Wishing

Alice’s wait for Christmas had never been so fevered. After her father died, she had written to Santa with just one wish: to see Dad again, just once.

On Christmas morning she dashed downstairs, but instead of a smiling Dad she found only an oblong parcel with her name on it. It turned out to be a fishing rod. Alice and Dad had often gone fishing, but her heart fell.

Still, she took the rod out to the lake in the spring and in Dad’s favourite spot she cast the line in the water. Soon she pulled up a big, slippery perch. It twisted as she slid out the hook, and in its bright scales Alice saw a familiar face flash for half a heartbeat. She started so violently that the fish writhed away and fell back into the water.

As Alice stared after it, doubting herself, the fish leapt up again in front of her. Now she could hear her father’s voice quite clearly: “Help! Let me out!” Then the perch swam off into the depths.

Exile / Poissa

I stand here, and I stand here, and I stand
But the doors don’t open and the words don’t sing
They’ve shut me out of fairyland,
Taken my portal,
Stolen my eyes and deafened me
Broken my legs and my sword

I would seek out the culprits, force them to recant
But I can’t see who
I can’t go where
And I certainly cannot fight

I stand, and turn, and cry here
And can’t hear their victory dance.

--

Seison tässä, seison tässä, ja seison
Eivätkä ovet aukea, sanat eivät soi
Minut suljettiin haltiamaasta,
Porttini vietiin,
Sokeaksi, kuuroksi tehtiin,
Särjettiin jalat ja miekka

Etsisin heidät ja pistäisin katumaan
Mutta en näe kuka
En pääse luo
Enkä todellakaan voi taistella

Seison, käännyn, itken tässä
Enkä kuule voitontanssiaan.

Two hours

Two precious hours

That’s what I’ve bought for today.

The door closes on their eager laughter

and their smiles and kisses,

and they run away with my heart.

I turn to greet myself and smile

The darkness fades as the walls turn to glass,

and in minutes I’m the Queen of Infinite Space,

The Lady of the Silent Moments.

In two hours my money will be spent

they’ll return with their treasures and hugs.

I’ll force my heart down my throat again

and rip myself off my body

so it’s not crushed by the noise and the colours.

New World Order

Kamilla’s eyes focused slowly on the ceiling and memory took its time returning, but when it did, she grinned and sprang upright. Today was the long, long, long-awaited day when the new overlords of the human race would finally reveal themselves and change everything, and make Kamilla the most important human alive. No, scratch that—the most important human ever to have lived.

She danced a samba into the kitchenette, put the kettle on, and checked her messages. Ervankaromerotamo had sent a brief one with nothing but “T-6”, as agreed. Six hours to go… no, five hours and forty-six minutes. Kamilla’s toes danced on the tiled floor under her kitchen table.

The newsreader on the BBC wore an eyesore of a tie and had not combed his hair properly. Kamilla sniffed. She would put paid to that sort of sloppiness when she was in charge and no mistake. That man would look good in a blue tie, even given that he would have to wear it with the tinfoil suit that Ervankaromerotamo’s people were about to mandate for all humans. Certainly having his hair shaved off would be an improvement over that undisciplined mess.

Reminded of her important task she got up and hurried—not dashed, no, that would be undignified—back to her bed and bent double to retrieve a low rectangular box from underneath. Inside the orderly rows of egg-shaped somethings gleamed exactly as they had when Ervankaromerotamo had entrusted her with them. Kamilla wished she knew what they were. Weapons? Food? In her favourite imagined scenario they were eggs, wirmen eggs, and she was the proud caregiver to a new generation of Ervankaromerotamo’s offspring. (Not that she knew how they reproduced, she had to admit. That was not the sort of thing you asked your overlords.)

Her second favourite scenario involved hand grenades.

She padded back into the kitchenette and poured her tea, and then listened idly to the news while buttering a slice of bread. Some stuff about farming subsidies and blowing up the polar ice caps, same old same old… until a funny insert about a waterskiing parakeet was rudely interrupted by the BBC World logo that just sat there spinning in an infinite loop. Kamilla stared in shock. There was still more than five hours to go, surely the wirmen had not started already? She double-checked her messages; nothing. As the logo continued to spin her nervousness mounted. Had they been discovered? The very existence of the wirmen was a closely-guarded secret and the revelation would delay the execution of the plan, not to speak of the disaster that would ensue if the plan itself were revealed.

The logo flicked out, replaced briefly by a blank screen and then by the face of another newsreader. This one was at least appropriately dressed, Kamilla noted.

“We apologise for that short interruption,” the newsreader began. “We have just received momentous news. I can hardly believe it myself.” The woman smiled, then laughed, and Kamilla was astonished to see two enormous glittering tears roll down her cheeks. She bent to read from a paper that, judging by its floppiness, had already been wept upon. “Following secret talks that have lasted for weeks, the leaders of every nation on Earth have pledged their allegiance to a new world order. They have signed a universal treaty, making the entire world one single military and economic entity. All armed conflicts have been resolved and universal disarmament is beginning as we speak. A plan is in place to deliver food surplus from affluent areas to those with food shortages. A minimum income is to be instituted that is independent of employment status. All human rights are affirmed in the legal code of this new entity, which is called the Democratic Republic of Earth.” The newsreader lifted her shining face to the camera and she seemed to gaze right inside Kamilla’s pounding heart. “We have world peace. I repeat, we have world peace. It is here.”

The view shifted to show crowds cheering and dancing in front of gigantic ad screens that had been adapted to show the news. London, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing, Helsinki… who knew where else. Kamilla sat stock still, unable to tear her eyes away from the screen.

It started to dawn on her that today was not a good day for a revolution.

The New School

The teacher had turned into a manatee again.

Meghan closed her eyes and turned back to the class she did not want to see. The sheet of paper containing her presentation notes was swiftly turning into a sweaty, wrinkled mess.

“The, uh, era of industrialisation was cha-characterised by… um…” She gasped and stumbled back as something light but sharp struck her face. Her eyes sprang open and she flinched at the sight of her classmates, sitting or lounging or squatting across rows and rows of desks. In the frontmost seats, two boys—or rather, two octopi as they now were—sniggered. The seahorse behind them, who had been Meghan’s new best friend Natasha only last week, snorted in disdainful comment.

The transformations had started ten days ago, only a week after Meghan’s arrival at her new school. The first to change had been the teacher, his already rounded form bulging out to the size and shape of a manatee, his whiskers thickening and blackening eyes retiring to the sides of his head. She had screamed and pointed and then fainted, and had woken up in the school nurse’s office. The nurse herself had turned into a tuna fish right in front of her, and Meghan had run away home.

She had tried to explain to her parents, but they had sent her back to school the next day, not believing a word. The teacher had been his old self at first, but then the other pupils had started to shift shapes, some permanently, some flickering back and forth before settling into their new habitus. They were all marine creatures: sea snakes, crabs, different sorts of fish, even an amoeba. Meghan was at a loss to explain how these animals could move around, or even survive, without water, but they did.

“Are you all right, Meghan?” the teacher asked in the high, skittering squeak of a manatee. It was hard to tell, but he seemed worried.

“I’m… I’m fine.” Meghan swallowed again and closed her eyes. “Spinning Jenny. The Spinning Jenny was the first great, um, innovation of the Industrial Age.”

The sniggers from the front row intensified. The teacher directed a long-suffering look at the two octo-boys. One of them caught his eye, but instead of simmering down he stood up, or at least arranged his limbs so that the varicoloured sac of his body rode higher.

“Why do we have to listen to that?” His words were hard to make out from among the watery slurps. “She’s weird, and she’s just so dry I’m falling asleep.”

“Yeah! She’s dry!” the other octopus confirmed, rising to flank his friend. “And you’re just a big ass-kisser of a sea cow!”

Everyone was pulling themselves up now and the classroom turned threatening. Meghan’s heart climbed into her throat and she let her weakened legs drop her into the chair beside the blackboard.

“Let’s get her some water!” someone burbled from the back, probably an enormous sea bass. Others eagerly took up the cry, and Meghan found herself gripped tightly in the tentacles of the octo-boys. She screamed and fought, but the suction-cupped appendages twined and twisted and squeezed harder as they dragged her out the door of the classroom and into the girls’ bathroom halfway down the hall. From very far away came the protesting manatee squeaks of the teacher.

A lamprey swatted its tailfin against one of the taps and water gushed out at enormous speed, overflowing the basin in seconds and splashing out onto the floor. The tentacles holding Meghan began to force her towards the stream, inexorably, ignoring her flailing and the screams that cut off when her face hit the water.

Afterwards, everything was better. Meghan spread out her fins and regarded the iridescent feather-like extremities with satisfaction, admiring the combination of red, black and blue. Siamese fighting fish, apparently.

“You look nice.” Natasha’s voice held a tinge of envy.

Meghan looked at her friend through new eyes and would have smiled if her mouth had been able to move that way.

“You’re beautiful,” she answered truthfully, although beautiful did not do justice to the girl’s rainbow colouring, not even the spring green of her belly or the orange ridge down her back.

Meghan glanced at her own strange reflection in the mirror.

“What will Mom and Dad say?” she muttered, suddenly unsure.

“Oh, they can be fish, too,” Natasha said. “Come on, we need to get to recess before it rains.”

“So what if it rains?” Meghan giggled. “We’re fish!”

Heart

To love them, I went to seek my heart

In lands far, far away

In the vortices of time

Under stranger skies.

I tempted it with magic,

Tried to move it with the power of my mind

Subdue it with force and my iron sword

But my heart would not be moved.

I fear, it said.

I fear the knife

I fear the fire

I fear the crushing weight of you.

I returned hollow.

To love them,

I drank my fill of the warmth of their blood

And hid us all from the sun.

Äidille

You’re in my fingers

Where they, restless, worry the clasp of my bag

You’re in the lip I chew, thinking

You’re in my eyes in this dawn that is dusk

You’re in my heart, still.

Learning

”Huomenta, kultaseni!”

”What?”

”Sanoin, että huomenta. Otatko leipää?”

”Mom, stop that.”

”Tosi hassua. Tules nyt aamiaiselle.”

”Honestly, mom, that’s NOT FUNNY!”

“Älä nyt ala vetämään pultteja heti aamusta...”

”Mom, speak FINNISH! Don’t do that!”

“Mähän puhun… I was speaking Finnish. This is English.”

“No it’s not. I don’t speak English this well.”

“But you are speaking English… Ah. You had the English lesson on your Sublimisystem yesterday while you were drawing, right?”

“Yes.”

“And forgot to switch it off, didn’t you.”

“… maybe…”

“Don’t worry, we’ll subliminate your Finnish back this evening. Now come have brekkers. Cheese on your bread?”

The queen's night

Round and round
The planet spun through another night.
Couched in soft fatigue,
The queen no longer even sought sleep.

Alone with the patriotic green of her slate
The chrono sketching minutes and hours in red
She swept her dreams from her brow.

 Round and round
The regrets, the longing and the fright,
The sting of court intrigue
Pushed to one side and buried deep
To free her to bow to this celebrated fate.

Eyes averted from the stars, crouched on her bed
She fulfilled, slowly, her vow.

Cascade 2

My chair clattered across the floor as I sprang up. I drew breath to speak, thought better of it and ran my fingers through my hair in confusion.

“We’ve stayed in touch,” continued Angelo, “but she hasn’t updated her Facebook page or called me in two months.”

I sat down again heavily and shook my head more to clear it than in denial. To remember all that again was dizzy, but I could only think of how much I wanted to forget all over.

I looked down at my desk and tried to speak but failed.

“I know you have no reason to help her now, or especially me,” Angelo said gently, almost sadly. “But I ask you, please, help me find her. She could be in trouble.”

“Why would I care?” I asked. I lifted my gaze from the tabletop to his face. 


Without replying, he changed the subject. "I need your language skills and your detective skills. I need you to come with me to Finland and find her."

Finland. I was Finnish once. I swallowed emptiness and recalled a land of spring snowfall and sunlit summer nights.

"How much did you take away from me?" I asked, throat trying to close in on the words. "How much of my life have I forgotten?"

"I'm sorry." Angelo sighed.

"You're sorry?" I snorted. "You didn't even do it, Maria did. And now you want me to help her?" I fought to keep my voice down through rising indignation. "Unless this is just a new game the two of you have cooked up between yourselves..."

"That's unfair. No one ever played games on you," Angelo protested.

"Just go away." I turned away, faced the window, tried to admire the effect of shop signs and streetlights in the London fog.

"She asked me to give you a letter."

After a small pause I snorted again. "Before or after she disappeared?"

"Years ago."

I couldn't think of anything more to say.

"Please, Lena. Help us. Help her."

"My name is Julia," I whispered.

Cascade

I had forgotten my greatest love, my greatest fear and my greatest adventure.

Suburban motherhood contains very little in the way of adventure or fear and ours is a different kind of love, and that had been my life for a decade: take the children to school, drive to work at Victim Support, drive home via Tesco, make dinner, put the kids to bed… then repeat. And repeat, and repeat. It’s not a bad life, if you love your children and have a worthwhile job, especially after you leave your controlling, boring husband.

From before, prior to that decade on the family-work axis, I actually remember very little of my life. One fine March morning I had woken to reality in a hospital bed, bloody and battered and weak and completely amnesiac. Over time, I had regained memories of my childhood and adolescence spent in another country and had some fleeting impressions of moving to London of my own volition, but any life I may have led in London lay buried under a red fog I called before, a fog I could never shift.

Until now, when a man I knew appeared unannounced in my upstairs office at Victim Support.

I was working late to support a newcomer to the night shift, but he turned out to need hardly any support and in any case my eminently competent colleague also working the lines had him well in hand. I took the opportunity to organise my files and clean my inbox, something that hardly ever happened as evidenced by the piles of written reports and the 2000+ e-mails. I had barely reached item 1406 when the door clicked shut. I schooled the annoyance off my face and glanced up, and my blood froze.

Angelo. His name was Angelo, and he was from before.

That wasn't all, though - he was also a vampire.

I think my world stopped for a full minute in that realisation: that I knew vampires were real. Not storybook draculas or edwards or lestats, not emo superheroes, not invariably even heartless, loveless monsters preying on their once-fellow humans - just vampires, as varied a bunch of ageless narcissistic sanguivores as your heart could desire.

I must have stared at Angelo the whole time but he never even flinched, just gazed at me with hazel eyes from below dark eyebrows, still as ridiculously handsome as he had been two decades before. (And how disorienting it felt to remember that far back! Like suddenly acquiring x-ray vision and being able to see through previously impermeable walls.) Tonight his curling chestnut hair was tied back with a ribbon, giving him what I imagined to be something like his original air of 18th century Italian gentleman. All he needed was one of those collared jackets and tight trousers.

That thought reminded me of another. My face heated and this time my heart turned over in my chest. I swallowed through a sandpaper throat.

"Go away," I said and turned to the window.

Angelo sat down on my desk (my visitor chair had been appropriated weeks ago and never replaced).

"I'm sorry to intrude on your important work," he said. He still had that Italian accent and that singer's voice that befit his name. I had heard him sing--impossible that I should have forgotten that, but I had. "But I have no one else to turn to." He paused. "You see... Maria has gone missing."