Lavender: a Strangely Slipstream Novelette

One Hug?

Annatalia giggled as she put a sticker on her red mailbox, which was shaped like a barn with a slanted roof. She positioned it to resemble giant advertisements that people back on Earth used to paint on their barn roofs.

The sky cracked a little in reaction to the mundanity of the ads, and she looked up and the crack and winked: she loved the horror.

At nineteen, she still found having her own home to be a novel experience and felt like she was playing house, finally getting to push the edges of the strict rules of decorum that existed within Lavender without triggering her parents' look of disgust.

She found a letter in the mailbox with a fake return address that she recognized from one of her fellow Anti-Heroes. She ripped it open, her long slender fingers shaking. The encrypted message made her take a big breath and blow out through tight lips. She opened and closed her black eyes. Oh my.

The big vote on what level of destruction the Anti-Heroes were going to stir up was suddenly scheduled for that night back on Earth. Her cohorts were expecting her. She would have to leave her time-share home on Lavender and pass through the Radionics portal soon -- Radionics had been employed since the mid 20th Century by the Psychotronics Association that her parents were core members of. The irony of its use was rich.

She threw down her shears, which stuck straight up in the moist dirt.

So, first, she overcame her squeamishness about cutting the roots of the baby Singing Deerplant in her DNA Garden. She covered her ears against the sound of its bleated aria about pain and suffering. She picked up the shears with a jerking motion and snipped the roots where they met the pliable fleshy encasement of its hooves to free it to become a mobile creature.

She'd been growing it in her tiny urban garden to take to her parents as a gift. It was time to harvest it. She needed something to enliven the final visit with them and make it beautiful for long enough to maintain the world's existence before she broke the news of her forthcoming betrayal and asked for one hug of forgiveness: she had no idea if they would let her have it.