Hub - Issue 32 Read online
Hub
Issue 32
10th November 2007
Editors: Lee Harris, Alasdair Stuart and Trudi Topham.
Proofreader: Ellen Phillips
Published by The Right Hand.
Sponsored by Orbit.
Issue 32 Contents
Fiction: T ME by A.H. Jennings
Reviews: Previously, Grindhouse (making of), Sapphire & Steel
Flash Special
We know you’re busy people, and at the start of the New Year you’ll be settling back into the routine grind of the working day, trying desperately to catch up on the multitude of emails and voicemails that were sent and left over the Christmas break! It’ll be difficult to find the time in any one sitting to read a full-length short.
That’s why, for our firs issue in 2008, we’re having a Flash Fiction Special! Seven pieces of fiction that are small, but perfectly formed! Seven tales of the fantastic, the futuristic, or the just plain weird! One for every day of the week – enough to whet your genre appetites, but not enough to get in the way of the daily drudge.
If you like the idea, we’d appreciate any financial recompense you can thrown our way - seven pieces of Flash costs us our fiction budget for four full issues, so we’ll be subsidising this one out of our own pockets (which we’re happy to do, but we’d rather not, of course!) Anything you can spare would be more than welcome – a buck, a quid, a euro, a spare mince pie or turkey sandwich. Just to let us know you care… :-D
About Hub
Every week we publish a piece of short fiction, along with at least one review and sometimes a feature or interview. We can afford to do this largely due to the generosity of our sponsors over at Orbit. If you like what you read here, please consider making a donation over at www.hub-mag.co.uk. We pay our writers, and anything you donate helps us to continue to attract high quality fiction and non-fiction.
Supported by The National Lottery though Arts Council England
T ME by A.H. Jennings
The portable classroom was larger than Joan Ellen had expected. Lit from overhead with fluorescent lights and busy with seventh-grade artwork, it smelled of chalk dust, old books, and refrigerated air. It reminded Joan Ellen of home. These days, most everything reminded Joan Ellen of home – or at least how far she was from it. She tried to pay attention, but now Joan felt the yawning chasm of distance, the thousands upon thousands of miles between Tunis and DC.
“I’ll put this as simply as I can,” Mrs. Thornton said. “Patrick is a brilliant boy.”
Liz Thornton was Patrick’s homeroom teacher. She was a heavy-set fortyish woman with close-cropped brown hair and a mouth that bunched up at the corners. Like many of the teachers here at ACST, Mrs. Thornton had come overseas with the Peace Corps, married, and stayed.
“I had a hard time getting through to him in our first few weeks together,” Mrs. Thornton said, “but I think his last essay assignment represents a breakthrough. He-- I have it here.”
The teacher opened a manila folder on her desk blotter and handed Joan a short typed manuscript crawling with red pen marks.
Joan Ellen frowned as her eyes slid over the heading at the top of the page:
WHAT COMES AFTER SCIENCE?
“It’s a bit of a mess,” Mrs. Thornton said, a tone of real excitement creeping into her voice, “but in its own way, it’s head and shoulders above many college essays I’ve encountered. His imagination, and his – He’s on fire.”
“He’s brilliant,” Joan Ellen said.
“Yes. Yes he is. And now I’ll outline what I’d like to do for him.”
In Tunis, traffic was awful all day every day, but during rush hour, it was even worse. Pieter had once joked that Muslims must not believe in traffic laws, but the joke held no humor for Joan Ellen as she threaded her way through a mess of battered and unruly sedans.
Joan tried not to think about the unfinished novel sitting on her iMac’s hard drive. Lately, she seemed to change its title every time she sat down to write.
She had always wanted a brilliant child, and Mrs. Thornton’s plan sounded fantastic, but Joan Ellen wasn’t sure whether she’d been swayed by the content of the plan or by the teacher’s obvious affection and enthusiasm.
The Mozart Effect. Joan Ellen remembered the term from her pregnancy. Edutainment Unlimited had used it to advertise their Prenatal Head Start Kit. Their literature had promised to “give your unborn child a HEAD START toward REAL AND LASTING SUCCESS.”
Money had been tight at the time, and Pieter considered the kit a waste of one hundred fifteen dollars. Even now, Joan Ellen could hear the irritation in his voice: Have you listened to it, Joanie? It’s just static and modem sounds.
And he was right – Well, almost. Joan Ellen had put the speaker to her ear and heard mostly static – but it didn’t sound quite like a modem. The white noise was shot through with a series of bizarre clicks and upper-register squeaks – it was as if someone had tried to train a CB radio to converse with dolphins.
The villa was a collection of round-edged whitewashed concrete walls surrounded by a wraparound porch, and beyond that, a high wall for privacy. Joan Ellen would have loved a pool – there was even room for one in the back lawn, but such things were against State Department regulations.
As Joan Ellen pulled into the driveway, the gardener, Rhida, jogged out to open the gate. Rhida was a brown and wizened man of indeterminate age who spoke no French or English. Even after six months living here, Joan Ellen felt uncomfortable around him – not because of the racial or cultural divide, she was sure – but because the concept of employing servants – and especially servants with whom she could not speak directly – seemed so strange.
Zayneb, the cook, met Joan Ellen in the kitchen, and Joan’s heart sank as soon as she saw the woman’s expression: Joan knew she should have gone with her gut and brought Patrick with her to the conference instead of leaving him with the servants for two hours.
Joan smiled tightly. “Is something wrong?”
“He do something,” Zayneb said. “The boy. He take chicken.”
“What’s he doing? What about the chicken?”
“He take.”
Joan Ellen realized now that Patrick had upset the cook so badly that most of her English had left her.
“Boxes with powder, he take, too.”
“Where is he now?”
“The bedroom. He take all – He’s in the bedroom, Madame.”
Patrick had taken the chicken, all right, and most of Joan Ellen’s make up. He’d lugged a card table in here and unfolded it in the middle of the marble floor, then arranged the chicken on its back, surrounded by the make up cases and – God damn it! – the jewelry box Joan had inherited from her grandmother. An odd chemical stench wafted from his room as Joan Ellen watched him work.
“Patrick,” Joan said. “What are you doing in here?”
“Wait,” Patrick said and brushed his shaggy blond hair out of his face. He bit his lip and leaned over the table, standing on bare tiptoes.
Patrick hadn’t just taken her makeup – he’d rearranged the cases, drilling holes in them, turning one or two inside out. Masses of wire and plastic drinking straws repurposed as tubing snaked their way from each module to the chicken, connecting to it by sewing needles and hair-fine copper filaments. How had Patrick done all this in just two hours?
“Now!” Patrick said. “Come look!”
Holding a white plastic kitchen timer, he backed away from the table as Joan crossed into the bedroom.
Ugh. That chicken! The flesh at the end of its neck had puckered closed without losing its pinkness – as if it had cooked somehow without heat.
Joan Ellen stopped breathing.
The chicken wedged its left wing beneath its body and pushed against the table like an old woman trying to rise from a fall. It lay back, and its neck went limp with resignation. Patrick started talking fast.
“I read a book where a doctor did it with frog’s legs but the legs weren’t really alive again and to bring something back you’d have to get the organs working.” His voice dropped an octave and he seemed to speak as an imagined interviewer, asking, “‘But what if it doesn’t have any organs left?’” His voice went back to normal as he answered himself: “Well, then you’d have to build them. ‘And what about the blood?’ You have to figure out what blood does and make some. I think my blood is better than real blood because it stays cleaner longer and I used a chicken because a chicken’s brain is so small it doesn’t hardly need it.”
“Patrick,” Joan Ellen barked.
“Yeah!” Patrick said. He turned on her, grinning. He wore his brown flannel shirt backwards over a bright red T-shirt, and his shaggy bangs had slid back into his face.
“Patrick,” Joan Ellen said as calmly as she could. “Turn it off and put the chicken back!”
The grin left Patrick’s face. He seemed now to sense that he’d done something wrong. “Put it back?” he said. “But it’s no good for eating.”
“Now,” Joan growled.
Joan Ellen sucked her teeth as she watched Pieter yank his tie loose from his neck. Pieter was the quintessence of rationality, but his looks – his white-blond hair, the delicate framework of his bones, and his strange, all-seeing stare – made him seem related somehow to the dream-people Joan had imagined during her childhood.
Joan and Pieter had recognized one another instantly in some essential way, and they seemed able to understand one another without speech or even thought – At least that was what Joan Ellen had believed early on. Now, so far from everything familiar, she sometimes felt she shared her home with a couple of strangers – two people who neither knew her nor owed her any allegiance.
“But that’s great,” Pieter said. “I’m proud.”
“Well, it’s good that his teacher says he’s doing well, but – ”
“She didn’t say he was doing well,” Pieter said absently as he unbuttoned his shirt. “She said he was brilliant and that she’s got a plan. But no, the other thing – ”
“That’s what worries me. He brought a chicken back – ”
“He didn’t bring it back to life,” Pieter said. “He ran a current through it, got it jumping around.”
“No, he – ”
“What’s really impressive is that battery he made. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it, but it works. That boy.”
Pieter kicked off his shoes and sat on the bed to toe his socks off. He’d left his pants lying in a heap just outside the bathroom door. Who did he expect to – ? Oh. Right. The maid.
“I’m just so – I mean, wow,” Pieter said. “Science was my worst subject. It was just – ”
“He built organs,” Joan Ellen said. “He used my make up cases and Mee-maw’s – ”
“He thought he did. He’s a sharp kid, but he’s not...” Pieter trailed off at the sound of a tone from the intercom by the bedroom door. It was Zayneb, letting them know that dinner was ready.
Patrick seemed to take to Mrs. Thornton’s new learning program, and some of his behavioral problems – his talking in class, his delaying tactics – seemed to evaporate.
Still, watching Patrick on weekends and after school, Joan Ellen found herself assailed by a diffuse sense of unease. But Patrick seemed fine, and Pieter was nothing but thrilled, so she dismissed her worries as the product of an overactive imagination. Blockage left her feeling antsy and depressed, so this odd paranoia must be yet another of its symptoms.
At the beginning of March, Barbara Tenhave invited Joan to lunch at the GSO compound. Normally, Joan Ellen would have begged off, but what good would it do her to sit at home staring at a blank computer screen?
Barbara was a cheerful sort of crank, and did most of the talking as they ate. Joan Ellen tried to listen, but she found herself nodding and smiling as Barbara rattled on about some internal conflict in the International Women’s Club.
Around one, Moktar, the balding and cross-eyed GSO cook, shuffled over to the table carrying a cordless telephone. “Phone for you, Mrs.,” he said.
“For me?” Joan Ellen heard herself speaking too precisely and realized that she shouldn’t have had that last beer. She took the phone. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Soames? This is Jouda from ACST.”
A bright blade of worry slid between Joan Ellen’s ribs.
“Patrick’s had a seizure. Mrs. Thornton and Dr. Spradling are on their way with him to Clinic Taofiq.”
Joan Ellen seemed to watch and hear herself from the next seat over. “I’ll be there,” she said. “I’ll be there right – Have you spoken to Pieter? He’s my – That’s my husband’s name.”
Pieter and the others were already at the clinic when Joan arrived by taxi. They sat in a cramped third-floor waiting room with mismatched furniture and grimy-looking mosaics on the walls.
Pieter sat in an ugly brown chair, his sleeves rolled up, his tie pulled loose, his head hanging between bowed shoulders. He looked like some changeling version of himself: red-eyed and pinch-faced, with a red wound of a mouth.
“What happened?”
Mrs. Thornton looked up at the sound of Joan Ellen’s voice.
“They think it’s a stroke,” Dr. Spradling said tonelessly. He was a graying, fiftyish man with powerful hands.
“A stroke?” Joan Ellen said.
“He – He screamed, and then he started seizing,” Mrs. Thornton said.
“How does a ten-year-old boy have a stroke?” Joan Ellen said. She almost laughed.
“Joan,” Pieter said.
“How could that happen?” Joan Ellen said. “He’s ten.”
“Joan,” Pieter said. “Let’s wait for the doctor.”
He looked down, shook his head, and methodically touched his own hands, as if making sure they still worked.
Without taking her eyes off him, Joan turned and backed into a chair beside him.
Later, after Thornton and Spradling had both left for the night, Joan Ellen tried to listen as Dr. Ben Azir explained the MRI results. His English was flawless, but Joan Ellen still felt like she needed an interpreter.
“So then it’s not epilepsy?” she said.
“Well,” Pieter said slowly, “What I gather from what the Doctor is telling us is that just because a person has a seizure doesn’t mean he’s an epileptic.”
“That is correct,” Ben Azir said. He smiled tightly.
“And the stroke – ? I still don’t understand.”
“His brain is – There are some other abnormalities.”
“What – ?”
“Has Patrick ever received a powerful shock or undergone electroconvulsive therapy?”
“What are you talking about?” Joan Ellen turned to Pieter. “What is he talking about?”
“I don’t know,” Pieter said stonily.
The doctor reddened, and part of Joan Ellen observed his discomfort with a mean sort of satisfaction.
“The imaging results were perplexing, to say the least.”
“But it’s not epilepsy,” Pieter said.
Dr. Ben Azir took a breath and paused, weighing his words. “Not... of any kind currently known to medical science.”
“Right,” Pieter said. “Then can we take him home?”
***
“Hey, there, little guy,” Pieter said as he pressed his right hand against Patrick’s cheek. “What a day you’ve had.”
“I did it wrong,” Patrick said.
“Yeah, don’t worry about that,” Pieter said. “You ready to go home?”
Just a seizure, Joan Ellen thought as she watched Pi
eter gather Patrick into his arms. Just a seizure.
“Should we take him home?” Joan said.
Carrying Patrick, Pieter had to turn his whole body to look at her. “Where else would we take him?”
“I mean home,” Joan said. “I could take him, and you could come after.”
“That’s – Yeah, no. Let’s talk about that later, honey.”
“You want to take him back to DC?” Pieter said. Together, they’d tucked Patrick in and left him sleeping with the bedroom door open, then headed downstairs to talk over cups of that sludgy, too-strong coffee found everywhere in Tunis. Joan Ellen kept forgetting to buy an American brand from the commissary.
“Well, I don’t know,” Joan said. “I’m just worried that the medical facilities here – ”
“Medical facilities here are more than adequate – especially for dealing with something like this.”
“Are you sure?” Joan said. “Shouldn’t we be sure?”
“Joan. Really,” Pieter said, speaking gently to hide his exasperation, “Sooner or later you’re going to have to adjust.”
“It’s so different here,” Joan said. “It’s so different, and we’re so far away, and visiting isn’t the same as living.”
“You were fine in South Africa.”
“I know,” Joan said. “People spoke English there. People were – ”
“We’re almost done the school year,” Pieter said. “And I’ve got another fifteen months. Don’t – Let’s don’t do anything drastic, okay?”
“It’s not just the seizure. It’s the way he carries himself, it’s – ! Have you read that essay of his?”
“What essay?”
“The – The ‘After Science’ one?”
“No, it’s – ”
“It’s a mess. It’s crazy, like – !”
“He’s ten.”
“Pieter.”
“I waited a year for you and Patrick to follow me here,” Pieter said. “It was the hardest year of my life. So let’s just – Let’s not be hasty about the two of you leaving me here, okay?”