Replacements
The marsh burbled. The reeds shook. The water rippled. The beat rose.
Fingers, then hands, arms and whole bodies thrashed their way up through the water. Tacky grey-black feet touched firm ground. Joints twisted. Sopping hair slopped against leathery skin.
And then, one of them began to sing.
“We fen as fuck, draggin' rhymes through the muck, lay it down on the wasteland, beats in the wet sand. Words unholy, dripping out slowly…”
“Is this rap?,” asked Gran, looking up from her reader. “It looks like Thriller. Do you even know who Michael Jackson is?”
“Of course. Jackson plays for Arsenal.”
“But that’s… never mind.” She settled the reader into its recharge base. “Is this what kids are listening to now?”
“Oh, Gran… this is trashhop. It’s SO OLD.” Jeskola spat the words out with disgust, rolling her eyes with the mortification that pre-teens seem to pick up all of a sudden, like a virus. Wasn’t it only a few days ago that she’d been a child?
“I have to do a paper on bog bodies. That’s the ONLY reason I’m watching this.”
“We fen as fuck, hit you like a Mack truck. Drop you hard like the old ones, tossing back cold ones…”
Stacy shuffled into the kitchen and opened the cupboard. Seaweed-nut bars. Algae crackers. Instant laverbread tempura. Exoflour cookies with carob chips. Strawberry-flavored agar spread.
She picked up the Exoflour cookies and scanned the label, looking for something that might have grown on an old-fashioned farm, the kind of place she lived when she was Jeskola’s age. It was all bug ranching and sea farming now. Not much there. Maybe the sugar beets and soy oil.
She sat at the table and nibbled one of the cookies. It was sweet, crisp and lifeless. In a coloring book, it would have been a pale gray disc, unnoticed among sunny richness of the shortbreads, the darkness of half-charred raisins in the oatmeal cookies, the spicy bite of the gingersnaps playing off a base of mellow molasses.
The standard Cavendish bananas Stacy had always known had died off years ago, replaced by the more lemony Goldfinger variety.
Jeskola and her mother didn’t notice. They couldn’t have noticed. To them, these gray cookies were the world’s definition of cookies. These bananas were their bananas. The music Jeskola listened to was music. The kitchen lighting and countertop surfaces represented the way things always were. There was never any “before.”
All the things Stacy had known in childhood — lightbulbs, books, music, dances, language, the furniture in the homes, the fabrics she wore. Replaced. All of it. Faster, cheaper, more efficient manufacture and distribution. Strange materials. Shifted perspectives.
These people had no memory of truffle butter or Jamón Serrano. They didn’t crave the juice that ran out of August peaches. Why would they need those things? They had agar spread and carrageenan pops.
She put the cookies back on the shelf. In another life, she’d worked as a food critic. Now Stacy realized there were no more jobs as food critics. It occured to her that she was no longer even Stacy. She was Gran, the old one. The one who was out of time, out of sync, living in a world that didn’t exist.
“Will you read this, Gran?” Jeskola set her tablet on the table. “I’m gonna make kombu patties. You want one?”
“Sure. Why not?” Gran watched her granddaughter, the long-limbed, clever girl. Dark-eyed, like herself. Similar in facial structure, but more confident and studious than she’d been.
Jeskola moved boldly through the world that was hers, owning her space, right in her time. An improvement on the original. A worthy replacement.