What Glory Chose
by Jessica Barksdale
First Runner-Up, Fiction Contest
Glory and her husband Mark sat together at the table, the light brilliant on the newly painted walls. Since they’d been stuck in their home, they’d had everything painted. They took the dogs to the beach for a week at a friend’s cabin and came home to all white walls. The room glowed.
“We need to look for some art,” Mark said. “Get color somewhere. Not that I don’t like our choice. It’s just a bit spare.”
Snowy Sunday. That was the color’s name.
Art, Glory thought. She would rather have broccoli. Maybe asparagus. Not canned peas. Outside, late winter winds whirled. It had been three years since the day the governor told them to sequester. Sure, they’d had breaks, weeks, months, when numbers were down, the virus seemingly over. Then somewhere—India, Mongolia, Halifax, a small atoll in the South China Sea—another strain would emerge, ravaging (that was the word) the planet. Everyone needed a booster. Then another booster. Then another vaccine altogether. She and Mark stood in line for them all, but still, here they were, eating canned peas.
Worse, they couldn’t see their children. The two eldest lived in the South and had children, one grandchild unable to be vaccinated due to a childhood cancer. The younger two—people Glory thought had been reasonable, smart, even—refused the second shot, the first booster. With his spotty internet in his remote, off-grid cabin, she hadn’t seen one son’s face in two years.
“Okay.” Glory sat back.
“Then the floors. We can get them refinished in the spring.”
Glory nodded again. Did floors even matter? At every house on their block, their street, probably even their town, white vans festooned with colorful logos hunkered in the driveways: Rawhide Electric, Paul’s Plumbing, Leaf and Wind Gutter Service. Backhoes backhoed. Men scaled roofs, cut down trees, unfurled fresh sod onto waiting soil.
But no amount of remodeling could fix the world.
She slid a pamphlet across the table toward her husband, this man she’d met her first semester of college. Mark picked it up, his face still as he read, opening one fold and then another. On the front, the image of the facility shone. Finally, he looked up, shaking his head.
“After the floors are done,” she began. “I want to do this.”
Mark had reacted better than Glory imagined he would, at least once he realized that Glory had enough money to pay for the initial freezing procedure and the fifty years of maintenance.
“You want to be frozen for fifty years.” Mark took in breath. “You want to leave me.”
“It’s not about that.”
He gave her a look, one she knew well. “How can you have stashed away enough to pay for it?”
A history professor with his head down in books and now in Zoom meetings, Mark had never paid attention to her job, the one she’d had until three years ago, the job that had supported the remodeling, vacations, and extras he seemed to take for granted. What had he thought she earned as a CEO of a national natural foods company? Her face had been on the metro buses for a time alongside warm, caring quotes the ad agency had parsed from her public statements.
“Good food, good life.”
“Helping you and the planet for forty years.”
The company had been bought up in the early days of the pandemic by a larger money-making animal that began eating its way through the food production companies while the supply chain was vulnerable. Chomp, chomp. They were more than happy to swallow her company and buy out her contract and festoon her with stock options.
Money aside, perhaps the only time to suggest a break in a marriage was after three solid years of togetherness. A real test, that. He wept, of course, as they went over the plans and signed papers and drew up legal documents, the handy template accompanying the brochure. They Zoomed with their lawyer. Reps from the company, PastPresentPerfect, sent long emails and DocuSign documents.
Then she took a car from her home in Vancouver, Washington to Portland for medical exams, all involving instant virus testing, masks, gowns, and gloves. The automated nurse took her blood, while live nurses talked to her from another room. The doctor videoed in while all her systems were observed and scrutinized. Somehow, the pandemic had left Glory lean and strong—all those dog walks and video workouts—and with a heart that literally didn’t miss a beat.
Later, she called her children, her friends, everyone inured or stunned into silence. She did get accidentally included in a text thread.
Is she crazy? Dementia like grandma?
One laughing-its-ass-off emoji. Then a question mark. Next, ask Dad.
One daughter went the hormone route. Post-meno psychosis?
They were all so bitchy.
Glory’s almost off-grid son, the one who blamed the government for the virus and the inability to cure it, only wrote: This isn’t a joke.
“Should we get divorced?” Mark asked.
Should they? It wasn’t fair to hold him hostage. Besides, being married to a partial corpse wouldn’t make him the most eligible bachelor in town. If he were lucky enough to overcome that hurdle, the next woman might want to get married during one of those strange virus lulls, events safe for half a minute.
Of all the people who might be alive in fifty years, Mark was not one of them, unless some other technology emerged while Glory was sleeping. He was alive now, though, and deserved to find the happiness he needed. At this point, Glory had nothing to give him. Sometimes, just before she fell asleep, Mark breathing quietly next to her, she felt the forty or so years of her life left after statis radiate like a sunbeam.
She called her lawyer for a referral. Mark hired a divorce attorney he found on Yelp.
Glory’s mother Joan had drifted into dementia. During her last week, Glory went to the visiting platform at Joan’s assisted living facility. There her mother sat behind the plexiglass, slumped in a wheelchair, her hand in her caregiver’s. Julie had saved Glory’s life a hundred times or more. Instead of Glory, Julie was the one there when her mother slipped or cried or worried over where California had gone.
“Am I home yet?” Joan would ask the few times Glory had been able to see her before that third, brutal variant that killed half the remaining folks in the home. “Am I back in Walnut Creek?”
“You are,” Glory said. “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it the most wonderful place in the entire world?”
Whenever Joan asked, Glory and Julie would nod and exclaim over the bright California afternoon, even though the clouds clung to the Cascades. Now Julie would nod her mother to the end. When she turned to leave, Glory waved, cried, finally, remembering her mother when she was young and before life had ruined her. Before Glory’s father died and her sister, too. Before her mother started to lose everything, including her mind.
Goodbye, Glory said to all. For now. Maybe forever.
“How is your sleep?”
“I don’t sleep much,” Glory said. “I haven’t probably since menopause. Or I fall asleep immediately, and then I wake up around 1 a.m., and then, it’s a few hours of horror show dreams, one of which involves putting myself into cryogenic sleep for fifty years.”
“In the past two weeks, how often have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless?”
“Two weeks? That’s all you want to know? What about three years? What about wondering what the point is of any of it? What about wondering if when I wake up in fifty years, I’ll want you to put me back under or just kill me because it will still feel pointless?”
“Have you had any thoughts of suicide?”
“Every single day.”
“How could you leave your kids?”
“I can’t bear to see them suffer, which they will. Eventually. Life is never going to be normal again.”
“Do you prefer to stay at home rather than going out and doing new things?”
“Are we supposed to go out and do new things? Really? Where have you been? Don’t you watch the charts? Of course, I would rather stay at home. If you could put me under there, that’s where I would like to be. At home and totally asleep.”
“How is your energy?”
“Gone. For years. I don’t have any at all.”
This is not how that conversation went.
“Pretty good. Most nights, seven or eight hours.”
“I think I’ve gotten used to the lockdowns. The pattern of them. We know what to expect.”
“I don’t want to kill myself. That’s not what this is about.”
“My children are adults. I’ve talked to them about the entire procedure.”
“When we can go out and do safe things, we do. It always makes us feel better.”
“I bought an exercise bike, and we walk every morning. I’ve stayed in shape.”
Glory had gone under before, twice for surgeries she awoke from with few side effects, at least after the waking up part. After her bunionectomy, she’d clawed her way through the cave of anesthesia and found herself weeping.
“Are you crying from pain or emotion?” a nurse asked, her face close to Glory’s.
“Emotion,” Glory said because she felt nothing, at least in terms of pain. What she felt was that she had been full into perfection and now she was back, here, ripped away from somewhere preferable.
The second time, she did feel pain, or at least, she felt her entire body, heavy, uncomfortable, bloated. She’d had a hysterectomy, her uterus pulled through her vagina like a magic trick. Whoosh, the surgeon waving her scrap of flesh like a handkerchief he’d pulled from his hat.
What if, she wondered, delirious, the stitches broke and she opened up, her inner body available to the universe? But she did not seem to be mourning the place she’d been to during her first surgery, that dark hole of peace.
Glory had no idea what she would feel like while asleep for years and years. She had no idea if she would wake up. She worried she would dream for fifty years, a series of relentless nightmares.
She worried when she woke up, she wouldn’t remember who she was. Maybe she would wake up fresh, whole, completely blank, a sixty-year-old tabula rasa.
Maybe there was no place of peace. All she’d felt was the medication knocking her out. It would be a lot cheaper to succumb to drug addiction, she figured. Alcoholism. She could buy a hookah and quarantine in her family room with bowls of ice cream and popcorn. Her kids might enjoy those visits.
“Are you sure?” Mark whispered one night when they were in bed, the house still and closed down around them.
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
The self-driving car dropped her off in front of the building in downtown Portland on a spring Sunday afternoon. There was not one car in the parking lot, and the building in front of her was windowless, grey, absorbing rather than reflecting light. The sky was bright blue like the inside of a buffed sapphire. The wind was mild, the sun angled low in the sky. Above her, Canada geese and the swirl and squeal of swallows.
Glory didn’t want additional hard goodbyes. Her family that could be there—her elder daughter and husband had driven for days from Chattanooga—had sat stunned on the family room couch, a stack of legal documents and medical releases in front of them. In a box in the corner, letters to each child for every year. Or, really, Glory had started out that way. By the time she’d gotten into the fourth decade of her long sleep, she’d switched to every five years. The last notes only read, Hope to see you soon. I love you.
“Mom?” her daughter had asked, looking up, suddenly alert.
“It’s going to be fine,” Glory had said.
Her eyes half-closed, Glory kissed them both and then left, empty handed, the car prepaid. If she could have shown up in a hospital gown, she would have. Why bring anything? She didn’t need her purse or wallet or keys. No sweater, shoes, coat. No phone or lipstick or breath mints.
They’d told her to not watch movies about cryogenic sleep.
“It’s just not like any of that,” the technician said as she went over the process in vague terms: slowing of bodily functions, body cooling, energy conservation.
Then bigger words and physics Glory let flow over her like rainwater: vitrification, anti-freezing agent, molecular similarity to glass.
“All of this sounds complicated, but it’s nothing Hollywood has gotten right.”
“What do you mean?” Glory asked.
The technician rolled her eyes. She was young, and pretty, though Glory wasn’t able to see her whole face due to the mask, shield, plexiglass, and six feet of white tile between them. Then, of course, was the large robotic arm taking samples from Glory’s arm, swabbing her nose, throat, and, yes, other parts.
“The pods. The fluid filling up from the bottom and seeming to drown you. So dramatic.”
“There is fluid,” Glory began. She’d read all the handouts and PDFs and digi-screens.
The technician waved a gloved white hand. Her white bodysuit crinkled noisily. “Of course. But just don’t watch.”
Glory didn’t watch. Or read. Not one movie about space travel billions of light years away or one science fiction novel about climate change and human storage. The technician’s words lingered, though, and now, she forced herself to look forward, her eyes on the I-5, the few cars in front of her. There, a bridge. There, a building. Then she was standing in an empty parking lot, the car purring away. Where had all the people gone? Over the course of the pandemic, three million Americans had died. But that didn’t account for this vast emptiness, stillness where once there was laughter and horns and trains rattling their tracks. Once close to here, she and Mark had been stuck for twenty-five minutes as a train inched by pulling cargo containers. Cargo. That was a thing of the past.
Glory turned to face the door that opened for her, a swooshing maw that sucked her right in and closed with a hissing whisper. Wrapping her arms around herself, Glory walked forward.
“Glory?”
Something parted, a hand reaching through a black curtain and then pulling back.
“Glory?”
This time, she felt her face, though she was still surrounded by darkness.
“Glory?”
Her eyes twitched, and she allowed herself to look through the slits of light that seemed far away, tiny windows she had to squint to see through.
“Glory. Glory. There you are. You’re awake,” the voice said, a man’s sing-songy voice.
She imagined she was nodding. She wasn’t sure she could feel her body, though she began to feel her heft, her bones, weight, substance. Gravity overcame her. Her spine was flat on a surface. Her toes were bare.
“Glory,” the voice said after what seemed like years.
And there, she felt her lungs filling up with air. Then she exhaled, her throat scratchy, sore, lungs flat like science exhibits. Pain or emotion? Pain.
Glory opened her eyes.
It took nearly three months for Glory to be able to stay awake longer than an hour without nodding off no matter what position or place she was in. This utter somnolence certainly hadn’t been in the brochure, but the good news was that PastPresentPerfect didn’t kick her out on her rear—that rehab clause that convinced her to sign up in the first place must be in full effect. They were bound to get her to the state she’d been in when she’d walked through the door. Sentient, standing, sound.
But Glory wasn’t close to that door or in that building or even in Portland. Most people around her were speaking French, a language she failed to pass three times by her reckoning: high school, college, adult ed. Sometimes, she thought she heard English in the hallways. Or maybe it was Dutch or German. Finally, she was able to get up, eat, shower (if you could call the contraption a shower), dress, and find a chair in the bright white solarium.
“When will my relatives come?” she had asked from the time she could speak again.
The technicians wagged fingers and tsked. She’d been told, more than once. When her body was ready, so would her mind be. Then they would reveal everything.
They dressed her in soft, rumpled clothing, all in light colors, white, gray, fawn. They gave her a mirror when she asked, and yes, she reminded herself of herself, so she handed it back, not wanting to do any further analysis, not yet.
Glory read children’s stories set in England that featured hedgerows, unicorns, and vast swaths of lawn and ate very bland food—Porridge or pudding? Soup or smoothie? First using a walker-y type contraption that seemed to float around her, Glory let an attendant lead her round and round the building, which was round, the ceilings opaque glass that let in only a filtered silver light.
The air smelled clean and fresh, massaged by air filters, lightened by the essence of citrus and lavender.
Warm water baths, massage, and sleep. More bland food. Sleep. Then, finally, a short talk with the woman who seemed to be in charge. Glory blinked when she walked toward her table in the common room. The woman’s hair was a cumulus above her, dark and ecstatic.
“You’re doing quite well,” the woman said. She said her name was Zi, her voice was filled with a place far away from the Pacific Northwest.
Glory looked at Zi and shrugged. What were the comparisons? she wondered. How many of her kind were staggering around like Frankenstein’s monster?
“How can you tell?” Glory asked.
Zi stared straight at her as if to say, Look around you.
The room—really, everywhere—was sparsely populated. One person at a table there, another walking past here. She’d only gotten to nodding acquaintance with one or two others. No one seemed to want to talk. Maybe curiosity was one of the last things to return to the frozen brain.
Glory put her hands flat on the table.
Zi waved open something in the space between them, a screen they could both read that appeared magically out of nothing in 3D.
Glory Matthews. 4/15/2026. The date Glory walked through the door.
“What went wrong?” Glory said after a long silence.
Zi opened up another screen with a whisk of her hand. It all played out in front of Glory like one of those documentaries she and Mark used to watch on the History Channel. But this had no voiceovers or captions, images only. There people in line for vaccines. There people in their hospital beds. More and more and more, enough so that Glory shot Zi a look. Zi nodded, indicated that Glory should keep watching, which she did, finally seeing the world lug its way out of illness, war, famine, despair, and chaos. Then new cities, solar and wind powered everything, populations looking relieved, but wary, stunned but living.
Fifty years had been a low-ball estimate. PastPresentPerfect hadn’t nailed down the perfect part.
“Well,” Glory said. “Things did not go as planned.”
Zi looked down at her hands. “They did not.”
“You kept me alive,” Glory said.
“You paid for that—”
“I know—”
Zi held up a hand, her smooth face serious. “Your contract stipulated that if necessary, we could perform emergency medical procedures during your sleep.”
“Like my what? Appendix was going to burst, right?”
Zi gave her the serious look again, and something (not her appendix) inside Glory twisted.
“We had hundreds of thousands of clients in deep sleep, and we were able to use their—”
“My?”
“Your tissues were used to help several large-scale, world-wide companies create a database to facilitate testing procedures that eventually led to a final cure for the virus. The latest and last variant.”
Glory sat back. She’d never been a scientist, but she was sure she couldn’t have been “sampled” while frozen. How, then, to thaw and refreeze bodies? Never worked well on chicken breasts, that was for sure. Freezer burn all around.
“That doesn’t seem to be my personal medical emergency, though,” Glory said.
“It was a world emergency,” Zi said, tapping closed the screen between them. “You ended up saving yourself.”
Glory knew her mouth was hanging open and shut it too quickly, rattling a tooth. Zi gave her a “what can I say” expression, hands up. “You signed your consent.”
“I suppose,” Glory said. Point was, though, she wasn’t missing her tissues at this point. She watched Zi, waiting for more.
“You were awakened three times in the past ninety years,” Zi said finally. “This is your fourth awakening, and your last.”
Glory looked at her hands. She was still sixty years old. “How long then?”
“One hundred and twenty-five years,” Zi said.
Lord. Glory thought of something she’d heard long ago (really long ago now). In a hundred years, all new people. So true. That’s all it took. She was in the land of all new people. Her mother, husband (ex), and children gone.
Glory breathed in deeply once, twice. She swallowed. “Why don’t I remember any of the other times you woke me up?”
“We kept you in an unconscious state,” Zi said.
“But I’m awake now,” Glory said, wanting to make sure.
“You are.”
Zi explained that Glory was in a facility near Paris, one she and some of the sleeping were relocated to during the first North American war. The EU had formed a scientific amnesty program that kept PastPresentPerfect clients alive and safe, at least as much as possible.
“Why would they do that?” Glory blurted.
Zi held up a hand and went on. Twenty-five percent of the clients perished during a defrosting (Glory now thought of popsicles and ice cream and frozen corn). Some were permanently altered by the process and were euthanized (legal now) by family consent (another part of the contract Glory neglected to read, fucking lawyer). And now, there was a slow process of revitalizing and awakening the remaining clients, giving them time to acclimate (if that were possible) and releasing them to their families, should there be anyone left. In any case, they were being given hero benefits for saving humanity. A place to live and a pension paid by various countries.
Glory turned to look out the window, though there was nothing to see but light. She hoped she didn’t have to hear what had happened to her family, sorrow surely in the narratives. First North American War? How many had there been? She’d save that gumball for later.
The days stretched on, Glory reading about the past few decades but mostly enjoying being outside in the atrium breathing in fresh air. They gave her work boots and a trowel and a plot of warm earth. Something she had been holding tight to her ribs and spine and pelvis relaxed, opened, and she hunkered down near the squash plants, digging up weeds.
She and Mark had had a garden in the first house they lived in, rows of basil and tomatoes, the end of summer awash in balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper.
When her children were little, Glory had taught them how to plant, all of them staring down into the two-inch holes they’d made with trowels just like these. They’d been so bright, little lights burning steady next to her.
If she stilled and closed her eyes, she could imagine them all at the dining table. All those voices, hands, Mark looking at her, eyebrows raised. They’d been in that family together, at least for a while. Shoulders touching as they pushed their family wheel forward.
How had Glory given up on that momentum? Them? She wiped her nose with the back of a white sleeve and blinked back into her tasks. Aerate, amend, attend. Over and over again.
“We have a surprise for you,” Zi said. “Yours is a very unusual case.”
Turning from the window, Glory rested her gaze on Zi. What a job. Telling the unfrozen what awaited them.
“Do tell.” Glory smiled to lighten her sarcasm. Her worst habit.
Zi smiled for the first time since Glory had met her. “Your husband. We woke him up two months ago. Soon, he’ll be ready to see you.”
Glory blinked. Had they married her to another client while partially thawed? Were she and another melted popsicle now together for eternity?
“What do you mean?”
Zi blinked and, for the first time since sitting down, seemed confused. “Your husband, Mark.”
“My husband didn’t do this with me. He stayed at home. He was going to get remarried and live on without me.”
Zi scrolled through the screen, finding another date and name to illuminate. Mark Matthews 7/22/2026.
“That’s very odd,” Glory said. “Why would he follow me?”
“Why indeed,” Zi said.
Mark smiled at her the way he used to pre-virus. Maybe even the way he had before they’d had jobs and kids, mortgages and cars and bills. He seemed rumpled, beaten down, and maybe not all there yet. But happy, like a toddler who knew that soon it would be lunch and then nap time and then play.
“It will take you both some time to settle into yourselves,” Zi said while the attendants walked Mark into the common room to sit with Glory near the window’s glow.
The attendants backed away, leaving them to stare at each other.
“I don’t get it,” Glory said. “You never liked this plan.”
Mark’s smile faded a bit but not by much. “It started to make sense. Of course, I never could have known…”
He lifted a hand, the same hand she had seen what felt like only months before. But 125 years had passed. She reached over and grabbed it, and for the first time since she woke up, Glory began to cry. Soon, she was on his lap, both of them in tears, clutching each other. Both of them survivors of war and pestilence. Both of them les survivants, as people called them.
“What are we going to do?” Glory asked finally.
“Live?” Mark wiped his face. “Go on?”
“Why not?”
Maybe, Glory thought, she was ready to try that now.
Turned out, they had relatives, three great-grandsons and their families who lived in what was now the country carved out of parts of Washington, Oregon, and California. Alliance Federation. What a mouthful.
Glory and Mark had chatted with them via some kind of AI chat, the Zoom of the way-in-the-future times.
Their two older children’s children had survived the viruses and the wars, and these great-grandsons had been put in charge of their frozen great-grandparents.
“We’re lucky,” one of them said, Davi, a handsome man in his mid-sixties. They could all be friends and go on a cruise together (if such things still existed), Glory thought. Pals heading into old age. “We made it through.”
Glory wasn’t ready to hear about her own children’s fate, not yet. So she asked questions about her great-grandchildren, the scientist, engineer, farmer. All of them had Mark’s dark eyes.
“We’ll come visit,” Davi and the others said, waving as the call ended.
“Imagine that,” Mark said when their images flickered away.
She barely could.
Of course, she still hated things about her husband. He didn’t ask enough questions about her or really care what she was doing with the cheeses in the cheese cave. He didn’t know the names of the cow and goats and was woefully ignorant about the drainage at the south side of their property. He wouldn’t gather eggs or pull weeds in the vegetable garden. Worst of all, he was excelling in French, mingling better with their neighbors and able to go to the local taverne to drink with his new fellows.
But he knew how to work the ancient (relatively) massive oven in the wide-open kitchen and made the most amazing coq au vin with the coq that wasn’t chicken at all, but a protein invented during some lean economic times. Now eating animals was forbidden. They could be milked or sustainably shorn or petted. They could sleep in your bed, run roughshod through the garden, or brought into public spaces. You could use their milk to make cheese but not their flesh to make pâté. No meatloaf. No sausage.
“Score one for the beasts of the field!” Mark said when discovering this nice twist, he a long-time vegetarian.
“Not to mention the birds of the air.”
When Glory potted plants and fed the chickens, cats wound around her ankles. The dogs barked at the ravens. Day and night and day again. Fall came, the leaves a crackling red. Late at night, she and Mark curled together on the couch, wondering what they would wake up from next.
“We need to look for some art,” Mark said. “Get color somewhere. Not that I don’t like our choice. It’s just a bit spare.”
Snowy Sunday. That was the color’s name.
Art, Glory thought. She would rather have broccoli. Maybe asparagus. Not canned peas. Outside, late winter winds whirled. It had been three years since the day the governor told them to sequester. Sure, they’d had breaks, weeks, months, when numbers were down, the virus seemingly over. Then somewhere—India, Mongolia, Halifax, a small atoll in the South China Sea—another strain would emerge, ravaging (that was the word) the planet. Everyone needed a booster. Then another booster. Then another vaccine altogether. She and Mark stood in line for them all, but still, here they were, eating canned peas.
Worse, they couldn’t see their children. The two eldest lived in the South and had children, one grandchild unable to be vaccinated due to a childhood cancer. The younger two—people Glory thought had been reasonable, smart, even—refused the second shot, the first booster. With his spotty internet in his remote, off-grid cabin, she hadn’t seen one son’s face in two years.
“Okay.” Glory sat back.
“Then the floors. We can get them refinished in the spring.”
Glory nodded again. Did floors even matter? At every house on their block, their street, probably even their town, white vans festooned with colorful logos hunkered in the driveways: Rawhide Electric, Paul’s Plumbing, Leaf and Wind Gutter Service. Backhoes backhoed. Men scaled roofs, cut down trees, unfurled fresh sod onto waiting soil.
But no amount of remodeling could fix the world.
She slid a pamphlet across the table toward her husband, this man she’d met her first semester of college. Mark picked it up, his face still as he read, opening one fold and then another. On the front, the image of the facility shone. Finally, he looked up, shaking his head.
“After the floors are done,” she began. “I want to do this.”
Mark had reacted better than Glory imagined he would, at least once he realized that Glory had enough money to pay for the initial freezing procedure and the fifty years of maintenance.
“You want to be frozen for fifty years.” Mark took in breath. “You want to leave me.”
“It’s not about that.”
He gave her a look, one she knew well. “How can you have stashed away enough to pay for it?”
A history professor with his head down in books and now in Zoom meetings, Mark had never paid attention to her job, the one she’d had until three years ago, the job that had supported the remodeling, vacations, and extras he seemed to take for granted. What had he thought she earned as a CEO of a national natural foods company? Her face had been on the metro buses for a time alongside warm, caring quotes the ad agency had parsed from her public statements.
“Good food, good life.”
“Helping you and the planet for forty years.”
The company had been bought up in the early days of the pandemic by a larger money-making animal that began eating its way through the food production companies while the supply chain was vulnerable. Chomp, chomp. They were more than happy to swallow her company and buy out her contract and festoon her with stock options.
Money aside, perhaps the only time to suggest a break in a marriage was after three solid years of togetherness. A real test, that. He wept, of course, as they went over the plans and signed papers and drew up legal documents, the handy template accompanying the brochure. They Zoomed with their lawyer. Reps from the company, PastPresentPerfect, sent long emails and DocuSign documents.
Then she took a car from her home in Vancouver, Washington to Portland for medical exams, all involving instant virus testing, masks, gowns, and gloves. The automated nurse took her blood, while live nurses talked to her from another room. The doctor videoed in while all her systems were observed and scrutinized. Somehow, the pandemic had left Glory lean and strong—all those dog walks and video workouts—and with a heart that literally didn’t miss a beat.
Later, she called her children, her friends, everyone inured or stunned into silence. She did get accidentally included in a text thread.
Is she crazy? Dementia like grandma?
One laughing-its-ass-off emoji. Then a question mark. Next, ask Dad.
One daughter went the hormone route. Post-meno psychosis?
They were all so bitchy.
Glory’s almost off-grid son, the one who blamed the government for the virus and the inability to cure it, only wrote: This isn’t a joke.
“Should we get divorced?” Mark asked.
Should they? It wasn’t fair to hold him hostage. Besides, being married to a partial corpse wouldn’t make him the most eligible bachelor in town. If he were lucky enough to overcome that hurdle, the next woman might want to get married during one of those strange virus lulls, events safe for half a minute.
Of all the people who might be alive in fifty years, Mark was not one of them, unless some other technology emerged while Glory was sleeping. He was alive now, though, and deserved to find the happiness he needed. At this point, Glory had nothing to give him. Sometimes, just before she fell asleep, Mark breathing quietly next to her, she felt the forty or so years of her life left after statis radiate like a sunbeam.
She called her lawyer for a referral. Mark hired a divorce attorney he found on Yelp.
Glory’s mother Joan had drifted into dementia. During her last week, Glory went to the visiting platform at Joan’s assisted living facility. There her mother sat behind the plexiglass, slumped in a wheelchair, her hand in her caregiver’s. Julie had saved Glory’s life a hundred times or more. Instead of Glory, Julie was the one there when her mother slipped or cried or worried over where California had gone.
“Am I home yet?” Joan would ask the few times Glory had been able to see her before that third, brutal variant that killed half the remaining folks in the home. “Am I back in Walnut Creek?”
“You are,” Glory said. “Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it the most wonderful place in the entire world?”
Whenever Joan asked, Glory and Julie would nod and exclaim over the bright California afternoon, even though the clouds clung to the Cascades. Now Julie would nod her mother to the end. When she turned to leave, Glory waved, cried, finally, remembering her mother when she was young and before life had ruined her. Before Glory’s father died and her sister, too. Before her mother started to lose everything, including her mind.
Goodbye, Glory said to all. For now. Maybe forever.
“How is your sleep?”
“I don’t sleep much,” Glory said. “I haven’t probably since menopause. Or I fall asleep immediately, and then I wake up around 1 a.m., and then, it’s a few hours of horror show dreams, one of which involves putting myself into cryogenic sleep for fifty years.”
“In the past two weeks, how often have you felt down, depressed, or hopeless?”
“Two weeks? That’s all you want to know? What about three years? What about wondering what the point is of any of it? What about wondering if when I wake up in fifty years, I’ll want you to put me back under or just kill me because it will still feel pointless?”
“Have you had any thoughts of suicide?”
“Every single day.”
“How could you leave your kids?”
“I can’t bear to see them suffer, which they will. Eventually. Life is never going to be normal again.”
“Do you prefer to stay at home rather than going out and doing new things?”
“Are we supposed to go out and do new things? Really? Where have you been? Don’t you watch the charts? Of course, I would rather stay at home. If you could put me under there, that’s where I would like to be. At home and totally asleep.”
“How is your energy?”
“Gone. For years. I don’t have any at all.”
This is not how that conversation went.
“Pretty good. Most nights, seven or eight hours.”
“I think I’ve gotten used to the lockdowns. The pattern of them. We know what to expect.”
“I don’t want to kill myself. That’s not what this is about.”
“My children are adults. I’ve talked to them about the entire procedure.”
“When we can go out and do safe things, we do. It always makes us feel better.”
“I bought an exercise bike, and we walk every morning. I’ve stayed in shape.”
Glory had gone under before, twice for surgeries she awoke from with few side effects, at least after the waking up part. After her bunionectomy, she’d clawed her way through the cave of anesthesia and found herself weeping.
“Are you crying from pain or emotion?” a nurse asked, her face close to Glory’s.
“Emotion,” Glory said because she felt nothing, at least in terms of pain. What she felt was that she had been full into perfection and now she was back, here, ripped away from somewhere preferable.
The second time, she did feel pain, or at least, she felt her entire body, heavy, uncomfortable, bloated. She’d had a hysterectomy, her uterus pulled through her vagina like a magic trick. Whoosh, the surgeon waving her scrap of flesh like a handkerchief he’d pulled from his hat.
What if, she wondered, delirious, the stitches broke and she opened up, her inner body available to the universe? But she did not seem to be mourning the place she’d been to during her first surgery, that dark hole of peace.
Glory had no idea what she would feel like while asleep for years and years. She had no idea if she would wake up. She worried she would dream for fifty years, a series of relentless nightmares.
She worried when she woke up, she wouldn’t remember who she was. Maybe she would wake up fresh, whole, completely blank, a sixty-year-old tabula rasa.
Maybe there was no place of peace. All she’d felt was the medication knocking her out. It would be a lot cheaper to succumb to drug addiction, she figured. Alcoholism. She could buy a hookah and quarantine in her family room with bowls of ice cream and popcorn. Her kids might enjoy those visits.
“Are you sure?” Mark whispered one night when they were in bed, the house still and closed down around them.
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
The self-driving car dropped her off in front of the building in downtown Portland on a spring Sunday afternoon. There was not one car in the parking lot, and the building in front of her was windowless, grey, absorbing rather than reflecting light. The sky was bright blue like the inside of a buffed sapphire. The wind was mild, the sun angled low in the sky. Above her, Canada geese and the swirl and squeal of swallows.
Glory didn’t want additional hard goodbyes. Her family that could be there—her elder daughter and husband had driven for days from Chattanooga—had sat stunned on the family room couch, a stack of legal documents and medical releases in front of them. In a box in the corner, letters to each child for every year. Or, really, Glory had started out that way. By the time she’d gotten into the fourth decade of her long sleep, she’d switched to every five years. The last notes only read, Hope to see you soon. I love you.
“Mom?” her daughter had asked, looking up, suddenly alert.
“It’s going to be fine,” Glory had said.
Her eyes half-closed, Glory kissed them both and then left, empty handed, the car prepaid. If she could have shown up in a hospital gown, she would have. Why bring anything? She didn’t need her purse or wallet or keys. No sweater, shoes, coat. No phone or lipstick or breath mints.
They’d told her to not watch movies about cryogenic sleep.
“It’s just not like any of that,” the technician said as she went over the process in vague terms: slowing of bodily functions, body cooling, energy conservation.
Then bigger words and physics Glory let flow over her like rainwater: vitrification, anti-freezing agent, molecular similarity to glass.
“All of this sounds complicated, but it’s nothing Hollywood has gotten right.”
“What do you mean?” Glory asked.
The technician rolled her eyes. She was young, and pretty, though Glory wasn’t able to see her whole face due to the mask, shield, plexiglass, and six feet of white tile between them. Then, of course, was the large robotic arm taking samples from Glory’s arm, swabbing her nose, throat, and, yes, other parts.
“The pods. The fluid filling up from the bottom and seeming to drown you. So dramatic.”
“There is fluid,” Glory began. She’d read all the handouts and PDFs and digi-screens.
The technician waved a gloved white hand. Her white bodysuit crinkled noisily. “Of course. But just don’t watch.”
Glory didn’t watch. Or read. Not one movie about space travel billions of light years away or one science fiction novel about climate change and human storage. The technician’s words lingered, though, and now, she forced herself to look forward, her eyes on the I-5, the few cars in front of her. There, a bridge. There, a building. Then she was standing in an empty parking lot, the car purring away. Where had all the people gone? Over the course of the pandemic, three million Americans had died. But that didn’t account for this vast emptiness, stillness where once there was laughter and horns and trains rattling their tracks. Once close to here, she and Mark had been stuck for twenty-five minutes as a train inched by pulling cargo containers. Cargo. That was a thing of the past.
Glory turned to face the door that opened for her, a swooshing maw that sucked her right in and closed with a hissing whisper. Wrapping her arms around herself, Glory walked forward.
“Glory?”
Something parted, a hand reaching through a black curtain and then pulling back.
“Glory?”
This time, she felt her face, though she was still surrounded by darkness.
“Glory?”
Her eyes twitched, and she allowed herself to look through the slits of light that seemed far away, tiny windows she had to squint to see through.
“Glory. Glory. There you are. You’re awake,” the voice said, a man’s sing-songy voice.
She imagined she was nodding. She wasn’t sure she could feel her body, though she began to feel her heft, her bones, weight, substance. Gravity overcame her. Her spine was flat on a surface. Her toes were bare.
“Glory,” the voice said after what seemed like years.
And there, she felt her lungs filling up with air. Then she exhaled, her throat scratchy, sore, lungs flat like science exhibits. Pain or emotion? Pain.
Glory opened her eyes.
It took nearly three months for Glory to be able to stay awake longer than an hour without nodding off no matter what position or place she was in. This utter somnolence certainly hadn’t been in the brochure, but the good news was that PastPresentPerfect didn’t kick her out on her rear—that rehab clause that convinced her to sign up in the first place must be in full effect. They were bound to get her to the state she’d been in when she’d walked through the door. Sentient, standing, sound.
But Glory wasn’t close to that door or in that building or even in Portland. Most people around her were speaking French, a language she failed to pass three times by her reckoning: high school, college, adult ed. Sometimes, she thought she heard English in the hallways. Or maybe it was Dutch or German. Finally, she was able to get up, eat, shower (if you could call the contraption a shower), dress, and find a chair in the bright white solarium.
“When will my relatives come?” she had asked from the time she could speak again.
The technicians wagged fingers and tsked. She’d been told, more than once. When her body was ready, so would her mind be. Then they would reveal everything.
They dressed her in soft, rumpled clothing, all in light colors, white, gray, fawn. They gave her a mirror when she asked, and yes, she reminded herself of herself, so she handed it back, not wanting to do any further analysis, not yet.
Glory read children’s stories set in England that featured hedgerows, unicorns, and vast swaths of lawn and ate very bland food—Porridge or pudding? Soup or smoothie? First using a walker-y type contraption that seemed to float around her, Glory let an attendant lead her round and round the building, which was round, the ceilings opaque glass that let in only a filtered silver light.
The air smelled clean and fresh, massaged by air filters, lightened by the essence of citrus and lavender.
Warm water baths, massage, and sleep. More bland food. Sleep. Then, finally, a short talk with the woman who seemed to be in charge. Glory blinked when she walked toward her table in the common room. The woman’s hair was a cumulus above her, dark and ecstatic.
“You’re doing quite well,” the woman said. She said her name was Zi, her voice was filled with a place far away from the Pacific Northwest.
Glory looked at Zi and shrugged. What were the comparisons? she wondered. How many of her kind were staggering around like Frankenstein’s monster?
“How can you tell?” Glory asked.
Zi stared straight at her as if to say, Look around you.
The room—really, everywhere—was sparsely populated. One person at a table there, another walking past here. She’d only gotten to nodding acquaintance with one or two others. No one seemed to want to talk. Maybe curiosity was one of the last things to return to the frozen brain.
Glory put her hands flat on the table.
Zi waved open something in the space between them, a screen they could both read that appeared magically out of nothing in 3D.
Glory Matthews. 4/15/2026. The date Glory walked through the door.
“What went wrong?” Glory said after a long silence.
Zi opened up another screen with a whisk of her hand. It all played out in front of Glory like one of those documentaries she and Mark used to watch on the History Channel. But this had no voiceovers or captions, images only. There people in line for vaccines. There people in their hospital beds. More and more and more, enough so that Glory shot Zi a look. Zi nodded, indicated that Glory should keep watching, which she did, finally seeing the world lug its way out of illness, war, famine, despair, and chaos. Then new cities, solar and wind powered everything, populations looking relieved, but wary, stunned but living.
Fifty years had been a low-ball estimate. PastPresentPerfect hadn’t nailed down the perfect part.
“Well,” Glory said. “Things did not go as planned.”
Zi looked down at her hands. “They did not.”
“You kept me alive,” Glory said.
“You paid for that—”
“I know—”
Zi held up a hand, her smooth face serious. “Your contract stipulated that if necessary, we could perform emergency medical procedures during your sleep.”
“Like my what? Appendix was going to burst, right?”
Zi gave her the serious look again, and something (not her appendix) inside Glory twisted.
“We had hundreds of thousands of clients in deep sleep, and we were able to use their—”
“My?”
“Your tissues were used to help several large-scale, world-wide companies create a database to facilitate testing procedures that eventually led to a final cure for the virus. The latest and last variant.”
Glory sat back. She’d never been a scientist, but she was sure she couldn’t have been “sampled” while frozen. How, then, to thaw and refreeze bodies? Never worked well on chicken breasts, that was for sure. Freezer burn all around.
“That doesn’t seem to be my personal medical emergency, though,” Glory said.
“It was a world emergency,” Zi said, tapping closed the screen between them. “You ended up saving yourself.”
Glory knew her mouth was hanging open and shut it too quickly, rattling a tooth. Zi gave her a “what can I say” expression, hands up. “You signed your consent.”
“I suppose,” Glory said. Point was, though, she wasn’t missing her tissues at this point. She watched Zi, waiting for more.
“You were awakened three times in the past ninety years,” Zi said finally. “This is your fourth awakening, and your last.”
Glory looked at her hands. She was still sixty years old. “How long then?”
“One hundred and twenty-five years,” Zi said.
Lord. Glory thought of something she’d heard long ago (really long ago now). In a hundred years, all new people. So true. That’s all it took. She was in the land of all new people. Her mother, husband (ex), and children gone.
Glory breathed in deeply once, twice. She swallowed. “Why don’t I remember any of the other times you woke me up?”
“We kept you in an unconscious state,” Zi said.
“But I’m awake now,” Glory said, wanting to make sure.
“You are.”
Zi explained that Glory was in a facility near Paris, one she and some of the sleeping were relocated to during the first North American war. The EU had formed a scientific amnesty program that kept PastPresentPerfect clients alive and safe, at least as much as possible.
“Why would they do that?” Glory blurted.
Zi held up a hand and went on. Twenty-five percent of the clients perished during a defrosting (Glory now thought of popsicles and ice cream and frozen corn). Some were permanently altered by the process and were euthanized (legal now) by family consent (another part of the contract Glory neglected to read, fucking lawyer). And now, there was a slow process of revitalizing and awakening the remaining clients, giving them time to acclimate (if that were possible) and releasing them to their families, should there be anyone left. In any case, they were being given hero benefits for saving humanity. A place to live and a pension paid by various countries.
Glory turned to look out the window, though there was nothing to see but light. She hoped she didn’t have to hear what had happened to her family, sorrow surely in the narratives. First North American War? How many had there been? She’d save that gumball for later.
The days stretched on, Glory reading about the past few decades but mostly enjoying being outside in the atrium breathing in fresh air. They gave her work boots and a trowel and a plot of warm earth. Something she had been holding tight to her ribs and spine and pelvis relaxed, opened, and she hunkered down near the squash plants, digging up weeds.
She and Mark had had a garden in the first house they lived in, rows of basil and tomatoes, the end of summer awash in balsamic vinegar, olive oil, salt, and pepper.
When her children were little, Glory had taught them how to plant, all of them staring down into the two-inch holes they’d made with trowels just like these. They’d been so bright, little lights burning steady next to her.
If she stilled and closed her eyes, she could imagine them all at the dining table. All those voices, hands, Mark looking at her, eyebrows raised. They’d been in that family together, at least for a while. Shoulders touching as they pushed their family wheel forward.
How had Glory given up on that momentum? Them? She wiped her nose with the back of a white sleeve and blinked back into her tasks. Aerate, amend, attend. Over and over again.
“We have a surprise for you,” Zi said. “Yours is a very unusual case.”
Turning from the window, Glory rested her gaze on Zi. What a job. Telling the unfrozen what awaited them.
“Do tell.” Glory smiled to lighten her sarcasm. Her worst habit.
Zi smiled for the first time since Glory had met her. “Your husband. We woke him up two months ago. Soon, he’ll be ready to see you.”
Glory blinked. Had they married her to another client while partially thawed? Were she and another melted popsicle now together for eternity?
“What do you mean?”
Zi blinked and, for the first time since sitting down, seemed confused. “Your husband, Mark.”
“My husband didn’t do this with me. He stayed at home. He was going to get remarried and live on without me.”
Zi scrolled through the screen, finding another date and name to illuminate. Mark Matthews 7/22/2026.
“That’s very odd,” Glory said. “Why would he follow me?”
“Why indeed,” Zi said.
Mark smiled at her the way he used to pre-virus. Maybe even the way he had before they’d had jobs and kids, mortgages and cars and bills. He seemed rumpled, beaten down, and maybe not all there yet. But happy, like a toddler who knew that soon it would be lunch and then nap time and then play.
“It will take you both some time to settle into yourselves,” Zi said while the attendants walked Mark into the common room to sit with Glory near the window’s glow.
The attendants backed away, leaving them to stare at each other.
“I don’t get it,” Glory said. “You never liked this plan.”
Mark’s smile faded a bit but not by much. “It started to make sense. Of course, I never could have known…”
He lifted a hand, the same hand she had seen what felt like only months before. But 125 years had passed. She reached over and grabbed it, and for the first time since she woke up, Glory began to cry. Soon, she was on his lap, both of them in tears, clutching each other. Both of them survivors of war and pestilence. Both of them les survivants, as people called them.
“What are we going to do?” Glory asked finally.
“Live?” Mark wiped his face. “Go on?”
“Why not?”
Maybe, Glory thought, she was ready to try that now.
Turned out, they had relatives, three great-grandsons and their families who lived in what was now the country carved out of parts of Washington, Oregon, and California. Alliance Federation. What a mouthful.
Glory and Mark had chatted with them via some kind of AI chat, the Zoom of the way-in-the-future times.
Their two older children’s children had survived the viruses and the wars, and these great-grandsons had been put in charge of their frozen great-grandparents.
“We’re lucky,” one of them said, Davi, a handsome man in his mid-sixties. They could all be friends and go on a cruise together (if such things still existed), Glory thought. Pals heading into old age. “We made it through.”
Glory wasn’t ready to hear about her own children’s fate, not yet. So she asked questions about her great-grandchildren, the scientist, engineer, farmer. All of them had Mark’s dark eyes.
“We’ll come visit,” Davi and the others said, waving as the call ended.
“Imagine that,” Mark said when their images flickered away.
She barely could.
Of course, she still hated things about her husband. He didn’t ask enough questions about her or really care what she was doing with the cheeses in the cheese cave. He didn’t know the names of the cow and goats and was woefully ignorant about the drainage at the south side of their property. He wouldn’t gather eggs or pull weeds in the vegetable garden. Worst of all, he was excelling in French, mingling better with their neighbors and able to go to the local taverne to drink with his new fellows.
But he knew how to work the ancient (relatively) massive oven in the wide-open kitchen and made the most amazing coq au vin with the coq that wasn’t chicken at all, but a protein invented during some lean economic times. Now eating animals was forbidden. They could be milked or sustainably shorn or petted. They could sleep in your bed, run roughshod through the garden, or brought into public spaces. You could use their milk to make cheese but not their flesh to make pâté. No meatloaf. No sausage.
“Score one for the beasts of the field!” Mark said when discovering this nice twist, he a long-time vegetarian.
“Not to mention the birds of the air.”
When Glory potted plants and fed the chickens, cats wound around her ankles. The dogs barked at the ravens. Day and night and day again. Fall came, the leaves a crackling red. Late at night, she and Mark curled together on the couch, wondering what they would wake up from next.