The protection provided by Oregon’s ocean-hugging Coast Range keeps the worst of the poisonhead clouds away, but not all of them. Sandra pauses on her way to the chicken coop, wicker basket in hand, and surveys the sky.
“Storm coming,” she says to the wall in her mind, but the anchorite does not reply.
The hens erupt into frenzied clucking as she ducks into the cramped structure. She piles the warm eggs in her basket and holds it far away from their flailing wings.
These will go for a dollar and a quarter each down at the market, Sandra thinks, tallying the potential profit. She’d intended to pay someone to reshingle the roof before the worst of the poisonheads hit, but they’d arrived even earlier than expected this year. Now she’ll have to rent a skinsuit and do it herself.
Sandra sprints back through the kitchen door just in time to miss the first acid raindrops. She stacks the eggs in a colander and rinses them free of feathers and sticky goo.
“I hope it clears up by tomorrow,” she says, putting the eggs in the fridge for later. “Don’t you?” Sandra doesn’t know why she expects the anchorite to answer her after almost forty years, but it’s still good to keep the lines of communication open.
A rising sensation in her stomach tells her that the storm is about to break. Sandra quickly prepares a cup of tea and burrows underneath the blankets on her couch. Just because this area gets off easy as far as the poisonheads are concerned doesn’t make the people who live here immune to their effects. It’s merely a matter of scale.
“You wanna watch something?” Sandra scans through the movies she’s saved up on her television’s hard drive.
The door knocks suddenly, rattling on its hinges. Sandra gasps, wondering who’s stupid or crazy enough to be out at a time like this, then realizes it’s probably one of the Perkins twins down the road. Their father doesn’t stop them from playing outside during storm season. He just doesn’t see the point of stopping them anymore.
“Coming,” Sandra says, setting down the tea and shaking off the blanket. She swings the door open, planning on giving the children behind it a solid scolding.
It’s not the twins. It’s a man, slight of build, at least a head shorter than Sandra. He’s wearing a skinsuit tailored to his measurements, not just a shapeless rental. He holds out his hand.
“Sandra Murphy?” He lets the hand dangle awkwardly in the air before pulling it back.
“Yes, that’s me.” She doesn’t invite him in, which she knows isn’t a kind thing to do during a storm, but his expensive suit seems like it can handle the onslaught.
A few beats pass between them, the short man searching her face for what he thinks should be there. “Can I come in?”
Dammit, she thinks, stepping aside. “Make yourself comfortable. I’ll get more tea.”
So dark. Closed. No light anywhere. Safe. Protected. Warm. Mandy the anchorite shudders when she hears the male voice echo through the ears she’s forced to share with another. Sandra’s voice in their over-occupied head is bad enough. Sleep soon.
When Sandy sleeps, Mandy becomes the queen of make-believe, and Sandy is her subject. Mandy’s been getting to play make-believe a lot more lately. Though, as yet, she can’t move the body.
Her body.
In frustration, Mandy kicks out. It’s enough to make Sandra’s face involuntarily tic, anyway. She giggles.
Serves you right, Mandy thinks, for keeping me in the dark. The anchorite’s visual link to the outside world decayed a long time ago. Nothing but darkness, except in dreams, only in dreams.
But right now, Sandy is awake, which means Mandy’s sight is severed, her ability to create inner worlds weakened to nearly nothing. Her killer’s stupid old-lady voice drones on and on, and Mandy can only hear what she’s saying by tuning in really good. The other person’s voice is completely garbled, except for the timber that tells Mandy he’s a man.
Gross, Mandy says, because she’s just a little girl.
His name is Dalton Jenkins, and he’s going to space in seven weeks.
“They’re building orbitals,” he says. “Artificial planets, to be settled by frozen embryos. The system is almost completely automated, but they need someone on the ship to monitor everything.””A caretaker.”
Dalton nods. “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of this.”
“We don’t really get the news out here, kid.” Sandra looks the stranger over again. Dalton is so short that his legs barely touch the ground when he sits on one of her antique high-backed chairs; he can’t weigh more than a hundred and twenty pounds. The United Space Agency must pick their caretakers for their physical attributes just as much as for their knowledge. “So why are you here? What, do you wanna buy some eggs?”
He leans forward. “I read about you in a medical database. They stripped out the identifying information but… I did a bit of sleuthing. You changed your name?”
“Maybe I changed it to avoid this kind of thing. Amateur detectives barging in to ask me about the time I was sick.”
“It didn’t work, though.” He grins, and Sandra glares at him until his expression goes slack.
Hair rises on the back of Sandra’s neck. “Maybe you should leave. You’ve got a suit.” As if underscoring her words, lightning cracks through the heavens, strobing once against the reinforced windows.
Dalton settles back, his dark face twisted up in a frown. “If I could spend the night it would be most welcome.”
Manners won’t let her turn him away. “I’ll make a space for you on the couch.”
His brief smile doesn’t really make her feel better about sharing her home with someone who, based on her sudden wooziness, the anchorite doesn’t much care for.
“I tracked you down,” he continues, “because I need to hear about your experience with the Narcissus Virus. You’re part of the 2.7% of non-bonders. That’s a very select group.”
“So I’ve been told,” Sandra says. “Anyway, nobody gets that disease anymore. There’s been a vaccine for forty years.”
“They’re re-engineering the virus. The orbitals… they can only send one full-grown human on them. There isn’t the space for anyone else.” Dalton pauses, a faraway cast to his eyes. “It’s going to get lonely.”
“Hmm.”
His next words come out in a rush and he stares at his swinging feet the whole time he’s talking. “The Agency is bringing back the virus. They’re infecting me, deliberately, so I can be that caretaker. And I need to know how not to turn out like you.”
Sandra sacrifices a few of her precious eggs for an evening omelet for two. Dalton may be small, but he eats like a linebacker.
“Are you running away?”
He furrows his brow. “Why do you say that?”
“You can’t honestly say that you want to be infected.”
“If I go on this mission I have to be,” Dalton says. “The Agency’s run simulations. In every case, an isolated human caretaker will have a complete mental collapse in the years following their launch. None of the simulations made it longer than three years without breaking down.”
Sandra pushes around the eggs on her plate a little. The mix of songs she’d programmed into the stereo in the corner rotates through a music selection from the early part of the century. There isn’t much new music anymore.
“So, we get our own companion for the ride,” he says. “Two minds that only need the resources for one body.”
She shoves her plate away. “People died from this thing.”
“It’s a mutated version. It won’t do that anymore.”
Sandra gets up from the table, scrapes her uneaten omelet into a Tupperware container and puts it in the fridge. “That’s about the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. The virus isn’t a good thing, Dalton. It was bad. It was very, very bad.”
Dalton forks the last bit of his meal. “Not for the vast majority of the people who got it.”
“Minus the ones who died.”
“Yes,” Dalton says. “Minus them.”
Sandra looks out the kitchen window at the sky, which is now full of poisonheads. “I’ll get you a fresh blanket.” She crosses to the cedar chest in the living room.
“It’s only seven-thirty,” Dalton says. “Can’t I at least ask you a couple of questions?”
“I need my rest,” Sandra says. She gestures at the side of her head, even though it’s not as if the anchorite actually lives in a single physical location in Sandra’s brain. The anchorite is distributed throughout her neural tissue.
Dalton frowns at the makeshift bed, obviously not happy to be rebuffed. “My supervisor is a multi, and she says the Narcissus Virus is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. That it’s a higher form of consciousness we just threw away. I have my doubts about that, but I still want to go to space. I just want to be prepared before I leave.”
Damn it, Sandra thinks. Someone has to tell this story right. She turns down the music. “You’ve got me for an hour, Dalton. Ask away.”
They’re sitting on the couch together, each of them cocooned in a blanket against the chill of the acid storm banging away outside. Before they began, Sandra jokingly asked if Dalton needed to set up a tape recorder, and the astronaut trainee seemed genuinely upset to have forgotten one.
“I caught it at a birthday party,” Sandra says. “Everyone who was there got it. It was the first infection in Portland. Patient zero was this nice little girl visiting from Coos Bay. I forget her name now.”
“It was mostly kids who caught this, right?” Dalton says. He’s sitting stock upright like a kid in school.
“You were a real teacher’s pet once, weren’t you?” He frowns, and she waves it away. “The infected adults died. Almost everyone who’d gone through puberty died.” She registers his surprise. “They didn’t tell you that part, did they?”
Lightning blasts a second time, and Sandra sees with horror that some of the contents of the poisonhead are dripping from the ceiling. She runs to the kitchen for a cast-iron pan. It’ll take hours for the acid to burn through.
“Excuse me,” she says, “for the drips. I didn’t get around to reinforcing my roof this year. Nobody thought the weather would shift so soon.”
“You know, I bet I could fix your roof.”
“Ever do it before?” Sandra frowns at the hiss the drops make when they hit the pan.
“No,” Dalton admits. “My family rented. But I think I can figure it out. Plus, it’s a good test of my suit.”
At least he won’t die out there in that fancy thing, she thinks. “Did the government give it to you?”
He answers in a wooden voice. “Yes, they did buy it for me. I never could have afforded it.”
Finally, she gets the pan into a position she’s comfortable with. “I do have the shingles.”
“Please, Sandra, it’s the least I can do.”
Sandra holds up a finger to Dalton and asks the anchorite what she should do. Of course, Mandy doesn’t say anything. But Sandra can tell that her other self is still unhappy with this whole guest situation, from the sick ache in her stomach to the tingling of her earlobes.
But on the other hand, Sandra thinks, fuck her. It’s my life now, whether I wanted it or not.
“All right, Dalton, you can start tomorrow.” She sits back down and resumes her story. “They made a ward just for us. Two dozen kids in a giant room lined with plastic. The smell was tremendous.” She chuckles but it turns into a cough halfway through.
“And where were all the parents?”
Sandra raises an eyebrow. “In the waiting room, I suppose. Sometimes they’d come by on visiting day and stare through the plastic. But all the kids were too wrapped up in their other half to notice.”
“Except for you,” Dalton says.
“Right. Except for me.” Sandra thinks back to what the press had retroactively called the “Autumn of Love.” In the end, around eighty thousand children in the western United States contracted the Narcissus Virus, though less than ten percent of these experienced the full and permanent development of another self. For most, the “soul marriage” was a quiet one. The bond with one’s secondary consciousness had its most visible symptom in a peculiar inward-turning personality type, which had given the pandemic its name.
The best-adjusted survivors, like Dalton’s supervisor, argued that the virus was a boon. They resented the implication that they were or had been sick in any way, and claimed the term “multi” for themselves. This subgroup especially hated the name “Narcissus Virus,” although for multis the name felt rather apt. These were not quiet marriages, but torrid love affairs. Stoked by the power of a bond closer than any two separate-born people could ever experience, multis blazed like supernovas, their confident and colorful personalities attractive to all who came in contact with them. An outsized number of them went on to become entertainers. Of course, they couldn’t return their fans’ affection, but even that was all right. It was merely enough to bask in their presence.
And then there was the group Sandra was in, the non-bonders. The smallest group, and one that the multis would prefer forgotten. In these cases, only one mind surfaced at any one time, and usually, a single consciousness predominated the waking hours, while the weaker one ruled the night.
Why won’t you say anything? she yells at the wall in her mind. I’ve never heard your voice, not once. This isn’t right. I never did anything to you. Or, well—
“Sandra,” Dalton says, his voice sharp. Her mind clicks back into focus as she comprehends where she is. The wannabe astronaut is standing above her, her shoulders clenched in his fists.
She jerks back. “I must have dozed off. I really need to get to bed. We can talk more tomorrow.”
His face brightens. “Do you mean it?”
“I’ll make us breakfast after I do the chores. We’ll talk then. It’s not as if there’s anywhere to go right now.” She peeks outside and sees that the poisonhead is, if anything, bigger than it used to be. She just prays the seal on the chicken coop holds.
“Can I leave the light on? I have some reading to do.”
“Astronaut stuff?” She waves a hand. “Yeah, sure, whatever. I’m a deep sleeper.” Sandra closes her bedroom door before the man can pepper her with any other questions. She really does need the rest.
Mandy’s eyes open, the inner eyes. The real eyes, if you want to come right down to it. She peels herself away from the boring old Sandra-part and makes a park for herself. The kind of place she used to play in, before Sandra ruined everything.
Big meanie, she thinks at the presence around her.
She flops down in front of an ant hill. An ant walks by with a pebble strapped to its back. She reaches out her thumb and index finger and mashes it.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
Mandy looks up. Sandra stares down at her, lips pursed.
“Why not?”
“It was alive,” Sandra says, talking down to her like always. “And you killed it.”
“Just because you’re older than me doesn’t mean you know more than me,” Mandy says. “And I’m as old as you are anyway. Older.”
“Oh, Mandy. You’re just a baby.”
Mandy’s face gets hot like the constructed sun in the park is hot. She stands up, overturning the ant hill. “You’re the baby, Sandy. You’re the baby!”
“Don’t get upset.” Sandy’s soothing voice just makes Mandy even angrier.
“You know a lot about killing.” Mandy kicks the remains of the ant hill at her other half’s shin and stalks off toward the goldfish pond. She dangles her hand in the water, allowing the fish to kiss her palm with their little orange sucker-mouths. It tickles.
Sandra’s heart pounds as she wakes, all memory of Mandy’s nocturnal adventures scattering to oblivion, as they invariably do.
That was a deep one, she thinks. But I’m okay now.
She wishes she could actually believe that.
Outside the bedroom window, the poisonhead is still hanging around, its belly low to the soil. The trees underneath its penumbra are withered from acid, nearly bare.
She steps downstairs gingerly, sure that Dalton is either reading or still sleeping, depending on how late he went to bed last night. Instead, she hears the sizzle and pop of bacon cooking on the stove.
“I made breakfast,” he says, smiling, holding up the pan. “Where did you get bacon?”
“I trade my eggs for it. We do a lot of bartering out here. Cuts out the middleman.”
Dalton slides the bacon onto a plate next to two miniature fried eggs. From the size, they must have come from the bantam. “I hope you don’t mind. I haven’t had real bacon in so long.” He looks around admiringly. “You live pretty good out here.”
She stifles a yawn. “It works for me.”
“You slept a long time. I was starting to get worried.”
“It’s only fair,” Sandra says. “That’s her time.”
“My supervisor says that once I’m infected, I’ll barely need to sleep at all. She only sleeps around three hours a day.”
Sandra’s lip curls. “I’m so happy for her.”
Dalton ducks his head. “I’m sorry.”
“Nah, don’t be. She’s an outlier. Most of the survivors didn’t get that effect. They sleep like normal people.” She presses against the wall in her mind. “And then some of us need a little more.”
“Do you feel it in there? If that’s not too personal a question.”
“She’s there,” Sandra says, “but she’s locked away.”
He nods. “That’s sad.”
“Yeah, sad. I guess that’s one way to put it.” Yawning again, Sandra reaches for the milk. She’d traded Perkins a dozen eggs for a gallon of the stuff, and the swap had been well worth it.
He chews meditatively for a few moments, and then a rush of words comes pouring out. “I looked through the photo albums you had on the shelf. They were under your old name. Amanda, right?”
Sandra’s hand jerks and the milk sloshes over the rim of her cup. “Okay.”
His eyebrows rise. “That’s it? Just okay?”
She mops up the mess with a cloth napkin, wondering if it would be uncouth to wring it back into her mug. “If your parents didn’t teach you that going through strangers’ belongings is wrong, I don’t know how I can help you.”
“I thought you changed it to avoid the paparazzi. But that isn’t the only reason, is it? There aren’t that many people trying to stalk people just because they had a disease.”
Sandra stares at the wadded-up milk-stained cloth, and then tosses it across the room. “You just don’t let go, do you? Amanda is the little girl I killed. I stole her body, I wasn’t going to steal her name too.”
Dalton blinks. “What? What do you mean you killed someone?”
But she’s not in any condition to reply. Sandra’s vision goes grey at the sides, and she feels herself slipping down into a place she’d been only half an hour ago, the anchorite pushing forward, becoming dominant, taking control.
She stands up, and immediately falls on her hijacked face.
Mandy decides this time that she wants to visit the pet store again. And so she does. A dozen Persian cats rise into existence in front of her, and she stretches out a network of new hands to pet all of them at once.
“It’s not your turn now,” says a crabby voice. Sandy again.
“It’s my turn,” Mandy the anchorite says, “when I say it is.”
Sandy storms across Mandy’s personal pet store, so the anchorite tries her newest trick, something she’s been secretly working on for all those hours in the dark. She flattens Sandy’s gross old body to the ground, until her killer is just a smear of sludge across the otherwise pristine linoleum.
“What did you do to me?!”
Mandy hugs two cats to her sides, and towers over the Sandy-sludge. “You’re flat. Flat like a pancake.”
She holds one foot above the icky thing, taunting it. Before she can bring her little Mary Jane down, one of the cats scratches her. Mandy yelps and starts sucking at the scratch, allowing Sandy to swim back into the driver’s seat. But Mandy accomplishes what she wanted.
“I can do this whenever I feel like, Sandy. And there’s no one you can tattle to about it. Not even yourself!”
Sandra’s eyelids flutter, and she holds them open with her hands. Below her is her trusty couch, and her breakfast plate sits before her on the coffee table. Standing above her is the astronaut. “You were out,” he says, “for fifteen minutes.”
“I was sleeping,” she says.
Dalton grunts and passes her a glass of water. “It’s Amanda who’s the original personality, right? She’s the one who got sick, and you’re the one who came after. She’s the one who’s doing… this.”
“It’s me who’s doing it to her,” she says, “technically.” Another wave of fatigue hits Sandra. She keeps her eyes propped open and visualizes a closed and locked door in her mind. If the anchorite won’t play nice, then she just has to stay away.
“Just take it easy.” Dalton sits at her side. He wipes a cold cloth over Sandra’s forehead.
Sandra reaches out for a piece of toast but sets it down before taking a bite. She can’t handle food right now. “One time I read this book about medieval history. There were these women who locked themselves in tiny shacks and ceased communication with the outside world. They got fed through a slot once a day and spent their whole life praying to God. They were called anchorites. That’s what I call Amanda. Except instead of praying to God she’s cursing my name.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s not doing that.”
Sandra sits up, draws her knees to her chin. “Well, I guess you’d know. I mean, I’m the one who’s lived in the body of my murder victim for forty years, but you’re the expert here.”
He stands, and Sandra detects a hint of resentment. “So, what did it feel like? Being born?”
“I feel like I’ve always been here. My history… it’s her history. I told you before, we only diverged after the virus. That’s how it works.”
“Then how do you know you’re the… interloper?”
“This body doesn’t feel right. It’s too big for me.” She taps her temple. “I just know, okay?”
“Is it angry?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
He bows his head. “Thank you for telling me. I really do appreciate it.”
Sandra can tell he’s sincere.
It rains for the next three days, the bad rain, the purple toxic rain that smells like five landfills overlaid on top of one another. Dalton braves the weather twice to gather up Sandra’s eggs and make sure the automated feeder is working. The geothermal generator used by all the farms in this community still functions, though she wonders how long it can last before the acid rots it away too.
The anchorite never warms up to Dalton, and she takes it out on Sandra’s sleep-wake cycle. On the last night of the poisonhead siege Sandra sleeps for fifteen hours.
Sandra stumbles into the living room, still half-asleep. Dalton is sitting opposite the picture window, his attention buried in a book as usual. “Dalton, I asked you to get me up at ten.”
“You threw a lamp at me.” Dalton rubs his cheek, and she sees for the first time that there’s a bruise forming underneath his dark brown skin.
Not me, she thinks, although at this point it’s just a technicality. “Sorry about that. She’s not a fan of strangers.”
“I’d leave you two alone, but…” The astronaut gestures toward the window. The big-bellied poisonhead still hangs over them, though it only spits acid today, instead of cascading it down.
“We’re fine,” she says, even though she at least is not.
“I’ll be going tomorrow anyway. I’ve got to get back to Houston. The Agency isn’t going to wait for me forever, there are fifty other people in line for this job.” He closes his book. “At least.”
She shouldn’t be surprised, and yet she is. “You’re going to get the infection anyway. Even after seeing,” she says, running her hand over her exhausted body, “this.”
“The chance of a non-bonding is so low, Sandra. I’ll integrate with my other half. We’ll fall in love, as they like to call it.”
She takes a sip out of the mug of tea she’d brought into the living room with her, which she’s already beginning to think of as Dalton’s room. She takes that as another sign that it’s about time for him to go. “You never did fix my roof.”
He smiles, then flicks his gaze toward the skinsuit hanging on Sandra’s coat tree. “Tomorrow.”
“You better.” She stands, then presses her hand to her chest. The anchorite has made her heart skip a beat again.
“It isn’t your fault. You didn’t kill her, Sandra.”
“She’s gone,” Sandra says, “so somebody killed her. And the most likely culprit is me.”
Outside the farmhouse, acid splatters the ground, hissing where it falls like a tangled mess of serpents.
Sissy, turn on the lights! It’s time to play!
Mandy kicks. Then she kicks again. She feels Sandy the Mean Old Bully Lady stir, and the anchorite is pleased at the attention she’s receiving. Mandy kicks her again and again until Sandy weakens back into sleep.
A dim light diffuses Mandy’s vision, and she can see an outline of the bully lady’s figure traced in black and white. “Please don’t keep bringing me back here. I know this is your time, but you can leave me out of it.”
“Don’t feel like doing that,” the anchorite says. She starts to paint the interior world. A carnival this time, she decides.
“You’re being a brat.” Mandy doesn’t like that much, so she forces her dream-sister to double over in pain. “Are you doing this because of Dalton?”
“Is that the man?” Mandy releases a volley of giggles.
“He’s a man,” Sandy says, “and he’s making a big mistake.”
“Poopy-head.” Mandy grabs a cone of cotton candy from a passing vendor, and just for fun shifts its hue from pale peach to lavender, then adds red polka dots. “He’s a poopy-head. You’re a poopy-head.”
“Yes, Mandy. Everyone’s a poopy-head.”
Mandy grins. “I could make you one for real.” She starts to transform Sandy’s face into a pile of poop, but changes it to a lemon at the last moment. Even Sandy doesn’t deserve poop for a head.
“It’s a sour old lemon,” Mandy says, “just like you.”
“Very clever, Mandy.”
The anchorite takes her killer’s hand. “Come on, lemon head. I want to ride the Tilt-a-Whirl.”
Sandra awakens with a gasp, and immediately checks her watch. It’s almost six in the morning. She’s slept for another twelve hours, splayed out on the couch in jeans and a T-shirt. Mandy hadn’t even given her the dignity of letting her stumble into the bedroom.
“Dalton?” He’s not in the living room, and there’s very few other places he can be in the little four-room house.
She draws aside the curtain. The cloud is nearly diffused, and while the ground is going to take forever to clean up, the damage appears to be manageable. Then she hears the sound of hammering above her.
“Dalton!” She wraps a blanket around her head and goes outside. The astronaut is up on the roof, Sandra’s ladder leaning next to him. He startles a bit when he sees her, but thankfully not enough to fall.
“I told you I’d fix your roof,” he says. “Nothing like last minute, huh?”
“Thank you. Really.” She picks a wad of purple sod out of the ground and stares at it. Aside from the color it feels normal, but it’s not. It’s the end of everything painted in technicolor.
Dalton sits up, a bit wobbly. “I need some water.”
“I’ll get it.” She goes into the house and returns with a cup and a long plastic straw. She uneasily climbs the metal ladder, feeling much older than her forty-seven years.
Dalton tucks the straw under his suit and sips.
“You know, I never got to ask you any questions.”
The astronaut picks the hammer back up and pounds in another shingle. “Like what? Ask them now.”
“Why do you want to go to space?”
He plucks a nail from the pouch at his belt. “It’s my dream. It’s everyone’s dream.”
“Not mine.”
Dalton shrugs. “I stand corrected.”
Sandra realizes he hasn’t really thought this plan through at all. “Will you ever come back?”
“I told you, Sandra. I’m going to be up there for the rest of my life.”
She stares at a purple smudge in the distance; the retreating poisonhead, on its trip to Idaho. “You’re giving up an awful lot for this.”
“It’s not so much.” He makes an exasperated sound beneath his skinsuit. “I never had a family. I’ve just always been working toward this. If I give up my chance at a normal life, then that’s worth it for all those kids on the orbital.”
“How noble,” she says.
Dalton pounds the next shingle in a little too hard. “Most people have to believe in something, Sandra.”
She takes her own sip from the straw. “The roof looks good.”
“Can you believe it’s my first time?” Dalton’s teeth glow white beneath the grey of the suit. “Are you still tired? I’m sorry my presence here was so upsetting to your… other half.”
“Fuck her,” Sandra says. She adjusts the blanket draped over her head. The air is only slightly acidic now, the atmosphere ripe as a fart. “How much more do you have to finish?”
He points at the pile of shingles stacked at the roof’s edge. “Just those. Then I’m out of your hair.”
Sandra descends the ladder. She can feel the anchorite trying to kick down the wall of their shared mind, but she resists the urge to black out.
This is my life, too, she thinks. Even if I’m a mistake, a side effect from a disease, I’m still here. I exist, just as much as she does. Did. Whatever.
As she walks to the mailbox near the front gate, she hears a sickening crunch behind her. She turns around. Dalton has vanished.
Sandra’s heart speeds up as she rounds the side of her house, where she sees Dalton’s body lying limp in a patch of purple acid runoff. Once, not so long ago, there’d been wildflowers there.
“It was a seizure,” says the paramedic.
“Are you sure?” Sandra replies.
He pulls out Dalton’s social identification card. “We did a background check. Dude was in training for the Space Agency when he had a fit. The doctor said he had epilepsy, and they booted him out. The guy went a little nuts after that, held up a convenience store. That’s probably how he got out here.”
She glances at the card absently. It has a name on it that isn’t Dalton Jenkins. “I didn’t know.”
“Well, it wasn’t like he was going to tell you, lady.”
“Is he okay?”
The paramedic shields his eyes from the brightening sun. “Well, besides the seizure, he has two cracked collarbones. They’ll fix him up at the prison.”
“Prison,” she echoes.
“That’s a good thing, ma’am. He couldn’t afford the care otherwise.” But it’s not a good thing, and they both know it.
The ambulance is parked next to the chicken coop. Dalton is strapped to a gurney, another bored paramedic flipping through her phone’s feed nearby.
“Why would someone do this?”
“Maybe he just wanted to be a big man for a few days,” the paramedic says, his voice haughty. Sandra already dislikes him.
“He may have robbed a store, but he didn’t do anything to me. I want you to write that down.”
The first paramedic sticks a toothpick between his jaws and chews. He doesn’t look like he’s going to write anything down.
The ambulance drives off, sloshing acidic mud beneath its metal-plated tires. Sandra winces as she thinks about the pain Dalton has to be in, compounded by the ambulance’s juddering movement. When it disappears, Sandra goes into the chicken coop. The chickens shriek at her.
At least he’ll never have to have someone like you in his head, she thinks at Mandy the anchorite, deaf and blind in her self-imposed exile. That is, if they’re even putting the virus into astronauts. If they’re even sending anyone up there. Maybe that part of Dalton’s story was bullshit, too. Maybe it all was: his past, his name, and his hopes for the future of humanity.
You have anything to add, Mandy? she asks the wall that never opens.
But the anchorite’s got nothing to say.
Sandra plucks the eggs from the artificial nests one by one and places them in the basket. She wonders what she’ll get in trade from Perkins this time around.
| Erica L. Satifka‘s short fiction has appeared in Apex Magazine, Interzone, Nature, and many other places. Her debut collection How to Get To Apocalypse and Other Disasters (Fairwood Press) was named one of the best SF books of the year by the Washington Post and Locus, and won the 2021 Endeavour Award. Her other books are Busted Synapses (Broken Eye Books) and Stay Crazy (Apex Publications), the latter of which won the 2017 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer. She lives in Portland, Oregon. |  |