|
Distant electricity turned the grass a shimmering green. On the hillside, the young couple sat among
the foot-high blades. Clouds bulged, rolled and collapsed, perhaps a mile out.
"They're coming," Jared muttered as he bit off another chunk of bread. An avalanche of crumbs fell
into his lap.
"No one's coming. It's a thunderstorm. Nothing special about it."
Jared didn't reply, but stared with a growing restlessness at the thunderheads. They loomed closer,
a moment later seemed to pull away. A vague sense of vertigo washed over him. He looked at Serena, wanted
to touch her again. Just her shoulder, hard skin through the cotton blouse. No sense starting something
he couldn't finish. Not with whatever lurked inside those clouds getting closer.
He shook his head and took another bite of bread.
The air smelled faintly of iron. It reminded Serena of the time she licked the end of a C battery.
Living metal. According to Jared, a ship sailed in those clouds. Maybe more than one.
"I was right about passing the physics final," he said, "wasn't I? Same way I know about this. Dreams,
Sen. Dreams don't lie." He leaned back in the grass, as if offering himself to the approaching invaders,
and folded his arms behind his head. "Don't you smell it? Christ, I can feel the things from here."
Serena couldn't tell how serious Jared took his premonitions. She pulled her legs up, locked them
in place with her arms. The act wasn't born out of any insecurity around her boyfriend's prediction,
but, rather, from a sudden gust racing up the hillside. It was the middle of June. The humidity atomized
from the approaching electricity, the barometer crashing into its bulbous cellar.
Jared had a dream he would be taken away this afternoon. Serena's father woke up last night. He
may have shouted. Layers of sheets and the half-closed door muted her parents' voices. She thought she
had heard her father crying.
Gooseflesh on her arms. What made pre-thunderstorm air so cool, so clean? The two sat in silence
on the grass, waiting for the first blade of lightening to break their reverie and send them scurrying
for cover. She rested her chin on denim knees and stared at the storm. It dropped down on them like a
rogue ocean wave.
White.
A blank wall. Or a ceiling.
She'd been hit by lightening. This was a hospital. But where'd she been three minutes ago? One,
six. No existence before this. Was it only a dream, sitting on the hillside with Jared, watching the
clouds? The room spun. Serena watched herself come apart, fall back together.
She was sixteen. What did that have to do with anything?
Fuzzy shapes flittered about. She tried to kick. Nothing moved. She had no legs.
"Serena." Jared's voice. She couldn't feel her hands. Had they been stolen, too?
Jared was close.
As soon as this thought came to her, the sensation disappeared forever.
* * *
"Grandma?" Serena looked up. She'd been dozing again.
Lucille stood on the single step leading from the porch to the front yard. Her dress already bore
three new stains since breakfast. Serena checked her watch. Church started in twenty minutes and Alice's
little girl already looked unkempt. Serena smiled at her great-great-granddaughter and shuffled forward
in the wicker chair.
"Come here, Cutie." She smoothed the dress over her lap. Lucille skipped onto the porch and clambered
up. Serena held her close. Reverend Corinne wouldn't be happy, seeing the Daws clan skulk into their
pew, once again after the procession was already up the aisle.
Nothing
to do about it now. Lucille snuggled against her Grandma's neck. Down the sloping lawn, the silver spaceship
sat all but ignored at the bottom of the hill. It crouched, an echo of a nightmare never fully dissipated.
Six legs jutted in right angles from the body, straddling Barber's Brook. A massive bug forever poised
to strike, unchanged in every way for the last fifty-one years.
"Grandma?" Lucille referred to all her grandparents that way. Everyone did. "Grandma" or
"Nana."
Serena preferred "Grandma," so that's what they used. "Grandma Serena," "Grandma Jane."
"Grandma Maura." Maura had marked the half-way point in the line. Little Lucille's grandmother,
Serena's grand daughter. Maura died in a plane crash when she was eighteen, finally taking her belated
post-natal vacation. She'd chosen Washington. The government complied, even paid her way. A small price
for her contribution to the population. Fate, however, did not comply. Fortunately, the Line wasn't
severed. Baby Alice, then two years old, was the continuation. And continue it did. Lucille was talking.
Serena looked at her and tried to recall what the girl had just said. No use. She smiled instead.
"Hmm?"
"I said, are you coming to my recital? Mommy bought me a new dress."
* * *
Cool grass on her face. Rain drops across her back. Dizzying, this sensation of water falling in
minute explosions on and around her. She lay prone on the hillside, among tall blades of grass, taking
inventory of her body. Jeans in tact. No socks anymore, white tennis sneakers. Had she worn socks today?
Maybe not. Muscles felt heavy like her wet clothes.
Details of the clouds blurred to an undefined haze as rain stretched across the town.
"Jared?"
How long had she been out? Hit by lightening. Yes, of course. But not dead. Serena squinted away
the rain and looked behind her, up the short distance to the rise. Two intertwined hemlocks offered futile
shelter from the storm. She looked back down through the haze. Something long and silver squatted in
the distance, near a cluster of trees at the curve of Devonshire Road. Something fluttered in her belly,
like the loose edges of nerves she tried to tie before each year's dance recital. Serena looked once
more around the hillside, trying to remember what she was looking for.
Then it came to her. Jared was gone.
* * *
"Is that a man?" Jane let go of her mother's hand, shuffled towards the painting as if hypnotized.
Before them, a sixteenth century orgy spread out, all motion and color. Four men and five woman lounged
among each other's limbs, all naked but for an occasional loose tunica--a celebratory salute to the pleasures
of the flesh. Always the ode to Bacchus, Serena noted, a whisper of melancholy playing across her face.
She missed Jared. Not just because of what they'd shared together. Physically, it wasn't a whole lot.
What would their world have been like, if things hadn't gone to shit? What would have happened, if the
two had reached this dream-like point? Jared holding her, like the Bacchus-image holding the woman. Was
this scene real, or some painter's lurid fantasy? Men and woman. The possibilities seemed endless.
"Mommy?"
Serena swallowed. "Yes. Those are men."
Jane paused for a moment, then pointed at a flailing penis. "Is that a --"
"Yes," Serena said, hoping the interruption would throw some discouragement her daughter's way,
at least with this particular topic. Maybe later. Not in front of the painting.
Jane stared for a while, moving now and again to a new vantage point. Nine year-old girls had their
own methodical rhythm. They seemed to ponder everything, turning things over inexhaustibly, finishing
in their own time. "Did Daddy have one?" she finally said.
Daddy; meaning Jared, of course. As if a virgin birth were some horrifying label to be peeled away.
As if it didn't happen to every sixteen year-old girl these days. As soon as she could listen, Jane learned
about her father, about Jared. Serena even named her after him, as close a name as she could come up
with. She never truly explained to her daughter what "father" meant. What did it matter? It wasn't a
necessary part of the equation anymore.
"Yes, he had one."
Jane made a face and turned away. "Gross."
* * *
Women gathered on the south end of Devonshire Road, to get a better look at the wonder everyone
called "the bug." Serena's nausea abated, retreating after a reluctant breakfast of butterless toast
and water. The fourth morning waking up like this.
No word from her father. No word from her brothers. And no Jared. All gone. Every man on the planet
replaced, it seemed, by these squatting alien monuments.
Serena's mother refused to come out of the bedroom.
With nothing else to do, only CNN and the local PBS station back on line, Serena followed the growing
crowd as it moved purposely along Marjorie Drive, then Devonshire. Leading the mob, the woman who tried
to get her mother into Amway two years ago. Mrs. Kyle stood an easy four inches over the next tallest
woman in the group. Black hair shot tightly back in a bun, she looked like an old-fashioned school marm
searching out delinquent students. She shrieked, "They're in there!"
Everyone followed her vindictive finger towards the ship. "All of them. My boys." She looked at
Susan Miller. "And, Sue, your husband, too. All of your husbands." The finger scanned the uneasy group.
"All of your sons."
Serena expected the crowd to start gathering up stones. Yet everyone knew better. In fact, warning
the remaining population about the ships' defenses seemed the sole impetus for CNN's return two days
earlier. Mrs. Kyle continued her pleas. "We have to get this thing open. Those warnings are bull shit!
The government doesn't want us too close, to find out what's really inside."
She reached for Susan Miller's arm, but the woman jerked back like a shell-shocked dog. "Those things
are booby trapped," Susan hissed. "You damn well know that. You saw the vid--"
"Special effects." Mrs. Kyle walked confidently up to the ship, bent her head towards the hull's
polished surface. "Andy?" She called like a lover outside a bedroom window. To Serena she sounded like
a frightened Aunt Bea. "Andy? Jimmy? You boys are in there. I know you're in there." She leaned closer
and whispered, "You knew they were coming. Somehow...." The words clouded her reflection. Serena felt
a chill along her arms, remembering her father's nightmare, Jared's calm certainty.
Mrs. Kyle turned her head, perhaps to scan the faces in the crowd. The tight bun of hair brushed
against the ship, lightly as her breath. "See?" she said. "Am I dead y--"
It took Serena's brain a few seconds to figure out what it was seeing. By the time the woman's head
and right shoulder were shredded into something resembling spaghetti, Serena was stumbling away, fighting
once more to hold down the toast.
* * *
Two or three blurred shapes moved around her, pulled away. The fuzzy outline at the foot of the
bed said, "Grandmother Serena? Are you all right?"
Serena tried to focus. Her heart beat with less regularity these days. Now it strained with fear.
Not of the shapes. If she had her glasses they would come back into focus. The fear, maybe apprehension
was a better word, revolved around the nightmare. And her daughters. Her daughter; the rest were daughters'
daughters.
From the moment of that final push to bring Jane into the world, Serena Daws tried to live with
a lie. Soon all of the lost pieces would fall back into place like a celestial jigsaw. Sixteen years
and two months after that lie began, Serena's teenage daughter woke up pregnant. Holding grandchild Maura
in her arms, Jane sleeping out her exhaustion on the hospital bed, Serena accepted with resigned clarity
that the world no longer belonged to her. She was a guest in someone else's home. Not a single male of
the species remained, nor would ever return. The illusion, the lie, fell away, overpowered by her granddaughter's
newborn cries. The iron storm which rolled across the hill, years before, scraped away Serena's universe
and replaced it with something half-done. Or so it seemed then. The Earth did vibrate with a much calmer
frequency. There hadn't been a single war, not since half the population was taken. Borders were dissolving,
reforming into new patterns.
Still, Serena found herself standing before paintings or watching old movies, vying for a glimpse
of what might have been. What had been. Now, she lay in bed and reflected, as if to pull some spiritual
circle closed.
"Grandmother Serena? Can you hear me?" The fuzzy shape was Art. She, the only one of Serena's Line
who used the formal "Grandmother" instead of "Grandma".
"I'm fine, Art. Just a bad dream."
She fumbled with her glasses, managed to wrangle them on. Still, Art was a blur, as were the other
two figures beside the bed. One of them took Serena's pulse. Perhaps the doctor. Lately, everyone had
lost their edges, become blurred photographs of the originals. This current pair of glasses was less
than a year old, and already useless.
Dreams were the only part of her life still sharply in focus. The same dream, since the day her
neighbor got minced by the bug. It returned in one form or another, now and again. Lately, once or twice
a week. She stood at the side of Devonshire Road, sometimes alone, sometimes with other faceless women.
Always, Mrs. Kyle, slamming her fists against the body of the ship. Some dreams ended as reality had,
the angry woman coming apart as if tossed against fan blades. At other times, like tonight, Mrs. Kyle
succeeded. Her fingers gripped an invisible fault in the bug's hull. A large rectangular door clanged
onto the pavement. Liquefied remains of Jared and a thousand other men poured from the ship's intestines.
Sewerage spilling from an open pipe. Brown and crimson. Excrement washing across everyone's feet. Jared's
pained expression floated among the flotsam toward the sewer drain.
* * *
Brenda Singleton examined a box of Saltine crackers with pale distaste. Serena rolled her shopping
cart alongside. They exchanged small talk, then symptoms. Around them, a dozen others silently collected
groceries, for the most part taking only what they really needed. The supermarket opened now for six
hours a day, everyone taking turns maintaining what dwindling stock remained until the proverbial supply
chain could wind itself back up. Every cash register was unattended.
Serena's attention locked onto the home pregnancy test sitting on the pita bread in Brenda's cart.
"Oh, my God, Bren. How... I mean, no not how... I mean I know how. Who's the...." But the question
died away.
Brenda looked at her with undisguised terror. "There is no father," she said, dropping the box of
crackers beside the tester.
Serena whispered, "There has to be a father." When she reached the aisle with the pregnancy tests,
only two kits remained.
* * *
The intangible shape of Art leaned over, laid on an extra blanket. Serena liked the way names were
going lately. Art would be pregnant any month now, and her daughter's name would be Time. Art was like
that, choosing the name early, always planning.
This would be Serena's death bed. Resigned acceptance once again. But it was about time. Ninety-
eight years felt to her a good enough span. Most of Serena's original class had already moved on, accompanied
by a flourish of mourning and remembrance from their lineage. Honoring each departing member of the
"First
Generation." No doubt Serena's own clan would do the same. What then?
The world would move on. Babies would be born. Young girls playing in the grass without fear, never
thinking of boys. Waiting with eager longing for their sixteenth birthday. How long would the cycle continue?
She'd taken to obsessing over this question. Maybe the pattern would carry on, long enough to populate
the world with whomever, or whatever, rolled over the hillside all those years ago.
She closed her eyes and felt a cool cloth touch her forehead. Her children did appreciate the role
their original grandmother played, unwitting as it was, in their existence. They looked upon the dying
first generation with a reverence once reserved for royalty.
Serena felt herself sink into sleep. Maybe the nap would be her last, maybe not. She felt a sense
of comfort, knowing that when the moment came her family would surround her. These were the generations
Serena Daws had raised and loved. More would surely come without her.
|
