Human Sister

favor and don’t challenge the story Mom told you.”
    Grandpa sighed. “You make it difficult for an old man to refuse you. Okay, it was a hole in a scanner. But I hope you’ve learned never to participate in whatever happened up there again.”
    “I have.”
    In the following weeks and months, I felt full of energy; Elio continued to come home twice each week and was, if anything, even more loving and caring than before; the winter rains subsided; and we celebrated Grandma’s ninetieth birthday with a picnic lunch on a hillside carpeted with wildflowers. But all the while, I had a sense, an odd feeling, that perhaps during a momentary blankness or a wandering of my mind on that foreboding New Year’s Eve something had changed, had darkened, had imperceptibly moved beneath my feet. It was as though the tempo and theme of my life remained the same, but there had been a key change of which I was only subliminally aware. I repeatedly asked Michael to try to detect, while brainjoined with me, the source of my disquieting feeling; but he found nothing unusual and finally suggested that perhaps I had just been frightened—as had he.

First Brother

    S he stops the Toyota brand vehicle with two canoes attached to its top in front of the gate of the security wall of the Jensen home. As she exits the vehicle she says, “Stay, Rusty. Stay. I’ll be right back.”
    She closes the vehicle’s door. The hat, backpack, and sweater lie on the backseat of the vehicle. She runs to the gate scanner. She uses both gloved hands to pull the goggles away from her eyes and down under her chin. She places her face into the hood of the scanner. The security gate, powered by solar panels on the winery roof, begins to open.
    She is back in the driver’s seat of the vehicle before the gate fully opens. The goggles are still under her chin. She drives into the yard. The dog’s head protrudes from the partially rolled-down passenger’s window. The vehicle passes a tiltrotor. The security gate begins to close. The grass exhibits suboptimal moisture. Weeds protrude in the garden. Three gardenerbots huddle in hibernation mode outside the toolshed door.
    The tires of the vehicle skid to a stop on the flagstone paving in front of the garage. The driver’s door opens. She jumps out of the vehicle. The dog leaps out of the vehicle behind her. She runs to the doghouse, peeks in, looks out over the yard, and shouts: “Lily!” She turns and runs toward the arborway leading to the house door. She calls out: “Grandma! Grandma!” The timbre of her voice exhibits signs of human stress.
    The dog sniffs around the garage and the doghouse. The door to the house is heard to open and close. Two minutes, 8 seconds pass. The dog appears to notice me walking down the stairs from the study deck above the house. At the base of the stairs, the dog sniffs my left leg and walks away.
    It is midday plus 3 hours, 52 minutes, 41 seconds.

Sara

    E lio and I spread out our picnic dinner in the shade of the old valley oak tree standing alone among rows of vines on the hill just east of our house. It was the end of May, ten days after his eighteenth birthday. Aunt Lynh had called him on his special day and said she was planning to visit my parents in Calgary for a week. She wouldn’t be visiting him in the United States, of course, so they would have to wait until summer vacation to get together.
    “Oh, I forgot to tell you.” Elio handed me our thermos of tea. “I got a call yesterday from Ma. She’s flying back home today. She said she wishes we’d taken more trips together. Weird how parents change. Except to swim meets, I never could get her to take me anywhere.”
    After eating, we were serenaded by several crickets while we sat together with our backs against the tree’s deeply fissured bark and gazed up at a cloudless twilight sky in the west. I was dreamily wondering how late our noisy little friends would stay up fiddling into the night when I heard Wilma, one of the security personnel, shouting as she ran: “Sara! Elio! Run home! Hurry!”
    Lily, whose hearing was failing, didn’t bark until she noticed Elio and me jump up.
    “What’s wrong?” Elio called out.
    “I don’t know,” Wilma answered breathlessly. She stopped in front of us, flushed and panting. “Something about androids attacking military bases and hotels on the moon. And I think your parents are on a lunar plane that’s just been hijacked. Now go! Run! Government agents