Nostalgia (2/14)

 Wrote a little story about YankeeFive. Again, I'm not sure if this is "canon" or anything, but it's a thought for a story I had and decided to give it to her.

            YankeeFive dangled her legs off the edge of the superstructure, kicking them in the languid breeze that floated by. The whole of the Rust City lay beneath her, the orchestra of the crowds tuned to a fine key this high up. She drummed her nails on the ground to either side of her hips. Bioengineered phytoplankton in the paint reacted to the impact, rolling waves of light racing from free margin to cuticle.

A few dozen stories below, the world ground on totally ignorant of her presence. A thick plume of black smoke billowed from the south side of town. One of the newer constructions, a rats-nest of slums that still had to be painfully untangled from itself. She’d grown up in a place like that, and had seen one too many fires in her time. She could still taste the ash on her tongue if she thought about those days long enough.

She made it a point to avoid thinking about those days.

She didn’t remember the first bonfire she’d witnessed. She didn’t even remember how many she had seen in her life. She had seen enough of them to last her to the end of her days, and hopefully for a few hours longer than that.

She had spent her childhood in the Gordian knot of streets and alleys, part of the third wave of contractors and gig workers clinging to the Corporate Zone like a remora. They lived in the sprawl of shipping containers and lean-tos that were now buried beneath Little Canton. She remembered the heat of the summer days, competing with her siblings to see who could keep their hand on the metal siding of their hovel for the longest. She remembered lying in the bed with her brothers, when the heat was so stifling you struggled to find the transition point between your skin and the air. She remembered bringing her father electrolyte water to the roof of the shack as he toiled in the garden, trying to coax vegetation to grow in soil rife with microscopic shards of plastic. She remembered plinking away on the net with a fourth time hand-me-down tablet that her father had managed to bargain for, learning all she could learn about the world that was and the world that had been.

Hours passed in the light of that screen. The Rust City, whose ever shifting labyrinthine walls pressed in and closed off the world, no longer seemed absolute. Yankee had access to music from pirate radio stations in orbit, bootlegged media that she could enjoy without paying the multinationals’ exorbitant subscription fees, and books that had been painstakingly transcribed by hand instead of scanned into corporate databases. She found friends, some in the Rust, others clear on the other side of the ocean. She lived on the net, darting between forums and blogs, devouring the knowledge that the corps couldn’t put a paywall on. She found a name there, one that became dearer than the one her parents had given her.

She would sing songs with her siblings, crude parodies of corporate jingles or media the corps considered “lost” simply because they didn’t own it. When her father would garden, gently tending to bulbs of garlic and misshapen round carrots, she would sit nearby reciting the plants’ latin names and giving advice on best methods for agriculture. She researched how to build rain catchers more efficient than the second-hand ones her family owned. If she wasn’t in her bed on her tablet, YankeeFive was strutting the rooftop garden her father had built, hopping the gaps between the different containers. The first clove of garlic she had, she cried

She remembered the bonfires.

She remembered she was eleven years old.

She remembered it had started with sheets. She had been lying in the bed she shared with her brothers, and stepped away to use the outhouse outside. She had told Brian, her oldest brother, not to touch the tablet. He stuck his tongue out at her and went back to his pushups. When she returned, Brian was standing next to their mother, both in the heavy rubber gloves they used for dishes. They were tearing the sheet of Yankee’s sisters’ bed, and their faces were white.

Their faces were white and the sheet had already been stripped from Yankee’s bed. Sweat beaded on her mother’s brow. Her eyes were wide and wild, and Yankee saw still damp bile at the corner of her mother’s thin lips. She and Brian carried the sheet out as though it were radioactive, keeping it far from their skin and clothes. Her mother turned and shot her chin towards the worn sheet that doubled as a bedroom door.

“Take that down,” her mother said, eyes dark as iron, “Use diē die’s gardening gloves. The thick ones, the rubber ones,”

Yankee remembered starting to ask why, but another glare from her mother silenced her. She knew a look like that was the first and last chance. YankeeFive obliged.

She remembered smelling smoke.

She carried the sheet same as her mother and brother had, holding the long shower rod in front of her like a hobby horse. It was cumbersome and awkward and her underdeveloped biceps screamed in protest. There was a roaring fire in the common courtyard that the shacks surrounded. What had once been a meeting place was now a conflagration reaching high over their heads. Embers lapped at the sky, flames licking the gaps between stars.

Her whole community was there, all of them throwing sheets and pillow cases into the blaze. She saw neighbors with nothing but polyester rain coats around their waists tossing in clothes by the handful. Everyone was screaming, some of them with tears but many without. She saw the bright red scabs on the hands and necks of her neighbors, saw them scratch the sores raw. She watched the ash settle into the wet spots that they’d picked away.

It was lice, she learned soon afterwards. They bit hard, they didn’t respond to the usual chemical agents. The itching was unbearable, the infections that followed soon after were often lethal in the Rust. They were mean as hell and bred like crazy. Each of them had the De Haaseler AgriChem logo bioengineered to appear on their back.

It was months before they discovered what had occurred. A deal had gone wrong, some suit wanted a nicer office at a different company. Plenty of white collars looking to jump ship did so in the Rust, far from the prying eyes of the CZ. He had assumed his new employers might want an example of his work, or maybe he’d been smuggling some AgriChem property out to sweeten the deal. Maybe it was a theft of pure spite. Whatever the case, his new employers weren’t interested in the lice. So he threw the vial out the window as the hovercraft took off, threw insects onto those he regarded the same.

YankeeFive remembered watching the blaze, felt the smoke sting her eyes, heard the roar of the fire and the roar of the crowd and something crack and break inside and out.

She remembered seeing her tablet, still wrapped in her and her brothers’ sheet, crack and melt. She remembered that her father died before he could repair the damage the ash had done to the garden. She remembered the soft sound of a lightbulb being crunched under a boot, a sound that came from somewhere behind her rib cage.

She tasted the ash on her tongue.

YankeeFive pulled her mask down and spat, the orb of spit battered by the wind as it dropped between the gaps in the skyscrapers. Her fingers stopped drumming.

She was very tired, the weariness heavy on her bones and in the space between her brows. She needed sleep.

She knew a good bar nearby that wasn’t likely to kick her out until the earliest hours of the morning. She headed there first.