April Holiday

Six months after the mass suicides April received a cardboard box full of her twin brother’s personal effects from the police. She ignored it for a week, things accumulating in piles around it on the counter as she tried to make sense of her sudden inheritance. She opened the box the same morning she stared at the sun. The six-shooter was inside, sealed up in an evidence bag with her brother’s name and case number written on it in black marker. March Holiday. March and April. They’d been born thirteen minutes apart on either side of midnight and Dad had always had a sense of humor. Mom didn’t make it. Happy Birthday. April Fools.

When they were seven Dad had changed the family name to “Holiday,” abandoning the unpronounceable Slavic jumble of consonants his grandparents had carried over from the old country. That was the same year he’d painted a sun on the bedroom ceiling. April had been sleeping in the guest bedroom since she’d come to the house. March’s room which had been Dad’s room, which had been Mom and Dad’s room felt oppressive. The morning she opened the box she had found herself looking at the yellow shape over the bed and thinking how he had really wanted them all to be happy, but it hadn’t worked. The bullets were in another bag. There were four of them.

April pulled out March’s laptop bag and peered in at the cursed thing. Just the sight of the Swordfish sticker on the back made her stomach clench. The whole country had been asking what Swordfish was for five years now. Was it a social movement? A political party? A cult? A religion? A joke? After March died she’d had to stop wondering. The journey down the rabbit hole starts with a single step and she was closer to her father and brother by then than the light at the beginning of the tunnel.

The laptop was new and looked expensive. The sticker on his battered old one had been worn. March had been one of the first people on the boat, they called it, one of the first adherents, one of the first to be brainwashed by the anonymous account posting puzzles on the internet that April felt she was too dumb or too smart to solve.

March had solved them, though, making posts about Poison the Well! and Point Taken! until she’d had to unfollow him. March had passed every one of Swordfish’s tests in sequence with flying colors, especially the last one. They hadn’t been in touch much in recent years. Looking at the sticker made her wonder who’s fault that was. There was relief in tuning him out which had nothing to do with Swordfish.

April had seen a thousand different versions of the sticker. The original simple, line-drawn fish with the blade protruding from its head reimagined in myriad awful ways. Every symbol of intolerance imaginable rendered at the end of its sword or plastered on its side or combined to form fresh, new concepts in hate. April opened the laptop and went through the bag while it booted up.

March’s clunky, overfull keyring was in there. April always said “here comes the janitor” when he’d pull it out, not that she’d accepted a ride from him in a long time and she had her own key to the house. Dad always left the door unlocked, anyway, he always had been too trusting. Pens, crumpled receipts, and various detritus including the chalky remains of a pill were the only other things she found. The pill was an antipsychotic. April knew it tasted bitter.

March had carried the bag everywhere. He’d rested it against his leg at their rare dinners together. April had never looked forward to family get-togethers, but since Dad had died she’d begun to dread them. At least Dad had kept his sense of humor until the end. That made things easier. Last time it had been March who’d gotten the gun back from the police and he hadn’t laughed much since that. Swordfish had arrived about a year later. April thought anyone could see that March had been trying to fill the void. She’d been too busy filling her own to help him, though he had certainly asked.

The first violence under the Swordfish banner had followed a drastic call to action after months of buildup. The bloodbath had shaken country like an earthquake. Everyone was still reeling and debating if justice had been served when, four years later, a second quake hit harder than the first. The body count was lower, but the dead were undeniably innocent this time. After ten days of silence following the tragedy Swordfish had exhorted his followers to meet him on the next plane of consciousness. March had booked a ticket on the next bullet as had almost a million others.

His path was set the first night he’d shown up with the laptop bag. That was when April first heard about The Grand Plan. He’d talked about security a lot. He’d said they already know all our old secrets and so we had to be extra careful with our new ones. He’d said his new laptop bag had a biometric fingerprint lock and “undetectable” secret compartments large enough to contain $20,000 in cash and a gun. She’d asked if he had $20,000 in cash and he said he of course he didn’t. April paid for dinner even though when she’d asked about Dad’s secrets March had told her she didn’t want to know about Dad’s secrets. March had been living in the house the whole time.

The biometric lock no longer worked. So much for precious security, thought April, flopping the bag open. The police had identified March by his license plate and later called April down to see if she recognized his clothes. They hadn’t offered to show her his face and she’d known better than to ask.

The body had been held at the morgue for more than a week before there was an opening at a funeral home. There were nonstop funerals during the somber months while the bodies were gathered and identified. While awaiting the simplest, cheapest cremation April had cleaned the house. March now sat in a biodegradable container on top of the refrigerator, right next to Dad’s urn. Mom was on the mantle.

Dad’s family photos held on by flower magnets had been replaced by March’s conspiracy-theory printouts held on with Swordfish stickers. April had pulled off what she could and covered up the residue with the photos, which she’d found in a drawer next to the sink along with the magnets. In the center was Mom’s bright face, smiling on a beach in Hawaii the summer before she’d met Dad. April tried to not think about how it was the only smile on the fridge. The kitchen was the only room in the house April could stand to be in the presence of her brother and father. She felt around in the bottom of the laptop bag and asked March how to open the undetectable compartments but he remained silent.

She picked through the keyring wondering what they were all for. Did her brother have that many secrets or was this just March’s history of forgotten locks? One of the keys caught her eye. It featured the same logo as on the fingerprint scanner. Finding the magnets in the bottom of the bag was easy. Twisting the key this way and that to unlock the expertly concealed compartments was not. April had not been expecting to find $20,000 in cash, but she had been expecting to find more than what she did. The two small compartments were empty. The big one contained a little black book.

It was the nice kind, with a dappled leather cover and an elastic band to keep it closed, not like the one April had gotten at a dollar store after some therapist had suggested that writing down important things might help. That one was more appropriate for a kid to jot their homework down in. April couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen it. Maybe if she’d had a nice one like this she’d have remembered to bring a pen. Dad had always said “your tools matter” even though he’d stood on the bed and painted the sun with a spatula, yellow drips on the sheets and spatters on his chest like stars.

April undid the band and flipped through the book. Four pages of usernames, passwords, and account numbers. The very first entry was for the deepweb forum from which Swordfish had emerged. “march_hare” had been a prolific poster, vocally supporting every new development Swordfish revealed. April had seen her brother’s account quoted in the newspaper more than once. The word “fanatics” was usually in the same paragraph.

There were fanatics on both sides, on all sides. Swordfish had always been on the fringe, coming in with a huge bang, but relegating itself mostly to fomenting discontent online in the years since that first fateful day. There had been a lot of violence at the hands of other groups, some of which were sympathetic to Swordfish, depending on their agenda. Counterpoint; Earth Bloc; The Rainbow Konnektion; too many acronyms to keep track of. April always wondered why no one had ever suggested cleaning the well.

The laptop chimed and the desktop appeared. Ever the hypocrite, there was no password on March’s machine and it connected automatically to the Wi-Fi. Windows popped open and closed as the connection passed through half a dozen data havens and god knew what sort of encryption. April was in the kitchen of her childhood home, but to anyone watching she was on an island in the South Pacific. March had mail, but The Swordfish deepweb forum was his homepage. April opened the notebook. Dad’s secrets were buried under the clutter in the house, but she intended to uncover March’s in his private communications.

She was ready to know. The Swordfish saga had been book-ended by death for April and she needed answers. She was going to find out what march_hare had been saying behind closed doors and finally make sense of all this. The notebook felt like the only clean thing in the house as she glanced at her brother’s scrawl. April felt tears in her eyes as she typed in the password, “yadiloHlirpA13” and realized it was her name backwards. They had been born thirteen minutes apart. Incorrect Password.

April ran her finger across the notebook’s crisp paper and typed it in again. Incorrect Password. She scanned the page. march_hare’s info was halfway down. “yadiloHlirpA13” was the password for a different account. April clicked “Change User,” selected “Swordfish” and typed it in again. Welcome Swordfish, you have new messages.

April stayed up all night, reading and planning. At dawn Swordfish posted for the first time in six months. The sun was rising, spilling through the kitchen window, sending a blinding beam climbing up April’s face and the refrigerator behind her. She’d put Mom with Dad and March before writing “Phase 1 Complete. All survivors have successfully advanced to Phase 2: Clean the Well.”

April found an encrypted wallet with $20,000 in CryptoCash with which she paid off the overdue bill for the servers. There was just enough left to order new stickers and a few other things. April thought that the Swordfish would look better with a heart on its side from now on. She liked March’s notebook and as things began to happen in The Well she ordered one for herself in which to write down important things. Alert after alert popped up, thousands of responses flooding her posts as the sun shines on the Holiday family for the first time.