“It’s better if you don’t know. There’s no telling what the Other David might do. I’ll be back in three weeks, though, I swear it. We’re going to have this baby, and it’s going to be goddamned healthy if I have to die making it happen.”
“Don’t say stuff like that.”
“I love you, Dave.”
I drain my smoothie and walk out to the recycling. One of the bourbon bottles has a couple fingers in the bottom, and I pour it in my empty glass. I hear booze delays the transition. I wish we never had to let the Others back in at all.
*
The sun is out, the snow is melting, and the bathroom is mercifully free of vomiting sounds. Emily’s imprisonment has made me a free man for five months now. In fact, if the pregnancy goes awry, it’s quite possible I’ll never have to see Emily again.
Freedom, for the first time in almost a decade. And yet, something isn’t quite right. I feel something gnawing at the edge of my consciousness, some sort of nagging anxiety or concern. I walk out to the balcony and smother it with a cigarette. It’s not enough.
Instead, I put on my Vector’s running clothes and race down along the Mississippi. I’m in better shape than I thought, despite the cigarettes, and I make it almost all the way downtown before collapsing on a bench and catching my breath.
My phone vibrates as I admire the ice drifting along the river.
“Hello?”
“David Delacroix?” The woman’s voice is rushed, like I’m the first name on a long list.
“That’d be me.”
“We’re calling today about your child, sir. Is …” the voice trails off and I hear a muffled conversation on the other end of the phone. “Sir, pardon me for asking, but are you the original David Delacroix or his Vector?”
“I’m a human being. If that’s what you mean.”
“Er, yes. All right. You may want to sit down, Mister Delacroix.” The person on the other end clears her throat. “Your partner Emily passed away at nine am this morning.”
“What? How?”
“She’d been hoarding some of her prescriptions. She took them all at once today, after breakfast.”
“Aren’t you supposed to prevent that sort of thing from happening?”
She clears her throat again. “We’re still not sure how she managed to keep them secret. But that’s not the end of it. Your wife passed, but we managed to save the child.”
I said nothing.
“Mister Delacroix? Hello?”
“Yeah. What does all this mean for me?”
“Excuse me?”
“What do I need to do?”
There’s more muffled conversation on the phone, and then: “You need to perform a positive identification on Emily Delacroix’s body, as well as take custody of your newborn.”
Oh. Right. The kid. I’d figure that out, I guessed. Couldn’t be worse than living with Emily. “I’ll be right along. Just let me run home and shower.”
“Goodbye.” The voice on the other side sounds disgusted. Probably just tired of having to call people.
At the hospital, I confirm Emily’s identity, and pick up the kid, a boy.
Back home, I wrap him in flannel and hold him on the couch while I watch TV. Looking down at the wrinkly little bugger, I can’t help but feel good. He’s more proof of my fresh start. A perfectly Vector-less human being.
I’m a father.
*
Part of me is dead. Killed by a self-destructive child, a psychopath with no empathy or concern for the lives of those with whom she shared a body. Part of me is dead, and there’s no way to get her back. We’ll never plant flowers again.
Part of me is dead, but she left something behind.
Eli.
Eli, we named our son, my Other and I. He’s not as bad, now that Emily is gone. Somehow Em’s death brought us closer together. Team David. Team Delacroix. It never occurred to me that he might hate Em’s Other as much as I did.
But we both love Eli, and that would make Em happy, I think. She’d want me to take care of him. She’d want both of us to take care of him.
Em lives on in him, and in me, and somehow in my Other too. She lives on in the lilies that we planted over the years, and the crease on her side of the mattress. She lives on in the smell of grapefruit and cigarettes.
Part of me is dead, but she isn’t gone. She’s still in the lilies out front, and in Eli’s chiffon pajamas. She’s still in the flannel sheets. She lives on in my memory. She lives on in the way she brought my Other and I together.
I can’t see her from here, but she isn’t gone.
Daniel Rosen writes speculative fiction and swing jazz in Minnesota, smack dab in the middle of North America. In between various fictions, he spends his time sprawled lazily with two cats and a lady. You can find him on twitter @animalfur, or at his website: http://rosen659.wixsite.com/avantgardens
Incoming
Thomas Clark
Art: Dave Alexander
Andy had just got off to sleep when it started again. It was getting to be every night now. He staggered out of bed, pulled his wax jacket on over his pyjamas. It could only have been three o’clock. Blearily, he stared at the Daedalian knots of his laces, tucked them down into the sides of his shoes. The close lights were broken, but the stairwell was already bright with open doors.
“Mornin, Mrs. McGraw,” he shouted at the first door. Mrs. McGraw glowered at him, her weathered fist clasping shut her nightie like a brooch.
“Ah’ll gie ye morning! It’s a bloody disgrace, so it is,” she said, “There’s ma man daein mornins and he cannae get a wink o sleep.”
“Ah ken, ah ken,” Andy said, “Ah’m just away doon tae see aboot it.”
“Aye, well, when ye see him ye can tell him fae me …”
The noise, a continual low hum which shook the windows in their settings, suddenly redoubled, driving out all competing sounds. As he passed down through the stairwell, Andy tried not to notice the faces that stared lividly at him from the cracks of doors, the horrific writhings of their silent mouths. By now the noise was so loud that his eyes quivered in their sockets, and the close had the freakish appearance of double exposed film, an art-house installation for the criminally insane. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he found himself whispering as he shuffled past the doors, each framing a scene of suspended domesticity warped into something grotesque.
Outside, on the street, it was just as bad. Fractals of window-light pocked the low clear night, and the noise boomed through the narrow roads as they sunk towards the fields. As he walked along, Andy took a glance at the town hall spire. The clock was usually wrong, but it was certainly well past four. On the farms beyond Hawick, hired hands were already rising: Bulgarians and Poles who washed their faces in freezing water and listened with wonder to the sound, which could be heard as far as Branxholme Castle. It wasn’t until the valleys towards Galashiels that the noise finally passed beyond the range of human hearing, although the Jedburgh dogs still whined, and the sheep in Selkirk bleated sympathy. No-one knew.
