“I hope I get a really cool trick, like Kerry’s,” Mildred said. “And I’d like to be taller and prettier, and I wouldn’t mind having exotic eyes, but...”

 

“But you don’t want to look like Kerry,” I said, and she nodded.

Twisted Throwback

part 1 of 25

by Trismegistus Shandy

This story is set, with Morpheus' permission, in his Twisted universe. It's set about a generation later than "Twisted", "Twisted Pink", etc. I've tried to write it as a stand-alone, so you need not have read Morpheus's Twisted stories first, or recently, to enjoy it; some of his characters make cameo appearances, but I don't think it has significant spoilers for the stories they come from.

A somewhat different version was was serialized on the morpheuscabinet2 mailing list in January-April 2014.

Thanks to Morpheus, Maggie Finson, D.A.W., Johanna, and JM for beta-reading earlier drafts. Thanks to Grover, Paps Paw, and others who commented on the earlier serial.

Monday is proverbially the most annoying day of the week, but the Monday of this particular week was so great that it gave me unreasonable expectations for the rest of it. I got back two graded tests from the previous Friday, A- in Physics and B+ in Modern History, both of which were better than I’d feared. During the lunch break, I asked Sarah Kendall if she’d go out with me, and she said yes; we made a date for that Friday. And when I got home and found my favorite uncle sitting on the porch swing, I just knew it was going to be a great week. But past performance doesn’t guarantee future results.

“Uncle Jack!” I cried, and we hugged. “Where have you been? Is that your ride?” I asked, pointing to the beat-up old hovercar in the driveway. It had been expensive once, one of the earliest models of hovercar back when they were new and exciting, but the chassis was dented in several places and had rust spots where the paint had peeled off, so it probably wasn’t worth much as an antique.

“Yeah, Cyrus, that’s mine. I bought it in Oakland just after I got back to the States —”

“Where from?” I hadn’t seen Uncle Jack since last Christmas, and here it was early November; but that hadn’t worried or surprised me.

“I sold my old groundcar last January and bought a ticket for Dhaka,” he said, “and I backpacked through Bangladesh, India, Bhutan, and Tibet. Then I got a hankering to see some familiar faces, and I flew back to the States, bought that thing, and drove over to see our kinfolks in Spiral.”

“When was that? We went out there for Kerry’s wedding in June, that’s the last time I saw them.”

“Not quite a month ago. I stayed with Kerry and Jeff for a few days, and with Paul and Lynn for a few days more, and saw everybody else at least once, and then started meandering across the country; I stayed in Austin for several days, visiting with Tim, and I had some good long talks with Mindy too.”

“Oh,” I said carefully. “That’s good. How are they doing?” I hadn’t seen Aunt Mindy since before she and Uncle Jack got divorced, and hadn’t seen my cousin Tim since he was a baby.

“They’re doing great,” he said. “Tim’s doing really well in school, and he’s playing soccer, and he’s started collecting bugs. He showed me his collection, and how he preserves and mounts them; I promised I’d bring him some specimens next time. And Mindy, well — we’re still friends, don’t worry about that. She was just tired of traveling, and I wasn’t.”

And he wouldn’t ever be. Uncle Jack’s Twist made him a traveler; he couldn’t stand to stay in one place for more than a few days, and he had a constant hankering to see places he’d never seen before. And he has a couple of neat tricks that make him good at traveling; he has a magnetic sense of direction, like a migrating bird, and he learns new languages really fast. He already spoke twenty languages by the time I was old enough to know what his trick meant, and I expect it was nearer forty by the time of this story; last time I saw him, a few months ago, he told me he was learning his hundredth language. He’s a freelance translator, so he can work from anywhere in the world with a net connection.

“And she even agreed to send Tim out here for Thanksgiving, since he hasn’t seen his kinfolks here in so long. I’ll be picking him up at the Atlanta airport that Tuesday, and taking him back on Sunday.”

“Great!” I said, and then what he’d said sank in: “You’re staying here until Thanksgiving? Really?” That would be difficult for him, staying in one place for more than three weeks, but he cared about family almost as much as about traveling.

“Not every night,” he said. “I’ll take a few jaunts to Atlanta, Chattanooga, maybe Huntsville — probably in the middle of the week when y’all are busy with school and work, so I can be here on the weekends. And of course I’ll go see Wendy in Milledgeville.”

Just about then the middle school bus pulled up and my sister got off. I realized we’d been standing there on the porch for too long, and I was forgetting my responsibilities as host.

“Come on in,” I said, getting out my key. “Can I get you something to drink?”

Mildred came in while I was pouring Uncle Jack a glass of sweet tea, and we both neglected our homework until Mom and Dad got home, listening to Uncle Jack’s stories about east Asia and the latest news from our cousins in Spiral. Of course, we’d seen their social media posts, but it wasn’t the same.

Dad got home from work a few minutes before Mom. “John!” he exclaimed (he’s the only person who calls Uncle Jack “John”), “it is as always a pleasure to see you. I could only wish that you had given us a more precise idea of when you would arrive, that we might be better prepared to offer you our best hospitality.”

Dad talks like that; he can’t help it, it’s part of his Twist to always be formal and polite. He’s a little more relaxed when he’s alone with me — or, I gather, with Mom or Mildred or other people he cares about, but even one on one he’s more formal than most people.

“Sorry, Oswald,” he said. “But don’t fret about it; you know me. I can crash on the sofa tonight if you don’t have the guest bedroom all ready yet, and I’ll eat whatever you put in front of me.”

“The guest bedroom is indeed ready,” Dad said, “and, though I am aware that you would eat the humble fare we had planned for our own evening’s repast without complaint, I am determined to offer you something better on this, your first night at home in many months.”

He called Mom and told her that Uncle Jack had arrived — apparently they’d been expecting him sometime before Thanksgiving, but had no idea, of course, when he’d get here — and proposed that we all go out to eat at Hanging Gardens, the best restaurant in town; Mom agreed, and Dad hung up and told me and Mildred to go get ready. We hadn’t changed out of our school clothes, so we didn’t have much to do, but we went. We had an idea that he wanted to talk to Uncle Jack by himself for a few minutes.

“I declare,” Uncle Jack said as we stood near the door of the restaurant waiting to be seated, “you kids have both grown six inches since I saw you last. Are you sure you haven’t gone through your Twist?”

He’d spared us that kind of talk when it was just him and us, but he seemed to know that it would gratify Mom and Dad. They smiled proudly as though the inches we’d grown in the last year were their personal accomplishment.

“I’m probably not going to,” I said. Mom wasn’t Twisted, so there’d been a fifty-fifty chance to begin with that I wouldn’t be either. And now that I was seventeen, the odds had dropped way down — I forget exactly what percentage, but well over half of all Twisted go through their Twist before they’re seventeen. Mildred still had a pretty good chance, though. Or a pretty bad chance; it could go either way, and our family had been really lucky overall, but that was no guarantee that she — or I — wouldn’t be one of the unlucky ones, with a disfiguring inhuman-looking Twist or a compulsion to do horrible things.

“I hope I get a really cool trick, like Kerry’s,” Mildred said. “And I’d like to be taller and prettier, and I wouldn’t mind having exotic eyes, but...”

“But you don’t want to look like Kerry,” I said, and she nodded.

“We’ll be here for you,” Mom reassured us, as she did at least once a month. “Either way, whatever happens, we’ll always be here for you.”

Dad nodded. “Your mother and I are fully agreed. Whether you Twist or not, and whatever sort of Twist you may go through, we will always support you.”

“Me too,” Uncle Jack said. “I can’t promise to be here when it happens, but I’ll try to come for a visit soon afterward, and help however I can.”

I knew they would. The worst Twist Mildred or I might go through could hardly be worse than Aunt Wendy’s, or Dad’s cousin Ryan’s. And Grandpa and Grandma had taken care of Aunt Wendy at home as long as they could, and after they’d had to put her in the hospital in Milledgeville, they and Dad and the rest of us had made sure that she didn’t go a week without getting a visit from somebody in the family. Somebody had gone to see Ryan every weekend the whole ten years he was in prison, too, and he’d always been welcome at Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings since he got out; he chose to live in Atlanta, though, where he could disappear into a crowd of people who didn’t know what he’d done or that he was Twisted. Back then, I still didn’t know exactly what Ryan’s Twist was or what he was sent to prison for; Dad’s generation kept quiet about that around us kids. But whatever it was, they’d worked out a way for him to keep his compulsions under control and stay straight.

The waitress led us to our table about then, and when we were seated, conversation turned to less serious subjects. “I meant to compliment you on your goatee earlier, Cyrus,” Uncle Jack said, “but you were so full of questions I didn’t have a chance. When did you start growing it?”

“Over the summer vacation,” I said. “I stopped shaving right after Kerry’s wedding, to see how much it would grow before school started. And there wasn’t much to write home about on the cheeks, but the chin was okay, so I shaved it down to just a goatee right before school started.”

“It looks great,” he said. “I hope it looks at least as good after your Twist.”

I would settle for still looking human enough to live in Trittsville. Of course, if I had to move to Spiral, I already knew plenty of people there, my cousins and my Dad’s cousins whose Twists made it hard for them to live anywhere else. But I’d much rather stay here.

There’ve been Harpers in Trittsville since about fifteen minutes after the Trail of Tears. That’s what Uncle Greg always says; Grandpa says there was over a year between the Cherokees being kicked out of this part of Georgia and our ancestors moving in, and it was several years later before Trittsville was officially incorporated, but “fifteen minutes after” sounds better. Harpers keep popping up in history wherever you look, as mayor, or city councilman, or pastor of a church, or sheriff, or owners of important businesses. We’ve even sent a couple of Harpers to the state legislature, though the one Harper who ran for Congress a hundred years ago didn’t get past the primary. The year of the Antarctic Flu epidemic, my great-great-grandfather was sheriff, one of his cousins was pastor of the First Baptist Church, and his brother was proprietor of the best furniture store in three counties.

My great-grandparents were nothing so important just then, the year they both caught the Antarctic Flu on their honeymoon in New Orleans and brought it home to Trittsville. My great-grandfather was working in his uncle’s furniture store and my great-grandmother was teaching elementary school when they got married. They barely survived the Flu, while their parents and several of their siblings and cousins died of it. But though nobody knew it at the time, their son Darren, born just over nine months later, had the distinction of being the first Twisted baby born in Georgia. Nobody figured that out until years later, after Darren and a lot of other kids born that year had gone through their Twists.

By the time my Great-Uncle Darren (who died when I was eight) went through his Twist and became a boy genius detective, solving two murders and exposing several scammers before he was out of high school, my great-grandfather was running the furniture store, his brother Aaron was a respected lawyer, and their cousin Silas was a judge. That helps explain why Uncle Darren, and his younger brothers and sister and cousins who went through their Twists in the next few years, didn’t suffer as much fear and hatred as the young Twisted in a lot of other places. It helped, too, that all of them still looked like normal humans, though better-looking and healthier than average, and none of the personality changes they got from their Twists were dangerous or particularly scandalous, unlike some unfortunate kids in other places. And Great-Uncle Greg’s healing trick, and the way he healed the mayor’s grandson right after he broke his spine in a soccer accident, didn’t hurt the family’s popularity any.

About the time Dad and the cousins of his generation were going through their Twists, some Twisted from other places heard about Trittsville, and how respected our family was, and thought this might be a good place to live. Our family tried to make them welcome. But they — at least, the ones who didn’t look human — soon found out that people in Trittsville weren’t quite as open-minded as they looked. They didn’t mind the Harpers, but we were their Twisted. We’d always been around, and if some of us had some odd tricks, well, they pretty much trusted us not to misuse them. Most of the less human-looking Twisted who’d moved in soon moved away again, some to Spiral, which was fairly new then, and some to big cities.

And when some of Dad’s cousins went through major physical Twists and couldn’t pass for normal humans, or had such extreme compulsions that they couldn’t function without accommodation from highly understanding neighbors, they moved to Spiral too, even though it was thousands of miles from the rest of the family. A few cousins of my generation had done the same. My cousin Kerry, Uncle Greg’s granddaughter, was the latest; she’d gotten green photosynthetic skin from her Twist, and she left town right after she graduated from high school. She lived with her uncle Paul and aunt Lynn for a year, until she satisfied the residency requirements and was able to attend Spiral State College at the local tuition rate. That’s where she met Jeff, whom she’d just married a few months before Uncle Jack arrived to stay with us until Thanksgiving.

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