In Memoriam

Fiction by Caitriana NicNealcail

This story appears in SUM FLUX, V.4: “Fragmentation,” a curated collection of boundary-pushing original fiction. Read the full lineup here.

Artwork by wildflower

I

In the white-and-blue church between the half-white trees, you stand. You open your mouth, a little embarrassed by that troubling molar, but the priest doesn’t mind or see, and neither does the blood and body that slips wet-soft from the spoon past teeth and tongue and down the slither-slide of your gullet. You smell garlic, your own breath’s or the priest’s or both, and the heaviness of incense.

Out in the green spring air, birch trees whispering of summer, you pull your collar high, scratching your stubble, eyes side to side. It wouldn’t do for any of the comrades to see you here.

Off the bus, you slink up the concrete stairs and into the warm steam. She’s slicing onions and potatoes by the sink but turns to smile at you, sunlight igniting golden curls. It’s early still, the day stretching out like a field of grain. A walk in the park. A picnic by the river. Your boy runs in, you spin his body in the swarming air. Low mass, velocity high as you can handle, he’s feeling that momentum like a centrifuge. Night shift this week. Treasure these daylight hours you have with them.

II

A long week, thank God it’s nearly over, but don’t let the old man hear you talking like that. The control room smells of sweat and stale tobacco smoke. There’s been some screw-up with some test, the evening shift comrades are clocking off complaining. It’s going to be your job now. Hell. There’s always something. That’s just the way things are.

You sit and light a cigarette. You draw deep: a spark of will, whatever that is, and current flows, a command crosses synapses, navigates neurons, long muscle fibres like sails and ropes respond, your lungs expand, fluid dynamics does the rest. High pressure to low, smoke and nicotine begin to flow. Take it easy, it’s going to be a long night.

Drink some tea. Get up to take a leak. Stretch and crack your neck, feel the vertebrae roll like beads on a rope. Probe that molar with your tongue, that strong wet muscle testing for wiggle. A uniform force applied to a body at rest, see if it accelerates.

Oh-one-twenty-three-oh-four. Turn off steam to the turbines. This should have been over by now. High-mass metal velocity slackening, turbine momentum winding down.

In the water, a bubble of vapour, a void. Then another, another, another, unseen and unavoided. Heat and more heat, growing with nowhere to go, unevacuated, exponential.

Oh-one-twenty-three-forty. SCRAM!

III

The moon is waning gibbous, quicksilvering the birch trees and the river where last Sunday you sat and ate dumplings and played with your boy. The trees shiver, leaves splaying in the night. One thunderclap, then another. Above the plant, steam plumes and then a beam of light, blue like souls of men and women, shines out of the fire: the light of atoms skinned.

Your boy, sound asleep, hears nothing. In your bed, your wife turns over and dreams uneasy dreams.

IV

You stagger home at dawn. You’re prickling all over, needles and pins and razors stabbing through the dust that silts your pores and coats the thin hairs on your arms and the thick hairs in your nose.

There’s been an accident, you tell her. She makes you tea. It tastes like metal. She tastes metal too, she says. You run to the bathroom and puke until the boy wakes up and comes to see if you’re alright.

In the sedges at the river’s edge, a coot’s egg cracks. The chick pushes into the rustling air, unsure. A fragment of pale shell tumbles from the nest.

V

Your skin is peeling, dead cells sloughing into the seams of your shirt and the seats of the bus carrying you and her and the boy away from the city. You hold his hand tight. He looks out the dirty window and watches the clouds blowing westward, high and massy.

VI

What is mass, after all? What is matter? The void is here, at the heart. Schrödinger saw part of it. Einstein saw a bit. Lise Meitner saw how it could split.

The void is here. The clouds of unknowing are here. Plural, countable, can’t-put-your-fingerable. Ninety-two plus one-hundred-and-forty-three equals two-hundred-and-thirty-five. I see U.

One more to the party of probabilities. A fission expedition. For an instant, the twinkling of an eye, U become two-hundred-and-thirty-six. What happens then, to all those nucleons? Those nebulae of forces in the dark? U break.

The clouds part ways. Mass becomes energy. Heat. A triumvirate of neutrons flee the wreck. U rain, one might say. Or: U ran, I um. What’s next?

I see U. U break.

VII

this is my body, broken for you

VIII

Once upon a time there was a star. It died, and in its dying spewed its stuff through space. The stuff was born again and died again, gravitation to fusion to explosion. Critical mass.

Forces foxtrot, strip-the-willow, strong and weak and electromagnetic. In a cloud of unknowing, the stuff becomes life. Somehow the clouds, sixes and sixes and eights and eights and ones, weave hardness, softness, wetness. Somehow cells weave nuclei and walls and ribosomes, they replicate, renovate, relegate, renew, review, and somehow bodies grow.

One, two, skip a few, here are you! A dark-haired little girl picking daffodils bright and yellow in April 1986, in those knee-high white socks that leave a pattern on your skin and itch when the elastic is just a little too tight.

IX

Six years old, your cells have cycled almost a full ship of Theseus. Not the oocytes, of course. Their million’s been nestled, snug as an ovarian bug since sometime in 1980. But around them burn the fires of mitosis and apoptosis. Fission, fragment, fission, fragment. This is how the wheels go round, this is how the ship stays steady on her course.

The wind blows from the east that spring. That cumulonimbus crossing seas, its vapour nucleating, fusing, falling hissing pissing in a million stinging drops on hills and fields. Does it undo the ship? Does it trace unplanned-for isotopes into grass and sheep? Do we suck them in with the flavoursome fat of a fried lamb chop, torn from the bone with small sharp six-year-old teeth and swallowed with tomato ketchup oh so red?

Nobody knows. In the cloud of unknowing, nobody sees how many times in the next fourteen years the double helix unzipped, zipped, unzipped, zipped, oops, missed a bit.

X

A new millennium, fresh as a baby. There’s an egg, speckled and broken, at the edge of the pond in the park, near the birch trees inside the railings. Shards of shell in tiny non-Euclidean triangles lie scattered in the mud. A mother coot is leading her long-toed children through the grey water and you pray the egg was one of them and not some other bird’s disaster.

A different egg became your boy. Before the cells in which it nested started multiplying too fast, one in that million grew, matured, unmoored, and carrying its chromosomal cargo met — the Y, unzipped. That two four eight tango budded and branched until he broke forth from your bloody flesh and wailed. He’s blossoming now, blond hair feathering in the breeze, laughing at the pigeons that strut and stump all iridescent and toeless in the park, all puffed up while they woo their XX, no I ain’t got my toes no more but ain’t nothing wrong with my XY sauce so how about it baby, lay some eggs together, look at me? Look at me?

You laugh at the birds with your boy, holding his hand, and you think about your ex, cos he’s gonna have to take care of your baby when you’re gone, and you don’t know if he really can, and under all of it you’re asking why.

XI

You squeeze your baby’s hand a little tighter, thinking, how much of me will he remember? What scraps and crumbs of photo-album memory will remain?

You know inside the cells are spread like head-blown dandelion seed. The drugs nibble on the edges, but those cells don’t die, not while you still live. One two four eight, how do we proliferate? Undying ain’t supposed to be like that.

You crouch in front of the railings with your boy while your mother takes a photo. The birch trees behind the pond frame you in silver-grey and green. Another child throws a slice of Mother’s Pride at the dirty water. The ducks triumph, the trees tessellate, you watch the ripples undulate and interfere until they hit the irises and muddy sedge.

It’s not going to be long now.

XII

What you don’t realise is how dark it is. You’d think the consumption of all that energy, all those cells with their data-crammed nuclei, dying and undying, all those dripping lipids, those subcutaneous fats, oils sequestered in the sebaceous glands, marrow of bone and meat of muscle, that all of that released would burn with a soft blue flame like the gases rendered from those ancient animals crushed under rock and sea; like a lantern fuelled by the cetaceous sperm of Ahab’s revenge; like fruiting bodies of luminous fungi in undergrowth at night, hyphae hidden away but spores ready to burst into the world; like warm phosphorescence on some far shore; like the slops and scraps from a primary-coloured primetime nuclear power plant. But conservation of that energy doesn’t turn to light. That energy goes chemical to chemical, builds the bodies of a trillion microbes, fuels their exertions, exterminations, extinctions. Entropy expands. Cells slumber, slump, seep.

And so it’s dark in there, beneath varnished wood and beetled earth and patchy grass re-rooting, re-routing. After more time than you’d think, the bones sag and untie. Humerus parts from radius from ulna, femur from tibia, vertebrae sit freed and lonely. All but the teeth. The jaws grip them even in death, mercury-filled molars and undressed incisors all in a naked grinning row.

The stink is gone now. And the sting?

XIII

Your boy is a man now. He helps his grandad with the sheep. He shaves dark stubble from his face and wears a smart blue shirt to work. At weekends he plays rugby. Forces meet bodies at rest or in motion, high mass, velocity high as they can handle, bodies crashing, sometimes (not too often) breaking. You’d be proud of him.

In the grey-harled hard-pewed church on the hill, when the walls finish absorbing the vibrations of the psalm, the minister tears a slice of supermarket white. Do this in remembrance of me. The crumbs part soft and soundless, like old flesh. We eat. He lifts a silver cup of tawny port. We drink.

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Visual by

wildflower