Hidden in a drawer is a book of photos, of the other Isla and Jude. In the beginning they look like the real Isla and Jude, but by the end of the book Isla is withered and sickly.
“Is this the future?” Isla wonders, “Is this what will happen to me?” He hopes not. He does not want to lose her.
One night he finds her in the kitchen, weeping. Her throat hurts, she says, her face is hot. He touches her at last! and she is burning. She is frightened, he is terrified. He carries her outside, where it is cool, where snow is falling. He wraps his arms around her. He cannot let her go. She is still hot, and he helps her remove her clothes, and he removes his as well and they stand together staring towards the beach until he begins to shiver and she wraps her hot body around his and they are no longer standing, but something else, something amazing out here in the snow.
He buries her with the others, but apart. He does not want to give her just a number, so he scratches Isla into the stone as best he can. The sun is setting.
He wishes he had more time.
He wishes he had more than a photograph of a woman who looks like her, but is not her.
He wishes he could start over, make another Isla, another Jude, and try again.
Maybe he can.
Hannah Lackoff has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and the storySouth Million Writers Award. She has been published in Spark, Drabblecast, Bourbon Penn, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink and others. Her short story collection After the World Ended was published by 18th Wall Productions. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at hannahlackoff.wix.com/writing.
Goodnight New York, New York
Victoria Zelvin
Art: Becca McCall
Despite the numerous publicreports otherwise, when Soo-Jung paddled up to where the Chrysler Building was supposed to be, she found it already claimed by the ocean. After circling the shadowed expanse of water twice, she slapped her goggles on, leaned out of her kayak, stuck her face into the water and… yep.
“Well,” Soo-Jung said to the lapping waves, salt water streaming down her cheeks.
Caroline’s despair translated easily across the garbled radio. It was the only thing that did. “No, n…fifty met…last year!”
Soo-Jung cupped some salt water in her hand and slapped it onto her neck. Official statement from the Office of Monitoring Sea Levels had reported, and been reporting for years, that the Chrysler building remained at least fifty meters above the water in all tides. While the sea had been halted in its gradual approach by the OMSL’s levy project, keeping shorelines fairly stagnant, no one truly knew how bad the damage was off shore, on what used to be land. Out of sight, out of mind, that was OMSL’s approach to the public. Lock away the former sites, shove them under a giant tarp labeled UNSAFE, and hope the people forget there was ever a place called New York City. It seemed to be working. No one had gotten a non-government sanctioned photo out of New York in at least twenty years and, slowly, those had lessened in frequency as well to nothing for the past two.
“Sea levels must have risen again,” she said, but she wasn’t sure how much made it through. VHFs were the grandfathers of antiquated maritime technology and theirs, despite numerous repairs and being fused together with equal parts old metal and plastic printed parts, barely cooperated. Even a scant twenty miles away across nothing but ocean, they were scrambled. But everyone, Soo-Jung included, was more worried about OMSL’s interference in the name of “safety” and arrests before they’re done than reliable communication and so without knowing what was intelligible, Soo-Jung continued into her walkie, “Plus your hurricane swept through. Cat-3 Caroline must’ve snapped the spire off. Storm surge’d easily swallow fifty meters of building.”
“G…mmit.”
Twirling her paddle up and down the top of her kayak, Soo-Jung’s eyes moved across the shadowed expanse of ocean to an above water spire. Soo-Jung held down the transmit button. “There’s not much of it left, but the Empire State is still kind of above water,” she said. “Think Empire State’ll work just as well. Slanted, but I think I can get in and tuck the kayak inside,” she concluded. The original plan had been to shelter within the walls of the Chrysler building, to tuck the kayak inside so it wouldn’t be snapped by satellites while she was under, and dive. The street-by-street plan would suffer from the difference, but in theory New York was easy to navigate.
There was a long pause from the other end, then: “…e care...”
Half sure that meant be careful, Soo-Jung responded, “Sure. Out.”
With a small sigh to clear her lungs, Soo-Jung dipped her paddle back into the water and twisted her kayak to face the dilapidated Empire State building. A good amount of the famous building remained above water, the familiar arches currently covered in gulls and their nests, and bent decidedly backwards.
Soo-Jung had to break a window to get inside. Seagulls shrieked at her as she slid the kayak inside, finding more nestlings burrowed into the decayed drywall. “Nice birdies,” she urged, though she knew they were not. She wound a length of rope around the bow of her kayak and tied it to an exposed metal girder just below the surface, stepping onto it to prepare. Even though her specialized skin weave would allow her to withstand the pressure and protect her internal organs, it was still going to be damned cold down there. The wetsuit was tight, uncomfortable, and hard to zip up alone, but she managed with only a few derogatory remarks to the yapping gulls, then pulled on gloves and little swim socks. She would swim faster frog kicking than she ever would with flippers.
Hand in hand with the weave that had thickened her skin was the procedure to reconstruct and strengthen her inner ear. For this project she’d tested the depth at five hundred meters, diving with other specifically-enhanced divers off the coast of Maui. While there, she’d also tested the most experimental and crucial aspect to her dive here: the alteration of her myoglobin in her muscle tissue. Specially infused with whale DNA, she’d sucked in a single breath before diving in Maui and lasted a full hour under the water.
She and Caroline had gone back and forth on this for months. The camera was a required, absolutely vital part of the mission. Anything else risked tripping the scanners. Hence, the kayak taken paddled out from the larger boat safe in international waters. Hence, the VHF’s. No diving apparatus still existed without a network connection and a host of electronics set to ensure as few drowning deaths as could be possible. They’d talked about 3D printing some, just a basic tank and some rubber, but in the end it had been easier to simply genetically engineer Soo-Jung into the ability to hold her breath underwater for the duration of the dive.
It was… troubling, though. She sat herself down on the girder a moment, forcing herself to breathe in the exercises the doctors had taught her, to count as the freedivers had advised, until her heartrate was marginally under control. If this was to work, she’d need her heart to beat slowly, not the other way around. Soo-Jung took her time, trying to find her calm even if she had to repeat the words find calm silently over and over. When she half-way believed it, she lashed her camera to her belt.
So far, so good, so haven’t been arrested yet.
Soo-Jung stood up on the girder, her legs unsteady underneath her. “Dear God,” she said, voice reverberating in the hollow cavern. “I would really appreciate it if I didn’t drown. Amen.”
She walked on the girder out to the window and hopped out the window, sinking below the waves.
The first thing she did was to take several barely sub-subsurface pictures of the view from the Empire State, over the ghastly shadows the buildings made in the water, testing her breath hold. She surfaced several times, sucking in deeper breaths, and sinking down further each time, ghosting alongside the dilapidated buildings. They scarce looked real, ruins just meters under the water. They grew more concrete to her gaze as she swam down, pausing every few floors to peer out at the city and to snap a photo, trying to work her nerve up.
She made one last trip to the surface, sucking in three quick gulps of air, before diving for real, straight down the side of the Empire State, following the lines the sun cut through the water until they faded almost entirely.
The main project was an artistic one, to dive down and take pictures of the sites of famous photos. The camera was preprogrammed with images and Soo-Jung was to take one picture as it was, then to line up the underwater of now with the scenery of the past to show the change. As she dove, her heart began to pound out a rhythm against her ribs. This hardly felt illegal, and yet...
Soo-Jung mentally crossed the Chrysler Building off her list, instead swimming away from the Empire State towards a spot she›d had picked out for herself.
It took some time to find the New York Public Library, what remained of it, and when she did Soo-Jung fumbled for her camera, fingers numb already. Some of the columns had fallen, a school of silver fish descending through them to go inside, but the sign remained at the base of the stairs. Soo-Jung pulled the photo of her great-grandmother up on her camera, and held the viewer up to her eye so she could laboriously line up her shot, trying to find the column that her great-grandmother had been leaning up against.
Her great-grandmother had made her way to New York on her own. While she never managed to scrape up enough money to go to school, like she wanted, her great-grandmother spent most of her life in the library. She was one of the last to leave the city, and had campaigned to evacuate the books as the city began to flood. In the photo she was young, sixteen, blushing as the wind blew her hair into her face. Soo-Jung wanted to swim further, inside the library perhaps, but salt water had begun to gather in her eyes and she could not afford to let it leak into her goggles. Her chest felt tight enough that she blew out a small bubble of air, just to calm herself. She swam away without daring to look back.
She had photos to take that she and Caroline had actually planned to take.
Times Square was the priority, and Soo-Jung had picked three inserts to shoot. The first was the V-J Day kiss. The second showed the crowds assembled to watch the first human step onto the surface of Mars. The third photo was the last New Year’s Eve in New York, an illegal party thrown in freezing waist deep water to watch the ball drop one last time. Soo-Jung found that same ball shattered on the ocean floor and discovered upon investigation that a family of crabs that had moved inside. She shone her flashlight upon them and disturbed them the few moments it took to take a photo. A large crab raised his claws at her as she backed away, snapping in the water, and she snorted to think he might have been saying, we own these streets.
