necessity’s child

The local weekly, Worcester Magazine, is running its 9th annual short story contest. I mailed my entry today, which is the opening scene of my perhaps-never-to-be-finished next novel, necessity’s child. The deadline’s a few days off, and the winners will be announced next month. But the tribe of nonists need not wait to read it.

Tuesday morning, for hundreds of miles, the sky was as clear as a bell waiting to be rung. A man, lean like a young jackal, pulled a cellphone from his dapper gray suit, and paused near an ornate stone fountain, smiling at a very private joke. “Let’s call mommy,” he said to a straw-haired girl no more than four, as she held his other hand. She sat on the low edge of a semicircular side basin, looking up at the sparrows landing on the lip of the big square basin to drink and feel the spray on their feathers, at the gas lamps and water jets on the corners and the waterfall in the middle, at the weather vane thing on the very top, so shiny it left a green streak in her eyes, at the brass flower spewing water downward next to her, listening to the rainy hiss of the water, feeling a few specks of mist on her arms bare in the warmth, wishing she could be a sparrow too.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Nessie. I have someone with me who wants to talk to you.”
“Vance! Where are you? Where- Marla?”
“Hi mommy, I miss you. We saw penguins and a horse and a merry-go-round.”
“Where are you, honey?”
“We saw the zoo, and birds, and now daddy has to meet some people. I wish I could see you in the hospital.”
“I’m not in a hospital! Listen, sweetie, I…”
“Me again, Nessie. How ya doing there?” He moved around the corner a few steps so the child could not hear.
“You are a piece of shit. Where did you take her?”
“Don’t be a sore loser, girl. We’re just fine.”
“You are a con man, and my little girl needs a real parent, not a drifter using her as a prop! Sooner or later you’re going to get caught.”
“Well, Nessie, not by you, huh? I’ll ditch this phone before you can sneeze, and I can vanish like smoke. Hey, I’ve got a sweet deal on the front burner. Our little lady might have a rich dad soon, and she’s such a charmer, people will sign up for anything. Top of the world!”
“I’m… almost sorry I met you. Don’t hurt Marla. Please.”
“Your problem is you’re too emotional. How can someone so emotional spend her days dicking around with those supercomputers, hey? I know, I know. You think they’ll save you. They won’t. You don’t understand them. I understand them. I think just like they do. I don’t need to feel. I just need to know. And then I win. Get used to it.”
He closed the phone and casually dropped it in the fountain, where it rocked gently to the bottom, dead in the cool water. “Let’s go.”
Marla had seen him do this a dozen times or more, usually down a sewer drain, and hopped off the fountain to grab his hand impatiently.  “When can we see mommy?”
“When she’s better.”
“When can we go home?”
“When the germs are gone.” That’s why he threw away the phones, he’d told her. The bad germs that made mommy crazy. They might come through the phone. He figured eventually she’d tire of asking, or he’d need a new story. One thing at a time, hey. They walked out of the park and into the shadow of an office building, off in the crowd, unknown among the unknown.

A dark-eyed woman, young in form and face, closed her cellphone and stood from an ergonomic chair before a Cray workstation. She moved as though covered with wasps, clawed open a hall door and sagged onto a break-room sofa with her fists on her temples. She wept.
Her name was Necessity. It wasn’t Nessie. Nessie was a sea monster, a myth, and a bullshit nickname that she asked Vance to stop using, a hundred times, her name was Necessity, and there is no bullshit about necessity. Named after a fort, a strong name, her own dad told her, so the kids at school would just have to face necessity, and she laid it down. Why couldn’t she lay it down with Vance? Was he that slippery, that good an actor, to play her for a fool, walk her down the aisle, clean out the bank and steal their child? Yes, he was, now she knew. He was a psychopath right out of DSM-IV. He was that clever. He was that cold. He was right, he was like a computer. When Marla was only a year old, he got fired from the university for running a DDOS blackmail botnet right out of their servers, but she believed his side of it, the evidence was weak, and didn’t his family already have money? Well, guess how he got that. The secrets crept out. He knew how to run all sorts of cons. He lost custody, and should be in jail now, but he knew how to run, how to cover his tracks, and he ran with Marla, and they half-assed the investigation anyway. Custody fights? The feds do custody fights like they’d do windows. They like to clean the easy side of the glass. He could buzz around like a horsefly out there, just out of reach. Like a biting fly that had no soul. She would find his fatal bug. She would beat him. She was a bad mother. She couldn’t do a thing. She should never have fallen for… but then there would be no Marla. Where was her baby now? She had custody, but he had Marla. Where?
“Necessity, are you all right?” One of the mathematicians from down the hall, come for coffee, looking embarrassed.
“Um, don’t feel good right now.”
“Maybe you should go home. You look tired.”
She nodded, yes, no, wobble. “I’ll stay here for a while, I guess.” Where?

Vance and Marla crossed the wide plaza, took a fast ear-popping elevator, and entered a vast room filled with people working at computer screens, talking on phone headsets, following numbers. Marla kept pace with her father and swiveled her head about, overawed by the commercial hive. He found the man he was looking for and clapped a hand on his shoulder.
A big bald man turned and smiled broadly. “Leo Baker! I didn’t expect you to drop by. And who is this young lady?”
“Hey, Art. This is my daughter Casey, Casey say hello.”
“Hello,” she said, glancing upward. Daddy was always making her do make-believe with strangers. He got so mad if she made a mistake. There were so many distractions in this place. She didn’t like it. Except the windows, where a carpet of buildings spread away, all the perfect dollhouses in the world. Just out of reach.
“Hello, Casey. This is where we trade. Lots and lots of people trading all over the world. What do you think?”
She hesitated, pointing toward the big windows at the edge of the room, and tugged her father’s sleeve. “Daddy?”
“Yes, Casey?”
“Why is that airplane coming here?”
He didn’t answer, and she didn’t ask again, and the towers became smoke on Liberty Street.