Call Me Maybe: Pacific City

Pacific City

Sitting on a barstool, watching Aster clean up the rest of the glass and absently pulling her long hair into a braid, a part of Peggy longed to be able to go back to the day she had originally planned. A very small part. A surprisingly small part, if she let herself think about it for too long. Which she didn’t, because most of her was trying to work the problem in front of her.

“I can see you thinking,” Aster said, brushing the pieces of light bulb and some stray crumbs off the dustpan and into the trash. “Think out loud. I don’t want to be left out of a single step.”

“Do you have a hair tie?”

Aster pointed to their own cropped hair, then snapped their fingers.

“Lori keeps some in the register.” They handed Peggy the tie with a, “Okay, now spill it.”

“Well, for starters,” Peggy said, winding the tie around the end of her braid. “We need to hope that Mario isn’t actually cursed.”

Aster nodded enthusiastically. “Because curses can’t be broken unless some way to break it is in the curse.”

Peggy stared at them, trying very hard not to look completely shocked and utterly failing. Aster tried to look offended, jutting out their jaw, but then broke and began laughing.

“I told you I was reading books.”

“Okay, then, smarty-pants, tell me what you think.”

Aster nodded, the smile falling off their face. They began to pace a few steps in either direction, one hand behind their back and the other at their chin. Anyone else and it might have been a comical exaggeration. But with Aster it looked real. And right. Peggy realized that she had been treating this whole ‘supernatural detective’ thing like a passing obsession of Aster’s. Like a kid with a new toy on Christmas when you know they’ll forget about it by the new year. But Aster wasn’t a kid. And it was obvious to her now that this wasn’t passing. Aster was taking this whole thing as serious as a car crash. Peggy remembered all the times in the past weeks Aster had tried to talk to her about what they had read and Peggy had sat disinterested and half interested, and felt her cheeks grow warm.

“Even though we don’t want it to be a curse, it sure sounds like one. Based on what I read, anyway. It’s too…’mean’ doesn’t feel like a strong enough word, but I guess that’s it. Oh, no wait. It’s too ‘vitriolic.’ Yeah, I like that word. But could a breakup be bad enough that someone would throw out a curse?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah, right, stupid question.”

“I can think of two exes, at least.”

“Three.” Aster nodded, coming around from behind the bar. “In a way, that’s a good thing. It narrows down the type of magic. Curses are only made from redwave magic.”

“And that makes things a little harder, because I can’t sense redwave magic. Only blue.”

Aster snickered. “What, you mean you’re not,” they waved their hands around, “spiritual?”

“I’m pretty sure Maria is less,” Peggy also waved her hands around, “spiritual, and more fairy.”

Aster scoffed, and Peggy put her hands up.

“Not like that. Like, actual fairy. Greenwave magic.”

“Wait, really?”

“Some fairies will bang anything in sight, including humans. Pretty much anytime you meet someone who’s vaguely psychic, it means they have fairy somewhere up the line.”

“You say that like I’m just meeting vaguely psychic people all the time.”

They both stared at each other for a few seconds before Aster let out a low whistle.

“I have more reading to do,” they muttered. “Anyway, redwave magic. Doesn’t that mean we’re looking for a witch?”

“If it’s a curse, it’s a witch. Seeing as how we don’t have any other threads right now I guess we pull this one. Finding a witch, though, can be tricky, if they don’t want to be found. We need…”

Peggy trailed off, staring off into the middle distance until Aster threw up their hands.

“What? We need what?”

“We need to go to the Gulp ‘n’ Go. Come on.”

“That’s not what I expected. Why the…hey, wait for me!”

Three blocks north of Dinah’s was the Gulp ‘n’ Go convenience store. Home to two gas pumps, a perpetually vandalized sign, some of the best food to buy when you’re drunk and it’s three in the morning, and Steve and Stevie.

They were standing in their usual spot, at the side of the building on the little patch of grass between the parking lot and the road. The smoke from their cigarettes was lazily floating around the ‘No Smoking’ sign affixed to the brick wall behind them. Between them was their boombox, playing some metal song Peggy didn’t know. One of them, swimming in an oversized Pacific City jersey and an Ocean City hat, was playing air guitar. The other one wore a Michael Jackson Thriller t-shirt and a trucker hat that said Eat Farts and was sitting on an overturned bucket, doing the drums. Peggy had never been sure which one was Steve and which one was Stevie. Everyone in the neighborhood just referred to them as the Steves.

As she walked around the parking lot toward the Steves Aster followed behind her, their eyes bouncing between Peggy and them. Peggy hadn’t said why they were here, yet, because she wasn’t completely sure she was right.

“These idiots?” Aster asked.

“Just let me do the talking.”

The Steves noticed they had company only after Peggy and Aster had been standing there for a few seconds. The one in the jersey slung his air guitar off his shoulder and gently put it down in the grass as he eyed Peggy and Aster up and down.

“Maybe if I was drunk,” he said, pointing at Peggy. Then he pointed at Aster. “Definitely.”

Peggy and Aster both squinted and said, “Gross,” at the same time.

The other one kicked the boom box to stop the music. “Did you come here to insult us? Or do you have a request?” He did an air drum solo, finishing on what Peggy believed to be a high hat, pinching the air cymbal to get it to stop.

“Neither,” Peggy said. “You guys are imps, right?”

Aster whipped their head to look at her. “Imps?”

“Low level demons. Mischief makers, really.”

The one in the jersey made a smug look and took a drag on his cigarette. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He said it at the same time the drummer lifted his hat to wipe sweat away and said, “Yeah, totally. How’d you know?”

The one in the jersey glared at him. “Stevie, man. Come on.”

Aster and Peggy looked at each other.

“Steve,” Peggy said, pointing at the one in the jersey.

“Stevie,” Aster said, pointing at the drummer. “Need to remember that.”

“What the fuck are you two, then?” Steve asked, pointing back.

“Quarter-god.”

“Whatever I feel like at the moment.”

Steve’s eyes lingered on Aster, and he licked his lips. “I feel that.”

Peggy rolled her eyes. “Keep it in your pants, creepshow. We need information. Someone in the neighborhood is fucking with redwave magic, we need to know who.”

Stevie opened his mouth and immediately clamped it shut with a single hand out from Steve.

“I’m not sure I feel like being nice to someone who just called me a creepshow.”

Aster squinted, and then their eyes went wide. “Oh! Oh, they want…Peggy, they want a bribe. I don’t have much cash on me.”

While Aster patted their pockets, trying to locate their wallet, Peggy sighed and pulled her own wallet from the back pocket of her jeans. She looked through the bills, then glanced up at Steve.

“I’ve got Teddy Roosevelt with me. He always struck me as a nice guy.”

Steve and Stevie looked at each other, considering. Steve sniffed and rubbed at his nose before holding out his hand.

“Two of us,” he said, examining the bill. “Two of these.”

Peggy sighed and pulled another twenty-five dollar bill out of her wallet. Stevie snatched it, practically giggling.

“Super-Slush and candy vines, here I come.”

“All right, now that that’s settled,” Steve said, his bill disappearing into his jersey. “What was it you wanted to know?”

“Redwave magic,” Aster said, stepping between Peggy and Steve. “Someone cursed this guy, every time he opens his mouth something bad happens.”

“Oh man, yeah!” Stevie said, standing up. “That car crash was sweet.”

Steve and Stevie giggled together for a few seconds, going over the details of the crash. They eventually sobered up, and Steve resumed his ‘all business’ stance, his hands together in front of him.

“We’re aware,” he said.

“We need to find whoever did the cursing,” Aster said.

“For you, my baby ray of sunshine, anything. Stevie?”

Stevie didn’t look up from the bill, still in his hands. “Been feeling it mostly over around Park and Lime.”

From the breast pocket of their shirt Aster pulled out the list of exes and unfolded it. They scanned it quickly and then shoved the list at Peggy.

“Fourth one down. Naomi Wallace. Address is right next to that intersection.”

Peggy handed the list back to Aster and nodded at imps.

“Steve. Stevie. Pleasure doing business with you.”

“You can come back any time, as long as you bring those Roosevelts,” Steve called as they walked away down the sidewalk. “Your friend, though, can come back any time they want.”

Aster glanced back at them and gave an awkward wave. “Are imps horny on main, or does Steve have a thing for me?”

Peggy snorted. “Yes, and yes.”

Previous Next

Nothing is Easy: A Biddies and Broken Hearts Story

The Biddies and Broken Hearts

Nico leaned against the doorframe in his room, yawning and wiping the sleep out of his eyes.

“Who is it?” he asked, knowing damn well there was only one person in the Biddies who would pound on his door at the ass-crack of dawn.

“Mike. Come on, Big Man. We’re going hunting.”

He’d been calling Nico Big Man since the mall. Mike seemed to like it because he got to poke fun at Nico being in charge and his weight at the same time. To be fair, Nico was a big guy. Didn’t make calling him that any less of a dick move.

Oh, how he wished he could just ignore Mike. No, his first wish was that Mike wasn’t here. That he’d found some other poor unsuspecting community to wiggle into and stick to like a burr. But if he couldn’t have that, than he at least wished he didn’t need to be around him so much. The Biddies weren’t big, but there was always something to do. Oh, Mike is helping with the bikes today? Guess I’ll go help with the canning. Mike is raking today? Guess I’ll go out with the resources crew.

Mike pounded on the door again. “Wake up, Big Man, it’s time to feed the faces and you’re one of the best I’ve got.”

And that was why there was no going back to bed. The people at the Biddies had come to rely on him and Mike and Paula for protein. And every time Mike said something that made Nico want to step on his foot, he went and said something like that.

Of course, something Nico had known even before the world ended: nothing is easy.

Sometimes you and your friends want to go to Dragoncon all dressed as Marvel superheroes and it doesn’t matter how much you want to be Thor, you’re the one Black guy so three guesses who everyone else wants you to be.

Sometimes you meet a girl and have that ‘love at first sight’ thing tearing up your heart but it’s really ‘love at first chat’ and it turns out she lives in the Philippines and neither of you have the energy for that long-distance thing.

And sometimes the crotchety, grizzled, sort-of racist POS you’d rather avoid at all costs is not only the best hunter in your little post-collapse community, he’s also somehow a really good teacher. And one of the second-best hunters in your little post-collapse community turns out to be you.

“You’re holding it wrong. You hold it like that the recoil is going to bite your nose off. Here…no, watch what I’m doing and copy it, get a feel for it. You want it to fit snugly…yes, right there. Wow. You figured that out fast. You’re smarter than you look.”

Before he found the Biddies, Nico had never held a gun in his life. He had been a modern twenty-first century man. Born and raised in Atlanta, he’d been a programmer doing back-end production for Coca-Cola’s internal websites for close to three years before the shit hit the fan. He’d had a small but nice apartment which he’d kept tidy and organized. A Hyundai he had almost paid off and drove only in the city except to go to his parent’s place out in the suburbs for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Juneteenth. He’d had his outside life, and his life online. He saw at least one movie a week and spent his Sundays streaming COD with his friends on Twitch. They were actually starting to get something of a following – over one hundred viewers the very last time they played together.

Nico was only in Denver for a work conference. Half the plane had been wheezing and sneezing and Nico distinctly remembered pulling out three packets of Emergen-C and dumping it all into the little half-swallow of orange juice they had served and eating the resulting Tang-colored sludge with a spoon. Everyone had known about this weird flu going around for two or three weeks, but the week of the conference was when its true, deadly nature began to spread. The last day of the conference was cancelled. Nico was on the train two miles away from the airport when his and everyone else’s phone went off. All air travel grounded until further notice.

He was already sick. Only a stuffy nose and a mild fever, but by then he’d seen what it could turn into. Nico really only wanted to go back to Atlanta to die in the comfort of his own bed. Never made it to Atlanta. Never died, either. He’d been one of the Lucky. His fever and stuffy nose had cleared up and that had been the end of that. Which meant that, instead of dying in an unfamiliar city, he had to survive the post-apocalypse there.

Nothing is easy.

“The two of you really surprise me,” Mike said as they cut through the woods. “I can’t believe a woman shaped like you can hold a gun, let alone skin a deer. And I can’t believe how quiet you are, Big Man.”

Paula and Nico exchanged looks behind Mike’s back.

I could kill him. Pretend it was an accident.

Nah, we might need him for food later.

They should have been done by now, where the fuck were the deer? Back in his other life, Nico hadn’t really believed all that talk about hunting deer to keep their numbers down. Sounded like exactly what any gun-happy carnivore would say for the chance to shoot more deer. It was one of the things he’d been the most wrong about in his life. Without humans, deer were everywhere. The woods. The crops. Walking up and down Main Street in Broken Hearts, nosing at the windows like they wanted to get in. Usually when they went out hunting in the morning they had a kill or two within the hour. Then they’d field dress it and then Nico didn’t have to be anywhere near Mike for a few more days.

They’d already been out here for a couple hours by now, according to his watch (thank God for lithium).

They hadn’t seen hide nor hair.

Paula smiled at Nico, a smile Mike definitely wasn’t supposed to see.

“I’m surprised you’re doing so well out here, old man,” she said.

Nico saw Mike stiffen and suppressed a snicker. Mike was in his forties but had apparently spent his teens and twenties on a motorcycle, soaking up all the sun and smoking up all the cigarettes and sopping up all the booze he could find. He looked closer to sixty. And he hated it.

“Yeah, man, how are your joints holding up? They starting to ache? I got some Motrin here,” Nico said.

After some sputtering, Mike half turned and spat, “How are your joints, Big Man? All that extra weight.”

They’d gotten under his skin, so his shitty little comment barely stung.

“I’ve been telling you, I’m not overweight, I’m just big,” Nico said. “You do remember me telling you that, right?”

“Oh, no!” Paula said, clutching her temple. “His memory!”

“My memory is just fucking fine and dandy, thank you!”

“Mike, you’re going to scare the deer.”

“Oh, fuck the deer! Where the hell are they, anyway? You’d think-”

Mike cut off and put his arms out, stopping the others.

They were in the woods northeast of town. This was their territory, and the knew every inch of it. Just beyond Mike and his outstretched arms was a small clearing, choked with thin grasses packed thick. They had breakfast here a lot, savoring Leo’s biscuits and jam while sitting on large stones across the way.

Currently, there was a bear standing near those stones.

Nosing through the grasses, large paw covering the stone Nico usually at on.

“Must not have heard us come up,” Mike muttered.

“I don’t see any cubs,” Paula said, glancing around.

Nico grunted. “Doesn’t mean there aren’t any. We need to-”

That’s when the bear stood up, and all three hunters shared the same epiphany.

Just like with the deer, ever since the humans had faded away the bears had begun to take back their territory. They had stared at this bear, bent over with its face in the grass, thinking it was one of the local black bears. Sure, its fur was brown. But that didn’t mean much. Black bears could have brown fur. Apparently, bear things were very confusing.

What wasn’t confusing was the bear’s height. Without speaking a word, all three of them were able to agree that this was the largest bear any of them had ever seen, communicated through hissed inhales and tightening muscles. Then Nico was noticing other things. The brown color wasn’t the same. It was too light, almost sandy in some spots. And there was a shape on its back, a hump, that he hadn’t seen before.

In real life, anyway. He had most certainly seen it online.

“That’s a grizzly,” he said.

“Grizzlies don’t live around here,” Mike said, his low voice wavering.

“They do now,” Paula said. “We need to go before-”

Too late. The bear was looking at them now.

“Maybe it’s a friendly bear from the zoo?” Paula asked.

Its roar was not friendly.

“I read about this on the internet,” Nico said in soft tones. “Don’t play dead. And don’t-”

He didn’t even have the r sound out of the word ‘run’ before Mike had turned around and pushed through them, screaming, “Scatter!” as he hustled through the grass and trees as fast as his tired legs would take him.

Nico may have been a modern twenty-first century man, but he knew enough about bears to figure he was dead. Mike ran. The bear grew even more pissed off than baseline. Paula and Nico took one look at the bear, one look after Mike, and one look at each other before turning around and running in opposite directions. Because Nico knew nothing in life was easy, it didn’t come as a surprise when he realized the bear had chosen him to follow. His placid resignation was swallowed whole by his fear of also being swallowed whole.

That Mike yellow-ass piece of SHIT. He’s killed me.

There was a barn nearby. John or Birdie could tell you who it used to belong to, but Nico just thought it of as the dookie barn thanks to its ugly color. Through the trees, a quarter of a mile at the most. He’d been on the internet a lot when everyone was suddenly obsessed with bears. Grizzlies could run thirty-five miles an hour. Whatever the top speed of a human being was, there was no way in fiery hell Nico was achieving it. The bear was gaining behind him. Its massive paws were slapping the ground and making tremors run under Nico’s feet. What, exactly, would happen if (when) the bear caught him was ineffable. He tried to picture it and found his brain wouldn’t allow it.

There was only one thing that might save him.

Just as the bear felt impossibly close, the musky smell of it washing over him, Nico reached the barbed wire fence. With one hand on a wooden post he vaulted over it easily, tripped a little as he hit the ground, and then kept running.

The bear hadn’t seen the fence at all and ran straight into it. Nico heard its angry huffing and snorting turn into a confused whine.

Relief dared to enter into Nico’s heart. He fought it. Looked over his shoulder.

The grizzly bear had half climbed, half fallen over the fence.

It had not lost sight of its prey.

But Nico had lost sight of the ground, and was terrified but not surprised when his shoe hit a rock and brought him tumbling to the ground, six feet away from the barn doors.

He almost turned around. Then decided he didn’t want to watch the jaws of death reach him.

He closed his eyes.

And waited.

BAM. BAM. BAMBAMBAMBAM.

A shocked, inhuman groan.

A thud.

BAMBAMBAM.

“Okay, okay, nice shooting, Tex! I think you got him.”

Carefully, slowly, inch by inch, as though any faster and the spell would be broken, Nico turned around.

The bear was in a heap on the ground. If the barn door was six feet away, the bear was only three. It was face down, wasn’t breathing, and surrounded by a growing pool of blood.

Still, Nico looked up to Paula and Mike for proof.

“Deader than the world, Big Man,” Mike said.

The sky began to grow dim and Nico realized he was holding his breath. He released it with coughs and wheezes, panting as he picked himself up.

“I thought you were long gone.”

Mike shrugged as he laid his gun across his shoulder. “Needed to get some distance on it so I could shoot it. Didn’t know who it would follow.”

“You used me as bait.”

“I used all of us as bait, didn’t you hear what I said? Jesus, use your freaking ears.”

With an outstretched arm, Paula poked the bear with the end of her shotgun. “Can we eat bear?”

“Huh,” Mike said. He spat. “I guess the first question is ‘can we get it back to the Biddies?’”

Nico was still brushing himself off. Twice in his life, now, he had been one hundred percent positive he was about to die. Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was immortal.

And if he was, that wouldn’t be easy, either.

Suddenly Mike was next to him. Looking him over. And was that concern in his eyes? Or the glare from the sun?

“You okay? I mean, really?”

Nico blinked. “I think so.”

“You’re bleeding.”

Nico looked down where Mike was pointing to find his pants ripped and the back of his calf red.

“Must have not cleared the fence as well as I thought.”

“That was good thinking, coming this way. That bear hit that fence and didn’t know what to do.”

“You saw that?”

“I told you, I just needed space to shoot. I wasn’t going to leave ya’s.”

Mike. Stupid, selfish, mean-spirited Mike. Easier if he could just walk away from him. But sometimes he said things, did things, that showed this other side of him, and-

“For some unfathomable reason God gave me you two idiots as the best hunters, and I ain’t keen on trying to teach nobody else at the Biddies to do what you two idiot savants could do with your eyes closed.”

Nico closed his eyes and counted to ten, something Wendy had taught him.

No, nothing was easy.

Previous Next

Slide, Part 2

Previous

2028

Maya didn’t die in 2028, but she did accidentally get some answers.

She was a professor in the humanities department at the University of Texas Austin, mostly teaching Anthro 101 and disappointing a hundred kids a year because whatever the fuck Indiana Jones did wasn’t actually anthropology, and she got suckered into a physics lecture by the university’s newest whizz kid because her boss said it would be good for networking or some shit, anyway he didn’t show up but there she was suddenly having to talk to people and it didn’t take her long to realize her boss had sent her in as fucking Tribute.

Maya was in the back row and half-dozing when she heard it. Another minute or so and she would have been completely asleep and missed it all. But she was awake enough to hear it, and then she was listening with every firing neuron in her brain. Hell, maybe even some of the ones she had killed with booze and the cocaine she did in her twenties came back to life to listen, too.

After the lecture there was the usual wine and beer and too-small snacks and lots of people impressed with the way their farts smelled trying to get everyone else to also be impressed with their farts. Maya let the crowd thin a little before approaching him while he was alone, trying to decide between two different types of shitty beer. He was a little pudgy, and that combined with his bright red hair made him look like he wasn’t even old enough for beer in the first place.

“That part about the multiverse,” she asked after the awkward pleasantries had been delivered.

“Yes, that’s the part everyone asks about.” But the way his eyes lit up said he wasn’t tired of talking about it. “Of course there’s still a lot of research needed, but the possibilities-”

“Yeah, yes, right, it’s very interesting. Specifically, the part where a consciousness might move to another universe after death?”

It took this baby-faced physics genius a second to recover from being interrupted and Maya remembered that he was a male academic and not a female academic and therefore not used to being interrupted during every conversation.

“Um, right. The science there is still pretty sketchy. It’s nothing more than fanciful theory at this point.”

“But it is possible,” Maya said, waiting for him to pause this time so he didn’t look like a deer staring down a 747 again. “Like, if I died here. Say, giving birth or, I don’t know, having a tire flung at my face on the side of a highway, instead of just ceasing to exist or moving on to an afterlife, I’d just…slide on over to neighboring universe?”

“That’s the idea. Again, there’s no hard science to back that up. I mostly bring it up during my lectures as a break from the hard stuff. When I see eyes start to glaze over.”

“That’s usually when I break out my bull whip. Anthro. The kids love it.”

She said all this to cover her tracks and immediately regretted it because the physics professor’s eyes lit up but Maya wasn’t done getting her answers.

“If I…If you’re going to a parallel universe, though, wouldn’t there be differences. Like in movies. You’ve seen movies? Like where the Nazis won and there’s still airships in the sky and shit and we’re all speaking German?”

He was already shaking his head. “There would be universes that are that different, of course. Universes that are so different we wouldn’t even recognize them. But a multiverse is infinitesimal. Every single decision, or outcome, is a new universe, and it’s constantly branching. If you die here, your consciousness is merely going to the next world over where you didn’t. Everything is exactly the same, except you’re alive. The differences in the universes would cascade as time went on, of course, but in the moment it would look exactly the same.”

“Oh.”

Maya’s brain was thinking too much and she needed to drown in something a lot stronger than shitty light beer, but before she could excuse herself the physics professor bobbed his head back and forth.

“Of course, if the death was caused by something catastrophic enough, you might slide into a universe that was different enough so that you’d notice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s say you get on an airplane that’s destined to crash in the ocean. There’s too much wrong with the plane, it crashes almost every time. It crashes so often, in fact, that the closest universe where you live isn’t one where it doesn’t crash, but one where you don’t get on it all. That’s not Wolfenstein differences, but there would still be a different set of circumstances leading to you never getting on the plane.”

The drive home was a blur. It wasn’t necessarily true. But it felt right.

She had been in a universe where Maya died on the side of a highway, and then she had slid into one where she didn’t.

But in that one, she died five years later slipping on the stairs. So, she slid into another one.

Where she died in childbirth.

Maya would kick herself the next morning when she realized she hadn’t asked about dying from old age.

2030

Turned out the next time she died was one of those catastrophic deaths. Funny how the multiverse works like that.

It was just a flu. A fucking flu. Everyone gets the flu. You’re not supposed to die unless you’re young or old or already fucked up. And besides the fact that this flu was spreading across the country outside of flu season – who gets the fucking flu in June?? – it looked like a normal flu.

Until it didn’t.

Lenny and Lily died first. Her son, Oscar, wasn’t even sick. As she lay there, staring at her ceiling and listening to her choked breathing and the ‘sorry you’re dying but everyone is and we’re too busy’ message repeat over the phone next to her ear, she wondered where they went, and if she’d go there, too. She’d never had the balls to bring it up with Lenny, rational to the point of his own insanity. If she had mentioned something the chances were high he’d have her locked away in a psych ward. How many different hers were out there, stuck in a straight jacket or something?

If they went somewhere, would they remember? Probably not. Obviously, something was wrong or at least weird with her, specifically. Otherwise everyone would remember all the times they’d been wiped off the earth. Either she was the only one remembering it, or the only one sliding around.

This was the worst one. A little because it was taking forever – Maya lingered, barely breathing, for twenty-three hours – but mostly because she was staring at Oscar. He was six. And he wasn’t sick. Lenny and Lily, one way or another, their suffering was over. But Oscar, sleeping next to her, wasn’t going anywhere. Maya was going to die. Maya was going to wake up in another universe where she didn’t. There would be another Oscar there.

But what about this Oscar?

By the time she realized she was going to die again it was obvious this flu was a world ender. Everything was in chaos. Maya would have taken hundreds of tires to the face if it would save Oscar from whatever his fate would be.

With her last bits of strength, she wrote a note and pinned it to his shirt. Then she told Oscar to find a neighbor and get food. What neighbor? Any neighbor. Anyone who would open the door. Find the neighbor and give them the note and get food.

Maya was crying when she passed into a coma. And still crying a couple of hours later when she snapped awake on the couch, completely healthy, no fever, no choking mucous. Both her kids playing in the back yard. Some version of them, anyway.

There wasn’t a pandemic in this world at all. No flu out of the ordinary. It took Maya a few weeks to fully comprehend what that meant. Every version of the world where the Blues showed up, she died. Whatever power was sliding her around had to take her to one where it didn’t happen at all.

It took her much longer to be able to look at this Oscar without immediately thinking of the one she left behind.

2082 – 93

It seemed all her deaths had come in the first half.

After the flu, nothing. Nothing, nothing, and more nothing. At least nothing she noticed. Who knows, maybe she died in her sleep a few times and woke up the next morning like everything was fine and fucking dandy. Maybe it was all random. Maybe she had just mellowed out. She didn’t do drugs, she stopped drinking anything more than a glass of wine on Fridays. Vacations were usually trips to the family cabin, nothing international or dangerous. Maya and Lenny settled into a comfy little rut and found they were happy to ride it all out like that.

Lenny died when she was ninety, and she wanted to go with him. She kept trying to follow. And kept getting waylaid to the neighboring universe. In the three years since she’d lost count of how many times she’d slid over, but figured it must be over three dozen by now. Falls. Infections. Cold weather. That time the aide swore up and down there was no coconut in the cake and turned out to be fatally wrong. All the little things that can take a ninety-year-old as easily as an empath can take a hint. Take her they did. Never where she wanted to go.

This, though. This was different. She could feel it in her bones, her blood, the way the air moved through it. This wasn’t a freak accident. This wasn’t a tire to the face or a Matchbox car on the stairs, and it wasn’t a curable (or incurable) infection. This was just…the end. Her body was tired. Over it. And frankly, so was she.

She never did get to ask that physics professor what happened at the end. What else could there be? In what rational world could she live past old age?

Maya had already died alone once, and was glad for her grandchildren to be by her side. Even if she couldn’t keep them straight anymore. One of them was holding her hand. She used what she had left to give it a pat and give them a smile. Then came the darkness.

Real darkness.

Maya snapped awake in the dark, and reached out to turn on the light she somehow knew was there.

This wasn’t her room.

This wasn’t any of her rooms.

Except…it was.

This time was different.

Something.

What.

Something was different.

There…there were two of her.

Not physically. Mentally. Two sets of memories. Two lives lived.

One Maya had been professor and wife and mother in Texas and besides dying and sliding about nothing extraordinary had ever happened. This memory was fading, not quite like dreams, but like a memory of a beloved book.

The other was the real one. The one of this universe. A universe of many where magic was real, and universe of not-quite-so-many where bluewave magic ran through Maya’s veins.

This other Maya was…no, not fading. More mixing in with the rest. It seemed lately every morning Maya was waking up to another one of herself joining her. It had taken her nearly a year to realize it was age.

Outside it was still dark, and the window across from the bed acted as a mirror. Maya could feel this new, other Maya jolt in shock at seeing her. Not ninety-three. Not looking like it, anyway.

In what rational world could she live past old age?

Maya sighed, and turned the light off, hoping to sleep for a few more hours. “You forgot, that’s all. The multiverse is vast and unending, and your ‘rational’ worlds are just a drop in the bucket. Just wait, my dear. Eventually I’ll die, too. My money is on waking up in a universe where I’m a vampire.”

Slide

2006

The first time she died was on the side of the road.

It was utter bullshit, too. Some real fluke of nature, Final Destination type crap that they only pieced together the next day.

It started with this idiot contractor who didn’t secure the ladder correctly to the side of his truck, so that after roughly the fifth time he swerved around someone going even slightly slower than him the ladder fell off and skittered down the middle lane of the northbound side of I-95.

Meanwhile, over on the southbound side, Maya was leaning against the back of her car, waiting for those triple-A fuckheads to finally get there with their tow truck and rip two hundred dollars out of her nose because the engine overheated because of course it did and if Alex would have listened to her instead of telling her she didn’t know shit about cars she would have been home by then.

Anyway, northbound I-95. Ladder. Middle lane. For roughly three minutes, about four dozen cars actually managed to see the ladder and get around it. There was some braking and some honking (which Maya did notice but didn’t bother to look over at because honking on I-95 is as American as apple pie and boob jobs) but for the most part the caging-and-raging masses managed to work together and defeat the errant ladder.

Until a Mr. Jayden Winters, 23, came screaming up the middle lane doing fifteen over in his shitbox Honda that he had put spinners and neons on. Honestly, even if his face hadn’t been in his phone he might not have been able to maneuver that POS out of the way in time. His face was in his phone though, trying to text his girlfriend using the T9 system on his Nokia 6820. Investigators eventually found the phone, sitting directly on top of one of the Jersey barriers, still displaying the last text message he would ever try to send.

So, no head

So Jayden hits the ladder at a blazing eighty miles an hour, and while the wheels might have had spinners five years of hard driving had worn the treads down so they were smooth as a seal’s ass and the next thing you know the shitbox Honda is flying through the air, spinning over the barriers into oncoming traffic like fucking Free Willy and landing directly in front of Mrs. Laverne White whose only crimes were loving Jesus and not paying any taxes in thirty-six years. Maya would sometimes wonder, did Mrs. White get to go directly to Jesus? Or in the world she slid into did the IRS catch up with her first?

The shitbox Honda hit Mrs. Laverne White’s wood paneled PT Cruiser head on. The impact not only killed them both, but broke off the rear passenger tire. Which used all of its remaining momentum to skip merrily southbound down I-95 for fifty yards until it slammed directly into Maya’s face still going forty miles an hour.

At least, that’s what should have happened.

No, no, no. That’s what did happen. That’s what was happening. The ladder fell off the truck and people avoided it until Jayden Winters didn’t and his Honda flung over the Jersey barriers and hit Mrs. White and a tire popped off and Maya was leaning against the back of her car and biting her nails and looking into the woods when she turned back to the highway just in time for the rubber of Mrs. White’s tire to fill every little bit of her vision. She never closed her eyes. Maya was dead.

And then she wasn’t.

Maya peeled herself off the back of her car, careful even through the dump of adrenaline not to back up into traffic, and watched as the tire, which a second ago had been an inch in front of her face, skittered off down the grass into the little gulley. She stood watching the tire for what felt like an eternity, possibly because her heart wasn’t beating. Her heart thought she was dead. So did her brain, kidneys, bladder, and spleen. The tire had been heading for her, not around her, so everything in her body had begun the shutdown process. Maya stood there, not breathing, her organs waiting for the brain to give the all clear, right up until Jayden’s shitbox Honda exploded behind her. Then her body and her brain expressed all of that mortal confusion by screaming for the next six and a half minutes.

2011

The second time Maya died was far simpler. Slipped on a Matchbox car one of the neighbor kids left on the stairs as she carried her delicates down to the communal laundry room in the basement. Landed flat on her back across the stairs. The stairs were wooden and uncared for and older than Larry King and she landed so that her full weight and momentum drove the corner of one of the stairs directly into the back of her skull. There was pain and a warm gush of blood.

And then there was none of that. Maya hadn’t fallen flat on her back. She’d stepped on the car and slipped and fell straight down. Bruised tailbone, yes. Broken skull, no.

At the time, Maya didn’t connect the fall with the car accident. The human brain can be pretty stupid, actually. Easily distracted. Forgetful. So, while it’s apparent to us, staring at these things one after the other, that something fucking bizarre was going on, Maya didn’t put it together. She was just out of college, working two customer service jobs along with the unpaid internship that was supposed to help with the career she actually wanted (spoiler alert: it wouldn’t) and she just didn’t have the headspace to think about the most traumatic thing that had happened to her (spoiler alert: so far).

Without even a ‘that was weird,’ Maya stood up, rubbed her bruised ass, cursed the neighbors and their shitty hellspawn, and started off for the laundry room again.

2021

Maya figured out something was off when she was thirty-two and died three times in the space of three days.

They say giving birth in the United States is one of the most dangerous things you can do, right up there with shark diving and free climbing in the middle of the desert without telling anyone what you’re doing or where you’re going. Well, everyone knew where Maya was and a team of doctors and nurses were all staring at her and she still died. Three times.

The first time, despite all the fucking staring at her and her monitors and the baby’s monitors, they missed when the placenta decided to fuck off early and tore a hole in her and she could feel the blood and the energy pouring out of her and she was trying to get this one nurse’s attention but the nurse was staring at the baby’s monitor trying to figure out if it was reading the heart rate right (it was) and if it was why it was suddenly plummeting (Maya and the baby were dying) and just as she was about to say ‘I think something’s wrong’ she died.

Of course, in the next second she wasn’t dead. In the next second nothing had ruptured and she wasn’t bleeding. Five minutes later she had a screaming bundle of screams in her arms, head full of hair and lungs full of oxygen and the doctors thought something was wrong but it turned out little Lily just liked screaming a lot.

The next morning while she was eating her shitty hospital breakfast with the toast that tasted like cardboard and the eggs that tasted like cheesy turds and her husband rocked a screaming Lily back and forth an embolism released itself from wherever it had been lurking in her bloodstream and shot up into her brain and she stroked out and died before she could even drop the fork.

Then she was forcing another bite of the hateful eggs into her mouth and listening to her own little hellspawn screaming and wondering if it would have been better to be dead after all.

Later that afternoon the infection she had developed giving birth began ramping up its ‘oh shit’ production. Maya went from fine to delirious in less than an hour and all of the IV antibiotics the hospital pumped into her wasn’t enough and at two in the morning she died again.

Another person, waking up the morning after they died, might think the whole thing was a nightmare. In fact, that’s what her husband, Lenny, thought when she told him.

“I had an infection,” she said.

“Oh?” he said, handing her Lily who had finally…finally…I can’t stress this enough…shut the fuck up for the first time in her life. “I didn’t hear that. Did they give you something?”

“Yeah, they gave me all the things. How do you not remember? I had a fever of 105. I was delirious, I think I was screaming about fish sticks. The last thing I remember is you bawling your eyes out and a couple of nurses standing over me giving each other those oh shit eyes.”

Lenny looked baffled. “Nothing like that happened. I brought you dinner from Wendy’s because you said if you had to eat hospital food again you were going to barf out your liver. The doctor came in and said we could leave tomorrow. We watched the Late Show. It must have been a nightmare.”

Maya agreed, but only because she was exhausted from dying the night before and didn’t want to talk about it. She didn’t think it was a nightmare. In fact, she fucking knew it wasn’t.

Because now she was remembering.

The highway.

The stairs in her first shitty apartment.

The placenta, the embolism, and now the infection.

It wasn’t a nightmare. In her life, Maya had died five times. None of them had stuck.

Next

What’s in a Name

Stephanie rocked back and forth, back and forth in the chair her grandfather had carved, her eyes never leaving the baby’s in her arms. So sweet and little. So full of possibilities. He was only two days old and she already loved him so fiercely when she thought about it she wanted to break something.

The birth had been hard, but if she had to choose, she’d pick the sixteen hours of labor over the fifty-ish weeks of actually being pregnant any day of the week. And now they were home and they were safe. This was the moment she had wished for the most. This small moment, rocking her new son in his new nursery. The beginning.

The second moment she had wished for would be coming very, very soon.

Dull, calm tones washed up the stairs, occasionally spiking into high laughs. Rob, in the kitchen, calling the people closest to them. They would put a birth announcement up on Facebook later in the week, once Stephanie thought she had the energy for accepting phone calls or even just looking at a social media page. For now, Rob would call the immediate family, and she would get to sit with her little angel.

He was supposed to be the first in his generation, and the fact that he wasn’t wouldn’t have bothered her under normal circumstances. Except with Jilly, there were no normal circumstances. Rob’s younger sister was the baby of the family, and while Steph usually got along with her in-laws, good Lord, it was like they had followed the ‘How to Raise Stereotypes’ playbook. Tess, the oldest, an overachieving heart surgeon still trying to reach her parents’ ever-increasing goals. Rob, the middle child, mellow and mostly ignored. And Jilly. Stupid, spoiled Princess Jilly.

No one even knew Jilly was pregnant until she was six months in. Stephanie guessed not even Jilly knew, but Steph had the brains to keep that guess to herself and Rob. Saying anything even remotely suggestive that Jilly didn’t have her shit together was anathema in front of the in-laws. Their Jilly was their perfect baby and could do no wrong!

It wasn’t her fault she dropped out of college, the professors couldn’t make it interesting enough.

It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t keep a job, all of her bosses – literally every single one of her bosses – had been out to get her.

It wasn’t her fault she couldn’t keep a relationship, she just hadn’t found Mr. Right yet.

Stephanie just kept her mouth shut. Jilly and her parents tanking Jilly’s life from the jump didn’t really change Stephanie’s life any. Oh, sure, there had been…incidents. Like the Last Slice of Pizza incident, which Jilly still brought up at family gatherings with non-jokes about Stephanie stealing Jilly’s food (it hadn’t even been on her plate yet and Jilly had already had three slices while Stephanie had only had one). Or the time, against her better judgment, she had gotten Jilly a job at her office. It was a front desk job, the sort of job Jilly had had three of already, so it should have been fine. In a way, it had been interesting to finally see the sort of shit Jilly pulled to lose every job she had ever had. The fact that her bosses probably still saw the screaming meltdown Jilly had had on her last day every time they looked at Stephanie was the unfortunate price she had to pay.

Little, annoying things. Things that came with any family. Things she could ignore. Until this.

Jilly had announced her pregnancy at Stephanie’s baby shower, and then gleefully reported that she was due a full two weeks sooner than Stephanie. To their credit, most everyone there had looked like they’d been slapped in the face with a fish. Her parents and brother, their friends, Rob and Tess all wore identical looks that said the same thing.

You’ve got to be shitting me.

But from that moment on, as far as Jilly and the in-laws had been concerned, it was Jilly’s party. The three of them had taken a corner of the living room and cooed over Jilly’s stomach, ignoring the party games and the gifts. In fact, suddenly, there was no gift from her in-laws at all!

Jilly went home that day with a brand-new stroller.

Stress wasn’t good for the baby, or for Stephanie (especially because she still couldn’t drink or smoke for three months) so she let it go. What did she care, anyway? It wasn’t like they lived together. She saw Jilly three or four times a year. It was clear the in-laws would be putting all of their attention on Jilly’s baby, but that was okay, too. Better than okay, in fact, as both of her in-laws had already been showing hints of attitudes Stephanie hadn’t been looking forward to (the ‘Gee-Maw’s my favorite’ onesie had gone straight into the trash).

Two weeks ago, shortly after she had heard Jilly had gone into labor, Rob had come to her holding his phone to his chest. She had been watching Netflix, and Rob gently picked up the remote control to pause it. Something he only did when he had bad news.

“Baby,” he said, still clutching the phone. “You trust me, right?”

“Yes,” she said carefully. It was a stupid question, and she didn’t like the where it was going.

“And you know I put us first, before the rest of family?”

“I would have bailed years ago if you didn’t.”

He took a deep breath. “Okay, so please believe me when I say I had no idea she was going to do this.”

Rob held out his phone, and Stephanie was eye to eye with Jilly’s birth announcement. A picture of Jilly and the new baby, her parents right behind her, of course. And the baby’s name.

The name Stephanie and Rob had chosen.

The name they had announced on Facebook, weeks before Jilly’s little ‘surprise.’

The whole fucking thing.

Patrick Liam. Patrick for her grandfather. Liam for his grandfather.

“Mother FU-”

“Honey, the baby!” Rob said, holding his hands up. She was two weeks away from her due date, ready to pop, and they’d been careful about stress the whole time but in the past week Rob had suddenly begun to believe if she made a middle finger the baby would impale itself on it.

Still, he was sort of right. She shouldn’t let her get to her. She took a long slow breath, letting it out through her nose. It made her feel like a dragon.

“We never should have announced the name,” Rob said. Waves of guilt were coming off him and she patted his arm.

“It’s not your fault. We didn’t know she was pregnant. If we did…”

Yeah, no way in fucking hell.

“Well, what do we do?” Rob asked.

“What do you mean what do we do?”

“We can’t name our baby the same thing…wait, can we just name the baby the same thing?”

Stephanie smiled as Patrick yawned in her arms and finally closed his eyes. It was at this same beautiful moment Rob once more came into the room, clutching a phone to his chest. His eyes fell on his wife and his son, but she knew the light in his eyes came from a more devilish place. Without a word, Rob handed her the phone.

“Hello, Jilly.”

“Hello, mama!” Jilly yelled, making Stephanie wince. “I can’t believe we’ll be mothers together! How exciting!”

“Uh-huh, very exciting.”

“So, Rob said it was a boy, what did you name him?”

Stephanie smiled, locking eyes with her husband. His face was already a bright red. “Why, you know what I named him. We announced it as soon as we learned the gender.”

A pause. A delicious, soul-filling pause.

“What do you mean?” Jilly asked. Feigning ignorance.

“Patrick Liam, of course. Patrick after my grandfather, and-”

“No. No no no. That’s what I named my baby.”

“Yes. It is. After you saw the announcement on our Facebook, right?”

“I mean… They can’t have the same name! It’ll be confusing!”

“Maybe,” Stephanie said softly, brushing her thumb against Patrick’s arm. So smooth! “But I’m sure we can figure something out.”

“You have to change it! You can change it, you know, in the first few days.”

“No, I don’t think we will.”

“You can’t steal my baby’s name! I’m calling Mom and-”

Stephanie hung up. There was no talking to her when she got like that. Also, there were tears in Rob’s eyes from holding in the laughter. As soon as the call cut Rob made ugly whale noises into the pillow he had picked up, still trying to quietly laugh to keep from waking the baby.

Rob had gotten to give the good news to close family and friends, people who would absolutely understand when they heard the baby’s name.

In turn, Stephanie got to tell the Princess.

The Horizon Zero Dawn Blanket: Banuk Ice Hunter and Ice Hunter Master

The HZD Blanket

Did you know there are only two escalators in the entire state of Wyoming?

Did you know Wyoming is called the Equality State because it was the first state to allow women to vote, but they only did it so they could claim a big enough population to join the United States in the first place?

Did you know bison are wild animals and NOT just big cows, because they absolutely are and they will 100% fuck up your day?

Harambe didn’t die for this shit.

Basically, Wyoming is a very pretty, very empty state, and the people you find there are so unused to meeting other people they’ll drive their car directly into yours before the shock can wear off. And apparently, a couple thousand years in the future, not much has changed. Let’s meet…

The Banuk

The first thing I need you to know about the Banuk is that every one of them exist on a spectrum:

They are a very spiritual tribe, believing a “blue light” lives in the machines and connects them all in life and harmony. They even take the blue glowy parts off the machines they hunt and weave them into the skin somehow to be closer. All of this makes more sense when you remember that prior to the beginning of the ‘Derangement’ most of the machines were pretty chill and the really aggressive machines that only exist to fuck shit up hadn’t been seen yet. The Banuk have ‘Werak’ leaders, and they also have spiritual leaders, called Shamans, who have just as much as say if not more as to what goes on in the Werak.

You’d think that would make them pretty pacifist when it comes to killing machines. You would be wrong. As previously stated, the Banuk territory stretches far to the north. In Horizon Zero Dawn you never actually see any of their territory, just the spots where they’ve settled in Nora lands, and already that area is constantly covered in snow. In the DLC The Frozen Wilds you venture further north into the Cut (essentially Yellowstone National Park through Wyoming and Montana) where it’s even colder and snowier. And this still isn’t even the Banuk’s main territory. This is just as far north as the Mad Sun King from Carja was willing to go to steal people for blood sacrifices. Their primary territory is called Ban-Ur, so far north it’s probably in Alberta. It’s so cold and treacherous up there they’ve essentially hit a ‘never invade Russia during the winter’ situation.

All of this is to say that brutal weather has created a people on hardcore mode:

  1. Any hardship is a challenge that should be met. So, if a Banuk is cold, they don’t layer up or go inside, they’re expected to fucking deal with it.
  2. Every Banuk needs to be capable of taking care of their own god damned selves. They travel in Weraks but because they’re constantly moving if you can’t keep up you’re getting left behind.
  3. All of this also applies to any foreigners who show up in their lands. If you decide to go on holiday to the Cut you better bring your own supplies because they Banuk ain’t giving you shit. Their world is hard enough to live in without trying to keep some flouncy little Carja alive.

So, yeah. You’ve got a mix of the highly spiritual and the ‘u wot m8?’ all living in a beautiful, deadly tundra. Of course they’re going to be weird.

Banuk Fashion

We are finally working with a tribe that doesn’t primarily use browns!!!

The Banuk’s primary color is blue, most likely to blend in with the ice and snow the way the Nora use green and brown to blend in with the forest. The Banuk get their colors from the sulfur springs located in The Cut (Yellowstone) so they also use pops of other colors.

There’s a lot of triangles and hard angles in their clothes, and in the rock paintings the Banuk will put up pretty much anywhere as long as they’ve got the pigments and the free time.

The angles and the colors were the most important things for me for every square design for the Banuk. Because I’m still learning crochet and don’t know many advances techniques, a lot are going to be corner to corner designs. Obviously I will be working with a blue base, but unlike with the Oseram I won’t be restricting color usage. In fact, I’ll be trying to get in little pops of other colors where ever I can.

In the base game, there are only two outfits, the Ice Hunter, and the Sickness Eater. I couldn’t add on the game map for The Frozen Wilds DLC without losing the standard blanket shape, so instead I decided to cut into the black border of the blanket where the Cut meets Nora lands. I’ll be making a square for the settlement that is right on the border, Song’s Edge, and around that I’ll have squares for two outfits that only appear in the DLC, the Ice Hunter Master and the Banuk Werak.

The Banuk Ice Hunter

The main Banuk Ice Hunter outfit is available in the base game. This outfit offers Freeze damage resistance and is especially good to wear when you’re dealing with those Glinthawk sonsabitches.

I hate them so much.

The light version of the outfit also highlights what I was saying about the Banuk seeing hardships as something to overcome. This includes the motherfucking cold:

“Frostbite is for pussies.” -some Banuk Shaman, probably.

The pattern I used for this outfit is called ‘Teatime’ from the same The Big Book of Granny Squares book I’ve been pushing my way through. I super love this pattern. First off, there were no mistakes and the instructions were clear (if you haven’t been reading my updates on this blanket, The Big Book of Granny Squares is a hot mess of a book that clearly wasn’t edited for clarity or mistakes). Secondly, it’s a corner-to-corner (c2c in crochet parlance) that’s also made out of diamond blocks, so not only am I getting the larger angles, I’m also getting smaller ones. Third, I just really like the texture of this pattern, especially these little swoopy bits.

This was not a hard pattern. Most of the Nora squares took me ninety minutes to two hours for each square, but these came out in about an hour. The hardest part was probably doing the edging. At first I did it with the same Gull color I used in the middle, but not only did it not look right, it didn’t look clean either, what with the uneven edges. The only thing I wish I could have done was get in little lines of red and green from the belt, but ultimately I think without those colors the square works great as a closeup of the shirt.

I used Navy for the dark half, Marina for the lighter half, and Gull for the white in the middle.

The Banuk Ice Hunter Master

Confession time: when I started on this blanket I didn’t think I would be writing it up like this. So I had my list and I started going down it in alphabetical order. It was only after I’d gotten through the first square that I realized I could put the journey up on my blog, and if I was going to do that, I should make the squares in an order that makes sense with the game.

So, these squares are the first ones I did for the blanket, way back in December. This pattern is also how I realized I was in for a bumpy fucking ride with The Big Book of Granny Squares. Again – I’m new at crocheting, so if it were a smaller mistake I might have just glossed right over it and had a fucking time trying to figure out why my square didn’t look right. Lucky for me, I tripped over what might still be the biggest mistake in the book.

Because the design is pretty simple, there’s a lot of ‘Repeat Line 2’ type instructions. Well, as I was beginning to decrease for the back half, the instructions told me to repeat a line for the increasing half. And then, the way it was written, I would have been increasing forever. Sitting on my couch until the fires reach me, forever making longer and longer rows in Whirlpool blue until they stretch across the house and eventually reach the moon, I suppose.

This book is hilarious garbage, 2/5 stars.

(Okay, I talk shit about this book all the time, so I do want to make clear that so far I have been extremely happy with how these squares turn out. There are some really fun patterns in here. You just have to be on your toes.)

Anyway, this square was done with Whirlpool and Tranquil in the middle, and Caution and Solstice around the sides. The whole thing is done in single crochets, the personality obviously coming from the shapes and the colors. This was the first c2c project I ever did, actually. I very much had no idea how to increase before this.

Before we wrap this up, I just want to put the outfits together side by side.

Now, I know the ‘Master’ outfit is the better of the two and obviously supposed to be more advanced, but…is it me, or does this seem like the kind of shit the Banuk throw on tourists when they show up without supplies? Like, ‘Aww, look at the widdle Carja baby crying about how cold it is. Is it too cold, baby? I’ve got the fluffiest thing for you, to keep the widdle baby warm.’

It’s so much thicker than any of the other Banuk getups and it makes me laugh every time I see it.

Granny Squares

I have finally finished the black granny squares that will be going in the negative spaces in the map. Sixty five squares, about an hour for each one, so over two and a half days of making these delightful little guys.

Next time on The HZD Blanket, we’ll be working on the Banuk Sickness Eater and the Banuk Werak, and discussing some Bodacious Banuk.

Previous Next

Translations and Synonyms

They landed their ship in some sort of field. The crop, according to their preparation materials, was called asphalt, and made for a steady landing. Apparently, the humans used this asphalt for the care and feeding of their primary motion animals, automobiles. It must have been very important, as it covered a great deal of the Earth, so Moelte and Cairynt were unsurprised to see a field of it in front of a leader’s residence.

“Look!” Cairynt shouted from the window, pointing. “There are even some automobiles grazing!”

Moelte looked, and saw several different species, including ones called a trook and an Elcameeno, and one of the smaller motorcycles. It nodded happily.

“We have surely reached this area’s leader,” it said carefully. It had been difficult learning this area’s primary language, but Nzorfan scientists had been unable to determine if the universal translator would work on human ears.

“Let us go, Cairynt, and begin a new relationship with a fresh species!” Moelte said.

“To think,” Cairynt said, nodding its face area. “We have the distinguished honor of welcoming the humans to the interstellar…” it struggled for a few seconds, and then its seven eyes lit up as it remembered the word it wanted. “Neighborhood.”

With a little more fussing of their attire, the two Nzorfans stood at the top of the ramp. With a shared nod, Cairynt pressed the button, and the ramp lowered to the asphalt with a hydraulic hiss. With steps filled with dignity and import, they made their way down the ramp. Carefully. They did not want to fall in front of their new friends.

They expected to be met by the intense security response they had read about in their preparation materials. Men in black and white suits, holding guns should have been surrounding them by now. But as they looked around and waited, nothing happened. Several automobiles went down the line of asphalt in front of the field, but none of them stopped. Only a couple of the humans riding the automobiles even looked at them.

“Curious,” Moelte said.

“I expected a bigger response.”

“As did I, which is why I said curious.”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps our reputation precedes us, and we are not perceived as a threat?”

“Unlikely,” Cairynt said. “Based on the preparation materials, humans are filled with…um…yes, they are filled with distrust and panic, especially with unknowns, and especially with their leaders.”

“You are correct, and I humbly apologize for offering a situation of miniscule chance as a possibility.”

“Your apology is accepted with humility,” Cairynt said. “Let us go inside, and perhaps our new alliance shall begin.”

They crossed the field of asphalt, fascinated at the heat that was expelled from it. What was the purpose of this heat? Moelte made a notation in his suit’s computer to ask one of Earth’s scientists.

The interior of the leader’s building was not as Nzorfans pictured it would be. There were many tables and chairs. A machine to one side that had nozzles underneath brightly colored squares. And at the back of the room, a long counter stretched out. A human male stood behind the counter, behind an unknown countertop device. The human male was wearing a shirt that humans would describe as blue. Gratefully, there was no fear on the human male’s face. The Nzorfans had studied pictures of humans and their emotions extensively, and the human male appeared to be feeling confusion.

“I give you greetings,” Moelte said, approximately a human greeting called a wave with one of its limbs. “The sounds used to identify me are Moelte, and the sounds used to identify my partner are Cairynt. We are Nzorfans, from the nearby planet Grewtna, and we have come to…as you humans say…forge an alliance.”

“Are we speaking to the leader of this group of humanity?” Cairynt asked.

The human male looked between the two. He still appeared to be feeling confusion, his eyes bouncing between the two Nzorfans.

“Oh,” Cairynt said, looking at Moelte. “Perhaps we have learned the wrong language for this area?”

“Nah, man,” the human male said. “You got it right. I’m just…a little lost. I’m going to be honest with you, I smoked a bowl on my lunch break, and I’m starting to wonder if it was laced with something.”

Now it was Moelte’s turn to feel confusion. It crinkled its noses and said, “I am apologizing, you have said words in such a way we have not learned.”

“Oohh. I bet you learned English, like, in a school and shit? Yeah, man, that’s not how we talk in the real world.”

This was not how this momentous occasion was supposed to go. Cairynt tried to get things back on track.

“Please. If you are not the leader of this area, can we be introduced.”

The human male shrugged his shoulders, a motion they knew could mean many things. He leaned his head over his shoulder and yelled. “Gary!”

“What?” was yelled back.

“I got…uh…there’s some…uh…someone asked for you.”

“Potch, you dipshit, what did you do now?”

The human called ‘Gary’ came around a corner and froze at the sight of Moelte and Cairynt. Gary stared at the two Nzorfans with a face neither of them were able to read. After three full seconds, Gary turned to Potch and pointed at the Nzorfans with a thumb.

“The hell is this shit?”

“Do I look like I know?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Potch, you’re already on thin ice. Did you set this prank up?”

“It’s not a prank, Gary. I fully have no idea what is going on.”

Moelte had finally heard a word he recognized in their discussion, and held up two of his limbs. “Please, this is not a prank. The sounds used to identify me are Moelte, and the sounds used to identify my partner are Cairynt. We are Nzorfans, from the nearby planet Grewtna, and we have come to…zzzz…come to…”

“Forge an alliance,” Cairynt supplied.

“Yes. Precisely. Thank you, Cairynt.”

Gary looked at the aliens for a few more seconds. His eyes darted around them, and must have seen their ship still on the asphalt.

“You’re aliens?”

“I believe this is the term humans use, yes.”

“And you’ve come here…to be friends?”

“Friends, allies, partners, yes. We mean your planet no harm.”

“Well, that’s a fucking relief,” Potch said.

“Yeah, I guess.” Gary rubbed his limb on the base of his head. “What are you doing here, then?”

“We were instructed that this location was the home of this area’s leader.”

Gary and Potch looked at each other. It was clear from their faces they were trying hard to understand. It was Potch whose face demonstrated understanding first.

“Oh, shit! Shit, man. You guys are looking for the White House.”

“Yes, precisely,” Cairynt said. “Is this not the White House?”

“No,” Gary said. “This is a White Castle.”

Moelte and Cairynt discussed amongst themselves in their own language, something that would sound like long strings of vowels to the human males.

“We are confused,” Cairynt said. “We were made to understand house and castle are words used for the same thing.”

“Sort of,” Gary said.

“They’re synonyms,” Potch said. “They mean the same thing in a broad sense, but have nuances that ultimately make them describe different things.”

Gary looked at Potch and made a noise that meant surprise. “That might be the smartest thing I’ve heard you say.”

“I do have an English degree.”

“I have apologies,” Moelte said. “Are you meaning that the leader of the area known as the United States of America is not at this location?”

“Shit, no,” Gary said. “He’s down in Washington DC. Probably. I mean, I don’t know his schedule.”

Cairynt pulled up the most recent map from their preparation packet and scanned through briefly.

“Yes, Moelte, they are right. I see our mistake now. There are approximately three hundred and seventy-seven White Castle places, but only one White House. Surely, it is this White House Tavern, located approximately…zzzz…twenty-fives miles from here?”

Both human males began to do something, expelling air from their mouths in quick jags. It took Cairynt a moment to remember that humans laugh when they find something humorous.

“Please,” Moelte said. “Is this a human prank?”

“No, it’s just…that place is a bar,” Gary said. “You know, a bar? A place where people go after work to drink alcohol and relax?”

Cairynt said, “Ah, I understand. They have named this bar after your leader’s domicile out of respect. It must be a very fine…zzzz…establishment.”

Potch forced air out of his nose. “I once got an STD from a one night stand I picked up there, so…”

“Oh don’t tell them all that. What is the matter with you?” Gary said. “Look, you want 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, okay? It’s in Washington, DC, and it’s like…I don’t know…two hundred miles down the coast?”

Consulting the computer once more, Moelte found the address the human male named Gary was talking about. Its appendage hair wiggled in embarrassment.

“Yes, Cairynt. I can see this is what we wanted all along. This White Castle-”

“House.”

“-has a controlled air space. Thank you, human Gary and human Potch, for settling our mistake.”

Cairynt and Moelte, each carrying a paper bag filled with tiny hamburgers, went back to their ship and put in the coordinates for the correct White House.

“Humans are strange, Cairynt,” Moelte said, pleased with the sound the paper bag made when it crinkled. “But if our new friends Gary and Potch are any indication, earth shall surely be a peaceful place to exchange ideas.”

Cairynt was staring into its bag. “What’s the point of these, anyway?”

Specter

The first time she appeared, she was standing at a corner.

Maureen shouldn’t have noticed her. She was still in the city. It was a busy corner. Others were standing there. But a few blocks later, Maureen couldn’t remember any of them. She could only remember her.

She wasn’t facing the street. The others were all waiting for the light to change, but she was facing the other way. The only thing Maureen could see of her was her jeans. Long blonde hair fell to her waist in loose waves. Was she barefoot? In the city? Gross.

Maureen pushed her out of her mind and turned up the music. This was her perfect day. Her day of freedom. The day where her old life ended. Somewhere behind her was her shitty stepdad and all of her high school ‘friends’ who had turned out to be selfish backstabbing bitches and all the teachers who didn’t think she’d amount to anything. The joke was on them. Sure, she’d only gotten into a state school. But the state was Texas and she’d picked the campus clear on the other side.

She had her little car, the backseat filled with the few things she truly thought of as hers. All her important papers were in the glovebox: her acceptance letter, her dorm assignment, all the money she had to her name. A full tank of gas and a passenger seat filled with snacks and waters.

It was going to be hard. But it had to be better than high school.

Interstates scared her so she stuck to the state roads. Better views anyway. She had her windows down because Stan never would have the windows down. Even on the nicest days the windows were up and the heat or the AC was blasting.

“Too many bugs,” she said in a high-pitched voice that did not sound anything like Stan but caught the essence of his soul. “Too windy. Too many smells. Too loud. Nothing is ever good enough for you, huh, Stan?”

A woman was on the side of the road, walking in the same direction. At first, she couldn’t understand why she was afraid. She had to get closer to see what her subconscious had already noticed. It was the same woman, the one who had been at the intersection. Same jeans. Same long blonde hair. Still barefoot, walking along the dirt.

Anyone walking down a state road barefoot probably needs help.

But Maureen didn’t slow down. That statement had been made by a rational part of her brain. The older part of her brain didn’t agree. Or it didn’t care. It just wasn’t letting her stop. She didn’t even slow down as she passed the woman, and when she looked in the rearview mirror the woman’s face was concealed by her blonde hair whipping in the wind.

“It couldn’t have been the same woman,” she said aloud. She’d seen the first woman over half an hour ago. Miles away. Maureen shook her head and forced herself to laugh. Jeans and blonde hair weren’t exactly unique. She was nervous about starting her new life. That’s all. Totally normal. The only cure for that was louder music.

Her phone rang around hour three of the trip, when the sun was beginning to set all of the metallic or dark things in the car on fire. She’d burned herself twice on the stick shift already and still refused to close the windows. She almost refused the call.

“Maureen Stacy Winston, where the hell are you?” Her mother’s ocean of indignation had been turned down to drops through the tinny phone speaker.

“I told you,” Maureen said, shuddering at the name. “I’m going to college.”

A barking sound that might have been a laugh. “You didn’t get accepted to no college.”

“I did, Mama, and that’s where I’m going.”

“Well, where?”

“I ain’t telling!”

“Because you ain’t been accepted!”

Maureen made a growl in the back of her throat. “No, because I don’t want you to know.”

“Maureen, I am you mother and-”

A scuffling sound as the phone was passed to someone else. Three guesses who and the first two don’t count.

“Maureen, you come home this instant,” Stan barked into the phone. “You’re hurting your mother.”

Maureen didn’t say anything at first. She’d been distracted by the woman walking on the side of the road.

Slowing down – a little, she wasn’t frightened like last time but her arm hairs were standing up – she managed to get a better look this time. The woman was badly skinny. She could see now there was a t-shirt hanging off her and her elbows were knobby. And dirty. She had thought the woman had tanned skin the last couple of times but Maureen could see now it was dirt scuffs. The car skated by at no more than twenty miles an hour. Still the woman’s hair was in her face.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Fucking Stan.

Maureen pressed on the gas. “Hurt her? You mean like you hurt her. Or like you hurt me? Which is it?”

“You shut your fucking mouth,” he said in the tone that used to scare her. But he was hundreds of miles away already, getting farther every second. She had tried to save her mother, but you can’t help people if they don’t want it. Maureen was done.

She said the thing she knew would piss him off the most.

“Whatever.”

He was still raging when she hung up. With the scream she had been holding in for six years, she whipped the phone out of the open window, narrowly missing a passing motorcycle.

Maureen stopped for gas and food around noon. It was a little shack on the side of the road with a couple of pumps. Standing on the strip of dead grass between the state road and the parking lot was the woman. She was facing away from Maureen, and as Maureen watched through the window while she waited in line to pay for her hot dog she noticed something. Five cars passed the woman by.

Her hair didn’t move once.

She was too afraid to ask the clerk if he saw her, too. Maureen took her Coke and hot dog and got back in her car and sped out, kicking up gravel and keeping her eyes in front of her. There was an itch at the back of her head as she drove on.

She’s watching me.

Lost.

She started to believe it about an hour after she first thought it. Sending her phone crashing onto the road meant she had lost navigation. So much of her time since she had been accepted had been spent daydreaming of the day she would leave and the route she would take, Maureen had it all memorized. But she should have found the next state road to turn onto by now. Maybe? She was pretty sure.

Finally, she came across a sign declaring how many miles to three different towns she had never heard of. It would be enough to find herself on the atlas in the trunk. One of the things her Daddy – her real Daddy – had taught her: always have a paper map, just in case.

It was early afternoon and without the shade of the car top or the wind rushing by at seventy miles an hour the heat threatened to pull her into the blacktop, never to let go. The atlas was on top of her emergency case, filled with jumper cables, a crank-powered radio, and a tire iron. Maureen smile at the case as she shut the trunk. She hadn’t been some idiot girl running away. She had planned. She was ready for anything.

Maureen turned and didn’t scream.

Whatever you wanted to say about Maureen Winston, she didn’t scream.

But she did freeze. A whistle did go through her teeth. The strength in her hands left her and the atlas fell to the hot ground with a muted thwap.

The woman was down the street.

She was walking toward her.

Maureen began to scramble around the car. Her foot found the atlas and went slipping away, introducing her knee to the pavement. Now she screamed, a short and girly thing. She ignored the pain and got back into the car.

In the rearview the woman was still coming. She could see her clearly now. Her blonde hair in her face.

She turned the key and punched it, speeding away from the woman.

For a full minute she was afraid to look in the rearview again. Maureen was completely sure what she’d see: the woman, still walking but never getting any farther behind the car. It took several deep breaths before she was able to look.

The rearview held nothing but the road.

Hysterical laughter bubbled out of her. The woman couldn’t be real. Could she? She knew what she saw. Didn’t she?

“Highway mirage,” Maureen said to herself. “Heat. Nerves. Fucking Stan.”

A tickle on her knee made her jump, swerving the car. But it was just blood from her scrape. A few little bits of blacktop were stuck in her knee.

The atlas was on the ground, somewhere behind her.

“I should go back and get it,” she said out loud.

The car continued forward, not even slowing down.

“I can get a map in the next town,” she said. “Directions. Someone will help.”

Help.

New thoughts began. What if the woman was real? What if she needed help? She’d never actually been threatening. She’d only been standing, or walking. Maybe she was frightened. Threatened by something. And for some unknown reason, Maureen was the only one who could help.

Anyone walking down a state road barefoot probably needs help.

How many times, in the past six years, had she wished someone had broken through her own barrier and helped her?

Only letting off the gas, never touching the brake, Maureen let the car drift to a stop. She pulled off the road into the dirt. Turned off the engine. And waited.

Early afternoon had turned to late. There was still plenty of sun, but it came at an angle now, more orange than yellow. She had stopped next to an unused field, and as she sat with the windows down she could heard prairie dogs rustling and grasshoppers snapping. Now that she knew what she had to do, her frayed nerves had smoothed out. It was pleasant, sitting there in nowhere, Texas. Waiting.

Maureen didn’t have to wait long. One second she was alone, picking the gravel out of her knee. The next time she glanced up there the woman was. Twenty yards away from the car. Standing. Facing away. Dirty blonde hair trailing lightly in the wind.

How did I not see it? Maureen wondered to herself as she stepped slowly out of the car. Skin and bones, dirty, barefoot. Whether she was a specter or flesh and blood, this was a woman in distress. She needed help. And maybe Maureen could give it to her.

The hairs on her arm stood up again, and a warning was going off in her brain, telling her to runrunrun. But she knew, now, that was just some ancient wiring, no longer necessary. Like the way she still got nervous around spiders even if she knew, logically, they couldn’t hurt her. Sometimes you needed to follow your gut. Sometimes your gut was playing by rules that went out of style a millennia ago.

“He-hello?” she called. She was ten feet away from the woman now, getting closer by small steps.

The woman didn’t move. Maureen moved closer.

“Hello? Are…are you okay?”

The woman turned the slightest bit. She was listening. Still, she faced away, and Maureen was unable to see her face through her hair.

“I’ve seen you following me,” Maureen said. She was only a foot away now. Her skin was crawling but she was staying put. “I thought…I thought maybe you needed help?”

A rasping, breathing sound came, and Maureen realized she was trying to speak.

“H…h…”

“Help?”

“Hungry.”

The woman turned around fully.

Teeth. So many teeth.

There was only screaming. The prairie dogs ran into their holes. The grasshoppers were indifferent.

Pre-Apocalypse

The song cut out as the radio started blaring a test of the emergency broadcast system beginning with its usual discordant WEEEEEEEEHHHHHH. Mack cut it off and left it. They were almost to the parking lot of the trailhead, anyway.

Next to him, in the passenger seat, Lois shifted. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her reach out, like she was going to turn the radio back on, but instead let her hand drop. He tried to settle his stomach.

Can’t even be in silence for five minutes anymore?

He smoothed his shirt under the seatbelt like he wanted to smooth his nerves. It would be okay. After this afternoon, everything would be peaches and cream again.

“Ta-da!” he said with a little drama as they pulled into the little parking lot. Lois squinted at it, and Mack swallowed. “It’s the place where we had our first date.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I figured it out on the way. Not a lot of things to do in this direction.”

Mack busied himself with parking to hide the embarrassment. Maybe Lois thought she had been a little harsh. She patted his arm and gave him a wan smile.

“It was a good idea, Mack,” she said. “Hopefully the trails are as nice as we remember.”

They got ready in silence, lacing up their boots and spraying down with sunblock and bug spray and loading their packs with water and trail mix. It was a six-mile loop, mostly uphill, that would bring them to a stunning view of the rolling foothills and the city below. The first time they had come here they had been fresh out of college, unsure of themselves or each other, and then that view. That view had told Mack everything he needed to know. It was stupid, but it was the loudest thought he had ever had.

If a view like this exists, everything can be okay.

With nods to each other when they were ready, Mack shut the trunk and hit the lock button on the fob until the car beeped, and then they were cutting across the lot and starting the trail.

It was a beautiful day. Late spring, cool and breezy in the trees, and they made good time. With Lois walking in front of him it was easy to think everything was still as good as the first time. He couldn’t see her face, so he could imagine it was pleasant or at least neutral. Not dark with some worry she wouldn’t share. Not distant, like instead of being here with him she was orbiting some mysterious planet. Certainly not the looks she gave him when he thought he couldn’t see. The ones that he must have been seeing wrong from the corner of his eye, twisted with disgust.

He’d tried to talk to her. Tried to get her to open up. But once they were talking it was all dimples and smiles.

“Nothing’s wrong, silly bear,” she’d say, and kiss him lightly on the cheek. “Everything is the same, you’re just worrying over nothing.”

Belief had been easy at first. Lois was the love of his life, and if he lost her…he couldn’t even imagine it. Mack wanted to believe.

It had been harder and harder.

Today was the day, he had decided. Up at the top of the trail, looking over that miraculous view, they were going to come to the truth.

Either everything was fine, or it wasn’t.

A couple coming the other way pulled him out of his reverie. They were coming down the trail so fast the man in front practically shoved Lois out of the way. Mack stepped to the side quick and threw out a hand to catch her as they hustled past.

“Hey, what the hell, man?”

The woman slid on the dirt, hitting her bottom and almost losing her grip on the battery radio she was holding. The man paused only long enough to pull her back up. He glanced at Mack with an inscrutable look, and then they were hustling again.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” She ignored his hand and brushed off the back of her shorts. “Fucking tourists, think they own the place.”

Mack took one last look down the trail, but the offending couple was already gone.

“We’re not far now.”

The last quarter mile was steep, the only sounds their huffing and wheezing. And then they were at the crest, standing on top of it. Below them was the view, as amazing as he remembered it. Rolling hills relaxing into a never-ending prairie, and right there at the switch was the city. He could imagine holding the whole city in his hands, all the noise and the people and the cars nothing more than specks.

Toss those specks to the wind.

“I know why you brought me up here.” Lois’ voice was a sword in his back.

Staring at him, one hand on her hip, it was clear she was waiting. From where she stood, so far back, she could barely see the view.

“It’s one of my favorite places.”

“It’s where we had our first date.”

“That’s one of the reasons why,” Mack said. He pulled his pack in front of him and his arm down the bag when Lois held up her hands.

“Don’t.”

They stared at each other for a few seconds, her hands up and his in his bag and neither moving except to blink.

“I thought we were doing okay?” Mack said.

“You know we’re not.”

“But that’s not what you say. Every time I ask…‘what’s wrong?’ or ‘What are you thinking about?’ Or ‘Why the look?’ You always say, ‘nothings wrong. Thinking about nothing. What look?’”

Lois swallowed hard. Sweat was beading around her hairline, dripping down her face near her ears. He began to pull his arm out of the bag again and Lois flinched.

“I…I didn’t know how to say it. You…you never stopped.”

“Never stopped what?”

“Loving me.”

Mack’s throat made a click. “And you did?”

Carefully, as though if she moved too fast she’d break something, Lois nodded.

“Is there someone else?”

“No. No one else.”

“You just fell out of love.”

“I’m sorr-”

“And strung me along for…months, at least. Right?”

She wiped at the tears springing in her eyes. Mack felt drier than the desert. He pulled his arm out of the bag, his hand clutching the ring box he’d hidden at the bottom.

If a view like this exists, everything can be okay.

He’d wanted the truth. One direction or the other, he’d just wanted to know. And now he did. It was over. It had been over, he supposed, but now he knew for sure.

Mack turned to toss the ring box down the mountain.

The brightest light he’d ever seen exploded over the city.

Frozen, one arm behind him ready to throw, he watched as the light resolved into fire and smoke where the city had once been.

“What…what…WHAT…” Lois was screaming.

But Mack couldn’t move, his eyes glued to what had been his city, and the rising mushroom cloud above it.

What Goes Around

April 3rd, 2037

His phone didn’t wake him up until it vibrated itself right off his nightstand. Still, he only turned over, his eyes glued shut to protect himself from morning. He groped blindly, his fingers running through the thick, cheap carpet. Seth hated that carpet. It held smells the way the dying held memories.

His fingertips found the phone, and he had to push himself out of the bed to reach it. It was still buzzing. Stupid alarm. Stupid mornings. Stupid work. Stupid…

Seth dared to crack open an eye to look at his phone.

It wasn’t morning. It was still dark.

The little clock on the bedside table said it was barely past four. Seth didn’t need to be awake for another two hours. So why was his phone still going crazy in his hand?

ALERT

Without looking at what the ALERT was, Seth turned the vibrations off and rolled over in bed. Amber, active shooter, or extreme weather, it all added up to the same thing: he couldn’t do anything about it while he was in his room trying to sleep. Maybe extreme weather, but there hadn’t been anything in the forecast, and-

The door to his room flew open, hitting the wall behind it was a bang.

Seth was sitting up, fully awake, heart racing, staring at one of his roommates staring at him.

“What the shit, man?”

“Are you seeing this?” Alex asked, ignoring him.

“The alert? What are we supposed to do about a missing kid or a gunman-”

“No…no, man. You didn’t read it?”

“No…”

“They’re bugging out! They packed their bags in secret and they’re leaving!”

Seth took a breath, trying to follow what Alex was saying but he was still very tired and the shock from being woken up twice in two minutes had completely scrambled every part of his brain.

“Wait…what?”

Alex rolled his eyes. “Come on.”

Alex, Janet, Luis, and Zoe were all surrounding the television when he finally came out to the living room. One of the twenty-four-hour news stations was on. They’d all agreed to never put on one of those stations. Janet glanced at him, giving him a thin, watery smile, but the others only watched.

“…still waiting for details to, uh, trickle in here,” said the Talking Head. He looked as startled and confused as the rest of them, his eyes constantly darting to either side of the camera. Hoping someone would tell him what to do, maybe. Lucky guy. A couple seconds later a young woman in a t-shirt and a headset came directly on camera to hand the Talking Head a sheet of paper.

“Okay,” he said, reading and wiping his mouth with his free hand. “Okay, we have some updates. The count of ships has officially been increased to ten, with new sightings being reported in Siberia and Australia.”

Seth’s blood ran cold, and he gripped the back of the couch.

“Ships? Like…spaceships? Are they reporting aliens on the news?”

They all shook their heads.

“Not arriving ships,” Luis said. “Leaving. The ships are leaving.”

“Leaving? Who’s leaving? What’s…”

He trailed off as his eyes found the scroll on the bottom of the screen. It was a list of names. Most of them he had only ever vaguely heard of, couldn’t even remember where he had heard them. And then three in a row grabbed his attention.

CEO’s.

Billionaires.

The world’s first trillionaire.

The second.

What Andrew had shouted at him from the door came back to him. He wasn’t watching some Talking Head report about an invasion. He was reporting on an evacuation.

The rich were leaving.

The message left on the front page of several websites, including the two most popular search engines, several of the biggest retail outlets, and half a dozen governments.

As you have seen by now, we have begun an evacaution.

We do not wish to draw this out, but do feel you are owed an explenation.

As weather becomes more extreme, air hazier, water murkier, only extremists can now deny that climate change is real, and effecting the planet for the worse. Humanity’s time on earth has a clock. Humanity must start afresh.

As we have built these ships in secret, we have also built habitats on Mars.

Please have hope knowing that the best of humanity will live on in the stars.

The message is signed by two hundred and ninety-six people. Historical scholars have noted that the ‘best of humanity’ was 88% white and of European descent, 70% male, and that they left three spelling and grammar mistakes in a message less than one hundred words long.

From the private journal of one Eric Price, former CEO of Nile.com:

January 30th, 2038

I really need to learn the Martian calendar. Can’t keep holding onto the past like this!

We’ve been on Mars for three weeks now. It’s mostly been setting up. I thought having the biomes built before we got here meant that everything would be done beforehand. Like when we go to the lake house and the staff gets the fridge full. Apparently not. We’ve had to do all of this ourselves. Well, our staffs, anyway.

No, I shouldn’t complain. We are here! We are humanity’s future! The brightest minds on TWO planets haha. Been working on this plan for decades and its finally happened. There was no easy way to fix Earth. The obvious answer was start again.

Finally got messages from Geoff back…I almost said back home haha. No longer. Finally got messages. Earth is in shambles. Riots. Massacres. Buildings and governments burning. I feel terrible, but at the same time I feel VITALIZED.

We! Were! Right!

Look at what happens! We all band together to leave the planet and start again and the rest of them, all seven billion of them, can’t keep their shit in order for more than a few weeks.

Anyway, let them decline. Let them fade away in a destroyed planet.

We are the future. We will take humanity to such heights the masses never even imagined.

April 3, 2038

If this was the collapse of society, maybe Seth had been living in it his whole life.

It was weird, to be sure. But not weird enough. In his mind he’d imagined collapse to be more like a movie. Martial law and folks getting shot in the street. Maybe some zombies or just a good old fashioned rage virus. There wasn’t any of that.

Seth still woke up at six in the morning to go to work. There was just one thing people would talk about, and sometime on his commute he would see a burning building or people running down the sidewalk with obviously stolen merchandise.

The internet was still running, with social media and memes still intact. Mixed in the pop culture references and the nonsensical ones were videos of people explaining how to hide your face from cameras with facial recognition, jokes about which Nile warehouse was going to get hit next, and a trend on ZigZag where people got more and more creative about flipping off Mars.

And…well, this moment for example. Here Seth was, eating a full breakfast at his favorite diner with his roommates. All of them scarfing down bacon and sausage and fruit. Protein. No carbs. They needed to full but not drowsy, because once they were done here, they were going to pay the bill with a 50% tip and head out to the nearest Nile warehouse. If Seth could get a new pots and pan set out of there before the whole building went up that would be great because his current set was all scratched to shit.

From the private journal of one Eric Price, former CEO of Nile.com:

Day 95

We’re still arguing about a calendar system. What the days and months should be called, if we even still have them. If that Popov clown thinks there’s going to be an entire month called Popova and only a Priceday he’s out of his vodka-soaked mind.

The rest of the Nilesphere continues according to plan. Everything has finally been set up. My room, honestly, is the height of luxury. I have windows. I insisted. I told the eggheads, just tell me how much money I have to throw at you to get you to shut up and get me a window to Mars. Preferably something with an automated window shade.

There’s a few more ships with supplies coming in from Earth, should be here tomorrow. And then that’s it. We’ve cut contact. Everything at the launching facilities has been destroyed – Geoff sent me the video footage. They can’t get to us, not unless we allow it. I can’t imagine they’ll be able to recreate what we developed for at least half a century, and by then they might have all been swallowed by a whale or some shit.

Got some meeting with the eggheads we brought in a little bit. They’re concerned about something, but when ARENT they? I’ll make it rain, and they’ll stop clucking their little beaky heads.

November 16th, 2040

Parts of the newly-elected President Donna Hayward’s victory speech.

“Three and a half years ago, not even two months after I had been instated as Secretary of the Interior, I was called upon by this country to become its leader. These past three and a half years have been a lot of things. Stressful. Scary. Violent. As times of great change are. And I will admit, there have been many times I thought of giving up. I was plagued with doubt, as any president who gains the title through anything but a fair election must be. Was I doing right by my people? Should I just leave it someone else?

“I decided time and time again, no. I must stay. I must not flee like so many above me had already done.”

Pause as applause consumes the room. President Hayward holds back a smile.

“I must not flee like so many above me had already done! This country still needed a president, and I was the first to stand up and say, “I will do it.”

“Still, I never lost that apprehension. That fear that I was doing something wrong. After all, I wasn’t elected for my platform. I wasn’t elected at all. How could I know my actions where what the people wanted? Early on, I decided the only way to know was to listen. Listen to the people. And listen to my heart.

“And now that I have been fairy and dutifully elected as the President of the United States, I truly feel that I have done the right thing.”

Pause as applause consumes the room. President Hayward stops the applause by pointing back to the crowd.

“You should be applauding yourselves! I truly feel like I am nothing more than the voice of the people. I listened to you, and I did as you asked.

“We have done a lot as a nation, and as a world, in these past three years, but I believe the most important thing we’ve done is taken direct action on the health of this planet. The Great Evacuation was really a Great Wake-Up call for all of us. I know some of these changes have been a challenge, but every time I see that Americans, and all of humanity, has risen to meet them. The challenges are not over. In fact, if anything, they are just beginning. But will we run away from them like cowards? No! I believe these challenges will only bring us together, make us stronger, and together we will walk toward the light of a healthier, greener planet!”

Pause for applause and standing ovation.

From the private journal of one Eric Price, former CEO of Nile.com:

Pricia 15, Sol 10

Karlson’s dead and I didn’t do it.

I know what people are going to say. They’re going to say I had the motive. The Karlson biosphere had the air scrubbers we desperately needed. Still don’t know what happened to ours. Suspect sabotage. Anyway, I didn’t do it. I’ll keep saying I didn’t do it until I’m hoarse in the throat.

And I’ll be able to with all this fresh air in my biosphere.

That motherfucker wouldn’t negotiate. That was his problem. No, that’s EVERYONE’S problem. No one knows how to cooperate. I’ve got needs for my biosphere and it shouldn’t take this long for the others to give me what I need.

We should have made Mars a monarchy.

Message relayed to Earth and spread on social media by unknown sources, June 25th, 2056

Greetings, Earthlings!

From all of us on Mars, we send a friendly hello. Do you remember us? I’m sure you do. Do you miss us? We can only hope (but we think we know the answer)!

Up here on the red planet, your Martian cousins are thriving. We have made many advancements in a variety of fields, such as health and genetics, interstellar travel, and even Martian farming! There has always been speculation of a ‘singularity,’ a moment when the advancement of technology reaches a point where technology becomes like magic and humanity is changed forever. We are pleased to report we have hit this singularity, and are being plunged into a wild and fantastical future!

We have made such great strides in advancing humanity, our only regret is leaving Earth behind. Leaving you behind. What goodness, what greatness, could come to Earth if we were able to bring these fantastic advancements back? It’s a question that has haunted us for quite some time!

We are calling on the governments of Earth to assist in reopening Earth to Mars travel, so that we might bright these advancements to you, the people.

International Martian Watch Center, June 25th, 2056

Carina read the message again before handing the tablet back to Shen. She bit into her apple as she mulled it over.

“So…horseshit?”

Shen nodded. “Big stinky pile of it.”

The Watch had been created a little less than five years after the Great Evacuation. At first, they were just pointing satellites at Mars, trying to pick up whatever they could. Then Geoff Garvey, ‘acting’ CEO of Nile.com (all of the CEOs who had left had put up replacements with the stipulation that they would always have the word ‘acting’ in front of their title, and if that didn’t tell you all you needed to know about the new Martian race…) had cracked under pressure and revealed that he had a line of communication with Mars. All the ‘acting’ CEOs did. And they weren’t just getting messages.

They were getting everything.

Weather, satellite, and life system reports. Communications between the biospheres. Reports on their experiments. Reports on their fights.

Oh, yes, the fights. Those had started almost immediately.

“Even if I didn’t know what I know,” Shen said, rereading the message. “I wouldn’t buy it.”

Carina shook her head and took another bite of her apple. “Not for a penny. Okay, so, they’ve made advancements in ‘interstellar travel’ but they need our help to get back to Earth?”

“Exactly,” Shen said. He shook his head. “So many exclamation points.”

“What do we do?”

“I can tell you what we’re probably not going to do. But I guess we run it up the chain first.”

April 3, 2057

Before the Great Evacuation (what he and his peers had called the Great Fuck-off and what he’d heard his granddaughter call the Darwin Dive), Seth had been told his entire life it was his fault the planet was dying.

His fault, and every other random citizen out there. It was his fault because he didn’t cut the plastic rings off his six packs. It was his fault because he drove an hour one way to work the only job he’d been able to find that would pay for his part of the rent for the apartment he shared with four other people. It was his fault because he ate the occasional hamburger, avocado toast for breakfast, and liked to pick up lattes for his endless drive to work. If only he bought an electric car, if only he didn’t run his air conditioner in ninety-degree heat, if only he didn’t fly commercial on holidays, then the planet would be fine. It was all his fault.

Yeah, so, that was a lie.

He was sitting on the back deck, watching the Gulf waters lap lazily against the beach twenty yards away. As a kid he always assumed Florida would sink. They all had. Burgers were grilling behind him, lab grown beef that tasted like the natural thing. He hadn’t actually seen a cow in years. The sun was setting somewhere on the other side of Mexico, setting fire to the sky. The good kind of fire. The metaphorical kind.

It had been hard, of course it had been. There had been changes. Big changes. Little changes. Things got more expensive. Other things were just outlawed out of existence. But those things were things he’d never actually gotten to have. Cruises. Private jets. Diamond mining. And things still weren’t completely right. But they were better. He couldn’t remember the last wildfire blazing for months at a time, and the last hurricane that had passed over his house had been a measly Cat 2. His grandkids were the first in his family to not have asthma in four generations.

Seth sipped his beer from its glass bottle – everything was glass or aluminum now, the last plastic bottle he’d seen had been on TV – and looked up to the sky. Next to the moon, looking like an angry boil, was Mars. It always made him grin, looking up at the red planet. The planet populated by the people who thought they were humanity’s best. He used to think it was just a line, that surely they didn’t really think that. But over time, he’d realized those people didn’t think like he did. They believed their own hype. They had the most money, so they were the best. Maybe they really did believe it was everyone’s actions destroying the planet, and not just theirs.

It was hard times down here on Earth, but once everyone banded together to raze what was left of the corporations to the ground things got easier. Others, of course, tried to install themselves – Earth had rid itself of only the assholes with money – but it was a lot harder for them to break down environmental laws than to stop them from being passed in the first place.

Meanwhile, the most selfish, egotistical, arrogant pricks had all shot themselves to Mars, destroyed any way for the rest of the plebes to follow, and were shocked when their society of rich douchebags had almost immediately collapsed in on themselves. A planet populated entirely by the kind of people who get out their cars in traffic to intimidate someone who honked.

Janet came out with a bowl of tossed salad and set it on the table.

“Is it official yet?” he asked her.

With a shake of her head, she picked up the remote on the table and brought the television out from its hiding place in the deck. Twenty-four-hour news had been one of the first things to go, so they had on the local news. On the screen was no Talking Head. That was Juan Blanco. He lived a couple doors down from their son and they saw him at the grocery store once in a while.

“Personally, I don’t think it’s a ‘complicated’ situation,” Juan was telling someone through a split screen. “They made their bed, now they can lie in it.”

“Shouldn’t we think of them as humans?” the other person in the split screen asked. “Humans who need help?”

“Why?” Juan asked, shrugging. And then he sat there for a second, letting the other person’s eyes bug out. “I’m serious. Why should we think of them as humans? Did any of them ever, for a second, think of the rest of us that way? Don’t, because the answer is ‘no.’ They saw us…as workers. As slaves. As fodder. They never raised a finger to selflessly help any of us, and then abandoned us to a problem they created. So, really, why should we think of them as humans?”

The other person began their rebuttal, but it didn’t really matter. The question of bringing these Martians home had been raised in a way never before done – a global vote. Every single person. It had already been three months since they had started, and they were still tracking down people in Africa and South America. This was a question of humanity, after all. There were paid volunteers trekking through the deepest forests of Brazil right now, finding left-alone tribes of people and explaining what was happening. Every single person.

The government wanted it official. They wanted every vote. But anyone paying attention knew what was going to happen.

So far, the votes to leave them on Mars were coming in two to one.

This happened days after this story had been written and posted: