....and another story fragment

Nobody knows exactly when it was that Lily Mae went digital. We wonder about it, sometimes, because it seemed to come on so quickly. It is so recent, it seems, that she was rolling around stubbornly in her bed of a morning, refusing the persistent, cacophonous call of her clock radio (large and boxy, with big red numbers flashing the time it was already outmoded by), that she was tramping downstairs for breakfast, pouring herself bowls of Frosted Miniwheats and Cinnamon Toast Crunch and shrugging wordlessly in response to questions.

No one is sure when things began to change, either. Some of us are disconcerted by that, and by the speed with which she evolved. They say they feel like our grandparents, who can’t understand why all their grandchildren need cell phones, or even our parents, who don’t recognize the evolution of the social world into something that requires you to be plugged in, on line, charged up, and logged on. “It’s all so different so soon,” they say. “How can anyone keep up with it?”

It’s true; we were caught unawares when it happened, as floored as any Gen-Xer who realizes that his children can communicate faster, and more constantly, with the world of visual and auditory stimuli than his Walkman-toting teenage self would ever have dreamed of.

Looking back, we begin to ask each other, “What were the first signs?” What was the point of no return, after which all other changes, all the inevitable slipping away from tangible, analog selfhood became inevitable? Was it when the alarm clock stopped working—succumbing to both the entropy of passing time and the fast-forward march of technological abandonment—and Lily Mae did not bother to replace it? She had no need to get up for school anymore, because she had programmed the material from her classes to download directly into her brain. Was it when she stopped speaking because her phone and computer could convert text to voice and voice back to text again? Maybe it was before all of that; maybe it was the first time that her wide-open eyes reflected back nothing but the faintly blue glow of the monitor they gazed into for hours at a time. Some of us say that she used to go days and nights without seeing, or even looking at, anything else.

We are all in agreement, though, that the change was in full motion when she started disappearing. We were already used to not seeing her—the hours she spent in her room did not admit to much, if any interaction, and she ordered all her meals (what little she ate) online, emerging hurriedly to snatch her sustenance, like a hibernating animal, before disappearing back upstairs for days at a time. But then there was the fact that her very presence would fade away; the sound of typing keys and clicking mouse would stop, although the letters and numbers would still dance across the screen and the cursor loop obediently after them.

Soon she began appearing—although appearing is the wrong word, since it was merely the consequences of her actions, the manifestation of her intent, rather than her breath or flesh or presence that emerged—on other machines. Somebody would start away from their monitor in shock when her strings of code, easily recognizable by their insolent, adolescent attitude, would appear in whatever document might be open at the time. She would take over wireless devices, or handhelds, whatever was near at hand, and flash though their programs like a ghost as she went about her own business.

Nobody remembers the last time we saw her here, in this house, in this world of forms, but we know, for certain now that she has gone. She has flashed away in a flash of electrical impulses, a sparking chain of information that snaps its way across the world, into another form, another way of understanding.

Another Story Starter

Story Fragment 2:

Around noon, there was a tock-tock-tock of someone at my door. It hurt to leave the patch of sun by the window, and the stretch of hardwood flood was cold and empty. I walked across it slowly, feeling the chill coat the soles of my feet and curl up my legs, raising rough-edged bumps on my bare calves. My hand moved as if through honey to wrap itself around the doorknob. Before I could twist to open, the knock came again. I felt the rapping through the palm of my hand, jolting up through my whole body. As if a spring had been released, I yanked the door open.

Orphea stood on the mat, her hand still raised. We stared at each other for a long moment, with the look of two conspirators face to face across a corpse. I realized the pressure I felt was partly the urge to release carbon dioxide from my lungs and draw in more oxygen-laden air. Somehow, the need to breathe persisted. The thought cracked the stiffness of my face, and Orphea smiled back. The tension ebbed out of her, a bit, and I saw a flicker of the girl I had grown up with in the curve of her mouth and the tilt of her head. Not in her eyes, though. Never there.

“Come in, Darkness,” I said, using the name only I was allowed, and stepped aside.

She came in.

“I was worried about you, Chicken.” She acknowledged my title for her with hers for me, but she was careful not to touch me as she brushed past, going over to the table and setting down her bag, “We haven’t heard from you in two days. Not since—” she turned back around, leaning back against the table and bracing the heels of her hands on its edge, “Excision night.”

Her eyes were clear and empty, like water so cold it should be ice, but hasn’t frozen yet. The darkness of them had dropped back and away, receded, and it was as if I could see a void stretching backwards through the space where retina, brain, even the back of her skull should be. To look into them was to flirt with emptiness, to feel loneliness and agoraphobia rise up to fill a sense of echoless space.

Before, when she had first changed, I couldn’t bear the feeling I got from looking in Orphea’s eyes. Before, I would also have been angry at her for this passive aggressive beating around the bush; for coming and speaking to me with the voice of the group, rather than as a friend; for using the names of our friendship to serve Melinda’s purposes. Now, though, I watched those feelings move by me, touching me distantly, but not possessively.

I took another full breath in. The air was a river rushing through me. Did it oxygenate my blood, so that it could flow as well? What drove it? I reached up and felt the ridge of the scar between my breasts through the thin fabric of my shirt. The demarcation line above the emptiness. Orphea’s hollow eyes followed my movement.

“Are you alright?” She asked. Her voice sounded light, almost trivial, as if she was asking about work, grocery shopping, anything.

When they took Orphea’s heart, she told me, she didn’t hesitate. The moment that Melinda cauterized and sealed her chest closed, and placed her heart, warm and bloody, in her hand, she knew what she wanted to do with it. She didn’t tell me what she did. She couldn’t; I was an outsider then, a non-initiate. I knew from the space behind her gaze, though, from her new abilities to hide and to send things away, that she had destroyed her heart in depths and in darkness. Had she taken it to a cave, or a crevasse in the dead of night? Maybe she had just thrown it down a mineshaft or an old well. If I asked her now, she could tell me, of course, and she probably would. I didn’t feel any desire to know.

Orphea was still gazing at me, her face making the shapes of concern around those mineshaft eyes.

“Would you like some tea?” I asked.

She sighed at me, and shook her head. “If you’re brewing, I don’t object.” She bent over her bag. “I brought strawberries.”

There was a part of me that would have smiled with half-irritation—Orphea knows me so well—but now it was too far removed. I just nodded. “That’s good. I made madelines this morning, and they will be good companions.”

Orphea did smile. “I knew you would have something baked.”

I turned away to fill the kettle, and she was suddenly beside me. “I know it’s strange, now,” She spoke softly, intimately. “But you need to take the next step. Once you do, you won’t feel so—so insulated. You’ll come back to the world, only you’ll be stronger, better—one of us.”

I put the tea kettle on the range, and the blue flame flared out beneath it. It was easier to make tea than to talk to Orphea about this crossroads I was at, to fall back on the routine of water, tea leaves, milk, sweet—milk…

“You want me to get the cream out of the fridge for the strawberries?” Orphea asked.

For the first time in an eternity, I moved quickly. “No!” I crossed to the refrigerator, and gripped the door handle. “I’ll get it.”

I eased the door open, blocking Orphea’s line of sight with my body. The wan fluorescent bulb inside flickered on, lighting the pale inner skin of my wrist with a crepuscular glow as I reached through the chill for the milk carton sitting beside the Tupperware tub holding my heart.