“Please,” she says, “just drive me home,” but instead, he stops the car completely and reaches for her. But she is waiting for a move of this kind. She feels her whole body uncoil and spring forth. She throws open the door and flings herself fast out of the car into the sunshine. She almost falls in the dust. She starts to run. She runs off the side of the road and into the bush and as she runs she turns her head and watches as the man goes fast now past her, swings his car with a screech of wheels in the other direction. She can hear the sound of his laughing. He is waving to her wildly, the dust rising and coating the grass at the side of the road. Then she begins to run again, running and running as fast as she can, her legs in the grass, going toward her house.
Amy is hot and feels hungry and tired. She wonders what has happened to her mommy and why she hasn’t come home when she said she would. Amy decides to take off her dress and her ribbon in her hair and splashes water all over her body. She goes a little further into the water, looking around for crocs. The dogs have slunk off into the shade and left her alone. Her mommy has been gone such a long time now. Amy looks at her watch but can hardly make out the hands. She’s getting muddled up with the sun on her head, and now the baby has started up crying again and beating his legs and arms around desperately. He is hungry, too, she understands, and he misses their mother. Why has her mother not come back to them?
When Stella arrives at the house, sweating and panting, there is no sign of the baby in the pram or Amy or the dogs. She hears no sound except the sound of the river running. What could have happened to them? She runs through the house desperately looking in all the rooms, throwing open cupboard doors, even looking behind the curtain in the bath, but there is no sign of them there. Is it possible they could have been kidnapped, eaten by leopards, carried off by marauding natives? All sorts of wild thoughts go through her mind. Or would Amy have thought to go to the servants’ quarters to look for the nanny?
Then Stella thinks of the river, which she knows Amy loves, and starts to run down the path through the reeds that lead down there. She stops and puts her hands to her eyes in the glare. She sees something by the side of the dark river. Something or someone is lying there. She runs across the sand. Amy lies asleep on the bank of the river in the shade of the trees. She has managed to lift the baby up over her and put him on her bare stomach and chest and balance him there. The baby is rooting around with his face down against her chest, looking for her tick of a nipple.
The World in Primary Colors
by Scott William Carter
© 2007 by Scott William Carter
Art by Jason Eckhardt
More than two dozen of Scott William Carter’s short stories have been published in magazines such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Asimov’s Science Fiction, EQMM, Weird Tales, and Realms of Fantasy. He makes a second appearance in EQMM with a tale that touches on every parent’s fear. Mr. Carter is himself the father of two young children. He lives in Oregon’s lush Willamette Valley.
The sign was quite clear — No Adults Allowed. Thank you. Like an afterthought, it was affixed to the red plastic tunnel with masking tape, slightly askew, handwritten on a white sheet of paper with a black marker. The paper had started to yellow and bubble with age, which was strange, because Doug didn’t remember the sign being there last time — and that had been only a few weeks earlier. Of course Rosie had never asked him to take her into the plaything before, preferring simply to watch other kids, so he may not have noticed.
Rosie tugged on his hand. “Go in, Da-ee? Go in wid Wosie?”
The room smelled faintly of baking pizza. Her small hand felt slightly sweaty. Doug adjusted his glasses and leaned closer to the sign, hoping for some small-print addendum that might let him pass. As a corporate tax accountant, he was trained to look for such addendums — loopholes, exceptions, and special circumstances to turn what was illegal into what was merely inconvenient — and he often found himself doing this in his private life, too. But in this case, no such luck.
The screeching and laughter of the children echoed all around them. The play equipment at Locomotion Pizza was in a separate room, its walls and ceiling almost entirely glass. Outside, mere inches from where children played, a steady pulse of traffic passed on Roosevelt Boulevard, but the glass was thick enough that it muted most of the noise. On the wall connecting them to the main part of the restaurant was a mural of an old steam engine passing through the mountains. The ceiling had been painted a perfect blue, but the real sky outside was a metallic gray, like the dull side of aluminum foil.
Doug’s mood always rose and fell a little with the weather, but the overcast skies didn’t seem to affect the kids one bit. They crowded eagerly around the video games in the corner, bounded through thousands of plastic balls in the area covered with black netting, and clambered after one another through the huge, castle-like structure of interconnecting tunnels.
The castle was the crown jewel of the play area, and the thing Rosie talked about incessantly for days after a visit — as big as a small house, each tunnel a different solid color, red, yellow, blue, with plastic bubble windows at various junctures and three different slides, some straight, some that curled like twisty fries. If only they had toys like that when he was growing up. But of course, he knew he had been a little timid, like Rosie, perhaps even more so.
He squatted down next to her. Children’s laughter echoed inside the tunnel.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, squeezing her hand. “It says I can’t. But you can go in. I’ll watch you.”
Her face darkened — lips compressing to a horizontal line, dark eyebrows bowing into the mirror image of checkmarks. It was an expression he had seen on Autumn’s face many times. Rosie was the spitting image of her mother — round brown eyes; fair, freckled skin; hair like dark chocolate and tied in a ponytail. Oh, she looks so much like you, Autumn! She could be your clone! Doug had heard that more times than he could count. What he hated was not the comment, but how people would always gave him this look, as if they were either feeling sorry for him because she was physically so different — with his sandy hair, blue eyes, and darker skin, really more of an opposite — or they were just a tiny bit suspicious that the child was not, in fact, his.
She wore a white dress over a red and blue plaid shirt, his favorite outfit, one that made her look a little like Raggedy Ann. She fiddled with the hem. “But I wan’ you go in, Da-ee!” she insisted.
He smiled. “I know that, dear. But it’s against the rules.”
“Wules?”
“That’s right. You know... Kind of like how Mommy tells you not to kick the table at dinnertime. That’s a rule. Well, this is a rule, too. Daddies can’t go in there. It’s just for kids.”
“Tids?”
“That’s right, dear.”
She hesitated a moment, gears turning, before saying with even more gusto than before: “But I wan’ you go in, Da-ee!”
Doug sighed. It was May, with the long days of tax season behind him, and he’d taken the afternoon off just to make her happy. He hadn’t been spending nearly enough time with her lately, getting home long after she went to bed, and the guilt had been gnawing at him. This was their first stop. So what if he had a bad back and tendonitis in his wrists? He’d survive. It might even be fun. Break a few rules, be a rebel.