You slid a hand into my jacket, the familiar coolness of your nimble fingers, and just as I was about to touch your face I saw that you had taken my plasma arc and gently pressed the barrel to my throat. I felt my blood tick against it, pulse metronoming out of the corner of my eye. “Unhook your grenades and give them to me,” you said softly. “And then run, my love.”
It was the first time you’d said it. Something exploded nearby, showered us with pattering grit, shook the tears from my cheeks. Your eyes were dry. You wanted to die not merely with honour, but in the carnage of any enemy foolish enough to approach you. I unclipped the belt and dropped it into your lap, hearing the end splash into a widening pool of blood. Your free hand met my hair, tangled in the curls, then fell away. “What medal do you want?” I whispered.
“The biggest one they’ve got, of course.”
One swift kiss, tasting of dirt and sulphur, and then I was running, supporting Gilmour, counting down as the ship hovered, swayed, dropped below the cloud cover. Acid burned in my throat. The mud was a treadmill, we grew no closer, and the land itself fought progress, throwing up slabs and boulders and sinkholes filled with boiling mud. We vaulted vents, wrenched ankles on the far side, burned our palms. The ship’s ramp was still down, only beginning to retract as we approached.
“No!” Gilmour cried.
I snatched his pistol from its holster and fired into the air, one, two, three, and watched through a glaze of fresh tears as the ramp paused. And then we slid into the circle of its light, strange hands pulling us up, dumping us into a pile of uniforms and warm limbs and clean air. I pressed my face to the floor and tried not to vomit.
Someone hauled me up by my jacket: Kara the medic. “My God, Jen! You’re alive! Is Thea coming?”
But I dragged myself to the viewport as we teetered into the air, grasping a grab-rail – yes, there. An Akhjian ship arrowed into the darkness and went up without warning in a string of turquoise fireballs, the micro-stellar cores of the grenades, flickering the lights on our ship.
“No,” I said when it was over. “She got what she wanted.”
That’s what they say on Crutas, I know; you had told me one night, late, jigsawed together on my bunk, eating each other’s whispers. There are bad deaths, easily known, and there are good deaths, which are subtle, which can only be judged as a piece of the whole.
And you died the way you wished. A good death.
Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and spec fic writer based in Alberta, Canada. Her work has been published by Nightmare Magazine, Martian Migraine Press, Innsmouth Free Press, and many others. She can be found on Twitter at @premeesaurus.
Arthur Kovic’s Days of Change
Michael Teasdale
Art: Becca McCall
Friday
It is evening on a day like any other.
Children are tired and exhausted. Adults, glad of the temporary reprieve, snooze peacefully in front of chattering television sets and poke at their TV dinners. On the flickering tubes, game show hosts crack lame jokes about mother-in-laws and the streets outside lie empty. The crickets are singing their evening lullabies and the encroaching dusk paints the sky a lurid shade of orange.
All is calm.
Arthur Kovic enjoys the sunset. He admires it for its quiet regularity and the way it always arrives, like a familiar friend, to usher in an end to the daily madness of meetings, appointments and complex office politics.
The weekend is here and Arthur smiles. Tomorrow will be his birthday and Anna is planning a surprise party.
He has practiced his planned expression several times in front of the bathroom mirror. “Oh, how wonderful,” he will say. Then he will raise his eyebrows in a carefully rehearsed display of dazzled duplicity.
Arthur Kovic likes to be prepared. He does not enjoy surprises or situations that require him to ad-lib, which is why Anna is always careful to warn him in advance.
As he reverses up the drive, he switches off the car radio to better enjoy the satisfying crunch of his premium gravel.
It is important to find pleasure in the small things in life.
Arthur read this in a book. The author of the book is a successful man. Arthur wants, very much, to be a successful man.
“Evening, Neighbour.”
Ned stands by his lawnmower on the other side of the garden fence. In one hand he clutches a can of Pab’s Blue Ribbon, as he strokes his greying beard.
“Good evening, Ned,” says Arthur.
They nod quietly at one another. All the wisdom that the world needs at 7:00pm on a Friday evening is communicated in the reassuring familiarity of such gestures.
It is the small things that keep the world turning, thinks Arthur, the everyday normalities that give us strength.
Arthur unlocks the door and slips off his loafers, wiggling his toes and allowing them to breathe through the cloying cotton of his thick, black socks. The big toe of his left foot waves up at him through a newly punctured hole. It is a familiar problem. No matter how frequently he clips his toenails, the toes do not want to stay hidden from view, poking through like ugly, alien rebels.
Arthur does not like his toes.
He pads through to the kitchen where the scent of boiling vegetables is causing his stomach to knot with hunger. The limp sandwich he had for lunch has done nothing to abate it.
His interest in Anna’s cooking is so all consuming that, as he enters the kitchen, he almost fails to notice the girl sitting at the kitchen table.
The girl is not his daughter Jennifer. She has a set of raven coloured pigtails that trail down the shoulders of a grass stained t-shirt. Jennifer’s pigtails are a mousy blonde. Below her gingham skirt, the girl is barefoot and her pale, thin legs swing nonchalantly back and forth like the ticking pendulums of an erratic grandfather clock. She does not look at Arthur as he enters the kitchen. Instead she stares in fixed concentration at the large sheet of cartridge paper she has laid out in front of her. With a worn-down colouring pencil, she scribbles furiously as her protruding tongue hops from one side of her mouth to the other. A sea of stationary lies scattered across the table. There is no sign of Jennifer and yet her friend seems either unaware or unconcerned by Arthur’s presence as he stands, momentarily transfixed by the rhythmic swinging of the girl’s milky legs.
In the end it is only the sudden hissing of the saucepan, as it begins to bubble over and singe on the heat of the electric hob, which causes him to break away from the girl’s hypnotic motion.
Arthur hurries over to the hob and removes the lid; watching as the overflowing bubbles begin to dissipate and a collection of wiggling green beans glare accusingly up at him from beneath the foam.
He feels himself blushing for a reason he cannot fully explain as he re-covers the vegetables, turning down the heat and placing the saucepan back on the hob.
Despite his commotion, the girl has not looked up from her drawing and Arthur wanders over to the table to see what she is doing.
“Hello,” he says, “that’s a nice picture.”
The girl does not answer him. Instead she continues scribbling, furiously; adorning the wings of a large, ornately detailed butterfly.
After a few seconds she puts down the pencil.
“There’s a hole in your sock,” she announces.
Arthur looks down at the protruding big toe. He feels quietly ashamed.
The girl begins to slide herself down from the stool.
“It’s silly to be scared of butterflies,” she scolds him and then pokes out her tongue in a wry act of childish rebellion.
Arthur does not know how to respond to either the gesture or the accusation and so he reverts to a childish mentality himself, poking out his own tongue in response.
The girl laughs. Arthur does not like the laugh. There are secrets in a laugh like this one. Arthur does not like secrets any more than he likes toes.
