***AS SEEN IN*** PLANET SCUMM #11

**Written by Sim Kern**
*Illustrations by* Maura McGonagle

Sim Kern gave our editors’ climate anxiety new depth and flavor with their vision of a near-future US government using a long-neglected climate crisis to accelerate authoritarianism. But against this bleak backdrop, “Real Sugar is Hard to Find” tells a stunningly intimate story about love, loss, and family. This story prods and comforts the reader in turns, stimulating thought and waking up the soul.

Since Kern’s appearance on our spaceship back in Issue #11 (the landmark issue guest edited by Hailey Piper) they have gone on to make some big waves in the publishing world with science fiction for young adults, science journalism, and the horror novella, “Depart! Depart!”

They also published a collection of short stories, which includes the eponymous “Real Sugar is Hard to Find.” Publishers Weekly called it “a searing, urgent, but still achingly tender work that will wow any reader of speculative fiction.” That is Sim all over!

The book is available now through Android Press.

Now, close all other tabs, pour yourself a drink, and prepare the mind for…

Real Sugar Is Hard to Find

Sim Kern

Mom’s gotten it into her head that we should bake a cake for Nicholle’s birthday. “A real cake, with butter, milk, and sugar.” She’s crouched in the mud room, digging through a box of respirators for a set with working cartridges. I’ve never gotten a real cake for any of my seventeen birthdays, just the Mart-bought kind made of bean flour and corn syrup.

But I’ve never swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, either.

Mom shakes out two dusty respirators, the front of the mouthpieces still illuminated by a dim green light. Clearly, it’s been months since she’s ventured outside our dome. I sneak out all the time, but I never wear a respirator.

I take one, though, slinging it around my neck, because even though my sister’s the one who tried to kill herself, it’s my mother’s emotional fallout that has consumed all my energy this past month. Nicholle went straight from getting her stomach pumped to a fancy “treatment center” near the lake. I call her once a day and do impressions of Mom to make her laugh. Some part of my brain knows I should be worried about her, but she seems so normal.

Mom on the other hand … a few days ago, I found her in the pantry, sitting in a puddle of red liquid. Can you imagine how that scared the hell out of me? It was just blackberry wine, though. Holding the bottle had suddenly become too much for her. And then the idea of cleaning it up had been too much for her, so she just sat amid the broken glass and cried. I got her to bed and cleaned up the mess, and that’s kind of how the whole month has gone.

So this cake-project is an improvement. Mom is up. Mom is doing stuff, and when she hands me a taser, I pocket it without a snide joke. Mom thinks the world outside the dome is all lawless bands of anarchist punks dying to jump a couple dome-rats for the thrill of it. But it’s not like we’re going to the Dells, and if we did go to the Dells, it’s not like a taser would save us.

She climbs into the passenger seat wearing synthetic green work pants with too many pockets, a white solar-block shirt and gloves, broad day hat, and dark-black goggles. They’re the kind of clothes you might spot on a domeless person, but the fabric is too pristine, and she’s still wearing her Silvia Truncheon earrings. Those gold leaves dangling from her earlobes make the whole outfit more like a cringey Halloween costume of a plain-airer than the real deal.

“Stop at the Mart first,” she says, buckling her seatbelt. “We can get flour, eggs, and baking powder there.”

“So where are we getting this butter-milk-sugar you keep bringing up?”

“Oh, I have my sources.”

I snort. “You have sources? Outside the dome?”

“Remember those lemon bars Bunmi brought to my last book club?”

“I’m not in your book club.”

“But I went on and on about them. I’m sure you remember. Well, turns out she used real butter she got from this goat farmer. It’s all very hush-hush, though. The mammal ban.”

My eyebrows shoot up. Plenty of people in Fox Haven break agriculture laws on the regular. There’s a speakeasy outside Waukesha where you can even get real cheeseburgers. But I’ve never seen Mom buy so much as an extra egg above her weekly ration.

I drive out of our neighborhood and past the coding offices where practically everyone’s parents work. Over by the school playground, a scaffold truck is parked against the edge of the dome. Drones scuttle up its hexagonal structure, replacing a panel of thin plastic, riddled with last night’s bullet holes.

Mom sucks her teeth. “Seems like they’re making replacements every day,” she says, pulling the respirator onto her face. “How good can the air be when the dome is a sieve?” Her voice is metallic now, coming through the respirator’s speaker. “Makes you wonder if it’s worth what we pay to be on the inside.”

Bullshit. She would sell both legs to keep our spot in Fox Haven. But I say nothing, swinging into a parking spot outside the Mart.

Mom has to chat with everyone in the store, bragging about our cake-adventure like it’s some charming, twentieth-century game, not a ploy to convince her suicidal daughter to go on living. Our neighbors nod and smile, giving her as little encouragement as possible to keep talking. They all know about Nicholle and Dad. So much tragedy for one little family. By dome standards, it’s indecorous, and our neighbors—particularly their kids, shifting their weight next to their parents, checking their Lenses to avoid making eye contact with me—are all desperate to get away from us. But mom is oblivious to the way she grates on others, and it takes fully an hour to get out of there.

By the time we get back in the car, my patience is already threadbare, and we haven’t even left the dome. At the western airlock, she tells me to put on my respirator while we’re still in the plastic tunnel, but I ignore her.

Guardian drones buzz above the clear-cut land that stretches for half a mile around Fox Haven Dome, their bullets held at bay only by the transmitters embedded in our palms. I don’t relax into my seat until they’ve disappeared around a bend in the road.

“So are you going to tell me where we’re going, or am I supposed to drive around until I hit a goat?”

Mom snorts a laugh, then taps the air a few times, and a location appears inside my Lenses. I swipe my hand to send it to the car’s nav system but decline the auto-pilot. The roads where we’re going will be too full of potholes for the AI to manage. I’m surprised Mom’s willing to venture so far from our dome. I’ve only been to that area once, to this show at The Granary. The bands had all sucked. I’d only gone in hopes of seeing Mahim, but he didn’t show up.

The highway out of Fox Haven is lined with skinny, teenage trees. There’s a pattern to the foliage—apple, pine, maple, pear—some configuration determined by scientists to maximize food production and carbon reclamation. It repeats at quarter-acre intervals, giving anyone speeding by an unsettling feeling of déjà vu. Dark swoops among the branches could be wild birds or the flying drones that guard the ag company’s investments from scavengers.

After a few miles, we hit a patch of younger forest, and the horizon opens up, broken by dozens of glinting domes. But straight ahead is Old Waukesha, which isn’t domed. I stop at the first traffic light, where a few people huddle in a bus shelter. A toddler in a stroller tugs on their respirator. Their parent isn’t wearing one, nor are the two teenagers leaning their heads together in a way that makes me ache for Mahim.

Mom sinks deeper into her seat, and she taps the passenger panel to arm the car’s surface taser.

“Seriously?”

“Sweetie,” she sighs. “Do you know how many car jackings there’ve been here in the last month?”

“No. How many have there been, exactly?” I ask.

She huffs. “Way too many.”

“Whatever. You’re so domeist. You realize this town is all just, like, families, right? Families trying to get by, do the best for their kids, just like you?”

“Peter, I’ve lived in this town all my life. I don’t need a lecture on it from my own son.”

The light turns green, and I pull forward. Main Street is lined with two-story brick buildings, the windows all wrapped in patchwork plastic sheeting to keep out the plain air.

“When my grandmother was a girl, this town was bustling. That was the big theater, where she’d see flat-vids for a quarter. And she always talked about the fountains full of soda.”

I’ve heard this spiel literally every time we’ve driven through this town since I was five years old. I don’t know why, but it makes me want to claw out my own eardrums.

“When I was a girl, though, Waukesha was a ghost town. Everyone had moved out to housing developments, and the stores went bankrupt because people shopped online. But then a few years before you were born, Congress declared the War on Warming. Domed communities were just popping up, and I insisted we buy a house in one. Your dad didn’t think it was necessary, but good thing we did! Domeless property all got seized and turned over to ag corps for reforestation, and the domeless had to crowd together in these abandoned downtowns.”

She clucks her tongue. “Shame that the architecture is ruined by all that plastic. So much history in these buildings. I wish they could get it together and put a dome over Waukesha.”

“It’s not that simple, mom. There’s no work for them. The system is, like, set up to keep them domeless.”

“Oh? And what ‘system’ is that, exactly?”

I’m not sure how to explain it, but I know I’m right. Mom takes my silence for victory and smiles. I try to remember how Mahim explained it—something about the racist-classist-domeist praxis. But thinking about Mahim makes my heart lurch, and my mind go gooey, and all I can remember is kissing him that night at the Gorge, when we stayed up talking until the sun rose out of the lake.

My stomach wrenches, and for the millionth time, I regret not asking for his Handle. We could’ve been chatting on our Lenses this whole month, but I was worried about looking too eager. I’d said, “See you around,” and I was sure I would—at the next silo show or abandoned-mall rave. But he’d disappeared from the scene, and now I had no way of talking to the one person in the world whose presence didn’t make me feel more alone.

In a town called Milford, the car’s nav system sends me north down a farm-to-market road lined with soybean fields. For twenty miles, massive harvester drones are the only breaks between us and the horizon. Finally, an old industrial mill looms up ahead. I pull onto a dirt lot beneath the towering grain cylinders, surrounded by low buildings made of aluminum siding.

“How do you know this is safe?” I ask.

“Weren’t you the one saying everywhere is just families? Who’s being domeist now?” She taps her mask. “Put it on.”

But I leave the respirator around my neck as I get down to help her out of the car.

A short, gray-haired woman crosses the gravel parking lot, calling to someone behind her in a south Asian language.

“Hello!” Mom begins, speaking too loudly. “We,” she points to me and her. “Are looking,” she shades her eyes with her hand. “For … dairy,” she hesitates, then mimes milking a cow.

“My son will be out to help you in a moment,” the woman says, with only a trace of an accent. I stare at the ground, willing it to open and swallow me whole, so I don’t see her son approaching.

“So, like, how can I help you?”

Our eyes meet, and I can’t seem to breathe, because it’s him. The guy I’ve been losing sleep over all month. The guy with the black hair that falls into his eyes and those impossibly soft lips. My heart swells with excitement, but only for an instant. Then it’s dropping out of my body and into the depths of hell, as I realize that Mom is here next to me, shouting through her respirator at the man-of-my-dreams, Mahim.

“We’re looking for milk?” She mimes spreading something on bread. “And butter?”

Mahim smiles at me. “She’s not a cop?”

“I mean,” I gesture at the ridiculous woman. “Does she seem like it?”

He laughs once and says something to his mother in their language, then waves for us to follow. I am tripping over my feet for staring at the divot in the back of his neck and the broad planes of his shoulders. As he leads us through a labyrinth of homemade buildings, I rip my respirator off my neck and try to shove it in my back pocket, but it won’t fit, so I just sling it back on, where it thumps against my chest with each step, like it’s saying, dome boy, dome boy, dome boy.

That night at the Gorge, I told Mahim everything about myself, save one. When I venture outside Fox Haven, I never cop to where I’m from. I don’t belong there, with those lemon-bar-people. I belong in the plain air, with carbon particulate in my lungs and a heart full of loss.

Mahim leads us into a pasture, shaded by a lattice of brightly colored plastic strips. The screening still lets in plenty of sunlight, and a dozen goats are happily munching on tall grass.

“How do y’all keep all this hush-hush?” Mom asks conspiratorially. “Isn’t mammal farming illegal?” I cringe, because her old-timey southern drawl always gets worse around strangers. Her mother was from Tennessee but moved north after the burning of Appalachia. That was years before Mom was born, so her accent is totally fake—picked up from old flatvids.

“The screening keeps drones from picking out the livestock,” Mahim gestures overhead. “And grandma has me vet who we sell to. I’m usually pretty good at reading folks.” He knits his eyebrows in my direction, and I can’t tell if it’s a flirty look or if he’s disappointed that I turned out to be a dome-rat.

Mom notices the exchange and, to my horror, tries to help. “You know, you boys look about the same age! What are you? 16?”

“17.”

“Exactly the same! You should exchange Handles.”

“Mom, drop it,” I hiss, guts churning miserably. Of course, I’ve been working up the courage to ask Mahim for his Handle, but now it’s going to look like I’m some loser whose mommy has to help him score dates.

Mom and I shoot eye-daggers at each other until Mahim suggests we head into the old mill. Inside, I’m hit by that animal stink again. Stalls line one wall, and on the other are refrigerators and long rows of tables covered in fabric-wrapped cheese.

“How much are you looking to buy?” Mahim asks.

“Well, the cake recipe calls for a half cup of butter and a half cup of milk…”

“But you want extra, right?” he says. “What if the cake doesn’t work on your first try?”

I raise my eyebrows. You slick salesman, you. He smiles back. Maybe he doesn’t loathe me completely. Maybe I can salvage this.

“Good thinking,” Mom says. “Let’s double it, then. I could always try baking Bunmi’s lemon bars.”

“You could bake lots of things,” he says. “And butter lasts in the fridge six months.”

“No kidding?” Mom clasps her hands under her chin. “Okay, you’ve sold me. We’ll take five pounds of butter and two gallons of milk.”

An expression of surprise flits across Mahim’s face, and my guts churn. It’s too much. As he pulls blocks of butter from an ice-chest, I realize Mom never even asked what it would cost. I see us through his eyes—a couple dome-rats spending a small fortune to bake sweets. Repulsive.

I carry the jugs of milk while he totes bricks of cloth-wrapped butter back to the car. Mom chatters the whole way, every word a nail in my reputation’s coffin.

“You were so helpful today, May-heem! Why don’t you two exchange Handles? You know, Petey got a perfect score on the math section of his pre-C-Cat? Maybe you guys could study together?”

“Stop it, Mom. He doesn’t care,” I whisper.

“And I’m sure you could help Peter with the, uh … agricultural section—is there an agricultural section to the C-Cat?”

“I’m not really sure—” Mahim starts.

“There’s not,” I say.

“Petey’s looking at mostly in-state colleges. Not that he can’t get into an out-of-state school. But Madison is fully domed, and every bit as good as the Ivies. Is Madison a good ag school? Or there I go, assuming. Maybe you’re thinking of majoring in something else.”

I heave the jugs of milk into the backseat. “He’s probably not going to college at all?” I blurt, too angrily.

“Well, that’s quite an assumption,” Mom says.

“Yeah, Petey,” Mahim says quietly, “That’s quite an assumption.” He places the blocks of butter next to the milk.

My face is on fire. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean—”

“No, you’re right,” he says. “I’m not going to college. I’m just a fucking domeless, right? Probably gonna milk goats forever.”

“I might not go either … I don’t care about that shit anyways.”

“Sure, perfect score.”

He swipes a hand to send Mom the bill, which causes her face to pucker in shock. Whatever it costs, she pays it without protest. Mahim won’t meet my eyes. “Thanks for your business,” he says to Mom. “Come back anytime.” And then he’s walking away, hands in his pockets, cool and lean and lost to me forever.

Mom purses her lips, shakes her head at me, and climbs up into the passenger seat.

“Now getting the sugar, that’s going to be the real trick. A pound of cane sugar was a dollar when I was a girl. A dollar! Of course, you can’t get cane sugar now. I don’t think there’s anywhere left it’ll grow. And beet sugar—well they used to grow beets around here, but not for decades past. The nights just don’t get cold enough. I hear they’re still growing beets up in Canada, but I haven’t seen sugar at the Mart for years.”

I’m not paying attention. I’m busy reliving those last moments with Mahim, imagining a million different things I could have said that wouldn’t have ruined things. I’m also not paying attention to where we’re going, how it’s northwest, northwest, northwest, until deep inside an old-growth forest, we pass the smoking wreckage of a police drone on the side of the road.

Then it hits me: what’s northwest, northwest, northwest of Waukesha.

I pull up the nav app and zoom in on the address Mom gave me. A river, a lake, a wide swath of green.

“We can’t go here!” I slam on the brakes, pulling off the road. “This is in the Dells.”

“What? No, that can’t be right.” Mom pulls up the address on her passenger panel. “Look, there’s the Dells. This is right outside the Dells.”

“Where did you get this address? There’s no way Bunmi came here.”

“I—I saw an ad for a flea market.”

“Where?”

“In an email.”

“Show me.”

Mom swipes her hand. An envelope appears in the corner of my lenses, and I flick my wrist to open it.

Pop-up Flea Market! Rare foodstuffs and goods!

- Freon canisters

- Virgin Cotton

- Granulated Sugar

I check the message’s subdata. “Mom this IP is from an unregistered server. It’s dome-rat bait. They’re luring you in to rob you.”

“That can’t be right. It didn’t trip my scam filter.”

“Well your scam filter fucking sucks!”

Mom’s eyes go wide, and I instantly regret the curse word. Swearing just shuts her down, making communication impossible. She flings open the door and climbs out of the SUV.

I cut the engine and hop down after her.

“Mom, I’m sorry about cursing, but you need to get back in the car.”

She’s power-walking up the road, gazing straight ahead like she can’t hear me.

“Mom, there’s a blown-up police drone RIGHT THERE. This is Dells’ territory. They are going to rob us and probably kill us.”

“I thought everywhere was just families,” she mimics.

“Gahhh!” I claw my hands down my face. “Most places are, but this is the most dangerous place in Wisconsin!”

“You want to know what’s dangerous?” Mom rounds on me and flicks the mask resting on my chest. “What? You’re too cool to wear it? I can’t understand you, Peter. Don’t you ever think of your father?”

“Dad never wore a respirator outside.”

“EXACTLY!” she screams, voice flying into a shriek, the speakers on her respirator maxing out. Her eyes are wide and wet with grief. “You want to be a risk-taker like your dad? Oh he was so cool. Well, maybe your mom feels like taking some risks today!” She brushes past me and marches up the road. “We can’t go back without the sugar.”

“Of course we can!” I shake my pressed palms together, literally begging as I chase her up the road. “We can get a Mart cake! Nicholle wouldn’t want us to get killed—”

Then we freeze, hearing it in the same moment—a growling out of another century. Somewhere to the north, a diesel engine roars towards us, choking and sputtering on fossil fuels. Mom touches my wrist, and at last I see common sense dawning in her eyes. We make for the SUV, but Mom is not a fast runner.

A black truck on monster wheels speeds around the curve behind us. I take Mom’s arm to usher her faster, but the truck speeds to a stop before us, cutting off our path. A thunderous bass line pulses from the cab, like the beating of a monster’s heart.

It goes silent, and the driver’s window slides slowly into its frame.

The driver could be my age, but with strung-out eyes and the pockmarked skin of an addict. They lean one arm out of the cab, real casually. There’s a gun in their hand.

Mom’s taser hangs heavy and useless in my pocket.

“What brings a couple of fine folks like you to the Dells?”

Mom’s oblivious act is so convincing, I actually believe she thinks “these nice young men” are giving us a ride to the “flea market,” even as they confiscate our tasers and usher us up into the back of the truck. They take the road north, of course, towards the Dells, the old country club-turned-crime syndicate. My terror is a ringing in my ears and a heaviness in my limbs that makes me docile and obedient. But Mom is chatty. Mom comments on the beauty of Mirror Lake and the golf course-turned-prairie, and the pretty architecture of the old clubhouse, despite its windows wrapped in plastic, its bricks streaked with acid rain. She smiles as they lead us into the gutted building and down a stairwell to the basement.

But as soon as we hear the ka-chunk of the bolt lock in the door, Mom collapses to the damp cement and chucks her respirator across the cement floor.

She sobs into her arms.

“It’s okay,” I say, getting down on my knees beside her. I rub her back, and it’s such a familiar role that I get a weird feeling of déjà vu. I realize that it doesn’t matter whether we’re home on a pleasant afternoon in Fox Haven or waiting on execution in the basement of a notorious gang hideout—I’ll still, always, be the one rubbing Mom’s back.

The thought makes a little of the fear ebb from my bloodstream. A little anger rushes in.

“Get it together, Mom.”

She sobs harder.

“I mean it. You should be comforting me. You’re the parent here, for fuck’s sake!”

She doesn’t even seem to hear the curse word.

Disgusted, I swipe a few times to try the police, but there’s no signal. Even if I got through, everyone knows cops won’t go near the Dells.

The cement floor is patterned in rust-colored stains that I’m trying not to think about. There’s a pile of mildewed upholstered chairs, and high on the opposite wall is a narrow window. I drag one of the chairs over and climb up. The glass is thick and spiderwebbed with metal mesh. I look around for something sturdy enough to break it. Hell if I’m going to die down here—not before I ever fall in love, or have sex, or at least try apologizing to Mahim.

The lock ka-chunks again.

Mom lifts her head, and I ease back down to the floor.

A man walks in––and, okay, I assume he’s a man, because he’s of my mother’s generation, without a wisp of femininity about him. He has sun-leathered skin and wears white shirtsleeves cuffed to his forearms, and there’s something out-of-time about his sturdiness. Like he’s composed entirely of mammal meat and grain alcohol. There’s a coldness in his eyes and a firmness of his jaw that makes me certain he’s never smiled for anyone else’s comfort.

“We were … looking for the flea market?” Mom says. She looks fragile as a porcelain tchotchke, still kneeling at his feet. The man turns those hard eyes down to her, and she straightens her spine. “We were hoping to buy some sugar? To bake a cake for my daughter—”

How can she still be thinking about cake? I turn to the man, keeping my eyes low. “We are so sorry for interrupting your, uh, operation,” I say. “My mom’s not great with directions—”

“Don’t interrupt your elders.” His voice sends a shock of fear straight to my bladder.

“Thank you,” Mom breathes. “Like I was saying, my daughter, she—well, about a month ago, she tried—” her voice cracks.

“Mom, he doesn’t care about Nicholle. Let’s just—”

Both their heads whip towards me, and I fall silent.

“Nicholle had an incident. With my sleeping pills.” She fiddles with a stuck zipper on one of her pants’ cargo pockets. “She wrote this—” The zipper tugs free, and she pulls out a folded square of notebook paper.

My gut roils with betrayal. “You never told me Nicholle left a note.”

“A poem.” Mom’s hands shake as she unfolds the paper.

“You’re not gonna read it? Mom, he doesn’t care—"

“How many times do I have to tell you to shut up?” the man growls.

I mime zipping my lips and I clench my jaw, feeling like I’ve fallen through my own Lenses into a surreal holovid. The crimelord of the Dells wants to hear my sister’s suicide-poem? Sure. Why the hell not?

Mom clears her throat and reads, in her most high-falluting, antebellum drawl.

“The only monkeys I’ll ever know

lived in the print on dad’s shirt—

that was my husband,” she adds. “He passed last year from lung cancer.”

The man nods. As Mom reads on, I picture Nicholle here in the basement, conjured by her own words. Her lank hair hangs down, paper notebook clutched to her chest. All our schoolwork is done on-Lenses, so it annoys people, that pretension with the real paper. I’ve tried to teach her to be cooler, but she has no instinct for it.

Everything is getting terrible.

The deserts creep north.

We bite fleas as if they were delicacies,

eyeing the dragon on the side of the road.

Oh Nicholle, why can’t you just say what you mean? Or at least rhyme. By “fleas,” does she mean cricket-cakes? She’s been vegetarian the last few years, refusing to eat even insects. And what’s this dragon about? An ag drone?

Then I realize what I’m doing. Criticizing her suicide poem. My eyes burn, and I swear I’ll never tease her again. I’ll read all her poems and memorize every last sentimental word, because it’s truly fucking hitting me. Something about hearing Mom read her poem—in this probably torture-basement in the Dells, to the weirdly rapt attention of Wisconsin’s most dangerous man—makes it all crushingly real for the first time. We almost lost her.

The twin arbors have fallen

and there is no silver behind the walls.

Sweetness went extinct

long before I was born.

There’s no real pleasure in life.

Mom falls silent, her cheeks as wet with tears as mine. She refolds the letter with trembling hands. “Her birthday’s on Friday, and that line—sweetness went extinct—it got me thinking about cakes my mother made when I was little. And then I got this email …”

“Those emails are dome-rat bait,” the man says.

“Peter tried to tell me,” Mom nods. “Oh, please don’t hurt him. Oh, I can’t stand for anything bad to happen to my children.” She buries her face in her hands and cries.

The man squats down to her level. “I had a niece, who was mentally … upset.”

Mom looks up.

“She went through with it.”

Mom holds a hand to her mouth. “I’m so sorry.”

They hold each others’ gazes, and with a sickening lurch, I realize what is going on here. I have to choke down revulsion, because it is so gross, that they are bonding over teen girl suicides and looking at each other like—well, like me and Mahim looked at each other a few hours ago.

Then I remember how easily I’d shattered that connection, and I’m praying to all the gods of history that Mom will keep her foot out of her mouth long enough for this horny old gangster to let us go.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “I’m taking your car and whatever’s in your bank account.” He spreads his hands wide. “I’m a businessman, and I’ve got people to take care of. I’m trying to get us our own dome here.”

Mom sniffles, nodding.

“But we did just get in a shipment of sugar. And I could go for a slice of cake.”

We’re given the use of the big industrial kitchen, and the help of Shie, a burly woman with sharp-cornered eyes and fox-ear implants. Stew is more her specialty, she admits, but she bangs open dust-filled cabinets until she finds us a set of cake pans. We go with her to grab ingredients from the “pantry”—an old ballroom that’s set up like a Mart, only aside from the standard groceries, it’s stocked with sugar and tropical plants and packets of drugs, and long, black guns.

As Mom measures out ingredients, adrenaline leeches from my bones. I’m suddenly so tired, I want to pass out for a week in one of the kitchen’s steel cabinets. But when Mom tells me to stir a bowl of gloop, I stir. I’m sure we’ve done something wrong, because the gloop doesn’t look anything like cake.

But we watch through the oven door as the cakes balloon up, like magic. Two barefoot kids run into the kitchen asking for a snack. Shie scoops up a kid that looks like her and sets them on her hip. She lets the kids swipe their tiny fingers around the inside of the mixing bowl, until every speck of batter is licked clean.

The kids run out the back door to play down by the lakeshore, and Shie follows, hollering at them not to get any water in their mouths.

In the moment of privacy, I catch Mom’s eye. “See?” I say. “Just families.”

She laughs and whacks me playfully on the sternum.

I whisk butter and sugar together for the icing, forcing my voice to stay even. “Why didn’t you tell me about the poem?”

Mom frowns at the cooling cakes. “Because everything in it was true. It’s been messing with my head, and I just … I wanted to protect you from that. Like her sadness could infect you or something.”

“You think I’m not aware? You think I don’t freak out about the dying of the world?” Mom makes a sound that’s half-laugh and half-sob, and the old urge to comfort her rushes in. “Look, everything in that poem wasn’t true. Sweetness is extinct? This icing tastes pretty fucking sweet to me.”

Mom narrows her eyes at me for the curse word, but her lips tighten in a smile. She swipes a finger in the bowl, licks it, and moans with pleasure.

When the cakes are cooled and stacked, we do our best to smooth the white buttercream over them. Shie finds some food coloring in the way back of a cabinet, left over from when the place was still a country club. I try to write “Happy Birthday Nicholle!” in blue icing, but the letters come out so crooked, we turn them into fluffy blue clouds on a white background. Like an inverse image of the sky.

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I hold the cake in my lap, hoping the roaring engine won’t shake it to pieces. Shie sits up front with Torrin—that’s the guy who picked us up off the farm-to-market road. Allen, the gangster-looking dude, follows behind us in a car that’s really more of a tank. We blast through old Waukesha. Bystanders whip their heads to track us, then recoil when they spot the circle-D spray-painted on the vehicles’ doors. We zoom past a police patrol-drone that only manages half a whoop of its siren before a mortar turns it to a pile of smoking rubble in the rearview mirror. Torrin cheers.

Then we are speeding downhill towards the biggest dome I’ve ever seen, framed by the glittering blue expanse of Lake Michigan. I’m hit by a cascade of memories—all those camping trips we took with Dad, before he got sick. Sneaking off to watch the sunrise with him and Nicholle, before Mom got up and nagged us into wearing our respirators. When this is all over, I’m going to take Nicholle camping again. I’ll fix her hair and take her to parties at the Granary, and we will dance to bad music beneath the plain, poisoned sky.

I expect Torrin to slow down as we approach the no-man’s land outside Calming Dunes Treatment Center, but he accelerates instead. The barrels of the drones’ guns swivel to track us, and the breath goes out of my lungs. Torrin swipes a hand, activating something.

And they drop. All the dozens of drones in sight drop to the earth. He and Shie cackle with laughter. I am struggling to suck in a lungful of air.

“Well, would you look at that,” Mom says, and I assume she means whatever happened with the drones. But then I see that her eyes are clouded-over. She swipes something off her Lenses. “Allen left us $10,000 in the bank account. That’ll be enough for groceries until my next paycheck, and we can keep Shie in treatment until the end of the month. What a nice man!”

Shie and I make the same baffled snort simultaneously. “Did you forget he just robbed you?” She turns in her seat. “He’s my dad, you know.”

Torrin pulls into the Calming Dunes airlock. He rolls the window down slow and hangs his arm out the window, tapping his gun against the door. The guard in the booth holds up both hands, and the inner airlock slides open.

Slowly, we rumble up a long, shaded drive. Grazing deer look up as we pull up into a courtyard lined with long brick dormitories. Dozens of people in white pajamas are streaming out of the doors to gawk at us, while a few people in suits try in vain to usher them back inside.

The engines fall silent, and we climb down. Torrin and the guys who rode with Allen hang back, leaning against the monster truck tires and vaping something that smells like burnt plastic.

I step forward, balancing a tower made of butter, milk, and sugar on my palms. Shie follows at my side, scratching a furry ear with the silver cake cutter, and Allen takes my mother’s arm, like they’re a couple from an old flatvid.

Across a lawn dotted with bunny rabbits, my sister’s notebook drops to her side. Her eyes fill with so many questions, until they find mine. And see the cake. And then her smile is huge with real delight.

"Real Sugar is Hard to Find" by Sim Kern [Issue #11 Full Story]

Real Sugar Is Hard to Find

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