It was the field of tiny yellow flowers that Chloe first started to remember. Gathering them up in her skirt. Making yellow flower bracelets under a blue sky. Where in the fuck was that?
Chloe didn’t ever remember seein’ no blue sky. The sky was sulphurous and orangey, everywhere on Phalanges. Chloe had been to the other continent, shipped over for a few parties when she was twelve. The sky was the same bile-orange over there, too. But where in the fuck was those yellow flowers and the blue sky? It was something weird, from out of her soul. But it was starting to feel like a real memory.
*
Chloe’s darkish eyes and pale skin made her exotic, on Phalanges. So she didn’t have to turn as many tricks. At sixteen, she still looked childish. She didn’t have to work the miner bars. The other thing that turned girls into hags was base`. The Paste. Chloe didn’t do Paste, so she still looked young. So she didn’t have to work as much. The customers paid more. But that meant they sometimes thought they had more rights to her body. Like at the parties on the other continent. Oh Jesus.
*
Once in a while they wired her up and made sensupornos. She was a star on other worlds, they told her. Other people paid money and played the sensuporn and felt what she felt. Even the fear and pain. The other people played the streams and they felt her fear and her pain, and they got off on it. For some reason, this made Chloe want to kill herself.
*
Then one night, late, alone in some squat, ripped on gage and booze, Chloe had remembered the tiny yellow flowers and how intensely pretty they’d been. Some quiet place, without the sky and street traffic racket that never ended on Phalanges. And pretty. A hillside, maybe. Right up in the blue sky.
Chloe was sure it was Earth. Only Earth could have a sky like that. She was starting to remember more. These memories were coming back to her.
She was sure she’d been taken from Earth. But it must have been a long time ago, almost too far back to remember.
*
Of course it was inevitable that Chloe started doing the Paste. Nothing else can really get rid of the pain and fear. Then, after a while, she wasn’t pretty anymore. She had to turn more tricks. She didn’t get paid as much. It didn’t matter. She didn’t give a shit. Everybody dies.
*
She still had Earth.
George O’ Gorman is a part-time laborer, full-time writer and musical artist living in Seattle. He has just finished writing a SF adventure novel called The Tao of the Shapeshifter and now is in the process of pitching it to the literary agencies. His fiction has appeared in many publications, including Black Petals, Alienskin.com, American Drivel Review and Kaleidotrope.