“It’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?”

“Why didn’t you come, then?”

Abigail shifted on the sofa and didn’t answer right away. She looked like she half didn’t want to be there.

Sierra studied her over the doll’s head. “You don’t like kids.”

“I’m ambivalent about them, to be honest with you.” Abigail laughed at herself, obviously thinking Sierra didn’t know that word. But Sierra understood a lot of things. Like that this “aunt” wasn’t here for Sierra so much as she was looking to do something nice for someone else. Sierra’s dead dad, maybe, or the grandmother she was supposed to be named for.

“But it’s not that,” Abigail continued. “I was hoping things would turn out different. But here we are.” She offered a sad smile. “You look like my mom.”

“I look like you.”

“Yeah, I think you do. They say you’re very smart. And artistic. You draw?”

Sierra nodded. “I write stories.”

“I used to write too,” said Abigail. “A long time ago. I was never good at finishing, though.”

“What do you do now?”

“I’m a biophysical engineer. That’s a kind of doctor. I design programs that trace back cellular evolution.”

“Why?”

“To reverse degeneration… disease.”

Sierra thought of her parents. “So you fix people?”

“In theory.” Abigail studied her hands in her lap. “Not everything can be fixed.”

“At least not by going backwards.”

Abigail stared at Sierra. “Right,” she said. “Anyway. I work a lot. I don’t know anything about raising kids. But I have a nice apartment, and my boyfriend can cook, so. It’s up to you, Sierra. What do you think?”

The girl made a pretense of considering it, then dropped Mama Lucy’s doll into the basket, head first. “Can we go now?”

Abby (III.)

We do not begin with a single act, Abby thought, struggling to keep her grip on the handhold as the shuttle swayed over downtown, but perhaps we can be defined by one.

Lizzie, straddling the middle aisle with all the strength and grace of youth, glanced up from her com and gifted Abby a smile. She was in the midst of her midterm exams at University, necessitating constant earnest conferences with her classmates, but she knew the ride was rough on Abby’s arthritic joints.

“Sure I can’t beg you a seat, Mom?” she asked, tilting a head towards the benches.

“I’m fine,” Abby lied, banishing any hint of pain from her face. Lizzie turned back to the device in her hands, immersing herself once more in the depths of xenolinguistics.

Abby studied the top of the young woman’s honey-blonde head, seeing not the tall, confident Lizzie as she was now, but Sierra Elizabeth as she had been, small and strange on that first ride home so many years ago. Sierra with her face pressed up against the window to see the city sprawled hundreds of feet below, the magnificent convergence of lights and steel, the hugeness of a world where she had lost and gained a family in a single night. Beneath the ache in her hand, Abby could still feel the avian frailness of the girl’s shoulder as she reached out to hold her, moved by some fetal sense of love.

Was that it? Was that the moment she’d become not-Abby, but a parent? Or had that happened earlier, with the knock on the door at the foster home? When the word “adoption” first left her lips? The night that Jesse died and Abby ripped herself in and out of time, the moment she returned, shaking and vomiting, to her laboratory floor?

Or had it been in motion all along?

“Our stop is next,” Lizzie said, taking Abby’s hand. “I’m so glad we’re doing this. I’m starving. Let’s share a plate of tikka masala, what do you think?”

“Absolutely,” said Abby, though she had little appetite anymore. The aging process was catching up with her—hardly noticeable for the first few years since her trip back, but now she was dyeing her hair, taking pain meds, treating her skin—it was getting harder to keep Lizzie and Michael from realizing the extent of her degeneration.

To tell Lizzie she was growing old quickly, irreversibly, Abby would also have to explain why. She wasn’t ready for that conversation. She knew she’d have to do it, sooner rather than later. But not now. Today was about Lizzie—a special mother-daughter lunch at their favorite restaurant to celebrate the nearness of a bright and promising future. That was how it should be.

The past could come later.

Shannon Connor Winward is an American author of speculative fiction and poetry. Her writing appears in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Persistent Visions, Pseudopod, and elsewhere. Shannon is also an officer for the Science Fiction Poetry Association, a poetry editor for Devilfish Review, and founding editor of Riddled with Arrows Literary Journal. She lives and writes in Newark, Delaware.

Message in a Bottle

Davyne DeSye

This is my 9,346th message to you, whoever you are, wherever you are:

The birds have sung their last. It is with an uncanny certainty that this knowledge settles upon me. For all the living beings that have left me, the loss of these frivolous singing creatures affects me most. Later, when I have the strength of spirit, I will go find a bird, or several, and press their corpses onto the canvas. I want a record of their frail forms that are so fitting to the gauzy insubstantial music with which they once graced my world.

My world. Mine alone. I wonder when you will come back. When you will end the experiment. I expected you long ago.

When I message you next, I will include a miniature of my bird canvas.

Music has always had an animating effect upon me. Music touches me deeply, establishes the strongest connections to my inward self. When we still had working machines that broadcast music, I knew the words, the tunes, the nuances of when to pause, when to allow my voice to roughen, when to push the muscles over my diaphragm to force volume—all the indescribably multitudinous aspects of thousands of songs. Music tuned my energy levels, relaxing me, or riding me to frenzied levels of tension, or pumping me with happy bouncing vigor. I must pause in this message even now, and sing, wondrous that after all these years, melody and words have not left me.

[pause]

I wish there was a way to press a song onto the canvas. But how to demonstrate the rhythms and melodies and harmonies with just shape and color? I know the rudiments of reading music, whole notes, quarter notes, 4-4 time. Given a keyboard and someone to tell me where middle-C is, I could slowly, excruciatingly, grind out a tune. But to do the reverse, to take a tune and turn it into notes, into the written language of music? That is beyond me. And so, in addition to the music of the birds, I have lost all music.

I have lost all music, other than the music that remains stubbornly within my skull. I cannot paint it, cannot write it, cannot fashion it from my surroundings. To know our songs, you must find me and let me sing them to you. I will not sing into this message. To hear me, you must come to me.

Surely, you are close now.

[pause]

I shall make another sculpture. After I have collected all the birds I can find, after I have pressed their shape into the canvas—I will press them into the sky of my painting, and into the trees because that is where they lived—I will add to my substantial museum a sculpture made up of their bones, and feathers, and sharp hollow beaks. I must design a way to show the liquid of their eyes because the truth of the lidless sockets will be frightening. You should not be frightened of the birds. They were beautiful.

I will truly be the artist I dream if, in fashioning their eyes, I can do more than merely show liquid orbs, if I can recreate the eager and uneasy meaning they assigned me. The challenge of creating the avian eyes will provide me with purpose.

The sculptures in my museum are not to scale. I tell you this now because I do not believe I have mentioned it in any previous message—although perhaps I have (over these years I forget what I have told you and what I have merely meant to tell). Each sculpture has been crafted with the materials at hand. My bird will be only as big as I can make with all the bird corpses I can find. While the avian population has dwindled in recent months, without the larger predators and scavengers which left me so long ago, perhaps I can recover corpses from months past. If I find only seven or eight, my bird will be small. I hope to find hundreds, even thousands. I wish my bird to rival my squirrel. My squirrel stands loftily above the other sculptures, taller than I am twice again, perched on posterior legs made of hundreds of thousands of posterior legs, balanced on a tail made bushy with individual squirrel tails. I have already told you of my squirrel in an earlier message, but in my pride, I am telling you again. You will be stunned and impressed by my squirrel.

Stephen would have been impressed by my squirrel. And my bird—by the whole menagerie. As our zoologist he was always fascinated by animals. He could talk endlessly of recessive versus dominant traits, subspeciation, mating habits and generational lifespan variations. He did not much like to touch the living creatures he studied—I always had the impression he thought them unclean—but study them he did. That is why I believe Stephen would like my sculptures. They are neither living, nor dirty.

I suppose if I was being true to life they would be a little dirty. I will have to think about that.