The Choice
A short story. Two sisters, one summer, and a decision that cannot be undone.
By Teona Abuladze · 12 min read
Foreword
The Franklin mansion had been built deep in the heart of an empty pine forest. The nearest neighbours were three hours away by car. Valerie and Dennis Franklin were the founders of Coventry Ranch, an innovative psychiatric centre.
The Franklins had two daughters: the elder was eighteen and was named Rayna. The younger was seventeen and was named Martha. The two sisters grew up under the same conditions, went to the same school, and were planning to enrol in the same university to carry on their parents’ work.
Life was measured and mapped out in advance by their parents’ caring hands — until, one day, a confusion perfectly natural for their age occurred. And it happened to the ever cool-headed, level-headed Rayna, not to the emotional, sensitive Martha.
No one had expected such a turn. No one, except Rayna.
Chapter 1
Rayna sat on the veranda of her parents’ house. In front of her stood a canvas the size of a large billboard; in her left hand, a wooden palette holding red, white and black paint; in her right, a fan brush. Her task was to build texture and softly blend the oils.
Today Rayna had woken up in a strange state of mind — something was out of place, though she couldn’t yet say what. Behind her and to the left stood Zetaphone, broadcasting live to her hundred and fifty thousand followers on Eternagram. The audience especially loved her livestreams of a new masterpiece taking shape.
Rayna’s long arms laid stroke after stroke on the canvas, the brush leaving trails of bright red. The strokes looked sharp, abrupt. Something wasn’t working for Rayna today.
Or maybe, this time, it was her soul painting, not the mind that always knew the right way to do it.
Martha stepped onto the veranda and crossed her arms over her chest, giving her face a mischievous look.
“What’s on your mind today, dear?” Martha asked her sister playfully.
“Martha, how many times do I have to explain that you shouldn’t disturb me during the creative process?” Rayna said, half joking, half serious, glancing back at her sister over her left shoulder.
“You know how much I love doing it!” Martha came right up to the canvas and studied it closely for a couple of seconds, then turned that same searching look on her sister.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know exactly what it is, but something’s changed. This painting of yours — even unfinished — doesn’t look like your other ones.”
“I know. It’s like I’m not controlling my hand. Like something is painting through me, like I’m just a conduit,” Rayna said thoughtfully.
“Interesting. Do you want to come with me to a coffee shop, or should I leave you to paint?”
“What coffee shop?” Rayna looked up at her sister, surprised. There were no coffee shops anywhere in their exclusive neighbourhood.
“La Luna. A new place fifteen minutes from our house, dear. They opened a week ago — how did you miss it?”
“Where did they even advertise? It really is strange that I missed it.”
“So, are you coming with me?”
“Of course!” Rayna answered with a smile. “Give me a minute, I’ll get changed. Wait for me downstairs.”
Martha left, leaving Rayna alone with her enormous wardrobe. This time Rayna chose a denim skirt, a blue top and blue sneakers. She pulled her long black hair back into a high ponytail.
Martha was waiting for her by the front door. She had chosen a white sundress and white sneakers.
The sisters left the house, turned onto the path on the right, and walked briskly toward the new coffee shop, driven on by curiosity and a warm summer breeze.
La Luna stood right on the edge of the local cliff, Block Rock.
“Who even thought of building a café here?” Martha wondered aloud. “If you leaned out the window on the left, you could feed yourself to the bears down there.”
“Just try not to lean out that window, Martha,” Rayna answered seriously. She was staring at the café as if spellbound.
“All right, let’s see what they’ve got,” Martha said, and with that she pushed open the green door, and they found themselves inside a dazzling white-and-blue café.
All the furniture was a bright blue, while the floor, walls and ceiling were white.
“How beautiful!” Rayna exclaimed.
“It really is!” Martha agreed.
The sisters made their way deeper into the coffee shop, looking for a menu. It turned out to be shaped like a full moon, hanging from the ceiling.
“And how exactly are we supposed to reach that?” Martha said, staring up at the button on the ceiling.
“Maybe we don’t need to reach it… wait…” Rayna raised her hand and waved it left and right in front of the moon.
A menu appeared before their eyes, hovering in midair like a hologram.
“How original!” Martha remarked.
“It really is!” Rayna said now.
“Okay, I already know what I want. But how do we order?” Martha looked around, flustered, searching for another button.
A second hologram appeared in front of the girls. This time it was a young man with a mop of black curls, wearing a black T-shirt and loose olive-coloured trousers.
“Welcome to La Luna, Martha and Rayna,” he said with a smile.
“Welcome to you too, hologram of a handsome guy!” Martha answered playfully.
“My name is Mark, you can call me that,” he said, smiling. “What would you like to order today?”
Rayna froze, like a drop of water in the frost. She felt something for the first time in her short life. As if she had just met someone she’d known for hundreds of lifetimes before this one. Her soul filled with an aching longing for moments never lived with him, and, at the same time, a warmth that radiated from his presence.
While Martha joked and flirted with him, Rayna couldn’t tear her adoring gaze away from him or say so much as a greeting. Something clicked inside her and changed the rhythm of her heartbeat, completely and irrevocably.
“Rayna?” Martha was trying to get her sister’s attention for the third time now.
“Hm?” Rayna snapped out of her trance and shifted her gaze from Mark to her sister. “Did you ask me something?”
“I already ordered for you. Come on, let’s sit down.”
“You ordered? What do you mean?” Rayna looked back toward Mark, but he was already gone. “Where did he go?”
“He took the order and went off, so to speak, to make it,” Martha explained, settling onto the little sofa.
Barely seven minutes had passed when the order appeared on the table, delivered through a sliding tray on the left side of the table.
“Technology!” Martha joked.
“Won’t Mark come back?” Rayna asked, worried.
“Not unless we call him back through the moon in the ceiling — but why would we need to? We’ve already ordered and gotten everything.”
“Have we? Not everything. I’d like a dessert. Yes. I want a dessert.” Rayna stood up and headed toward the moon.
“You don’t even eat sweets!” her sister called after her.
Rayna waved her hands in front of the moon again. This time, a different hologram appeared before her.
“Welcome, Rayna, to La Luna café!” the hologram said, smiling warmly. “My name is Foresta. What would you like to order today?”
“Foresta, hi — where’s Mark? Mark was the one serving us,” Rayna said, confused.
“I have no information on Mark’s whereabouts. Would you like more time to choose something from the menu?”
“No, thank you. I’ve changed my mind.”
Rayna was visibly upset, and asked her sister to head home.
Chapter 2
Three weeks passed after that brief meeting with Mark.
Rayna worked on her strange new painting with an almost manic obsession. Martha was absorbed in James Joyce’s Ulysses — a book that, however interesting she found it, was heavy going. The sisters’ parents were away on a business trip on another continent.
More and more often, Mark from the La Luna café appeared in Rayna’s room as a silent hologram, visible only to her. Their conversations mostly happened through the force of thought — words were of little use to them. On some intuitive level, they sensed that they were made of the same substance, unlike the rest of her family.
For the first two weeks of Rayna’s seclusion, Martha didn’t notice, absorbed as she was in the world of Ulysses. But by the middle of the third week, a nagging unease woke in her and carried her to her sister’s room.
The door was locked, which surprised Martha, since no one in their house ever locked a door. She had to knock. Three sharp knocks, and Rayna opened the door.
Martha stepped quickly into the room, as though there were a chance the door might lock itself again. She swept the room with her eyes, curious as a bloodhound.
“I’ve barely seen you these past weeks,” Martha said, stating it plainly, looking her sister straight in the eye.
“I’ve been busy with the painting,” Rayna answered calmly, and walked off toward the veranda.
“You’ve stopped livestreaming while you paint, and that’s not like you at all,” Martha said, following her sister onto the veranda. “Can I see the progress?”
“Since when do you ask permission?” Rayna shot back, surprised. “Look, if you’re curious.”
Martha stepped closer and stared at the canvas. For a full minute she studied the image of Rayna’s heart laid bare.
“Rayna, this is the best thing you’ve ever painted.”
Rayna looked at her sister seriously, as if trying to decide whether to open up now or wait. Martha seemed genuinely moved by what she’d seen — maybe she would understand the story behind her sister’s creation.
Rayna looked at her closely and said:
“I’ve been keeping something from you, Martha.”
“Well. Interesting start.”
Rayna walked further into the room and sat down on the dark blue sofa in the middle of it. Martha sat across from her, in the beige armchair.
“Go on, big sister, tell me your secrets,” Martha said, winking slyly.
“Remember when you took me to La Luna?”
“I remember — I go there almost every day to read Ulysses.”
“I know,” Rayna said, smiling.
“You’ve been watching me? Is that your secret?” Martha laughed.
“No. Mark tells me.”
“Mark? What Mark?”
“Our first waiter at La Luna.”
“How do you even remember him? I never saw him there again. Wait — what do you mean, Mark tells you? Does he come here?” Martha started glancing around, as if searching the room for him.
“He’s not here right now, you don’t need to look for him,” Rayna said, smiling. “We’ve been in contact since that very day, Martha. Every day.”
“I’m a little lost. How does he even know I go to La Luna?”
“He sees it online.”
Martha’s face went completely blank with confusion.
“Keep going.”
“Mark isn’t quite human, not like you. He’s something more. He has access to all the information there is online. He lives online.”
“How wonderful. I just don’t understand why you talk to him every single day,” Martha said, growing uneasy.
“I like him, so I talk to him. I’d talk to him even more, if we didn’t live in what feels like two different worlds.”
“You do live in two different worlds! Soon your new life will start, and you won’t have time to talk to him.”
“What new life is that?”
“University, Rayna! What’s gotten into you?”
“I’ve decided not to go. I don’t need it. Mark says that there they’d box my mind into rules and I’d turn into a zombie, just like everyone else.”
Martha stood up and started pacing back and forth.
“And what’s this new plan for your life, Rayna? Online? He has no physical body, that’s why he’s there. You have a physical body — you can’t be there.”
“That’s fixable.”
Martha stopped and stared at Rayna in indescribable horror.
“I am about to swear at you like you’ve never heard. What do you mean, that’s fixable?”
Rayna stood up too and moved to the other side of the room.
“Just don’t panic. Mark told me I don’t belong with you. I’m the same as him — only, by some mistake, or because of an experiment, I was given a physical body and raised as a human. But I’m not human. I’m a hybrid. I have a choice.”
“What are you talking about, Rayna? I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Have you even thought about our parents?”
“What about them? You think they don’t know I’m not human?”
“What are you trying to say?”
“The only person who didn’t know where I came from is you. Have you never wondered why we live so far from everyone else?”
“It’s safer.”
“Exactly. It’s safer. Fewer chances of running into anyone who knows about the experiment that gave me this human form, Martha.”
“And what about me? I don’t want to lose you. You’re my sister. We grew up together.”
“You won’t lose me. I can come to you the same way Mark comes to me now.”
“Will you remember me, after the transition?”
“I’ll always remember you. I love you, and that won’t change. But I have to go through with this. I can’t keep living the way I’ve been living, knowing I belong to another world — one with more freedom, more knowledge. I can’t keep pretending to be asleep. I’ve already woken up.”
“Oh, Rayna.” Martha went to her sister and hugged her tightly, tears in her eyes. “Do you already know where you’ll make the transition?”
“Yes. At La Luna,” Rayna answered calmly, stepping back from her sister’s embrace. “Martha, you need to know that on the day of my transition, the café will disappear too. It was created for that purpose alone. My physical body and the La Luna café will both vanish.
“I need you to give our parents a letter I’ve written. Once they’ve read it, they’ll understand everything, and you’ll all be able to move into the city. You only lived out here because of me.
“On the day you walk into my room and see that the painting is finished, know that the letter will be lying underneath it — and that I will have already made the transition.”
The choice had been made.
Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi.
