CW: Cancer
On the day Dad is diagnosed with terminal cancer, Ana arrives home from the hospital, does the dishes from the dinner—cluttered from the previous three days—puts some food out for Tufinho, sags back on the couch to spend half an hour crying, then finally opens the faucet in the sink, swirling her finger on the rising water.
The window opens after two minutes.
“Hi, Hannah,” Ana says to the green-haired girl at the other side. She tries to smile. She can’t. “Dad has terminal cancer.”
“Ana, my dear! I’m so sorry” Hannah stops what she’s doing (typing a number in an electronic organizer, which seems to have never run out of fashion in her verse) and widens her eyes. They shiver in the sink’s water, shiny. “My Dad went a long time ago, but it was in an accident.”
“Is there a cure at your end?” Ana asks, already knowing the answer. Why would Hannah be so sorry if cancer was a curable disease in her verse?
Hannah shakes her head.
“Stay put! I’m going to ask the others along the line!”
“Thanks. I’ll wait.”
Ana opens the drain and Hannah spirals away.
Hannah bites her lips. She feels as if that other version of hers—from a verse where people don’t seem to be fond of painting their hair green—is a part of her. She goes to the garden and digs a hole of about five centimeters in her potato field. The cars above her fly back and forth in their typical afternoon buzz. Tufinho sniffs what she’s doing and sticks his snout in the inter-dimensional puddle that froths up in the hole.
“Hi, Anne,” Hannah says, patting Tufinho’s head. “So… I wanted to ask you something.”
Cancer! That damned word. Anne asks herself in how many verses that disease is so repugnant. Shouldn’t there be a place where it has been eradicated, like the badly written stanza of a poem? Anne rolls a gigantic list on her lenses to seek for recent scientific papers on the subject. She searches for material from UFRJ—the Rio de Janeiro Federal University—to the UNEEI—the New International Space Station University. She gives up and opens the third drawer from the top on her wardrobe. She sketches semi-random lines with a chalk until Hanne appears.
Hanne is a political prisoner in a nefarious dictatorship and can’t do much to help. However, before severing the connection, Anne hands over a knife and a hammer through the window. Hanne hides them beneath her mattress.
She closes her eyes. Advantages of having a window within oneself.
“Hi, Any.”
Any is in an interplanetary trip to kickstart the research of Europa’s surface when the monitor blinks and opens up a window with Hanne.
“Weren’t you imprisoned, dear?” Any says.
“Not anymore.” Hanne lifts a hammer and grins. “But I want to know if you have the cure for cancer in your verse.”
Nothing. For many other diseases, yes. Her father had his hand regenerated and since the super-funding in science and education, right after the frustrated military coup attempt in 1964, medicine had advanced steadily. But the cure for that damned disease? No. Her father died of it two years ago.
Any opens up a terminal and regulates the correct frequency to speak with Annie.
But Annie isn’t there. It’s the end of the line—an unfinished poetry with a purged verse. Annie’s world had come to an end years ago after a climate catastrophe. But she’d left a note for her neighbor Any, coordinates carved on a stone. Of all things, a stone has to survive in an emptied world, right?
None of them can cross a window to the other side, but they’ve always been able to exchange objects. Any grabs the marked stone and gives it to Hanne, who gives it to Anne, who gives it to Hannah. At last, Ana pulls the stone from the kitchen sink.
Ana knows where the coordinates lead: to a stone wall right underneath the National Museum.
When she gets there, she touches the cold stone, which flutters like the tepid water in the sink. All around, dozens of windows start opening…
Hundreds…
She doesn’t know if any of those Anas live in a verse with the cure for cancer, nor if her dear father will come out of this alive.
But she knows that her support network is a complete poem, composed by Anas, for Anas.
Renan Bernardo is a Nebula and Ignyte finalist author of science fiction and fantasy from Brazil. His fiction appeared in Reactor/Tor.com, Clarkesworld, Apex Magazine, and elsewhere. His dark sci-fi novella, Disgraced Return of the Kap’s Needle, was finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novella.
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