A Locket For Harper

The razor clattered to the floor, blood flew off of it as the kinetic energy from the fall quickly rushed into the liquid, sending off a shower of crimson droplets. Ralph looked at himself a moment longer in the bathroom mirror, regret suddenly coursing through him. Imbued with a voracious desire for life, he reached down toward the razor, intending to cut his shirt into a tourniquet of sorts.

Blood loss made him feel cold even as the warm blood trickled down his shredded forearms, and he stumbled forward, losing a battle for consciousness. A manic rhyme screamed through his head, like a carousel that decided to take every child on it hostage. What’s done-bun can’t be undone, what’s done-bun can’t be undone.

He slurred his way through a curse as his oxygen deprived mind struggled to maintain rational thought. What’s done-bun can’t be undone, what’s done-bun can’tbeundone. The rhyme picked up speed, beginning to blot every other thought out of his mind. Was he really dying? The thought should have concerned him more; but he barely noticed it past the clamor of the insane cacophony in his mind. What’sdonebuncan’tbeundonewhat’sdonebuncantbeundone. He screamed at himself between his ears, begging himself to wake up.

Too late, too little, he heard sirens in the distance. His vita-reader must have tripped as his O2 plummeted. “What’s done-bun can’t be undone,” he croaked, as first saturation, and then light altogether faded from his view.

•••

Detective Harper walked slowly through the scene, his weight making the half-rotted boards of the apartment softly cry out in protest. Sam, his trainee trailed behind him like an asinine puppy, loyal to a fault. That was how he would describe Sam, a slow-witted puppy. One who really intended to do the right thing, but somehow always ended up shitting on the rug that would inevitably stain.

If asked to describe himself in the same metaphor, John Shirley Harper would have described himself as almost the opposite. Something tall, somehow regal in its brutality, a Doberman, or something like that. He supposed he didn’t really know his dog breeds very well, seeing that most purebreds had been eaten during the Calamity.

He almost chuckled thinking of all those long dead rich bastards locked in their houses, looking at their dogs like they would at the soup of the day at their favorite restaurant. He wondered how many of those dogs looked at their owners in much of the same way.

“Detective, I’ve finished my report,” Sam’s voice, a tragic reedy mess of one recovering from puberty, shot through his head, slicing through his ponderings at once.

“And what does it say, Samuel?” Harper inquired smoothly, turning to his assistant. He honestly couldn’t give less of a damn, but he knew it would make Sam feel good.

Like clockwork, Sam’s face broke into a smile, just happy to be acknowledged by his superior. “The victim, a Ralph Anderson Adams, took his own life by exsanguinating himself. He was thirty-three years of age at the time of his death, and has no known family, probably due to him asking to be reset in the records at the age of eighteen.”

Harper took a slight mental note of this fact, purely out of habit. Asking to reset yourself in the records was the closest you could come to changing your name in this day and age, it was usually done by those whose family hated them, or those who hated their family. However, it could also be done to make it harder to trace a crime back to yourself. “What about the suicide weapon?” Harper asked, disinterestedly.

“Um… well, none of the officers have found anything, sir,” Sam said, almost apologetically.

This piqued his interest slightly. He had had suicides, hell even homicides before that hadn’t had murder weapons, but they were at least more interesting than your typical death. “Nothing at all?” Harper followed up his question with another one, “Have you seen anything?”

Sam shook his head emphatically, then stopped, looking quizzically at nothing in particular. After a moment he said, “Well, I found this in its own small pool of blood,” holding up a clear plastic bag that contained a small heart shaped locket. Harper eyed the locket, drawn to a memory that felt to be from a million years back. His mother had given him a locket that looked exactly the same. Well, had tried to give it to him. That was right before-

“Detective?” Sam asked, his concerned voice once again shattering Harper’s train of thought. Damn, that’s twice today he’s caught me daydreaming, Harper thought, then said aloud, “I was assessing the locket, it doesn’t look like it has any sharp edges, so I don’t suppose that it could count as a weapon, don’t you think?” The words came out harsher than he had intended, and Sam flinched like he had just been struck.

“No, sir, sorry, sir,” Sam apologized, “I’ll leave the report unsigned until we discover a proper weapon.”

“Or until we can deem that the weapon has been relocated past the incident scene or destroyed,” Harper finished for him, and Sam nodded desperately, trying to save face with his boss. Harper sighed and then gestured for the bag; Sam handed it over.

He wasn’t stupid, Harper reflected, Sam had found something that most other officers would have looked straight past, even if it didn’t amount to anything. “Good eye,” Harper told Sam, then patted his shoulder and walked past him, toward the door.

“Thank you, sir!” Sam beamed, and stood up a bit straighter. “Are you leaving?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, it seems like a pretty open and shut case, I’m confident you’ll be able to handle it. Just make sure not to write anything off as unimportant until you’ve fully checked it out.” Harper replied, not bothering to look back. He felt tired and dissatisfied.

In his car, he sat for a moment while he lit himself a cigar. He hadn’t been a smoker five years ago, hadn’t even considered it, but life had a way of surprising you. As he started his car, his eye caught on the plastic bag that sat where he had carelessly tossed it in the passenger’s seat. More accurately, his eye caught on what was in the bag. He looked around quickly, and made sure no one was watching him, then reached over and grabbed it. He opened the bag, and took out the locket, tossing the bag to the floorboards on his right. It floated slowly down, and landed with a soft crinkle.

He turned the pendant around in his hand and looked at the delicate inlay engraved along the metal. He thought it probably wasn’t real gold, no lowlife like Ralph would be able to afford a trinket made out of gold; but still, it felt heavy for its size. He thumbed the release on the side, and as it clicked open, he stared, dumbfounded at the picture the locket had revealed to him. It was a picture of himself as a kid. Memory swept over him along with a strange feeling of unreality. Slowly, fingers feeling numb, he closed then hung the locket on the rearview mirror and started his car. I need to go home; I’ve been working way too much. There’s no way that’s actually me, I’m just over tired.

As he rationalized with himself, he pulled out into the sparse traffic of town. Most people couldn’t afford cars anymore, and more than a few hungry tired faces eyed him as he drove past. He hardly even noticed. His mind was preoccupied.

Nobody could really remember what the Calamity really was anymore. It had happened when almost everyone’s grandparents were kids, and for John, it had happened to his great grandparents. All he knew was that it was really bad, and his grandpa had said that it was “green” whatever that meant.

John’s dad had told him that Grandpa Brady was old and senile and should have died a long time ago, but John had chosen to ignore this comment.

Now whenever he felt bad, he thought to himself that he was feeling green. He felt exceptionally green right now. The locket had drudged up more than he had expected. He felt it now as he drove, memory slowly drowning him.

His mom, opening a can of peas for him. Another green thing, he hated peas, and was crying and fussing that he had to eat them. His mother had sat down on the floor next to him, her dress flowing around her like flower petals. She had taken the spoon that he was using and slipped him a sly wink as she told him that peas weren’t actually vegetables; that they were in fact seeds from an alien world, and that if he ate them, he would get superpowers. His eyes had gone saucer-wide at that, and had never complained about eating peas again.

In the present, he turned his car around a corner, his mind fully on autopilot, tears building up in the corners of each eye. Before he could forget the chalky mush of the peas/alien-seeds on his tongue through the window of his memory, his mind propelled him through another aperture, this one of much worse consequence.

He was eleven, and two years before, his dad had died; impaled on a jutting plank in the scrap fields when he fell through the unstable flooring of a collapsing house. He had barely cried; he hadn’t had the energy.

He and his mother were headed to the very same scrap fields where his father had died. They spent the day in the arid heat, pulling any metal they could find, and putting it into the cart they had been provided. When it got too dark to see clearly, they had gone home, guided by their cart. They had turned in their metal and received their money, enough for a loaf of bread and a gallon of water. When they had gotten home, his mother had given him the pendant, and John had fallen in love with it.

He was also terrified because he knew that withholding metal was a crime, and before the night had even finished, Enforcers had kicked in their door, and shot his mother down while she was trying to keep it for her son. John had never understood why his mother hadn’t just given up the pendant.

Now, an adult wading in the memories of his childhood he began to understand. His mother had slowly been fading, she gave most of her food and water to John, and she always gathered from scrap posts where the irradiated sun was shining so John wouldn’t have to. She had been slowly dying and her weakened brain simply decided that her son was going to have this pendant.

Ahead of him in the road, the other cars were swerving to the right to avoid a speeding driver in the wrong lane. A vagrant had hijacked a car and was making a suicidal getaway attempt.

In his memory, John sat on the floor and held his mother’s corpse. He knew he had cried; he knew he had to have cried, but he couldn’t actually remember the tears trickling down his face.

In the present, two cars ahead of him, a yellow truck swerved and blared its horn. John heard the honk from what felt like a million miles away. He reached up and grabbed the pendant, turning it in his hand, and thumbed the release. It was his picture in it after all.

Too late, he looked up and saw that there were headlights, not taillights lit up in front of him. What’s done bun can’t be undone, echoed through his mind, and he wasn’t sure it was his thought. Then all he heard was the crunch of metal, all he saw was a flash of light, and then nothing.

The locket, its job done, shifted….