Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (25 page)

Vestigial Girl

written by

Alex Wilson

illustrated by

JACKIE ALBANO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alex Wilson is a writer and actor in Carrboro,
North Carolina.

Earlier in 2012, a dark fantasy comic he wrote won
an Eagle Award, the longest-running of the major comic book industry awards, and
a short comedy film he co-wrote and starred in premiered at an international
film festival in Germany. Alex then signed with a film agent for acting and
finished the year by winning third place in Writers of the Future.

“Vestigial Girl” is Alex's third professional
science fiction sale and his twenty-fifth entry into the contest. Locus
identified him as a “promising new writer” and Publishers Weekly has called one
of his stories “a clever idea executed ably; lots of laugh-out-loud moments and
offbeat humor pepper this fun, inventive romp.” He's had work appear in
Asimov's Science Fiction
and elsewhere.

Alex is currently shopping around a full-color crime
graphic novel, figuring out the difference between stage combat and stunt
fighting, and performing in two indie feature films:
Box Brown
(based on the true story of th
e
man
who shipped himself out of slavery in 1849) and
Bombshell Bloodbath
(based on the theory that audiences enjoy movies about zombies,
guns and women). He's originally from Ohio.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Born and raised in Miramar, Florida, Jackie
Albano has been teaching herself to draw since the age of nine. She grew up
watching cartoons and listening to stories (often adventurous), which were read
to her every night. Jackie knew then that all she wanted to do in life was to
show the fantastical worlds brewing in her imagination. She decided to do this
through illustrations, concept art and comics.

In middle school, Jackie discovered Japanese
animations director Hayao Miyazaki, who creates beautiful animated fantasy
films. Upon watching them, she decided that she would follow Miyazaki into the
world of animation.

Now at the age of 18, Jackie has started her first
year of art school at New World School of the Arts in Miami, Florida, where she
plans to study digital media in the visual arts. At New World she hopes to
create animated shorts and work on projects with fellow animation
students.

Vestigial Girl

T
he cartoon butterflies were sleeping
along the pushlight nursery wallpaper as Charlene fumbled with her cradle's locking
mechanism, using fingers too large and uncoordinated for anything so practical. She
blinked away the fuzziness of the low light—clearing her eyes for less than a
second—and fought against the calming scent of lavender wafting up through her
mattress. She flexed the monster in her throat. She didn't love the feeling, but
would miss such control over at least this one part of her body.

She heard muffled voices in the next room, beyond the transparent gate
of her cradle, beyond the sleeping butterflies. Her fathers were fighting again, and
they'd forgotten to activate the night muffler to hide the sounds. This was a good
thing, this night. Of course they usually didn't check on her again after nine
o'clock, but it usually wasn't so important that she hear them coming if they
did.

Six months ago, Charlene had averaged three hours, forty-four minutes to
open her cradlelock on any given evening; tonight it took her only forty-seven
minutes. She wasn't ready to celebrate that her physical development might finally,
slowly be catching up with that of her mind. She wasn't sure what that meant yet.
She had an idea that it wasn't entirely good news.

Again, she flexed the monster. She was four years old, and the limited
mastery of her throat was still her only material proficiency.

The lock clicked. The cradle gate swung gently open. The voices in the
next room became louder and clearer.

“Calm down, Gary. There's still hope.”

“Think you'll still say that after we've been changing diapers another
twenty years?”

Daddy Oliver was calling Daddy Gary by his given name. That meant he was
upset. When they weren't upset, they called each other
Chum
or
Babe,
terms of affection rather than
identity. She'd figured out all this on her own, from watching, from listening, from
reading. She understood that degrees of isolation and socialization weren't the only
indicators of her potential, and sometimes her fathers did, too. But could
observation,
without interaction,
adequately prepare her
for life? Could she defeat the monster entirely on her own?

By eighteen months—mostly from whispers and entertainment screens and
books her fathers left active where she could see them—Charlene had identified a few
of the big ways she wasn't like others her age. She was smarter and could better
keep her outward displays of emotion in check. But, other than her relationship to
the monster and a small amount of control over the power and timing of her breath
exhalations, she was well behind her peers physically, as though her inner and outer
development were incapable of progressing at the same time.

“…doesn't make her disabled. God, I must've been twelve before
I
could whistle, and even now, I can maybe hit half the
notes she can. And she reads all the time.”

“For all we know, she just stares at the words until we swipe a new page
for her. And I don't know about ascribing too much to the whistling. Maybe she's
just doing that instead of crying.”

“Only you could look at these test scores and take it as all bad. Look
at this! Factoring out reaction times and fine motor skills, her nonverbal reasoning
alone could be—”

“Suddenly off the charts? Sure. And if you also factor out the Troop
test and ability to recognize her own name, she could be Mensa? God, what's more
likely? That she's smarter than either of us, or that the doctors are as clueless as
we are? And maybe, just maybe, those tests only apply to
normal
girls and not whatever random input they might be lucky enough to
get from her if they wait around long enough.”

“Jesus, Gary. Just don't give up on her. That's all I'm saying.”

Charlene tumbled out of the cradle. She dropped to the ocean-themed
carpet below. It had a pattern like the water's surface, and it responded to the low
pushlight of the wallpaper with the appearance of waves pulsing at twenty-second
intervals. It was how she could count time, whenever she could measure by minutes or
hours instead of days. The blue-green motif was intended to calm her constant
fidgets, she supposed. But if she was right, and if she was successful, she would
soon be able to communicate with her fathers in a way they understood. And one of
the first things she would tell them is how the constant suggestion of moving water
all around her encouraged much more frequent peeing, the consequences of which
neither she nor they particularly enjoyed.

The carpet was soft enough to dampen the noise from her fall, but rough
enough to make the skin on her bare legs hot and itchy as she attempted to drag
herself to the play-fort in the corner. (She almost wished she had knee and elbow
pads made from the same smooth and protective surface material of her diaper.) Each
arm and leg eventually did her approximate bidding; she just couldn't coordinate
them to work in unison.

Daddy Oliver had built her fort out of synthetic cardboard shipping
boxes. Charlene had torn out a “floor piece” of the fort and folded that switchboard
panel up into a false wall deep inside her fort, against the actual wall of her
bedroom. This had taken Charlene nine and a half nights.

But even that one-time task was easier than the repetitive practice of
forming words with writing utensils. Each time she picked up a crayon, it was like
learning to hold it anew. And pressing it to a writing surface didn't yet resemble
communication; the equal and opposite reaction from the surface was more likely to
push the crayon out of her hand. At best she could make imprecise and meaningless
dots and smudges before needing to pick up the crayon again. And touchscreens were
even harder: programmed to intuit the most likely user intention based on gesture,
the gap between the user interface's interpretations and her finger movements only
added to the broader gap between those movements and her actual intentions.

Cracking her cradlelock had been less technically challenging than
writing longhand, but, using her tediously slow facility at freeing herself as a
guideline, she guessed it would be another four months at least before she could
write her first simple word with any practical speed or consistency. And that all
assumed her motor skills would continue to develop through puberty, whenever—if
ever—that would come. There were no guarantees that any part of her body, either
organ or appendage, would be immune to obsolescence. Even her fathers suggested this
when they thought she couldn't hear or understand. She was something to be afraid
of. Something new.

Just thirty-one minutes after escaping the cradle, Charlene pushed at
the top of her secret switchboard panel deep inside her fort. Lucky. And luckier
still that it popped loose on the sixth try. She reached behind to grab at the three
prepared components, two of which she'd wrapped in freezer bags over the course of
the last month. She knew she should make a few practice runs with the equipment
before going against the monster. She knew her failure to do so had undermined her
likelihood of survival. But the growing tightness in her vocal folds—the monster's
growing strength—made it worth the risk. If she was to escape the monster's trap,
she couldn't take half a year to get good at it, as she had with escaping the
cradle. She had to beat it tonight or it would have her forever.

“Congratulations, 'Liver. We've created a monster.”

Charlene's hand slipped on the switchboard while working the freezer bags
toward her. The side of her chin banged against the floor. This was called
“hyperbole.” It was the most difficult element of her fathers' speech to identify,
and often the most difficult to hear. Irony. Sarcasm. Exaggeration. Hyperbole. Maybe
after tonight she'd try them out for herself. She could tell her fathers that it
didn't hurt when they said these things. That she knew they didn't mean it.

“Listen to yourself. You know who you sound like.”

“Not the same thing.”

“Right.
Now
you don't sound like him at
all.”

“Yeah. Well.”

“Hate on yourself all you want, Gary. She's still our daughter.”

“Doesn't make me my father.”

Charlene's first bagged component was a barely serviceable endoscope, a
bundle of optic fiber with a lens and light on one end and a backlit OLED on the
other. She'd ripped it from a cheap microscope designed as a science-learning toy,
after it fell apart in Charlene's clumsy hands. It had taken a month to reattach the
inkcell battery.

Months before that it had taken Charlene just as long to arrange block
letters to form the word “grandiloquent” on the nursery floor. It was an uncommon and
difficult derivative of “tardiness,” meaning “slow in speech.” It only repeated one
letter, and she could use the “zero” on a numbers block for the second “O”. If one
word could demonstrate both an advanced grasp of language and an inability to speak
it, she figured that was it.

Her fathers had allowed the completed blocks to sit on the carpet for
two whole days before they put them away without noticing or at least acknowledging
the word. Smaller words, arranged in weeks, then eventually mere days, also failed
to impress her fathers or even get their attention. And she couldn't form them into
phrases fast enough between room cleans.

This would be the third time Charlene half swallowed the endoscope's
lens to get a look at the monster. She'd rinsed the endoscope as best she could
before each previous exploration. The last time, she'd used near-scalding water
before placing it into the freezer bag. This weak sterilization attempt—adventuring
out into the kitchen in the dead of night—had taken her only six nights, but she
still had an itchy, minor burn on her forearm, thanks to the rush.

“Okay, so I hear you saying you think we made a mistake. It's perfectly
natural to doubt—”

“A mistake? No, using that meth-head surrogate would've been a mistake.
What
we
did was a crime against laws not worth putting
into writing because no one ever thought anyone would be so stupid.”

Hyperbole. Exaggeration. Daddy Gary didn't mean it. The sooner she could
ask him to clarify, the sooner he would say so in certain terms.

“God, I can't even talk to you.”

“If only that were true.”

Charlene lay on her belly, tilting her chin up and forward, and sticking
her feet out the fort's entranceway. It afforded her the least amount of involuntary
movement. There was just enough pushlight coming through the cracks between the
switchboard boxes that she could keep time on the patch of carpet where the floor
panel used to be.

She tore open the endoscope's bag (eleven minutes), and shoved it into
her throat (seven and a half minutes). It was a simple motion and it only took
twenty-two failed attempts before she got the device past her teeth and squirming
tongue. On the twenty-third try, she was able to pull her hand away quickly enough
and not let those fat fingers of hers knock it out of place again.

Charlene gagged twice before managing the mild convulsions. She flexed
and held the monster in front of the lens. As her tongue continued to try and wrap
itself around the endoscope, she got the night's first glimpse of the monster in the
backlit OLED.

“I think we made the best choice we could've, given the information we
had.”

“Thank you,
doctor
. And now she's what? The
worst of both of us? God, do you even care?”

When flexed, the monster was a porous flap of gray meat spiderweb out
across her throat passage at the vocal folds. Charlene didn't entirely trust the
color representation of the toy-grade OLED, but she
could
believe the monster was gray. It looked nothing like the few
pictures she'd found and descriptions she'd heard of cysts and other, more common,
throat ailments. It was thin enough for her to wonder where exactly the muscles were
hidden. For all the control she had over the sizes and shapes of the holes through
which the monster graciously allowed air, perhaps the whole thing was a muscle,
strangling her from the inside instead of visibly, the way a normal girl might be
strangled.

When inflexed, the monster disappeared from view, even though she could
feel it pressing flat against the point of the “V” where her vocal folds met. It
didn't restrict her breathing, but the way it smothered the surface of the throat
had to be what prevented her from controlling the rapid changes in air pressure down
there, which was how other children—children who couldn't whistle as she
could—generated normal speech.

It wasn't until after the last specialist visit that Charlene learned to
flex and reveal the monster. From what the doctors had said in front of her, she
later guessed that the inflexed monster was indistinguishable from normal tissue,
hidden from body scans as though designed to do so. They thought her inability to
speak was a problem of emotional development. Perhaps she should have let herself
cry more. She'd been trying to be less of a burden.

Still, Charlene believed her vocal cords were normal and functioning
beneath the monster. She
had
to believe she was a normal
and functioning girl underneath. Or at least she could be so, once her body finished
developing. But she was also sure that the monster was hardening—its muscles
strengthening—and if she waited too long to stop it, she was convinced it would
prevent her from
ever
using them, and ever speaking to
her fathers in a language they could understand.