PREFACE
Future Fictions is a friendly competition providing space for writers to explore edgy ideas and subjects in a compelling narrative framework – speculative fiction, we call it, but it’s really just storytelling where realism is slightly modified, altered, enhanced, because sometimes realism is not enough to say all we want to say about the world and our place in it. It’s an opportunity to look at what the world is becoming and write about where we find ourselves in a future that is approaching much faster than we might ever have expected.
The two winning stories in this initial iteration of the contest are both about physical and spiritual transformations – even metamorphoses. In “Spider Bite,” children are literally growing up too fast; in “The Choice,” we may not have to die at all if we can only accept becoming someone else. Both stories reflect a desire to understand the predicament of mortality and change itself in the one best way it can be understood: through story.
The Creative Writing Program and Cellar Door wish to thank Toby and Trish Alligood, whose support, ideas, direction, and vision make these stories possible.
Enjoy.
Professor Daniel Wallace
Director, Creative Writing Program, UNC
WINNERS
1st Place: “Spider Bite” by Tara Penman
Tara Penman (she/her) is a junior at UNC majoring in Psychology and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in elementia, Chinchilla Lit, and she is also a two-time alum of the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. She is currently working on her first novel.
2nd Place: “The Choice” by Karina Lazorchak
Karina Lazorchak is a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, majoring in English with a concentration in Writing, Editing, and Digital Publishing. When she’s not writing, she enjoys playing the bass guitar and listening to music, her other true love.
Spider Bite
None of us wanted the spider bite. Why would we? That’s why they tried to keep us indoors all the time, in our schools and homes, until they thought they had gone away. It had been over five years since the infestation began in our town, so long ago that I barely knew a world beyond darting from classroom to classroom, steering myself clear of the middle of the walkways. Cedarcreek was a large town, but since they had closed the gates, everyone had gotten a lot more comfortable with each other, like a disgruntled family that had spent too much time at the dinner table.
The spiders lingered in the shadows. They lingered on the blacktop that was overgrown with weeds since the infestation prohibited us from playing outside. They stalked our front yards, our old swing sets, our golf courses. They mated in our swimming pools and had babies under our back porches. The only place that could be guaranteed safe was our houses, where our helicopter parents choked every corner of every room with insecticide and vinegar. Five years of the nasty buggers that kept us away from playing outside and going into the woods behind our mobile school. We ran fast, trying to make sure none of us lingered in the shadows and cracks of the dilapidated pavement where the arachnids could surely be found.
Only the adults seemed to be immune. I remember when I was in second grade, around the time when the first infestation began. The playground became a battleground, my nubby little knees submerged in the mulch trenches. I remember Josie Raymond’s tangled orange hair, tangled with the hold of wood chips and little crystal rocks. She was fighting over some game with Cameron Pickett. They both were
pretending they were paleontologists, the crystals being their fossils. At one point, Cameron had
gotten angry and stolen a lot of her crystals. He had hidden them inside the slide.
When Josie had gone through the slide, she said she had found a spider. It was tiny, with black beady eyes that looked in every single direction, including Cam’s nose. Josie teased it in front of Cameron’s face, as payback for stealing her fossils. She accidentally let it go and catapulted the bugger.
At the funeral, Cameron’s parents had an open casket. They wanted Josie and everyone else to see the size of the welt. It had consumed the flesh, blowing up to the size of a small gourd, and the rest of his body was covered like orange and yellow fireworks. I remembered thinking the grotesque figure could not have once been a boy; it had instead always been an ancient monstrosity, and by some revelation, the spider had revealed its true form. There was some sort of pus-liquid dripping down the side of the casket from when they had plopped the body first inside. When they lowered the casket into the ground, that was the first time that the adults had looked properly scared.
All the grown-ups had since forced us to abandon the playground. The only thing that I got out of second grade was meeting Thorley, Cam’s younger brother, clutching his parents’ legs, swearing that he still did not believe in spiders.
…
Five years later, Thorley Pickett and I had settled into our routine at Cedarcreek Middle School. As we darted to the gym, school books under our arms, we would count the number of cracks in the sidewalk. Thirty-two. We would count out loud as we jumped over each one. We called it the jumping game. We were getting to be too old to be watched all the time by the nagging teachers, who would spray every suspicious crack just to make sure, but jumping over them made us feel just as safe.
“Thirty-two,” Thorley gasped, and then smiled with a snaggle-tooth grin. He was both the smartest and dumbest person I knew, never afraid of anything, not even the spiders that ruined his brother. Whenever I thought about spiders, I thought about Cameron’s body dismembered in the casket. Sometimes I’d ask Thorley about it, but mostly he didn’t want to talk about Cameron at all. He would instead prefer to lecture me about how spiders weren’t real, and were some figment of our imagination, like narwhals or the FDA. Real things, he said, did not close down entire towns, separating us from the rest of the country due to a singular invasive species. I released the longest sigh, looking back on all that we had traveled. I could see our music building off in the distance like a silver cloud, the gym building close and rising before us like a skyscraper. It never seemed like the longest road back before the spiders had invaded our town, but that was before we had our valiant army of teaching staff to protect the lot of us.
“C’mon snaggle,” I said, as we slipped indoors. That day we played dodgeball. It was boys against boys and girls against girls, until we got down to only a few people left. It was me, Thorley, and Ben Van Hires. Van Hires always had the sniffles from allergies. Some of the popular girls like Sarah with the yellowy braids, whispered that he had already gotten the spider bite and didn’t want anyone to know, but he was very good at dodging balls. Thorley was strong and tall for his age, despite the snaggletooth that kept him looking eight. He got Van Hires out by throwing the ball so hard that it left a black streak on the white spotted tile. Mr. Coach blew his whistle as the rest of our cohort looked on from the bleachers, peering down to see who’d win.
We faced each other, and it was almost like we were jumping over cracks again. We were all laughs. He threw a ball at me, and I dodged out of the way, hearing it ping against the wall. I threw a green one, and he dove out of the way.
To me, Thorley was one of the only kids at the school still with a sense of wonder about what was beyond school books and teachers. There lay the difference: Thorley considered me his greatest opponent, but I considered him my best friend. So, sometimes I gave up while playing. He pushed it too far, and my legs would hurt, or my back, and he would get a devilish look in his eyes, which meant he would not be stopping any time soon. I went slower. He scooped up a big blue one and threw it at my back when I was running to get a ball. I immediately turned around, feigning hurt.
“That’s not fair!” I yelled.
“I seized an opportunity.”
“But you broke the rules! Remember? No throwing while backs are turned!”
“It’s just a game, Emelie,” Thorley smirked.
“You broke the rules!”
Mr. Coach blew his whistle, his mustache curling with anger. “Enough!”
“But Mr. Coach-”
“Life isn’t fair!”
…
In the locker room, as I was taking off my gray gym clothes, I heard some girls snickering behind my back. It was those popular girls, led by Sarah with the braids.
“She did it on purpose!”
I whipped around, my cheeks flushing.
“How do you know that?” I asked, realizing that all the girls were staring at me in my training bra, a little flowered bralette with a bow on the front. Sarah found a way to make everything she did trendy, even in a town disconnected from the rest of the world’s trends. She had tucked in the gray T-shirt into her shorts but pulled it out a little so that it looked purposefully baggy.
“He might be better at throwing, but you’ve definitely dodged enough balls to win before. You like him, don’t you?”
She was untucking her shirt now and pulling it over her head to reveal the full-sized bra her mom had bought for her big boobs. “Just anyways, I hope both of you know it doesn’t matter to anyone if you win.”
“Yes, it does,” I said, “It matters to him, anyway.”
“Well, it only matters in the world of grown-ups,” said Sarah. “Only stuff like that matters if you’re waging wars or making peace with a faraway land, or paying taxes. Then it really matters if you win.”
“Or if you’re keeping away the spiders,” Leah, a girl behind her, snickered.
I threw back on my school clothes and scooped up my books, slamming the jump door shut.
…
Some of us had never seen a real spider bite. I didn’t know much about it, but Mr. Science said that they were working on a cure for spider bites, a cure that would prolong the warty, yellowing pus effects, make the bones hurt less, and make the victim’s mind clearer.
He didn’t tell us more about the research. Instead, he showed us pictures of children’s legs all swollen up and red. You could see where the maw clamped down, the two little red incisors. He warned us about how no one really knew what caused it or how it felt to be the victim, and no one would survive if we got bitten. It was drilled into our skulls, the weight of death inching nearer and nearer as the broken AC unit tried to keep humming on.
We were told that anyone who got the spider bite had to report it immediately – or else.
Mr. Science never explained what the “or else” meant, but we didn’t really need to know as the teachers protected us all the time. Someone had started a rumor about what would happen; the CIA could take you from your house. Roger liked to say that aliens could smell the bite and abduct you. I also heard that
the teachers could suspend you if you got the bite. Thorley used to deny all the rumors, saying that Cameron didn’t get abducted or suspended. But every time someone asked him how Cameron died – if it wasn’t the spiders – he’d go completely quiet, lowering his head in class until Mr. Science, Ms. Social Studies, or whatever adult was present had to pull him aside and comfort him.
When I was stressed by the idea of the spiders, the only thing that calmed my nerves was the jumping game. I was more naive than he was, and sometimes when I heard a new story, it took me a lot longer than Thorley to figure out that the stories were stories and nothing more.
…
After walking back from Mr. Science’s classroom, I took off. I didn’t talk to Thorley, I didn’t even start counting out loud. I took off and didn’t look back. He wasn’t smiling like he usually did when class ended and we played our game. There were forty-eight cracks between Mr. Science’s and Ms. Social Studies’ classrooms. One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight. Thorley dashed to meet my stride, puffing.
“Look, Emelie. I heard a little about Sarah. I’m sorry.” I said nothing. Eleven-twelve-thirteen-fourteen-fifteen…
“Is it something I said? How can I make it up to you?”
I said nothing. Eighteen-nineteen-twenty-twenty-one…
“Why don’t we make a new game?”
I said nothing, but I slowed the rate of my jumping.
Thorley’s eyes started to light up again. “Why don’t we go looking for spiders? We could make that a game.”
“But the spiders could bite us.”
Thorley smiled wider. “They won’t, but we could find a way to carry ‘em without touching us, just in case. We could toss them on Sarah and her stupid friends.”
“That would be nice. But that could kill ‘em.”
“You don’t believe the stupid stuff the teachers tell us, do you? I wanted to yell at him, but instead I shook my head. “They make that stuff up just so they can control us, so we stay on the sidewalk.”
“You’re lying again,” I grumbled.
Thorley shook his head. “I’d lie to Sarah. I’ll put a bugger on her chest and watch her scream. I’ll stick it in her perfect yellowy braids. But it won’t do anything. It won’t kill any of us.”
I remember him saying a lot more beyond that and that I was nodding a lot, sweat from my forehead dripping down and closing around my mouth. Part of me wanted so badly to linger in the grass, in the woods again, like all those years ago before the spiders came to Cedarcreek. Before the riots, where my neighbors’ kids had been part of a group that had slowly vanished over a few days. I remember my mother comforting my neighbor. I had run to the edge of town as part of their search party; that’s when the police started barricading us away from the woods.
The first summer after the infestation, my mom had burned all of our books about spiders, and read us stories about fairy tales with snakes and dinosaurs instead. They were less scary, she explained to me, the fantastical world couldn’t hurt. She would try to keep us safe from them. The things in the books are always less scary than the thing itself…
Thorley was suggesting we directly face the horrid thing, look it in the eyes until it was no longer a fantasy anymore. But why venture into the soft grass where a spider could latch its maw onto my thigh and I’d be done for? I didn’t want to be abducted, or suspended, or have the CIA come for me. But if I decided to linger on the sidewalk instead of the grass, Thorley probably wouldn’t want to be my best friend anymore. And I would lose my first crush and my best friend.
If I could somehow prove to both of them that I was not someone to be reckoned with, then all my problems from dodgeball would be solved. I would not be anyone’s fool and I would have my best friend.
Thorley was grinning again as we ran ahead, leaping over more and more cracks. He beat me again as we sank into Ms. Social Studies’ seats to muddle through the next forty-five minutes.
…
At lunch in the main building, Thorley waved me over to where he and a bunch of our friends were sitting with a cluster of blue trays surrounding them. They were launching yogurt from pouches into the air and trying to aim them into each other’s mouths, but it mostly landed on the prison-grade table. He smirked at everyone with his snaggletooth.
“You ready?” Thorley asked.
“Yep.” I wasn’t. Thorley waved goodbye to some of our buddies, and when the teachers monitoring the cafeteria weren’t looking, we dumped our trays early into the trash. The door to the outside world, the overgrown blacktop, had a lock and hinges that were rusted through to the point that simply pushing the door made it creak. Thankfully, over the shouts and yogurt, we slipped out seamlessly.
The grass was up to our knees. “See, this isn’t so bad,” Thorley said. I couldn’t see anything in the underbrush. Where the basketball hoop used to be, ferns snaked up and dragonflies flitted about. Weeds covered the chalk lines and little seedy goldenrods choked the violets. The ivy grew all around us, around where our footsteps used to be, around where the teachers used to stand outside and whistle at us to come in. A crabapple tree was rotting, the small, putrid fruit compact enough to clasp a palm around. Thorley picked up one and bit into it, his lips puckering. He dropped it to the ground, and a big, bright bumblebee circled it. I was trying to be brave, really I was, but I found my hand clasped around Thorley’s. I needed something to hold on to. Thorley pushed my hand away, bending down to look.
“You can’t be scared,” he said, “We are braver than Sarah, remember?” I heard something move and I huddled up to him. He smelled like fresh baby powder and leftovers. Something rustled in a bush. “It’s probably nothing.”
A bunny hopped out of the long grass as I grabbed Thorley’s arm, reeling backwards.
“Stop it!” He said. “There’s nothing here, and I thought you weren’t going to act like a baby. Now, help me search. And when we find a stupid spider, we will pick it up by our sleeves, like
this,” he folded his sleeve inside out, making a make-shift glove. “Or,” he continued, “when we don’t find any stupid spiders, we can tell them that there isn’t anything. You won’t be worried anymore.” He bent down again, and this time I helped him search. I saw a horde of ants marching back and forth around an ant hill, a garden snake minding its own business, and even a small butterfly. It had been so long since I’d been able to play with a dancing butterfly. I think it liked my blouse because it landed on my shirtfront before taking off again. I felt much better.
“I guess you were right. Nothing’s here except butterflies,” I giggled, turning to Thorley.
Then all the blood drained from my face. He was poking a nest full of them with a stick. “I guess they weren’t lying,” he said. “But these buggers are tiny.”
He was right; they were so small and brown that they blended right into the flora. But there they were, eight limbs, itty-bitty beady eyes, huddling all close in a pile of brush. They were ugly. They had silky legs and rough underbellies for hiding their young. Those legs made my stomach do a cartwheel. There were too many of them, more than I thought were evolutionarily possible. I looked down at them and saw them all around Thorley, crawling up his shoes from their nest. And Thorley was provoking their home with his stick.
“Stop it!” I screamed with a witch-like cry.
“Don’t worry, I’ll protect you if they attack. I got my stick and my wits.”
I tried to think about Cameron, about how Cameron wasn’t scared until all the adults had said he was dead. How Thorley wasn’t scared, even though Cameron was long dead. I grabbed Thorley’s arm and yanked him away from the bushes, away from the spiders I never thought I would see again, and I took off running, jumping over each weed and blade of grass, the world’s most extreme version of our jumping game. He didn’t follow me.
“Emelie!” he screamed. I turned around and held out my hand for him to take it, but he just stayed there. He had let go of the stick and was staring down at my left leg. “They got you!” A silent shrill erupted from his mouth as I looked down at the monster blooming across my left leg. I clapped my hand over his mouth. I had lost to his awful games again.
“You don’t want the teachers to come looking and get us in trouble?” I asked. Thorley moaned incoherently. “You don’t want them to take me away? The aliens? The CIA? Suspension?”
“Nooo!”
I let go of his mouth. “Then shut your pie hole.”
“What are we going to do?” His cheeks were all ruddy from crying. “We can’t go back in there, with you looking all like this.”
“We got to. We have Mr. English’s class next, remember?” He nodded; I helped him back up to his feet. He wiped his face and took off running. I ran behind him, this time much slower than he was. I pulled down my skirt really low, and you could almost not see the splodge blooming all over my upper leg.
…
Mr. English’s class was fifty whole jumps away, and we arrived late for class. He made us sit down and read silently. Apparently, the door to the blacktop had been found cracked-open during class change, and he was frazzled from the news. Mr. Coach had found that his keys on his belt had been missing. No doors were supposed to be unlocked; it was school policy, so that meant whoever left the doors open would get in big trouble. He didn’t give us our test.
It was towards the end of the class when I stood up to leave that Sarah, with the braids, started screaming, seemingly out of pain. She was usually known to be dramatic, but she was being super dramatic. It was so shocking that Van Hires took his hand out of the tissue box.
She was looking down at my leg.
Thorley was blubbering too now, crossing in front and protecting me as the students circled to get a closer look at the blob. It was swelling and starting to crawl down to the tip of my knee, forming fluorescent yellow and orange skin. The more they looked at it, the more I could feel it. It weighed me down, slowed me to the point that walking hurt. No way I could play the jumping game now. I tried to limp towards the door, but in a panic, a kid closed it. Mr. English looked at me, his mouth a big, round hole in his head.
“I did it!” Thorley cried, “I told her to come to the blacktop with me!”
White pus leaked out of the gape in my upper thigh; I touched it. It was much thicker than the pictures had suggested, and it was clearer than what Cameron’s body had looked like years ago. It was sticky and I put my hand in Thorley’s. He didn’t let go.
Mr. English called Ms. Principal down through the speaker system. All the kids were told to stay back, even Thorley, but he wouldn’t let them see my leg. I tried to hobble away, but they barricaded me in with a swarm of desks. The desks creaked like an old ship as they scraped them on the floor. They made a ship around me to keep me inside.
Ms. Principal came in spraying insecticide. I had always envisioned that the teachers would have some big, important plan whenever a kid got bitten. But it seemed that they were still resorting to their prevention measures. It had been five years since the first bite, and yet Ms. Principal looked just as dismayed as the day the invasion was discovered.
Mr. English shuffled the kids outside as they grabbed their school books and made a beeline for the buses. Ms. Principal grabbed Thorley as he kicked and screamed. I tried to make a run for it, too, but there was nowhere to go. My leg started itching, and I wanted to go outside. The last thing I remembered was that Thorley bit her glove, his snaggletooth aimed and ready, as I passed out on the floor
…
When I woke up, my legs felt much better. I knew I wasn’t at home because my mother wasn’t hovering in the doorway or patting my head with a damp washcloth. I sat up, staring at the gray tile ceiling. I was in the nurse’s office. My legs clanked to the ground as I stretched. I bent down and investigated, and the blossom was gone, eradicated completely. There was no evidence that I had ever gotten bitten.
When I stood, I noticed something was wrong. I was much farther away from the ground than I usually was. I was always tall, looking Thorley in the eyes, but now I felt like I was wearing stilts. I inspected my features in the cracked mirror, then vomited into the sink. I wasn’t Emelie.
My face was too lanky, too narrow. Too adultish. I had curves that made my body feel like some sort of teapot, hair dyed darker and yet graying at the roots. The silver was a different, plastic texture. I pulled at it, and the skin encasing this new, wicked prison. What was wrong with me?
You could see the veins on my hands and the thin lines under my eyes, the beginning of wrinkles. When I tried to move my face up and down, lines formed every which way, folding up and into my head. I had to be some terrible monster. The girl staring back at me in the mirror wasn’t the one I knew; she was some beastly creature.
The memories of what had happened prior to the spider bite began to shift, and migrate down to the more inner lizard parts of the brain. They rose with a fuzzy fever and faded back down, putting a glossy cover over their contents. My mind felt more full, more developed, as other ideas of youth came forward to replace the perspective I had once held.
Ms. Principal knocked on the door. I jumped as she opened it and wiped my mouth, the stranger’s mouth. Maybe she knew what had happened to me. Maybe it was just a side effect of the medicine they gave me or something, and it would go away soon.
“You really took a tumble there on the stairs,” she explained. “Glad you’re feeling better. The interview process is really stressful; they don’t lie about that.”
She was clutching a sheet of paper and extended it to me. “You are going to be teaching seventh-grade mathematics.”
“You have to be mistaken,” I growled. My voice wasn’t coming out right; it was deep and feminine. “I’m Emelie. Emelie Coven. I’m twelve. I’m a student.” I was good at math, sure, many years better than my peers. But I am twelve, not a teacher. Ms. Principal frowned as if that was some wicked joke. “Emelie Coven died two days ago from a spider bite.”
…
After begging and pleading with Ms. Principal to let me out of teaching, I finally accepted the position. They didn’t have a math teacher in Cedarcreek anymore, they said. The last one had disappeared. I knew I had to tell Thorley. The doorway was open between Mr. Science’s and my classrooms. It was only twenty-nine jumps away. He was sticking out his head, getting ready for the day. He spotted me and quickly ran out of the room.
“Coven,” he said. “I know it’s you, the little girl who dug with Josie all of those years ago.” His gaze met mine, and he was fiddling around in his pockets. He took something out of his pocket, a small shiny rock. I knew it was him. Cameron Pickett. But Cameron looked unrecognizable, with a brown beard trailing down from his neck, rubbing against his collared shirt, emphasizing his quiet, mature eyes.
“I thought you died,” I said. “You can tell me how to get back. I need to get rid of this face,” I pulled on it to show how many folds there were in the face. Cameron did not look amused.
“Get back?” He said. “That’s not how this works.”
“How do I go back? I got to tell Thorley.”
“It’ll be okay. It’ll take some time. It took me years to get over my bite.”
My chest tightened. “Are you saying I can’t go back?”
“They won’t understand, even if you try to tell them. I’d hate for him to grow up before he’s ready.” He glanced over his shoulder, his eyes darting around the distant sidewalk as if someone would quickly approach. “And as I have always said, the rules are the rules, Coven.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demanded.
“We aren’t supposed to force them to know. They might know on their own; they might become us in time. Who knows? But I know we can slow the spread, if you work with the rest of us. Every day we keep the rules, we keep them safe. Like Thorley. None of them are ready to join us yet.”
I stared at him, my throat tight, words trying to form but unable to bubble to the surface. “But I guess you were.” Cameron then softened, stuffing the rock back into his pocket. “I wish you the best of luck in teaching seventh grade,” he said, his voice almost kind.
…
“Good morning, Ms. Math,” the students would say as they plopped down in their seats and unloaded their textbooks. They looked so young and wild. Van Hires threw a paper airplane across the room, the folds stuck together with clear snot. Even Sarah with the braids looked pitiful. She giggled about rumors, or about her cup size, or about how she had already gotten her braces off. She was so small, they all were. Their numbers were dwindling each day in Cedarcreek as the teaching staff expanded. No one wanted to tell the children why.
I wrote them some easy problems on the whiteboard as I drifted from my new desk to the window. I could see him now, walking slowly. He didn’t jump. Thorley Pickett carried his books cautiously as if he were Atlas carrying the weight of the world. He looked down at his boots, and each shuffled step was like a disgrace to mankind. He shivered awkwardly, looking around at the patchy grass and the brush, wondering why he even played games in the first place.
But his eyes lit up when he saw me. I was hoping he knew I was in there somewhere, despite being a head taller than he and looking much older. I missed him and I envied him. I felt many words growing on my tongue.
He looked at me with a knowing, sad stare. “Welcome to our school, Ms. Math,” he said, as he walked by to take his seat. The one beside him was vacant. He stared at it forlornly, then back at me, examining the newfound space between me and my childhood. He caught me continuing to stare and smiled again.
I noticed that his snaggletooth was missing. It had fallen out.
***
The Choice
A man died at Grandpa’s funeral. It was in the middle of the closing remarks. “May his memory be a blessing,” the rabbi told us. He said it again after the coroner left. Dad told me it’s
like proposing at someone else’s wedding. The bride would be pissed. Mom said to stop
laughing. People are staring. Dad said people grieve in different ways.
It wasn’t the air that killed either of them. At least, no one thought it was. I was already
crying, so I let the tears keep flowing until they spilled down onto the fabric of my dress. I
thought it might be nice for someone to read the dark stains like tea leaves. Mrs. Posner, who
swore she was wearing black underneath her yellow hazmat suit (she was one of those people),
said sorry for your losses because now there were two of them.
She said Mr. Redding was one of Grandpa’s oldest friends, that they would’ve been buried next to each other if this wasn’t a Jewish cemetery and if Mr. Redding wasn’t an Episcopalian. I didn’t tell her I’d never seen the man with the walrus mustache in any of Grandpa’s photo albums. I wondered if it had been Grandpa’s doing.
Maybe Mr. Redding chewed his gum too loud or cut in line at the post office or always took the newest golf cart.
Maybe Grandpa called in a favor with God. Or maybe it was the air after all.
Mom had sprung for the Camellia Plan, which came with a headstone, fifty programs printed on heavy cardstock, and full control over the playlist in the receiving room, but no food for the reception. I walked through the rows of graves while Mom and Dad shepherded everyone back to our house for Diet Dr Pepper and whatever was left in the freezer, plus a plate of assorted cheese cubes.
The cemetery was shrouded in the familiar dull gray haze. They’d stopped calling it the greenhouse gas effect when the weight of burnt coal and pesticides became too heavy for the name to bear. They didn’t even bother tracking it anymore. We all knew it was well into the red zone each month.
In most places, the air was still, but above a few of the graves I could see small patches of holographic light, glittering like oil spills in the late afternoon sun. I thought I spotted shadowy faces twisting inside them. As the air turned closer to molasses, the floating masses had become more difficult to ignore. Scientists, psychics, and politicians disagreed on what exactly they were—spirits or psyches or souls—but eventually they figured out that they were worth capturing.
When someone died, the air could hold them for a week, sometimes two, before letting them go. During the interim, the spirits were ripe for the taking. Mortality was up; birth rates were down. No one wanted to bring a child into the air. And with “deceased” stamps in every language running out of ink and jobs left empty by the hundreds of thousands, they needed a way to keep the species going. Some of the bodies here were still perfectly healthy. It would be a shame to let them go to waste. And maybe the souls (or whatever they were) wanted a new body to call home. That’s how they came up with The Choice.
I counted twenty-seven spirits, including the one above Grandpa’s plot. It hung low, close to the freshly churned soil, not yet strong enough to break free of the thick atmosphere above. I’d heard rumors that the unmatched spirits could latch onto people’s bodies, slither through the cracks in your skin and stick themselves to your soul if you passed too close to them, so I kept my distance. My mind was crowded enough without adding Grandpa’s to the mix, even though we shared the exact same opinions on which reality shows were secretly scripted.
I walked home. Mom and Dad didn’t mind. They were too busy discussing plans. Body and spirit pairings were hard, especially since Grandpa’s spirit was more stubborn than most. And it would take time to find a body that hadn’t been completely poisoned by the air. We were lucky, Mom told me. Most people couldn’t afford The Choice. There were rumors about a black market of stolen bodies and souls, a bit bruised or wispy but still potentially viable. But things could go wrong very quickly. The procedure was still in the experimental stages. If the body rejected the soul, or if someone caught you in the act, the punishment—from vengeful spirits and volatile governments—would be severe. I wondered if someone would make The Choice for Mr. Redding, if his family could afford it. I wondered if he had a family.
The streets outside the cemetery weren’t crowded. Most people preferred to visit the dead on days the spirits weren’t visible. It’s hard to see them floating there if you can’t bring them back down. I made sure to stick to the main roads, just in case. I took my pocketknife out of my purse (pepper spray was milder than tap water these days) and squeezed the handle until my knuckles turned white. The city had been more violent since the air turned against us. Some people were desperate enough to create a body themselves if they thought a spirit close to them was worth saving.
By the time I got home, the guests had finished the last of the jalapeño poppers (Grandpa’s favorite) and were making their way to whatever would occupy the rest of the afternoon. Probably another funeral.
“Your mother has terrible taste in hors d’oeuvres,” Mrs. Posner said, not knowing it was Grandpa’s taste instead of Mom’s. The clear plastic flap that normally blocked her face from the air was unzipped. There was a smear of cream cheese on the corner of her mouth. I didn’t point it out to her.
Mom and Dad were sitting at the dining table across from Mr. Lange, our assigned representative from Spirit Services. Mom was holding a tablet, swiping through the same series of files she’d been obsessing over since Grandpa’s last breath. Her face glowed in the artificial light. The files listed each body’s name, height, age, and medical history, along with a photograph from when it was alive. You couldn’t be too picky about how handsome a body looked. They were just empty shells. But people liked to get to know the faces before they became part of the family. When a body was Chosen, any surviving relatives would be compensated with enough money to cover a year’s supply of groceries in exchange for their donation and to account for any emotional damages. It was a good deal. Produce prices had skyrocketed, since it was nearly impossible to get anything to grow, and the cost of everything else had followed suit.
Mom read one body’s information out loud: Kyle Watson. Five feet, eleven inches tall (the same height as Grandpa before he’d started walking with a cane). Twenty-six years old. No allergies. No prior surgeries. No history of heart disease. No living relatives.
“Who is he?” I asked.
“Someone strong,” Mom said.
“Where did he come from?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “He’ll be in a better place here.”
Mr. Lange reached over and tapped an icon in the top-right corner of the screen. It showed two overlapping human silhouettes. The tablet made a loud chirping sound. The file flashed, then turned green.
“Congratulations,” Mr. Lange said. “It’s a match.”
That night, Dad and I stayed up for the evening news. There was never anything good being reported, but the noise was comforting. Dad told me that giving a body to The Choice was like being an organ donor. It would give Kyle Watson a new purpose. It would give Grandpa another chance at life. He’d have to go
back to working full time, of course, in whichever industries needed people the most. That was one of the conditions. But he would also get to do all the other things he used to love, like singing off-key and giving treats to the dogs he passed on his walks. With Kyle’s young ears, he would probably be able to hear the lyrics of his favorite Odd Bodies song again. I could still remember the dance we’d choreographed to it together.
Mom told me Grandpa had laid out the money for The Choice in his will. I didn’t want to believe her. I wondered where Kyle Watson’s own soul would go. It would be nice, I thought, to watch it drift up and out and away from here.
I dreamt of Grandpa. I found him in aisle four of the grocery store, trapped in a thirteen-dollar jar of peanut butter. It was the super chunky kind he always insisted on buying, even though it hurt his teeth. I tried everything I could to twist the lid open—pliers, duct tape, one of those stretchy hand toys—but it was stuck on too tight.
“Are you going to pay for that?” I turned to see Mr. Lange, wearing a red, collared shirt and an employee ID card, even though he didn’t work there. He picked up the jar and opened it on the first try.
“Grandpa, go,” I shouted, motioning frantically toward the automatic doors. I waited for him to float away, but he stayed. His limbs and joints were settled into even layers, arranged like sediment in the jar. His eyes blinked calmly up at me from the top of its open mouth.
Despite my protests, The Choice was scheduled for the following morning. Mr. Lange didn’t want to risk losing Grandpa’s spirit by waiting too long. I had a feeling Grandpa wasn’t going to leave, but I still hoped he would be gone by the time someone went to catch him. Mom and Dad had agreed to have the transfer occur on a tree-lined field about five minutes from the cemetery, so Grandpa’s spirit wouldn’t have to be transported too far. It was cloudy. “That’s a bad sign,” I told them. They held hands. “It won’t really be Grandpa. Grandpa is gone.”
Mr. Lange was joined by another man in a navy Spirit Services uniform, who would actually perform the procedure. His name was Brian. I knew because of his nametag. The two of them had driven separately, each pulling up to the curb in a hearse. It seemed a bit dramatic, since I didn’t think spirits took up nearly as much space as bodies, and it would’ve been a nightmare if they’d needed to parallel park, but it did make the event feel more official.
Mr. Lange carried Grandpa’s spirit, which had been collected in a rectangular glass container a bit larger than the peanut butter jar I’d imagined him in. Mr. Lange seemed to struggle with the weight of it. Grandpa was slightly more translucent than he’d been yesterday. He filled the corners like silvery water in a fishtank. Maybe, if our budget had been bigger, Grandpa would’ve been allowed to float around in a kiddie pool before being crammed into another body. I pictured the plastic one he’d set up in the front yard when I’d decided I was going to be an Olympic swimmer (we’d gotten rid of it at the end of the summer after my obsession had changed to figure skating). Mr. Lange placed Grandpa in the center of the field, then went to help Brian with the coffin that I assumed held Kyle Watson. They pushed the two
vessels together so that they were touching.
Brian told us to close our eyes. I held mine open. I didn’t want to miss seeing Grandpa for the last time. We paused for a moment of silence. I kept my mind empty and my mouth shut. Grandpa had smoked cigarettes, so I didn’t think he’d remember what full and open lungs felt like. Maybe the new body would inhale too deeply at first and make him cough. Maybe, if we let him go, he could get to a place where the air was clean.
It was like looking directly into a camera flash. The faces on my retinas were overexposed and smiling. Grandpa and Kyle Watson blurred until I couldn’t tell whose teeth were whose. Stepping out of the coffin, Kyle had dark brown hair, green eyes, and sharp cheekbones. He wasn’t Jewish. Well, he was now. His face was free of wrinkles.
“I kept my promise,” Mom said.
“I’m glad you did,” the body replied.
The man that wasn’t my grandfather moved into Grandpa’s room. For breakfast, he ate Grandpa’s favorite: four deviled eggs topped with bacon bits and a Bloody Mary with extra celery. He offered me a sip when Mom and Dad weren’t looking, but I only trusted it from Grandpa. For the first week, the man in Kyle Watson’s body was assigned to work at the hospital. I was pretty sure that both Grandpa and Kyle Watson had absolutely no experience in medicine, but the only requirement now was a steady hand and a clear mind, even if they came from two different people. He took shifts at the fire station, the school, and a nearby dairy farm.
He said the cows moved so slow, they might as well have been garden snails. After work, he tested how fast the body could run and how high it could jump.
“Does it feel strange?” Mom asked him.
“I’m still me,” he said. I silently disagreed. Once the novelty wore off, he mostly just sat in Grandpa’s favorite chair and did Grandpa’s crossword puzzles. On his day off, he took Grandpa’s clubs to the golf course. He stayed out for longer than Grandpa used to. His knees could handle the strain.
“Come sit with me,” Not Grandpa said one evening after dinner. He’d made Grandpa’s
chili, not needing to look in the recipe book to know how many cans of genetically modified red
kidney beans to buy. It hadn’t cheered me up as he’d hoped. “We can watch that baking show
you like.”
“Maybe later,” I said. Only Grandpa could make me laugh by imitating the British
accents.
“You’re upset with me.” Not Grandpa’s eyes were watery, probably from cutting the
onions.
I don’t know you, I thought. “Of course not.”
“It’s alright,” Not Grandpa said. “You can be.”
I retreated to my bedroom, but the sound of cracking eggs and whirring stand mixers from the television seeped under my door and continued late into the night.
The next weekend, at Not Grandpa’s request, we drove to the Burke River. It was like when I was little except there weren’t any fish and what was left of the water had turned murky and brown. Dad brought his tackle box, even though we all knew he wouldn’t catch anything. Mom brought one of her cheesy mystery novels. Not Grandpa brought a deck of cards.
“Want to play Gin?” he said. We used to play all the time, but it had been years. I shook my head. He started up a game of solitaire. I moved a bit upstream, if you could call it that, to a rock where a small waterfall used to be. Not Grandpa followed a few minutes later, scrambling easily over the rocks and bringing the cards with him. He sat down a few feet to my left and crossed his legs neatly in a way Grandpa never could.
“The air feels crisper here,” he said. “Don’t you think?”
“Not here,” I said. “But somewhere.”
“Where?”
I pointed to the place where the earth met the sky. “Out there. Maybe.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But we can’t know for sure.”
You could’ve known. “Why did you come back? Were you afraid?” I didn’t mean afraid to
die. I didn’t think any of us were scared of that anymore. But I couldn’t imagine wanting to live
the same painful life again just because you didn’t know what else was out there.
“It’s not that,” Not Grandpa said. “I’m needed here.”
It was true, the government needed him. He had been assigned a shift at the courthouse for the following week. But it could’ve been anyone. I thought of the way Mom’s face lit up when Not Grandpa told stories from her childhood. And Dad would’ve been lost without someone to laugh at his corny jokes. And me… The clouds parted. Even in a beam of sunlight, the body was still Kyle Watson’s. But just below the surface, I saw Grandpa.
I pointed to the deck of cards in his hand. “Can you teach me the rules again?” I asked.
He nodded.
Grandpa held the cards out to me. “You can shuffle,” he said.