Short Story, 1700 words
Publisher’s Note: Please enjoy this short story by Premee Mohamed, who, coincidentally(!!), has a book out from Psychopomp on February 11th. It’s called One Message Remains, and it contains one brand new novella, two brand new novelettes, and one previously published novelette all set in the same world.
You can preorder it here (now with Kindle version!)
Here is the shape of our story, the three of us: an ellipsis (from a particular fixed point we flew away from each other and then rejoined at another point; and then we had you).
Here is the shape of our doom: an ellipsis (on its way, in its thousands and thousands).
It also means: dot dot dot, an uncertainty, a trailing off.
But you are a little young for all this. You are so young that your soft and hard palate are not fully developed and you still have a toddler’s charming rhotacism. Everyone keeps saying probably and you say pwobably and I think that is the only thing your mother still laughs at these days. Because, let’s be fair, there isn’t much.
For grownups, I mean. You laugh all day, and I would never have known that before signing up to be the one who stayed home with you. When the atmospheric noises begin and the sirens outside start to wail, we get a special treat—I turn on Mackenzie Webster Can Do It! and I crank the volume.
Together we dance to the songs and we watch the Webster family wreck and fix their bright untidy lives. You turn to me at egregious pratfalls and gasp, “Dada! Dada look!” to make sure I got the joke. To make sure I’m laughing. The sirens make me want to scream, but I laugh.
Too little for daycare, my darling son, so we are raising you on cartoons and music, playdates with the dogs next door and the middle-aged ladies on the other side; I don’t know if it’s good for normal development, but Mama says we’re all going to have to give up on normal if we want to stay sort of sane these days, and that applies to everybody. It’s tough to bring up kids at the end of the world. Who knew? Not us.
It’s funny how many of the scientists at this complex don’t have kids. Or don’t have kids any more—older folks, brisk power-walkers (we see them in the morning from the kitchen window), white-haired, friendly, with every accent in the world. They pop multivitamins casually while they talk to you, like cough drops. Their kids are all in their twenties and thirties.
Your Mama and I aren’t planning for a sibling, my son. Not even a dog. Not that you’d mind: you are so little you think the whole world revolves around you. It does, a bit. You were one of the last babies born before the warning shot, just three months old when it happened. You won’t remember the weeks we spent in the shelter—everyone wanted to hold you, snuggle you when you cried, walk you up and down the faintly luminescent hallways while Mama fretted and Dada slept.
After the impact, the kind of people who were able to stop having children did stop and they haven’t started again. It’s all too unsure.
Here is what your Mama is doing at the institute: writing things like statistical probability and impact severity on the big crackling displays. Drawing curved lines with her index finger while people nod or sob. Risk assessment is likelihood X consequence. This can be numbers or it can be colours or it can be other categories—for example, groupings related to proportions of the population at existential risk.
Everyone keeps saying probably. Everyone keeps saying existential risk is a threat to continuing existence, not related to a certain quality of life.
Your Mama sleeps in her office sometimes. They all do it. She calls home after you’re asleep (I will tell you this again if you get older) and in my sock feet I softly take the phone into your room, because she doesn’t like the moiré effect of pointing it at the baby monitor. We are funny about some technologies and not others, just like you.
Our home country, which you have never seen, arrested and deported and fired and surveilled all its scientists—like your Mama, and not like me. When the warning shot came, I was a graphic designer. I was hurt, a bit, that all my work dried up; but then I suppose you don’t need that many posters for the apocalypse.
It was all right. She had already come back to me, and we moved a few times to keep our work visas, and then we settled here, with its clear air and its telescopes and its clusters of weird science in every valley: here the synchrotrons, here the cyclotrons, here the eyes peering out at the universe like a spider in a crevice.
She says things like The seeing is good tonight, but no one’s looking any more. That’s all math and distant telescopes sending back numbers, spectra, temperatures, sounds. They look at readouts, not stars.
We came up with a snappy name for the warning shot. We don’t have one for what’s coming.
For a while our feet didn’t touch the ground; then every flight had to be grounded and our feet never left it. But no one’s feet did, so that was all right.
And the whole world, my son, came together, just like the song we sing when we pick up your toys—they came together and unearthed the living, buried the dead, scrubbed the air, built the tidal turbines and the wind farms, screwed into the earth for geothermal energy, built the aquaculture towers to grow the produce we couldn’t grow without sun. We saw blue skies again. We congratulated ourselves on not going the way of the dinosaurs. We sent planes back up.
And then someone said What’s that?
Listen. Man to man. Your Mama and I broke up in graduate school. We were walking clichés—the high-energy, high-ambition nerd and the weird English major (soon to be dropout) with the Byron quotes and the silly hat. We agreed to stay friends and then she didn’t speak to me again for seven years.
Your Mama does not know what the word reverence means. Possibly literally. I don’t know if they talk about it in planetary astrophysics. Maybe they should. Maybe not, though, because I will feel it all on her behalf, so that she can work. I want us to be the safe place she lands when she comes home. I want to hand you to her and remember the moment the way she doesn’t and the way you can’t.
I remember how things feel; she remembers how they were. Between the two of us we can usually cobble together something fairly accurate. I forget who I used to be fairly regularly. So does she. But together we know exactly who we are and why. And then we added you: early but perfect, apparently too stunned for several days to even cry, just staring around yourself as if you had blown in from Kansas and seen colour for the first time.
When she came back to me she said sometimes, lying in my arms in the tiny apartment, “Was it like this? I don’t remember it being like this.” Sleepy, smiling. Happy to be back. We were stilled then, temporarily. We were at rest.
What is she doing there at the institute? I’ll never understand the math. I know there will be more impact bodies—we’ve stopped arguing over whether to call them comets or cometoids or asteroids or asterites—that much we all know now. I know Jupiter’s gravity has for many billions of years been pulling these things away from the other planets in the solar system, and letting others through, and that Earth has been lucky.
I know sometimes Jupiter does the opposite of that. I know things are coming our way, in tens of thousands, most likely. We don’t know the number very precisely. It’s hard to fight what you don’t know, it’s hard to guess, sometimes you hunger to know for sure for sure even if the answer is bad.
Your Mama wants to be Jupiter for us. Keep anything bad far away. She has become someone I barely recognize: at all times, all, she is posed and poised like someone getting ready to throw a punch. A meaningful one, with all her meager weight behind it. That is her body language now. Oh, she’s ready to fight, ready to kill—she needs only a target, and I want to hold her sometimes and say I’m sorry. I’m sorry there’s no target for you. For the thousands like you. There are too many targets. One fist won’t land.
She is the sword. I am something else: not mystical shield or healing sheath but even less of narrative note, not even given a name in passing. I am the bowl of oil and sand that cleans the blade. Keeps it shining.
Maybe we are all something in the story, though, not just those of us married to the fighters. I read somewhere that the Manhattan Project employed a hundred and twenty-five thousand people at its peak, and maybe twice that in support staff. But saving the world must call for more than that. Maybe every hand, every mind. Maybe me (I am not sure) making beef fauxganoff and making sure it’s hot when she staggers home. Maybe you (I am not sure) contributing little more than perfect curls (how?!) and laughter that snorts when you start and you can’t stop.
Nobody wants to be unsure. We can all deceive ourselves about intent and we can do it as much as we want; but even if there is no path ahead, we go on. Even when we know we might put a foot wrong, we go on. The next step after that might be right. Or more right.
Where hope lives is uncertainty. We never throw ourselves into battle for a sure thing. And you, my son, with the name we gave you that means something different in four languages, you too are hope. Let the world live for that, let it hold up sword and shield for that.
What does pwobable mean? I spend a lot of time on the rug now, down at your level. When the world ends I want to be looking into your eyes.
If you enjoyed that story, you’ll LOVE Premee’s new collection, One Message Remains; 200 pages of new stories set in a morally ambiguous world of war and magic. Support small press publishing and grab your copy today!
Credits:
Author – Premee Mohamed
Editor – E. Catherine Tobler
Copy Editor – Annika Barranti Klein
Art – inkshark