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

Once I saw a bird sitting on a pearl colored branch just outside the edge of the field, silver patterned feathers splaying out on bifurcating wings across twin tails. I reached out, not caring, across the field, the skein folding like a glove, clasping a single feather and pulling. The feather slithered across the horizon, a feeling like slick oil. Drew and Obi were elated at the possibility that the feather could be in our skein without collapsing under the weight of its quantum interference. The feather was slight, an inconsequence, it existed in a tiny bubble that hung perfectly in our own imperfect reality, with nothing to pop it. That was perhaps the root of it.

The idea cuts through grief. Hope, like a flaming sword rising through my chest. I sat with Kuan in the paint spattered basement where the grief is buried under turpentine and oil. I explained to her about the quantum sea and the twist of matter exotic, the filigree of skeins branching out through dimensions near and far. It burned, this hope, it burned with shame, and fear and the dirty mud-slick feel of its repercussions. Kuan clutched me to her breast, letting my tears muddle into the ochre and the ultramarine streaked on her skin.

"Ayo, we can’t. I don’t believe you. I couldn’t do it even if it was possible. She’s gone Ayo. She’s gone, and there’s nothing we can do. We can’t do this!"

Yes we can. We can if you want it enough, if that desire burns you like flame. I said words that shouldn’t be said. Accusations without meaning. We dug up that grief, so quickly buried, and let it flourish and flower. We are mothers, both. One of us bore the seed, the other fed of her breast. We raised this child, and though Kuan yields to the simple causal truth of what is, I cannot—what-if space beckons me. Once I drew the feather across the cusp of skeins, it wasn’t so simple anymore.

The box disappeared from the lab, rousing Trake from his stupor.

"What do you mean its gone? Gone how? Gone where? Who took it, Ayo? We can’t tell them yet? Its not yet time!"

Trake is spluttering with rage and paranoia. He quietens when I tell him we’ve already built another one, retreating back into that small coffin of indecision. The children in the lab, Drew and Obi and I, go back to our meaningless explorations.

They knew I worked late. They knew why, but they had accounted me an exile from their questions and cares and asked nothing. It was easy to bring the box home, wrapped in nothing more than garbage bags and packing tape. I rigged it in Xikele’s room, attached by a spider’s web of wires to my slate, so I could map the skeins. Kuan stayed up with me the first night and the second. By the third night she went back to the basement and her paint, deathly afraid of what I might bring back.

It is a gradient descent through the sea of skeins, tracking the similar to find the closest strands. By day, the slate’s imager searches randomly, to find avenues worth exploring in my endless nights, until I crawl exhausted into bed. A grain of sand sails on a desert wind, a trillion causal connections separating skein from skein. I pick one road at random, adjust the dials with nothing more than intuition. Flicker. Another empty room, so similar to this one, the bed made and kept just like the day Xikele left. I sigh, the tears welling as they always do.

Once I saw another Kuan, slashed in shadow beyond the hall. That room was empty too, just like ours. Another skein without Xikele. That Kuan looked at me with shock. Understandable since another Ayo likely stirred in her bed. I flutter quickly away, another skein scratched off the list. Sometimes Xikele was older, a young woman asleep in the bed, the hair long and braided, the skin russet like red tea. The crayon drawings no longer adorn the walls, replaced by a scatter of books, Achebe lying atop Shakespeare.

Kuan and I both loved to read. We had spent our first night together on a beach in Durban, reading Yeats to each other by moonlight. The words had tumbled out our lips like the odor of spices, stanzas flecked with notes of chocolate, verses laced in cardamom and myrrh. Years later, we would take turns reading sonnets to Xikele though she couldn’t understand the words, her gentle smile our only encouragement. I saw the Achebe on the floor, dog-eared like my mother’s copy of Things Fall Apart, a victim of my school bag and too many bumpy rides on buses drifting over ill attended roads. Yes, I would have given it to Xikele. Another what-if. Flicker. This isn’t the one.

Once, Xikele is old and gray, death’s pallor inscribed on her face. The room is different but still the same house. Had we given the house to her before our own passing? It is a small bed, single, no room for another to curl into the space between her neck and shoulder, a sunken cavity of skin and bone now. This Xikele is awake when I appeared. Did I seem like an angel to her, the surface of the merging skeins like a ball of tiny feathers hung in space? Did she fear my mask, and the box in my lap? She did not. She raised her hand, though heavy with death’s weakness, fingers clawing out into the air. I drop the mask and reach out, the skein like silk against my skin as I clasp my fingers around Xikele’s. We hold there, for moments stretched in time, a meeting across possibilities, doomed to be brief. I can do nothing for this Xikele, and she can do nothing for me. Flicker. I pressed the button. I tried again.

In the mornings when I don’t go to work, as I brew coffee into a stained cup, Kuan regales me. It is our alotted time, when her wakeful energy clashes with my sleepless exhaustion.

"Ayo, what of the other Ayo? What of the other Kuan? If you take their Xikele, it dooms them too. It dooms them to this , " She waves her hands at the kitchen counter, the dishes piled up like small sculptures, the mold—iridescent green—growing in long uncleaned corners. It stops us, this gnawing grief, it holds us in dirty places where we wallow like flies in still water.

"How could you live with it? Ayo, how could you?"

Yes. It is awful. It is monstrous, but I rationalize it. The box exists in other skeins. Other Ayos will search for other Xikeles. An infinite number of Ayo’s searching and finding and retrieving an infinite number of Xikeles. Indunction on infinity replaces morality, as if replacing the act with an equation is enough of an excuse. The truth is, I simply want her back, and I do not care.

Kuan grew still, that quiet stillness that I knew so well.

"What if…what if," Her voice stills to an ominous whisper.

"What if that’s how Xikele was taken? What if that’s why there wasn’t a trace. Maybe one of you took her."

The idea burrows deep. I am become a we now. A plural community of would be monsters unable to accept the state of the world, grasping at exotic mysteries, opening doors locked closed by causal keys. Yes, induction leads to that conclusion too.

"Does it matter now, Kuan? Does it matter? I’ve opened that door in my heart, its taken seed and grown to root. How can I stop now. I’ve seen her, young, old, just born, just dying. I’ve held her hand, felt her breath. I’ll find her Kuan. I’ll find her, and bring her here, let her merge with our space, and our time."

Kuan shakes her head.

"Even if you bring Xikele here, it won’t be the same. It can’t be the same. This road doesn’t lead anywhere but darkness Ayo. I’ve lost Xikele, I don’t want to lose you."

An impasse. I cannot relent, and grief binds us too deep for her to leave, so the conversation stutters, like a broken piece of film. It curls up like flowers in the night, awaiting another dawn to unfurl the same argument, the same pointless words. Nothing changes. Nothing will change, not until I find Xikele.