Hortencia showed up at my front door one day carrying her baby boy. “Here,” she said. “I need you to take him.”
“What, me?” I said. “Why?” I hadn’t seen her in over three months, not since Oliver was born.
“There are killer robots chasing me.” She dropped him into my arms, and Oliver wailed in protest, a thin sound like dented tin. Panic gripped my chest. What was I supposed to do? I knew nothing about babies!
“That’s good,” Hortencia said brightly over his cries. “You’re a natural.”
“What do you mean, killer robots?” I said, holding him stiff in my arms as he howled.
“They’re big, and they’re following me,” she said. She dropped a diaper bag with green and blue frogs from her shoulder onto my front step. “I left two bottles of breast milk in there.”
“Wait, Tency! Maybe I should fight the robots off for you.” I’m very good with grass spells. I can enchant each blade to make it reach up and pull apart a robot by its screws.
“No, no. I’ve got it. Thanks, Moonbeam!” she told me and turned to go.
I looked down at Oliver. Hortencia had swaddled him in a plain brown blanket that made me think of the sack they tie around the roots of a small tree when they’re trying to move it from one house to another. He looked fragile and tender, like it would take no more than a flick of the wrist to dig him up.
I thought about dropping him on my doorstep next to the bag with the frogs and running after Hortencia to fight the robots with her, like a real witch. Or I could just stuff Oliver in the mailbox. He was the perfect size for it, after all.
But what would Hortencia say?
Well. I was, after all, a witch. We witches work our will on living things, and Oliver was a living thing. I’d have to manage.
Unhappily, I brought Oliver into my small house, where he didn’t stop crying for hours. Finally, in a fit of desperation, I gave him a broken toaster I’d been using for a doorstop. He fell asleep hugging the metal casing like a teddy bear, drooling into the slots. That was all right with me. I don’t care for electrical contraptions, even simple ones like that. I shouldn’t have even had it lying around.
Tency returned victorious two days later, missing one of her teeth. “Thanks, Moonbeam,” she lisped airily through the gap as she took up Oliver once again. She didn’t look him over tenderly the way I expected. She wasn’t even upset about the toaster. Instead, she pried it from the bewildered, angry clutch of his fingers and marched off, her steps quick and light as if he were only half there.
Hortencia had regrown her missing tooth by the time she brought Oliver to my door again six weeks later. By the time he turned two, I’d become an old hand at watching him. Always, she’d drop by without warning, Oliver in tow. “It’s only one robot this time,” she’d say. “I’ll destroy it and come right back. Maybe an hour or two?”
“But Tency, I was about to turn my neighbor into a rat! I’ve been preparing for it all week, you know that.”
“Please, Moonbeam. You’re so good with him. I can’t trust anybody else.” It was hard to say no to her. She was just that kind of witch, the kind we all envied and admired.
I’d begun collecting odds and ends for Oliver to play with when the robots attacked, little tidbits I thought might catch his attention. I made a set of little toy soldiers out of straw and pecan shells that I enchanted to walk around the floor and keep him entertained while I worked. They fell apart when he poked them, though, and he ignored them after five minutes.
“Bow-bot!” he exclaimed when he found the old rotary phone I’d enchanted to place its calls without electrical currents or telecommunications companies. I wouldn’t have kept it in my house otherwise. Wires are so sharp and ugly, like vines that won’t do what I tell them. Besides, electricity gives me a migraine.
“No, Oliver,” I scolded. “That’s not a robot! Don’t say that!”
“Bow-bot,” he said, unconvinced. He grabbed the receiver and smacked it against the side of my iron pot. Clang, clang, clang! He giggled. When Oliver laughed, it was like a meadow full of toads hopping this way and that. I suppose I should have taken the receiver away, but I let him keep it a few minutes longer. It kept him happy.
Years before, when Hortencia discovered she was pregnant, everyone thought it was a bad idea, especially me. She sat in my little house that night, a cup of bitter tea in her hand and tears streaking down her cheeks like jail bars. To tell the truth, I was flattered she’d come to me of all people. It showed what good friends we were. “Our lives are all wrong for taking care of a baby,” I reminded her, as gently as I could. “We’re sisters of the darkness, Tency.”
“I’ll make it work,” she insisted. “I can give birth under a full moon. I’ll find a crow to midwife, and the baby will be a witch, just like me.”
“I don’t think you get to choose those kinds of things.”
“I do,” Tency said, affronted. “If I can make the trees dance, I can do this!”
“I thought we were going to go on wild adventures together,” I said. “We were going to cast our magik to reanimate the dead! Isn’t that what we always planned?” She’d talked for years about how we’d create a host of undead servants to do our bidding, and I’d been looking forward to it.
“We still can,” she told me. “We will! Just wait and see.”
Once Oliver was born, of course, she discovered I was right.
Hortencia tried to be a good mother, I’m sure of it. It was hard for her, though. She was the kind of witch who was best untethered, free to dance with satyrs at midnight, or to travel on the wind for days. And it’s not as if tossing out her wand would have solved everything. Some people are too much themselves to be a parent to a child who’s not like them. Tency was too wild and fierce to make room in her life for who Oliver turned out to be. She loved him savagely, but she could only see what she thought he should become.
Once, Hortencia came to fetch Oliver while still holding in her hand the arm of the robot she’d destroyed that day. It was more of a claw than a hand, with enough springs and visible wires to make my teeth ache. It wasn’t nearly as elegant as a flayed limb. Two steel rods made a forearm that shifted as the claw opened and closed.
“Robot!” Oliver cried, reaching.
I pulled his hands away. By then he was too big to carry. “Tency!” I said, aghast. “Why do you still have that with you? Put that away before someone sees!”
“I wanted Oliver to understand why Mommy keeps leaving him with Moonbeam.” She held it up to him with a grotesque insistence and gave it a shake. The vicious claw flopped to the side with a clunk. “Look at this disgusting thing, Oliver. Look!”
He studied it with wide, fascinated eyes.
“Who’s sending these robots, Tency?” I asked. “Have you ever wondered about that?”
“Probably some mad scientist,” she said breezily, blowing a lock of wild hair out of her bruised face. The day’s fight had left her with a rosy afterglow. “You know how they are.”
I didn’t know how they were, and I didn’t understand why it was always Tency the robots attacked. Why didn’t they come for any of the rest of us? I made a perfectly respectable target, too.
“No, Oliver,” I said again, pulling his hands away from the robot arm. He’d nearly seized the elbow, where a crusty, black vintage knob, just like the ones on my oven, held the joint together. My head ached just looking at it.
“Come on, Oliver. Let’s go home,” Hortencia said, tossing the arm into the open garbage bin by my front steps. It landed with an ear-splitting racket. He cried out in distress like she’d just thrown out his favorite toy.
I didn’t like the idea of Oliver leaving with her in this state. “He could stay here a bit longer, if you need some time,” I offered cautiously. It surprised me to discover that I’d have liked that.
“Beam-beam!” Oliver said. He grabbed my leg with both arms in an effort to stay.
“No, we should go,” said Hortencia, taking Oliver’s hand in hers and pulling him with her. But for a moment, she looked back with a disturbed frowned, only then considering if maybe the answer should have been different.
It would have been strange if she’d said yes. Oliver wailed as she dragged him away.
Back then, Oliver was small and tenacious, like a seedling from a stray acorn. He was sweet, too, always climbing into my lap and reaching for my tea. Then, without warning, he grew into a stubborn little sapling, the kind with angry roots that don’t easily quit.
I came home one day to find him at my kitchen table, the pieces of the old rotary phone strewn across the gingham tablecloth. Hortencia had taken to sending him to my house after school. “What are you doing?!” I said.
He scowled at me, the gaps in his teeth pink and fresh where his front teeth had fallen out. I’d asked Tency to save me one or two baby teeth for a charm I’d make to keep him safe, seeing as how the robots kept coming. I suppose she forgot, just like with our plans to reanimate the dead.
“I wanted to see what’s inside,” Oliver said in his raspy little voice. Even as a boy, his voice was rough like the bark of an old oak tree.
“I’m a witch. I don’t keep wires in my house,” I told Oliver. “You know that.”
“But they were in your telephone!” he said.
“At least I didn’t have to look at them!” I snapped. Standing this close to the wires, I could feel a migraine coming on.
Oliver’s eyes widened in surprise. I had never shouted at him before. His small hand tightened around the rotary dial, and he laced his fingers through the ugly spiral of that plastic cord. His face puckered against his will.
“Oh, don’t cry,” I said. “Fine, fine. Just take it outside.”
Wiping his nose with the back of his wrist, he quickly scooped up the pieces of the phone in his arms. For the rest of the afternoon, he picked apart the little machine and laid each component out on the uneven bricks of my patio where I liked to conjure my dandelions and centipedes. One by one, he built neat and tidy stacks of wires, springs, bells, and switches. He linked them together in all sorts of terrible ways, then pulled them apart again, the same way I do with frogs and snakes. It was terrible. Disgusting, really… but Oliver was very clever with them. It was hard not to watch.
Most people would be scared to hear their back door slam open and shut in the middle of the night, but not me. I could always turn a burglar into a cricket and twist his back legs off, if I felt like making the effort. In any case, I knew it was just Oliver, coming to hide at my house after another fight with Tency. It happened more the older he got. Stomp, stomp, stomp. He’d come inside then flop his tubby, teenage body down on the old sofa to sulk. I kept a set of bedsheets out for him, for those nights when he needed someplace to go.
By then, Oliver was in freefall. He wanted nothing to do with witchery or spellcraft, no matter how much Hortencia pushed him. Instead, he’d run away from her with wires and circuitry dangling from his pockets and show up at my house, even though he knew I hated the sight of them. It was like he couldn’t help it, like he needed to show me all his little inventions.
“She won’t even let me see the robots who keep attacking her!” Oliver complained one night when he’d stormed away from Hortencia after yet another argument.
“She only wants to keep you safe,” I pointed out as I brewed a pot of tea for us. I was secretly glad when he showed up at my house, wires and all. At least then I knew he was safe.
“I could make an alarm to warn her. That way, when the robots come, she could just destroy them already and then come home again.”
“Could you do that?”
He explained it all to me, every last transistor and relay. I tried my best to feign interest, even though it all made me feel queasy. I felt he should stop all his fiddling and show some respect. But I let him talk. After, he slept on the sofa, his bulk weighing down the whole house like an anchor.
Not long after Oliver turned eighteen and moved away, we lost touch. For a time, Oliver wrote me letters. Yes, real letters. See, he had begun to show a little consideration! No buzzing or beeping, just simple paper from dead trees, arriving at my house. He told me about all his community college courses in electrical engineering and astrophysics and lots of other things I would have preferred not to know about. Then, after a time, even the letters stopped. That was a shame, but I told myself he’d outgrown me and tried not to let myself feel so disappointed. It wasn’t worth getting sad if I couldn’t conjure him back.
Hortencia and I had drifted apart long before that. I imagine that to her I wasn’t much of a witch, what with my little magiks and plants and small creatures. Never mind that I had plenty of adventures of my own in those years! Tency wasn’t the only one who knew some satyrs, is all I’m saying.
In the end, they say the robots got her. All that was left were signs of a struggle and a smashed-in door, but I don’t think that’s true. Not far away, a cemetery lay with a dozen graves suddenly upturned. I knew she’d gone and reanimated the dead without me. Either way, I wouldn’t be hearing from her again.
That stung, but her disappearance was a relief, in a way. I no longer had to wonder if she’d ever remember our promise, or thank me for all the years I’d helped Oliver. Tency could go ahead and run off with her army of the dead. Maybe the other witches would never say I was as wild or glamorous as Hortencia, but I tried to satisfy myself with my home and what I had. Regret is like a toothache, after all. Wave your wand a bit and pretend it doesn’t exist.
It was years later when, at last, a killer robot finally came for me.
It arrived at night outside my house with a flash and a thunk, on the patio where Oliver had played as a boy. The robot positioned itself atop the uneven bricks, its claws gleaming in the light from my kitchen window. Its legs were nothing but steel rods and exposed springs, its feet wide as dustpans. For a body, it had a grey metal casing with knobs and switches and hard, square buttons. Atop its shoulders rested a squat, squared-off computer unit with cruel, red LEDs blinking steadily. Its claws opened and closed as it surveyed my house.
A thrill shot through my spine, setting off an ache in my lower back. No matter. I set down my knitting, snatched my good oak wand from the bowl by the sink, and hurried out, ready to face the robot that for years had endangered the closest thing I’d ever had to a family.
“You won’t get me like you did Hortencia!” I cried out as I burst from the back door onto the patio, cackling for good measure. I wasn’t going to simply blast the evil mechanical monstrosity apart. I was going to make this fun.
The robot lifted its claws high in the air, preparing to strike. I cackled again and conjured dozens and dozens of long, twisting vines of poison ivy to burst forth from between the bricks of the patio and from the overgrown trees of the garden. Like the lines of a spider’s web, the ivy flew to its hub and ensnared the robot.
The ugly, brutish creature’s arms whined in protest as they strained against the greenery. They weren’t its only weapons, however. A little trapdoor opened in its chest, and a small circular saw emerged and began sawing through the vines, one at a time. Then, two laser guns popped up from either shoulder with a whir. A red glow appeared at the base of each as they prepared to fire.
“Ha!” I cried. Little did this robot know, I’d been bending light ever since I was a young witch. I waved my wand, and two red laser beams curved harmlessly into the cloudy sky. The robot beeped out a futile error signal as its lasers proved useless.
“I can’t believe it ever took Tency this long to do away with you,” I gloated as I moved in for the kill.
That’s when I realized: it never did take Tency that long.
I stopped in my tracks, wand still aloft.
All those times she’d told me about her grueling fights with the killer robots? It was all a lie. Hortencia was twice the witch I was, she always had been. If it was this easy for me to fend off one robot, she must have dispatched with all of her attackers with no more than a flick of the wrist. She’d simply been using me to escape from Oliver.
I let my wand hand fall limply to my side. The robot just beeped quietly, waiting patiently for me to make up my mind what I’d do next.
Mortification is such a strange feeling. It creeps up from below, like black mold from the basement, only when it finally strikes it’s so quick. I coughed, finding it suddenly hard to breathe. I’d been so dull, hadn’t I? All those years spent believing that I could help her, when I should have tossed caution to the wind the way Hortencia had. Instead, what did I have? A small house and a tangled garden. A host of spiders and lizards who lived in fear of me. It was all so unremarkable. My teeth ached with regret.
The air was silent but for the familiar nighttime breeze in the branches—so many years here, alone and waiting—and the soft whirring of the robot’s machinery. It stood very still, the way only artificial things can, as it sawed through the vines holding it, a few at a time.
It was so ugly and hard in its metallic case. I was tempted to destroy the robot anyway. I could polish it off, push the pieces into the ground, and make the trees grow their trunks around the wreckage to hide it forever. No one would have to know.
Then a disc in the middle of its chest spun, catching the light. Wishing I had my readers, I craned my neck to inspect it. Ten finger holes formed a C-shape in the clear, plastic wheel.
It was the dial from my old, enchanted rotary phone.
That wasn’t all. My nickel-plated size 10 knitting needles, the same ones I’d just set down beside my chair, connected the claws to the elbow joints. The handle of the metal trashcan outside my door was welded to an access panel above the robot’s pelvis. The red flag from my mailbox jutted up from the side of its silly little head.
“What are you?” I wondered.
It finished sawing through enough of the poison ivy to free its arms. I stumbled back, holding my wand before me, but the robot didn’t strike. Instead, it held out a claw as if for a handshake.
“No! I don’t like robots!” I told it.
With a mechanical whir, the machine withdrew its claw. Then it rotated like a dandelion turning to the sun. It pointed its laser guns at the long grass of my garden and drew in the air a rectangular doorway. I gaped in astonishment at the vivid, red outline of a doorway that hovered in place.
The robot urged me forward with its claw. Then, without looking to see if I would follow, it shook the rest of the poison ivy from its legs, gently flicked a centipede off its shoulder, and stepped forward with a clumsy, mechanical lurch of a walk. It passed through the doorway and vanished.
I stared after it. Only the garden was visible through the doorway, but instead of the little weedy wilderness that I tended, orderly rows of cultivated nonsense with metal wickets lined the yard. The robot had disappeared. I hadn’t dreamt it; I couldn’t have, not me. I only ever dream of living creatures, of plants and animals and things I can control. It would have been crazy for me to follow it. A witch has no business with laser doorways!
Except I’d just learned that the greatest witch I’d ever known had lied to me for years, the killer robots were never killers, and I’d been a fool for longer than I cared to admit. What did any of it matter?
I took a deep breath and stepped through the door after the robot.
Bright, fluorescent light blinded me the moment I passed through. I’d stepped from the bricks and weeds of my patio onto a hard, level concrete slab. The smell of earth, trees, and grass was gone, replaced with the tang of wires and battery acid.
I blinked as my eyes adjusted. My house was gone. So was the house that had belonged to my neighbor, the one I’d turned into a rat years before. In their places stood a concrete block with a square roof and a sliding metal door. The robot pulled open the door and waited for me.
I scowled. I didn’t care for any of this business, but I’d already followed the machine this far. I stomped to the door and stepped through sideways to avoid touching the robot.
Inside was a garage the size of two lots, filled to the rafters with half-finished machinery and robots. Wires hung from the ceiling and lined the walls, with computers and keyboards and goodness knows what else cluttering every surface. A sharp hiss of sparks emanated from a far corner of the garage. My temples pounded and my wand hand trembled at the sight of all that electricity coursing through the space. This could all be a trap, perhaps, one that Tency might have fallen for years ago. My pulse quickened at the thought. It would mean she hadn’t lied to me, that the robots really were dangerous after all. I raised my wand.
The robot with me beeped loudly. The sparks ceased, and someone new emerged from behind all the metalworks, pushing a welding mask up above his face, revealing—
“Oliver!” I said, astonished.
He wore a welding apron and gloves over a white lab coat. There was grey streaked through his wild, unruly hair, and a wiry goatee sprouted from his chin. His face had more wrinkles than it ought to for his age—but it was him. I’d know him anywhere.
“Moonbeam!” he cried out, equally amazed. “You came!” He tossed his tools, his mask, and his gloves aside, and he stumbled forward to greet me. “I can’t believe you’re really here!”
“What do you think you’re doing?!” I demanded. “Explain yourself this instant.”
His eyes brimming with hope and excitement, Oliver held out his arms expansively. “I brought you here to show you. This is my lab!”
“Your lab?! What do you mean?”
He hurried to my robot escort and, his hands shaking with emotion, used the rotary dial to enter a command. The robot stomped off to a corner of the garage, out of sight. “I discovered how to send these robots back through time,” Oliver said. Still rough and raspy, his voice was deeper now. “Can you believe it?”
“Oliver! How horrible! How could you?”
He took a step back in dismay. “What do you mean?”
“All those years your mother fought these infernal machines off to keep you safe—and it was you, all this time, putting us in danger!”
He shook his head urgently. “No, no. They were never dangerous, Moonbeam. I promise.” He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist, just as he had as a little boy. “I only wanted to bring my mother here, so she could see what I’ve made. But… she never gave me a chance. She would send me away and then blow the robots to bits. She never once stopped to listen to what they were trying to tell her, no matter how many adjustments I made.”
“If you knew that, why did you keep sending them?”
“Well… I didn’t realize… I mean, I thought if I could just tweak the settings a little, if I could make them not so frightening to her, maybe I could make her see they’re not so bad. I could change everything, and instead of taking away all my tools and throwing me out, maybe she would’ve… But it wasn’t like that.” He wiped his nose again.
“What happened to my house?!”
“They knocked it down ten years ago, Moonbeam, after you…” He drifted off.
It took me a moment to understand: after I died. “I see.”
His shoulders fell, and he stared at his shoes. “I just wanted someone to see what I’ve been able to do. I wanted…”
He wanted someone to be proud of him.
My head ached. It was all so much to take in, even without wires and blinking lights everywhere hurting my eyes.
Stomp, stomp, stomp. The robot returned, carrying a painted tea service on a silver tray. I flinched as it passed me on its way to a worktable, where it set the tray down next to an old, shiny doorstop that looked very familiar.
I pointed at it, bewildered. “Is that my…”
Oliver nodded sadly. “Your toaster. Yes, I fixed it for you. It works now.” With a precision that set my teeth on edge, the robot sliced and inserted two halves of an English muffin into the toaster’s slots and lowered the lever. Then it poured two cups of steaming tea, each to within an exact measure of the rim. It held one cup out to a forlorn Oliver, who accepted it but didn’t drink. He only stared down at the cup miserably. The robot held the other cup out to me. My eyes burned. It was all so garish, so sharp, so rigid.
Yet a little curl of steam rose in the air above the teacup held perfectly still in the robot’s claw, curving like a vine. It wafted slowly up, this way and that.
Perhaps there was something natural there after all, among the contraptions.
Perhaps my regrets weren’t really like a toothache. Maybe they weren’t regrets at all, but simply the pain and sacrifice of love.
Gingerly, I took the teacup from the robot, careful to avoid touching its shiny claws, and I sat down at the worktable. The now-toasted English muffins popped up with a sproing, and I took a cautious sip of the tea. It was strong and bitter, the way I’d always brewed it.
I cleared my throat. “Well,” I said to Oliver. “Why don’t you tell me about the other contraptions you’ve pieced together?”
Surprised, he looked up. Then, a smile spread across his face. His eyes brimming with tears and love, he took my hand, and together, we visited until the night was through.
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Elizabeth Cobbe‘s short fiction has appeared in Fireside, Cossmass Infinities, and Daily Science Fiction, and she is a graduate of Viable Paradise. She currently has a novel out on sub. |