Time Capsule – Terrain.org

 
By the fifth day of wildfire sky Scarlett had eaten so much ginger that the mound of gnawed ends no longer fit in the compost bin, so she dug a hole out back by the sliding door to bury them. She thought Elaine would object so she told her sister she was working on a time capsule, one that shouldn’t be opened for 20 years. The world, their house and backyard and cul-de-sac on the lonely elbow of a court of manufactured homes built by speed and poverty in the 80s, had been a brittle orange place ever since a transformer blew three counties over and containment had yet to inch past 20 percent. Scarlett’s stomach felt like a squalling many-fingered thing, stewed over the inescapable horror of this world she lived in, that she must have in part created. If only she’d been better, recycled more, driven less. And although the amber sky gave her a buzz behind the eyes if she stayed in it too long, Scarlett liked digging the hole, until one day she walked over with a wet handful of ginger ends and found instead a fat figure, pink and yellow-pale, the size of a large baby doll, squatting there instead.

Shocked and freshly nauseated, Scarlett staggered away, squeaking the glass door shut and knocking into Elaine, who was hunched over the desktop computer, flipping through articles about air quality and gun control policy, drought forcing mountain lions into suburban neighborhoods; babies born addicted to iPads. Scarlett told her sister she had to show her something, and Elaine followed Scarlett to the backyard, where the bulbous being seemed to perch on the edge of the hole, swinging fat legs that looked more like stumps. Though it was the size of an infant the figure was in no way cherubic, and though it had a human-like torso and limbs they were more vegetal and tuberous than flesh. Elaine—the older, logical one, who had mediated when their parents called each other “lazy and useless” or “stupid nagging bitch,” the one who had baked a carrot cake for her birthday when their mother forgot—knelt beside the figure and gingerly extended a hand, retracting quickly when it opened a round hole-like mouth and snapped two stubby fangs at her. Elaine cleared her throat and announced that this was a child of abuse, thrown out because of her abnormal features. Scarlett didn’t say anything, although she wanted to ask how Elaine knew it was a she.

Elaine returned with two Teflon oven mitts and picked up the being, now squealing and gnashing its teeth. She took it inside, citing smoke and lung fatigue. “Empty out the junk drawer in the laundry room and line it with your old soccer sweatshirt,” she called to Scarlett from the living room. Scarlett hurried as Elaine sang to soothe the awful creature.

All through the night Elaine stayed up, at first singing, then pleading, and eventually begging the creature to calm. Her footsteps, pacing back and forth, lured Scarlett to sleep, and she dreamed a friend had stolen her savings because it would teach her to be less materially dependent. “I don’t care about money!” Scarlett yelled as she sat in her burnt backyard. “I just want to be able to live!” When she woke she found Elaine slumped asleep in the living room loveseat, the creature whimpering slightly in her lap, gnawing on the wooden arm of the chair.

The nosy old woman next door had heard the squealing and came over the next morning with lasagna in a stained glass dish and a basket slung over her elbow. “Brought a couple jars of my apple butter,” she called as she hobbled through the front door before Scarlett could stop her, “Most of ‘em rotted fast so they’re no good for much else.” She was not surprised by Elaine’s oven mitts— “You’d probably bite too if you couldn’t talk!”—nor by the baby’s root-like limbs or lack of fingers or toes. She insisted on doing their laundry and folded Scarlett’s underwear cheerfully as the creature bounced on Elaine’s knee. She left them with her phone number which she’d never offered in the two years they’d spent next door. She’d barely gone when Elaine’s ex-girlfriend Mae appeared, looking sheepish and holding a bouquet of lilies that Scarlett quickly threw away before the stray cats she fed tuna to could eat them. Scarlett watched Elaine and Mae take turns rocking the baby, a heaviness sinking through her as the women swaddled the creature in a fireproof blanket they’d taken from the new emergency kit. They looked like the parents they’d vowed never to become, saying it was immoral to mint new humans in the eve of their extinction. The smoke had seemed to clear as soon as the baby had been found.

Mae ordered Chinese for dinner that night, and even Elaine didn’t complain about all the plastic it came in. She sat at the head of the table and rocked the sleeping creature in the drawer with her foot. “I could put some real wheels on the bottom of that thing so it would be easier to push around,” Mae said into her plate, twirling noodles around her chopsticks. “Maybe… we could take her on walks around the block?” Elaine smiled, quickly but contentedly, and Scarlett remembered their breakup, how her sister had insisted she was fine but also swore she never wanted to date anyone ever again.

Elaine nearly fell asleep at the table and Mae carefully brought her to bed, the creature whining whenever Elaine got too far away from it. As Scarlett threw the takeout containers into the landfill, she wondered if family happened only by accident. If you planned too hard about what you wanted or didn’t want, if you put too much effort into making it a certain way, then you would only end up disappointed. What about her own ex-boyfriends, the one who had gotten her pregnant, the one who died from an overdose, the one who was now running for senate on a platform of what he called “unrestricted liberty.” At some point each of them had seemed so certain to her, their future as guaranteed as seasons. But even those were unknowable now.

The baby did not adapt to their wants or whims, but kept chewing on plastic and wood and fingers, an appetite of destruction that was oddly comforting to Scarlett, who held her when Elaine was in the bathroom. Scarlett had been told she couldn’t sing her whole life but it was usually the only way to get the creature to stop whining. She didn’t know any lullabies so she sang about popping bottles and getting low, songs from sweaty middle school dances decades ago that seemed indelibly inked in some crevice of her brain. The creature would calm at the start of a song and begin to whine in the breaks between, so when Scarlett ran out of lyrics she put on rain sounds, and although she might’ve been imagining it, it seemed a great wave of both calm and longing washed over them both. “I hope you get to see rain,” Scarlett whispered to the creature, her sleeping tuber face breathing a soft hum, “I hope you get to see rivers and forests and maybe even a glacier one day.”

Then came the call they had been dreading. “Finally!” their mother’s voice was always strained, as though she was trying not to show her teeth. “Well, I can’t say this is exactly what I imagined but it’s better than nothing.” Scarlett held her breath as Elaine tried to stammer a response back, her usual conviction wavering. “I’ll be there first thing tomorrow morning,” their mother said. “We can do the christening then.”

The sisters did not need to speak. They called the old woman next door, who answered on the first ring and brought over Jello and three cigars her late husband had been saving for a special occasion. Mae didn’t need to be summoned because she’d never left. The women laid the baby down on the living room wool rug, stained in the left corner by red wine from years earlier, when they’d had more energy and invited people over for philosophy reading group and games of never-ending charades. Elaine unwrapped the fireproof blanket, the weighted anxiety blanket, the construction tape that held the creature bound. She wriggled out.

“What… is she?” Scarlett asked Elaine in a quiet voice that still felt too loud in the naked presence of the root creature, who was squirming anew in the space around her limbs. No one answered. “Why did she come here?” But Scarlett felt the silence settle like an answer as she asked. The creature let out a soft cooing now and the slits in her tuber face pointed toward the backyard. They carried her outside, all of them holding Elaine’s bare arms, pockmarked from the baby’s bites over the past week.

“There.” Scarlett pointed to the hole she’d dug.

The creature stilled as they lowered her. And as they began to toss the dirt over her, she nuzzled into the earth, her fibrous body ceasing to be separate from the ground she came from. If they dug her up again they would find only the soft wet earth.

Selene Ross is an audio producer, writer, and musician from Berkeley, California. She has produced stories for Radiotopia’s The Kitchen Sisters, KALW, and NPR, and her writing appears in Literary Hub. She has an MFA in Fiction from Oregon State University, where she teaches creative writing.

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