Short Stories
Travelogues
Personal Musings
Anna Gibson missed her dad. It wasn’t easy to think about him, but she tried to do so every day. She missed the way he would dangle her from her ankles and swing her back and forth, and she missed the way he would laugh like a monkey when he did. She missed Sunday father-daughter time, where they would paint or make lego sets or tell mom they were going to run errands and secretly go to a park and he would teach her how to use a bow and arrow. Last month, the two of them hollowed out a book so she could make a “secret hiding spot.”
After he died, she was sleeping in mom’s bed and she smelled him, but it was just a red bottle of something called Old Spice on the side of the bathroom counter. She grabbed it, and took a deep sniff. It made her feel happy, like he was here again, so she kept his deodorant in the book now, and sniffed it from time to time. Just so she’d remember. She didn’t ever want to forget.
Mom cried more than Anna did, though Anna cried too sometimes. Mom tried to hide it, but Anna was old enough to know. Or at least to guess most of the time. Mom’s voice was different afterwards, and Anna would hug her because that’s what Mom did when Anna cried.
They moved away from Reno, and down to Los Angeles. Anna didn’t want to go, because she found out two days before the moving trucks showed up. But mom said they needed to move because it was safer. First, a house near the ocean. Then all those people came by, and mom had all the meetings, and Anna heard her shouting into her phone a lot. They sold the house and moved to an apartment further inland.
She didn’t like Los Angeles. It was too big, and she missed being able to ride her bike around the wilderness. Los Angeles didn’t have the kind of wilderness they had in Nevada. Los Angeles didn’t have any wilderness at all. It was just streets and stores. Worse was the days right after it rained when she could see the mountains creeping up over the top of the city. Anna missed turning off the street, ducking under the fence, and seeing nothing between her and the mountains. She missed the smell of horses and clay dirt. Her mom said they’d find a way to let her ride horses again, but Anna didn’t see the point if they had to drive for hours to get to where the horses were.
Anna wrote to her dad, some days. She would bring up the programs the two of them had written and compiled together, and use them to write notes to him with double slashes in front of the code, just like he’d taught her. That wasn’t what it was there for, but it served it’s purpose. She’d leave him notes and thoughts in these comments, firing them off into the compiler to turn it into unused machine code.
Where it went from there, she didn’t know, but she like to imagine that it reached him somehow. People were a lot like code, she knew. Or at least her dad used to say it. Anna believed him, even though she didn’t understand everything. Where does code go when it doesn’t run?
// Dad, Los Angeles sucks. All the kids at school are dumb and I miss Jenny, and Mickey, and Scottie.
She missed Scottie a lot. For a lot of different reasons. She didn’t tell her dad those reasons though.
// I’m the best in my whole class in Math. You’d be proud of me. I got a 99% on the test last week and no one else got above an 81. It was hard, but I remembered what you taught me and it made it easy. You’re a better teacher than Mrs. Nash.
Thinking about her dad teaching her math made her sad, so she moved on.
// English is dumb and I don’t like it. I already know what books I like, but Mr. Graves is making us read books that are boring and stupid and I don’t care. I have to write a full page paper on Charlotte’s Web, and it’s so boring and I hate it.
She was pretty sure Dad would have agreed with her. He liked to read her good books like Jurassic Park and The Hobbit and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Nothing happened in Charlotte’s Web. And all the talk about the farm made her miss Nevada.
Anna couldn’t think of anything more to say so she hit “compile” and the file saved. Then she hit the home button on her tablet and put it back on her desk.
—————
Taryn watched her daughter wander outside, talking gleefully to whatever digital pets were in her watch. It was the last gift her father ever gave her; Taryn wondered whether Anna would ever make that association and how her daughter would parse the physical manifestation of that finality. Would she treasure it forever, caring for it as it became obsolete technology and then later, an antique? Would she throw it off the balcony trying to get it as far away from her as possible? Or would she never connect those two ideas?
She watched as Anna stopped and looked up at the sky. Taryn had just learned about “June Gloom.” Must be misting again. Los Angeles couldn’t commit to a good rain. The spread of seasons barely changed from summer to winter. Just rain hard, give us a rainbow to celebrate the end, and let’s both move on. Instead, it was a perpetual gloomy summer, two hours of sun, and fog rolling in again. What a metaphor for her life right now.
David was gone. An innocent victim - at least of the events which…happened to him. She still couldn’t pick the right language to describe what had happened that particular morning; nothing felt right. David wasn’t the target, but in a way he was.
Ryan James McMillian didn’t target David specifically, but he was there because his shitty internet cult had latched onto David’s work as some portent of action. As a prompt. The echo chambers and rabbit holes where objectivity goes to die had decreed that ASI’s announcement was just one more chain in the link which demanded “good people” stand up and do evil things in the name of a vague and ever shifting narrative.
David was so naive, she thought. It’s one of the things she loved about him. It’s one of the things she fell in love with. He could look at the worst person in the world and find some reason why the world was better for their inclusion. At least at the beginning. Over time he had become more cynical. Closed off. And in the last few months, cold. Taryn felt guilty that David died before they ever had the chance to fix their marriage or get divorced. She tried to think about them mostly in the earlier times, not the liminal limbo state of their marriage at the end.
She hated remembering him like this. And she hated that she ran away. Hated that she couldn’t stand there, with the seething hordes on her front porch, and defend her late husband until her dying breath. But she couldn’t. She didn’t have it in her to mourn and to fight the world and raise her daughter all at once. She could pick two, but no more. She ran from Reno towards the only place where she still had family left.
Even after she left the seething masses behind, the Feds came after everyone even remotely associated with ASI. Taryn paid a fortune in legal bills to defend herself, selling the house to pay for her freedom despite having only set foot in his office a half dozen times. Apparently the Feds found it “damning” that she needed to get away from weekly threats spraypainted across her windows and being accosted in the produce section by sweaty conspiracy theorists. They didn’t understand why she left town so suddenly when she saw someone pull out a gun and pointed it towards her living room.
Even after the book was closed on her investigation, she continued to sell most of their things. She told herself it was to find somewhere more private so she could mourn in peace, but deep in her heart she knew she was still running away. She gave away his clothes and all the signs of his hobbies, in the hopes that someone could get some use out of them, instead of letting them just take up space in her head and heart. She sold his car too - that one she could admit just reminded her too much of his absence. Sitting there, never moving. A ghost she walked by every morning. The gathering dust a symbol of her loss and his having been lost.
They moved into a beautiful apartment right in the middle of the best school district in the city, and Taryn vowed that it would be the final time. They’d had some savings, and thankfully the life insurance hadn’t put up too much of a fight. Maybe she would find purpose in time. But so far she hadn’t done much of anything beyond mourning and doing her best to ensure her eight year old daughter only remembered this time as a speed bump, and not the turning point when things started to go bad. Her purpose, if there was one, would be to to manufacture stability for Anna in an unstable time. She would provide her daughter with that. No matter how much Taryn felt in search of whatever it was that she needed, or hoped to find it elsewhere, she would be here, now, for Anna. She would end the turbulence.
God she was beautiful. And mature for her age. Taryn had been the same, for better and worse. Her mother had once introduced her to friends as “my little hellraiser.” She’d mostly outgrown it by the time she met David, but her mischievous streak came out a little when she drank. Taryn wondered whether Anna would as well.
Anna had decided that the mist wasn’t magical today - just wet. And that inside was better. Taryn watched her march off to the playroom, steel in her resolve, decisions having been made. This is just how it would be now. Just like Taryn’s father. At least she still had that.
Los Angeles wasn’t ideal, but it was easy to get lost in. She felt safe in the massive anonymity. And her family was here - she definitely needed the help some days. She did relish watching her father and Anna together. Her father, the mechanic, who intimidated every suitor she’d ever had. And her own daughter, his little princess, who had him wrapped around her pinkie finger.
She loved seeing it. David would have loved it too. Damn him.
—————
Poppie was coming over later, and Anna wanted him to read with her. She could read really well, but Poppie was better. She stumbled on big words sometimes and he always knew what they were supposed to sound like and what they meant.
She’d been reading Jurassic Park with dad when he died. She wanted to know how it ended, but she didn’t want to go back to that right now. Dinosaurs were awesome, but she didn’t like dinosaurs anymore.
She was looking for The Lord of the Rings. Dad had said it came after The Hobbit, but that she wasn’t old enough yet. But she was. And Poppie would agree with her. She knew it was a big book, but she’d read big books before. And if there were words she didn’t know, Poppie could help.
It wasn’t on her shelf, but that wasn’t surprising. There were still a lot of boxes she hadn’t unpacked. It was probably in one of those boxes.
Anna knew what it looked like - it had swoopy words and the writer had lots of letters instead of a real name. She grabbed the top box and pulled enough books out so that she could see all of the titles. None of them looked right. Then she pushed the box aside and opened the second box. Nothing there either.
It was in the third box. At the top! How lucky! It was really big though. Bigger than she remembered. She flipped through it hoping that some of the pages were pictures, and that’s why it was so long, but all she saw were some maps.
Until she got to the beginning. There was a hole in her book, where someone had neatly carved out a little hiding spot. Just like the one she’d made with her dad. And in the hole was a little plastic thing. It looked like her fingernail, but bigger.
Anna held it in her hand, and dropped the book on the floor to examine it. The plastic was curvy and sharp in some places. As she pulled on part of it, the whole thing came apart and half of it skittered across the floor.
The part that was still in her hand looked weird. It took her a moment to figure out it was a USB key, but as soon as she did, she felt like she had just discovered a mystery and she was a detective. She knew what the first step of solving this mystery was, and plugged it into the side her tablet.
A little box popped up which read PASSWORD REQUIRED.
She didn’t know what that meant, but some of the games she played with dad started by having you make a character and give it a name. Anna thought about it for a moment, but since she didn’t know what the game was, she didn’t know what to call her character. Maybe her character was a car or a horse or a monster. Or maybe it was like the Zelda games and she was just a normal person. She shrugged, and then typed in “Anna”.
A folder opened with a bunch of files. None of them looked like games though. She tried to open some of them, but they wouldn’t open. One did, but it was just a bunch of code, and she didn’t recognize the language or understand what it was supposed to do. Dad said there were lots of different kinds of code, but she only knew some of the easy ones like java and swift.
Oh well. She’d come back to it later. She loved solving mysteries, just not today.
She unplugged the USB drive and put it back inside The Lord of the Rings. Then she ran back downstairs to see if it had started raining, the mystery all but forgotten by the time she hit the bottom of the stairs.