“It’s a secret magazine.”

Iro’s eyes widened for emphasis, and he looked left and right in the weedy backyard like he wanted to make sure no one could hear the three of them.

“There’s symbols on the last page, and if you read them out loud at midnight—but you gotta be alone, and it’s gotta be exactly midnight, not like, ten-thirty.” He scowled at Sandy, like she was some kid who didn’t know what midnight meant. “Then if you read them right, the aliens come!” Iro threw his hands up, “And they give you secret powers!”

Sandy covered her mouth with her hands. Her loose tooth moved; any day now it’d fall out, and Momma would panic again, even though everyone said losing baby teeth was normal.

“But you gotta really believe in them,” said Cait, her conspiratorial hush barely louder than the rustling shrubbery. “Or else when they come, they put you in the hospital.”

Iro nodded. “This kid Joey from school read the symbols five times. He’s been in the hospital three times…”

Sandy was rapt: “And the other two?”

“Who knows?”

“Whoa.”

She loved staying at her cousins’ house. Iro and Cait were already ten, and they knew all the cool stuff.

They remembered Sandy’s Papa, too, better than she did. She’d been just three when he vanished, and all she remembered was standing by his knee watching the night sky. Iro and Cait had known him better, and they told Sandy about him.

They said Papa loved stories about aliens and stars, so Sandy loved those stories, too.

“You think Papa read the special symbols? Maybe the aliens put him in the hospital!”

Momma said Papa was in the hospital ‘cause he didn’t know when to stop, but Sandy never knew what he was supposed to stop. Maybe he’d read the secret magazine too many times.

“You think that’s why Papa had to go away?”

Iro scratched his chin, sharing an uncertain look with Cait. “Eh…”

“You’re not really supposed to tell anyone when you read it,” said Cait. “It’s a secret.”

“Hush-hush,” Iro agreed, and their twin mops of brown hair bobbed in unison against Aunt Delly’s myrtle bush. Sandy relished in the excitement of their wonderful shared secret.

“I want to read the magazine!” She jumped to her feet. “Where do we buy it?”

But the twins looked mournful.

“We can’t buy the magazine,” said Cait, with a big sigh.

“They only sell it up in the city,” Iro put in. “And only if you got lots of money.”

“And you gotta know a secret code, or the seller won’t give it to you.”

Sandy wilted. “We can’t get the magazine?” What was the point of knowing about it if she couldn’t read the alien symbols and get powers?

“But we know where there’s a copy,” said Iro, and he lowered his voice as Cait looked cautiously around the yard again.

“Mikos keeps it under his mattress.”

They gather at his backyard every night. They sniff the pine-infused air, dark noses glistening with moisture, and orange-furred ears pasted to their skulls. Ivan watches through the patched screen door, the fine net stitching shallow indentations across his forehead.

The foxes are four in total: a vixen and her cubs. They prowl the swath of scraggly grass that connects his property to the outskirts of the forest. The cubs don’t seem interested in him. They chase, tackle, and nip each other, orange-black-white balls of yarn, tumbling. The vixen’s movements are slower, more deliberate. She doesn’t go near his cabin, only watches him as he stares back through the mesh screen, in his robe and slippers and skin coming apart at the seams.

Plum dusk gives way to muddy night, and the cubs yap and run back into the underbrush. The vixen lingers awhile.

She looks familiar. Painfully human. And he can’t tear his eyes away from her.

Theirs is a small village. On the rare occasion Ivan cycles to the shops for supplies, he hears people talk even when he doesn’t want to listen. The story goes like this: murderer; imbecile; hermit.

The rest he’s pieced together with the doctors’ help, but mostly on his own. He has all these photographs in an old biscuit tin. Baby photos and school photos and church choir photos. Then there’s Vera in a white sundress. Vera in a pearly wedding gown. Vera under a white morgue sheet. This last photo, shown to him while he was still in the hospital, isn’t actually in his possession—not outside his nightmares, at least.

What he knows but doesn’t remember: He was driving to the city on ice-slick mountain roads with his wife and kids when something darted in front of his car. Despite trying to swerve, he hit the creature and lost control of the vehicle. Fur and guts stuck to the grill of his car, which is how they could tell afterward that it was a red fox.

What he knows for certain, without rhyme or reason: The foxes in his backyard are Vera and the kids.

Now, he may have huge chunks of memories missing and little metal screws embedded in his skull, he may not remember how to tie his shoelaces so he only wears holey house slippers, but he hasn’t lost it—not yet and not completely. It’s not that his wife is a vixen, the three cubs their triplets. But maybe his family’s souls are trapped inside the foxes’ bodies. Maybe this is Vera’s reincarnation, there to torture him the way the Furies would torture murderers and breakers of oaths (to have and to hold and most emphatically to not kill in the mountains until death do us part).

At night, he hears them scratching and screaming by the vegetable patch outside his window. He lies awake in bed and counts the knots in the wood-paneled ceiling. Over and over again, he whispers, “I’m sorry I don’t remember you. I’m sorry I can’t feel sorry for what I did.”

[1]

“I saw myself, running beside a cornfield, just after sunset.”

“Say that again, Mr. Flax?”

“I saw myself, running beside a cornfield. After sunset.”

“Yourself.”

“Yeah. But I was on my bike.”

“What did you—” the cop, who’s been asking questions through his boot-brush mustache groomed, or not, to hide the crooked buckteeth his slick cop benefits should’ve fixed by now, looks at his partner and flares his nostrils. “What did you do?”

“I foot-braked hard, swerved onto the gravel, called out.”

“And?” says Bootbrush. The other cop has been drawing what Pete can only guess are dicks in his notebook, bored as hell, saying nothing so they can get out of this shack, trying instead to make Bootbrush laugh. Pete watches him tilt the notebook over his paunch, ever so slightly toward Bootbrush, who strives valiantly not to look.

“He didn’t stop. I got back on my bike and came here, called you.”

Bootbrush, who had introduced himself as some dipshit cop name like Officer Sanderson or Anderson, makes a show of clearing his throat. Pete wonders if he ever chokes on one of his pubey mustache hairs. He raises his notebook, pretends to read from it. “So let’s get this straight. You were biking after sunset. You saw someone running in the ditch between the road and the cornfield. That person looked exactly like you in every respect. You stopped and called out. He didn’t stop.”

“Yep.”

“After sunset?”

“Yep.” Pete lolls his head back and sighs like an airbrake, but Bootbrush trucks on.

“What was the other guy wearing?”

“Jeans, white t-shirt, Kaepernicks—no, I don’t know, but nice shoes, real nice.”

“You sure you got a good look at his face?”

“Yep.”

“And he was running?”

“Yep.”

“After sunset?”

Pete opens his mouth to blurt some smartass joke about the definition of insanity—

“Mr. Flax, I think what Officer Blanderson”—Blanderson, dammit, thinks Pete, should’ve known—“is getting at is that it’s hard enough recognising someone in the day, let alone at night. And this guy was running.” The Dick Artist pauses, tilts his head to look curious, uncreases three neck-rolls in the process. “Have you ever consumed illegal substances?”

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

The Dick Artist rolls his eyes theatrically. This guy gets all his preteen-girl emotes from Andy, Mandy, Brandy, & Brad. “Just doing our jobs, Mr. Flax.”

Bootbrush—Blanderson—looks knowingly down at Pete’s pants, black tights with neon green pot leaves all over them, draws his lips into a messy line, nods I-told-you-so-y.

“Okay, first of all, no. Second of all,” Pete looks squarely at Blanderson, “your idiot government is still grandfathering out all the pot plants.” The second Harper government—led by the monomaniacal Harper, now using a wheelchair and a vat of stem-cell cream after a salvo of strokes, propelled by some unquenchable thirst for his since-won title of Canada’s longest-serving prime minister (23 years, 7 months)—had re-criminalised marijuana, after it had been legalised for nearly a full dozen years, in the first of Trudeau’s three lazy terms, and was now struggling to make good on that. “So this,” he pinches his tights and snaps them back to his leg, “wouldn’t be illegal if it was pot, which it isn’t. It’s fucking pants.”

A mischievous, no, a dangerous light glints in the Dick Artist’s beady eyes. “Don’t you fucking swear at us, Peterson. We’re here because you called us here, and you’re clearly fucking around. If we wanted to, we’d haul you in for one of the hundred other laws you’re breaking.”

Pete fumes, but sits rigidly still. Blanderson looks a little uneasy, keeps checking his oversized reinforced-poly watch.

“Whoever you saw, it wasn’t you. It’s not a clone. We don’t live in the fucking Black Mirror.” The Dick Artist, groundlessly proud of his thirty-year-old pop-culture reference, gathers his baggy legs under him and teeters off the low couch. “Don’t call us again, unless it’s serious,” he wheezes, clutching at the thin rail beside the door to catch his breath. “And stay away from the elections signs.” He turns to go, and Blanderson hops up and follows him out.

by Andy K. Tytler, Features Desk
19 Esinat 7.00 RST

When veteran volitite miners Irro Tonhamgra and Ephrea Burold heard the shouting in the corridor, they assumed it was just the latest in the near-daily scuffles of that endlessly rainy winter. But then came the order from on high: lock it down.

‘We started the lockdown procedures, just going through the motions, you know, following orders,’ Tonhamgra says. ‘Didn’t realise anything was squint.’

We are sitting in Tonhamgra’s frontroom, a small but cosy space with a large picture window letting in the afternoon sun, and providing a view of the quiet street on the northeast side of Ofsoli, where Tonhamgra has lived since first starting as a packer at Undipetra Stand. Now Ofsoli is known for its trendy shops, quaint and affordable single-family detached homes, and excellent view of the stand, but back then it was just a place for the workers to live.

Burold sits on the sofa beside me, working his way through his third cherry biscuit. He lives a block away, also at the same address he was assigned when he first got the job in the laundry room on Rig 12. Each day they alternate hosting each other for lunch, then take a walk along the shore to watch the sun set over Undipetra. Both assert the daily walks and homemade meals are the secret to their longevity. He will be ninety-five this year, Tonhamgra ninety-six. Although Burold adds wryly that it might be all the cherry biscuits.

‘It wasn’t the first time we’d gone into lockdown, not by a long shot,’ Tonhamgra continues. ‘Not even the first time that winter. Everyone was on edge, what with all that sour-rain. It was the fifth week of it, and five weeks inside doesn’t suit anyone, let alone the Aviai.’

‘The whole place thrummed with it,’ Burold tells me. ‘Tempers flaring at the smallest thing, little scuffles and things breaking out a dozen times a day, accidents, sinks, mini-collapses through the roof.’

Tonhamgra nods. ‘The walls felt like they were closing in on us. There was nowhere for a moment alone, and all the time the rain, no sun, and the knowledge that you’re trapped. The whole rig was wrapped round by this crated sense of anxiety.’

She sighs and falls silent. Burold leans back wearing a pensive expression, his brow furrowed. Surrounding them on the walls of Tonhamgra’s front-room are old revolutionary posters and framed newspaper articles, including that now-iconic image of Tonhamgra at the march on the capital two months after the riot, hands up, arms trying to shield her face from the Civic Guard’s acid spray. The scarring on her left cheek, neck, and hands is gone now, long since replaced by skin grafts. Not so on her arms. She tells me when she catches me staring that she chose not to remove it. After all, she points out with a tone hovering between humour and reproach, she earned those scars, and she has nothing to hide.

After a lengthening period of silence, I prompt Tonhamgra to continue, but it’s Burold who picks up the story.

‘I was just about to put in my key so Irro could start the lockdown when we heard the cry for help, to wait, to keep the door open,’ Burold says. He’s still leaning back, his hands clasped together, and speaking without looking at me. The cherry biscuits are forgotten now. ‘We just sort of looked at each other, like “What now?” We both knew the official procedure is hermetic seals on all doors, no exceptions, but we’d also never been in a lockdown where there’s someone in the corridor begging not to leave them to die.’

Enter Tweil*, the Avia on the other side of the door.