Lightspeed: Year One

I don’t keep track of how many people I love anymore, but I am pretty sure that it is not very many because Allison is always coming up to me and asking me to talk to her in her office. She is worried about me and says that I have experienced something very traumatic, and that it will take time but I will heal. But I don’t believe her when she says that I will heal. I think that she is just lying to herself because it makes her feel good. I can see in her eyes that she is scared of me. It makes me angry. It makes me angry that she is so weak. It reminds me of my parents and the weakness of all the adults that I know. And I am angry that almost half of the world thinks they know me.

They do not know me.

Sometimes I think of those children in the province of France that killed the dictator. I think they could know me. I look for them sometimes online but I can’t find them. I hear that they went into the hills or mountains someplace and got rid of the brains they were given when they were four. Now they live like humans used to live. Sometimes I think that I should go find them. Then sometimes I think that my classmates and I should go do what they did. I love my classmates. They know me and I know them. I think they are all that keeps that red heart in my profile from blinking out.

CUCUMBER GRAVY Susan Palwick

I wasn’t too happy when the knocking started on my door that morning. Nobody’s welcome out here except UPS and customers, and I wasn’t expecting any deliveries, and customers have to call first. New buyers have to be referred by people I know. That’s a rule. I check references, too. I don’t let anybody in who isn’t vouched for, and even so, it’s amazing I’ve never had cops out here. Some of my buyers ask why I didn’t go legit when the medical-marijuana bill passed four years ago, but that’s a no-brainer: I do not need the government crawling up my backside to regulate me, and I have a lot more customers this way, and I make a lot more money. Being legal would be nothing but a pain in the ass, even if I didn’t have to worry about keeping people from finding out about the space cucumbers.

As it happened, my latest bunch of cucumbers was due to start singing any minute, which meant the last thing I needed was somebody in the house. That’s another reason buyers have to call first: depending on what the cucumbers are up to, I tell people they have to wait, I can’t see them today.

So when the knocking started, I thought, shit, government, and my stomach tied up in a knot. I’d have pretended I wasn’t home, but you can get stranded motorists out here too, and the sooner you let them use your phone or whatever, the sooner they go away. So when I heard that knock and looked out and didn’t recognize who was there—some bearded guy pushing forty, about my age, in jeans and a plaid shirt and hiking boots, had tree-hugging liberal written all over him—I grabbed my gun and yelled through the door, “Who is it?” Since it was only one guy, that made cops less likely, but on the other hand his car was in front of the house, a nice little Toyota, which made mechanical failure less likely, too. Maybe he had to use the bathroom, in which case I’d tell him to use the desert. If he needed water I’d give him some, though. You always give people water, out here. You’d think people would know not to drive anywhere in this state without extra water in the car, but between the dumb college kids from Reno and the morons moving here from California, the average survival IQ in Nevada isn’t what it should be. This guy was too old to be in college, so I pegged him as Californian. Local folks only drive in the desert with four-wheel drive.

“Mr. Whitwell Smith?” he yelled through the door. “Welly?”

“Yeah?” Only buyers call me Welly: It’s a kind of code. I’m Whit to everybody else, not that I’ve talked to much of anybody else since Nancy Ann left. “Who wants to know?”

“My name’s Jim Humphreys.” The name didn’t mean anything to me. “I’m a friend of Sam Mortimer’s.”

That name did. Sam used to be one of my best customers, out here once a month spending big money, until he suddenly stopped coming altogether about six months ago. No call, nothing. I’d been wondering what happened to him, not that it’s any of my business. I’d almost started to think of Sam as a friend, I’d known him so long; we’d even gone skeet-shooting on my property a few times. “Yeah? You know Sam, you know you have to call before you come out here. Sam knows that.”

“I’ve been trying to call for three days, Mr. Smith. Your phone’s out of order.”