“Nothing makes sense.” I can’t get it above a whisper but I know she hears. It’s silent here. There’s nothing to drown me out.
“There’s no way to make it make sense. But none of the rest of them ever came back out. When you’re inbound you’re inbound forever. Except you.”
“I didn’t-”
“Why are you different, Lonnie?”
I make a fist and hold it up. The bronchi, the heart. In the light through the rain, it looks like I’m pulsing. Beating. “You know why. Christ, you should know that better than anyone. They didn’t lose what I lost.”
“You don’t know what you lost.”
“You.”
Oh.
I’m breaking open. I was always open; I’m coalescing. Collapsing. “I just wanted to know. What happened. Why. Why can’t I know that? It wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t for me.” Why couldn’t they understand that? Waiting for news, for one specific inbound pod, day after day after day, and in the end there was nothing, and no one could ever tell me what happened. No one could ever tell me why.
What she wanted to know.
She’s fading. The color is receding, the wind leaving and taking it along, and the orbit is swinging outward again. Eventually she’ll slingshot away, go floating off into nothing and I won’t have her voice anymore.
I won’t know any more than she probably did.
Unless she knew everything. Unless that’s why she never came back.
“Reason isn’t resurrection, Lonnie. You can’t change something when you understand why it happened. And it won’t fill the empty place inside. You came back with it still empty, but you would have even if you knew.
“But even that wasn’t why. Not really.”
Why?
You just couldn’t take the silence any longer.
*
Sitting alone in the dark, dead air in my ear. All around. This is what I’m left with. Nothing is better, nothing makes sense, and she’s gone. I don’t know when she hung up. I don’t know what the last thing she said to me was. I don’t know what I was waiting for, whether I got any part of it. I don’t know anything.
That’s the point.
*
We all have that moment, that one moment that stands like a threshold between a child and an adult, when we realize everyone we love is going to be gone.
We all have that moment when we realize everyone we love already is.
Why makes no difference. The ones who come back with it aren’t any luckier than the ones who don’t, because in the dark and the silence, what you know doesn’t make you less alone.
Hey. How’s it going?
Do you need to talk to someone?
About the Author
Sunny Moraine’s short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Lightspeed, Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History, and multiple Year’s Best anthologies, among other places. They are also responsible for the Root Code and Casting the Bones trilogies and the novels Labyrinthian and Lineage, as well as A Brief History of the Future: collected essays. In addition to time spent authoring, Sunny is a doctoral candidate in sociology and a sometime college instructor; that last may or may not have been a good move on the part of their department. They unfortunately live just outside Washington, DC, in a creepy house with two cats and a very long-suffering husband.
Singing With All My Skin and Bone Page 19
