Complete Atopia Chronicles

“Oh really? Is that why you pssi–block me all the time? I can still see you, you know, sneaking around out there.”

“I need to focus on work during the days. I wish you would try to understand. We’ve talked about this. I thought we’d agreed.”

Mother snorted derisively. “Yeah sure, work. I thought we agreed about a lot of stuff, Phil. And you stink like fish, it’s disgusting,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Well block it out,” suggested my dad futilely. “That’s what pssi is for. Anyway, of course I smell like fish, I just got back from work. We’ve been analyzing the new stocks. I was trying to take a shower but you stopped me.”

“I stopped you, huh? So it’s me that’s holding you back, right Phil? What a joke! Just block it, that’s your answer to everything, right? Maybe I like to see things for what they are, Phil, like what you are.”

“I’m just trying to do my best, Gretchen.”

“Well obviously your best isn’t good enough,” she spat back. “You are what you are, right Phil?”

“I’m going in the shower,” said my dad as he turned away to finally escape.

Mother waved him off drunkenly and turned her attention to me. Even as a toddler, I cringed in the glare of her disappointment. She snapped into me, looking at the yellow cyber blocks through my own eyes, staring at my own little hands.

“Playing with blocks again, eh stinker?” she laughed. “The other pssi-kids your age are composing operas and you’re obsessed with blocks. You just don’t get on with the other kids, do you? Your cousin Nancy is quite the star, from what I’ve heard. Not you, though, not my little stinker. You’re just as useless as your dad.”

She angrily snapped out of my body, shoving it over as she left. I didn’t understand what she meant by all this, but the words hurt just the same.

Samson was watching all this from a distance. He walked over to help me up, and then sat down with his hand in mine. He summoned up and handed me some more interlocking blocks. We quietly finished building the wall around us, and just sat there dumbly, trying to figure out how to fill in the cracks and make it impenetrable.

6

Identity: Patricia Killiam

IT WAS BONFIRE night, and excited squeals rose up between the bursts of rockets and bangers. As we walked down the lane, I caught glimpses of children playing in the alleyways, scrambling atop piles of rubbish stacked high on the abandoned bomb sites behind the row houses.

Fireworks whizzed and popped overhead, and coming around a corner we almost ran smack into a little girl running the other way, her eyes fixated on a lit sparkler that she waved back and forth in her tiny outstretched hand.

“Careful now,” I laughed, stooping to catch and stop her before she tripped herself up. She never took her eyes off the sparkler, completely mesmerized. It sputtered out, and the girl looked up at me with eyes wide in wonder. Small, ruddy cheeks glowed warmly above a tightly wrapped scarf. Alan, my walking partner, knelt down on the wet pavement beside us, rummaging around in his pockets.

“Sorry mum! Little rascal got away from me!” called out a large huffing and puffing man, waving towards us, obviously the girl’s father. The already foggy night was now also thick with the acrid smoke of gunpowder, and my watering eyes strained to see the man approaching.

I called back, “Oh, it’s no trouble at all.” The man stopped running, obviously coming from the Lion’s Head, the pub where we were headed.

“Ah ha,” said Alan, having found the prize he’d been searching for. He produced another sparkler from the pocket of his great wool overcoat. He looked towards the little girl. “Would you like this?”

The girl’s eyes widened, and she nodded. Just then the man arrived.

“Oah, that’s very kind of you,” he started to say cheerily, but then his face darkened. “You’re that perfessor, ain’t ya?” He reached down to grab his daughter’s hand.

Alan sighed but said nothing, bowing his head and putting the sparkler back in his pocket.

“And what of it?” I growled at the man, gently releasing the girl.

“You stay away from my Olivia!” he spat back, roughly jerking the little girl away from us. “You stay away, you hear me? Disgusting.”

Turning sharply he walked away, dragging the girl behind him. She continued to watch us intently as she disappeared into the gloom. I sighed and reached down to gently pull Alan back up. He’d visibly crumpled during the exchange.

“Don’t pay any attention to them,” I said softly, pulling him in the opposite direction, away from the Lion’s Head. “What do you say we have a drink at the Green Man instead?”

“Yes, I suppose,” he replied distantly.

It was the spring of 1953, although spring in Manchester wasn’t much different than most of the rest of the year. While even the Blitz hadn’t been able to displace my mother and father from London during the War, the Great Smog of ’52 had been the last straw to encourage them to take the family north that year.