SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

And listened. And waited.

This story was previously published in the anthology TEMPORALLY OUT OF ORDER, released by the small press Zombies Need Brains LLC.

Becca hadn’t even meant to show Sam the typewriter. It had sat in the crate in the attic with the other things she and Julie had played with as children that their mother, Candice, hadn’t gotten rid of yet. Becca had flown in to Heathrow, thrown her bag on the lower bunk of her childhood room and driven to the hospital to collect her nephew from Candice’s arms.

She’d had to turn her face away from Julie’s battered face on the bed, unable to look at the tubes and bruises and swelling. The doctor’s prognosis had stuttered through static.

You know she’s not in there anymore. Becca hadn’t dared say the words. There’s a reason they offered to up the morphine, they just can’t say it. She might wake up, but she’s not coming back.

Work had given her two weeks’ bereavement leave. A luxury, with the project already overdue. She’d used up two days just getting here, walked out on salvaging six years with Rick with four words that had burned into her mouth like acid. My sister is dying .

Now she couldn’t even look at her.

Candice had sat haggard in the only chair next to the bed, Sam hunched and silent in her lap. When Becca lifted him from Candice’s strong grasp, neither of them stirred. She’d driven Sam back to the house in silence and trawled through the attic for something for him to do while she worked out how in the hell you explained to a seven-year-old about comas and car accidents and orphans.

It would be different if Sam’s father were alive. If Candice had had anyone else to call but the daughter who’d crossed oceans to get away from her. Candice had barely said a word since that phone call, not even when Becca had hired a car against her instructions after twenty-six hours on a plane.

It would be okay. It would all be okay. Becca hugged her elbows like they could fill the hole in her stomach. Julie’s not going to wake up, how can that be okay?

Because she’s not going to wake up. You won’t have to stay here. You can just say goodbye and go home, like you planned. She sank her teeth into her cheek and forced the admission from her mind. She had more important things to deal with.

Sam was solemn, and for once not full of questions. A dozen platitudes rose in her throat and withered. Julie’s weekly Skype calls aside, the last time he’d seen her, he’d been a toddler at his father’s funeral. She was the aunt who appeared when parents died.

Becca flinched. She hasn’t.

You can’t tell him differently. It wouldn’t be fair.

He sat at the crate, hunched in on himself, and poked the old typewriter buttons. He hadn’t even lifted it out. Armed with a cup of earl grey and a chocolate biscuit, Becca sat next to him and waited.

“I’m writing a letter to Mum,” he said flatly. “But the letters don’t come out right.”

Becca leaned over; the typewriter produced the same gibberish she remembered from her childhood.

It had driven her father to distraction. His last unsolvable riddle: a perfectly normal, working, ordinary typewriter that wrote alien hieroglyphics. He’d kept it in pride of place in the lounge to puzzle out with his two girls, and taken it apart three times, even the electronic pieces and the 80’s-era solar-cells. What is it we do when we don’t know something? She smiled at his voice in her head.

But I can’t puzzle this one out, Dad. I can’t fix it. I just want her to go, to be peaceful and I hate myself for that. She squeezed the biscuit so hard it shattered, gazing down at the typewriter and its printed nonsense like it was a talisman.

Candice had packed it away after he died, along with all of his things, like he’d never lived here at all.

Sam stroked the yellowed paper standing stiff from the rollers.

“How many letters can it make?” he asked.

“How many do you think? Can you work it out?” Becca brushed biscuit crumbs from his hair while he screwed up his face.

“Twenty-six?”

“Come on, that’s a guess. You can work it out.”

This was met with silence. He peered at the paper, at the keys, fingers opening and closing individually.

“Forty…Fifty…eight.”

“Including the numbers and all the commas and things?”

More silence while his finger hovered over each of the number and punctuation keys.

“Eighty…six?”

“There you go.”

Sam shook his head, blonde curls shivering like Julie’s pixie-cut did. Used to. “But it makes more than eighty-six different letters.”

Becca pressed her lips, her mother’s “that’s impossible” dismissal pent up behind them. Julie had said he was bright. Even if you doubled the keys, there seemed to be far more printed letters than the typewriter could physically type, none of them familiar. She released her breath with a smile.

“Your mother and I used to pretend it was a message from someone far away,” she said. “It’s what made me become a programmer, trying to figure out puzzles like that. We kept everything it printed in that binder, there. Maybe you can figure it out.”

Sam lifted the almost-full three-ring binder, flipped it open. Becca’s eyes stung at the sight of Julie’s margin notes, the backwards ‘a’s she used to write as a child, and she ruffled Sam’s hair.

The hospital ward echoed with clicks and hums and machine-driven breaths. Julie lay, too bruised and too still, with Candice curled over her.

“Mum! Guess what I found!” Sam burst in, a hurricane of enthusiasm.

Candice glared, barely shifting from over her daughter. “Hush, sweetling. Your mummy is sleeping, she needs to get better.”

“But I want to tell her about the codes! It’ll make her feel better, it’s really interesting!” He shook Julie’s shoulder gently. “Mum, I have to show you something.”

“No!” Candice slapped his hands away and fussed over the tubes Sam had minutely disturbed. “You mustn’t touch, Mummy is very fragile,” she snapped. “Nurse!”

“But”—Sam’s voice squeaked—“Mum always feels better when I hug her. She said so.”

Becca wrapped her arm around Sam’s shoulder, squeezing him while she tried to swallow the cannonball in her throat. “You can give her lots of hugs when she wakes up, okay?” She rubbed the crown of his head like her father used to do. “We just need to be careful of the tubes and things, mate. They’re very important.”

Sam snivelled. “They look uncomfortable.”

“It’s okay, she’s asleep, she can’t feel them. Why don’t you tell her what you found?”

“You said she’s sleeping, she won’t hear me.”

“She’ll hear you in her dreams, love.” Becca shot a look at Candice, who still crouched over Julie like she was shielding her, and hardened her voice. “The doctors said it’s good for her to hear things.” She lifted Sam onto the foot of the bed and pulled the typewriter pages from her bag. Candice snatched the papers and waved them under Becca’s nose.

“Not your father’s nonsense again! Nothing but broken junk.”

“It’s a code!” Sam grabbed at the paper. “Someone is sending coded messages and we have to work them out!”

Candice sucked in her breath, and arranged a honeyed smile. “I know you want your Mummy to get better, because you love her very much,” she said softly. “You want to help look after her, don’t you?” She curled one arm around his shoulders, easing him off the bed. “She needs you to be a big boy so you can help her. Can you do that for her?”