Sela.
My name. My name is Sela.
IV.
“Sela. Your name is Sela.”
My grandmother’s words float over the wind and reach around me, comforting me in our language. I know my name.
She takes my face in her hands, those dark eyes with oceans of stars staring back at me, and my mind struggles to focus on her. We are outside, standing at the mouth of a dark cave in the homeland of our people, staring out at the shadow of Pimu Island in the setting sun. We have traveled far—that I can tell by the rising and setting of the sun three times. She’d gathered me into her arms, breaking the bonds that tied me down, and whispered over and over. “Your name is Sela.”
I had been speaking when she came in. “2231,” I was saying, over and over. The roll number they had given me when they stole me from my mother’s arms and brought me to that place. Where they took my blood, with the hope that they would one day find a cure for the disease that turned their own blood black and their skin into pustules and oozing death. “2231. 2231…”
I stand nearly as tall as my grandmother, maybe even taller, as I gaze into her eyes. I am weak from my captivity. She tells me they have held me for three years.
“How old am I?”
She doesn’t hesitate as she answers: Thirteen. She had been searching for me, and when she entered their facility, their compound, the war was nearly over. There was no one left to question her when she rode up to the lab in her black Army-issue Jeep Wrangler, dressed in black fatigues and a headband holding her braid back against her head. “Your name is Sela. You were named for me,” she says, speaking over and over, as if I can’t understand. “I’m Isabella. Your grandmother….”
She presses something into my hand. Something warm, soft to the touch, yet firm. Pliable. Grasses woven together in the shape of sticks crossed against one another, and bear grass woven between the spines. We are standing among the tall grasses, the breath of the ocean moving up the cliffs and through the swaying stalks. As she is speaking, my fingers begin to form a pattern in the strands, and I weave the strands through the spine into the beginning of a new basket.
Her words sing in my head as she tells me how she has searched for me all these three years, staying under the Army radar, posing as a doctor, pretending to search for a cure for this disease that my captors have let loose in the world. Blackpox, they call it. “It has killed them like it killed our ancestors, my own grandmother…and now our blood is our immunity. Our blood is what will survive this war.”
The sun drops down against the western sky, and all around me the sea foams and surges. In my dreams I stood at this very spot, against the caves in which our ancestors rode out the storms that tried to extinguish us before. I look into my grandmother’s eyes, and I can hear my father sing as she wraps me in her arms. The basket is in my hands, and tears form in my eyes as I see there are no holes, no crooked patterns in this thing I have created from the memories in my blood. Tears fall onto the pale grass and, like the kelp in the ocean, the grasses float upon the breath of our ancestors. I imagine I see Pahe Pahe’s tail glistening like the stars under the sea that surrounds us in this place that is now, always has been, and always will be our home.
Sela. My name is Sela. I am thirteen years old. I stand at the caves where my ancestors rode out the storm that once tried to take us down. It is here where we survived, and here where we will survive again.
FAKE PLASTIC TREES
by Caitlin R. Kiernan
“YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING,” MAX SAID. “YOU’RE STILL HAVING nightmares about the car. When you’re awake, it’s what you think about. I’m right, Cody, aren’t I?”
“Mostly,” I told him, and then neither of us said anything else for a while. We sat together and stared at the ugly red river. It was Max finally spoke up and broke the silence.
“Well, I was thinking,” he said, “maybe if you were to write it down. That might help, I was thinking.”
“It might not, too,” I replied. “I already saw Dr. Lehman twice. I did everything he said, and that didn’t help. How’s writing it down supposed to help?”
“Well, it might,” he said again. “You can’t know until you try. Maybe you could get the bad stuff you saw out of your head, like when you eat spoiled food and throwing up helps. See, that’s what I’m thinking.”
“Maybe you ought to think less, Max. Besides, where am I supposed to get anything to write it on?”
He promptly handed me the nub of a pencil and some paper he’d torn out of the
“Cody, we can always put the pages back when you’re done,” he said impatiently, like I should have thought of that already without him having to explain it to me. “Only, they’ll be better than before, because one side will have your story written on them.”
“Who’s gonna want to read my story?” I asked.
“Someone might. Someday, someone might. Anyway, that’s not the point. Writing it’s the point.”
Sitting there on the riverbank, listening to him, it began to make sense, but I didn’t tell him that, because I didn’t feel like letting him know I didn’t still think he was full of shit, and because I still don’t think I can do this. Just because it’s my story doesn’t mean I can put it into words like he wants.
“At least try,” he said. “Just you take a day or two and give it a go.” I told him I had too much to do in the greenhouses, what with the beans and corn coming on ripe, and he said he’d take my shifts and no one would even care because there’s so little work right now at pumps and filters in the hydroplant.
“Oh, and while you’re at it, put in how things went wrong with the world, so when things get better, people will know how it all happened.”
I said that was just dumb. Other people have already written it down, what went wrong. The smart people, the people who weren’t four years old on the first day of THE END OF THE WORLD.
I stared at the shiny encyclopedia pages in my hands. If they’d been ripped out of a real encyclopedia, words would already have been printed on both sides, but they were just copies got made right after THE EVENT. See, that’s how the olders always talk about it, and they say certain words and phrases like THE BEFORE and THE AFTER and THE EVENT and THE GOO as if they were being said all in capital letters. I stared at the pages, which were at least real paper, made from real wood pulp, and I told him if I do this I get more than a kiss. Max said sure, why not, so long as you’re honest, and he kissed me then and told me I was prettier than any of the other girls in Sanctuary (which is bullshit), and then he left me alone at the edge of the river. Which is where I’m sitting now. Sitting, writing, stopping to toss a rock that’s still a rock into the sludgy crimson river that isn’t still a river because most of the water went FACSIMILE twelve years ago.
The river moves by about as slowly as I’m writing this down, and I count all the way up to fifty-three before the rock (real rock) actually sinks out of sight into the not-water anymore. At least the river still moves. Lots of them went too solid. I’ve seen rivers that stopped moving almost right after THE EVENT. These days, they just sit there. Red and hard. Not moving, and I’ve even walked on a couple. Some people call them Jesus Streams. Anyway, I walked all the way across a broad Jesus Stream on a dare. But it wasn’t much of a dare since I got a good dose of SWITCH OFF in me right away, back when I was four.
Okay. Fine, Max. So I’m
