Defective

Defective

A novella

By Sharon Boddy

Published at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Boddy Language

Copyright ©2015 Sharon Boddy

ISBN: 978-0-9948880-0-6

Table of Contents

Winter

Summer

Autumn

Winter

Spring

Summer

Autumn

About the Author

Acknowledgements

The Children

Porkchop, 18

Santa, 17

Titania, 16

Forest, 14

Narrow, 12

Bull, 11

Jones, 7

Jelly, 7

Mixer, 18 months

The Adults

Ma

Pa

The Landlord

PC Pierre

Pater

Rank

Gaines

Mrs. Nibbs

Marvellous

Mrs. Baker

Selected sources from the reference library of PC Pierre (P), Deloran County

Reference Code: G32

Title: The Upheaval's Geologic Legacy, Arthur Pawli, pub. 2417

See summary by PC Pierre (P), Deloran County, 5.45.22

P3: First came the vibrations, like something large and heavy falling close by. The vibrations would have grown stronger and stronger within minutes or hours and the ground would have begun to shake. Buildings and infrastructure collapsed, roads were buried. Presumably, many of the old countries' populations were drowned by buckling rivers, lakes and oceans; in other places, mountains shook apart, firing bits into the air. Whole populations — human, animal, insect, bird, plant — were obliterated in less than a day along with many important cultural and historical artifacts, now lost to time.

Reference Code: M3

Title: Human Reactions to Long-term Infection Exposure, Drs. Winj, P., Estelle, F., Kathra, R., pub. 2478

See summary by PC Pierre (P), Deloran County, 11.27.22

P114: In conclusion, it is not possible to isolate the genetic components of the defect, previously linked to contaminants unleashed during the Upheaval. Data suggests that the infection itself, which is no longer fatal, recurs every thirty to forty years and with each reoccurrence, the defective gene mutates; however, no two genes studied to date follow the same mutation pattern. The defect also occurs in non-infection years but there has been a marked decline in the number of reported cases in the last twenty years. This could suggest that its lessening appearance in new births is a signal that both the infection and the mutation are waning, or that social or other factors, such as non-reporting behaviours are involved, which are outside the scope of this study. The majority of the defects that do appear are minor in nature.

Reference Code: PR402

Police Crime Summary Report, Dated: 12.33.42

Reporting Officer: PC Marsellum Peach

Prisoner Name: Martha New

Prisoner Number: F89

Residence: Ferguston, Deloran County

Charge: Infanticide; blunt force trauma. Prisoner claims her new born son was defective and attacked her. CX: Confession.

Reference Code: PR433

Police Crime Summary Report, Dated: 1.4.43

Reporting Officer: PC Marsellum Peach

Prisoner Number: F89

Notes: Prisoner held in the local till weather clears and can be transferred to Andrastyne.

Reference Code: PR437

Police Crime Summary Report, Dated: 1.7.43

Reporting Officer: PC Marsellum Peach

Prisoner Number: F89

Notes: Prisoner found dead in cell by hanging. Burial arranged. CX: Morgue.

Winter

The first thing Mixer knew with certainty was that he was hungry. The feeling grew more intense each day until it became unbearable and Mixer began to lash out. Quietly, steadily he ate away at his enemy and, in a few weeks, where there had been two, now there was only one.

Summer

There’s something wrong with Mixer, Ma said one night in bed.

There’s something wrong with all our kids, Pa yawned. He rolled over and looked at his wife. She looked serious. And old. They kept their voices low; the children slept above them in the loft.

This is different. Ma sat up. Maybe it’s what you said, that it was twins.

Ma had been nervous most of her pregnancy with Mixer, the youngest and ninth of her and Pa’s kids. Ma said the number nine was bad luck. Nothing good comes from nines, she would say. Ma said a lot of things like that and Pa had learned to ignore most of them.

When she was five months pregnant, Pa listened to her belly and pronounced twins. Ma wasn’t so sure, but Pa had some experience with this, he said, pointing to Jelly and Jones, their twins. Ma kept her thoughts to herself. Either way, she thought, twins or a single, this'll be the last one. She’d finally perfected the recipe that would see to that. When Ma’s labour was over, however, only Mixer had shown up. Pa poked around up there for a bit, perplexed by the absence of infant. He had distinctly heard two heartbeats.

Pa sat up. The moon waned in the sky outside their window.

Different how?

Each of their children possessed at least one defect, although Pa never used that word. He called them talents. Ma knew them for what they were: trouble. Anyone different, anyone who could do something others couldn't was shunned or worse. She and her mother and father had been kicked out of so many towns when she was a child she couldn't remember half their names.

Her father had been a painter but despite his best efforts to keep his defect under control, his work on barns, houses and fences stood out. Designs within the paint would appear, faint at first, the outline of things: trees, women, or the sky at night. The paintings would then take on deeper lines and colours would appear and disappear. Her mother had been a healer and had taught her daughter what she knew of medicine. She would try to help people but they were afraid of her. They would always be found out and run out of town; sometimes they were beaten. They moved from place to place and her parents waited until Ma turned twenty and then left her in Battery. Alone, they thought, she'd stand a better chance.

She went to work for the Landlord of Battery, part of a group of young men and women hired at slave wages to work a pearl apple orchard after the former owner died. There she met and married her husband and started having his children. Within a year all the other workers had gone; the two of them and their growing family had worked the land ever since.

Her defect was the ability to see under the earth. She knew what a plant's root system looked like without ever needing to dig it out. In the early years at the orchard she often saw things buried among the trees or near the barn but if she did dig them up, she did it at night when the children and Hap were asleep. She never told anyone about it. Some things, like the skeletal remains of a baby buried in the wild rose bush behind the shed, were best left as they were.

She had been raised to hate and fear herself and others like her, but most of all to be afraid of being found out. She couldn't turn back time but she could make life easier for her children. She could give them a stable home, keep them safe and protected; few people knew they were here. She taught them, ruthlessly at times, not to display their talents, not even to each other. The children were only allowed to use them for orchard work or when specifically told to.

Their eldest, Porkchop was able to see the minutiae of her surroundings at a glance. She could spot the first sign of life or blight. Her memory was astonishing and in terms of her daily duties Porkchop's mind inevitably ran far ahead of everyone else's. Ma sometimes suspected that Porkchop knew more about how to run the orchard than she did but her oldest child, besides being sensible and obedient to a fault, never contradicted any of Ma's decisions.

Forest could predict the weather. Since he was a baby Forest had been fascinated by insects and plants and water and how they behaved in different types of weather. He'd studied their habits and learned that nature could tell him everything he needed to know so long as he listened and observed. Forest also had an innate sense of the seasons, how they would unfold, and what challenges they would bring. He was indispensable in scheduling some of the most important orchard tasks.

Ma hated Santa's talent because she feared what could happen to her if people found out. Santa could sing. Musicians and singers and artists were among the most hated of defectives. They didn't do anything useful or productive; they didn't grow food or catch fish or trap animals. They didn't fell timber or plant trees; they didn't build things or fix things.

Bull had always been large for his age. He could track even the smallest game from miles away. Ma believed that her son's keen sense of smell came from her being bitten by a stray dog when she was pregnant with him. It wasn't unusual for feral curs to stray onto the property in those days. Their numbers dropped dramatically after they began feasting too much on the local deer population and the Landlord thought it would be both fun and useful to institute a dog-killing contest. The tenant farmer who killed the most dogs got double his salary for the month. Pa never won. The contest ran for six years until the dogs had been almost wiped out.

Narrow was worse than her husband for taking things apart but, unlike her husband, her middle child put things back together again. When he was about nine months old he woke up the household taking apart his crib. The slats had given way and he'd gone straight down, landing on his bottom. When Pa brought his tool box to fix the crib the next day, Narrow had crawled over to the box, rummaged for a moment and brought out a screwdriver. Narrow could almost always fix or build or create anything with whatever resources were available.

Titania was Ma's special daughter.

Twins were sometimes considered defective simply because they were twins. Most people did accept that twins existed naturally in nature, but identical girl-boy twins, like Jelly and Jones, were unusual and therefore highly suspicious. They were so alike that it wasn't until their hair began to grow that Ma began to cut her son's but not her daughter's hair so that she could tell them apart.

Jones never learned to crawl. One day, as he sat cross legged on the floor of the press house he had hopped across the room. Ma had been standing at the pressers, enormous square wooden boxes with tight wire mesh-topped lids that were pressed down onto the pearl apple mash. The juice flowed through the boxes into a trough that was connected to a pipe to the fermentation vat. She thought she had closed the press house door but she'd suddenly felt a breeze by her ankles. She looked around and found Jones in one corner, gnawing on his thumbnail. He hopped back to where he'd been. She'd seen a blur across her vision and her son then reappear on the other side of the room.

Jelly had learned to talk early. At six months she was able to tell her mother, in a few words, what she needed, a diaper change or food. Her defect deepened the day she found a plastic bag caught in one of the pearl apple trees in the orchard. The bags were useful things if they didn’t have many holes in them, but their numbers had dwindled with each passing year.

Ma was teaching Jelly to forage for medicinal and edible plants and had taken the four-year old into the woods one autumn day for another lesson. Jelly had the right temperament for it. Patient. Observant. Curious.

On their return home, the press house and barns in the distance, Jelly caught sight of the bag. She carefully untangled it and smoothed it out on the ground.

Made in China, she said.

Stop messing about with that, said Ma impatiently. She needed to start supper; needed to make sure that Santa started supper.

Jelly continued to study the bag. It had a line of black marks on it.

That’s what it says. Made in China.

Ma grabbed her by the arm and hauled her through the orchard and home. Jelly held onto the bag the entire way and by the time they arrived at the house Ma was fuming. She barked an order for Santa to get dinner started. Santa, who was already cutting up potatoes and carrots and parsnips, looked up, saw her mother's expression, and ducked her head back down to her task.

Ma grabbed a short pearl apple switch from its hook on the wall, put Jelly over her knee and gave her four sharp whacks. She had beaten all of her children this way, starting from a young age. She used it to remind them not to show off; she believed it would make them as strong and resilient as the trees they tended.

After they'd eaten supper, Jelly started to talk about the bag again. Ma reached for the switch but Pa interrupted.

What’s that?

It talks to me, Jelly said, taking the neatly folded bag from her pocket. Made in China. She pointed to a line on the bag. Fifteen per cent post consumer plastic.

What’s China? Narrow asked.

Ma and Pa ignored him.

Pa sat back and scratched his chin. He knew it was writing but he couldn't understand how Jelly could read it. He recognized some words, mostly place names that others had pointed out to him: Piggy Gristle, Hap Road, Battery, Delora.

Ma couldn't read