November’s Lightspeed Magazine short story is ‚In the Zone‘ by Lisa M. Bradley.
io9 is proud to present fiction from Lightspeed Magazine. Once a month, we feature a story from Lightspeed’s current issue. This month’s selection is “In the Zone” by Lisa M. Bradley. Enjoy!In the Zone
As her head hit the pillow, Yadira felt exhausted and relieved. Exhausted, because she’d worked on a very large collage almost the whole day straight. Her shoulder blades ached from hunching over her worktable, and, despite scrubbing, she still had ink under her nails. Relieved, because she felt like she’d left it all out on the field, rather than still vibrating with artistic energy. That meant what she’d experienced that day was a natural creative high, not the start of a manic phase. She wished she didn’t have to constantly question her moods, but she hadn’t been on the Vraylar for very long. She didn’t quite trust it, still.
That night she dreamed she sat on her balding velveteen couch watching a news report about Latin American immigrants stuck at the US-Mexico border. One woman cried as she spoke to the reporter in what sounded like Kʼicheʼ, though the voiceover translation muffled it. She’d trekked from Guatemala with her two young children and wasn’t being permitted to enter the US to seek asylum. Yadira’s heart felt sprained, seeing the mother holding her children’s hands even as she sobbed. Without understanding what she was doing, Yadira reached to touch her computer screen.
A circle flared to life on the screen and quickly grew to the size of a full-length mirror. Yadira saw the whole family as if spotlit by the circle. Squinting from the light glaring off her framed poster of Sylvia Rivera, Yadira stood and reached out again. She felt the mother’s shoulder, round and warm, under her fingertips. The mother turned from the reporter and looked Yadira in the eye. Without thinking, Yadira gripped the mother’s shoulder and pulled. The woman stumbled into Yadira’s living room, and the children followed, gliding as if on invisible skates.
That was as much as Yadira remembered the next morning. Over her café con miel, she thought, What I wouldn’t give to be able to yank every person trapped at the border into this country. Even better, to pull them into the Midwest sanctuary city in which she lived. Far away from Border Patrol and ICE, beyond the reach of police who abetted those carceral agencies. Yeah right, her inner critic blurted. Better to send them money so they can rebuild their lives somewhere else, since the US is betraying them.
That day moved slower than the previous had. Yadira still had ideas, but she needed to scan the artwork she’d already produced and Glaze the images against AI bots and content thieves. Then she had to send some images to the nonprofit she worked for and upload others to the print-on-demand website that sold posters and totes featuring her art.
The Guatemalan family from her dream never left her thoughts for long, though. When her mom called for their weekly check-in, Yadira mentioned her outlandish dream. To her surprise, Socorro started laughing.
“Oh, not that again!” Socorro said.
“What do you mean, again?”
“When you were little, I sometimes put you in front of the TV while I did chores. When I checked on you, you’d say one of the characters—a girl with glasses, I think—came out of the TV to play with you. I’d ask, Well then, where is she? And you’d say, Oh, she had to go.”
Yadira’s eyes went wide. “I don’t remember that.”
“I’m not surprised. You were very young and you didn’t seem to think it was a big deal.”
“Amazing.” Yadira kind of wanted to hang up so she could ponder what this recurring dream might mean, but she forced herself to continue the conversation, eventually asking, “How’s Abuela?”
“Oh, that woman, you know her, she never stops,” Socorro said with a familiar exasperation. “She’s got this gaggle of witchy types that frequent her botánica. They call themselves Las Bruja-jas and they’re always up to something. Good trouble, she says.”
“Good for her,” Yadira said. Unlike Socorro, she’d never been embarrassed of Abuela Hortencia’s curandera work. Healing was just something she did, like other grannies played dominoes or pickleball.
That night, Yadira looked up an immigrant aid group to offer some pro bono work. Afterward, she checked the news, despite her better judgment. Reading about the illegitimate president’s unconstitutional executive orders before bed more often than not left her with rage insomnia. Still she couldn’t help clicking on another update, this one live from the border.
Lit pink by her bedside lamp and cocooned in her Snoopy duvet, she watched a reporter interview a spindly, dark-skinned man from Honduras. As a gay man, he’d tried to get asylum in Mexico, but with the US border locked down, they’d already exceeded their capacity for refugee intake for the next five years. The news network did not translate his commentary, probably because they feared retribution from the US president, but plenty of the audience, including Yadira, understood enough Spanish to grasp the man’s scathing frustration. Sometimes the news made Yadira so angry, she saw spots, and at first that’s what she thought was happening to blur the video. But then the circle from her dream appeared onscreen.
I really have to remember to report this to my prescriber, Yadira thought as she rubbed her eyes. When she looked again, the golden circle was expanding to touch the walls and dusty popcorn ceiling of her bedroom. She squirmed out of the duvet and stood beside her bed, then turned her laptop to face her. The circle turned also and the man spotlit within paused mid-diatribe to stare at Yadira.
This is crazy, her inner critic said. But Yadira’s therapist said the inner critic wasn’t qualified to render such a diagnosis, so she ignored the critic and lifted a hand to the man.
Dreamily, he reached out as well. Golden light flared from the circle as Yadira’s hand passed through it, and she took his hand. Then she pulled him into her bedroom. They collided and stumbled into the dresser behind Yadira. The reporter gave a little scream, while on the dresser, earrings fell from the framed chicken-wire holder and clattered onto the wood surface.
The man’s eyes searched the small, pink-lit room as he pushed himself away from Yadira in a panic.
“Qué pasó aquí? Y dónde es aquí?”
Yadira, glad she’d donned proper pajamas, led him to her kitchen. In her halting Spanish, she tried her best to explain while reheating tamales for him. Later, she asked if he’d like to wash up. She took him to her bathroom, swiped the workout bra drying on the towel rod from sight, and handed him towels. Later still, she made up the couch for him. He was too tall for it, his feet would dangle over one arm, but he’d refused to take her bed.
Augustín, for that was his name, sat on the fresh sheet and asked, for the third or fourth time, “I-o-wah? In the United States?”
“Sí. Mañana, voy a . . .” Yadira paused, suddenly unable to remember the rules of conjugation or parts of speech. “Voy a presentarle? a algunas personas que pueden ayudarle. Usted puede vivir conmigo por un rato.”
He looked dubious, and Yadira didn’t blame him. Even if she’d managed to say what she meant, she didn’t know who to contact yet, herself. But she wished him a good night and returned to bed.
Unfortunately, her brain wouldn’t stop for sleep. She kept being bombarded by images, doubts, inspirations. But, given the circumstances, she thought it was understandable, not a manic episode. She typed up some of her most pressing thoughts before setting aside her (mundane once more) laptop and staring at the dusty ceiling. She’d have to work on her Spanish.
Because if she could pull someone to safety again? She absolutely would.
• • •
Yadira didn’t know exactly how she yanked people from the news into her one-bedroom apartment, and she kinda didn’t want to know. She thought of it as she did her artistic impulses: better left to mystery. That did not stop her from experimenting to understand the parameters of her newfound (or rediscovered?) power.
She couldn’t do it using her phone, maybe because it was too small? Not enough power? And she couldn’t do it using a prerecorded interview, it had to be live. That prompted a slew of questions about what, exactly, she’d done as a child—if anything. Had she pulled out cartoons or puppets or real people, and had they been from live shows? She didn’t ask Socorro, not wanting to exasperate her.
She could do it with an audience. Augustín insisted on seeing how he himself had been transported to this mostly white little town, and after a week, Yadira pulled a trans woman named Dulce into her kitchen in front of him.
After a couple of days for Dulce to get used to her new environment—Yadira made Dulce sleep in her bed while she curled up with Snoopy on the floor—Yadira took her to the office of Migrant Movement for Justice, same as she had Augustín. The organization began the perhaps impossible task of procuring legal documentation for the two refugees. Yadira wasn’t sure what counted as impossible anymore.
Her power wasn’t limited to migrants at the border, either. One Sunday morning while Yadira was making migas for breakfast, Augustín sat at the kitchen table watching CNN. Not a morning person, Dulce sat sipping coffee and peered at the screen through slitted eyes. The director of Homeland Security was being interviewed, and he spent a good portion of his segment bad-mouthing a Congressional “upstart” who was leading Know Your Rights seminars in response to the administration’s horrible immigration policies.
When Yadira leaned over Augustín to place his plate on the table, she glared at the white, thumb-faced director on screen. Almost immediately, a gold globule appeared over his face before it thinned into the familiar golden ring that preceded a teleportation.
“¡No! Ese hombre, no!” Augustín yelled.
Even as the director apparently gave the camera a puzzled frown, Augustín recoiled and slammed the laptop shut. Yadira, stunned silent, blinked at the broken connection.
“Bueno,” Dulce said, standing for a second cup of coffee, “no necesitamos ese problema.”
From then on, Yadira was careful not to focus too hard on celebrity interviews and the like. Sometimes she giggled to herself at the thought of pulling a pop star from the screen, but even if she hadn’t teleported the director of Homeland Security, he’d clearly been able to see her through the portal. Yadira had no desire to inflict what might feel like a hallucination on someone or yank them from their glamorous life into her already crowded apartment.
Yadira wished she could conjure folks directly into the MMJ office, not because she minded them in her home but because the org’s members spoke fluent Spanish and she thought they could more effectively orient refugees. She tried it once. She claimed she was there to pick up more Know Your Rights wallet cards and then locked herself in the bathroom with her laptop, but she couldn’t find a livefeed in the fifteen minutes she felt she could reasonably occupy the bathroom.
