Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Read online

  A BACKGROUND

  Our town is, in many ways, like any other town. Imagine parallel lines of artisan boutiques running beside a brick-laden boulevard that sprawls outward, onto a few dozen crosshatched streets along which stand sentinel rows of townhomes and condos. Beyond the townhomes and condos, imagine that the streets gain curvature and turn to winding roads that slide by cozy one-story, two-story, and three-story homes replete with manicured yards and picket fences and two-car garages. And on the fringes of it all, where the roads meet the infinite progress and regress of the interstate highway, imagine the dense modern fortifications of commerce—the strip malls and chain stores and supermarkets and fast food parlors and gas stations and motels and casual family eateries all vying for patronage. Our town is, in this, like any other town: the fruition of some sort of dream and the image of some sort of beauty, though neither may be ours.

  Just as is the case with our parents and grandparents, most of us have lived here our entire lives, with, perhaps, a brief four-year foray to a college or a university within driving distance during our early adulthood. Occasionally we venture outward, to other towns, other cities, other regions of the world where people speak with intonations different from ours and wear clothes designed more for function than for form, but, though we may be charmed or fascinated or surprised by those other places, we are, inevitably, neither drawn away from our town for long nor tempted to remain elsewhere. We are tethered to our town by a dull, soothing comfort and, with the lengths of our tethers, have woven complex webs of existence to further secure ourselves here.

  Life is, you might say, easy for us. We have no great wealth but also no real poverty, no overwhelming love for our neighbors but also no outstanding hatreds. We are not a people who leave our doors unlocked throughout the night, but neither are we a people who suffer from any crimes worse than petty theft and vandalism. We have achieved a level of contentment and stasis in which our primary worry is losing our contentment and stasis. Thus it is that everything we do, every decision we make, every social, cultural, fiscal, philosophical, theological, and political step we take as adults, as citizens, and as parents is designed to uphold the most sacrosanct of our shared values: security.

  A SYMPTOM

  After the orange ball had been spotted on the elementary school playground by an astute second-grade teacher, the sixteen boys and girls involved with its play were rushed to a secure hospital facility where, mere hours later, the symptoms of contact began to manifest. We knew what to expect as we huddled by the side of our children’s beds. First came the uncontrollable leg spasms that, had the children been upright, would have sent them sprinting into the blustery night at ten or fifteen or however many miles per hour their muscles and ligaments could carry them before completely shearing away from bone or snapping apart. Impervious to muscle relaxants, the spasms lasted for several grueling hours during which our children alternately laughed and cried, sang unfamiliar songs and shouted words we’d never taught them. As they sweated through their bedsheets, we sweated through our clothes, waiting for a resolution that we’d fooled ourselves into believing might arrive.

  Once the spasms had run their full course, metabolic exhaustion set in and extreme cramping stole over our children’s tender bodies from head to toe. Despite the best efforts of doctors and nurses to rehydrate our children and replenish their depleted electrolytes, chorales of anguish blared from the isolation ward, driving us to near madness with their fiery accusation of our universal impotence. If hell has an anthem, truly we believe it must be the ululation of one’s children in hysterical, unending pain.

  As our babies screamed and thrashed through a hurricane of tears, we wrung our hands and tore at our hair and prayed to our myriad deities for succor and mercy. We discovered, however, that succor and mercy were in short supply, even for us, even for our town, which we had always assumed must exist as a tiny sparkle in the corner of our gods’ eyes. Indeed, only when the doctors pumped the children full of opiate pain killers—so many, in fact, that we feared coma must be near—did the cries subside and our beloved quietus regain temporary control of our lives. Then, only then, with our children in deep chemical slumber, did we again feel safe.

  Of course, this was only the first symptom of the ball’s infection and, as we understood it, the least severe. There would be two more symptoms yet to come, two more symptoms for which none of us could be properly prepared, unimaginable as they were.

  Our peace was, in the end, a fragile lie.

  A REALIZATION

  We initially learned of the orange ball seven years ago. Rumors of the ball’s existence had been spreading across the internet for months prior to our localized revelation, but this spotty information was relegated to fringe news sites, shared social media posts, and obscure discussion forums—none of which registered on our tightly focused radar. We didn’t read to the margins of our world; we didn’t feel that we needed to. The margins were for those people too unmotivated or too deviant to find their way to a more stable center. Surely, we believed, our town and our lives were near the center of whatever vast page reality had been impressed upon. Thirty minutes curled up with the local nightly news on television, an occasional foray across the main page of a cable news network’s website, a glance at a nationally distributed magazine: these were the energies we deemed it necessary to expend in order to remain informed citizens of greater, polished society. So while the ball rolled on and families in other communities—dust-ridden rural locales and bullet-populated inner city neighborhoods, mostly—dealt with its aftermath and expressed their despondency, their fear, and their anger through peripheral channels, we went about our days in relative peace and naiveté.

  It wasn’t until the ball passed through a town much like ours, a town sealed tight in its onion-layers of self-satisfaction and supposed normalcy, a town with the anywhere name of “Vernonville,” that the mainstream media followed its bounce. In Vernonville, cameras captured grim men in pressed, button-down shirts and sensible khaki pants, quavering women with tasteful makeup in smart, monochrome wrap dresses, and tearful children in all manner of character-emblazoned shirts, pants, and shoes. These were a safe people, an ordinary people, a people with enough time and money and respect for the prescribed social order to arrive for interviews entirely photogenic, even in the face of crisis. We worried over the people of Vernonville, because, in truth, what the cameras in that quaint suburban town captured was nothing less than ourselves, doubled at another point in space.

  To the media, the people of Vernonville spoke of an inexplicable childhood illness run rampant in their town, of an orange ball with which the stricken youths had played. They spoke of their outrage, their sadness, their memories, their lack of understanding. They asked for prayers and protection and they insisted that the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization investigate the disease, for, surely, disease it had to be that their children had contracted. To pacify the people of Vernonville, the CDC and WHO did, indeed, finally launch an investigation, but, ultimately, neither found evidence of a pathogen or a wicked foreign invader endlessly multiplying in the blood of the town’s children. The lone key fact the doctors and scientists at the CDC and WHO discovered—or what they knew all along, more likely—was that a series of past incidents in other locations mirrored the situation in Vernonville. All the rural nowheres and the urban centers that had cried out for the selfsame recognition and investigation that Vernonville received were at last acknowledged, if only as fragments of a greater pattern and decimals in a ledger.

  The situation in Vernonville, combined with the newly revealed information that the incident was not isolated and that the orange ball had spread a sickness to children elsewhere, sent us into a lowboiling panic. We began to discuss the ball at work, at PTA meetings, at the gym, in our bedrooms well after midnight—anywhere that our children wouldn’t hear. We drove by our homes and our children’s schools during our lunch breaks, just to spot check for o
range balls that might be lolling about outside. We threw into the garbage any orange balls that our children or our pets possessed and bought them shiny new blue or green ones for their enjoyment. Even the recreational basketball league at our local YMCA switched from traditional orange and black balls to red, white, and blue Team USA balls.

  As days passed, our fear did not abate, but, instead, settled into our routines. We formed a community watch group to buy all the orange balls in the all the stores in town and burn them in pre-selected dumpsters; we gathered up orange traffic cones and hurled them into gutters wherever we passed them; if we were sports fans, we stopped following the NBA and NCAA basketball altogether. We even purchased oranges at the grocery store with less frequency. And yet, despite all our activism, we spoke of the ball less and less, almost as if we didn’t give it second thought, almost as if it was something we’d never heard of, almost as if it didn’t even exist.

  A SECOND SYMPTOM

  After our children’s cramps unknotted and melted away, the second symptom began to manifest. Its appearance could have been mistaken for an unusual rash or an off-color bout of jaundice, but we knew better. The circular, orange blotches that crept over our children’s skin had no dermatological precedent except in the history of the towns the ball had visited.

  For many of us, this was the most difficult stage of the illness. Though our sons and daughters remained firmly ensconced in cradles of opiates so as to not feel the flesh-peeling inflammation that the children of Vernonville had, we found the mere presence of their infected bodies intolerable. We sat by their beds with our faces turned away, unable to watch as the blotches spread and joined with one another, forming Rorschach patterns we feared to interpret for what they might reveal about ourselves. We were asked by doctors and nurses to comfort our children, to hold their hands and wipe their chins as saliva leaked from their lips, but we could not bring ourselves to touch them. With every new sore, with every new patch of smooth, glistening orange, they drifted from us, becoming less a part of us and more a part of the ball. Theirs was a future we could not countenance, let alone accept.

  In the hallways and common areas of the secure facility, we pounded vending machines with our fists though we were not seeking refreshment and we stared into bathroom mirrors for hours though we were not preening. In the facility’s lobby, we gave interviews to assembled reporters, our faces properly stoic, our words sufficiently labored. In the facility’s parking lot, well-meaning friends and family lit bonfires and invited us to stoke the flames with balls of diverse size and color, balls that they had purchased for precisely that therapeutic kindling purpose. And all the while, as we sulked about the facility in our bubbles of distraction, our children lay in their rooms, alone, transmuting.

  The bravest among us eventually worked up the courage to return to our ailing offspring. We pulled up chairs beside the hospital beds and, tears welling at the corners of our eyes, whispered unheard endearments to our sons and daughters while stroking their swollen pumpkin-hued foreheads. Even for those of us with iron resolve, however, the caresses did not last long. We pulled away our fingers and wiped them on our pants, our dresses. We ran to the nearest bathroom and scrubbed our hands under scalding water, so desperate were we to remove the sensation of our children’s rashes against our flesh. For what we touched when we stroked their heads was not soft, pliable skin, but a hard, dense surface that barely yielded to the pressure of our fingertips. Where once had been ridges and divots and tiny, perfectly formed imperfections was now an expanse of smooth, featureless orange. Doctors who had biopsied the rashes of children in other towns had long ago determined the nature of this impossible flesh. It was a substance the world knew well, a substance that had no place in human biology, and we shuddered to witness it merging with our children, becoming our children, our children becoming it.

  Brave or not, we fled into flasks, into puffs of cigarette smoke, into passionless sex in the hospital bathrooms. We spent our last remaining energies in pursuit of merciful distraction. We refused to contemplate the truth of the situation, and the truth was this: by the time the second symptom had run its course, our children would no longer be copies of ourselves, but products of forces far beyond our control. By the time the second symptom had run its course, our children would be, effectively, rubberized.

  A REFERENDUM

  When, a few months after Vernonville, the orange ball appeared in another town like ours and the death toll ticked higher in that small burgh than it had in any of the previous places the ball had infected, we experienced a surge in anxiety unlike any we’d known before. Every bounce of a kickball and spin of a bowling ball and hollow plink of a ping-pong ball against a table sent us into cold sweats and caused us to glance over our shoulders to make sure nothing was rolling up behind us. Accident rates in town doubled. 9-1-1 calls reporting suspicious incidents tripled. We became a study in paranoia. So, in conjunction with the PTA and several local religious groups, our mayor called a meeting to discuss “the ball dilemma” and invited all concerned adults from the community to attend. Minors—even teenagers who understood the issue at hand—were strictly prohibited from entering the town hall during the meeting due to the nature of the subject matter.

  On the evening of the “ball dilemma” discussion, seating at the town hall was elbow to elbow and hip to hip. It seemed that every person in town over the age of eighteen had come to listen, if not participate. We all wanted resolution. We wanted the mayor or the president of the PTA or a local minister or rabbi or imam to give us instruction, to tell us that our town would be safe if we simply followed an enumerated plan with easily accomplished steps. Instead, we were faced with a coterie of leaders who, through PowerPoint slides and Excel spreadsheets, explained that no feasible protection was possible. We couldn’t wall off the town from the rest of the world— though some of us would have surely felt more at ease behind medieval battlements—nor could we afford a video surveillance system for the town’s perimeter. We couldn’t track the ball’s movements—not even the Department of Homeland Security had been able to manage that feat yet, or so it claimed—nor did we have the resources to set up an official ball patrol. We couldn’t even print informational posters because we had no information to convey that might have been of use in case of the ball’s appearance. For all intents and purposes, we lacked any meaningful choice of action.

  It was, therefore, not surprising that when the presentations ended and the mayor opened the floor for questions, the town hall broke into a silence reserved for sepulchers. We dared not speak or move, as speaking and moving would imply that the meeting was truly nearing its conclusion, that our authorities had failed us and left us without plan or direction. The notion of confronting such a limbo we could not abide. So we sat and waited in the anticipation of one last key address or instructional video. Our leaders fidgeted, unsure of the silence’s tenor. We held our breaths, unsure of the question to ask. And, somewhere, the ball kept bouncing, entirely sure we could not stop it.

  Finally, after the tension had grown so sharp it could slice through the hall’s concrete walls, one of us—Marcus Jefferson, the proprietor of our town’s used bookstore—stood and asked the question that would govern our lives for years to come.

  “If you don’t have a plan to deal with it,” he said, “and we can’t prevent it from happening, then why are we even talking about it?”

  The question provoked no answers from our leaders, but it did raise applause and echoes.

  Other voices in the crowd, our voices, yelled at the stage, asking “Why? Why? Why do we need to discuss it? Why should we even bring it up?”

  The mayor responded the only way she could. She asked us what we wanted to do about “the ball problem.” She asked what our democratic solution might be.

  Again we slid into silence. We’d never imagined the decision might fall to us. We had no idea how to prevent the ball’s coming; we had no special information, no learned insight. We only knew th
at we were frightened. So when Jessica Cadiz—a manager at one of our town’s three banks—stood and said, “Let’s try to ignore it. Let’s imagine it doesn’t exist. Let’s push it away as best we can. Let’s strike it from our vocabularies and close the browser windows when we see stories about it online and turn off the tvs if newscasters start yammering on about it. And, for the love of God, let’s never allow the kids to know what it is, to know that it’s out there. At least not until they’re older,” we all understood why.

  The applause for Cadiz’s suggestion shook the floor and rattled the windows. A chant of “ignore it, ignore it, ignore it” erupted from the crowd. We, the people, had spoken. Shortly thereafter, our mayor called for a vote, a referendum, and what would become known as the Cadiz Proposition unanimously passed into our town charter and into our law.