warm socks, set them in a neat stack on the quilt. At the bottom of the bag was the skull.

  It was wrapped in a faded Patriots T-shirt, soft threadbare fabric tucked around the horns and jammed into the eye sockets. The long jut of the jaw stuck out through the neck hole. The shirt had been Jesse’s. Lacie lifted the bundle, inhaled, but all she could smell was dust and her own perfume, still clinging to the funeral dress from the last time she had worn it.

  One of the horns had slipped free. She brushed her finger along the clean white curve. It was the left horn, the crooked one that had been split and healed with a fungal mass of scar tissue. One eye socket was larger than the other; Thea had measured them after they brought the skeleton out of the woods. Jesse had dug through his mother’s sewing things to find a tape measure for her, and Lacie had recorded each number: sockets, teeth, jaw, horns. When they had measured everything they could think to measure, Lacie turned to a fresh page in her sketchbook to draw the skull while Jesse and Thea argued over what its asymmetry meant, whether there were others like it, what it was and where it had come from and how it had died.

  “Lacie? Food’s ready!”

  She tucked the skull into her bag and went down to join her mother.

  Red-faced and sweating, Marla was struggling to tip a large pot of pasta into a colander in the sink. Lacie hurried to take it from her. “Mom, let me. That’s heavy. Why did you make so much?”

  Marla surrendered the pot and stepped away. “Well, I thought leftovers. It’s easy to heat up. Not tomorrow. We’ll have a real dinner tomorrow.”

  Steam billowed as Lacie poured out the water; the spaghetti curled into the colander in a starchy tangle. Throughout Lacie’s childhood Marla’s best effort at dinner had been chicken breasts painted with barbecue sauce and baked dry, mashed potatoes from a box, frozen veggies microwaved to mush. She had gotten better since then, more adventurous in her tastes, but still Lacie asked, “You’re not doing a turkey, are you?”

  Marla laughed and dabbed her brow with the potholder. “Not for just the two of us, no. Remember that time we thought it was cooking all day and—”

  “I remember,” Lacie said. She picked up the colander to shake the water out. “You got the plates?”

  She remembered the broken oven and the frozen turkey, the way the electric knife had snapped when it hit solid ice, the whir of the motor and
the jagged tip of blade flung like a ninja star into the kitchen ceiling. She remembered Marla’s wide eyes and surprised gasp: oh shit! She remembered it every time her mother brought it up, and its clockwork repetition whenever they found themselves together in the kitchen was like needles under her skin. She knew Marla was growing more forgetful. When the phone rang at six in the morning a week ago, Lacie’s heart had been thumping as she answered—no good news came at six A.M. It took her several groggy seconds to register Marla’s voice in her ear and the sharp feeling of relief, which didn’t fade even when Marla said, “They found Jesse Madison in the woods last night. I’m sorry, sweetie, I know you used to be friends.”

  Marla set plates on the table and plucked forks from the drawer. “Are you tired?”

  Lacie shook the colander one more time. “Yeah, a little. The drive up here sucked.”

  “You could have come last night.”

  “I told you. I was working.”

  Marla didn’t say should, wouldn’t shame Lacie for missing the funeral, but Lacie felt the jab anyway. She spooled spaghetti onto her fork and took a bite. The pasta was undercooked, the sauce too sweet. The pale noodles made her think of earthworms in soil.

  What Lacie had been doing when she ought to have been driving to Maine was sipping Diet Coke and staring at a blank spot on the wall of the student gallery, smiling vaguely and asking herself why she had ever given up drinking. One of the exhibiting students had swaggered up to her drunkenly and asked what she thought of his blotchy oil-on-canvas, and Lacie had entertained the thought of throwing her drink in his face. She thought about it, and the thought passed, and she told him his work was interesting, and there was a voice in her head that sounded like Jesse—not Jesse as an adult, but Jesse as a child, fifteen years old and bouncing with excitement, and he was snickering and he was kicking through autumn leaves and he was telling her to hurry up and his breath was misting in the cold and he was alive, he was alive, he was so alive that for a moment Lacie was breathless with the impossibility of it, that Jesse could be fifteen and alive, forty-one and dead, and this stupid student before her had lived his entire life from unremarkable birth to this moment of flaccid artistic failure in the span of years since they found the thing in the woods.

  “It was a nice service,” said Marla. She had lost weight since Lacie had seen her in August. Her collarbone was more prominent, her skin looser. “A very nice service. Everybody was there.”

  Lacie looked down at her plate. She couldn’t tell if her mother was as embarrassed by her absence as she was.

  “Your old friend Thea Macdonald came by to pick me up,” Marla went on. “Her and her aunt. They know I don’t like driving in bad weather. They want you to stop by tomorrow. Thea said to make sure I told you.”

  “Okay. I will.” Lacie hadn’t spoken to Thea in five years. Six. Seven. She remembered the shape of their last conversation but not the date. She had run into Thea as she was leaving the grocery store; she had ice cream in her bag. How are you, it’s been a while, we should get together. They never did. All Lacie knew of Thea’s life now she knew through Marla. She was divorced. She still worked at the hotel. She had a daughter. They lived with her father and aunt. That was all.

  “The reverend was with them,” Marla said. “I’m surprised he came, to be honest. He doesn’t get out much anymore.”

  “I am sorry I missed it,” Lacie said. She winced at the sound of her own voice, the sincerity she had practiced under her breath during the drive. “Where is Mrs. Madison staying? I should go see her.” The last thing she wanted to do was face Jesse’s mother and stumble her way through condolences.

  “That’s sweet of you, honey, but she’s already left the island,” Marla said. “She’s got that sister in Bangor, remember? They left right after to beat the storm. At least she’ll be with family for the holiday.”

  Lacie was relieved, and guilty for her relief. “Yeah. That’s good.”

  They finished their dinner, washed the dishes, packed away the leftovers in tomato-stained margarine tubs. The wind was howling, a tortured wail that rose and fell. Marla was dozing by eight, heading to bed before nine. Lacie followed her up the stairs. She watched the way Marla gripped the railing tight and set each foot carefully before lifting the other. She held her breath until they reached the top.

  Alone in the guest room, door closed, Lacie stood on her toes to reach the cardboard boxes on the closet shelf. She carried them to the bed and brushed a few ladybugs off the quilt.

  The boxes held everything she had left behind when she moved out: school photos offering a timeline of eighties and nineties fashion humiliations, the rattling dull ends of colored pencils, a dozen sketch books filled with ink and charcoal drawings. The blue ribbon from the day she and Thea won the three-legged race at the Fourth of July picnic. A smooth red stone she had picked up on the rocky shoreline where, according to island legend, a Nantucket whaleship captain had crawled ashore after losing his ship to a storm; whether or not he ate any of his crew before being rescued was a matter of enthusiastic debate at the historical society.

  There were no bones in the first box. Lacie set it aside and dug into the other. School yearbooks, which she resolutely did not open. Three plastic quarter horses, one with its bent front leg broken off. A stack of photocopied posters she had drawn for the band Jesse was going to start. Another sketchbook—and in this book was the thing in the woods.

  She had captured its decay through an entire summer and fall and into the first frosted nights of winter. In the first drawings it was nearly whole, as she had found it. She turned the page and the thing softened, liquefied, holes opening in the scaly hide, sinews disintegrating into the ground, bones jutting beneath what remained of the skin, then through it. The horns and skull sharpened as muscles and scales and tufts of bristle-like fur pulled away. Finally all that remained was a cage of ribs, a whip of spine, long limbs like clubs.

  Lacie paged through the sketchbook slowly; the charcoal smudged her fingers. She had filled every page. She could see where her hand had been clumsy, where she had clung to dramatic affectations of elongated shadows and angry black streaks. The instructor in her head raised a tired eyebrow and asked the student to try again, to think less and feel more, to capture what she saw and not what she thought she ought to see. She didn’t know what she was looking at. She did it no service pretending she did.

  Under the sketchbook was the shoebox. Lacie lifted it out and removed the lid. The bones were in a grocery bag, looped handles tied in a knot she couldn’t work free. She tore the plastic instead.

  Aside from the skull, her share of the bones was the smallest: a few broken curves of rib; three knobby sections of backbone; and fingers, each phalanges longer than her hand, with rigid keratin claws on the end. All the larger bones—the limbs, the pelvis, the scapula—had gone with Jesse. At fifteen he had been the only one with a place to hide them. Thea’s father searched her room regularly, and Lacie and Marla had been living in a one-bedroom apartment. Jesse had an entire tool shed his mother never used, full of secretive corners and cluttered shelves, and a padlock for the door. He was building something, he told his mother. She always indulged his hobbies: the guitar for which he had no talent, the basketball for which he had no passion, the woodworking that never produced more than sawdust. The thing in the woods was the only one of Jesse’s obsessions to last more than a few months.

  Lacie squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. She had forgotten to pack anything to sleep in, so she borrowed one of Marla’s old nightshirts from the closet. It was too big, draping her shoulders like a sack, but the cotton was soft and smelled of cedar. She moved the boxes off the bed, climbed under the quilt, switched off the light. The oil heater clicked softly. Tree branches scraped the side of the house; Marla couldn’t climb the ladder to trim them anymore. Lacie brushed away a faint tickle on her arm: another ladybug. Even in thick winter socks her feet were cold.

  Exposure. That was the medical e
xaminer’s official declaration. He froze to death. There hadn’t been a storm last week, not like the one raging outside now, but it was cold enough. As best anybody could figure, Jesse had gone for a walk. It was night. He was only wearing a flannel shirt and jeans.

  An easy walk could take a person from the southern end of Knockdown Island to the forested north in a couple of hours, yet an invisible boundary divided the island into two parts. Town and woods, civilized and wild. They weren’t nice woods. Summers choked with mosquitoes, ticks, biting flies. Low-lying boggy ground pockmarked with slippery rocks and spindly black spruce. Hollows of stagnant air that gave the impression of stepping between fever and chills. Beer bottles and used condoms. Islanders joked about mafiosos driving up from Boston to ditch bodies in the bog, but Jesse’s death would bring the grand total of corpses found in the woods to two, and nobody except Lacie and her friends knew about the first.

  They said it didn’t hurt at all, freezing to death. The numbness passed. The exhaustion passed. The shivering passed. The flash of agonizing, impossible heat passed. The clumsiness, the panic, the groggy confusion, it all passed. The blood thickened, the lungs shuddered, the fear faded. Memories and hallucinations slipped away. It barely hurt at all.

  Lacie and Marla spent Thanksgiving watching the parade and watching the snow and talking about nothing of importance: the cold, the floats, how much better fresh rosemary tasted than dried. Marla made roast chicken and potatoes to eat in the early afternoon, then she slumped onto the sofa for a nap while Lacie scrubbed the dishes and wiped the table.