*

Mother died for the third and final time on the day of my eighteenth birthday. The day I became an adult. Just like that. She left for work and never came back. A car accident. Utterly random.

I was numb. I was hysterical. I was inconsolable.

I realised that I hardly knew her, that I was just on the cusp of being able to get to know her.

Yet I carried on.

I went to university.

I went a little crazy.

I moved to London, inevitably.

I made a name for myself.

I had a succession of nice, but ultimately pointless men.

I missed my mother.

*

“It’s like this.” Grandma bent forward in her wheelchair and scooped up a handful of gravel from the path.

I’d asked her about mother, about her work. It was more out of lack of anything else to say than any hope I might hear something new. We’d spoken of it a thousand times before. Grandma enjoyed talking of her genius daughter.

She held out her frail, translucent hand to me, filled with pebbles and bits of twig, clods of dirt. It shook gently as she spoke.

“Each of these stones is a person, the same person give or take a few minor details.”

She hefted the handful high into the air and we watched them splash down into the pond.

“The ripples that spread from each are their lives. Those points where they touch, they interfere with one another, you can feel. That inexplicable feeling of serenity that strikes you when you least expect it, at the oddest moments. Where our lives touch. An infinite number of me, an infinite number of you. All just ripples on the pond’s surface. That’s how your mother explained it to me. I mean your real mother.”

“Gran?”

“Oh I’m sure there was more to it than that. When they recruited her she said she couldn’t talk about it anymore, not even to her own mother.” A small smile. “But she did. Sometimes. If they touch, we can see into them, she said to me. If they touch we can travel between them.”

“Gran I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“Your mother, darling. She drove a hard bargain. They needed her and she knew it. She was brilliant. There was nothing they could do about her condition, about her heart, but she got insurance. She made them promise.”

“Promise what, Gran?”

“That if she died they’d bring another her through.”

*

I watch the light through the leaves on the old oak. My hand traces the creases in the bark, fingertips brushing lichen and moss. The sun is good on my skin. It soaks through my pores, down though muscle and bone, into the marrow. I feel lifted, inexplicably alive, and I know in this moment that my sister, one of many sisters, is near.

I wonder if she knows her mother. Our mother. Or if, like mine, she too disappeared one day. An empty space left behind. A hollowness that always had been there, muted, but now pushed to the fore.

And as the feeling passes, as it always does, I long to reach across the radius of the ripple, to see her, for her to take me in her arms and for her to tell me that everything is going to be okay.

Dan Grace lives in Sheffield. His novella, Winter, is published by Unsung Stories and was reviewed in Shoreline of Infinity 4. The review is also published on our website, www.shorelineofinfinity.com

Brother’s Keeper

Shannon Connor Winward

Art: Siobhan McDonald

Abby (I.)

A human being is not like a bullet. We don’t begin with a single act—a finger on a trigger. Our existence depends on the confluence of choice, desire, factors far more complex than angle, range, wind. Even if, in hindsight, our outcome seems inevitable, the trajectory of a life is not so easily calculated.

So, how to avoid an undesired outcome? Where do you start? Not at the end. You have to go back. You have to unravel. But how far? To the bottom of the stairs, the beginning of the breakdown? Further. Before he buys the gun, before he becomes addicted, before the marriage dissolves, before the army. Before the child. Before the first confluence is even crossed. You have to go back to where the lines are clean.

Back to when life was simple.

Jesse

While his mother had her hands stuck inside the turkey, Jesse slipped outside to spark a joint.

The neighborhood was quiet, full of fireplace scents and white chimney smoke. Clearing a thin layer of snow off the backyard swing, Jesse settled on the bench and rocked, enjoying the familiar, rhythmic squeak of the chain.

Then Abigail came around the corner of the house, red sneakers crunching over snow. Thirteen years old now, she seemed to have aged years instead of months since Jesse went away to college. Black New Moon t-shirt but no coat, blonde hair dyed black and swept up in a severe ponytail. She stopped when she saw him and put a hand on her hip. “What are you smoking?”

“I’m not.”

Abby looked at him with that odd, fierce gaze that had been unnerving him all week. “That’s weed. Give me some.”

Jesse coughed into his glove. “I’m not giving weed to my baby sis—”

“I’ll tell Mom you have it. M-oooom!”

“Shut up! Fine! Jesus.”

Jesse felt a qualm as he handed her the joint. He could still picture Abby dancing in pink footie pajamas, brandishing her first lost tooth. “Just take a little. A puff. Not too much.”

Blue eyes twinkling, Abby pinched the roach between black sparkly fingernails and sucked it like a straw.

Jesse gaped. “How long have you been smoking?”

“Oh,” she said, and held her breath. Exhale. Handed it back to him. “A while.”