Anomaly

The steady din of the jet engines was uncontested in the darkened airplane cabin. It was a red-eye flight to Kansas City. Though they had begun their descent, most of the passengers persisted in trying to convince themselves that they were sleeping. One young man had given up. He raised the cover on his window. A black, starless night greeted him.

The green light on the winglet blinked, and he thought he saw something, something impossible. He put his face right up to the glass. A girl of perhaps eighteen sat at the very tip of the wing, one knee drawn up to her chest and her opposite foot dangling carelessly over the edge. Air whipped around her at five hundred miles per hour, yet her pale, freckled face bore a smile.

After two hours of flying, Emma Mahoney had become numb to the wind screaming in her ears and the rustle of her jacket. Even tucked under one of the straps of her backpack, her brunette ponytail flailed wildly. She waved to the man when the light flashed again. Emma avoided being seen as much as possible, riding on the roof of the plane for most of the trip, but her stop would be coming up any minute now, and she had to watch for landmarks.

There was no missing Liberty Memorial. Giant spotlights shined on the tower’s limestone façade. She pushed herself to her feet with the tip of her umbrella. As she jumped off the back of the wing, she stole one last glance at the young man. Oddly, he was smiling, yet a deep sadness showed in his big, round eyes.

Emma tumbled and twirled and finally righted herself in the air. She fell like a slice of bread, as though her scrawny frame weighed one pound rather than one hundred. Notwithstanding, the earth approached in a hurry. She opened her umbrella like a parachute and held on for dear life. She was at the whim of the wind. Hopefully, it would steer her away from the busy streets lest the sight of her should cause a car accident.

She interacted with the natural world differently than normal people. They fought the elements. They were burnt by sunlight, afflicted by sickness, weakened by age, and scratched by the slightest misstep. Sometimes, she envied them. She envied the community they shared.

She didn’t know what she was or even how old. Her memory stored only twenty years. Every new day, she forgot an old day. Maybe, if she knew her origins, she could find others like her. That was her impetus for coming here: her best friend, Denise, may have found a clue.

She touched down hard on the rooftop of a bank and rolled head over heels, flinging her umbrella and crushing everything in her backpack. She came to rest on her rear end. A metal ladder led to the bank’s deserted parking lot. She retrieved her umbrella and dug her smartphone out of her pocket. New cracks crisscrossed the glass display.

She walked the sidewalks until she happened upon an open wifi network and then hid in an alley nearby. First, she brought up her e-mail to let Denise know where she was. Then she logged into her blog. She used it as a daily journal and had been doing so for the past thirty years, effectively extending her memory by a decade.

She recorded how she snuck onto the plane—it had taken most of the day—and how two emotions played tug of war with her heart. One was excitement. Denise said that she had found something about Emma’s past, but she wouldn’t say what it was. The other emotion was doubt. If the clue didn’t end up helping, Emma knew she would end up feeling even more alone.

Eating generic sandwich cookies as she worked, she edited the post and published it. She didn’t like writing, but, after all these years, she had gotten pretty good at it, and she tried a little harder these days: she felt like she owed it to her readers. The blog had amassed enough of a following that the advertisements paid for her minimalistic life. She wrote the truth, but people thought that she was just a unique character. There were even fan groups that speculated who might be behind the blog and what the crazy diary was supposed to mean.

Part of her wanted to show them that it was all true. A larger part told her that she could never show herself to the world, that something terrible would happen if she did. What if the government wanted to experiment on her? What if she was a government experiment that was never supposed to get out?

She flopped on her side and rested her head on the hard ground. No normal person would have found the concrete comfortable. What if she was an extraterrestrial who took the body of the first human she encountered? What if she was sent from the future but forgot her purpose? What if she was a glitch in a computer simulation? Maybe that’s why she couldn’t dream.

A gentle shake roused her in the morning. She jumped up and embraced the middle-aged woman before her. Denise, of course, had aged, even if beautifully, while Emma remained the same.

Emma apologized, “Sorry I’m such a mess!”

“I don’t even want to know how you got here so fast,” Denise said with a motherly caress. Here on a business trip, she only had free time between meetings to explore the city. “Come on, the taxi is waiting.”

The National World War I Museum wasn’t two miles away. History had never been Emma’s forte, as far as she remembered. She felt detached from humanity and its exploits. To her surprise, Denise guided her straight to the one section that piqued her curiosity, a seasonal exhibition focused on espionage during the Great War.

In the back corner were black and white photos of known spies from that era. Her eyes landed on a familiar face among them, the face she saw in every window and every puddle. Her heart raced.

Denise urged, eagerly, “Stand next to the picture!”

Emma acquiesced. She let her hair down and cocked her head to mimic the woman in the photo.

“What do you think?”

“Identical!” Denise said. She snapped a couple of pictures. “See for yourself.”

Not one freckle was out of place. The name on the tiny plaque beside the photograph was Emma Ingles. She must have changed her surname for some reason. Had she been married between then and now? She had tried dating a couple of times. Either the guy would think she was insane or she would get too scared to tell the truth.

The date on the plaque was 1914. She was over a hundred years old! They took their time on the way out, chatting about the implications of their discovery. There had to be records from Emma’s spy days. There had to be answers.

The museum’s information and memorabilia carried weight now; Emma had been part of this war. An unlikely collection called out to her. The images portrayed the aftermath of the Battle of Caporetto. One featured a young man walking up a street littered with rubble. Oddly, he was smiling, yet a deep sadness showed in his big, round eyes. She jerked the picture off the wall to get a better look.

“What is it?” Denise asked.

“I’ve seen him. He was on the plane here, probably for the same reason I was.” Emma’s eyes watered in elation. She wasn’t alone. “This is a seasonal exhibit, so someone probably told him about the picture.”

Denise was doubtful and then scared. “What will you do?”

“I’ll hang around the museum for a few days to watch for him. He might know what we are!”

“Don’t trust him just because he’s like you,” Denise warned. “In fact, that’s a really good reason not to trust him. Remember all of the things you have speculated that you might be? He could be any of those things as well.”

“I have to talk to him.”

“I know, but it can’t just be a coincidence that you’re both featured in a World War I Museum. Maybe you’re some sort of genetically engineered super soldiers.” Denise grimaced at her own theory: it sounded as silly as Emma’s. Then she sighed. “Just be careful.”

“I will. I promise.”

Emma left with a skip in her step. Denise left in a cold sweat. Keeping Emma’s secret for the past twenty-five years had felt like a special privilege. Now it felt like a responsibility. Emma was harmless, but others like her might not be. More anomalies meant that Denise was involved in something bigger than she could imagine. More anomalies meant that the world was not as simple as she had hoped.