by Nisi Shawl
Mamo walked towards the hot tub with both Natalie and Scott Lynn Miller in her sights. “I think it’s time for you to go,” she said to them. “Both of you.” She started to reach for them, when there was a terrible boom.
And the sky went dark, like the end of a scene.
The moment before, Roxy was holding Natalie’s hand. But now, in the dark, Natalie held Roxy’s up over her head. Unnatural light pushed through her eyes like flashlights. They lit up her small face, perfect with a symmetry I hadn’t noticed before.
Scott Lynn Miller’s hand rested on my shoulder, heavy and dumb, like a bag of groceries.
I saw the shadows of my family, Tate roaring again with hateful words, Káko Marko lowering Dei to her knees, and my Aunt Gracie with fists by her side. Mamo holding the edge of the hot tub. I saw my sister with her hand held by an alien. We all had our mouths open like hungry babies.
Ω
There are alternate versions of the Lallah Pombo story. Uncle Fatlip’s second wife, Hope, an Austrian Sinti, told a version where Lallah Pombo finds the rain, but when she returns, it is too late and all she has left are the stories of her people and what she has seen.
Other versions say that the rain, or a god or creator or a great sower in the sky, gave Lallah Pombo a choice; she could save her people and be left alone, or die with them. In one telling, her presence itself is what sets the whole world out of balance, but there are a number of other versions in which it isn’t, though she is hung out to dry to protect someone else who actually instigated the crisis. In about a third of the stories, she sacrifices herself to save her people and becomes the rain, or the god or creator and sower, or a star in the sky. In another third, her people sacrifice her to make things right; sometimes she fights to the end. Sometimes she goes willingly.
Ω
The ship was above us, but we couldn’t see it. Instead, that darkest dark pushed down like a low ceiling while the air rubbed on us with a heavy, woolen charge. The truck and Tate’s van honked together like a chorus of metal ducks, and “Free Bird” flipped on and off from Roxy’s laptop, over in the ofisa: “…must be travelin’ on now…”
Mamo understood. “They came,” she said. “I can’t believe they came.” She looked at me, alarm coming off her skin like a fever. “They came to take you.”
“We did,” Natalie said. Her voice was large and merged together with the light from her eyes to become a thing in and of itself. “But now we are taking Roxana.”
“…places left to see…”
Roxy snatched her hand back from Natalie and cradled it like a burn. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Taking me?”
“I asked if you would come home with me.”
“You trapped me,” Roxy said. “You lied.”
“I didn’t lie,” Natalie answered. “I came for her, but fell in love with you.”
“…you, girl…”
“It wasn’t planned,” Natalie continued. “But this project was designed with a rigorous desire for experiential knowledge. That requires loose margins.” Natalie reached again for Roxy’s hand, but she wasn’t quite ready to give it again.
“…free as a bird now…”
Mamo wailed, Tate roared. Scott Lynn Miller clamped down on me with unexpected power and asked, terrified, “What is going on?”
I’d forgotten he was there. I slapped off his arm like it was a mosquito. The thing, Natalie’s voice and light, hovered before me. It waited for me to say something, but I leaned around it and gazed at Natalie herself. The geometry of her face, the exaggerated pyramid of her fingers. I didn’t see it but I hadn’t been looking.
“We wouldn’t take both,” Natalie said to Mamo. “That is too cruel.”
“I wasn’t expecting this,” Mamo said. “Not like this.”
“No one was,” Natalie said.
Our father came behind Mamo and held her shoulders. “You can’t have her,” he hissed, at Natalie, at the light.
Roxy took Natalie’s hand again. “I’m not yours to give, Tate,” she whispered.
“And this bird you cannot change…”
“Kizzy is as human now as anyone,” Roxy said. She kissed Natalie’s hand. “I’m the alien.”
“Lord knows, I can’t change.”
Ω
There is never a way to say goodbye. Roxy threw herself into my arms last. “Rovli,” she whispered.
Then she stood next to Natalie and looked, one last time, at all of us.
I couldn’t watch so I looked at the ground. The unicorn lay exactly where I’d sat the night before. I swooped for it and threw it at my sister, just as the light curled around them.
The unicorn bounced off the tube of light, and I caught it and yelled for Roxy. A hand—my sister’s? Natalie’s?—waved through the light like it was clearing away cobwebs, and I pushed the toy into the hand. It clasped the unicorn and pulled it in. Then they were gone.
We stood in the yard for a long time. We looked up until our necks ached, and then a little longer.
Scott Lynn Miller broke the silence. “I don’t know what happened here tonight and I want some answers.” He grabbed my arm. “What are you?” Rage and confusion made him careless, and he twisted at me, clasping hard on my battered hands.
“What are you?” he asked again and again, snatching at whatever he could of me. “What are you?”
I ducked him as best I could, but he kept coming. Tate stepped between us and picked up Scott Lynn Miller in his big hands and slammed him once against the side of the hot tub. If it’d been anyone else, the crack would have made me sick. Tate dropped him like a sack onto the dirt and broken flowers.
“What is she?” Scott Lynn Miller asked, his voice barely a whisper. He tried to find his bones and joints and push himself up.
Tate shoved him back down with his foot. “She’s my little girl,” he answered. “Now get the hell out of here.”
I didn’t watch him leave. I only know he did, muttering and confused. Tate stood between Mamo and I, his arms around us, as we all watched the sky again. Eventually, Gracie brought us out glasses of water.
I took the water from Gracie like I was coming out of a long dream. She stood next to me while I drank, and after a while she took my hand. She turned it over carefully and pulled up the bandages to look at my palms. “Kizzy,” she said. “When these cuts heal, there’s going to be deep lines.”
Ω Ω Ω
Afterword: “Free Bird” is a section of a novel in progress, which follows an alien invasion of Earth, told from multiple viewpoints, including Kizzy, an alien test subject, who we meet here; Natalie, an alien sent to retrieve Kizzy, who falls in love with Kizzy’s sister; and Scott Lynn Miller, security guard and part-time father, who takes his knowledge of alien presence to paranoid new levels.
Impulse
Mary Elizabeth Burroughs
A table moved itself. But no one noticed because the paralyzed teenagers began to move at the same time.
It was dawn, a Monday morning, and peculiarly crisp and cool for Florida in July. Nurse Ida Winstone had just finished administering Devon’s respiratory meds via his nebulizer when his sleeping roommate, Costas, a quadriplegic, scratched his nose. Ida was wiping down his mouthpiece when she caught sight of the movement. She froze, dismissing the vision as something induced by fatigue. Oh, she knew better than to trust the things she thought she saw at the tail end of a night shift. But then Costas raised his baby-like balled fist to his nose, uncurled a finger, and poked.
Nurse Ida shrieked.
Costas Kosmakos had been paralyzed from the neck down since a diving accident at Tarpon Springs that occurred when he was eight years old. Yet there sweet-eyed Costas was, scratching his nose after eight years of needing his attendants to do everything for him.
Devon Miller, 17, reflective, lower spine crushed after being accidentally struck by his grandmother’s ancient Ford Taurus in Memphis, Tennessee, was propped up in bed and wheezing out the last of the foul aerosolized
meds from his own nebulizer treatment. “You’re awful loud this morning, ma’am,” Devon said.
Nurse Ida stared at Costas.
Devon followed her gaze and, finally seeing what she saw, laughed. “Costas, you’re moving!”
Costas grunted, too stubborn to wake, and turned over to face the wall. Entirely on his own.
“Bro, seriously—wake up, you’re moving!” Devon was shaken but gleeful at the sight of his sleeping roommate’s unexpected movement. He began applauding and kicking his feet—the sort of movement he’d last made when he was a five-year-old. It was a movement of essential delight, like kicking and clapping his hands over Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street. Devon looked down at his legs but was too struck to say anything, after ten years of feeling like a boulder in his family’s way and then two years at the facility. He looked over to Nurse Ida for some small confirmation of what he was seeing, for her to tell him that it was, indeed, true.
All Nurse Ida could manage was a shake of her head. Her mouth hung open. Ida felt somehow defeated by her inability to comprehend why, let alone how, two paralyzed teen-aged boys could spontaneously exhibit signs of full mobility. She silently watched as Costas Kosmakos tossed and turned and Devon Miller lifted his legs.
With all the commotion within room 11, no one noticed the liveliness of Devon’s comforter. It flicked its corner up, then down. It was excited, too. A magazine on the desk fluttered open its pages to a UNICEF advertisement. A water pitcher sitting in a puddle of condensation glided slightly to the right. The Luke Skywalker-as-Stormtrooper action figure sitting on the edge of Costas’s proximity shelf took off its tiny white helmet, set it on its lap, and looked out at the room. Neither Nurse Ida, Devon Miller, Costas Kosmakos, nor anyone else in Liberty Shores Boarding School for the Disabled may have been registering various objects’ tiny movements, but the objects were registering theirs.
≈
Classes, of course, were cancelled for the day. The phenomenon of the newly mobile students took precedence over routine. It was not just Costas Kosmakos and Devon Miller who could now move, it was all of the Liberty Shores boarding school’s paralyzed students.
The deaf and blind teens spent most of their day in the lounge with tentative smiles on their faces. They played games of gin rummy, the deaf in a group with regular cards and the blind in their own group with Braille cards. As each and every one of them spread their cards out, they wondered if anything would happen to them, too.
The vinyl loveseat observed.
School support staff phoned parents to update them on their children’s changed conditions. Had this been the doing of Liberty Shores’ unimpeachable medical staff? Had Costas (or Devon, or any of the other 46 formerly mobility-impaired students) worked exceptionally hard in physical therapy sessions this quarter? Parents asked whatever question came to mind. “We simply don’t understand,” they’d bleat. “We’ll be consulting with a team of specialists so as to determine the root cause, and we’ll share any information we discover,” was all the support staff could reply before hanging up.
How things could just change in an instant, marvelled the receptionist.
No one on staff thought to phone the other facilities for the disabled nearby. The office manager would have, had she not been away vacationing in the Keys. If the school had not been in quiet panic mode they would have quickly discovered that they were not the only place housing especially lively charges.
Most of the newly mobile students practiced walking outdoors. Several attendants and volunteers trailed behind them in case the students’ legs weren’t as sturdy as they appeared. Some volunteers were teenagers like the students, and had been called in that afternoon and evening for “the situation,” as administration was calling it. The volunteers occasionally huddled up, chirping about how hot this or that student was now that their face wasn’t twisted up in anguish. To think that the Liberty Shores kids were just like them!
But then a sharp wind from high over the Gulf of Mexico gusted in, and dusk arrived.
The teens moved more boldly on their last laps along the lawn, aware that they were growing famished from these new ambulatory efforts and even yearning to devour the cafeteria’s gelatinous jambalaya, moist chicken fingers, and by-the-box carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Stomachs groaned. Leg muscles ached.
April Wyatt, 16, hair hot-combed, eyebrow pierced, haughty, and formerly a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic, called out to ask whether the umbilical cord between herself and her matronly part-time attendant Jaime Velasquez had finally been cut when something else struck her as…wrong.
Just above the horizon, a plane dropped, falling out of the dusky sky.
April squinted. “Holy shit, Jaime—did I just see that?” She whirled around in order to grab her attendant’s hand, but Jaime, for once, wasn’t there.
Liberty Shores’ attendants and teen volunteers had collapsed to the ground, and they were not moving. Not in the least.
“Jaime?” April asked. She dropped to her knees and reached out for Jaime’s pudgy hand, which was draped over someone else’s face.
The attendants’ and volunteers’ eyes darted around frantically searching for a sight to focus on while the rest of their bodies remained as unmoving as dusty mannequins in a storage closet.
A traffic helicopter crashed a quarter of a mile outside Liberty Shores’ brick wall. Rich scents of gasoline inflamed the students’ noses. April patted her arms, her chest, in search of some comforting tick, though she had none, as she’d never had the opportunity to develop any. She’d been paralyzed from the neck down for most of her life.
The students stood there, able to move, but not knowing where to go, what to do, or whom to cling to.
≈
Nearly all objects made by humans or worried over by people’s fingers fidgeted of their own accord by sundown. The objects moved as the paralyzed teenagers first moved. In fits.
Outside Liberty Shores, a fallen pedestrian woman’s bra unhooked itself and slithered from underneath the woman’s shirt. It paused and patted her on the lips. Not to worry, not to worry. The woman wanted to scream. All she could manage to do was blink, breathe, and then saturate her panties with urine. The panties instantly twisted themselves to get away. The lacy, nude-colored bra crumpled and extended its length, inch-worming away across the street.
Plastic grocery bags jumped into the wind, riding the static-charged gusts out to sea.
Inside the home of a young couple, wind from an open window swayed a photo mobile hung over their infant’s crib. Large black-and-white photographs of the mother (when she was pregnant, finally, after three unsuccessful in vitro attempts) and of the father (wearing his bachelor goatee) dangled from the photo mobile’s clasps. It had been the mother’s idea, the photo mobile. This way, the baby could be comforted by images of the family when she woke up throughout the night.
The photo mobile twitched awake in the cool evening air, opening its small metal clasps. The photographs, equally lively, fluttered down and into the crib, then at once sprang up again. The black-and-white images of the parents balanced on their edges, sensing that something was off—something besides their being able to move, to sense, to consider. Each photograph slowly pinwheeled over to the baby, who had yet to stir. They stuck their corners into the baby’s chubby legs, trying to prod it awake, but the baby didn’t respond to the photographs’ worried nudges.
Pale dashes imprinted themselves on the baby’s dark skin.
Annabelle Reece Spalding, a hearty nine pounds and seven ounces, was not going to move. Not only had she been paralyzed when the sun went down, like all other able-bodied persons, but her small heart had shorted-out due to the strange electric burst accompanying the paralysis. It had ceased beating.
The befuddled photographs, however, did not know this. They kept vigil over Annabelle’s body while her now-paralyzed parents lay wide awake one room away. The baby monitor, which connected to the receiver in Annabelle’s parents’
room, only sputtered static. The new parents had no clue that their child was dead, let alone any idea of what was happening to them.
The photo mobile did. But because it had never done anything before, it had no idea what it should do now. So it chose to spider up its fishing line and run away from such decisions.
Outside, garbage cans frantically rolled around, emptying their contents. Clumps of like items grouped themselves together.
A wandering state-of-the-art, Japanese-manufactured sex doll looked around. Her name was Selma, and she registered that most every formerly inanimate thing was struggling to move or successfully wandering wherever the inclination took it.
Selma’s velvet leopard print belt began to rebel, so she knelt down and yanked it out of her shorts’ loops. She put the belt to the ground and it rubbed its buckle over her ankle in deep gratitude.
Trembling wads of used handkerchiefs creased with snot stumbled over and swiped themselves across her silicone toes. Marbles with children’s chocolaty fingerprints smudged upon their surfaces rolled over to Selma and rubbed her heels. Sopping wet sweatpants crawled out of the ditch, ready to embrace her. She was so like a person! So like a person, yet so attentive!
A clump of ill-used Barbies destined for a local charity climbed out of their cardboard box. They spotted Selma. Some tiptoed her way, gathering at her feet like puppies huddling under their mother. The other Barbies remained near the box and clutched each other, burying their faces in each other’s glossy synthetic hair, afraid to move on their own. Some stray Greek worry beads clacked up and down, hopping really, in their desperate need to reach her delicate fingers and be stroked by her.
So many things were coming over to touch or rub her, it made Selma feel she must pause and receive them as a dignitary. She waited as the parade of objects queued, and she raised her hands in welcome. How things can change all of a sudden, she thought. How things can suddenly be different forever.
Dancing in the Shadow of the Once
