By Mary Jane Elton
A short story about a young woman joining a revolt on the moon and the emotional fallout that results
The table was still set with a spot for Autumn–right next to me–so I had to sit a seat apart from Aunt Marie.
“Can I hold him?” a flock of relatives asked my sister. They passed around the baby until he got fussy and my sister took him back, rocking him until the helpless whines shifted to nervous cooing. It was the first time the baby had been to one of our Family Swarms, where all of us–even the divorced exes–show up and bring a dish. All except my ex, whose spot laid empty as Mom brought out the backup wine and filled everyone’s glass. I put a hand over my empty water cup just in case.
“You know it’s Christmas?” Cousin Jen said as she held her glass out.
“Merry Christmas,” I said, and Jen laughed.
I’ve always been the rainbow sheep: vegan, lesbian, anarchist; all my parents’ worst fears. And since Autumn and I split, I don’t even drink.
Aunt Marie leaned over the empty chair and said, “Don’t mind them, sweets. They’re just jealous.” She winked. I smiled despite myself.
But then I heard Dad over the chatter. He was in the den, watching TV with the rest of the Uncles.
“ Joseph, quit it with your Latin legal jazz. They don’t belong here, and you know it. They can’t even handle the gravity!”
“Like a duck, sweets,” Aunt Marie said. “Remember, what would Jesus do?”
What did it was the old record player. That pissed me off. I mean, she owned what? Two albums?
I flipped through the old covers still there: Elton John and Neil Young, and some death metal Autumn convinced me to get. The spot where we used to keep the turntable just had an outline of dust, showing me where it wasn’t.
“Fuck you,” I said it just to say it. No one there but me anymore. And without realizing it, I’d punched a dent into the living room wall.
I stared at the indents my knuckles made. The paint and sheetrock crumbled away. Just another thing I had to fix.
I put something twangy on my phone, set it up where the turntable used to be, and danced as I packed up the rest of my things.
“It’s so sad,” Cousin Jen said, “About Autumn, I mean. I know y’all are lesbians, but can’t she… I mean, we all show up to Christmas.”
Jen was sharing a plate with her baby daddy, still cut his meat for him even after their divorce, “shattered both of them” is the way mom put it.
“Just need a beer is all. We can be friends,” Jen’s baby daddy said and smiled.
“Maybe my kind are just like that?” I said.
“Oh come on, I didn’t mean it like that,” Cousin Jen said. “It’s just–”
But I was already headed for the bathroom before I could hear what it was.
I splashed water on my face, rinsed away the line of sweat above my brow. The mirror stared back and I felt like I was 12 again. Guts falling out my ass.
“Let’s just get it over with.”
I turned off the sink, flicked the water away, and wiped the rest on the seat of my jeans.
“I can’t fucking believe you! You said you’re done with all that!” Autumn said.
It’s not the first time we’d had that fight, which is why she went from zero to incandescent in a beat. And it wasn’t like it was just me on a lark about wildland firefighting or volunteering as a medic on the barricades downtown or my months-long obsession with photographing riot cops.
“You’re fucking suicidal!”
When she was mad, everything was “fucking” this or “fucking” that. It was in every glowing hot sentence.
But she wasn’t wrong. To believe in Revolution is to be suicidal, to not care that you’ll probably not live to see the dawn. But it wasn’t all idealism, I can’t pretend like that. I’d wanted to die long before the General Strike on Luna gave me a convenient excuse.
“I’ll be doing something…”
“You’ll just be making another fucking corpse.”
“Well, at least I won’t be making one here!”
Maybe I shouldn’t have told her exactly where I was going. That’s bad opsec and all. But she had to know this was goodbye for good, that I’d made up my mind.
“I can’t fucking look at you,” Autumn said. She closed the bedroom door behind her, put on some music, and I could hear her crying over a driving drumbeat.
I’d already done my crying, so I took the streetcar and ate noodles and drank bitters and sodas alone at a bar until I was sure she was asleep.
I slept hard on the couch, and when I woke up, she’d taken the turntable and the speakers.
The thing I wanted to remember most about Dad was listening to Mahalia Jackson on old gospel AM stations while we drove up to the lake.
When I was younger, Dad loved that I was a tomboy. If I even so much as breathed a word about fishing, he’d have the truck loaded with six different poles and the canoe on top by the next morning. He’d never wake me up, he always carried me to my car seat, still sleeping, and let me come up naturally somewhere along our route up the mountain. Looking out the window it always felt like we were on the side of the top of the world.
But as I aged and my behavior stopped being cute and began being dykey, we fished less and less.
More and more all I can remember of him is the way he looked at me that Christmas Eve. It didn’t look any different than when he was staring at the TV screen. Like all that I was to him was just his worst fears bundled up and come home to visit.
“I’ve actually decided to take that spot in Switzerland. The one with the microscope company. I’m leaving for Zürich well… next week.”
Mom somehow managed to be everywhere at once, so of course she was at my shoulder as soon as I said it, grabbing my wrist. I didn’t see her until she grabbed me. She must have snuck into the seat beside me when Uncle Jimmy got up. God that woman was like a ghost.
“How come you didn’t tell me?”
“I just decided.”
“You didn’t tell me…”
I tried to take her hand but she stood before I could catch her, crossed back over to the marble kitchen island, and filled her glass with the last of the backup wine.
“So… what? You really hate money? What’s the tax like anyway? Thirty? Forty? Fifty percent?” Dad said.
“It’ll be around twenty-five for me. Remember, I don’t make that much Dad.”
“But you can manage Sweden?”
“Switzerland. And they’re covering the move. The company.”
Dad grumbled but I could see the lines around his eyes, the way he was working his jaw like he had something to say but couldn’t make the air move.
Mom was out on the porch, openly sucking on a clove cigarette and staring into the city lights on the horizon.
“Well I think it’s fantastic, don’t you Jenny?” Aunt Marie said. “You know just how proud of you we are Livie, big scientist and all.”
Cousin Jen didn’t say anything but she smiled. Polite teeth all in a row.
“Who wants pie?” Uncle Jimmy said and every head turned.
“I do!”
“You know I had a wedding dress all picked out for you. From the time you were nine and you got that crush on… who was it? Robert… Little Robby Calhoun. Yes. It was him. And you two were so cute… You remember?
“He dressed up in a suit and I made you spaghetti and you ate under candlelight. So adorable! And I never stopped thinking about your dress. How you’d look. I know exactly what it’ll look like… But, Autumn… Honey… You were going to be married…” Mom looked up at me. She was sitting out in the garden, one hand floating by her mouth, holding up another clove cigarette.
It was dark but the stars were bright back home and I could see Luna and all the flashing lights: Ripley Place and Vandermeer Terrace and the ozone mining pits all blinking red and green and orange. If I looked real close, I could make out Karr Station zipping by, a bright streak over Luna’s surface, looping in orbit.
But mom thought I was going to Switzerland.
“I remember Mom,” I said.
“And it’s so sad… you and Autumn. I liked her you know.”
“I know.”
Mom took a deep drag and blew it out to the milky sky above. I could see it in the shape of her mouth, that we were about to fight.
I tucked myself into Crash Position and waited for it to hit.
When our apartment was empty and I’d given half of it to Levi across the hall, a quarter to thrift stores, and the rest to the trash, I felt my nerves settle. It’s hard to be angry at an empty room but I gave it the old college try.
Autumn was probably still at her dad’s. They were probably making plans to ride street bikes and go see loud live music and drink 40s of terrible malt liquor like they’re hard like that. I knew the drill, I’d been there at the start: Autumn fresh off her last true love, us crashing with her dad because I was still a grad student and she was still looking for elementary schools in need of substitutes.
I sat down in the carpet outline of the couch, thought about when we bought it. All the cute names we gave the furniture.
Armand the Sexy Blood-Sucking Armoire.
Peggy the Wobbly Dining Table Chair.
Rupert the TV Stand, because he just felt like a Rupert.
The floor squeaked beneath me as I got up and shut off the lights.
I had my bag already by the door.
I double-checked that I hit all the mold with bleach, wiped all the drawers of the fridge, putty in all the holes in the wall.
It was just an excuse to stay a little longer.
“Jesus, what did you say to her Livie?” Kasey said, baby on one hip, husband on the other.
“Where’s my coat? Has anyone seen my coat?” I said turning over the pile of fabric draped over the back of the couch.
Dad was already outside: the perpetual shoulder to cry on.
Everyone else was staring at me. Pie on forks, halfway to mouths.
I already had my boots on, but my coat, my green spider-knit parka wasn’t anywhere. It was the one thing of Autumn’s I kept, and it wasn’t there.
“Did someone move my fucking coat?”
Uncle Jimmy took me by the arm. “No one touched anything, honey.”
My sister rolled her eyes and walked away–husband and baby by her side–like she couldn’t believe I was still like this.
Bad with people.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I tore my arm out of Uncle Jimmy’s soft grasp and went out the back way.
I heard Mom crying as I slamed myself into my ancient Oldsmobile Cutlass.
I found out when I arrived at the rendezvous that I’d brought too much.
Clothes with logos and a collapsible tea set and old Polaroid pictures of Mom and Dad, Kasey and the baby and Mark. All of it had to go, especially my phone.
The rendezvous was in a coffee shop, all kitschy local paintings and expensive espresso drinks. I got up from my spot at the table full of us would-be revolutionaries and went out back to the dumpsters in the alley.
I tossed the pictures and the clothes not on my back in the garbage and I held up my phone.
“Honey, I talked to Autumn and she says you’re going to the college in England? I just don’t understand. I love you.”
Mom’s texts.
“You better answer or so help me we’re not paying your phone bill anymore!!”
Dad’s texts.
“You didn’t even say goodbye.”
Kasey’s texts.
I broke my phone over my knee, fished out the SIM card, and snapped that too.
I felt naked walking back in without my phone.
The recruiter, the handler for the half a dozen or so of us, stood, drained her coffee, and did a final head count.
“Okay everyone a little lighter? Good. Let’s go then,” and she led us out of the coffee shop to a white van with a rental logo on the side. There was a pair of binoculars on every seat. Our cover, if anyone stopped us, was that we were a group of bird-watching freaks out to go visit the reservoir.
No one stopped us until we got to the launch site perimeter. Way up the backroads and into the forest highways where the only channels that would play were evangelical AM stations playing bad Christian rock.
They searched us for real at the first checkpoint: pockets and underboob and assholes. And they gave us standard Karr Station fatigues.
At the second checkpoint, they had doctors and dentists scan us for chips and recording devices.
One guy got flagged and the doctors cut out his forearm chip right there under cover of the forest. A child-tracker, like they put in dogs, probably implanted by the guy’s parents at birth.
The last checkpoint was clicks away in the other direction and up a different ridge. We all fell asleep before we got there.
When they woke us up, we were in a clearing: an atmosphere skipper steaming at the center, ready to load up and lift off.
They unloaded us from the van and up into the skipper then gave us flight drugs to keep us alive through the G.
The next light we saw was the shine off Luna’s surface piercing through Karr Station’s viewport.
We got stopped up the stairway to La Plaza de Las Estrellas
“IDs,” the guy done up in riot gear said. The rest of his colleagues were in fatigues. One had a rounded ceramic vest like a naked pot-belly around his torso, eggshell white and shining under the stairwell lights.
“You’re aware of the new regulations?” one of the rent-a-cops said.
“We heard the announcement this morning,” I said.
The guy in ceramic armor nodded and held out a Plate Reader. We set our phones in a row on the plate, waited, heard a ding. They handed back our phones and waved us through the Crotch Scanners.
I had a plasteel knife in my boot and the man next to me had underwear full of plastic explosives shaped like a penis and testicles. We used pre-op trans people as bomb carriers: shaped the explosives like tits or dicks so the Crotch Scanners would still see what they’re expecting.
We walked right on through.
There was a small crowd in the plaza. That level of Vandermeer Terrace was for mid-level corpos: there were coffee shops and tea houses and noodle stalls all to fuel hungry middle managers as they took their two-hour-lunches and luxuriated in their place on the upper levels. The smattering of Pro-Unionist protestors were outnumbered by the anti-crowd and corpo security.
Our game was good, me and my three-person team. We were professionals by that point. Still disposable enough to run out-in-the-open operations, but good enough that this was our seventh time. Face jamming makeup and strangers’ clothes, every route and exit memorized. We pushed through the square and ended up behind the corpo building at the center. A small back alley, frequented only by custodial staff. A weak spot in the O2 lines was our target.
We didn’t get noticed and set up in the alley. The man next to me–I called him Walter but that’s not his chosen name–took out his explosive packer and mushed it into a brick.
People streamed by the alley but no one noticed us.
I took the det cord, all wires and copper nails, and pressed it into the brick. Walter smushed the bomb up in between the O2 lines.
“Set to det,” Walter said as he turned and then froze.
I flipped around and froze too.
It was a kid, nineteen or twenty, in blue coveralls. Double doors behind him swung closed. He had a bag of trash in each fist and his eyes were wide. He dropped the trash and ran.
Walter and I stayed still. Our other two comrades took off after the kid and snatched him before he could get to La Plaza de Las Estrellas. They drug him back and I could hear the kid babbling.
“Please! I didn’t see nothing! I can keep a secret. My cousin, she’s in the cause, she can vouch for me. Honest! Please!”
“Emmie? Emmie!” Walter said.
I didn’t recognize my fake name but I met Walter’s eyes: panic.
“Emmie, he saw us, our faces.”
The other two dropped the kid at my feet. He looked up at me with doe eyes, pleading.
Someone at the head of the alley did a double take.
“Emmie?” the other two said it as one.
“Em…” Walter grabbed my shoulder.
I shrugged him away and leaned into the kid on the ground. I was gonna say something… Say what? I still don’t know.
“Hey!” the someone at the head of the alley said as they took two steps in.
I tried not to look at the kid as I took out my plasteel knife.
“No…” he said.
I pushed his head up, palm on his forehead. The other two comrades held his arms back.
“No please…”
But I couldn’t. He looked up at me, eyes like plates. So I put my thumb and pinky in his eyes and could feel them water and close under my fingers. I cut the kid’s throat and the blood poured and the kid started thrashing.
“Hey! Security! Help!” the someone at the head of the alley was now two, three someones. They were heading towards us. A lone security officer joined them, running in from the street.
Walter pulled me down the alley. The other two already slipped into the sewer and were running. I could hear their steps, splashing through sewage ahead of us. Walter shoved me down through the sewer grate and threw it back into place above us.
In the darkness, I heard Walter yell my fake name until I clicked the detonator.
Then, I didn’t hear anything until we got back to base.
They promoted me. I was no longer Private First Class Emiline Luna, I was Second Lieutenant Emiline Luna. We all progressed fast through the ranks when the fighting started for real.
My new rank gave me privileges I wish I could have gone without. But I wanted it to work, for our rebellion to not just be a rebellion. I wanted Revolution.
So I went to the officer meetings, I was assigned a platoon, and I think I did right by them. But it was never enough. It couldn’t be. It’s so clear now.
After the bombings started, corpo security started cutting O2 lines to the warrens beneath the surface. One by one they choked us all out and they got twenty-three thousand non-combatants along the way. And still, I believed it might work. Their cruelty was so strong, so comprehensive. No one thought they could last much longer.
But then I was still a kid. We all were.
It took long enough but I finally found a spot in a university back on the surface.
A decade of living in worker’s barracks and sewers and HAB domes left me afraid of the sky and it took me a few months before I could step outside without a hat and sunglasses. My therapist prescribes me walks in the park now.
My therapist, she thinks I was a TA in U of L while the Struggle was ongoing. I can’t tell her why I’m really going to see her, but I think she suspects.
“And your boyfriend right? When was he killed?” she said when I finally tried to bring it up in a roundabout way.
March 24th, 9 years ago, 1352 Luna time.
“I try not to mark it down, you know, anniversaries…” I said.
“They cut his throat…”
“They did.”
“And where were you?”
“I… I mean… I was there… There.”
“You saw it all happen, the bombing?”
“No I… I didn’t see the bomb go off.”
“But you saw him, what’s his name? Your boyfriend. Was he your first male partner?”
She paused, “If… I’m not doubting you, just trying to get a clear picture… If you saw him die, how did you not see the bomb? I know this must be difficult but sometimes it’s the details that make the difference…”
She knew the details. She’d seen the statue.
“I… Maybe we can circle back some other time… I…”
She sat for a long moment. I could see the look on her face: like I just told her I work in waste management consultation and to just fogetabautit.
“Has your sister called you back?”
More scabs to pick.
It was six years later when they put up the monument in La Plaza de Las Estrellas.
Five on the street and three hundred in the offices. For that, I got promoted.
That was the apogee of our movement.
The statue shows a young man, a kid really, eyes like plates in shining bronze, two bags of trash by his feet.
I was teaching a course on organic chemistry for the liberal arts kids when I saw him the first time.
I stretched and strained and tried to catch sight of him before he disappeared out the vomitoria. But he was gone. As soon as I walked out in front of the auditorium, he got up and left in a hurry.
“Today…” I paused and all the kids waited as if I was about to recite something from Allen Ginsburg, something nasty and harsh on the ear. But I just cleared my throat–my head–and started with the basics.
“Listen, why should you care about O-chem? I know you’re all thinking it. Who gives two motherloving shits about carbon and oxygen and free radicals–and it’s all so much isn’t it? Jargon and science and Latin, fucking Latin!
“But the thing is, if you master this course, by the end of it, you will know how to make explosives.
“Boom. Yeah. There you all are. Alright, now this is not terrorism 101. I have to teach you how to make explosives so I can teach you how not to make them on accident. Such is the power of Organic Chemistry. Now. I hope everyone read the first chapter? On benzene and it’s oh so many rings. Right. Now nitrogen, that’s the seventh element on the periodic table, and it is the one that makes TNT go boom.”
In breath.
Out breath.
My therapist tells me to focus on my breathing. So that’s what I spend most of the day doing.
I was on campus drinking a tea when I spotted him again: across the courtyard. He was dressed up like a professor, I could see real-deal leather elbow pads on his scratchy-looking jacket. I pulled out my phone camera and zoomed all the way into his face, but didn’t take a picture.
Old habits.
It was Walter. The phone’s image was a bit fuzzy but it was him. He was wearing a patch over one eye (a rubber bullet) and still had his limp.
I set my phone on the cafe table I was seated at. Happy undergrads chittered under a smooth bassline from the speakers. I took out my laptop and emailed my students to let them know that I was sick as it turned out, and couldn’t make it to my 2pm class.
I was grading papers in my favorite chair, Elton John spinning on the record player above me, when the mail came.
Bills and credit card statements and coupon books and a package fell through the mail slot. I picked them up, organized the junk and the necessaries, and stopped halfway back to my chair.
In the end, I didn’t die on a barricade like I wanted, but I lived long enough to see hell freeze over.
Folded up in the slim package–faded but there–was Autumn’s green spider-knit parka. And taped to the top, was a postcard of the bridge over Rogue River:
“It’s your sister, if you still remember you have one.
“We’re doing Christmas at our place this year.
“Mark doesn’t know I’m sending this but come if you want.
“We’ll set out a plate.”
The little creature that I used to just call “The Baby” had grown into a bubbly sixth grader.
Ezra.
“Momma? Can I show Aunty Liv the treehouse?”
“I don’t know. Can you?”
“Momuh… May I show her the treehouse?”
Kasey kissed her son on the crown of his head. “Go on bud.”
Ezra took my hand and pulled me hard into the backyard. The same oak tree dad had planted when he bought the place a thousand years ago was still standing, only now, it was a little balder, with a plywood tree house stuck in the crotch of the main branches. Mom and Dad were on the property, under a different tree, their slate pillows carved with dates I don’t know.
“Momma and Dad put it up for me last year and it’s all mine.”
“Not even your brother?”
“Hell!… I mean, no.”
I lean in, “Don’t worry, I know your mom’s the real potty mouth. I won’t tell.”
Ezra giggled then pulled me more. “Come on! The ladder is totally safe.”
And I was ushered up the tree and inside, bent over as Ezra showed me the pulley system to bring up snacks and where he shined the projector to play video games. I paid close, careful attention, remembering how much I hated it when adults only pretended to care.
In time Ezra lost interest and announced that he was going to go see if his brother wanted to play some racing game they were obsessed with. But I stuck around up in the tree. Watched out the window.
Cousin Jenny’s girl was a couple years older than Ezra and she was bundled up, reading in the Adirondack chair furthest away from Jenny and her latest husband. Three of Jenny’s previous husbands fiddled with the grill and drank too much beer.
Uncle Jimmy was in a wheelchair watching the kids run around and chatting with Aunt Marie.
I stayed up in the treehouse, criss-cross-applesauce, rubbing my hands together, watching the sun creep towards the horizon. I choked back panic at the open sky, but then remembered my breathing.
“Oxygen is everywhere here. See the open sky as proof that no one can crimp a line and choke you out.” My therapist’s words.
After a chorus of breathing and affirmations, Kasey poked her head through the trapdoor.
“You’re still in here,” my sister clambered up and through the floor holding two glasses, a finger of scotch in each. She held out one.
“Kase, you know–”
“Drink it,” not a request.
I took it and sipped it. Old memories flooded back and I was tasting the sweet banana notes high in my nose, the stench of Autumn’s perfume.
She saw me in the parka and laughed.
“What’s funny?” I said.
“That jacket. Dad said he held onto it that night, to try and keep you from running off. He knew it was Autumn’s and thought that would do the trick…” She let that hang in the air.
“You know Mom thought you were dead,” Kasey said, sipped her scotch. “Dad never talked about you. But Mom kept wondering. She never stopped wondering, not until she started thinking I was you.
““Oh Livie, thank you honey. Oh Livie where’s my jewelry box? This isn’t my room. I sleep upstairs Livie–””
“Kase–”
“No! You don’t get to pretend anymore.”
She was silent. I could only hear my heart, her shaky breaths.
“You go and… then what? Your revolution fails so you come back, tail between your legs? Pretend like you didn’t abandon us?”
“I didn’t abandon anyone.”
“What do you call it then?”
And there it is, the reason I stayed away. What I’d been avoiding all those years in therapy.
Truths.
“I call it war.”
And my sister looked at me, just like Dad did, and I knew I was right where I belonged.
I saw Walter again. Over and over I see him. Not too frequently: he’s in liberal arts, and on our campus, rarely the twain shall meet. So I see him, walking past, sitting at a café, grading papers on a bench. And in time, I hope I can learn to let the memories come and go. The guilt scratching in and out of me, like trying to tune into a distant radio station.
The Soft Machine 
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