I’ve cut your bracelet off.
It’s started to snow. I have to go now. Goodbye.
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra. It must be six months since I tagged you. I see you never tagged me back.
Today I left the farmhouse. I cleaned Mom’s room, the room she slept in as a child, the room where she died. Old fingernails under the bed like seed.
There are good people in that house. What Mom called “ordinary people” or, in one of her funny phrases, “the most of us.” They got her some weed, and that made it easier for her toward the end. One night she said: “Oh Sahra. I’m so happy.”
She laughed a little and waved her hands in the air above her face. They moved in a strange, fluid way, like plants under water. “Look,” she said, “it’s the Movement.” “Okay, Mom,” I said, and I tried to press her hands down to her sides, to make her lie still. She struggled out of my grip, surprisingly strong. “Look,” she whispered, her hands swaying. “See how that works? There’s violence and cruelty over here, and everyone moves away. Everyone withdraws from the isolation zone until it shrinks. A kind of shunning. Our people understood that.”
“Our people?”
She gave another little laugh, kind of secretive, kind of shy. She said she’d grown up going to a plain wooden church, a church where they believed in peace, where they sang but played no instruments, where the women covered their hair with little white hats. I said we’d met some people like that back in California. “They had the peppers, Mom, remember?” “Of course,” she breathed. “The red peppers.” The memory seemed to fill her with such delight. She said she’d left her old church, her old farm, but now she could see her childhood in the shape of the Movement. “What’s isolation but a kind of shunning?” she said softly. “That’s what we do, in the Movement. We move on, away from violence. A place ruined by violence is a prison. Everyone deserves to get out. The Movement opened up the doors.”
She looked so small in the bed, in the light of the pale pink sky in the window. It does that on moonlit nights, in snow. A sky like quartz.
“That baby quilt,” she said, “do you still have it?”
I took it out. One square ripped away, a green one. “Your grandmother made this,” she said.
I wonder if you still have it, Fox. That green square. The Milky Way.
Later, I don’t know if she could recognize me, but she asked: “Where are you from?” And I said “Here.” Because “here” means this house and this planet. It means beside you.
“Are you an angel?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra. The snow is melting. The geese are back.
When I leave a place, I also leave a word for you. By now, it’s like talking to myself. I leave words like I’d leave a stray hair somewhere, a clipped fingernail. My track across the land.
Movement. Back and forth. The two of us sitting wrapped in your blanket, breathing fog against a rain of shooting stars. I’m thinking today about your excitement when I recited my ancestors’ names, how you said it felt like the future, and how quickly I cut you off. “There was war,” I said. “Those family lines became front lines.” As if your enthusiasm was somehow unbearable. I think of the fight we had later, and how you said: “Don’t embarrass yourself.” Did you mean I’d never belong? Maybe you meant: “Don’t make me into a symbol.”
Is it possible to be worthy of the Movement? Of my mom? Of my dad? I just walk, Fox, I meet people, seek shelter, avoid isolation. I make art with kids out of gratitude. I think about Mom all the time. All the time. “Are you an angel?” Her last words.
The night after I slept with you in the cave, I woke up cradled in light. My arm looked drenched with blood, but it was just dirt from the floor.
I still have the bracelet you gave me. I carry it in my pocket. I still have a redness on my wrist, as if someone’s grabbed me.
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra. Sometimes I just feel like leaving one word. Even if it’s just my name. A single thread.
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra.
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra.
Dear Fox,
Hey. It’s Sahra.
I got your message.
EXPEDITION 83
WENDY N. WAGNER
Wendy N. Wagner is the author of the SF eco-thriller An Oath of Dogs. She’s published more than forty short stories and written tie-in fiction for Pathfinder and Exalted role-playing games. She is the managing/senior editor of both Lightspeed and Nightmare magazines, and also served as the Guest Editor of Nightmare’s Queers Destroy Horror! special issue. She lives, games, and gardens in Portland, Oregon.
Visiting her was the best and worst part of my day, the good and the bad like the two sides of my rations card. Her voice, our laughter: the side with the Department of Revenue’s sunshine logo, the part you tapped on the chip reader and it beep-beeped your purchase of citrigel fruit squeezes and energy sticks. The chemical stink of her room and the ever-dampness of the heavy plastic quarantine gloves were the side of the card imprinted with my pay grade and my address, the side with the orange warning sticker reminding me of the Serious Penalties I would incur if caught shopping at illegal sales facilities. Like anyone needed the reminder.
My boots clanged on steel gridding as I passed through the last ring of the city proper and entered the Expansion Zone. This deep and this far out, the lighting turned to shit. Half the bulbs in the tunnel flickered or had gone out, and nobody bothered replacing things out here. The government had quit pretending the city was ever going to grow into this empty space. We were all just biding time, wondering if Portland would go the way the cities south of here had all gone and waiting for Seattle to shut down the last highway north.
Security lights snapped on with a nasty buzz. I shielded my eyes and made my way to the quarantine facility entrance by muscle memory.
“Henrietta!” Joel, the facility guard, beamed when he saw me. “How was work?”
I blinked until the silhouette grew features. “You know how it is.” I pulled a much-battered paperback out of my back pocket. “Got that novel I was telling you about. Alfred Bester, at his best.”
“Not even going to ask where you found this. Girl, I owe you.” He waved me through the security gate without even frisking me. Five years now, six days a week. Everybody knew I knew the drill.