Smoketown by Tenea D. Johnson

Author:Tenea D. Johnson [Johnson, Tenea D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blind Eye Books
Published: 2012-02-17T16:07:16+00:00

10

Rory lit a candle for Katherine’s birthday, as was his custom. He stood in the flickering shadows with the shades drawn, staring at the flame as images of his sister and the rest of his family floated past on holo. He tried to absorb the three-dimensional slideshow with which he always celebrated her birthday, but it seemed even more hollow than it had last year and the year before. Over the years, Rory had found thousands of images of his family online and downloaded dozens of them, but they were press images: PR photo ops with rehearsed smiles and product placements. They made him feel much the same way he expected they must make any other stranger feel: my, what nice looking people, they look very well-to-do, wonder what they’re hiding.

In his mother’s photos one could tell. She had a gift for capturing not just a certain expression of personal reverie, but choosing the perfect one. He had once watched her review over two hundred photos in an afternoon to find one of his Pop Pop that she thought showed him clearly: his funeral photo. They had given him his Last Word, but his mother had wanted the photo to sit on the easel next to the sleek metal case that contained his ashes. In the photo, Pop Pop held the black lab puppy his sister had bought for his eighty-second birthday. Pop Pop and the dog had matching hair and the same laughing eyes. For this reason, he had named the dog Jack, short for jackass.

Over the years, Rory’d thought of the photos thousands of times. Sometimes they seemed the only proof that Katherine, Mom, and the girls hadn’t been some elaborate hallucination designed to whittle his mind into a sharp stick that he would one day fall upon. At times, it seemed to him that only his mother’s photos would save him from that fate. But he didn’t want a stranger rifling through his family’s things.

Rory had tried to go home once before, on the fifth day after he locked himself inside the apartment so many years ago. Standing at the door with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets, nowhere near the palmlock, he cursed himself.

“Ridiculous. You’re a grown goddamned man! A goddamn soldier!” he screamed red-faced at the door. He’d been standing there for fifteen minutes with visions of his family playing through his head. His repeated calls still hadn’t brought a response. The service wouldn’t take any more messages. The circuits were overwhelmed.

Rory wanted to think that they’d evacuated already or maybe that the phone in the panic wing had been disconnected for some reason. His contacts outside the city hadn’t heard from his family either. So he stood there unsuccessfully willing himself forward.

He’d never known such fear and he couldn’t understand it. His hand shook each time he reached out for the palmlock, and much as Rory didn’t want to admit it, the thought of going outside made him nauseous. What would he do

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