FICTION

The children’s hospital is a ghost town at night. The daylight people – the receptionists, the administrators, the gift shop cashiers, the people who fix the vending machines – they all go home. But the rest of us. We have to stay. We can’t go home because our babies are hooked up to monitors and IVs. Home feels far away. Farther than eighty-four miles.

We’re the nighttime people. We walk the halls and we battle the ghosts.

My shoes squeak too loud. The night nurses talk too cheerfully. The machines beep too fast. This is the noise of battle.

Two of us get on the elevator together. Strangers but somehow familiar, two mothers, fellow warriors, fellow soldiers, both of us wearing signs of fighting under our puffy eyes and in our shaking fingers. We don’t speak. We’ll speak later, when the ghosts have been pushed back once again.

As we step off the elevator, the garish, too-bright light of the long hallway greets us. We don’t flinch. We’ve faced this hallway before. We know these ghosts.

The ghost of Fatigue comes first, limping around the corner, moaning at us, but my comrade straightens her back, stretches her muscles, and swats it away with a swift backhand. The ghost of Boredom follows, wailing monotonously. I hit it with my purse. There’s a heavy book in there. The ghost of Boredom explodes all over the hallway and disappears.

The ghosts of Stress and Overwhelm are harder to fight. We kick and punch and scribble notes on paper and set alarms and make lists and count pills and throttle and grapple until those ghosts fade away too.

We look at each other. We know who’s next. In a videogame, this would be the final boss. This one we can’t beat and we know it. But we can stave it off for one more night. We nod to each other and face forward.

The ghost of Fear drops, screaming, from the ceiling. We don’t strike or hit or kick. That’s useless with this one. The other mom reaches for my hand and we hold on tight as he pummels us with every terrifying sentence he can. You’re not strong enough. You can’t handle this. This is what the rest of your life is going to be. Things will never be normal again. You’re going home with tubes and machines. And then the one we can’t handle. You’re going home without your child.

We roar and charge forward, shove him away, push right through him, and march on down the hallway. He recedes and dissipates and we let go of each other. We fought him off. One more time. One more night. We’ll do it again tomorrow.

We turn the corner and I hold open the door to the twenty-four hour store for her. She buys a cold brew coffee and I get a protein shake.

“Doin’ okay?” she asks.

“Hanging in there,” I answer and hand the night cashier my money.

Janie dropped the dried cranberries and tiny diced apples into the chicken salad. She stirred until the ingredients were thoroughly mixed, then eyed the store-bought croissants in their dented plastic box. It had been the last box of croissants at the grocery store and the flaky pastries weren’t the prettiest. But her mom had asked for a chicken salad sandwich—made with Janie’s recipe—and she was determined to make it happen.

The small grocery store near the hospital wasn’t particularly well-stocked, but she had gotten all the ingredients, plus a cheap knife and spoon, and hauled them back to her hotel room. Making chicken salad on a desk under a reading lamp was weird, but she got it done.

Janie spooned the salad onto the croissants, fighting back tears as she built the sandwiches. She had cried so much in the last week she was surprised she had any tears left. Her mother’s heart attack shocked everyone, including the doctors. She was a healthy and active 63-year-old one day and going into emergency heart surgery the next.

Janie had stepped into the ICU and found her mother lying sedated, on a ventilator, with a dozen machines beeping around her, and tubes and IVs trailing from her body.

It was the first time she’d seen her mom in seven years.

Ten years ago, Janie had started down a path littered with wine bottles, beer cans, and prescription pills. Her mother had been a bulldog; she took her to treatment centers, hunted down her secret stashes, made her take drug tests, and nursed her after overdoses. But she finally reached her breaking point and asked Janie to go destroy herself somewhere else.

After cleaning up her makeshift kitchen, Janie packed the sandwiches into the box and headed to the hospital. Her mom sat up in bed, looking a hundred times better than she had a week ago. Janie rolled the table over to the bed and opened the box of chicken salad sandwiches.

Her mom bowed her head for a quick prayer and bit into her meal. The delight in her face made Janie’s eyes tingle with tears yet again. She reached for her mother’s hand.

The words got stuck in her tight throat but she forced them out in a harsh whisper. “I’m sorry, Mom.”

Her mother gripped her hand, pushed the table away, and pulled her daughter close. It was a surprisingly tight hug for a woman recovering from open heart surgery.

Agatha was the only pixie in her entire colony without a talent.

The Old Mother told her some pixies just blossom later than others, but Agatha felt like a failure.

Her friend Jori was a water fairy and he could make dewdrops just by clapping. May and Tilly, the “wind twins,” were so good at breezes, they got in trouble for blowing grouchy Mr. Pak’s hat off. Even the colony’s new baby, Axie, already had her talent.

“It’s not fair,” Agatha shouted into one of Tilly’s wind gusts. “Axie can already do birdsong and she can’t even talk yet!”

The Old Mother kept her eyes on her grass-weaving. “Your time will come, my dear.”

“But when?”

“I suspect it will come when you stop looking so hard for it,” the Old Mother answered, pausing to give Agatha a pat on the cheek.

So she tried. She busied herself playing with Jori, lassoing bullfrogs and sneaking up behind butterflies. She got really good at guessing Axie’s birdsongs and even let May attempt to float her on a breeze.

Then one day, her feet began tingling. The tingles got stronger and stronger until Agatha couldn’t stand it anymore and she started stomping her feet. Everywhere she stepped, something began pushing up through the soil. Plants! She was a plant pixie! Agatha wanted to jump and shout.

Until she noticed.

They weren’t wild roses or morning glories or poppies. “Mushrooms? Mushrooms?”

The Old Mother came running. “Your talent!” She pressed her hands against her heart. “Mushrooms! Oh, Agatha. We haven’t had a fungi fairy in generations! This is marvelous!”

“It is?”

“You can blanket tree trunks with lichen. You can color the forest floor. You can make dance rings. It’s been ages since we frolicked in a dance ring!”

The Old Mother took Agatha’s hands and spun her in circle. They danced and kicked up their feet, and soon other pixies had joined in, all laughing and cheering for Agatha’s new talent. Even Mr. Pak celebrated.

Agatha stopped to stare at her creation. A perfect circle of stout, strong, round, red mushrooms.

The Old Mother leaned down to her ear. “See? Some pixies blossom later, but it’s always worth the wait.”

Henry Tilney bought the derelict old brick house on Fourth Street because it was the only thing that had reminded him of home in the three years he’d been here. Here, in the twenty-first century. He was pretty sure he had what these people called clinical depression. The electric lights, the impossibly fast vehicles, the little talking devices in everyone’s pocket, the absurd obsession with speed—it all made him weary and doleful. He wanted horses, grass, and quiet.

And Catherine, but that was impossible.

Working on the house was the first real joy he felt since landing in this time period. The library, wrapped floor to ceiling in shining wood planks and lined with empty shelving on every side, nearly made him cry with homesickness. Fortunately, a light fixture fell from the ceiling at that exact moment and shattered his sentimentality.

He threw himself into the renovations, hiding his inexperience with power tools behind a desire to do things “the old-fashioned way.” That turned out to be a blessing because it put him in touch with Brendan, who’d been teaching himself joinery and sashimono and all manner of unusual construction techniques.

They became friends, and between the two of them, began returning the brown three-story beauty to her former glory. One evening, while working in the long, narrow dining room, Henry let Catherine’s name slip.

“I think we should go with a dark stain. Give it a bit of a Gothic feel. Catherine would like that.”

Brendan lowered the sanding block. “Whoa, dude. Who’s Catherine? You’ve never even mentioned her.”

“She’s my—” He paused for so long that Brendan started grinning.

“Still need to define the relationship, huh?”

“She was my fiancé,” he said finally. “She’s gone now.”

“Gone, like, she died?”

He gave a short nod.

“Oh man. Oh man. Bro, I’m so sorry.”

From that moment, he made every decision with Catherine in mind. He never spoke of it, but it became his mission to make this a house Catherine would have loved. It had secret passages, romantic reading nooks, ladders up to hidden alcoves, and huge window seats for gazing outdoors.

When the renovations were complete, over a year later, he and Brendan toasted their success. Brendan held his glass up again. “So I have another little item to celebrate. I asked Hailey to marry me and she said yes.”

“Ah. Congratulations, my friend!”

“Yeah man. Feeling pretty lucky today.”

Henry went that same week to a lawyer and had his will drawn up. He willed the house to Brendan and Hailey in the event of his death. He made sure to include “or disappearance” in the clause. Just in case. Just in case that wretched mantel clock ever came back to life.

Another year passed. And another.

And then, the old clock began ticking.

. . .

His heart pounded when he walked into the sitting room of the vicarage. Catherine was there, bright and lovely, looking as if no time had passed at all, a length of fabric across her lap.

“What do you think of this muslin?” she asked. “Is it too dark for a wedding gown?”

He swallowed down his tears and grinned. “You can wear the most hideous muslin in all of England, as long as you marry me.”

When she ran to him and gave him one of her enthusiastic, but delightfully awkward kisses, six years of lonely misery dropped away, and time started up again.

The last rose in the world died this week.

Matthew had watched the petals curl and turn dark as the days passed. When the first petal dropped, his hopes did too. None of the propagation efforts had been successful. The cuttings, the starts, the petri dishes, the genome samples, they’d yielded nothing.

His superiors had written it off as just one more lost plant in a world of dead and dying vegetation. They were more concerned, and rightly so, about those last few stalks of corn struggling to survive. But to Matthew, the loss of the rose pricked deep into his heart, killing out his wavering hopes.

He stepped to the window. The research facility was surrounded by garden plots, most of them brown and shriveled. But a handful were still a weak green. Beyond the little plots lay the rest of the world. Matthew forced himself to study it. Brown, sandy, windblown, dead. Not a green leaf in sight outside of the facility.

The director had tasked him with getting rid of all the rose-related materials to make room for other studies. Normally, such materials would go in the incinerator. But Matthew gathered up the scraps of petals, thorns, stems and buds, and carried them out to an empty garden plot. Under a shallow layer of sand and soil, he buried all that was left of Earth’s roses.

A heaviness settled in his core. All that beauty and symbolism. Gone. Yellow roses for friendship. White for weddings. Red for romance. He’d given his wife all those colors. In the Before.

Matthew worked hard on the remaining projects. He celebrated when the corn made tiny, but edible ears. He joined the others in a toast when the wheat seeds split open and sprouted. But his eyes kept straying to that empty plot where the rose remains were.

That’s why he was the first person to see the tiny jagged leaves poking through the soil.

Rilla stared at the large sign on the door of The Hog and The Dog.

“No Turn-Born Admitted.”

It had once been her favorite eatery. When the Beldars began paying her to do chores at their farm, she started coming in for a slice of sweetcheese pie. At 14, it made her feel rather mature to walk into town and buy herself a meal. But she’d visited less and less in the past months as the attitude of the new owners became clear. Her kind, those born on the turning of the seasons, weren’t welcome.

The Turn-Born possessed unusual abilities, powers that the Day-Born didn’t have and didn’t like. Rilla wasn’t sure if this divide between Turn-Born and Day-Born was getting worse, or if it had always been like this and she was just growing up and seeing it.

While she stood in the street scowling at the sign, a boy with white-blond hair walked by. She knew him from school but he was a couple of years younger. He put his hand next to his ear and wiggled his fingers, a rude gesture reserved for the Turn-Born.

Rilla’s cheeks flamed and a wave of heat rippled up from her skin. Her birthday fell on Autumn Turn, the day summer turned to autumn. Her ability was to create heat or cold. Not actual fire or ice like some Turn-Born, but an intense spike or drop in temperature.

The boy must have seen the fury on her face because he scurried away.

Heat rose from her, making the air around her undulate. She concentrated all that heat into the palm of her hand. She would pay for this later, with an exhaustion that wiped her out for hours. But for now, she focused on her hand and poured every flicker of heat into it.

She grasped the doorknob of The Hog and The Dog and held it tight. Ripples ascended from her hand, briefly visible, then gone, like elusive silver snakes. Beneath her fingers, the doorknob, the latch, the strike plate, all of it, melted together into an immovable mass.

Rilla pulled her hand away and smirked. The place only had one entrance. Until they got a metalworker out to work on it, NO ONE would be admitted to The Hog and The Dog.