Digital Soul by Zoe Cannon

Author:Zoe Cannon
Format: epub

Hearth Fires

“You’re walking along a dirt path. The grass is green, the sun is shining. You turn a corner and see a house you recognize. You’ve been on a long journey, but now you’re finally home.”

Heather rounds the corner, past the oak tree where Charlie used to climb, and sees a skeleton of blackened wood. The roof is half caved in, exposing the house’s vulnerable insides to the oppressive openness of Earth’s sky. She can still see the outline of the cozy Cape it used to be, can still pick out traces of the robin’s-egg blue siding she and Matt picked out together. But now there are two gaping eyes where the upstairs windows used to be, and the downstairs windows are a snarling mouth of shattered-glass teeth.

“You open the door and step inside. Someone is standing on the other side of the door to greet you.”

For a moment, Heather holds her breath and hopes. But she opens the door onto a dark abyss. Claws skitter on linoleum as something runs from the light. The smell of smoke and rot clogs her nose. If she squints, she can see the indistinct silhouettes of the furniture that survived the fire. But even in the dark, she can see clearly enough to know none of those shapes belong to a person.

“You’re disappointed at first, but realize they must be in another room, waiting for you. You go to them.”

She can’t disobey the voice. She has a vague memory of trying, once, but just as she’s powerless to resist the imagery it shapes around her, she also can’t stop herself from doing as it says. She walks mechanically up the stairs, clutching the banister to keep herself from falling through the fire-weakened steps. Bits of charred wood break off under her feet. The final step creaks, and she pulls her foot up just in time, before her leg goes through.

She pushes open the bedroom door, even though she already knows what she’ll find. This is where the roof caved in. After five years in the Martian domes, the yawning void above her feels like death. When she looks up, she can see bodies hanging in the emptiness, drifting. She forces her eyes down. The bed is wet with rain, sprinkled with bits of broken shingles and splintered wood. It’s a single. Even here in her mind, she can’t forget that this is Matt’s home now, and not theirs.

She tries Charlie’s room next, because the voice told her she was searching for someone, and now she can’t stop until the search is done. The fire didn’t do much damage here. His dinosaur bedspread is still intact, and the dinosaur posters on the walls, and the dinosaur figures making a minefield out of the floor. In real life, Charlie must have outgrown dinosaurs a long time ago, moving on to interests she never got to hear about. Somewhere there’s a room identical to this one, with walls papered in football posters, or lovingly-sketched spaceships, or something else she doesn’t even know enough to imagine.

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