Thrust: A Novel

In their falling-to-pieces apartment building, time never budged. She understood that Aster wanted to protect her and hide her from harm, but she was starting to learn how stasis could kill a person. Look at evolution. The question was a kind of trade: Was it more dangerous to risk being out in the world, knowing that the refugee Raids were happening everywhere these days — armed men in vans snaking like killer whales through the streets, taking people away to god knows where — or was it more dangerous to atrophy, like a stone growing moss, inside a squatter’s apartment with a father dying from grief? No one ever became anything stuck inside staring at shadows, languishing inside Plato’s cave. People could forget they had bodies at all, living that way. Being alive meant walking toward death, and she had no special fear of death. Life and death were a story familiar to her.

She’d located the penny she carried in the swollen riverway lapping around The Brook. The P she’d found in an alley between abandoned and misshapen buildings, half buried in rubble and ensnared by weeds. This falling-to-pieces city was beautiful. She had no fear on this day, except the fears her father had put into her. To Laisvė, objects were everything, because they moved backward and forward in time. Sometimes the same was true of people: the right people might be in the wrong time and thus need carrying. When that happened, she went to the Awn Shop.

The closer she got to the shop, the louder her heart beat. She knew she was supposed to be a secret of a self — staying at home while her father was at work, walking the iron to build the Sea Wall to keep the water back — but she couldn’t sit still the way he wanted her to. The beauty of abandoned subway tunnels piled with debris and grown over with thorns and ivy that didn’t need much light, the sound of moles and rats and mice dotting the ground, the decommissioned library filled with falling-apart books, the fractured windows, a roof caved in here and there — well, everything vibrated, beckoned to her, come.

What used to be the public library was now a strange word-and-sound church, filled with all manner of birds and small rodents and disheveled books. When it rained or snowed, she sometimes moved books to different rooms or floors in the library, away from the weather. Sometimes she’d see someone else in the library, but not often. If she met up with any other person, she had instructions from her father: she should give her name as Liza, then hide. Names were tricky in these times.

Her armpit itched from the big blue P she’d tucked under her arm. At the door of the Awn Shop, she closed her eyes briefly, calming her breathing to a four-count rhythm as Aster had shown her.

Inside the shop, an old, old, old man sat curled like a comma over a great glass case. His eyes sat embedded within such a deep nexus of wrinkles that his face looked to her like an aerial map, which she very much loved. His hands were even better — veins like mycelia dancing over skin and bone. She suspected that he was blind, but he never let on.

Her favorite thing about the Awn Shop: the most important objects were always in the front glass case, but the whole shop was filled with time, as if time itself were among the objects on display. Everything there was from some other epoch. There were no customers left in The Brook, that she knew of, except in the underground economy. What used to be businesses had turned to debris. The peeled paint of the Awn Shop’s exterior walls was dung green. The front window was clouded with grime and time. She had no idea how the shop endured.

Today her excitement made everything orange and yellow. Steadying her breathing, Laisvė opened the front door and entered.

“Liza,” the old comma said. “Welcome.”

She set the P carefully atop the glass counter.

He looked at her, then at the blue plastic letter. Her cheeks flushed. She scratched her armpit. She knew it was something.

After a pause — long enough for Laisvė’s eyes to focus on actual dust particles moving through the light and air between them — he opened his mouth. “This object has been missing for a long time,” he said. Then he did something strange. He bowed, as if to thank her. She’d never seen him bow before.

“Is it yours?” she asked, the pulse at her neck quickening.

“In a way, yes,” he said. “This letter belongs to a word, and the word used to be very important in my life. The word used to be my livelihood. Before the pandemics. Before collapse. Before the water. Before the Raids.” He bowed again. “Come with me,” he said, and they walked outside of the building for a bit. He pointed to the big blue plastic letters of the Awn Shop sign. “See?”

She didn’t see, but she nodded and smiled, and they went back inside. Something important had been exchanged, she knew. Adults were weird. Then, her confidence renewed, she placed the penny on the glass counter between them.