Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (26 page)

“Leave the dishes.”

“No, I'll do them.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“I said I'll do them. Jesus.”

The second bagged component was a sliver of shaving mirror, attached at
an angle to the hollow casing of a steel pencil. She'd patterned it after a
professional dental mirror. She'd broken both her fathers' shaving mirrors before
identifying a fragment small and safe enough to use.

Though the edges were sharper than she would have liked and it was the
most difficult to assemble originally, this component was the easiest of the three
to position once she got it out of the bag (twelve minutes) and beyond her lips
(five minutes). She inserted it past her teeth, and let the mirror end simply slide
toward the back of her mouth. She remembered the proper position by the specific
discomfort of the placement: tickling but not quite triggering her gag reflex. Just
six small nudges and it nestled into the right spot.

“Have you calmed down?”

“I'm calm.”

“You don't look calm.”

“Would you rather I
be
calm or
look
calm?”

The third and final component was a small laser, about the size of her
fist. It was the heart of a kitchen toaster-slicer with the protective casing and
mirrors removed. Charlene had spent three days disconnecting a wire without
permanently damaging the machine. Then she waited until her fathers tossed the whole
thing into the disposal before stealing it away into her fort. It had been the
longest, most physically exhausting night of her life. Until tonight.

She slowly, gently wiggled both herself and the laser into remeasured
places inside the fort, limiting her movement and maximizing the likelihood that any
movement she
would
make would be small and, given time
to correct her many mistakes, deliberate. She opened her mouth as wide as she
thought she could hold it, and approximately aimed the laser toward the center of
the mirror at the cusp of her throat. The laser would take ten seconds or so to
slice through and gently toast a bagel positioned a few millimeters from the beam's
source. At a distance of about thirty centimeters, and with the impurities in the
mirror, she hoped it would diffract enough that it would require at least a few
extra seconds' concentration to do more than heat up its target. Charlene counted on
this, that she would have time to adjust the position of the beam before she cut
into the wrong thing.

Lying on her belly, Charlene stared forward at the endoscope's OLED. She
hadn't the coordination or the skill or the even the best tools to defeat the
monster. All she had, all she ever had, was endless time alone. She'd done nothing
but prepare for this battle for a significant percentage of her life. If she failed
tonight, it was because she'd
already
failed a day or a
week or many months ago.

She reached for the laser's power button. This would take a while.

“Look, yes, fine. I'd do it again. Okay?”

“Do what, Gary?”

“Have a child with you. Ours. From both of our DNA. Charlene. Yes.
Knowing the risks.”

“I suppose you think that makes you less of an ass?”

“I was hoping.”

Almost half her lifetime ago, Charlene had seen an older girl at a
support group for parents of cloned dependents. Like Charlene and a few of the other
kids at the meeting, this girl had seemed physically undeveloped. Her hair was thin
and patchy. She had little apparent control over her motor skills.

Still, Charlene had thought this girl interesting because she had
whistled softly throughout the adults' discussion. At first it had seemed random, as
uncontrolled as most of the things Charlene's body did. Then Charlene realized the
girl's lips weren't pursed or otherwise positioned to whistle, at least in the ways
Charlene understood whistling worked. And when the girl caught Charlene's eyes and
began to whistle louder, even generating two or three notes at once, Charlene got
the impression that this girl was trying to get her attention.

Later Charlene learned just how impossible it was for the typical human
whistle to produce double-stops in the
mouth,
much less
in the throat. And when still later she learned to flex her own monster and to
whistle with just as much complexity, she wished she could go back to that meeting
and find out whether this older girl, too, had a monster and two fathers who argued
behind muffled doors. And were there others?

Charlene wondered whether her (or their?) ability to hit two or more
notes simultaneously meant she could eventually create complex chords. She could
imagine using this to communicate with others like herself: individual notes as an
alphabet, musical chords and dissonance as words or phrases. She could imagine it
might be her responsibility to invent a language, if there were more children out
there like them, and if that older girl hadn't started already on developing such a
language. How wonderful it would be to talk to someone, no matter how much time or
effort it took. How wonderful to be part of something. Maybe they weren't even
human. Evolution—at least as she understood it—didn't work that way. It was more
random and much slower than that. But maybe they were
better
than human, and that was the point of all of this. Something new
in their fathers' eyes. Foreign, which didn't have to mean “grotesque.”

But Charlene didn't know the older girl's name or the likelihood she
would ever see her again. Could she ask her fathers after tonight? Would her fathers
even remember that meeting, one of so many they attended? For that matter, would
there no longer be a point in meeting that girl, after tonight? After Charlene
destroyed her own monster once and for all?

Charlene had to work with what she had. Her vocal cords might be trapped
beneath the monster, but at least she would still get to keep them. On her present
course, as a whistler, her normality was obsolete, as useless as the human tailbone
or the wings of a flightless bird. It was trapped there to tease her with what she
wouldn't have. At best her vocal cords would stay that way, dormant, and the most
she could hope for was to become a part of that whistling world instead of the world
of her fathers, unless she did something about it.

She did it.

She switched on the laser.

“You mind? I'm reading.”

“You can't read in bed?”

“I'll be there in a minute, Babe.”

“Will you check on that thing we created first?”

“The…You're right. I shouldn't have said those things. I was tired. God,
I just shouldn't have.”

“Don't cry, babe. It's okay.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Thank you for saying so. Will you?”

“Yes. Jesus.”

Charlene seared the monster near its base. Lucky. Lucky so far. She kept
it flexed, in the path of the laser beam, almost colorless and blinding, it was so
white and bright. It illuminated her throat in ways the fiber optics and OLED never
could and, to add to the confusion, created dozens of new shadows to further tax her
focus.

She could feel her internal temperature rise, either from the heat or
the nervousness. She could feel her body wanting, struggling to move. The sizzle
inside of her began to drown out most other sound except for the laser's whir. So
close to her head and with nothing else to mitigate it, the toaster laser had never
seemed so loud. She was sensitive to the growing dryness in her throat, even as the
area around the incision dampened with blood where the laser's heat failed to seal
the wound. Where
Charlene
failed to seal the wound.

The incisions stung, but the pain was more bearable than she'd expected.
To Charlene, this was further evidence that the monster was not a part of her, and
didn't belong inside her. It smelled like cooking meat, and, after everything,
that's all it was and ever would be.

“Chum?”

“I said I'm going.”

Charlene heard her father's footsteps and then the door open. She tried
to remain still. Just a few more seconds (minutes? hours?) and she would completely
sever the monster. And then she'd need a few additional to finish heating and
closing the wound. And then? Infection—and how right or wrong she was about
everything in the world—would be all she had left to worry about.

She became aware at how long she'd been staring at the backlit OLED. She
tried to glance away and blink the strain out of her eyes. Then she had to blink
again when she saw the nursery light spilling through the cracks in the
switchboard.

Charlene imagined what she must look like, lying on her stomach and legs
stuck out of her fort. Would Daddy Gary think she was dead? She didn't dare move
with the laser firing down her throat.

“Char?”

She remained motionless. The monster bled. Her throat bled. The pain was
real now. The monster dangled from less and less flesh. Stinging sweat replaced the
strain in her eyes.

“Char, are you okay?”

She risked jerking her foot—luckily, successfully—very slightly to tell
him, yes, she was okay. She hoped it would be enough. Nothing she could get her body
to do was ever enough.

“Answer me, Charlene.”

Her given name. It didn't always mean anger with her as it did between
her fathers. But it wasn't helping.

Less than a millimeter of tissue now held the monster to her. She was
sure of it. It dangled from the roof of her throat. The bleeding obscured her view,
but she was so close that she should have just been able to reach in and yank it
off, had she smaller hands and any semblance of control over them.

The floorboards bent beneath her belly, beneath the carpet, as her
father was surely stepping toward the fort.

“You stuck in there? Come on out, buddy.”

And then the monster fell. It fell loose in her throat. She felt herself
convulse in a choke as it pressed against the side of her windpipe.

She was almost free, but the monster wasn't finished with her. It wanted
to strangle her or drown her in her own blood. Before anything else, she needed to
refocus the laser to cauterize the incision. But she had no monster left to flex,
nothing to reposition in front of the laser. She tried to tilt her neck, but her
movements were too big and unpredictable. She couldn't even find the beam on the
OLED. The laser was missing the mirror entirely.

Two hands grabbed her feet. Daddy Gary yanked her out of the fort,
gently but quickly.

“Charlene?”

Charlene grasped at the laser, bumping it onto its side, as her father
dragged her backwards. He flipped her over. The monster sank deeper into her
windpipe.

When her face cleared the fort's entrance, Charlene met her father's
wide eyes.

“The hell is that in your mouth?! Oliver, get in here!”

She coughed and gagged up blood as her father retracted the mirror-stick
and endoscope from her throat. She felt a slight cut on the roof of her mouth. Then
she couldn't cough anymore. The monster was stuck somewhere deep, and it wasn't
going to let her go.

“Oh Jesus. Is that blood? Ollie! Ambulance! Call an ambulance! I think
she swallowed something sharp!”

In a swift move, he stood Charlene upright and squatted behind her. He
reached around her abdomen. With the heel of his palm he pressed inward and upward.
Then he repeated the thrust, less gently.

“C'Mon!
C'Mon!”

It wasn't working. The monster had won. Charlene managed to crudely
shake her head, but her father was unlikely to recognize it as anything but one of
her random spasms.

Her father picked her up again. She no longer knew where the monster was
inside her body (inside a lung?), but she burned with the realization that she'd
lost. She'd never be free. The monster would rather they both die than let her
go.

Daddy Gary sat, his legs out ahead of him, and then he lay her face down
over his knee. He gave her a gentle whack on the back. Then a harder one.

Charlene stared at the floor, at her bent and broken instruments. The
sliver of mirror was no longer attached to the steel pencil. Had that adhesive
failed inside her throat, she wouldn't even have made it this far.

At her father's third whack, the monster came up into Charlene's mouth.
It caught between her teeth and tongue. She could feel her mouth working, wanting to
re-swallow it on instinct. She forced a cough instead, then a successful spit, and
with a wet sound the monster collapsed to the carpet, smothering the
Sign Language for Toddlers
OLED book cover of his tablet,
which Daddy Gary must have brought into the room with him. If only she could touch
and swipe the pages and point at the words that would tell him how sorry she felt.
How thankful. How loved.

Outside her throat, bloody and naked and piled on the floor, the monster
looked like the throwaway stuff her fathers would trim off their chicken before the
marinade. It wasn't her. It didn't even look like it was
from
her. It wasn't a part of this family, and it never belonged inside
of her.

ILLUSTRATION BY JACKIE ALBANO