PYA story finalists are chosen by chapter support and editorial staff, and sent to The Washington Pastime to be judged for our PYA Prize, which includes publication.

This year, our prize winner, Brian Smith, comes from Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. His story was selected by the outstanding Chelsea Burris, and we’re very excited to be featuring it on both our website and our 2013 Collections, to be available this summer.

Look for the story at the usual time — 10 a.m. — tomorrow, and let us know what you think!

If you’re interested in bringing the PYA to your high school, college or university for 2013, or in becoming a standalone member, contact us!

When Teesha got to the hospital, she knew the way to the emergency room. She found her mama in a wheelchair, nodding off. Band aids pockmarked her mama’s arms where the nurses tried to find veins but couldn’t. Her mama lost so much weight over the past year since she went back on the pipe, her sweat pants barely stayed up. Teesha wheeled her mama to the door and her mother leaned on her to get to the cab. Although her mama could hardly walk, she was already crying for her medicine.

“Baby, let’s go see Ray Ray.” Her mama’s head lolled from side to side.

“Mama, you need to rest.”

“I don’t need no rest, I’m fine. Please baby,” her mama said in the little girl voice she used when she wanted something real bad.

They pulled up in front of their door and Teesha helped her mama out of the cab. Her mama was as limp as a rag doll. Teesha opened the deadbolts and as the door swung in, the smell of their apartment wafted out. It was a mixture of burnt coffee, stale sweat and roach spray.

Teesha walked her mama inside and positioned her to fall onto the bed. Once she was on top of her blanket Teesha grabbed the other half and folded her mama into it. She took off her mama’s sneakers and threw them on the floor. Wisps of black frizz poked out where her cheek mashed into the pillow.

“Baby,” her mama croaked. “Get me some water.”

Teesha ran the faucet in the kitchen until the water got cold. She carried the cup to the bedroom and stood in the doorway. Her mother was crumpled by the bed trying to put her sneakers on.

“Mama, what you doing?”

“T, I got to have my medicine. The snakes is coming, they crawling under my skin,” she wailed. She scratched the inside of her arm. “I got to get them snakes out.” Her fingernails raked her skin, ripping off band aids and leaving bloody trails in their wake.

Teesha knew what could happen next, like the other times things happened. Like when her mama threw a beer bottle and Teesha needed stitches. Or when mama brought a homeless pit bull in and told Teesha it was her birthday present but it wasn’t her birthday. Her mama tied the animal to the couch but didn’t think about the dog’s need to eat or pee. And when her mama left the house to get more drugs, Teesha untied it and opened the front door. The dog ran away fast; Teesha wanted to follow it. Mama beat her later for what she did. She didn’t mind, at least one of them was free.

“Okay, mama, we gonna see Ray Ray.” Teesha put the cup of water on the top of the television in the living room and knelt by the couch. The pit bull rope was still tied to the back leg. She freed it, stuffed the coil into the back of her pants, and pulled her shirt over it.

“Baby help me get my sneakers on.”

Teesha pulled her mother back up and got her to sit on the edge of the bed. Teesha slid the rope out of her pants and pushed her mama to lie down. Her mama was so weak her body fell back. Teesha made a loop around her mama’s wrist and tied it to the leg of the bed.

“Get off me. You gonna kill me!” her mama screamed. She hit Teesha with her free fist. Her mama struggled, but she couldn’t put up a fight.

“Stop, I ain’t gonna hurt you.” Teesha straddled her mother’s chest and grabbed her other wrist. She rolled off her mother, and pulled the rope toward the other side of the bed. Teesha tied the loose end to the other leg. Her mother swore at her. Teesha went into the living room and closed the bedroom door. She didn’t want to listen to it.

She turned on the television. A show came on about poor people who won the lottery. It made Teesha sad. She lay on the couch and watched the newly rich family go on vacation until she fell asleep. When she woke the sun was setting. The television cast flickering images in the darkened room. She turned off the TV and listened; no noise came from the bedroom.

She opened the door and went inside. When Teesha pulled back the blanket her mama’s body was slick with sweat. She was shuddering and barely conscious. Teesha put her hand on her mama’s forehead; she was burning up. Teesha went to the bathroom and got a wash cloth. She soaked it with cool water, then ran back and wiped the sweat from her mama’s face.

“Baby,” her mama wheezed, “if I don’t get my medicine, I’m gonna die.”

Teesha stroked her mama’s hand and rubbed her thumb over the coarse rope binding her mama’s wrist. “I seen you when you on your drugs mama. You might hurt me.”

“T, you my baby girl. If you want, keep me tied so nothing happen. Just reach into my bra and take the twenty I got. Take it to Ray Ray and get me two rocks.”

“I never bought no drugs.”

“You ain’t buying drugs, you getting medicine for your mama. That’s what you gonna say. Hurry.”

Teesha put her hand on her mother’s chest and slid it down into her bra. The padding was drenched with sweat. She felt the limp paper bill sticking to her mother’s breast and peeled it away. She jammed the folded bill into her pocket.

“Thank you baby,” her mama said, and closed her eyes. Her body was still shivering.

Teesha pulled the covers over her mama. Her mama’s arms stuck out of the blanket at angles where Teesha had tied her. Teesha didn’t want to buy her mama drugs, but she believed her mama would die without them; the withdrawal was killing her.

When she locked the apartment door, Teesha knew where to find Ray Ray. Everybody in the neighborhood knew where he lived.

#

She knocked on the gray metal door of the ground floor apartment. She heard lock after lock being undone. The door opened and a woman with long braided hair stood there.

“What do you want?” the woman asked and looked at Teesha hard.

“I’m here to…” Teesha felt her throat close up. “My mama sent me for her medicine.”

The woman rolled her eyes and told Teesha to step inside. The woman re-bolted the locks. “Wait here,” she told Teesha and disappeared. As she stood there Teesha smelled hamburger cooking. Her mouth watered. She couldn’t remember the last time she ate.

Ray Ray seemed to materialize out of the darkness. His head was shaved; a tattoo of a cross branded his cheek just beneath his left eye. Another tat on his neck spelled his name in graffiti letters.

Ray Ray looked her up and down. “You Shiree’s little girl?”

Teesha craned her neck to look at him, he was so tall. “I ain’t no little girl,” she blurted out.

Ray Ray laughed. “That right? You look like her. What you need shorty?”

“She say if I give you this,” Teesha said and pulled the still-damp twenty from her jeans, “you give me two rocks.” She pushed the bill into his hand.

“She do, huh?” Ray Ray said, pocketing the money. “In my house twenty don’t get you two rocks. Your mama using you to get over on me…trying to anyhow.”

“Can I maybe get one?” She was afraid of Ray Ray, but she was even more scared of what her mother would do if she came back with nothing.

“Tell you what…” Ray Ray pulled two vials out of his pocket and put them in her hand. A chunky white rock sat at the bottom of each tube stoppered with a bright red cap. He closed her fingers around the vials and held her hand inside his. “Because you a new customer. When you done with this, you gonna come back to get more good stuff, right?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Teesha said. She thought I’ll never come back here. She pulled her hand away and put the vials in her pocket.

“Next time we gonna work out a real good deal,” Ray Ray said. He traced his finger down the side of her cheek. “When we be alone, you gonna let Ray Ray teach you something new.”

“I got to get home to my mama,” Teesha said. She couldn’t move. It was like her legs were stuck to the floor. She could hardly breathe.

Ray Ray unbolted the door. “Come back anytime shorty,” he said. “Day or night. I got everything you need.”

#

Teesha pulled the blanket back from her mother’s face; her mama was still burning up. Teesha shook her shoulder. “Mama, wake up.” Her mama’s eyes fluttered open half-way. Teesha brushed the hair back from her mama’s cheek with her fingertips.

She felt one of her mama’s hands still tied to the bed. It was cold. Teesha leaned down and untied the rope from the bed leg closest to her and unwrapped her mama’s wrist. There was an imprint on the skin from the coil. Teesha rubbed the mark with her thumb; her mama moaned.

Teesha turned on the bedside lamp. She took one of the vials out of her pocket. She slid her fingernail beneath the bright red cap and pried it away. It popped into her palm. She looked at the white rock sitting at the bottom. She wondered how something so small could make her mama crazy. It didn’t look like much of anything; it was like a flake of blackboard chalk, or a piece of sugar candy.

Teesha opened the drawer in the bedside table. She pulled out her mama’s lighter and glass pipe, with its scorched bulb end. She put them in her lap and looked at them. She never lit a pipe before. She picked up the pipe and tapped the open end of the vial against the side of the pipe until the white rock came out and fell to the bottom of the bulb.

The tapping of glass on glass stirred her mama to open her eyes. Instinctively her mama reached for the pipe and put it in her mouth. Teesha offered her mama the lighter, but her mama shook her head. She pulled the pipe out of her mouth long enough to say, “You do it T. Put the flame under the rock.”

Teesha watched as the flame began to cook the crack inside the bowl. It made a popping sound. The vapors rose from the white chunk and her mama inhaled as much as she could. When she couldn’t hold her breath anymore, her mama blew the smoke to the side of her mouth. Teesha was sitting so close she couldn’t help but breathe some in. Teesha felt dizzy, her heart began to pound so hard she thought she might pass out.

“T, keep the lighter going,” her mama said, her eyes wide open now. Teesha lit the bowl again, and her mama inhaled a wheezing breath and held in the smoke. Her mama’s body began to shudder, but still she held it in.

Her mama exhaled the smoke into Teesha’s face. “I’m free at last, baby girl. Free at last…”

Her mama’s head fell back onto the pillow, her eyes fully open, as if she was really seeing the world for the first time. Her hand opened and she let go of the pipe. It fell onto her chest. The glass bulb sizzled as it hit her skin.

Teesha grabbed the pipe and put it on the bedside table. A raw welt burned into her mama’s chest. Teesha looked at her mother’s blank eyes. “Mama?” Her mother was a still and heavy weight.

Teesha’s head pounded from blood pumping hard through her temples. She felt sick. Teesha pushed her mama over so she could lay down beside her. Teesha closed her eyes. She hoped the bed would stop spinning.

But somehow, inside the spinning, inside the pounding blood, inside the insides of her eyelids, Teesha felt something strange. Something new. It felt like an angel came down from heaven and touched her. Her hunger and sadness disappeared.

Teesha’s body relaxed. The pink rays of dawn lit up the spaces between the broken slats of the window blinds. She felt a love for her mama so deep she began to cry. She nestled against her mama’s warm body and thanked her for this joy. And if this kind of joy was possible in life, Teesha knew, it was only the beginning.

That day was a chilly afternoon in fall, and the breeze burned a passage into Cheryl’s lungs, reddened the pale, almost translucent skin around her nostrils. She stepped from the car and made a shuffled run to the passenger’s door where her mother had already stepped out, a pink shawl wrapped tight across her shoulders. Cheryl made a fuss over it, adjusting and straightening, incessant repetition of the question, “Are you warm enough?”

Her mother jerked her arm away as Cheryl reached for it. She wouldn’t give way to sentiment now, Cheryl knew.

“I didn’t learn how to walk just yesterday!” she said. “Quit lording over me like I’m a child.”

A man stood in the doorway of the entrance, and Cheryl, not wanting to look cruel, attempted to place a hand over her mother’s shoulder and walk beside her, but her mother slapped her hand as she reached around.

“I said I could do it myself!”

The man walked over to Cheryl and asked if anything needed to be brought inside. There was a single suitcase, large, in the trunk of the car. Cheryl insisted on taking it in herself. Just to spend more time. To sit with her mother, enjoy some time together alone. She believed these words, if only for a moment, even as they emerged in short, clipped fragments. He nodded and left her there to gather the luggage.

Cheryl watched her mother disappear with him into the living center. She stared at the empty doorway, half expecting her mother to walk back out and demand to go home. But that didn’t happen, and the cool air seemed to pierce her exposed skin. Pangs of guilt. Cheryl grew defiant. Well, why should she feel guilty, there were no other volunteers in the family. She’d already spent enough time taking care of her mother. Plenty of time.

She thought about Mark. He had managed to convince her that their mother would be better with Cheryl. Besides, she could especially use her mother’s help in the house now that her husband was gone, Mark had said.

#

And Mark had continued to sip his coffee, his eyes peering at Cheryl over the lip of his mug. She imagined a smirk hidden behind the mug. Even as he stared at Cheryl, feigning a look of concern and sympathy, she knew he had only refused to let their mother stay with him because he didn’t want her interrupting the trysts he had with women.

“Look,” he said, his eyes shifting from Cheryl’s. “You keep her for another few years…”

“Years?”

“Or months,” Mark said, tapping a few packs of sugar with the tip of his finger.

He shrugged, and Cheryl remained quiet. She stared at him. His head shifted, his gaze jumping from his mug to the sugar to his cabinets. He looked everywhere except at her. Cheryl felt the silence filling the space between them, an uncomfortable position for both. It was like the games they played as children, always a competition in everything they did. Who could stare without being the first to blink; who could hold their breath the longest. This moment between them felt the same to Cheryl. Each one, seeming to hold their breath, waiting for the other to burst so they could slowly exhale, sigh relief. It was still a game, and Cheryl was losing. Mark refused to let the uncomfortable wear him down, she knew. She tired of holding her breath.

“You have an empty house,” Cheryl began.

“Yours isn’t so filled anymore,” he replied.

Cheryl stood. She snatched her coat from the back of the chair, and the chair fell to the floor. The clattering of it bounced off the cabinets and echoed in the kitchen. Mark had won, as he had almost always done when they were children.

Cheryl turned, opened his front door. And just before the door closed behind her, she heard Mark call out, “I just don’t have the time!”

#

She thought about Mark’s last remark as she stood in front of the nursing home, suitcase gripped in her fingers. Now that was her main excuse too. She just didn’t have the time to give her mother the care she desperately needed. Desperately. She emphasized this word when she told others where her mother would be. A fine place to live – better than a living center, a home. So said the brochure. And Cheryl tried to believe it.

Cheryl shut the trunk and carried the suitcase inside the center. The suitcase felt light. She had packed it herself, trying to pack what she would want if she were going to live in a long corridor of rooms that smelled like naphthalene and soiled linens. A picture of the family, comfortable clothes, a robe, some slippers. She imagined that these material possessions, as little as they meant, would bring some comfort. At least, she wanted to believe that.

She winced as the suitcase slipped from her fingertips and fell to the floor. Cheryl heard her mother’s harsh words: condescending and unforgiving. The potatoes are never cooked properly. They have to be firm but not hard. They need some bite to them. And what was this mush anyhow? How was Chris supposed to grow on meals like these anyways? Cheryl’s son needs something substantial, meals that take most of the day to prepare. This is what a woman should be doing, making sure her husband is satisfied, that her son becomes a strong man. And where was her husband, gone to find a real woman, no doubt.

Resentment. Cheryl had gone against generations of this kind of rearing. She became a woman with priorities, at times, higher than her family. When it mattered most, she chose to stay at work late to finish a memo or financial report instead of coming home in time to make dinner and get her son into bed. She must be reminded of this daily, psychologically reprimanded. And she was. Her mother slid her disapproval into any conversation she could. Even when Cheryl tried to enjoy a conversation together about Chris, her mother found some way to interject dissatisfaction in the way Cheryl raised him. Cheryl felt each remark like nettling thorn pricks.

When Cheryl brought the suitcase to her mother’s new room, she placed it on top of the vanity and started to unpack. She placed the photo of her family next to the mirror. It would end up turned over in the sock drawer next to the slippers, broken and unappreciated.

“I can situate my own things,” her mother said.

Cheryl stepped away from the suitcase and watched her mother push the items around in it.

“Where is my jewelry?” she asked.

“You said you didn’t want me to pack it. You insisted it would be stolen from here.”

“I said no such thing!” Her mother slapped her hand down on the dresser. “You’re impossibly incompetent, you know that?”

But Cheryl didn’t answer. She recognized it as a rhetorical question, one meant only to provoke her.

“I wish your father could see you now. I told him you needed more discipline.”

“I know you’re upset about being here,” Cheryl said, moving towards her mother, attempting some kindness. She wanted to know that she hadn’t made a mistake. She wanted to leave with no guilt, maybe a tiny moment of peace between them to show that her mother was going to be okay here.

“That’s your problem, dear child.” Her mother turned to her. “You think you know. But you don’t! You don’t know not one damn thing about anything.”

Cheryl touched her mother’s arm, but her mother jerked it away.

“It’s why you’re still pining over that husband of yours. If you’d known anything at all, it’d of been that you didn’t satisfy him. Had to get someone else, and if you’d of known anything, it would have been how to keep the man in your home not out gallivanting with someone barely old enough to drink.”

There was silence that filled the empty space. And before it could be interrupted by another tirade, Cheryl left the room. Once Cheryl started the car, she turned to see her mother watching her through the bedroom blinds. When their eyes met, she walked away from the window. And Cheryl watched the vertical blinds shifting in her mother’s absence. That image would be what Cheryl pictured when she called to see how her mother was doing over the years. Cheryl would insist that she only had a few minutes to talk, and it wasn’t necessary to speak with her mother. She just wanted an update, she’ll call later, she would say. After the first six months, the nurses all knew only to give an update when Cheryl called. Then some months later, they stopped asking if she wanted to speak with her mom. At first, Cheryl refused to speak with her mother because of resentment, anger. But at some point, Cheryl was simply embarrassed by the time that had passed since they last spoke, embarrassed by having to remember she should feel guilty and not sometimes relieved.

#

Two years later, Cheryl brought her mother home to die peacefully; it’s what her mother wanted. At least, that’s the reason the hospice nurses gave her. They told her that her mother had limited time; she’ll feel more comfortable at home, they said.

Cheryl noted how the building had aged since she’d last seen it two years ago. The gutters scratched, bent and clogged; the welcome mat tattered, unreadable. The building had obviously changed, but her mother seemed – at a distance – to look just as she had when they first arrived at the home two years before. When Cheryl approached her mother, though, she noticed how visibly her mother aged. The same pink shawl swathed around her body. It made her appear smaller, wrapped almost twice around her shoulders. Her mother’s shoulder blades jutted out like two impossibly steep mountains. Cheryl walked towards her but stopped after only several steps. She felt obligated to help her mother to the car, but she was frozen in the moment, watching her mother inch towards her. Her back curled, pressing her upper body forcibly down as if time were running backwards, transforming her once again into an unrecognizable fetus.

Her mother shuffled across the pavement in her slippers, the thin, rubber soles scraping against asphalt, each tiny pebble seeming to pose as an obstacle for her. Her eyes were fixed at the ground. Cheryl’s skin prickled at the sight, and she rushed over to her mother in such a hurry, that her mother became startled and unbalanced. The nurse standing there held her upright until she regained her footing.

“What the devil do you think you’re doing?” her mother shouted.

Cheryl’s body stiffened. The tone had not changed at all. Here was this frail woman, shriveling and nearly unrecognizable, and yet the force in her voice had not changed at all. A condescending, critical voice untransformed and trapped within a woman who didn’t have the strength to look in the eyes of the person she was judging.

Cheryl wanted to speak to her mother on the way home, to ask how she managed at the living center. But she feared the answers she would get, the pitch of her mother’s voice ringing disapproval in her ears. She even expected to hear something from her mother, unprovoked. But there was nothing. Cheryl rolled down the window and let the air rush past her ears, hoping the sound would drown her own thoughts.

#

That night, Cheryl awoke to her mother staring down at her, hovering over her body, her shawl laced loosely around her shoulders.

“Mom?” Cheryl wanted a reassurance that she wasn’t dreaming.

“Where’s Chris?” her mother asked, pulling her shawl until it fell to the ground.

Cheryl slid off the couch and reached down to pick up the shawl.

Her mother shuffled away, “Chris?”

“Chris isn’t here mom.” Cheryl took a robe from her closet and put it on before following her mother. “He’s gone to summer camp. He’ll be back in a week.”

Cheryl wrapped the shawl around her mother again and pulled her shoulders back, an encouraging gesture to get her to turn towards the stairs so that she could put her back to bed. But she wouldn’t go. She jerked her shoulder forward.

“Chris, sweetheart. I’ve got that chocolate you love.”

“He’s not here, mom.” Cheryl dropped her hands.

“We just talked this morning,” her mother insisted.

She let her mother shuffle across the kitchen, and watched her open the front door and walk outside. The doorway was empty, and she strained to hear her mother dragging her feet against the deck, the gravel in the driveway. But there was nothing. The whole house was suddenly still, and darkness seemed to flood it. She wanted to walk towards the door, but her feet were like two blocks of cement. Unable to move, grounded in the spot where she had picked up her mother’s shawl. It was aged, ragged and worn. It was unraveling, falling loosely towards the ground, transforming into one single thread of yarn.

She stepped towards the door, her mind a mist of sleep and confusion. She walked outside to find her mother there, leaning over the rail, sobbing. The image seared in her mind, and no other movement her mother made registered in her vision. There was only an old, confused woman doubled over the deck; she was barely recognizable.

“Mom,” Cheryl said, finally moving towards her mother.

“I wanted to see Chris. Tell him to come here,” her mother said.

Cheryl stopped. She watched her mother lean away from the rail, pressing her body upwards in an attempt to uncurl her back and hold herself steady as she looked into Cheryl’s face. And Cheryl strained to see her mother’s eyes. But there was only the shadow of a woman, a silhouette of her mother standing there in the darkness. Only silence lingered there between them. It was several minutes before it was broken.

“I am so sorry.” Her mother’s words seemed deliberate, as if she were savoring an uncommon moment of clarity.

“Momma?” The words emerged from Cheryl’s mouth, some hesitation on her tongue created a stutter. Cheryl wasn’t sure if this was her mother speaking, or the disease that had stripped her of lucidity. Was she hallucinating, did she really know what she was saying?

“I should have said do what you need. I trust you.”

“I don’t understand,” Cheryl said.

Her mother’s arms shook as she continued to prop herself up. Cheryl stepped closer, and her vision focused. Her mother’s form filled out. Cheryl recognized the face, hidden in small folds of wrinkled skin. There was no critical stare, no disapproval.

Her mother’s arms collapsed, and she fell to the deck. Her body tucked in on itself, almost completely still. Cheryl ran to her and wrapped her up in the shawl. She embraced her mother, and buried her face in her mother’s hair just as she’d done as a child.

Cheryl didn’t know how much time had passed before her mother shifted beneath her. She stood up and helped her mother to her feet, tucking her arms beneath her mother’s and leading her towards the empty house.

“Chris, honey, come get some candy.”

Cheryl started to hush her mother but stopped herself. Instead, she listened to her mother’s buoyant tone transform with each word until it softened to a sob.

Dystopia is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or bad,” usually as a result of environmental degradation or totalitarian government. In short, these books are a societal pessimist’s prediction of where we’re headed.

Dystopian fiction has existed in some form or another since the 19th century. Some of the earliest examples are Oliver Bolokitten’s 1835 A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation, and more famously, The Time Machine, by H.G. Wells. Wells’s novella, which was published in 1895, is a shining example of our society gone wrong. With a future that seems nothing short of backwards, Wells popularized a trend of dystopian literature that would include roughly 8 books per decade over the next century, including some of the most popular books of modern times.

Those books, which include George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (each belonging to a different decade) stand as testament to both the resonance of dystopian literature and compelling reflections on the fears of a society at a particular moment

Continuing to track the release of dystopian books, however, reveals a pronounced boom in the 2000’s. With 37 books published from 2000-2010, and 17 in the two years since, it seems that more authors are imagining a world/future where something isn’t quite right than ever before. At any rate, the genre seems poised to completely eclipse the preceding century with regard to the volume of books published. But now, as then, a certain book within the genre seems to have emerged as the “people’s choice” for posterity.

That book is Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games. A dystopian trilogy, Hunger Games recently celebrated its theatrical release by shattering nearly all box office records. With such popularity, Collins has virtually guaranteed a long-term readership, as generations to come will surely “volunteer as tribute” to engage this perfect example of modern dystopian fiction

And her readership will span decades. That’s another unique aspect of the dystopian novel – it has a pronounced shelf life; a sustainability worth considering. Most novels have a shelf life of roughly 15 years. Yet, a generation’s “dystopian pick” is seemingly elevated to a literary canon spanning generations. The books are taught in schools, and widely cited in political circles. And truly, dystopian novels create an environment of caution.

Perhaps “caution” is the greatest strength of dystopian literature. These books are passed on from generation to generation, after all. As they are, phrases and axioms seamlessly fuse with our social vernacular, despite the best efforts of Big Brother. From dystopian lit., we learn about our past as well as our social fears. And still, because perceptive youths are asked to digest these lessons, the importance of both [our past and social fears] as crucial tools in building for our future cannot be overstated.

That is, however, only the surface resonance of the dystopian genre. There are other arguments to be made, and contrary rationale to consider. To begin, there is a Candide-ian argument that would have us believe our world is the best of all possible worlds, and thus, we should be grateful for our struggles. Even in war, this argument goes, it-could-be-worse.

Running congruent to this hypothesis is the idea that by heeding cautionary tales, injustice can be overcome. Predatory Violence (A Clockwork Orange) the dangers of our reliance on technology (Fahrenheit 451), and censorship (1984) might all be problems we never have to confront, we hope, so long as their potential is fully understood by future generations.

Finally, there’s the fact that dystopian literature is changing. This generation’s exemplar series, Hunger Games, is not about a decline in morals, nor does it seek to temper the sacrifices of combat. Instead, it should be looked at as a very humanistic belief in the palpability of hope in the face of insurmountable obstacles. It’s a powerful tool, and one that seeks to depart from “dystopian classics” that offer no escape from a flawed reality.

It is this singular distinction — that The Hunger Games offers hope for people to change or re-claim their future, that is ultimately responsible for the book’s (and movie’s) success.

After all, the newest generations to take control of our society have read all of the classics. They’re keenly aware of what to avoid, and have been trained to spot and oppose oppression. They care for their environment and they value the middle class. Yet, in spite of all these lessons, they’ve never been offered an opportunity to fix a wrong in a Dystopia.

Finally, however, that once steadfast rule is becoming flexible. And when a story affords flexibility, when it allows a reader to solve a problem created by someone else at some other time, it becomes an interactive experience, rather than a cautionary one. Perhaps it is simply more commentary on the present generation, but I for one would welcome a future where the darkest part of the night is followed closely by the rising sun.

Follow Mike Vidafar on twitter @mikevidafar

I plopped down on the couch, grabbed some popcorn from the bowl on the coffee table, and said to my husband, “So, guess what some of the alphabet blocks spelled out when I got up to the attic today?”

He shook his head, lost in the intricacies of his football game.

“S-L-A-Y. Slay,” I told him. “Weird, huh?”

“That’s nice.” Jerry reached out for a handful of popcorn and stuffed it into his mouth. I didn’t press the issue. We’d received the blocks from my mother when our daughter was a baby, and Jerry had wanted me to get rid of them long ago. Sara had loved the blocks, transitioning from playing with them as toys to spelling out words when she grew older. It hadn’t helped her much; she had been a dismal speller up until her tragic accident at age 18. I’d kept them along with several other childhood mementos. I still hadn’t decided how and if I was going to smuggle the treasures to our new house across town.

The next day, I began to wonder if the blocks were trying to tell me something. When I arrived in the attic, I found four of them leaning up against my hope chest, spelling out another word.

“Jerry, did you go up to the attic today?” I asked my husband at dinner. I served myself some salad and passed the bowl to him.

“No, I did not. You said you were taking care of packing those boxes. That you didn’t need any help. And, by the way, I certainly hope you’re not planning to lug Sara’s old things over to the new place. I know you, Catherine, you can’t throw anything away. But we just don’t have room at the new house.”

“It’s just…the alphabet blocks…they spelled out another word.”

“So? I’m sure you could find a ton of words up there, depending on how the blocks are stacked. And you’ve probably been knocking them around with your boxes and rearranging them without even knowing it. But the bigger issue is why haven’t you gotten rid of the damn things? I asked you to give them away ages ago. You never listen to me!”

I decided this probably wasn’t the best time to tell him that the blocks against the hope chest spelled out K-I-L-L.

The following day, after about fifteen minutes of packing, I glimpsed a new arrangement of letters stacked up against one of my finished boxes. I abandoned my current project of packing up Sara’s childhood sled, tore down the stairs, and ran from room to room, desperately seeking out my husband.

I finally found Jerry in the garage and, heart pounding, told him I’d had enough with the attic.

“Why?” he demanded. “What’s the matter now? Can’t you just finish what you said you would do?”

“The blocks!” I whispered. “They spell M-A-I-M!”

He laughed. “You’ve always had such a great imagination. You really should be a writer. Maybe you could make us a lot of money, and I could quit my job.”

I turned and stomped off. I sulked in our bedroom for half an hour. But as my heart rate calmed down, and I considered the three episodes some more, I realized my husband was right. My imagination was playing tricks on me.

After all, I’d lived in this house my entire life. Jerry had proposed to me on the porch, and we’d wed in the living room. Our reception had been held amongst the flowers in the garden. Sara had taken her first step in what was now the laundry room, and I had pictures of her posing with her date in the foyer, dressed in her pink prom gown. They were some of the last pictures of her.

I had to face it. Subconsciously, I didn’t really want to leave, and I was finding words which reflected death. I was giving up a place I’d known and loved my whole life, and the place where I’d last known and loved my daughter. I’d been against the move from the beginning, though I knew Jerry was right when he insisted we needed a smaller place as we got older. Ironically, the couple who was buying the house had been looking for a larger place. They had ten great-grandchildren and were looking forward to holding frequent family reunions.

In any event, it was pure coincidence that I’d found threatening words in the attic. If I looked closely enough, I’d probably find benign, even positive, arrangements such as “LOVE,” “BIRD,” and “KIND.” Perhaps even “MOVE” and “GOOD.”

I had to buck up. I couldn’t help this “death” from happening. We were moving, and that was that. I resolved to finish my attic packing the next afternoon, and give away the blocks and Sara’s other toys to charity.

***

The elderly couple who had purchased our home arrived the next morning to look around.

“Dear, is it all right if we go up to see the attic?” Mrs. Peabody asked. “We’ll probably use it for some of the children’s sleeping arrangements.”

“Of course. I’m not quite done with my packing. But go ahead.”

I watched the Peabodys tentatively climb the stairs, gripping the railing and each other’s arms with each step.

I headed for the kitchen to help Jerry finish packing the pots and pans, thinking nothing more about the attic until Mr. Peabody’s voice rang out through the entire house, “Mame!!”

I heard a horrible noise of someone falling, stair by stair by stair.

Jerry and I ran to the foot of the staircase, where Mrs. Peabody was now lying with her limbs splayed in an unnatural position.

“She slipped on the sleigh!” Mr. Peabody cried from the top of the staircase. “It killed her. Mame, oh, Mame!”

***

It was only after the coroner had come and gone that I said to Jerry, “You can move if you want. I’m staying here with my daughter.”

I read all I could at the beginning, tried to comprehend what was happening, but I only got so far, immersed in all that medical jargon. What I did understand were the bacteria. Cartilage and flesh and bone. They were hungry little buggers. You shake your head, read on, know deep inside that it can never happen to you. That’s the other thing about the media; it puts things right there in front of your face, but keeps them at a distance. For all of the reportage, it’s like watching a movie, always at an acceptable distance, that extra step removed. It could never happen to us. Nothing could ever happen to us. Nothing like that.

That first night, a heavy sticky evening, not a breath of air, I was standing out on the porch watching the bug light, as we used to call it, fanning myself with an old hat, feeling the sweat trickles crawling down between my shoulder blades. A hazy white corona encircled the porch light, small insects and moths darting in and out, fading into darkness and back again. I remember the smell of damp earth and vegetation filling the surrounding atmosphere with extra weight. At one end of the porch sat a pile of stacked chairs, covered with an old blanket. From time to time, we’d pull them out and sit around at the back of the house, sharing drinks or simply reading, but the rest of the time, they were stacked there out of the way of our comings or goings. Our cat had decided that was in ideal spot to curl up and sleep in comfort. Most of the time, he seemed to do little else. As I stood there, I was tempted to go over and disturb his feline reveries. What right did he have to sleep while we stood around and sweltered? Good luck to him that he actually could. I turned away to watch the insect dance for a while, still fanning myself before heading back inside, my hopes for a little relief in the evening air already faded. At least we had a fan in there.

Just as I was about to reach for the back door, a movement in the corner of my eye caught my attention. At first, I thought it was merely Angus, turning and stretching on his accustomed perch, and I was tempted to go over and give him a scratch anyway, but it was something else. Nuzzling up against him, licking at his exposed pale belly fur was Cashew, the neighbour’s cat, a friendly, stocky, black and white, easily recognisable by her burglar-mask facial markings. I crouched down to call her over. She was fond of bumping up against your legs and sliding in an out.

“Hey, Cashew,” I called. “Here puss.”

She halted her ministrations and jumped down from the stack of chairs, quickly padding across to my outstretched hand with a faint miaow. There was something funny about the sound, something different, but I didn’t register it immediately. I was still looking up at Angus when Cashew butted against my leg and miaowed again. At that point, I looked down, preparing to scratch the top of her head.

“Shit,” I said and scuttled backwards. There was something wrong with her face. The burglar mask was still in place, but all around it and below, the fur was gone. No, not only the fur. It was just hollow, missing. Where there should have been white fur, where there should have been flesh and more, there was nothing. Just deep incised hollows, and at the bottom of them, it looked like bone. It was hard to tell in the shadowed light, but it was enough. I shot to my feet, scrabbled with my free hand at the back door behind me and stumbled back into the house. I stood panting there, like that, for a couple of seconds, shaking my head, something cold working inside me. Then, I headed further back into the house to find Anna.

“Christ,” I said to her, standing in the doorway to the lounge. “I don’t know what’s happened to the neighbour’s cat, but it’s dreadful.”

She looked up from her place on the couch, lifting her gaze from the magazine she was reading and gave me a frown. “What do you mean?”

“Cashew. The neighbour’s cat. You know.” I proceeded to describe what I’d just seen.

“Oh God,” she said. “Really?”

“Yeah. It didn’t seem to be bothering it though.”

“I wonder what happened. Maybe it got hit by a car or something.”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t look like that. It was something different. Oh shit, I touched it.” I dropped the hat and quickly strode over to the kitchen sink and started scrubbing my hands. “I touched it,” I said.

“John, you don’t know. It didn’t sound as if it was something like that,” said Anna from the lounge.

“No, I don’t know,” I snapped back, but by then, it was probably too late anyway.

We weren’t aware of the growing tide then.

Angus was the first to get it, our Blue Burmese with his beautiful face, his silky sealskin fur. The first sign was that he started to look patchy around his eyes, like mange, but it was too even for that, too regular. Thin lines of bare skin appeared beneath his eyes and down the sides of his nose. Apart from the missing hair, he seemed completely unaffected. We took him to the vet, who gave as some ointment to apply and told us about this new mutant strain of streptococcus. He’d seen more than a few cases recently and there was very little he could do about it. What was peculiar about it was that it was so targeted, so specific about the regions that it attacked. He told us to expect further degeneration in the affected areas. As he said, there was very little he could do about it until they understood more. Angus grew steadily worse. The skin along the affected areas just seemed to withdraw, the flesh beneath drawing back and collapsing into itself till it revealed bare bone beneath, and then it kept going.

We were worried of course, but he didn’t seem to be experiencing any real discomfort. He was still hungry, affectionate, his usual cat-like self.

“But it’s so ugly,” said Anna.

“I know,” I told her. “There’s nothing I can do about that. He’s still Angus. Perhaps it will grow back.”

The first human cases appeared a couple of days after we had taken Angus to the vet. It wasn’t until it broke the press in full force that the words ‘flesh-eating bacteria’ appeared. Anna and I were already nervous. That first experience with the neighbour’s cat had been enough, but after the press got hold of it, we didn’t know what we were going to do. By then, there was nothing we actually could do. It was far too late. And anyway, perhaps we’d be okay. It’s funny how you always live with that vain hope.

I was the first to exhibit the symptoms. Deep lines appeared below my eyes like grooves in the skin. There was no real discomfort, more a sort of numbness. At first I didn’t believe it. I poked and prodded at my face, but they didn’t go away. I tried smoothing them with my fingers, but that did nothing other than making the numbness around the area more apparent. For a while, I simply ignored the fact that they were there, but I could see them in Anna’s expression when she looked at me. The lines started to grow deeper, and two days later, they appeared on Anna’s face as well. We raced to the emergency room, but the hospitals were already overflowing, the panic was on the streets. Even the medical staff looked at us askance, apparently reluctant to approach too close. Pills and ointments and salves, they provided in abundance, but the truth was that they didn’t really know what to do at all. They didn’t understand it, and that soon became painfully apparent. I shouted at them. I yelled and I ranted. There had to be something they could do. What sort of medical facility was it anyway? Did we live in the Dark Ages?

By the time Anna started exhibiting the full-blown symptoms, we knew, it was firmly on its path. We didn’t bother calling the doctor. We didn’t bother heading back to the hospital. We stayed locked behind our front door, hidden, drawing back from our own images in the hall mirror, from the unfamiliar ruined faces, from the hollows where our noses had gradually dissolved away, from the deep grooves across the tops of our cheeks. I couldn’t look at myself. I couldn’t look at Anna without turning away despite myself. We weren’t sick. We didn’t feel sick, but the thing continued regardless and dragged us down with it. I even considered drastic action for a while, but my mother used to say to me that that was the coward’s way out. Those words had stuck with me for some reason.

One day, it simply stopped. Angus was Angus, and he continued on with his cat life as if nothing had ever happened. Anna and I didn’t believe it, looking, waiting, hoping that there would not be any more, but it had really stopped. The gradual deterioration slowed, then crawled to a halt and went away as if it had never been there, leaving us with nothing but our ruined images and our…shame…yes, that was the best way to describe it. We felt ashamed. We were embarrassed about our own faces. We could not look at ourselves, let alone each other. How could we carry on like that?

Each day, we peered at Angus, hopefully, praying that there’d be some sort of improvement, that he’d regain some of the parts that had simply shrunk away to expose the ugliness, but there was nothing. We saw Cashew a few times too, but it was the same, and she had had it longer.

We had to venture out eventually, from sheer necessity. We had to eat, we had other things to attend to, and we weren’t really sick, were we? We decided on hats and scarves, despite the weather. At least it would do something to conceal a part of our humiliation and if we didn’t look at people directly, if we kept our exposure to the outside world to a minimum…. We simply had to hide what we had become, that was clear. Work, social interaction, other things, we could deal with those in due course, but in the meantime, we had to live. We still had to live. All around us, the plague continued, passing from cat to human to country to country, across oceans and mountains, around the globe, as more and more became afflicted, but to us, that no longer mattered. We were too busy dealing with our own little microcosm to pay any real attention. It was still hard to look at each other, to look at ourselves, but we were learning to cope. Outside, and we had started to think of it as that, the outside, things were more difficult. I know that look. We’ve all done it. You look at something or someone, register, and then your gaze simply slides away pretending that you hadn’t seen. The maimed, the disfigured, the unusual, I’d done it myself. You don’t want to be caught staring, do you? It was strange being on the receiving end instead.

“There might be options, things we could do…” I said to Anna a few days later.

“Like what?” she said. There was still resentment in her voice. I couldn’t work out whether it was directed at me or at the circumstance. We were learning to accept how the disease had left us, but it was not enough.

“I don’t know. Surgery? Prosthetics? I’m sure there’s something they can do.”

“And where are we going to find the money for that?”

“What about masks? We can get those medical masks. You know, like the ones they always seem to wear in Asia. I’m sure they’re easy enough to get.”

Anna narrowed her eyes at me, processing the image, but at least she was considering.

“Maybe,” she said, resignedly and turned away.

My shoulders slumped and I let out an involuntary sigh. I was trying. Why couldn’t she see that?

For a while, we were so bound up in dealing with our affliction that we hadn’t really been paying attention to what was really going on outside in the big bad world. It consumed us, just as the bacteria had consumed our cartilage and flesh. Every time we thought about the future, a cold hollowness grew inside. The road ahead was bleak, but gradually, some sort of acceptance had started to come with it. I don’t know whether it was displacement or simple resignation, but after a few more days locked in our self-imposed social quarantine, we turned back to the television. It was another reminder, but we felt there was nothing more we could see that could make us feel any the worse about our condition. There was the vague hope, perhaps, that we might even see something about some potential cure. It was not to be. The Eater, as they called it now, continued its spread. Some seemed to be immune, but mostly, it was indiscriminate. At least they’d passed beyond the cat culling that had taken place in the early stages.

The funny thing was that I hadn’t been too far off the mark with my suggestions. Things had moved on in other ways whilst we’d been locked away. Masks are all the rage now. Even the newsreaders are wearing them. And the weather girl. It won’t be long before they’re appearing on the sitcoms too. The designer labels have started with their own lines of specialist fashion masks and, of course, they cost and arm and a leg, well beyond our reach. The aesthetic of what is desirable has always been defined by its context. The culture, the social media, the fashions of the age, all of them delineate the boundaries of what is attractive or acceptable. It doesn’t matter if it’s the dimensions of the Rubinesque or the frame of Heroin Chic, the use of labrets in the Amazon and Africa, the stretching of the necks. I understand that better now, or think I do and Anna too. We have discussed it at length. Together though, finally, we have come to a decision. In the end, perhaps, we won’t be too alone. But then again, perhaps it’s just our way of coping.

We built a fire in the back yard last night and burned our masks. We stood there, hand in hand, watching the sparks float up into the night sky, a symbol of our transformation. Tomorrow, we plan to venture in to town, together, our heads held high. We don’t need the masks any more. Nobody really needs them any more. After all, why would we? We’re beautiful.

I was five when the Mexican Army executed my father and the other Texans, about the same age he was when he planted the peach tree on his family’s land. The tree had lived for thirty years now, me fourteen, Jessica and Samantha nine. The tree’s bark was worn, some of its branches torn and twisted by the wind, others with green leaves sprinkled here and there, like wisps of hair on an old man’s head.

The tree bore fruit each year–barely. Hadn’t been more than a couple dozen peaches last year. Still, Momma wouldn’t begrudge a peach to those who’d come for a taste. But she’d ask, “Leave the stone, please.” Momma said it was important to extend the proper courtesies–whether folks deserved it or not.

Every sapling Momma sprouted from the stones of the old tree stayed sickly and small before dying altogether. Undeterred, Momma would plant trees on a different part of the farm, looking for the right sort of soil, sometimes moving saplings two or three times.

While peach trees wouldn’t grow–except the one–everything else did just fine, and we had plenty of coin for what we couldn’t farm ourselves–Momma coming from a moneyed family. We could have lived extravagantly, but Momma said it was more important to live well. Still, she bought us books and baubles from town, and said she’d hire hands for the farm when my sisters and I were grown.

The Panaderos owned the farm next to ours and sold pies and cakes in town. They kept to themselves for the most part, but I knew Mr. Panadero from sight.

I was surprised to see him and his family crossing our fields one day. They took care where they stepped, making sure we could see them coming. When they came near the house, I could see they were dressed well. The father might have been a bit older than Momma, the mother a bit younger. A young boy toddled behind them, holding hands with an older girl in a green dress.

“Francis… were you intending to greet our guests?” asked Momma.

I snapped my mouth shut and shook my head, trying clear my thoughts of long, dark hair, big, black eyes, and the sweetest smile I’d ever seen.

I extended my hand to the father. “Hola. Mi nombre es Francis Reynolds.”

Mr. Panadero took my hand with a firm grip. “I’m Eduardo Panadero. This is my wife Katrina, my daughter, Rosario, and my son, Tomás.” His English was accented, but he spoke well. “We’ve brought your family a gift.”

Mrs. Panadero took a cloth off a pie she held in her hands. My mouth watered at the sight of cherries peeking from the golden crust.

“It smells wonderful,” I said. “These are my sisters, Samantha and Jessica.” They attempted to curtsy, like they’d read. “And this is my mother, Elizabeth Reynolds.”

“Mrs. Robert Reynolds,” Momma corrected from the porch.

The boy pulled away from Rosario and jumped, trying to reach a peach in the tree. I fidgeted my hands, looking from Mr. Panadero, then to his wife. I blushed when I glanced at Rosario. She blushed right back.

Momma said, “Francis..?”

“Oh… Of course! Help yourselves to a peach.”

The girls scrambled from the porch to help Tomás reach the fruit. The boy put the huge peach to his face, trying to take a bite, but couldn’t manage more than a nibble. Mr. Panadero laughed, took a knife from his waist, and started to cut slices for his son.

I expected Momma to ask that they leave the pit, but she went inside the house instead. She returned to the porch, and I froze when she clicked the hammers back on my father’s pistols.

“You will drop that peach,” Momma said. Her voice was cold, like when she told me to cut a switch.

Mr. Panadero went pale. “We thought… Our son did not understand. I’ll pay for the fruit.” He held the peach before him.

My ears screamed from the blast, and the peach flew from his hand. The pie fell, smashing to the ground, smearing the soil red.

Momma stalked forward, aiming the second pistol. Tomás and my sisters started to cry, Rosario huddled with her mother.

“Let me see that knife,” Momma said, in the same cold voice.

Mr. Panadero’s hand shook as he extended the blade.

Momma took the knife and nodded. “Mexican Army. Hard to part with good steel. Get on your knees.”

Mr. Panadero wobbled to the ground. “Please… I was a cook.”

Momma put the pistol to his head. “Do you know what your people did to the men at Goliad?”

Mr. Panadero crossed himself. “I was not there. I swear it.”

Momma stood very still. At last, she reached to take a peach from the tree, then handed it to Mr. Panadero. She said, “I’m keeping the knife, but a blade should only be bought or bartered, never gifted. Now get off my land.”

As we watched the Panaderos disappear from our fields, Sam said, “Momma, I didn’t know you could shoot.”

“No point in keeping a tool you don’t know how to use.”

Momma forbade us to see the Panaderos–which of course meant we’d try to see them as often as possible.

#

Rosario and I leaned on a cottonwood tree that bridged our farms, watching as Sam and Jess stuffed wild flowers into Tomás’s shirt until he looked like a scarecrow. My sisters giggled as the boy spun in place, trying to smell the flowers.

“I’m sorry about your father,” said Rosario.

“Nah, I’m sorry about my mother.”

Rosario smiled, glancing at me, then looking away again. I walked my fingers across the bark of the cottonwood until I brushed her hand. I took a breath, then took her hand. I stood there, heart thudding away, palms sweating, thinking this was the best day of my entire life.

#

Rosa and I saw each as often as we dared, but Momma caught on pretty quick. One windy day, Tomás and the twins were off flying his new kite. Tomás had gotten the kite stuck in the cottonwood, but even before he could start bawling, Rosa had scrambled up the tree to get it. I’d brushed the leaves and twigs from her hair, then Rosa and I sat on the grass holding hands, looking for faces in the clouds.

When a darkness came over us, I heard Momma say–in the voice–”You will stay away from my son, you Mexican whore.”

I leapt to my feet, as angry as I’d ever been. “Goddamn it, Momma! You know that’s not right!”

Momma slapped my face as Rosa ran home in tears.

“You will not use that language with me, Francis Jackson Reynolds!”

I stood my ground, refusing to touch my reddening cheek.

“And, Momma, you will write that girl a letter of apology for what you said, because you know that wasn’t right.”

Momma made me cut a switch, but she wrote that letter.

#

The girls and I worked out how we could see the Panaderos when Momma was in town, making sure one of us kept watch for her return. Momma kept her relations with the Panaderos polite, if not friendly.

At least once a month, we’d receive an invitation from the Panaderos to come to a Sunday dinner, and the twins received a birthday invitation from Tomás that was stuffed with wildflowers.

Each time, Momma would get out her ink, smooth out some paper and write in a careful hand:

We regret that we will be unable to attend.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Robert Reynolds.

I wanted to invite Rosa to my fifteenth, but had to settle for a gaggle of my sisters’ friends. They held a tea party in my honor. The girls in attendance spent most of their time giggling, whispering, and making eyes. I drank tea, sitting next to a doll, glumly chewing the soggy cake Momma had made.

I snuck out that night, meeting Rosa under the cottonwood in the light of the moon. She gave me a package wrapped with a bit of yellow cloth, then stretched up and gave me a peck on the cheek before running home. I stood in the moonlight grinning, sure the glow from my face could be seen for miles.

Rosa’s gift was an old pamphlet on grafting trees. Momma stared at it when I showed it to her, then just said we’d give it a try, saving me the lie of how I’d come by the pamphlet.

#

There’d always been talk of annexation, so we didn’t pay much mind to all the chatter, but a couple of weeks after Christmas, Momma returned from town to tell us that we were Americans.

“What does that mean?” asked Jess.

Momma looked at me. Something crossed her face. She said, “It means that there will be a war, most likely.”

There were six saplings that spring–grown from the old tree’s stones. As usual, they didn’t thrive. Momma’s one attempt at grafting had ended with a deep cut on her hand and a string of words I hadn’t realized she’d known.

Rosa’s Quinceañera was coming up, and I pleaded with Momma to let me go, just this once. She took out the ink and paper.

We regret…

Still, I wanted to tell Rosa in person that I wasn’t coming. Jess and Sam sent word through Tomás, and the twins said they’d tend the hogs and chickens while I met Rosa at the tree. As I headed across the fields, cottonwood puffs floated in the air, dancing in the breeze. I didn’t see Rosa waiting for me, but we had some time before Momma returned.

A puff flew into my face, and I blinked, wiping it from my eyes, then Rosa stepped from behind the tree. She wore a light pink dress and had a white ribbon around her throat. Her hair was up.

She said, “I wanted to show you… since you won’t be able to come. How do I look?”

A thousand words ran through my head, but I couldn’t string enough together to say anything–”beautiful” wouldn’t do. Rosa stood waiting, smiling, the anticipation clear on her face. As I stood, speechless, her expression changed: first to confusion, then to worry.

“Francis, what’s wrong? Say something.”

“You… You don’t look like a girl.”

Hurt washed across her face. “You don’t like it?” Hurt changed to anger. She repeated, “You don’t like it.”

I went to her and held her. I said, “No… That’s not what I meant at all.”

#

There was frost on the grass the day of Rosa’s celebration. Momma had got me up before dawn to help put blankets around the roots of the saplings. My breath clouded before me when I asked Momma if I could go into town.

The threat of a spring freeze and rumors of war had filled the town with more faces than I’d ever seen. Young, hard-looking men carried guns and knives, farmers carried supplies and worry.

Momma bought bales of burlap and lengths of rope. I bought a silver locket. Momma gave us money for our work on the farm–not much, but enough so we’d learn to plan and save. She’d told us we could spend it how we wished. She wanted to say something when she saw the locket, but she held her tongue.

Back home, I cut poles for Momma to tie together while the twins gathered pine needles and green branches. We used the burlap to make something like an Indian teepee, placing one over each sapling. As dusk fell, we lit small, smoky fires under each teepee and lit more fires around the old tree, hoping to protect its growing fruit from the cold.

We took turns minding the flames. I could hear music coming from the direction of Rosa’s home. I had the locket in my pocket, and I’d told Rosa I’d try to meet her by the tree that night.

When Momma and the twins were abed, I saw to the fires–making sure they didn’t burn too hot or too fast–before setting off across the fields. Clouds moved swiftly across the moon’s face, forcing me to slow at times to find my way through the dark. I held the locket in my hand, careful not to drop it, admiring the way the moon glinted on the metal.

I heard a muffled noise as I approached the tree.

“Rosa?”

A shadow loomed, and I was slammed to the ground. Dazed, it took me a moment to realize the cold on my neck was a blade. A man hissed into my ear, “Sorry, boy. You weren’t invited.”

I heard fabric rip. The moon came from behind the clouds. Another man was on top of Rosa, pushing her legs apart with his knees. He held his hand over her mouth.

Her eyes were wide with fear. The locket I’d brought lay in the grass near my hand, its chain twisted. I struggled until I felt the knife cut into my neck.

The man holding me said, “Get on with it, Mason!”

More fabric ripped, and Rosa thrashed as the moon went behind the clouds, then Momma said from the darkness, “Let my boy up.”

She’d followed me!

The knife at my neck pulled away.

“Who’s there?” asked the man holding me.

Momma said again–in her cold voice–”Let my son up. Now.”

I scrambled to my feet. I could hear the men moving and Rosa sobbing. Hammers clicked back on pistols.

The man who’d held me said, “We weren’t going to hurt your boy, ma’am. Y’all are free to go.”

“We’re just going to spend a little more time with the señorita,” said the other man. “You know how they are.”

Tears sparkled on Momma’s cheek as a shaft of light came from the clouds. The pistols in her hands gleamed.

#

Momma was always digging up her saplings, moving them around, trying to find a place where they’d grow. We’d moved two that night, shoveling in the darkness. Later, those two would thrive. Likely it was the moonlight.

My sisters and I must have made a strange sight, wearing our Sunday best, holding the peach pie Momma had baked, as we crossed the Panadero’s fields–Momma had sent her regrets.

It was the most god-awful looking pie I’d ever seen. It tasted worse.

We’d eat every bite.

Previously published on Frontiertales.com.

It’s a fascination many of us haven’t even bothered to consider. After all, when most of us grew up, the question was “Batman or Superman?” – not “Superheroes or Regular People?” And that distinction is a great place to start a discussion of the place of “super-power” in our world, where it comes from, and how we interact with it.

In different variations, superheroes have been around since the beginning of stories. Warriors like “Swift-Footed” Achilles and villains like the mighty Cyclops dominated the Ancient Greek landscape, and are among the earliest “main stream” examples of super heroes. The trend is consistent throughout time though – from Beowulf and Grendel, to the Viking tales of Odin and Thor, and into modern day.

There are notable heroes who were not “super” as well: Sherlock Holmes is a prime example. In the modern canon, Batman is the most famous of the power-less heroes. Each hero, of course, highlights different aspects of what I like to think are the “heights of humanity.” Holmes’s intelligence and problem solving ability make him the man for London’s toughest crimes. Batman, on the other hand, stops evil-doers with his own brand of vigilante justice.

Moving beyond the natural, Gods (Zeus, Odin), mutants (Spider-Man, Wolverine) and aliens (Superman, Green Lantern) all seem to captivate us in the same way. They are (by all measures) extraordinary, and thus, are capable of accomplishing things most people cannot. However, it’s interesting to consider that superheroes are, most prominently, pit against equally powerful adversaries. We’re left with the question: What’s the point?

It would seem likely that if a person was indeed all-powerful, their power would be used for the betterment of society. Yet, we see examples over and over again (through epic) that “society building” is not done by Gods. It is not done by Superman. It is done by people. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas – the founder of Rome – is not even a demi-god. In The Odyssey, Odysseus – King of Ithaca – overcomes and rules without any supernatural ability (though he faces supernatural opposition in his quest). Similar accounts in early stories are common. Gods and other extraordinarily powerful creatures may inhabit, shape, and influence the world, but they are curiously never the ones founding cities or winning wars.

I don’t mean to imply that Gods are galactic spectators either. I just mean to say that the most powerful creatures tend not to be the ones granted the greatest societal prestige in early stories. Yet, those stories have evolved. Though they are similar in ability, Greek Gods are (at best) distant ancestors of today’s heroes: the earliest incarnations of modern marvels like Superman and Iron Man.

There is a long list of “requirements” for super-heroes. Qualities like a moral code, secret identity and “Achilles heel” are major topics addressed by Wikipedia, for instance. These traits belong at the forefront of our mind, because they are what define heroes for us. For example, we know Batman will not kill, and that a hero’s identity is a precious gem to be guarded, for in the wrong hands, it can lead to destruction. What gets overlooked, however, is the story itself.

We know that superhero all stories have evolved over time. Whether you want to “buy in” to Hades, Poseidon and Zeus as the predecessors to the Fantastic Four or not, it is true that at some point, all superheroes were born in stories. And we know that stories have evolved in a specific manner.

First, tales were oral. There were dedicated story-tellers, and they used heroes to recount episodes of extraordinary will, destiny, freedom, and pride. In other words, heroes began (quite literally) through word of mouth. Beyond that, their tales dealt so firmly with humanity that even when faced with a treacherous Siren song, a simple wax-plugging of your ears would render you victorious where others had failed.

The appeal is obvious: it’s something any of us could do. We could be that hero. Try to imagine that sort of mentality, and couple it with the freedom of not having an image to distort your dream. Hearing a tale of Achilles wasn’t accompanied by a painting. The tale lived in the audience’s imagination, and was given life by their own hope.

Fast forward to the written word, and still, the same holds true. Except that paper provided a “permanence” to a story that words alone couldn’t maintain. To be able to read of a hero’s plight over-and-over-and-over, to give it to another and have them experience the story exactly as you had, and to imagine someone (or something) greater was integral in the experience.

And finally, there is our modern superhero text: the comic book. For the first time, heroes were given faces. And with those faces came extraordinary powers, which (sort of) put the whole “it could be me” thing out of reach. Or did it? After all, there were secret identities and costumes, so if it isn’t me, it could be you. And then there’s the fact that many heroes were “average” once – before a metamorphosis of spirit or of ability.

With regard to environment, we are again encouraged to superimpose ourselves into the lives of our heroes. That’s because in many comic-realities, the world at play is our very own. There are recognizable countries, Presidents and histories. And in some instances (think: Captain America) the hero was even so much as a product of historical circumstance. What’s important to remember now – in the comic book era – is that heroes were fundamentally fighting for humanity, yet they almost never sought to rule over humans despite the wide-held belief that rulers should be the most powerful members of society.

And the truth is, their help was welcomed, embraced, and celebrated. After all, we could all use a hero. We’ve all wished one might come and solve our problems – fix our printers, cure cancer, or lift our car past scores of less fortunate onlookers in grid-locked traffic.

Our embrace has directly led to the current state of super-heroes. They made their jump to the silver screen because of the same desires that kept them alive throughout the evolution of the story. We want them to be real. Movies, especially in 2012, have enabled heroes to not only occupy our world, but to do so realistically. Ambitious cinematic projects like The Avengers are the result of years of careful planning, and showcase not only heroes that are plausible, but whom we identify and believe in. For all intents and purposes, they are real.

Though we – people, audiences, humans – may thirst for super powers, for the extraordinary, it is imperative that we also heed their lessons. If we all possessed an arbitrary power (let’s say flight), we would still have the same problems. Life wouldn’t improve, and we’d be praying to the stars for something else. The same is true of magic in general, and of power. Nothing will ever be enough.

That’s why the “rules” of super heroes have remained a constant over such a long period of time. It’s a driving force and belief that people are free to govern themselves (though help is always appreciated when monsters are abound). Heroes can’t solve problems or build bridges. What they can do is defend us, much in the same way we are expected to defend ourselves.

“Good guys” triumph because the alternative is oppression. It may be an overly democratic judgment, but to say that today’s heroes are simply the personification of societal values is a valid argument in my eyes. The final task, however, is for us to realize that super heroes are not an answer or a solution. They are simply a representation of our potential, and a reminder that anything is possible. And though they fight the battles that none of us want to fight, they are bound by our expectations. Our codes of responsibility, honor, free will and justice inspire “super-culture,” and thus, if you ever really need a hero, you can find one. They exist within all of us.

Follow Mike Vidafar on Twitter @mikevidafar

When we go out to a restaurant—something my father insists on the moment he finds himself with money over debt—our host asks ‘Smoking or non’ only because it’s a formality whose omission could earn him a demerit. The host and the entire live-long world knows where we will sit on account of her. They only need take a look at the fissures raked down her upper lip so hard they don’t look like wrinkles but like birthmarks from a Bully God. That buttery blot at the meeting place of her smoking fingers. The fried laugh she musters upon hearing something decently raunchy. Jesus Christ knows why her voice still sounds husky rather than crunched, like gravel under a Mack truck, because in down or simply boring times the woman’s been known to plow through two, three cartons a week.

There’s a legend coursing through suppers in my family that, prima gravida with yours truly, she idled down to a pack a day, an ascetic level she kept until at three weeks old I was weaned to whole fat cow’s milk with Karo syrup. For this reason, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that whenever I die, it will be with perfect awareness that I could’ve lived 15 to 20 years longer but for her nasty crutch. Though she does scowl when I wave this matter under her deadened nostrils, there are greater ways to evoke a rise out of Mathematical Joyce. When she’s on my ass about something the way she is given half a chance, I’ll point out that had she breastfed longer I might have been a more intelligent child. Might’ve had real potential to get out of this backwash delta she and my father took a shine to for no reason they’ve ever been able to articulate.

Usually, then, we share a mother-daughter laugh and let go whatever our discrepancy was because—Christ only privy, again—despite her smoking to beat a spit, her little daughter Iris is a genius. Not “I painted neat pictures young” sort of parent-labeled genius. No, I graduated at 13 just to be addled by various colleges saying why I should attend when I know well and fine the reason I should attend—to bring to their school the weird sort of prestige that goes hand-in-hand with Ripley’s Believe-It-Or-Not and overstuffed people in freak-tents at fairs.

Right now, though, I’m not contemplating colleges and I’m not gagging on a secondhand fog. I am sitting in the lounge of the Family Planning Clinic waiting to be called back.

Several factors would prevent nearly anyone with sense from liking this building. The first is that the workers are cloistral to a mind-numbing extreme—nouveau nuns from the order of Testing Poor People for Babies. Christ’s sakes, there’s a dollar store in town where you can get a two-pack of home tests for fifty cents; I’ve known girls to go home with ten boxes in hand just to shore up against their unpredictable futures.

Another thing that can make your skin creep as though from chiggers is that directly cock-eye of this place, so you’ll see it if you look up from the table magazines the nun-workers have arranged in a perfect stack, is Linwood’s Laundromat where the owner’s son is famed for killing himself one night. He got hopped foolish on a multiplicity of drugs, used his daddy’s key to the place and—you may not want to visualize this—stood there touching himself in front of the huge windows panes. Everyone knows this due to half the town driving by seeing him; he gleefully waved with his unemployed hand. Then he climbed up to the roof and just jumped, crown-down onto the cement which had just had oak leaves blasted off it earlier that afternoon.

Can you conceive of how hard a boy’s got to thrust himself, and from what angle, to accommodate his death when thousands of other boys all over the country jump from buildings taller than Linwood’s Laundromat to no consequence except a lasting vibration in their shins? I’ve tried to shut my eyes and see it several times. And though theorems dawned powerfully upon me while most were drawing rainbows in the empty place of their protractors, I cannot understand this suicide. Every single time I’ve been to the clinic, I’ve looked over there, then shut my eyes and tried to be quiet enough that the facts would come together and create some kind of motion picture.

I’ve been here, now, five times. For me, it’s a matter of convenience: the clinic is only 87 strides from my house.

When the girl calls my name, she stops and sighs halfway through saying, “Iris Auction.”

I give them a sample, wait for them to demystify it. The girl who normally intimates that I’m not pregnant this time tells me to hold a skinny minute if I will, there’s someone else who wants to see me and before I can swing off this table, there is little black Ingrid Hertz in front of me. Little black Ingrid Hertz asks point-blank what in land-over-hell I’m trying to pull and even though I know what she means, I ask her to tell me what she means.

“You been in here repeatedly taking these tests, and you go slack-jaw when it turns out nothing. Now you explain for me, and you do so without your smart lip, what you’re doing wanting a baby.”

When I do not answer her, thinking it’s not one stitch her business, she changes her question to: “Iris, do you know how to have a baby?”

Do I know how to have a baby.

“Iris.” Ingrid is gentle now. “You haven’t been close with any of those boys have you?” Her eyes claim she won’t believe me if I say I have. I sit there for a while looking square-on at her, allowing female-to-female transmissions to go on between ours sets of stonewalling eyes. Now, her features squirm alive. “Iris Auction, your mama would belt your ass! Do not tell me—we just naturally assumed you were coming in here ’cause nobody’d ever taught you birds-and-the-bees, and you thought maybe, well, maybe …” I can visualize her eyebulbs going POP right out of their sockets, oozing down her cheeks like runny eggs.

“Your mama has talked to you about sex?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m doing it.”

“You are thirteen.”

I explain to her that, most likely thanks to a generational flailing of hormones, which in turn is thanks to over consumption of bovine once subjected to steroids, most girls have their monthlies well before thirteen now. I ask her then why I’ve had not even a scare when I’ve made sure to be as skin-to-skin reckless as possible with them.

She now loses the equanimity she’s known for, slapping her thighs as she stands up with a snap. “Why on the good Lord’s green earth you want to go havin’ a baby you’re only thirteen you’re a baby you are –” She stands near the door of the exam room, pointing at me and not flinching from that stature. I would assume she’s picked up on the conjugation of my male pronoun, is realizing that I’ve just claimed a farm of them. I see her reasoning stripped stark in the changing contour of her eyes, the restriction followed by the shrugging by the easing off of her eyelids. I have now exaggerated too much and have lost my footing.

That rapidly, Ingrid Hertz makes a face to indicate her worries have gone the way of so much left-over salad dressing. She conjectures I feel ostracized from the girls at my grade-level, a group around here known for swelling up like knotted water-hoses, having pretty babies, getting saved, taking to cross-stitch patterns of wolves and rainbows found at Walmart. I listen to her go through this, amused and grateful to be so.

When I convince her that I’ve seen the error in feigning promiscuity, I get away from her and into the sun. Warmed up and fit for the next thing on my shoddily built itinerary, I stroll over to Linwood’s and shield my eyes to see the roof. I’m certain that Linwood himself or any one of his myriad Asian workers could look out and see what I’m doing, know that I am trying to see something that happened a while back now and did not involve me. If they indeed think that last part, they’re actually somewhat wrong. Which is not to say I had one iota to do with the boy’s goon-headed leap; but I knew him.

Sometimes now, I will find myself losing track of what his name was, reminding myself and writing down that it was Solomon if I light on it through the day, but name is incidental in the affairs I’ve worked up for he and I over time.

In my mind, Solomon Linwood didn’t blister himself on every chemical handed to him, and he certainly didn’t lose two-thirds of his brain bashed on a sidewalk. He lived and made good on the hinted-at, daredevil promise he’d given me by saying, “Hay, Iris” and waggling his sandy eyebrows, walking backward in the hall at school that was being rebuffed that day. He lived right the hell on. We started going out, eating bananas sitting on the balcony of the water tower, tossing our peels down afterward and waiting to see various rodents and water bugs make eyes at them. I sat passenger while he slung mud off the tires of his Jeep onto anybody with poor enough sense to get near him. He got me pregnant, and was I ever a sight—little peg-body Iris and then this gelatinous egg in my middle.

Sad that all of this has been pulled from beneath me and with such lingering gusto, I leave the block of Linwood’s and the family clinic. Having reached the end of what I intended to do with my day, I try to think of something else that seems likely to either titillate me, lull me into a body-and-mind dullness which will allow me to not care that I am not amused, or provide a spate of gossip for passing back and forth with Joyce.

There is nothing. There are few dull movies. There are no new road-side mascots for tax firms for me to pester. I glance backward at the ugly, ribbed, beige Family Planning Building.

I walk the 87 Iris-steps back home. Joyce sits on our front porch, which has always reminded me of a bird house. Our yard this time of year sways full with red sweet grass and purple yard flowers; when the breeze strikes it just right, the whole thing appears to be a square-shaped, pulsing spleen.

Having waded through our ankle-tall weed garden, I sit down beside her and lean away from her exhaust. Then I change my stance on smoking, entirely and suddenly, and hold my hand out, asking that she give me one. She cannot bring herself to do this, not even when I point out that I’ve already smoked the equivalent of a skybox seat stuffed full of loose cigarettes, what with neighboring her so long. She offers no response to speak of.

For a few minutes, we sit there looking at the cul-de-sac, both hoping our neighbor will materialize in her gown the likeness of a dressed-up cowbell. While this doesn’t happen, a boy and a girl staying with their grandmother who lives exactly parallel to us come out in the middle of the street’s bulb and hover over a dead raccoon. The little girl pokes it with bare fingers.

My IQ didn’t germinate out of the blue, piecing itself together from nary an anteceding material. My mother once blew the ever-living socks off of Stanford. Born here, left here, could have stayed gone as long as she cared to, throwing her intellect at the great quizzes of the world. Came back here instead. Didn’t come back married and dragging the dirt with child, now. She came back fully aware of herself and everything that she could do, every way in which her life could diverge from the front-porch-sitting, meatball-cooking, pack-a-day-smoking lives of her friends. Hell. When you’re born in one of the world’s last remaining petri dishes of rednecks, aren’t you supposed to want to get away?

I look at Joyce, who was once beautiful and has weathered herself to within inches of a greeting-card caricature, who is part of all this but not quite. She asks have I been down heckling the good-hearted sisters of the clinic. Not knowing how she knows this—I certainly haven’t told her—I say yes I have.

She comments that she hopes that stupid kid washes her hands before sticking them in her mouth. She waits a little bit then cuts her eyes toward me, saying, “You get bored, don’t you, baby?”

I wait a minute myself, so as to fence back my sarcasm because she is asking me something real, and I say, Yes ma’am, and she nods because she knows exactly what I’m saying.

She avoided his gaze, feigning interest in an ad on the crinkled paper in her hand. Her face sagged as if the weight on her mind had settled in her cheeks and the folds beneath her eyes. Mike wished he could do more to assuage her anguish. She wasn’t herself anymore. Large chunks of her personality had seceded to the melancholy of loss since her brother Frank died four months ago, and he wanted desperately to see her old spunk and spirit again.

Becky glanced at him from the corner of her eye as she centered the vase on the coffee table and removed another item from the moving box. “Don’t pressure me. We have no idea what’s in that stuff. What if something goes wrong? Angela’s cousin bought cocaine from that gas station attendant in Pickens last year, remember?”

Mike nodded. “Yeah. He died because there was Drano or something in it.”

“Uh-huh. Angela said it ate a hole in his nose.”

Becky didn’t even know the worst of it. Angela’s husband told Mike that the poor guy died alone in his apartment. When the neighbor found the body, she said there were red freckles all over the place like he had been sneezing blood uncontrollably.

A shudder rippled through his body, and his proposition lost much of its appeal.

“Where’d you get that stuff, anyways?” Becky asked, placing an antique music box next to the vase.

“This guy from work, Carl. You met him at the Halloween party last year.”

Her eyebrows dropped and her chin jutted in deep concentration–a gesture that always made Mike laugh. He called it her cavewoman face. She pretended to hate that, but he knew better.

The cavewoman disappeared, replaced by the bright enlightenment of remembrance. “The guy with the little mustache who kept asking me if I had any single friends?”

“Yep, that’s Carl. He told me about this stuff a while back, but I didn’t really get the idea until last week. I remembered him saying that the experience really ‘set him free.’ I dismissed him at the time, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Carl’s a bright guy. Real bright. In fact, he makes me look like a stain on a white T-shirt. He started working there seven months after me, but he’s already two tiers higher on the totem.”

“He seemed kinda silly to me.”

“Oh, he is. No doubt. But he’s still as smart as they come.” Mike paused and placed a hand on her knee to grab her attention before proceeding. He wanted to ensure his point was made. “I don’t want to pressure you. If you’re uncomfortable, I’ll flush these pills right now. Seriously. We can unpack the DVD player, curl up on the couch and watch a flick. Don’t think I’ll be resentful or anything. It was just an idea, nothing more.”

Picking up the plastic baggy, he walked toward the kitchen. “As a matter of fact,” he said without looking back, “I’m dumping them down the sink right now.”

“Well … wait. I didn’t say no. I just want to feel like I have a choice.”

Mike stopped and turned around. “Okay…”

“What do they do? All I know about Flight is what you hear on the news. Your body tingles and you hallucinate. But they say you can’t move or control yourself. Sharon Summers did that special on CNN and said users turn into catatonic vegetables.”

Mike shuffled his feet. He wasn’t sure himself. He knew most people called it Flight, but some referred to it as Fourth Dimension, Limes, or OB for Out of Body.

“Carl said he couldn’t really explain what happened. He said to take one pill, wait about fifty minutes, and then Boom! your world changes. He said on one end, it’s like you’re in a paint-by-numbers picture. You see this general outline of the world around you, all black and white and gray. But you can change the colors just by thinking about them. On the other end, it’s like you’re a guardian angel for yourself. I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds cool.”

Her face showed horrified fascination as he relayed Carl’s explanation. What he left out was that new drugs like Flight were untested. No FDA studies on the long-term or even mid-term effects existed. For all they knew, they might grow tentacles and crave salt water three years after dosing.

“I’ve never done any drugs,” she muttered. The cavewoman was back.

“Pfff. You need coffee like diabetics need insulin.”

“Hey!” She scoffed at him mockingly. “You better watch it, Waltz.”

Mike grinned. Ever since he proposed, she had made a conscious effort to work his last name into her vocabulary as often as possible. The idea of changing the name you grew up with seemed absurd to Mike. For twenty-nine years she had faced the world as Becky Milford. Nearly three decades of teachers, friends, co-workers, doctors, dentists, and magazine subscriptions had recorded her name as Milford. But now, because they had chosen to spend their lives together, that name was being erased. Mike couldn’t imagine changing his and was more than prepared for her to hyphenate her own. But that idea didn’t even seem to occur to Becky. She was a Waltz now, and always had been.

“I don’t know,” Becky said. “What if we get addicted?”

“We’ll make a pact. Just this once. Then, never again.”

The weight gone from her face, she said, “Okay. Let’s do it.”

#

Becky organized the boxes in the bedroom, laid out the Egyptian cotton sheets, and fluffed the pillows. She draped a silk scarf over the shade, and the room bloomed with a diffused red light.

Meanwhile, Mike showered. Nervousness excited his thoughts, and he fantasized about the adventure to come. What would it be like? What would they see, feel, hear, taste, experience? Would they emphatically tell their friends about it as Carl had? One beer got Becky buzzed, how would she react to a hallucinogen? Hell, how would he react? He had toked (did people even say that anymore?) some weed in college, but this stuff wouldn’t, couldn’t compare to that.

Simply anticipating the drug was a high.

When he got out of the shower, he dressed and entered the bedroom to find Becky sitting on the edge of the bed with her hair tied back into a bun and her feet pulled beneath her in the straight-backed pose of an enlightened monk.

She was nervous, but at least her mind was off of her brother for once.

“You ready?” Mike asked.

She looked at him with wide eyes that said no. “Sure,” she said in a frail voice, and opened her hand to reveal the tiny lime-green football in her palm.

Mike approached and clasped her open hand between both of his. “We don’t have to do this.”

“No. I mean … I want to.” She tried to smile, but faltered.

“Sure?”

She popped her hand to her mouth in response. Her throat and mouth worked as she collected enough saliva to swallow the pill.

Mike looked at her with pride. “Impressive. Didn’t even need water. You sure you’ve never done this before?”

She giggled and said, “That’s right, Waltz, I’m down to get high.” She drew the last word out as if she were receiving a pleasant shot of morphine. “So what now?”

“Should be awhile before it kicks in, which reminds me.” Mike grabbed his pill from the dresser, and swallowed it. “We’re supposed to hold hands when it starts. Carl said we’ll go together, whatever that means.”

“Ok. What should we do until then?”

Mike sat on the bed next to her, wrapped an arm around her waist, and pulled her in tight. “Tell me about how we’re gonna decorate the new house.”

#

Forty-minutes and a lifetime of plans and dreams passed while they talked. The conversation came naturally and in excited bursts. Mike rejoiced as he saw the old Becky coming out. Her ears perked, the green of her eyes sharpened, and she seemed to gain a general interest in life again. The drug–or as he began to think of it, the solution to Becky’s slough–was producing better results than he had hoped for.

“Mike,” she said, lying back on the bed. Her legs dangled off, and she began swinging them, lightly kicking the mattress with her heels.

“Yeah?”

“I think I’m feeling something…” she trailed off as if she had forgotten to end her sentence.

“Lay back on the pillow. I’ll get on the other side.”

They lay next to each other, stretched out on the king-size mattress like two strangers sharing a bed. A tingle crept up Mike’s spine, and nestled in the back of his mind where head met pillow. He reached for Becky, found her smooth forearm, and grasped her hand. He sensed her head roll to face him, and Mike realized that he was unable to do the same. It wasn’t that his head was too heavy or that he didn’t have the will to move. He simply couldn’t.

“Whoa,” Becky said from inside a dream.

Mike wanted to respond, but the ceiling had captured his attention. The popcorn texture was moving. The entire ceiling was covered in lines of marching white ants. His view of the room tilted. The ceiling vanished, giving way to the wall at the foot of the bed. Mike knew the wall was empty–they were still the clean white of a fresh home–yet black lines swayed and swooped down the wall in long, sinuous tendrils. They writhed on the white canvas, dancing like a canopy of vines in a gentle breeze.

A memory popped into mind. Carl’s words. ‘…you can change the colors just by thinking about them.’ As soon as the thought came to full fruition in his mind, the black vines turned red, then green. The boxes in the corner melted and reformed into green vegetation. The white behind the vines vanished, replaced by dark undergrowth. The scent of humidity and compost wafted in and out of his nostrils, teasing him with the pungent odor.

The tingle in the back of his head seeped to all parts of his body as he lifted into the air. He rose higher and higher until he had a landscape view of the jungle that was once a house. The sun stuck to the horizon like a painted backdrop in an old western. The moon, shy and faded, was beginning to show itself in the farthest reaches of the sky from the sun. The jungle throbbed with life, and in a clearing at the heart of the thicket, the bed. Amazingly, Mike saw himself lying there. His hand still gripped Becky’s as their eyes darted and twitched beneath closed lids.

Mike wondered if she saw the jungle, too. He hoped so, because this was the most incredible thing he had ever seen. He almost couldn’t wait to get back to reality so he could tell her about how their new home had transformed into Tarzan’s backyard.

A rainbow extended from the jungle floor in the distance and slowly arched across the sky until the other end met the side of a mountain.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

Mike twisted around in mid-air, unsure and uncaring of the hows or whys of it, and found Becky floating behind him. She was leaning back with her hands behind her head in defiance of gravity.

“Becky,” he said. “So this is what Carl meant about us going together.”

“I suppose. Did you like what I did with the rainbow?”

“You did that?”

“Sure. Aren’t you the one who put us in a jungle?”

“I guess so,” he said, knowing it was true, but only realizing it as a result of the question.

“What else do you think we can do?” She started flying in slow circles around Mike, moving fluidly through the air.

Mike scanned the area, and caught sight of a colorful bird. He thought of the botanical gardens where he had proposed. Besides exotic flowers and hedges in the shape of elephants and rearing horses, Wemberly Gardens had one of the largest aviaries in the southeast. And Becky loved birds.

Mike shut his eyes and tried to picture every detail of the day he popped the question–the misting rain, air cold enough to bunch them together, but not drive them indoors, and even the Asian couple who couldn’t stop taking pictures. When he reopened his eyes, the jungle was gone, replaced by neat rows of hedges, intertwined with a concrete path. To the right, near a grand fountain, was the glass and steel dome of the aviary. Small shadows glided around inside. A camera flash popped.

“Oh, Mike,” Becky exclaimed. Happiness radiated from her with enough intensity to make the sun jealous. She drifted to him. They embraced, and slowly sank toward the ground. They kissed with the passion of a forbidden love and held each other until their feet found the bed.

Mike briefly wondered what had happened to their bodies, but lust soon made him forget. They made love for what seemed like hours, days, months.

All thoughts and sensations seemed both ephemeral and eternal at the same moment as their bodies became one.

#

When Mike and Becky came to, they found themselves in the same plank-like positions. Becky’s face said it all. Incredible. Amazing. Stupendous.

Wow, just wow.

They went to sleep in each other’s arms–the first time since her brother’s death–and in the morning, Mike awoke to Marvin Gaye and bacon.

#

“So-ooo, how was your flight?” Carl asked the following Monday in the break room.

“In-effing-credible,” Mike responded. He glanced at the white-shirted supervisor who was digging for something in the back of the fridge. They waited for the rotund man to find what he needed and leave before continuing. “I wouldn’t be caught dead using a phrase like ‘that blew my mind,’ but I can’t think of any better expression for what happened to us.”

Carl clapped him on the back. “I don’t like giving too many details away to virgins. Adventure is in the exploration.” He grinned wisely.

“Could you…,” Mike glanced around, “get some more of that? Becky wants to try it one more time.”

The wise grin morphed into concern. “You sure? I thought this was a one time deal?”

“We’re making it a two time deal. Becks has been down for the past while and I think the other night really took a load off.”

“Okay, but you guys need to be careful. Flight isn’t addictive in the physical sense. But it is in the mental sense.” He pushed a stiff finger against his temple. “Especially for people who are trying to escape reality. But … I’m not one to deny anybody a goodtime. After all, life is all about impulse and satisfying those impulses, am I right?”

Such philosophical ideas were beyond Mike. Life is all about impulses? “Sure, sounds good. So you’ll do it?”

“For you, buddy? The world.”

#

The second time was better than the first. They planned ahead, mapping out everything they wanted to try. She wanted to see the wonders of the world. But not the current wonders–anyone could grab a National Geographic and see the Great Wall or the Pyramids. She wanted to stroll through the Hanging Gardens of ancient Babylon and climb the lighthouse of Alexandria and sit on Zeus’ lap like some gargantuan Santa Clause.

And they did all that. They even had time to throw red rocks a hundred miles across the surface of Mars and watch the Earth rise from the moon. The reality of the Earthrise was so vivid and breathtaking that tears built in Becky’s eyes. Mike could almost see the changes taking place in his fiancée as the white-blue swirl broke the moon’s horizon.

#

“You should see if Carl can get some more Flight,” Becky said the next morning as casually as a Sunday drive.

“I don’t know, Beck. Carl said we could get addicted.”

“Addicted? I thought you said that stuff was safe?”

“It is. But if you recall, this was a one time thing.”

She nodded. Her gaze dropped to her hands, and the old darkness seemed to slide over her. “I suppose you’re right.”

#

“OB can take you out of yourself in more ways than one,” Carl warned. Mike sat on the visitor’s side of a mahogany desk in Carl’s spacious office. He’d been promoted again, putting him three levels above Mike on the totem. “Like I told you, life is about impulses. If she had continued on her merry way, ignorant to the little green pill, she’d be fine. All of her impulses would be satisfied. But oh wait, something new and amazing comes along and she’s no longer satisfied. Funny, huh?”

“Not really.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, buddy. Tell her I’m dry. My guy is all out. The feds busted him. Whatever, just tell her you can’t get anymore.” He sat back in his leather chair, and pushed the fingertips of each hand together. “Problem solved.”

“You think?”

“Yep. I told you, OB isn’t physically addictive. Before long, she’ll forget all about it. You’ll be saying ‘Remember the time we flew together?’ in weeks.”

Hope rose in Mike. Carl was right, of course. After all, he’s a bright guy.

#

When he told Becky the news–Carl’s supply got pinched, so no more Flight–she peered at him for a long time. He wasn’t a good liar. She smiled, conveyed her disappointment, and agreed that it was for the best.

Secretly, Mike shook his head at their role reversal. Hadn’t she always been the levelheaded decision maker in the relationship? When he had decided to buy a new car, she talked him out of it with calm reason, pointing out that his current car was paid off and running well. Why take on a car payment? For new and shiny? What about the future? Starting a family, she had said in a not so subtle hint, takes a lot of dough.

And here he was, worried he’d find her in a back alley somewhere, clutching a handful of lime-green pills. Ridiculous.

He embraced her in a full-bodied hug, and whispered in her ear, “I love you.”
“I know you do, Waltz.”

#

Work got busy, and even though they weren’t together as much as either would like, Becky’s good mood endured. She let Mike hold her at night, she focused on preparing a different gourmet meal on the weekends and every so often they would make love in the shower.

A full month passed before the prophecy was fulfilled.

They were driving home from steaks and drinks at Prime Cuts when Becky, staring at the moon, said, “Remember when we flew and watched the Earth rise?”

“How could I forget?”

#

Another month came and went, as did the season. With the first snow of winter, Mike wasn’t surprised to find the office nearly deserted. He went to his cubicle, logged into the system and started filtering his e-mails.

Not more than ten-minutes later, someone knocked on the carpeted wall behind him.

“Hey, Mike,” Pauline, the head of his department, said. Her stout frame filled the only exit.

“Morning, Pauline. What’s up?”

“Snow day,” she exclaimed, and her arms shot over her head as if she were declaring the field goal good. “The plow company that handles Mercer County has their trucks in Hastings. I guess the storm hit really bad over there. And since half our office lives in Mercer, and none of them can get out of their driveways, the benevolent whip-crackers on the tenth floor decided to give us poor souls who trudged our way to work the day off, too.”

“Really?”

“What the heck are you still doing here? Go home.” She shooed him with both hands. “Go on, get.” She laughed and disappeared to spread the word.

Mike barely remembered to log out of the computer before hurrying to the parking garage. The prospect of some alone time at home motivated him to weave through traffic and grey slushes of snow.

He slowed as he rounded the sign reading Fairfield. They had chosen a good neighborhood. After an exhaustive search, they had finally settled here because the properties were larger than average. The houses were smaller, but big enough for the two of them, plus a couple of kids. If needed. They hadn’t really talked about kids, yet. Becky wanted them, he knew, and so did he, but they had never openly admitted it to each other.

Mike turned left onto Saw Mill Lane, and spotted his house. A part of him had worried Becky would be home. As a daycare teacher, she often got released early on those random days parents were forced to stay home with their children–such as snow days. But today he was lucky. No lights were on.

The tires lost traction and slid diagonally, almost pitching him into the yard. A thin layer of ice covered the driveway. That’s what I get for shoveling in a hurry, he scolded himself.

He shut the car off, and walked through the snow lining the driveway so he wouldn’t slip. When he opened the back door, a rush of warm air invited him in, and he breathed in the scent of home.

Looking at the neat arrangement of photos hanging on the breakfast nook wall, he almost felt guilty for being there without Becky. He recalled her careful planning when choosing where to place each picture and which frame to hang it in. The pictures were in four neat rows of four pictures each, forming a mosaic-like square. Some pictures were of them at the beach, on top of a skyscraper, vacation in Baja. But a few, scattered in strategic locations for the sake of art, were black-and-white prints of Ansel Adam’s work in Yellowstone.

He pulled his collar open, made a sandwich, grabbed a beer from the back of the fridge, and plopped his happy ass on the couch. It’s only ten-thirty, he marveled. But, of course, the satellite’s out. Storm must’ve moved the dish again.

There was too much snow and ice on the roof to fix it, so he cranked the stereo instead. He put on his favorite Chili Peppers album, but after listening to a couple of songs while staring at a blank television, that grew old. He considered calling Becky at work, but thought better. If she wasn’t home, she was probably knee deep in toddlers.

Time alone wasn’t as much fun as he expected.

He decided to change out of his work clothes and into his sweat pants; maybe do some exercises. He flexed his buttocks as he walked, wondering when the last time he had lifted anything heavier than a ream of paper was.

When he walked into the bedroom, he paused at the sight of an unmade bed. Becky never left the house without making it. Not once since they moved in together. The comforter was pulled up to pillows that still held concave divots from where their heads had lain. Mike’s heart froze when the comforter began shifting. A tired moan followed. Becky? He grabbed the end of the comforter and whipped it off, revealing the disheveled lump of pale skin and auburn hair that was Becky. She still wore her pajamas, her arms and legs writhed slowly as if she were dreaming about trying to escape a tar pit, and she clutched a medicine bottle in one hand. Mike’s first thought was that she must be sick.

He pried the bottle from her fingers without waking her. He figured he could tell what was wrong by what she had taken, but the label was peeled away, leaving only a sticky residue.

He shook her. “Becky, wake up, I’m home. Becky.”

Her eyes floated open.

“Hey, are you alright?”

She reached an arm to his face and patted it as if she didn’t believe he was real.

“Do I need to call nine-one-one?” He tried to keep the worry out of his voice, and tried to pretend he didn’t already know what was wrong.

She smiled, reminding him of the blissfully ignorant grin babies have when they poop themselves. Her hand fell back to the bed, and her lips moved. Nothing came out at first, but little-by-little, words formed, then sentences and finally, a coherent thought.

“What you doing home … Waltz?” she said in a drunken voice.

“Tell me you’re sick.”

Her eyes wandered around the room, lost. “Sick? Not sick. I feel better than ever. Why? Are you sick?”

Rage was building near the surface. She was high. If Mike were younger and down with the lingo, he’d say she had just landed. “Where’d you get them, Beck?”

“What?” she blurted. “I already told you I’m not sick.”

“The pills,” he screamed, surprising himself. Becky didn’t seem to notice.

“I don’t have any pills. Why would I have pills?”

He continued yelling, far beyond any kind of rational behavior. “Then what the hell are these?” Mike opened the medicine bottle, and spilled at least six tiny green footballs on the bed next to her. “Don’t lie, either. I want to know.”

A semblance of clarity returned to her eyes as she sat up. Her ears glowed with shame. “I didn’t know where else to go…”

“Becks. Please.”

“Carl,” she said with disdain. The rage in Mike died, and from the ashes came fear and sorrow. Carl. His friend. His confidant. And the way she said his name. It was like she was saying ‘Don’t expect me to stop, either.’

“You’ve been seeing Carl?” Just then, he flashed back to a time when his high school girlfriend admitted to dating him so she could get closer to his older brother.

“So. It’s just once in a while. I deserve to let loose once in a while.”

His entire body convulsed. He wanted to heave and cry, scream and punch, hate and die all at the same time. He wanted to burn the house down, but he also wanted to crawl beneath it and never come out. He looked at her, his eyes hot with tears, and she looked away. He stared until she caved and glanced back. Her eyes softened. The old, beautiful, caring Becky was still in there. Somewhere.

“I’m sorry, Mike. Frank died and you’re always working and I thought I could handle it, I mean, I was handling it, right? You had no idea, and it’s been weeks. And I … I …” Her face paled, and he could see a mental struggle occurring within her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I need to go back.” She picked two pills off the bed, swallowed them without remorse, and laid back. “Frank’s there, you know.”

“I know.”

“Come with me. You remember how beautiful it was? Remember watching the Earth rise?”

Mike couldn’t help but cry. How long had she been hiding this? Worse yet, how did he not notice? This wasn’t the person he had proposed to. This wasn’t the Becky who had become more than just part of his life, but the whole thing. That Becky was gone. A stranger lay in his bed.

“It comes faster now,” she said from a dream, and slipped away.

Mike cried until his body couldn’t produce another drop. Then he sat and watched her face as she slept–as she flew. She would wake up eventually, but not really. She’d never really be free. Once you experience a world like the one Flight offered, this one seemed almost painful in comparison.

He wrote a note on an index card, and took his time to find the perfect message for when she woke up. He wanted to be clear so she wouldn’t be confused. When he was finished, he placed it on her nightstand and turned the lamp on so she couldn’t miss it. Even if she didn’t come back until it was dark. It was important that she understand what he had done.

Mike tucked Becky into the comforter, leaving her arms exposed so she wouldn’t get too hot. He kissed her on the forehead, the nose, and the mouth. She was stiff and distant, and she would always feel that way now.

He gathered the remaining pills and set them next to his note. He then walked around the bed, lay next to his fiancée, and took her hand in his.

With his free hand, he quickly swallowed two of the pills he had kept for himself. The excitement of that first night built in him. He closed his eyes and thought about all the things he would do when he got there–when he flew with Becky.

And then he waited.

#

Dear Becky,

I’d go with you anywhere.

Catch you on the moon,

Mike