Lydia Schoch

Just tuning in? Start here. 

Daphne should have know it was going to be a grey day. She woke up with a bone-crunching headache that radiated down her spine and into her shoulders. It was a blisteringly hot morning.  The sun oozed slowly over the yard, and by the time Daphne woke up every puff of air felt like it was on fire.

“No, it’s mine!” Wilhelmina said as she snatched the little wooden horse away from her brother. They’d been squabbling since dawn when Paige retreated to the corner of the house to silently work on her knitting. Daphne’s early morning dreams were punctuated by angry squeals and Lemon’s agitated barks.

She groaned as she dragged herself out of bed. Hadn’t the agreement been that she’d provide food and shelter for their neighbours and Paige was responsible for childcare and discipline?

When Felix accidentally tipped his breakfast onto the floor after his sister playfully tried to snatch it away from him Daphne felt something small and brittle in her diaphragm snap. Lemon slurped up the now dusty food as the girl giggled and threw a handful of her own meal onto the floor. In that moment a jagged fleck of the anger and fear Daphne had buried deep inside herself bubbled up her esophagus and rolled over her tongue before she knew what was happening.

“Both of you stop it!” The children froze. Paige grumbled at them without following through on her threats so often that they’d long since learned to ignore her warnings. They’d never seen their quiet, patient, timid neighbour raise her voice before, though.

“Sit down and be quiet,” she said as she begrudgingly scooped another serving of gruel onto the boy’s plate. “You will never waste food or feed the dog table scraps again. Have I made myself clear?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Wilma stared at the table and took a small, halfhearted bite of food while her brother attempted to eat his meal as quickly as possible. He knew Esther was coming back today to give them all special medicine. Maybe that was why Miss Daphne was so uncharacteristically authoritarian?

After breakfast Felix, Wilma, and Lemon  were swooshed out of the house while everything was tidied up. Ephraim and Isaac were busy repairing tools in the shed and the children had been given strict instructions not to bother them. Instead Felix challenged his sister to a game of tag until they were both too warm to continue. While they cooled down in the shade Wilma began rubbing dust into Lemon’s fur. Every time he shook it off she giggled and gathered up another handful of it to sprinkle on his head.

Lunch was a quiet affair. Daphne had been expecting her visitor to show up before they ate, and it was unnerving to know a virtual stranger might be entering her house while she was busy taking the bread out of the oven and making a simple stew. The afternoon scraped over her last nerves as the sun began its descent. Esther really should have arrived by now.

“Well, we should get some more water,” Isaac said a few hours after lunch. Normally he and his brother performed this chore first thing in the morning or right before sunset.

“It’s too hot outside for that long walk,” Daphne said as a flicker of irritation tickled her lungs. She wasn’t happy about being crammed into a hot, tense, too-small house with 5 other people all afternoon either, but Esther had reiterated over and over again how important it was for everyone to be scanned and vaccinated.

“Ill be back soon,” Isaac said. His mother’s sharp tones were rubbing him raw today. What he needed even more than a fresh glass of water was an hour of peace and quiet during his slow walk to a bigger stream. Sparrow Creek didn’t dry up every year, but the weather last winter had been particularly dry. They were now in the middle of an unusually hot summer.

“I should help you,” Ephraim said suddenly. It was true that Isaac couldn’t carry all of the empty water jugs by himself, but it wasn’t strictly necessary for all of them to be filled. He just preferred not to be left alone with the bickering children and the tension in Daphne’s voice as she fumbled through her herbs for a mild painkiller.

Ten minutes after they left Esther arrived at the homestead breathless and covered in perspiration, and so it was that she once again missed out on meeting MacArthur’s sons. Daphne accepted the scans and vaccination warily. It was doubtful they would work, but she’d seen much more painful cures being touted in previous epidemics.

If nothing else it gave her the opportunity to observe the stranger’s medical care up close. Swallowing bitter tea or rubbing pungent salve on a sore muscle made sense, but Daphne couldn’t imagine how the tiny pieces of metal the stranger injected into everyone’s arms were supposed to prevent or cure anything.

“It realigns your ions,” Esther said when Paige pressed for more information. Daphne was too embarrassed to ask what an ion was or how hers had become so unstable, but she hoped it would bring more mobility to her sore knee. Esther’s scanner had picked up on the injury, but when Daphne asked if there was anything they could do to fix it the woman was eerily quiet. Maybe even the capital didn’t know how to fix old injuries?

“Well, I could have told you mine were defective!” Paige said as she rubbed her sore forearm. “They’ve been hurting for years.”

“What time will your sons be back?” Esther asked as she carefully wiped down her equipment. Ordinarily she might have written off the teenagers as noncompliant, but her supervisors had insisted that everyone in this family participate in the program.

“Soon,” Daphne said. Only fools would take a long walk on such a hot day. When suppertime rolled around with still no sign of her sons, though, Esther was forced to move onto the next house with the promise that she’d come back again soon to ensure Isaac and Ephraim were healthy and vaccinated. Daphne felt the ball of fear in her diaphragm pulse as it grew a few inches bigger.

Supper was a quiet affair. The children were groggy from a long day of waiting, and Daphne felt a twinge of pain in her arm every time she moved it while slicing the bread and rehydrating some vegetables. She couldn’t say the rest of her felt any better or worse and wondered how long it would take for the vaccination to work. There were no stories tonight, just gentle hugs and an early bedtime.

It was nearly midnight before her sons arrived back home. Lemon was the only one still awake to greet the bleeding boys who limped into quiet little house.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, quotes, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Confronting our feelings and giving them appropriate expression always takes strength, not weakness. It takes strength to acknowledge our anger, and sometimes more strength yet to curb the aggressive urges anger may bring and to channel them into nonviolent outlets. It takes strength to face our sadness and to grieve and to let our grief and our anger flow in tears when they need to. It takes strength to talk about our feelings and to reach out for help and comfort when we need it. – Fred Rogers

On the Significance of Digitally Documenting Zoo Visits. What children really learn when they visit the zoo. This is the kind of stuff I love doing with my nephew and his parents when we’re in the same city. Kids see things with fresh eyes that adults have long since learned to explain away.

Does This Path Have Heart? This is my life philosophy as well.

To the Guys Who Threw Eggs at Me Tonight via Scalzi. I love this blogger’s sense of humour and no-nonsense approach to people who think they can bully her about her weight.

Wrench. An exquisitely detailed article about what it’s like to work in a bike shop.

Flip The News – NSFW Survey Results. A few weeks ago I retweeted a link to a sex survey the owners of this blog had compiled. The results, while not at all scientific, are fascinating. What modern society says about the sex drives and preferences of men and women, straight and LGBT, young and old is often the exact opposite of what these groups self-report.

(Untitled). When I look at this painting I see a darker, grown up version of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy is seeking the wizard not to find her way home but to piece her life together again…starting with her own body. (No, this isn’t a gory piece). What do you see?

Safe Sex: Choose Your Own Adventure Style! Now this is a creative approach to safer sex. Our parents (probably) don’t know this, but I may or may not have given one of my siblings condoms when he was in high school. I was quite irritated with fear-mongering, abstinence-only sex ed in our community and wanted him to be safe when he decided to become sexually active.

Just Another Monday – Almost via Brudberg. How would you react if you found graffiti on your property?

I first read Do Androids Dreams of Electric Sheep? in high school. Every few years I return to it and am amazed by something new in it.

Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter who slowly begins to question the morality of destroying the androids he is being paid to hunt down. This book is set in 2021, a time in which humanity has caused the extinction of a huge percentage of the animals that used to live beside us. There are android-ish versions of many of the creatures that used to really exist as well.

What I loved and love the most about this book is how blurry the lines become between “real” and “artificial” people. It would be difficult to name the philosophical questions this plot twist brings up without giving you spoilers, but sufficed to say this is one of those books that asks hard questions and doesn’t accept wishy-washy answers.

What have you been reading?

© Nevit Dilmen found at Wikimedia commons.

Just tuning in? Catch up with parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty of this story.

Lemon had been born in a small log cabin deep inside the Mingus mountain range. His thick coat was designed to keep him alive through long, cold winters and it was during July and August afternoons that he suffered the most. The valley rarely grew as warm as the desert, but the temperature could still get quite hot in the dog days of summer.

Watching miserable pets pant in the shade must have been what prompted the ones who came before to invent such a funny phrase Daphne decided. Her grandfather was the one who first used it with her when they’d taken in yet another dog at the end of August, and in her 9-year-old mind the dogs days of summer were meant to be a celebration of the unique bond between dogs and their humans. She quickly learned how to bake favourite treats for the dogs in her life and draw some of the water supply into a dog-sized bath for cooling off.

Which is how Daphne ended up meeting the new representative for the Arizona territories while standing in the middle of her front yard naked from the waist up as she attempted to dry off her wiggly companion. There was nothing Lemon liked better than soaking in a cool tub of water on a hot day, and Daphne had learned from experience that the only way to get him out of the tub was to climb in after him. Her knee still protested when she picked up dogs and small children, so Daphne was hoping to gently coax him out of the tub instead of tipping it over or struggling to lift him out. She was nude from the waist up because at least then one article of clothing would remain dry for the evening.

“Mrs. Loous?” the slim blond woman standing at the edge of Daphne’s property line blushed as she carefully enunciated Daphne’s legal last name. Five minutes ago Daphne had been wishing that Paige was awake or one of her sons was around to help her de-tub the dog. Now she was grateful that no one else was staring awkwardly at the ground while she hurriedly put on a shirt.

“Yes, I’m Daphne.” Overjoyed at the thought of meeting a new human friend, Lemon barked his greeting as Daphne struggled to hold onto his slippery body.

“My name is Esther Penn. I’m here on behalf of your government to take a census. Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

As the stranger spoke Lemon wiggled out of his owner’s grasp and rushed forward to meet his new human. When the newcomer rewarded him with a quick scratch behind the ears Daphne could have almost sworn that she saw her dog grinning.

Esther flashed a small piece of metal she called a badge in front of Daphne and was shocked when it didn’t have the desired affect. Daphne had never seen such an object before and didn’t realize that it was intended to evoke obedience and a tinge of fear into everyone who saw it. To Daphne it looked like a child’s toy not a weapon. The petite woman who wanted to know everything about Daphne’s life was a curiosity, so for the sake of learning more about the world beyond Mingus valley Daphne agreed to sit in the front yard and answer her questions.

“Mrs. Lewis, I really must insist that we stick to the script,” Esther said after Daphne interrupted her yet again with another question.

“I just want to know where all of this information is going,” Daphne said. Even with Esther’s explanation of what a census was and why it was so important to know the names, ages, and occupations of everyone living in the valley Daphne still wasn’t sure why that was the only data that mattered. While waiting out the long, hot summer Daphne had begun to formulate strong ideas about what her valley needed, and government-issued ID numbers were nowhere on that list.

“Well, the algorithm tells us how to allocate resources after we input all of your information.” Esther might as well have told Daphne they were going to throw it to the moon with a slingshot when verboten terms accidentally slipped into the conversation. Daphne was still having trouble believing that anyone’s medicine could be strong enough prevent disease before it occurred. It was as preposterous as choosing when the gods sent you a child or Death carried you away.

Esther was frustrated as well. Half of the information she’d been prepped with on this family was either wrong or Daphne was a much better liar than her profile indicated she would be. Not only did she claim to have no knowledge of the Cohen brothers or where they might have moved on to after Mr. Everson allegedly broke them out of jail, she refused to say anything about her estranged husband at all.

Hopefully her sons would be more cooperative. Esther still needed to vaccinate everyone and visit three more households before dusk.

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, prints, quotes, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia. At least 130 women in a Mennonite community were drugged and raped for years before their attackers were finally caught. This article describes how the men who violated them were caught and what the victims have done since the trial. Trigger warning: there are graphic descriptions of the assaults in this link.

What Happens When You Hire a Craiglist Poet to Mock You?  If I ever become wealthy I’ll hire artistic people to create personalized stuff for me. This is such a funny idea.

The Case for Quiet via Dan__Bennett. My mind can be a pretty noisy place. Cultivating quiet is so much more than how many words you speak.

Marriage Without Sex is Meaningless. On the one hand, I completely understand what the woman blogger spoke to is saying about emotional intimacy. It really is the glue that holds any romantic relationship together through the rough times. On the other hand, I can’t imagine ever growing so old that sex permanently becomes less enticing than a massage or other nonsexual forms of touch from your spouse. Even the idea of it makes me chuckle.

Something More Wrong. Life in a longterm, inpatient mental health hospital. Some of the stories of these women are disturbing, but the author did a wonderful job describing how they pass their days and nights.

My Name via dlboonstra. A modern-day parable about the things we say to and about ourselves.

From The One via Moonbeam McQueen:

They didn’t have the time
that younger lovers do,
so they blazed twice as bright
and their years together flew;

From Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Some Fucking Awesome Sex:

Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.

Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own.

What will future generations misunderstand about us if they only have access to a handful of random artifacts? A Canticle for Leibowitz explores this question by introducing the reader to a cloistered monk who ekes out a living hundreds of years after humanity is nearly wiped out by an atomic war.

This is speculative science fiction at its finest. The characters’ understanding of how the world works is quite different from what you or I would say about it, but it was a joy to slowly piece together the truth about what really happened to our species as we meet the people who live in this distant future.

Everything else I want to say about this book veers into spoiler territory, but I highly recommend it to anyone interested in philosophy, post-apocalyptic fiction or science fiction.

What have you been reading?

Here is this week’s list of blog posts, comics, and other tidbits from my favourite corners of the web.

Someone Write Me a Book Based on This Image. My flash fiction response is below. Leave yours in the comment section!

Mabel loved her husband now more than she did when they first met sixty years ago, but sometimes she wondered what her life had been like if True Love’s Kiss hadn’t worn off after a few decades. It had been years since she’d gone dancing.

TP. It’s best if you click on this link with as few preconceived notions of what you’re about to find as possible. (Don’t worry, it’s nothing scary or disturbing!)

Friendship Never Fleeting via RantingnRaven. There’s something weird going on in this story. My theory about what is really happening is posted in the  comment section of this link.

Untitled. The Dr. Who police box I understand. The flowery ribcage, not so much. It’s beautiful, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it represents. Ideas, anyone?

From Do Stop Believing via Dorsalstream:

 My lovely wife, to her credit and wisdom, has insisted that our kids come to these truths on their own. She believes that the various fairies and magic bunnies and nocturnal elves can give a great gift in the opportunity to discover their nonexistence.

This discovery is inevitable. Beliefs and the stories that bind them together tug at each other even as they distribute logical load. Beliefs that don’t square with the stories we tell ourselves tend not to last long. Same with stories that don’t square with beliefs we are reluctant to relinquish. Childhood myths survive until the evidence nags and the desire to know overpowers the desire to believe in their truth or what would allow them to be true.

From Knives:

I was haunted by the most chilling story in the entire Little House on the Prairie series: a chapter called “Knife in the Dark”. Wilder describes boarding with a severely depressed woman who waves a knife at her husband during a nocturnal argument, scaring the daylights out of teenage Laura peeking through a gap in the curtain partition. If the story gave me goosebumps before, now it knotted my stomach.

This week I’m thrilled to recommend my friend Daphne Purpus’ “The Egg That Wouldn’t Hatch.” This is her second fantasy novel and third book overall, and it’s been wonderful to see her writing style develop over time.

The Egg That Wouldn’t Hatch is a young adult fantasy novel about a girl named Lucy who has the odds stacked against her several times over again. She’s poor, motherless, physically disabled, bullied, and was raised in an abusive and emotionally cold home.

And then a chance encounter with a Dragon Rider and her dragon changes Lucy’s destiny forever. What I loved about this book was that Lucy’s past was never glossed over. She struggles to undo the emotional damage her father (and peers) cause even after her life changes dramatically for the better. It isn’t always an easy process, but I really appreciated Daphne’s realistic approach to Lucy’s character development. It was delightful to see a frightened little girl learn to express her true self.

Lucy is 7 when this story begins, but I’d recommend for kids who are 9-12 years old due to its frank discussion of abuse, neglect, bullying, and death.

What have you been reading? Have any of my other readers published anything lately? I love promoting the work of friends, so please let me know if you have anything coming out!