Harmonious Hearts 2017 Read online

  “How come you’re at Station 111 alone?”

  Jackie stared, stricken. For once, she seemed wordless.

  Eventually she pulled her knees to her chest, wind blowing hair across her face. She picked her words carefully when she finally spoke.

  “I… ran away a week before the plague,” she said. “I packed up and left home without even saying goodbye. I wanted some fun.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Fun,” she repeated, mulling on the word, slow and bitter. “I thought I’d get an apartment with some friends… get my GED on the side… party in the city. And I knew my folks would be pissed, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care. And then everything went wrong, and I never got back.” My heart seized up. Jackie offered a dispassionate half-smile. “They never liked the types of girls I always brought around. They would’ve liked you.”

  “Shit.” I rubbed the stinging corners of my eyes. “Shit, Jackie, I’m so sorry. I… I lost my mom two years ago.” A name I still woke up with on my lips, that I would start to scribble on emergency contact forms before the realization hit. A four person family that so easily and so suddenly dropped to three. A lump formed in my throat. “I know how you feel.”

  Jackie shrugged. As she gazed out over the waves, one corner of her mouth turned up.

  “You know what?” she said. “Everything is figureoutable.”

  Something that had been clenching hard in my stomach released in a rush, muscles I didn’t even know I’d been tensing. “So,” I said, looking at my hands. “You… you always knew?”

  “Knew what?”

  My eyes flicked away. “Girls.”

  The glimmer returned to her eyes. “Ohhh! Yeah. Always knew.” Jackie lifted her bottle but didn’t drink. She traced her lips with the glass. “I was cool with it.”

  I didn’t think I’d ever heard anything lovelier in my life.

  Jackie glanced up at the sky. “Yo, it’s getting dark!”

  It was. I stood, stretching. Remembering my pretty kindergarten teacher and how I read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in sophomore year and adored it.

  “Huh,” I said out loud. After a long minute, I followed her, wondering why the Sapphic warmth in my own chest had only kindled there recently… but yes. And yes. And yes.

  It was right.

  V. Boldly Go

  THE ALARM began at late noon.

  It wasn’t when it was supposed to happen. Not when I’d pictured it. Bombs drop and people scream and horizons catch flame at dusk or dawn, not at 3:00 p.m. on a sepia-toned summer evening, where anything you did felt both glorious and entirely correct. I was supposed to be bumming around outside with Jacqueline, flouting our chores in favor of blowing dandelions at the war-scarred horizon.

  Instead we were rushed through white hallways, stumbling, the alarm screaming in our ears.

  “Where are we going?” I tried to ask. One of the men pressed his hand between my shoulder blades to keep me moving. “Is it time? Jesus, is it time?”

  “Fuck,” Jackie was saying. “Fuck, fuck, fuck—”

  “Where’s my dad?” I twisted my head, trying to get one of the lab coats to look at me. A couple burst from a door we passed; the woman clutched a crying baby in her arms. Warning lights bathed the walls red. “Look at me!” I shouted. “I need my dad! I need to—I need to say goodbye to my—”

  They shoved us into the entrance hall. Cryopods gleamed where refugees once stood. Immediately, Jackie and I were wrenched apart. When I lunged for her hand, someone caught my elbow and yanked me back. Latex gloves and needle pricks and wailing—beyond the blur of pale blue hands and powder white lab coats, I heard Jackie holler, “Shotgun!”

  I choked out a laugh, even as I was forced into the Mayflower, even as my wrists and ankles were twisted into restraints. I yanked against them, stomach lurching with adrenaline, immobile. God, not yet!

  I glimpsed dark brown skin in a white lab coat. “Dr. Hussein!” I screamed.

  Our gazes locked. He looked wild, disheveled, glasses askew. “Gillian!” he mouthed—I could hear nothing past the shaking walls, the screaming sirens. My eyes were pried open. Glue-reeking liquid was dolloped in—

  “Dr. Hussein—Hakim!”

  The Mayflower’s hull slammed shut. For just a moment, Hakim’s wrinkled hand pressed against the circle of glass separating me from a burning world.

  And then it fell, and he was gone.

  Silence.

  The slight noises from my body, my heartbeat, my breathing, the sounds of life, stood in stark opposition. Oh God, my pulse was so loud. It was a roar in my ears. I clenched and unclenched my fists, twisted and bucked against the restraints. Can’t move, can’t move—

  Count, Gillian. He told us to count.

  I sucked in a shuddering breath.

  One.

  Lights flared to life around me. Oxygen levels, heart monitor, nuclear radiation sensors. The numbers on that last one were soaring, needle going haywire.

  Two.

  Three.

  Four.

  Something hissed near my right ear, wet, like steam, but so cold it burned. Tears, hot and fat, squeezed from my eyes. The tiny window began to ice over—just count, justcountjustcount—

  Five.

  Six.

  Sev… en…

  Exhaustion swept over me. I wanted to sleep. God, please, let me sleep. No thinking. No feeling. No concern for the dark figures beyond the glass, falling to their knees….

  Eight…

  Nine…

  I hoped it would be nice. I wanted a gentle nap and Jacqueline kissing me awake. I wanted to punch Hakim. I wanted to hug him goodbye. I wanted my time back, a lifetime of things I’d never know how to miss—graduation caps and weddings and traveling the world. Each snapshot stolen by algae and sunburns.

  I wasn’t ready. I wanted my dad. I wanted out.

  I wanted the other half of that fucking lemonade.

  Ten.

  VI. Brave New World

  THE BIRDSONG comes from far away.

  At first, it means nothing. It’s just the whisper of the leaves and the twittering of blue jays, soft and sweet. Perhaps a memory from the woods behind my house, or from the time my family went camping. Ice and steel, blood and chrome, a thousand recollections swirling in a frosted hourglass….

  Until someone speaks. More solid than any of the ghost figures behind my eyelids. More real than any of the voices in my dreams.

  “Fifteen minutes until deployment.”

  I can’t cry out past the tubes crammed down my throat. The nuclear bomb floats down like a dandelion wisp and kisses the horizon; huge white clouds unfold like morning glories; even from miles away and behind thick walls, waves of heat blister my cheeks—

  My fingers flex on cracked leather. I’m slipping from the fog pools in the crevices in my skull, drawn back to earth like a flyaway balloon by creaky joints and hair damp with sweat.

  “Ten minutes until deployment.”

  It’s now or never, and my heart cries now, now, now.

  The bands snap away from my body. Creaky and reluctant, the hull shudders open.

  A brilliant cerulean sky opens up above me.

  GROPING BLINDLY for the sides, I heave myself onto the earth. The dirt. The tubes in my throat slide out from the pit of my stomach, slow and sickening. Great hacking coughs wrack my body, dislodging something, and I begin to vomit, expelling blue gel from my lungs. It comes and comes until my guts are hollow and my throat is on fire and I’m trembling like a leaf—panting hard, for the first time in an eternity.

  “Oh God,” I rasp. “Oh God.”

  My body spasms; twitchy legs, jittery stomach, shuddering breaths.

  And then it hits me.

  I can feel again.

  Suddenly I’m laughing, never mind my sore, hollow stomach and raw throat. I muster the strength to prop myself up on my arms. Hakim’s voice echoes in my ears. “Slow, Gillian. Take it slow.”

  Everything’s dizzy. It takes a while to r
emember how to focus my eyes, how to send impulses through my body that should’ve been so instinctive.

  “The lenses, Gillian.”

  Shakily, I remove them. They’re slimy to the touch, bubbled at the edges—too much sun, melting straight through the plastic.

  My vision focuses.

  Station 111 looms high above me. The Mayflower rests at the bottom of a hill, with a trail of broken twigs and flattened grass marking its path all the way up to where a station wall seems to have collapsed. Once this landscape was scrubby and bare. Now a forest of goliath trees stretches its limbs across the sky. All the colors feel turned on, like LSD, like Alice in Wonderland, like a freshman photography student fiddling with too-saturated filters. It smells of dirt, of cleanness, of life. Birds trill. I spot the source—a splash of yellow feathers no larger than my fist, perched in a leafy nest. One bird, singing melody and harmony at once.

  With an explosion of feathers, it erupts into flight, boughs creaking. And after that….

  Silence in the neon forest.

  One thought rattles in my head—

  This is no longer my world.

  “Okay,” I whisper.

  And I exhale.

  Then something catches my eye, and my heart lurches.

  Another pod rests in the corner of the clearing, nestled in ferns dotted with spiny yellow pods. The foliage is trampled in its path, glittering with shattered glass and metal. The landslide, or—or collapse, or whatever it was, must’ve rolled this one farther than mine. The name on the pod is faded but legible.

  Excelsior.

  My heart skips a beat.

  Ever upward. Rows of smooth, stainless steel pods. Jackie putting her hand on mine—

  Jackie. Jackie!

  I’m off like a shot, wobbly and unsteady, like a knock-kneed foal unable to coordinate its limbs. I race to Excelsior’s side and hit my knees hard.

  There she is. Snow White, inches away, the glass fractured into spider webs. She’s peaceful from this angle, tight brown curls resting on her cheeks, her dark skin unusually pale. Oh, thank God, thank God, her chest is rising and falling. She’s breathing—she’s alive.

  With all my strength, I wrench the pod’s handle. Gas whooshes out.

  “Deployment initiated.”

  Jacqueline’s thick eyelashes flutter.

  As the restraints retract, I grab her hand. “Jacks?” I whisper. My tears are dripping onto her cheeks.

  Her fingers twitch.

  “Jackie,” I whisper again. I don’t know what to say—can’t find the words. Is ‘please don’t be dead’ even enough?

  But I think of her. I think of her from that first day, introducing herself, just letting the words come out. How beautiful she was.

  “Jackie,” I start again. “C’mon. There was… there was a landslide, or something.” I try to say “We’re awake now,” but somewhere along the way it gets tripped up, and what comes out instead is, “We’re alone now.”

  Dad and Owen are gone. Dad and Owen are gone.

  Dad and Owen are dead.

  I can’t begin to process it. It’s too impossible. Station 111 and a radioactive forest and a landslide dumping our possibly-malfunctioning cryopods down a cliffside? I can wrap my mind around those. But not Dad, not Owen.

  Not them.

  While I was packed away on the ice like fresh fish at a farmer’s market, they died. Or perhaps they lived through it all somehow—emerging from the rubble and dust of the nuclear bombs untouched, shaking off the plague like a fraying sweater, and living whole lives, as Owen got tall and Dad got gray….

  Without any warning, I miss my mom.

  Somewhere along the line, she became a hard memory. I used to cling to her every night until I realized it only led to crying myself to sleep. But here, I smell her and hear her and feel her again all at once, lemony dish soap and rouge and silver wristwatch and every kind word she ever said. It’s like all the losses—Hakim, Dad, Owen, Earth—are digging up my old hurts too, even the ones I thought I’d already licked the postage for.

  A daughter’s supposed to outlive her mother. But not for hundreds and hundreds of years. Not all alone.

  As the sobs begin to wrack my body, I rest my head deep into Jackie’s collarbone. I make a nest in her pillows of hair. I hate myself because I don’t want to worry her. But I love her because somehow, she still somehow lets me feel private, even as my tears gather in the cup of her breastbone.

  “Motherfucker,” Jacqueline moans quietly.

  And despite myself, I choke out a laugh. It’s a tired one, but it’s… it’s good. Comfort rolls over me like a wave.

  I exhale against her heartbeat.

  I’m not alone.

  Hakim never lost faith in me. Neither did Jackie.

  After all I’ve overcome, maybe I believe them.

  Jack and Gill will climb this hill. We’ll wake the others. And we’ll start at the beginning.

  Jackie’s eyes are glassy. I don’t think she heard anything I said. Yet as I stroke her hair, her gaze drifts to mine, and a brilliant smile cracks drowsily across her face.

  “Larchwood,” she slurs. “Are you… you looking down my shirt?”

  AMY CAROTHERS is a Florida native who grew up among the orange groves and immediately fled to Iowa for college. Before you ask—yes, she is cold. She is very, very cold. Currently, Amy is pursuing majors in English and theatre and a minor in philosophy, and at any given moment can be found scribbling in notebooks, experimenting with makeup, or losing games of D&D.

  Ramen and Unrequited Crushes

  By K.A. Maldonado

  Beck has pined for his best friend Wren for as long as he can remember—they even kissed after a party back in high school. Beck never forgot that kiss, but Wren never mentioned it again. Surely Wren doesn’t even remember what happened between them years ago….

  IF BECK Lee Bates knew anything at all, it was these two things.

  One: Ramen made everything better.

  Two: His best friend, Wren Bradley, also made everything better.

  Beck lay sprawled out on his couch, vaguely irritated at how his shirt felt too tight or how his arm felt trapped beneath his body or how it felt like his stomach was being slaughtered in his abdomen. He wanted to sleep, but nothing was comfortable. The TV was too loud but the remote was too far away. Every inch of his skin itched. He’d run out of Girl Scout cookies.

  Needless to say, it was a shitty night.

  Wren sat hunched over a biology textbook on the other side of the couch, his brown curls falling onto his forehead. He half-read and half-listened as Beck despaired, though Beck was almost certain his words were going right in one ear and out the other. Wren was Beck’s best friend, but even he could only be expected to listen to so much whining.

  “I know what’ll make you feel better,” Wren said. Slowly, Beck turned over to face him with a groan.

  “Are you about to pull out another box of Thin Mints? Because if not, then I don’t care,” Beck said, then planted his face back into the sofa.

  “Hey,” Wren said, rolling Beck back over, “what about ramen? You’re always up for that.”

  Beck glared at him for a moment, grimacing to hide the pleased grin curling the corner of his mouth.

  “You’re not wrong, Wrennie-boy.” The nickname ran together like one word, the sound familiar and comforting. Wren snorted at it, set his textbook on the armrest, then bounded over to the kitchen in pursuit of the saucepan.

  As much as he tried to cover it up, Beck’s unyielding crush on Wren was starting to get out of hand. In the midst of his hormone-addled haze, he let his mind wander to how glorious Wren looked in his sweatpants, or how his face softened whenever Beck used that dumb nickname. His mind sped away to a sugar-coated world where they were together for real, and when Wren came into the living room again, he’d set the bowls down on the coffee table and Beck would pull him close until they were chest to chest and their faces would draw closer together and th
en they’d—

  No. Beck always cut it off there, before memories of that summer night resurfaced. The night just before their freshman year, when they’d stayed up until the wee hours of morning and accidentally gotten a little drunk and prattled on about the person they thought they’d fall in love with. Even all these years later, Beck remembered it like it was yesterday.

  “I want someone I can talk to, someone who has the same interests as me,” Wren had said, twirling an empty bottle around the carpet with his finger. “But I guess so does everyone else. Just someone I can connect to. Someone who’s easy.”

  “That’s so vague,” Beck retorted, downing the last of his drink. “I want details. Hair color, height, nice butt or not.” The glow-in-the-dark stars on Wren’s bedroom ceiling had started to swirl into one giant green mass. “I saw how you looked at Kat Ellis at Alec’s party last night, man. Her hair dyed bright red and curled, her green eyes all wide and fiery, and was she wearing actual makeup? You ate it up, Wrennie-boy.”

  Wren flushed bright red, the color even traveling to darken the tips of his ears. “Th-that doesn’t matter. She’s pretty, I’ll admit that much, but I don’t think I’d actually date her in the long run or anything. Like, I’m sure she’s cool and all, but I need someone on my level. Like you are.”

  Beck stared at him for a moment, processing his words, then pushed them aside without further thought. “Whatever, you hippie. I want a guy who’s tall, dark hair maybe. Lean, not ripped. Freckles are a big hell yes but not a requirement. And, most importantly, he has to have a nice butt.”

  Wren scoffed at the last addition, giving Beck a light shove. “But what about personality, man? You sound like you wanna date a mannequin. Come to think of it, I never really hear you talk about who you wanna date, anyway.”

  Beck’s grin immediately fell, his face unreadable. He scoffed, running a hand through his hair.

  “That’s because all the guys at our school are either straight or probably unwilling to take a chance on me. Because, y’know, I’m sort of a trans guy?” Beck paused, letting emphasis fall on his secret insecurities. He’d never told anyone about his insecurities before, not to mention outright refusing to acknowledge it himself. So why was he letting it all spill?