Barnacles
The revivification contract, handwritten on delicate vellum, lay on the knotted desk in front of her. The necromancers’ mouths opened to intone the sacred disclaimers, but she cut them off with a wave and flipped to the signature page. They shot glances at each other as she slid the section on side effects out of the way. The smaller one, who had walked her through the mundane logistics of the ceremony, dabbed his seeping eyes and whispered something about barnacle management. Her brow furrowed as she recalled the pamphlet that she was supposed to read about this, but abandoned on the floor by her front door. With a slight shake of the head and without looking up, she scribbled her signature, pushed the papers back and tossed the pen on top. The tip chipped and scattered small, dark ink drops across the page. She flinched, but the second necromancer, a long-legged cellar spider in human form, glided over and soundlessly grasped each page. His lips curled like a fiddlehead as he informed her the process had begun.
They met while he was still married to someone else. Loneliness had hibernated in the dark spaces between him and his ex-wife long before he met her. But their friendship, at first a safe respite from the absurdities of their work, shined a light on it so inextinguishable that it couldn’t be ignored. The shift from platonic to romantic grew until it swept her away like an avalanche and buried her early attempts to resist. Being together became inevitable. Months of keeping a respectable physical distance fell apart one evening when they hugged goodbye. In that embrace, she felt his heart’s beat match hers like two caged hummingbirds and she knew he felt the same way.
Despite the joy their union brought her, her guilt never lessened. She suppressed it in order to embrace life with him, otherwise, she questioned why she had committed such a sin only for it to lead to despair. As she wrestled with how she had ruined the life of a woman, who didn’t deserve it, she suspected she had ruined his too. Her justifications and revisionist history of how they met failed to sooth him. Stress devoured him from within until his weakened body succumbed to disease. He listened passively to the poor prognosis, apologized to the doctor for the trouble, and walked out. He never returned to the hospital, but accepted his illness as karmic punishment, feeling something akin to relief. The fact that their love had caused someone else’s pain tortured him. He felt the time they had spent together was all he deserved. He rebutted her protestations with chastisements that the guilt wasn’t the same for her, so she’d never understand his decision.
But as his condition worsened, his resolve wavered. He alternated between commanding her not to revive him so he could find peace in another place, and begging her to do so, fearing what awaited him. One gloomy afternoon during a lull in the rainstorm battering their bedroom windows, she recalled the tempest that raged the first time they made love and how he made her feel whole for the first time in her life. When he didn’t respond, she fell to the floor and sobbed. She existed in near catatonia for months after his death. She wanted him back more than she wanted to breathe, but indecision gripped her. His murky instructions left her reeling, unable to find purchase on what was the right thing to do. Her mourning perplexed those closest to her. Revive him or move on, they shrugged. Bureaucrats hassled her to declare him dead. A year passed until a crack of thunder woke her from a yet another dream, in which she felt him lying next to her again. The chasm in her heart accepted that as a sign and she scheduled a revivification consultation. They cautioned he’d been gone so long that he’d likely return with some hangers-on. Her confusion shone through her tears, so they handed her pamphlets and noted they had, for lack of a better analogy, dubbed them barnacles.
He neither thanked nor chastised her for bringing him back. He refused to discuss where he’d been, and claimed to remember only darkness. She didn’t believe him, but didn’t press. When she brought him home, he lumbered between rooms like through a thick fog. He tested objects with his hands as if they’d dematerialize upon touch. When he shielded his eyes from the sun pouring in their large living room windows, she drew the curtains closed. As the shadows of the room settled over him, a deep sigh left his body and his back straightened. His eyes darkened into a deep shade of emerald and scanned the room. He marveled at the smallest details like someone who had been in a coma since they were a child. He ran his fingers along the microfiber couch and through the wool rug, inhaled the roses and lilacs of the welcome home bouquets, and devoured a peach, leaving a trail of juice trickling down his forearm. He asked her about each thing as if she were his tour guide, not his wife. She stood at a distance during his exploration, his name sitting on the tip of her tongue. But she hesitated to speak it. Something told her it no longer belonged to the man in front of her. He looked like himself. But as he passed the mirror in the foyer, she caught a glimpse of the darkness clinging to him. She had difficulty focusing on it, no, on them. But as her eyes adjusted, their form, like globs of newly-formed obsidian blacker than the surrounding shadows, emerged. She crept toward the window and slid open the curtains. He stopped, rubbed his head, and asked why his arm was sticky.
The pop scientist on the internet claimed the barnacles were toxoplasma post vitam. But these weren’t parasites trying to change him, they were some thing trying to replace him. Unsatisfied, she gathered up the boot-stained pamphlets, which grouped the barnacles with changelings and ogbanje. The old ones believed that when these creatures failed to break into the world as children, they hitched rides on revived adults instead. But no one beckoned the barnacles back to their world. They were here to stay. They. There were a few of them, or many, she couldn’t tell. One night she caught them rifling through her books. In a pile of scattered comics, they discovered Legion and declared it a fitting name. In a conversation she couldn’t believe she was having, she explained it had been lifted from the Bible. They scoffed and said they came first. They insisted they were neither a personality disorder nor a demon, and tossed the comic back in the pile. But they would never say what exactly they were. It was like they didn’t know. But they were adamant they didn’t want to return to be with the rest of their kind.
They supplanted him in the dark. So she made him sleep with a light on and refused to take him to the movies, something he used to love. He chafed at these changes, but had the luxury of not dealing with them when they had control. He didn’t realize he’d withdrawn until he blinked and found himself in a different place. He answered no questions about where his consciousness went.
After a month together, she had to return to work. She drilled into him that if he wanted to stay, he must surround himself with light. I know, I know, he assured her. But she wasn’t afraid he didn’t understand. She was afraid he didn’t want to stay.
She fretted about him all day and called him multiple times. He stopped answering after the third. When she got home long after sunset, she found them on the back patio, covered in a light coating of snow, staring into the nothingness. She slid next to them on the bench and watched their dark eyes track some unseen thing. She rose but their hand grabbed her arm. Wait, they said, we’re not ready. She yanked it away and triggered the floodlight. He shivered. She wrapped her arms around him and kissed his neck. Inside, she toasted spices for chai. After he warmed up, she announced she was going to hire a full time lightling. His stare bored a hole into his mug. On the verge of saying something for ten minutes, but saying nothing, he gave a slight nod and went to bed.
The lightling lasted a week. She accused him of undermining her presence and purposely avoiding her glow by allowing them to come out in a pitch black bathroom with a towel shoved against the bottom of the door. His giving them that opportunity was no accident, she said, and implied he and they may be colluding. She wanted no part in it.
Exhausted, she relaxed her vigil. As a result, sometimes, though the darkness wasn’t absolute, they still broke through. They thought it would be easier on her if they pretended to be him. But their eyes, dark forests where his were tea green, gave them away. Spend time with us, they implored, we can be friends. And so they convinced her to let them stay out longer. They loved to walk during the predawn hours when the streets held quiet possibilities. What they stopped to describe as wondrous – a black mass of leaves rustling in the breeze, a dog’s bark from an indistinct place – haunted her. The dissonance of his voice speaking their words made her head swim and chest tighten. Every walk ended with her snapping half a dozen yellow and pink glow sticks, tying them around their wrists and neck, and escorting him home. He never asked what transpired on these walks or why she truncated them.
Golden hour, however, brought him closest to how he used to be. Their inside jokes and tender intimacy flowed smoothly between them until the light faded and he grew despondent once more. He sensed their restlessness. She hated them for taking him from her and resented him for not fighting back. Since neither she nor the lightling could keep them at bay, she would go bigger. She would harness the sun.
She spirited him to Svalbard at the end of April and let four months of daylight shut them out. Every room of the small cabin she rented had windows, and she had called ahead to request they remove all the curtains. This time felt endless. Outside the settlement, they hiked with guns slung over their shoulders to ward off the polar bears, and in the sun-soaked evenings they befriended the hyper huskies at a local cafe and delighted the locals with their stilted Norwegian. They wrote down their deepest and silliest thoughts on life and watched arthouse movies and read ancient philosophies that explained what it all meant. Most of all, they pretended everything was normal. But as August came to a close, the restlessness returned. She fidgeted as she asked how he wanted to handle it. She longed to hear proposals of Antarctic adventures. Instead, he turned toward the window and locked his gaze on the path of a skua in flight. Give them the winter, he said. She asked if he’d be there when she returned in April. When he didn’t respond, she fell to the floor and sobbed a second time.
At the revivification center, the necromancers explained that it happened sometimes, especially among those, who didn’t fight death to begin with. The barnacles chose their ships well. She reasoned it was fitting that they took him from her like she had stolen him from another. She accepted this penance but never regretted the strange and beautiful life they shared, however brief, and prayed to everything in this world and the next that they would meet again.
Clarity
I inched toward the machine. I didn’t understand how it worked, where it came from, or how long it had been nestled in the library like a long forgotten vending machine. It had always been there, but never there and yet a fundamental part of our lives. Three people away now. The thin, middle-aged man steps up, closes his eyes (I assume, I can’t see, I don’t know what to do or say or think when I get there, no one does except those who’ve done it and they’re not talking.) Ten seconds later, he crumples to the floor. Sometimes the spotters catch people, sometimes they don’t and the thin, middle-aged man hit with a dull thud on the frayed indoor-outdoor carpet. The spotters shrug and sigh with a world-weariness as they drag him away and around the corner. The woman in front of me waits patiently until the way is clear, walks up to the machine, and the same happens to her. Only they catch her, almost too quickly, like they want to feel her warmth before it’s gone. I don’t like the look of that but figure I wont mind when I’m dead. I step up. I turn to the spotter, Do I just, think it? His blank stare turns me back to the machine. Tremors start in my shoulders and cascade down the rest of my body. I’m taking longer than most and the line behind me is antsy. I hear throats clearing and weight shuffling from foot to foot. I step out of line and apologize and let others go. More fall. More disappear. Is this how the entire world meets its end? People don’t like that I’m watching them. They don’t mind the spotters, they have a job to do. I’m just making people nervous. The line now snakes around me like at an amusement park and chattering from a couple of teenagers echos in the otherwise somber space. They’re in awe, as much as teenagers can be, over the only sure path to the afterlife residing right here in our small, stupid town. I ask why they are so anxious to escape their young lives, why not live a little first. But they roll their eyes and mutter old people under their breaths as if forty-two is really that old. The pressure to do the inevitable builds until I’m in line again. The spotter noticed me tiptoeing to the back but touched my arm and turned me around and said with eyes dripping with kindness or menace, You don’t have to wait again.
I stared down the machine and thought, I’m ready to die now. All went black and I floated backwards into nothingness and in that moment I screamed, No! I change my mind, I want to live. I want my husband. I then stood in a dark, crumbling, mansion, battered and decaying as if it had teetered for years on the rocky coast of a turbulent sea, furniture under ghostly white sheets, shards of dirty glass littering the floor. My heart pounded in fear, or stilled in death. What sounded like a rush of papers blowing through the room spun me around. There stood my husband, dumbstruck, next to a piano crusty with barnacles, its sheet music fuzzy with mold. I sprinted through cobwebs to him and embraced him and wept. I feared my last minute indecision ruined his chance at a proper afterlife. I pulled him somewhere we shouldn’t be, a strange liminal space neither Heaven nor Hell nor Purgatory, maybe another dimension or planet. He held me, calmed me, assured me he had thought the same thing, running into line behind me and begging the machine to join us together.
We explored the mansion for days or decades. We heard neither silence nor the howls of winds and crashing waves, felt neither dampness nor dryness, and neither darkness enveloped nor light illuminated the space. Our skin neither pallid nor flushed, our minds neither whole nor broken. The gray rooms and halls were endless or had we gone this way before? The windows, painted shut and covered in grime, never revealed the world beyond no matter how furiously we wiped them clean. Infinite panes of shattered glass stoked fears of burying ourselves under a mountain of cloudy shards. No clues reached us of where we were or what storms raged or doldrums settled on this forgotten place.
We endured through musty books that released clouds of dust when opened. The languages were familiar and unfathomable and we understood them all. Our ancestors’ magic woven into our lives; who we were before we were we; the deepest truths of our wants, desires, motivations, fears, laid open to ourselves and each other. All contained in their delicate and rough, blank and brimming pages. Our new knowledge danced together through laughter or shouts or wordlessly together or with miles of mansions between us.
With each revelation sheets fell from artwork or electricity buzzed to tinkling chandeliers. One day, or was it one night, a window unlatched. We pulled it open and paint cracked and flaked away. Our sun and our moon hung in the sky in all their colors and forms, all at once. Stars shone and fell and exploded and collapsed before us. Mountains rose and fractured and tumbled into the churning and calm sea. The ancient and the imminent gave us a clarity of life’s purpose of meaning, to each other, to the world. Our hands grasped each other’s tight. But as if holding onto something in a dream that loses substance as you wake, our dream world disintegrated, we disintegrated. His hand burst into a hundred fireflies, tiny sparks of life flew out of his arm, his body. I gasped and held my own hand up to stop it, but became a growing cluster of dew drops, glittering in his firefly light. We were together and would always be together, no matter where the darkness took us next.
Karly Foland is originally from Omaha and has spent over a decade living in Africa, Asia, and Europe. She recently moved from Abuja to Brussels and lives with her husband, newborn, and the two cats they rescued from the streets of Rabat. Her short stories have appeared in print in Best Climate Change Stories and online in Unleash Lit, Panorama, and soon in Black Hare Press.