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Risa Ward has come unstuck in time.
Risa has gone to sleep a crippled young nurse and awakened to the cold eyes of the Every-man. She has traveled through bridges made of unimportant ice and fallen into buildings where children go to die. She's revisited those bridges in her convoluted youth, only to find that the ice has melted and she stands again in her reflection. She has seen her death expanded tenfold, and knows nothing of her origins.
Supposedly.
Risa is spastic in time, has no control over where she is going next, and these trips aren't necessarily fun. The only place she will never leave is that stage whereupon her final judgment is wrought, telling a story by Chopin's hand to people who've never even heard of the man.
Ohio State Home 23 contained all manner of senseless youth, the day number 0038 was storked. It was a burgeoning shelter, then, so this new arrival was more than alright with its owners. Money was all that mattered.
The baby was shaped like a pistachio, her skin jaundiced from malnutrition and peeling away due to an early development of Eczema. She grew from her nut-shaped form into an alluring young woman, which, according to the counselor, led to several traumatizing events that turned her tough and cold. Within or without, she spent year after year training with the kindhearted and blissfully ignorant Mr. Durkin, learning the art of classical piano.
When Risa was six, she wandered away on a field trip. They were in a forest, just outside of Akron, and it was here she met her first coyote. He was the first creature she'd yet encountered who didn't want to hurt her. But the rest of her classmates were nowhere to be seen, and the sun had begun its descent in the frozen sky, so little Risa sat down by a very tall tree. The coyote stared at her. It was, according to legend, thinking:
"What is that tiny piece of flesh doing in my territory?"
She was insubstantial, so he had no interest in eating her. She was crying, so he felt a small tug of sympathy as he beheld her. Lastly, she was a child, and he'd sworn long ago to never hurt a child. Risa wasn't thinking anything, because it was here that she first came unstuck in time.
She finds herself in the basement of an antique shop, staring into the eyes of a towheaded stranger.
"Um," she says. "Sorry?"
"Spam?" he repeats, smirking. "You weren't here when..." he trails off, looking after the one called Connor. "Anyways. Hayden Upchurch. Of the... Ohio Upchurches."
Risa shakes his hand, but rejects the pink meat with a soft, almost inaudible "no, thank you."
"Come on," he needles. "You got another mouth to feed." Risa isn't imagining the way his gaze shifts down to her chest, subtle as it is, and he's back at her eye-level by the time she realizes.
It makes her angry, in the way a lot of things make her angry. Hayden can feel it, and he corrects himself nearly instantaneously, donning his trademark devil-may-care grin. "So," he begins, making sure to look Risa in the eyes, "you and AWOL. You two serious?"
Risa pauses. "Of course," she deadpans. "He's the love of my short life. I can't live without him. This is our child."
Hayden chuckles.
“Why?” asks Risa innocently. “You got a thing for him?”
“Too much baggage,” he snorts. “I mean. No. Obviously not. Ew. How dare ye.” Hayden shakes his head. “Besides, I was noticing your figure in a totally casual, non-sexual way, which is why I asked.”
Risa decides she likes Hayden. He might have what they in the business call “diarrhea of the mouth,” but he's clever enough for it to work on his behalf. Besides, trust is a hard thing to come by when one's crew is made up of spurned, hormonal teenagers.
“Who in the hell gave you a baby, then, if it ain’t the demonseed of Lassiter?”
“Well, he gave me the baby. I mean, I took the baby from him, but only because we were on the run and he was being a stupid…” she almost says ‘hero,’ but swaps it out for, “idiot, and grabbed this little bitch off some other bitch’s doorstep, at which point the other bitch was all ‘this your baby?’ and he was all ‘uh um well I’m too stupid to react oh Risa help me’ and we played hot potato with it all the way to Sonia’s.”
Hayden reaches out, opening and closing his hands to indicate his want to hold the child. Risa obliges, giving him a “drop it and you’re dead” stare. They communicate with their eyebrows for a little while, until Risa cracks a smile, and Hayden begins to speak.
“How in the name of fuck does someone send something like this off to die?” he asks, and Risa knows immediately that he isn't just talking about the baby. She senses his vulnerability, the facade fading alongside his impish grin. “Just… look at it.”
“I’m…” she begins softly, then realizes she has nothing to say.
“Pets are a lot cuter when they’re little, I guess,” he continues. He doesn't look up from the child's face, focusing in on some intangible point in his history, and that baby is his portal to the past. “Wonder what my parents are doing with my baby pictures.” He laughs mirthlessly. “Probably tearing them into itty-bitty motherfucking pieces. God knows that’s what they intended to do with me.”
“I never got baby pictures,” blurts Risa. She claps a hand over her own mouth, but it's too late. Hayden gapes at her. “I mean… my last name? Ward?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Hayden coughs. “That sucks in the not-good way.” He repeats that last sentence in baby talk for the child's benefit. Risa smiles all the more for it. “Ah, babies,” he concludes, “truly the backbone of any happy ending.”
Risa quirks a brow. “Babies?”
There were three other girls in Risa’s dormitory: Vera Lynn, Zelda Marie, and Natalie Winter. A fifth bed lay empty, where Aurora used to sleep, and none of the new inductees were old enough for that room. Risa tended to these little ones when she wasn't preoccupied with school, piano, or otherwise. They didn't yet know their enumerability. To them, the world was bright, and the hands that held them were soft, all they needed. One, two, three, and at four they began to ask questions Risa couldn't even begin to answer.
“Where did I come from?” asked one Grant Douglas, his brow furrowed, his pale hands grasping desperately at Risa’s ripped jeans.
Risa bit her lip. “You came from a mom,” she began carefully, voice a little too high for her liking, “and a dad.”
“Where are they?”
Risa didn't sugarcoat it. The only lie she told came at the end, and that was to spare his tender emotions. “They couldn’t take care of you, not anymore. So they brought you here. And here… here you’re wanted, you get it? You’re… you’re safe here.”
Grant looked unconvinced.
Risa knelt until she was eye level with him. Her lies made her sick, made her cringe. She'd been caring for this boy from the very moment the computer declared his name. Every convoluted, early onset maternal instinct, they kicked in as if he were her own son. “You’re safe with me,” she decided. “I have no idea where you came from. Not a clue. And I don’t know where I came from, either. But you’re here. And I’m here. And I’m going to take care of you as long as I can.”
It was the speech she’d always imagined a mother giving her. A faceless, nameless mother, one made of infinite beauty, some enigmatic giver of life. Mr. Durkin was the closest she’d get, she reckoned.
The boy wrapped his arms around her neck and pressed a sloppy, innocent kiss to her cheek. Then it was time for him to be placed in the young boys’ dormitory with other four-through-five year olds, where he would inevitably be subjected to emotional torment until he was able to defend himself. It made Risa cold inside, fearful, all the way until she let go of his hand. He brushed back a mop of jet black hair and smiled.
“Buh-bye,” he said.
“Goodbye,” she murmured, tousling his hair. “Little brother.”
Vera had an old spaghetti western running on their antique plasma screen when Risa got back. She was in her bed, painting her toenails, absentmindedly registering the action while reading Gravity’s Rainbow. It was a vivid picture: a girl, twisted, slouching, here and now and nowhere at once. She didn't acknowledge Risa’s arrival at first. Risa made no attempt to greet her.
“Zelda with you?” asked Vera, still transfixed with the vibrancy of her acral operation. Which is to say, staring intently at her neon-colored toenails, for those of you not fluent in the language of pretension.
Risa shook her head. “No.” With a sigh, she slumped on her bed, angled her gaze so as to witness Clint Eastwood’s final, deadly blow to a mongrel’s twisted head. She was tired, and everything was so incredibly screwed to hell that Risa barely registered the next event, one immortal sonata and five mistakes later:
“I’m being unwound?”
“I’m Vera Lynn,” said Vera Lynn, holding her long fingers out for the taking, and Risa took them, gently shook them, “like the singer.”
“I’m Risa Megan,” said Risa Megan. Like nobody, she thought, but smiled at the strange girl in front of her anyways. “We’re with those three, in room two-twenty-one.”
“Like Sherlock!” exclaimed Vera.
“Like, um, yeah,” mumbled Risa. “Like Sherlock.”
Vera had a thing for the vintage, and it showed. Her tattered clothes were adorned with handmade trinkets, obscure references to old world media, quotes from books nobody read anymore, pictures of actors who’d long since passed. Her hair was a mess of red curls, but the rest of her looked vaguely Arabic. She spoke with a very artificial British accent. Risa couldn’t decide how she felt about her.
In the corner of her eye, Risa noticed Aurora Rae staring at the wall. Risa knew, then, that she’d be in their humble abode for a week, maybe less, before shipping off to God-knows-where to give away her pieces to God-knows-who. Despite, perhaps because of their mangled friendship, she experienced a mixture of disgust and relief she’d only feel again when a certain boy received a certain arm.
“Zelda Marie,” said Zelda Marie, a short, smart mouthed girl with deep-set eyes and a crooked smile. “You’re Risa Megan.” With that, she turned to the last one to be introduced. “Natalie Winter. Our names are strange, don’t you think?”
“I guess,” replied Risa. “There’s really no thought process behind who gets called what.”
“Yes, but my name, roughly translated, means Happy Sadness. Yours means Smiling Pearl, which, yeah, doesn’t make a lick of sense, and Natalie here’s got a super Christian name. Guys, Natalie’s Jewish.”
“Um,” said Risa.
Zelda rolled her eyes. “Real stunning conversationalist we got here.”
“Shut up, Zelda,” snapped Natalie, who was, apparently, Jewish. She was the tallest of them all, blonde haired, blue eyed, with a supermodel look about her, if not for the scar that ran from the bottom of her lip to her collarbone. “Shall we?”
“Yeah,” said Aurora finally. “We shall.”
Risa began taking piano lessons when she was four years old. Her little feet floated nigh eleven inches from the floor, kicking slowly as she plinked a simple tune. Mr. Durkin beamed every time she got it right, and furrowed his brow every time she messed up. The older she got, the more tense his brow-furrowing became, until Risa realized that the path she’d chosen would be the only thing to save her in this ruthless monolith.
When she was only five years old, she was already making the instrument sing such ancient songs, sometimes bringing the sentimental Mr. Durkin to tears. He’d praise her, tousle her hair. She’d grin, and it was perfect in every regard, until the day she accidentally called him “dad.”
“Für Elise?” he requested. “You’ve been wonderful, Miss Risa.”
So she began Beethoven’s eternal bagatelle, white key, black key, white key, black key, A minor, and she took off, revising the deaf man’s love story to suit her own needs, at age eight it became the sorrowful theme to her glorified prison.
“I’ll see you next Tuesday,” said Mr. Durkin. “Practice til your fingers bleed!” He laughed raucously at it, though Risa didn’t find it all that funny.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said in passing, packing her books.
Then his demeanor changed. “What did you call me?” His eyes were stormy, his frown deep.
“I… what?” because Risa couldn’t remember calling him anything, she didn’t even begin calling him Mr. Durkin until she felt comfortable enough.
“I’m not your father,” he barked.
“I… I know you’re not, I’m sorry…”
“You don’t have a father.”
Risa froze. It wasn’t the first time an adult had reminded her that, yes, Risa was completely and utterly alone in the world, but it was the first time the flawless Mr. Durkin did.
“I know I don’t,” she said, and her voice sounded all wrong, it sounded weak. “That’s why I’m here.”
Mr. Durkin was extra careful around Risa from then on.
“I learned how to shoot from Brad,” said Natalie excitedly. She was bouncing on her heels, which made Risa profoundly worried considering the girl was brandishing a tranq gun. “He’s gonna be a boeuf, you know. Top of the class.”
Brad was Natalie’s boyfriend. She wasn’t wrong, not really. Parts of him did go on to serve their wonderful country. Parts of him cut Ritalin with coffee and wrote novels about anarchy. And one part, his spine, went to a boy made of everyone.
“And now I’m gonna show you,” grinned Natalie, placing a buzzing pistol in Risa’s hand. “Aim for the heart, that way he’ll be cooked like a Hanukkah yam.”
“Isn’t the point of a tranq gun to, you know, tranq him?” asked Risa, aiming anyways.
“Yeah, but it’s funner to imagine killing the bastard.”
“I fear you,” Risa remarked, pulling the trigger. “But you should be a boeuf, too. Get some estrogen up in that shit.”
Natalie cackled. “I like your style.”
The little one, finally asleep, mumbles and whimpers, just a puppy in the eyes of this dog-eat-dog world. When Risa finally drops off, she makes sure the baby’s safely tucked away. Connor joins her, warily watching her as she curls up. He looks like he’s going to explode, or cry, or kiss her.
Instead he asks, “are you okay?”
She glares at him before answering. “Yeah, I’m great. I’m a mother at fifteen, on the run from people who will literally tear me apart limb from limb, and my fake boyfriend sucks at being a boyfriend. Are you, dare I ask, okay?”
Connor blinks. “I’m awesome.”
“Awesome.”
At precisely three o'clock in the morning, just as Risa begins to snooze, Didi bursts into wailing sobs of infantile hunger. Her wrinkled face screws up as she forces her voice as loud as she can. Risa jumps up with a gasp, pulling Connor with her.
“Oh my god,” she whines. “You did this to me.”
“I… what?” asks Connor, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“You! You with your… baby-loving, post-traumatic, bus crashing… UGH!”
“Calm down!”
“DON’T TELL ME TO CALM DOWN!”
Connor swipes the baby from Risa’s shaking hands. “You’ll wake the others!” he hisses.
“LIKE THEY WEREN’T ALREADY UP!”
Risa traveled back in time, to when puberty had struck its first awkward chord, and Nurse Greta pulled her along the brightly lit halls by one bruised arm. She was eleven then, got in her first bad fight with a boy called Anton. Now Greta took her, rubbed a disgusting green petroleum substance on her tender skin, and led her to the nursery.
It was here that Risa Megan saw the most beautiful creature she thought she’d ever see. So sayeth the computer, his name would be Grant Douglas, but at the moment he was stamped 24601, in red. He wasn’t aware of this number, wasn’t aware of much of anything but the starched pillows the nurses presented him with, and the strange, squishy nutrients they fed him.
“What is it?” asked Risa, brown eyes wide in wonder.
“He,” corrected Greta, “is a newborn.” Greta was a small, severe woman, with tight auburn curls held up in a ponytail. Her eyes were a steely blue. She regarded every StaHo child impersonally, as if their broken minds were as contagious as their abundant germs. Except once.
“Would you like to hold him?” she asked gently.
Risa nodded, daring a smile in the sterile room. Greta nodded back, and carefully picked up the child, who squirmed until he noticed the girl.
“Hi,” she whispered, taking him. They looked at each other for a while. In a moment, she would fully comprehend the delicate matter of birth and death, in a moment far from then, stuck in a metal wheelchair, hurtling at impossible speeds down the highway, while a young man with a cleft lip begged her to save him.
But this time, she stared into the child’s eyes and felt a stirring of something profound. Just below her left atrium, her chordae tendinae rumbled mightily, which is informal medical speak for heartstrings getting pulled. She knows it now to be love.
“My name is Risa Megan,” she said.
24601 smiled.
“See this?” she indicated her black eye. “I got it from a boy. You’re not allowed to be like that. Don’t hit people, ever, unless they deserve it. I didn’t deserve it, but I got hit anyway.”
24601 looked about as solemn as a baby could be. Risa was pleased.
“You’re very small,” she continued, “like a little old man, all wrinkly like that. I hope they give you a good name. You know, it took the computer .01 seconds to name me? Yeah. Technology, man.”
24601 sneezed.
“Bless you. Did you know that the reason people say ‘bless you’ is cos in the old days, sneezing meant that you were trying to get the devil out? Except that’s only for, like, Christians and stuff. I saw a Bollywood movie once and they said that sneezes were because someone is thinking about you. So instead of ‘bless you,’ they said ‘someone’s thinking of you.’ And that was their way. I think. The movie could be wrong.”
Nurse Greta cleared her throat.
“Oh,” said Risa. “I guess I better put you back.”
The hallway stretched on and on as Greta accompanied Risa back to the dormitories. A question weighed on the young girl’s mind.
“Why’d you show him to me?” she blurted.
Nurse Greta looked annoyed. “You’re getting to the age where you’re going to be sorted into an occupation. You already have your craft. Now you need to master a field, a way of making a living. I’ve seen you with the other children, Ward. You’re a healer.”
“Explain the baby,” prompted Risa.
“A healer needs to deal with all sorts of people. It takes sensitivity, something you haven’t yet lost.”
“So you handed me a baby.”
“So I handed you the baby. You’re to take care of him, and the other infants, starting next week.”
One look into Greta’s eyes and she realized: “I don’t have a choice in this, do I?”
“Nope,” said Greta. With that, she left Risa to her thoughts.
"You ever read the Hunger Games?" asks Hayden, mouth full of spam.
Risa averts her eyes, frowning disgustedly. "Um, no, what's that about?"
"It's really disturbing," he says reverently. "They get these kids and put them in an arena where they have to fight each other to the death. How dystopian is that?"
"Pretty dystopian," agreed Risa, though she has no clue what the word means.
Babies, on the whole, don’t make endings all that happy. They’re loud, obnoxious, tiny, demanding prima donnas, who happen to excrete all manner of repulsive fluids and solids, regardless of if they’re wearing pants or not. This Risa found out her first day in the nursery, surrounded by the blood-curdling screams of children who desperately pine for the breasts of their mothers.
“Christ,” muttered Risa to herself, looking over the miles and miles of hospital bassinets. “The amount of storked children in this town...”
She had, at her hip, a newly christened Grant Douglas, suckling on her shoulder as she made for the milk. There were other people on shift, other children, but the nurses were little to no help, talking about how the youth are to inherit the earth, and laws, and such, and the children were as lost as she was.
One toddler, Myrcella Jade, had blackened her eye in the play area, and the bruise needed tending. Yet another baby, Steve Mitchell, a name far too mature, more likely to be tacked on to a middle-aged man than a kid who hadn’t even learned to crawl, had actually tipped over, and lay howling in a puddle of his own drool. It was a disaster, across the board.
“Are you assholes gonna actually do something?” she spat as she passed three children.
“What can we do?” whimpered a girl who couldn’t have been more than seven.
“I don’t even know why we’re here,” cried a little androgyne. Risa thought he looked like a fallen angel, the kind romanticized by films and art alike. “I’ve never actually held a baby, not a real one.”
Risa cruelly thrusted Steve Mitchell into the child’s arms. “Now you have.”
Falling in love with Connor is three parts desperation, one half circumstance, two thirds estrogen, and a dash of fate. In the Graveyard, they break up before they ever begin as a unit, and she starts to wonder about the concept of hero-worship. It’s concepts that have been keeping her going, see. Mortality, a corporeal fallacy, maintains Risa’s survival instinct. Hope, an intangible dream, forces her to treat every patient she finds, even if they’re beyond her help. Lastly, there’s a sort of blissful ignorance, a sleight-of-hand when it comes to this game she plays, and this holds her fast in the Graveyard, brings her to Connor’s arms.
Sometimes she thinks she sees other StaHo kids arrive. It’s horrible, considering everything that they’ve done to her. Traumas dealt that she never, ever wants to remember, but this communal feeling of fraternity has been indoctrinated into her systematically, turning the bitter terror of vulnerability into a want for acceptance, for familiarity. So she watches the Admiral’s list, watches the children come in, cold and fearful as the crates drop them off, precious wholly cargo. She keeps a careful eye on the Wards.
Connor doesn’t touch her without permission. They move together, skeins of skin concealing ruddy marrow and ivory, passionate and heartbroken. It’s not fast-paced, not overly dramatic. There are jokes, times to laugh, times to cry, and Risa’s not ready, and Connor won’t push, and it’s all a convoluted dance of naive faith in each other.
When the first riots occur, Risa runs to him. When she can’t find him, she runs back. She is alone.
They returned the tests to little Risa within the hour. On the paper, it said her number, and below that, another number, which reminded her that she was eleven years old. It also reminded her of who'd done what to her, what they'd found inside.
It was horrific. Risa's roommate, the compassionate and destined to be unwound Vera Lynn, found her on the floor, clutching her abdomen, screaming about the ending of a book Risa hadn't even read. She repeated the same phrase over and over again, "what's it mean?" until Vera was certain her head would explode. She then scooped her friend off the floor and promptly brought her to the counselor's office.
"What happened?" asked an alarmed Mr. Paulson.
Vera brandished the paper in front of his bespectacled face. He took it and skimmed it over, frowning slightly, before primly setting it on his desk.
"What's it mean?" asked Risa.
"That's rather unfortunate," said Mr. Paulson. "But it's to be expected, in this kind of environment, with that kind of girl."
It took a moment for Vera to register what the man's soothing voice was charging Risa with. Suddenly, it occurred to her. "So you're just gonna let her rot like this?" she fumed. "What the hell kind of counselor are you?"
Mr. Paulson shrugged. On his notepad, he scribbled: Vera Lynn Ward. It was the notepad he used to keep track of all the orphans set for unwinding.
"They kill kids so you don't have to," sang Risa, staring at the back of her skull.
"You can take her to Nurse Greta. Although, there's a new treatment that's just been approved. It can remove the patient's unwanted memories, if she'd like."
Vera wondered how much trouble she'd be in if she covered Mr. Paulson's desk in vomit. She hadn't seen the notepad. "I'll ask her," she said quietly.
"Good," said Mr. Paulson, beaming. "Take one of those pamphlets on your way out. They have some information I think would be very useful to our dear Miss Ward."
Vera spat on his nameplate. He barely flinched. She leaned way into his personal space, just ten years old, and hissed:
"We're. All. Miss. Ward."
AT THE REQUEST OF MISS VERA LYNN WARD, YOU ARE TO BE SUBJECTED TO A SERIES OF TREATMENTS AND TESTS TO REMOVE CERTAIN SPECIFIED MEMORIES FROM YOUR FRONTAL LOBE. YOU WILL BE CONSCIOUS DURING THE ENTIRETY OF THIS PROCEDURE, BUT WILL FEEL NO PAIN. PROCEED INTO THE CHAMBER NOW.
Risa finds herself in a hospital bed. The starched sheets are damp with sweat, and she's changed clothes. While she sees her feet, curled oddly and bare in front of her, she feels nothing there. It is as though they've been completely removed.
In her wrist is an I.V. The drip feeds her, keeps her neutralized. She can see daylight shimmering into the sparse room through a small window. A nurse comes by with a cup of jello, a peace offering. Her hair is pale blonde, tied up in a severe bun, and she can't be more than thirty. Risa takes the snack, a single neon color in a monochromatic world.
"How are you feeling today, Miss Ward?" asks the nurse, whose tag gives her name as Samantha.
"I'm not," replies Risa.
"You know," begins the nurse, but before she can continue, Risa stops her.
"I know. I refuse."
"We can replace your spine," insists Samantha. "It'd be for the best."
Risa shakes her head. "No. If you give me... just. No."
Samantha nods, smiling slightly. "It's grape." She indicates the jello. Risa wonders why they even give patients the translucent substance, seeing as they serve no actual nutritional value, and only manage to make her feel emptier. But, hey, at least it's grape!
"Thank you," says Risa softly.
"Your friend Elvis is awake," says Samantha as she leaves.
Risa is alone with a cup of grape ungulate by-product, surrounded by the color white. She looks into her spoon, an unvoiced question on the tip of her tongue.
"Who the hell is Elvis?"