Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 133 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novelette, science fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2017-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

4. Physics

Mara goes to the comm center to call all the people she’ll never forgive.

Her parents, for agreeing to work here; the medical loans that had them so desperate to start with; Made-Fine. Officer Birch, whose death didn’t nearly make up for what he did; Celandine, for everything, all the time.

There’s no sound on the other end. At this point, the entire system groans as she starts it up, and every third or fourth time she’ll get an alarm that the system doesn’t have any receptors in range. Sometimes it goes dark halfway through her SOS. None of them will even know what to do when it goes; you didn’t learn how to fix things until you were older, and the company was sure you could be trusted.

She respects that it even turns on. It’s gonna die any day, but it’s going with dignity, giving up in stages.

Mara likes machines. She wanted to join the mechanical engineering program at the high school, before she got locked up. Her parents talked about it when they visited like it was something she’d be allowed to do when she got out, which was her first clue she was never getting out.

Outside, she looks at Birch’s bones.

There was a while when the whole thing was disgusting. Once she had to turn back because of the smell, and there’s still a stain on the sidewalk. But the nice thing about having too many insects is that they’re more than happy to take care of a corpse. Now it’s just some bones inside a Made-Fine jacket. (She cannot believe this asshole was still wearing his company jacket when he jumped. Some things are fucking sad.)

For how much they all avoid it, Mara’s seen each of them in Willow Square. Jack first, gripping his handlebars with white knuckles; when he saw Mara he actually started to bike over like he was going to protect her before he realized he’d have to go past the body and stopped.

Robbie came a few weeks after, at the farthest possible edge where you could still see it; she’d caught his eye, and he’d nodded. She’s never mentioned it. He’d come to make sure Birch was really dead, and she doesn’t think that’s strange. It’s important to know some people are nothing but bones.

Celandine came when the body was almost gone—the gases dispersed, the liquids dried up, the fat under the split-open skin carried off by ten thousand dutiful bugs. The streetlights were on, a waste of energy that no one did anything about because it was easier to leave this grid on than admit to being afraid of the dark. Celandine stood in the middle of the town square and looked at the body for close to an hour, never moving, even when the ants started walking across her boots.

Mara doesn’t know what she was thinking. (Mara has never once known what Celandine was thinking.) Celandine never even saw her. She just stood there for an hour, and then walked home, carefully out of the puddles of light.

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