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

Rathwan looks at the flayed fish on the wood board before him. There is no one to assist him anymore—it is he alone who prepares the fish. It is Rathwan alone who cuts the poisonous sac instead of lifting it, who lets the colorless and odorless death wash over the meat.

The fish is served raw, in the purest Gedt style, accompanied by little more than a mild puree of tubers. A true fourth course would have presented the fish in riotous constructions of color and form, but the new Gedt nobility have subsumed the old ways. The Gedt do not see the roots of the dish, the tension of life against death. They see merely fish, blind to history.

Rathwan walks out of the kitchen and hands the dish to a servant. He watches the little death wander its way between the patrons before finding purchase on the general’s table. The general does not look at him, their first encounter long forgotten. The general has gone to fat, descended into complacency, no longer concerned of the thought of Mahaali around him. Rathwan returns to the kitchen and puts on his coat. He walks through the back alley, between the crates of imported fruits, across cobbled stone long worn down. The roots of his city are fading, and like a ghost, Rathwan slips away.

Originally published by Crossed Genres

The room clatters into being, a sound like the slow flapping of wings. This room is empty, the wood covered in wind tumbled dust blown in from the gaping hole in the roof. The sky is burned and callused like the skin of dried grapes, a dull unblemished cinnamon. I don’t hear anyone around, but there is a keening in the distance, perhaps a wolf, or something akin to that. The windows are aged into amber, the glass obscuring whatever lay beyond. There are many of these rooms, abandoned, unattended and empty. I breathe deeply, hearing the hiss of my breath through the gas mask. This isn’t it. I press the button on the side of the box, holding on to my flashlight in case a windstorm or a gale punctures the skein and blows it away as it happened once before. I learned to bring a flashlight the first time I opened my eyes to a cold unyielding darkness. The ground was solid enough but the darkness gnawed at my bones until my scrabbling fingers found the button. I’ve seen burning rooms, icy wastes, airless plains under a sky the color of cherries—that last one taught me the value of an air mask—all these worlds wrapped in my two meter cage. None of them contained Xikele.

There were rooms that were so close that I sobbed a hot sea of tears as I pressed the button to make it disappear. Once I saw that same curlicued tassel of black hair and my breath caught as I pulled the blanket down. It was a boy. He had my eyes, the same almond colored cheeks, that same kink in the nose that Kuan loved to kiss, but his chin came from somewhere else, askew and dimpled. He stirred lightly and I hurried away, the conversations would hurt me more than the disappointment. It had to be close, it had to be a hairs edge away. I’d tried before, with a maybe, a possibly, an almost found. She had slumbered softly in my arms, her head burrowed into the crook of my elbow. Her wall had that same scrawled stick figure drawing, two mothers and a child in crayon, a streak of blue paint across the top. She didn’t know Kuan though, she had uncurled awake to Kuan’s desperate eyes and stumbled back in fear. She didn’t known Kuan, she hadn’t felt Kuan’s kisses or her gentle hands, her skein was too different. Ours collapsed her in a silent flicker flash, as swift as a hummingbird, and then the weight left my arms and I was standing there holding nothing, feeling Kuan’s resentment and anger. I’d sobbed on the floor for an hour until I crawled weary into bed where Kuan finally let her rage cool and covered me in her warm arms.

The year had scrubbed us clean. Scrubbed us clean of words and hopes and dreams, washed away by a sea of endless waiting. Waiting for a vid, an email, a data fragment from some police ferret endlessly searching the datasphere of public surveillance. There was an eight in ten chance that walking out our front door, a spy-sat would capture an image fine enough to see the dried tears against my eyelids, and yet all we had was speculations and questions. One day she returned home from school, the next day, nothing. The first day was frantic and terrifying, our minds careening through as many possibilities as I have seen through the box. The next few traded the hot flush of terror with a cold seeping fear. As the days, and the interviews, and the depositions, and the investigations tumbled into each other, an unbearable agony of powerlessness—after all that, the fear remained, sunk into our bones, leeching away hope. At work it began with shock, then questions, then finally a wordless silence, the new leprosy of grief. Abandoned, we sunk into each other like water into sand.

Kuan and I spent the first nights as a tumbled sphere of arms and heads, locked in endless sobs until finally the grief ran so raw that we could only sleep in separate rooms, the mere touch sending arresting frissons of memory rushing through my head. Alone, I ran through those recollections, fragment by fragment, as if saturation might stop the torrents. I remember the ampule of synthesized sperm, an egg white shell of micro-machined delivery mechanisms clad around Kuan’s genes. In that capsule lay the ancient song of my ancestors on some deep Kalahari night, thundering into the memories of Kuan’s wind scarred Mongols riding across the plains.

We had both been ready to carry the child, but even on my research salary, we could only afford one. I remembered her fingers moving gently inside me while her lips described poems on my skin. I remembered the subtle flick and whirr of the ampule delivering its cargo, my body already suffering from the synthetic hormones. Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. The memories run by too fast. The agony and ecstasy of birth. Xikele’s screaming cry, borne from her Okwango ancestors, as they pulled her out of me. Seeing that perfect almond colored face against my chest for the first time. I wished I had fed her at least once, cupping her tiny head gently in my hands as I gave of my body. Instead I spent the first few months dazed on the bed, as the leftover chemical brew in my body slowly faded, stunting my mammaries as they exited my system.

Flicker. Flicker. Flicker. She’s one. She’s two. She’s eight. She’s ten. Where did her childhood go? She’s out the door, I wave to her and kiss Kuan goodbye. I’m getting into my car as we both watch her turn the corner. Flicker. Flicker. Stop. That’s it, there’s nothing. Then she’s gone, like a soundless whisper into the wind.

Kuan threw herself into her painting. Six feet swatches of incandescent blacks and browns, sometimes the red of the burning fire, the paint splattering the walls around the canvas like angry hands beating concrete. We swapped conversation for long hours apart; she in the studio; me in my lab—the lab where the box was.

It is a terrible thing I do. Monstrous.

At work there’s a glass jar with a feather patterned in silver and copper. It was the first thing we pulled through, a tiny beautiful feather. We’ve kept it in the jar for months, its tiny cupola of antipodal space merging into our own, the distortions swabbed clean as the skeins merge. It was magical and mysterious, beyond anything, an accident that fractured all the simple rules that moored us to this simple linear causality. Trake was terrified of the consequences, ethical and moral. It anchored him to indecision, into waiting, into more tests. He stayed in his office, awaiting our reports, unable to direct us for fear of the possibilities.

A twist of matter exotic, curled around a swath of quantum instabilities rendered and manipulated by silicon and diamond. A matte cube with a button and dials to constrain the direction of flight. A box. A button. Flicker. Flicker. What skein twists around this sphere, this quantum tunnel into another fork? An endless multitude of what-if spaces enveloping like water around this small cupola that the box extends. We watch our skein and the other fracture around the edges like feathers. Too long and one skein wins, the water rushing in, the air pulling out. Flicker. Flicker. We turn the dials randomly, not caring where it went, like children playing with toys. By accident we found strands that mirrored ours, the differences noticeable but slight. The dials turn slowly as we traverse the cusp of skeins barely distinguishable from our own. It bores us quickly. We swing the dials like casino wheels, the gamble of a window into a million worlds.