By Wes Parish
The beginning of this tragedy is simple. About ten years ago my husband Rodrigo was killed while repairing some elements of the forward shield array. His body was never recovered. My friend Louise's husband Sam was also killed a few days later in the tokamak shielding refractor when the magnetic shielding bent for a few seconds. He was vaporised.
So Louise was widowed with a young son, Kenneth, and I was left widowed with a young daughter, Cher.
We'd been good friends; I offered her a place with me to recover. It helped that she was a registered obstetrics nurse — she could help me in my midwifery practice. Which she did, with gusto. It's not something you forget. It really broke my heart when she died of cancer last year.
All I need to do to close that is to iterate that we were two widows giving each other strength. We were never lovers.
Ah yes, Kenneth and Cher. I wish there was some other way to say this, but Cher is totally devastated. It's all I can do to keep her responding to me.
Cher was not at all pleased to discover she had to share her mother with anyone else in the wake of losing her father. Kenneth was equally devastated by the loss of his father; but he never took it out on her. She took it out on him. I did what I could to restrain her; I failed in that.
Then came puberty and Kenneth, who had withdrawn into himself, discovered he was fascinated with medicine and science. Cher took a bit longer, but she discovered she was interested in psychology. A little while later, after Kenneth had disappeared on a visit to the medical school in the generation ship's bow, she discovered she was lonely for him. She had hated him. I worried about his reaction; I didn't think he would take it well.
Nothing changed, as far as he was concerned. She was a nuisance he was resigned to ignoring. Or trying to ignore. He never asked for help. She could've been discussing fried frogs for all he was concerned.
None of this deterred her. If anything, it made her more determined. He was hers; she would not let him get away.
He was accepted into the medical degree at the medical school, and he was overjoyed at that. Some of it may have been the opportunity to get away from Cher; but he never talked about that. I think my overreaction when he did complain about her once when they had just moved in to my house may have made him so closed.
He came back for the holidays — and with his training, we found we worked together. Cher was overjoyed at this. It meant she had continuous access to him which no other girl would have.
He was much too polite to tell her to leave him alone. Not that she would've paid any attention.
The death of one of the local nurses had made us the clinic responsible for her clients until someone new came along. This meant we had a lot of her equipment in some front rooms, and Kenneth was assigned those.
Some time during his last visit he received a message that caused him real pain, but he refused to talk about it. Cher seemed to thrive on that, and turned up the pressure. She wanted to parade around the town on his arm. She wanted to discuss their future together. He refused to admit such a possibility. He just shut up.
I guess the pressure got to him.
On his last day, I was in the clinic and stopped to look in the CCTV system. I saw them, Cher and Kenneth, sitting in the clinic's front rooms where the non-obstetrics equipment was stored. One of those was the liquid nitrogen used for warts. Weird, isn't it, we're several hundred light months away from our species' birth planet Earth, and we still worry about warts.
Cher was talking twenty to the dozen about their future together, and Kenneth was tying some cotton sticks for freezing warts off when he looked up — directly at the camera, it seemed — and smiled. I hope never to see such a ghastly smile again in my entire life. He dipped the cotton buds into the liquid nitrogen and held them against his neck.
"What are you doing?" screamed Cher.
"Freezing off the ugly wart on my shoulders that you informed me a few years ago was my worst feature," he replied.
I screamed and ran to the room as fast as I could.
When I got there, he was lying on his side on the floor. I felt for a pulse. Nothing. Cher screamed and screamed and screamed.
She now talks of death. Nothing else. But I don't know how to break her free from her despair.
The one question that keeps repeating in my mind, is: was there anything I could've done to help him? I loved him as a son, and if Cher's dreams had come true, he would've been my son-in-law. Was there no way he could stop thinking of Cher as an annoyance who refused to grow up? Why didn't he talk? Why did we never listen?
About The Author
Wes Parish
Wesley Parish is an SF fan from early childhood. Born in PNG, he enjoys reading about humans in strange cultures and circumstances; his favourite SF authors include Ursula Le Guin, Fritz Lieber, Phillip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard and Frank Herbert. He lives in Christchurch, NZ, is an unemployed Java and C programmer, and has recently decided to become a mad ukuleleist, flautist and trombonist, and would love to revert to being the mad fiddler and pedal steel guitarist.. "Where oh where has my little pedal steel got to ... ?"
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
David Whitaker is originally from the UK though has travelled around a bit and now resides in India. He has a degree in Journalism, however decided that as he’s always preferred making things up it should ultimately become a resource rather than a profession.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.