The things my mother left unsaid
By: Hana Leshner
Tags: Serial Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy

I rolled over in my little sister’s twin bunk bed, stretching my left leg under the scratchy pink sheets searching for a cool spot under the covers. I sat up abruptly, nearly smashing my head against the ceiling. It was pointless. The heat was unbearable and I had to get up soon anyway. I crawled to the end of the bed and crept down the ladder as noiselessly as I could. Gilea didn’t even stir nestled between her stuffed animals and her fluffy purple comforter. I decided it was time to finally mentally grapple with the thought that had been troubling my sleep for the past five hours. I slipped my phone from my backpack, slung across my sister’s white plastic desk chair, and tapped through to a recently acquired file

I examined the series of code blocks that represented the keys to Gilea’s existence. Why did they look so familiar? The suspicion that Martje had left much unexplained was screaming in my brain. Feverishly flipping on a tiny desk light, I quietly extracted a sheet of notebook paper from a spiral notebook with kittens on the front and seized the closest writing implement, a blue gel pen that excreted a glutinous aqua substance, laced with glitter, masquerading as ink. Calming my thoughts, I looked inward into my memory vault, flipping through mental folders until I reached one labeled ANGIE DNA and extracted the data it enclosed. I’d recited my genome to myself at night like counting sheep, but writing it out was always seem to make it flow from my pen almost unconsciously. I began to copy it down on the page, not each letter, but using the shorthand symbols for gene blocks which geneticists used these days, comparing it to the document bearing Gilea’s genetic code as I went. A certain resemblance could be explained by any shared material we received from our mother, but so far it was identical.

The hours slipped by and as the soft light of dawn began to drip into Gilea’s window, I finally set down my pen, comparing both genomes. “That’s it,” I muttered. I’d been meaning to make another search for Martje once I cleared up the case of the vicious trolls that had gotten way out of hand and overrun that Russian intelligence base, but I’d gotten distracted — as usual. Now, I was back on Kauai, at Aunt Lucy’s behest to spend some “quality time” with Gilea. It hadn’t been going well. I doubted I was the only one to find my preciously precocious little sister difficult to handle. From her imperious fashion pronouncements about my choice in wardrobe like “grey is not a color” to her determination to decorate her bedroom walls with perfectly executed drawings of unicorns, it became painfully clear that we had absolutely nothing in common, at least personality-wise. On the other hand, staring into her preternaturally wise brown eyes was like staring into a mirror/time machine. It was creepy.

Apparently, genetically we had everything in common. Gilea was my clone. Or perhaps a more disturbing thought — were we both clones? Of whom? Our mother? I had always known there were mysterious circumstances surrounding Gilea’s birth. She had been born while I was 16 and spending a year of rebellion traipsing around Latin America with a former boyfriend. When the relationship finally went down in flames, I had slunk back home, tail between my legs to find my mother cradling a newborn and vaguely glad to see me. Martje claimed Gilea was the result of a fling, but she had had no compunctions about terminating an inconvenient and unexpected pregnancy four years earlier, making the “accident” story difficult for me to swallow. I’d never even met the supposed father. However, with the breathtaking ego-centrism of most 17-year-olds, I had let it drop at the time, since it didn’t appear to involve me.

Apparently, it had involved me. Suddenly, my mother’s lessons in memory manipulation bore a disturbing significance beyond their obvious utility. I thought she just wanted me to memorize my genetic code as a form of “Making Learning Fun,” proving that even ridiculously long sequences of data could be internalized for retrieval using the proper technique. However, like everything with Martje, there was a hidden message, an ulterior motive, that when revealed, I would come to either appreciate or despise, depending on the scenario. Right now I was leaning towards the latter.

For a heartbeat, I debated questioning Aunt Lucy, but she’d just hide behind plausible deniability if she knew anything at all. Furthermore, I wasn’t exactly sure how she’d react to the idea that I’d had my little sister genomed either, even if it was via a vendor on the supposedly anonymous Silk Road 5.0. “You never know,” she would say, with a certain unbearable disappointment in her voice.

Packing the few of my belongings that were scattered about the room, I slipped out of the little blue house, studiously avoiding a last look at my sleeping sister’s all too familiar face and marched down the drive to the main road.

When my cab pulled into view, I realized the extent to which island fever had been gnawing at me and I heaved a sigh of relief. When I was last in Prague, I’d had a vague idea that my mother had been close by. Considering how much time Martje had spent there in the past, it was a good place to start. Plus, I owed Viktor a probation visit about now anyhow.