Let me go (Honey oh) - Catherine Rockwood
Erin wanted to go down to the dog park again but Ann, Erin’s mother, couldn’t face it today. Anything else – any amount of tattoo-candy. A rare and expensive longlink message to Erin’s dad, complete with biotailoring for an overnighted goodnight hug. Real popcorn.
“It’s almost five o’clock,” Erin said, hopefully.
“I’m sorry sweetheart,” Ann said. “Wait just a second.” With a silent apology and a flick of her fingers she diverted routine comms to the twelve-hour waiting pool. Another early morning tomorrow then. Didn’t any of the dog park people work? She supposed not very many. Still half-blind, her vision spotty with the effects of the sudden shutoff, she turned to meet her daughter’s intent gaze.
“You were saying,” said Ann. “Five o’clock.”
The kinetic scribbles that Erin and her best friend Naomi had enabled only for each other floated in Erin’s hair. Small purple hearts, and running purple stick-dogs, and lightning-bolts made out of bubbles bobbed and re-submerged in her short dark curls.
“Honey’s puppies are coming to the park today,” said Erin, doing her best This-Is-Important grin. “For the first time! Sarabeth told me at lunch. Mom, please?”
“Erin,” said Ann, slowly. “We went two days ago,”
“I know,” said Erin.
“…and you cried until bedtime.”
“I won’t! I just want to see them, Mom. It’s Honey. She’s my favorite, she’s so nice, and Sarabeth said she heard--"
“Yes?” said Ann, keeping her face still, as Erin’s voice trailed off.
“Nothing,” said Erin. “Okay. She said…maybe some of the puppies haven’t chosen anyone yet.”
“Oh Erin,” Ann said, before she could stop herself, thinking: truly what the fuck, Sarabeth? But Sarabeth didn’t have a labradoodle either. She was just excited.
Parenting Erin was the only thing Ann knew that replicated, sometimes, the precise sensation of descending the Vortexel Slide at Eschapark. Except, with the Slide, one could afterward say no to it for good. Not so when the very heart of your own child was once more doing its best to come out of her chest, and you had choices to make about whether to bear it company or try (impossible) to lever it back inside.
They were on the bike, on their way to the park, when Marshall’s asynchronous message came through, his weary face unrolling onto the windbreak. Hello to my favorites. Just getting off shift here and thinking of you both. Not much longer now, okay? Love you. A click; the open eye of the recording function, blinking at them from where he’d been.
“Say hi, sweetheart,” said Ann, and Erin, in a rush from the back seat, said “Dad! Puppies!”
“We’re just dropping in,” Ann said, hurriedly. “Just watching. A few kids from school are on their way too. I’ll catch you up,” she said, blowing a kiss to the screen. The link disappeared.
They weren’t too late to get seats, but of course the best had been taken by season holders, some of whom hadn’t deigned to show up. Still, once Ann had located an available Standard Access unreserved pod and docked the bike there; once Erin had, in her eagerness, presented their neighborhood identification the wrong way round twice and nearly gotten them locked out; past all that, as they settled into the resilient bench with their packed snacks, Ann was able to look up and away, across the green expanse of the dog park, and admit for a moment that the Owners had done this very well. You felt it was all for you, sitting there: the wide, long sweep of the municipal-private lawn, with a haze of irrigation-water hovering over it like real evening humidity, and the seamless image of a geometric hedge-maze camouflaging the doors of the other pods across the way. You breathed it in and heard birdsong, of one kind or another.
Erin, sitting forward on the bench, sighed involuntarily. She was too excited to snuggle, her compact form tense with the act of hungry looking. A constellation of icons flashed above her cupped right hand as friends announced themselves present and podded. And then – the icons rustled, exclaimed – music. Ann always forgot it was coming. Followed by the dogs, cream-colored and dapple, sweeping in through the leftward gate in a soft and living wave. There never had been anything exactly like it and, in the rest of the world, less and less now.
Later, when Marshall asked what had happened, Ann would say her attention had wandered. But the truth was, when Honey approached with her ornamental collar gleaming, its pod-access light enabled, Ann had been able to tell that Erin was preparing to leap through the suddenly-open iris of the interior door, all the way into the park. What else would she be doing, her hopeful child? Let her go, for a minute, before she was caught. Let her race with the dogs, out there in that rich heaven.
Originally published by Antipodean SF, # 279, December 2021
Catherine Rockwood (she/they) lives fairly close to Boston. She reads and edits for Reckoning Magazine, and reviews books for Strange Horizons. Two chapbooks of their poetry are available from The Ethel Zine Press. If interested, you can find more work at www.catherinerockwood.com/about
