“They — women — have this rough rule that it starts at the first sign of deep lines around the female mouth. About early-to-mid-thirties. Now I think that’s an obscene way of looking at it. Obscene.” The ice cubes in his father’s glass clatter with his indignation. For the first time, Merlin sees how wrinkled his hand is on Alison’s shoulder.
“In the last few years of her life, your mother was severely pressured by the Sisters of her group. I told her not to listen, of course. But she wouldn’t hear of it. One day she snuck out of the house early with Lena and presented them both to the Women’s Municipal Powder Room — on a suitable day.” His father’s eyes water.
“Suitable?” Merlin asks.
“Weren’t you paying attention when you sneaked off to that Powder Room without permission?” Alison is harsh as a saw. “It’s not just nice, sweet-smelling stuff they pump in through those little holes.”
“Come with me, Alison,” his father murmurs, moving away. Alison turns to look at her stepson, trying to smile — but it is a rictus grin, her eyes like glass.
* * *
On his bedroom windowsill, a photograph of Merlin’s mother and sister looks down at him. Merlin puts his hand on the picture. The glass is gathering dust.
Slowly, reverently, he wipes it off with his fingers and looks again: first at the woman who has stopped Deteriorating forever, then at the little girl who never started.
“Stay special, Mama. Stay special, Lena. Love you both, stay special.”
Susan Lanigan is the author of two short stories in Nature and her debut novel, White Feathers, is due for publication on 25 August. Her website is at susanlanigan.wordpress.com.
Dead Yellow
Tanith Lee
This was my wedding dress. At the time people remarked on my choice of colour, but with my hair the way I had it then, it worked. I remember there were daffodils blooming. But I won’t show you the photographs. No point now, is there?
When did it start? Officially in 2036. But the papers had been reporting curious anomalies for years before that. And people spotting things. Thinking at first the fault was in them and getting frightened — so many medical case-notes.
And I? Oh, I think I first properly noticed that day when we walked in the park. We often did that, then. It was a nice park, lots of trees, wild areas. But I heard a child — it’s funny, isn’t it, the way children always ask the truly awful question? — this child said to some adult, “Why are all the trees going brown?” And it was late May, you understand, early summer, and the leaves flooding out and the grass high and everything lush. What did the adult reply? I can’t recall. But as we walked on, the scales, as they say, dropped from my eyes. I wish they hadn’t. I began to see it too.
It wasn’t like it is nowadays. Then it was only just establishing itself, the — what did they call it? — The Phenomenon.
It was almost like looking through a photographic lens. Except, obviously, this lens didn’t completely change everything, as normally it would.
Neither of us said anything to the other. But I realized he, my husband, had also in those moments begun to see. We kept talking and joking, we even stopped for coffee and a doughnut at the park café. But an uneasy shadow was settling on us, and a silence.
We didn’t actually discuss anything for several weeks. One evening we were making dinner, and — I remember so vividly — he was suddenly staring at the counter and he said, “What colour is that pepper, would you say?”
“Sort of orange, I suppose,” I said, “an orange pepper.”
“No,” he said, “it’s a brown pepper. And the lettuce, that’s a pale brown lettuce, only its edges are … pale blue.”
And we had become two statues, while the cooker bubbled carelessly, and then he said, “Someone at work went for his eye-test today. He’d told me he was afraid he was going blind. But his problem isn’t caused by any defect in his vision. The optician said, apparently, the problem is becoming universal.”
And then, as if we must, we looked around us, at all and everything: the brown curtains that had been a deep green, and the green trees beyond the windows that were the colour of sludge, yes, even in the evening light — where the blue sky was somehow wrong and the west such a dark and sullen red. In the clear glass bottle the white wine gleamed colourless as water, but the mustard in the jar was mud. And on my hand my gold wedding ring had altered to the dull metal of a tarnished, ancient penny.
“What is it?” I said.
“God knows,” he said. But I don’t think God, if there is God, does know either, any more than the rest of us.
We all comprehend by now, or I assume most of us must do. It’s worldwide after all. Hardly anyone talks about it. Aside from very young people like yourself, who never watched it happen. It’s meant a lot of make-overs, home décor, clothing — good for commerce then. Even I had my corn-blonde hair bleached dead white. Better than the stagnant-pond shade it had become. (Like my wedding dress, as you see.) And if no one wants black-brown-blue cabbages and lettuces, or eggs with blind-brown centres, or the quite fresh yet decayed-looking brownish peaches and apricots, there are still things to eat. Apples and tomatoes like an old wound, doughnuts like excrement. The jewel trade suffered. Who buys a topaz? A cut emerald the size of a cat’s (brown/grey) eye, is worth less than nine euro-dollars — less than the price of a bottle of good (stale-tea colour) Pinot Grigio. Or black Merlot.
It’s worse for animals. Those white leopards that lost their camouflage, the brown canaries that stopped breeding and died out — as the leopards and the tigers did. And overhead the Sun is molten white or murky crimson, and the Moon ashes, that sometimes curdle into blood.
Because yellow was a primary colour it didn’t die alone. It took green and orange with it, and virtually every other shade lost some nuance or definition. How strange. Who could ever have guessed? They said that some kind of spectrum-microbe caused this. It attacked only that one element, the colour yellow. Nothing dangerous, no need for alarm, can’t harm us. Just … hurts. No, I won’t show you the photos. It affects photographs too, of course. That girl in a brown dress, the brown and bone-white daffodils …
My husband? I’m afraid he died young.
Thank you for your visit. Yes, isn’t it a dramatic sunset?
Apocalyptic, you could say.
Tanith Lee: written more than 90 books, nearly 300 short stories, four radio plays and two episodes of science-fiction series Blake’s 7. Is married. Has cats.
A Good Time
Shelly Li
Whenever he got drunk, my old man would tell me: “If you’re looking to get married and have kids and a white picket fence, get a girlfriend. If you got a girlfriend when all you’re looking for is sex … you’re overpaying.” Sometimes I wonder if he was the same guy before Ma left him.
Driving down the street, I can feel the car engine humming in my fingertips as I grip the wheel. During the day, I follow the rules and let the car drive itself. It speeds up the traffic, I know. But at night, I love sitting in the driver’s seat, tilting my wrist left and right, and watching the car heed my will. This baby is one of the only things I’ve got to show for five years and counting in investment banking.
Stoplight colours blur together at the speed that I’m going. Everything in my peripherals has long folded into a grey vortex.
Thirty miles later, I find myself downtown, and I ease onto the brake. Cops don’t usually hang around here, but I slow down anyway to enjoy the moment.
The lights, the scarce number that there are on this street, solidify to a standstill. All along the walls, young women line up like prisoners waiting to be decimated. They stand casually, though, a nonchalant shrug in their shoulders, a carefree glint in their eyes. You won’t find a girl more beautiful than one on this street. You also won’t find a real one — real girl, I mean.
Prostitution only became legal after the robotics companies took over the business. It was just more tax money to collect, so the
mayor didn’t seem to mind. Who knows? Maybe the potholes in my neighbourhood were finally fixed last year at the expense of some socially stunted invalid who scheduled daily appointments of sexual therapy?
I pull up by the kerb and roll down my window. Immediately, a pretty little thing steps forward and fills the frame. “Hey there,” she says, the fine tips of her dark hair brushing my left arm. She looks over the inside of my car first, checking to see how much I’ll be capable of paying. Quality and price are adjusted per client. “Whatcha lookin’ for, handsome?”
I open my mouth to tell her that I’m looking for an escape, but all that comes out are the cliché words I’m used to saying. “A good time.”
The woman smiles before slowly raising her head to make eye contact. Her blue-grey eyes are arresting, and looking at them is like viewing the ocean from space, watching drifting silver clouds blanket a massive body of glittering blue. The company, whichever one she belongs to, must have spent extra time producing this model.
Finally she says: “Sorry, not selling that today.” And with that, she backs away from my car and turns to leave.
“Hey, wait,” I call out. For a moment my mind freezes, and I have no idea what to say as she turns around to face me again. Did that just happen? “You’re not allowed to turn me down.”
The woman blinks. “For the next month, I will be. Companies are ordered to regenerate their models.”
Frustration courses through my blood, pent-up anger rising from God knows where.
“Regenerate what? This is not right. I want to speak with your … manager — I mean supervisor — I mean, pimp. Whatever you call him.”
At this the woman lets out a warm and husky laugh. She walks forward and hands me a business card. “Call the number on the card,” she says. “Or you can send a message to customer service.”
I stare blankly at the card between my fingers, shocked and confused and maybe even a little hurt. Sitting in my 760 BMW, window rolled down, a piercing autumn wind seeping through my sweater, Pa’s voice pops into my head. I can just imagine him muttering quietly to me, the scent of Myer’s Rum lacquered to his breath: “Son, you know you’ve reached a new low when a whore tells you no.”
After a long pause, the woman starts to walk away again.
My stomach does a flip, and I call after her. “You selling anything at all?” The desperation in my voice is glaring, one that I cannot seem to control or understand. If I want, I can call up any old college girlfriend and set up a late-night rendezvous. This is about more than sex. If I’m honest, it’s always about more than sex.
The woman sighs, her breath curling up as a silver wisp in the night air. She puts her hands on her hips and turns around, looking annoyed now. It suddenly occurs to me that I do not know whether she can feel or not. Robots can surely reason, so why shouldn’t they be able to feel? I wonder why I never bothered to wonder this before.
“What do you do for a living?” she asks me.
I frown at the question. “I’m an investment banker. Why?”
“Oh, fantastic. This’ll be easy to explain.” She takes a few steps closer to my car, but stays a casual five feet away. “Supply and demand. In order to keep the demand high, the government must limit supply. You and I, we’re all just part of the business, sugar.”
This time, when she walks away, I make no attempt to stop her. Soon she disappears around a corner, becoming a shadow against an adjacent wall, and then a phantom.
I roll my window up and lean back against my car seat. A minute or so passes, and I begin to chuckle at my foolishness. Hitting the side of my steering wheel, I drive off. The lights all blur together again.
The microeconomics of prostitution. Now there’s a class I missed in graduate school.
Shelly Li has published more than 20 short stories. Her first novel, The Royal Hunter, is forthcoming from Philomel Books.
Mortar Flowers
Jessica May Lin
Sometimes in the morning, a single gull would cry, after the mortar shells had rained all night and spilt blood trickled down the alley walls into the sunbaked asphalt.
The Cement Florist boiled jars of coloured resin in the crumbling kitchen of his third-floor apartment, which overlooked the warships in the harbour. He bit a cigar between his teeth as he spooned hot resin out of its jar and let it fall back, occasionally glancing over his shoulder at the neatly made bed with its blue-and-pink-striped quilt.
He had awoken in the middle of the night to gunshots in the cul-de-sac. Another execution. It was at times like these, when he lay alone in the dark and the screams ate into his mind, that he missed her most.
Drawing his brown leather jacket around his shoulders, he set one of his jars under his arm and locked the door.
The alley was filled with cold, pale faces. Eyes open, staring lifelessly past him at the empty mustard gas canisters rolling in the shadows. The concrete had been blasted away by mortar bombs, leaving spiralling, blotched scars that decorated the pavement like bruises.
The Cement Florist opened a jar of hot yellow resin, honeyed vapours rising out of the glass. He slowly poured the contents into the whorled contours of a mortar scar.
Achillea millefolium. The bloodwort flower, once used on the battlefield to staunch a soldier’s bleeding wounds.
* * *
The fires in the Juku Ghetto had finally died, taking the rotting tenements with them.
The Cement Florist stood under the overhang of a destroyed brothel, carrying his jars. The prostitutes glared at him with accusing eyes from where they huddled in the ruins, neglected, lace garters ripped and nails long.
Street urchins ducked in the rain, hugging to their chests the spokes of a broken chandelier they’d hauled out of the river after last night’s flood.
This was where he had first met her, when he sold flowers out of his rusted truck to the working men, for their sweethearts. Things had been different then. Lovers walked with their heads up, and children didn’t fight each other with sticks. There hadn’t been the pasty smell of ashes, which drifted down on the city like snowflakes.
He stepped into the charred street, his face streaked with rain and tears, and fell to his knees. He filled the concrete scars with blue resin, for the urchins’ dirty scarves, wrapped around defunct mortar shells that they’d painted into dolls.
Myosotis scorpioides. The true forget-me-not, for children from whom the war had cruelly robbed their innocence, shivering in the cold and forgotten.
* * *
He used to walk with her in the Hanging Gardens, which now hung limp, brown and wilted from the mustard gas. Waffle crumbs still littered the marble walkways where young lovers once walked through the dappled sunlight, licking ice cream cones.
He’d read a story in the newspaper last week about a boy and a girl who tried to escape on the long bridge that led from the gardens out of the city. The snipers found them before they could taste freedom. Their bodies still lay entwined in the dust, where nobody had bothered to retrieve them.
Standing in the dry shadows of limp, dead ivy, the Cement Florist wondered about what could’ve been — if he had taken her hand and run. If they would be together right now, in this life or the next.
He sighed.
Apple pies and warm Saturday mornings sipping coffee in bed, watching sailing-boats race in the harbour. All these things had been stolen from his fingertips.
Eventually he set the jar of white resin down on the ground, and filled the blotched concrete.
Asphodelis aestivus. The summer asphodel, the flower of the underworld. They say that in the Silent Meadow — the place where all lovers are eventually united — it grows in soft fields, slowly bending in a nonexistent breeze. That’s where he would meet her.
* * *
Back in his apartment, the Cement Florist sat down on the edge of the bed. He lifted the quilt with his blistered hands and breathed in her warm, lavender scent.
The hands of the brass clock hanging
over the sink moved onto the hour.
He looked at the door.
They came when he had known they would.
The gloved men with cold faces, who carried rifles and ordered him to come outside into the street.
He followed them in silence, and thought of white flowers in a sweet-scented field, when they drew a knife across his neck and lay him down on the pavement to bleed.
His heartbeat was the last thing he heard, the sun warm against his skin, when he exhaled for the last time into the musty evening air.
His blood swirled into the concrete scar where a mortar shell had fallen that morning — a bright, flowing red.
Protea cynaroides. The king protea, the oldest flower in the world. One of great strength and courage — for a man who devoted himself to changing suffering into art, to making beauty where it no longer exists, even if no one will ever see it.
Jessica May Lin studies Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, but is currently studying abroad in Beijing, China. When not writing, she is an acrobatic pole dancer. Her website is jessicamaylin.com.
The Stuff We Don’t Do
Marissa Lingen
Dear Uncle Michael,
Thanks so much for taking me for a spin in the time machine! What a great way to spend my sixteenth birthday. It was honestly better than a new car. Versailles and the Mars launch and the flock of velociraptors — I just can’t pick which was the best. They were all the best. Being able to watch Grandma play her favourite Aho symphony before the Minnesota Orchestra broke up. Breathing in the scent of fourth-century Beijing. It was all so amazing, so carefully chosen — almost more of a cultural festival than a birthday. It was like a liberal-arts education with strawberry gelato at the end. I’ve learned so much from you about space, time and the Novikov self-consistency principle in the years since Mum and Dad disappeared and Uncle John died. I really appreciate it.
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