Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Ten thousand years ago, when our volcano should of blown up, people invented farming and started living in cities. Then, instead of just having little skirmishes between roving bands of hunter-gatherers, they geared up for real wars. All the wars in the Bible started, and the wars never stopped, right up until where we are now. All the wars that never would of happened if human brains weren’t so violent and angry.

• • • •

I cuddle Carrie, who don’t cry as long as Sophie does. Carrie, my baby, one of the oldest fetuses affected by whatever stuff the volcano threw into her fetus brain. Most of the others aren’t even in school yet. Kids don’t get studied much until they’re in school.

But two days ago I was talking on my work break with Lisa Hanreddy. She told me she went to a pre-school parent-teacher conference for her son Brandon. Lisa said he’s doing good except in counting, but his teacher also praised him for being nice. “She said he’s the only boy in the class that doesn’t take toys away from other kids or hit them,” Lisa told me, “and my heart sank. He’s gonna be picked on all through school.”

Yes. But it isn’t the bullies that Lisa should worry about. That I should worry about, for Carrie. You can find the bad guys and stop them—some of the time anyway.

I think about a whole generation like Carrie, growing up all around the world. Whether aliens are trying to shape humans and screwing up the timing, or God is doing it and making a piss-poor job, or all the theories are just so many crocks of shit—whatever,

something

is happening here. These kids will grow up alongside the rest of us, the people like Sophie and me, and we’re going to be more of a danger than the bullies. We, the good people who just get frustrated and take it out, like we all do, on whoever’s closest and will stand for it—on the Carries and Kezias and DeShauns, the butts of that careless kind of cruelty, who don’t ever fight back because the impulse to fight just isn’t in them.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Sophie sobs. And she is.

For now.

I clutch Carrie closer. What’s going to happen to her and the kids like her?

And what will they turn the rest of us into?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-two books, including twenty-five novels, four collections of short stories, and three books about writing. Her work has won two Hugos (“Beggars in Spain” and “The Erdmann Nexus”), four Nebulas (all for short fiction), a Sturgeon (“The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and a John W. Campbell Memorial award (for Probability Space). The novels include science fiction, fantasy, and thrillers; many concern genetic engineering. Her most recent work is the Nebula-winning and Hugo-nominated

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall

(Tachyon, 2012), a long novella of eco-disaster, time travel, and human resiliency. Forthcoming is another short novel from Tachyon,

Yesterday’s Kin

(Fall 2014). Intermittently, Nancy teaches writing workshops at various venues around the country, including Clarion and Taos Toolbox (yearly, with Walter Jon Williams). A few years ago she taught at the University of Leipzig as the visiting Picador professor. She is currently working on a long, as-yet-untitled SF novel. Nancy lives in Seattle with her husband, writer Jack Skillingstead, and Cosette, the world’s most spoiled toy poodle.

Seanan McGuire – SPORES

June 2028

Something in the lab smelled like nectarine jam. I looked up from the industrial autoclave, frowning as I sniffed the air. Unusual smells aren’t a good thing when you work in a high-security bio lab. No matter how pleasant the odor may seem, it indicates a deviance from the norm, and deviance is what gets people killed.

I straightened. “Hello?”

“Sorry, Megan.” The round, smiling face of one of my co-workers—Henry, from the Eden Project—poked around the wall separating the autoclave area from the rest of the lab. His hand followed, holding a paper plate groaning under the weight of a large wedge of, yes, nectarine pie. “We were just enjoying some of Johnny’s harvest.”

I eyed the pie dubiously. Eating food that we had engineered always struck me as vaguely unhygienic. “Johnny baked that?”

“Johnny baked it, and Johnny grew it,” Henry said, beaming. “The first orchard seeded with our Eden test subjects has been bearing good fruit. You want a slice?”

“I’ll pass,” I said. Realizing that I was standing on the border of outright rudeness, I plastered a smile across my face and added, “Rachel’s planning something big for tonight’s dinner. She told me to bring my appetite.”

Henry nodded, his own smile fading. It was clear he didn’t believe my excuse. It was just as clear that he would let me have it. “Well, we’re sorry if our festivities disturbed you.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I gestured to the autoclave. “I need to unpack this before I head out.”

“Sure, Megan,” he said. “Have a nice evening, okay?” He withdrew, vanishing around the cubicle wall and leaving me comfortably alone. I let out a slow breath, trying to recover the sense of serenity I’d had before strange smells and coworkers disrupted my task. It wasn’t easy, but I’d had plenty of practice at finding my center. Less than thirty seconds later, I was unpacking hot, sterile glassware and getting my side of the lab ready for the challenges of tomorrow.

Project Eden was a side venture of the biotech firm where I, Henry, and several hundred others were employed. Only twenty-three scientists, technicians, and managers were appended to the project, including me, the internal safety monitor. It was my job to make sure the big brains didn’t destroy the world in their rush toward a hardier, easier to grow peach, or an apple that didn’t rot quite so quickly after it had been picked. On an official level, I was testing the air and lab surfaces for a committee-mandated parts per million of potential contaminants. On an unofficial level, I spent a lot of time sterilizing glassware, wiping down surfaces, and ordering new gloves, goggles, and lab coats.

It was work that could have been done by someone with half my education and a quarter of my training, but the pay was good, and it gave me an outlet for the compulsions that had kept me out of field biology. Besides, the hours were great. I didn’t mind being a glorified monkey if it meant I got to work in a good, clean lab, doing work that would genuinely better the world while still allowing me to quit by four on Fridays.

The team was still celebrating and eating pie when I finished putting the glassware away and left for the locker room. I hadn’t been kidding about Rachel telling me to save my appetite. It had been a long day, and I wanted nothing more than to spend an even longer night with my wife and daughter.

• • • •

Rachel was in her studio when I got home. She had a gallery show coming up, and was hard at work on the pastels and impressionistic still lifes that were her bread and butter. I knocked on the wall to let her know I was there and kept walking toward the kitchen. It was her night to cook—that part was true—but that didn’t mean I couldn’t have a little snack before dinner. The Farmer’s Market was held on Tuesday afternoons. I had worked late Tuesday night, but I knew Rachel and Nikki had gone shopping, and Rachel had the best eye for produce. Whatever she’d brought home would be delicious.

The fruit bowl was in its customary place on the counter. I turned toward it, and froze. A thick layer of grayish fuzz covered its contents, turning them from a classicist’s ideal still life into something out of a horror movie. “Rachel!” I shouted, not moving. It was like the information my brain had was too jarring to fully process. It would take time for all of me to get the message. “There’s something wrong with the fruit!”

“You don’t have to shout, I’m right here.” My wife stomped into the kitchen, wiping her hands on the dishtowel she’d been using to clean her paintbrushes between watercolor overlays. She had a smudge of bright pink dust on one cheek, making her look like a little girl who’d been experimenting with her mother’s cosmetics. I fell in love with her all over again when I saw that perfect imperfection.

That was the best thing about being married to my best friend, as I’d been telling people for the past fifteen years: I got to fall in love with her every day, and no one ever thought I was being weird. Sometimes normalcy is the most precious gift of all.

I didn’t get the chance to tell Rachel about the fruit. Her eyes followed my position to its logical trajectory. It was almost a relief when she recoiled the same way I had, her upper lip curling upward in atavistic disgust. “What did you do?” She turned toward me, scowling. “This was all fresh when we brought it home yesterday.”

I blinked at her. “What do you mean, what did I do?” I asked, feeling obscurely offended. “I can’t make fruit go off just by looking at it.”

“Well, then, did you bring something home from the lab?” She stabbed her finger at the gray-washed contents of the bowl. “This isn’t right. I examined this fruit myself. There was nothing wrong with it.”

“You got this from the farmer’s market, right?” She was right about the age of the fruit: I remembered her bringing it home and dumping it into the bowl, and it had looked fine then. I’d even been thinking about how nice those peaches would taste with some sharp cheddar cheese and a bottle of artisanal hard cider. I wouldn’t have done that for moldy fruit. I wouldn’t have made it to the office without sterilizing the entire room.

Rachel frowned. “Yes, we did.”

“There you go.” I picked up the whole bowl, holding it gingerly to avoid any contact with the gray scum, and walked it over to the trash can. The decay had progressed far enough that the bowl’s contents made an unpleasant squishing noise when I dumped them out. I wrinkled my nose and put it in the sink, resisting the urge to toss it into the trash with the fruit instead. “Something went bad and set off a chain reaction.”

Rachel wasn’t listening. She wrinkled her nose at the place where the bowl had been sitting, and before I could say anything, she ran her finger through the circle of gray fluff marking its footprint. “This crap is on the table, too. We’re going to need disinfectant.”

“I’ll disinfect the table,” I said, swallowing a jolt of panic. “Go wash your hands.”

Rachel frowned. “Honey, are you having an attack?”

“No.” Yes. “But this stuff reduced a bowl of fruit to sludge in less than eighteen hours. That doesn’t make me feel good about you getting it on your hands.” I glared at the gray circle. Rachel’s finger had cut a clean line through it, showing the tile beneath. “Please. For my sake.”

“Megan, you’re scaring me.”

“Good. Then you’ll use extra soap.”

“You’re such a worrywart,” she said, a note of affectionate exasperation in her voice. She kissed my cheek and was gone, flouncing back into the hall, leaving me alone with the faint scent of rotten fruit.

I looked at the circle for a moment longer, and then turned to the sink. I was going to need a lot of hot water.

• • • •

Fungus is the great equalizer.

We give bacteria a lot of credit, and to be fair, life as we know it

does

depend on the tiny building blocks of bacteria. They allow us to digest food, recover from infections, and eventually begin the process of decaying back into the environment. But the truly heavy lifting of the decaying process comes from fungus. Fungus belongs to its own kingdom, separate from animals and vegetables, all around us and yet virtually ignored, because it’s not as flashy or exciting as a cat, dog, or Venus flytrap.

There are proteins in mushrooms that are almost identical to the ones found in mammalian flesh. That means that every vegetarian who eats mushrooms instead of meat is coming closer than they would ever dream to their bloody hunter’s roots. With so many things we’ve cataloged but don’t understand, how many things are there that we don’t know yet? How many mysteries does the kingdom of the fungus hold?

Rachel—after washing her hands to my satisfaction—had gone to pick up our daughter from cheerleading practice. Nikki was in the middle of one of her “dealing with either one of my mothers is embarrassing enough, I cannot handle them both” phases, which would normally have aggravated me. Tonight, I took it as a blessing. Having them both out of the house made it easier for me to go through the kitchen and systematically bleach, disinfect, and scrub every surface the fruit might have touched to within an inch of its life.

Rachel’s immediate “what did you do” response wasn’t unjustified. I worked in a lab full of biotech and geniuses, after all; it wasn’t unreasonable to blame me when something went awry. But that was why I was always so

careful

. Didn’t she see that? Nothing from the lab ever entered our home. I threw away two pairs of shoes every month, just to cut down the risk that I would track something from a supposedly clean room into our meticulously clean home. Whatever this stuff was, it couldn’t be connected to Project Eden. It just didn’t make any sense.

When I was done scrubbing down the counters I threw the sponges I’d used into the trash on top of the moldy mess that had been a bowl of nectarines and apples—the mold had continued to grow, and was even clinging to the plastic sides of the bag—and hauled the whole thing outside to the garbage bin.

I was on my knees on the kitchen floor, going through my third soap cycle, when Rachel and Nikki came banging through the front door, both shouting greetings that tangled together enough to become gloriously unintelligible, like an alphabet soup made of my favorite letters. “In here!” I called, and continued scrubbing at the linoleum like I’d get a prize when I was finished. I would, in a way. I would get the ability to sleep that night.

Footsteps. I looked up to find them standing in the kitchen doorway, and smiled my best “no, really, it’s all right, this isn’t an episode, it’s just a brief moment of irrational cleanliness” smile. It was an expression I’d had a lot of practice wearing. The elbow-length rubber gloves and hospital scrubs probably didn’t help. “Hi, guys. How was practice?”

Nikki frowned, which was almost a relief. There had been a lot of eye-rolling and stomping lately, which wasn’t fun for anyone except for maybe her, and I wasn’t even certain about that. Having a teenager was definitely a daily exercise in patience. “Mom, why are you scrubbing the kitchen floor? It’s not Thursday.”

I’d been braced for the question. I still cringed when it was actually asked. There was a weight of quiet betrayal behind it—nights when I’d missed my medication without realizing it and wouldn’t let her eat until I’d measured every strand of dry spaghetti and placed it in a pot of boiling, previously bottled water; days spent searching through the women’s department at Target for the only bras that had no structural or cosmetic flaws. Years of living with my OCD had left her gun-shy in a way neither Rachel nor I could have predicted when we decided to have a baby.

Nikki looked so much like me at her age, too. That was part of the terror. Nikki was sixteen, and that was roughly the age I’d been when my symptoms had really begun to solidify. Had she managed to dodge the bullet of her genetics, or was she going to start washing the skin off of her hands any day now? No one knew. No one had any way of knowing.

“Remember I told you about the fruit from the farmer’s market going off?” asked Rachel, coming to my rescue as she had so many times before. “That mold was nasty. It needed to be cleaned up before we’d be able to cook in here again.”

Nikki glanced to the trash can, which was so clean it gleamed. “All this over a little mold?”

“It wasn’t a little mold,” I said. I was starting to feel like I should have taken a picture of the trash before taking it outside. That stuff had been growing at a rate that made me frankly uncomfortable, and for more reasons than just my OCD. I might be obsessed with cleanliness, but that didn’t make me immune to the allure of a scientific mystery. Mold that grew at that kind of rate was mysterious to be sure.

If it were legal to burn trash in our neighborhood, I would have already been looking for the matches.

“Uck,” said Nikki: her final word on the matter. She backed out of the doorway and announced, “I’ll be in my room,” then turned to prance away, flipping her hair theatrically. Rachel watched her go, waiting until the characteristic sound of a door being slammed confirmed Nikki’s retreat to her room. Only then did Rachel turn back to me, rolling her eyes. I managed to stifle my laughter.

“You’re where she gets the stomping around and slamming doors, you know,” I accused, resuming my scrubbing. “My little drama queens.”

“I had to contribute something,” Rachel said. There was a worried note in her voice. I glanced up to see her leaning in the doorway, arms folded, frowning as she watched me. “Honey…is this really about the mold? You can tell me if you’re having a bad night. I just need to know.”

I shook my head and went back to work. “I’m fine, honestly. I took my medication, and I’m not having trouble breathing.” Asthma-like symptoms were often my first warning of a serious attack. “I just

really

didn’t like the looks of that mold, and I don’t want to risk it being carried through the house on our shoes. I already scrubbed down the table and the trash can.”

“Mmm-hmm.” From Rachel’s tone, I could tell that she was debating whether or not to believe me. “What about the fridge?”

The smell of the bleach was soothing. I kept scrubbing. “The fruit never went into the fridge. I did a basic check for mold or signs of spoilage, found none, and left it alone. You can check if you want, as soon as I’m done with the floor.”

“I will, you know.”

“I know.” I dropped the sponge into my bowl of sudsy water and stood, stripping off my gloves. I threw them into the trash and turned to find Rachel still looking at me with concern. I offered her a tired smile. “I’m sort of counting on it. What do you want to do for dinner?”

“How do you feel about spaghetti?” The question was neutral enough, but I understood its intent. Spaghetti was one of my triggers, and had been since Nikki was a baby. If I could tolerate irregular pasta, I wasn’t having an attack.

“Spaghetti sounds great,” I said. “Do you want me to go get some tomatoes from the garden?”

“That would be wonderful.”

“Be right back.” I stepped out of the kitchen, my bare feet feeling slightly tacky from the bleach, and kissed her cheek before starting for the back door. The floor was clean. The mold was gone. It was a beautiful evening, and it was going to be an even more beautiful night.

• • • •

Rachel’s spaghetti was, as always, fantastic. She had a real gift with the sauce, managing to combine basic ingredients in a way that was nothing short of magic to me. I could work up complex solutions in the lab, I could synthesize impossible things, but ask me to brown some ground turkey and I was lost. Even Nikki, who had been making vague noises about watching her weight—worrisome, given how slim she was and how often OCD was connected to eating disorders—ate a serving and a half.

Dessert would have been a fruit tart, had everything gone as planned. In the absence of the fruit, we had ice cream—pear sorbet for me, Ben and Jerry’s coffee with chunks for Rachel and Nikki—while we talked about our days. As always, Nikki was happy to listen to Rachel talk about painting, and began interrupting with facts about her own infinitely interesting life as soon as I started talking about what I’d been working on back at the lab. I thought about getting offended, and settled for smiling and stealing half of Nikki’s ice cream while she was distracted. Rachel’s job was more interesting to hear described: she created art, something that could be seen and touched and immediately understood without years of education and practical experience. All things being equal, I’d rather hear about Rachel’s job, too.

All in all, it was a pretty peaceful night at home. No, that’s not right. Once I shut away the dread that still lingered in the pit of my stomach over the gray mold in the kitchen, it became a

perfect

night. It was just flawed enough to be real, and so real I wanted to repeat it over and over again for the rest of my life. If I could have had that night a hundred times, I would have been able to die a happy woman.

That’s the trouble with perfect nights: No matter how good they are, you only ever get to live them once.

It was a work night for me and a school night for Nikki, and both of us were in bed by ten. Rachel joined me an hour or so later. I woke up when she pressed a kiss into the hollow of my throat, her lips practically burning my skin. She snuggled close, and we both dropped down into dreamland, where everything was safe and warm and nothing could ever hurt us, or change our perfect little world.

I woke to the sound of Rachel whispering my name, over and over again. “Megan,” she said, her voice tight with some arcane worry. “Megan, wake up, please, I need you to wake up now.

Please

.” It was the panic in that final plea that did me in, yanking me straight through the layers of sleep and back into our bedroom. There was a strange, dusty scent in the air, like something left in the back of an airless room for a long time without being disturbed.

“Rachel?” I sat upright, reaching for the lamp on my side of the bed. Light would make things better. Monsters didn’t thrive in the light.

“No! Don’t turn it on.” The panic that had woken me was even stronger now. “Megan, I…I need you to take Nikki and go next door. Call the paramedics when you get there, but don’t turn on the light.”

“What?” I squinted into the darkness. Rachel was sitting on the far edge of the bed. I could see her silhouette in the light coming through the open bathroom door. “Honey, what’s wrong? Did you hurt yourself? Let me see.”

“Oh, no.” She laughed, but the panic wasn’t gone. It laced through her laughter, turning it jagged and toxic. My heartbeat slowed for a moment, and then sped up as my own panic bloomed. “You don’t want to see, Megan, all right? You don’t want to see, and I don’t want you to see, so please, just go. Get Nikki and go.”

“I’m not going to do that. Honey, what’s wrong?” And then, God help me, I turned on the light.

Rachel was wearing her favorite nightgown, the blue satin one with the popped and faded lace flowers around the neckline. Her back was to me and her hair was loose, hanging to hide her face from view. As I watched, she sighed so deeply that her entire body seemed to sag, the delicate tracery of her spine pressing hard against her skin.

“I should have known you’d turn on the light,” she said, and twisted to face me.

I didn’t gasp or recoil. I wish, looking back, that I could say I’d been a better person than that, but the truth is that I was too stunned to do anything but stare silently, trying to make sense of the single gray mitten that she had pulled over her left hand, or the patch of pale gray felt that she had glued to the corner of her left eye. Then she blinked at me, and the strands of mold clinging to her eyelashes wavered in the breeze, and my denial snapped like a broken branch, leaving me holding nothing but splinters. Before I knew it, I was standing with my back against the wall, as far from her as I could get without actually fleeing the room.

Now I understood the dry, dusty smell. It wasn’t old paper or a forgotten library book. It was mold, living, flourishing mold, feasting on the body of my wife.

My throat was a desert. It didn’t help that Rachel—my beautiful Rachel, who should have been the one panicking, if either one of us was going to—was looking at me with perfect understanding, like she hadn’t expected any other reaction, yet still couldn’t blame me for following the nature she’d always known I was slave to. She blinked again, and I realized to my horror that the sclera of her left eye was slightly clouded, like something was beginning to block the vitreous humor. Something like the spreading gray mold.

“I must have had a cut on my hand,” she said. “I thought I’d scrubbed hard enough, but I guess I was wrong. And then I rubbed my eye in my sleep…maybe that’s a good thing. The itching woke me up. So we can go to the hospital and they can do whatever it is you do when you get a…a fungal infection, and then it’ll all be okay. Right? I just have to go to the hospital. Right?” There was a fragile edge to her words, like she was standing very close to the place where reason dropped away, leaving only a yawning chasm of blackness underneath.

She looked so sad. My girl. My wife. The woman I had promised to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, amen. And I couldn’t make myself go to her. I tried—no one will ever know how hard I tried—but the muscles in my legs refused to work, and the air in my lungs refused to circulate until I was stepping backward into the doorway, away from the dry, dusty smell of mold growing on human flesh.

“I’ll call the hospital,” I said, and fled for the hall.

• • • •

Nikki woke when the ambulance pulled to a stop in front of our house, flashing lights painting everything they touched bloody red. “Mom?” She appeared on the stairs, holding her robe shut with one hand and squinting through the curtain of her hair. “What’s going on?”

I forced myself to smile at her. The EMTs already had Rachel outside. They’d taken one look at her and swung into action with a speed that impressed even me, producing gloves and sterile masks and anything else they could use to keep themselves from coming into contact with her skin. Even then they’d touched her as little as possible, guiding her with words, not hands, casting anxious looks at each other and then back at me as they moved. I understood their concern, but there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn’t even force myself to follow them. The dry mold smell filled our bedroom, almost solid in its presence. I wanted to bleach the whole place,

would

have bleached the whole place, except that I knew Rachel’s treatment might depend on being able to examine the spot where she’d been infected.

“Rachel’s not feeling so well,” I said. “I’m going to follow her to the hospital as soon as they call and tell me it’s all right. I was going to come up and make sure that you were awake before I went.”

Nikki’s eyes got very wide and round. “You’re going to leave me here?”

“No, I’m going to ask Mrs. Levine from next door to keep an eye on you.” I didn’t want to leave her alone in the house, but even more, I didn’t want to take her to the hospital. Not until we knew what the

thing

on Rachel’s arm was, and whether it was contagious.

It had to be contagious. It had been on the fruit, and then it had been on the table, and Rachel had touched the residue on the table; just touched it, nothing more than that. If this stuff wasn’t contagious, she had been exposed at the same time as the fruit, and Nikki—

Sudden terror seized me. “Honey,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level, “are you feeling all right?”

Nikki’s eyes got even wider. “Why? Is it food poisoning? My stomach feels fine.”

“No, it’s not food poisoning. Hold on.” I flicked on the light, illuminating the hall and stairs in a harsh white glow. Nikki squinted at me, looking affronted. I would worry about her sensibilities later. “Show me your hands.”

“What? Mom—”

“

Show me your hands

.” I was using the tone Rachel always called “OCD voice”—and she wasn’t kidding, exactly, even if she used the label to soften my admittedly violent reactions, turning them into something that wouldn’t frighten people who weren’t as used to me as she was.

Nikki had grown up with my quirks and issues. She stopped arguing and held her hands out for me to inspect. They were spotlessly clean, with short, close-clipped fingernails that had been manicured with a simple clear coat. Most importantly, there was no mold on them. I swallowed the urge to tell her to disrobe, to prove that she wasn’t infected. Things weren’t that bad. Things weren’t going to

get

that bad. I wouldn’t let them. I couldn’t help her if I let them. I had to hold onto control with both hands, because if I lost it—

If I lost it, I was going to lose everything. For the first time in my life, the sense of impending doom that followed me around might actually have weight.

“Mom, what’s going on?” Her voice shook a little as she pulled her robe tight around herself once more. “Where are they taking Rachel?”

“I told you. To the hospital.” I turned to look at the front door, and then at the open door to our bedroom. “Go upstairs. You can get online if you want, but I don’t want you down here until I’ve cleaned up a little.” Any mold that was in our bedroom could stay; I could sleep on the couch. But the kitchen? The dining room? My fingers itched, and I rubbed them together to reassure myself that it was just the urge to clean, and not a sign of contamination.

“Okay,” said Nikki meekly, and turned and fled back to her room, where she could barricade the door against me and my insatiable need to scrub the world.

Rachel’s hand. Rachel’s beautiful, delicate hand. Completely obscured by clinging gray.

I turned and walked straight for the closet where we kept the bleach.

• • • •

The hospital called a little after five a.m., four hours after they had loaded Rachel into the back of an ambulance and left me alone with a contaminated house and a teenage daughter who refused to come out of her room. The gray mold had been growing on Rachel’s latest picture, almost obscured by the pastel loops and swirls. I’d stopped when I found it, standing and staring transfixed at the delicate swirls it cut through the color. There was something strangely beautiful about it. It was hardy, and alive, and finding sustenance wherever it could. Even in pastels.

It was eating the last thing my wife had touched before she came to bed and woke me up pleading for help. I had thrown the picture in the trash and was in the process of bleaching the studio walls when the phone rang. My gloves were covered in bleach. I answered anyway. I didn’t trust the receiver. “Hello?”