UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations
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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Fell World Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7s4589d0 Author Holmes, Jason Edward Publication Date 2012 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE The Fell World A Thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts by Jason Edward Holmes June 2012 Thesis Committee: Professor Nalo Hopkinson, Chairperson Professor Michael Jayme Professor Susan Straight Copyright by Jason Edward Holmes 2012 The Thesis The Fell World by Jason Edward Holmes is approved by ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California Riverside Acknowledgements I want to thank my wonderful Anna for helping make this story better than I could ever have made it myself. Thanks to my parents for letting me write when that might not have been the easiest decision. Thanks also to all my friends—you know who you are—and the wonderful faculty I worked with at the University of California Riverside, including but not limited to Michael Jayme (6 years), Susan Straight (5 years), and Nalo Hopkinson (sadly, just 1 year), for helping make this possible. iii For Anna iv Prologue—California, Six Years Ago Jordan fled and tripped through the undergrowth. His hands slammed into a thick tree trunk. He rounded it then put his back to it and held his breath. Everything was quiet and still in the frozen forest. The garr in the woods behind him was unlike the other garr, with its black shimmering flesh, wings, wicked tail, and sinister cunning. It had hit his son, and he’d gone limp in a second. Jordan had to run, even though he knew this was it. He’d known it was coming, he just couldn’t remember what it was. He wrote in his journal, moments after waking or before sleep, that his thoughts weren’t safe, that something was going to kill him. Whenever he wrote the name, he always forgot later, and when he went back to check, it had been crossed out and drowned with ink. If he stored it somewhere without any ink nearby, he found it somewhere else, or with the page torn out and gone. He glanced back around the tree trunk. Nothing. The gray sunlight peeked through the canopy of clawing branches. This creature, like a panther, had already taken his twelve-year-old son, and he wished he could fight it, but he wasn’t armed. And something else was more important, above all else. He needed to lead it away, as far as he could. Give her some chance of surviving. But he made himself banish her from his thoughts. His thoughts weren’t safe. 1 A twig snapped. He ran. He could hear his own feet crash through the forest, but if it was behind him, it stalked silently. Branches slapped his face and snagged his clothes, and he wished his wife had still been around, that he could have seen her one more time. Blades raked his back, but it only hurt for a moment, before numbness spread through him. His legs failed. By the time he hit the forest floor he couldn’t feel it. His eyes were stuck open. They stayed open as the garr rolled him over, as it stood over him with glistening maw, and as it dug into his chest. He couldn’t feel any of it, anything except horror. He tried to pull in his thoughts—not safe—resign himself to dying alone, but they ran away from him once the garr started to drag him away, and he became dizzy, and was glad he had led it away from his daughter. 2 Part One Over Dark Hills 3 Chapter One After six years without a family, Michelle still sometimes made herself see the good in things that were awful. Twenty years of the sun behind a shroud, for example, meant she and Mr. Keaton could be the lone occupants of a three-story office building. Mr. Keaton was a big reason she could look at anything positively. Michelle lived in someone’s old office, as in someone now definitely dead, but did her best to respect it. She never broke into the filing cabinet and had moved it to the hallway. A plaque for most Yellow Page sales hung on the wall, and a framed photograph of a smiling woman and two inattentive children, a boy and a girl, sat on the desk. She kept these as they were because she hoped that, if someone moved into her old house, they wouldn’t throw out the books she read, or the ones she drew in, or the tools her father had made, or the toys her brother had played with, and especially a family photograph. Tonight was Saturday, which meant she and Mr. Keaton were going to the market. She had to gather some things to trade, because even though they could survive on the crops that Mr. Keaton grew and the meager things the Arbiter gave them for reasons she couldn’t understand, they traded what they could to other people in Logo City. Other people needed Mr. Keaton’s crops, so he got things like the tweed jackets that he wore 4 every day. She did her best to contribute by quilting or sewing or repairing things she found in abandoned buildings. She moved from her bed to her bookcases, to her rack of clothes. She picked out a leather jacket that she no longer wore since she found her heavy coat, and then she moved to her desk and looked through the drawers, which were mostly empty. From her little drawer of knickknack things, she pulled out the pair of diamond earrings she’d given up trying to trade a month ago. Maybe this time she would get lucky, and someone would be seduced by what these diamonds might have meant twenty years ago. At least she would try to get something for them. Maybe if she included the jacket. In the corner she kept her most valuable possessions. In his youth, her dad had a thirst for learning, so he took classes in everything from pottery to fencing; when he found a sword at a bazaar when she was twelve, he traded for it and taught her how to use it. Next to it, her mom’s broken flashlight. Her mom used to carry it with her all of the time because she said it protected her from demons even though it didn’t work. It was the spirit of the thing that mattered. She gave it to Michelle when Michelle was eight years old and told her that she never needed to be afraid of the dark. Every night before she slept, Michelle set these items on the small table beside her bed, and she picked them up each night before she went out. It would be like leaving home without her legs. It was the thought of going outside and being attacked and killed and eaten by garr without having what was most important to her, what really protected her whenever she was alone. A journal on the table at all times. Her dad had taught her to always write, so she did. She had some of his journals, and it was her only way of connecting with him. 5 She slid her mom’s flashlight into her coat’s breast pocket, put her journal in a satchel over her shoulder, and slipped her dad’s sword in its sheath through the loop she had made out of leather and sewn to her belt. She slung the leather jacket over her arm and piled a quilt she had just finished on top of it. Lastly, she put the diamond earrings in her pocket and went out her door. She used her foot to close the door then locked it. Normally she would work on her board until they had to go, but the last time, Mr. Keaton complained, so she wanted to surprise him. The hallway was stark. She slid around the filing cabinet and down the hall. The blue light of Mr. Keaton’s agricultural lamps spilled into the hallway. She knocked and entered, wobbling around the door with the bulk of her items. Mr. Keaton looked up and lifted his tinted goggles to the top of his head. “Michelle,” he said, “you’re quite prompt. Are you feeling well?” He was sixty-five but always claimed to be a man of at least twenty years younger than that. Michelle thought maybe he liked to think that the Eclipse hadn’t taken those years from him, that he was still forty-five and the sun still shined and there were no monsters. “Just prompt today, that’s all.” Troughs made of wood and filled with soil split the center of the long room, and a choke of cords with electricity borrowed from streetlights on nearby blocks wound across the floor to the agricultural lamps, which buzzed blue and hung above the sprouts and vines and small bushes. “Those lights always hurt my head,” she said. 6 “Then be good to yourself and avert your eyes.” He wore his pair of tweed jackets and a fine bowtie from his professorial days, and his face had that clean-shaven glow— he was ready to leave for the market. “Looks like you have plenty to trade.” She turned away from the lamps. They had to run constantly to allow the crops photosynthesis.