ISSUE #9 | Excerpt, "Marigolds in Winter"

WRITTEN BY ELENA SICHROVSKY, AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM ISSUE #9

Illustrations by Sam Rheaume

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Some science people said the virus is in the air, so they are trying to fix that. They are working on building special suits for us to wear. Teresa and I tried one, but as soon as Dad helped us put it on our legs started to squeeze out between the cracks, like toothpaste in little squishy squiggles. I tried to smash them back in, but it just got all over my hands, sticky like a pack of taffy left out in the sun too long.

  Teresa is more sick than me now. She has to wear a special hat because half of her head fell off when she rolled out of bed. I almost slipped in the puddle when I was going to the bathroom, it was all white and red and she was lying there screaming. But now she has a glass hat like a helmet—Dad says it’s to keep her brain inside. Before, her brain used to look like the pictures in my science book, choppy like ketchup on mashed potatoes. I like to put lots and lots of ketchup on my potatoes, and then mix it up and splat it around the plate until it’s a pink sauce.

That’s how Teresa’s brain looks right now.

But yesterday Mom said they finally found a new medicine that will really work well, and it won’t need needles. That’s good because I don’t like needles. One time I asked her why she doesn’t have a needle that can just put me to sleep, like I heard them talking about how Danny’s parents did. That made her look sad, or maybe mad, and she sat down next to me. Danny’s parents got in trouble for doing that, she said, because until our whole body turns into soup the virus is still active and can spread to other people or animals and plants. Maybe it can even go into the earth itself and the whole planet might get “the drippies” and we would drip right off! It sounded scary and so I asked Mom where would we go if we turned into a big puddle of goo and she said the people in charge of the country made a special place to keep us.

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ELENA SICHROVSKY is at the Shanghai University of Engineering Science and is also a longtime member of The Shanghai Writing Workshop. Her short stories have been published in SciPhi Journal and Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, among others. Through her work, she seeks to find the beauty in the terrifying and the terror in the beautiful. She is also currently working on her first novel; you can follow her on Instagram @elenitasich for updates on her latest writing projects.