Penner

Alpha

By Robert G. Penner

Post-it notes of various colors are attached to hard surfaces throughout the house: refrigerator, freezer, washer, dryer, bathroom mirrors, the inside of the front door and the back. Just before she died Rebecca had written various instructions on the Post-its for Michael, who is standing in the kitchen with his supper. Because he keeps forgetting things. Because he doesn’t pay attention.

Tinfoil is pulled taut across a square cake pan of frozen lasagna and crimped about the rim. In one corner of the tinfoil is a yellow square of paper:

Preheat oven 375
Bake 55 minutes
Let cool 5 minutes

Michael peels the yellow note from the foil and presses it down on the countertop, running his finger firmly across the top to ensure it sticks.

Michael wakes on the couch fully dressed. The air is saturated with red light. The walls look wet. One of his pant legs has rolled up to his knee, black sock below his ankle. His calf looks like boiled ham. He goes to the window.

The ambulance is at the neighbors’ again. He can’t remember their names. Rebecca knows them. They are unaccountably poor. Their house is a slow-motion catastrophe: shingles flake from the sagging roof, the porch is an animal with a broken back, cracked windows backed by cardboard. The grey-skinned husband goes for slow walks around the block every afternoon, bent forward like an inchworm reaching for a leaf: tentative step; concentration and consolidation; tentative step; concentration and consolidation; tentative step.

Rebecca said there was something wrong with the man’s spine. There was an accident in a factory or a warehouse. Rebecca knows because she talked to the wife. The wife is in her sixties. She sunbathes in her bikini on a reclining lawn chair in their front yard and smokes cigarettes. She has blonde hair with which you could scrub the white out of a tub.

The rotating lights of the ambulance illuminate the neighborhood. The wife is on the porch in a nightgown, smoking, chatting with the paramedics. Her husband waits in a gurney on the sidewalk, oxygen mask strapped to his face.

Sharon calls.

“I’m worried about you Dad,” she says. “How are you getting the laundry done? And the cleaning? How long are you planning on eating frozen casseroles?”

“I’m fine,” Michael says. “I enjoy doing dishes. I enjoy vacuuming.”

Sharon calls to fuss over Michael and cry about her mother.

“I miss Mom,” she says.

“I miss her too,” says Michael.

“I miss her so much.”

“Yes,” says Michael.

“It’s not fair,” says Sharon.

“No,” says Michael. “It isn’t.”

Michael is eating cold lasagna at the computer in the upstairs office. Reading the local news. Thinking about work. Diversification. Streamlining. Retrenchments. The bottom is falling out. The bottom is falling out of natural gas. Out of oil. Out of everything. The bottom has fallen out. There is no longer a bottom.

“It’s very sad,” Clarissa had said after the meeting.

He was about to say: “It’s not sad, it’s just the market,” but instead he said: “What is sad?”

“People losing their jobs,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed. “Very sad indeed.”

There is a pink Post-it note attached to the top right corner of the computer screen. On it, Rebecca has recorded his passwords.

He is back from his walk and just out of the shower. Someone is knocking at the front door.

“Just a second!” he shouts.

He hates the feel of a dry shirt against damp skin. His underwear sticks to him.

“Just a second!”

It is the neighbor woman. The wife.

“Sorry to bother you,” she says.

“Yes?”

“Is Becky in?”

“Rebecca?”

“Yes,” she smiles. “Becky.”

“No, she’s not,” Michael frowns.

“I’m out of cigarettes and I don’t want to run to the gas station because Arnold is due back from the hospital any minute now.”

“Yes?”

“I thought Becky might sell me a couple.”

“Rebecca?”

“Sure,” says the neighbour. “Rebecca.”

“Rebecca doesn’t smoke.”

“Oops,” says the neighbour and smiles again.

“She quit years ago.”

“Nobody ever quits,” says the neighbour.

“Rebecca did.”

“Inside pocket of the red coat,” says the neighbour.

The closet door is open, the red coat hanging in the shadows.

“Rebecca quit,” Michael says.

“Just check,” says the neighbour.

Michael reaches into the coat. In the satin-lined pocket is a pack of Virginia Slims, a sheet of green Clorets, and a yellow Bic lighter. In his confusion he tries to hand it all to the woman.

“Just a couple of the cigarettes,” she says.

He puts everything but the pack down in the key tray and extracts two for her.

“Maybe three,” she says.

He selects another.

She offers a few coins to him and he takes them.

“Thanks,” she says.

After she closes the door behind her he puts the coins and the Virginia Slims into the key tray with the Clorets and the lighter.

Michael goes for a walk the next evening and a drone follows him. It is very noisy. He stops and tries to stare it off, but it just hovers above the powerlines. Pulsating. It is very loud. Much louder than Michael had thought a drone would be. He starts walking and it follows him. He picks up his pace and his armpits start to prickle with sweat. A woman working in her flowerbeds looks up at him.

“Good evening,” Michael says and stops.

She is wearing a straw hat with a wide brim and her straight white hair hangs down to her shoulders. Some black mud is smeared on her cheek. She kneels in the dirt, both gloved hands on her lap, one of them lightly clasping pruning shears.

“It’s not mine,” says Michael.

They look up at the buzzing drone, suspended above them, not quite motionless: it moves an inch up, drops an inch down, slides to the right, to the left.

“It’s not mine,” says Michael.

She does not respond.

“Good evening,” says Michael and strides off. The drone follows. It sounds like a woodchipper. Or a jackhammer. He wants to go home but the thought of the drone hovering outside his door makes him feel ill, so he walks more than twice as far as usual: down streets he has only seen from the car, past rental properties, past badly kept parks. Some children spot him and the drone and follow them. They form a ragged parade. One of them is riding a bike and keeps pace with Michael.

“Is that yours?” asks the kid on the bike.

“No,” says Michael.

“Is it your friend’s?”

“No,” says Michael. “I don’t know who is operating it.”

“Maybe it’s the police.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe it’s a pervert.”

“I don’t know who is operating it,” says Michael.

“Maybe you’re the pervert,” says the kid. “And it’s the police keeping an eye on you.”

Michael says nothing.

“Are we too close to you, pedophile?” asks the kid. “Are we making you nervous? Are we a probation violation?”

The kids start chanting: “Violation! Violation! On probation! Violation!”

They do this for half a block before they get bored and leave.

Soaked through with sweat and shaking with anxiety, Michael concedes defeat and returns home. The drone pauses above his driveway, rotors screaming. He walks into the house and runs upstairs to watch it through the office window, but by the time he raises the blinds it is gone.

“It followed me for the whole of my walk,” Michael tells Clarissa. He is having his coffee before she gives him his day.

“That is horrible,” she says. “There should be a law. I’m sure there is. Did you call the police?”

“No,” says Michael and thinks about the chanting children. “I didn’t want to bother them with something so stupid.”

“You are such a thoughtful person,” says Clarissa. “So conscientious. But you should really have called the police.”

Michael can’t think of what to say.

“If it happens again promise me you will call the police,” says Clarissa.

“I don’t know,” says Michael.

“Or at least call me and I’ll call for you,” says Clarissa.

Michael is in the upstairs office watching Closing Bell on CNBC and eating toast with margarine. He is still in his shirt and tie. He hears shouting outside and goes to the window. The neighbour woman is on the sidewalk in her bikini shouting at another woman. A young professor who just bought a house a few doors down. The young professor is in her work clothes, slacks and a shirt, but with running shoes on, and a backpack slung over her shoulders. She is wearing a Covid mask.

Michael puts the toast down on the sill and cracks the window so he can hear what they are saying.

“Can’t live in fear!” the neighbour woman shouts.

Michael picks up the toast. The door to the neighbour woman’s house swings open and the bent husband shuffles onto the porch.

“Jeannie!” he shouts. “Leave her alone!”

“You have to live your life!” Jeannie shouts at the young professor.

“Jeannie!” the man shouts. “Leave her alone!”

Jeannie looks at him and the young professor hurries off, hunched, both hands tightly clutching the straps of her backpack.

Jeannie glances back at her.

“That’s right!” Jeannie shouts. “Run off home! Go and hide!”

The young professor does not look back. The husband shakes his head heavily and goes back inside. Jeannie stands where she is. Michael watches until she sits down in her reclining lawn chair and closes her eyes. When he finishes the toast he wipes the crumbs from his mouth with a Kleenex from the box Rebecca keeps on the desk, then wipes the window sill clean as well.

Sharon has left a message on the machine. She had an epiphany. She and her husband Trevor are going to buy him a meal plan with a company that delivers meals to peoples’ houses.

“It’s not like Meals on Wheels,” she says. “It’s not for seniors or anything like that. They deliver all the meals for the week and then you prepare them as you need them. According to their easy recipes. Trevor’s friend Ian uses it. He’s a teacher. He’s divorced. He loves it.”

There is a photograph of Michael and Rebecca by the answering machine. They are on holiday in Iceland. Standing in front of a waterfall. Rebecca asked another tourist to take it for them because Michael can’t abide selfies. They loved Iceland because it was so close. And clean.

“We’ll buy you the first year,” Sharon says. “And if you like it, you can just renew.”

It is morning and Michael is sitting on the edge of the bed trying to put on his tie, but he has forgotten how. He looks around the room. By the landline is a pink Post-it with important numbers: Sharon’s cell; Clarissa’s cell; the doctor; the pharmacy. On the mirror a yellow Post-it lists which outfits for which days. A blue Post-it below it reminds Michael that Rebecca loves him. He wonders if they are color coded. He wishes there was a Post-it with instructions for his tie. It is the yellow knit tie Rebecca paired with a blue shirt.

Something about a rabbit and a tree.

Something about going around the tree and down the hole.

He can’t remember. He considers searching YouTube for a video that will show him how to complete this simple task, but the thought exhausts him.

He lays the tie across his lap and smooths it out.

Clarissa will help him.

When he gets to work Clarissa will give him a hand with the tie while she is telling him his day. He knows he should do it himself but what’s the point? Why waste the energy when Clarissa will do it for him? She’ll enjoy doing it. She loves to help. She is like Rebecca in that way. Like Rebecca was.

Robert G. Penner lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly's Best Science Fiction Books of 2020. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms. His second novel The Dark King Swallows the World is forthcoming with Radiant Press. He can be found on twitter at @billsquirrell and on Instagram at @robertgpenner.