Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

There was no thunder, no rumbling of the earth. In wonder Aracai faded from consciousness, now sure of what he had unleashed. Change, he thought. Change for the better. A new world, where men can take responsibility for their own evolution. I am so lucky to have witnessed this. Our children will inherit the stars.

For a while he floated downstream, gasping, floundering. His eyes dimmed, he struggled to breathe, soot and poisons choking him.

A buzz rang in his ears, and suddenly he heard old Escalas’s voice one last time: Come swim with me.

He looked up and saw the Milky Way, stars shining like a river of light in the heavens. Escalas was swimming down toward him, with Dulce smiling at his side, and holding her hand was their tiny daughter.

He reached up, and with a firm grip around his wrist, Dulce pulled him free of his wasted flesh.

So, like most things, it began and ended in the bathroom. Specifically, a bathroom in Lighthouse Point, Florida and a bathroom in the dilapidated Lucerne Hotel on West 79 thStreet in New York City. (It might also be noted that there is a third bathroom involved in this story, located in the swanky Pierre Hotel on New York’s Upper East Side. However, I will leave it to the reader to determine whether this one is an integral part of the story’s resolution or merely an epilogical literary device.)

And I should tell you that all these bathrooms were the very same bathroom. Sort of, but not really. To explain, allow me to introduce you to Norman and Laura Gumbeiner, who on Wednesday, November 10 th, 2020, at 9:30 in the morning, were standing beside each other in their ensuite bathroom located in their stucco, pink, single-story, two-bedroom house overlooking the Intercoastal Waterway.

“Can’t you see I’m in the bathroom?” Norman asked, as he swished his chrome safety razor in the faux-antique marble sink’s frothy hot water. He was a spry eighty-five-year-old hypochondriac, who often deflected his wife’s sarcastic remarks about his attention to body, mind, and receded hairline by repeating the canticle that “What you call hypochondria is what has kept me alive all these years.” Or he would ask, “Do you think colonoscopies where precancerous growths are discovered every time should not be performed?” Or, if he was in a really expansive mood, he would soliloquize about his encounters with Fuch’s dystrophy, urinary infections, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, amongst a host of other undeniable empirical ‘proofs’—all that to crush, to utterly crush his white-haired (with a touch of hairdresser’s blue), seventy-nine-year-old assailant.

Laura looked intently at her husband’s reflection in the bronze framed mirror, which was a family heirloom (her family) and would be out of place in any bathroom, except perhaps one in Windsor Castle. She was already dressed, showered, and perfumed. A handsome, if rather overweight woman, Laura Gumbeiner smelled like happy memories of Coney Island.

“You’re mowing the lawn today,” she said sweetly, talking directly to the reflection, as if by doing so, she wouldn’t have to interact with the familiar stranger beside her.

“You’re not my boss. And I’ll mow the goddamn lawn—”

“Today,” Laura, said, recasting what he was about to say.

In response, Norman nicked his chin with the razor, then jutted his jaw forward so that his life mate could apply the styptic pencil she already had in hand.

“Okay, I’ll do it this afternoon.”

“Not in that heat you won’t. You’ll do it this morning.” She smiled wryly. “And after that, who knows? If you’re not exhausted, maybe a little hanky-panky.”

He smiled back at his wife in the mirror. “But if I take one of those get-up-and-do-your-duty pills and have a heart attack, it’ll be on your head.”

“I’ll take that chance,” she said. Then she made an odd gurgling sound and suddenly stepped backwards, as if she had just seen a ghost, which, in a sense, she had.

“Whasamatter?” Norman asked, turning towards his wife. He still had patches of shaving soap under his sideburns.

“Look! ”

“At what?”

“At yourself. There.” She pointed at the mirror, then stepped forward, looking intently into it. “At us .”

Norman complied, looked at their reflections in the mirror, and repressed a fart. “Yes, I see you, and I see me. Now what the hell’s the matter with you?”

“Look at us. We’re… young.”

“Okay, if you say so, we’re young. We’re as young as we feel.” He scowled at himself, just now remembering the film As Young as You Feel with Monty Woolley and Marilyn Monroe. He grimaced. He had a gray age mark on his left cheek, folds in his neck—what the hell did they call them? chicken somethings—and what he thought of as old-men’s earlobes. And when he looked at his wife in the mirror, he could see that she, too, had spots and the selfsame chicken skin under her chin. But he considered her pretty, nevertheless.

“No, Norman. Look! ” She looked at him directly for an instant, saw the old man that he was, shook her head in disappointment, and then turned back to the mirror. “My mother,” she said, talking to the mirror, “may-she-rest-in-peace, was right. She once told me that this was her second-chance mirror.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Norman asked, pulling a monogrammed washcloth from the heated towel rail and wiping the soap off his face.

“I never knew what it meant until now,” she whispered, mesmerized, for the reflection in the mirror was that of a sleek, ash-blond young woman: her face slightly asymmetrical, full lips, large boat-blue eyes, a somehow quizzical face that most people—men especially—found charming. She smiled at herself and then extended her hand toward the mirror… into the mirror.

It was blood warm, viscous and slippery as mercury; and as she felt its palpable adamantine suction, she grasped Norman’s arm. Although he resisted, reflexively, she pulled him right through the mirror. Pulled him over to the other side. Pulled him right back to their old apartment situated in 1965. November 10 th.

The day before, a distant Canadian power station had failed at 5:27 p.m., plunging New York City into star-ceilinged darkness until 3:30 a.m.

3:30 a.m. today.

It was now 9:35 a.m., New York time.

I won’t burden you with the astonishment that the Gumbeiners felt at that isometric moment of transition. Whatever it was, you’ve just imagined it according to your own cultural frame of reference. And after their initial gob smacking, disorienting shock subsided… after they made what might be referred to as mad, passionate love before they could even reach the bed… and after they, finally, showered and changed into their ‘old’ tight-fitting sweater and jeans vestments; Laura found a jar of instant Sanka decaffeinated coffee and boiled some water.

They sat quietly at the kitchen table in their respectively bewildered states of continued shock and sipped the acrid brew out of chipped mugs. Norman sniffed the flat black liquid and wished for a strawberry latte from the cappuccino machine that was sitting on a counter in what had once been their kitchen on the other side of the mirror. He looked at the young woman who had been his wife for almost sixty years and felt yet another non-chemically induced stiffness. And so they watched the traffic on West 79 thStreet and Broadway. And they listened to the horns blaring, listened to the background roar of the city until Laura broke their trance of silence.