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Never (original short story)
Nov. 3rd, 2023 01:46 pmCreativeCommons CC-BY-NC 4.0
It was blue. Blue. I didn't know what to make of it. Nobody did. But there it was, on the card, in blue and white. I was so surprised, I barely noticed the date, or rather, the lack of a date. All the blue text said was one, simple, solitary word.
"Never".
I showed the card to my parents. My Dad said it must have been misprinted. My mother was more encouraging, "maybe it means exactly what it says?" "But how can that be?" I asked, "I mean, 'never'? Really?".
I didn't know whether to be thrilled or terrified.
My parents got out their cards for comparison. There was my father's date, in the usual green font. He was in his mid forties and still had just under thirty years until he died of natural causes. My mother's was red and as we all knew, had known for as long as I could remember, she only had a couple of years left.
I asked them why they hadn't opened the envelope containing my card when I was born. Why they had waited until I was eighteen. "The same reason we didn't let the scan technicians tell us your sex", Mum told me, smiling softly, her eyes moist with memories whose rough edges had long since been softened by the passage of time, "we wanted to let you surprise us." "We thought we'd had the biggest surprise of our lives where the midwife told us you weren't a boy or a girl", added my father. "Can we take it back?", I asked, "if it's a misprint, a mistake, some kind of April Fools joke gone wrong, I really want to know. If it's right ..." I couldn't even finish the sentence. It was inconceivable. It must be a mistake. But I had to know for sure.
My parents sat on either side of me on the worn fake leather couch at the Department of Mortality. We'd been waiting for several hours and the smell of stale cologne and floor polish was making my eyes water. The waiting room was small, like a dentist surgery, except that all the magazines covering the chipped veneer of the coffee table were about funeral parlours and monumental engravers. I realized I was chewing my knuckles and snatched my right hand away from my mouth with my left. Minutes later, I realized the left knuckles were in my mouth. I sighed and wedged both hands between my knees.
Finally, the receptionist caught my Mother's eye and waved us through. The office was even shabbier than the waiting room and the rumpled man behind the desk was smoking two hand-rolled cigarettes, holding them in one hand while he pecked away at the keys of an ancient desktop computer with the other. The optical disc drive had been wedged open and repurposed as an ashtray holder, which was full to overflowing with half-smoked butts. He grunted and jerked his head in the direction of three chairs, each sitting in a halo of empty floor that looked like it had been rapidly cleared only minutes before, in order to place them there.
The man took a final, vengeful stab at his keyboard and settled back into his chair, peering at us over his reading glasses, and clearing his throat with a sound like a kitchen blender full of gravel. He wore what might once have qualified as a suit. His creased brown pants, which almost matched the threadbare jacket casually draped over the back of his chair, were accompanied by a shirt the colour of nicotine-stained fingers and an orange bow tie, flecked with soup stains. We waited for him to say something, but he didn't. He just sat, and stared, and occasionally coughed.
My parents and I looked at each other. Just when it seemed like one of us had decided to say something, the man spoke. His voice was surprisingly smooth and debonair, giving the distinct impression he was lip syncing to a statement someone else had recorded earlier. "The ...", he began, then thought better of it. He started again, "we checked the deep data processes that produced your ... child's prognosis".
He paused, again, for an uncomfortably long time.
"We can find no flaws".
He chewed on his lips, as if he found this news profoundly agitating. Just as I took a breath to reply, he went on.
"We have checked your cards against the algorithms and your due dates too come out exactly as predicted when you were born. There has been no mistake".
He took a deep and noisy breath, making a show of adjusting his tie and straightening his filthy glasses. "Good day to you", he said, and went back to his irritated typing, as if we were no longer in the room.
That was over two hundred years ago. My parents died exactly on their due dates, just as everybody did. My mother was electrocuted in the swimming pool when a malfunctioning automated lawnmower trundled into it. My father, having been preparing himself for years, remarried a couple of years later. He died in his early seventies of an undetected brain aneurysm. I'm still here. Grey haired, but healthy as a horse. Still, nobody knows why.
Nobody I know these days was born before my hundredth birthday. I'm lonely, in a way that nobody more than a century younger could understand. I never married. Never had children. How could I do that to them? Knowing I would outlive them all?
But I'm not completely alone. Every few months I go back to the Ministry of Mortality, worrying, and later hoping, that some improvements made to the deep data cluster in the intervening years will make it spit out a date this time. It never has. Every time, I drink a glass of whiskey with the rumpled man in the orange bow tie and we wonder why we're the only two people in the world to ever get a blue card, saying "never".
This story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.
It was blue. Blue. I didn't know what to make of it. Nobody did. But there it was, on the card, in blue and white. I was so surprised, I barely noticed the date, or rather, the lack of a date. All the blue text said was one, simple, solitary word.
"Never".
I showed the card to my parents. My Dad said it must have been misprinted. My mother was more encouraging, "maybe it means exactly what it says?" "But how can that be?" I asked, "I mean, 'never'? Really?".
I didn't know whether to be thrilled or terrified.
My parents got out their cards for comparison. There was my father's date, in the usual green font. He was in his mid forties and still had just under thirty years until he died of natural causes. My mother's was red and as we all knew, had known for as long as I could remember, she only had a couple of years left.
I asked them why they hadn't opened the envelope containing my card when I was born. Why they had waited until I was eighteen. "The same reason we didn't let the scan technicians tell us your sex", Mum told me, smiling softly, her eyes moist with memories whose rough edges had long since been softened by the passage of time, "we wanted to let you surprise us." "We thought we'd had the biggest surprise of our lives where the midwife told us you weren't a boy or a girl", added my father. "Can we take it back?", I asked, "if it's a misprint, a mistake, some kind of April Fools joke gone wrong, I really want to know. If it's right ..." I couldn't even finish the sentence. It was inconceivable. It must be a mistake. But I had to know for sure.
My parents sat on either side of me on the worn fake leather couch at the Department of Mortality. We'd been waiting for several hours and the smell of stale cologne and floor polish was making my eyes water. The waiting room was small, like a dentist surgery, except that all the magazines covering the chipped veneer of the coffee table were about funeral parlours and monumental engravers. I realized I was chewing my knuckles and snatched my right hand away from my mouth with my left. Minutes later, I realized the left knuckles were in my mouth. I sighed and wedged both hands between my knees.
Finally, the receptionist caught my Mother's eye and waved us through. The office was even shabbier than the waiting room and the rumpled man behind the desk was smoking two hand-rolled cigarettes, holding them in one hand while he pecked away at the keys of an ancient desktop computer with the other. The optical disc drive had been wedged open and repurposed as an ashtray holder, which was full to overflowing with half-smoked butts. He grunted and jerked his head in the direction of three chairs, each sitting in a halo of empty floor that looked like it had been rapidly cleared only minutes before, in order to place them there.
The man took a final, vengeful stab at his keyboard and settled back into his chair, peering at us over his reading glasses, and clearing his throat with a sound like a kitchen blender full of gravel. He wore what might once have qualified as a suit. His creased brown pants, which almost matched the threadbare jacket casually draped over the back of his chair, were accompanied by a shirt the colour of nicotine-stained fingers and an orange bow tie, flecked with soup stains. We waited for him to say something, but he didn't. He just sat, and stared, and occasionally coughed.
My parents and I looked at each other. Just when it seemed like one of us had decided to say something, the man spoke. His voice was surprisingly smooth and debonair, giving the distinct impression he was lip syncing to a statement someone else had recorded earlier. "The ...", he began, then thought better of it. He started again, "we checked the deep data processes that produced your ... child's prognosis".
He paused, again, for an uncomfortably long time.
"We can find no flaws".
He chewed on his lips, as if he found this news profoundly agitating. Just as I took a breath to reply, he went on.
"We have checked your cards against the algorithms and your due dates too come out exactly as predicted when you were born. There has been no mistake".
He took a deep and noisy breath, making a show of adjusting his tie and straightening his filthy glasses. "Good day to you", he said, and went back to his irritated typing, as if we were no longer in the room.
That was over two hundred years ago. My parents died exactly on their due dates, just as everybody did. My mother was electrocuted in the swimming pool when a malfunctioning automated lawnmower trundled into it. My father, having been preparing himself for years, remarried a couple of years later. He died in his early seventies of an undetected brain aneurysm. I'm still here. Grey haired, but healthy as a horse. Still, nobody knows why.
Nobody I know these days was born before my hundredth birthday. I'm lonely, in a way that nobody more than a century younger could understand. I never married. Never had children. How could I do that to them? Knowing I would outlive them all?
But I'm not completely alone. Every few months I go back to the Ministry of Mortality, worrying, and later hoping, that some improvements made to the deep data cluster in the intervening years will make it spit out a date this time. It never has. Every time, I drink a glass of whiskey with the rumpled man in the orange bow tie and we wonder why we're the only two people in the world to ever get a blue card, saying "never".
This story is licensed under CC-BY-NC. You can share it freely, but if you want to use it in anything commercial, you need my permission.
