FRAGMENTS OF A NEW WORLD

[fragmentsofanewworld]

So here we go again

Wake up. From one day’s radiance into another. It had still been light out on the other side, and it was already on this one. The room was sweltering in the radiator heat she’d allowed inside. Ostensibly to make it feel more like home, but mostly to keep any mouthy snowmen from intruding upon her domain. 

Check the clock. She had about an hour before the mouthiest of them all would come back as well. The only sixty minutes of the day that didn’t have to matter all at once. This was what she did for a living. Anyone’s living aside from hers.

Listen. Amidst the palace’s terrible acoustics, Kerli could hear the luckier servants at work. Drawing baths, kneading breads and directing overly eager guests to the waiting room, where they’d get to sit and ponder the straightness of their priorities for implicitly professing their paltry liegeman’s problems to be more pressing than their lord’s early morning doze. 

Consider. Theirs was a grit she could respect. No, not the liegemen’s. The servants’. A diligence she could only simulate by sacrificing sleep for a few dozen minutes of rest. As actually joining them in their being all but taken for granted would somehow rub both the taken and the takers the wrong way. Not that she cared. Yet not doing whatever she damn well pleased, like a good little noble, was a bigger act of rebellion than any solidarity could ever be. 

Reflect. It’s pragmatism, she thought, don’t judge me.

“I’m not judging you,” Aeife would say.

“Maybe I want to be judged.”

Compare and contrast. Most other vinkona got out of bed along with their sisters. Yet Aeife’s mere presence was such a smother on her daily existence that she had to allow herself at least an hour to catch her breath in advance. Everything after that was dressing, preening, driving, meeting, smiling, shrinking, kissing asses, making nice and at the end of the evening cursing herself for wasting yet another day choking on the undignifying drone of debonair dignity. Effacing herself for a loyalty to no one in particular. For a fealty more foul and fatuous than the gilded bitterness boiling up inside her. 

Don’t lie. She wanted to be judged. But Aeife couldn’t. And Faye wouldn’t.

Lie. So here we go again.

[fragmentsofanewworld]

All across the nation there wasn’t a single television owner who had never heard the name of “Slinky” Simon Koenig and not a nostalgic millennial who didn’t remember it without thinking of catchy theme songs and unprecedented national tragedy. In little over five years, the only son of friendly Jewish expats Leonard and Judith Koenig had worked his way up from a humble stagehand with extremely flexible extremities to the man who singlehandedly taught Canada’s children to share, forgive and high-five hand puppets. Parents planned their afternoons around Slinky Si’s scheduled appearances on public television, secretly wishing their children’s favorite friend all the well in the world for spending their tax dollars on something they actually wanted: half an hour of peace and quiet.

For those five blessed years, Simon Koenig was as mainstream a mainstay as butter on toast. Until May 7th, 2004, when at 6 pm sharp, not Slinky Si, but a nervous elderly lady sat at the kitchen table in the Fabulous Funhouse. Children nationwide watched as she explained that not even people on television live forever. And thus were rendered null and void their parents’ desperate attempts to hide that morning’s headlines from their poor progeny’s prying eyes, announcing the news that popular children’s television host Simon Koenig, aged 34, had been found dangling from a rope in his bathroom.

While the less melodramatic would have drowned their sorrows in drugs or alcohol, his widowed wife Allie decided to flush them in expensive treatments for the mysterious condition her daughter had developed after her father’s death. After suffering pretty much every curative treatment on the sensible side of an exorcism, little Emily’s misfortune reached its boiling point when she became a bit of a medical sensation. As such, she got to read her books, baffle doctors and cry quietly in the sterile fluorescent light of over half a dozen hospital rooms until her mother, after two long years of hypochondriac spendthrift, finally accepted that her daughter would never sleep again.

From that point onwards, Emily only ever visited physicians for matters involving preventing pregnancies, safe for that one time when a gnat had gotten caught in her nightgown and the myriad swellings it had left behind grew far redder and itchier than she was comfortable with. It was a mistake for the ages that ended with her mother threatening to sue the doctor over his poor choice of words regarding the ‘mosquito bites’ on Emily’s chest. On the way home, she launched a tirade against the evils of mainstream medicine, after which she decided to keep herself healthy by the sheer force of the placebo effect alone.

[fragmentsofanewworld]

The sun was setting when Emily got home that afternoon. She emptied her bookbag on the couch, lit the stove underneath yesterday’s leftover minestrone and pulled open several of the many kitchen closets looking for a clean mug. The Koenig household owned approximately two dozen mugs, far more than two regular dishwashers could ever need, yet most of them had gotten lost in the wasteland of her mother’s atelier, a room the both of them had agreed to clean only when it started to birth new life. At least, that was what she liked to think.

The bell rang. When Emily opened the door, she was met by her own reflection in a pair of mirrored aviators. It was Aeife. Somehow.

“How the hell did you get here?” Emily asked.

“Well, I sorta followed you here. I hope you weren’t about to slip into something more comfortable?”

“I’m more than comfortable enough, thank you.”

“Really now.” Aeife raised an eyebrow and cast a skeptical look at Emily’s frumpy getup. “Mind if I come in?”

"Actually, yes.” Emily leaned against the doorway. “How the hell did you get here?”

Aeife scoffed. “You think you’re the only slider around these parts?”

“A what?”

“You know, that whole thing where you fall asleep and wake up in another world? We’ve been doing that for my entire life. And so have you, by the way. You just can’t remember.” Emily couldn’t shake the feeling that Aeife was disappointed in her. “How do you think we knew how to get you out of there?”

“So you were the one who attacked me,” Emily muttered.

“The only way to wake you up over there was to knock you out over here, yes. You starting to see how this thing works?”

Would it hurt this girl to apologize once in a while? Or was she the one who had to apologize? Emily ran a hand through her disheveled hair and lowered her gaze to the perfect feet gracing her doorstep. They were wearing designer heels. Of course they were.

“Aeife, I, eh...” she said, “I don’t know if I wanna be involved with all this stuff.”

“Call me Evanna.”

Emily looked up.

“My parents aren’t sliders, you see. Sure, they exist in both worlds, but as two separate entities. They don’t share their memories or personalities like we do. Most people live an entirely different life in the other world without ever knowing they’re not the only ones of them around,” Aeife -- or rather, Evanna -- said, pursing her lips. “So yeah, I ended up with two names. One for each world. One for each life. Unlike you.”

“Wait, so in that other world... my name is the same?”

“Yup. That can only mean your parents knew you’d be a slider and wanted to give you a single identity. And they’d only knew you were a slider if they were sliders themselves. Or at least one of them.”

“I’m pretty sure my mom would have told me she’s a witch,” mumbled Emily.

“You have another parent, don’t you?”

Emily started to bite her nails. It felt wrong, as things should be.

“So, are you gonna let me in, or what?”

[fragmentsofanewworld]

Continuation of this.

Emily stared down at the table, where the apple lay innocently on its side, still wobbly from its drop. Her way out was within arm’s reach, and she couldn’t even touch it. Literally. She had dreamt more than anyone who actually could dream. She had waited for an opportunity to fall into her lap, and now that her wish had been granted, through some cynical twist of fate, a giant middle finger to the spirit of initiative that’d almost made her feel guilty, she was too scared to make even the minimum of effort it still required of her.

She’d no reason to trust Aeife. She knew. But she’d never been the most rational person. She wanted to trust Aeife. She did. But she’d never been the most courageous person either. So here she was. Banging on a locked door. Her grand adventure, aborted before it’d even started. She chose. The same thing she always chose.

“I can’t,” she said.

Coward.

“Why not?” Aeife asked.

That question. Always that question.

“Because it won’t matter. It’s not gonna change anything. I don’t know you. I don’t know this place. I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I’ll never be a part of it. Never, really be a part of it.”

Aeife reclined in her chair. Outside, the sun was going down.

“You’re already a part of it. You’re a part of everything. This world, all of the worlds, they’re just grand spiderwebs of similarities and differences. Relationships. All you need to do to see that, is to acknowledge that you’re a part of it. To use magic is to reach into something you see, isolate every single one of its treats and find that which connects you. I reach into you and I see not a single aspect I won’t find anywhere else. On the contrary. You and I have so much in common you’ll never see the end of me. You already belong, Emily. That’s not your choice to make. But you can choose to accept it.”

Silence. Emily looked at Aeife, then at the apple, then at the seemingly infinite space between them. Breathe in. Reach out.

“There’s just one thing i want to know before I do this,” she said. 

Aeife cocked her head. She swallowed.

“Is it scary, to fall asleep?”

“You don’t even notice it.” Aeife smiled.

Breathe out. The fire scorched her hands. It didn’t hurt. She tightened her grip around the apple’s round contours. Not hers. She imagined the taste of tart, luscious sweetness in her mouth. Not hers. She envisioned the old farmer’s hand, plucking the ripe fruit from its branch to usher in the end of summer. Definitely not hers. 

Hers was the red. The pervasive, abundant red longing to flow through her veins. She called out to it; it pulled itself loose from the apple’s skin and seeped into hers. It poured into her like a tidal wave, washing away her fears and doubts. Within a matter of seconds, she’d dug her teeth into the feeble fruit’s fragile flesh and rent it to shreds in her mouth. And then it was over, and she was Emily again. And she wondered how she ever came to be brave enough to have done the things she’d just done. The apple, pale and colourless, fell to the table. And she was still alive.

“Congratulations,” Aeife whispered. “You just learned your very first suite.”

[fragmentsofanewworld]

“Well, so the thing with magic, if that’s what you want to call it, is--”

“Wait, so you don’t actually call it magic?” Emily blurted out. It had been a while since she’d last interrupted anyone.

“We don’t really call it one thing.” Faye emerged from the living room and dropped onto the seat next to Emily’s. “It just comes naturally to us. ‘Magic’ is what the people over on the other side call it, so we sorta picked up on that, but we’ve never really felt for it to need a name. It’s just the way of the world’s work.” 

“Don’t you have good feelings to make with my vinkona?” groaned Aeife. She slammed the fridge door shut and strode back to the table, where she put what looked like a large apple down in front of Emily. It gleamed an alluring deep red in the late afternoon sun.

“She can wait. I wouldn’t wanna be missing this for all the moolah in the world.”

Aeife scoffed. Even her scoffs sounded like they came from another world. “Suit yourself,” she said, “but don’t come crying when things get a little heated.”

“Are you gonna make me set this thing on fire or something?” Emily said. Usually the fire came after months of reading and breathing exercises and philosophical pontificating. At least in books it did.

“Nah. That’d be too easy. You’re gonna eat it.”

Another answer that raised five more questions. Emily sighed from a sit into a slouch, swept the apple up from the table and held it in front of her face. It smelled like grenadine, and looked like carved ruby far more than anything edible, but the longer she held it, it mostly just felt. It hurt. It hurt like nettle, scorching every pore in her shivering skin. It pulsated, convulsed, lived in the palm of her hand, drawing out pain from places she didn’t even know could hurt. It stuck to her like boiling sugar. But the only thing harder than letting it go would be to keep holding on. The strange fruit dropped onto the table to the beat of Faye’s fist.

“Have you completely lost it?!” Emily heard, and “You’re making her eat a Scarlet Kiss?” Someone was screaming. She wasn’t the one screaming. Somehow. She blew into her hand, hoping it would ease the pain. She clenched, hoping it would quell the fire. She bit off her fingers, but they were still there.

“It’s the easiest way to see if she can tap into the Cavalier’s power,” someone sang. I was Aeife. Aeife sang. The unpain slowly trickled back into her body. The oxygen forced open her throat. Her hand was lying right in front of her on the table, floundering in a puddle of its own blood. Her ears listened. “This is a mutated type of apple known as a Scarlet Kiss,” Aeife said, “I've read that before the Age of Colonization, these were presented to condemned criminals on the night before their execution -- usually by their wives, or their sisters, hence the name. The idea was that if they chose to atone for their crime by dying by their own hand, they’d deserve a more gentle death than whatever the executioner had in mind for them.”

The words burrowed their way up through her gullet, like vomit. A million bottled-up accusations, fighting for the right to strangle her. She swallowed then all. She took everything back. But Aeife wouldn’t stop looking.

“It’s gonna be okay, Emily. Trust me.”

Emily hadn’t had any problems trusting Aeife up until now. But that had been another Aeife, a gentler, goofier, far more enthralling Aeife. This Aeife, royal and uncaring, she didn’t want to trust.

“You just tried to poison me,” she said.

“It’s gonna be okay. Eat the apple.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“I can’t, okay?” Her voice capsized. It was humiliating. She clenched her fists, gazing into Aeife’s ice. “I know what this is,” she stammered, “you want to brute force me into doing something magical by endangering my life. I know that. But if that’s how it works, then I don’t want to learn mag--”

“I’m sorry, Emily.” Aeife hung her head. Faye put a concerned hand on Emily’s shoulder. “But this isn’t about what you want anymore. This is about what you have to do. And all you have to do is trust me.”

(Continued here!)

[fragmentsofanewworld]

Waking up was a nightmare. Sprawled across another bed she didn’t know, Emily wondered how people managed, being pulled out of their sweat and stink, swallowing the consciousness shoved into their mouths as their first act of the day and realizing they’d just wasted another few hours of their lives.

First things first. Her eyes flashed across the room, looking for answers. She saw lines of books along the walls, interrupted only by a single door on the left. She saw two crescent flights of stairs embracing her bed from behind, joining together at the top into an elevated wooden mezzanine graced with even more bookshelves. A library, but also a bedroom? Not a bad place to wake up in. 

Upon closer inspection, the room looked ancient, but felt brand new. The intricate, flowing curves had been polished in sober matte blacks and whites, and from the ceiling hung an enormous, writhing chandelier of metal and wood and glass and tiny lightbulbs scattering its elegant branches across the room like a tree growing upside down. Yet that wasn’t were the light was coming from.

It came from the other side of the room, that seemed to consist mostly of large curtains failing to prevent the sun from breaking through. Strange, Emily thought. Last time she’d checked, it had been a few minutes to midnight. But that couldn’t have been more than an hour ago. At least, in reality it couldn’t have been. Aye, there’s the rub. This wasn’t reality. This was the place where her hair was long and her legs were sore and everything was beautiful and bullshit. This didn’t even resemble reality.

Emily scrambled towards the large glass door and tore open the curtains to confirm her suspicions. Once her eyes had adjusted to the autumn sun, she was looking out over rows of grandiose brick buildings colored like eggshells, their plastered fronts disrupted by a relief of elaborate line patterns and skeletal balconies of blackened steel, stately and academic and European. She saw maple trees lining the promenade walks, and street lights shaped like flowers. She saw copper-colored curls and spirals adorning the display windows on the other side of the river, and meticulously illustrated billboards advertising absinthe and deerskin purses and something called a ‘ciphograph’. She saw crowded, clanking train cars zooming by on sailcloth wings, dangling from a single rail bridging the water. Yet most of all she saw the mountaintops in the distance; the same mountaintops she saw everyday on her way to school. This didn’t even resemble reality, and yet it did.

The sound of voices on the floor below broke her out of her baffled daze. They were back. She grabbed hold of the handle and pushed her meagre weight against the door. It didn’t budge. What would she even do when she got to the balcony anyway? Jump? 

The only other way out was the pursuers’ likely way in, but compared to staying there and waiting for her death to catch up, rushing headlong into danger somehow seemed like the more sensible option. Luckily, this door wasn’t locked, but when she heard footsteps, she quickly backed away from the door, straightened out the blankets to make it look like they hadn’t been slept in, and crawled under the bed, hoping her pursuers would somehow be in enough of a hurry to shirk a more than superficial look around the room.

The footsteps came closer. Maybe they’d have mercy on her if she told them she had no idea what was going on. Closer. Maybe they had the wrong person all along. Maybe they’d apologize and bring her back home. Closer. Maybe this was all just a dream after all.

But nothing happened. The footsteps walked right past the door, echoed further down the hallway, and then stopped.

Relieved, Emily crawled back towards the door and carefully poked her head out into the hallway. Just a few meters to the left, she saw a girl with her back turned, short, immaculately dressed and wearing high heels that could believably have produced the sound that’d scared her to death less than a minute ago. It was the girl who’d flung her across the hallway the first time she’d woken up here. A complete stranger, but at least one who seemed to be on her side. 

Emily reached out to grab the girl’s shoulder, but suddenly found her scowling face staring up at her. 

“Oh, you’re awake,” she said, seemingly more out of obligation than about genuine surprise.

“Where am I?” Emily blurted out.

“Like, relative to the rest of the house, or in what street, or...”

“Where am I? Is this...” She swallowed her words as soon as she realized there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t be met with scorn.

“We’ve been waiting to tell you.” She urged Emily to follow her. “Just try to remain sane for a few more minutes. It’s hard, I know.”

[fragmentsofanewworld]

Compared to this view, nothing else seemed everything it was cracked up to be. It was dark out -- this far north it always was at this time of year -- but the streets and their gorgeous spires woven from marble and glass were bathing in the warm light of the sunstone paving the roads. Grand bridges erected in glistening, crumpled metal guided large crowds of the city’s nightlife over the frozen river branches. Everything felt like it belonged.

Her city wasn’t like that. In fact, she’d never seen a city before where everything belonged. A city is where something ended up that didn’t belong anywhere else. This wasn’t a city. It was a museum, a sanitized cavalcade of fancy indulgences, a playground for people like Aeife, people who couldn’t be any more different from her if they tried. For the first time since waking up, Emily actually felt like she was in another world.

[fragmentsofanewworld]

This fragment follows immediately after this one.

At least her senses were returning, judging by the pain breaking through the haze in her legs. Awkwardly wobbling back to her feet, she looked over the railing that had broken her fall. The tiled floor below was as gorgeous as the one she was standing on. Four, five floors before she’d reach ground level, maybe? The screams and gunshots emanating from downstairs didn’t sound very welcoming, but going back was even less of an option.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

It was the most oddly endearing voice Emily had ever heard, a melodic, high-pitched song of an accent lisping its way through a question she honestly didn’t know the answer to.

“That’s where they’re coming from. Come on!”

She’d heard this voice before. It was the voice that had woken her up. And it belonged to a girl no self-respecting person would ever dare to fall in love with.

Clearly tired of Emily’s waffling, the girl with the dainty voiced grabbed her arm and nearly pulled her upper body off her legs, still struggling to wake up. Emily didn’t like being touched, especially not by someone as infuriatingly perfect as this girl. Her magnetism troubled Emily on a level far beyond mere attraction, oozing a sense of comforting unattainability she thought existed only in print. 

Unfortunately, she had bigger things to worry about than lust at first sight. Panting and worrying and trying to put one numb foot in front of the other without breaking it, she let the other girl drag her back into the hallway she came from. It gave on to several doors she hadn’t even noticed the first time she’d passed through. The other girl stuck her head around one of them, then urged Emily to follow her inside. None of this was making any sense, but she’d read enough books to know that she wouldn’t be getting any answers at this point, even if she bothered to ask for them. This girl seemed all to eager to play her role as mysterious savior entirely by the book.

[fragmentsofanewworld]

Emily reached out to the last remaining unsoiled patch of grass and channeled every last drip of green she could squeeze out into a desperate roll. The blade came plunged into the ground before her eyes. There was no time or serenity left to think of a way out. She was all out of options, and his were as infinite as ever. Any misguided excitement from another brief brush with death was promptly cleansed out of her body by another blunt kick to her lower abdomen. Nothing came anymore. She’d bled all the red her body could lose before breaking down, spat out more rancid yellow than she could ever have eaten, nothing but a squirming, empty shell of a women starting down her end with dulled, grey eyes. What else was death but a lifetime’s worth of sleep, anyways? She was only getting what she’s owed.

[fragmentsofanewworld]

On the right-hand side of the portrait was her father, just like she remembered him, with right next to him her mother — or at least a younger, more easily presentable version of her. Charlotte was standing right in front of them, gazing straight at the painter with milky eyes, like a Margaret Keane painting. Emily recognized herself in the girl to the left, a confused-looking creature of innocence and ruffled hair, but she’d never seen the third girl before.

“Are you looking at the family portrait?” Emily felt Charlotte’s cane prodding against her feet. How did that girl know what she was looking at?

“I assume that’s what this is.”

“This was actually the last time our brother ever saw you,” Charlotte said in that impeccably schoolish voice of hers, “if I remember correctly.”

“Wait, we have a brother now?”

“Doesn’t look like a brother,” Aeife butted in.

“Well, it’s an historical painting,” Charlotte said, “These do have a tendency to meddle with some truths their commissioners find… undesirable. I’ve heard Father didn’t look as handsome as he does here, for one.”

No one felt any need to object. At this point, Emily felt blinder to her father’s flaws than Charlotte would ever be.

“This one just won’t do, won’t it? Once we’re all together again, we should have a new one made. A proper one.”

[fragmentsofanewworld]

Much to her own confusion, Emily found out that the instigator of her fall had been her own hair. It had always been longer than sensibility prescribed, but now it gushed down her body in coppery waves, far better-kempt than she remembered it and laced with inexplicable streaks of gold and red. It all didn’t seem very plausible or pleasant. Yet here she was. She’d been saved from a certain death, thrown down a tower of marble servants and flung across a hallway like skipping stone, and she’d done all of it looking like the cover of a third-rate fantasy novel. If this was dreaming was like, she’d be more than happy to go without it for the rest of her life.

[fragmentsofanewworld]

No matter how hard she tried not to stand out, the librarians welcomed her like grandparents at this point, which at least alleviated some of the embarrassment she felt for visiting with the regularity of clockwork. Ever since the semester started, there had been a gap in her schedule on Mondays, between two and three in the afternoon — too short a timespan to risk a quick trip back home, but just long enough to pluck five books off a shelf and make it back on time for class. By now she didn’t even look at their titles anymore. Last week, she’d read a biography of British Prime Minister Clement Attlee, a formulaic sci-fi novel about teenage time travelers, a historical treatise on Native American involvement in the civil war, a book trying to explain string theory to children and a rather saucy novella clearly aimed at women twice her age. How enjoyable reading them actually was didn’t even matter anymore, as long as it kept her busy.