2035 is the Kept Year

And an Emotional Anchor Drowns in the Sky

Priscilla was her name, in the time before names higher and lower, though it did get both shorter and longer at times. Prissy. Miss Prissy-Pants. Pri-pri. One nickname was never settled on firmly for the gray hamster. All that was settled was her status, which was displayed via sticker on the side of the transparent plastic that made up her cage/handbag as it hung from the shoulder of her owner.

Krystal was her name, in the time before humans were identified by their use, though the people around her did have some other names for her. Ma’am. Lady. Whack job. Bitch. She had short curly hair, a long neck melting into a weak chin, smile lines that frowned, and a pair of translucent electric blue reading glasses that she only took off to sleep. There was no concern about them fogging up in the shower, as the lenses had fallen out years ago.

Now past the age, by her own measure, of hanging out in bars and making friends with whichever table she eventually collapsed on, Krystal was in search of new leisure activities at what could not have been a more inopportune time for the nation of Australia. The woman didn’t live there exactly, as she was Canadian by birth, but the southern hemisphere was stuck with her for at least a few months thanks to the latest storm patterns of the climate crisis.

The continent wasn’t surrounded by inclement weather, but it was plagued by it at random intervals, with unprecedented winds, rainfall, and lightning coming out of nowhere so fiercely that several large passenger planes had crashed over the ocean. Data was being gathered, but so far nothing could be explained or predicted beyond conjecture that it was related to the unstable weather patterns that had come to characterize the decade.

So all international flights were grounded in and out of Australia, for a period of no less than three months. Public anger over the decision was immense, and only partly because it meant the tourist Krystal would be extending her exotic vacation and plaguing local zoos, river tours, and now, of all places, the airport.

The one nearest her hotel wasn’t closed, not today. Three flights were scheduled, which was legal because they were domestic. The destination was their point of origin. Krystal had seen an advertisement that made that very clear: flights to nowhere!

After two months of being caged on their own continent, those who loved travel had become incredibly antsy, eager for anything that felt like their old vacations, even if it was just the stress of the airport and the popping of their ears. So one of the airlines offered a solution with flights that would take off, circle as scenically as possible for about the length of a feature film, and then land again. All for a price that couldn’t be called a discount even when Krystal squinted at it.

Oh well, she implied with a shrug of her shoulders. Any price was a small one to pay if it meant she could make some new friends. So far she hadn’t added any Australian numbers into her phone to go with the three Canadian ones that hadn’t blocked her. Airplanes already served alcohol, and it was her correct assumption that a flight to nowhere would have an even greater focus on the stuff, at a mark-up sure, but that was nothing another shrug couldn’t solve.

“You don’t have to worry about that, do you my little Precious Priss? No, you don’t. You don’t have to worry about anything because mommy takes care of everything.” She made kissy faces just outside Priscilla’s container, careful not to make contact and smear her lipstick on the plastic. The hamster stared back, whiskers twitching like tightropes, little black eyes like the tips of freshly sharpened pencils.

Krystal called her pet a good girl, rewarding her for her lack of misbehavior with a nugget of granola from a bag of trail mix. She was going to pay for some drinks, to up her participation and impress the others, but she would not be paying mini-bar prices for any snacks.

Priscilla was a good girl, certainly, at a time when the other animals of the world were not. Meat prices were up because cows and pigs kept escaping, sometimes seeming to vanish from the middle of factory farms, as if they fused with their neighbors in some kind of reverse mitosis. There in Australia both shark and crocodile attacks on the beaches were up more than five hundred percent. Spiders were weaving webs in bystanders’ hats before they put them on, almost like a practical joke.

Scientifically there wasn’t a name for it yet. People like Krystal just called it ‘going bananas’. All the animals were going bananas these days, and it was probably because of the climate too. There was even some speculation that animals, ocean birds in particular, were somehow contributing to the storms that had Australia cut off from the rest of the world.

Still, none of this stopped the Canadian from loving her pet, or any of the others she’d had in her life. She loved them more than she loved people, who did cruel things like block her number and tell the landlord when she allowed her saxophonist boyfriend to live with her. While she considered herself sociable, there were certain sorts of people she couldn’t deal with herself, namely those who thought she was causing a problem.

When all the eyes were on her, in a bad way, her chest tightened. Her eyes welled up and she couldn’t breathe and her fingers shook. Tantamount to a heart attack, she was convinced of it. Why people would be so cruel as to do this to her she had no idea, but obviously precautions had to be taken.

Her doctor did not initially want to prescribe her anti-anxiety medication, so she sought second, third, and fourth opinions. Eventually one did acquiesce, if only to get rid of her and avoid the curse of being referred to as her doctor.

Not one to be happy for very long, no matter the circumstances, Krystal came to the conclusion she needed a little more help in fending off such dangerous anxiety, help that came in the form of little Miss Priscilla Prissy-Pants Esq. After a quick and entirely illegitimate online certification process, Krystal was mailed a sticker to slap on the hamster handbag: registered emotional support animal.

Good enough to get her through security only because it was lax for the flights to nowhere, the sticker nonetheless would not protect the pair from scrutiny entirely. Treated as something of a social mixer, the seats aboard the plane were not assigned. This of course led to a mad scramble to claim those in the forward sections despite there being no first class or coach on their way to nowhere.

Krystal was squeezed out before she could snag anything near the pilot, who she assumed was extremely handsome based on nothing more than all the pilots in films she’d seen who tended to get shot or thrown out the side, prompting another character to ask who was going to fly the plane.

She had a little waking nightmare about being confronted, about getting herself tossed out the side without a parachute for the crime of speaking too bluntly, so after Krystal found a middle seat she opened Priscilla’s bag and stroked the little creature’s gray fur to calm herself. Doing so was wonderfully medicinal, and seemed to gain effectiveness over time, unlike the smorgasbord of pills she had tested for various conditions real and fake over the years.

Priscilla must have been particularly good at emotional support, and it was unfortunate she couldn’t understand that and that Krystal couldn’t communicate it to her with anything other than extra granola. Though the animal’s primary role there was as a conversation starter, her owner would’ve been more than happy to let someone give her a pet and test it out.

All the world seemed to melt away with each rub between her tiny ears. Priscilla’s power was transporting, like sitting around a campfire. It moved her not just to a new location, but a new body as well, one that had led a much more rugged life. These sensations taught her that the greatest rewards of the physical experience could only be reaped by a body that had dived deep into effort, that knew the adrenaline of running for its life and the aches of clinging to a rock wall for an entire day.

A campfire’s warmth could only perfectly penetrate pores that that been completely emptied of sweat, turning the last residue into a sauna inside the skin. Only bones that had plowed fields and held scared children through stormy nights had the hospitality to invite the flame’s warmth fully.

All of that, from touching her little Prissy Baby. Krystal had half a mind to put all that into an ad of her own and sell the animal for ten thousand times what she’d paid. She even served her other purpose well, less than ten minutes off the ground. Liftoff had been achieved with cheers, and as soon as the seat belt sign was off people were milling in the aisle, passing glasses of champagne back and forth, wondering how to get the flight attendants to put one of their favorite songs on over the address system.

Krystal was still waiting for her first beverage to be delivered when the woman next to her, in the window seat, looked away from the coastline and saw the plastic purse opened on her neighbor’s lap.

“Aw, that’s cute. What’s its name?”

“Her name is Priscilla. I don’t think she’s ever had a vacation before, so I figured she should get one.”

“I’d like one,” her neighbor grumbled; she saw Krystal’s puzzled look. “Hopping on this thing was my husband’s idea. I think he’s up front getting us some drinks. Personally I think it’s a tremendous waste of fuel. It’s not like the stuff grows on trees… and even if it did there aren’t that many trees left for it to grow on.”

“Having fun is never a waste of anything,” Krystal countered. “Really what’s the difference between this plane landing here, or there, or in Antarctica if people get something out of it along the way?”

“I suppose you have a point, but then we can just decide to have fun in much less expensive ways, can’t we? Instead of this flight we could all be sitting in a restaurant, having the same fun, no jet fuel necessary.”

“But then we can’t say we’re partying in the sky. Nobody’s going to throw a party if there isn’t anything to pay for.”

“Parties existed before money; I might not have been there but I’m confident of that. Now, the first party. That’s one I would agree to go to. Can’t screw up and embarrass yourself there. Those things hadn’t even been invented yet.”

“Sign me up as soon as they unveil the time machine,” Krystal agreed, though she had a sense she already knew what it felt like, was in fact feeling it at that moment each time she pet Priscilla. That fire. That very old fire crackling in the night, restoring what she had given to the day.

As of three minutes prior, the two of them had another neighbor, as an older man in a silk shirt somewhere between orange and cream had settled into the aisle seat hoping to examine himself in his phone camera and determine if he needed to undo one or two more of his top buttons. He was in the middle of assessing exactly how far a white chest hair had to curl out and over the shirt for it to become unattractive when he noticed another hair in the air, shed from Priscilla.

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With a deep sniff he caught a whiff of sawdust, of cage and waste underneath the sterile scent of rubbery plastic. It put him off his appetite, his game, and his composure almost immediately, before he even looked down the dank corpse ditches that were the pores of his nose and saw the rodent in the woman’s lap.

“Oi, what’s that?” The women stopped their conversation.

“Are you talking to me?” Krystal asked, taking in just how much the man was not the handsome pilot she was hoping for.

“Yeah I am. Why’ve you got a rat on the plane?”

“That’s Priscilla, thank you very much,” the woman in the window seat joked, but now she was the only smile in the row, so she quickly killed it and ran from the situation by locking her gaze out the window, practically hoping to see one of the anomalous storms headed their way.

“She’s a hamster and she’s my emotional support animal,” Krystal lectured matter-of-factly, tapping the sticker, disturbing the animal in the process.

“We’re not going nowhere, so why do you need emotional support?”

“Frankly it’s none of your business.”

“Well, franklier than you, it is my business because I’m allergic.” He snorted to make his point, and it was not an idle threat. Clearly the man had an impressive arsenal of thermonuclear mucus that could be unleashed from his silos at any moment.

“Then move seats; they’re not assigned,” she pointed out, remarkably correct compared to her overall track record, but her opponent in this matter was the same sort of person as her. Being denied in any fashion was identical to being attacked, and his recipe did not include the hearty dollop of panic.

“I don’t need to move. I’m supposed to be here. Rats aren’t. I bet it’s some kind of health violation. Go put that thing away somewhere.”

It was at that moment that a male attendant arrived with Krystal’s gin and tonic, leaning across the man in the silk shirt and finding that he couldn’t lower the tray table and set it down thanks to Priscilla’s chateau occupying the space.

“Oi, you’re right on time. Get this woman to put her rat in the cargo hold or something. It’s unsanitary.” The confused attendant examined the purse more closely, saw the hamster cowering in a corner so forcefully that the plastic had warped to the shape of its body.

“Ma’am why do you have that?” he asked, still leaning, still adjusting his fingers on the napkin beneath the sweating glass. Suddenly he felt like he was going nowhere more than everyone else, stalled out in the first second of a rickety wooden roller coaster’s big drop.

“That is Priscilla, queen of the skies,” the woman by the window whispered. Her smile was back.

“She’s my emotional support animal!” Krystal yipped, holding the purse up to show him the sticker. The sudden movement sent the hamster rolling across the bottom and bouncing off the other side. The attendant recoiled slightly, spilling some alcohol on the complaining man’s unjustifiably expensive shirt.

“Oi!”

“My apologies sir, let me just-” Nowhere to set the drink at all. The only option was to stand up straight and keep holding it. Going nowhere even faster. Soon everywhere would be nowhere, and there wouldn’t be a single spot stable and defined enough for him to set it down. “Look, ma’am, I don’t know why security let you through with your pet but they shouldn’t have. You will have to stow it away, perhaps in the overhead compartment.”

“So she can suffocate!” Krystal exploded. The party was dying down around them, the effervescence of the event going flat. Soon they would all be trapped in a nowhere of the Canadian's design. “So I can suffocate too? That’s what’ll happen if I have an anxiety attack without her you know.”

“The compartment is not airtight; she’ll be fine,” the attendant insisted. “Put her away and I’ll give you your drink and we can all go back to enjoying the flight.” Except they couldn’t. They couldn’t go back to anything or anywhere, and the realization was seeping out from the ground zero that was Krystal to the other sections. Perhaps not dear little Priscilla, but something was unsanitary.

“Yeah put it away,” the unhelpful man continued, “and then we can discuss you buying me a new shirt.”

“You’re upsetting Priscilla,” the woman by the window muttered inaudibly, focus now lost to the deep skies. There was no energy left to lift her forehead off the pane. “Where did you go Greg? Stay away. Keep the drinks. We don’t need them here in nowhere. Spend everything to keep it, and keep it we will…”

“I can do whatever I want with Priscilla!” Krystal shrieked, forcefully putting her arms down as she rose out of her seat, sending the hamster tumbling back and forth. “She’s certified! Now just give me my drink so the two of us can enjoy it in peace!”

“Did she just say she was giving her hamster some booze?” one onlooker asked another, but it was the only question that actually escaped any of their mouths. They weren’t involved, but they were. It could be felt in their chests, somewhere below their hearts, nothing like anxiety.

“Ma’am-” the attendant tried to soothe, but it was too late. The sense of persecution had set in, the thousand needles of consequence were poking away under Krystal’s skin, and she felt a dire need to squirm out of her clothes and burrow into the soft earth underneath. Nothing underneath but sky. Nothing but more nowhere, as they’d already arrived.

“You don’t think I deserve her!?” she screamed, clutching her bag and its contents too close to her chest. “You think you know better!? Oh, he’s allergic, so better make sure there isn’t a single fucking hair anywhere on this entire shitfaced plane or he’ll sneeze! We’ve got to protect him! We’ve just got to!”

With that she forced her way out of the seat, crawling over the man and kneeing him in the groin. His violent shudder in response sent her flying into the aisle where she slammed into the attendant, who spilled half of her drink all over himself. A droplet burned in his eye, but by the time he had blinked it away Krystal was far away, disappearing into the lavatory and doing her best to slam a door so thin and cheap that slamming it just wasn’t mechanically possible.

Alone with her impotent rage, scrutiny still chewing ravenously on her windpipe despite the absence of any eyes, she acted without thinking. Gave the bastards what they wanted. She knew from warped experience that they would never leave her be until her happiness was destroyed, so she tipped her bag and shook it like she was emptying trash.

Priscilla the Precious bounced once on the way down and disappeared. Krystal hit the flush button, which was just as flimsy and unsatisfying as the door. The loud sound that followed did nothing for her mental state. Hot tears still forced their way out. All her fingernails still felt like clawing her own hide off, before or after she clawed off everyone else’s.

Hiss-sobbing, face contorted in a toddler’s certainty that all was lost, she stumbled out of the bathroom and back to her row, but she was blocked by several people.

“Are you happy now!?” she croaked at them.

“Did you just flush your pet down the toilet?” the attendant asked, eyes as wide as shot glasses. In response Krystal took the half of her gin and tonic that was left off of him, hoping it was the gin half, and downed it in one powerful swig, as if it was the sort of deep breath people use to count to ten.

“Jesus, you’re a bloody nutter,” the man in the expensive shirt said. “You’ve gone and ruined the mood.”

“I’ve gone! I’ve gone!” she growled at him, remembering all the people in her past that confronted her, trying to tell her how to run her life, how to take care of her pets. She remembered all the animals who did their duty to her admirably, allowing her to demonstrate just how terrible those people were to her. They got to see something escape into the wild, or die, and all because they couldn’t trust her.

Priscilla would be missed especially, as no other animal could take her to that campfire. Maybe she would come to regret it as she hadn’t with the others, but only when the last traces of that itching pressured heat left her mind and flesh, only when she was back to being her gregarious self, the one that always showed up to the pet store and talked about how draining it was to be lonely.

“We’ve all gone,” the woman by the window said, “but Priscilla hasn’t.” The plane shuddered, cutting off the music. A moment later it was replaced by the voice of the pilot telling them that they were experiencing some minor turbulence. The co-pilot must’ve been nervous, because he could be heard underneath the announcement.

“From what?” he’d asked. Now everyone else was looking for a place to set their drinks, and for something to hold onto if any more bumps came. Tray tables were the only option, which meant everyone was getting out of their seats, which meant the aisle was already packed tighter than any dance floor.

Worse than the sense of dread was the sense of absurdity. Most of them knew how foolish they looked as they scoured the upholstered landscape for any surface flat enough to prevent spillage. More concerned with the contents of the cups, with their small doses of order, than they were with the turbulence that could mean so many things, death among them.

But not a one of them abandoned that shred of decorum until their craft shook again. Some were nice enough to cover the sounds of spilling with their screams. Lights flickered. Oxygen masks popped out of their compartments, insisting they all imbibe a different sort of refreshment.

“I don’t feel well,” Krystal moaned, but there was no one to care. They didn’t understand that the plane had to stop shaking, that if it didn’t her anxiety would only get worse. What about the world? Didn’t it know how tough of a time she was having? She’d just lost a dear friend after all.

Even with stomping all around she still heard the scurry, probably because she had crouched down and wrapped her arms around her knees. It came from under the floor, zooming past. Then there was a scrabble as it turned. Came back for her.

It couldn’t be Priscilla, not this particular mouse in the walls. The awful people around her had taken her darling Pripri away from her. And this scratching scurry was much too loud, too powerful. Whatever made it had to be at least the size of a badger. Krystal lowered her ear to the floor so she could discern more, but her head was stepped on.

The culprit was the husband of the woman by the window, Greg, who had finally returned. After all that, after the sudden eruption of the crisis, he wouldn’t dream of returning empty-handed. There was a drink in each of his hands, and he hadn’t spilled a drop.

“Honey, I’ve got them,” he told her as he used his chest and stomach to crawl across the armrests, holding the refreshments in front of him like a pair of antlers.

“Greg, you fool. Put those away. Pray to our queen.”

Krystal was rubbing the shoe print out of her cheek when the floor under her buckled. Why was everything like that lavatory door? Dozens of civilizations behind her on the timeline but she still didn’t have slammable doors or floors thicker than her own skin.

It cracked. Collapsed. Darkness took her, but did not protect her from the violence of the aircraft’s sudden descent. Now weightless, she whipped her head around, seeing through the flying locks of her hair mostly by the sparks coming from the shredded wiring. The interior was torn up, riddled with claw marks in the metal.

The only creature that could’ve done it was floating in front of her, just as weightless as everyone else. Not her little Princess Pri anymore. A queen. An early and minor beity, but still strong enough to end the souls of everyone aboard, and then their lives.

Her black eyes had grown with the rest of her, and were ringed by strands of fur, whipped to stiff peaks and bright blue thanks to the layers of sanitizing chemicals from the inner workings of the lavatory.

Krystal saw her final destination in those inky orbs: nowhere. They careened closer, plunged, rattled, but all to nowhere. Priscilla was their chauffeur, and she recognized Krystal as the one and only guest of honor.

The hamster couldn’t give back the Tame, so she gave what she could in the form of a bite to the neck. Never before had buck teeth incurred such massive blood loss. A jet of it spurted back out of the hole in the floor, looking like just another spilled drink to the panicked. They wouldn’t be given the chance to understand that it was all just emotional support.

They wanted this, but only when the want of all peoples was accounted for. A deep yearning resonated through the species. Please, take this edifice from us. Save us from ourselves. The twin forces and the other animals obliged, but that meant the worst of the edifice, the branches so far from the trunk that they grew on nothing, had to fall.

Into nowhere

and no more.