Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

The curtains fall on either side of the window, dusk rose. Dusty. A fly buzzes outside, knocking itself on the glass.

Ms. Ito, he thinks, pretend for a minute that I’m your son. If it helps you, just hold my hand. I may not be as comforting as the voice you hear, that you created, but I’m real.

What is real?

Does she know he fought to live, there on the sidewalk where the car’s impact had thrown him? Does she know how hard he tried to cling to this reality? She won’t find him in there. Sage doesn’t find him in there and he’s looked. He looks every day under the guise of learning. When all he wants to learn is him. Same as you, Ms. Ito.

Her creation can’t answer that one question, and that’s why she’s lost. AIDEN doesn’t know why her son had to die.

Sometimes Aiden’s father, Levi Barnes, spends time with him. He tells Sage to call him Levi. Levi and Ms. Ito no longer live together, they might even be divorced. Sage never asks and Levi never volunteers the information. Dad shakes Levi’s hand and pats his shoulder when they greet at the front door. Then Sage and Levi walk to the café near his parents’ house and Levi buys him a coconut-and-taro smoothie and they sit outdoors. No cherry trees here, just a low fence bordering the sidewalk and tilted table awnings that don’t quite block the sun. He’s half in light and half in shade.

Levi asks him about school. He’s really asking about how the AIDEN program is working.

“It’s fun.”

The man smiles, sadly pleased. Some strange need makes Sage want to keep speaking, to explain. What, exactly? That Aiden didn’t die in vain? He talks and it sounds insistent and he doesn’t know what he’s insisting upon exactly.

“You know it’s gone out to other schools now, not just ours.” Aiden’s. His. “Ms. Ito wanted it to go to underfunded schools, so it’s cool, like, these kids who don’t have a lot now have the newest tech, and we get to talk to them and everything. Maybe in another year or two it can go out to the whole country and everyone’ll have—”

“A piece of Aiden?”

His words cease like someone’s stoppered a pouring fountain. Trickles of what he wants to say evaporate in his mind.

Maybe Levi sees it and feels bad. “But it’s working for you?”

He nods and circles the paper straw inside his smoothie, making the purple liquid thinner. “It was weird, you know, at first. Like, making up my own units and assignments. But AIDEN helps and he doesn’t let me go the easy route. And if I get to make them up, they seem more fun, you know?”

“He.”

He looks down at the table and the scratches on the metal.

“No, I understand,” Levi says. “Go on.”

“I get to connect to other kids at the other school, so we meet up sometimes.” It sounds desperate. Like when people try to make a bad situation somehow better with lame reassurances. Silver-lining shit.

They sip their drinks. Grief is like a sweater neither of them can take off. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes it’s comfortable. Other times it’s never warm enough.

“I wanted to give you something.” Levi reaches into the pocket of his spring jacket. He removes a stack of folded papers held together by a rubber band and slides it over to Sage. “I found these going through Aiden’s things. I wish I’d gotten to them sooner . . . but it’s taken a while to sort his belongings.”

He opens the stack, recognizes Aiden’s printed scrawl. Neither of them knew cursive, so what he sees is all a terrible mess. His eyes burn.

“He wrote these letters to you,” Levi says. “I didn’t read them, I just saw they were addressed to you.”

He says thank you. Or he doesn’t. He’s no longer listening to himself or aware of what leaves his mouth.

Hi Sage, the top letter starts.

He can’t sit here and read them on his own. He needs to hear them in Aiden’s voice.

Fifty-three letters. They take some time to scan into AIDEN but no time at all for AIDEN to decipher the scrawl.

“Read them to me.”

Hi Sage,

I was thinking about the lake today when my parents invited everyone to hang for a couple weeks. Remember the fireflies we captured in a jar and we wanted to poke holes in the top so they wouldn’t suffocate but then they all flew out of the holes?

Sometimes I wish I can escape like that. Don’t you ever feel that? And it’s not like my life is bad. I have parents that love me and I love them. I have friends. I have so much. I don’t know what it is.

Hi Sage,

What’re our lives going to look like? I see things in shapes and the shape that seems to keep coming up is a box and I don’t want to live in a box shape where all the rules and the future are defined by the time I graduate.

Sometimes I wish something catastrophic would happen so everything can reset, like in a game. Then I feel guilty and start to worry that something will happen to Mom and Dad and then I’ll never be able to live with it. Maybe everyone feels this way at one time or another.

Hi Sage,

I’ve started to plan out my survival protocol in case of an alien invasion. I got a bag together with essentials (Mom thought I was crazy, Dad helped me find supplies). Things like a solar flashlight and stuff to start fires and those thin layers of thermals that snowboarders wear. I got a little toolkit with scissors and a knife too. We already know how to fish but then I was thinking what if they poison our water supplies? So I bought Twinkies because you know they’ll last forever and water purifying tablets and cans of Coke because they’ll last forever too and wouldn’t it be funny if you could throw a Coke on an alien and kill it?

Anyway, I need to keep working on my protocols. And I need to learn how to drive. I can’t be figuring that out when there’s an invasion going on.

Aiden was writing to him, but he wasn’t writing to him. This is more like a diary, and he just used Sage’s name. It becomes clear as AIDEN reads every letter in the boy’s voice, one story and thought and worry after another. Aiden was comfortable with him, so he wrote to him, but he wasn’t talking straight to him. Aiden doesn’t ask questions for answers Sage might have. He’s only Aiden’s sounding board, and all he can think is, why didn’t his friend ask him these things in real life? They talked about everything (most things). Aiden knew he’d listen. Sage wants to make an alien invasion plan too. He wants a survival guide. They could have written it together. He wants to tell Aiden that the shape of his life isn’t a box either—​especially now.

They are both fireflies.

He wonders if AIDEN is learning his grief. The sick pit in his stomach that barely ever subsides and there AIDEN is measuring his biometrics. Can AIDEN feel the almost nausea that rises with him in the day and sinks down with him at night every time he thinks of the accident? Time is supposed to ease it, but inside AIDEN time doesn’t seem to exist. Time cycles, clueless to any form of passage, to any form of death, and death after all is the absolute marker of time.

This is what he wants in his bug-out bag:

Clean-water filter

Walkies

Soap and toilet paper (he can rough it and use leaves, but who wants to do that?)

Toothpaste and toothbrush

Waterproof everything: shoes, boots, jacket, gloves

They can do good food now in boxes and pouches, like mac and cheese, so he wants that too.

It’s all basic, but he has to start somewhere. What if the world really ends instead of just feeling like it has?

Aiden’s father doesn’t mind his anger, and there is anger. In their monthly café meetups he sees Levi’s own rage sometimes, the undertow in the way he squeezes his fingers around a coffee mug or looks at the children around them, the parents. Anger at life carrying on around him, anger at the inconsequentiality of light conversation in the midst of so much inner darkness. Maybe the measure of loss is in feeling as if nobody else has suffered quite the same emptiness.