Read the previous installments here!

Foreword:

I have been in the process of writing this story for the Cuspidor for about two years. If you are unacquainted with the characters, don’t panic — so am I. Let’s find out what they end up doing, one issue at a time.

“I need to say something.”

Maliciously, “Do tell.”

“We’ve known each other for quite some time now, James. But I really must know. Why do you keep doing this?” Jones smiled, showing his teeth. “I’m obviously too important to be disposed of, and it should be equally obvious by now that I don’t want to help you at all.”

“Well, let’s be...”

“No. Shut up with your cool and condescending responses to every goddamn thing I say, James. I’m sick of it. Do you have any idea how unpleasant this is for me? I’m just some guy who happened to be useful and now my entire life suffers the intolerable inconvenience of your frankly Orwellian rigamarole.” He paused petulantly. “You give me the opportunity to attain fame and power when I’m a twentysomething retail store worker in a nuclear holocaust and, yeah, sure, of course I sign your devil’s contract. Not that you guys would have been all accepting and willing to leave me be if I’d declined, at that.”

“Jones what does this have to do with...”

“Stop talking.”

A respectful pause from the other.

“So I’m taken into this hush-hush operation that makes me feel oh-so-important. I do your dirty work better than anybody else, not by any innate talent or intelligence, no our dear friend Jonesy hasn’t got any of that, but because of some idiotically random coincidence. I feel like I’m at the top of the world, lighter than air, walking on water, letting the bygones be themselves, floating through.... And yet, something is wrong. As always, something just absolutely positively has to be wrong. Doesn’t it James? It turns out that you’re all just a bunch of crooks and liars. If you even know what a lie is. It’s where you say something which isn’t true. But you don’t care about the truth, do you? All you care about your perverse little ideology. You’re not the government of the United States and Provinces of North America, you’re a bunch of Entists. Now how does that sound? Did you think I would just sell out the Human race for a couple billion dollars? Do you think that? Huh? These humans are mighty stupid and weak, but we’re not suckers. At least I’m not. So there.”

He paused, evidently satisfied that he was finally able to deliver his little rant.

“Do you know what it was that first tipped me off that you were fakes?”

James, detecting the lack of rhetoric in the question, almost imperceptibly shook his head from left to right, right to left, then back to center.

“I’m eating lunch with a couple of you buffoons and one of you drops you egg salad sandwich on the floor. Nothing out of the ordinary there. But then you pick up the sandwich, you clap your knees together in a failed attempt to prevent its rise. That’s when I knew.”

“How on earth does that...”

“Oh, you wouldn’t understand. I get it. In some ways you’re very far from being human.”

“We are physicochemically ident..”

“The mind is what matters James. And, speak of the devil, my mind tells my mouth to say that I quit. I’m done with this whole sham. And since you’ll probably keep me around just in case I, one day, decide to be more helpful, I won’t be harmed.”

Jones smiled effusively, looking around the room. Hands not belonging to Jones were raised in a gesture which, to a more friendly audience, would have appeared apologetic. Unhurriedly, the hands descended onto the table, but there was a barrier between the two. In between the hands and the table there happened to be a small electrical device.

“If you really must have it your way, Jones. You could have been such a great help to us. To our mission.”

James frowned, reluctantly considering his options. A decision was made, and soon after the device was, as so many have been, activated. Jones collapsed on the floor, writhing in pain.

“Such a shame, Jones.”

Eventually his movements calmed as did his heart and breathing and brain activity and life. James frowned, and stood up to leave.

Read future installments here!

April was cold—abnormally so. It felt as if my smoky breaths would crystalize mid-air and fall to the grass in icy shards. But, perhaps out of habit, I once again found myself at the pond, just a five-minute walk from my house. My fingers, wrapped around my simple, compact camera, were frozen numb in the bitter air. My attempts to warm them with my breath offered little respite—but to hide them in my pockets would be to potentially miss a shot.

I wasn’t sure about what I wanted to capture—but I felt that at any moment I would see it, so long as I stood upon these grassy slopes, above the picket fence of woody brush, searching the blurred mirror for some ripple in its reflection of the bleak, blue-gray sky.

If you asked me why I take photos, I would tell you it’s because I’m forgetful.

Or rather, I’m afraid of forgetting.

When I was fourteen, my mom passed away from cancer. She had been fighting it for two long years, trying to gun it down with money, chemo, radiation, and everything in between. The cancer was a better survivor than she was. What had started in her breast had metastasized through the lymph nodes to invade her lungs, causing hemorrhaging, and ultimately drowning her in her own blood.

After the funeral, I realized the last picture we had of her was from two years before she passed. We were on vacation at Banff, striking silly poses against a forest of gold, and the infallible white-streaked mountains beyond, for the kind stranger taking our photos. Mom was short and plump; even twelve-year-old me stood at least an inch taller, while my father towered nearly an entire foot above us. In the photo, however, she had wrestled us into headlocks, so that she stood a head above us, brandishing a flushed and victorious smile to the camera.

It was a brilliant, unburdened smile. One that existed only in the dusty boxes tucked into a spider-webbed corner of my mind.

The mom I remembered was pale and frail. She had no trace of the short locks of dark brown which hugged the countenance of the woman in the photo; a plain, blue headscarf had taken its place. Almost all of my memories of her seemed inextricably tainted by the smell of antiseptic, and called to mind a hoarse cough which, for some reason, always invoked an image of sandpaper against my eardrums.

The mom I remembered was always smiling. Always. It was the same expression every time Dad and I entered her room in the hospital—a ferocious smile, brightly lit by a wild inferno of emotions in her eyes. And though she was cold to the touch, every time she wrapped me in an embrace, it felt like I had been plunged into a hot spring—it was invigorating, as if the energy generated by a thousand burning coals was being poured into my muscles. As if the fire of her life was pouring out of her, escaping from even the smallest pores in her skin, and seeping into me.

I want to live. Every cell in her body seemed to scream it, over and over. Every time she gave me one of those hugs, it echoed through my chest and seemed to interrupt the rhythm of my heartbeat. I want to live.

That smile, those hugs, so full of love…

They tormented me.

She lived every day as if it were her last. So naturally, every time I saw that smile, I was devoured by an electrifying terror. An abyss would open up within my stomach and my heart swayed precariously above it, desperately dangling from the precipice by a single heartstring—

—She’s going to die.

The words were claustrophobic and bore down on me, as if, in the very next second, her body would evaporate in the conflagration of her own desire to live.

—She’s going to die.

Every time, those words would flash epileptically before my eyes, and the negative afterimages smeared themselves across my field of vision, painting over my reality. They piled atop each other like a squirming mass of ants, growing denser, more twisted, until—

—She’s finally dead.

I almost feel like I’m the one who killed her.

A sudden rush of cold wind whipped across the pond. I tucked my face in, protecting my neck and face from the bite. My fingers, however, still tight around my camera, were lashed mercilessly, enough that I feared my fingers would fall off.

An echoing squawk distracted me from the pain. It was a Canada goose standing on the gentle slopes, looking up at the shadowy clouds above. Although the sexes of Canada geese are difficult to ascertain, I was familiar with the geese in this area, and fairly certain this was one of the females. Every morning, she and her gander would parade their goslings around the pond, nibbling on the virid grasses.

But now, she appeared as a lone figure standing against a patchwork sky of thick, smoky cumulonimbi and the cold, silver light peeking through the gaps. Weathering the violent cracks of cold air that tore at her plumage, again she sent a cry into the sky—it was a sound that began low and spiked in pitch like a voice cracking.

Slowly, as if sudden movements would disturb the scene, I knelt and held the camera vertically before me. Somehow, I could tell that she would soon take off into the sky.

“No pictures!” she shouted, and swiftly snatched the camera from my hands.

“Mom...”

“I don’t want anyone to—” A fit of coughs interrupted her words. “—remember me like this.”

But I wanted to remember. I wanted to remember the mom that burned with such love and vitality, even as the colour leaked from her skin and her voice became a wisp of its former self. I wanted to immortalize that warmth which was, by its very nature, fleeting.

Carefully, I lined up the shot according to the composition which had materialized within my mind, increased the shutter speed, and with shallow breaths that escaped my mouth in dissipating puffs, I waited.

But just as mother goose cast out her wings, the turbulence of some vengeful wind god swept a flurry of fallen leaves into me. By the time I pressed the shutter button, she had long flown off into the heavens, leaving behind only the residual echo of flapping on the wind, and a moment of falling feathers frozen on the LCD display.

Even though I hold onto this camera unrelentingly, and look through its lens as my own eyes, I can never seem to capture the things I truly wish to remember.

Where am I? I look up at a pale blue sky, clouds dotting its surface. I can feel something soft on my back. It feels like… sand? I twist my body over to find that I’m right; it is sand.

I groan. My head feels like it’s going to burst open, each beat of my heart making it scream in pain. I gently feel the wound, just above my eyes. All that does is make the screams even more unbearable. I curse. The same question echoes in my head again. Where am I?

Suddenly, I get jolted back into reality. I remember huge, surprising waves, so I must have been caught in an unexpected storm. At the time, I was also fishing, so I’m probably a fisherman. I remember how the waves tumbled over my boat and then…blackness. That’s probably when I hit my head. The waves must’ve swept me ashore, but to where?

I get up and wince from the pain. I must have hit my head hard. I look around and step back in surprise. The landscape is magnificent. If I wasn’t stranded without a camera right now, I would’ve taken a picture.

There are some mountains in the distance that reach high up into the sky, their peaks white with snow. Beside them, is a gigantic field, as flat as a green floor. My jaw drops.

It is only now that I notice my boat. Cracked in half, it has washed up not too far away from me. Its motor is a total wreck, leaking oil everywhere. My heart sinks, it’s beyond repair. Anger suddenly boils inside me. “Aaaaaargh!” I shout and kick some wreckage of the boat, only to flinch at the pain it brings on my foot. Great.

I plop down on the cold sand. I’ve suffered hardships in the past, but nothing like this. I’m stranded on some coastline with no way back to the docks. I don’t even know which direction the docks are.

I shiver as a cold breeze passes by. I desperately try to think of a plan, but nothing comes to me. I curl up into a ball, giving up. Just like that, I get an idea. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. Of course! Perhaps this place has resources that could repair my boat, or even better, civilization. I get up, renewed with hope, and decide to walk toward the mountains.

***

It takes ages to walk there. I trek past swamps, small lakes, forests and even some odd-looking spikes made out of limestone. I pause for a second. Limestone usually doesn’t form like this, but then again, this area has a very interesting ecosystem. I walk on, reaching the mountains about two hours later.

The mountains have tall dark cliffs that loom over me menacingly. Their dark, long shadows engulf the landscape in blackness. It takes my eyes a few minutes to adjust to the light. I start to look around, and something catches my eye. It’s on the right side of the mountains, just beyond the mountain’s shadow. It looks like… a farm.

My legs are already racing there before I even know what I’m doing, powered by that hope that there is civilization nearby.

As I get closer, I realize that there is a farm, and it’s quite big too. Its lush fields are dotted with wheat and another plant that strangely resembles a bamboo tree.

When I reach the farm, I start looking for a shack or house that the farmer might live in. I spot it. It looks like some sort of wooden box that fits two or three rooms. My heart jumps with joy, and I start running toward the shack.

As soon as I get there, my legs collapse. I’m safe now. I’ve found a farm, a place for me to stay. I hear two voices inside. They sound calm. I lean closer, trying to hear what they're saying, but my head knocks on the door. Both voices stop. Then I hear two sets of footsteps walking toward me.

I slowly retreat from the door, embarrassed for eavesdropping. How will these farmers react to a stranger eavesdropping on them? I try not to think of an answer. The door creaks open revealing a man and a woman staring at me. They look shocked and slightly annoyed too.

The man has long brown hair that is tied up in a bun. His face has brown marks in a V shaped formation, the lowest point being just under his nose. He’s wearing a long, blue shirt with buttons up the middle. His pants are a bright red, stretching down to his barefooted feet.

The woman has long braided hair that reaches her knees. She’s also barefoot, and wearing the same clothes as the man. My eyes almost miss it, but I notice one more thing. On the middle of their chests, is a bronze medallion. Pictured on it is the bamboo tree I saw earlier.

“Abi Ana Calidada,” one of them whispers in shock.

“What?” I say, completely confused. They must not speak English. I raise my hands, trying to show my confusion, but they don’t seem to understand.

“Oblika Darkin” the other shouts. This makes me really confused.

I’m about to raise my hands again when they both pick me up, and start dragging me away from the farmhouse. I struggle to free myself, but their grip is too strong. Desperately, I scream and kick, but this does no harm. These farmers are not friendly at all.