Authors: ed. Simon Petrie
Orla bit her lip and turned to the boy. “Can I shoot your gun?” she said. Orla had used a firearm before. Once, a few years ago, her father had made several unique pieces for a man with an impressive mustache who called himself “a collector.”
The boy looked surprised, but he leaned back and pulled his belt around until his gun was in the front. A pistol, Orla remembered it was called. Papa had taken her out by the pond with him to test the weapons. He had laid his long hands over her ears and she had smiled at the booming in in her chest and the wisping, burning smell.
Orla had become an accomplished shot. She was very good at things that required stillness and precision. Despite this, she allowed the boy to help her, to take her elbows and position them in front of her, slightly bent.
“Be prepared,” he said, pressing his larger hands over hers, “it’s quite a jolt.”
Orla paused, breathed, took careful aim at the trunk of a tree and deliberately missed it by nearly a foot.
“Good!” the boy laughed, sounding genuinely delighted. “Very good!”
Orla turned, still in the circle in his arms. “You … came here for me?” she said, turning red. Normally, she did not liked to be touched by unfamiliar people. But it was not so terrible, being touched by this boy, even though it was not like her papa or Parse. The boy nodded, his chin collided very gently with the side of her face. It didn’t hurt.
“I came here for you, Orla. I think you can save the world. Maybe you’re the only one who can.”
* * *
Orla went into her father’s lab without permission that night. It was the only time she had ever done so. He was there, standing at the end of a polished metal table. Orla paused on the staircase and looked at his silhouette, which curved a very little to one side, as though he was standing fast in the middle of his own personal hurricane.
“Papa,” she said tenderly. He looked at her without surprise or rebuke. In fact, he looked as though he had been long expecting her. “What are you making?” He stretched out his hand for hers.
“I’ll show you,” he said.
* * *
They had an oval metal panel in their backs and their eyes were silver and black with gadgetry-a kind of camera, Papa said. But they had skin and hair and bones and white teeth and Orla could not help but to reach out and touch the raised blonde hair on the forearm of one. It was so fine, only visible when it caught the overhead light. It felt like nothing at all.
“He’s beautiful,” Orla said grinning. Her father smiled in return.
“They are magnificent.” He looked down fondly at the still figure on the long tray. “I will never do better work than this.”
“What are they for?” Orla asked, skating her fingernail between the dull red freckles on his hand. Raised blue veins, hard knuckles. The blood moved purple behind his eyelids, as though someone had laid careless threads across his closed eyes.
Her father hesitated. This was rare. “They stay alive,” he pronounced. “They’re experts at it.”
“How many have you made?” Orla asked. There was an entire bank of cabinets on the far side of the laboratory, all with closed drawers that must open out like the one before her.
“Many,” her papa said.
“Is this a bad thing, Papa?” Orla asked him. Her father smiled, touched her face. She tilted her chin into his palm and felt much younger than seventeen. “It’s just … there was a man today, he said … He said that it was up to us, that we must save the world.”
Papa shook his head slowly. “You don’t look very much like your mother. But your voice is curiously identical. Sometimes, I hear you calling through the house and for a moment I think … But they robbed me of her. They made you so …” He took Orla’s hands in his own, squeezed them slightly. “You are very young, Orla, and you know little of the places outside this house. But I am old and well-worn and I can tell you this, my darling girl: you are the only part of this world worth saving.”
* * *
Orla debated with herself all the way to the ‘just in case’ room. Ordinarily, she never would have hesitated with a worry, a question or a fear. But she did not know how to tell her mother about the man in the village, the creature on the tray, in raps and knocks. For the first time in her life Orla looked into her heart and found an absence where her mother should have been. She suddenly wanted to talk to her so badly, to hear their like voices rising in concert. It ached and stabbed at her as though she had run some terrible distance.
“Made venison roast,” she rapped out on the side of the chamber. “Knit sweater for P. Present.” Of course, her mother could not show her pleasure, could not smile. Orla trailed her hand down the cool glass of the chamber and as she listened to the little sticky catch of her fingers on the smooth surface, doubt crept black into her mind. Maybe it would be better to have no mother at all than to have one under glass like Snow White. It made her angry like the shopkeeper’s wife and the thick white trailing of flour and all the places she couldn’t go and all the people who would never look her in the eye and all the things she did not know of in the world and would never know of, because she was her father’s daughter and her mother’s only child. Maybe her heart would hurt less if Mother was just a face in pictures, a woman from a time before memories.
Against the transparent chamber wall, her hand balled up almost unconsciously into a fist. But her mother was blinking. “Good girl. Takes care.”
* * *
Orla had never known the house to be restless before. But in the days before what Papa called ‘completion’, it seemed to seep out of the walls, float in the air. The man in the black coat was around all the time, though he had the good sense to stay clear of her kitchen. Papa refused to eat. His cardigans were hanging loosely on him and the bones in his arm were sharp as awl-points. Even patient Parse seemed ill at ease, starting several tasks and then abruptly abandoning them in frustration.
“The future is opening,” the man in the black coat would say to her, and his eyes would light up that unspeakable blue. Orla wanted many times to ask him what that meant—she had no doubt he would tell her—but in the end, she always decided that she would not truly want to know. “Everything will be different now,” he would tell her, taking the cup of tea or plain toast she offered him. “Everyone will be different.”
Once, he had looked hard at her and said, “you could be a queen.” And softer, more awkwardly, “You look like a queen.”
“I look like my father,” Orla had informed him.
“This is the great work of my life,” her father marveled one evening, taking a rare rest in his old wing chair by the fireplace. Yellowed stuffing was peeping out in a thin bead around the cushion’s edge. Orla would have to ask Parse to repair it. “Ten years ago, Orla, men would never have even dreamt of this.” He shook his head and laughed. It sounded wet. Orla hoped he was not coming down with a cold. Fall would be upon them in a few short weeks and he would need his strength after all this was over and their life resumed its natural shape. “You know, they did not even want me to save your mother. Would rather I had left her to die like a sickly dog. No,” he murmured, “only I had the courage to dream …”
Orla rested against his legs and he patted the top of her dark head. “I think, after this, I may retire after all,” he mused. Orla turned to smile excitedly at him. They could take walks around the lake and her father could build her amusements, as he used to in her childhood. They could read from books and grow the garden that Orla had been wanting to start alongside the house.
“Papa,” Orla said, “I’m proud of you.”
Her father looked, for a moment, struck. As if some speeding debris had rocketed through the room and hit him square in the chest. He looked at his daughter with wondering eyes. “I’m very glad, my girl.” The truth of it seemed to surprise him.
* * *
Orla had always been a light sleeper. When she was a small girl, she had terrible nightmares. She could never remember the shape of them, but the feeling of precariousness followed her into waking life and she lay in bed in the dark, too afraid to call for Parse or arise and run to Papa’s room. She had learned to be fitful and to wake herself at the first sign of dark tanglings. Consequently, she often woke five or six times a night at small creakings and clatterings deep in the belly of the house.
One night, just days before Papa finished his project, Orla awoke to the sound of footsteps and the creak of a staircase. It could have been her father, heading down to the lab to correct some detail. It could even have been the man in the black coat. Orla knew that he came sometimes to the house long after she had gone to sleep. But though it could have been any of those things, the tremor in Orla’s stomach told her that it was not. She got up silently and put on a long leather coat that had belonged to her father and her flannel slippers.
As she passed by Parse’s little room at the end of the hall, she briefly considered knocking and waking him. There were no problems that Parse could not solve; but Orla was the lady of this house. She had a duty. She took care.
Orla knew each stair like an old friend. Her feet were certain, gentle. The boy with the gun did not hear her approach behind him. But even if she had clomped down the stairs grumbling and shouting, he likely would not have noticed. Orla found him in the ‘just in case’ room. He was staring up at her mother and Orla could not see his face, but his hands at his sides were shaking.
For a moment, Orla couldn’t breathe. He was here. In her mother’s room. In her mother’s room. He didn’t belong; he wasn’t supposed to … It might have hurt less, been a smaller invasion, had he cut open her breast to gawk at her red heart.
“What have you done?” she said, hoarse.
The boy’s face was white. He didn’t smile at all now. He looked young. He had freckles, which she had not noticed before. “I came to stop … what has he done? What is this?” he gestured towards the glass case. Orla flinched, as though he had reached out and struck her.
“That’s my mother. Don’t talk about her. Don’t talk about her, don’t look at her, don’t come in here—” Her voice rose higher and higher. She could feel it pushing out of her like steam from a teakettle’s spout.
“What did he do to her?” the boy cried over her, he sounded as though he had been wounded, as though he had encountered the spill of his very own blood.
“She was sick. She would have died. Papa saved her.” Orla said.
“Saved?” the boy’s voice cracked.
“Papa was the only one who could do anything for her, and they called him crazy for it. She wanted it. She wanted to stay with me. She wanted to live.” Orla’s father had told her; how happy her mother had been when he told her of his plan. How, even though she couldn’t speak anymore, he had known.
The boy shook his head. He was crying. Tears were coming from his eyes. “Why doesn’t he just fix her? Why keep her this way? I’ve seen what he can do with a body, he could, you know, if he wanted to …”
Orla shook her head. Without realizing it, she had begun raising her hands to cover over her ears. “She doesn’t want that. She likes it. She needs it. She can talk to me and be my mother. She’s safe in there and nothing will ever hurt her and she has Parse and Papa and no one can call her names or hate her or bring her pain.”
“This is not life!” the boy was shouting. He had taken the gun from his belt, he waved it in the direction of Orla’s mother’s tank. “She is not alive, she’s just breathing.”
“Don’t …” Orla raised both of her hands, “please don’t. She’s my mother. I need her.”
The boy looked at her, stunned. “Orla,” he said, “I’m not going to … I would never. I’m the good one.”
Orla’s hands remained in the air in front of her. “You have a gun,” she said. “You came into my house, into my secret places and you have a gun. That is not good.” She thought about the sound the falling china had made. How he wrote his name upon the world with every word. How he had smiled and left it all broken behind him. Something of this must have shown in her face.
The boy lowered his arm, stared at the gun as though he could not imagine how it had made its way into his hand. “Orla …” He crossed the room towards her so quickly, she did not even have time to step back. He took her outstretched hands, pressed the gun dull and heavy into her palms. “Orla, I would never hurt you. I only want to help you. Your life does not have to be this way. Orla, I could make everything different for you. Don’t be afraid.” He clutched her hands, folded them around the metal of the gun. It was warm and slippery with his leftover sweat. “I’m the good one, he is the bad one. Orla, I can save you.”
The man with the mustache, who called himself a collector, had only ever had one conversation with Orla. He had told her that it was unwise to shoot at an enemy’s head. A small target you were likely to miss and then you had lost valuable time. “It only works,” he had said, “if you are a very good shot and you’re very certain.”
Orla looked at her mother. She was happy in her tank. The walls were not to keep her away from the world; they were to keep the world away from her. Why would she want anything different? Who would want someone coming in, breaking up the fine, strong, orderly world Papa had built for her?
Orla raised the gun and pulled the trigger in a single motion. The boy’s head snapped backwards as if surprised. Blood sprayed on to her mother’s tank and the wall beside it. The boy fell, blood pooled all around him. Orla had never seen such a concentration of it before. She carefully opened the pistol’s magazine and emptied out the remaining bullets before crouching down and examining the spreading red stain. It was much thinner than strawberry jam and darker. It was almost black and it was only when she spread it out thinly on her fingers that it looked truly red.
She realized that her mother was blinking something rapidly. Orla stood up, empty gun in hand, and watched her carefully. “Oh, my girl,” her mother said, over and over again.
* * *