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Old People’s Folly (Part 1 of 2)

By Nora Schinnerl

Setti knew the woman for a ghost the moment she appeared. It was the pink hair that gave her away, short and spiky. Real people didn’t have hair like that. Also, you couldn’t see the scratchmarks on Setti’s kitchen table through real people’s torsos.

“The hell?” was the first thing the ghost said. Setti’s grandfather had tried to tell her ghost stories when she was a kid, a long time ago, but he’d had a habit of smoking and drinking too, so none of the stories had ever made any sense and Setti didn’t like unannounced visitors.

“Get out of my house,” Setti demanded.

“Um,” the ghost answered, staring at Setti with her eyes rimmed in thick black mascara, then held holding up a placating hand. “Okay. Just let me find—”

The ghost blinked out of existence.

---

Setti poked at the shiny silver disk with the tip of her mussel knife. There was nowhere else the ghost could have come from. She’d found the disk down at the beach while foraging for mussels, half buried in a mudslide but gleaming with a smoothness and lack of rust only pre-flood things ever retained. One more thing unearthed by the storm. It hadn’t been a bad storm, as they went, not tearing-down-houses strong. Plenty strong to bring down the pear tree behind Setti’s house, though. Setti sniffed. Shame it hadn’t been the apple tree. She held a severe dislike for apple trees.

Setti had planned on bartering away the disk at the next market fair. Always some dumb folks about, paying for useless curiosities. She poked it again for good measure, with no more reaction than the first time. Some people might even pay more for the ghost living inside it, but Setti wasn’t sure it was worth the trouble. Maybe she should toss it back onto the beach. She glared at the disk some more without reaching a decision, then turned away to grab her cane. Wasn’t like the ghost would help with planting beans or checking on her bees or getting rid of the tangle of branches and pear blossoms now blocking the back garden. She grimaced getting up, her bad knee twinging. Folk used to say you could feel a storm coming with a knee like this. The way her knee usually screamed in agony Setti figured there should have been a storm every day the last forty-five years, or maybe she simply hadn’t figured out the difference between the pain announcing bad weather and the pain telling her she’d run out of willow bark tea.

Setti hesitated in the doorway, then hobbled back to snatch up the disk and put it in her satchel. She didn’t want the ghost to get any ideas, slipping out of its home and into some of Setti’s furniture while she wasn’t looking. Who knew what ghosts might set their mind to?

Hauling up water from the well was always a pain with her bad knee. Surprising how many things you needed a painless limb for, not that Setti bothered with surprise any more. She staggered inside with a bucket of water, dumped the mussels into it so they wouldn’t spoil until evening, then left the ghost disk on a stack of firewood under the eaves before checking on her bees. Bees got angry about the strangest things, so better not risk it.

The bees were fine, still hunkering down after the storm. All the hives had survived without damage this time. Setti didn’t even bother slipping on gloves for opening the hive boxes. The bees had been furious before the storm, bad weather always got their temper up, but now they buzzed placidly, almost sluggish in the chilly breeze. When Setti returned to the house the ghost was floating in the yard.

“Figured this didn’t count as your house.” She smirked.

“Get lost, ghost,” Setti said. “I don’t have the patience for the likes of you today.”

“I’m not a ghost,” the ghost protested with indignation.

Setti rolled her eyes in disagreement and hobbled for her shed. “You’re see-through.” The only reason Setti didn’t try to walk straight through the ghost or poke her with her cane was that she’d have to go out of her way to do so and it wasn’t worth the pain just to prove her point.

A flare of anger skittered over the ghost’s expression and she crossed her arms. “For your information, I’m an upload, not a ghost.” The ghost pouted.

Setti ignored her in favor of fetching her hand axe, then dragged herself over to the fallen tree. It was a mess: broken branches, splintered trunk, white blossoms littering the ground. It had crushed a couple of gooseberry bushes, at least two of them beyond hope, but Setti figured with some luck she might save the other two. Not that luck was too keen on her, in general. The only reason the pear tree hadn’t crushed the house was because it had been planted too far away for that to be even remotely possible. Setti glared at the tree for a bit, just for satisfaction. The ghost hovered next to her, somewhat sulky at being dismissed so easily.

“Hey, you. Old lady. Could you at least tell me where I am and what fucking year it is? My display is glitching.”

The old lady’s mouth twitched with annoyance, partly at the ghost, and partly at the tree. She chopped at some of the branches more out of resentment than any hope of stripping them off the trunk. “Samsonville, 313 AF.” Why was she even talking to the ghost? Might as well invite her in and offer her a cup of tea with sugar cubes.

“Shit. That helps exactly not at all.” The ghost hunched her shoulders as if the chill wind cut through even her insubstantial form.

A tangle of dead gooseberry branches tore at Setti’s skirt as she tried to step closer to the trunk, ripping the hem. Her cane slipped off dead leaves and she flinched with the sudden weight on her bad knee.

“Don’t you, I don’t know, wanna get help with this?” The ghost peeking over Setti’s shoulder looked ridiculously out of place in her make-up and pink hair.

With a thump the old woman buried her axe in the trunk and rounded on the ghost. Who’d asked her anyway? She’d just shown up out of her shiny disk and started pestering Setti without prompting. Setti didn’t need a ghost. Setti didn’t need anyone’s help, anyone’s pity. “You want to lend a hand?”

“Kind of handicapped here.” The pink-haired woman waved her fingers through a tangle of leaves, then shrugged.

Of course it would only be Setti who’d gotten caught in the gooseberry thorns. The ghost floated a few steps backward to take in the hill Setti’s house sat perched upon. The neat rows of onions, leeks and kale in her vegetable garden, the gnarly fruit and sprawling nut trees, the scraggly oaks in the distance. You couldn’t see the village from here, which suited Setti just fine. Nothing but a trail of smoke from the bakery chimney reminded her of its existence.

“What about him?” Setti followed the ghost’s pointing finger toward a lonely figure a couple of hundred meters away, right on the edge of where the hill dropped abruptly into a ragged cliffside. Romantic view of the Fingers, the wreckage of a pre-flood city shedding rust and broken glass into the sea that had swallowed it.

Setti squinted. “Just some loner kid who hides from the village folks. Sits there all the time, whining and feeling sorry for himself.”

The ghost gave her a pointed look as if to say they weren’t so different, Setti and the boy. The old woman scoffed in contempt. She felt plenty sorry for herself, but at least she succeeded in moaning and working at the same time.

“Not like people would just pop in to help me,” Setti grumbled, turning back to the tree, “out of the goodness of their hearts. What kind of world do you think we’re living in?”

The ghost didn’t reply, just stared at Setti with the strangest expression on her face, somewhere between hurt, anger and defiance, then vanished in the blink of an eye.

---

“I’m Jasmin,” the ghost introduced herself.

Setti kept methodically pulling off the mussels’ beards to prepare them for eating, one by one, and ignored her. She shouldn’t have put the disk back inside the house, but she still thought it would fetch a decent price and leaving it unattended seemed like an invitation for trouble. It wasn’t like the ghost would stay. Setti was very good at making people not want to stay.

“What’s your name?” The ghost floated in front of Setti, turning in excited little circles while she scrutinized the kitchen furniture, the mussels, even the garlic drying in the rafters, with apparent interest.

“Setti. Go away.”

The ghost, Jasmin, shrugged. “Don’t worry, I won’t be around too long. My battery is at point three percent. Is this your house? What are you doing with the shellfish?”

“I should throw you back into the ocean to shut you up sooner,” Setti replied. Cleaning the heap of mussels was starting to hurt her fingers and her knee still throbbed from her effort with the axe that afternoon. She was in an even sourer mood than usual.

Jasmin shrugged again. “That would probably do the trick. Or not. This fucking handheld is pretty sturdy. Maybe I’ll see some fish.”

Setti rolled her eyes at the flip answer. For a blessed minute the ghost ran out of things to ask and both women listened to the meditative crackle of flames in Setti’s stove. The silence didn’t last too long.

“You said it was 313 AF. What’s AF. stand for?”

No idea how to keep their mouths shut, these young people. Not even if they were ghosts.

“After the flood.” Setti shifted around in her chair, trying to find a comfortable position for her knee. Futile, as always.

“Oh. My. God. Fuck.” The ghost dropped her butt onto the table, something Setti would have protested sharply had Jasmin been even remotely corporeal. “No wonder the date is glitching. My time, we didn’t even get rain in most places any more, never mind a flood. And the sunken ruins out there…” Jasmin buried her face in her hands. “Damn it. I was hoping… What did you say? Three hundred years at least. Not even my baby niece is still alive. Not even my baby niece’s baby niece.”

Setti, unimpressed, chucked a cleaned mussel into the pot in front of her. “So go haunt somewhere else.”

Utterly ignoring her words, Jasmin flopped down to stretch all across the kitchen table. “I hope this was fucking worth it.”

Setti rolled her eyes at the drama. She wasn’t about to give in and ask. Then again, it might be that asking was all it took to get rid of the ghost. Most living people would prattle endlessly about their problems given half a chance, so why should the dead be any different? “Was what worth it?” the old woman relented.

Jasmin gesticulated with one insubstantial hand to indicate her equally insubstantial body. “This. Going to prison. Being a fucking upload. They didn’t even ask our consent, you know, not even as a formality. The world was going to hell. First the cells got crowded, then the food ran low. Then… My brother woke me a couple of times, said they’d sued the prison company, sued the government, sued everyone. As if I had any illusion that’d help, with the world ending!”

“World didn’t end,” Setti interjected. Samsonville didn’t have any prisoners. Nor did any of the other communities around. Who had food enough to feed useless mouths? Better kick them out, send them to the Wastes or whatever else the bailiff did with them. Setti didn’t stick her nose in things she couldn’t change. Rumor had it there was a prison over in Treize, but not many folks ever traveled that far. Setti sure didn’t, not with her walking at the speed of a slug.

“I guess not,” Jasmin admitted. She sat up again. Her face took on a bit of color, clashing with the pink hair, but it set her eyes ablaze. “We had a shitty government. People used to vote for the shitty government, before they started simply faking elections. Hell, some people still voted for the shitty government. World went to shit. Ice caps melting, storms without any rain, droughts lasting for years, and nobody did anything but moan how it was too late anyway. People just kept doing what they had always done. They didn’t care enough to give up their comfort, their plane tickets and Argentinian steak and designer lipstick. And then when they started starving they acted as if they’d known it all along.”

Setti’s eyebrows rose at the ghost’s rant, not even trying to pick up on all the unfamiliar vocabulary. “Your words don’t match,” she said instead. Jasmin frowned, caught in the middle of drawing a breath she didn’t need. “The words and the shapes your lips make,” Setti clarified. “They don’t match.”

The ghost let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Translation software.” She shrugged. “Pretty low-standard edition as well. Hell, no idea what part of the world I’m even in right now. Also, fucking three hundred years!” She scratched her spiky pink hair. “I don’t know how different language sounds after three hundred years. Maybe we’re speaking the same one and don’t even notice.”

Setti grunted noncommittally. The ghost’s explanation made no sense at all, but she’d finally finished cleaning her mussels and got up to put them on the stove. Her knee felt hot and swollen. “What did you go to prison for, anyway?”

Jasmin raised her chin in stubborn pride. “Arson. Protesting just went on and on and got us nowhere so I torched the High Court of Justice.” She turned the last word into a mockery.

“Did it burn?”

A gleam in the ghost’s eye, almost like the glint of tears. “Like cinder.”

---

“Hey, that boy’s still out there!” Despite Setti’s efforts, talking had done exactly nothing to banish the ghost. At least she’d ceased occupying the kitchen table.

“And you’re still in here,” the old woman grumbled in reply. She squinted at the needle and thread in her calloused hands. Dusk had started to conquer the room and the meager fire in the kitchen stove threw more shadows than light. The smell of mussel soup clung to the air.

“How old is he? Won’t somebody be out looking for him?”

Nosy, for a ghost who’d complained about an hour ago that everybody she’d ever known was long dead. What did she care? Setti sipped her willow bark tea, lips curling at the familiar, bitter taste.

“Fourteen, fifteen? Told you, he’s here all the time. Doesn’t get along with his folks.” In Setti’s opinion it didn’t take much not to get along with the village folk.

The ghost kept hovering at the window, then cocked her head. “Is he… is my micro glitching or is he singing?”

Setti fiddled with her needle, trying to fix the hem she’d torn earlier even though her fingers trembled and the stitches got ugly. It wasn’t good to be idle. Idle left too much time to dwell on how much everything hurt. “He thinks I can’t hear him from here.” He’d have a nice voice too, rich and resonating, if he’d use it for anything else but dirges. The ghost shut up for a moment, listening to the mournful snippets of song drifting on the wind.

“Why doesn’t he get along with his people?” she finally asked. Setti noticed how Jasmin had clearly not felt the need to ask why she didn’t get along with the village people.

“They want him to marry.” Setti grimaced into her tea. Wasn’t like she couldn’t understand him; she hadn’t exactly been the marrying type either. Never mind that no one in their right mind would have ever married a cripple.

“Let me guess,” the ghost replied, her voice suddenly turning a deceptive kind of calm. “He doesn’t want to marry?”

Setti wondered if Jasmin would burn down the house if she didn’t like her answer. That would at least save her from bothering with the pear tree.

“From what I heard, it’s not the marrying so much as the bride. He’d rather marry a lad from the Merieux farm than run off with a pretty village girl.” Look at this old lady, spreading gossip when she resented every painful trip down to the mill to swap honey for flour, the only place she ever came into contact with gossip.

“Seriously?” Jasmin’s words came out in a hiss. A hardness snuck onto her face, incongruous with her soft features and bright hair, and for a moment Setti had no trouble picturing her as an arsonist. “This is the fucking future I fought for? I got manhandled and locked up without trial and put in a fucking handheld for this? For a world that forces children to marry and doesn’t give a shit about what they want? And you don’t even care? I should have given up like the rest of the world and enjoyed my steak! I mean, we had a fake government and we fucked up the world, but at least you could be with whomever you wanted to be, didn’t matter if it was a man or a woman or a fucking video game character.”

Setti scoffed at the ghost’s ideals. Young people’s folly, ideals. Setti had grown out of them. The old woman turned back to her sewing and glared at her trembling hands. “Used to be different. Used to be you could marry whoever you wanted as long as you brought something to the village.” Setti was rather sure there was still some law about it, somewhere. Not that anyone cared. “Times are bad.”

Jasmin’s face morphed from furious into even more furious. Setti shrugged.

“They don’t get children any more. None of the village folk. Or if they do, they’re born dead or too early or wrong and then they die.” Setti carefully tied off her thread. The ghost blinked, her scowl lessening marginally. “Something broke in the Fingers. Something spilled. Fish tasted odd for a while. Been like this for years now and folk are getting desperate. They think we’re dying out. There’s only one family left with a child under seven and she’s got the shakes.”

Jasmin crossed her arms, outrage still etched into her frown. Floating closer, she took a suspicious peek into the pot of soup. “You shouldn’t eat these, then. Mussels absorb pollution. Must be shit for your health.”

Setti twisted her mouth in contempt. The brief flare of respect she’d held for the ghost’s conviction vanished. As if she wouldn’t know. As if anyone living off the sea wouldn’t know. “Bright little pre-flood ghost. With your pre-flood ideals and your pre-flood magic.” Setti didn’t know much about pre-flood times, but she’d heard the stories, seen the ruins. She didn’t think the ghost had ever had to scavenge for a meal, or eat seaweed and shellfish because there was nothing else edible left in early spring. “Care to tell me what else we should eat instead? Mussels might make you sick, but they’re still better than starving.”

That shut the ghost up. Her eyes flickered over Setti’s kitchen furniture again, the homemade chairs and dried herbs and threadbare rug. Setti wasn’t too badly off, having only herself to look after, and the honey was good for barter. But it was hard to grow anything in this soil, even harder when a storm took half the harvest or the rot came in like last year or half the livestock died in agony from a plague nobody had ever heard of.

Rain started to fall in a quiet drizzle while the ghost sat back onto the kitchen table, calmer, but with her eyes no less ablaze. “Then how come one kid marrying against his will makes any difference?”

Setti swallowed the rest of her tea. It had gone cold, making it taste even worse. “Don’t blame me for the village folk. Their doing, not mine.”

“I don’t see you doing anything against it,” the ghost muttered as she hovered back to the window. “Would you at least get the kid out of the fucking rain? And do me a favor: put my handheld into the sun tomorrow, I’m out of juice.”

A tremble ran through Jasmin’s projection, then another and another until the ghost conveniently vanished. Setti grunted in satisfaction.

---

“Ey, boy! My ghost says I should get you out of the rain.” Pain made Setti’s voice even more irritable than usual. Her cane kept slipping off the wet grass, and the drizzle had turned into a downpour, soaking her shawl. Shouldn’t have listened to a ghost. To be honest, she didn’t really know why she had. Some stupid notion of proving her wrong, of proving how futile it was to offer help and expect anything to change for the better.

The boy, Kite, startled and spun around so fast he almost lost his footing on the slippery ground. That would have been a statement, him falling off the cliffside because an old woman had gotten it into her head to try and lend a hand. Kite had smooth dark skin and huge black eyes just made for daydreaming. No wonder both girls and boys down at the village mooned after him. Setti’s lips twisted at the ugly bruise marring his left cheek.

“I’m… I was… I’m sorry,” Kite stammered in the same silky voice she recognized from his singing, but quietly, barely audible over the downpour as if he wanted to keep it a secret. “I should leave…”

“Don’t be stupid.” Setti nodded in the direction of her house, then turned around without waiting for him to follow. She wanted her soup and another mug of tea and dry clothes. “You’re going to eat my food and sleep in a place where there isn’t another bruise waiting for you. Least you can do is stay until the morning and cut up the pear tree for me.”

(… Continued in Part 2)

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Host Commentary

By Tina Connolly

And we’re back! Again, that was part one of Old People’s Folly, by Nora Schinnerl, narrated by Tatiana Grey.

About this story, Nora Schinnerl says: This story sparked from wondering how people from very different eras would think of each other’s appearance, their ways of life, and what they’d have to talk about. What concepts and ideals they’d share, and which they’d have to explain. I was also recovering from illness while writing it down, which is where much of Setti’s grumpiness comes from.

And about this story, I say….that I’ll wait till next time to comment on it, so as not to accidentally give you any spoilers! Come back next week for part two and we’ll read you the rest of this lovely story.

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. Don’t change it. Don’t sell it. Please, go forth and share it.

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Our opening and closing music is by daikaiju at daikaiju.org.

And our closing quotation this week is from TJ Klune in The House in the Cerulean Sea, who said, A home isn’t always the house we live in. It’s also the people we choose to surround ourselves with.

Thanks for listening! And have fun.