Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast.

The next year ran for its life.  Cities grew, lights were lit, and the drunken rattle-clatter of civilization returned.  Once we understood that people had an easy time of emotional transfer, the machines began appearing everywhere.  Schools, government buildings, churches and stores – anywhere easily accessible was soon home to those early-model perspiring eyesores.  Fortunately, as their numbers grew they shrank in size, and quickly scurried out of the public sphere altogether.  They took up domestic residence, in apartments, houses, in spare rooms and pantries, eventually then receding into walls and under floors, completely out of sight. 

Site of a different revolution entirely, Zara couldn’t have cared less.  She was enthralled by her new find: this cunning, bilingual opportunist, and had no time for even the most radical social scheme.  Not distracted (though for different reasons) by the developing nuance of ETM technology, Zara and Asseem dove headlong into one another’s lives, leaving the flurry of activity like so much fuss on the surface of a dark deep pool.  As the streets began to reflect the brightening light of people’s frustrated lives, Asseem spent more and more time in theatres earning a buck from swarms of eager cultural illiterati, and Zara likewise chose a shadowed path, shedding her scholastic stripes and donning the seductive, disaffected mask required by what would soon be her first real job.

What drew Zara to Asseem from Go was his ingenuity.  She saw they shared the shackle of disappointment in their peers, their environment, their parents.  They had the spark.  But where Zara had been content to wander around, nurture a reputation, and generally stick out, soar-thumb-like, against the hands applauding her every aberrance, Asseem had taken to the sidelines, funneled his discontent into forward movement, and wedged his way into productivities she’d never even considered.  It was refreshing.  She’d grown so complacent!  It was clear now.  She had to “do something.”

By morning the evening’s erratic weather had conspired with a mess of dirty cotton, had traded in its wind and roiling clouds for fog that clung, cowardly, to the tops of buildings and trees.  The food carts below had already begun to clutter the streets, and their bells – milk’s dull clunk and the long clear ring of filtered water – woke Zara early from her dry-sided dreams.  She thought about the awkward conversation with her parents the night before.  She thought about Asseem.  She looked around her room at the remains of aborted hobbies which, long since having given up hope, lay hobbled on every surface.  Old fetish texts boasted missing, cut ‘n pasted pages.  An empty goldfish bowl filled with purple water.  Juggling pins.  A small, half assembled model.  Tarot cards.  It was disgusting. 

Zara pulled herself out of bed and slowly through the house, her socked feet sliding over hardwood floors.  The kitchen was cooler than other rooms, and she shivered entering it, drawing her robe around her and rubbing her arms.  She began to go through the cupboards, closets and drawers until she found, tucked away behind the garbage can under the sink, a bag of plastic bags.  She tore through it until, finding one suitably huge, she shuffled back to her room and stood at her doorway, arms akimbo.  She’d been gripped by the need to clean.

Her determination vaguely waned as she gazed across the awkward landscape of her room, but she forced herself to bend down and begin with a set of spoiled paints, left open one night and never recapped.  She picked up broken pencils and a small, water-dropped pad of paper whose pages were now illegible, the voices muffled by moisture.  Though slow at first, she was surprised at how easy it was to throw things away.  The transition from sentimental object to trash took nothing more than a sigh and the occasional averted eye.  Books, tapes, pictures and old toys quickly became intimate inside the black plastic, nothing more than lumps and the small sounds of metal meeting metal meeting rubber meeting glass.  She quickened her pace, and as the floor was revealed nearly all trace of hesitation vanished.  Zara grabbed armfuls of everything, and finally had to stop herself from discarding useful items like the lamp, her pillows, loose change.  Everything was suspect.

When the bag was full and the room was largely clear of debris, Zara dragged the evidence into the hall and looked in on an almost unfamiliar space.  She entered sheepishly, wondering what she’d done, and sat on the edge of her bed.  The room was exposed, seemed helpless.  She’d stolen its security blanket and there it was, no pretending, for all to see.  She felt a little sorry for it.  She felt a tinge of regret.  A black bishop lay on its side a foot from her foot, and she leaned in to grab it but thought better, sat back up.  The bishop would remain.  Witness to the holocaust.  Let him warn the world.

As she got ready for school, Zara thought about Asseem, about his kempt appearance, and drew strength from the idea that he’d approve of her newly discovered bedroom.  “One simply has no time for sympathy when there’s progress to be made,” she thought in an odd, unfamiliar voice.  Certainly not hers.  Something she’d heard, perhaps.  Or read.  She grabbed a shirt from the pile she’d made, and pants from under the bed.  The street bells had changed from milk and water to eggs and noodle soup, and her stomach urged her outside, led her through the house and toward the beckoning door.  Just as she reached it, however, her conscience bought her backward, turned her around, and made her retrace her steps.  She wasn’t quite sure what she was doing until she got there, and stood again at the entrance to her room.  Clear now, she marched in and made straight for the little bishop.  She picked it up and held it tightly in her hand.

Zara left the front door unlocked – Marshall’s rule – and began walking to school.  She passed by the usual temptations, always having to resist spending her lunch money on the first food cart she encountered, and headed for a complimentary dog at Knuckle’s.  The mongers made eyes at her as she passed, ever uncertain, having learned to save their pitch but not to write her off entirely.  Like any young lady, they said amongst themselves, she’ll give in sooner or later.  Zara walked by without looking.  The street was strewn with litter from the wind overnight, and she had to pay attention, watch her feet as they negotiated paper and plastic and Styrofoam: containers uncontained.  She wondered (though she knew) whether Asseem would acknowledge her in class, whether he’d feign disinterest to protect himself from a paparazzi of their peers, always eager to exploit any new alliance within the factional classroom.  She began to feel a little anxious, and rubbed her black plastic bishop for luck.

Approaching Knuckle’s Dirty Dogs always had the same effect on Zara – a mixture of repulsion, hunger and intrigue combining in her gut for a tummy tug-of-war.  She heard the growls grow louder as she crossed the street, and louder still as she stopped before the stand.  Knuckle was perched on his usual stool out front of the small, bedraggled shack he called a kitchen, his greasy apron stiffly cascading down the slopes of his slouching form.  He gave a quick glance in Zara’s direction before sliding off his stool and shuffling behind the counter. 

“Miss Zara,” he said.

She took this as her cue, and on the tips of her toes leaned over the counter, letting the neckline of her shirt fall forward until the Turk’s dark eyes could trace her collarbone, scan her youthful skin.  Knuckle raised an eyebrow, cleared his throat, and started preparing her morning special. 

This had been their routine for over a year. 

She wasn’t sure exactly how it had begun, couldn’t say when the first free Dirty Dog was pushed across the counter at her, when the first time she’d seen that arched eyebrow and the faint twinkle shining through layers of grease and neglect.  When she first bent her athletic body over the remaindered Formica.  Or which came first.  But it didn’t matter.  What mattered was the dog.  Besides, once the trade was made an easiness quickly replaced the vague lechery of their ritual, and the two would sit, usually alone, and gossip or complain, talk about their lives or the day ahead.  It had become, though she might not have admitted as much at the time, the closest thing resembling friendship Zara had in her life.  It was contained, of course – rarely was even eye-contact made away from the food stand – but it was casual, unthreatening, and reliable. 

Once the dog had been delivered, Knuckle made his way around the counter to join Zara as she ate, sat with his back to the shack, and looked out at the lifting fog.  “Weather’s been weird,” he said. 

Zara nodded, mouth full, and watched people pick through the trash that lay along the overgrown street. 

“But I guess,” he added, “everything’s been pretty weird.”

Zara finally swallowed.  “My folks are freaked out by the emotional energy whatevers.”

Knuckle sighed, swiveled the stool to face her.  “Your parents, Miss Zara, are against anything progress.”

She took another bite, and agreed through a mouthful of food.

“Myself?  I’ve applied to have one installed here at the kitchen.  They say they’re only putting them in public places, but I told them Knuckle’s Dirty Dogs has more visitors than the library!  I said Who goes there?  I said Do you or don’t you want people to use this thing?”

Zara grunted her approval.

“Anyway, I will get one I think.  It just will take some time.”

They sat for a while and people-watched.  Food carts clanked by, and for each one Knuckle had some disparaging remark.  They were vultures, he liked to tell her, just waiting for him to let down his guard, turn his head, or otherwise give them an opportunity to assume his enviable place on the corner: a quartered quarter lot he’d won in cards and now clung to like crazy.  He didn’t seem like an entrepreneur so much as a sour crossing guard keeping watch on his corner, letting people pile up on the curb until some critical mass of attention was spent in his direction, only then reluctantly leading them across as though both traffic and pedestrians were an inconvenience.  As though he’d rather just have the corner, nothing to sell, than have to peddle his wares.  The Dirty Dogs were, Zara suspected, an afterthought for Knuckle.  He wanted his stand, and for people to know who owned it.  Nothing more.  Zara’s mind kept returning to her encounter with Asseem the night before, and without her usual quick forgiving quips about the passersby, Knuckle sensed her distraction, and finally flipped her in the arm with his strong but stubby fingers. 

“Hey, Miss Z,” he said.  “You’re off in Zara-land this morning.”

Zara thought for a moment longer, wanting to finish retracing the distinct separation of pink lip from the dark, smooth surface of surrounding skin.  She doubted Asseem would ever have eaten at Knuckle’s, but knowing what a trained eye the Turk turned on the street before his stand, wasn’t surprised to find out he knew of the boy.  She squinted against a lonely ray of sunlight that had slipped through the low-lying fog and found its way to her face.  “You know a kid named Asseem?”

 Knuckle had a distinct harumph for everything, it seemed to Zara, but she’d never heard this one before.  It was lower than most, gravelly, and ended almost before it began, covering its tracks. 

“Is that a yes?”

“You’re too good for that boy, Miss Z,” he said and, standing now, began to shuffle back around the counter.  Making distance.

“You think?  He seems…” she began.

“Yes.  Seems.”  There was a brief but uncomfortable pause.  “You’re probably late for school, eh?”

Annoyed, Zara huffed off down the street.  She couldn’t tell if Knuckle’s response was born of the same spirit that produced the food now destroying her stomach: a general jealous and vindictive jab at the world, or if there was more to it, something seated in experience.  She felt for the black bishop in her pocket and hurried to school.  All she had to do was ask Asseem.

The morning bell rang before Zara got to the door, but she made it to class before lockdown.  Before Handpepper.  The ETM still stood up front, sweating, a dejected giant too big for a desk, and Zara gave it a wide birth as she walked by, feeling sorry for it, half-expecting some sort of lonely meltdown.  She scanned the classroom on her way to her seat and was disappointed to see that Asseem hadn’t made it to class on time.  The room buzzed with the usual mixture of talk, laughter, beats issuing from eardrum-bursting headphones, and she fought against thoughts that he’d skip the whole day.

The kids ignored everything. 

Zara looked around the classroom, her eyes scanning for someone her brain knew wasn’t there, and she found her eyes stumbling over certain classmates she’d known since her transfer two years before.   Fondness evoked.  Nostalgia not earned, a projection more than anything.  Who would she remember once she’d left them all behind?  Normally taken as a vast morass of misshapen adolescence, it could not be denied that some among them had, despite themselves, impressed her.  She paused for a moment on Agnew, one of the only boys gutsy enough to ask her out.  He sat, slack-jawed, staring straight ahead with a face long since taken over by characteristics he’d meant at first only to mock. 

He’d been convincing initially: his request uttered in the pitch of afterthought, communicating the perfect twist of desire and despondency.  She’d made it almost through the entire day before catching on.  Before seeing through the act.  She’d pulled him aside in the hall and told beautifully sunken shoulders that they should have waited until later in the day.  If she hadn’t caught him staring at her from the corner of his eyes, or if, upon being caught, he hadn’t quickly looked away, betraying his sublime anxiety, he could have had her.  For coffee at least.  She’d have found out within 5 minutes of conversation anyway, but perhaps by then she’d have anchored herself somewhere within his prepossessing heartbreak and found something to love.  Zara looked at him now, searching for some change.  His shoulders seemed to slump even more, she noted, and his hair covered one eye now entirely.  Depth perception sacrificed for the perception of depth.  Zara wondered idly what it was about her own obsession with appearances that distinguished it so fundamentally from that of those around her.  The classroom door opened and she looked up.

Handpepper entered the room slowly and quietly closed the door, walked to his desk.  He walked with a limp.  His briefcase looked heavy but weighed very little, and when he heaved it onto his desk the sound was drowned out almost entirely by ambient noise.  Did his students even see him enter?  He turned his back to the class and cleared the chalkboard.  He considered just walking back out, down the hall, onto the street, out of the city.  He put the eraser on its tray and picked up a piece of chalk.  What was the itinerary?  He put the chalk to the smooth green surface, hoping he’d regain some sense of what should be written.  Nothing.  He closed his eyes, and when he opened them Zara was standing at his side.  She looked at him skeptically, took a step back, and said “What’s the matter, forget how to spell ‘emotional’?” 

Handpepper felt a quick rage rising up from this gut that didn’t make it halfway before he realized what she meant.  He opened his mouth to say, to say what?  But before anything left his lips she’d turned, this strange girl, and begun walking toward the door.  He watched helplessly as she left the room, gripped his little piece of chalk, and gouged out three oversized letters on the eager board: ETM.

Slowly the class calmed down.  Slowly, and he waited.  He waited.  Half certain that it was Zara’s exit, not his entrance, that called the class to attention, he waited patiently, arms crossed in top professorial form until all their hateful eyes were raised in expectation.  This was how school was supposed to be, he thought.  Expectation.  Expectation and delivery.  But the delivery wasn’t nearly as important.  The delivery was just a loss of expectation, these two embittered forces battling, making it more and more difficult for the teacher, for him, as he struggled to find a foothold on information he became less and less sure of as time went on.  The command he’d felt the day before: where was it?  He weighed what he knew.  He measured how much there was left.  Handpepper’s understanding receded just out of view, and he thought if he could only keep it there, never quite catch up despite his paradoxical imperative of doing exactly that, he’d be okay.  He’d deal in expectation, keep a currency with his students. 

Today everyone got a chance.  Today each student would come before the class and dredge up something dark inside them to make the machine work.  Everyone would produce.  Zara came back into the room and glanced at the chalkboard before meeting his eyes.  He watched as she scanned the classroom, sighed, and sulked back to her seat. 

As Handpepper began speaking Zara glazed over and looked out the window, losing focus, watching the green-grey blur of trees and concrete, people walking by.  What had gone wrong?  She was sure they’d found some common ground.  Had he put her on?  Her stomach was in knots, but her breakfast masked the source.  She was used to feeling sick for the first part of the day.  It was something she clung to, some reminder of the outside world as she sat through eerily pointless lectures, whitewashed explanations of ideas her parents protected her against after school, demonstrating their fallacy.  She clung now especially, since the outside world was not just something that called, incessantly, for her return, but something that had captured her crush, keeping him from her.  Zara wondered what it wanted in exchange.  As ransom.  She thought about what she might offer.  She’d cleaned her room already.  She considered the possibility that it might have been exactly the wrong thing to do.  Had she given up a part of herself?  Sacrificed something essential?  If so she could see why she was being punished.  This was rule number one.  This was a Big No-No.  Unforgivable.  Handpepper prattled on, and Zara was vaguely aware of the trickle of kids slowly approaching and returning from the front of the room, from the glowing, humming ETM.  Hours passed.  Lunch.  It wasn’t unlike Zara to skip it, to sit in the classroom and read, and she opened a book to pursue the deceit but its words escaped, evaporating into the air and through a cracked window to mock her, to join forces with the world that had swallowed Asseem. 

To Handpepper’s delight, the children came back from lunch in a semblance of order, sitting down without the scoff and angry-kid caricature normally smeared across their uneven faces.  Could he have actually gotten through?  Maybe they felt pity for him.  They had some sense of how close to the edge he was, how close they were to losing him entirely and, as though attending an enemy’s funeral, were a study in selfless acts.  He didn’t care.  The limits of his understanding were comfortably out of sight, and Handpepper looked down at his list of kids who’d gone, kids who’d yet to go.  This he could do.  Keep them in suspense.  Something unfamiliar that taught them a lesson in forgiveness.  He brought a pen to the paper and retraced the crosses over some of their names, extending his time, relishing the attention.  Then a sound to his left, a door opening that broke the class’s concentration and his own along with it, exposing an unknown.  Asseem.

The knot in Zara’s stomach was released, and climbed one step up to her chest.  It nestled there while she watched him cross the room, head bowed, to his seat four aisles over and two rows up.  Not one look in her direction.  No word. 

Handpepper tapped his desk.  “Asseem?”

Asseem grunted.

“Asseem?” Handpepper repeated, intention clear, not wanting to fish for excuses, let his lesson be forgotten. 

Asseem waited, wanting the word to go away.  His hand was still sore from writing, from painstakingly reiterating the arcane language of the Qu’ran, and humiliation radiated from him like a bad smell.  He thought of his idiotic father, floundering over a text he’d never understand and so living through Asseem’s breezy religious acumen.  He absolutely hated admiring that man.  Handpepper’s pronunciation of his name rebounded around inside his head and began to wear him down.  Finally he relented, hoping it was the most direct escape route back into anonymity.  “I in here, ain’t I?”

It took everything Handpepper had to end it at that.  He’d finish this damn list today.  “Yes you are.  Thank you for joining us.”  A tickle of pride tried to turn the corners of his mouth upward, but he coughed, pressed a bruised hip against the edge of his desk, and settled back into a familiar state of sorry dull throb.

For Zara, this exchange was both charged and irrelevant.  She watched as though it determined something momentous, but did so toward a fated end.  What mattered was that he was there, that he came.  She tried not to think about why he hadn’t looked at her on his way in, why he was ignoring her now.  She tried, but ultimately failed.  The quick thrill of success faded, as quickly, against the anxiety of future defeat.  She calmed herself by fixing her eyes on the tight curl of Asseem’s hair, on the soft curve of his jaw.  He didn’t move for the remainder of the day.  His name wasn’t called, of course, since he’d done it the day before, so he had nothing to contribute but his presence.  No reason to shift, even slightly, any element of his frustrated frame. 

But soon Zara grew weary of tracing these lines.  Why wasn’t he moving?  Did she not deserve even the tiniest acknowledgement?  She’d considered the option of being ignored, but not seriously.  It was something so far from her experience that she called on it from time to time simply as a placeholder for something she was too lazy to explain.  They didn’t see her.  No one noticed.  What began a soothing exercise became, the more she looked and the more he didn’t, an insult.  Who did this little prick think he was?

When the bell rang the prick shot out of his seat and was the first one through the door.  Zara lunged after him, but was blocked by a throng of students interested in taking a closer look at the machine to which they now felt strangely attached.  The machine that had made them sing.  She started to fight her way through, but suddenly gave up hope.  What would she do, punch him again?  Force him to hold her hand?  Stupid. 

Handpepper watched his students leave, surging into the hall.  Zara looked stormy, he noticed, and something in him wanted to let her know that things would be okay, that she’d be fine.  This ridiculous thought crept through him and suddenly made his arm shoot out, grabbing Zara’s sleeve as she passed.  She looked at him, but turned back and walked off, his hand slipping off her arm without protest.

The hallways were a playground, kids running, throwing rulers and books, yelling and sobbing in front of their lockers.  Zara blurred by.  She’d been betrayed.  She’d read about this sort of thing, but had of course never experienced it before.  Never mind that they’d exchanged a total of maybe 100 words – Asseem had Let Her Down, plain as plain.  What was she supposed to do?  Get even?  By the time she’d reached the front door her shoulders were competing with Agnew’s for Most Pitiful Pose, and just as she’d decided to “get herself together,” she felt a hand on one of them.  Handpepper.  What did he want from her?  Advice?  She wasn’t in to S&M anymore.  She thought about all manner of ways to put him down, to release her anger and sadness and pain all over this silly brittle man.  Then she noticed.  The hand was brown.

“Hey kid,” said Asseem in a warm, resonant voice. 

She turned.  He was smiling.

“You want to go catch a show?”

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Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Seventeen